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“We all dream, by night and by day, we are all surrounded by a throng of images, memories and associations.… Creation is an activity which selects and connects the images found in sleep. It is a universal activity. The great writer differs from the rest of us because he selects and connects properly.”

— E.M. Forster, “The Creator as Critic”

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$90.00/£45.00

The Creator as Critic

And Other Writings by E.M. Forster

Edited by Jeffrey M. Heath

E.M. Forster, whose novels, including Howards End, A Room with a View, and A Passage to India, probe the values of the English middle class, is recognized as one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished authors. He was also a respected literary critic. The Creator as Critic contains more than 40 of Forster’s hitherto-unpublished essays, lectures, and memoirs, spanning the period 1898 to 1960. They reflect his views on a wide range of authors: Poggio, Cornaro, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Scott, Coleridge, Austen, Ruskin, Tolstoy, Meredith, Arnold, Butler, Pater, Hardy, James, Wilde, Shaw, Conrad, Housman, Cavafy, Kipling, Wells, Proust, Beerbohm, Joyce, Woolf, Keynes, Sassoon, Eliot, Auden, and others.

The Creator as Critic presents the original texts of some 30 broadcasts made by Forster for the BBC during the years 1928 to 1959. These radio talks, collected for the first time in this volume, offer insight into his attitude toward writers such as Swift, Crabbe, Voltaire, Dostoyevsky, Edward Carpenter, Ethel Smyth, Lowes Dickinson, Strachey, Munshi Premchand, Lawrence, Graves, Dos Passos, Capek, Wescott, Steinbeck, Orwell, and many others. They are the thoughtful and thought-provoking products of Forster’s active engagement with the literary, political, and social events of his time.

Jeffrey M. Heath is the author of The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and His Writing. He edited Profiles in Canadian Literature, co-edited the University of Toronto’s Modern Drama, and is the author of essays on E.M. Forster.

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E.M. Forster portrait: © King’s College Library, Cambridge, EMF/27/319, by Edward Leigh, 1915

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The Creator as CriticAnd Other Writings by E.M. Forster

Edited by Jeffrey M. Heath

Dundurn PRessToronto


Selection and editorial material Copyright © Jeffrey M. Heath, 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form orby any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review)without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Copy-editor: Jennifer GallantDesign: Jennifer ScottPrinter: Transcontinental

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan), 1879-1970 The creator as critic and other writings by E.M. Forster / edited by Jeffrey M. Heath.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55002-522-4

1. Literature--History and criticism. 2. Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan), 1879-1970. 3. Radio scripts. I. Heath,Jeffrey M., 1943- II. Title.

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We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing pro-gram. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing IndustryDevelopment Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario throughthe Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

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E. M. Forster material:Copyright © The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge.

Excerpts from Abinger Harvest, copyright 1936 and renewed 1964 by Edward M. Forster, reprinted by permission ofHarcourt, Inc.

Excerpts from Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster, copyright 1927 by Harcourt, Inc., and renewed 1954 by Edward M.Forster, reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Excerpts from The Hill of Devi, copyright 1953 by E.M. Forster and renewed 1981 by Donald Parry, reprinted by per-mission of Harcourt, Inc.

Excerpts from Two Cheers for Democracy, copyright 1951 by E.M. Forster and renewed 1979 by Donald Parry, reprintedby permission of Harcourt, Inc.

Excerpts from Howards End by E.M. Forster, copyright 1921 by E.M. Forster, are used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf,a division of Random House, Inc.

Excerpts from The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster, copyright and published 1922 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., are used bypermission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Excerpts from A Room with a View by E.M. Forster, copyright 1923 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House,Inc., are used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.


Preface 9Introduction 13Explanatory Note 19

I. Talks and Lectures 21

Happy versus Sad Endings 23The Poems of Kipling 26A Roman “Society” 41Samuel Butler, 1835–1902 45Walter Pater 50Meeting Old Bloomsbury 51On Pornography and Sentimentality 54English Literature since the War 56Memory 61The Creator as Critic 64Three Generations 99West Hackhurst: A Surrey Ramble (Part I) 108Modern Writing 120A.E. Housman 124The Last Moment of Life 130Reply to Lord Cohen 131Cavafy 133Eightieth Birthday Speech 134

II. Essays 137

The Relation of Dryden to Milton and Pope 139The Novelists of the Eighteenth Century and Their Influence on

Those of the Nineteenth 150The Sentimental Essays: 161

The Pantheon 161Rome 162Via Nomentana 163Museo Kircheriano 164Syracuse 166

CONTENTS


The Seat of the Scornful 167The Amateur among the Mountains 168Cnidus 170

Pagus Quidam 171The Bugiale 174Luigi Cornaro 178

III. Other Memoirs and Memoranda 185

Loch Meikle 187Stisted 187Incidents of War 188Swimming in the Sea 197Madame Myslakowska 200Charlie Day 201Points de repère 204Mother 205Notes on the Future of Civilization 205Nassenheide 206Death of a Clock 211Sex 212

IV. Broadcasts 217

Railway Bridges 219D.H. Lawrence 222A Conversation in the Train 227The Future of Broadcasting; Strachey, Capek, and Others 236Books of 1937 240Efficiency and Liberty 244Here’s Wishing… 246Reading in Wartime 247Books of 1939 250The Freedom of the Artist 253Some Books: The Brothers Karamazov and Bhakti 255Books and the Writer: Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and Others 258Some Books: A.L. Rowse, Rose Macaulay, L.A.G. Strong, and Others 261Story by Five Authors 264Some Books: Machen, Graves, and Others 267Some Books: Islam To-day ; Lord David Cecil on Thomas Hardy 270The World We Want: What Must We Give to Get It? 273Some Books: A New Year’s Resolution for 1944 275A Book that Influenced Me 278Some Books: Hayek, Laski, Wedgwood, Smyth, “Q” 281Some Books: Moon, Weston, Anand, Orwell, and Others 284Some Books: Vercors, Lunn, and Others 287Some Books: Edward Carpenter 290


Some Books: Jackson, Wescott, Wilder 293Some Books: Orwell’s Animal Farm 296Some Books: Hilton Brown on Kipling; Keenan, Wilson, Welty 299The Planned World and the Creative Artist 302Some Books: Stoll, Dickinson, Iqbal, and Others 303The Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts 306I Speak for Myself 310The Butler Legacy 312Power and Authority 316E.M. Forster at Cambridge, 1958 317

Key to Abbreviations 319A Note on the Forster Catalogue at King’s College, Cambridge 321A Note on the Page and Line References 322Notes on the Talks and Lectures 323Notes on the Essays 505

The Sentimental Essays: Introduction 529Notes on Other Memoirs and Memoranda 591Notes on the Broadcasts 625

The Broadcasts: Introduction 626

Appendices 723

Appendix A: Poems 724Appendix B: Pater, Novalis, Forster 742Appendix C: The Whole Truth 756Appendix D: The Two Cheers for Democracy Broadcasts 764

Bibliography 775Index 783


For

Louise, Morton, and Richard


This volume brings together some forty hitherto-uncollected writings and morethan thirty BBC broadcasts by E.M. Forster. The radio talks are reproduced, for themost part, as Forster initially delivered them on-air. The originals of most of the doc-uments contained in this book are held in the Archive Centre of King’s College,Cambridge, where they form part of a large quantity of papers (sixty-three boxes andseventy-two volumes) carefully preserved by Forster and bequeathed to the collegeupon his death. The Archive Centre also holds copies of many of the broadcast type-scripts and several of the autograph manuscripts upon which they are based. Almostall of the talks are available on microfilms held by the Written Archives Centre of theBritish Broadcasting Corporation at Caversham Park, Reading. Other previouslyunpublished documents included here are described in the King’s College ArchiveCentre’s Handlist of the Papers of E.M. Forster, Honorary Fellow, which has beenrevised and incorporated into the Cambridge University Library’s very useful Januswebsite (janus.lib.cam.ac.uk). Individual Forster callmarks are prefaced here by“King’s/PP/EMF” (see page 321). These documents range from informal talks, lec-tures, and essays to memoirs, memoranda, and poems. They represent almost everyperiod of Forster’s life: his two undergraduate essays, on poetry and the novel respec-tively, were written before the turn of the last century, while his brief meditation onold age, “Death of a Clock,” was written about twelve years before his own death, inhis ninety-second year, on 7 June 1970. The most recent piece of information repro-duced is a 1963 entry in Forster’s “Sex” memoir, made when he was eighty-four.

In publishing this material I am aware that it will be seen by a readership thatranges from informed general readers to those whose interest is more scholarly innature. In an attempt to produce a result that is as widely satisfactory as possible, Iannotate the documents but avoid cluttering the text with editorial markings thatmight irk or distract. For those who wish to do no more than read the primary mate-rial, I have edited it for style and consistency. For those who need more than the edit-ed texts, I have tried to preserve a sense of the original documents through remarks inthe Notes, which are keyed to page and line numbers. In the Notes the works that arecited most frequently, both by Forster and others, are given abbreviated titles; the Keyto Abbreviations (319) supplies the full titles and the authors’ names. TheBibliography may be consulted for the complete details of publication. Where contextmakes the source of a reference clear, no title is provided.

The annotations are of three sorts. First, some of them attempt to clarify theprocess of composition by preserving the more important emendations Forster made,

PREFACE


10 | T H E C R E ATO R A S C R I T I C

either in the initial writing process or at some later stage. I have not preserved every slipof the pen or changes of an obviously trivial nature. The symbols that I employ forrecording emendations will already be familiar to many readers, since they are those thatwere created by Oliver Stallybrass and Elizabeth Heine for use in their Abinger editionsof Forster’s work. They are set forth in the Explanatory Note (19). A certain amount ofstandardization has seemed desirable, partly in an attempt to find forms of usage thatare acceptable on both sides of the Atlantic, and partly because Forster is himself ofteninconsistent, even nonchalant, about matters such as spelling, capitalization, word divi-sion, the closing of quotation marks and brackets, commas, colons, and semicolons, theuse of dashes and suspension points, and sometimes even subject-verb agreement.Following Stallybrass (TCD, 360), I adopt the terminations “-ize” and “-ization” ratherthan “-ise” and “-isation,” a practice that would not have troubled Forster, who usesboth forms interchangeably, sometimes within the same sentence. Where Forster mis-spells a word, I silently correct it, but I sometimes preserve the misspelling (if it is par-ticularly interesting) in the Notes. With regard to punctuation, I agree with Stallybrassthat it is “an integral part of the writer’s craft,” but also that “[Forster] was exceedinglyslapdash over such matters” (TCD, 360; LTC, 24). I have decided that beyond certainlimits, the accurate preservation of a “slapdash” text becomes counterproductive, and so,with a view to ease of reading, I silently supply, where necessary, commas, semicolons,periods, terminal quotation marks, and terminal brackets, and I turn certain idiosyn-cratic sequences of dashes into the suspension points or ellipses that they were obvious-ly intended to be. In the correction of such matters, editorial intuition and the desirefor rigorous accuracy can often collide. I have therefore aimed flexibly at accuracy, witha view to respecting nuances and departures from standard usage that are possibly inten-tional. Where Forster misquotes a passage, as he not infrequently does, or provides anerroneous title, or (less frequently) gets an author’s name wrong, I have adjusted the textaccordingly. The interested reader, browsing “in the back of the book,” can usually findwhat Forster originally wrote.

Annotations of a second sort provide factual information about Forster’s refer-ences to persons, places, dates, books, situations, quoted passages, translations (butonly if they are thought to be difficult), and, generally speaking, any material that maypossibly be unfamiliar. Needless to say, some readers will know more than others, so Ihave placed limits on this kind of assistance.

Other annotations are expository in nature. They link ideas, attitudes, and refer-ences in The Creator as Critic to Forster’s other writings. The reader will judge whetherthese comments are useful and will treat them accordingly. Taken as a whole they con-stitute a somewhat experimental approach to Forster and his work — but then, exper-imentation is at the very heart of Forster’s outlook. For example, it is clear that hebegan his “Creator as Critic” lectures adventurously, not knowing beforehand wherethey might lead (see its Conclusion, 98).

Many people have helped to bring this volume into being. First and foremost, I wish toexpress my gratitude to the succession of Archivists at the Archive Centre of King’sCollege, Cambridge, who helped me as I transcribed the documents that are repro-duced here. Jacqueline Cox, Rosalind Moad, Elizabeth Pridmore, and Patricia McGuiregave unstintingly of their time and expertise to answer my questions. Thanks to their


Pre f ace | 11

sharp eyesight and familiarity with Forster’s “cacography,” many readings that wouldhave been labelled “conjectural” have become reliably actual. My equally warm thanksgo to Peter Jones, Librarian of King’s College, for his help and patience as we corre-sponded in the early stages of this project. I am indebted to the British Library, espe-cially to its splendid online Integrated Catalogue. I owe a debt also to the efficientlibrarians of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, and toRobert Brandeis and his friendly staff at the E.J. Pratt Library, Victoria College,Toronto. I thank Julie Snelling of the BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading, whohelped me coax legible photocopies from the microfilms of Forster’s broadcast talks. Ialso thank Elizabeth Haylett of the Society of Authors for her unfailing courtesy andforbearance as we worked through the intricacies of copyright and other matters.

In preparing this volume I was fortunate in having much help and encouragementfrom friends and colleagues. For his encouragement from the outset, I owe a great debtof thanks to Brian Thomas, who read early interpretive material, some of which reap-pears in revised form in the present volume. He also read and commented on many ofthe essays and lectures that I reproduce here. Frank Collins gave much support and, later,help in translation. At an early stage of the project Peter Brigg read and commented veryusefully on many of the essays. Valued help of various kinds was given by Brian Connery,Michael Dixon, Daniel Dooner, Dennis Duffy, William Edwards, Linda K. Hughes,Greig Henderson, Brad Inwood, Heather Jackson, J. R. de J. Jackson, Ian Lancashire,T.J.A. Le Goff, Timothy Mead, Peter Morton, Mike Nellis, Magdalene Redekop, AnnRobson, S.P. Rosenbaum, Sue Slack, Sam Solecki, Elaine Sternberg, Frederick Sweet,Mark Thornton, Andrew Toplack, Cameron Tolton, John Traill, T.R. Verny, DonWaterfall, and Maureen Waugh. Ingrid Smith keyed in some of the primary material. Atthe publishing stage, Jennifer Gallant and Jennifer Scott gave invaluable assistance. I add,with much pleasure, that the roots of this book reach back to an insightful Forster sem-inar group at Victoria College, Toronto. I owe my unforgotten students of 1982 a greatdebt of thanks: clearly there are times when unexpected and beneficial consequences canresult from research that is carried out “for no ulterior motive,” as the narrator ofHowards End remarks (196).

I am aware that I have come late to a large and already well-documented field. Iacknowledge my indebtedness to the bibliographers, literary historians, editors, and biog-raphers who have devoted much time and attention to Forster and his work. I think par-ticularly of P.N. Furbank, Philip Gardner, Elizabeth Heine, Judith Scherer Herz, B.J.Kirkpatrick, Mary Lago, S.P. Rosenbaum, Oliver Stallybrass, John Stape, and George H. Thomson. There are of course many others, too numerous to name here; some arementioned in the pages that follow. By the same token, this volume would have beenimpossible without its archival underpinnings — without the careful collecting, sorting,conserving, and cataloguing that has made Forster’s manuscripts and other Forsterianaavailable to researchers. To the names of the King’s College Archivists who have assistedme in person, I should like to add the names of those whom I never had the privilege ofmeeting, but whose dedicated work has helped me greatly: Elizabeth Ellem, PenelopeBulloch, Marian Stewart, and Michael Halls. Many people have helped me in many ways,but any errors or omissions that persist are, of course and as always, my own.

I wish to give special thanks to Victoria College and Victoria University for thefinancial support and encouragement they have given this project. They have showngreat faith and patience. On eight occasions the Victoria College General Research



Grant Committee helped me travel to King’s to transcribe Forster documents, and intwo other instances I received grants from the Victoria University SSHRCC GeneralResearch Grants Fund. The Victoria University Senate Research Committee awardedme a travel grant and a grant-in-aid for publication. I also acknowledge, with thanks,travel grants from the University of Toronto Vice-President’s Fund in 1995 and fromthe University of Toronto Department of English in 1993.

I thank the Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, for granting mepermission to publish the lectures, essays, memoirs, memoranda, broadcast talks,poems, and other pieces that are contained in this volume. I also thank them, as wellas Harcourt Brace and Random House, for permitting me to quote from previouslypublished Forster material. At many stages in the preparation of this volume, the assis-tance of the Society of Authors has been invaluable, and it is very gratefully acknowl-edged. (See also page 4.)

J.M.H.4 May 2006


When Forster arranged his material for publication in Abinger Harvest (1936) andTwo Cheers for Democracy (1951), he avoided a chronological approach and opted forthematic groupings, remarking in his Prefatory Note to Two Cheers that he was “anxiousto produce a book rather than a time-string” (xiii). His refusal to capitulate to “the nakedworm of time,” as he calls it, is characteristic (AN, 42); moreover, it has the additionalmerit of imposing a measure of order on what he describes, in the Prefaces to both col-lections, as a “miscellany” (AH, xxii; TCD, xiv). Even while admitting (with Forster him-self ), that “we have much to learn” from that “dull realist,” chronology — not least, asense of the development of a writer’s thought and style — it has seemed wise to followhis lead and avoid a merely sequential arrangement (AN, 42; “Three Generations,” 106).The present collection is even more of a miscellany than either of Forster’s, but I hope— as he wrote of Two Cheers — that even if it “lacks unity of atmosphere,” it may “revealsome unity of outlook” (xiv). Divisions there are, then, even if they may be in certainways artificial. This means that the volume falls into four sections: “Talks and Lectures,”“Essays,” “Other Memoirs and Memoranda,” and “Broadcasts.” Within these categories,chronology rules. In the Notes, readers will find — if they wish to have it — textual andfactual information about the pieces, as well as commentary on their connections withone another and with Forster’s other published work.

Strictly speaking, the hitherto-unpublished poems in Appendix A are the onlypurely “creative” components in a volume that takes its title from “The Creator asCritic,” a lecture series that Forster presented in Lent Term 1931 to students and fac-ulty of Cambridge University. In the first of those lectures, Forster dwells on OscarWilde’s view, as expressed in “The Critic as Artist” (Intentions, 1891), that criticism isitself creative — sometimes even more so than artistic creation itself. Through the per-sona of “Gilbert,” Wilde praises self-consciousness and the intensified “personality” asgoods (156), and writes, “But surely, Criticism is itself an art. … I would say that thehighest Criticism, being the purest form of personal impression, is in its way more cre-ative than creation…” (137, 139). Gilbert proceeds magisterially, “Who cares whetherMr Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? … That mighty and majestic prose ofhis … is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach orrot on their corrupted canvases in England’s Gallery…” (141). Proceeding to recitePater’s well-known account of the Mona Lisa, he asserts, “the criticism which I havequoted is criticism of the highest kind. It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation” (143). As “The Creator as Critic” makes clear, Forster, whowas a believer in less conscious modes of inspiration, disagrees with Wilde.

INTRODUCTION



P.N. Furbank writes that Forster had “something flitting and discontinuous” abouthis personality (FL, I, 66). It seems sometimes to have been, to use words associated withRuth Wilcox and Margaret Schlegel in Howards End, “blurred” or “out of focus” — ratheras if his personality was indistinct and unemphatic because he had so many of them (86,322). For whatever reason, the “Taupe,” or mole, as Lytton Strachey called him, was nofriend of self-consciousness and the intensified, isolated “personality.” In Forster’s view weare (or can be) more connected than isolated. In “I Speak for Myself,” for instance, heremarks that “if I assert my personality properly, I shall assert yours” (310; see alsoAppendix B). It is not surprising that Forster rejects Wilde’s views about personality andhis related argument that criticism is a form of creation. He observes that Wilde is mere-ly “juggling” with words: “self-consciousness may make a man an artist, and may makehim a critic, but the artist and the critic don’t thus become one” (“Creator,” 68). Forsterhad already made a key complaint in “Anonymity: An Enquiry” (1927): “Modern criticsgo too far in their insistence on personality” (TCD, 82). His remark applies to Wilde, andbefore him, to Walter Pater, who also thought of criticism as creation. The similarity ofthe titles (“The Critic as Artist” and “The Creator as Critic”) suggests that Wilde’sprovocative views about criticism, so sharply attacked here, were among the forces thatgenerated Forster’s lecture series in the first place. Even as Forster was composing his lec-tures, he was unhappily inquiring into the causes of his own artistic sterility; he knew alltoo well that criticism, however well done, was no substitute for artistic creation. He setextremely high standards for creative work: as he reminded himself in a 1943 entry in hisCommonplace Book, “N.B. this book and pensées not important and the temptation tomistake them for Creation must be resisted” (155).

It is Forster’s view that although creation and criticism are distinct, they can some-how coexist in the same person, producing (as in the case of John Dryden) “a monsteras rare as Caliban” (“Creator,” 97). They coexist, as he had already pointed out in“Anonymity,” because each of us has more than one personality; moreover, it is from theunconscious “lower” personality, not from the self-conscious “upper” one, that artsprings. In “The Raison d’Être of Criticism” (1947), which owes much to “The Creatoras Critic,” Forster again stresses the lack of connection between creativity and critical“apparatuses”: “Two universes have not even collided, they have been juxtaposed. Thereis no spiritual parity” (TCD, 113). In “Creator,” one paragraph after Forster’s dismissalof Wilde and “Gilbert,” he quotes T.S. Eliot’s disdainful remark that so-called “creativecriticism” is no more than “etiolated creation,” and that Walter Pater is one of the worstoffenders in this regard (“A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry,” The Chapbook, II,9 [March 1920], 2). With that, we can begin to see that Forster’s attack on the notionof criticism as creation is also an attack on aspects of the school of “Art for Art’s Sake”itself. I write “aspects” because some of the same sentimental and associative criticismthat Pater practised and Wilde praised was sometimes congenial to Forster himself. Hefreely admitted his sentimentalism (see “Hayek, Laski, Wedgwood, Smyth, ‘Q’,”283).Moreover, as a young man he had written and endorsed “creative criticism” himself inhis “Sentimental Essays.” Although he laughs at Walt Whitman for writing it (“Here isadorable literature, but what has it to do with Op. 20?”[TCD, 108]), it was a habit thatdied hard. “Not Listening to Music” and “Not Looking at Pictures” (both written in1939) confirm the point (TCD, 122–25, 126–29).

“Personality” was important to Pater as well as to Wilde. In the Conclusion toStudies in the History of the Renaissance, Pater writes of it as if it were a prison. He


In t roduc t ion | 15

points to “that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever piercedon its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without” (209).When we compare Pater’s statement with Forster’s more optimistic “Only connect…”in Howards End, the contrast in outlooks is obvious — although it is important tostress that there are also similarities. In Forster’s view, not only does fin-de-siècle criti-cism misappropriate the name of art, but it is also far too self-conscious, too self-absorbed, and insufficiently aware that — although connection is difficult — person-alities can indeed pierce and be pierced by one another. We are not necessarily solip-sists, “each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world,” as Paterclaims (209). In the end, Forster finds Pater more attractive than “Wilde and the aes-thetes” because, despite Pater’s interest in “an uninterrupted chain of sensations,” healso manages to have a “deep sympathy with humanity” (“Walter Pater,” 50). Forstermay have decided — on the strength of Marius the Epicurean, perhaps — that Pater’sconcern with humanity outweighed his bleak words about the “thick wall of personal-ity.” That Forster could find “sympathy with humanity” in a writer like Pater saysmuch about his own outlook: “aesthetic or social reformer, which is uppermost?”Beatrice Webb understandably wondered in 1933 (FIR, 13). His position hovers some-where between the two “danger posts” that he mentions in “The Poems of Kipling”:“Art for Art’s Sake” and “Life for Life’s Sake” (28).

