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THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE




LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSIST PRESS




THE DEMON
OF THE ABSOLUTE
BY
PAUL ELMER MORE


NEW SHELBURNE ESSAYS
VOLUME I
PRINCETON
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
1928




COPYRIGHT, 1928, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
OTHER WORKS
OF THE PRESENT AUTHOR
THE -GREEK TRADITION
Introductory Volume: PLATONISM
Volume I: THE RELIGION OF PLATO
Volume II: HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
Volume III: THE CHRIST OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
Volume IV: CHRIST THE WORD
Published by the
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
ELEVEN VOLUMES
Published by
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
---—.. ----.


PRINTED AT THE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON NEW JERSEY




PREFACE


T is the fashion of the day to write about one's self;
and now, as I turn once more to literary criticism
after prolonged immersion in studies of another sort,
I would avail myself of this privilege claimed by the
"moderns."
A good deal, in fact, has happened in the Republic of
Letters during the interval between the publication of
this first volume of New Shelburne Essays and the years
when I was writing the material collected in the last volume of the old series. For one thing a group of writers
have come forward who sever themselves quite definitely
from what they call the "middle generation" represented
in criticism by H. L. Mencken and Van Wyck Brooks and
in fiction by Dreiser and Anderson and Cabell. The distinction, though by no means so radical as the new insurgents would like us to believe, is pertinent, and may be
noted here by way of explaining a certain difference of
tone between such essays in the present volume as that on
Modern Currents in American Literature, which deals with
the middle generation, and that on The Fetish of Pure Art,
which is directed to theories adopted by some of the
younger aesthetes. It is also from the critics of the middle
generation that I draw the genial comments on myself
quoted in the essay on Standards. The upcoming lions of
the press are not quite so superlatively sure of themselves
as were their immediate predecessors. Indeed one of their
modes of distinguishing themselves is to turn back with a




vi


PREFACE


discriminating approbation-not without a touch of pardonable condescension-to the "older generation" represented for them by Mr. Brownell and Professor Babbitt
and myself. In a recent article in Books, for instance, Mr.
Lewis Mumford apologizes, if the word is not too strong,
for the days when to him and his contemporaries "these
excellent gentlemen were effigies that we dragged mercilessly through the streets, attacked with the daggers of
revolt, and on occasion made a bonfire of.... If we
wanted to swear hard we said 'Babbitt!' 'More!' 'Brownell!'" Now Mr. Mumford finds "much unkindness" in
that practice and "little sense." "When," he says, "I
finally came to read these authors without rancour and
without any desire to protect myself against their contamination, I discovered that Mr. More, for example"whereupon follows a paragraph of generous appreciation
which I will not quote, but for which I am none the less
grateful.
The same note is struck by Mr. Gorham B. Munson in
his volume of essays entitled Destinations: A Canvass of
American Literature Since 9goo. At the conclusion of a
chapter on myself, for the most part sufficiently eulogistic
to satisfy any author's vanity, he says: "I started with
the fact that the middle generation 'shelved' More and
briefly indicated the nature of one of its most considerate
attacks. My own purpose, it must be apparent, is somewhat controversial. It is to suggest that More is a force
that has not been encountered on its own plane, and
surely our present milieu suffers insofar as such forces are
not permitted open-minded hearing and direct opposition."
It is pleasant to be thus rediscovered (or discovered,
should I say?); it affords the kind of sensation that must
have surprised Tom Sawyer when he heard his virtues




PREFACE


Vii


proclaimed in his own funeral sermon-with the difference, however, that I fear Mr. Mumford and Mr. Munson
will not believe that I am still fully alive. I trust the oddness of the event will even excuse the egotism of so much
talk about myself, if any such apology is needed in these
Freudian days which teach us to avoid reticence as ay, a
dangerous vice. As a matter of fact this growing and already pretty wide-spread revolt from the domination of
the so-called middle generation has a significance far beyond any reference to my personal reputation. In the
article from which I have drawn Mr. Mumford's partial
recantation of the merely contemptuous attitude towards
the older critics, the same writer makes it clear that he
has no thought of exonerating them for their deficiencies:
Against the insurgent forces that sought to humanize industry and
subordinate property values to vital ones, Mr. Paul Elmer More
showed only an obstinate interest in the welfare of the rentiers who
lived, in chaste seclusion, off dividends from the dark satanic mills of
Lawrence or Fall River. Against the new experiences and the fresh
traditions, which it was necessary to accept, to fuse, and to remould,
the genteel tradition of the older critics presented a united front. They
were not prepared to face the chaos of transition-yet without that
chaos, not order, but only the frozen semblance of order was possible....As one looks back upon the work of the older critics during the
last twenty years, this is perhaps one's capital impression: it is mainly
irrelevant. Our instincts were sound if our reasons were bad. Mr.
Babbitt, Mr. More, Mr. Brownell had left us in the lurch.
Now I have little concern to defend myself against the
charge of showing only an obstinate interest in the idle
and wasteful rich. Such an accusation is of a piece with
the view of that gentleman of the repudiated middle generation who could imagine no more crushing rebuke than
to compare me, of all men, with the late J. Pierpont
Morgan. This is mere silliness; it can only be explained as
a wilful misunderstanding of my writings, particularly




Vi.i.


PREFACE


perhaps of the volume of essays on Aristocracy and 7ustice.
The more important point in the indictment, because the
less personal, is that I, and the gentlemen with whom I
have the honour to be associated, offered the young
devotees of "life" no adequate philosophy against the
anarchy of transition, but left them in the lurch. My once
esteemed friend, Stuart P. Sherman, meant something the
same when, in his Americans, he rallied me for "doing too
little to meet his poor living countrymen half way," and
for making of my essays "a many-chambered mansion,
conspicuously withdrawn from the public highway, built
and maintained for the reception of Indian sages, Greek
philosophers, great poets, moralists, scholars, statesmen,
and other guests from the Elysian Fields."
A critic so impugned might, I suppose, take refuge in
the assertion that a mansion of this kind, if only it were
wisely planned, would in itself be a service to letters; he
might even hint that a self-complacent ignorance is not
the best guide from chaos to order, and that one of the
things much needed by the modern victims of genius is a
renewed acquaintance with the great traditions of the
past. But that perhaps would be an evasion. Mr. Mumford-and Mr. Munson agrees with him in this-is right
in feeling that the truth and fineness of art at any time
depend largely on the philosophy behind it, and that no
relief from the present confusion is possible until society
reestablishes for itself some body of ideas in which the
artist can live and breathe and expand. And Mr. Mumford is also sound in his implication that it is the proper
task of the critic rather than of the artist himself to help
in the creation of such a philosophy, or at least to bring
out its connexion with the practice of art. If the older
critics neglected this duty, if for the growing pains of
youth they offered the soothing syrup of gentility and no




PREFACE


ix


nourishing ideas, then their work so far was irrelevant.
I admit my own shortcomings, and am trying in the
present volume to amend my ways. At any rate it will not
be said that I have failed to speak out. But is it possible
that Mr. Mumford has gone to the books of Professor
Babbitt and Mr. Brownell desiring milk for babes and has
been repulsed by finding meat for men?
To the superficial observer it might appear, in fact does
appear, that the acknowledged distractions under which
the artist, with the rest of us, suffers is the result of conflicting theories of life; but a closer study of the phenomena will show, I think, that we are rather under the sway
of a single philosophy which bears in itself the inevitable
seeds of contradiction. We subscribe indeed to innumerable isms, but they all go back to that ism of nature which
was one of the peculiar products of the Renaissance, and
which, for English readers, found its most eloquent advocate in Francis Bacon. We are all, like that corrupt judge,
seeking for liberty by submitting the mind to things; we
are set upon mastering nature by regarding ourselves as a
part of nature. The fathers have eaten sour grapes and
the children's teeth are on edge. In Bacon's programme
the new outlook of power and freedom was associated
with a revolt from the dominance of Aristotle; and in so
far as the Aristotelian metaphysic was responsible for the
scholastic methods of the Middle Ages the rebellion was
timely and fruitful. But there is another side to Aristotle's
philosophy, his humanism, and the loss of this has been
our undoing. To Aristotle the distinctive mark of natural
things was an inner purpose, or, as it is more technically
termed, the working within them of a final cause; nature
to him was characteristically teleological, the realm of
ends. The final cause of an acorn, the purpose of its being,
is to develop into an oak; and in that sense its end, the




x


PREFACE


full-grown tree, exists in the seed potentially from the
beginning. The potential end of a colt is that it-,should
become a horse; and so with all plants and animals. Furthermore their behaviour is teleological; they act for the
attainment of an end, whether it be food or safety or reproduction. But-and this is equally the differentiating
mark of natural things-their end, whether in growth or
in behaviour, is unconscious or at the most merely instinctive. The growth of neither the acorn nor the colt is a
deliberative act; and the animal as well as the plant in its
behaviour is driven by instincts which it does not consciously control. And there the kingdom of nature stops.
Man in the Aristotelian scheme is both of nature and
above nature; as an animal he belongs to the natural
realm of unconscious ends, while as a human being he
possesses in addition to his animal instincts the faculty of
consciously directive purpose. Here, in this faculty of
conscious purpose, begins the field of conduct, of ethics
and statecraft and religion, wherein a man makes of himself by free choice, under certain limitations, that which
he will; and here lies the field of art, wherein a man makes
for himself that which he will. The recognition of this
dualism of the natural and the supernatural in man (or
of a higher and a lower nature, for the word "nature" is as
unstable as the sea) is precisely the philosophy of humanism, as contrasted with the philosophy of naturalism
which denies that the distinctive mark of man is a consciously directive will. And the history of European culture since the Renaissance turns on the varying fortune of
these two hostile views.
A preface is not the place to follow the unfolding of this
history. It is sufficient to say that at last the philosophy
of naturalism has come pretty well to dominate our
thought. We are victims of the Demon of the Absolute,




PREFACE


xi


the Deluder who can take many forms, but who for us
appears as the idol of Nature set high on the throne of
omnipotence. The manifold results of this idolatry I have
tried to analyse in some of the following essays, having in
mind the reproach of my more friendly censors; and I
would not here anticipate. But it will not be amiss to indicate by way of summary the two main currents of influence from the same fountain head of naturalism. On
the one hand we have the illicit usurpation of science
which came to a climax in the mid-nineteenth century,
and which taught us to believe that the world runs forever
in a set groove under some complex of mechanical laws,
and that man like the animals is no more than a cog in the
huge fatalistic machine. The modern form of this hypothesis is what our psychologists call behaviourism; its outcome in literature is the sort of realism that still actually
dominates our fiction. On the other hand we are haunted
by a suspicion that this world of ours, so far from exhibiting the tight regularity of a machine, is an infinite flux of
accidents without calculable plan or meaning. From this
creed derives the literature that undertakes to represent
man as the merely passive channel for an ever-flowing
stream of sensations. It might appear that these two
views were mutually exclusive one of the other, and the
distraction of the age is indeed due to the fact that they
are in one sense contradictory. But it is to be observed
that they have a common origin in the denial of that element in man which is outside of nature and is denoted by
consciously directive purpose; they are alike in being
anti-humanistic, and they both end in the morass of
"futilitarianism" by depriving life of any serious interest
or deep emotions for representation.
As I see it the perplexity of the younger generation, so
engagingly acknowledged by Mr. Munson and Mr. Mum



Xii


PREFACE


ford, springs from an uneasy and, if I may say so without
offence, not very intelligent reaction against the slavish
submission of their elders to the Idol set on a pedestal by
one Francis Bacon and served by him as "the high priest
of nature." Some of the more courageous rebels have even
sought a way of escape by claiming for the imagination a
complete independence of the laws of life, by what has
been dubbed, without intentional irony, the dehumanization of art. But that is only to fall from one absolute into
another, to exchange servitude for vacuity. There is one
door of true liberty, and that is by way of the humanism
of which Aristotle long ago was the spokesman. I do not
say that the views of the great Stagirite were without
their limitations and omissions; I hold that his conception
of the supernatural needs very much to be complemented
and corrected by a deeper insight into the eternal verities
of the spirit; but humanism we must recover if there is to
be any rejuvenescence of literature. Only on that rock can
a sound edifice be raised for the questing modern mind.
In my plea for a return to this saner philosophy I trust
that nothing I have said will be taken in the spirit of
Rousseau's famous maxim: Le raisonnement, loin de nous
eclairer, nous aveugle. The rationalism I denounce has no
affinity to the reasonableness of common sense; it is rather
just that defalcation of the reason to its own unreal abstractions which, obscuring the true function of the
master faculty of our composite being, reduces the soul of
man to a nonentity controlled by fatalistic law or to a
puppet tossed in the winds of irresponsibility.
Of the essays here collected those on Vaughan and
Borrow go back to my old days with the Nation; that on
Poe was published in Studies in Philology for July, I923;
Modern Currents in American Literature (translated by
Professor Louis Cons) came out in the Revue de Paris of




PREFACE                   xiii
December i5, I927, and in the Forum for the following
month. The rest of the book now appears in print for the
first time.
P.E.M.
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
JUNE 6, 1928




I
6
i




CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE                                   V
THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE                  I
I. STANDARDS                            2
II. TRADITION                          II
III. THE CRITERION                      i8
IV. THE FETISH OF PURE ART              29
V. THE PHANTOM OF PURE SCIENCE         42
MODERN CURRENTS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE   53
A NOTE ON POE'S METHOD                   77
MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE                       89
GEORGE BORROW                            127
HENRY VAUGHAN                            143
SIAVITRI                                 165




II
I




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


HOWEVER it may have been a couple of decades
ago, there are few men today bold enough, or blind
enough, to deny the presence of certain demons in
human society,-the Moloc of violence, the Beelzebub of
treachery, the Belial of lying flatteries, the Mammon of
gold, the Mephistopheles of scepticism, and others of the
Stygian Council escaped through the open gates of hell.
And I suppose that not many educated men today, looking back upon history, will doubt that these disturbers of
the peace have always been stalking over the world, plying their trade of malice, though the worst of them, the
hobgoblin of fear, may have been unchained only since
the War. But there is one demon who retains so much of
celestial glamour, who so wears the robe of authority, that
he still moves about unnoticed or passes for an angel of
light. And the mischief of his art is that the finer minds
are often those most subject to his wiles. I mean the
Demon of the Absolute.
This Demon of the Absolute is nothing else but rationalism, what Francis Bacon called the intellectus sibi permissus, or, if you wish it in plainer English, reason run
amuck. Now reason, so long as it is content to accept the
actual data of experience, is manifestly one of our diviner
faculties; at.every step in life it is our guide and friend,
and without it we can do nothing wisely or prosperously.
And that is why it becomes so dangerous when, disregarding "matters of fact, those unconcerning things," it sets




2       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
up its own absolutes as the truth and asks us to act thereupon. For there are no absolutes in nature; they are phantoms created by reason itself in its own likeness, delusions
which, when once evoked, usurp the field of reality and
bring endless confusion in their train. Their close is chaos,
in which Anarchy rules supreme. You can trace their
disastrous effects in philosophy ever since Parmenides
and Heraclitus in ancient days started the pretty wrangle,
still going on, between the metaphysicians who conceive
the ultimate reality of things as immutable unity and
those who reduce the universe to pure flux and multiplicity. You can see the Demon at work in politics whenever men begin to contend for some final unchecked
authority in the State, whether it be lodged in a monarch
or in all the people. It has wrought havoc in religion by
presenting to faith the alternative between an absolute
omnipotent God or no God at all, and between an infallible Church or undisciplined individualism. But nowhere
has it produced more stupid contrariety than among the
critics of art and literature.
I. STANDARDS
If you doubt the malignity of the Demon in the field of
criticism open one of Mr. H. L. Mencken's popular volumes of Prejudices. You will find his pages scintillating
hell-fire in the manner of the damnatory clauses in the
Athanasian Creed. You will learn that "Brownell argues
eloquently for standards that would bind an imaginative
author as tightly as a Sunday-school superintendent is
bound by the Ten Commandments and the Mann Act.
Sherman [this was before that genial writer had listened
to the lure of Broadway] tries to save Shakespeare for the
right-thinking by proving that he was an Iowa Methodist




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


3


-a member of the local Chamber of Commerce, a contemner of Reds, an advocate of democracy and the
League of Nations, a patriotic dollar-a-year-man during
the American scare.... And Babbitt, to make an end,
gives over his days and nights to deploring Rousseau's
anarchistic abrogation of 'the veto power' over the imagination, leading to such 'wrongness' in both art and life
that it threatens 'to wreck civilization.' "
If I have omitted my own name from this elegant diatribe, it is not because I was too obscure to escape the attention of Mr. Mencken and his ilk. Alas, no; et tacitur
vivit sub pectore vulnus. Perhaps, in fact, the simplest and
most direct way to deal with the matter will be to give a
little of my sad experience in those days, now beginning to
be remote, when I was an editor and frequent writer of
essays. I used to solace myself then with the boast that I
was at once the least read and most hated author in existence. Other writers I admitted might be more hated, and
I hoped that a few were less read; but the combination I
claimed for myself as a unique distinction.
The watchword among the wolves was given by a
Brooklyn newspaper in the statement that a certain book
of mine was "pathetic when it was not disgusting." There
was a finality about that which I could not but admire.
Sometimes the attack was more picturesque. I remember,
for instance, coming into the Century Club one morning
for breakfast and being greeted on the steps by Professor
Dunning, that rare gentleman now gone to his rest, with
the quizzical remark, "And so you were one of those who
gave the hemlock to Socrates!" followed, when I expressed
my surprise, by the query, "Haven't you seen the last
issue of the New Republic?" Well, I picked up the magazine, and discovered that to its reviewer a recent book of
mine on Platonism proved me to be such a one as would




4        THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
have joined the murderers of Socrates had I been living
at the time. And not content with this the writer, grasping at the most awful insult in his vocabulary, declared
that I had the temper of a banker and resembled the late
J. P. Morgan. Imagine it; imagine the exasperation of a
reviewer brought to such straits of fatuity!
A good deal of this splutter of indignation might be attributed to the naive cause avowed by a lady in the North
American Review: "I do not like you, Dr. Fell; The reason
why I cannot tell." And to such a mood I would bow in
silence. Who would undertake to defend his own amiability? But other critics had a very definite reason for their
animosity, a reason which might have lifted the debate
out of the petty range of personalities, though to my sorrow it did not. For example, one of my excited adversaries
took the occasion of a couple of books by John Cowper
Powys to make comparisons that, to speak mildly, were
not meant to be agreeable. "Mr. Powys," he observed, "is
what is currently termed a subjective critic. Only, perhaps, in America are there people left who object to that
sort of criticism and seek for some cosmic footrule with
which to measure works of art." In contrast with the true
subjective critic I was then named as a specimen of the
"arid" sort who think they have a cosmic footrule in their
pocket. Another gentleman, in "A Note on Criticism"
contributed to a New York review, was, if possible, even
more explicit. It is the hidebound critic, he averred, who
ought to be reminded of the true meaning of culture, and
not "the avid child who can digest green apples where
later he won't be able to stand the delicate monstrosities
of Katherine Fullerton Gerould." And then the reviewer
added, like Jove scattering his bolts upon the just and the
unjust, "'Wholesome' boys are spanked every day for
reading detective stories which delight"-strange fellow



THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE               5
ship in joy-Elihu Root and Charles E. Hughes and myself. Whether Mr. Root and Mr. Hughes indulge in the
secret vice of reading detective stories I do not know; it is
awful to contemplate such depravity. As for my poor self,
I might have suspected that, by coupling my name so
unexpectedly with two distinguished statesmen, the reviewer intended a compliment, had he not held me up elsewhere in the article as a deplorable case of the madness
that comes from rejecting "the irresponsibility of temperament" and searching for "a true criterion of criticism."
There you have it. The cat is out of the bag, that
Demon of the Absolute who has played such pranks with
philosophy and politics and religion, and is now let loose
in the pleasant garden of letters. On one side is set up a
monster of pedantry and over against him is ranged the
genius who champions a complete irresponsibility of temperament.
To all which I would say that this denunciation of
standards by souls enamoured of aesthetic adventure is
very pretty if taken as rhetoric, but has no connexion
with facts. Has there ever been a sane critic who thought
he had a cosmic footrule in his pocket, or believed he
could measure the value of a work of art by some infallible
standard? Sane critic, I say, for I do remember an article
by an eminent psychologist which undertook to create an
absolute scale for measuring the merits of style. With the
audacity of an experimenter used to laboratory methods
he gave a series of quotations, ranging from college exercises up to acknowledged masterpieces, and marked them
by percentages, as if he had been correcting a paper in
mathematics. He then proceeded to show how, with these
specimens as a testing scale, any one could take a paragraph of English and rate it as so many per cent good or




6


THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


bad, without fear of contradiction. The results were excruciatingly funny; but the fellow, as I said, was a laboratory psychologist, and a psychologist of that school has
been described as a student who investigates the mind,
having first acknowledged that he has no mind to investigate. And I remember another scholar, not a psychologist
but a professor of English in a large university, who promulgated a somewhat similar scheme for establishing
literary values of a more complicated sort. He had discovered that the effect of a piece of literature depended on
its possession of ten qualities- such as pathos, humour,
sublimity, and the like. To each of these qualities he allowed ten points or less, so that a perfect piece of writing,
having all the qualities in the highest degree, by a simple
process of addition would be graded one hundred per
cent, and so on down the scale. The scheme possessed the
ease and infallibility of a problem in arithmetic; it was a
veritable cosmic footrule, and the perplexities of the critic
were forever ended. The only difficulty was in the application of the rule. As I recollect the measurements actually
made by the learned inventor, in a long list of tested
books Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush stood at the top as the
greatest work of literature ever produced, while Hamlet
was far down towards the bottom. And so of the students
of this distinguished pedagogue I fear it might be said:
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread;
Besides what the grim wolfthis academic wolf being no other than those so-called
utilitarian pursuits that ever stand ready to draw off the
ill-fed students of the humanities.
If the foes of standards have in mind such freaks of
criticism as these, let us bid them Godspeed. No sane




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


7


critic believes that questions of taste can be settled by an
absolute rule like problems in arithmetic. But is there any
more sanity in setting up an absolute law of irresponsibility?
Luther once likened our human nature to a drunkard
on horseback: prop him up on one side, and over he
topples on the other. The simile is apt, and applies to taste
as well as to morals. As soon as we are convinced that no
absolute standard exists, forthwith we flop to the other
extreme and swear that there are absolutely no standards
at all; so hard is it to keep the middle path of common
sense. And so behind the light-armed skirmishers of the
press whom, to say the truth, no one takes very seriously,
we have scholars like Mr. Spingarn, who, with the inverted sort of pedantry common today, teach a ready
public that art is only expression and criticism only impression, and that no one need bother to hunt for standards of taste, which are not and never were. And worse
than that, we have sober philosophers like Lord Balfour,
arguing for pure relativity of taste on metaphysical
grounds:
That is for every man most lovable which he most dearly loves.
That is for every man most beautiful which he most deeply admires.
Nor is this merely a reiteration of the old adage that there is no disputing about tastes. It goes far deeper; for it implies that, in the most
important cases of all, a dispute about either love or beauty would not
merely be useless: it would be wholly unmeaning.
These men, I assert, and not the champions of reasonable standards of taste, are the veritable addicts of the
Absolute and slaves of the Demon. They theorize very
persuasively, but have their conclusions any relation to
fact? Is it true that admiration so varies with time and
place, and from individual to individual, that no common
sense of beauty is discoverable which can be used as a




8        THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
basis of conversation and to which appeal can be made in
argument? If my theme were the plastic arts, it would be
sufficient to adduce the indisputable truth that the forms
and pictures prized as lovely by the Orient do sooner or
later obtain due recognition in the West, and vice versa.
However it be with minor eccentricities, the supremely
beautiful things in Greece and Italy and India and China
are beautiful for all the world. But for our convenience we
may look rather to the extraordinary absence of local and
temporal barriers in lyrical poetry. When Simonides composed his epitaph for the Spartans who fell at Thermopyle:
0 passer by, tell the Lacedxmonians that we lie here obeying
their ordershe used words that would carry the same poetic thrill to
all men of all lands. Perhaps you will say that the emotion
expressed by Simonides is so simple, the language so devoid of ornament or metaphor or fancy, that the couplet
is scarcely to be reckoned as poetry. I think n6 one acquainted with the Greek would raise such an objection;
but let it pass. Let us take one of the epigrams of the
Anthology, written by a poet of no particular reputation
and replete with the imagery of pagan superstition:
Do thou, who rowest the boat of the dead in the water of this reedy
lake, for Hades, stretch out thy hand, dark Charon, to the son of
Cinyras, as he mounts the ladder by the gangway, and receive him.
For his sandals will cause the lad to slip, and he fears to set his feet
naked on the sand of the shore.
That is one of the trifles of art, yet its pathetic beauty
could touch the heart of an American, Lafcadio Hearn,
who had made his home in the far Orient, and who set by
its side for comparison a tanka (a lyric confined to thirtyone syllables) of a Japanese governor on the death of his
son:




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


9


As he is so young, he cannot know the way.... To the messenger of the Underworld I will give a bribe, and entreat him, saying: "Do
thou kindly take the little one upon thy back along the road."
Surely there is a common ground of feeling and taste
even in these minor things, something that overleaps all
estrangement of land and race and age. So, to come nearer
home, Ben Jonson, "Saint Ben," as Herrick called him,
Briton to the core of him, could cull a few phrases scattered through the very prosaic letters of Philostratus, and
weave them into a song which, given the knowledge of the
English tongue, will find an echo in the heart of any lover
of beauty the world over:
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise,
Doth ask a drink divine:
But might I of Jove's nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
And Goethe, alone amidst the trees and the mountains,
in the wide silence of a summer night, once wrote in German what a Chinese, centuries ago and far away by the
shores of the Yangtse River, might have expressed in his
own metrical form:
Ueber alien Gipfeln
Ist Rub.
But we have no need to multiply examples. It is a simple fact, not a theory, that in the matter of taste there is
still that which is not confined by the boundaries of space
or nullified by the process of time, and which makes the
whole world kin. This is not to say that we can lay down
any absolute law of agreement; but it does mean, emphatically, that certain standards of taste exist which approximate, more or less, to universality. It is a direct chal



10       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
lenge to the veracity of those who would stop our mouths
with the dictum that a debate about either love or beauty
is not merely useless, but wholly unmeaning.
If only the henchmen of the press, who have been seduced by the prophets of the flux, would act consistently
on the principle that there is no disputing about tastes!
But this is the curious fact: just so surely as you meet with
one of these relativistic critics, you will find him pretty
soon uttering the most savage and exemplary judgements
against those who disagree with him. This Mr. Powys, for
instance, who is regarded as a model of adventurous and
irresponsible sympathy, can slash about when he pleases
with a cutting assurance which hints at a bowie-knife in
his pocket, however he may eschew cosmic footrules. But
the really test case is the great Anatole France, the flowing philosopher par excellence, from whom so many of
our late-emancipated youth have borrowed their literary
creed, to the effect that criticism is a continual adventure
of the soul, a kind of freebooting romance for the curious
and enlightened. Well, one day, in the course of his Vie
Litteraire, Anatole France felt obliged to write about a
certain novel, La r'erre, which no amount of adventurous
sympathy could make him like, which, in fact, he heartily
disliked; and this is how he sums up his condemnation of
the author: "He [M. Zola] has no taste, and I have come
to believe that the want of taste is that mysterious sin
spoken of by the Scripture, the greatest of sins, which
alone will never be pardoned."
In other words, when Anatole France laid aside theory
and spoke his real mind, he could judge as incisively as M.
Brunetiere or any other avowed doctrinaire; and admittedly he judges from a ceiitral principle of his nature,
which he calls taste. How, indeed, could it be otherwise?
/Every man likes certain things and dislikes certain other




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


11


things; more than that, every man likes a certain class of
things and dislikes a certain other class of things, and
praises or dispraises by a standard, whether he names it
taste or refuses to acknowledge that it has a name.
II. TRADITION
The simple truth is that every man, unless he be a
dumb idiot, has a standard, more or less consciously
chosen, by which he judges, and when the "irresponsibles"
exhibit such fury at the sound of the word, they are
merely throwing dust in our eyes to confuse the issue. The
real question is not whether there are standards, but
whether they shall be based on tradition or shall be
struck out brand new by each successive generation or by
each individual critic./And first of all is there in fact any
discoverable tradition of taste, or do we deceive ourselves
in imagining its existence?
The relativists, like Lord Balfour, point to the mistakes
of criticism in the past, and particularly to its failure to
recognize great works of original genius on their first
appearance. They take a ghoulish glee in quoting the sentences of Jeffrey and Gifford and the other anti-romanticists of the early nineteenth century. And what, they ask,
shall we expect of "official" criticism which says that The
Excursion will never do, tells a certain young surgeon's
apprentice named Keats to go back to his gallipots, and
has no better description of Shelley's poems than "convulsive caperings of Pegasus labouring under colic
pains"? Well, those much-maligned maligners are like the
devil in one respect at least: they are not so black as they
are painted. There were fools among them, no doubt; and
our own feeble-minded are not all in asylums. But if those
who take most delight in decrying Jeffrey, for instance,




12       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
would condescend to read what they abuse, they would
find that his taste was generally good, and that most, not
all, of the things he condemned were worthy of condemnation. They might learn, too, that the despised Gifford's
chief work, in 9'he Baviad and The Meviad, was to bring
contempt upon the "namby-pamby madrigals" and
"splay-foot doggrel," the "motley fustian, neither verse
nor prose," of a horde of much-lauded poets now well forgotten. As Scott said, he "squabashed the Della Cruscans
at one blow." I suspect that one of the things we most
need in our own day is just a Baviad to pillory some of the
lawless men who are trampling down the wild thyme of
Parnassus.
I am far from saying that Gifford and his tribe were
always judicious or generous. I do say, however, that
where they failed it was precisely because they were not
in the tradition, but pronounced sentence from the narrow and ephemeral point of view of the pseudo-classic,
not the classic, school. Those who scold these errant
critics as an illustration of the complete relativity of taste,
forget that they do so by virtue of the validity of a larger
tradition. It is with tradition as it is with standards: because tradition is not absolute and infallible, men are
prone to cry out that there is no tradition. That is a habit
deep-rooted in human nature, hard to eradicate. No intelligent man supposes that tradition is a scale fixed once
and forever in all its nuances of valuation; but it is a simple matter of history, nevertheless, that a long tradition
of taste does exist, wavering and obscure on its outskirts,
growing steadier and more immutable as we approach its
centre. Let us take a poet who stands in this central tradition and follow his fortunes, briefly by necessity, in general estimation. We shall see, I think, that the law of
taste is the least changeable fact of human nature, less




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


13


changeable than religious creeds, far less changeable than
scientific theories. The advent of Christianity has left it
untouched, and the waning of faith does not trouble it.
The hypotheses of science-elemental spirits, antiphlogiston, corpuscular and undulatory explanations of light,
atoms and ions and the continuum, catastrophism and
natural selection-come and pass and come again, while
the central tradition of taste is still the same. Wars and
revolutions alter everything, but not this. It is like the
sea:
Man marks the earth with ruin, his control
Stops with the shore.
If anything in history seems to be settled it is the position of Homer among the Greeks. To him they turned for
the source of literature, the mirror of conduct, the fountain-head of all right thinking and all right speaking. He
was the guide of the young, the philosopher of the middleaged, the friend of the old. Not that his acceptance was
absolute. Plato, though he could write of Homer in terms
of adoration, also censured him harshly for his familiar
treatment of the gods; and there was a crabbed grammarian named Zoilus, who won the epithet Homeromastix,
scourge of Homer, for his systematic abuse of the poet.
But these exceptions only prove that a solid fact need not
be an absolute fact. And what Homer was to the Greeks,
he continued to be to the Romans until the old civilization
passed away.
With the coming of the Dark Ages-significant namethere is a change. The Greek language was almost forgotten in the West, and as a consequence the Iliad and
Odyssey were little read. Nevertheless, the tradition was
not lost, nor even totally eclipsed, and with the revival
of learning it emerges once more, never again, let us hope,
to be darkened. There were, however, several curious and,




14       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
in part, contradictory currents in Renaissance criticism
which for a while prevented the complete acknowledgement of Homer's literary supremacy. For one thing,
owing to the language of the ~neid and to the ease with
which Christian ideas could be read into various passages,
Virgil had supplanted Homer through the Middle Ages
as the master poet; and the scholars of the Renaissance,
despite their pose of general rebellion, were too deeply involved in the spirit of the immediate past to escape its
esthetical restrictions without a long struggle. And the
theory of the new criticism, with its insistence on the
authority of reason and on the authority of age, tended to
uphold the superiority of the Latin epic. These two principles of authority were clearly and definitively formulated by Scaliger in his Poetice, published in i56i, and
were applied to the tradition of taste with childlike confidence. "Homer's genius," he says (Poetice, v, 2), "was the
greatest; his art was of such a character that he seems
rather to have happened on it than to have cultivated it.
Wherefore there is no reason for surprise if I find in him a
certain Idea of nature, but not art.... Then Virgil,
having received art from Homer in this rude state, raised
it by his selective study of nature and his judgement to
the highest point of perfection.... As in the very circle
of our life there are many things, yet few give pleasure,
and still fewer raise admiration; so many things would insinuate themselves into the breast of the poet, but not all
are to be admitted. He who follows the example of Virgil
prefers therefore to exclude an occasional good thing
which might give pleasure, rather than admit anything
which can offer even the suspicion of offence."
Here you will see how Scaliger applies to Homer and
Virgil the false notion of reason as a faculty superior to,
and in a sense hostile to, the creative imagination-the