In the end, Forster’s views on personality likely owe less to Pater than to SamuelButler. Butler maintains, “We are none of us personalities but bundles of instincts,‘scraps of the huge creature life.’” Indeed, we may only “imagine that [we] have per-sonalities” (“Samuel Butler, 1835–1902,” 49). Yet people who are in touch with thegenerations who have preceded them, and who are still alive in them, somehow havea deeper sense of identity: they have learned to say “I am I” (HE, 236). Because they“[care] about their ancestors,” they have “some rudimentary control over [their] owngrowth” (36, 273). People who are not in touch with the many selves who have goneinto their making are like Henry Wilcox and other “supermen”: “If you could piercethrough him you’d find panic and emptiness in the middle” (232). The commentarieson “Samuel Butler” (1913) and the brief but important “Walter Pater” (ca. 1917) con-tain fuller accounts of “personality,” as does Appendix B, “Pater, Novalis, Forster.”

Forster’s “Talks and Lectures” make up the bulk of his work in the present vol-ume. The informal tone that characterizes the talks is audible also in material that wasdesigned for the lecture room — not only in “The Creator as Critic” but also in “ThreeGenerations,” which Forster describes as “the tragedy of the individualist — a tragedyin three acts” (107). The first ten years of the century were amazingly productive onesfor Forster. Talks such as “Happy versus Sad Endings” (1905) and “The Poems ofKipling” (1908) are of intrinsic interest, but they also shed much light on his culmi-nating work of the decade, Howards End. That densely written novel, published on 18October 1910, is a compendium of his ideas and techniques up to that point (indeed,many years afterwards, he said that there was actually “too much” in it [“E.M. Forsterat Cambridge, 1958,” 318]). The “Samuel Butler” talk (1913) helps to sum up theformative attitudes and ideas that Forster had inherited from Butler in earlier years.His debt is considerable, despite his rather curious denial that Butler’s “theories ofvicarious immortality” had influenced him (WW, 29).

Among the “Talks and Lectures,” the papers that Forster gave to Bloomsbury’sMemoir Club are of particular interest. Furbank remarks that the group was “a reincar-



nation of a pre-war society, the Novel Club, and included many of the same members:the Woolfs, the Bells, the MacCarthys, Keynes, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant. Forsterenjoyed the club and sometimes shone at it, adopting a special, rather hard and brittlestyle for his papers to it” (FL, II, 66). In later years Forster grew less enthusiastic aboutit. For one thing, its stringent rules of membership (family only) excluded those whomhe wished to sponsor, while others were permitted to join without any previous consul-tation with him. Moreover, he was annoyed that a reminiscence about his family hadbored the Club (FL, II, 66; SLF, II, 204n3; FIR, 61). “West Hackhurst: A SurreyRamble,” “Meeting Old Bloomsbury,” “Memory,” and “A.E. Housman” are all MemoirClub papers, although not all of the first-mentioned is reproduced here. (Nor could allof it have been presented to the Club, since, in its entirety, Forster’s “shapeless piece” isnearly sixty pages long [117].) His “hard and brittle” tone is especially audible in the can-did “A.E. Housman.” “Nassenheide” had its origins as a Memoir Club paper, but the ver-sion that is reproduced in Part III differs from the one Forster delivered to the Club, andalso from “Recollections of Nassenheide” (PT, 202–309). “Colonel Wilson” (i.e.,Colonel W.C.C. Leslie) and “Kanaya” are also Memoir Club papers, but they are notincluded here since they are readily available in Elizabeth Heine’s Abinger Devi (89–97,310–24). Two other addresses to the Club, “Uncle Willie” and “My Books and I,” maybe found in Heine’s edition of The Longest Journey (294–300; 300–06).

S.P. Rosenbaum’s The Bloomsbury Group (rev. ed., 1995) contains illuminatingperspectives on the Memoir Club by Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, DesmondMacCarthy, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, David Garnett, and FrancesPartridge. Leonard Woolf recalls that the Club came into being in March 1920, con-tinued meeting until 1956, and that “it was agreed that we should be absolutely frankin what we wrote and read,” even though “absolute truth was sometimes filteredthrough some discretion and reticence” (BG, 154). Rosenbaum reproduces Forster’startly worded recollection of Bloomsbury in general:

Its contempt of the outsider plays a very small part of its activity,and rests on inattention rather than arrogance. Once convincedthat he is not a figure of fun, it welcomes and studies him, but therest of humanity remains in a background of screaming farce asbefore. Meanwhile the intellect — thinking and talking things out— goes steadily ahead, “things” looking rather like small Xmas treeswhen they come into the room, and trees minus their leaves anddecorations when they are carried out. The final bareness isn’t trag-ic, the horrors of the universe being surveyed in physical comfort,and suffering apprehended only intellectually.

According to Forster, members of Bloomsbury, and of the Memoir Club in particular,were “Essentially gentlefolks. Would open other people’s letters, but wouldn’t steal,bully, slander, or blackmail like many of their critics, and have acquired a culture inharmony with their social position” (BG, 79 [CB, 48–49]).

The second grouping, “Essays,” contains the earliest of the pieces collected here,“The Relation of Dryden to Milton and Pope” (1898) and “The Novelists of theEighteenth Century and their Influence on those of the Nineteenth” (1899). These paperswere undergraduate English Prize essays, the first unsuccessful, the second a co-winner.


In t roduc t ion | 17

While they are largely of documentary interest, there are patches of good writing in them,especially in the “Novelists” essay. The most remarkable of the essays, I believe, are theseven “Sentimental Essays,” written in late 1901 and early 1902 while Forster touredSwitzerland and Italy, almost exclusively in the company of his mother, Lily. Forster’s yearin Italy was of the utmost importance to his development, so I take a close look at each ofthe “Sentimental Essays” and set them in the context of Forster’s Switzerland and ItalyJournal and letters written by him and by his mother. “The Bugiale” (1907), an essay onthe Facetiae of the bibliophile and collector Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), springs fromForster’s research on Renaissance Italy, particularly Florence. “Luigi Cornaro” (1905) isanother very readable essay, born of the same Italian research. Forster rewrote it in 1911but, surprisingly, it never found its way into print. “Pagus Quidam” (1905) is a whimsi-cal account of adversities suffered during a walk in the West Country. “Swimming in theSea” (ca. 1921) begins as a gently humorous memoir but ends on a strangely elegiac note;it is among the more distinguished pieces of writing in the collection.

Among the “Other Memoirs” in Section III is a journal that Forster kept while heserved with the Red Cross in Alexandria from 1915 to 1918. His job as a hospital“searcher” was to canvass the wounded for news of soldiers missing in the campaigns inMesopotamia and (especially) Gallipoli. Some of the combat stories recorded there areso vivid that the reader will not soon forget them. It is entitled “Incidents of War.”“Charlie Day” (written ca. 1936) is a frank and affectionate account of a failed relation-ship. It provides insight into Forster’s sentimentalism (his memories of Charlie Day lin-gered on for years), and it possibly relates to his attempt, as he puts it, “to say what I see”in his fiction. In a memoir written at about the same time as “Charlie Day,” Forsterremarks that what he sees is that “I want to love a strong young man of the lower class-es and be loved by him and even hurt by him. That is my ticket….” (See the “Sex” mem-oir, 216, and FL, II, 50). By comparison, Forster’s recollections of his meetings with theJunoesque Madame Myslakowska come as comic relief.

Some thirty BBC radio talks are collected in the “Broadcasts” section. There were tohave been more, but that did not prove to be possible. Still, there are enough of them togive the reader an accurate sense of Forster’s excellence as an on-air communicator —especially during the “European anxiety” of the “tormented West” (277, 252). He knewthat the wireless put him “in the position of a preacher who never hears his congregationcough. You can escape my sermons, but cannot interrupt them.” It was a state of affairsthat troubled him, and he did everything he could to overcome it. He expressed regretthat the “metal pineapple,” the intrusive microphone, bore “no resemblance to thehuman face, and is no substitute for human intercourse” (see “Some Books: HiltonBrown on Kipling; Keenan, Wilson, Welty,” 299). Yet if radio posed problems, it alsooffered possibilities; the latter led him to “speculate a good deal on the future of broad-casting — it’s the biggest technical innovation affecting words since the invention ofprinting, and we don’t know at all where it’s going to lead” (“The Future ofBroadcasting,” 19 December 1932, 236). Despite his fears that radio might ultimately“overthrow” books, Forster diligently used it for three decades as a medium throughwhich to discuss books and other topics of cultural, social, and political interest.

The radio talks in Section IV are a distinctive and important part of Forster’s crit-ical output; a more complete introduction to them is provided in the Notes. The talksalso merit their own appendix, about which a brief explanation may at this point beuseful. Many of the pieces contained in Two Cheers were conceived and given as radio



talks, to which Forster later made adjustments when he revised them as essays. Some(but not all) of his “concealments” are recorded in Oliver Stallybrass’s notes to theAbinger Two Cheers. As Stallybrass remarks, “a handful only of the more interesting[revisions] are noted” (TCD, 359). Appendix D supplements his invaluable work byrecording certain changes that he chose to overlook.

None of the documents collected here is another Howards End or Aspects of theNovel. Accordingly, some readers will worry about whether they are worthy of publi-cation, and whether they might harm Forster’s reputation. Similar situations have aris-en before. For example, in George H. Thomson’s Introduction to Forster’s uncollect-ed pre-1915 publications in Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings (1971), he remarks,“Not everything in this collection is of equal interest, not everything is in itself worth-while. But it is the mark of a good writer that the lesser may add to our understand-ing of the greater” (xii). Anyone who has read Thomson’s collection knows that hiscomment hits the mark. Elizabeth Heine makes a similar observation in her introduc-tion to the stories and fragments contained in Arctic Summer and Other Fiction (1980):“Forster is a major writer whose reputation will not, in the long run, be damaged bywork that falls below his own highest standards, and the more distinguished can oftenbe illuminated by the less” (vii). Forster was by no means averse to destroying lettersor other writings that he did not like, and he did so often. He deliberately preservedthe pieces that are reproduced here. Certain documents are marked “Keep”; othersbear instructions to his literary executor making it plain that he did not want them tobe lost. On the first page of “Luigi Cornaro” (1905 version) Forster wrote,“Publishable?” He clearly thought that it was. Upon reading it and the other items thatare presented here, one may be reminded of what Forster said to the Memoir Clubconcerning Housman’s Last Poems — that they constituted a “second eye,” that they“showed the same country from a slightly different angle, and, completing the stereo-scope, made the view seem solid” (127). The documents that are assembled in this vol-ume (or reassembled, as in the case of the title piece) are offered in the hope that theytoo will “add to our understanding” of Forster, making our view of him and his workmore complete and more solid. If they do not do so directly, then they may do soobliquely, just as Forster’s reading of The Merchant of Venice threw “unexpected light”on his view of Nazi aggression in September 1939 (“Reading in Wartime,” 249).


Readers familiar with the system of editorial symbols evolved by OliverStallybrass for use in his Abinger manuscript editions will experience no difficultywith mine, since they are his. For the benefit of readers unfamiliar with his system,here it is, in a slightly abbreviated form. In each case the three dots represent oneor more words:

…3… words preceding the arrow substituted by Forsterfor words immediately following it

\…/ words between oboli inserted by Forster

<…> words within angle brackets deleted by Forster

{…} words within brace brackets inserted, then delet-ed, by Forster

<<…<…>…>> deleted passage (within double angle brackets)within which a deletion (single angle brackets)has already occurred

\\…\…/…// inserted passage (between double oboli) withinwhich a further insertion (between single oboli)has later been made

[…] words (or letters) clearly intended by Forster andsupplied by the editor; or — if italicized —interpolated editorial comment

Stallybrass writes, “Normally both text and variants are quoted from the firstto the last divergent words, often with some additional shared words to facilitateidentification or round off a phrase or clause; and the effect of many such changesis clear even out of context” (The Manuscripts of Howards End, xx). I adopt the same

EXPLANATORY NOTE



practice. For a fuller account of Stallybrass’s symbols and how they are used, thereader is directed to his Explanatory Note, either in The Manuscripts of HowardsEnd or The Manuscripts of A Passage to India.

For the method used to refer to passages from the text in the Notes, see “Noteon Page and Line References” (p. 322).


I. TALKS AND LECTURES



aprilduffy

Typewritten Text


Talk s and Lec ture s | 23

Happy versus Sad Endings

Some years ago there was a competition in one of the domestic papers — I think it wasin the Gentlewoman. The public was invited to write an original story, length not to exceedtwo thousand words, and the best story was to get a prize. A certain young lady, who hadalready been honourably commended, for she had stuffed a pincushion, determined tocompete. She started gaily, but found it more bother than she expected. It had seemed sosimple — just a pen, paper, and a little thought — but really the pincushion was child’splay, besides being much more useful. The day for sending in approached, and of the twothousand words she had not written one. In her despair she cried, “I know what! I’ll makethe story awfully sad and everyone shall die. They’re sure to like it then.” But her auntoverheard her and exclaimed, “You ridiculous child! You’ve never had a day’s illness, you’vejust eaten the most enormous tea, and now you want to write something unhappy. I’ldnever give you a prize and I trust the Gentlewoman won’t either.” But the girl would onlyrepeat, “I’ll make it all awfully sad and everyone shall die. It’s my only chance.”

The story did not get a prize, nor do I remember what it was about, nor did sheever write another. But the conversation is as significant as any high discourse on art,and though neither the girl or her aunt may have been very profound, yet people ofgreat profundity stand behind each of them, and the words of each might have comefrom the heart of the world.

Behind the girl there stands the majority of modern artists. They, like her, want towrite something awfully “sad.” They, like her, would be rejected by the Gentlewoman.In spite of great opposition they have made themselves heard, and the critic of thefuture, though he may be disgusted or bored by them, will certainly not be able to passthem by. They include most of the novelists and dramatists who have European repu-tation — Tolstoy and Gorki, Ibsen, Hauptmann and Sudermann, Maeterlinck,d’Annunzio, Anatole France — together with some of their immediate ancestors, Zola,Flaubert, Turgenev. In our own country there is the possible exception of Mr GeorgeMeredith, but we have also the notable example of Mr Thomas Hardy, and, I think, ofMr Henry James, who leaves us with a feeling of depression when he leaves us with anyfeeling at all. Some of these men are morbid, others brutal, others cynical, others ten-derly regretful. But it pleases all of them to let us hear the note of sorrow. Each year theyfind it more and more difficult to be cheerful with sincerity. Each year their reputationgrows, and though they may be bubbles — I hope that some of them are — it is scarce-ly our generation that will prick them. At present they show as a solid phalanx, diverse-ly armed, but all in black, and the young lady’s aunt had better be careful.

But she also has a phalanx behind her, and it is not all recruited from the Philistines.People who think, people who love beauty, people who have wide knowledge of theworld, join in her protest. They are angry with all these unhappy books. They are angrywith the noisy author who tells them that it cannot be helped and that they ought to beunhappy. Is there not happiness in daily life, happiness sure and certain? Then whyshould the author neglect it? Why, when they ask him for wine or at all events for freshwater, should he hand them a cup of bitter tears and declare that these are the result of



his chemistry, these the quintessence of life, that the many-flavoured world distils at lastinto no sweeter drink than this? Have they not a right to say, “the man is a public nui-sance, and a liar besides”? Is not the aunt, their spokesman, reasonable when she cries“Buy a modern novel? No thank you. If I want to cry I can do it without spending fourand six.” Is there any quick retort to such objections?

We might of course quote Aristotle to the aunt, and say that tragedy ennobles herand has a cathartic influence on her emotions. She will reply that it does nothing ofthe sort. We can hint that those who have no taste for tragedy in art are often apt tohave a taste for cheap tragedy in life and will rant and pose and talk bad poetry whenthey lose their tempers. But she can hint back that love of tragedy in art may blunt aman’s practical pity and charity, and make him callous to the hum-drum sorrows ofthe actual world. And in any case she will be left repeating “I do not see the point ofpaying four and six to make me cry.”

Such is the position of the two parties. On the one side the modern artist, veryconscientious, and, we may add, rather self-conscious, holding up his cup of tears. Onthe other side the modern public, drinking under protest, and declaring that sweeterthings do exist, and demanding as a right some portion of happiness, cheerfulness, andjoy. And here I should like to revert to the title of this paper, which is “Happy versusSad Endings.” For it is just possible that the word “endings” may help us to decidebetween the two contending parties.

Those who, like myself, have had the pleasure and privilege of attending Mr Jack’slectures on Tragedy, will remember that he said that a tragedy need not necessarily issuein a catastrophe — in other words that a “sad” book need not have a “sad” ending. Hequoted as an example the Alcestis of Euripides in which a woman dies, is lamented, andthen is restored to life. And in modern drama he might have quoted The Lady from theSea by Ibsen, in which we expect a woman to go mad and leave her husband, instead ofwhich she turns sane and stops with him. These plays, though they end happily, cannotbe called happy plays, and so Mr Jack gave us a more philosophical definition of tragedy,basing it on the spirit in which the author works, not on the results at which he arrives.Now, right as he is, it is nevertheless true that in the great majority of cases we can clas-sify books by their endings. The popular criticisms of a book — “It was so sad: the lastpage nearly made me cry” or “It is so delightful: they all get married in the end” — aregenerally the true criticisms. The end is important, and in comedy it is all-important. Forif a comic book or play ends sadly we feel justly indignant, and recognize that it has failedas a work of art. I have in mind that delightful novel The Real Charlotte, which is con-ceived in a comic or farcical spirit, but the effect of which is ruined by insertions oftragedy and a tragic conclusion. On the whole, I think, we may judge books by their end.

Granting this — perhaps it has not been granted — what kind of end will the mod-ern artist tend to select? I pass over the inartistic writer and the artist who writes pot-boilers. They have their purpose, and we should be prigs if we pretended that we got nopleasure from them. But the conscientious artist, though often very tiresome, is the onlykind of artist worth discussing, and it is he alone that I have in mind this evening. Whatkind of ending will such a man, living in the present age, tend to select? Where, in theinharmonious world around him, will he find the note of permanence that shall concludethe harmonies of his book? He is soaked, not to say sodden, with the idea of evolution.

[There is a gap in the text at this point. See note.]



There are, however, some isolated points which may come into the discussion. Whatare we to say about those stories that do not end at all — or to be more accurate that endnot with a full stop but with a mark of interrogation — those stories in which the fateof the characters is left to the reader’s imagination. Did he marry her or didn’t he? Didshe open the letter or did she throw it into the fire? Did he switch the runaway tramdown the left-hand rail and run over his daughter, or did he switch it down the right-hand rail and smash up the other tram? These questions are undoubtedly interesting, andstir the reader’s imagination far more frequently than do the questions raised in RichardFeverel and King Lear. But they do not stir it with equal profit, and meanwhile the writerhas shirked his business, and got his money for asking a question instead of attemptingan answer. The Lady, or the Tiger? was the first story of this type, and for The Lady, or theTiger? personally I have the greatest respect. But as an artistic formula it is intolerable.There is nothing refined or splendid in an author not knowing his own mind. He setsout to tell us something, and stops before that something is reached. Artful rather thanartistic, he makes the reader do his work and provide him with a solution. Now the read-er may be left in the clouds, amid mysterious unfamiliar shapes, with the sense of greatevents and great landscapes behind him, and of unimaginable greatness before. Here isan end and a wonderful one — the kind of end we are given in The Cenci. But he mustnot be left in a London fog, trying to solve a missing fact competition.

Probably every one is agreed on this point, and it may seem unnecessary to mentionit. But in our righteous indignation against vagueness we sometimes condemn a book asvague which is not vague at all. Now and then — especially in a subtle writer, such asHenry James — we seem to be confronted by a note of interrogation of The Lady, or theTiger? type. We exclaim “Here’s this horrible modern vagueness again. Here’s anotherauthor who doesn’t know his own mind.” But on closer inspection we see that the markof interrogation is really a full stop, though not a very obvious one. The writer is boundto tell us something important — the most important thing he knows. But there, I think,his obligation ends. He is not bound to tell us everything. In The Wings of the Dove themost important thing is that the hero and heroine are separated by a spiritual gulf, andwe are told this clearly. It is not of supreme importance whether they are married or not,and Henry James has a right to withhold the information if he chooses. He withholds it.

There is another point, and a most important one. What about fairy tales, whichend with the sentiment, “and they all lived happily ever after”? People don’t live hap-pily ever after. There aren’t any fairies. Ought we not to weigh such stories in the scalesand find them wanting?

Well — fairies are rather difficult things to weigh, and, if we have any sense ofhumour, it is better not to make the attempt. This paper has concerned itself chieflywith realistic literature — with books that deal with human life and human problemsdirectly. To write such books imagination is needed, but not the imagination thatopens the gates of fairyland — gates which I would indicate but not attempt to enter.The land inside them belongs to the poet, whose privilege it is to contradict the factsof life, to make the impossible the inevitable, to alter the whole course of nature, untilthe sun rises in the west, as it did for Shelley, and the heavens open as they did forDante and for Keats. These men are the greatest of all men. But they contradict thefacts of life, they do not falsify them. For the men who falsify life, who profess to beaccurate, and give us inaccuracy, no blame can be too strong. Such men write the nov-elettes and the storiettes and the rosy romantic comedies in which ordinary people do



extraordinary things. They pretend that life is simple and easy, that the issues in it areclear, that men are either heroes or villains, and that the heroes prevail. They pretendthat time does not fly, and that perishable things are eternal. They pretend that earthis heaven, and so their books are neither heaven nor earth.

Once upon a time the aunt and the niece were walking in a meadow. “Look dear!”said the aunt. “Look at the fairy rings!” The niece, who was scientific, replied, “Thosearen’t made by fairies. They’re made by little toadstools.” One lady spoke as a poet, theother as a realist. Literature has room in it for both. But it has no room for the pseu-do-realist who has not the imagination to say that the rings are made by fairies, or thecourage to say that they are made by toadstools, and so adopts a middle course, andsays they are made by mushrooms — nice edible mushrooms — and that no poison-ous or unpalatable thing is permitted to grow on the earth.

Here the paper ends. It has wandered a good deal from its title, and been illogicalin other ways. Therefore it may be as well to tabulate the results at which it has beenaiming. With much diffidence and with many reservations I would submit the two fol-lowing assertions for discussion:

I. Modern books ought — on the whole — to end unhappily, because (a) theidea of evolution [and] (b) the habit of detecting latent discomfort haveentered too deeply into the modern mind for the artist to neglect them.

II. Unhappy books need not imply unhappy life, because art and life have dif-ferent aims. The one aims at what is permanent, even if it is sad. The otheraims at what is cheerful and gracious, even if it is transitory.

And to these two assertions I should like to add a third: that if the world succeeds inproducing a literature that is sincerely cheerful, that literature will be the greatest thatthe world has ever known.