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


15


notion underlying pseudo-classic art and pseudo-classic
criticism, which, strange as it may sound, is still confused
with the true classic by some of our belated scholars. It is
easy to understand how such a theory worked against the
full and frank recognition of Homer as an artist.
The other principle formulated by Scaliger was oddly
inconsistent in its operation. Like the Renaissance
scholars in general he was imbued with respect for authority as a power synonymous with age. Now, in accordance
with this law the Iliad as the older poem ought to be the
better, and this undoubtedly would have been Scaliger's
avowed opinion were it not that he stood committed to
the greater regularity and art of Virgil. Instead, therefore,
of comparing Homer with Virgil on the basis of authority
by virtue of age, he switches aside and makes his comparison between the Iliad and the Hero and Leander of
Musaeus, really a late production of the sixth century
after Christ, but by a confusion of its author with the
mythical Musaus held to be a work of the remote preHomeric age. Scaliger was too sound a critic at heart not
to see that the actual matter of the Hero and Leander was
relatively slight and insignificant; but he had his hypothesis ready, like a true philologian. He imagined that this
poem was a mere parergon of the mighty bard of antiquity and that the serious works of Musseus and Orpheus
and their coevals had been lost. "If Musseus," he says,
"had written those things which Homer wrote, we may
suppose that he would have written them far better."
And as it is, "the style," if not the substance, "of Musseus
is far more polished and elegant than Homer's."
Now this triple judgement of Scaliger on Homer and
Virgil and Musseus bears closely on the true nature of
tradition. It shows, I think, that in his heart of hearts
Scaliger was quite awake to the surpassing genius and art




i6      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
of Homer, but was seduced by current theories to express
opinions not entirely in accord with his actual taste as determined by the criterion of pleasure. And one can follow
this deflexion of expressed opinion right through the
reign of pseudo-classicism. Let me illustrate what I mean
by two familiar examples taken from English literature.
One cannot read Pope's Preface to the Iliad without feeling
his preference of the poet he was translating; yet so deeply
ingrained in his mind was the Renaissance notion of the
opposition between reason and inventive genius that he
could not omit a formal comparison of the two ancient
epics on the basis of this contrast. "No author or man,"
he says, "ever excelled all the world in more than one
faculty; and as Homer has done this in invention, Virgil
has in judgement. Not that we think that Homer wanted
judgement, because Virgil had it in a more eminent degree; or that Virgil wanted invention, because Homer possessed a larger share of it; each of these authors had more
of both than perhaps any man besides, and are only said
to have less in comparison with one another. Homer was
the greater genius, Virgil the better artist. In one we most
admire the man, in the other the work." And so on. For
our other illustration we may take the absurd wrangle
that was the occasion of Swift's Battle of the Books. Does
any one suppose that Sir William Temple and Boyle or
any other champion of the Epistles of Phalaris got more
satisfaction out of reading those frigid exercises in rhetoric
than from the genuine masterpieces of Greek prose? Certainly they did not; yet because they believed these
Epistles to be from the hand of the Sicilian tyrant and so
endowed with the authority of primitive age, they did not
hesitate to cross swords for them with the terrible Bentley
himself. At least one of the false theories of pseudoclassicism, the sheer authority of age, was so damaged in




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE             17
that battle that it has had little force since then to deflect
the straight line of tradition.
Homer was to come to his own with the revival of Romanticism, though here again the mischievous inheritance
of the Renaissance can be seen at work. The romanticists
were, and are, quite as convinced as any pseudo-classicist
of the inherent hostility between reason and imagination,
between judgement and genius; only they take the opposite side and bestow all their praises on imagination, as
they understand it, and genius. Hence you will find a succession of scholars in the nineteenth century, particularly
in Germany, who made much of the spontaneity and
naivete of the Iliad, likening it to the untutored ballads of
the people, and comparing it in this respect favourably
with the Eneid, which they were wont to belittle as a
product of reflective judgement and conscious art. On the
whole I am inclined to believe that the justice of tradition
has come nearer to suffering a real perversion from these
romantic sentimentalists than from the rationalists of the
pseudo-classical school.
But withal the tradition still abides, and promises to
abide. There are, of course, men today, like our late professional endower of libraries, who affect to look down on
the Iliad as the work of a barbarous age. But if you investigate their opinion, you will find that it is warped by
some extraneous theory, such as a crude pacifism which
thinks it uncivic to enjoy a tale of fighting, or an equally
crude evolutionism which measures excellence unflinchingly by the criterion of newness. And you will commonly
find, moreover, that these faddists have not read the poem
in the original, that is, properly speaking, have not read it
at all, and so ought to be put out of court. The verdict of
those who have a right to judge is almost without exception that in Homer we have the nearest approach to pure




18       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
poetry, and that everything since is in a way derivative.
and secondary.
At any rate, I do not see how one can study the history
of taste honestly without acknowledging this fact of the
enduring permanence of the Homeric tradition. His place,
you will observe, has not been absolutely fixed; it has deflected a little to this side and to that in accordance with
the changing theories of criticism, but it has always
moved close to a central point-like the North Star,
which moves about at a slight distance from the axis of
the sky. As we depart further and further from this core of
tradition, our literary judgements become less certain and
the probability of variation grows greater; but the central
truth is not affected. Those who deny the validity of tradition are like watchers of the heavens who should set
their eyes on the wandering planets of the ecliptic and
from these alone should infer that there was no possibility
of a Polar Star.
III. THE CRITERION
At this point a wary antagonist might break in with a
seasonable objection. All this, he will say, is very well, but
it scarcely touches the real issue. I will grant that standards do exist, in the sense that for all men certain works of
art possess qualities which they instinctively or consciously use as a criterion of taste. I will even grant the
existence in the past of those traditional standards on
which you lay so much stress. But what is it to me thQugh
a hundred generations of mankind have united in acclaiming the merits of this or that poem; is that any reason why I should admire the same thing? The truth is
that our relativists, who dwell with such satisfaction on
the errors of authoritative criticism, are not so much con



THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE              19
cerned with disproving the existence of traditional standards as they are with establishing their own right to independence of taste.
Well, tradition does not create standards; to suppose
that it did would be to fall into the pseudo-classical error
of regarding age as a criterion of excellence,%Jut tradition
may be evidence that certain works of art embody-qualities which it is very much-our concern to appreciate, and
which we have very reason to use as a criterion. To understand why this is so we must look a little into the nature
of these criteria on which standards are formed. And here,
luckily, we have the help of one who, as the first of romantic critics in English, ought to possess, and does possess,
high credit among the relativists of today. "As it was my
constant reply," Coleridge says in his Biographia Literaria, "to authorities brought against me from later poets of
great name, that no authority could avail in opposition to
TRUTH, NATURE, LOGIC, and the LAWS OF UNIVERSAL
GRAMMAR; actuated too by my former passion for metaphysical investigations; I laboured at a solid foundation,
on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the
component faculties of the human mind itself, and their
comparative dignity and importance. According to the
faculty or source, from which the pleasure given by any
poem or passage was derived, I estimated the merit of
such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and
meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms;..
first, that not the poem which we have read, but that to
which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the
genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry.... Be it however observed, that I excluded from the
list of worthy feelings, the pleasure derived from mere
novelty in the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment at his powers in the author."




20       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
Coleridge is verbose and wanders as usual, but his
"solid foundation" resolves itself clearly enough into
these four rules:
First: That the value of a work of art is not determined
primarily by authority, but is a question of truth and
nature.
Secondly: That our sense of truth and nature in a work
of art is the pleasure we derive from it. To this notion,
that the aim of art is to give pleasure, Coleridge returns
frequently in the course of his rambling treatise.
Thirdly: Coleridge asserts that pleasures vary in value
and importance by a criterion of permanence. For instance, other things being equal, we place a higher value
on a poem which continues to interest us on a second or
third perusal than on one which interested us a first time,
but bores us a second time.
Fourthly: He asserts that pleasures vary also in value
and importance by a criterion of quality, that is, in accordance with the faculty of the mind which is concerned.
Now to the first and second of these principles I do not
see how the most truculent individualist can object; taken
alone they might even appear to support the position for
which he is contending. And the same thing, I suppose,
might be said of the third and fourth principles, were it
not for certain inferences which too patently can be
drawn from them. In these inferences lies the very crux of
the question at issue.
To take the third proposition: if it be true that pleasure
is a criterion of value in a work of art, and if one element
of comparison between two pleasures be their relative
degree of permanence, if, that is to say, other things being
equal, we instinctively prefer the pleasure that endures
the longer, then is there not, on the face of it, a strong
probability that the book which has been read with inter



THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


21


est by a hundred generations of men, while other books
have been read and forgotten, is the one which will maintain its interest for the individual reader, if he will give it
a fair chance? At least the burden of proof rests upon
those who would deny such an analogy.
Let me ask for indulgence if I speak from my personal
experience. It was my custom for a number of years, while
I enjoyed the schoolman's privilege of leisurely vacations,
to pass my summers on the coast of Maine, and there
each season, within sight and sound of Homer's eternal
sea, to read through the Iliad and Odyssey alternatively,
not indeed shedding tears like the captive of Calypso, who
Day after day, from beach and rocky caves,
Looked out upon the waste of untamed wavesbut filled with "the sober certainty of waking bliss," such
as no other reading has ever afforded me. I do not give
this experience as in any way peculiar to myself. On the
contrary, Homer has kept his place in tradition just because he has offered this uncloying pleasure to all who are
prepared to take it. Possibly some book written today
might have the same power, but, considering the actual
destinies of literature past and present, the chances are a
million to one against it-habent suafata libelli.
Tradition, it is well to repeat, is not in itself a quality of
excellence, but merely evidence of such qualities; and the
question is still to be answered, why these poets-Homer
and Virgil and Dante and Shakespeare and Milton and
the other genuine classics-have attained their preeminence, and why they are able to afford us a permanence of delight such as we cannot get from ephemeral
productions.
First of all they have this power, I think, because they
appeal to what is universal in human nature, rather than




22       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
to what is temporary and accidental. But this quality of
universality needs to be defined, since it is of a double
source, and in one of its aspects is the aim of a -sort of art
which can be called anything but classical. Men lose their
differences and show the common ground of humanity
when they rise to the height of their being and when they
sink to its lowest substratum. There is a striking passage
at the opening of the ninth book of the Republic in which
Plato tells of the lawless desires that lurk in the breast of
every man, even the most virtuous, silent by day when
the man's will is awake, but sometimes in his sleep going
forth to accomplish their filthy ends.l Yes, the beast is in
all of us, and it is possible to attain a kind of universality
by rousing it, and feeding it with suggestions, until it
dominates the soul. This is the truth that the naturalists
have learned. There is in fact a whole school of writers in
Russia and Austria and Germany and Scandinavia who
are trading on it systematically; and recently the same
theory of art has begun to hold up its head in England
and America. We have among us a growing number of
pithecoid creatures, who know enough of art to understand that its appeal should be to the universal in human
nature, but are not sufficiently educated to perceive that
the true universal of art is of quite another order than the
bestial. These naturalists forget that permanence of pleasure is a prime requisite of good art, or, remembering it,
are blind to the fact that the pleasure derived from the
inverted order of universality is of all kinds the quickest
to cloy. This is not a matter of theory but of experience.
Take Zola's La Ierre, or any other of his novels in which
the principle of naturalism was first worked out systematically, is it possible to imagine any normal man return'Pretty much all the truth of Freudianism can be found in the
Platonic and Stoic theory of dreams.




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


23


ing to such a book year after year, with ever-heightened
enjoyment? Naturalism may conceivably fascinate by the
shock of surprise, or may conceivably interest for a while
by the intensity of the emotions it excites, but surprise
and intensity are the least stable factors of pleasure, and,
if they appeal to the animal within us, they pass quickly
to satiety and from satiety to disgust. As Shakespeare's
Friar Laurence said, in words that might be applied to
naturalism long before Anatole France reviewed La I'erre,
it is but "the unreasonable fury of a beast":
These violent delights have violent ends,
And in their triumph die.
The universality of true art is of quite anotker order
than this, and leads to the fourth of our criteria. It will be
remembered that Coleridge, besides grading pleasures by
the standard of permanence, distinguished them "according to the faculty or source" from which they were derived. Man, he would say, is not simple in his being, but
dual; there is in all men the lurking beast, but there is also
in all men a faculty of control whether you call this higher
element reason or the divine or the supernatural. The
error of the naturalist is to regard men as simple, or as
natural in the sense of having no other nature than animal
instincts. He seeks the universal there where, according to
his imperfect psychology, it can alone be found, and the
puppet world of his vision is like Cassio's: "I have lost the
immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial."
The true artist, on the contrary, is aware indeed of the
bestial in man, but sees also something else, and in that
something else looks for the meaning of life.
I do not say that the artist, by this law of our double
being, is restricted in his representation of nature to what
is pure and innocent; very far from that. Homer and




24       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
Shakespeare and Turgeniev, all the poets and dramatists
and novelists in the great tradition, have not blenched before a world shaken, as the world we know is shaken, by
passionate ambition and furious desire. Nor is the true
artist one who takes upon himself the office of preacher, to
rail unseasonably against the shortcomings and vices of
the life he is portraying; very far from that. Rather he is
one who, by the subtle, insinuating power of the imagination, by just appreciation of the higher emotions as well
as the lower, by the revelation of a sad sincerity, shall I
call it, in his own soul, gives us always to feel that the true
universal in human nature, the faculty by which man resembles man as a being different from the beast, is that
part of him that is "noble in reason," the master and not
the slave of passion. True art is thus humanistic rather
than naturalistic; and its gift of high and permanent
pleasure is the response of our own breast to the artist's
delicately revealed sense of that divine control, moving
like the spirit of God upon the face of the waters.'
So far I seem to see my way clear. If you should ask me
by what rhetorical devices or by what instrument of representation one poem or one work of art appeals more successfully than another to the higher faculty within us,
how, for instance, Milton's Paradise Lost accomplishes
this end better than Blackmore's King Arthur, though
both poems were written with equally good intentions, I
would reply frankly that the solution of this problem of
the imagination may be beyond my powers of critical
analysis. And, fortunately, I am not here concerned with
artistic means but with artistic results. I could at least say
to the questioner, with a good deal of assurance, that, if
he would read honestly both Paradise Lost and King
Arthur, however he might feel towards Milton's epic he
would find his pleasure in Blackmore's epic less in kind




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE              25
and quality. No power on earth, not even the desire to
rout an adversary, could make him read Blackmore a
second time.
But there is still a difficulty. Why, if these criteria are
inherent in human nature, are not they themselves universally acknowledged? Whence the obvious fact that the
tradition of taste is so widely rejected today by those who
make a boast of modernism? "I know," we can hear one
of these gentlemen say, "that past generations of' men
pretended to find their fullest artistic satisfaction in
Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and others of the
illustrious dead; but I do not. I won't say much about
Homer, since he is Greek to me; but Bernard Shaw gets
more pleasure from his own plays than from Sophocles
and Shakespeare and Racine rolled together, and so do I.
And as for your Milton, I have heard college professors
declare that no one now reads Paradise Lost except under
compulsion, and I know that I and my friends are vastly
more entertained by the meandering prose of Mr. Joyce's
Ulysses than 'by all the formal epics ever composed. The
past was in leading-strings, but we have suddenly grown
alive and, I may add, honest."
Well, our sceptical friend is certainly honest, and he'
seems to be pretty wide awake; but is he educated? Now
education embraces many things: it does not despise the
most humble and utilitarian pursuits; it is largely occupied with the bare acquisition of knowledge; it aims to
strengthen the muscles of the body and to tighten the
fibres of the brain; but, above all, it is, or should be, a discipline of the soul in the appreciation of pleasure and
pain. Do not suppose that such a discipline is a light or
unimportant matter. If you will read the ninth book of
Plato's Republic and the introductory books of the Laws,
you will see how, to the eye of that keenly observant




26       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
philosopher, the whole of human conduct, whether for
good or for evil, is dependent on the right appreciation of
pleasure and pain, and how deeply the welfare of the
State is concerned with the education of youth in just this
field. Teach a boy to take pleasure in things that are fine
and pure and strong and of good repute, and you have
prepared him for a life wholesome and happy in itself and
useful to the community.-...
Certainly, at least, the standards of taste are involved
in this discipline. That faculty of the soul which responds
to the higher and more permanent pleasures of art is, no
doubt, present in all men, and is thus potentially universal; but it may be, and commonly is, dormant until awakened by external stimulus. For the reason that its activity
means a steady choice among our natural inclinations and
impulses, demanding self-control and, in a way, selfabnegation, it comes to full fruition only by exercise that
at first may be painful and repellent to the natural man.
By nature men are prone to grasp at the nearest and
easiest pleasure, and to shirk the labour necessary for the
higher and more permanent pleasure. They are even inclined to question the reality of the higher and more permanent pleasure, until it has been forced upon their
recognition by the experience of others. And just here is
the function of tradition. The- very essence of education
is not to confirm the young mind in its natural temperanent, in its tendency to pursue the present and easier
pleasure, but to set before it the stirring example of those
who have found their joy and consolation in the higher
things, forcing it by a tender compulsion, painful perhaps
at the moment, but leading gradually to the liberty of
endless delight, to taste of these things for itself and to
acquire the right to judge of them whether they be indeed
full of pleasantness for the awakened soul. Education is




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


27


the ability to judge. The educated man is he who has the
right to pronounce on the standards of taste, because he
has had experience of both the higher and the lower
pleasures. I am not upholding any priggish or superhuman
ideal. The educated man will not have lost his appreciation of the commoner things at their time and in their
degree. He will enjoy the wholesome books that are of the
moment and make no pretension to permanence or elevation; you will remember that our relativistic friends have
even charged Mr. Root and Mr. Hughes, whether for
honour or for dishonour, with finding a secret satisfaction
in detective stories and penny-dreadfuls. But the educated man is one who has also been trained to know that
highest and most enduring pleasure which is derived from
the few great books selected and approved by the verdict
of tradition. And in that power of enjoyment he will feel
himself set free from his own petty limitations, and made
a humble companion of those who share the heritage of
time.
I suspect that these sticklers for the liberty of taste
against the judgements of mankind are in the main simply uneducated; being untrained to feel the higher and
more permanent pleasures of art, they grasp at any
ephemeral work that offers an easy flattery of the lower
elements of their nature, and swear there is nothing else.
It may sound a bit paradoxical to reduce the rebellion
against standards to so simple a matter as imperfect education, and, indeed, that phrase does not tell the whole
story. The merely uneducated man is likely to be indifferent to standards rather than actively hostile, or he may
be a modest fellow who knows what he has missed, and
would never think of raising his ignorance into a "cosmic
footrule." There is a cause, a trait of character, behind the
belligerence of ignorance. The belligerents themselves call




28        THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
it "irresponsibility of temperament" or the "spirit of
romantic adventure," or may dignify it as a "philosophy
of relativism"; but it has another name, which I rather
hesitate to mention. In fact, I should not have courage to
pronounce the invidious phrase at all, had it not been
spoken long ago by those whose insight into human nature gave them the right to speak. Even Matthew Arnold,
when he came to explain the common hostility to academic standards, thought it safer to take refuge behind a
venerated authority, and quoted Spinoza's maxim that
"the two great bans of humanity are self-conceit and the
laziness coming from self-conceit"; and he might have appealed to a more ancient philosopher than Spinoza —to
none other than Buddha, who also traced the origin of all
evil, ethical and esthetic, to this source. That, then, the
spirit of indolence and conceit, is the animating cause
behind the bitterness of those who proclaim against
standards. It is the indolence, moral in some, intellectual
in others, that revolts from such discipline as would enable a man to judge between the higher and the lower
pleasure; it is the conceit that makes him cling tenaciously
to his naked temperament as a better guide than the voice
of tradition.1 Standards there are, and all men judge by
them; but there is a vast difference between the standards
of education and those of a self-satisfied ignorance. Unfortunately, there is a theory abroad today, formulated and
preached by a preposterous body of pedagogues, which
professes to have found in this indolence and conceit the
corner-stone of education.
1Anatole France, for example, was highly educated intellectually, and
as a matter of fact his critical judgements are generally sound and
in conformity with the great tradition. But his philosophy of life was
tainted with moral indolence, which betrays itself in his literary productions and to some extent in his critical standards.




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


29


That is the new thing, so far as there is anything new,
in the world today; not indolence and conceit, which are
as ancient as humanity, but the philosophy which justifies them under the title of absolute relativism. That is
the present disguise of the Demon as he stalks abroad,
instilling his venom into the innocent critics of the press.
IV. THE FETISH OF PURE ART
It is a nice question to ask whether belief in the absolute irresponsibility of the artistic temperament has engendered the modern ideal of absolute art, or the contrary. Which is first, the complacency of conceit or of
theory? For myself I am willing to leave the solution of
such a problem to the Demon himself, who alone knoweth
his own mind; but from the Esthetic1 of Signor Croce, the
most epoptic hierophant of the demonic mysteries in
i these days, I can see how nearly the two absolutes are,. ated, and can get some glimpse of the procedure of the
metaphysical mind at its highest point of activity.
Now Signor Croce, though really himself a child ofHegel, makes good sport of the theoretical sestheticians in
the train of Kant and Hegel who define art as pure hedonism, or pure moralism, or pure conceptualism; and so far
he does well. You might suppose he was taking the ordinary and sensible'point of view, viz., that art must of
course give pleasure, and must be psychologically moral
(not pedantically so), an mu'st contain ideas, but that it
is a false sort of simplification to define art'itself therefore
as pleasure, or as morals2 or as ideas. If such were the
motive behind Croce's antipathy to the Teutonic aesthetics of the last century, he would seem, as I say, to be
pleading for the liberty of common sense against the ab1Nuovi Saggi di Estetica, 920.




30       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
solutism of the Demon; but he too quickly dispels any
such illusion. "Art," he declares, "which depends on
morals or pleasure or philosophy is morals or pleasure or
philosophy, and not art at all." Now what kind of logic is
this that argues: Because art is not pure pleasure, therefore pure art is absolved from the need of giving pleasure;
because art is not pure morals, therefore pure art is absolved from any concern with morals? One might as well
say, egg., that cookery which is relished for the pleasure it
gives is pleasure, and not cookery at all; therefore cookery
has nothing to do with pleasure. It is the old story of
Luther's drunken man on horseback: prop him up on one
side and over he flops on the other. IBecause one absolute
is not true, therefore the contrary absolute mist be true;
because art which gives pleasure is not definable sinmply
ass -pasure, therefore art is a hieratic abstraction entirely
ideiplendt of pleasure.
But if such a theory of art would seem to be buzzing in i
a metaphysical vacuum, it is not without its very practical aspect, whether as cause or effect. "The artist," says
Signor Croce, coming down abruptly to earth, "is always
above blame morally and above censure philosophically."
There you have it, the claim to irresponsibility, so dear
to our militant gentlemen of the press, vested in the
authority of an awesome name. I do not suppose many of
our emancipated writers are deeply versed in the thin
dialectic of Esthetics, but they understand pretty well
what is meant when they are told that in their work as
creative artists they need not concern themselves with
the ethical laws supposed to govern life or with the dull
maxims of truth.
It may be a question, as I have said, whether the great
Neapolitan has risen from the popular lust of irresponsibility to his theory of independent art or has conde



THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


31


scended to the lower level from the heights of abstract
reasoning. In either case the next step, from a definition
by negation to a definition by affirmation, carries him
into an altitude beyond the reach of any earthly telescope.
Art, he has shown, is absolutely not pleasure or morals or
philosophy; it just absolutely is-but is what? In the
answer to this question I seem to hear no human voice but
the very diction of the Demon. Otherwise I cannot understand whence the avowed foe of Kantian and Hegelian
abstractions has derived his positive definition of art,
which of all abstractions is the most abstract and of all
absolutes the most absolute. "Art is intuition," he says,
that and nothing else; not the vision of something, mind
you, but pure vision. Or, if you desire more words in your
definition, you may have it thus: "An aspiration inclosed
in the circle of a representation, that is art; and in it the
aspiration exists solely by the representation, and the
representation solely by the aspiration." Which words, if
they mean anything, signify, I suppose, that art is of the
spirit of pure creativeness, a reaching out towards a goal
which is non-existent.untiLyizualized by the very act of
reaching out. Such a definition may engage the attention
of metaphysicians; in my common-place mind, frankly, it
draws blank. I do not comprehend what is meant by aspiring towards that which is non-existent until we vizualize it by aspiring.
Croce is the pope of the new school, and as such ought
to be immune from the questioning of the lay intelligence.
For a more accessible exposition of the ideas stirring the
young modernists I turn to the distinguished critic and
philosopher of SpainiJose Ortega y Gasset, and in particular to his essay published under the significant title
of The Dehumanization of Art.1 Unless I mistake his lan'La Deshumanizacion del Arte, Madrid, 1925.




32        THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
guage, Sefior Ortega finds little satisfaction aesthetically
in the extreme products of the movement he describes. But
he believes that it is not the function of a critic to value
works of art in accordance with his own taste or distaste.
And especially today, when more than ever before it is a
characteristic of art to divide mankind sharply into those
who comprehend and those who do not, the business of
criticism should be to enter into the intention of the
artist, and not to judge his work from some alien point of
view, least of all to condemn. Well, Se-nor Ortega in a
sense comprehends; he states the various theories adopted
by the j6venes to justify their adventurous ways with admirable perspicuity and precision-and with that final
confusion at the back of his mind which enables him to
speak as one who belongs intellectually to the movement,
however practically his taste may lag a little behind its
utmost advance.
The central thesis of Senor Ortega's book, which at
once justifies his title and summarizes the most advanced
attitude towards art, is exactly this: "To rejoice or suffer
with the human lot which a work of art may incidentally
suggest or present to us, is a very different thing from the
true artistic pleasure. More than that: this occupation
with the human element of the work is essentially incompatible with pure aesthetic fruition."1'
That clearly is the voice of the Demon once more, appealing to the same lust for an irresponsible absolute as
inspires the Crocean aesthetics. And now art is to be not only
independent of morals but in its essence divided altogether
from human nature; and if it still aims to please, its pleas1Alegrarse o sufrir con los destinos humanos que, tal vez, la obra de arte
nos refiere o presenta, es cosa muy diferente del verdadero goce artistico.
Mds azun: esa ocupacion con lo humano de la obra es, en principio, incompatible con la estrictafruicion estetica.




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


33


ure is of a kind peculiar to itself and unrelated to the
coarse fodder of life. Suppose, to take the illustration
given by Senor Ortega, a notable man is lying at the point
of death. His wife will be standing by his bed, a physician
will be counting his pulse, while elsewhere in the house a
reporter awaits the news and a painter is engaged to depict the scene. All four persons-wife, physician, reporter,
painter-are intent upon the same fact, but with varying
degrees of intimacy and with different kinds of interest.
To the wife the event is an occasion of grief and anxiety;
she is, as it were, a part of it; whereas to the artist, at
the other extreme, the situation is entirely divested of
human sympathy or sentiment: "his mind is set solely on
the exterior, on certain lights and shadows, certain chromatic values." And so it happens that if the natural emotions felt on such an occasion by the wife, the physician,
and even to a lesser degree by the news-reporter, are what
the ordinary man (the "philistine" or "bourgeois" of the
older romantic jargon) regards as the real stuffof life, then
art to the ordinary man is removed to a sphere of incomprehensible unreality. "An artistic object," says Senor
Ortega, "is artistic only in the measure in which it ceases
to be real." Hence, in the scene just described, the actual
death-bed and the artist's picture of it are two things
"absolutely different (completamente distintos)." We may
interest ourselves in one or the other; in one case we live
with, or in, the event, in the other case we "contemplate"
an object of art as such, with asthetic pleasure perhaps,
but with no human emotions. Just in so far as the picture
shows any feeling for, or awakens in the beholder any
response to, the significance of death, it falls below the
high function of art. The tragedy of loss, the frustration of
ambition, the humility of surrender, the consolations of
hope, the victory of love, the sanctities of religion,-any




34       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
shadow of these resting upon the canvas will detract from
the purity of aesthetic pleasure. The artist and the connoisseur in the presence of death find only an occasion for
certain lines and colours. And further, as our power of
contemplation becomes more refined, we cease to discern
(or, if we are artists, to paint) even the unreal representation of a real event; a picture will cease to depend on, or
suggest, any subject whatsoever. For art is like a window
through which we look out upon a garden. The ordinary
man sees only the flowers and leaves beyond, and is so absorbed in these as to be quite unaware of the pane of glass,
the more so as the glass is purer and clearer. But with
effort we can make ourselves conscious of the medium
through which we are looking; and as our vision is thus
concentrated on the glass, the garden fades into a confused blotch of colours or even passes out of conscious
perception altogether.
That is Sefior Ortega's vivid metaphor for the Crocean
theory of art as pure intuition-which he professes to
reach, however, by no theorizing of his own but from
study of the actual practice of certain of the j6venes. For
those who believe in the divine mission of art the elevation of society might seem to lie in obeying the command
of Mr. Skionar in Peacock's Crotchet Castle: "Build sacella
for transcendental oracles to teach the world how to see
through a glass darkly." It all sounds rather funny to
me. But I hope I am not laughing at an unfair caricature.
What else in fact is the meaning of those sapient critics,
who might join me in repudiating the language of metaphysics, yet insist that in judging a picture we shall pay
no heed to the subject represented but consider it as pure
representation, or who say that the value of a work of art
depends not at all on the character of the human experience put into it but only on the sincerity of self-expres



THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE              35
sion?-as if there were some mystical virtue in selfexpression even when the self has no experience worthy to
be expressed. It is, in fact, pedantic talk of this sort in the
mouths of respected critics that indicates how far the
depredations of the Demon have extended into the realm
of common sense.
As for the creators, so called, there may be a young
votary of art here and there who is trying honestly to put
these abstractions into practice; and for him, I should
suppose, the goal of dehumanization and derealization
will have been attained when his pictures are simplified to
a cunning design of line and colour with no suggestion of
a definite subject, or still further to a spread of pure
colour with no design at all; his music to a pure tone
without melody or even variation; his poems to a succession of beautiful words unsullied by sense. That would
seem to be the nearest practical equivalent to seeing a
pure pane of glass. One wonders why the pilgrim of
vacuity should be so slow and hesitant in his progress
towards so easy a mark. Perhaps he foresees that absolute
art, so reached, will cease to be art at all. Perhaps he has a
foreboding that the prize if obtained would not be very
valuable. It is hard to imagine the pleasure or profit to be
derived from concentrating one's attention upon a pane
of transparent glass until one sees nothing through it;
most of us would prefer to retain our impure perception of
the flowers in the garden beyond. Despite the majestic
logic of youth we persist in thinking that such a picture
as Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper is a truer work of art
than the deftest whirl of colours ever painted; that the
Eneid is richer in poetical joy than Kubla Khan (not to
mention the latest lyric from the American colony in
Paris); that Bach's Mass in B Minor is still a miracle and
a rapture of sound. Yet all these-the painting and the epic




36       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
and the mass-are brimming with human emotion and
with a brooding sense of the eternal values of life. They
are great for various reasons, no doubt; but certainly
among those reasons is the fact that they are not art at
all as the modernists would have us believe.
The simple truth is that the effort to create pure art is
nothing more than idolatry to a fetish of abstract reason
-unless you prefer to ticket it as empty conceit-and
could never engage the practical interest of any but a few
witless cranks. There is a profound confusion in Sefior
Ortega's interpretation of what is happening among the
mass of the younger artists, as indeed there is often in
their own statement of what they are endeavouring to do.
They may be seeking an absolute, but it is not an absolute
of purity in any sense of the word.
Now I grant at once that there is a difference between
art axid life, that the attitude of the painter, to return to
the old illustration, is not identical with that of the wife
in the house of mourning. There is in art a change, a
transmutation, a something taken away and a something
added. "Art," said Goethe, "is art only because it is not
nature." And Aristotle, perhaps, had the same truth in
mind in his famous theory of the purgation of the human
passions. In that sense we can accept a maxim that comes
from Japan: "Art lies in the shadowy frontiers between
reality and unreality."' The point I would make is the
falseness and futility of the logical deduction that art can
therefore dispense with the stuff of humanity or nature,
or can weigh anchor and sail off into a shoreless sea of unreality. What has actually happened is this. Always the
great creators have taken the substance of life, and, not
by denying it or attempting to evade its laws, but by look'Masterpieces of Chikamatsu, the 7apanese Shakespeare, translated by
Asataro Miyamori, p. 48.




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


37


ing more intently below its surface, have found meanings
and values that transmute it into something at once the
same and different. The passions that distract the individual man with the despair of isolated impotence they
have invested with a universal significance fraught with
the destinies of humanity; the scenery of the material
world they have infused with suggestions of an indwelling
otherworld. And so by a species of symbolism, or whatever you choose to call it, they have lifted mortal life and
its theatre to a higher reality which only to the contented
or dust-choked dwellers in things as they are may appear
as unreal. That, for instance, is precisely what Perugino
has achieved in his picture of a death-scene entitled the
Mystic Crucifixion, where pain and grief and the fear that
clutches the individual heart in its hand of ice have been
transmuted into a drama of divine redemption through
suffering, while the tender burgeoning of spring thrown up
against the far-off juncture of earth and sky gives hints of
a mode of existence in joyous and infinite freedom. Even
the lesser creators, those who in innocence of spirit have
undertaken merely to reproduce what they see, may have
done so with a clarity and largeness of vision capable of
working a magic alchemy of which they themselves perhaps never dreamed.
That was the tradition of agelong practice; it is what
we mean, or ought to mean, by classical. And then, after
the devastating materialism of late eighteenth-century
philosophy there came a change of ideals. The veritable
feeling for the otherworld and for spiritual values was
lost, while at the same time the new school, stirred with
vague aspirations, was not satisfied with a simple and, in
its way, wholesome naturalism. Above all these prophets
of the romantic movement, as we designate it, revolted
from the restrictive rules of an art which was neither




38       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
classical nor innocently naturalistic, but pseudo-classical,
and which had developed from one side of the Renaissance. They too perceived that no great art was possible
without escape from the levelling tyranny of natural law,
and, being unable to transcend nature, seeing indeed no
higher reality into which nature could be raised, they
sought freedom by sinking below nature. In painting, as
Mr. Mather has shown with fullness of knowledge and admirable acumen, this process of escape meant "a successive elimination of academic authority, imagination,
memory, fidelity to nature, and nature itself. It would
seem as if the last sacrifice had been made; but no. In all
these rejections and in the most grotesque experiments
the painter had retained his seriousness and self-respect.
This too went by the board in a brief moment after the
War, when the Dadaists bade the artist create in a mood
of joyous bluff, meanwhile mocking himself and his world.
The oft-repeated demonstration is complete once morethe latter end of expansive Romantic individualism is
Romantic disillusionment and Romantic irony."' And the
same history might be given of modern music and literature, though in the case of the latter the disinvolution, by
reason of the medium employed, is more complicated. For
instance the liberation of art from the moral obligations
of life, so vaunted by Mr. Cabell and others of the left
wing in America as a new achievement, is really contemporaneous with the romantic movement. At least as far
back as 1837 we find George Sand declaring that by almost universal consent the arts have become accomplices
in this strange tendency towards "amoralism." Now conscientious theorists may hold that amoralism is a step in
the direction of freedom; in practice it became commonly
'Modern Painting, by Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., p. 375.




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


39


a mere euphemism for immorality, not to say vulgar indecency. The climax of the movement in that direction
was reached in the realism of Zola and others who, quite
frankly and systematically and "scientifically," made
human nature coterminous with the bestial in man. Art
may have been emancipated from one set of bonds, but it
was wrapt and enfolded and constricted in a bondage tenfold straiter. It may have been dehumanized in the sense
that it had repudiated the government of reason which to
the older humanists was the distinguishing trait of man as
man; it certainly was not purged of its attempt to evoke
passions which on a lower plane are menscblicb allzu
menschlich.
As a matter of fact the radical writers of today who are
accomplishing anything of magnitude are still predominantly of that school of realism. But a few restless souls,
those in particular whom Sefior Ortega has in mind,
driven on by the despotic Demon of the Absolute, have
not been content to abide in this halfway house. They see
clearly enough that art has not been purified by such
realism, but mixed and muddied by deliberate opposition
to the ethical interpretation of life; they will detach art
from even that poor remnant of deliberation which made
a selection among the elements of composite human nature with a certain regard, though an inverted regard, for
moral values. They hold deliberation to be the foe of
liberation. Hence the later theory, exemplified in English
by James Joyce, that art shall not reproduce a picture of
life as the humanist sees it, or even from the inverted
point of view of the realist, but for its subject matter shall
descend to what they call the pure "stream of consciousness." The hero of fiction shall have no will, no purpose,
no inhibition, no power of choice whether for good or evil,
but shall be merely a medium through which passes an




40       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
endless, unchecked, meaningless flux of sensations and
memories and emotions and impulses.
And so the limit of elimination has been reached-at
least the practical limit, since below the stream of consciousness there would seem to remain nothing to represent save bottomless inanity. But this fact is to be noted:
though the process of evolution may seem to have been
carried on in the name of absolute art, the actual goal attained is an absolute of quite another order; there has
been no true liberation, but a progressive descent in
slavery. As, successively, one after another of the higher
elements of our composite nature has been suppressed, a
lower instinct has taken its place. The submergence of the
humanistic conception of man as a responsible creature of
free will has been accompanied by an emergence of the
romantic glorification of uncontrollable temperament;
this has been supplanted by a realistic theory of subjection to the bestial passions, and this, at the last, by an
attempt to represent life as an unmitigated flux, which in
practice, however it be in literature, means confinement
in a mad-house. The practitioners of the newest art call
themselves surrealistes, super-realists; they flatter themselves, they are sub-realists. Art may be dehumanized,
but only in the sense that, having passed beyond the representation of men as undifferentiated from animals, it
undertakes to portray them as complete imbeciles. To
speak of the works produced by the boastful modern
school as pure art is, from any point of view, mere bluff.
By their fruits you shall know them. Turn the pages of
the little magazine published in Paris under the title of
transition, wherein Mr. Joyce and a group of denationalized Americans and Americanized Frenchmen collaborate
to their own mutual satisfaction: you will there find what
the Simon-pure article is in theory and practice. For in



THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


41


stance a certain M. Louis Aragon,-described by his
admiring introducer as "an intellectual on a lifelong holiday, a twentieth century pilgrim with a pack of words on
his back," etc.,-expounds the theory thus:
Reason, reason, o abstract day-phantom, I have already driven you
from my dreams. And now I am at the point where they are ready to
blend with the realities of appearance. There is no longer room only
for me. In vain reason denounces the dictatorship of sensuality. In
vain it puts me on guard against error. Error is here the queen. Come
in, Madame, this is my body, this is your throne. I pat my delirium as
I would a beautiful horse.... Nothing can assure me of reality.
Nothing, neither the exactness of logic nor the strength of a sensation,
can assure me that I do not base it on the delirium of interpretation.
And so M. Aragon, concluding "that only the syllables
of reality are artistically usable," exemplifies the new
style:
Iti it las re'a
It6 iti la reialit
La rea la rea
V'e t6 La rea
Li
Te' La realit6
Ily avait unefois LAl RELJLIE.
Such is the manifesto of Super-realism, "the Freudian
period," as the addicts of the stream of consciousness call
it, "to the realistic misconception." Their title, I have
said, is a pretty mistake for sub-realism; but they are not
mistaken in their claim to have reached a kind of absolute.
At least I cannot imagine what lower level of imbecility
may still be honoured with the name of art.
(If any votary of "pure art" chances to read this essay,
he will say: So Keats and Milton were treated by critics of
their age.)




42       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
V. THE PHANTOM OF PURE SCIENCE
One of the hardest things for a student to learn, which
yet, if he could but know it at the beginning, would save
him from endless perplexities and perhaps from final
despair, is just the simple fact that brain-power is no
guaranteefor rightness of thinking, that on the contrary a
restlessly outreaching mind, unchecked by the humility
of common sense, is more than likely to lead its owner into
bogs of duplicity if not into the bottomless pit of fatuity,
that, to repeat the phrase of Bacon, himself a shining example, the intellectus sibi permissus is the easiest of all
dupes for the Demon of the Absolute. There has been no
more powerful intellect for the past hundred years than
Kant's; I doubt if any writer ever filled the world with
more confusion of thought or clouded the truth with a
thicker dust of obscurity. And it is in this spirit of distrust, not incompatible with a kind of admiration, that I
criticise the works of one who today has reached the pinnacle of fame as a thinker.
Professor Whitehead's philosophy spans the double
field of religion and science; and in each of these, I presume to say, he has come by the circuitous ways of abstract reasoning to conclusions that in a lesser man would
be regarded as preposterous. If such a statement shocks
you or sounds disrespectful, take yourself the argument of
his Religion in the Making and strip it to the bones. You
will find that it proceeds from the definition of religion as
"the longing for justification," and is directed by the fact
that "today there is but one religious dogma in debate:
What do you mean by 'God'?" Upon this basis, then, Mr.
Whitehead undertakes to find such a meaning for the word
"God" as will satisfy man's "longing for justification."
Such a simplification of the religious problem will strike




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


43


some inquirers as high-handed, but I let that pass; it has
at least whatever merits appertain to simplicity. And I
admit ungrudgingly that in the course of his lectures Mr.
Whitehead makes many shrewd observations on the
deeper mysteries of human life. Memorable passages
might be quoted, for instance such sentences as these,
that touch the Crocean metaphysic on the quick: "To be
an actual thing is to be limited," "Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality," "Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing."
But in the end how does Mr. Whitehead reply to his
own question: "What do you mean by 'God'?" For convenience' sake I quote this summary of his answer from a
eulogistic article in the Hibbert 7ournal for July I927:
All being does this [i.e., "comes to a focus in each thing"] because
it is its nature so to do. I'his inherent nature of all being is God. All
being does this because it is organized according to the principle of
concretion. All being does this because of a certain order or character
which pervades it. That order pervading the universe that makes it
concrete is God. God is not himself concrete, says Whitehead, but he
is the principle which constitutes the concreteness of things.
That is to say, in still simpler language: An individual
object is not cut off from the universe, but stands in some
relation to all other objects and owes its character to this
relationship; this is so because it is the nature of things to
be so; such is the law of "concretion," and the "principle
of concretion" is God.
Now, apart from the final clause, a plain man might
suggest that the argument, so relieved of the obscurantism of metaphysical jargon, is more true than originaltrue to the point of insipidity. As for the conclusion, no
doubt, so left in its native jargon, it comes with the shock
of originality; but has it sense? Will any man admit that
the God whom he worships and to whom he prays-and




44        THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
without worship and prayer the use of the word "God"
is a pure solecism-is no more than the "principle of concretion" in the universe? Has such a definition any bearing on religion as the "longing for justification"? Is it
anything more than a phantom of abstract science surreptitiously substituted for the object of faith? The fact is
that between the last clause of the argument and what
precedes there is a sheer hiatus. It is the age-old fallacy of
metaphysics: you take a word used in ordinary speech
("God") with a perfectly clear connotation; you define
the word in a manner to suit your convenience ("the principle of concretion"); you prove that there is something
in the nature of things corresponding to your definition,
and then casually assume that your proof holds good of
the word in its popular sense. It is the oft-repeated adventure of the Absolute: you wrap a commonplace up in abstract terminology, and then in that fog of language you
find yourself precipitated into an abyss of nonsense (that
the "longing for justification" is satisfied by belief in "the
inherent nature of all being").1
But this is by the way. Our present topic is rather Mr.
Whitehead's philosophy of science, which is his real concern, and in which the terms "God" and "religion" are
manifestly unwarranted intrusions. Here, again, to the
student of contemporary thought Mr. Whitehead's
Science and the Modern World must be in many ways a
welcome book. His comments on the connexion between
the poets and the physical theories of their day are illumi1There are passages in Mr. Whitehead's books in which the word
"God" is used properly, even nobly, with its religious connotation; and
indeed, as Professor A. E. Taylor has shown in the Dublin Review for
July i927, part of the difficulty in grasping his argument is owing to
this intellectual double-dealing. But in the end the conception of God
as a physical law, or impersonal principle, quite wins out.




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


45


nating and bring to the subject a knowledge not often
found in the literary critic. And I for one am much beholden to him for his treatment of the ghastly relic of
materialism bequeathed to us by our fathers-I would almost say his indecent burial of it, were the epithet indecent applicable to the disposal of a corpse which has remained too long above ground. And very cleverly he
directs his attack to the two points where the mechanistic
philosophy is most vulnerable-its apparent simplicity
and its presumptive regard of facts.
There was indeed at first sight a seductive simplicity
about the theories of Huxley and his militant brothers. It
is so easy to say that the world is nothing but a machine
nicely constructed of atoms, running smoothly and updeviatingly under the mechanical laws of motion; to deny
that anything new or incalculable ever breaks in to disarrange the regularity demanded by science; to dispose of
the passions and appetites and the very consciousness of
man as mere products of atomical reaction. It was the
kind of simplification that promised to solve for us all the
annoying problems of life, exactly the kind of bait that
the Demon of the Absolute loves to dangle before a mind
unprotected by the humility of common sense. Certainly
if ever any group of men had a cosmic footrule in their
pockets, it was this particular group of mid-Victorians
who married the atheistical philosophy of the eighteenth
century to the physical discoveries of the nineteenth. Unfortunately, what seemed a process of simplification has
led step by step to such a complexity of adjustments to
keep the machine going that long ago the plain man, if
he dared, would have scouted the whole conception as a
fantastic dream. And here Mr. Whitehead, by virtue of
his standing as a mathematician, speaks with an authority
for which the plain man must be very grateful. "The




46       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
physical doctrine of the atom," he says, "has got into a
state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus." In all conscience, is it not
true that to accept the more recent developments of scientific mechanism requires about the same sort of credulity as was demanded of the theologian in the Middle
Ages when asked to debate the number of angels who
could stand together on the point of a needle?
And as the mechanistic theory, when used to explain
the inner workings of matter, instead of simplifying
science, breaks down under a weight of infinite complications, so, when applied to the nature of man, it shatters
itself on what Mr. Whitehead rightly calls certain "stubborn and irreducible facts"-the most stubborn and irreducible of these facts being, as every unperverted mind
knows, that we are not pure machines, and that any argument which would subject the human will and consciousness to the mechanical laws of motion is void because
based on false premises. Against the high-handed assumptions of Darwinian materialism and the fanatical dogmatism of its votaries (relics of which still circulate in the
backwaters of the biological laboratory), as against all
forms of complacent obscurantism, whether theological or
scientific, "Oliver Cromwell's cry echoes down the ages:
'My brethren, by the bowels of Christ I beseech you, bethink you that you may be mistaken.' "
It is the bare truth that one must rake the records of
history to discover a more complete and abject subservience to the Demon of the Absolute than that of the philosophy, falsely called science, of the period now closing.
And, as I say, any one who clings to common sense must
be thankful to Mr. Whitehead for lending his authority
as a scientist to the unlocking of these shackles. But then,
why should so masterly an intellect, again like Luther's




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


47


drunken man, topple over on the other side into a contrary but equally impossible absolutism? Why? "The
only way of mitigating mechanism," he says, "is by the
discovery that it is not mechanism." And so, instead of
admitting humbly that mechanism is mechanism while
beside it there exists something of a totally different nature, and that the ultimate nexus between these two fields
of experience surpasses our comprehension, he must demonstrate mechanism out of the world altogether. In his
philosophy there will be no more solid obstinate material
things such as go to the making of machines, but only
"events." Time and space, which used to be regarded as
modes of perception, become internal components of
things; value, which used to be a name for our conscious
estimation of what we could do with things or for their
effect on our spiritual life, now proves to be "the intrinsic
reality of an event." There is, you see, an entire reversal
of the mechanistic hypothesis. Formerly it was held that',
the human soul obeys the same laws as a stone; now we are
to believe that a stone is of the same nature as the soul. In
either case we avoid the discomfort of a paradoxical dualism and reduce the world to a monism which may plausibly call itself science, though as a matter of fact Mr.
Whitehead's theory, if carried out, would simply abolish
science.
And it is clear enough that the new monism is open to
precisely the same criticism as was that of the mechanists
which it looks to supplant. Aiming ostensibly to simplify,
it really renders the nature of things incomprehensibly
complex. Promising to release us from the known paradox
of a world composed of two irreconcilable classes of
things, it ends by forcing a perfectly arbitrary paradox
upon us in its definition of inanimate objects. To define a
stone as an event consisting of a bundle of time, space,




48       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
value, and relationships, does not seem to me to be moving in the direction of lucid simplicity. "What is the
sense," Mr. Whitehead asks, "of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you
mean by mechanics?" And the question is entirely pertinent, if by the word "mechanics" we mean slyly to
imply something more than the observed actions and reactions of material bodies in motion. Mr. Whitehead
therefore discards the "traditional scientific materialism"
for an "alternative doctrine of organism," that is, for a
"theory of organic mechanism." Well and good. But is it
unkind to ask the use of talking about an organical explanation when you do not know what you mean by
"organism," or to hint that no very clear idea will be
evoked by joining together two unknown quantities, "organism" and "mechanism," and calling the world an
"organic mechanism"?
And again, what of the "stubborn and irreducible
facts," in whose name Mr. Whitehead attacks the rationalism of the Huxleyites and their predecessors of the
eighteenth century? If we are to cast away their imposing
structure of logic as unreasonable for the simple reason
that, after all is said, we still know that the human mind
(or soul, if you please) is something other than a stone,
shall we swallow the contrary theory, which has not even
the virtue of logic, and which transfers human qualities
to a stone? Aristotle made the proper and sufficient distinction long ago, when he said that a stone obeys laws
and a man forms habits: you may throw a stone into the
air a thousand times and it will continue to do the same
thing, whereas a man learns by experience. But alas for
those "stubborn and irreducible facts"! How bravely we
all summon them to our aid! How desperately we run
from them when they appear!




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE


49


But if this merging together of the animate and the inanimate in a new naturalism makes a travesty of the
inorganic world, its real menace is that, equally with the
older naturalism, it reacts to deprive humanity of what is
distinctly human. The solid objects of "our naive experience" have been made organic by a kind of relaxation
into fluid composites of time and space and value and
relationships; they have evaporated into a semblance of
psychical events (the very term "events" indeed is little
more than an awkward translation of Berkeley's "ideas
in the mind"), and the peculiar note of an event is its
transitoriness: "one all-pervasive fact, inherent in the
character of what is real, is the transition of things, the
passage one to another." Thus it happens that the organic and the inorganic worlds flow together in an indistinguishable flux, wherein the soul also, dissolved by association into a complex of relationships, loses that central
permanence of entity which used to be held to mark the
dignity of man. Nor, if we look beyond, is there anywhere "an ultimate reality" to which we can appeal "for
the removal of perplexity," but only an endless concurrence of events. "In the place of Aristotle's God as Prime
Mover [itself a conception, one might suppose, far enough
removed from "our naive experience" into the abyss of
abstraction], we require God as the Principle of Concretion"-not a person, not an entity of any sort, nor even a
law apparently, but a mere name for the fact that concrete groups of qualities are everlastingly forming and reforming in the infinite vortex of existence. A cynic might
distinguish between the old naturalism and the naturalism now proposed to take its place by saying that under
the regime of the former true science might flourish but
no humanism or religion, whereas the metaphysical naturalism of Mr. Whitehead would leave us neither true




50       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
science nor humanism and religion, but only mathematics. The Demon of the Absolute, whether he appears
as the advocate of a mechanical fatalism or of the universal flux of relativity, is brother germane to Apollyon, the
Destroyer.
The curious thing in all this farrago of insight and error
is the superstitious hold of the word science on a mind
otherwise so awakened. Mr. Whitehead perceives that
one scientific hypothesis swallows up another-as indeed
he could not fail to see that his own hypothesis turns its
predecessor upside down; he admits with engaging candour that one and all they rest on a "naive faith" which
cannot be verified and is "indifferent to refutation"; yet
he clings fanatically to the scientific attitude as possessing
a monopoly of truth and honesty. "When," he says,
"Darwin or Einstein proclaim[s] theories which modify
our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go about
saying that there is another defeat for science, because its
old ideas have been abandoned. We know that another
step of scientific insight has been gained."
I suspect that an utter confusion of thought has arisen
here from the ambiguity of a word-as has happened immemorially with metaphysicians better and worse than
Mr. Whitehead. Science as an accumulation and classification and utilization of observed facts may go on from
victory to victory; but science as a name for such hypothetical theories of time and space, matter and motion
and life, as those broached by the Darwinians of the
nineteenth century, or the Einsteinian relativists of the
twentieth, is not a progress in insight but a lapse from one
naive assumption to another in a vicious circle of selfcontradicting monisms. It really is not easy to understand
the state of mind of one, cognizant of the history of
thought, who urges us to seek relief from the present




THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE             51
debacle-Mr. Whitehead himself places our intellectual
and spiritual level lower than it has ever been since the
Dark Ages-by introducing the hypothetical method of
science into religion. This is his analysis of the present
condition of the popular mind: "A scientific realism,
based on mechanism, is conjoined with an unwavering
belief in the world of men and of the higher animals as
being composed of self-determining organisms. This radical inconsistency at the basis of modern thought accounts
for much that is half-hearted and wavering in our civilization." My reading of history is different. I should assert
that our vacillating halfheartedness is the inevitable outcome of the endeavour, persistent since the naturalistic
invasion of the Renaissance, to flee from the paradox of
life to some philosophy which will merge, no matter how,
the mechanical and the human together. I should assert
that the only escape from our muddle is to overthrow this
idol of Unity, this Demon of the Absolute, this abortion
sprung from the union of science and metaphysics, and
to submit ourselves humbly to the stubborn and irreducible fact that a stone and the human soul cannot be
brought under the same definition.
There are two laws discrete
Not reconciled,Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.
For legitimate science one may have the deepest
respect. But to scientific absolutism masquerading as religion, one may say justly and truly what was said so unjustly and cruelly to Keats: Back to your gallipots!




i
I
I




MODERN CURRENTS IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE
[The following essay was written some time ago at the request of the
Revue de Paris and was intended primarily for French readers.]
I T IS a disability inherent in my theme that it leaves no
place to speak of the work of our most accomplished
novelist, Edith Wharton, or of our eminent poets,
Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost. The dignified standing of these writers has long been recognized;
but they are not modern or American, perhaps I should
say they are not at once both modern and American, in
the sense of those who have signed the new Declaration
of Independence in letters. For somewhat similar reasons
I pass over the host of prolific penmen, extending from
the fairly distinguished output of Booth Tarkington,
through the respectable mediocrity of Hamlin Garland
and Meredith Nicholson and their kind, down to that
nadir of popular success, Harold Bell Wright, whose very
name to all reputable critics-unless I dare to except myself, who have a kind of sneaking admiration for the rascal
-is a byword of infamy.
There is in fact not very much to say about these purveyors to the market, from Mrs. Wharton to Mr. Wright,
save that they are turning out books of more or less
honest craftsmanship, in better or worse English, with
this or that smear of local colour. We read them for entertainment, but do not talk about them a great deal. The




54       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
writers who belong to the modern movement as a conscious school are fewer in number but more clamorous for
notice; and if at any time we forget to take them seriously,
one of the clan, sacrifising himself for the good of his fellows, publishes a book so audacious, or so salacious, that
the frightened authorities try to suppress its circulation,
and then we begin to talk again. For their artistic principles these rebels to tradition are in the main, of course,
trailing after a similar movement in England, as their
British models in turn have taken their cue from France
or perhaps from Russia. And, generally speaking, it would
not be much of an exaggeration to say that in such matters London follows what was the mode in Paris twenty or
thirty years earlier, while New York toils after London at
about an equal interval of time. But in one article of their
creed the-Americans stand by themselves: without exception they are animated by a whole-hearted contempt for
New England Puritanism and all it means. The young
bloods of London may speak disdainfully of their Victorian, especially their mid-Victorian, predecessors, in
some cases on the good old ground, pereant qui ante nos
nostra dixerunt; but their antipathy is mild beside the red
rage which suffuses the brain of a "modern" on this side
of the water at the mere suggestion that any allegiance or
even respect should be accorded to the literary prigs who
used to utter their platitudes from Boston. Now there is
no other bond of union so strong as a common hate, and
if our new men disagree widely in what they like, they
agree wonderfully in what they dislike. And though there
are, as we shall see, other forces of a more positive sort
at work among them, it is -this community of revolt
that binds them all together into the semblance of a
school; while it is chiefly the Americanism of the object
of their revolt that marks them off as American from




MODERN CURRENTS                 55
similar schools in Europe. They know, as we all know,
that the most characteristic production of these States to
the present day is just the output of these Puritan New
Englanders,-Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier,
Hawthorne, Thoreau; and some of us, while recognizing
the limitations of this literature in comparison with the
masterpieces of Europe, yet esteem it for its originality,
and cherish it as something in its way very fine and
precious. But not so the children of the rebellion; they
anathematize it for its very virtues. So far as they
acknowledge any ancestors in this land, it is to Whitman
and Poe and, among the more recent writers, Stephen
Crane they pay homage.
There are many causes that contribute to this repudiation of New England's primacy. For one thing mere local
jealousy plays its part here as in politics; and the citizens
of Oshkosh or Kalamazoo in the broad lands of the West
are convinced that their birthplace is, or shall be, as truly
a centre of light for the world as was the metropolis of the
Puritans. You will see these gentlemen of Oshkosh and
Kalamazoo, even of Chicago, flocking to New York as
soon as they have found their literary legs, for New York
is any man's, or no man's, city, a place where millions
congregate to do business and to eat and die, where Yiddish or Italian and occasionally a kind of English is
spoken, but where no one was ever born-to Boston you
will see them migrating, never!
And then there is the larger jealousy of patriotism. It
is rumoured that the Brahmins of Boston, as they used to
be called, got their culture from abroad and wrote a language slavishly like that of London, whereas our new men
are determined at any cost to be themselves, to employ a
dialect which they fondly call "good United States," and
to create a literature the like of which has not been known




56       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
hitherto in the world. Of course they are wrong; for as a
matter of fact, however the poets and essayists of New
England's golden age may have clung to the traditional
laws of grammar and the established forms of art, they
were in the deeper things of the spirit more distinctly national, as the nation then was, than are the present advocates of independence. Certainly, if there be anything
common to the writing folk of the earth today and not
peculiarly American; it is the creed of the modernist, that
what has been shall be no more, and that quite suddenly
we have been liberated from the old laws and conventions
and fears, from the ancient gods and their precepts of
morality.
Above all the gods and their morality. The Puritans of
the early and middle decades of the last century may
have "come out," as we say, from all the traditional
dogmas and rites of religion-Emerson gave up his pulpit
because the very mild and defecated formalities of Unitarian worship "ceased to interest" him-but Emerson
and all his tribe were frightfully moral; their works are as
stuffed with the stale moralities of religion as were the
tragedies and epics of ancient Athens. There are naturally
various stages in this revolt, an advance guard and a rear
guard. To some immorality and irreligion are an avowed
and joyous creed; for the object of their attack they have
coined the contemptuous words "moralism" and "religionism," and wherever the infamous thing raises its
head, whether in life or art, they pursue it with inquisitorial fury. Others are not so consistent. They will admit,
if pressed, that morality and even religion may have a
useful function in the actual affairs of life, but insist that
they have nothing to do with the canons of art. Whatever
may be the law of life, art exists for its own blessed sake.




MODERN CURRENTS


57


These then are the animosities that unite the otherwise
centrifugal champions of liberty into a brotherhood:
hatred of Puritanism, rejection of "moralism" and "religionism," emancipation of art from the responsibilities
of life. They have learned a lesson from the despised Pilgrims of New England, and have really "come out."
In a broad way our moderns1 may be divided into two
different and often antagonistic schools, the aesthetic and
the realistic. Of the xesthetic school, until her recent
death, Amy Lowell was perhaps the leading spirit, as she
was undoubtedly the most finished artist. For the most
part she was content to adopt the instruments forged by
more daring hands. In the fashion of the day she threw off
the trammels of rhyme and metre for the supposed enlargement of free verse, borrowing her form, as a good
American, from Whitman, and then, as a true cosmopolite, shaping it after Parisian models; and her practice
of "imagism" was admittedly French. But a modern
xesthete must be original, and so Miss Lowell added to
her repertory what she called "polyphonic prose." The
idea of such an invention she found, indeed, in the writing
of Paul Fort, but instead of basing her rhythm on the
Alexandrine verse, as did M. Fort, she chose "the long,
flowing cadence of oratorical prose," and so created a new
genre, or at least a new name. Polyphonic prose then, as
Miss Lowell defines it, is "an orchestral form; its tone
is not merely single and melodic as is that of vers libre,
for instance, but contrapuntal and various." The programme is large and made some stir in the more recondite
poetical circles when first issued; but the results, it must
1As a matter of fact the principal writers here criticised are no longer
young, nor would they be recognized as typically "modern" by some
of the advanced aesthetes. But the younger group have not yet caught
the ear of the public.




58       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
be admitted, have been meagre. Whatever reputation
Miss Lowell retains will depend, I am sure, less on her
polyphonic prose than on her more regular verse. Here
her vein of genuine talent cannot be questioned, and
some of her pieces have a beauty of hard incisive imagery
of no common order. No one can say what she might have
accomplished, had she not been hampered in her gait by
a kind of aesthetical scholasticism; I think of her sometimes as a genius hag-ridden by theory. She enjoyed a
succes d'estime during her life, and the merry legend of her
eccentricities still adds to the gayety of at least one nation, but her literary influence is small and, I suspect,
already waning. In fact the mere liberty of form in verse
no longer satisfies the advance guard of the insurrection; I
have heard a college sophomore, whose aspiration towards
free morals in literature led to his rustication,-I have
heard him speak of Carl Sandburg, the chanter of Chicago's "smoke and steel" in very free verse, as simply
"dead."
Of the living aesthetes James Branch Cabell, a somewhat enigmatical figure, is unquestionably the most
talked of. He was, if truth be told, resting in peaceful obscurity not many years ago, when suddenly he was made
famous by the activity of the Federal authorities who took
alarm at the free ethics of his Yurgen and forbade its
transmission through the Post. Forthwith his fame was
established as a martyr of high art; for the American intelligentsia is rather naively convinced that whatever is
illicit is artistic. As for the book itself I confess some
uncertainty of judgement. You will hear men of wide
reading and presumably of trained taste pronounce it an
immortal masterpiece and its author our most consummate craftsman; others, the majority of the sober, will
tell you the book is a bore, and smile at the writer as a




MODERN CURRENTS                 59
pretentious "four-flusher." So far as I can discover the
most radical of our youth do not take the work seriously;
but then they do not take anything seriously-except
perhaps the portentous Ulysses of James Joyce, and he is
not American. Jurgen is a mediaeval poet and pawnbroker of Poictesme, who by a magic chance lives over
again his youthful experiences in a kind of fantastic
dream. The tale is an allegory of life expressed in weird
adventures and weirder symbols, wherein fragments of all
the mythologies of mankind are woven; it is meant to be
sly and ironical and disillusioned and disturbingly profound, and it certainly is always erotic. The method might
be described as a compound of Maurice Hewlett and
Anatole France, an attempt to reach the last refinement
of conscious art by an assumption of innocent simplicity.
For my own part, I confess that I was caught by passages
here and there, even by whole chapters, which through
the affectations of jollity gave hints of a sad and chastened wisdom born from too much brooding on the
transience of all earthly things; and then a false note, a
lapse into provincial English, a flash of cheap smartness,
would break the charm, and make me feel that the erudition so lavishly displayed was more superficial than solid,
the art more sophisticated than fine, and the superiorities
of manner rather snobbish. A vein of unfulfilled genius
furgen undoubtedly has, sufficient to explain its attraction for a certain class of critics; but I cannot help asking
myself whether its wider reputation does not depend
chiefly on its elusive and cunningly suggestive lubricity.
Besides Yurgen Mr. Cabell has written a group of
novels conceived on a scale which, if you will take the
word of his admirers, overtops the combined ambitions
of Balzac and Zola. It is not the society of a period such
as the Second Empire, or the annals of a family such as




6o       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
the Rougon-Macquart, that will confine the roving imagination of our citizen of Richmond, Virginia. I quote
from Mr. Bjorkman's Introduction to the uniform edition
of Mr. Cabell's works: "Starting from his own day and
the immediate surroundings of his own youth, Mr. Cabell
has set himself the task of tracing the roots of a social
group in all their ramifications through space and time.
In the pursuit of this immense task he has produced a
series of intensely dramatic and psychologically convincing screen flashes of numerous inter-related human destinies, which, when studied in their proper order, give us a
surprisingly complete line of hereditary development
from the days of the troubadours to the eve of Main
Street." No wonder that in comparison with such a
scheme Balzac appears "static" and "provincial." Mr.
Bj6rkman of course writes blank nonsense. The novels
are fairly clever, fairly entertaining, and in their more
fantastic parts have sometimes a vein of wistfully ironic
wisdom; but they are trivial things in the end, with no
mark of greatness. To compare them with the Comidie
Humaine is to display an ignorance of art and life which,
unfortunately, is not confined to Mr. Bj6rkman among
the smarter journalists of the day.
To my taste the most interesting of Mr. Cabell's books
is his Beyond Life, wherein he sets forth his personal
theory of art in direct opposition to the creed and practice
of the realists. The work, I admit, is distressingly uneven;
and the author's spokesman, who is introduced to us as a
retired novelist, very eccentric and erudite and cynical
and quaint, pretty soon degenerates into a manikin of
leather or prunella. But when Mr. Cabell talks of literature he has something to say that at least arrests one's
attention. The function of poetry and fiction, he maintains, is to bring into the open, by a kind of anticipatory




MODERN CURRENTS                   61
magic, the "dynamic illusions" which stir the hearts of
men to move ever towards better and finer ends; and this
"illusion of reality" that we call romance is not a mere
vanity, so long as the artist "is seriously striving to show
fundamental things as he sees them,... and thereby,
perhaps, to hint at their true and unknowable nature";
rather, in that sense, the artist is the pioneer and priest
of life. "And it is this will that stirs in us to have the
creatures of earth and the affairs of earth, not as they are,
but 'as they ought to be,' which we call romance; but
when we note how visibly it sways all life we perceive that
we are talking about God." A reader prejudiced in favour
of precision may complain of Mr. Cabell's failure to discriminate between ideas and ideals, that is between an
intuition into the eternal truth of things behind the curtain of appearances and an attempt to wrap the hateful
facts of reality in veils of deliberate illusion. But such a
confusion is not peculiar to Mr. Cabell; it is in fact the
very atmosphere of the pseudo-Platonism which for many
minds today offers the only alternative to a sordid pessimism, and which has been endowed with professional
standing and with more than professorial charm by Professor Santayana. Its latent treachery is brought out by
Mr. Cabell's attitude towards the relation of romance to
the ethical basis of life. Literature, he insists, quoting the
Sophoclean maxim from Aristotle, aims to portray men
not as they are but as they ought to be. Very well; any
good classicist will stand with Mr. Cabell on the side of
Sophocles against Euripides. But what does Mr. Cabell
mean by "ought to be"? "It can hardly be questioned,"
he says, "that 'good' and 'evil' are aesthetic conventions,
of romantic origin," and "what men 'foolishly do call
virtue' is thus relegated to a subsidiary position, in comparison with beauty, not as being in itself unimportant,




62       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
but as being of no very potent value aesthetically." In Mr.
Cabell's vocabulary "ought to be" proves to mean simply
that the characters of a book should be allowed to follow
the pretty vagaries of vice without any of the ugly consequences that overtake a sinner in the actual flesh. This is
not quite to despise morality as "moralism" and "religionism"; but it does make a divorce between the true in
life and the beautiful in art which must spell death to any
serious emotion in literature.
The resthetes in America today are a small band. Indeed, besides Mr. Cabell himself it would be hard to
name any living writer who has gained real distinction in
this genre-unless by chance one wished to include
Joseph Hergesheimer in that family. Now Mr. Hergesheimer possesses a kind of cleverness that removes him
from the ranks of ordinary realism, but his style is so uncertain, so riddled with affectations and obscurities and
glaring solecisms, that one hesitates to place him on the
other side with the artists. Bad English may be the proper
badge of the realist, but it disqualifies an Eesthete. And
certainly it cannot be said that Mr. Hergesheimer even
tries to follow the rule so constantly in the mouth of Mr.
Cabell: "to write perfectly of beautiful happenings."l
It is a fact of some significance that both our leading
aesthetes spring from prominent families long established
in the two most conservative of our Eastern States, and
that they are educated. Miss Lowell was a kinswoman of
James Russell Lowell and a sister of President Lowell of
Harvard, belonging by inheritance to the Brahmin circles
of Massachusetts. Mr. Cabell's people are well known in
Virginia, and he himself once taught Greek in the WilMr. Thornton Wilder's Bridge of San Luis Rey, published since
the writing of this essay, contains promise of better things.