[1905]

The Poems of Kipling

A few years ago I went to an amusing exhibition of caricatures. Mr Bernard Shaw,Mr Balfour, Mr Chesterton, Mr Belloc were all held up to ridicule, but perhaps themost diabolical of all was the caricature of Rudyard Kipling. Our poet is representedin the act of carrying off the Nobel Prize, lately awarded to him by the Swedish gov-ernment. He is clad for the ceremony in brown reach-me-downs: on his head is abowler hat into which the Union Jack is stuck; in his hands are immense money bags;and out of his mouth proceeds the legend “Good Lord, they ha’ paid in full.” He is



attended by a tin soldier and a toy motor car while Mr Hall Caine, standing discon-solately in the background, indicates the type of rival with whom he has had to com-pete. Above, at the top of the picture, heaven opens, and we perceive George Meredithand Algernon Swinburne, sitting on a cloud and both serenely indifferent to the wholeaffair. “These things,” they say, “do not concern the gods. Kipling is not literature.”

There is much food for thought in this picture, and it will make a very good startingpoint for our survey. The caricaturist has put the case against Kipling — unfairly if youlike, but not untruly. He has expressed, with a few strokes of the brush, certain unpleas-ing qualities that all the poet’s admirers must allow, and every line in the picture — onemight say every tint in it — could be illustrated by some quotation from the victim’spoems. Kipling is vulgar. He does brag. He is at times the bounder who appears in anoth-er of the caricatures, taking out ’is gal Britannia for ’arf- ’oliday on the ’Amstead ’Eath,and swopping hats with her. And if the truth here stated was the whole truth, if Kiplingwas what Kipling seems, if he really was putty, brass and paint — how quick we’d drophim, how remote he would be from literature, how little he would concern the gods.

It is not the whole truth. Putty, brass and paint are there, but with them is fused,at times inextricably, a precious metal. To call the Kipling amalgam “all poetry” wouldbe absurd. To call it “partly poetry” is surely justifiable, and if anything understates itspower. Words that move the reader so deeply, that have an almost physical effect uponhim, cannot be the words of a charlatan. As we read Kipling he seems actually to be inthe room with us; we see his face — occasionally with feelings of disgust: we accept orreject his remarks vividly: his verse has all the power and the defects of personal con-versation, and in spite of the defects, it takes us in a snare that cannot fail. Those whohave felt his magic will find themselves reconsidering all the literary definitions thatthey have been unwise enough to make. They may have felt, with Plato, that poetry isthe shadow of a shadow, or with Milton that it should be simple, sensuous, and impas-sioned, or with Tasso that it is a medium for allegorical truth; but in the end they willcome to the less dignified but tenable belief that

There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,And every single one of them is right!

Kipling is alive. And if he is not literature, then so much the worse for literature, foroutside it there will exist at least four books to read.

Kipling is alive. That is his great merit. And — let us pass on to another point —that is his danger. Vitality, irrespective of the qualities that inform it, is such a poorbusiness. An eel is full of vitality. Yet few men have made a companion of it. They haveusually preferred the vitality of a fox terrier. Vitality, before it attracts us, must be plussomething: — plus intellect, plus beauty, plus goodness. To admire Kipling simplybecause he is alive, would be a grave mistake.

Into this mistake we are very likely to fall. We middle classes — our life today isso sheltered, so safe, we are so protected by asphalt pavements, creosoted palings, andpolicemen, so guarded on all sides from all that may injure the body or disturb thesoul, that in literature we are apt to rush to the other extreme, and worship vitalityunrestrainedly. “How magnificent” (we think) “to lead a lawless roving life somewhereeast of Suez, where the divorce laws, which we should be discussing this evening, needno reform because there are none. Armed with a sword instead of an umbrella, and a



revolver instead of a train ticket, how magnificent to meet some other strong man faceto face, and of course to get the best of him.” It is we of the suburbs who buy the phys-ical culture magazines of Mr Sandow and Mr MacFadden, we who read the bellicosepoems of Henley, we who encourage all books that beckon the imagination outwards.As for the soldiers and sailors and backwoods men — they, I understand, prefer poemsto be about their mothers. And so, when Kipling comes along with a great bang-whanging, dropping his h’s, splitting his infinitives, jolly well ending up a sentencewith a preposition if he has mind to, and singing

Ow the loot!Bloomin’ loot!That’s the thing to make the boys git up an’ shoot!

— we are too apt to exclaim, “Oh this is the Reality, this is life. This man is in touchwith the facts of existence,” too apt to regard him as a sort of inspired buccaneer andnot as a very complex poet, who, like most poets, touches the facts of existence at onemoment, and fails to touch them at the next.

The above remarks may be taken as prefatory. They indicate the lines on which ourcriticism of Kipling should be conducted. Let me restate them in another form. Thereare, as it were, two danger posts which the critic has to avoid. On the one is written,“Art for Art’s Sake” and if we go too near it we shall undervalue Kipling, think him abounder in a billicock and miss half the wonder of his work. On the other post is writ-ten, “Life for Life’s Sake,” and if we go too near that we shall overvalue him, and try tomake out that those lines I have just quoted about loot are virile stuff, whereas they areclearly balderdash. And it may further be premised that in the blind worship of Vitalitylies Kipling’s own danger, and that it often leads him to mistake violence for strength,lust for manliness, and impudence for truth. And now let us proceed to the poems.

They fall into five classes. Poems in narrative form; Poems relating to MilitaryMatters; Poems suggested by a Residence in India; Poems dedicated to Imperialism;and Poems connected with Childhood. The Poems in narrative form perhaps containhis greatest work — “The Ballad of East and West,” “Tomlinson,” and “The MaryGloster.” Those relating to military matters are of course The Barrack-Room Balladstogether with the later Service Songs. Poems suggested by a residence in India are most-ly the Departmental Ditties — early; and the Poems dedicated to Imperialism are alllate. These last being highly didactic, not to say dogmatic in tone, we shall find thema convenient excuse for examining Kipling’s opinions, and for saying anything abouthim that we have not been able to say before; and for quarrelling a little with oneanother. As for the Poems relating to childhood — they will speak for themselves, andI don’t think we shall quarrel about them.

Poems in narrative form. It is not surprising that these should be so good. ThatKipling can tell a story in prose will hardly be disputed, and the man who can tell astory in prose is partially equipped for telling a story in verse. What we may call thetechnique of these poems is admirable. All of them — “The Ballad of East and West,”“The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” “Tomlinson,” “McAndrew’s Hymn,” “The Rhyme ofthe Three Sealers,” “The Mary Gloster” — all of them grip our attention in the open-ing lines, proceed without effort to a climax, and leave no loose threads at the conclu-sion. They are easy to read — as narrative should be. The incidents are simple and



striking, the characters firmly contrasted: regarded merely as craftsmanship, they areworthy of high praise.

But this is not all. They might have all these technical merits and yet be onlyputty, brass and paint. For all their competence, they might still confirm the carica-ture. What is it that lifts them from journalism, which only desires to be paid in full,into literature, where no one should work for money, and no one should work forfame? What tells us that they are made by hand and not by machinery? Long quota-tions from the poems themselves could alone answer this question. Failing that, thebest answer is this: “Because they are inspired by passion.” “The Ballad of East andWest” is inspired by the passion for strength — strength as Kipling understands it; nota very heroic quality, but inspiring a passion all the same. “McAndrew’s Hymn” isinspired by the passion for

Law, Orrder, Duty, an’ Restraint, Obedience, Discipline!

as embodied in the engines of an ocean liner. “The Rhyme of the Three Captains” andthe poem on the finding of the Parnell Commission are inspired by the passion for jus-tice, “Tomlinson” by the passion of contempt. And “The Mary Gloster,” the greatest ofthem all, is inspired by the greatest of all the passions — Love: not the love of littleCupids but the love that a long rough life has nourished and that bursts into fullersplendour at the hour of death. It is absurd to distinguish between prose and poetry,but one might perhaps say that prose implies reflection, poetry passion, and that thisis certainly illustrated by the work of Kipling. His stories in prose — “The Bridge-Builders” for instance — are strung together on a thread of criticism: both sides of aquestion are given us, and we [are] not informed which is the right side. His stories inverse are compacted of passion: one side only is given, nor, while we read, do weremember that another may exist. It is this that gives the narrative poems their magic.In nothing else that Kipling has written — not even in “A Matter of Fact” or “TheFinest Story in the World” does he carry away his reader so completely. They may notbe “great poetry,” whatever that may be. They may not soar up with us to the verysummit of Parnassus, whereon dwell Apollo and the Muses nine. But most certainlythey take us for a long gallop on the mountain’s lower slopes, and if at times we objectto the roughness of the action, let us remember that Pegasus in these days seldom getson to the mountain at all, and that it is better to gallop there clumsily than to standall your life exquisitely groomed in a loose box. But they are magnificent reading.

It has just been asserted that “The Mary Gloster” is the greatest of these long nar-rative poems. Perhaps the assertion will be disputed. Some will prefer “The Ballad ofEast and West” with its torrent of lilting words, with its vivid action, and its happyending. The poem has high merits. But though [Kamal], the border thief, is an attrac-tive fellow, the colonel’s son, the other character in the poem, is surely a bit of a stick,who might have stepped straight out of a picture by Mr Caton Woodville. Though hetalks a great deal, he never lets one forget that he is a strong silent man, who says solittle and feels so much and feels all the more for saying so little. And as I doubt myselfwhether strong silent men feel anything at all, I can never believe that the colonel’s sonwas really tired when he came to the Tongue of Jagai or that he really wanted to getback his father’s mare, or that he wanted to do anything at all except to illustrate thegood qualities of the British Army. However the colonel’s son does not much matter,



and “East and West” remains a fine poem, though debarred by him from its full meas-ure of human interest.

In “Tomlinson” on the other hand, the human interest is supreme and good crit-ics have rated it highly. Flippant in tone, it is yet passionate and profound — passion-ate because of its hatred for those who are neither for God nor for his enemies: pro-found because it makes many of us feel very uncomfortable when we read it, and won-der whether we too shall not suffer a like condemnation. Tomlinson, who has read andheard and thought and felt but has never done — never done either good or evil —would be housed by Dante in Limbo: Rudyard Kipling can find no place for him eitherin Heaven or Hell. St Peter rejects him and the Devil equally refuses “to anger his gen-tlemen for the sake of a shiftless ghost.” So back goes Tomlinson to earth. The roots ofwickedness are in him: “but look that ye win to worthier sin ere ye come back again,”says the Devil, adding, “the God that you took from a printed book be with you,Tomlinson!” The sincerity and force of this poem are beyond all question; but Kipling’sconception of the Unseen World is a little too Anglo-Saxon for some of us. There is nomysticism in it, no spirituality, nothing intellectual. Action is the only thing that mat-ters, and Kipling does not mind whether the action is good or bad. If only you are badenough, he will crown you with a Satanic glory that is scarcely distinguishable from thesplendours of heaven. But mind you are really bad. The moral of the poem is: Be vital.Vitality at all costs; if it is only the vitality of an eel. Life for Life’s sake irrespective ofthe qualities that inform it. In other words the poem has no moral.

Now “The Mary Gloster,” to which I will now turn, has no moral either. But thenit doesn’t try to have one. It is just a story about a self-made man, who has buried hiswife at sea, and who desires to be buried with her. His life has not been respectable,nor even honest. We are not required to imitate it, and perhaps for that very reasonour hearts go out to him at once. Too often, in Kipling’s work, there is a feeling of ten-sion. He is bullying us to assent to something of which we do not approve; one hasthat feeling in “Tomlinson,” and a little in “East and West.” In “The Mary Gloster”there is no bullying; we are merely understanding one of our fellow creatures. As weread, we share Sir Anthony Gloster’s passions from beginning to end: his contempt forhis son, Dickie, another Tomlinson, who “muddles with books and pictures”; hishatred for Dickie’s wife who “calls and calls in her carriage, her ’andkerchief up to ’ereye”; his belief in McAndrew, his oldest friend. “I’ve never asked ’im to dinner, but he’llsee it out to the end”; and greatest passion of all, his love for the wife of his youth:

… she died in Macassar Straits —By the Little Paternosters, as you come to the Union Bank —And we dropped her in fourteen fathom: I pricked it off where she sank.Owners we were, full owners, and the boat was christened for her,And she died in the Mary Gloster.

And to us as to him the one thing that matters is that at death he should return to hiswife not only in the spirit, but in the flesh too — that he should go down to her inthe Macassar Straits, in the ship that bears her name.

So the poem works on — slangy, ungrammatical, straying into a score of detailsabout ship building, navigation, money, men, women — but ever working on and up.And Dickie, we know, is sitting by his father’s bedside thinking what a cad the old man



is, and wondering whether he can possibly execute his wishes, in spite of the extra£5000 he is to get for doing it. So ungenteel — will attract so much attention. Suchbad form not to be buried in the family vault at Woking:

… “I’ll do what I please with my own!!” cries Sir Anthony.“Your mother ’ud call it wasteful, but I’ve seven and thirty more;I’ll come in my private carriage and bid it wait at the door….”

Dickie shudders and is thinking “what execrable taste.” And the poem works on. The conclusion can only be paralleled by some of the work of Browning — not in

its language, or thought, but in its power of fusing all the experiences of a long life intoone supreme emotion. Life’s bitterness and meanness, and coarseness, are all remem-bered by Sir Anthony Gloster up to the very last, and he scarcely repents of them; theyare merged into the glories of reunion. His wife explains everything; she made him, liv-ing and dead as woman and as spirit; she has guided him in dreams far away on theother side of the world, she is Lady Gloster still, and he’s going back to her:

For my son ’e was never a credit: ’e muddled with books and art,And ’e lived on Sir Anthony’s money and ’e broke Sir Anthony’s heart.There isn’t even a grandchild, and the Gloster family’s done —The only one you left me — O mother, the only one!Harrer and Trinity College — me slavin’ early an’ late —An’ he thinks I’m dying crazy, and you’re in Macassar Strait!Flesh o’ my flesh, my dearie, for ever an’ ever amen,That first stroke come for a warning. I ought to ha’ gone to you then.But — cheap repairs for a cheap ’un — the doctor said I’d do.Mary, why didn’t you warn me? I’ve allus heeded to you,Excep’ — I know — about women; but you are a spirit now;An’, wife, they was only women, and I was a man. That’s how.An’ a man ’e must go with a woman, as you could not understand; But I never talked ’em secrets. I paid ’em out o’ hand.Thank Gawd, I can pay for my fancies! Now what’s five thousand to me,For a berth off the Paternosters in the haven where I would be?I believe in the Resurrection, if I read my Bible plain,But I wouldn’t trust ’em at Wokin’; we’re safer at sea again.For the heart it shall go with the treasure — go down to the sea in ships.I’m sick o’ the hired women. I’ll kiss my own girl on the lips!I’ll be content with my fountain, I’ll drink from my own well,And the wife of my youth shall charm me — an’ the rest can go to Hell!(Dickie, he will, that’s certain.) I’ll lie in our standin’-bed,And Mac’ll take her in ballast — an’ she trims best by the head….Down by the head an’ sinkin’, her fires are drawn and cold,An’ the water’s splashin’ hollow on the skin of the empty hold —Churning and choking and chuckling, quiet and scummy and dark —Full to her lower hatches and risin’ steady. Hark!That was the after-bulkhead…. She’s flooded from stem to stern….“Never seen death yet, Dickie? … Well now is your time to learn!



“The Mary Gloster” is the great triumph of Kipling’s method. That mixture ofslang and bluff and Scriptural reminiscences — the Kipling amalgam as I have calledit above — is fashioned at last into a perfect form. Many writers have concocted bal-lads of humble life, but to express the heights of emotion in the dregs of our commonspeech, is absolutely new in literature. Sir Anthony Gloster is not a Hamlet or a KingLear disguised, he is Sir Anthony Gloster, who says things his own way, and no oneelse could say them. Nor is a disguised Kipling covertly getting at the reader for thepurpose of preaching the gospel of vitality. No. He is unconscious of the reader’s exis-tence. He is simply Sir Anthony Gloster.

Would that Kipling had always written on these lines! Would that he was alwayscontent to let us love his characters, instead of insisting that we should imitate them!Perhaps it is too much to wish. All of us, except Shakespeare, want to preach, and all ofus believe our sermon is the one that really matters. We can’t realize that sermons onlyprofit those who agree with them beforehand, and that those who disagree will merelybe repelled from the preacher. Observe how this works in Kipling’s case. Those whoaccept the gospel of vitality will think him the more human for setting it forth. Thosewhose temperaments reject it, will be inclined to reject the preacher also and so commita deplorable mistake. They must remember that a man is always more valuable than hismessage and that Kipling is worth reading even when he is scolding a round peg becauseit will not go into a square hole. And now I will conclude my sermon against sermoniz-ing and will leave “The Mary Gloster” and the narrative poems of which it’s the finestexample; and let us pass on to another division of our subject matter — the poems deal-ing with Military Matters — in other words to the Barrack-Room Ballads.

To many readers, these are Kipling, and most perfectly manifest his genius. Andcertainly to say so much through the mouth of Tommy Atkins is no small feat. To giveus the romance of the East in “Mandalay,” the love of comrades in “Follow Me ‘Ome,”the pathos of “Mary, Pity Women!” and the philosophy of “For to Admire” — to giveus so much beauty and life in slangy doggerel is another great triumph of the Kiplingamalgam. Whether it is its greatest triumph may be questioned. There are momentswhen one suspects a fake. It is just possible that a Tommy might say:

Elephints a-pilin’ teakIn the sludgy, squdgy creek,Where the silence ’ung that ’eavy you was ’arf afraid to speak!

It is not possible that he should say:

Me that ’ave followed my tradeIn the place where the Lightnings are made;’Twixt the Rains and the Sun and the Moon —.

What he really said was:

I that have followed my trade.

and he was not really Tommy at all, but Mr Kipling choosing a wrong medium inwhich to express himself. The Barrack-Room Ballads are best when they are simplest



and are expressing the lively good humour of simple men. How perfectly Kiplingknows his business here! The profound cynicism of Mr Atkins, his mistrust of any-thing original, whether it takes the form of Mr Haldane or of a joint of New Zealandmeat, his brutality, his kindness, his independence, his murderous discontent that ishalf a joke — all are set forth with matchless skill.

For it’s Tommy this and Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”But it’s “Saviour of ’is country” when the guns begin to shoot;An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool — you bet that Tommy sees!

You can hear it any day in one of the Aldershot trains. “You bet that Tommy sees.” Lastyear I travelled with a soldier who cried without ceasing between Weybridge andWaterloo, “’Aldane’s sold the Army. ’E ’as. ’E ’as. Don’t tell me ’e ’asn’t sold the Army.”He did not give us the name of the purchaser, nor did we ask for it. To have said “thefurriners” would have been almost too hard on ’Aldane, who is after all aHenglishman. And to have said “the nonconformist conscience” would have been toocomplicated. So we all sat looking very knowing, but in our hearts half laughing, andnot at all like soldiers of France, who when they say “nous sommes trahis” mean mis-chief. And it is just this comical discontent that Kipling excels at presenting, and thatgives its flavour to so many of the Ballads.

Wot makes the soldier’s ’eart to penk, wot makes ’im to perspire?It isn’t standing up to charge nor lyin’ down to fire.

No of course it isn’t. It’s leading the commissariat camel wot does it. It’s the camel thatis the real curse of life, the lumpy-’umpy ’ummin’ bird a-singin’ where ’e lies, who’s “adevil an’ a ostrich an’ a orphan-child in one.” Life would be bearable if there were nocamels in it. But in another poem it is boots that really matter: boots, the measuredtramp of boots as one goes marching. In another, one grumbles at the general or the ser-geant, or at Missis Victorier — not bitterly, but partly for the sake of grumbling. Orone pays fretful tribute to the enemy — to Fuzzy Wuzzy, “a pore benighted ’eathen buta first-class fightin’ man,” to Piet, the Dutchman, and to the ’eathen

’oo in ’is blindness bows down to wood and stone,And don’t obey no orders unless they is ’is own,

taking care to remind him that

The ’eathen in ’is blindness must end where ’e beganBut the backbone of the Army is the Non-commissioned Man.

All these poems are great fun and leave a pleasant taste behind. Whether they are trueto life, only a soldier can say; they are certainly convincing to the casual observer. It isonly when Kipling begins to put more into Mr Atkins than he can hold, that one’s mis-trust begins. “Mandalay” and the “Sestina of the Tramp-Royal” just come off, andmagnificent they are. “Chant-Pagan” and “The Return,” in spite of high merits, must



be classed as fakes. The point — to which I have already referred once — is of someimportance. To use a convenient metaphor, the Kipling amalgam cracks very easily. Itwill often hold in one verse and crack in the next. One of his best ballads, “Ford o’Kabul River” contains an example of this:

Kabul town’s by Kabul river — Blow the bugle, draw the sword —

There I lef ’ my mate for ever,Wet an’ drippin’ by the ford.

Here we have the Kipling who wrote “The Mary Gloster.” But no one can read the restof the verse without a sense of disappointment:

Ford, ford, ford, o’ Kabul river,Ford o’ Kabul river in the dark!

There’s the river up and brimmin’, an’ there’s ’arf a squadron swimmin’’Cross the ford o’ Kabul river in the dark.

It won’t do, surely. One cannot treat of death in the jingle of the music halls. The mat-ter and the method are incompatible: in other words, the amalgam has cracked.Perhaps you will say, “this is niggling criticism; a poem must be either good or bad.”One more verse will make the point clear, I fancy — four lines of poetry — slang butpoetry and then — crack! four lines of slang that are doggerel:

Kabul town was ours to take —Blow the bugle, draw the sword —

I’d ha’ left it for ’is sake,’Im that left me by the ford.

Ford, ford, ford o’ Kabul river,Ford o’ Kabul river in the dark!

It’s none so bloomin’ dry there; ain’t you never comin’ nigh there,’Cross the ford o’ Kabul river in the dark?

It is hard to forgive Kipling for writing “bloomin’ dry.” I am afraid he thought that he wasbeing manly: vitality will lead one to odd conclusions at times. It is hard to forgive himfor spoiling the emotion by choosing so artificial a mouthpiece for it as a private soldier.For Tommy Atkins may be as artificial, as “literary” as were ever the Strephons and Silviosof the eighteenth century, and may equally fetter the poet in the expression of truth. TheBarrack-Room is not a large place; it is larger than we civilians thought, but it is not thewhole world. And the Ballads sung therein must keep to their own subjects; when theyventure into high tragedy or into romance they become either painful or insincere. Withthis reflection, and with prolonged applause, let us dismiss them.

Of the third division of our subject — the poems suggested by a residence in India— it is not easy to speak. The poems themselves are mostly poor, being youthful work,and parallel to the stories about Mrs Hauksbee in prose. Second rate Anglo-Indian socie-ty may be an amusing theme for the cynic, but it is not inspiring, and one soon forgetsthe jumble of girls and subs and rickshaws that gallivant through the pages of the



Departmental Ditties, leaving an odour of stale whiskey behind them. These vulgar littlephantoms are not India. The real India, that has its capital not at Simla, nor at any citybuilt by men, the India of Buddha and of Brahm that desires not government appoint-ments but unity with the divine, the India that the Bridge-Builders saw when Gangescame down in flood, and the Lama saw when he found the River of the Arrow and res-cued Kim from the tyranny of the Wheel — that India — only by chance I think —scarcely finds expression in the poems at all. There are hints of it in “The Mother-Lodge,”and in “Buddha at Kamakura.” But for the full expression one must turn to prose.