MODERN CURRENTS


63


liam and Mary College of which he is an alumnus-and
Greek is not exactly a common adjunct of our writing
folk.
As a contrast the realists who throng the left wing of
the modern school come almost without exception from
small towns sprinkled along the Mid-Western States
from Ohio to Kansas, where for the most part they have
grown up quite innocent of education in any such sense as
would be recognized in Paris or London. It would not be
easy to exaggerate the importance of the fact that in
letters they are self-made men with no inherited background of culture. One of them, indeed, Sinclair Lewis,
coming out of Sauk Center, Minnesota, has a degree from
Yale University; but intellectually he is perhaps the
crudest member of the group, cruder, for instance, than
Theodore Dreiser who got most of his education in the
streets of Chicago and from the free libraries of this and
that town, or than Sherwood Anderson who apparently
owes his acquaintance with the alphabet to the grace of
God. Another of the group, John Dos Passos, was born in
Chicago, is a graduate of Harvard, and has been influenced, one guesses, by certain French Writers and by the
Spaniard Ibaniez; his work is too knowing to be called
crude intellectually or perhaps even artistically, but as a
reflection of life it is about the lowest we have yet produced. His much-bruited novel Manhattan T'ransfer, with
its unrelated scenes selected to portray the more sordid
aspect of New York, and with its spattered filth, might be
described in a phrase as an explosion in a cesspool.
I give these biographical facts not in a spirit of snobbishness, nor in any contempt for the Mid-West (to which
indeed I myself belong), but because they have stamped
the whole school, giving it a certain unity of character and
marking it off from the contemporary realism of England,




64       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
not to mention France. Of all the group Mr. Dreiser is
pretty generally recognized as the most powerful and,
with the possible exception of Mr. Anderson, the most
typical, and it will not be out of place to look a little more
closely into his career. Fortunately for our purpose Mr.
Dreiser, like his compeers, is tremendously occupied with
his personal importance and unimportance in the universe, to such an extent that his own character peeps in
and out through all his fiction, while, again like his fellows,
he has thought it necessary, or profitable, to give the
world his autobiography. One may smile at the conceit
of an author who, at the age of fifty and with no fixed
tenure on fame, spreads out the small doings of his youth
and early manhood over five hundred pages octavo; and
one may shrink from the immodesty-or shall we say
frankness?-of a man who regrets in print that he did not
seduce an innocent and trusting girl while his passion for
her was strong instead of waiting to marry her after his
lust had cooled down. There are some things which even a
realist need not tell. But the book is a document of the
highest value.
Theodore Dreiser was born in Terre Haute in 1871. His
father, a German, was by the son's account a poor fecklesscreature, a "religionist" of the maudlin sentimental
sort, who passed his later days going the round of the
Roman Catholic churches of Chicago, whither he had
taken his family. At an early age the boy Theodore was
travelling the streets of Chicago selling shabby goods for
an "easy-payment instalment house," from which occupation he broke away after stealing twenty-five dollars.
The fear of detection and punishment, he says, made him
"very cautious." In his twenty-second year he got a small
job on a struggling newspaper, owned and controlled by a
ward politician. In I892 he moved to St. Louis, where for




MODERN CURRENTS


65


a while he had the advantage of reporting under "Little
Mac," an editor of outstanding ability and in those days
of almost incredible repute throughout the SouthWestern States. Here I am able to check up Mr. Dreiser's
narrative in part, for he came to the city of my birth just
when I was leaving it, and I can testify to his account of
its streets and institutions, and to his characterization of
some of its well-known citizens, as truthful and extraordinarily vivid. From St. Louis he soon drifted eastward,
and ended in New York, the Mecca of all our writing men,
to whom Chicago is a kind of halfway house. Lean years
still lay before him; but his stories began to attract attention, and his American Tragedy, a novel spun out through
two long volumes, has captured the heedless reading mob
and has been acclaimed a masterpiece by reputable reviewers here and abroad.
For my own part I regard his autobiography, despite or
possibly because of its shameless "exhibitionism," as
more significant than any of his novels, as perhaps, with
Sherwood Anderson's similar Story SIeller's Story, the
most significant thing that has come out of our school of
realism. I may be prejudiced in its favour by the fact that
the autobiography, though the events of Mr. Dreiser's
life were different enough from my own, recalls so vividly
the intellectual and sentimental atmosphere of the America in which my youth was passed, and which is rapidly
disappearing. But, apart from such accidental reasons, it
is notable that the Book About Myself has the telling
straightforward style and method natural to a trained reporter, whereas the English of Mr. Dreiser, when, as
sometimes in his novels, he tries to be literary, is of the
mongrel sort to be expected from a miscegenation of the
gutter and the psychological laboratory. Certainly for
those interested in such matters the springs of American




66       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
realism are laid bare in these autobiographical records
with startling frankness. Take a boy of humble origin in a
Mid-Western town some forty years ago. The only
breath of immaterial things to reach him would be
through religion, in the case of Mr. Dreiser a perfectly uncritical catholicism, but with most of the others a thin
poverty-stricken Protestantism from which all ritual and
symbolism had dropped and every appeal to the imagination had exuded. Art and letters would be about as
remote from him as from the Bushmen of Africa. Intellectually and aesthetically and emotionally he is starved.
Suppose then that such a lad, with no schooling to speak
of or with a degree from some lonely hungry "college," is
carried to the bustling conceited Chicago of those days,
and, aspiring to write, gets ajob on a sensation-mongering
newspaper. Of knowledge of life in its larger aspects he
has brought nothing, and in the new school of experience
he is pretty well confined to the police courts, the morgue,
scenes of crime and calamity, sodden streets where unsavoury news may be picked up, homes which scandal has
made public property. We need not guess at the colours
the world would assume in the eyes of such a youth, for
Mr. Dreiser has described his own reactions with sufficient energy. He began his work "still sniffing about the
Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes, expecting ordinary human flesh and blood to do and be those things";
he discovered that most of the people among whom he
was now thrown "looked upon life as a fierce, grim struggle in which no quarter was either given or taken, and in
which all men laid traps, lied, squandered, erred through
illusion," or, more succinctly in the words of one of his
admired and imitated friends, "life is a God-damned
stinking, treacherous game."




MODERN CURRENTS


67


Meanwhile our young aspirant to fame and wealth,
being endowed with no ordinary brain, begins to read.
Translations of Balzac and Zola fall into his hands, and
he learns that the society of Paris, the vile lumitre, is
playing a game very much like that which he sees about
him, only on a more magnificent scale and with vastly
greater opportunities. And he learns, or thinks he learns,
that the high art of letters is to develop the sort of realism
he is acquiring as a reporter. Later he dips into the works
of Huxley and Tyndall and Spencer, and finds his "gravest fears as to the unsolvable disorder and brutality of
life eternally verified" by authorities who were then supposed by the uneducated or the scientifically educated to
have uttered the last word on the mysteries of the universe, the last word eternally verified. "Up to this time,"
he observes rather innocently, "there had been in me a
blazing and unchecked desire to get on and the feeling
that in doing so we did get somewhere; now in its place
was the definite conviction that spiritually one got nowhere, that there was no hereafter, that one lived and had
his being because one had to, and that it was of no importance. Of one's ideals, struggles, deprivations, sorrows
and joys, it could only be said that they were chemic
compulsions, something which for some inexplicable but
unimportant reason responded to and resulted from the
hope of pleasure and the fear of pain. Man was a mechanism, undevised and uncreated, and a badly and carelessly
driven one at that."
Add to this education a spark of genius, an eye to note
and record the panorama of the streets, a nervous system
highly sensitive to the moods of those about him, and you
have the realism of which An American Trragedy is the
most notable achievement. In his drawing of characters
from the lower strata of life and from the gilded haunts of




68       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
Broadway Mr. Dreiser shows an easy competence. In
particular the hero of this tale, from his suppressed childhood in the home of ignorant wandering evangelists,
through his career as bell-boy in a hotel, and employee
in a factory, ending in trial and conviction for the murder
of his mistress, is portrayed with a masterly understanding of the devious ways of a weak untutored nature. But
when the author passes to the doings of conventional society, even to the account of a game of tennis, he displays
a ludicrous ignorance and awkwardness. The same sort of
contrast is seen in other fields. At one moment the tone
of comment is callous and cynical, befitting his acquired
theory of life's unsolvable disorder and brutality; and
then there will break through the native note of sentimentality that pervaded the atmosphere he breathed in
the rural Mid-West of his childhood. Just as he himself
remains, as he says, "a poetic melancholic, crossed with a
vivid materialistic lust of life." In one place religion is
only "religionism," a contemptible yet hated deception;
and then again the spell laid on his early years reasserts
itself, and at the end of the story you might suppose that
his deepest sympathy was with the self-sacrifising minister of the Gospel who befriends the condemned murderer,
and with the poor mother on whose face was written the
"fighting faith in the wisdom and mercy of the definite
overruling and watchful and merciful power" of God.
I lay down Mr. Dreiser's novel with a feeling that it is
an American tragedy in a sense never intended by him
when he chose that title. If only he knew the finer aspects
of life as he knows its shabby underside; if only his imagi- nation had been trained in the larger tradition of literature instead of getting its bent from the police court and
the dregs of science; if only religion had appeared to him
in other garb than the travesty of superstition and faded




MODERN CURRENTS


69


fanaticism; if only he had had a chance, he might possibly
have produced that fabulous thing, the great American
novel. As it is he has brought forth a monstrum informe
cui lumen ademptum.
Though the work of Mr. Dreiser is the conspicuous
phenomenon of the noisy realism that has invaded our
literature, the honour of starting the school, if honour it
may be called, belongs rather to Edgar Lee Masters,
whose Spoon River Anthology first stripped the veils of
decency from existence in a Mid-Western town. The book
was in its way a notable achievement; but the unfailing
dullness of Mr. Masters' subsequent productions shows
that the Anthology was at best only a malodorous flash in
the pan. Then came the Main Street of Sinclair Lewis,
which, so to speak, wove a long novel out of the lives of
the mean people whose virulent epitaphs Mr. Masters
had composed. If popularity were the test, Main Street
might dispute with An American YTragedy the place of
preeminence in the school; at least I found two years ago
that it had penetrated England and that about every man
I met there was curious to know whether it gave a true
picture of our democracy. But I suspect that Main Street
owed its vogue in part to its title, which is a veritable
stroke of genius, and in part to its flattery of those who
like to believe that, whatever their sins, they are better
folk than the dull hypocrites who grovel and boast in so
typical a community as Gopher Prairie (alias Sauk Center
or any other town in which one of our realists may have
been born). Otherwise it is hard to account for the success
of so monotonous a tale written in so drab and drizzling a
style. One might feel there was something wholesome in
this satirical treatment of the very sources of realism,
were it only possible to discover anywhere in the pages of
Mr. Lewis-or in those of Mr. Masters for that matter



70       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
an indication that the author himself had risen more than
an inch above the aesthetic and ethical level of the people
he insults.
If Mr. Dreiser has any rival to the throne, it is Sherwood Anderson, a realist also after a fashion, but one in
whose brain the solid facts of life have an odd way of dissolving before your very eye into the clouds of dreamland.
And here again the author's most significant work seems
to me to be in the autobiographical record of his own
childhood and youth (told with a good deal of Dichtung
interspersed), and in his tales of Winesburg, Ohio, which
reproduce the atmosphere of a town like one of those in
which he grew up. Again we are brought close to the
cradle of our realistic movement. As for the quality of
these books, particularly of A Story Teller's Story, I think
Gertrude Stein, that adventuress into the lunar madnesses of literary cubism, might have had them in mind
when she described her own method of composition: "In
these two books there was elaboration of the complexities
of using everything and of a continuous present and of beginning again and again and again." Some of Miss Stein's
reviewers have laughed at her notion of a continuous present, but they might see it exemplified well enough in Mr.
Anderson. Certainly he has the trick of beginning again
and again and again, and of mixing the past and the
present into a kind of unprogressive circulation. He
starts to narrate some incident, and forthwith a host of
memories from the past are conjured up; what he is describing we behold as a fixed object seen at intervals through
floating masses of mist. One gets the impression of a
physiological cause at work; as if the writing had been
done in that state between waking and sleeping induced
by a low fever, when the mind goes round and round in a
kind of timeless suspense, and we do not know whether




MODERN CURRENTS


7 1


we are living in the past or the present. Something of the
same sort may be said of the sex-obsession in Mr. Anderson's novels which offends so many readers not otherwise
squeamish. At the core I should say there was something
wholesome and clean in the author's attitude towards
these matters, expressed, as he puts it rather bluntly, in
the desire of a man to have "his woman," his own mate to
go with him through the lonely adventures of life; but the
idea is lost, and seen, and lost again in a drift of morbid
fancies and unclean images that float up unsummoned,
and unrestrained, from the submerged depths of his nature. To peruse Mr. Anderson is to be reminded of Plato's
account of the appetites that sometimes awake in a man
when he falls asleep, and the wild beast within him, freed
from the control of reason, goes forth to commit him to all
kinds of follies and shameful deeds from which in his waking moments he would shrink in abhorrence. It is not such
a sleep that sets loose in Mr. Anderson's mind these prurient fancies that the normal man holds in abeyance, but
a kind of low vitality, a sickly feverishness of the imagination. In his healthier moments he shows a vein of genuine and idyllic poetry which might have been developed
to almost any extent; he is not without wise notions of
living; he has a hearty distaste for the shiftlessness and
disorder and dirt which plagued his own steps; he knows
that "it is the impotent man who is vile"; he sees that the
problem for the worker today is "to reach down through
all the broken surface distractions of modern life to the
old love of craft out of which culture springs." There was
the stuff of a good artist in Mr. Anderson; the pity of it is
that, through indulgence encouraged by evil communications, there has come about an almost complete impotence to check the flood of animal suggestions from his
subconscious self; svme of his later books are a painful




72       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
illustration of what "the stream of consciousness" means
when it is allowed to grow putrid.
In the end an unprejudiced critic of these men is likely
to be divided between indignation at so much perversity
and a feeling of pity that so much talent and earnestness
should be expended upon the making of books, no one of
which, despite their present fame, is likely to be remembered twenty years from now, or in fact has any claim to
be called literature at all. There are, as I have tried to
show, various causes contributing to this failure, among
them sheer ignorance; but the deepest and most universal
cause of all is that strange theory which, after many wanderings to and fro, has just reached these western shores,
the theory that there are no moral laws governing life, or
that, if such laws are, they have no jurisdiction in the
artistic representation of life. For it really is an extraordinary theory if you consider its implications, and, when
held with the childlike simplicity of the newly enlightened,
leads to about as distorting results in literature as would
befall a scientist who set out to experiment under the
belief that there were no physical laws. For the moral law
of character Mr. Cabell undertakes to substitute an
esthetic philosophy of beauty; but so far as I can fathom
his ambiguities, he has only one thesis serviceable to art,
viz., that the pursuit of perfect beauty leads in the end to
inevitable disillusion and disappointment,-not a very
original thesis nor capable of a very wide application.
Meanwhile his human actors have about as much depth as
the dolls which children cut out of paper and, bedeck with
fantastic names. How could it be otherwise when he has
denied the validity of the laws that shape our destiny and
control the deeper sources of emotion? On the other side
Mr. Dreiser, so far at least as his creative instinct does not
break through his parochial theory of art, simply repro



MODERN CURRENTS


73


duces the surface of life as he has seen it, with no attempt
to reorganize it artistically or to interpret its larger significance. He does not create characters, he does not create
anything; he merely extends the front page of the newspaper to the volume of a book, rarely venturing to go
beyond the training he received as a reporter. And he
reaps his reward; for he gives the great mob of readersshop girls and tired clerks and thoughtless boys riding
back and forth to business-exactly what they want and
can understand, not literature which requires for its appreciation an intellectual readjustment, but a sensational
dressing up of the world they know.
So much for what would commonly be regarded as the
modern and really vital current in American literature
today. It makes rather a sad story in the telling, and,
taken alone, would give a hopeless notion of the intellectual state of the country. Fortunately it is not the whole
story. Besides the poets and novelists, competent craftsmen
some of them, who are pursuing the more beaten track,
and whom for that reason I have passed by in this article,
there are a few writers who, while not modern in the popular sense of the word, are doing altogether the most
original and aggressive work we can show to the world,a work more noteworthy, I make bold to say, than anything of its kind now done in England and equal to anything produced in France. I refer to the little group of
critics of life and letters scattered over the land, who have
set their faces against the all-invading currents of irresponsible half-thinking, and, with full knowledge of what
has been thought and done in the past, are trying to lay
the foundations of a new humanism for the present. Of
these the outstanding figure is Irving Babbitt, of Harvard, perhaps our most powerful intellect, as he is certainly the most virile personality, in the whole realm of




74       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
criticism and scholarship. He is also one of the few Americans who have made themselves felt in France, and quite
recently was elected a corresponding member of the Institut. Others who are contributing to the same salutary
end, and whom I can only name, are F. J. Mather, of
Princeton, primarily an authority in the history of painting but an incorruptible champion of good taste in other
fields as well; P. H. Frye, of the University of Nebraska,
author among other books of a volume of essays on
Romance and T'ragedy which contains the most penetrating study of the ethical basis of Greek drama known
to me in any language; S. B. Gass, also of Nebraska,
whose Lover of the Chair is replete with mellow wisdom
on the central problems of education and life and art;
and, among the younger men, Robert Shafer, of Cincinnati, whose Christianity and Naturalism is in itself a considerable achievement in philosophic criticism, and holds
the promise of better things to come.
It will be observed that all these writers-and I could
name three or four others of the same class-hold academic positions. The only exception to this rule would be
W. C. Brownell, the honoured doyen of our letters, a
thoroughbred New Yorker, who is affiliated with no college and proves, against all presumption to the contrary,
that something intellectually fine can come out of our
Babylon on the Hudson. For one who believes, as I do,
that the difficulties now confronting civilization, if solution there be, must be solved by education, it is encouraging to run down this list of college men who are at once
successful teachers and sound thinkers and forcible
writers. The discouraging aspect of the situation is that
the universities as institutions are doing so little to help.
If these scholars were publishing in any European country they would be widely read and discussed, and would




MODERN CURRENTS


75


have weight as forming a united phalanx arrayed against
the forces of disorganization. Here they are dispersed over
thousands of miles of area, isolated in depressing loneliness, and barely heard amid the hubbub of the pedants on
the one side and the illiterates on the other side. One of
them produces a book which ought to bring him recognition as a leader of public opinion, and what is the result?
In most cases there is no result; nothing happens; voices
calling in the desert. Ask the first scholar or supposedly
cultured reader what he thinks, let us say, of Professor
Frye's Romance and T'ragedy or Professor Gass's Lover of
the Chair, and the probable answer will be that he has
never so much as heard the name of either of them. This
lamentable condition is owing in part to the very size of
the country and to its lack of any recognized centre of
culture, of any true capital such as London or Paris. But
it is just here that our institutions of learning are failing
us. I think of the possible consequences if any one of our
major universities had the foresight and courage to gather
into its faculty such a group of men as I have mentioned.
Each would be fortified and comforted by the others, and
together they would make such a push as would be felt
from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Nor is this a counsel of
perfection; within measure it might easily be effected.
The sad truth is that the English departments of our
colleges, from whom such an impulse of organization
ought to proceed, are not only irresponsive to their opportunity, but are unsympathetic, too often even antipathetic, to the kind of discipline that would produce and
hold such men. They want experts in Anglo-Saxon and
Medieval French and Chaucerian bibliography, or in the
name of literature they admit a makeshift of romantic
mestheticism; while in the path of any student who turns
aside from the narrow line prescribed for the doctor of




76      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
philosophy to acquire a broad education and a sound understanding of life they place almost insurmountable obstacles. Thus the field at large is left open to the unleavened impudence of noise, and the critical ideas of the immature and ignorant are formed by brawling vulgarians
like H. L. Mencken.
Yet withal there are wholesome signs of rebellion
among the younger students, indications that the benumbing reign of pedantry may be broken, and that in
the next generation our colleges may awaken to their duty
of providing what above all else American literature
needs,-the discipline of a classical humanism, which will
train the imagination in loyalty to the great traditions,
while cherishing the liberty to think and the power to
create without succumbing to the seductions of the
market-place or the gutter.




A NOTE ON POE'S METHOD


IN theAuthors Club of New York there hangs a life-size
portrait of Poe which engages my attention as often as
I visit those chambers. It is a face that might well
haunt the dreams of a man for its pathos. On it is stamped
the mark of defeat; the very lines of the mouth, the pronounced asymmetry of the two sides, tell only too clearly
the secret of broken self-control and the long unsuccessful
struggle with insidious habits. In this it is typical, unfortunately, of a whole class of supersensitive, physically unbalanced artists, who have given some basis to the plausible, but I think now rather discredited, theory that
would explain all the phenomena of genius by a morbid
psychology. But in one thing the face is unlike the type to
which it otherwise belongs: there is not the least sign here
of that mental relaxation, that loosening of the mind's
grasp and determination, which often goes with what
must be called-though the phrase should not be wrongly
interpreted in Poe's case-the breakdown of character.
On the contrary, the eyes retain the look of intense concentration and logical grip.
And in these features the portrait is true to the original.
For one of the distinguishing marks of Poe's work is just
the combination of nervous irritability, running even into
the morbid, with rigorous intellectual analysis. It is a
combination not unknown in other writers of the ultraromantic group; but it is the exception, and it is carried in
Poe to an extreme for which it would be hard to find a par



78       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
allel. Of his reasoning powers and his delight in the exercise of logical argument, no proof is required; it is sufficient
merely to mention his story of 'The Gold Bug, his ingenious
detective tales, his uncanny skill in predicting the development of one of Dickens' novels while running as a serial,
his uncovering of the automatic chess-player, his Eureka.
But you will observe that his mind is not directed to
ethical abstractions and does not work upon ideas, after
the fashion of his great contemporaries in the North; it
is rather analytical, and interested in the detection of
facts and the dissection of sensations. The difference may
be illustrated by two stories in which Hawthorne and Poe
have treated a similar theme. One of these is Ethan
Brand, the most extraordinary and characteristic, in my
judgement, of all Hawthorne's shorter works. It is the
tale, you will remember, of a lime-burner who, in the long
solitary watches by his furnace in the hills, meditates on
the secret nature of the Unpardonable Sin, until his mind
becomes possessed with this one idea, and he is driven to
go down into the world and search among men for the key
to the mystery. And he discovers it-discovers it in his
own breast-and returns with this hideous knowledge to
the lime-kiln. Yet he has committed no crime in the ordinary sense of the word; his wickedness lies in the mere
search for the idea, and of his victims we hear only
vaguely of a girl, "whom," as the account runs, "with
such cold and remorseless purpose, [he] made the subject
of a psychological experiment, and wasted, absorbed, and
perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process." The effect
of the story is ghostly, where Poe would have been
ghastly. From Ethan Brand turn now to the tale of 'he
Man of the Crowd, whom Poe pretends to see passing in
the mob of a London street, and, fascinated by the singu



A NOTE ON POE'S METHOD


79


lar countenance of the wretch, follows through the night
and the day in his restless hurry from one thronged region
of the city to another. "This old man," he exclaims at
last, "is the type and genius of deep crime. He refuses to
be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to
follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds.
The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the
Hortulus inima., and perhaps it is but one of the great
mercies of God that er lasst sich nicht lesen." Poe's is a
grim and unforgettable story, as original as Hawthorne's
but different. Its power over our imagination depends on
the analysis of the sensations connected with crime,
whereas in Ethan Brand the interest is centred upon the
search for the idea of evil in itself.
But if Poe differs from the ethical writers by avoiding
what may be called the ideal use of the intellect, he differs
also from the great mass of the romantic writers, with
whom he is otherwise akin, by insistent use of the intellect
in his own way. And this distinction comes out even more
sharply in his criticism than in his practice. In three of his
essays he has developed his critical theory elaborately and
consistently, in The Poetic Principle, The Rationale of
Verse, and The Philosophy of Composition, which together
form one of the few esthetic treatises in English of real
value. In the first of these, a lecture which was read, it
will be remembered, in Boston, he lays down his definition
of poetry "as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole
arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with Conscience, it
has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no
concern whatever with Duty or with Truth." Some allowance must be made in this definition for the fact that Poe
was flaunting his flag resolutely in the face of the ethical
folk of Boston, and we shall see in a moment that his
"collateral relations" of the intellect, as he expresses it,




80       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
need a pretty wide interpretation. The next step in his
theory brings us to these significant words: "It is in
Music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the
great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles-the creation of Supernal Beauty."
This position he maintains in The Rationale of Verse,
where he declares that verse "cannot be better designated than as an inferior or less capable Music." So far, of
course, he is merely adopting one of the familiar commonplaces of the age. The conception of poetry as reaching its
normal goal in music was constantly held forth by the
early German theorists of the Romantischbe Schule. It is
implied in Schleiermacher's declaration that the religious
feeling should "accompany all the doings of a man as if
it were a holy music; he should do all with religion, nothing through religion;" it is carried to its dogmatic extreme
by Novalis, who sees the consummation of art in "poems
which sound melodiously and are full of beautiful words,
but without any sense or connexion." The theory may
appear absurd, in fact is absurd, when stated in this bald
manner; but it is held nevertheless in scarcely less extravagant terms by some of the radical critics of the
present day. Now in their practice the poets of this school
ordinarily have sought to attain the effect of musical
evocation by throwing the thinking part of us under a
kind of hypnotic spell which leaves the emotional part of
us free to float off in a state of vague revery. Thus, Kubla
Khan, the typical poem of the genre, was actually composed by Coleridge in his sleep, and its charm upon us is
that of a dreamlike magic, beginning anywhere and ending anywhere, lifting us up on luxurious waves of indolent
music. No doubt there is verse of this pure evocative
quality in our Poe, notably in 'he Valley of Unrest and




A NOTE ON POE'S METHOD


81


rThe City in the Sea, and in these lulling cadences of The
Sleeper:
At midnight in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapour, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And, softly dripping, drop by drop,
Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.
There is, I maintain, an opiate magic in such lines as
these equal in potency to anything ever produced by the
rhapsodist of Highgate; but it is not, in my opinion, the
most characteristic note of Poe. He is even more himself,
not when he surrenders his genius to these flowing waves
of revery, but when his mind is concentrated and works
with a logical precision, with a logical hardness one might
almost say, which is the opposite of the ordinary romantic
manner. Consider, for instance, the logical structure and
completeness of The Bells: there, if anywhere in the
English tongue, poetry does become pure music and pure
beauty, almost to the exclusion of ideas, yet the thing is
worked out and its effects calculated with the mathematical finish of a Bach or any other master of counterpoint who composed before spontaneity became identified
with genius.
And Poe not only practised this logical concentration,
but raised it to a principle of art. We come thus to the
third of his aesthetical treatises, that on The Philosophy of
Composition, in which he sets forth with ruthless frankness the whole method employed by him in composing
The Raven. According to this extraordinary exhibition of
genius at work, having determined to produce a great
poem, he first considered what effect he should aim to
produce. As beauty in his view was "the sole legitimate




82       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
province of the poem," his choice was so far decided for
him. The "next question referred to the tone of its highest
manifestation"; and here again his choice was fixed for
him by his belief that "all experience has shown this" tone
to be one "of sadness. Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul
to tears." To evoke this effect, or any poetical effect, he
saw that the refrain is the most universally employed and
the most cogent instrument; he would therefore make a
refrain the keynote of his poem, selecting for this purpose
a word capable of protracted emphasis, melodious in
itself, and in the fullest possible keeping with the tone of
melancholy. These conditions led him immediately to the
word "Nevermore" (suggested, probably, by Byron's
famous -use of it in Don /uan). The next step is the most
curious of all. He felt the difficulty that "lay in the reconciliation of this monotony with the exercise of reason on
the part of the creature repeating the word." It occurred
to him that this difficulty might be obviated by putting
the refrain into the mouth of a parrot, but he changed
to a raven, "as equally capable of speech, and infinitely
more in keeping with the intended tone." He had now to
consider what topic, "according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy." Obviously
this would be beauty associated with death, "the death,
then, of a beautiful woman." This being determined, his
task was to bring together his theme and the instrument
of his refrain; but we need not pursue him through all the
windings of his ingenious plot.
Now what shall be said of this cold-blooded piece of
analysis? To many critics it has seemed to be a grand
hoax or a bit of unparalleled effrontery. Or at least the
whole thing must be taken as an ex postfacto account, so
to speak; for it is impossible that any poem deeply emo




A NOTE ON POE'S METHOD             83
tional and effective, or any true product of inspiration,
should be thus put together like a piece of calculated machinery. And from the ordinary theory and practice of art
such an opinion is right. But I am inclined to believe that
The Raven was actually composed very much as the author
explains, and that his essay is not only essentially true
to facts but throws a remarkable light on one phase of his
genius. I do not mean to say that in all details the reflection on the method to be adopted would precede by an
appreciable moment of time the actual invention; the two
processes may have gone on together in his mind. The
point is that this conscious logical analysis was present
with him throughout the whole work of composition to an
abnormal degree, now preceding, now accompanying,
now following the more inscrutable suggestions of the
creative faculty. This, I take it, is Poe's original note, a
quality which distinguishes his art from that of the other
masters of unearthly revery. Here, too, lies the principal
sphere of his influence on Baudelaire and the whole line of
foreign poets who have imitated him without reaching his
supremacy-they could borrow his method, they could
not steal his brains.
Judged thus by the achievement in accordance with his
own canon of art, Poe must rank high, if not first, among
our American poets, and measured by the extent of his influence he would take a prominent place among the poets
of Europe. But when we consider the character of his
canon in itself, I fear that certain deductions must be
made to his fame. We are forced then to question the very
validity of his doctrine of truth and beauty. There is no
uncertainty as to the nature of his principles, nor, as is
often the case with others, is there any discrepancy in
him between theory and practice. To go back to the beginning, let me recall a few words from his criticism of




84       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
Hawthorne, in which he gives precision to his theory by
contrasting the provinces of the tale and the poem. "The
tale," he there says, "has a point of superiority over the
poem. In fact, while the rhythm of this latter is an essential aid in the development of the poem's highest ideathe idea of the Beautiful-the artificialities of this
rhythm are an insuperable bar to the development of all
points of thought and expression which have their basis
in Y'ruth." We have here merely the insistent application
of the doctrine promulgated in the essay on YThe Poetic
Principle, that poetry is "the rhythmical creation of
beauty," and that "the demands of truth are severe; she
has no sympathy with the myrtle; all that which is indispensable in Song, is precisely all that with which she has
nothing to do."
Now just what did Poe mean by this distinction,
amounting to an opposition, between truth and beauty,
and how did he carry it out in execution? In one sense it is
manifest that no poet ever was truer than Poe; all that
intense concentration of his mind, that logical grip of his
theme, was directed in a way to the attainment of truthto the perfectly and relentlessly true attainment of the
effect which he had chosen to produce. Wherein lies the
contrast between truth and beauty to which he was always returning in theory? It lies not in any failure to deal
truthfully with his material, but in the restriction of his
material to a certain range of emotions and in the exclusion of what he brands as "the heresy of The Didactic."
This he declares explicitly is the ground of his hostility to
the contrary assumption that "the object of all Poetry is
Truth." Had he confined his attack to didacticism as a
mode of expression, it would have been well; but his unfortunate identification of didacticism with truth cut him
off from a whole range of material, the highest and finest




A NOTE ON POE'S METHOD               85
emotions of the human breast, which need not be didactical at all in form, but are connected with the intuition of
moral truth. I mean that kind of emotion, to take an extreme case, which is stirred in Emerson's ethical epigrams. It is a question of values. Beautiful as is much of
Poe's work, true as it is, I think an honest criticism must
add that it leaves almost untouched the richest source of
human feeling. Only perhaps one should except from this
limitation the stanzas To Helen, in which Poe's distinctive
sense of unearthly beauty lies close to the Platonic vision
of the Ideal. If these stanzas were written, as tradition
has it, when Poe was a mere boy (and they were certainly
composed before he had reached his majority), they are
one of the most astounding pieces of precocity in literary
history-and that even though the two noblest lines stood
originally in this comparatively flat form:
To the beauty of fair Greece
And the grandeur of old Rome.
And there is this also to be said. Taking truth and
beauty as Poe did and as Keats did, Poe, I hold, was the
more honest and the less mischievous theorizer than
Keats. For taking truth and beauty as they did, Poe was
manly and clear-headed in opposing them one to the
other; whereas Keats delivered a doctrine as dangerous
as it was misleading when he threw out those memorable
words,
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
So much by way of extenuation. But we cannot forget,
Poe himself never lets us forget, that he was a man to
whom life in its outer circumstances was a long experience
of unmerciful disaster, and that he had also to contend
with an enemy in his own breast, the terrible physical




86       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
taint whose ravages we see in his countenance. It is natural, but it is none the less unfortunate, that such a man
should have developed an aesthetic theory which rejected
from the province of poetry any claim of truth beyond
that of fidelity to a chosen sensation, and which emphasized so strongly the element of melancholy inherent in
the perception of physical beauty. His theory thus, instead of correcting the inevitable trend of a nature like
his, rather confirmed him in his temperamental weakness.
And so we see him often looking for beauty, and indeed
finding it, in the ravages of disease and the ghastly secrets
of the tomb. In this field of the abnormal Poe has wrought
miracles, reaching his climax in that appalling song of
madness which strikes the keynote of T'he Fall of the
House of Usher. But we are merely darkening counsel if
we set him in competition with those normal poets who
deal with the larger and more universal aspects of nature
and create loveliness out of the more wholesome emotions
of our common humanity. Health is above disease in art
as it is in life. Poe remains chiefly the poet of unripe boys
and unsound men.
So much must be granted. Yet it is to the honour of
Poe that in all his works you will come upon no single
spot where the abnormal sinks to the unclean, or where
there is an effort to intensify the effect of what is morbid
emotionally by an appeal to what is morbid morally. The
soul of this man was never tainted. How much that means,
how great and near was the danger, can be known by
turning to certain of his Continental disciples. The line
between them is narrow, but it separates two worlds. Poe
does not hesitate to descend for his effects into the very
grave where beauty and decay come together; but if you




A NOTE ON POE'S METHOD              87
wish to understand the perils he escaped, read after The
Sleeper one of the poems in which Baudelaire, Poe's
avowed imitator and sponsor to Europe, gropes with filthy
hands among the mysteries of death.




.1




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE


OR many years I have felt a kind of obligation to
1 write on Trollope. Through the most part of a lifeL   time his novels have been the chosen companions of
my leisure, and, with the possible exception of Boswell's
Johnson, have been oftener in my hands than the works
of any other English author. I have not gone to them,
naturally, for that which the great poets and philosophers
and divines can give. But they have been like an unfailing
voice of encouragement in times of joy and prosperity;
they have afforded solace in hours of sickness and despondency and adversity; they have lightened the tedium
of idleness and supplied refreshment after the fatigues of
labour. They have been submitted to the test of reading
aloud, and have passed the ordeal with more than honour.
Indeed, I question whether any one has fully relished
their wit and irony and their delicacy of insinuation, who
has not gone through them at that slower pace demanded
by such reading and with the heightened interest of participation by sympathetic listeners. I cannot boast, alas,
as does that fortunate bibliophile, Mr. Newton, that "I
have every book Trollope ever wrote," much less that I
possess them all in first editions; there are even eight or
ten out of his six score and more volumes that I have
never yet seen. But those I own spread out sufficiently
over my shelves, and remind me daily of the largeness of
my debt of gratitude to their author, a debt too long
unpaid.




90       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
I
So it is that, released from the confinement of more
exacting studies, I take the opportunity of this initial
volume of a new series of essays to discharge my obligation, for my own relief if to no other end. A more particular occasion for writing is Mr. Sadleir's recently published
"Commentary,"-an excellent book in the main, broadly
informative, richly documented, often finely critical, intended to be laudatory, yet with that recurrent note of
apology which so frequently annoys me in those who profess themselves Trollopians.1 My mood is not apologetic.
I see no reason why I should be niggardly of praise to one
whose novels, as Hawthorne said of them, "precisely suit
my taste," whose Orley Farm was Cardinal Newman's
favourite piece of fiction, and whose mimic world of politics enthralled the declining years of a statesman so versed
in the actual ways of men as ex-President Cleveland.
Yet withal I too, like Mr. Sadleir, would wish to pay
my tribute to Trollope "soberly and without exaggeration." I admit that "there are novels more spiritual than
his, more heroic and more beautiful." He could not do, at
any rate did not try to do, what Balzac and Dostoievsky
and Turgeniev and Manzoni have done. He has his limitations. But who has not? Could Balzac or Dostoievsky
or Turgeniev or Manzoni have written the chronicles of
Barsetshire? Imagine the "clumsiness" and "awkwardness" and "garrulity,"-epithets which Mr. Sadleir
bestows on Trollope,-if one of these geniuses had undertaken to fashion such a society as that in which Mrs.
Proudie and Dr. Grantly and Mr. Crawley and Lily Dale
and Mary Thorne play their parts. And these, I speak for
'Anthony T'rollope: A Commentary. By Michael Sadleir, with an Introduction by A. Edward Newton. Houghton Mifflin Company, I927.




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE


91


myself, are the people amongst whom I am at home.
Then, narrowing the field of comparison to England, I
ask myself whether one ought to subscribe to the opinion
of Mr. Newton: "I do not say that Trollope is our greatest novelist; I know that he is not, but I can read him
when I can't read anyone else." Now "great" is an ambiguous term, and it might be said that, among writers of
fiction at least, he has a fair claim to be called greatest
who can hold our interest when all others fail. But then I
think of Thackeray, and suspend my judgement. I remember the heavy passages through which Trollope plods
with leaden feet; but does Thackeray's lightness always
save him from being tedious? Is there any novelist who
writes largely without boring us at times with gratuitous
dullness? Trollope's language lacks the sustained urbanity
and the fascinating charm of Thackeray's, his constant
use (to descend to trifles that are not trivial) of "proposition" for "proposal" and "predicate" for "predict," his
abuse of "commencement" for "beginning," grate like
sand between the teeth; but in the long run I wonder
whether his clear, manly, straightforward style is not the
most satisfactory medium after all, and whether the softness of Thackeray's overworked "kind" and "artless" and
"honest" does not end by exasperating us almost as much
as Trollope's solecisms. Or shall we measure the two
rivals by their great climactic scenes? I think of the tenderness of Thackeray at his best; but is the death of
Colonel Newcome more finely imagined or more feelingly
described than the passing of Mr. Harding? I remember
such revelations of character as that in which Lady
Castlewood turns upon the Duke of Hamilton and
Beatrix whispers her regrets into Henry Esmond's ear;
but is the thrill of artistic satisfaction any keener than at
Mr. Crawley's ejaculation, "Peace, woman!" to Mrs.




92        THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
Proudie, which caused the bishop to jump out of his
chair? And there is this to be said about Thackeray. With
all his cunning analysis of human motives, he never quite
escaped that strain of eighteenth century sentimentalism
which called forth the indignant protest of Sir John
Hawkins. "His morality," declares that friend of Johnson, speaking of Fielding but in language that applies almost equally well to the Victorian novelist who imitated
his Georgian predecessor so far as he dared,-"his morality, in respect that it resolves virtue into good affections,
in contradiction to moral obligation and a sense of duty,
is that of Lord Shaftesbury vulgarized, and is a system of
excellent use in palliating the vices most injurious to society. He was the inventor of that cant phrase, goodness
of heart, which is every day used as a substitute for probity, and means little more than the virtue of a horse or a
dog."1 I confess that all Thackeray's finesse and sweetness
and generosity do not save me at times from being irritated by his complacent admiration of such blundering
irresponsible fools as Philip Firmin and Harry Warrington and Colonel Newcome, if only their heart is in the
right place. Of a piece with which is his endless wailing
over the thefts of time, as though the only desirable thing
in life were the thoughtless insouciance of youth. I am led
for the moment to write of the prodigious Thackeray as if
I were insensible to his charm and goodness. It is not so.
I read him and love him and marvel at his powers; but I
cannot forget nevertheless, when the spell of his genius is
not upon me, that he is in the direct line of the "futilitari1The Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, by Sir John Hawkins, 2nd ed., p. 2I5.
Hawkins's diatribe on the fiction of his age is one of the landmarks of
English criticism which should not be forgotten. And, generally speaking, it is a pity that Boswell's greater achievement should have
brought oblivion upon so entertaining and important a work.




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE                     93
ans" of the present day. To that school Trollope certainly
does not belong.
II
But my concern is not to magnify Trollope at the expense of any of his rivals, nor to complain against the
caution which would season eulogy with a proper recognition of his limitations (what writer of fiction, as I have
said, is without limitations?). My resentment, so far as I
allow it, is aroused when an admiring Trollopian, like Mr.
Sadleir, thinks it necessary to apply to Trollope, with no
reservation at all, Professor Santayana's detraction of
another Victorian:
It is remarkable, in spite of his ardent simplicity and openness ot
heart, how insensible Dickens was to the greater themes of the human
imagination-religion, science, politics, art.... Perhaps, properly
speaking, he had no ideas on any subject; what he had was a vast
sympathetic participation in the daily life of mankind.
I say nothing now about Dickens, but I would maintain
stoutly that so flat a denial of all ideas whatsoever to
Trollope is a slander upon the novelist and an insult to his
devoted readers.
And first of all let us distinguish. To lump politics and
science and religion and art together, as if Trollope's attitude towards all four subjects were one of equal indifference, is not the way to get at the truth. He himself, in one
of his excursions, separates politics from the other three
as the special field in which the characters and external
activities of men are so blended that it lends itself peculiarly to the uses of fiction. And surely it is critically unsound to accuse the author of the Parliamentary Novels,
to mention no others, of insensibility to the political
doings of his people or to the importance of politics in
itself. Nor are his ideas on the subject vague or fluctuat



94       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
ing or doubtful. His own particular brand of liberalism is
never concealed, rather it is thrust almost too persistently
upon the reader; his distrustful antipathy to Disraeli is
not only unmistakable, but goes to a point, in my judgement, beyond reason; in one of his novels a chapter on the
theory of government and the relation of the social classes
-"The Prime Minister's Political Creed" he calls it-takes
the form of a little essay barely contained within the
framework of the story.
Whether rightly or wrongly (rightly I think), Trollope
holds the material offered by the other subjects mentioned to be less amenable to his purpose, and one suspects that, apart from this, his own private interest in
them was less keen-non omnia omnibus. But here again
it is necessary to distinguish. Science, as professedly the
most impersonal of these occupations, is scarcely touched
on in his novels, save perhaps in T'he Fixed Period where
sociological theory takes a scientific slant; and I for my
part, having in mind the exceptional flatness of that tale
and the dismal consequences of such a mixture of the
genres in certain bolder writers, can only be grateful to
Trollope for his abstinence, whatever the cause of that
abstinence may have been. But with religion and art the
case is not quite the same.
Now in discussing Trollope's attitude to religion it is
well to remember first of all that he was a novelist and
dealt with the material of life accordingly. The reminder
is a commonplace; but it is just the forgetting of such
commonplace distinctions that causes half the confusion
in criticism. He-supposing there were any such mistaken
zealot-who should go to a novelist expecting to get what
he would find in the great theologians, is bound to be disappointed; why not? On a lower, or at least a different,
plane, it may be possible to adapt fiction to a more direct




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE


95


and intellectual treatment of religion than Trollope has
ever attempted. Henry Shorthouse shows what can be
accomplished in that line-a writer whom I love and
esteem; and no doubt Trollope's glory would be enhanced
were such a work as fohn Inglesant added to the jewels of
his crown. But to ask of the same man that he should
write in the vein both of 7ohn Inglesant and of Barchester
Towers would be about as sane as to demand strawberries
and apples from the same root; and between the two, if
choice were necessary, as happily it is not, I should prefer
Barchester Towers as the more permanently satisfactory,
partly for the very reason that, being a novel, it does not
try to do what can be better done through another medium. Trollope himself, in his Framley Parsonage, apologizes frankly for what might appear to be a deficiency in
his account of lives devoted to worship, and at the same
time shows how voluntarily he submitted to the limitations of his art:
I have written much of clergymen, but in doing so I have endeavoured to portray them as they bear on our social life rather than to
describe the mode and working of their professional careers. Had I
done the latter I could hardly have steered clear of subjects on which
it has not been my intention to pronounce an opinion, and I should
either have laden my fiction with sermons or I should have degraded
my sermons into fiction. Therefore I have said but little in my narrative of this man's feelings or doings as a clergyman. But I must
protest against its being on this account considered that Mr. Robarts
was indifferent to the duties of his clerical position.
With the Barsetshire novels before us, let us be glad
that their creator worked contentedly within his selfimposed restrictions, though for all that we need not be
sorry that a Shorthouse broke through the bounds.
So much by way of concession and explanation. But
because Trollope did not compose religious tracts it by no
means follows that he was insensible to religion or had




96        THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
no ideas on the subject. He hated, as warmly as did
Dickens, a certain type of evangelical cant not uncommon in England, and he satirizes it mercilessly. His
Prongs and his Slopes have a place with the most detestable hypocrites of the world, and they are not the less
convincingly human because, beneath all their humbug,
there is still something of genuinely righteous fervour. He
could make fun of a worldly prelate like Dr. Grantly,
whom yet he loves for the man's downright honesty,-as
do I. But to the Church in its more majestic modesty he
was loyal in his life, as to a true churchman he was always
reverential in his fiction. Nor are his books wanting in
hints of the deeper matters of faith. After the very defence
of his reticence quoted above from Framley Parsonage, he
permits himself to dwell for a page on the penitential
qualms of the parson whose frailties as a man have been
the central theme of the novel. Elsewhere (Barchester
Towers, Vol. I, chapter xx) there is a detailed account of
the "mental struggles" and "agony of doubt," through
which the Rev. Francis Arabin fought his way to an assured conviction, that not only seems to me psychologically subtle and historically true, but satisfies my taste as
a model of what can be done on such a theme within the
stricter bounds of fiction. And in Arabin's apology for his
own and his friends' contentious opposition to the innovating Slopes, and at the same time for the Church of his
predilection, there is a quiet dignity, covering strong
emotion, that only a master craftsman could attain:
"You speak now of the Church of Rome?" said Eleanor.
"No," said he, "not necessarily of the Church of Rome; but of a
church with a head. Had it pleased God to vouchsafe to us such a
church our path would have been easy. But easy paths have not been
thought good for us." He paused and stood silent for a while, thinking
of the time when he had so nearly sacrifised all he had, his powers of




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE                      97
mind, his free agency, the fresh running waters of his mind's fountain,
his very inner self, for an easy path in which no fighting would be
needed; and then he continued;-"What you say is partly true; our
contentions do bring on us some scandal. The outer world, though it
constantly reviles us for our human infirmities, and throws in our
teeth the fact that being clergymen we are still no more than men,
demands of us that we should do our work with godlike perfection.
There is nothing godlike about us. We differ from each other with the
acerbity common to man,-we triumph over each other with human
frailty-we allow differences on subjects of divine origin to produce
among us antipathies and enmities which are anything but divine.
This is all true. But what would you have in place of it? There is no
infallible head for a church on earth. This dream of believing man has
been tried, and we see in Italy and in Spain what has come of it. Grant
that there are and have been no bickerings within the pale of the
Pope's Church. Such an assumption would be utterly untrue, but let
us grant it; and then let us say which church has incurred the heavier
scandals."
The clerical champion of Barcbester q'owers knew his
own mind and through perseverance found the way to
such peace as the world can give. In fae Bertrams we
have the sadder story of one who never, never at least
until too late, grasped the full meaning of that lesson. The
book as a whole is not in Trollope's best vein, but the
early chapter, describing George's dedication of his life to
holiness while, sitting on the hill above Jerusalem, he
looks out over the scenes where the ancient drama of salvation was staged, is in its kind a veritable masterpiece
of art and of delicate suggestion. It could have been conceived only by a writer who was himself deeply religious;
and of its kind I know of nothing quite like it in the
English language. The complications of the plot that follows do not always hold our interest; but, again, the
failure of the hero to live up to his high resolve is kept
finely in the background of the story, until the whole
tragedy of regret breaks out in the closing sentence:
"Reader, can you remember the aspirations of George




98       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
Bertram, as he sat upon the Mount of Olives, watching
the stones of the temple over against him?"
III
But the element of religion which furnishes not an occasional theme and moves not an exceptional character,
but pervades all Trollope's fiction, is the ethical. Now and
then, to be sure, he falls, like Thackeray, into the sentimentalism left over from the eighteenth century, as if
morality were synonymous with a natural and undisciplined goodness of heart; but for the most part his code
is of a sterner sort. No one of our greater novelists, unless
it be George Eliot, saw more clearly than he the inexorable nexus of cause and effect in the moral order, or followed more relentlessly the wide-spreading consequences
of the little defalcations of will, the foolish misunderstandings of sympathy, the slight deflections from honesty, the deceptive temptations of success, the failures to
make the right decision at critical moments, the ruinous
corrosions of passion and egotism. It is this sense of the
subtle adhesions of folly and evil that excuses the monotony of his plots turning on the entanglements of a heroine
who succumbs to the baser of two loves presented to her,
as in. the typical story entitled Can You Forgive Her, or
who through mistaken pride clings to an innocent error of
judgement, as in Kept in the Dark.
I am aware that I am treading here on slippery ground,
and that a diplomatic critic who desired to bring credit
upon a beloved author would not go about it today by
signalling his preeminence as a moralist. We have changed
all that. Even the exhorters from the pulpit know that
this is not the road to popularity, and you may hear an
unctuous preacher applauding our youth of the day because they have thrown over the traditional codes, and




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE                 99
assuring a college audience that he would not think of
talking to them about right and wrong or ask them to
"live a righteous life," since it is sufficient "to be an
artist and live a beautiful life." And so the docile youth
(for despite all that is said to the contrary the distinctive
note of youth is its docility and its lack of originality)
turns to the artists, naturally, for instruction, and hears
that beauty so far from being ethical may be even antipathetic to common morality. And he discovers that the
art most extolled by emancipated critics is reducing the
human soul to an irresponsible and irrational medium for
"the stream of consciousness," or, as Coleridge wrote long
before that cant phrase was invented, to a "shifting current in the shoreless chaos of the fancy in which the
streaming continuum of passive association is broken into
zig-zag by sensations from within and from without."
Such inhumanity is perhaps a counsel of perfection to be
left to the few prodigies of modernism. In ordinary practice the dehumanization of art means more concretely its
demoralization, to such a point that about the only form
of literature today wherein you may be sure that the
author will not play tricks with the Ten Commandments
is the detective story; the astonishing growth of which
branch of fiction can be traced in no small measure, I suspect, to the fact that there alone murder is still simply
murder, adultery simply adultery, theft simply theft, and
no more about it.
At any rate there is no doubt about the place of Trollope. His soul, to quote the antiquated language of Ben
Jonson,
Was never ground into such oily colours,
To flatter vice and daub iniquity.
I for one admire him for this integrity of mind, but I know
that a man may be sturdily, even intelligently, moral, yet




100        THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
withal a dull writer, that the temptation to preach      ay
invade the region of art disastrously. Morality is not -rt.
That is a canon of criticism, out of which the Demon of
the Absolute has formulated the deadly maxim that art has
nothing to do with morality. And it is, doubtless, under
the sway of this seductive article of faith in the aut itomy of art that Mr. Sadleir defends Trollope from the
ruinous charge of preaching, thus: "In his Autobiography
he [Trollope] speaks of the moral purpose of his fiction;
but no modern reader can take this statement very seriously. It is merely another example of the influence of his
period on his method of self-expression." Now I cannot
answer for the "modern reader," being uncertain whethe:
I should be justified in appropriating to myself so exalted
a title of enlightenment. But I suspect that Mr. Sadleir
despite his modernism, has suffered some confusion C
ideas between moral purpose and unmitigated preaching,
and that Trollope, whatever the modern reader may say
of him, was altogether serious in his claim to the former.
Let us examine the passage to which Mr. Sadleir refers;
it is important enough to bear quoting at length:
The writer of stories must please, or he will be nothing. And he
must teach whether he wish to teach or no. How shall he teach lessons
of virtue and at the same time make himself a delight to his readers?
That sermons are not in themselves often thought to be agreeable we
all know. Nor are disquisitions on moral philosophy supposed to be
pleasant reading for our idle hours. But the novelist, if he have a
conscience, must preach his sermons with the same purpose as the
clergyman, and must have his own system of ethics. If he can do this
efficiently, if he can make virtue alluring and vice ugly, while he
charms his readers instead of wearying them, then I think Mr. Carlyle need not call him distressed, nor talk of that long ear of fiction,
nor question whether he be or be not the most foolish of existing
mortals.
I think that many have done so; so many that we English novelists
may boast as a class that such has been the general result of our own




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE


101


wor, Looking back to the past generation, I may say with certainty
that such was the operation of the novels of Miss Edgeworth, Miss
Au"" n, and Walter Scott. Coming down to my own times, I find such
to Gave been the teaching of Thackeray, of Dickens, and of George
Eliot. Speaking, as I shall speak to any who may read these words,
with that absence of self-personality which the dead may claim, I will
bo-  that such has been the result of my own writing. Can any one
by search through the works of the six great English novelists I have
named, find a scene, a passage, or a word that would teach a girl to be
immodest, or a man to be dishonest? When men in their pages have
been described as dishonest and women as immodest, have they not
ever been punished? It is not for the novelist to say, baldly and simply:
"Because you lied here, or were heartless there, because you Lydia
Bennet forgot the lessons of your honest home, or you Earl Leicester.'ee false through your ambition, or you Beatrix loved too well the
fttter of the world, therefore you shall be scourged with scourges
either in this world or in the next"; but it is for him to show, as he
carries on his tale, that his Lydia, or his Leicester, or his Beatrix, will
(c dishonoured in the estimation of all readers by his or her vices.
I believe that Trollope in this profession of his faith
(which he goes out of his way to repeat several times in
the course of his fiction) was as serious as was Solomon in
his prayer for wisdom; I think that the critic, not to
mince matters, who would defend Trollope by calling
such thoughts a merely superficial blemish of the age, is
simply as ignorant of the canons of art as of the laws of
life. First of all, let us brush cant aside. Life is more than
art: if to be true to art it were necessary to be false to life,
then only a shallow dilettante would choose art; and if to
seek beauty it were necessary to forget righteousness,
then a whole-hearted man of experience would say, Perish
the name of beauty. If there is anything more than the
petulance of a spoiled child in Mr. Yeats's adoption of the
"proud words" of Villiers de L'Isle Adam, "As for living
-our servants will do that for us," then the career of a
servant is more honourable than that of a poet. But these
are the stale spewings of a moribund romanticism. Trol



102      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
lope was saying exactly this, that there is no such antinomy in the nature of things; and Trollope was right.
Of the intimate relation between ethics and any form
of art that deals directly with human nature I do not see
how there can be a reasonable doubt. Such a relation, in
fact, means no more than that he who would depict life
must be familiar with the springs and consequences of
action, and that in the large matters of experience the
tradition of the ages is probably richer in content than his
own limited observation. The problem for the artist, more
especially for the novelist, is not how far he shall accept
the obligations of this law-his art will gain in depth in
proportion to the measure of his acceptance-but how
he shall manifest its operation. And just on this point we
have the confession of a master of the craft. Preaching,
Trollope says, will not do; preaching, open and undisguised, will defeat the end of an art which, if it instructs,
must instruct by entertainment. So far, certainly, there
will be no demur. The only question in my own mind
would be whether Trollope has not conceded more than is
necessary in this direction, whether the moralist in the
writer must yield quite so much to the entertainer. For
my own part I am willing that the mover of the puppets
should step forth openly now and then upon the scene and
tell me how he is manipulating the strings. For me the
pleasure of artistic illusion is not broken by such interruptions, in moderation, but enhanced; I get the feeling
that the destinies of these mimic people are so near to
their creator's heart as to seem to him worthy of reflection
and comment like the doings of real men. And I observe
that this is the practice of Trollope himself, whatever his
precept, as might be proved by many instances, notably
by the paragraphs in the early part of The three Clerks,
where he not only pauses in his narrative to discuss Alaric




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE


103


Tudor's slight deflections from honesty out of which so
much trouble was to flow, but, like a good pulpit expositor, traces these moral delinquencies back to their source
in religious indifference.
IV
However, I am ready to admit that patience under sermonizing is an idiosyncrasy of my own, and that in general the novelist should screen his ethical theory under
the guise of an objective presentation of life. The problem
is how to wear the mask. What Trollope has to say on this
delicate matter might be summed up in the phrase
"poetic justice," which is the critic's equivalent for the
/Eschylean maxim SpacavrTL raOcv ("he that does must
suffer the consequences of his doing") and the Hindu doctrine of Karma, or for what St. Paul expressed in the language of theism: "Be not deceived; God is not mocked;
for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."
Now the principle of poetic justice, I know, has rather
fallen into disrepute among the critically expert, and with
some reason. To those of us whose memory goes back
beyond the present age it recalls the sort of story, like
Sandford and Merton, designed for Sabbath reading, in
which the good boy was very good and the bad boy very
bad, and both were rewarded accordingly. That was the
Victorian model, we say; it was straightforward and
easily managed, as simple as the contrary model exemplified in Tom Sawyer, wherein naughtiness in the end
carries off all the blessings of virtue. The weakness of the
older model (as indeed of its topsyturvy contrary) is that
it caricatures human nature and falsifies the facts of life.
Men are not divided quite so sharply into sheep and goats
as it would have us believe, nor, granted such a division,
is it quite so apparent that the pleasant things of the




104       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
world all go to the sheep. I put the matter crudely, but in
truth the difficulty is one which has never ceased to
trouble the conscience of the deepest thinkers from the
time of Job to the present day: how shall we retain our
belief in justice or any faith in the reality of virtue while
we behold the prizes for which men contend falling, as it
appears, indiscriminately upon the just and the unjust?
Plato had to meet that question, and did meet it frankly
in his reply to the emancipated youth of Athens who used
it as an argument to discredit the government of a divine
providence:
The fortunes of evil and unjust men, in public and private life, not
truly happy, but held to be happy in the exaggerated opinions of the
undiscerning, and celebrated without regard to fact in song and tales
of every sort,-these are the things that have brought you to impiety.
Or perhaps you have seen wicked old men reaching their term of years
and leaving their children's children in the highest honours, and are
amazed at the sight; or you are troubled by the stories you have heard,
or by the spectacle before your own eyes, of men frequently raising
themselves from small estate to tyranny and exalted place by their
acts of impious and high-handed wrong. And with these things happening, manifestly you are unwilling... to blame the gods as responsible for such events. (Laws 899.)
Plato answers these difficulties with a theodicy suitable
to a philosopher and a theologian. They confront the
novelist today just as peremptorily as they did the epic
bard when Homer sang his "Iliad of woes," or the tragedian when AEschylus presented the tangled destinies of
"Thebes or Pelops' line"; and the novelist today, like the
poet of old, must in some way make his response within
the medium of his own art. He may, of course, deny any
solution to the problem, and so adopt for his art the same
sort of scepticism as that which Plato encountered in philosophy. That he may do; and I would not deny that a
certain kind of entertainment can be derived from books




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE               1o0
which deftly and consistently skim the surface and make
us forget the hidden rocks and the fatal tides and the
depths beyond the utmost plumbing in this voyage that
we call life. There is an art of desipience and a place for it,
as Horace knew. Nor would I deny that, at the other extremity of scepticism, a kind of tragic earnestness, a
tragedy a rebours so to speak, may be imparted to literature by the very indignation of revolt against a world
which contains nothing to correspond to our moral sense
and is majestically indifferent to our spiritual demands.
Of that school Lucretius is the great exemplar. But in the
long run the ways of frivolity and of indignant agnosticism are not fruitful for art, and high achievement
therein must always be exceptional/If there be any conclusion to be drawn from the history of literature, it is
that the writer of stories "must teach whether he wish to
teach or no"; his very denial of the pertinence of the
moral law to art becomes in practice inevitably a form of
teaching, and as a matter of fact the modern style of fiction is as rampant with didacticism as was the most
orthodox fiction of the Victorians, though naturally with
a different lesson in view. Pick up a current novel of the
better sort like Mr. Young's Love Is Enough, and before
you reach the end you will find the plot twisted and the
characters actually warped into a tract for divorce; and
that is typical.
If then, under such a necessity, the author aims deliberately, as Trollope says, to "make virtue alluring and
vice ugly, while he charms his readers instead of wearying
them," how shall he proceed? If truth to life forbids him
to do this by too open a distribution of rewards and penalties, then he must have recourse to more indirect means.
He must by cunning suggestion carry our thoughts into
those secret places of the heart where, beneath all the dis



106      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
tractions of blind events and the defensive crust of vanity,
our conscience dwells face to face with those everlasting
laws to which the Antigone of Sophocles appealed against
the tyranny of appearances:
The unwritten statutes, ever fixed on high,
Which none of mortal heritage can deny;
For not of yesterday but to all years
Their birth, and no man knoweth whence or why.
Unless the poet or novelist, oftener by a hint than by open
declamation, can centre our judgement of his characters
upon those high laws and by them ultimately move and
control our emotions, he is at the last, however rich his
talent and refined his method otherwise, no true artist but
a mountebank of letters. His upheld mirror has caught
but the glancing lights, not the full face of nature. And
this is the canon of poetic justice.
V
Here should be noticed a peculiarity of Trollope's attitude towards the denizens of his imaginary world which,
perhaps, requires some defence. We hear a good deal
about the objectivity of art and the detachment of the
artist from the moral implications of his work. And there
would seem to be an element of truth in this maxim. A
true artist will often obliterate himself so far as to suppress any expression of opinion, letting the facts speak for
themselves. I might even suspect that such alone would
be the procedure of great art, were it not for the part of
the chorus in Greek tragedy. But to translate this law of
reticence into an obligation of indifference laid upon the
writer is simply a step in the direction of a divorce between art and life which must culminate in perfect sterility. At any rate this certainly was not the method of