And yet one cannot neglect it even here, for no external influence has touchedKipling more deeply. If he had not been born at Bombay,

born in her gate,Between the palms and the sea,

Where the world-end steamers wait,

if he had not felt

the Soul of all the EastAbout him at Kamakura

a deepest note would have been missing from his work; and he would not have givenus the greatest of all his books, Kim. Kim is Kipling. It is the one book that we mustbear in mind when we are trying to estimate his genius, for it contains the spiritualstandard by which all his developments must be measured. Mysticism may be a mis-take, but no one will deny this — that if once a man shows traces of it, those tracesmust be carefully scanned by all who are trying to understand him. To have felt, if onlyfor a moment, that this visible world is an illusion — to have conceived, however faint-ly, that the real is the unseen, to have had even a passing desire for the One — is atonce to be marked off from all who have not thus felt, thus conceived, thus desired.There is no explanation of the gift of mysticism; many criminals and outcasts have pos-sessed it; many bishops, if the truth were known, are devoid of it; it pays no honourto rank, character, or avocation; only one thing is certain; it is the peculiar gift of India,and India has given it to Kipling, as she gave it to his boy hero, Kim.

So when we read “Tomlinson,” with its Anglo-Saxon account of the unseen world,or the “Recessional” hymn with its assumption of a Chosen Race, let us remember thescene with which Kim concludes. The old Lama has received the mystic’s reward: his soulhas left the body and is united to the World Soul, and beholds all India at once, from theHimalayas to Ceylon. And from that bliss he withdraws himself, and returns to the sillybody with agony, in order that Kim also may attain salvation. With the supreme beautyof that scene we are not here concerned. Let me only note that it places in their properposition many poems that we might consider too seriously. “Tomlinson” and the“Recessional” are not by any means insincere. But they are thrown off by the superficiallayers of Kipling’s mind, while Kim proceeds from the central core of it, that was quick-ened into life by India.

India is the most important religious influence that Kipling has ever felt. Of religionas it has presented itself to the finer minds of the West he has little comprehension. Inall his pages you will find little encouragement for the pure in heart or the meek or the



merciful, or for any of those whose lives have been transfigured by the Christian ideal.The God of his celebrated “Recessional” is a Hebrew deity who has given us dominionover palm and pine and who may take that dominion away if we do not keep the Law;the spirit is not mentioned. It is to Jehovah of the Thunders that we are to pray in the“Hymn before Action,” to Samson, to [Attai?], and to Tubal Cain that we are to turn forexamples of righteousness and wisdom. The New Testament exists for him scarcely morethan it did for the Ironsides of Cromwell: all his affinities are with the Old.

It is true that Calvinism (approaching as it does to the idea of a Jewish theocracy)finds him sympathetic. He admires it for its consistency and its strengthening influ-ence upon the character. To admire Calvinism and to admire Buddha as well, mightseem impossible. But life is always more wonderful than one supposes, and there is nodoubt that Kipling, or one of the Kiplings, is actually a puritan of the Geneva type.He can vivify such phrases as “predestination” and “sudden conversion.” He can enterinto the soul of McAndrew the Glasgow engineer, who is tempted to let civilizationslip and to drowse away his life in some tropic island. “This,” says McAndrew, was “theSin against the Holy Ghost,” “rank blasphemy” — worse than all the more obvioussins of life, and he is only saved from it by seeing, in the machinery of his own steam-er, the spiritual machinery that God has created to rescue his elect.

From coupler-flange to spindle-guide I see Thy Hand, O God —Predestination in the stride o’ yon connectin’ rod.John Calvin might ha’ forged the same — enorrmous, certain, slow —Ay, wrought it in the furnace-flame — my “Institutio.”

Into all this can Kipling enter but behind it all there remains the mystic, passionlessface of India and the Lama saying to Kim, “Just is the Wheel! Certain is our deliv-erance. Come!”

Let us leave these high matters, which are perhaps a little too high for the presentoccasion and for public discussion. But that is Kipling’s fault. He is so interesting thathe opens vistas onto every aspect of life, and so forcible that he touches the reader toa quick rejoinder. Worthy logical people who “set forth their views” are invariablyheard with apathy. They lecture on Buddhism or Calvinism or Imperialism, while wesit yawning and taking notes. But Kipling has only to say a few words and we agree ordisagree at once. Even those who detest him most have never accused him of dullness.He may be — and he is — vulgar; he may be wrong on every point of metaphysics,ethics, aesthetics, politics and patriotics; he may be indiscreet and provoke indiscre-tion; but never, never is he dull.

The division of his work that now concerns us — the poems dedicated toImperialism — is not as important as the Indian division, but it is equally controversial.Kipling here makes a political appeal, and the more we respond to that appeal the morewe shall respond to his poetry. Those who believe that the Anglo-Saxon race is divinelyappointed to govern the world will rejoice when he expresses their belief worthily, andpardon him when he vulgarizes it. Those who, like myself, have a sneaking admirationfor “them furriners” and who hope that France, Italy, and Germany, even Germany, willhelp to shape the civilizations of the future — we shall read these later poems with a feel-ing of tension, for Kipling will be dragging us into a position that isn’t ours. We shallreadily accuse them of materialism, of cant, of an almost bestial view of the English char-



acter; we shall shudder when we read about the Race with a big R, the Blood with a bigB, and the Trail with a big T; we shall resent the facile appeals to the Almighty, inter-spersed with demands for conscription and a preferential tariff; and such poems as “TheWage Slaves,” “Et Dona Ferentes,” “Kitchener’s School,” “The Old Issue,” “The Lesson,”and “South Africa,” will seem to us to contain more than their due share of putty, brass,and paint, the brass predominating. Is our resentment just? Who [can be impartial]?

All will agree that his Imperial work has a certain hardness of touch. It isn’t differ-ent to his early work, and technically it is as remarkable. But somehow the wrong ingre-dients have got moved to the front. In the South African songs the cheeriness of theBarrack-Room Ballads is replaced either by brutality, or by an impossible Romanticism,while in the more serious poems, convictions have become arid catchwords, and inspi-ration turgid metaphysics. Compare any poem in The Five Nations with a correspondingpoem in an earlier volume, and this criticism will hold. Compare “Piet” with “Fuzzy-Wuzzy,” “Lichtenberg” with “Mandalay,” “The Feet of the Young Men” with “The Songof the Banjo,” “Dedication” with the “Envoi” of The Seven Seas. In each case the earlierpoem throbs with life, while the later poem, though it lays even greater stress on vitality,is itself dying. Is there any explanation for this? Yes, and one might put it in these words:Kipling has been too hard on Tomlinson. Tomlinson is doubtless a worm and no man,but if you despise even Tomlinson too much, he will end by turning on you. To demandaction, action, and always action, as Kipling has for many years, is to provoke a very sub-tle Nemesis. For it will imperceptibly narrow into a demand for physical action, and willfirst neglect, and then will despise the activities of the spirit. To create a corner in wheatis action, to have Germany on toast is action; to drive a screeching motor car along theSussex lanes is action; but truth, sympathy, mercy, and modesty — they denote a seden-tary body and a parochial mind. However, let Kipling speak for himself.

When through the Gates of Stress and StrainComes forth the vast Event —

The simple, sheer, sufficing, sane Result of labour spent —

(in other words, when the Anglo-Saxons have triumphed; these poems are ratherobscure): then —

They that have wrought the end unthoughtBe neither saint nor sage,

But only men who did the workFor which they drew the wage.

That is to say, virtue and philosophy count as nothing in the development of theBritish Empire, all that is wanted is commercial honesty.

Whether Kipling is right or wrong does not concern us here; another has said thatpoets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but let that pass. We are con-cerned with the light the stanza throws on the writer’s own character. Surely in it liesthe secret of the metallic effect that all his later poems produce. He has been too rudeto Tomlinson; he has brooded and brooded on the superiority of action to mere thoughtand feeling, until his mind has overbalanced hopelessly and he cannot realize that all



those men who do the work for which they draw the wage, must at the same time leadinner lives of their own and that the state of these inner lives is the true measure ofnational progress. He does not deny the inner life in so many words — no educatedman has the pluck to do that — but he pushes it far into the background, and bringsmaterial strength and material organization to the front. Now to approach the BritishEmpire in such a spirit is to ensure Jingoism. An Empire is a very difficult subject forpoetry. Unless the poet possesses exquisite taste and deep inspiration, he will fall intoKipling’s error, and praise it because it is big and can smash up its enemies. To celebratea nation is easy enough; it demands a straightforward patriotism that most of us cansupply. But an Empire, with its claims to world-wide dominion demands somethingmore profound — that instinctive reverence for all humanity that was possessed byVirgil, when he celebrated the Empire of Rome. Kipling’s task is more difficult thanVirgil’s, for the British Empire, unlike the Roman, cannot claim a monopoly of civi-lization. And, needless to add, he lacks the Virgilian qualities; he would scorn them asun-British. The results are depressing. For one thing the colonies are exalted beyond allproportion, because being young communities, and therefore still engaged in the phys-ical struggle with nature, they appeal to him strongly; whereas England, aged one thou-sand years, and occupied in the effeminate problems of education and social reform,rouses his soul to loathing. For another thing the foreigner is beyond all proportioninsulted. Kipling’s big vital empire must do something, it must have something to hitat, else were its vitality in vain. Fortunately there are the foreigners, whom he regards asa sort of moral football, designed by providence for the purpose of keeping the ChosenRace in good condition. Smash ’em up. Smash up the Gentiles. They’re sure to be plot-ting against us, if only we could understand their beastly lingo. Teach them that we arethe Chosen Race and they aren’t, that we have the Law and they haven’t, that we are thereal Jungle Folk and they the gibbering monkeys who carried away Mowgli for a little,but were afterwards slain in their thousands by Bagheera and Kaa. The sentiment is nota pretty one, and Kipling’s religious phraseology makes it doubly repellent. And onemay note that it springs from demanding action, action, and always action and is thelogical goal towards which Kipling has been moving. India, as it were, put the drug onhim, and granted him visions of another ideal; Barrack-Room life deflected him into arare geniality; Romance and the Spirit of Wonder restrained him till he sang of theMary Gloster and the Banjo and the Three-Decker, and a dozen other themes for song.But action, action, hurried him forward when these influences stopped, and passed intime into physical action, into “down with introspection,” “down with social reform,”“down with the Foreigner,” “down with the other poets.” His most recent utterances —the letters published last spring in the Morning Post — scarcely read like the words of asane man. At all events, both in practice and in theory, they avoid all the qualities thathave endeared him to us in the past.

Quotations might be made to illustrate these points. The attitude towards thecolonist might be confirmed from “The English Flag,” “A Song of the English,” “TheNative Born,” “The Islanders,” and “The Parting of the Columns”; the attitude to theforeigner from the same poems, with the addition of that most offensive ditty of all —“Et Dona Ferentes.” But I am anxious to hurry away from it, and to conclude on apleasanter note. A man’s bad work is of interest to the literary historian, but of nointerest to the lover of literature. It is the love of literature that has brought us togeth-er this evening, and we desire to lay some uncontroversial garland at the poet’s feet.



Almost above controversy are the words that he has written about children. Theymay not all be of equal merit, but in all of them the wings of Romance are opened.One cannot see how Kipling does it — it is yet another Kipling, closely connectedperhaps with the one who was awakened into life by India. Children in literature areall the fashion now, and many a good writer has stooped to delineate them. But withKipling it is not stooping: he is perfectly serious; he puts forth the whole force of hispoetry, and rings them with a halo that he seldom wastes upon adults. Perhaps he ishalf a child himself. He too loves puns and catchwords and vain repetitions, like theyounger heathen. How unsatisfactory it is to play Robinson Crusoe with the cat! (shescratches and won’t attend). How probable that an armadillo would go dilloing in hisarmour. The whole of life — how delightful it is, how satisfactory, provided it’s trulyexploring and not being in to tea. The woods are full of fairies and pixies, the housesare full of ghosts — not the priggish ghosts of the Psychical Research Society, but realcreepy crawly ghosts that are only banished by a blazing fire. Nor is the more seriousnote absent. When Kipling writes about children, it is with a graciousness, a comfort-ableness, if I may coin the word, that we seldom find elsewhere. There is no jaggededge, no feeling of tension: we listen to one who does not scold but soothes, and isprogressing, however shyly, from the rule of the Law to that of the Spirit. In one poem— it is prefixed to the short story called “They” — he broods over the fate of thosechildren who have died in childhood, and if the poem in question fails, it is notthrough any lack of tenderness. In two other poems — but I shall venture to read youthese two other poems, though you are certain to know them. They are the mostexquisite things that Kipling ever wrote, and they deal with our own country.

The first of them goes thus:

There runs a road by Merrow Down —A grassy track to-day it is —An hour out of Guildford TownAbove the river Wey it is.

Here, when they heard the horse-bells ring,The ancient Britons dressed and rode, To watch the dark Phoenicians bringTheir goods along the Western Road.

Yes, here, or hereabouts, they metTo hold their racial talks and such —To barter beads for Whitby jet,And tin for gay shell torques and such.

But long and long before that time(When bison used to roam on it)Did Taffy and her Daddy climb That Down, and had their home on it.

Then beavers built in BroadstonebrookAnd made a swamp where Bramley stands,



And bears from Shere would come and lookFor Taffimai where Shamley stands.

The Wey, that Taffy called Wagai,Was more than six times bigger then;And all the Tribe of TegumaiThey cut a noble figure then!

Here Kipling joins the world together link by link, not by the tinkle of the banjo —but by a nobler bond: the thread of paternal love, that has descended unbrokenthrough the centuries. The father and daughter of the Neolithic age are the father anddaughter of this, and by the magic of poetry their joys and sorrows touch ours andbecome our own:

Of all the Tribe of TegumaiWho cut that figure, none remain, —On Merrow Down the cuckoos cry —The silence and the sun remain.

But as the faithful years returnAnd hearts unwounded sing again,Comes Taffy dancing through the fern,To lead the Surrey spring again.

Her brows are bound with bracken-fronds,And golden elf-locks fly above,Her eyes are bright as diamonds,And bluer than the sky above.

In moccasins and deer-skin cloak, Unfearing, free and fair she flits,And lights her little damp-wood smokeTo show her Daddy where she flits.

For far — oh, very far behind,So far she cannot call to him,Comes Tegumai alone to findThe daughter that was all to him!

Words like these will never be widely popular. They will never be shouted from theplatforms at elections, or quoted as headlines by the halfpenny press. They are toomelodious, too tender, too wise, they only deal with what is permanent and noble inour humanity. They speak to us of the past: they may speak about us to the future, indays when our politics are forgotten and our newspapers indecipherable.

[1908]



A Roman “Society”

Since I was up the Society has discovered Literature. The result has been perfectlydelightful. Instead of niggling about with ethics the papers have become bright andbroad, and handle the weekly rebus with growing lucidity. The discussions too havegained greatly in appeal. When elected, I could not understand anything I heard, butnow, though unable to hear, I am almost certain that I understand it. We are entering(are we not?) upon an ampler field. We have left Thought behind us, and are almostpast Conduct. Passion and Beauty are widening out, and in their treatment we prom-ise ourselves inexhaustible joys. What a long way Literature has brought us! Whereshall we not get to if we discover History also?

It is therefore my intention to describe a group of embryos who existed at Romein the pre-Tomlinsonian era! I shall assume a certain amount of historical knowledge orthe describing will never get done. Please do not be tiresome. When I say “The papa-cy” or “the spirit of the Renaissance” or “the unhappy if gifted peninsula,” please con-note the phrases as any honest phenomenon would connote them, and do not twistthem into something different on the hearthrug. It is true that these embryos are an alle-gory and may be not far from Apostolic birth. But we cannot come to that until we haveconsidered them as they appear to Gregorovius, Burckhardt, and Pastor.

The fourth century before T[omlinson] was wearing to its close, when there mighthave been observed, very early any morning, the figure of an undersized man. He wasdescending the Quirinal or the Esquiline — he had some property on either — and wasmaking his [way] towards the Capitol, on which was situated the University. In one handhe held some lecture notes, in the other a lantern to guide his feet through the mud andthe fallen masonry, feet that were shod in buskins, buskins that were closely imitated fromthe antique. A good many other people had got up early too, and morning after morning,year after year, the man lectured on classics to a crowded audience. Most were civil ser-vants from the government offices over at the Vatican, but some were the sons ofCardinals, and some were the local nobility, who hoped to improve their position by cul-ture. He spoke to them in Latin and of Latin; he spoke of Ennius and Varro and the ear-lier greatness of Rome; never a word of Greek passed his lips: fearing to spoil his pronun-ciation, he had refused to learn Greek. On and on he went, stuttering, but moving theaudience to tears; they cried and he cried. Dawn broke over the Holy City as he wenthome. He could see the ruins of antiquity, and the contrast between them and the imagesin his mind was more than he could bear. He stood motionless, mesmerized, and tearsfilled his eyes again. But his life was happy. When he got back there were his ducks to feed,and his chickens, and his vines to cultivate according to the precepts of Columella, and heliked fishing, and snaring blackbirds, and picnicking out in the Campagna with hisfriends. To money or position he was indifferent. The bastard of a princely family, whenhis cousins asked him to stop, he wrote back to them as follows: “How do you do. I can-not do as you want. Good bye.” What, you will ask, was the name of this attractive oldcard? Nobody can tell you. His name has been lost. His cousins were the Sanseverini ofSalerno, but he himself is only remembered by his adopted name of Pomponius Laetus.



We do not know when he came to Rome, but early in his professorship he madefriends with several members of his audience. They would meet at his house to dis-cuss deeper points of archaeology or grammar. Their studies ramified and overshad-owed the whole of life, and at last the meetings coalesced into a fraternity, which wassupposed to be secret, and which was known in after years as the Roman Academy.There was a ritual for election: each member adopted an antique name. HencePomponius Laetus, and we also hear of Sabellicus his biographer, of Callimachus, ofGlaucus, of Asclepiades, and Augustinus Campanuo, of Petrejus, and above all of theeminent humanist Platina. There was an annual banquet — in honour of Romulus’sbirthday. There were numerous suppers, which in early days consisted of herbs out ofPomponius’s garden, but, as time went on became perfectly delicious and werewashed down with costly wines. Members would read papers and discuss: if a bishopwas present he opened proceedings by a prayer for the dead; or Pomponius led offwith an address; or elegiac couplets were recited. The discussions proper were on var-ied topics, starting with Republican Rome but getting a long way away from it. Whenthe bishop was there they may have kept fairly orthodox, but generally theAcademicians flew like moths into that most brilliant of heresies — the doctrine ofthe Three Impostors. Moses was a charlatan, Christ a seducer of the people,Mohammed, though extremely clever, was only looking after his own interests. Thusall religions are false, and what fools are we to be bound by them. Let us eat anddrink, let us love women and one another, for tomorrow we die. Pomponius was aDeist who believed in a life after death; the younger members were more daring, andheld that the mind will never feel again when once it has been parted from the body.They determined to enjoy themselves, they grew wilder and more drunken, theyacted farces in the Atellan style, they went down into the Catacombs and signed theirpseudonyms over the early Christians’, they blasphemed, they made friends withheretics and with Turks, they prophesied the death of the Pope. Speaking phenome-nally they were not serious; three quarters of their remarks must have been jokes, andthey had not the least intention of conspiring against the Papacy. Speaking apostoli-cally they were serious; they made as good use of their lives as men then could make.They increased every value by secrecy, and the years from BT 360 to 352 must havebeen an uninterrupted heaven of friendship, merriment, and wisdom.

The Pope of that day was called Paul II. He was a heavy and sentimental man wholiked everyone to be happy. Though fond of meat, he could not bear to see the beastsbeing driven to the butchers. Though a strict disciplinarian, he always inflicted theminimum sentence and when people objected to his leniency replied with emphasis,“Is it indeed so small a thing to take the life of so wonderful a work of God as is man— a creature too on whom society has for many years expended so much pains?” Andso, instead of killing the criminal, he sentenced him to light penal servitude for life.The poor loved him. He suited them exactly. He would sit by their bedsides when theywere sick, and he had a little pharmacy from which he dispensed medicines gratis. Insociety too he held his own. Geniality reigned despotically at his table, and he oftensaid that he wished that every one of his guests could have a nice villa in the country,to retire to in the summer when the town gets so hot. As for literature and art, he didnot recognize them, and is not responsible for the licentious miniature of a Cupid inviolet stockings, which Dr Pastor has been so unfortunate as to discover among theVatican archives. But he did not ignore culture entirely. He was obliged to be interest-



ed in something, and, since postage stamps had not been invented, Pope Paul’s collec-tion of precious stones was unrivalled throughout Christendom.

Such was the man into whose hands the society was to fall. He was a coward anda fool, and I feel that he was a eunuch, though I have not any authority for saying this.His appearance was handsome. His morals were pure. They do not seem to have real-ized their danger.

All might have gone well, but for an unfortunate episode in the outer life ofPlatina. Platina is a figure of some importance in the literary history of the century. Hewas a humanist of the lighter type, and his History of the Popes may still be read withpleasure. He was also a poet. He composed the verses to Melozzo da Forli’s gloriousfresco for the Vatican Library, and in that fresco he himself appears, pointing to theverses that he has just composed. But his normal profession was that of civil servant.Under Paul’s predecessor, he bought himself a post in the Chancery. The work, main-ly diplomatic, was well paid and desirable socially. In Rome, as at Florence, the civilservice had a great tradition behind it, and Platina hoped to follow in the steps ofPoggio and Valla, whose Latinity had made princes tremble. His hopes were dashed.When Paul was elected, his first care was to reorganize the government offices — inother words, to dismiss all the clerks in order that the Cardinal Vice Chancellor, whowas a friend of his, could sell the posts by auction for the second time. Platina lost hissalary and his purchase money, and his prospects, and it is not surprising that his tem-per followed. For twenty nights he clamoured for an interview. It was refused, and heresorted to desperate measures. He wrote a letter threatening the Pope with a generalCouncil of Christendom if the clerks were not reinstated. The interview followed alltoo quickly. He was tortured and thrown into prison.

It was winter, and the cells of Sant’ Angelo are damp. He emerged crippled withrheumatism. Doubtless the Society gave him a glorious supper, but no welcome couldcomfort him for his first great contact with the world. He, and other civil servants whohad suffered like him, threw personal passion into the heresy of the Three Impostors,of Moses, Christ, and Mohammed; Christ is clearly the most deceitful. The saints arecheap-jacks, St Francis is an idiot. The priests have invented fasting and forbidden mento have more than one wife; astrology, a surer guide, has declared that the exasperat-ing Pope will die. And so things went forward for five years. The sense of fraternitygrew stronger. The society had a wrong which it did not propose to revenge, but whichbound it more passionately into one.

At last we come to the police. Need I say that they had known of the society and lis-tened to its conversaziones for many years? Exactly what they discovered I cannot say, butin the February of 1468 they made a report to the Pope, and the same evening nearly allthe brothers were arrested. Callimachus, Glaucus, and Petrejus had warning and fled.Pomponius Laetus was away at Venice, visiting a young man whom he loved in that city.But the unfortunate Platina was caught, again tortured, and again thrown into Sant’Angelo, while the licentious poems that were found in the houses of the fugitives fur-nished fresh proofs of their guilt. The Pope was out of his mind with terror. He was men-aced by anarchy, atheism, heresy, paganism, and immorality, and simply did not knowwhere to begin. Only one thing seemed clear. Literature and History must be abolishedimmediately. “If God spares my life,” he cried, “I will forbid everyone to read poetry orstories. Children are bad enough as it is at ten. Then, they know a thousand villainies:think how much worse they become when they read Juvenal and so forth. I am aware that



Juvenal rebukes vice, but he reveals it while he rebukes it, and he is like an ill-advised cler-gyman who tells the congregation of more improprieties than they would ever think of forthemselves. If a man insists on reading, there are plenty of harmless books, but it is betterto call things straight by their names, and not to go all round about them as in poetry.”The Pope was right. Literature and History, if not the most effective weapons againstAuthority, are the easiest to handle, and the Roman Academy had discovered their power.