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE                107
Trollope. As Taine, the absolutist of science in literature,
complained of Dickens, so it might be said of Trollope:
"I1 ne fait jamais abstraction de la morale.... I n'a
pas cette indifference de l'artiste qui produit le bien ou
le mal comme la nature.... I n'aime pas les passions
pour elles-memes." On the contrary, like his own Lady
Carbury, the novelist of l7he Way We Live Now, he might
say: "One becomes so absorbed in one's plot and one's
characters! One loves the lovable so intensely, and hates
with such fixed aversion those who are intended to be
hated." There is no indifference in Trollope, some would
say no reticence. We are never at a loss to know how he
feels towards his characters and their actions. For example he pursues the frigid but impeccable Lady Dumbello
through several books with a kind of sullen implacability;
he revels in his love of Lily Dale and Mary Lovelace; he
avows his hatred of Crosbie and gloats over the rascal's
discomfitures; he "claims a tear" for Mr. Sowerby, after
balancing his villainies and his sense of honour. Sometimes his practice leads him into a curious sort of double
presentation, as in his reflections over the peril of his beloved Eleanor in Barchester T'owers: "And then it must be
remembered that such a marriage as that which the archdeacon contemplated with disgust, which we who know
Mr. Slope so well would regard with equal disgust, did not
appear so monstrous to Mr. Harding, because in his charity he did not hate the chaplain as the archdeacon did,and as we do." That, I take it, is the sort of thing done
openly and naively, which Henry James tried to accomplish by tricks of artful sophistication. The question would
be whether this frank-dealing of Trollope is good or bad
art; and my own answer would be that, whatever may be
said of the method theoretically, its actual result is often
to enhance the artistic effect. Take the story of Crosbie




108       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
and Lily Dale in the Small House at Allington. The unconcealed vindictiveness of the author towards the villain
of the piece really acts as a clever device to bring out more
clearly the charm and loveliness of his heroine. Or take
the case of the incomparable mistress of the bishop's
palace. One day, Trollope tells us in the Autobiography, he
was sitting in the Athenaeum Club at work on The Last
Chronicle of Barset, and heard two clergymen abusing his
novels because the same characters were reintroduced so
often.
Then one of them fell foul of Mrs. Proudie. It was impossible for
me not to hear their words, and almost impossible to hear them and
be quiet. I got up, and standing between them, I acknowledged myself
to be the culprit. "As to Mrs. Proudie," I said, "I will go home and
kill her before the week is over." And so I did.
And then Trollope adds, and this is the point of the anecdote: "I have sometimes regretted the deed, so great was
my delight in writing about Mrs. Proudie."
That is why the lady abides in our memory also as a
veritable person whom we have known in the flesh and
have judged in the final court of conscience. It is for the
same reason that the author's habit of interrupting the
narrative to expatiate on his own feelings does not diminish but heightens the reality of his imaginary world, and
that he converts his readers into accomplices with him in
executing the law of poetic justice.
VI
The fact is that ethics and ~esthetics are inseparable in
art. Or, more precisely, just in proportion as the practice
or criticism of art becomes superficial, ethics and aesthetics tend to fall apart, whereas just in proportion as such
practice or criticism strikes deeper, ethics and Easthetics




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE


109


are more and more implicated one in the other until they
lose their distinction in a common root. In this sense
Keats's dictum, "Truth beauty is etc.," may be applauded as profoundly right; though the same dictum
may be turned into a mischievous fallacy when taken, as
it too often is taken by the shallower aesthetes, to mean
that beauty may supplant truth, or to justify the theory
that art exists for its own sake in its own world, and has
nothing to do with morality.
But this is not quite the view of Mr. Sadleir; and so,
passing on in the chain of concessions, we are not surprised to find our encomiast of Trollope depriving him of
other qualities which would lift him out of the rut of
cheerful mediocrity. "Both [Dickens and Trollope]," says
Mr. Sadleir, "lacked a lively sense for fine art, for the
power of spiritual principle or for natural beauty; but
both, where dramatic force in landscape or in the handiwork of man could help to illustrate a character, called it
to their aid and worked it dexterously." A strange sentence from the pen of a professed Trollopian, a sentence,
I make bold to say, that contains about as much intertangled truth and error as could well be packed together
in so few words. It is true that Trollope does not take art
and artists for his theme, and, with the results before us
of novels based on a study of the "artistic temperament,"
we ought to be thankful for his abstention, or, if you will,
his insensibility, in that direction. But to say that he
lacked a sense for the power of spiritual principle is a
sheer calumny, as I have attempted to show under the
head of religion. As for natural beauty, if Mr. Sadleir
means that Trollope did not sprinkle his pages with
purple patches of descriptive "fine writing" which have
little or nothing to do with the plot or the characters, if
he intends no more than this when he complains that "in




110     THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
the finer forms of fancy he [Trollope] was deficient," then
again I for one am thankful for such a deficiency. But I
fear that more is intended than this. It would be tedious
-though he himself is never dull-to follow Mr. Sadleir
as he develops his thesis in detail. The point I would make
is that the final impression left by his reservations and
explanations is so exaggerated as to be fundamentally
wrong. For instance Trollope's "descriptions of country
town or country house." No doubt the prime concern of
the novelist with such scenes is as they affect or indicate
the life of his people, and that surely is good art. But to
infer that he has no sense of the picturesque in itself, no
feeling for "the idealisms of the past," or is content before
such qualities "to parrot text-book phrases of appreciation,"-that I maintain approaches the line of critical
hebetude. "In The Small House at Allington, Mrs. Dale's
cottage and the Squire's home," says Mr. Sadleir, "are
taken so nearly for granted, that one can almost imagine
Trollope glancing at any Victorian wood-engraving of
the houses in a conventional English village of the time
and telling himself that everyone would know the kind of
cottage and the kind of manor house that Lily and her
uncle must naturally inhabit." I can only reply that, with
the minute and picturesque descriptions before me in the
first chapter of the book, such a statement strikes me as
simply amazing. And I fail to understand how, in making
his list of descriptive passages for the purpose of showing
their poverty, Mr. Sadleir can have overlooked Ullathorne Court and Carbury and the country places in
Phineas Finn.
The sum of the matter is that, in making his eulogy, our
lover of Trollope-and it must be remembered that I
write of Mr. Sadleir as the typical Trollopian-thinks it
necessary to apologize for him as intellectually without




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE


I111


ideas and imaginatively without wings. There is for instance this quotation of a review written by Henry James
and published in the Nation of January 4, I866:
Our great objection to 'be Belton Estate is that we seem to be reading a work written for children, a work prepared for minds unable to
think, a work below the apprehension of the average man or woman.
5the Belton Estate is a stupid book... essentially, organically stupid.
It is without a single idea. It is utterly incompetent to the primary
function of a book of whatever nature-namely to suggest thought.
Now Mr. Sadleir does not exactly endorse this "excoriation"; he quotes it rather to illustrate the beginning of the
reaction against Trollope that culminated with the aesthetical insurgence of the closing century. But neither on
the other hand does he totally reject it as a piece of ignorant imbecility; he compromises, and makes concessions,
in a manner almost as exasperating as that of James, as
thus:
Perhaps, to those who demand of fiction what Trollope does not
pretend to give, it [the novel reviewed] may be an aimless irritationundistinguished, a waste of time and labour, incompetent (in the
Jamesian sense) to suggest a single thought. Nevertheless, to a reader
in sympathy with the Trollopian method and mentality [that is to say
a method awkward, idealess, pedestrian, commonplace, unimaginative, narrow, etc.], the book is a delight for its smoothness, its subtlety
and its faultless adjustment of character and circumstance.
Evidently Mr. Sadleir is endeavouring to be conciliatory by the fairness and balance of his judgement. More
bluntly, I should say that a reader to whom no single
thought is suggested by a book which is a delight for its
faultless adjustment of character and circumstance has
a very strange notion of what thinking really is, that such
an adjustment (Matthew Arnold would call it the "criticism of life") is precisely the method by which the novelist should display his realization of ideas. I suspect that




112      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
Mr. Sadleir has fallen into the not uncommon error of
identifying thought with fussy activity of mind. To me
the right identification of thought is rather with the perception of truth, and there is no truth more important or
profound or more difficult of attainment than that which
concerns the adjustment of character and circumstance.
The idealism of Plato means at bottom no more than this,
though philosophy, as Plato practised it, may have a
larger conception of character and a deeper insight into
circumstance and, by its power of generalization, a more
permanent appeal than is possible to a medium of expression which is bound to expatiate in the minute and ephemeral details of living. The final count against the powerful
and, superficially considered, more penetrating novelists
of Russia will be that, with all their vivid grasp of circumstance, they have failed to comprehend the ultimate springs
of character. And the final shelving of Henry James, to
whom Trollope is merely stupid and without ideas of any
sort, will be caused by the fact that in his endless chatter
about this very adjustment of character and circumstance
both character and circumstance tend to disappear-they
do actually so disappear in his imitators-in a network of
abstract relationships. I wonder sometimes whether those
who delight, rather superciliously often, in the Jamesian
method, and who think they are thinking when they unravel his tangled sleave of oblique suggestions, are not the
victims of a brain restlessly active yet with no sense of
what is seriously worth thinking about. A man may have
an inordinate subtlety of intellect without ever coming in
sight of an idea.
VII
What Mr. Sadleir concedes to his favourite novelist is,
in the language of Professor Santayana, "a vast sympa



MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE                113
thetic participation in the daily life of mankind," or, in
his own language, "the inspiration of humanity and the
instinct for its interpretation,"-certainly a large concession and, on its positive side, eminently right. It is true
that human life as it is lived in this world of ours was the
dominant interest of Trollope's mind; it is true that religion and politics and art, as specific activities, were in
themselves subordinate with him to this main interest,
and further that in so far as he permitted them to enter
into his fiction it was rather as concrete factors in the
shaping of character than as the material for abstract
ideas. But this, I take it, is not, property understood, a
concession so much as an appreciation of the fact that
Trollope knew his business as a writer of novels. I guess
that this is what Mr. Sadleir is really trying to say, and
what makes him in the end a genuine Trollopian. I suspect that the tone of apology which so annoys me has
crept into his "Commentary" from the baneful influence,
unacknowledged and perhaps unconscious on his part, of
the current theory of the dehumanization of art. Because
Trollope's tales are superlatively human, because the
very warp and woof of them is woven out of the loves and
hates, the joys and sorrows, the good and evil, of life,
looking to the adjustment of character and circumstance,
therefore, though they may be infinitely entertaining, yet
they must be poor art, the product of a brain devoid of
imagination and ideas. So I explain to myself why a
reader so acute otherwise belittles critically what instinctively he admires, and so I am confirmed in my
opinion that a theory of art which leads to such a contradiction is intrinsically false.
Undoubtedly Trollope himself was measurably responsible for the heavy decline in his reputation that followed
immediately upon his death and that lingers on today in




114       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
the compromising tone of his most ardent admirers. The
mischief was done by the confessions in his Autobiography,
published by his son in I883. Trollope like Dr. Johnson,
whom in some solid John-Bullish traits he resembles, was
not ashamed to admit that he wrote for money, and, in
this unlike Johnson, kept an account of every penny
earned. Nor was he debarred by pretensions to genius
from exhibiting the routine of his labour at the desk.
Thus, with the laudable pretext of guiding young aspirants to literary success, he describes his method of composition:
It had at this time become my custom,-and it still is my custom,
though of late I have become a little more lenient to myself,- to write
with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every
quarter of an hour. I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went. But my three hours were not
devoted entirely to writing. I always began my task by reading the
work of the day before, an operation which would take me half an
hour, and which consisted chiefly in weighing with my ear the sound
of the words and phrases.
Take with this the passages in which he dilates on his
ability to get through his appointed task in trains and
inns and wayside stations, and particularly the extraordinary account of writing Dr. Thorne (one of the very
best of his novels) on shipboard during a tempestuous
voyage to Alexandria, when more than once he left his
paper on the cabin table and rushed away to be sick in the
privacy of his stateroom. Trollope himself may draw the
moral, labor omnia vincit improbus; but it must be remembered that these confessions were first read by the public
when a wave of belated romanticism was sweeping over
England with its exaltation of temperamental spontaneity, and when such labour as Trollope advocated was improbus in a very different sense from that intended by




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE                  115
Virgil. Naturally Trollope was set down as a self-convicted Philistine, a stodgy, uninspired, unimaginative,
unideaed penny-a-liner. It did not occur to the nympholeptic exquisites who made the standards for the 'eighties
and 'nineties that Trollope's procedure was a notable triumph of the disciplined will, nor, had such a thought
occurred to them, would it have redeemed the traitor to
genius in their eyes; for in their psychology decision of
will, like decision of judgement, meant a suppression of
creative originality. Not in the workshop of a Trollope
would those decadent forms of beauty be evoked into
which, as Pater was to say, "the soul with all its maladies
has passed."
And there is another aspect of Trollope's confessions
too often overlooked. He may have boasted of his ability
to put down so many words in so many minutes like a
well constructed machine; in fact this was merely the
mechanical act of recording what had been conceived and
shaped and passionately felt through long hours of preliminary meditation. He was, besides his business of
authorship, a much occupied man; yet somehow he contrived through the distractions of work and pleasure and
during his incessant journeyings to and fro, to live with
the people of his fictitious world as few other novelists
have done. The habit began long before he actually put
pen to paper, in those early days when as a young hobbledehoy, to use his own word, he was cast upon London
without friends or resources:
Thus it came to pass that I was always going about with some
castle in the air firmly built within my mind. Nor were these efforts
in architecture spasmodic, or subject to constant change from day to
day. For weeks, for months, if I remember rightly, from year to year,
I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws,
to certain proportions, and proprieties, and unities.... There can, I




ii6       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
imagine, hardly be a more dangerous mental practice; but I hozfdfi
doubted whether, had it not been my practice, I should WVer nave
written a novel. I learned in this way to maintain an interest in a fictitious story, to dwell on a work created by my own imagination, and
to live in a world altogether outside the world of my own material life.
In after years I have done the same,-with this difference, that I have
discarded the hero [himself] of my early dreams, and have been able
to lay my own identity aside.
And any reader of the Autobiography knows how masterfully this double life was carried on "in after years."
There is the passage which tells how Barsetshire, created
by the author's imagination from several actual counties
and cathedral towns, was all mapped out in his mind,
with its roads and railways laid down and the relative
position of its houses carefully plotted.' And there is the
warning given to the would-be writer that he can never
make the creatures of his brain stand out like breathing
persons to his reader unless he himself knows them, and
can never know them unless he lives with them in the full
reality of established intimacy, present to him   when he
lies down to sleep and when he wakes from his dreams, as
people whom he has learned to love and hate, with whom
he argues and quarrels and pleads and makes terms of
pardon and submission:
It is so that I have lived with my characters, and thence has come
whatever success I have obtained. There is a gallery of them, and of
all in that gallery I may say that I know the tone of the voice, and the
colour of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the very clothes they
wear. Of each man I could assert whether he would have said these or
the other words; of every woman, whether she would then have smiled
or so have frowned. When I shall feel that this intimacy ceases, then
I shall know that the old horse should be turned out to grass.
'One of the most interesting things in Mr. Sadleir's book is a comparison of the maps of Barsetshire as conceived by Mr. Spencer van
Bokkelen Nichols and by Father Ronald Knox with the map drawn
by Trollope himself and found three or four years ago among some
papers.




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE               117
It isalmittedly because Trollope held so vividly in his
mind this fictitious society and possessed the art to make
it real to his readers that he is loved and admired by those
who profess to find him-though I think they do not
quite believe what they say-so insensible to the higher
claims of art and so devoid of ideas. And what a gallery!
From the first and the second Duke of Omnium to Mr.
Moulder and his commercial friends in Orley Farm, from
Bishop Proudie and Dr. Grantly to the harassed Mr.
Quiverful of Puddingdale, from Lady Glencora to the
homeless Carry Brattle, what variety and precision and
veracity of portrayal! From the agonized humiliation of
Mr. Crawley, the tender piety of Mr. Harding, the devouring egotism of Lopez and George Vavasor, the tortured love of Lady Laura Standish, to the cringing criminality of Emilius, what range of passions and emotions
and motives, how deftly the reactions of character and
circumstance are adjusted, how cunningly the upward
and downward paths of conscience are traced! There is
nothing like it in any other English novelist except Scott
and Dickens; and Trollope to me at least has this advantage that he is never paralysed, as the mighty Sir Walter
sometimes was, by the grandeur of his noblemen or the
sweetness of his heroines, and that his people are never,
like some of Dickens', caricatures or mere gramophones
limited to a single phrase.
Nor was this marvel of creation achieved by the mere
mimicry of observation without reflection. If any novelist
ever wove his plots with a definite idea before him about
the meaning of life in general, it was this same "unideaed"
Trollope; he is as clear in his conception of human destinies as George Eliot, and if anything truer to the facts.
Of late years there has arisen what one would hesitate to
call a school, but what is rather a disorganized band of




n18      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
marauders in fiction, who have this one thing in common,
that life appears to them as a struggle for existence
without significance or purpose or law or ulterior hope, as
a blind game ruled over by "unsolvable disorder and brutality," in which the players are no more than channels
for an endless flux of sensations. Love, deprived of its
sanctions and obligations, has been surrendered for the
transient flames of lust, and even lust has lost the power
to delude its victims with a promise of satisfaction; ambition offers no rewards worthy of effort, and education is
derided as a paralysis of pedantry. For the adjustment of
character and circumstance these seers of disillusion bring
us problems without answer. The world to their wisdom is
merely futile, and they themselves have been neatly designated "futilitarians." I do not deny that in the hands of
a clever manipulator like Mr. Aldous Huxley such a pose
may produce a kind of sparkling satire, but its crepitations of joy very soon acquire a deadly monotony. I know
too that, from another angle, the modern attitude may be
defended as bearing in solution the stuff of pure tragedy,
for from /Eschylus to Shakespeare and Calderon the futility of life has been a constant theme. But with this difference, that to the great tragedians always a vision of a
higher order guarded by incorruptible laws of the spirit
lay behind the fluttering curtain of illusions, and that
beyond the fitful accidents of time they discerned, or
dimly surmised, what Milton at the close of his drama
named "the unsearchable dispose of highest wisdom":.His servants he with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismist,
And calm of mind, all passion spent.
However that be, I suspect that what is beginning to
attract more and more attention to Trollope at the pres



MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE


119


ent time, what is winning the affection of an ever growing
circle of readers and restoring him to his rightful place in
the estimation of critics, is not so much his art in the
telling of stories and his discernment into the vagaries of
human character, as the incontestable fact that he is, of
all the novelists of the Victorian era, the one most contrary to the desolating mood of the "futilitarians." To
Trollope preeminently life presented itself as a game
worth the candles. The goal which his heroes set before
their eyes may not always have been of the most exalted
type. His Dr. Grantly, scheming to marry his daughter
to a marquis, and rejoicing in his success, may be condemned as a worldly snob, and indeed his creator did not
deal with him too gently; but even such an ambition,
frankly and actively cherished, is something; it is nobler
than the flabby indifference of our heroes who drift on the
tides of temperament with no rudder at all. Success in
politics or affairs may not seem the most exalted end of
life. Nor did they so seem in themselves to Trollope. No
one was more bitter against those who succeeded outwardly through grasping or dishonourable or hasty means.
His Melmottes and Undy Scotts and Alaric Tudors are
pilloried mercilessly in novel after novel; his excoriation
of the devotees of "excelsior" at any cost extends at
times to something like fanatical antipathy to the modern
methods of business. What he held to be desirable, what
he presented always as really worthy of respect, was the
slow and unostentatious distinction that comes normally
to strength of character and steadiness of purpose,
checked by the humility of religious conviction. His estimation of these things, as he attained them in his own
life, he records simply and bravely at the close of the
Autobiography:




120        THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
If the rustle of a woman's petticoat has ever stirred my blood; if
a cup of wine has been a joy to me; if I have thought tobacco at midnight in pleasant company to be one of the elements of an earthly
paradise; if now and again I have somewhat recklessly fluttered a
~5 note over a card-table; —of what matter is that to any reader? I
have betrayed no woman. Wine has brought me to no sorrow. It has
been the companionship of smoking that I have loved, rather than the
habit. I have never desired to win money, and I have lost none. To
enjoy the excitement of pleasure, but to be free from its vices and ill
effects,-to have the sweet, and leave the bitter untasted,-that has
been my study. The preachers tell us that this is impossible. It seems
to me that hitherto I have succeeded fairly well. I will not say that I
have never scorched a finger,-but I carry no ugly wounds. For what
remains to me of life I trust for my happiness still chiefly to my workhoping that when the power of work be over with me, God may be
pleased to take me from a world in which, according to my view, there
can be no joy; secondly, to the love of those who love me; and then to
my books.
VIII
Such are the final reflections of Trollope on the meaning
of life to him, and they may be applied equally as a criterion of the vast range of characters described in his
novels; for what Trollope lived he wrote, and what he
wrote he lived, the man and the author being in his case
transparently identical. And what are we to make of such
a confession? It should be read, of course, with the preliminary statement in mind, that in recording his labours
and relaxations he had deliberately refrained from including the events of his "inner life" (as in a measure he had
kept them out of his fiction); but, even so, I fear his
words will be held by many to justify the reservation of
those who admire him yet cannot forget that he is the
typical Victorian. I do not feel so. Victorian he may be;
but why apologize? As a matter of fact, in sobriety of
temper, in appreciation of the beauty of clean living, in
proud reticence, in freedom from the note of "defeatism"




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE


121


which has crept into literature (and the boasted separation of art and life is an aspect of the wide-spreading admission of defeat), Trollope is Victorian only in the sense
that in these points the era of the good Queen was the
consummation of what is the persistent spirit of her people. I make bold to say that there is nothing in our language more essentially British than Trollope's A'utobiography and novels, unless it be Boswell's 7ohnson. And for
that spirit I see no cause to be humble. I know there is
another side to the English genius, as exhibited in
Shakespeare and Shelley; but I think that a right understanding of the former will bring him closer to Johnson
and Trollope than might at first be suspected, though his
imagination no doubt far outreaches theirs, and I believe
that the divorce in Shelley between character and ideals
has been, so far as it is typical, a danger signal of national
degeneration morally and artistically.
And there is another aspect of Trollope's work which
shows him a representative not only of the spirit of England but of that older tradition that goes back to the prehistoric roots of Aryan civilization. To understand this
kinship so as to get the full measure of satisfaction from
many of his novels I know of no better preparation than a
perusal of such a book as Fustel de Coulanges' Cite
antique, in which the origin of European customs is carried back to the primitive cult of the dead. From that cult
rose the institution of the family as an embodiment of a
common life passed on from generation to generation. On
the living father, as the priest who for all those associated
with him offered the yearly and daily sacrifices to the
fathers who preceded him, depended that continuity of
memory which kept the dead in existence as powers shaping and controlling the destinies of the clan. From him the
duty was handed on to the son, when he himself sank into




122      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
the shadowy realm of the Manes. Hence the authority
vested in him to admit into the circle of the sacred inheritance by adoption or to eject from it by exile, in the old
days even by capital punishment. Hence the law which
made the wife when she crossed her husband's threshold
an integral but subordinate member of the new family, as
the prospective mother of the heir to be. From the vestal
flame kept burning in the inmost recesses of the house,
where the sacrifices were offered and the images of the
dead were exposed, sprang the reverence for the home as
something more than a mere place of shelter for those in
possession, the sense of mysterious presences out of the
invisible world which still clings to us with a kind of dim
inexplicable comfort and awe when we gather about the
kindled hearth. Hence the wider sacredness of the enclosed land about the house, originally revered as the
underground abode of the buried which could not be
alienated without interrupting the memorial rites of
homage and so cutting off the communion of the living
with the dead. Who shall track the devious channels by
which these primitive beliefs have travelled down the
centuries? Who shall say how much their influence rests
on the mere momentum of superstition, and how far they
are rooted in the deepest strata of human experience? We
of this day respond with waning sympathy to their appeal; we find it difficult to comprehend their hold upon
our fathers, for we are beginning at last to gather the
fruit of the revolution brought about by Cobden and
Bright and Peel, when the institution of the family was
annulled by transferring economical power from the inheritors of land to the self-made masters of machinery.
We think that revolution was final; but was it?
At any rate a good deal of the fiction of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, if we wish to relish its deeper




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE


123


implications, must be read with that tradition consciously
or unconsciously in mind; and this is particularly true of
Trollope. I do not know that he was familiar with the
special studies of Fustel de Coulanges (though he was
well enough versed in classical literature); but that he
was sensitive to the effects of that cult, still active in his
age, which made an ancestral estate into something more
than a mere parcel of land and which imposed on its
present possessor a sense of sacred responsibility to the
past and the future,-of this there is ample evidence. A
few introductory sentences to tuhe Small House at Allington leave no doubt of his purpose to embody that spirit
in fiction:
It had been a religion among them; and seeing that the worship had
been carried on without fail, that the vestal fire had never gone down
upon the hearth, I should not have said that the Dales had walked
their ways without high principle. To this religion they had all adhered, and the new heir had ever entered in upon his domain without
other encumbrances than those with which he himself was then already burdened. And yet there had been no entail. The idea of an
entail was not in accordance with the peculiarities of the Dale mind.
It was necessary to the Dale religion that each squire should have the
power of wasting the acres of Allington,-and that he should abstain
from wasting them.
Again, in Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, the cult
of the family as dependent on the continuity of inheritance gives the problem about which the whole plot revolves. Sir Alured Wharton, in T'he Prime Minister,with his joy over the new heir to the property, his readiness, amounting almost to impatience, to be gathered to
his fathers under the assurance that "he would return to
Wharton as a spirit, and take a ghostly share in the prosperity of the farms,"-is a pure personification of a faith
thousands of years old; and, to go no further, Roger Carbury performs a like function in The Way We Live Now.




124      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
Interpreted by the light of this same tradition, certain
traits of Trollope's society, which may irritate the uninformed reader as false to human nature, take on the
glamour and authority of hoary antiquity,-the sentimental submission of the women of the family to the lord
of the house, the conflict between filial piety and mating
love, the conception of a Plantagenet Palliser as the ideal
gentleman, the admiration of a scheming Dean Lovelace
as the "fortunate man" in life, the humorous acceptance
of the complacencies of Lord De Guest and his sister, the
anxieties of the Poppenjoys. We may tag these conventions with the epithet of mid-Victorian; they are that, and
they are something more. We may repudiate them as the
marks of British insularity; in their ethical colour they
are that, but they are still something more. They have
their source in the historical beginnings of our race, and
if we think the flurry of a petulant modernism has put
them away forever, we are mightily ignorant of the subtle
ways of the Spirit that pronounces: "Far or forgot to me
is near." It is because, beyond his understanding of the
individual heart, I find in Trollope this feeling for the vast
integrity of civilization, embodied in what Burke and
Bagehot glorified as the "stupidity" of a people too wise
to be clever, that I go back to him with ever renewed
interest and with certainty of refreshment when the
illusions of life press too closely upon me. It is because
most of our recent novelists, as children of their day, have
lost contact with the long lessons of time, that the passions they analyse seem so superficial, the problems they
raise so futile, and the life they portray of so little significance.
At the very end of his Autobiography Trollope, who had
peopled the world of memory with so many characters
and was himself about to pass into that shadowy realm,




MY DEBT TO TROLLOPE              125
makes his farewell to the living: "Now I stretch out my
hand, and from the further shore I bid adieu to all who
have cared to read any among the many words that I
have written." Out of respect for that brave and honest
soul, in gratitude for all the consolations he has afforded
me, and even now affords in this hour of my writing when
the shadows of death have congregated about my own
hearth, I take the proffered hand.








GEORGE BORROW


T         HE goodBorrovianprobablygothis first initiation
into the sect (for Borrow, like Peacock, is one of
those originals who gather about them a peculiar
people) through the sheer love of adventure. Certainly
there is enough of that commodity in Borrow to allure the
boy and still fascinate the man, despite the long stretches
of dulness and the occasional effect of repetition that
somehow seem almost inevitable to a genre which ought
theoretically to be freest from them. But the Borrovian
has another anchor to hold his interest. As from the mere
entertainment of Borrow's works, which are little more
than a continued autobiography, he is drawn on to study
the writer, he finds himself looking at one of the most
enigmatical and tantalizing personalities of English literature. Such, at least, has been emphatically my own experience while reading the new biography and collection
of letters' and after them re-reading Borrow's works. The
outlines of the desired portrait are clear enough, but when
7'Tbe Life of George Borrow. Compiled from unpublished official documents, his works, correspondence, etc. By Herbert Jenkins. New York:
G. P. Putnam's Sons.
Letters of George Borrow to the British and Foreign Bible Society. Published by direction of the Committee. Edited by T. H. Darlow. New
York: George H. Doran Co.-When Dr. W. I. Knapp wrote his Life
of George Borrow (1899) these letters were supposed to have been lost;
they were discovered in the crypt of the Bible House the very week in
which that biography appeared. They add nothing which destroys the
value and interest of Dr. Knapp's excellent work.




128      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
I have thought to touch the heart of the man I have been
curiously piqued and baffled. At times I have been ready
to believe that the enigma really had no answer, and
there was no possibility of seeing the face behind the
masque simply because no such face existed and the
masque was all. Which would be only another way of
saying that Borrow escapes us by possessing the innocence and elusiveness of Nature herself.
Yet in a superficial way Borrow is one of the easiest of
men to place. Both in his life and his writings he belongs
clearly to the great picaresque tradition which begins as
a conscious kind with the story of Lazarillo de q'ormes and
in England is continued by Nash and Defoe and Smollett,
and was not forgotten by Thackeray when he created his
magnificent Becky Sharp. It should seem as if an irresistible instinct of his nature led Borrow to associate himself with the outcast and Bohemian and adventurous
waifs of the world. He was born at East Dereham, near
Norwich, in I803, while his father, a captain of the militia, was absent on a recruiting expedition, and his early
years, like Sterne's, were passed much in various camps
and barracks. From the first he was unamenable to ordinary discipline. He describes himself in childhood as "a
lover of nooks and retired corners." At school he rebelled
against the routine of study, and his first intellectual
awakening came, properly enough, from the pages of
Robinson Crusoe.
At the age of seven he became acquainted with a wandering snake-charmer and herbalist, who filled his mind
with strange tales of the King of the Vipers, and on departing left with the boy a tamed and fangless reptile,
which he used to feed with milk and carry about with him
in his walks. One day he surprised a family of gipsies in




GEORGE BORROW


129


their tent, and was saved from harsh treatment ordeath
by his ready wit and his uncanny pet:
"On the spy," said the woman, "hey? I'll drown him in the sludge
in the toad-pond over the hedge."
"So we will," said the man, "drown him anon in the mud!"
"Drown me, will you?" said I; "I should like to see you! What's all
this about? Was it because I saw you with your hands full of straw
plait, and my mother there-"
"Yes," said the woman; "what was I about?"
Myself. How should I know? Making bad money, perhaps!...
"I'll strangle thee," said the beldame, dashing at me. "Bad money,
is it?"
"Leave him to me, wifekin," said the man, interposing; "you shall
now see how I'll baste him down the lane."
Myself. I tell you what, my chap, you had better put down that
thing of yours; my father lies concealed within my tepid breast, and
if to me you offer any harm or wrong, I'll call him forth to help me
with his forked tongue.
Man. What do you mean, ye Bengui's bantling? I never heard such
discourse in all my life; playman's speech or Frenchman's talkwhich, I wonder? Your father! Tell the mumping villain that if he
comes near my fire I'll serve him out as I will you. Take that-Tiny
Jesus! What have we got here? Oh, delicate Jesus! what is the matter
with the child?
I had made a motion which the viper understood; and now, partly
disengaging itself from my bosom, where it had lain perdu, it raised
its head to a level with my face, and stared upon my enemy with its
glittering eyes.
Borrow, when this occurred, was not older than eight.
The story, which is related in Lavengro, might be rejected
as a myth, were it not so entirely of a piece with his whole
career. The upshot of the encounter was a warm friendship with the gipsy boy, Ambrose Smith (or Petulengro,
the Romany equivalent of Smith), which became one of
the strongest influences in Borrow's life. Under the name
of Jasper he plays only the second role in the pages of
Lavengro, and from his lips comes the famous creed, which
contains the immemorial philosophy of the true vaga



130        THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
bond, and which, once heard, will somehow forever after
blow through a man's intellectual heavens like the clean
wind it celebrates:
"What is your opinion of death, Mr. Petulengro?" said I, as I sat
down beside him.
"My opinion of death, brother, is much the same as that in the old
song of Pharaoh.... When a man dies he is cast into the earth, and
his wife and child sorrow over him. If he has neither wife nor child,
then his father and mother, I suppose; and if he is quite alone in the
world, why, then he is cast into the earth, and there is an end of the
matter."
"And do you think that is the end of a man?"
"There's an end of him, brother, more's the pity."
"Why do you say so?"
"Life is sweet, brother."
"Do you think so?"
"Think so! There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun,
moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise the wind on
the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?"
"I would wish to die-"
"You talk like a gorgio-which is the same as talking like a foolwere you a Rommany Chal you would talk wiser. Wish to die, indeed!
A Rommany Chal would wish to live forever!"
"In sickness, Jasper?"
"There's the sun and stars, brother."
"In blindness, Jasper?"
"There's the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that,
I would gladly live for ever. Dosta, we'll now go to the tents and put
on the gloves; and I'll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is
to be alive, brother!"
Another lasting influence on Borrow's character was
the conversation of William Taylor of Norwich, a vagabond of the mind who delighted, as Southey said, in "supporting strange and paradoxical opinions," and had "unsettled the faith of many." In one of the chapters of
Lavengro (No. xxiii) Borrow tells how Taylor instructed
him in German, and drew strange parallels between the
philosophic profundity of that people and their profi



GEORGE BORROW                        131
ciency in smoking.' Borrow was to repudiate his older
friend's opinion of the Bible as not quite sound in philosophy, but "respectable from its antiquity," although
sometimes one wonders a little how much of Borrow's enthusiasm for the book was due to its religious content, and
how much to the fact that it is the production of a wandering and homeless race. Of Taylor's nonchalant way of
free-thinking more, perhaps, entered into the young man's
brain than he himself ever knew.
Having spent five years with a firm of Norwich solicitors in the laudable exercise of learning various outlandish
languages and neglecting the law, in April of 1824, Borrow, now foot-free by the death of his father, went up to
London with a few pounds in his pocket and a "small
green box" filled with manuscripts, chiefly translations
from the Welsh and Danish. One of the poems gave this
description of the author, faithful to life, unless certain
friendships broken when his temper became irascible with
age and disappointments may be held to annul a single
line:
A lad who twenty tongues can talk,
And sixty miles a day can walk;
Drink at a draught a pint of rum,
And then be neither sick nor dumb;
Can tune a song and make a verse,
And deeds of Northern kings rehearse;
Who never will forsake his friend
While he his bony fist can bend;
And, though averse to broil and strife,
Will fight a Dutchman with a knife;
O that is just the lad for me,
And such is honest six-foot-three.
'There are several fine passages on smoking in the letters of William
Taylor, published by Robberds. He believed heartily in the efficacy
of tobacco for the ills of body and soul: "A cigar, the friend of silent
reminiscence, the peculiar incense for the shrines of Harpocrates and
Mnemosyne."




132      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
He found the metropolis cruelly indifferent to the
charms of Ab Gwilym, whom he nevertheless maintained
through life to be "the greatest poetical genius... since
the revival of literature." But by a proper chance he fell
into the clutches of a publisher who employed him at
starvation rates in compiling from the Newgate chronicles and elsewhere six volumes of Celebrated T'rials and
Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence. This and
other literary hack work kept him chained to the treadmill until health and spirit were almost broken. After
fourteen months of this life he fled from London, and literally took to the road. Of the adventures that followed,
Lavengro and t'he Romany Rye are the immortal record.
Just how much of those books is fiction and how much
genuine biography we shall never know; there is certainly
truth at the core of the great chapters which relate his experiences as a wandering tinker, including the magnificent
fight with the Flaming Tinman, and the extraordinary
courtship, if courtship it may be called, of Isopel Berners
in Mumper's Dingle.
After a certain period of years which Borrow has left in
obscurity, there came to him his great opportunity. In
I833 he was appointed an agent of the Bible Society. His
first task, the translation of the Scriptures into the Manchu, took him, for reasons which need not here be stated,
to St. Petersburg. His letters to the Society, as published
by Mr. Darlow, tell the strange story of his life in that
city, and show him as indefatigable in accomplishing his
task as he was shrewd in managing men. In I835 he was
transferred to Portugal and Spain, where for five years he
was engaged in distributing translations of the Bible, his
zeal for converting the natives being apparently in proportion to the danger and difficulty of reaching them.
From the letters which he wrote to the Society, and which




GEORGE BORROW


133


so far as they are preserved have now been printed, and
from diaries, he afterwards compiled T'be Zincali, an account of the Iberian and African gipsies, and The Bible
in Spain, the most popular and, on the whole, the greatest of his books. A comparison of the latter work with the
Letters shows that his method of composition was largely
a mere matter of transcription, though there is some significance in the fact that the additions which go to make
up The Bible in Spain, from whatever source drawn, have
little to do with his missionary labours, and a great deal
to do with the incidents of the road and with the gipsies
and other outcasts he met by the way.
Two violent aversions he carried with him everywhere,
the Roman Catholic Church and what he was pleased to
call gentility. The two had a strange way of coalescing in
his mind, and were, it is scarcely uncharitable to say,
merely symbols of that order and convention of society
against which his whole nature rebelled. He associated
their prevalence in England with the unlucky fortunes of
the Stuarts, and his impotent rage against Scott for reviving an interest in that dynasty and the things for which
they stood is amusing or shocking, as you choose. "As
God," he ejaculates in the Appendix to The Romany Rye,
"had driven the Stuarts from their throne, and their followers from their estates, making them vagabonds and
beggars on the face of the earth, taking from them all they
cared for, so did that same God, who knows perfectly well
how and where to strike, deprive the apologist of that
wretched crew of all that rendered life pleasant in his
eyes, the lack of which paralysed him in body and mind,
rendered him pitiable to others, loathsome to himself-so
much so, that he once said, 'Where is the beggar who
would change places with me, notwithstanding all my
fame?' Ah! God knows perfectly well how to strike."




134      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
Borrow's years in Spain answered in every way to this
petulance of his nature, and were altogether the happiest
of his life. By the distribution of the Bible he was shattering, as he thought, the idolatry of Rome; while his ramblings through the Peninsula brought him into contact
with a people at the furthest possible remove from the
smugness of British gentility. He possessed a strange
power over the wild creatures of the road, whether human
or bestial, and often apparently with a glance or a word
could change them from hostility to friendship or submission. Something of his joy in Spain, despite the extraordinary hardships he underwent, was no doubt due to
the conscious exercise of this almost supernatural fascination. His service as translator and missionary for the
Bible Society also brought into play his remarkable linguistic ability. If he was not quite the philologist he liked
to call himself, and if he was capable of devising etymologies that would cause a trained scholar to gape and stare,
he could at least make himself understood in a bewildering
variety of tongues, from Manchu to Irish. It is characteristic of the man that his interest in a language increased in proportion to its eccentricity. Of Greek and
Latin he apparently knew little and cared for them less.
French and German and Italian attracted him languidly.
But the vagabond speech of the gipsy and the isolated
language of Wales were his lifelong delight.
His days after leaving the Bible Society were embittered by quarrels and distracted by his own insatiable
restlessness. Just before returning from Spain he married
an English widow who brought him a small estate at
Oulton, in Suffolk. He travelled at times, and Wild Wales
is the fruit of much tramping and exploring in that country. But on the whole his attempt to settle down as a
country gentleman was deplorable. He could not, or




GEORGE BORROW


135


would not, make himself at home in conventional society,
and as a lion he had no speech between a roar and outrageous silence. Strange stories of his ways got about.
Children trembled at his approach: "older people he
seldom spoke to when out on his solitary rambles; but
sometimes he would flash out such a glance from beneath
his broad-brimmed hat and shaggy eyebrows as would
make timid country folk hasten on their way filled with
vague thoughts and fears of the evil eye." Another writer
tells how "his great delight... was to plunge into the
darkening mere at eventide, his great head and heavy
shoulders ruddy in the rays of the sun. Here he hissed and
roared and spluttered, sometimes frightening the eelcatcher sailing home in the half-light, and remembering
suddenly school legends of river-sprites and monsters of
the deep."                             t
Death came to him at the age of seventy-eight, broken,
and chilled, and silenced. It was a passage for him, one
likes to think, from the crowding conventions of the
world into unencumbered spaces and into the heart of
that untamed nature to which his own heart was akin.
Such a man and such a life it might seem easy to
pigeon-hole: he might be set down at once as the perfect
type of the picaro in the nineteenth century. Yet there
are aspects of his character which refuse to fit into such a
frame. "The picaro," says M. Jusserand, with his accustomed precision, "holds a place in literature which is
peculiarly his. Faithless, shameless, if not joyless, the
plaything of fortune, by turn valet, gentleman, beggar,
courtier, thief, we follow him into all societies.... There
is no plot more simple or flexible, none that lends itself
better to the study of manners, of abuses, of social eccentricities. The only defect is that, in order to abandon himself with necessary good will to the caprices of Fate, and




136       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
in order to be able to penetrate everywhere, the hero has
necessarily little conscience and still less heart." The path
of the picaresque writer is indeed, in one sense, narrow
and sharply defined. His role is to set forth the underside
of life with all its variety of incident and its hostility to
prescription, but he must do all this with a kind of imperturbability of conscience which converts evil into innocence. The moment he displays a touch of moral indignation he passes from the picaresque to the preacher or the
satirist, and if he shows the least disposition to gloat over
things evil as disgusting or revolting he falls into the mood
of the modern realist. Now in that strait road Borrow
walked with all the apparent carelessness of a Gil Blas or
a Colonel Jacque. From childhood to old age his pleasure
was to associate with vagabonds and thimble-riggers,
horse-thieves and poisoners, prize-fighters and' cutthroats, and these are the people of his books. Mr. WattsDunton has told from personal experience how his very
manners were moulded by the free company of the roadside:
When Borrow was talking to people in his own class of life there
was always in his bearing a kind of shy, defiant egotism.... But
the moment he approached a gipsy on the heath, or a poor Jew in
Houndsditch, or a homeless wanderer by the wayside, he became
another man. He threw off the burden of restraint. The feeling of
"armed neutrality" was left behind, and he seemed to be at last
enjoying the only social intercourse that could give him pleasure.
This it was that enabled him to make friends so entirely with the
gipsies.
As for moral sensitiveness there is scarcely a trace of it
to be found in any of the accounts of his astonishing adventures. Even when he relates the grewsome attempted
murder of himself by Mrs. Herne, the mother-in-law of
his peculiar friend, Jasper Petulengro, not a word falls




GEORGE BORROW


137


from him of indignation or surprise or fear. And for his
strength of stomach, I would recommend the episode of
the gipsy inn-keepers of Tarifa (f'he Zincali, chapter iv)
as equal to anything in the writings of Nash or the other
mighty men of the Elizabethan age. After telling a story
of poisoning and thievery the very memory of which
would disturb the nights of a weak man, but which he observed without lifting his finger or uttering a word of
protest, he dismisses the victims of the villainy with the
dispassionate comment: "Upon the whole, however, I did
not pity them much." There is no sign of self-restraint in
all this, no concealment of righteous anger; he is simply
describing the scenes in which he felt himself at home,
though, it need scarcely be added, his own conduct seems
ever to have been scrupulously honest and clean.
That is the role of the picaro, and that is the part of
Borrow generally when he deals with actual events. It
might seem as easy to place him as it is to enjoy his
sublime indifference to the troublesome laws of morality.
Yet there was another side to his character which must
not be forgotten: he was, if you please, while stopping at
this den of robbers, and through all his extraordinary adventures in Spain and Africa, an evangelist and colporteur
of Bibles, and he was as bold and as sincere in this ryle as
he was in the other. On occasion he could take advantage
of his intimacy with gipsies and other outcasts to bring
the Scripture to their attention, and there is one particularly striking scene in ihe Zincali which relates in the
same breath how he became a participator in the most
secret thoughts of a gang of Cordovese Gitanos, and how
he perfected himself in their tongue by getting them to
translate with him the Apostles' Creed. Nor when he
came to moralize at large on gipsy life was there anything
in his tone to distinguish him from the most proper




138     THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
parson. "It is therefore to be hoped," he remarks in one
of his missionary moods, "that if the Gitanos are abandoned to themselves,... the sect will eventually cease
to be, and its members become confounded with the residue of the population; for certainly no Christian, nor
merely philanthropic heart, can desire the continuance of
any sect or association of people whose fundamental principle seems to be to hate all the rest of mankind, and to
live by deceiving them." Such is Borrow's impersonal reflexion, entirely honest no doubt, on the people who were
his chosen comrades and from whom came his philosophy
of life. The picaro is a common character in literature, and
the missionary also has his place, but where, except in the
author of Lavengro and the Bible in Spain, shall you find
the indissoluble union in one man of the complete picaro
and the dauntless missionary? The combination is piquant, to say the least.
And if Borrow's works follow the narrow tradition of
the picaresque by escaping on one side all the qualms of
conscience, they are equally true to the rnorm by avoiding
on the other side the peculiar appeal of the heart which is
the essence of most modern romanticism. Perhaps their
most striking trait is just this unexpected absence of emotion in scenes where the follower of Wordsworth would
revel in sentiment. In all Borrow's descriptions of the wild
country of Wales and the Peninsula I can recall but a
single instance of that revery so familiar to the nineteenth
century in which the soul loves to lose itself in pantheistic
contemplation of nature. Once, indeed, we see him sitting
on the ruined wall at Monte Moro, absorbed in a dream of
the world's rapturous beauty, while the memories of his
past life flitted before his "eyes in airy and fantastic
array, through which every now and then peeped trees
and hills, and other patches of the real landscape." Yet




GEORGE BORROW                  139
even from this unwonted spell he rouses himself with the
reflexion that such "reveries... only serve to enervate
the mind and steal many a minute which might be more
profitably employed."
It might seem sufficient to say that to Borrow, as to the
other masters of the picaresque style, the desolate and unusual scenes of nature were only a continuation, so to
speak, of the spirit of adventure among strange human
beings, and that the absence of sentimental personification was as necessary to the proper effect in the one case
as the absence of moral concern was in the other. In a way
that is true; but it is by no means the whole truth. Somehow, without a touch of that conscious blending of the
human and the natural by which the romantic writer
awakens our sentimental emotions, and with seldom a
word to indicate that his own heart was moved, Borrow
has succeeded in giving to Nature a magic power to charm
or appall the soul which many an artificer in sentiment
might envy. There are, for example, two or three pages in
The Bible in Spain describing the nocturnal journey from
Bembibre to Villafranca, which for terror and sublimity it
would be hard to match in any other English book; yet
only in a single brief sentence, so far as I remember, does
any hint appear of deep feeling on the part of the writer
himself.
The absence of direct human emotion in Borrow is even
more surprising, not to say tantalizing, than his continence in the romantic sentiment of nature. It should
seem at times as if he were utterly devoid of heart and the
common passions of mankind. Think for a moment of the
episode in Mumper's Dingle and all its emotional possibilities. It may not appear so extraordinary that he can go
through the great fight with the Flaming Tinman as if his
breast had never swelled with the feeling of rage or hatred




140      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
or revenge, but where is the language to describe his relation to Isopel Berners? With minute detail he tells how
she and he lived in their tents side by side in the remote
and secret glen. We see the tall queen of the roads with
all her blonde beauty and crown of yellow hair, a superb
Amazon whose right hand was the flail of evil doers and
puny tempters; night after night we see her by the solitary light of the camp-fire serving her companion in
simple devotion, her pride humbled to pliant submission,
yet, so far as any expression escapes the writer, you would
not know that he possessed a body. When the woman in
her threatens to break out, he crushes her with lessons in
the Armenian verb, drilling her in these antic exercises as
a master might train a dog; but it is a wise reader who can
say whether he does this deliberately to avoid the perils
of the equivocal situation or as a pure pedant with no
pulse to leap at danger. The whole episode is cruel and in
any other author would be sterile and unnatural. Yet
withal, though there is no word of passion in these chapters, indeed scarcely a word of human feeling-save after
Isopel has fled, and then the note of regret is feeble and
false-they are able by some trick of composition, perhaps by the very absence of what is expected, to fix themselves in memory as one of the great love scenes of our
literature. Was ever woman so coldly wooed before, we
exclaim; but there exudes from that wooing, nevertheless,
some thin, impalpable air of passion which he who
breathes shall never forget.
Even more remarkable than the lack of any direct expression of amorous feeling is the sheer freedom from fear
in the man. In Portugal and Spain, then torn by civil war,
he travelled often alone or with a single companion, by
day and by night, over lonely mountain roads that were
beset by brigands and roving bands of brutal soldiers, and




GEORGE BORROW


141


on a mission that must have made him enemies at every
turn. At rare intervals he speaks in an offhand impersonal
way of dreading violence, but I cannot recall a single instance in which he turned back or hesitated before warnings of the most frightful danger, nor does the real emotion of fear, as most men have known it, ever seem to
have fluttered his heart. His resolution he attributed now
and then, when in his missionary mood, to a perfect trust
in the providence of God; in another mood he declares,
more fatalistically, that "when threatened by danger, the
best policy is to fix your eye steadily upon it, and it will
vanish like the morning mist before the sun"-as if the
physical harms that confront us were no more than the
"evil eye" of Nature to be faced down and quelled; but at
bottom his fearlessness can only be explained as a part of
the unemotional basis of his character. Yet here again
comes the curious inconsistency. Though the fear of specific evil scarcely entered into his make-up, he was subject
at times to a seizure of blind terror, that came over him
without cause or warning, and drove him to acts of maniacal frenzy. Such a fit of madness struck him one night
when alone in the Dingle:
Suddenly I started up, and could scarcely repress the shriek which
was rising to my lips. Was it possible? Yes, all too certain; the evil one
was upon me; the inscrutable horror which I had felt in my boyhood
had once more taken possession of me.
As one reads this history of Borrow's malady (which
there is reason to accept as substantially true to facts),
one can with difficulty avoid the superstitious explanation
of it as a kind of penalty imposed upon him by Nature
for his lack of natural emotion-as if now and again,
looking into his heart and into the heart of the world and
seeing there no bond of sympathetic feeling, but empti



142       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
ness and solitude, he was struck down by the ancient fear
of Pan. The explanation is, I admit, overdrawn, if not fantastic, and would raise Borrow into a figure of mythology,
who at bottom was likely enough little removed from the
normal; but it has at least the merit of fitting in ethically
with his own account of the release:
After a little time I arose, and staggered down yet farther into the
dingle. I again found my little horse on the same spot as before; I put
my hand to his mouth, he licked my hand. I flung myself down by
him and put my arms round his neck; the creature whinned, and appeared to sympathize with me; what a comfort to have any one, even
a dumb brute, to sympathize with me at such a moment! I clung to
my little horse as if for safety and protection. I laid my head on his
neck, and felt almost calm; presently the fear returned, but not so
wild as before; it subsided, came again, again subsided; then drowsiness came over me, and at last I fell asleep, my head supported on the
neck of the little horse. I awoke; it was dark, dark night-not a star
was to be seen-but I felt no fear, the horror had left me. I arose from
the side of the little horse, and went into my tent, lay down, and again
went to sleep.
So Borrow appears to me-as I seek the man himself
within his books-essentially a picaresque character to
whom life was an adventure in which the conscience and
heart had no concern; yet he was still on the one side as
clean himself as the wind on the heather and as fearless in
missionary work as a Jesuit, and on the other side he can
convey to the reader some of the subtlest emotions of romanticism. I state the contrasts sharply, knowing that
they might perhaps be shaded away by exceptions and
modifications; but they are there and they pique curiosity.




HENRY VAUGHAN


T HERE are poets who, by virtue of some affinity
of spirit with our own, appeal to us with an intimacy that takes our judgement captive; we go
to them in secret, so to speak, and love them beyond the
warrant of our critical discernment. Such a poet Henry
Vaughan has long been to me, and in undertaking to
make an essay on his works as they now appear in their
new dress,' I am fully aware of the risk inherent in the
attempt to give a sort of public validity to what ought
to be, in Vaughan's own language, "a sweet privacy in
a right soul."
The task would be easier if we knew more of the man's
life. Yet if there are few events to record, his career is
typical of many who pursued the hidden way in that
much distracted age. He was born of a good Welsh family
in the year i62i. His father was then residing at Newton,
not far from Brecon, on the banks of the Usk, the murmur
of whose winding waters we shall hear all through the
son's poetry. With no presumption he was to link the
river's name forever with his own:
ITfhe Works of Henry Vaughan. Edited by L. C. Martin. The Oxford
University Press, I914.-Besides an accurate text of the verse and
prose this edition gives six letters to John Aubrey and Anthony Wood
which throw light on some of the disputed points of Vaughan's life.
In my quotations from the poems I have modernized the spelling and
punctuation.




144       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
When I am laid to rest hard by thy streams,
And my sun sets, where first it sprang in beams,
I'll leave behind me such a large, kind light,
As shall redeem thee from oblivious night,
And in these vows which-living yet-I pay,
Shed such a previous and enduring ray,
As shall from age to age thy fair name lead,
'Til rivers leave to run, and men to read.
No idle boast; for only the other day one reader at least,
two hundred and fifty years and more after it was uttered,
went a long pilgrimage to see with his own eyes those
Happy banks whence such fair flowers have sprung;
and, walking up and down the valley where so often the
poet-physician must have ridden in his errands of healing,
learned this truth as he had never understood it before:
Poets, like angels, where they once appear
Hallow the place, and each succeeding year
Adds rev'rence to 't, such as at length doth give
This aged faith, that there their genii live.
At the age of eleven Henry, with his twin-brother
Thomas, was sent to study under Matthew         Herbert,
rector of Llangattock, to whose care and wisdom he attributed his "posthumous life," as the "brief and slippery
part of himself" he owed to his father. With Herbert the
boys resided for six years, and then proceeded together to
Jesus College, Oxford. Here Thomas, if we may turn
aside for a moment, remained for ten or twelve years, and
took the degree of Master of Arts. He was ordained and
for a while acted as rector of Newton, his birthplace, but
was ejected by the Parliamentary Ecclesiastical Commissioners on the stereotyped charges of "drunkenness,
swearing, incontinency, and carrying arms for the King."
Whether there was the slightest foundation for these
accusations, except the last, I do not know; but it is hard




HENRY VAUGHAN


145


to believe that a man of lewd habits could have retained
the respect of Henry Vaughan, as Thomas, to judge from
Henry's letters and verse, apparently did. At any rate
Thomas became, in the words of Anthony Wood, "a great
Chymist, a noted Son of the Fire, an Experimental Philosopher, a zealous Brother of the Rosie-Crucian fraternity, an understander of some of the Oriental Languages,
and a tolerable good English and Latin Poet." He wrote a
number of books of magic, with magniloquent titles, from
which any one who will labour through them, or part of
them, may discover that he was in mind and temper very
much like his brother, except that his Platonism ran to
looser, madder ends. The following passage from the
inthroposophia Theomagica shows the quality of his writing at its best:
The Soul of man, whiles she is in the body, is like a candle shut up
in a dark lanthorn, or a fire that is almost stifled for want of aire.
Spirits (say the Platonicks) when they are "in their own country," are
like the inhabitants of green fields, who live perpetually amongst
flowers in a spicy, odorous aire, but here below, "in the circle of generation," they mourn because of darkness and solitude, like people lockt
up in a pest-house. "Here do they fear, desire and grieve." This is it
makes the Soule subject to so many passions, to such a Proteus of
humours..... This is occasioned by her vast and infinite capacity,
which is satisfied with nothing but God, from whom she at first
descended. It is miraculous to consider how she struggles with her
chaynes when man is in extremity, how she falsifies with fortune,
what pomp, what pleasure, what a paradise doth she propose to her
selfe! She spans kingdomes in a thought, and enjoyes all that inwardly
which she misseth outwardly. In her are patterns and notions of all
things in the world. If she but fancies her selfe in the midst of the sea,
presently she is there, and heares the rushing of the billowes. She
makes an invisible voyage from one place to an other, and presents
to her selfe things absent as if they were present. The dead live to
her; there is no grave can hide them from her thoughts. Now shee is
here in dirt and mire, and in a trice above the moone:




146       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
"Above the region of the storms she soars,
Beneath her feet she hears devolving clouds,
And under foot she thrusts the thunders blind."'
After the death of his wife, in I658, Thomas seems to
have sunk into a state compounded of uxorious despair
and Rosicrucian ecstasy. We learn from one of the biographical memoranda discovered by Mr. Waite, that
twice he enjoyed "the Secret of extracting the oyle of Halcali," on the day his wife sickened and again on the day
of her death; "soe that," as he says, "on the same dayes,
which proved the most sorrowful to mee, whatever can
bee: God was pleased to conferre upon mee ye greatest
joy I can ever have ih this world, after her death." He
himself died in 1666, and was lamented by Henry in some
of his most melodious lines:
Here Daphnis sleeps! and while the great watch goes
Of loud and restless Time, takes his repose.
Fame is but noise; all Learning but a thought,
Which one admires, another sets at nought;
Nature mocks both, and Wit still keeps ado;
But Death brings knowledge and assurance too.2
I may seem to be forgetting Henry in my zeal for the
rhapsodic Eugenius Philalethes, as Thomas called him1From the reprint by A. E. Waite, London, I888.
2 Another brother, whose name is unknown, had died some time before
I650, and had called forth from Henry several poems of more poignant
grief. See the allusions on pages 416,420,426, 478, and 479 of Martin's
edition. Compare also the words at the close of Thomas's Anthroposophia T'heomagica: "I would not have thee look here for the paint
and trim of rhetorick, and the rather because English is a language the
author was not born to. Besides this piece was composed in haste, and
in my dayes of mourning on the sad occurrence of a brother's death.
'And who knoweth how to write amidst a strife of teares and inke?' "
It is interesting to know that one of the best masters of English of the
age, as Henry Vaughan was in his prose, spoke Welsh as his native
language for the greater part of his life.




HENRY VAUGHAN


147


self, but I suspect that the years they were living together
at Newton had something to do with deepening the mystical and religious vein in Henry's mind. If Henry occupied himself with the strange but very earthly drugs
known to the physicians of his day, rather than with the
"oyle of Halcali," he at least followed his brother far
enough in the occult path to believe in astrology, though,
as he admits in one of his letters, the most serious men of
his profession were not only unkind to the art, but even
persecuted it. Possibly if he had studied at Oxford for a
decade he too might have lost himself amazed in "the
magician's heavenly chaos": but Fate was kinder to him.
At the end of "two years or more" at the University he
was, in the words of Anthony Wood, "taken thence and
designed by his Father for the obtaining of some knowledge in the municipal Laws at London. But soon after the
Civil War beginning, to the horror of all good Men, he was
sent for home, followed the pleasant Paths of Poetry and
Philology, became noted for his ingenuity, and published
several Specimens thereof, of which his Olor Iscanus was
most valued. Afterwards applying his Mind to the study
of Physic, became at length eminent in his own Country
for the practice thereof, and was esteemed by Scholars an
ingenious Person, but proud and humorous."
From his first volume of Poems it is clear that in London he was caught by the rollicking, rhyming society of the
taverns. He could not quite say, as did Clarendon, that
"whilst he was only a student of the law, and stood at
gaze, and irresolute what corner of life to take, his chief
acquaintances were Ben Jonson, John Selden, Charles
Cotton, John Vaughan, Sir Kenelm Digby, Thomas May,
and Thomas Carew, and some others of eminent faculties"; at least the master of the choir, then dead for three
or four years, he could not have seen, but at the Moon,




148      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
the Star, and the Globe he must have found himself in a
circle where the laws and traditions of the Dictator were
still remembered. There is joy in the very title of his
Rhapsodis, which was, he adds, "occasionally written
upon a meeting with some of his friends at the Globe
Tavern [a part of the famous theatre, Mr. E. K. Chambers thinks], in a chamber painted overhead with a cloudy
sky and some few dispersed stars, and on the sides with
landscapes, hills, shepherds, and sheep." Nor has any one
of the sons of Ben caught the spirit of that unrepentant
Bohemia where the sack was diluted only with Hippocrene, better than Vaughan:
Darkness, and stars i' th' mid-day! They invite
Our active fancies to believe it night:
For taverns need no sun, but for a sign,
Where rich tobacco and quick tapers shine;
And royal, witty sack, the poet's soul,
With brighter suns than he doth gild the bowl;
As though the pot and poet did agree,
Sack should to both illuminator be.
The poet of the Rhapsodis, of the lines To my Ingenuous
Friend, R. WV., and the Song to Amoret had in him the making of another Herrick, one thinks, with a note of deeper
sincerity, though less finished in execution, than the
author of the Hesperides. But the jocund Muse held his
allegiance too short a time for that. He was summoned to
sterner duties, as he says in his letter, by "the sudden
eruption of our late civil wars." Whether he himself took
any part in the actual fighting is a question which has
been much disputed. To me the Elegy on the Death of
R. WV. and the lines Upon a Cloak (both in 0/or Iscanus)
seem to afford fairly certain evidence that he was engaged in the skirmish at Rowton Heath, near Chester,
and in the defence of Beeston Castle, which surrendered




HENRY VAUGHAN


149


a few weeks later. The only objection to these inferences
is drawn from two verses (I9 and 20) in the biographical
Ad Posteros, written probably in 1647:
Duret ut integritas tamen, et pia gloria, partem
Me nullam in tanta stragefuisse, scias;
but I agree with Mr. Martin's interpretation of the lines
as "merely disclaiming connection with the Tysiphonax
of 1. I4."
The Poems were published in I646, and the battle of
Rowton Heath took place the 24th September, I645; yet
the first piece in the volume is to "R. W.," manifestly the
same person as the "R. W." of the elegy, who must have
been alive, very much alive, when the manuscript of this
volume went out of Vaughan's hands. We may therefore
conjecture with some assurance that, after a residence in
London of four or five years, Vaughan was summoned,
some time well along in 1645, to join the Welsh royalists
about Chester, and on his departure left the "copy" for
his book with a publisher. After his unhappy experience at
Rowton Heath and Beeston Castle he apparently went
home to Brecon and the family seat at Newton, where he
practised as a physician for the rest of his life. How he got
his medical education does not appear, but in 1673 he was
able to give this account of himself: "My profession also
is physic, which I have practised now for many years with
good success (I thank God!) and a repute big enough for
a person of greater parts than myself."
At first it is clear that Vaughan felt the return to the
valley of his birth as an exile, and tried to create about
himself in the "metropolis" of Breconshire something of
the witty, careless atmosphere of the London taverns. He
puts some of Ovid's laments into English verse, evidently
thinking of himself as lost in a "savage Pontic band." He




150       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
writes eulogies of Fletcher, whom he had not known, of
William Cartwright, whom he "did but see," and of
Davenant. More significant of his mood are the lines To
his Retired Friend, an Invitation to Brecknock (the old
name of Brecon):
Come then! and while the slow icicle hangs
At the stiff thatch, and Winter's frosty pangs
Benumb the year, blithe-as of old-let us
'Midst noise and war of peace and mirth discuss.
This portion thou wert born for; why should we
Vex at the time's ridiculous misery?
An age that thus hath fool'd itself, and will
-Spite of thy teeth and mine-persist so still.
Let's sit then at this fire, and while we steal
A revel in the town, let others seal,
Purchase or cheat, and who can, let them pay,
Till those black deeds bring on the darksome day.
But there are signs, too, that his mind was already
turning to more serious thoughts. In these same days he
was making translations from Boethius and Casimirus
and from Plutarch's Moralia. For confirmation, one
thinks, of a new taste growing within him, he busies himself with a version of Guevara's fine Praise and Happiness
of the Country Life, a few sentences from which may be
given here as a specimen of Vaughan's prose style and as
a denial of the strange fallacy of any who may still
believe that the intimate charms of nature were discovered by the poets of the romantic revival:
O who can ever fully express the pleasures and happiness of the
country-life! with the various and delightful sports of fishing, hunting,
and fowling, with guns, gray-hounds, spaniels, and several sorts of
nets! What oblectation and refreshment it is to behold the green
shades, the beauty and majesty of the tall and ancient groves; to be
skilled in planting and dressing of orchards, flowers, and pot-herbs;
to temper and allay these harmless employments with some innocent
merry song; to ascend sometimes to the fresh and healthful hills; to




HENRY VAUGHAN
des cend into the bosom of the valleys, and the fragrant dewy meadows; to hear the music of birds, the murmurs of bees, the falling of
springs, and the pleasant discourses of the old plow-men: where
without any impediment or trouble a man may walk, and (as Cato
Censorius used to say) discourse with the dead, that is read the pious
works of learned men who, departing this life, left behind them
their noble thoughts for the benefit of posterity and the preservation
of their own worthy names.
The prose and verse of these first two years of his retirement Vaughan gathered together, with a dedication
to Lord Kildare Digby, dated "Newton by Usk, this I7
of Decemb., i647"; but for some reason he withheld the
manuscript from the press. It was, in fact, not published
until i65i, and then against his will, probably by his
brother, under the title of Olor Iscanus. Manifestly a
sudden change had come upon him after the date of the
dedication, leading his mind to revolt from the secular
character of these pieces, though they were for the most
part innocent enough, even distinctly moral in tone. From
that time his mood was purely religious. The first fruits of
his conversion were given to the world in the Silex Scintillans of i6So. Two years later he published a group of
devotional treatises in prose, original and translated,
under the general title of t'he Mount of Olives, and again,
in i654, a similar group as Flores Solitudinis. In i655 he
reissued his Silex Scintillans with large additions, and
with a Preface in which he vehemently repudiates his
association with "those ingenious persons which in the
late notion are termed Wits," and attributes his conversion to the poet of The Temple:
The first that with any effectual success attempted a diversion of
this foul and overflowing stream, was the blessed man, Mr. George
Herbert, whose holy life and verse gained many pious converts (of
whom I am the least), and gave the first check to a most flourishing
and admired wit of his time.