Meanwhile the prisoners were returning confused answers. It must be difficult fora secret society to give a clear account of itself when the lid is taken off suddenly, andthey really did not know whether they had been conspiring against the Pope or not.Measured by the standards of fact, exactly what were their jokes, what were theirdreams? When Papal soldiers were turning the rack, to what exact extent was Christ animpostor? They took the only course that is open to a lively mind — they blamed oneanother, the only apostolic course, but it shattered their fraternity for ever. Platinablames Callimachus, a gossip and a drunkard. “Who would have supposed,” he writes,“that the ridiculous visions of a buffoon could have brought us into such trouble? Hepretended to give us treasures and kingdoms; we laughed, but now he goes at large, eat-ing and drinking enormously, while we languish in prison because we have not report-ed his dreams.” Not to have reported Callimachus to the authorities — that is his onlycrime; otherwise he is blameless. Henceforward, if even a bird speaks disrespectfully ofthe Pope, His Holiness shall be told at once. He will give up classics and take to theol-ogy. He will be Homer and the four evangelists rolled into one, and all his poetry andprose shall concentrate on this glorious Pontificate of Paul. If only he may come out ofprison! “If only, O Father, you will give hope to us who, with clasped hands and bend-ed knees, are waiting for your mercy!”

The turn of Pomponius followed. He was extradited, and also tortured in Sant’Angelo. For a time he kept his gaiety, and asked for books, and for a cheerful com-panion with whom to exchange ideas. Then incoherence covers him. He too lays theblame on Callimachus. He too is guiltless and asks pardon for his sin. When accusedof Paganism, he quotes some verses that he has composed on the Stations of the Cross.When accused of the young Venetian, he quotes the example of Socrates. It did notmuch matter what the prisoners said as long as they said enough. The Pope weighedthe evidence, weighed it again, consulted the Cardinals, made pretentious enquiries inNaples and Poland, and gradually came to the conclusion that there had been no con-spiracy against his person. He found the brothers guilty of flippancy only, and dis-missed them with a kindly caution. Broken in health, degraded to one another and tothe world, they were led back to their ancient haunts and reorganized as an Academy,under official patronage. They outlived their persecutor. Platina had even the pleasureof traducing him in his Lives of the Popes. But anything that may have been Apostolicin their existence had gone forever.

Could they have managed better? In the muddle of the trial, in the throng of accu-sations, most of which were true, could they have conveyed the strength and the dig-nity and the joy that had been theirs in secret for a dozen years? The banquets, theAtellan farces, the fearless interchange of thought — could they have given a clearaccount of these things and gone to the galleys for them? Or did they manage as wellas they could and better than we shall? Is squalor the inevitable end of such an affair?

[1910]



Samuel Butler, 1835–1902

Let us suppose that towards the close of the last century John Bull went on a tourof inspection. He visited in turn the various industries that have made our islandfamous, and came at last to the factory in which we produce our literature.

Literature had never been a favourite industry of John Bull’s. He always put offinspecting it and often wondered why he supplied this article at all. “It’s just a habit ofmine” he would say, “just a habit. If foreigners want literature, and it is the sort ofthing foreigners would want, I mean to show them that I am top of this market heretoo.” He was not swaggering when he spoke like this. Though he took no trouble overhis literature and had no theories about its manufacture, yet it really was top of themarket and had been for many hundred years, and the factory that he would describeas a plain sensible building with none of your fallals was actually the most gloriouspalace which this earth has seen.

Entering this building by an exquisite fourteenth-century porch, through whosearcades the sun was shining and the sweet air blowing, Mr Bull proceeded to [the] cen-tral hall and to the central column that supports that hall. “Shakespeare’s plays” he mur-mured, patting it. “I’d like to see a German write Shakespeare’s plays.” He then left thishall. A passage, intricate at first, led him out into the noble corridors of the eighteenthcentury and here again he paused and pronounced with real feeling the name of DrJohnson. However he had not come to celebrate the past but to inspect the present, andproceeding through another porch — of sham Gothic this time — he left the eighteenthcentury for the nineteenth and entered the newer buildings where the actual business ofproduction was being carried on. A busy scene met his eyes. The workmen were of allgrades and making use of all kinds of tools. The dramatists were writing dramas, thepoets headed by the Poet Laureate were composing poems, the critics criticism, thethinkers thought. The humorous men were being funny. Mr Bull could not but bepleased. If you will have literature no one turns it out as copiously as the English. Hestrolled to and fro, his hands behind his back, occasionally remarking “Ahem.”

While in this happy state he noticed a curious figure. One of the workmen,instead of sticking to his job, was running about and hindering his fellows, or else wasplaying in the passage quite by himself. Just as Mr Bull noticed him he noticed MrBull, and drawing himself up gave his employer a most equivocal bow and disap-peared. “Ahem!” said Mr Bull, “What have we here? Ahem!” and he called up a criticand asked him who the fellow was. The critic replied, “His name is Samuel Butler, sir.”

“Samuel Butler? What is his job?”“He is best known as the author of a book called Erewhon. ‘Nowhere,’ you see. He

writes his words upside down, and [as] for his job — he seems to have no special job.”Mr Bull had heard of Erewhon and pronounced that it was a “fanciful work,

decidedly fanciful.” He added, “I’ve no special objection to fanciful works. He may aswell go on writing them.”

“But that’s just what he won’t do,” the critic cried, “He wrote a sequel, ErewhonRevisited, but with that exception all his other books are different. We never know



where we are, and it is most tiresome. For instance he writes two books about Italy —Alps and Sanctuaries and Ex Voto. We think that is his line. The next moment he is dab-bling in science: Life and Habit; Unconscious Memory; Evolution, Old and New: andactually being rude to Charles Darwin. Then poems if you please, and pictures, andmusic — he has composed a comic cantata in the Handelian style — and theology —a treatise called The Fair Haven which reading too hastily we mistook for orthodox,and a book on Shakespeare’s sonnets upsetting all the usual theories, and another onHomer’s Odyssey proving that it was written by a lady, and a novel called The Way ofAll Flesh which is to be published after his death, only he declares that he really neverwill die. Did you ever —! But a quotation will show you. Allow me.” And opening oneof Butler’s Note-Books the critic read as follows (Note-Books, p.183):

I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, andI know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to giveme a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the mid-dle of them.

John Bull could not help laughing. “Oh now I understand” he said. “The fellow’sa what d’ye call it — an iconoclast. Let him go on heaving his bricks. It’ll come to thesame in the end. Put him in that gang.”

“But he won’t go there” cried the critic in despair. “He says he is not an iconoclastbut a conservative. There’s never been such a man in English literature before, neversince the factory was started. You can’t fit him in anywhere, and if he’s allowed to goon writing, we shall go mad.”

“Ha, ha!” laughed Mr Bull, for he has no sympathy with critics. “We’ll go madeh? Ha, ha, ha!”

The critic with some bitterness then dwelt on Butler’s private life — how heintended to be a clergyman, but had gone to farm sheep in New Zealand instead: howhe hadn’t even stuck with it but had returned to England with a small competence;how he had lost all his money through bad investments, and then became rich again;how he had never married, wouldn’t know the “right people” and wore odd clothes andboots that looked like apple pies; in short how you couldn’t place him financially orsocially any more than you could place him in literature. He went on so long that MrBull got bored, and would have shut him up had he not remembered the enigmaticalbow that Samuel Butler had given him, and that was still unexplained.

Desiring an explanation he said “Well? and what does he think of me?”The critic hesitated.“Speak out man. Don’t be afraid. I can stand a little blame.”“He does not exactly blame you Mr Bull — on the contrary he approves of you.”“Very well, good then. Put him among the patriotic writers. Where’s your difficulty?”“But he does give such strange reasons for his approval.”His employer told him to explain. “He likes you chiefly — because you are pros-

perous. Prosperity is to him the highest of all virtues. If a man flourishes like a greenbay tree, it is to Butler proof positive that he is civilized. Since this has been your case,you attribute your success to a high morality, Butler to the skills with which you havestolen such beef and beer as were lying near you, and to the ease with which you havedigested them. Were you unfortunate, were you meek, or poor, or humble of heart,



were there one touch of the saint about you, you would find no grace in his eyes. Hedislikes saints. He dislikes all idealists. Hence his affection for you.”

Mr Bull tried to think this out.“In the second place, he likes you because you are muddle-headed. You know noth-

ing about the working of your own mind. It works and very efficiently — if you wantan example look at the building in which we now stand — but you do not know how itworks, and this is a great merit in the eyes of Butler. He hates people who understandthemselves. It renders them (he declares) unloveable. He values (in Englishmen and allmen) the unconscious rather than the conscious qualities: good breeding, good health,good looks are to him the highest gifts because we have acquired them without knowingand through our ancestors. For example, Mr Bull, when you tell a lie, you tell it uncon-sciously. You deceive yourself as well as others and he likes this. It has helped to make youwhat you are — a pleasant, sociable, and genial gentleman. People who lie consciouslyare always unpleasant. Besides they do not do it nearly as well. He admires you for theinstinctive grace with which you tell a lie.”

There was a short pause.“In the third place” the critic concluded, “he admires you because you are timid,

conventional, conservative and a stick-in-the-mud. Long may you stick in that mud,for if ever you were out of it, it means misery for yourself and for the world. Not foryou is the ultimate reality, the changeless truth of the Empyrean, not for you is anyknowledge of the Love that moves the stars. Had you that knowledge Butler would notlike you any more. No aspirations are yours, no burning spiritual desires. Yours is thekingdom of this world. You have stained with the Dome of many-coloured glass thewhite radiance of Eternity. Well done. Well done.” He was silent, having pointed tothe ceiling above their heads.

As for Mr Bull he was silent too — at least I shall not produce his reply. Let usassume it was “Tut-tut.” I am only concerned to note the steps he took for silencinghis unwelcome admirer. Something had to be done, and quickly too. The critic, anintellectual man, would have lacerated Butler in the columns of the press but JohnBull is far too wise for such folly. “No, no,” he said. “Do not attack the man, do notexpel him from the pursuit of literature forcibly — you will only make him notori-ous. Let him go on working, but don’t pay him anything. You understand — ignorehim. Cut off his pay.”

Then he completed his inspection and left the building and as soon as he foundhimself outside among the trees and hedges and the jolly green fields and the farmers andthe fishermen and the sailors and the simple men and women whom he loved, he won-dered why he had ever left them to bother about literature and why he supplied such anarticle at all. As for Butler he was treated as indicated. His pay was cut off. He wasignored. He had had some success with Erewhon (1872) and had even been praised forit by The Spectator, but those golden days were now over. Year after year he sank intooblivion, partly because he had offended the vested interests, partly because he was beforehis time. Towards the end of his life he calculated that the profession of literature hadcost him exactly £779.18.11/2. Today his books are selling but he is not here to receivethe pay. Butler loved money, loved it openly and heartily. In this as in all things he wasfree from cant.

The influence of Butler has been great behind the scenes. He is a writer who par-ticularly appeals to other writers and one can see his effect not only on the Shaw



Granville Barker Galsworthy type, but also in more unexpected quarters such as thelater work of Maeterlinck. He is now taking a fresh lease of life with the general pub-lic; also, the dinner held annually in his honour ever draws a wider circle of guestsand he will stand out as an example of tardy appreciation on the part of John Bull.Here let us leave him for a moment. The audience deserves an apology for all thisallegory about John Bull and his factory with which my paper has begun. Allegoriesare tiresome things. But it does sometimes happen that they lead us straight to theheart of the subject. I hope that my main point may be already clear. It is this: thatButler’s methods are revolutionary but his conclusions are conservative. Hence thebewilderment and disapproval with which he was greeted. He satisfied no one. Andhence our main difficulty in reading him today. He is so brilliant and original in hisdissection of human nature that we suppose he is working to some extraordinary con-clusion about it. It puzzles us when we find that he most admires an average good-tempered healthy man.

Note-Books, p. 36 and p. 35

I suppose an Italian peasant or a Breton, Norman or English fish-erman, is about the best thing nature does in the way of men —the richer and the poorer being alike mistakes. … I find the nicestand best people generally profess no religion at all, but are ready tolike the best men of all religions. … Heaven is the work of the bestand kindest men and women. Hell is the work of prigs, pedantsand professional truth-tellers. The world is an attempt to make thebest of both. … People ask complainingly what swells have done,or do, for society that they should be able to live without working.The good swell is the creature towards which all nature has beengroaning and travailing together until now. He is an ideal. Heshows what may be done in the way of good breeding, health,looks, temper and fortune. He realizes men’s dream of themselves,at any rate vicariously. He preaches the gospel of grace. The worldis like a spoilt child, it has this good thing given it at great expenseand then says it is useless!

His hero is a man like Towneley in The Way of All Flesh, who when asked whether hedoesn’t prefer poor people freely replies “No-no-no-no,” and among the inhabitants ofErewhon he likes best a sect called the Ydgrunites — i.e. Grundy-ites: worshippers ofMrs Grundy.

Erewhon p. 175

Take her all in all, however, she was a beneficent and useful deity, whodid not care how much she was denied so long as she was obeyed andfeared, and who kept hundreds of thousands in those paths whichmake life tolerably happy, who would never have been kept there oth-erwise, and over whom a higher and more spiritual ideal would havehad no power.



I need hardly add that Mrs Grundy would repudiate such praise, and if she thought itdecent to know Latin would exclaim, “more Latin.”

But Butler is expressing a profound truth — that the majority of men are keptstraight — not by principles but by instincts that they have inherited through theirancestors. His knack of behaving decently and quite unconsciously exercises it. Theunconscious life: all the actions that we perform without thought: these he values.All that we acquire consciously, all that we aspire to, all our information and ideals— he has small value for these. They are not part of us. They are like a suit ofclothes we have bought or like another we see hanging in a shop window and wishwe could buy. In neither case can they become flesh and blood. This insistence oninstinct runs through all Butler’s work. In Life and Habit he attempts to expoundit scientifically. Not only does it govern our actions but it is the only key to ournatures, for it links us to our ancestors and through them to living matter of everytype. The individual says, “I do this.” Butler replies, “Not you but your ancestors,whose experiences you unconsciously remember. They are working through youand do.” The man says, “Still I have a personality.” Butler decries such a claimpoint-blank: “When was personality given you! At birth? Had you none before?Surely the new-born child is more like the child just before birth than it is like theman of eighty into whom it afterwards develops. So we must suppose that you hada personality before your birth. If so when was it given you, when?” And movingback step by step, he shows that there is no fixed line, no definite moment of whicha man can say, “Then I began, then personality came to me,” and similarly movingstep by step forward he shows that there is no definite moment of which a man cansay, “Then shall I end or die.” We continue in our children as our ancestors con-tinue in us. We bequeath to them much [of ] what we have inherited — namely ourinstincts, our unconscious reminiscences of what has gone before. We are none ofus personalities but bundles of instincts, “scraps of the huge creature life.” We arepart of the creature and in it we have our being. And to illustrate our relations toit, Butler draws a brilliant parallel from the relations of the blood corpuscles insideour body to us. They like us are coursing through the veins of something infinite-ly beyond their comprehension and like us may imagine that they have personali-ties. They vanish or are transformed: we continue. We vanish or are transformed.The huge creature life continues, indifferent, incomprehensible, fed by the surge ofthe generations, fed equally by their reflux moving like all its component parts froman unknown origin to an unknown end. Compared to its immensity what is man?He is “a passing mood coming and going in the mind of his country; he is thetwitching of a nerve, a smile, a frown, a thought of shame or honour, as it may hap-pen.” Caught in its uncomprehended motions, what can man do? He can bedecent. He can be kind. He can follow whatever instinct does least harm to others.If he must have principles he can learn to drop them in the name of Charity. Logicis dangerous. Ideals are dangerous. The best person going is neither scientist norsaint but the “high Ydgrunite,” the enlightened follower of the conventions, thesensible, the kind-hearted.

[1913]



Walter Pater

Pater was an Oxford Don, whose character scarcely prepares us for the greatnessof his books. He was polite retiring and intensely sensitive, he dreaded the impact ofany hostile personality on his own, he was the essence of respectability, alwaysattending college chapel in the morning and dressing for dinner in the evening.With his pallid face and heavy moustache[,] his gold-topped umbrella and tall hatand shy cultured talk[,] he seems the sort of person that is likely to write books[,]but books that are unlikely to be read. His subjects all reveal the scholar. Marius theEpicurean deals with Rome in the days of M[arcus] A[urelius], Gaston de Latour withthe sixteenth cent[ury] in France, other books with the Italian Ren[aissance] or withGreece. And his style, his much praised style, is also what an academic trainingwould produce: fastidious and involved with no touch of raciness. But he soars outof his quadrat of local conditions into the eternal. He is a great writer, and for theonly reason that a writer can be great: he has something to say.

A contemporary of Oscar Wilde and the aesthetes, he was charmed, like them, bythe surface of life, and he teaches that we should take a continuous and passionateinterest in all that surrounds us and live in an uninterrupted chain of sensations. Butunlike the aesthetes he detested triviality. He was not content with feeling a sensation:he insisted on estimating its value, and thus was always breaking through into a larg-er region above that was obscure with clouds and bright with stars. In Marius the herotakes up, one after another, the goods of this world — flowers friends philosophiesbooks. Some of them are dross, others are not and those that are not suggest some eter-nal workshop where they are made. He passes from sensation towards a vision — avision that he never sees himself but that he surmises to be Divine Love. He dies, apagan at the door of Christianity.

Pater not only had something to say. He had a deep sympathy with humanity andthis, too, is sometimes forgotten amid the delicacies and rich complexities of his style.He couldn’t it is true, reconstruct other people’s lives, he had not the dramatic sense.But he could realize that they felt pleasure and pain, and his achievement is a great one.The knowledge that joy and sorrow are dividing the world. It never left him.

[1917?]



Meeting Old Bloomsbury

The nineteenth century had not yet closed, and Professor Waldstein, still far frombeing Sir Charles Walston, was lecturing in the Casts Museum at Cambridge. His maintheme (the indubitable pedimentality of a fragment of a torso of Ixias) need not detainus now. We are only concerned with his peroration. He had, he said, a very good pieceof news for us. He had persuaded a friend of his, a most able and excessively brilliantyoung man, to come up and give some lectures on Venetian Art. It was, at first hearing,a most attractive proposition, but when he went on to say that he could not possibly askMr Roger Fry (for that was his young friend’s name) to lecture without a fee, there wasa slight movement of disillusionment in the audience. Most of us were boys of nineteen— very few girls existed as yet — most of us were poor, and for my own part I felt strong-ly that art is all right as long as you can get it for nothing, a feeling that has often recurredin later years and kept me out of a good many galleries and some drawing-rooms. Butthere was a contrary feeling — one mustn’t be mean — and also a feeling of curiosity,and furthermore a proprietary feeling for I had read The Stones of Venice at school. So Itook a ticket for the course — price 15/- or a guinea or two guineas: these payments growrapidly obscure — and then had a reaction and remembered someone saying thatWaldstein was a Jew.

But as soon as the course began all doubts disappeared. Mr Fry’s pedimentalitywas indubitable. Seldom have I felt safer in lectures, got more from them, or enjoyedthem more. The Vivarini, the Bellini, arranged themselves in parallel or converginglines, Squarcione and the Paduans sent in their arrows sideways, Giovanni theGerman, bulky rather than weighty, did not deny his contribution, and down as far asTitian all the pictures fitted into a picture which one could carry away comfortably inone’s mind. With or after Titian difficulties occurred; the play of influences, alwayssuch a relief, grew less, and these were hints of the coming reign of Mass and Line, andof Treatment, that undying worm. “It’s not the Subject that matters, it’s theTreatment.” Roger didn’t say this at the time, nor may he ever have said it, nor mayanyone in Bloomsbury exactly have said it, yet it may fairly be called the Bloomsburyundertone, the champing of little teeth inside bedsteads and Greek columns, and atiny premonition of it, as yet ununderstood, fell upon my boyish ear.

However there were the Vivarini and the Bellini — they were booked anyway —and these were my notes upon them — I can show them you now — and there was MrFry’s offer to show those students who were interested some photographs, if we wouldcome round to see him after the last lecture. I went round — one wants one’s fullmoney’s worth, also one wants to create an impression when so definite an impressionhas been received. But I made none on Roger. He was bored or indifferent when I ven-tured my timid remarks, and if he dealt out the photographs it was because he hadpromised to do so. Flat grey, and small, Venetian Art lost its magic lanternous glories,and I came away with a feeling of disappointment. A slight feeling: one has always,when recalling the past, to emphasize slightnesses because the mere effort of remem-brance lends undue weight to what has been remembered. I was far more upset by



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something awful which happened just then about Collingham, and the awfulness inwhich is all that I now preserve. My first interview with Roger is memorable because itwas the first, and the discomfort it caused infinitesimal, and more than outbalanced bythe weight of Giovanni il Tedesco. Roger then went away — I don’t know where to.

It is Mr G.M. Trevelyan who must next act as sponsor. Though blacker, quicker,and younger than the Professor Trevelyan we know, he was near him in spirit. Healready had rooms in Trinity, he was earnest, learned, distinguished, and completelywithout influence. To be respected and admired, to evoke affection, to be accepted asa moral force but never never to be followed — that was already his fate, and his room,as if joining in the international conspiracy, always managed to stage something thatwas slightly inappropriate. He asked me to lunch. He had nothing to eat at all,Trevelyans still thinking eating wrong. I had a Spartan plate of mince, mashed pota-toes, and sprouts, covered with a tin to keep warm. Most of the sprouts were cookedin the usual fashion, but one of them by some fantastic chance [was raw].

But perhaps rather more ought to be said about art. When first did I stumble againstyour creative, as opposed to your critical rill? In Greenwood’s rooms at King’s I think. Mymother is there on a visit. Enter Duncan, and asks her to get up off her chair, which hewants for some purpose connected with art; he is very polite and does not make it clearwhat the purpose is. Exit Duncan carrying chair. And since it was a chair of non-moralbuild, showing bosses of gold and expanses of prune-coloured silk, perhaps it is here thatI should introduce my first memory of Clive. Clive appears out of the void, in the Galleryof Covent Garden, between the acts, yes in the 2/6 seats as then they were. We must havemet before, for we started talking about the Second Empire, but this is my earliest mem-ory of him. He praised the Second Empire, I censured it. He said it was civilized, gay, ina word French. I said it was frivolous and extravagant. He grew warm and said, “Quiteso.” I grew cold and said, “What about the poor?” “The poor?” said Clive, leaning back,but finding no support, as the Gallery seats have no backs — “I subscribe to one or twocharities, and that salves my conscience.” I was shocked at his levity, for I felt it a duty tobe unhappy without reserves whenever the poor entered my mind — as occasionally theydid for the purpose of making a point — and I should never subscribe to anything. Cliveand I didn’t pull it off — but here again how slight, how slight was our failure. I begin tothink that memory occupies itself by preference with little things, several items, rawBrussels sprouts and that the great stream of events, if there is one, is the stream of Lethe.If one had kept a diary or copies of intimate letters, the impression might be different, yetit’s strange how completely that which must have been important vanishes or is general-ized into raptures of roses, languors of lilies, virtues of vice, useful as spiritual manure butnever arising again to the surface under its proper colour and form. Let us get back to Art.I don’t know what Duncan did with that ormolu chair. Probably sat on it himself. I don’tknow what it was doing in Greenwood’s rooms. His works do however begin to haunt me— works with a slight promise of pornography which has never been fulfilled. Pictures ina bath-shed at Grantchester. Frescos at the Borough Polytechnic. But these last must belater in date, indeed almost bring us to the Omega period with decoration in full cry andthe Belgians on its heels. And the Grantchester graffiti I only saw once. It is all very vague,indeed it may all be said to be vague to me now, when the rill has widened into a riverand mandolins lie thicker than apples on the bank.

What I would like to recapture in conclusion is my physical entry into Bloomsburyitself. Dinner with the Sangers in their flat looking into the Strand, a novel called



Bloomsbury by a friend of theirs called C.F. Keary, my own residence of over a year at theKingsley Hotel — none of those hit it, and I am most inclined to follow the guidance ofMr Arthur Cole. At one time — shortly after I came down — I could have followed thatguidance anywhere. He was so witty, learned, wise, tolerant, charming, and the unnaturalcleanliness of his features had not yet told me their tale. Cole certainly spoke with approvalof the Stephens, the young folk living together in Fitzroy Square, and perhaps he took meto see them, or perhaps it was Adrian who took me. I was there once, but can remembernothing of the visit, the solitary statement of Cole is more definite and has that echoingquality which suits the past. He went to see them regularly once a week, and it is onlybecause of his regularity that he does not see them now. A Cole timetable? first unper-ceived, then treated as a joke, and then realized as being the man himself. If you came tosee him at 7.14 he could not be witty learned wise kind etc. to you: you had to come at7.15. At 7.14 he was reading Strabo. If you would walk his usual route with him from hischambers, he would open his interesting and courteous mind, to strap it up like a walletif you deviated one yard from the course. Of all the sponsors of Bloomsbury, this is sure-ly the strangest. For Bloomsbury, though most willing to sacrifice human beings in somedirections, has seldom offered them up on the altar of punctuality.

[1920]

On Pornography and Sentimentality

From a work of art, two pleasures — aesthetic, from colour, composition etc., sen-timental, from subject matter. Sometimes I feel “How perfect”: at other times “Howmuch I should like to know that person, or to walk in that view.” In my case the aes-thetic pleasure is weak, the sentimental very strong. But every spectator feels both, invarying proportions. One declares that subject matter is indifferent, yet he does notfeel the same to Botticelli’s Venus when it is thrown on the screen upside down.Another will only look at pictures of pretty women, yet he prefers a picture to a pho-tograph. The two pleasures melt into one another and reinforce one another, and ourspontaneous praise may be expressing either or both.

Is the same true of the artist? Is he also in a muddle? I have not the least idea, butshould like to ask the question. Sometimes I think that he is, for all his clear-cut chillingwords. And — to go to my chief point at once — is he too drawn from his aesthetic cen-tre by the power of sex? Does he paint with special pleasure the face and the form of thebeloved? If he does, he introduces disturbance at once, for though we all love, objects ofloving are numerous, and those who do not sympathize with the artist’s passion will berepelled by it: there is no middle course. We all develop a sexual ideal as we grow up —an ideal that is spiritual in one sense for we shall never find it on the earth, but carnal inanother for it may fill us with lustful thoughts and excite us in dreams. Indeed it seems



better to call it “lust” than “love.” Love is personal. When a man meets his future wife,he may transfigure her for a little with the visions of his adolescence, but she will sooncreate a world of her own. To put it crudely, the vision may have been of dark women,she is fair; sometimes she will so capture her husband that his vision will become one offair women; sometimes, however tenderly and faithfully he loves her, that with which hewas born will persist, not to die till he does. One cannot tell: experiences are so variable,so carefully concealed. One is inclined to think that generally the vision, the lust, will beas persistent as the man’s own features and the colour of his own hair, and shadowinghim till he dies, and intangible as a shadow.

What does the artist do here? And what ought he to do? Shall he make the shad-ow tangible? Or shall he escape it, by creating a world that is lit by no earthly sun?

Pictures of the first class have an esoteric side. They may have other sides, which willpersuade all spectators of every type of their artistic excellence, but only those spectatorswho share their sexual vision will understand them fully. To such a one, they will givetwo great joys. The joy of companionship. The artist, divided from me by place or time,has yet felt my longings more than any of the men among whom I pass my days. He hasdriven away my loneliness. This thing shall never be, but because another besides myselfhas said, “it shall never be,” it has taken on some of the qualities of being. Others are cry-ing out for it. Others are incomplete with my incompleteness and I hold out my handto them. The second joy is the joy of fruition. The vision has not put on flesh and blood,but it has put on colour and form, and the heart leaps at the sight of it. Through themedium of art, the intangible beloved has been seen, and though my pleasure in the sightis not artistic, though I am wishing the beloved would step from the frame and speak, Ican yet realize that our union is closest as things are, for that which steps from the framewould become a person with other qualities than loveableness, must grow hungry forex[ample], and would [become] dirty — but that which stays in the frame retains thesimplicity of a vision, and can be loved and loved only. Pornographic art, we are told, isnot art. Not knowing what art is, I cannot say, but all the pictures I am at present con-sidering are pornographic. They are all writing to the body with the body, in languagehowever delicate, and it is only in degree that they differ from what is obscene. The artistoffers us two joys — companionship (he desires what we do) and fruition (here is whatwe desire). Does not the pornographer attract his clients similarly? Both, according totheir lights, are sentimental.

Here we come back to my question — I can but ask it again and again. Is the greatartist ever sentimental? When we suppose him to be holding out one hand in fellow-ship and pointing with the other to our common vision, is he not really striking anattitude of quite a different kind, an attitude of pure beauty, which cares nothing forcomradeship and less for desire? We see him in disinterested pursuit of beauty throughsea and sky, purifying it of associations, disentangling it from complexities, and at lastmounting it for our observation with all the resources of technical skill. Will he notdeal likewise with the human form, and think not of his idealized wife, or of the idealwho might have been his wife, but of the colour or the design with whose help he isexpressing beauty? Admitting that I am sometimes wrong in attributing my attitude tohim, must I admit that I am always wrong?

Connection between beauty and desire. Impossible to think the beloved ugly. Allaesthetic standards must yield. It is odd that passion should have annexed the aesthet-ic sense. One could imagine it pure hunger — desiring the beloved as the completion



of oneself, physically and spiritually — and perhaps this is the basis. But beauty comesin. The beloved is regarded as something complete already — not as the half of animperfection, but as a perfection — and the image is sent forth to play havoc amongthe laws of aesthetic. The only aesthetic that most men have, I think. And all of usapply it occasionally.

Obviously doesn’t intrude in landscape, architecture, design. But [introduces]chaos into the human-figure subject.

[1920s?]

English Literature since the War

The effect of a war upon literature has yet to be studied scientifically. We are tooanxious to prove the war good, bad, negligible, to examine dispassionately the booksthat attend it. A government’s attitude is that any war which it undertakes is good, andthat books inspired by the war must also be good, since their writers are purged fromselfishness by the holy fire of battle.

The fighting man shall from the sunTake warmth, and life from the glowing earth;Speed with the light-foot winds to runAnd with the trees to newer birth;And find, when fighting shall be done,Great rest, and fulness after dearth.

Thus wrote Julian Grenfell, one of the few poets who have sincerely echoed the officialview of war. To him a battle was all that prime ministers pretend it to be, an intoxica-tion, a purge, an exaltation of the individual to heights that he could not have attainedduring peace. He was killed in action. But when we have mentioned him, and the son-nets of Rupert Brooke, the list of apologists is almost complete. In England at all events,literature has declined to celebrate tanks and major-generals. Patriotic verses abound, butthey are usually the work of elderly gentlemen who could not, if they would, reach thefiring line; patriotic novels are also common, but they are usually written by ladies; andthere are official biographies, such as Sir George Arthur’s Life of Lord Kitchener, in whichthe hero is not a man but a tailor’s dummy, a sort of pincushion onto whom medals canbe stuck, and who after conferring with other prominent pincushions, drops unregrettedinto the waters of the Arctic Ocean. Books of this type are produced, but they are notbooks. Neither the heart of the critic nor of the nation is expressed in them.

Opposed to the official view of war-literature, is the pacifist view. It has moretruth in it, but not the whole truth. Believing war to be bad, the pacifist argues that



literature can only be good when it discredits war. In France, Barbusse’s novel Le Feuand George Duhamel’s Civilisation were great and fine examples of this attitude. InEngland we have no example of equal importance, but the poems of Siegfried Sassoonand of Wilfred Owen (the latter was killed in action) express the same disgust and bit-terness, and J.M. Keynes’ brilliant and famous book, The Economic Consequences of thePeace, contains a calm and logical exposure of militarism. On the whole, men whothink war bad write better than those who think it good, but they have their own dan-ger: querulousness, and many of them fall into it. It is well to hate war, but useless tocomplain of it, because here it is and will be for many a year. The note of personalaffront is too often sounded. The writer is offended because his own life and ideas havebeen interfered with, and becomes weakly cynical in consequence. Neither pacifismnor militarism has any necessary connection with genius.

And so we are come to the third view which maintains that a war is neither good norbad in its literary effects, but negligible, that the years 1914–1918 have left no specialmark, that a writer’s development is internal, and that the more he possesses the creativespirit the less he will attend to Armageddon. There is much to be said for this view. Someof our best writers have passed unchanged through those four years, or have changed onlyin accordance with their own internal law. Take The Rescue, the latest novel of our great-est novelist, Joseph Conrad. Although published in 1920 it has the same atmosphere asLord Jim, which appeared at the beginning of the century. Take Lytton Strachey’s QueenVictoria, also just published, but in accord with his Eminent Victorians, written before thewar. Take Max Beerbohm, our one comic writer in the fine sense of the word comedy, ourdivine and incomparable Max. Over him too the fire has not passed. And Even Now, hislast volume of essays is one with The Works of Max Beerbohm, the tiny book in which everso many years ago he began his exquisite career. Take Bernard Shaw himself. Shaw is apacifist, it is true. But pacifist because he felt the war coming, not because it has come.His recently issued play, Back to Methuselah, is a logical development from his early Armsand the Man. It describes a millennium in which “The diggers and the fighters have dugthemselves in with the worms. My clever ones have inherited the earth. All’s well.” He hasalways hoped for a millennium such as this.

So here are four writers of the first rank — Conrad, Strachey, Max Beerbohm andShaw — on whom the war has had no effect. Can we argue that the rest of English lit-erature is in similar case? No. There really has been a change. The change had begunbefore 1914, but those four years accelerated it. We were already stepping out of thenineteenth century — the Victorian era, as we call it — but now we have jumped, andthe break is exhibited in our literature. For what did the Victorian era stand? For aspi-ration. That was its great characteristic. The Victorian writer believed that the worldcould be perfected, either through God, or through Science, whom he accepted as abeneficent power. The individual might doubt or fail, but the goal, though he mightnot see or reach it, remained and would be achieved by his successors. And even theagnostics like Matthew Arnold and Leslie Stephen, whom neither God nor Science sat-isfied, assigned to the universe at least a moral ladder, up whose rungs humanity mightprogress. Aspiration was always desirable, there was always a goal, life was always a pil-grimage. Such beliefs were essential in Victorianism and gave it its solidity and value.

But aspirations do not exist today, at least for the younger generation. There is nogoal and life presents itself not as a pilgrimage but as an adventure. To what end shouldthe twentieth century aspire when the high minded efforts of the nineteenth have ended



in a catastrophe? We are weary of ideals: they only lead to collisions between the ideal-ists. We suspect Science, because she has proved herself a destructive rather than abeneficent power. We are cold towards Christianity because the countries where it hasbeen longest established were foremost at the gates of Hell. Nor can we even hold theVictorian sentimental view of personal relationships, which deified and obscured thereproductive instincts, and pretended that marriages were made in Heaven. From allthese aspirations have we parted, nor have we yet substituted any of our own. We aredisillusioned and rather cynical. We want amusement and demand it unashamedly, andthis spirit has infected our literature. Fearful of boring their readers and themselves, thewriters of our day flit over the universe like birds, quick or slow, daring or timid accord-ing to their temperament, picking up a berry here and a fish there and a pebble in theother place, but never soaring to the stars. They abhor system. Even philosophy shrinksfrom it, and holds that her main duty is to keep her devotees awake. Bertrand Russellsucceeds to Herbert Spencer, Lytton Strachey to Lord Macaulay, the tentative fancies ofWalter de la Mare to the robust romanticism of Browning and the Idylls of Tennyson.

A trivial example will show the trend of public opinion. Many years ago a childcalled Daisy Ashford scribbled a story, as children will, and forgot about it. In 1919 shehappened to turn up her old manuscript, found it amusing, and sent it to a publisher.Its title was The Young Visiters (the word should be Visitors, but she did not know howto spell). It was issued with a preface by the playwright J. M. Barrie, and had a large sale,especially among critical and cultivated readers. Quaint, fresh, naive, frivolous, ungram-matical, acute, it appeals by its very irregularity to an irregular generation. No doubt itis excellent fooling, and the career of Mr Salteena, who is not quite a gentleman andknows it, has pathos as well as absurdity. Still, compared to conscious literature it is ofcourse a toy, and it was strange to reflect that thousands of men and women who hadpassed through the biggest war in history were playing with it. Perhaps the human mindis only capable of a limited amount of suffering and concentration. At all events TheYoung Visiters could never have had its success in Victorian England.

Our age is indeed unfavourable to pure creative work. The systematic philoso-phies, and monumental novels, of the nineteenth century have no successors, and eventhe outburst of lyric poetry that began ten years ago — the so called Georgian School— is on the wane. Writers feel safer when they have plenty of material to hand eitherin their own lives or those of others, and can take refuge in facts when their imagina-tion flags. In other words, they tend to autobiography or biography, and it is in thesedirections that our best and most interesting work is to be found. There has been a realdevelopment of method here. We are learning to handle the past deftly, and our effortsdeserve the attention of foreign readers.

The most important book of this class is Lytton Strachey’s biography of QueenVictoria. It is a brilliant and destructive yet learned essay, a torpedo of a book whichexplodes many a pompous reputation and the old style of official ironclad biographybesides. Her Majesty as a fat baby, Her Majesty as a schoolgirl who shows all her gumswhen she laughs, Her Majesty as a bride more loving than beloved, as an obstinate andmeddlesome politician, as a dictatorial matron, as a pro-German, as a stout and self-centred widow, as an unpopular monarch and finally as a popular monarch whose realoutlines disappear in the prolonged and sentimental afterglow of old age — HerMajesty passes before us very much alive but not the least majestic. Can this be theGreat White Queen who is supposed to have built up the British Empire? Apparently,



for Mr Strachey documents his epigrams. He is cruel to the poor lady, but we don’tobject to that if the cruelty’s amusing any more than we minded it in The YoungVisiters. He is never dull, he never speaks in organ tones or lifts his eyes to the stars,his English is exquisite, his wit as impeccable as Voltaire’s. Whether his work will liveis another question. Lightness of touch, welcome as it is to us, may not satisfy thecalmer and more robust generation that will come after us if all goes well.

Akin to Strachey in spirit and style, although his aim is practical, is J. M. Keynes,whose Economic Consequences of the Peace contains a wonderful picture of anothermuddle-headed idealist, President Wilson. And I may also mention an inferior butbright little book, The Mirrors of Downing Street, which sketches various modernpoliticians. It is by Harold Begbie, a journalist, who published it anonymously in thehope of attracting more attention. And the reminiscences of Mrs Asquith are nothingif not modern; she has upset a pailful of her past experiences in the market-place,regardless of whom they may splash. Here indeed we approach the ephemeral. Turningto autobiography that may live we come to Impressions that Remained by Ethel Smythand to My Diaries by Wilfrid Blunt. Ethel Smyth is an eminent musician and a delight-ful writer; she gives a brilliant account of her childhood and studies in Germany, anddescribes with power her emotional life and her friendship for another woman. Blunt’sDiaries (1888–1900) are presumably familiar to inhabitants of Egypt. They haveattracted much attention in England. They are a noble record, full of colour andhumanity, admirably written, and so arranged as to be a work of art.

Before leaving books which deal with facts, I must mention three more, all impor-tant, but not conceived in the foregoing spirit. Two of them are literary — Samuel Butler,author of Erewhon, 1835–1902: a memoir, by H. F. Jones, and The Letters of Henry James,edited by Percy Lubbock. The third, H.G. Wells’ Outline of History, requires a paragraphto itself. Samuel Butler (died 1902 and not to be confused with his namesake the seven-teenth-century satirist) belongs more to our generation than to his own and it is fittinghis biography should appear now. He attacked Domestic Life, and Science and orthodoxreligion, and idealism generally, and naturally enough the nineteenth century rejectedhim. His influence has been great, both directly, and indirectly through Bernard Shaw.As for Henry James (died 1915) he belongs neither to the nineteenth nor twentieth cen-tury, but to himself. His outlook upon life, limited but not little, gave him a unique posi-tion among novelists, and his letters reveal the same sensitive and fastidious spirit. Bothbooks, the Butler and the James have been well done, on conservative lines.

H.G. Wells’ Outline of History is harder to classify, because no other book of itskind exists. It is systematic and optimistic, and to that extent akin to the past, but inits brilliancy and lightness and freedom of outlook it is modern. Wells got his name asa novelist. He was also interested in religion and social problems. Gathering up all hisexperiences he has suddenly taken this leap into the middle of the historians, rather totheir displeasure. His Outline covers the whole of human endeavour from protoplasmto the Treaty of Versailles, and some speculations about the future are thrown in. It isno dead compilation. His provocative personality fills every sentence, the selection offacts and their arrangement are good, there are excellent time-charts and maps, and thewhole is permeated with a sort of business-like gaiety. Wells has no sense of mysticismor of poetry, and is thus debarred from two great departments of human achievement.But in other ways he is well qualified and even his conceit and egoism help him, forwithout them he could not have undertaken so colossal a task. The cultivated reader



must not reject the Outline as a popular work, unworthy of notice. It is one of theremarkable books of our age.

Let us turn from books that record facts to books that invent them, that is to say toimaginative literature, to fiction, the drama, poetry. The list will not be very long.Imagination is not dead in England, because — contrary to the opinion of many foreignobservers — it enters deeply into our national character. But it is even more diffidentthan it used to be, even more fettered than usual by our damnable self-consciousness. Asregards novels, there is a large output, but little that is distinctive. The English novel hasexisted now for 170 years and it is probably worn out and a new form requisite, thoughone cannot tell what the new form will be — the cinema perhaps, though the thoughtappals me. Certainly there is a lack of sureness in much recent work. A significant book,and a curious one is They Went, by Norman Douglas. It tells of a fantastic city which thesea overwhelmed, and its tentative nonchalant tone is typical of our age. It tries but nottoo violently to create a new tradition, and the same attempt is made in The Memoirs ofa Midget, by Walter de la Mare. Passing over these; passing over the secluded genius ofJoseph Conrad, who continues to evoke for us the charm and the severity of the sea; pass-ing over another genius, D. H. Lawrence, whose recent works The Lost Girl and Womenin Love reflect but faintly the movement and colour of his earlier — we come to an inter-esting and well defined group of novels, urban in setting and intellectual in outlook.Night and Day by Virginia Woolf is the most considerable of them. It is finely planned,on traditional lines: that is to say its problem is personal relationships and its solutionmarriage. But its psychology and methods are so modern that one feels the wine to bebursting the bottle. Bliss by Katherine Mansfield should also be noticed: biting short sto-ries written in a strange atmosphere of exasperation and beauty. And there is What Notby Rose Macaulay, a witty and enlightened satire, and Pointed Roofs and the other impres-sionistic attempts of Dorothy Richardson. All this group of writers is sophisticated, andis further troubled by the inadequacy of the novel-form. Their ideas are interesting, theirobservations acute, the character-drawing consistent, the spurts of imagination attractive;but their material has not yet found its proper home.

Of the drama there is little to say. Bernard Shaw has published two more volumes,Heartbreak House and other war plays, and Back to Methuselah. And England is at lastbeginning to admit that he is not an amusing buffoon but a consistent thinker and a greatman. James Joyce, a tortuous but inspired Irishman has written Exiles, which is worthstruggling with. John Drinkwater had a popular success with Abraham Lincoln; the dramawas touching, but marred by deplorable poetry. As for poetry itself, Siegfried Sassoon isthe only reputation who has arisen out of the war. Wilfred Owen, a greater genius, waskilled. Of the pre-war poets, Walter de la Mare is the only one who continues to develop.

This concludes my brief survey. I have offered one generalization — that the warhas bequeathed to England a mistrust of idealism, and a consequent shrinking of creativepower: we have developed in the deft handling of facts rather than in our imaginations.I have worked into my generalization a list of books that have interested me: the readermust see for himself whether justifiably. I have omitted from the list writers such asThomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, W. B. Yeats, Robert Bridges, Arnold Bennett, GeorgeMoore, John Masefield, who have great and deserved reputations but who have pub-lished nothing of importance since the war. And I have also omitted writers who are saidto be great but whom I cannot read, such as Hugh Walpole, and writers whom I readbut cannot understand, such as Charles Doughty. Nor do I touch the important subject



of literary reputation, except to make two remarks. The first remark concerns ThomasHardy: our fathers appreciated Hardy’s novels, but we recognize him as a great poet, ourgreatest: he is hailed with joy and reverence by the younger generation. The secondremark concerns Oscar Wilde. However much we condemn the way in which Wilde wastreated as a man, we do not think him great as a writer. The mass of continental opin-ion is against us here, and for that reason the remark seems worth making, though itwould require an article longer than this to defend it.

[1921]

Memory

How can I write a memoir when I have lost my memory? We ought to have thoughtof that before. It went about 1927, after I had seen all Africa with two hundred scientistsin two months. The Cape, the Transvaal, Southern Rhodesia, Portuguese East [Africa],Kenya and Uganda so strained my mind between them that it has never recovered. “Imustn’t forget that robin with a blue breast, get him down, nor the fruit of the dum-dumpalm, bring back a specimen, dum-dum, register that view from the asbestos mines witha blue mountain in Rhodesia’s middle distance, manager unsympathetic to natives, andprevious week you were actually down a gold mine, two thousand feet, thin streak isgold, great trouble taken, and now you’re listening to the most fantastic, characteristicand amusing scene south of the equator, the sort of scene most tourists never notice,namely to the members of the Caledonian Club as they meet, a little drunk, in theVictoria Falls Hotel, to decide what form shall be taken by the Livingstone Memorial.It’s the experience of a life-time.” And when I got back after it everything became dim,the tendency to forgetfulness and to general softness gathered force, the clouds of thefifties gathered quietly from every quarter of the sky, and not only did Africa sail awaybut she drew with her continents which seemed to be tethered securely. I have had somuch experience that the past is obliterated, and though this may make for lightness ofheart and for wisdom — and I have improved in both these qualities since last speaking— it is awkward when Molly asks one to write. I won’t affect to forget everything —should be presenting too definite a picture of myself if I did that. She asked me to writewhen we dined in Wellington Square, and as dish after delicious dish slipped down Ithought I was a memoirist still.

There’s one paragraph finished. The second is shorter. It compares me to a kingin Dante, snub-nosed Wenceslas, whom lust and sloth consumed.

Snub-nosed Wenceslas looked out, through the clouded windows of his palace andsees a collection of objects which finds no parallel even in the early writings of Virginia.Opals and emeralds, they lie at the roots of turnips. Not only so, but they [are] indistin-guishable from the turnips. It is impossible in this warm twilight of middle age to tell



where roots start and gems stop. And perhaps neither roots nor gems exist. They may bepainted on the glass — that deceptive diaper work so characteristic of Bohemia, asLeontes found. If Wenceslas got up and smeared his finger across the pane he might dis-cover that much. But he is too idle to rise. He sits on his low trestle stroking his soft greybeard and admiring a distant radiance which the Lord Chancellor reports to be snow. Heis not gaga. But he lacks continuity, and the contrast between him and a young manwhom I watched in the train the other day is most marked. He lives in the present butnever gets it into focus. Too much trouble. Never gets it into focus. Does not distort it.

Now this young man in the train — my hat, how he focussed. He also had a beard,but it was curly and tough, and a large thin parcel of the same colour as his beard. Theparcel may have contained a calendar — the month is September, I know, still that’s nottoo early to post to a brother in the colonies nor too late to make half price worth while,or failing a calendar it may have been a sketching block, and the whole way from RaynesPark to Dorking North he was writing his Confessions on the outside of this parcel. Whata memoir that would have been! His pencil moved and moved, he saw nothing else butits eversharp tip, and he wrote very clearly. I managed to read over his shoulder “I amhenceforward one of them,” and a few lines further down the word “humbug.” Of whomwas he now one? What humbug had he escaped or espoused? I felt and feel not the slight-est curiosity, and it was indifference rather than my failing eyesight that stopped me fromlooking over his shoulder. When he had completely covered one side of the brown paperparcel I thought he would finish, but no he turned it over and continued to confess againstthe triangular folds and knots in the string and jolts of the electric train. He was met atDorking North station by a girl in a large open car. He kissed her on the lips and droveher off. I have no car — I have not worked hard enough — look at the size of Leonard’s— Maynard’s I dare only guess at — and my bus for Abinger Hammer had not come.While waiting for it, I talked to two or three timber fellers who were leaning over the fenceof the lumber yard, their shirts open to the waist. I enjoyed doing this, but there we are,you see. By the time I had asked them some easy questions, pleased them because I worea tie and failed to catch their answers, the bearded young man, who knew how to con-centrate, had surely reached his abode. He had boned the calendar, he had refolded thebrown skin into its previous shape, taking the knife which would shortly carve the NewZealand meat, he had slit it carefully, crip crip crap crap, and placed front and back sideby side, the front an uninterrupted expanse of truth, the back only diversified now by thetriangular folds. While he did this, and while I was still asking the timber boys the timeof the bus though I knew it and they did not, the girl — wife, sister, mistress? I care not— had run the car up that awkward turn into the barn and had secured the door with thegreat wooden bolt. They eat their meat on a round table of cheap but polished wood, inwhich two candles gleam. The cat comes in, lifting its eyes and its tail towards them.Supper over, he continues writing, she not enquiring what, she respects his work so much,and all work generally. That you know is youth. I used to be that way myself.

What survives then in my case is a blur which turns grey or rose colour accordingas I am unhappy or happy. Perhaps none of you remember the past, but you have noneof you been to Africa to my extent, and my impressions must be more flagrantly unhis-torical than any of yours. The sequence of events disappears, so does the outline ofobjects, and so does the relation between one object and another. All is not fantasy. Iam conscious of my own enormous shadow increasing behind me, but if I turn andlook at it, it falls across or between clouds. My childhood, which was to have leapt out



with Pre-Raphaelite clearness, has not done so yet. Proust’s madeleine is still uneaten,his irregular tiles untrodden, Odysseus still waves his sword as my beardless ghostapproaches the trench to drink. Only last year I went down to the house of childhood,Howards End, and found that its magic had vanished. I had a happy cheerful charm-ing expedition stuffed with notes of past events, but never evoking the past. First of allI called at the farm (where the Averys lived in the book), expecting to find that it hadaltered out of recognition and changed hands. Quite wrong. It looked much the same,and there was Frankie Franklyn, whom I had known as a boy, pulling on his boots togo to cricket at the Hall. We drove up him and his wife, the trees were larger than Ihad expected, not smaller, because they had grown quicker than I have, the distancenot shortened, although I had never a car to the Hall before, and there is all this talkabout baby lags. On our arrival, Mrs Poyntz Stewart shrieked at us over the ha-haabout her ornamental pheasant which was on its eggs in the laurel and must not bedisturbed. The evening got very dark owing to a cloud, the park dark dark green, thelittle shaven part by the wickets glowed like a ribbon of silk, and the cricketers, am Igoing to say, took on a magic quality? No, I am not going to say it. The scene was oneof the prettiest of last year’s, but it is last year’s, and does not evoke forty years back.Neither contrast nor similarity opened doors into childhood. Mrs Poyntz Stewart hadforgotten her old little friend, though she had given me an ornamental pheasant in aglass case once, and when I implied that I was of gentle birth and said my mother waswell she only showed her teeth. “He is my great stand-by, what should I do withouthim,” she cried, waving at Frankie Franklyn’s enormous shoulders. Then she passedover the lawn into Chisfield, her bald white house, still shrieking jokes at her tenantry,gaga I think, but denied poignancy by my recent rearrangements.

Then we drove back to Howards End, leaving Frankie and his little wife to watchthe game and their sons to play it; Howards End, the house out of which the PoyntzStewarts turned my mother and myself when I was fourteen. They wanted it for a friendof their own, who soon afterwards died. If I had been allowed to stop on there, I shouldhave become a different person, married, and fought in the war. I rang the bell, for thepresent tenant is the second widow of an old friend, and would have let me in. Nothinghappened, so I went round to the back, where a dog barked violently until I rang thekitchen bell, when he saw I was a gentleman and fell silent. Nothing happened again, noservant came, neither did Mr Walter de la Mare peep out of an open window. I gathereda leaf from the vine on the chance of remembrance, but none came, and leaving thehome of my childhood to its unresponsiveness and obvious charm I drove back to town.The fields continued to be dark green, the sky dark black, no rain fell, I was content withmy companions who had brought me and went on living with them, and it is only todaythat I have tried to analyse the visit at your implied request. In my twenties, thirties, andeven forties I had immense emotions when I went down to Hertfordshire and visitedthose same scenes. Either I have visited them too often and inoculated myself, or —which seems more likely — this is the way I am going to behave through the fifties. Ishall sit cosy and idle on my low trestle until it crumbles beneath me.

What of the poor man gathering fuel outside? I confess that he worries me some-times, and that the Lord Chamberlain’s assurances that he does not mind the cold arenot always convincing. The misery in our civilization, my impotence to alleviate it, theextent to which I should forget — these are matters which still trouble me, and I thinkincreasingly. Take the case of which I heard the other day (does your attention wander



at this point or not? it’s a sort of test) — take the case of a boy who had no work, wasnot qualified for the dole, and has married, a baby soon arriving. What is to happento him? There are thousands like him, and our knowledge that this is so makes himunreal. I mention him this evening not out of compassion but to tear another littlehole in my attitude towards life. How anyone can have a philosophy passes me.

That’s by the way. But it’s clear now isn’t it why we should not admit any newmembers into our club. They would incline us to pull ourselves together which is theworst thing we could do. Youth, youth! I actually spend a good deal of time now withpeople younger than myself, and whether this is a mistake at our age or not is a prob-lem we well might toy with. But youth mustn’t be let in here, nor anyone else withwhom we haven’t grown old, and growing old for memoirists means the vista of littleoccasions on which they have met. The next of these occasions I want to be in [a]restaurant, less expensive than the Ivy but dearer than the Commercio, where you willdine with me and whence you will proceed afterwards to my flat, 26 Brunswick SquareW.C. There, in the presence of a picture painted by Roger on silk in the Chinese style,we will hold our next meeting. I don’t exactly look forward to the meeting, for I am badat entertaining, but I am determined it shall take place, and when you learn the subjectof the picture — it represents Dante and Virgil on the shores of Purgatory watching thesoul of King Wenceslas arrive in a boat — it becomes impossible for you to refuse.

The monarch has now reached his last paragraph, and breeding inwards as usualhe will now tell you how he once saw a jewel in a larch tree. I was lying in bed late onemorning down in the country not a couple of months ago when I saw something shin-ing at the top of a tall larch tree through my window. It had the dimensions of an egg-cup, the radiance of a diamond and the shape of a pearl. When I moved my head itvanished. When I got my head back to the same position on the pillow it disappeared.I have nothing whatever to say about it. It is a memory.

[1930]

The Creator as Critic

I. Creation and Criticism

We are faced, at the very outset of our enquiry, by Scylla and Charybdis. Our mainsubject is straightforward enough: we are going to discuss those creative writers who werealso interesting as critics — but we can’t well start until we’ve discussed what creation andcriticism respectively mean. There’s no way in except between Scylla and Charybdis —no other way into our comparatively calm sea of literary enquiry — and we have to shootthe passage before there’s any speed on the boat. Moreover, they are not like Cerberus,who merely guarded the gates of Hell and could be silenced by politeness. They are mon-sters who require something philosophic to appease them, and I feel here specially con-



scious of my inadequacy. They require to be defined, honeyed words are not enough, andI wish that some other lecturer — say Mr Eliot, or Mr Lucas, to name men from differ-ent camps — could be giving the opening lecture of the course. I don’t want them to givethe rest of the course — I look forward to doing that myself — but it would be a reliefif someone else could function today and give the necessary and the sound definition ofCR[eation], of cr[iticism]. Scylla and Charybdis are such jealous creatures. If you give toomuch to one, you are destroyed by the other. It would be easier if they were identical; weshould then merely be confronted by the Sphinx. But I do not believe they are, for rea-sons that will presently appear, and so two definitions, not one, must be offered.Definition’s the more necessary since these lectures are supposed to bear upon the tripos,and examiners have an inveterate habit of asking one what one means. (“What do youmean by Creation?” Or, even, “What do you understand by it?”)

Well I mean by Creation an activity, part of which takes place in sleep. It has, or usu-ally has, its wakeful alert side, but it’s rooted in the region whence dreams also grow. Theregion has various scientific names and psychoanalysis is ready to come to our help at thispoint and tell us all about it: Jung, Freud. But we’re treating literature, and it is better tokeep to metaphors, and to analogies with natural states — they will lead us closer to ouranswer. Dreams and poems have a common origin, and now and then — very seldombut often enough to assist us in our enquiry — a dream actually is a poem. Coleridge —who will haunt us in various aspects during the next six weeks — has given us the mostfamous example of this. “Kubla Khan,” composed entirely in sleep and under drugs, isfrom one point of view an abnormal production. From another point of view it is morenormal than most poetry, because it is a direct arrival from dreamland, withoutrearrangement or dressing up. It is also a good poem, but I don’t want, at this early stage,to introduce aesthetics. “Creation is an activity, part of which takes place in sleep, andwhich may or may not turn out to be literature” — that is my fuller definition. Creationis more frequently bad than good, as one knows from one’s own work. There was oncea man who awoke out of sleep, like Coleridge, with an inspired poem in his mind. Hewas sure that it was one of the greatest creations that had ever risen from the depths ofthe human soul, he seized pencil and paper and wrote it down. Fully awake, he read whathe had written. There were only two lines in the poem, and they ran as follows:

Walker with one leg, walker with two,Something to live for, nothing to do.

This is not a good poem, but like “Kubla Khan” it is an example of pure creation, and itcontains the essential minimum which must be present in all creative work, good or bad,poetry or prose. Creation must arise from sleep, or from a state similar to sleep, and“Kubla Khan” and the Walker poem are the two simplest examples. For a third example,I refer you to your own experience. Everyone here has written a poem some time or other— everyone without exception; it is the open secret. And everyone, after his or her poemwas finished, has looked back on it with surprise. One couldn’t think how one had donethe thing. In my own case, and in most cases, the surprise was accompanied by depres-sion: I couldn’t think why I had been so foolish. But in some cases people can’t think howthey have been so wise. There is always a gap of some sort between the poem and the poet,when he rereads his poem, and this is because the poet, when he comes to the rereading,is in a more wakeful state. How could I have done that, he thinks. (Quote Claudel):



I do not speak what I wish, but I conceive in sleep,And I cannot explain whence I draw my breath, for it is

my breath which is drawn out of me.I expand the emptiness within me, I open my mouth, I

breathe in the air, I breathe it out.I restore it in the form of an intelligible word,And having spoken I know what I have said.

To Claudel, a poem is not so much an expression as a discovery — it has been revealedto the poet by God, and the poet shares in our surprise for that reason. We need notfollow him here unless we wish, but he well expresses the dream element in creation,which is to me the essential element. When it is present, nothing may happen — youmay well only get “Walker with one leg, walker with two.” But unless it is present noth-ing can happen — neither “Kubla Khan” nor King Lear nor Wuthering Heights norGibbon’s Decline and Fall. I’ll quote an unexpected witness in its favour — JohnDryden. You wouldn’t expect that sensible fellow, the father of English prose and allthat, to have one of his feet in dreamland, but listen to him. He is dedicating one of hisplays, The Rival Ladies, to the Earl of Orrery, and he addresses the noble lord as follows:

My Lord,This worthless present was designed you, long before it was a play;when it was only a confused mass of thoughts, tumbling over oneanother in the dark, when the fancy was yet in its first work, mov-ing the sleeping images of things toward the light, there to be dis-tinguished, and then either chosen or rejected by the judgment; itwas yours, my Lord, before I could call it mine. And, I confess, inthat first tumult of my thoughts, there appeared a disorderly kindof beauty in some of them, which gave me hope, something worthymy Lord of Orrery might be drawn from them: but I was then inthat eagerness of imagination, which, by overpleasing fanciful men,flatters them into the danger of writing….

Dryden is conscious of the same element as Claudel; he too conceives in sleep. He israther contemptuous of it, for the reason that he belonged to the seventeenth century:it is the moving of the images towards the light that interests him. But he realizes thatit is only among the shadows that they are found, and that you cannot even write TheRival Ladies, a tragi-comedy entirely out of your wakefulness. Or Gibbon — he had tomuse in the Church of Ara Coeli before the Roman Empire could be shaped to hispurpose, although he is full eighteenth century.

It is easiest to detect the creative activity in lyric poetry and “Kubla Khan” is, from thispoint of view, the easiest poem ever written. Although it uses facts (as I will presentlydescribe), it has nothing to do with facts as they are arranged in daily life. “The AncientMariner” is a trifle nearer daily life — e.g. there’s a south pole — and when we leave lyricpoetry and come to the drama, and leave the drama and come to the novel, and leave thenovel and come to history we get nearer and nearer to the order, or rather to the disorder,of our own daily lives, until we reach blue-books [and] timetables, which try not to createanything but to give information and are therefore not literature at all. There are, by the



way, two distinct uses of words — creative and informative. For instance, the words “I shotthe albatross” bear two different meanings. They may be creative, as in “The AncientMariner,” and cause the whole universe to crack and decay in horror. Or they may justmean “I shot the albatross” — a feat that has been accomplished by many a respectableornithologist without evil consequences. There are several stuffed albatrosses in Cambridgeat the present moment, and they do us no harm. And our difficulty with literature is that,except in a few lyrics, it’s always using words in two senses, and our judgments on it areoften wrong, because we fail to see in which sense the albatross is being shot.

I have just said that “Kubla Khan” is full of facts, and want to emphasize this;before a man sleeps, he is awake, and Coleridge, before he took those drugs, had beenreading travel-books. Memories of them, and of other experiences, came to him in hisdream, he found nothing there that he didn’t himself bring. Similarly with “Walkerwith one leg, walker with two.” The dreamer remembered about walking, and that itis connected with legs, and he had at some time or other been discussing conduct, and“something to live for, nothing to do” was the result. His poem also is full of facts.Why then isn’t it as good a poem as “Kubla Khan”?

For the reason that he chose his facts badly. He hadn’t got what Coleridge in anoth-er poem calls the “shaping spirit of imagination” or what Dryden calls “the judgment.”And now we can amend our definition of creation. We all dream, by night and by day, weare all surrounded by a throng of images, memories and associations, even when we [are]leading practical lives. Why then are we not all great writers? Because we don’t select prop-erly. And why don’t we select properly? Ah — now you have me, here’s the central mys-tery which no one has succeeded in answering, here is the secret of genius. We haven’t theimagination that shapes. We left it: “Creation is an activity, part of which takes place insleep, and which may or may not turn out to be literature.” Let’s put it: “Creation is anactivity which selects and connects the images found in sleep. It is a universal activity. Thegreat writer differs from the rest of us because he selects and connects properly.”

One word of reminder before we pass on to criticism. I haven’t attempted creationthoroughly, only to define the part in it that seems to me essential — the part that restsin the dream-state. In nearly all books there is a great deal of conscious work, which isput in after the initial selection has been made — the problems of literary form, forexample, seem to come under this heading. But I am wanting, for the purpose of thisintroductory lecture, to put something definite before you, and so I’ve ignored what-ever in the creative activity that doesn’t seem to have central importance. I’ve tried toshow the root, and have passed over not only the flowers but the leaves. A plant is keptalive through its leaves as well as the root, but the root is the origin, the essential.

So much for Scylla and now for Charybdis. Homer tells us that Scylla nearlydevoured the crew as they rowed past, whereas Charybdis could swallow the wholeboat, and that Ulysses steered on the Scylla side accordingly. I have done the same, andby giving a rather narrow definition of Creation, by confining it to the dream states(although it extends beyond them) I am able to allow a wider space to the disgustingwhirlpool opposite. Criticism is a whirlpool. Read a manual on it, like ProfessorSaintsbury’s, and after a few chapters you simply don’t know where you are — up inthe air, under the water, or down on the rocks. Critics, to put it mildly, have been ver-satile. For more than two thousand years they have shouted and smiled and frownedand sighed and theorized and denied theory, have abased themselves and crownedthemselves, have declared themselves to be artists, not artists, scientists, not scientists,



schoolmasters, men in the street, and gods, and have in turn presented as the imple-ments of their craft, the bludgeon, the loving cup, the compass, and the sponge.Beneath all this versatility, what is Criticism? We shall have to define it. And as I say,we shall find definition a little easier because we have tied down Creation rather tight.

I propose to define Criticism as a wakeful activity. Whatever the critic’s aim, hisfundamental need is alertness. He may have intuition too, it is best that he should butif he has only intuition he will respond too capriciously and occasionally to his sub-ject. I see him as a plant whose main roots are in daily life, just as I see the creativeartist as a plant whose main root is in sleep. That is the difference between the twoactivities. A creator and a critic may have the same qualities, but the stress falls differ-ently, the critic will be poised round the business, the creator round the dream. Andthis difference in stress constitutes a barrier between them. The critic like other read-ers can’t ever become identical with the man who was writing. They may think and feelthe same, their pulses may beat equally, but one of them wrote the book, and the otherdidn’t. The creator can’t retrace his steps; Coleridge was interrupted by that man fromPorlock, and couldn’t get back to “Kubla Khan,” and what happened to Coleridge istypical — the creator can’t understand afterwards how he did what he did, and oftencannot continue it. But the critic can retrace his steps, because he hasn’t to get backinto the dream state; Coleridge, as a critic, can always reconsider and restate — no onefrom Porlock can interrupt him now, because he is confined to wakefulness, and theBiographia Literaria goes on and on, round and round, forward and back, at his con-venience, though not always at ours. The two faculties constantly occur in the samemen — and they often fade into each other. But they are essentially different.

Not many people would disagree here. There’s a tendency — dating back to theeighties — to say that creation and criticism are the same. It has been best said by OscarWilde, in two brilliant dialogues called “The Critic as Artist.” Wilde is a neglected and adifficult author. He’s such a mixture of the shoddy and the fine, he’ll pass from one toanother in a single sentence. These dialogues, for instance, are full of seriousness and wit,but offer a deplorable setting of piano playing and cheap scent. Two tiresome young mendo the talking, and the one who maintains that the critic is a creator has the author’s sup-port. He advances three arguments — to dignify or degrade them by such a name. (i)There is no art without self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit areone. (ii) Criticism should regard art, good or bad, as an opportunity to create — instanc-ing Walter Pater’s description of Mona Lisa. (iii) The argument that it takes two people towrite a book — one to write and one to read: or as he puts it, “As art springs from per-sonality, so it is only to personality that it can be revealed, and from the meeting of thetwo comes right interpretative criticism.” I don’t think any of these arguments are sound,but they conveniently indicate an attitude of mind. (i) is juggling with the word “self-con-sciousness”; self-consciousness may make a man an artist, and may make him a critic, butthe artist and the critic don’t thus become one. (ii) and (iii) are more interesting. Theyboth rest on the assumption that a work of art has no fixed meaning, but varies accordingto the attitude of the observer. I’d like to go into this eternal topic for a minute.

Well there’s no reason why one shouldn’t use a work as a kickoff for work of one’sown — Wilde is quite right here. Pater was justified in misdescribing Mona Lisa,Fitzgerald in mistranslating Omar Khayyám, and Shakespeare in mishandling the leg-end of Macbeth. The results are in all three cases excellent, but why drag in criticism?The wrong word has been employed, the business instead of the dream. I see that the



critic needs imagination if he is to interpret an imaginative author, but his imaginationmust be disciplined and canalized, it can’t go anywhere. He has to recreate what thepoet has created, and if he moves in a direction other than the poet’s, he has failed,because he interprets something that hasn’t existed. A French contemporary of Wilde’s,Barbey d’Aurevilly, exclaims “Who can doubt that criticism as well as poetry can havewings?” I doubt it very much. For me a critic is a parasite on a bird’s back, but nevera bird. He may be “carried away,” but it must be in a wakeful state rather than a dream,so that he retains words afterwards to describe his rape. He may be carried up to theseventh heaven, but if he gives one little skip on his own, he has deserted his subject,and attempted creation. “Etiolated creation,” Mr Eliot calls it, and he points out thatthere is a great deal of bastard writing today, particularly in our literary weeklies, whichis neither one thing nor the other. There is, and I see no moral objection to it. If weare trying to define — as is today our painful duty — we must distinguish severelybetween criticism and creation, parasite and bird. The confusion is partly due topoliteness. When people think a critic very good they are tempted to say “Oh this iscreative work” or “all critics are creators.” Just like calling everybody “colonel.” No realharm is done, and the men who aren’t colonels are often braver than those who are.But it introduces unnecessary ambiguity.

Wilde’s third argument is that it takes two people to produce a book — thewriter and the reader — and that consequently “right interpretative criticism” resultsonly when two personalities combine. Put like this, it sounds reasonable enough, butput it a little more strongly, and you are landed with the doctrine that any bookmeans any thing, and it is only a step thence to the mechanics of Pirandello — anarrangement which appears to allow the widest scope to human nature, and reallycondemns it to monotony. A book does mean one thing rather than another, and sothe judgments passed on it can be less true, or more true. The writer himself oftencan’t tell us the significance, because he composed in the dream-state, and no criticmay be able to hit it exactly. But there is something to hit. There is such a thing asa final interpretation of Hamlet, as apart from the responses Hamlet has evokedthrough the ages — responses so contradictory that the readers seem to be followingin different texts.

Perhaps you will say at this point “Oh bother all this, why can’t I be left alone. Idon’t care about the final interpretation of a work of art, I don’t care about criticism,and am only doing it because of the tripos, my only pleasure is in appreciation.”Appreciation is certainly a formidable rival of criticism. She is a dangerous and delight-ful damsel, a perfect siren, and it is my duty to deliver a feeble attack on her before Iclose. Feeble, because by temperament I sympathize with what I have just made yousay. If we follow her, we shall read books not to understand but to love them, and it isan open question whether this isn’t the best way to read books. She never lingers onthe difficult, the defective, or the uncongenial, she slurs all three over, and beckons usonward to our heart’s desire. In the end, one feels awfully grateful to writers for hav-ing written — a little too grateful. “How very kind of Shakespeare, and of Hamlet too:how very nice of Pope. I owe a great debt to George Meredith, Baudelaire — what afeast.” And so on, and in a sense it is a feast — it does bring spiritual nourishment, butit also means inert acceptance of the menu. If you appreciate whatever comes, love willdegenerate into acquiescence or reverence — both of them fatal to literature.Moreover, if you go in for appreciation instead of understanding you will find that you



are not quite [as] sweet natured as you think. Spurts of irritability will arise, directedagainst the harpies who would disturb your banquet, and you will find yourselves mak-ing remarks about Bloomsbury that are peevish rather than profound. I don’t know….But I do know that criticism and appreciation are different, and that though criticismdoes fall in love, love isn’t its aim.

What are the aims of criticism? I will state them in order of importance —premising all need alertness.

(i) Interpretative. To find out what a book means, and what was in the writer’smind when he wrote it. These are two enquiries not one (if you have accepted myview of creation), but they both come under the head of interpretation. In this, hisgreatest activity, the critic does not try to help or place his author. His only aim isto enter into the author’s mind, both into the final expression that has appeared inprint, and into the sleep-like state where creation is born. For this he requires imag-ination, but of the wakeful sort — the sort that is roused by a hint. He must nothimself start dreaming.

(ii) Judicial. This proceeds out of (i), for the critic cannot enter a writer’s mind, and cometo no conclusion as to what he finds there. He is inevitably led to praise or blame, and tocompare. He is also tempted, by an easy slope, to discuss the reputations of authors ratherthan their work, and if he yields to this he will become what is called an “influential” crit-ic, who is more concerned in what is said about an author than in what an author him-self says. He will be indignant for instance at the huge circulation of Mr so and so’s nov-els, and try to ham-string it by a well placed blow — all the more indignant because thesales of Mrs so and so’s fine play probably suffers in consequence. Let’s assume that he isdisinterested and that he’s right both about the novels (and indeed I have a particular nov-elist in view), and also about the play (I have a particular play in view, and I’ll mention itsname — Beatrice Mayor’s exquisite masterpiece, The Pleasure Garden, which ought to runfor weeks at a London theatre, but which gets swept aside in favour of trash). Let’s assumeall this; nevertheless the critic here is getting away from literature, and turning himself intoa schoolmaster. That’s what Boileau did, and Pope after him, and M[atthew] Arnoldscarcely escaped. They yielded to impulses that were often generous, and to a passion forjustice, and so were led away from their subject-matter.

(iii) Formulation of general rules. This aim has occupied critics much in the past, andwhere literary tradition is strong has seemed all-important. The “Unities” [are] anexample of it; they had, to the late seventeenth century, a majesty of their own. TheUnities were the Trinity: a play that disobeyed them was evil, a play that obeyed themwas good, but not even an obedient play could be, as they were, divine. Of course thisis an extreme example, yet even today the possession of a critical apparatus is apt todivert the critic from his subject matter. He is so pleased with his machine that what ittells him about an author is of secondary importance.

But I don’t myself believe that there are general rules so anything I say about themis bound to be unsympathetic and shallow. What I do believe though is that a criticlike Mr Eliot who has tried to formulate general rules and failed, is in a better positionthan a critic like myself who has never tried. They don’t help him to an author, indeedthey often mislead him. But they do educate in the long run.



(iv) Assisting the author. I would put this aim first, if I thought it ever succeeded.Critics pretend it does, they do really deceive themselves into thinking and sayingthat if they point out his defects to an author he will write a better book next time.As a matter of fact, the most they can do (I borrow the simile from Mr Lucas) isto scare the sparrows off one field on to another; the author, when he writes his next book, will merely transfer his defects into a new position, where they areless likely to be disturbed. Critics never have improved authors and never will;though as great a writer as Matthew Arnold thought they could. It isn’t theirprovince; they are too remote from the creative state to drop into it anythingwhich will be helpful.

Well, we’re now past Scylla and Charybdis — heaven alone knows at what cost,but past them as regards the clock. We have offered, however feebly, our tribute, haveconnected creation with sleep, criticism with wakefulness, and now we can start on ourcourse. Our aim will be to examine the relationship between creation and criticismwhen the two faculties occur in the same writer — in Coleridge, for example, or inDryden; these are the two most eminent examples in English literature, thoughM[atthew] Arnold is important too. After Coleridge, Dryden and Arnold — all ofwhom we must [examine] come an enormous crowd whom we may examine. I’ll readout a few of the names.

List i. English LiteratureList ii. Other LiteratureList iii. Contemporaries

We are not going to deal with all these writers — heaven forbid! But they are all ofthem creators who have said something of interest critically, and we can cite themwhen convenient. The number of writers who must be excluded because they did onlycriticism is very small — Sainte-Beuve is [a] leading example. And the number of writ-ers who did only creative work is not large. Most authors are ineligible, indeed ourdanger is that we have too much material, and may become desultory. The sea beyondScylla and Charybdis is an archipelago. I propose next week that we confine ourselvesto one aspect of the subject — a narrow aspect, but an interesting one: we will studythe creative artist when he is in an attitude of self defence. Self defence is his most rudi-mentary form of criticism.

II. Self Defence

We must partition our subject somehow, and perhaps the most convenient division isinto writers who tend to remember their own work when they criticize, and writerswho tend to forget it. The division isn’t hard and fast, a writer may move from oneclass to the other, also he may have been a critic before he was [a] creator, in which casehe won’t have anything either to remember or forget. But there aren’t many writers ofthis type — the late William Archer was one of them — and the division will serve.Today, and next week[,] I shall be occupied with writers who remember, and today Ishall deal with those who are aware of scarcely anything outside their own work, andare concentrated on it.



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We must consider COLERIDGE carefully, for two reasons:

(i) Creator and critic of highest order.

(ii) Mass of evidence. Wrote much and introspectively; plenty of witnesses, fromWordsworth to Carlyle. Under anxious observation all his life, and had neither the skillnor the wish to conceal the operations of his mind.

Thus unique position. We can study our subject better here than anywhere.

As a rule I omit dates. B

Some Coleridge dates. Born 1772.

(a) Before 1797 Uninteresting poems, marriage; but is taking to drugs — 70 drops lau-danum for neuralgia, 25 more an hour.

(b) 1797 William and Dorothy Wordsworth at Nether Stowey. “Kubla Khan” (drugs),“Ancient Mariner.” First part of “Christabel.” (L[yrical] B[allads])

(c) 1798–1803 Turns to philosophy (German visit). Death of creation. Second partof “Christabel.” “The poet is dead in me” (letter of 1801). “Dejection,” 1802, his lastfine poem and a most important document. Drugs.

(d) Lectures beginning badly with the lost 1808 course; from 1811–18 increasing suc-cess. Gives up drugs (Gillman) as a wise and gentle old man — actually in his early 50s.

(e) All these years Wordsworth has been stumping ahead, publishing The Excursion etc.,and republishing Lyrical Ballads (containing his early poems and some Coleridges,notably “The Ancient Mariner”) with prefaces of ever increasing length and dogmatism,in which he expounds his views on poetry, and offers as examples of it the entire vol-ume, C[oleridge]’s poems as well as his own. C[oleridge] begins to look round. He does-n’t care for W[ordsworth]’s later poems, and, though liking his earlier, he knows they dif-fer from his own, and consequently one theory can’t cover the whole of the joint vol-ume. This is one of the causes of the Biographia Literaria, 1817. Apex of critical period,exactly 20 years after the creative. Let us examine the creative period more carefully.Three points come out:

(i) The help given by drugs. Moralists and others have rightly seen that drugs destroyedColeridge as a poet, but they must also face the fact that until he took drugs he wasn’ta poet, only a thoughtful and sensitive versifier. Listen to this sort of thing (“TheDestiny of Nations,” 1796) (Quote p. 100):

And what if some rebellious, o’er dark realmsArrogate power? yet these train up to God,And on the rude eye, unconfirmed for day,Flash meteor-lights better than total gloom,As ere from Lieule-Oaive’s vapoury head



The Laplander beholds the far-off SunDart his slant beam on unobeying snows,While yet the stern and solitary NightBrooks no alternate sway, the Boreal MornWith mimic lustre substitutes its gleam,Guiding his course or by Niemi lakeOr Balda Zhiok, or the mossy stoneOf Solfar-kapper, while the snowy blastDrifts arrowy by, or eddies round his sledge,Making the poor babe at its mother’s backScream in its scanty cradle….

The icy landscape, the spectral lights, the feeling for sufferers — we shall find themall again in three years’ time in “The Ancient Mariner.” All the ingredients are there,but “the shaping spirit of imagination” has not arrived. Similarly the “Hymns” hewas planning in 1796 which were to end in “a sublime enumeration of all the charmsand Tremendities of Nature and a bold avowal of Berkeley’s system” — he was towrite the following year in the pleasure domes and chasms of “Kubla Khan.” It’s use-less for most of us to take drugs — let alone the unpleasant after-consequences. Weshould only cramp our style. But C[oleridge] required an abnormal agency to helphim to use the poetical material which his previous experience had given, and to turnit into poetry.

(ii) Help of Books. Where did he find his experience? Mainly in books. Gained littlefrom direct observation, shunned adventure (never “used” his enlistment escapade),had never crossed the sea when he wrote “The Ancient Mariner.” Reading gave himsubject matter. But he read in a peculiar way. He would skip through volumes of trav-els, science, philosophy, and masses of stuff would sink down into the part of him thatslept, to be aroused at the proper time. There’s a notebook in the British Museumwhere he jotted down references, and Professor Lowe[s] has analysed these and lookedthem up with thrilling results. He proves that “The Ancient Mariner” and “KublaKhan” are erudite poems, only a reader could have written them; but it’s the eruditionnot of the scholar but of the seer, e.g.:

The water, like a witch’s oils,Burnt green, and blue and white

emerge from commerce of three passages — from Priestley’s Opticks, Cook’s Voyages, andThe Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. [The] same three reminiscences combinein another sense to breed [a] benign instead of a malignant image — the “tracks of shin-ing white” made by the lovely water snakes: “Blue, glossy green, and velvet black.” Nor isthis all. The jottings in the notebook don’t refer directly to the passage that’s being used.They refer to a passage which in the original book is near that passage; that’s to say, whatC[oleridge] remembers as a note-taker and what he remembers as a poet are not the same;the critic and the creator are already dividing. He reads ahead; the critic in him thinks“that’s interesting or beautiful, it might come in useful, I’ll jot it down!” But the poet inhim is noticing something else — words or phrases that sink down into a region where



they will be found at the proper time. He’s the clearest example we have of the two stateswhich occur, I believe, in all writers.

N.B., he was reading in just the same way for the “Destiny of Nations” poem. TheLapland passage is as heavily documented. But he couldn’t then turn his material intopoetry. The abnormal conditions of 1797 requisite.

(iii) The Wordsworths’ visit. An additional stimulus. There’s the walk to Linton, wherethe two friends plan out “The Ancient Mariner,” because they want to raise £5; dis-covery that their methods differ too much to admit of joint composition; passagesfrom Dorothy’s diary which anticipate C[oleridge]’s work (“the horned moon was set”— “Ancient Mariner” — the “one leaf in the top of the tree” that reappears is“Christabel”). All three were in creative excitement, and though the emotion passedthe impression it made lasted all their lives. Coleridge, in particular, was from thatmoment obsessed by the importance of Wordsworth — an obsession that increaseswhen he passes from the creative into the critical phase of his life. He was right —Wordsworth was important — but he was drawn to him by this personal experience,and that was why he felt it worth while, twenty years later, to put him right very gen-tly and elaborately on some points where he felt he had gone wrong — points which,he admits, are not of first rate importance.

Decay

Tragic and interesting period: Coleridge’s death as a creator and birth as a critic. Opium combines with the study of metaphysics to de-poetize him. He finds it

difficult to concentrate, or to work from within. Cf. Second part of “Christabel” withFirst. He has become anxious, he is trying to keep the tone, magic has hardened intoconjuring tricks. He declares it’s just the same, and that he’ll finish the whole poem,but he knows better. Cf. also his relation to the Wordsworths. Here too the “Secondpart” is out of tune with the First. He follows them to the Lakes because he has beenso happy with them in Somerset, he determines all shall be as before. But it can’t,because he has changed.

This breathing house not built with hands,This body that does me grievous wrong

are dragging him away, and not either William’s good sense nor Dorothy’s affection helps.

Dejection — the only poem in which a poet says farewell to poetry. Academic aurevoirs abound, and may be charming and sincere (opening poem of Housman’s lastvolume) but the poets are not upset — they remind of those farewell performances byPachmann, where the performer is positively exhilarated by the thought that he willnever be heard again. Coleridge far too much involved in the wreck of his genius to begraceful or elegiac about it. He knows that in a little time he won’t even be able to writethis. It’s the expiring glimmer, which just shows the shape of the lamp. Uneven.Bookish start: Sir Patrick Spens’ moon suggested by former moons. Then the trouble



[is] defined; not agony but sterility — he still understands the creative process, butfrom the other side — as a critic. [Here Forster turns to “Dejection: An Ode” and readsstanza two, in which Coleridge laments, “I see them all, so excellently fair, / I see, notfeel, how beautiful they are!” Forster interjects, “What comfort to him, as yet, is thisvision compared with the one he has lost?” He reads stanza three: “My genial spiritsfail…” then remarks, “Looks back on the creative period,” and reads the first half ofstanza six, in which Coleridge mourns the loss of his “shaping spirit of Imagination.”]

Elsewhere “the property of passion is not to create, but to set in increased activity” andhis view of creation is that [it] is the conjunction of previous experiences from booksor life with excitement; if the excitement is able to shape, great art may be born, butin themselves neither experience nor excitement is unusual.

[He] goes on to say how he went wrong. A philosophic error — he mismanagedhimself, and by developing one part starved the other and thus damaged the whole:

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 stealFrom 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.

I.e., research and introspection may bring knowledge of human nature and the uni-verse, but are fatal to poetry. He gets [the] same material, but in the wrong way, andthus in the wrong place. C[oleridge] did this before maturity (“Destiny of Nations”)and does it again in his decay; in 1803 he writes a dull grumbling poem about a badnight (“The Pains of Sleep”) and actually published it as a pendant to “Kubla Khan”!

But the disaster had compensations he couldn’t yet see. “The Ode to Dejection”is a watershed. He has described in it the death of his creative power, not realizing thathis very description means the birth of another power — the critical; an inferior infant,yet it lived and made remarks beyond the scope of its inspired predecessor. The shap-ing spirit of imagination was after all not to forsake him; though it no longer arrangedhis own images it led him into worlds created by other and more fortunate men, andin particular into the world of Shakespeare. There he moves like a dethroned king, andthe sweetness of his nature prevents him from reflecting, “I too once reigned.”

The colouring of C[oleridge]’s life, the highlights and shadows produced by theopium, make it abnormal. But regarded as a curve it is typical of the creator-critic, it is apassage from sleep to alertness, from the unconscious to the conscious life. A passage pecu-liarly painful to Coleridge, because of the purity and completeness of his sleep. His greatpoems had rushed up at him out of the darkness and when the flow ceased (second partof “Christabel”) he began to get alarmed. But all writers have had his experience in amilder and more confused form, and some of them have gained critical power from it, ashe did.

So he’s particularly useful for us as a specimen which we can readily dissect, andwith which others can be compared, and I preferred to spend time in the dissectionrather than in attempting a general account of his critical work.



Lectures, Themes

Recuperative period — lectures, on Shakepeare, which contain the most readable andcharming of C[oleridge]’s criticism, with isolated remarks and studies that penetratevery deep. His fundamental attitude to Shakespeare seems unsound: he thought he hadprofound reasons for all he wrote, which is absurd — S[hakespeare] was often writingcarelessly. Yet it led C[oleridge] into very little absurdity and some valuable discover-ies, because his instinct always directed him to the right passages. If Dryden excels asa critic through the strength of his stomach, C[oleridge] excels through the fiercenessof his nerves. We feel him vibrating all the time, and there are moments when he seemsalmost to connect us physically with the movements and the characters in the drama.

(Quote Raysor II. 177 — Ariel):

Is there anything in nature from which Shakespeare caught the ideaof this delicate and delightful being, with such child-like simplicity,yet with such preternatural powers? He is neither born of heaven, norof earth; but, as it were, between both, like a May-blossom kept sus-pended in air by the fanning breeze, which prevents it from falling tothe ground, and only finally, and by compulsion, touching earth.

(Quote Raysor II, 133 — Nurse):

But what am I to say of the Nurse? We have been told that her char-acter is the mere fruit of observation — that it is like Swift’s “PoliteConversation,” certainly the most stupendous work of human mem-ory, and of unceasingly active attention to what passes round us, uponrecord. The nurse in Romeo and Juliet has sometimes been comparedto a portrait by Gerald Dow, in which every hair was so exquisitelypainted, that it would bear the test of the microscope. Now, I appealconfidently to my hearers whether the closest observation of mannersof one or two old nurses would have enabled Shakespeare to draw thischaracter of admirable generalization. Surely not. Let any man con-jure up in his mind all the qualities and peculiarities that can possi-bly belong to a nurse, and he will find them in Shakespeare’s pictureof the old woman: nothing is omitted. This effect is not produced bymere observation.

Biographia Literaria

We’ll approach the desert of the Biographia Literaria. You’ll all have read it, or bits of it,and know how tiresome it is, and how it is slightly absurd. C[oleridge] after about twen-ty years wakes up to the fact that he has been labelled incorrectly. The Preface to LyricalBallads, which Wordsworth had written and kept complacently expanding, might applyto the W[ordsworth] poems, but didn’t to “The Ancient Mariner,” and Coleridge dis-associates himself at some length. He is anxious not to hurt W[ordsworth]’s feelings, yet



he can’t allow the misunderstanding to continue. He reminds us rather of an intelligentand unwieldy bee, demonstrating to another of equal girth that they do not belong tothe same hive. Now and then he gets into a flower bed, sometimes he hovers in front ofa looking glass, and it is delightful to watch him in either position. But more often hegets into the window pane, — i.e. wastes his strength in distinguishing between proseand poetry. The question of the difference between prose and poetry is to my mind anexamination question — nothing to do with literature. Yet Coleridge had to attack it,because his fellow insect had preceded him. So with the hardly less barren question ofthe difference between the Imagination and the Fancy.

Over Poetic Diction he is more interesting, because he is dealing withW[ordsworth]’s poems as well as his theories. I don’t want to go into this well worn con-troversy, but will take one or two points in it, to bring out Coleridge’s mentality.W[ordsworth] said poems ought to be written in the language of ordinary men, but hewas not certain either who ordinary men are, or how they talk. He was against cultivat-ed talk, as sophisticated and corrupt, but was also against dialect, and so found himselfdriven towards a standardized dullness. His children speak not as country children butas school children, his leech gatherers and sextons appear to have been established in theLakes by some central educational authority. He realized his difficulty, and defined poet-ic diction anew as the language of ordinary men when they were in a state of excitement;this gave the poet the words he needs, or rather the right to rearrange them in the orderhe wants. Coleridge is down on this, and down on it because of his own experience as apoet. Knows that the poet’s excited if no one else is, and the diction to be appropriatemust express this. Would have defined it as the language of extraordinary men in excite-ment. B.L. [II], p. 55.

Tasso the most tragic example of CR[eator] as cr[itic]. Ruined his life by trying tojustify it. Sensitive and weakly — the type of genius whom people love to bully or pet.He enjoyed making love and paying compliments and being sad. He had neither agreat mind nor a strong imagination, but a good ear, fine taste, a gift for pathos andrhetoric. Cf. Virgil, who was tougher, though.

T[asso] wrote odes, sonnets, and pastoral drama. Then the Rinaldo. T[asso] oftencomposed his works long before they were published and showed them about finishedor unfinished in MS. After Rinaldo he began (i) a long or “Heroic” poem on the firstCrusades (ii) a series of Essays saying what a Heroic poem ought to be like. Wanted toobey Aristotle, but A[ristotle] hadn’t said, for the reason that the Crusades hadn’toccurred, so T[asso] tried to work out what Aristotle would have said; and in particu-lar what sort of Unity he would have presented.

Teaching — Xtian, but not too dogmatic. Supernature is admissible if Xtianand based on popular belief.

Theme — historical.

Treatment — neither too familiar nor too remote.

Person and scenes — noble and stately.

Unity of action necessary, but episodes permissible.



Critics complain (i) He wasn’t as good as Aristotle.

(ii) He wasn’t following Aristotle.

(iii) He wasn’t even following his own rules — e.g. was giving the devil the best tunes in the person of Armida.

Three vol[ume]s of controversy — which even Prof. Saintsbury hasn’t read and does-n’t mean to read.

T[asso] hard pressed, says the G[erusalemme] L[iberata] is an allegory, has series ofnervous breakdowns and finally determines to rewrite the epic and keep all the rules.

Result — the unreadable Gerusalemma Conquistada.

Here self defence is fatal — all the more fatal because he began to defend himself inadvance. He was so anxious to be right that everything went wrong.

But the impulse that worried him was the same impulse that stimulated Dryden and pre-served Corneille; he wanted to prove that he was following the rules or transgressing themlegitimately. He didn’t conceive of a new dispensation in which Aristotle didn’t count.Indeed when there is such a dispensation — and we live under one today — the art of selfdefence loses its distinction and degenerates into repartee.

Continue the subject of personal sensitiveness next week.

I have had today to dwell on the irritability of authors and to represent them asrather petty creatures. One can’t generalize here, but I think they are rather pettierthan the world assumes: in other words, the world has a false sentimental view aboutthem, and expects them to live up to their writings — not realizing that the writingsrest in a dream-state on which the awakened man may look back as a stranger. Itdoesn’t much matter — there’s no reason authors shouldn’t be laughed at, and ifthey’re misjudged, the loss is not theirs but the world’s. But if you think I havedrawn too dark a picture of them, do allow me to conclude by blackening the otherside of the canvas, and saying a word about the irritability of critics and about theirhabit of self defence.

They defend themselves not against the author, who is usually incoherent or dead,but against one another. By some mysterious dispensation, they are haunted by a mali-cious imp, who always tries to divert them from their subject matter to their col-leagues, and who usually succeeds. If you examine any controversy — either the Cidor the Jerusalem or that which more recently bickers round the Brontes, or round D.H.Lawrence — you can trace this curious law at work. The subject matter is apt to retirewhile it is being discussed, like an ebbing tide, and the critics are left in a row on thebeach, in the form of seaweeds and odds and ends of cork. They do not realize whathas happened; for a little time they did register the motion of the sea, and they do notrealize that it has ebbed, and that they are now concentrating on one another, and —if I may pursue without impropriety the simile of the seaweed — are getting hot and


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