152      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
After this Vaughan came before the public only twice,
in I655 as translator of the Hermetical Physic of Henry
Nolliyus, and in I678 with a collection of poems called
Thalia Rediviva, in which he apparently swept together
those of his earlier secular pieces not before printed and a
few religious "ejaculations" of his later years. He died in
I695. Of his family life we know that he was twice married,
and left several children. From documents discovered by
Miss Louise Imogen Guiney it appears the poet's old age
was darkened by the persecution of two of the children
by his first wife,' but we may think of him as passing his
latter years otherwise in peace and hope.
We have the statement of Vaughan himself that his
conversion from the secular to the divine Muse was
effected by his admiration for George Herbert, and the
echoes of The Temple throughout his works show how
deeply he had drunk from that well. But there were other
causes moving in his soul. His reading after his return to
Brecon was largely in the philosophers of a religious cast,
among whom one of the most influential was Owen
Felltham, author of a now forgotten book of Resolves,
which combines the manner of Bacon's Essays, lacking
the genius, with a spirit not unlike Herbert's own. As Mr.
Martin has pointed out, not only is the prose quotation
in the Preface to Silex Scintillans ("That he would read
no idle books," etc.) taken from Felltham, but whole passages of the versions of Boethius in Olor Iscanus are conveyed unblushingly, with slight changes for metrical
reasons, from the same source, besides various lesser bor'This information came to me in a letter from Miss Guiney, who was
engaged in collecting material for a biography of the poet. But death,
alas, prevented the execution of that task, as it took from us in herself
one of the fine spirits of our age.




HENRY VAUGHAN


153


rowings in the religious poems.1 Perhaps the most notable
of these appropriations is the beautiful line in I he Retreat,
Bright shoots of everlastingness,
which is adapted from this sentence in Felltham's reflexions on The Soul: "The conscience, the character of a
God stamped in it, and the apprehension of eternity, do
'Vaughan, like many of his contemporaries, was a mighty borrower.
Mr. Martin has done an excellent service in tracking down a large
number of these parallels, but one of the most interesting of them has
escaped his diligence. In the Shepherds Vaughan has the pretty lines:
"Perhaps some harmless Cares for the next day
Did in their bosoms play,
As where to lead their sheep, what silent nook,
What springs or shades to look;
But that was all."
The whole poem is a kind of descant on the theme of one of the stanzas
of Milton's Hymn on the Nativity, and in the lines quoted runs close
to the original:
"Perhaps their loves, or else their sheep,
Was all that did their silly thoughts so busy keep."
The score stands so heavily against Vaughan in this genial art of
conveying that I am glad to bring an item to the credit side. A certain
Cambridge royalist, Henry Tubbe (born i6i8, died i6S5), solaced his
ill health in those troublous days by spinning rhymes. Only one of his
poems appears to have been printed in his lifetime, but he left his
verse and prose, including copies of his letters, in two neat manuscript
volumes, from which a selection has been recently edited by Mr. G. C.
Moore Smith (Clarendon Press, I9vi). Many of his lucubrations are
said to be mere paraphrases from his contemporaries, particularly
from Randolph, Suckling, and Crashaw. Such paraphrases are
omitted from the recent selection, but the editor has not observed
that the first poem-altogether the least bad in the volume, in fact
the only one that can by any stretch be called a poem-is nothing
more than a clumsy adaptation of Vaughan's To My Ingenuous
Friend, R.W. Now the odd question is: What was this fellow Tubbe
about? It is observable that he turns Vaughan's tripping octosyllabics
into heroic couplets, and as this measure was gaining in favour, it is
just possible he thought he was doing a fine thing by putting Vaughan's




154       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
all prove it a shoot of everlastingness." One can imagine
Vaughan reading Felltham's little essay Of Poets and
Poetry, with its rejection of "the flashes that do follow the
cup" for the "sober muse and fasting," and being smitten
with compunction for his own irresponsible rhymes. It is
a fair conjecture, also, that he was affected by the renewed intercourse with his cloud-walking brother, though
fortunately the summary ejection of Thomas prevented
that influence from dominating Henry's mind.
Through all these influences, and deeper than any of
them, if we judge from his own works, were the evil state
of the country and the horrors of irreligion, as these appeared to an ingrained royalist and Anglican. Very soon
he sank into a mood in which he could no longer speak of
making merry over "the time's ridiculous misery." To
understand him, as to understand the other religious
poets of the age, we must never forget the dark background of malice, confusion, calumny, and violent change
out of which their songs arose. Most of these singers were
of the party of Vaughan; they were bound to feel that the
victorious iconoclasm of the Puritans was sweeping from
them ruthlessly all the comfortable traditions which
stayed the inherent restlessness of man's soul, all the symbols which had trained the imagination to take its due
rather loosely clad Muse into a more fashionable bodice. Almost all
of his original verse-if any of it be really original-is in heroic couplets, and I should like to know whether in those unedited adaptations
of Suckling and others he made the same transfer as in the case of
Vaughan. But the thing is still a mystery. I don't see what the fellow
was about. Certainly he could not have expected to pass off these
stolen goods-stolen in a manner quite beyond the permitted license
of the times-as his own, even after obliterating all marks of the king's
ownership. Mr. Henry Tubbe has suddenly grown interesting to me,
since I have found that he admired my much-loved swan of the Usk
enough to steal his plumage.




HENRY VAUGHAN                  155
share in the act of worship. These things lay heavily pon
Vaughan's mind. He was not, in that part of his work
which counts, a poet of cheer; neither indeed was Milton
on his side, nor any other of those who reflected the turmoil and double defeat of the times.
This dejection we who again look upon a world filled
with the alarms of war and the hatred of man for man,
and ache for deliverance from "the tedious reign of our
calamity"-this darkness of spirit we can comprehend;
and I confess that, much as I have always loved Vaughan,
the pathos of his cry for civil peace touches me now in a
peculiar manner. But there was another source of darkness in Vaughan's mind for which we, with our modern
training, are not so ready to feel sympathy-I mean the
shade of life itself, the sorrow and discontent that are
caused by no accidental evils of an age but are inherent in
the very conditions of mortal existence. In these latter
years we have been caught in a kind of conspiracy of
silence on this matter, until, as it sometimes seems, we
have become cowards to the truth. Our modern books are
filled with complaints against society and government as
these are organized, and against the failure of institutions
and the inadequacy of traditional beliefs, but it is really
astonishing how seldom any writer dares to touch on the
crude imperfections and cruel necessities that always
have been, and must always be, the law of life; to speak
with any frankness of these bitter facts is frowned upon
as disloyalty to the popular dogma of progress and perfectibility, or as ignorance of those implications of cosmic
evolution which command us to be credulous only of
good. How then shall we feel ourselves at home with
those moralists who took a sort of savage delight in
spreading before our eyes the blacker side of man's natu



156       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
ral feebleness and perversity?1 Yet we quite misunderstand such a poet as Vaughan, if we turn from him as
from one essentially gloomy and depressing. The joy in
him still overrides the gloom, the joy that came to him,
as it can only come to a man then or at any time, from
lifting his eyes out of these shades and flickering lights to
the radiance of another sun, and to the possession of a
peace that is not of earth:
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres,
Like a vast shadow moved; in which the world
And all her train were hurl'd.
Such is the great note of Vaughan and of his contemporaries in their moments of inspiration, purer and higher in
Vaughan than in any other, though not so powerfully sustained as in Milton; and it is the occasional occurrence of
this note that makes the religious poetry of the period,
despite its mass of fumbling attempts, something unique
in English literature. Faint echoes or distorted repetitions
of it you will catch in Whittier and Newman and Francis
Thompson and other poets of the nineteenth century; but
the glorious courage and assurance, the pure joy, the full
flight against the sun, you will meet nowhere in England
since the Revolution, with the new politics, brought in the
grey reign of naturalism.
1These lines were written and first published in the year I916. Since
then there has been a change, and today the most characteristic note
of literature, at least of fiction, is a feeling that life is altogether futile
and meaningless, and that even its pleasures are scarcely worth the
seeking. I need not say that this bitter fruit of agnosticism is quite
different from the disillusion which lies at the background of
Vaughan's otherworldliness.




HENRY VAUGHAN15
It is not to be supposed that Vaughan rose often to this
height, nor, indeed, do we who have long prized him in
private rest our affection on the few poems in which he
shows himself a master of his craft. As with most of the
writers of the day, there is much of the careless amateur
in his method: he lacked self-criticism., failed to distinguish between what was commonplace and what was
exquisite in his perceptions, and even in his moments of
inspiration left the labour of expression too much to
chance; as a whole his achievement is sadly at loose ends.
But he never forgot or misrepresented himself, and it is
his constant betrayal of a rare personality, his adjustments to life, the sincere variation of his moods, his faithful expectation of the coming of the light, that draw us
back to his books again and again and lend a peculiar
interest to poems which we should find it hard to recommend to unwilling ears. It is the man Vaughan, who dwelt
by the river Usk and himself walked in the valley with
God, we seek always, not the artist; and if we admit
readily that this is not the attitude we take towards those
who have achieved an invulnerable position, yet we love
him none the less. Naturally this quality of his work
cannot be exhibited in a specimen or two; nevertheless, so
far as this may be done, I would point to the artless charm
of such a poem as T1ihe Bee, and particularly to such lines
in it as these:
Hail crystal fountains and fresh shades!
Where no proud look invades,
No busy worldling hunts away
The sad retirer all the day!
Hail, happy, harmless solitude!
Our sanctuary from the rude
And scornful world; the calm recess
Of faith, and hope, and holiness!
Here something still like Eden looks;




158        THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
Honey in woods, juleps in brooks;
And flowers, whose rich unrifled sweets
With a chaste kiss the cool dew greets.
When the toils of the day are done,
And the tired world sets with the sun,
Here flying winds and flowing wells
Are the wise watchful hermit's bells;
Their busy murmurs all the night
To praise or prayer do invite,
And with an awful sound arrest
And piously employ the breast.
When in the east the dawn doth blush,
Here cool, fresh spirits the air brush;
Herbs straight get up, flowers peep and spread,
Trees whisper praise, and bow the head;
Birds, from the shades of night releast,
Look round about, then quit the nest,
And with united gladness sing
The glory of the morning's King.
The hermit hears, and with meek voice
Offers his own up, and their joys;
Then prays that all the world may be
Blest with as sweet an unity.
If such a passage makes no appeal to you, why, then it
doesn't; but one can perhaps hint at certain qualities in it
which endear the writer to some of us. In the first place
we feel here the reality of the divine immanence in nature
which everywhere speaks in Vaughan's verse, and which
curiously enough, paradoxically you may say, comes to
poignant expression only in those who deplore the natural
world as fallen from Grace and given over to the powers
of evil. It is he who believes in a paradise lost, actual or
symbolicalHe sighed for Eden, and would often say,
Ah, what bright days were those!
Nor was heaven cold unto him; for each day
The valley or the mountain
Afforded visits, and still paradise lay




HENRY VAUGHAN


159


In some green shade or fountain.
Angels lay lieger here; each bush and cell,
Each oak and highway, knew them:
Walk but the fields, or sit down at some well,
And he was sure to view themit is he who sees that about the world the "curtains are
close-drawn," who will also, by some strange legerdemain
of the human heart, draw away the veil from your eyes
and show you the truth of the everlasting mythology:
My God, when I walk in those groves,
And leaves, Thy spirit still doth fan,
I see in each shade that there roves'
An angel talking with a man.
Under a juniper some house,
Or the cool myrtle's canopy;
Others beneath an oak's green boughs,
Or at some fountain's bubbling eye.
But to return to the lines of qihe Bee which we have
taken as typical of the retired life, we may note in them
something more specific than the feeling of a man who,
by submission to the divine will, re-creates for himself a
lost paradise; they direct us to a peculiarity of the imagination, a habit of mind, which Vaughan shared indeed
with the other poets of his day, but possessed to a degree
that marks a real distinction. Simcox, in his introduction
to the selection in Ward's English Poets, calls attention
to the prominence of the dawn, "the awe of the freshness
of morning among the Welsh mountains," in Vaughan's
reflexions on nature. The observation is just; but it was
not so much the beauty of the morning in itself that
seems to have impressed the poet as its contrast with the
11 have taken the liberty of substituting roves for grows in this line for
the sake of the rhyme, but grows is likely enough to be the word
Vaughan wrote. The whole poem is careless, even for him.




160       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
hours of darkness past. I am sure that Vaughan, something of a valetudinarian we know, was often sleepless,
and sometimes in these wakeful seasons felt the presence
of the stars as a "host of spies" stealing out from heaven,
and was entranced by the palpable nearness of the spirit
world in the silence and abstraction of visible things:
Dear night! this world's defeat;
The stop to busy fools; care's check and curb;
The day of spirits; my soul's calm retreat
Which none disturb!
Christ's progress, and His prayer time;
The hours to which high Heaven doth chime.
God's silent, searching flight;
When my Lord's head is filled with dew, and all
His locks are wet with the clear drops of night;
His still, soft call;
His knocking-time; the soul's dumb watch,
When spirits their fair kindred catch....
There is in God-some sayA deep, but dazzling darkness....
At other times Vaughan seems to have been oppressed
by the thought of the suspension of life through these
hours, as if Nature nightly retired into a tomb, from
which she could be aroused only by the miraculous voice
of her Creator. Out of these nocturnal meditations, being
an early riser, he went forth to view the dawn, already
quickened in spirit, as he would say, by the celestial
dews, or ready to join the "hymning circulations" at the
spectacle of the earth's perpetual rebirth. In such a mood
he could scarcely walk abroad without looking for the
promised coming of his Lord:
Or shall these early fragrant hours
Unlock Thy bowers?
And with their blush of light descry
Thy locks crown'd with eternity?




HENRY VAUGHAN


i6i


It is hard for me to leave these things: there is so much
more that I could say from my long reading of Vaughan
-how, for example, his characteristic ideas of nature are
associated together like a golden chain, link with link, so
that the sight of a withered flower would remind him of
the morning freshness, and this thought would lift his
eyes to the hills of his valley from which the dew was supposed to fall, and beyond these to the light that appeared
to stream from the mountain of God:
Come, sapless blossom, creep not still on earth,
Forgetting thy first birth.
'Tis not from dust; or if so, why dost thou
Thus call and thirst for dew?...
Who placed thee here, did something then infuse
Which now can tell thee news.
There is beyond the stars an hill of myrrh,
From which some drops fall here...
I fear that this will seem but a straggling set of rhymes
to anyone whose judgement is not already bribed in their
favour. As for myself, I cannot quote them without a
vivid recollection of a certain "white day" when, walking
alone on the bank of the Usk, I myself saw such a sapless
flower in a dry spot, and for the rest of my way went
piecing together what I could recall of Vaughan's lines.
It is thus we of the brotherhood find our pleasure in
these poems, not because of their perfection as works of
art, but because of a certain transparent honesty in them
which enables us to enter into the privacy of a singularly
beautiful spirit. Again, not a dominating spirit: Vaughan
was not one of the stalwarts of the age, not a Milton, not
even a Falkland, but one who shrank almost pathetically
from contention and the noise of tongues. But neither was
there anything to reprobate in his flight from the world,
unless we think that all men are called to fight in the hour




162       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
of desperation. There was nothing, or at least very little,
of Crashaw's morbid substitution of religious emotion for
the plain duties of life; no taint of self-indulgence in
voluptuous sensation or relaxing revery. Nature was a
retreat for him, but he found there the visible presence of
a God who had not laid aside His commands and prohibitions; the impulse to compose came to him chiefly, we
think, in the fresh breath of morning, when he set out
from home on his errands to the sick and suffering. And if
his verse lacks finish, it has yet the substance of poetry
which was the birthright of that age. Sometimes it has
more than that. Suddenly, as if by a divine accident, he
will reach a strain-a single line, or group of lines, it may
be-which startles the reader, as the ear is caught by a
few notes of piercing melody breaking through a monotonous chant. In the midst of rather commonplace reflexions
he will unexpectedly gather up the meaning of life in a
sharp pregnant image, such as this:
But now
I find myself the less the more I grow.
The world
Is full of voices; man is call'd, and hurl'd
By each; he answers all,
-Knows every note and callor this:
Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest
And passage through these looms
God order'd motion, but ordain'd no restor this:
Where frail visibles rule the mind,
And present things find men most kind;
Where obscure cares the mean defeat,
And splendid vice destroys the greator this:
And how of death we make
A mere mistake.




HENRY VAUGHAN


163


Or he will celebrate the sweet influences of a holy life:
Stars are of mighty use; the night
Is dark, and long;
The road foul; and where one goes right,
Six may go wrongor in slower measure will praise the gift of Sir Thomas
Bodley to Oxford, and express in memorable language the
gratitude of all readers for the preservation of good books:
And in this age, as sad almost as thine,
Thy stately consolations are mine.
These are not the accidents that come to a little man;
and occasionally Vaughan's performance is even greater.
Once or twice he will sustain this elevation from the beginning to the end, producing a thing as exquisitely
perfect as The Retreat, which certainly helped Wordsworth in the composition of his famous ode, and, strange
juxtaposition, may have been in the mind of James
Thomson (B. V.) when he wrote one of the most haunting
cantos of The City of Dreadful Night; or rising to the bold
flight of those stanzas, unnamed, than which there is
nothing purer and deeplier felt, nothing truer to the
strangely mingled exaltation and humility of sound religion, nothing more superb, in the sacred literature of our
English speaking people:
They are all gone into the world of light!
And I alone sit lingering here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.
It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,
Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest
After the Sun's remove.




164        THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
I see them walking in an Air of Glory,
Whose light doth trample on my daysMy days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Mere glimmering and decays.
O holy hope! and high humility!
High as the Heavens above!
These are your walks, and you have show'd them me
To kindle my cold love.
Dear, beauteous death, the Jewel of the Just;
Shining no where but in the dark!
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,
Could man outlook that mark.
He that hath found some fledged bird's nest, may know
At first sight if the bird be flown;
But what fair well, or grove he sings in now,
That is to him unknown.
And yet, as Angels in some brighter dreams
Call to the soul when man doth sleep,
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes,
And into glory peep.
If a star were confined into a tomb,
Her captive flames must needs burn there;
But when the hand that lockt her up gives room,
She'll shine through all the sphere.
O Father of eternal life, and all
Created glories under thee!
Resume thy spirit from this world of thrall
Into true liberty!
Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill
My perspective still as they pass;
Or else remove me hence unto that hill,
Where I shall need no glass.




SAVATRI


[This famous Hindu story is an episode of the great epic of the Mahabharata. In my translation I have omitted a few words here and there
for the sake of brevity, and have dealt freely with one or two of the
rhymed epigrams; but otherwise the English follows the Sanskrit
closely.]
I
T HERE was once a king of the Madras, Agvapati by
name, famed in justice and piety, magnanimous,
truthful, temperate of habit, and glad in the welfare
of all creatures. Yet, being without an heir in his old age,
he surrendered himself to grief, and for the sake of offspring laid upon himself vows of mortification. To this
end he gave up the world and lived again the chaste life
of a student, taking food but once a day at the sixth
watch, and offering a hundred times a thousand sacrifices
to the goddess Savitri. Eighteen years he passed in this
way; and when the eighteenth year was fulfilled Savitri
was satisfied, and appeared before the king in visible
form, rising up from the fire of the altar, and spoke graciously to the prince, and said:
SAVITRI SPEAKS: I am content with thy perfect chastity, 0
Prince, with thy austere vows and thy devotion. Choose of me
therefore a boon, 0 King of the Madras, as it seemeth to thee
good. Yet take heed lest vanity come among thy just desires.
AqVAPATI SPEAKS: For the sake of offspring I have done all this
in conformity with the law. If now thou art content with me,
0 Goddess, grant me many children to continue my race; for




166      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
I have heard the Brahmins say, "Posterity is the highest law."
This boon I crave.
SAVITRi SPEAKS: Even before thou spokest, O King, I knew thy
desire was towards children, and this was told of me to
Brahma, the Great Father. Now I am well pleased to grant
thy vow, and right soon a noble daughter shall be born to thee
by the good will of the Great Father. Nevertheless, take heed
thou announce her birth to no man.
"So be it!" replied the king; and again besought her,
saying, "May it come to pass soon!" And when the
goddess had vanished from before him, he returned to his
own land, and there abode in his kingdom, governing the
people in justice.
Now after a certain time the king dwelt with Manavi,
his chief queen, and she conceived, and the child grew
within her as the Lord of the Stars waxes in the clear sky.
And when her time was come she brought forth a daughter, lotus-eyed, for whom the good king in gladness
celebrated the birth-feast. And because the child was
given by Savitrl at the sacrifice, so they called her by the
name of Savitri. But like (ri, the Queen of Beauty, in
human form, the young princess grew up; until in due
time the girl became a woman, and the people, seeing her
like a golden image, slender of waist and broad of thigh,
said one to another: "It is some daughter of the gods come
hither amongst us." Yet no man came to woo the lotuseyed maiden in her glowing splendour, for they feared to
approach her glory.
One day, having fasted and sprinkled her head with
water, the princess went to a place sacred to the gods, and
there sacrifised to Agni according to usage, and afterwards talked with the priests for a while. And then, with
the flowers that remained from the sacrifice, she went into
the presence of her father, herself fairer than the Queen




SAVITRt


i67


of Beauty, and, bowing at his feet, offered him the consecrated flowers, and stood with clasped hands beside the
king. And the king was grieved because he saw that his
daughter was now a woman grown and like a goddess
formed, yet no man came to seek her hand.
THE KING SPEAKS: My daughter, the time to wed has come, yet
no man asks for you. Therefore do you yourself choose a husband, some one equal to yourself in virtue. Tell me what man
you desire, and I, seeking him out, will give him to you.
Choose as it seems good to you; for thus have I heard the
Brahmins read from the holy books:
The sire thal weddeth not his child we blame,
And him that knoweth not his wife;
And when her lord is dead, the son we shame
t'hatguardeth not his mother's life.
Now as I have spoken, make haste and choose you a husband,
lest I suffer reproach among the gods.
So he said to his daughter, and gave orders to the aged
counsellors, and sent away his servants. Then the girl
bowed down again at her father's feet, and departed according to her father's command, shamefaced and
troubled, saying nothing. She mounted her golden
chariot, and, together with the aged ministers, set out
for the pleasant penance-groves of the royal Rishis. There
she saluted many ancient venerable men, travelling from
grove to grove; and at all the sacred bathing-pools made
gifts to the chief Brahmins, and so journeyed through the
land.
II
Now one day while the king of Madra sat in his hall,
conversing with Narada the seer, his guest from heaven,
came his daughter Savitri back to the palace, having




168      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
visited all the sacred pools and hermitages. And when the
radiant maiden saw her father sitting with Narada, she
bowed down her head at their feet.
NARADA SPEAKS: Where hath thy daughter been, and whence
cometh she, my Lord? Why is the young girl not given away
in marriage?
ACVAPATI SPEAKS: To that end she was sent on a journey, and
only today hath she returned. Thou thyself, heavenly Sage,
shalt hear what husband she hath chosen.
Then turning to the radiant girl, he said, "Tell us all,
my daughter." And she in obedience replied:
SAVITRi SPEAKS: In Chalva there reigned a just king of the
warrior caste, Dyumatsena by name. But he grew blind with
age, and by reason of this infirmity his neighbour, an ancient
enemy, drove him forth from the throne while his son was
still a child. So with his wife and the young boy he went out
into the forest; and there he now lives under vows of penance.
And there Satyavant, his son, who was born in the city and
reared in the sacred groves, has grown up to be a prince
worthy of my hand. Him I have chosen in my heart.
NARADA SPEAKS: Ah! alas! Savitri hath ignorantly done a great
wrong in that she hath chosen Satyavant, the prince, the virtuous. Truth his father speaks, truth his mother speaks;
therefore the Brahmins called him by name Satyavant, the
Truthful. And because even when a child he loved horses, and
moulded horses of earth and painted them in pictures, he was
called also Citrava, the Painter of Horses.
THE KING SPEAKS: But this Satyavant, the darling of his father,
is he glorious also and wise? is he patient and strong?
NARADA SPEAKS: In glory he is like the sun, in wisdom like the
Lord of Speech, like Indra himself he is strong, and patient as
the all-sustaining earth.
THE KING SPEAKS: According to thy word, O holy Seer, he is
endowed with all good qualities; tell me his faults also, if such
there be.




SAVITR1


169


NARADA SPEAKS: One only fault he hath, clinging to all his virtues; one blemish no effort may surmount; one fault he hath
and no other. On this day when a year hath passed, the term
of his life is consumed, and he must put off the mortal body.
THE KING SPEAKS: Nay then, Savitri, my fair one, go now and
choose some other; for one great fault clingeth to all his
virtues. The holy Narada, the honoured of the gods, hath said
it: In but a year his little life endeth, and he must put off the
mortal body.
SAVITRI SPEAKS:
Once only we attain our heart's desire,
And once a maid is given away;
One only time, "I give thee," saith her sire.And these threefall but once they say.
Now whether his life be long, or whether his life be short;
whether he be virtuous or without virtue, once I have chosen
him for my lord, and a second time I shall not choose. Moreover when I have taken a resolve in my heart, straightway I
speak it with my lips, and thereafter it is accomplished in
deed. My heart to me is a fixed law.
NARADA SPEAKS: My Lord, the mind of thy daughter Savitri is
very firm, and no one may shake her from her just resolve.
Virtuous is Satyavant above all others, and I am well pleased
in this betrothal of thy child.
THE KING SPEAKS: Thy words are ever true, O holy Seer, and
cannot be gainsaid. I will do as thou biddest, for thou art my
preceptor.
NARADA SPEAKS: Now may no hindrance befall the espousal of
thy daughter Savitri. But I go on my way; prosperity attend
you all.
So saying Narada left them and departed upward to
the third heaven. But the king made ready for the nuptials of his daughter.




170      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
III
Meanwhile the king meditated the marriage of his
daughter and made all things ready. On a day of good
omen he summoned about him the aged Brahmins and
the priests; and went with the girl to the Medhya forest,
to the hermitage of Dyumatsena; and there, together with
the Brahmins, drew near to the royal Rishi on foot; and
found the man with darkened eyes sitting under a cala
tree on a mat of kuca grass. Reverently he saluted the
sage, and with modest words announced himself. And
courteously the other offered him a seat and the gifts due
to a guest, and asked, "Why is thy coming hither, O
King?"-So Agvapati told him all his need and his purpose respecting Satyavant, and said:
ACVAPATI SPEAKS: This, O Rishi, is my daughter, the fair
Savitri. Receive her at my hands to be the lawful wife of
thy son.
DYUMATSENA SPEAKS: We have fallen from our estate, we have
fled to the forest, and live under vows of austerity. Thy
daughter is not meet for this woodland hermitage; and how
shall she endure this rigorous life?
AQVAPATI SPEAKS: I and my daughter too are not unacquainted
with the changes of prosperity and want. Such a reproach
befits me not. I bow before thee in friendship, take not away
my hope; I come before thee in love, reject me not. Thou art
my peer in state, and our lot is equal; accept then this girl to
be thy son's wife.
DYUMATSENA SPEAKS: Long ago I desired this bond of union
between thee and me, but always came the doubt, "I am
fallen from my estate." Today my long hope is accomplished,
for thou art my much desired guest.
After this the two kings summoned all the Brahmins of
the forest, and celebrated the nuptials according to usage.




SAVITRI


171


And Agvapati, having given his daughter her due portion,
returned in gladness to his own home. Satyavant too was
glad, who had received a wife adorned with every virtue;
and she also rejoiced, who had won her heart's desire.
But when her father was gone, she laid aside all her
bridal ornaments, and put on garments of bark and the
hermit's yellow robe. And always by kindly service, by
goodness and modesty and meekness, by her pliant ways,
she gladdened her new friends, pleasing her new mother
with a handmaid's care, and rejoicing her father by piety
towards the gods and by humble speech. And all the time
with loving words, serenity of heart, and secret services
she made her new lord happy.
So while these good people dwelt together in their
hermitage, fulfilling vows of penance, the seasons slipt by.
But always the words of Narada abode in the breast of
Savitri, and she grieved over them day and night.
IV
Now as the fatal period came about, the time drew near
when Satyavant must die. And ever the words of Narada
abode in the heart of Savitri, and she reckoned the waning
time day by day. And now thinking, On the fourth day
he must die! she made a vow of penance, and for three
days she remained standing and watched. But when the
blind king knew of this austerity, he was pained, and
rising up spoke to Savitri to console her:
DYUMATSENA SPEAKS: This is a cruel task you have undertaken
to do, 0 Princess. It is a hard matter to stand and watch for
three nights.
SAVITRI SPEAKS: Grieve not for me, Sire; I shall accomplish my
vow. It is undertaken with resolution, and resolution will
carry me through.




172      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
DYUMATSENA SPEAKS: Alas, I cannot say to you, "Break your
vow!" Rather, such as we must bid you endure to the end.
So Dyumatsena, the great-hearted, ceased; but Savitri
continued to stand and watch, seeming, as it were, a pillar
of wood. Now the last night before her husband should
die passed for her in sorrow; and on the morning she said,
"It is the day!" And when the sun was risen a little she
performed the matin rites and sacrifised to Agni, the
devourer of offerings. After that she saluted all the aged
Brahmins in due order, and her father and mother,
and stood before them with folded hands. So the holy
men of the forest blessed her, saying, "Long life to your
husband, 0 Savitri!" And she replied, "Be it as you
say," accepting the prayers of the holy men. But still she
brooded in her heart over the fatal time and moment and
the words of Narada. Kindly then her new father and
mother spoke as she stood before them, saying: "You
have kept the vow you made, and now the hour for the
taking of food has come. Do not put it off longer."
But Savitri replied: "When the sun has gone down, I
will eat, having fulfilled my vow. This resolve I have
made in my heart, and this is my ordeal."
Now even while Savitri was saying this, Satyavant laid
an axe on his shoulder and started for the woods. And
Savitri said to her husband: "You must not go alone, but
I will go with you; for today I cannot be parted from you."
SATYAVANT SPEAKS: You have never before gone into the woods,
and the path is hard, dear Lady. You are weak from penance
and fasting; and how can you walk with me?
SAVITRi SPEAKS: I am not faint from fasting; I am not weary;
I have strength to go, and you must not forbid me.
SATYAVANT SPEAKS: Nay, if indeed you have strength to go, I
will not forbid you. Yet do you first say farewell to our
parents, lest any fault be done.




SAVITR1


173


Then Savitri saluted her parents, saying: "My husband
goes today into the great forest to gather fruit, and I ask
of you permission to go with him; for today I must not
be parted from him. Your son goes to gather fruit for the
sacrifice and may not be deterred, otherwise he might be
deterred from going. It is a year almost, and I have not
been away from the hermitage. I am eager to see the
woods in bloom." And Dyumatsena said: "Since Savitri
was given to us by her father, I do not remember that
ever she has expressed a single wish; let her then do as
she desires. But Oh, my child! take heed of Satyavant
along the way!"
So when she had received permission from her parents,
she set forth with her husband, smiling indeed, but sick
at heart. All about her she beheld with open eyes the
ever-changing pleasant groves haunted by flocks of peafowl, and the rivers of clear water, and the great flowering
trees. And Satyavant with soft voice murmured, "Look,
Savitri!" Yet always like a blameless wife she kept her
eyes upon her lord, thinking, "Now he must die, or now!"
remembering the words of Narada. Thus she followed him
with gentle steps; but her heart was divided, for she regarded the fatal hour.
V
Now the hero together with his wife gathered the
fruits, a basket full; and then he began to cut wood for
the sacrifice. And as he was chopping wood, the sweat
collected on him, and his head began to ache from the
labour. So he came to his wife and said to her in his pain:
"My head aches from this labour; my limbs and heart are
in a fever, 0 Savitri. I feel as though I were sick. Sharp




174      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
pains dart through my head, I have no more strength to
stand, and am fain to sleep, dear Lady."
Then Savitri sat down on the earth by her husband and
rested his head in her lap. And she remembered the words
of Narada, and knew that the moment and the hour and
the day was come.
And that very moment she beheld a man, clad in red
garments, with his hair bound up, resplendent as the sun.
His hue was mingled black and yellow, his eyes were shot
with blood, and in his hand he held a noose,-a figure to
strike terror, standing at the side of Satyavant and gazing
down upon him. And when she saw him, she moved aside
her husband's head, and rose up quickly, and stood sorrowful, with folded hands and beating heart, and said:
SAVITRI SPEAKS: I know that thou art a god, for thy form is more
than human. Graciously tell me, my Lord, who thou art and
what thou wouldst do.
YAMA SPEAKS: Thou art loyal, O SavITRI, and firm in thy penance; therefore I speak with thee. Behold, I am Yama, the
death-god. Consumed is the life of Satyavant, thy prince, thy
spouse. Now I must bind him in my noose and lead him
away: and this I would do.
SAVITRI SPEAKS: Yet is it said, my Lord, thy messengers are sent
to lead men away. Why now art thou thyself come hither?
And the King of the Dead had pity on her as she spoke,
and told her all that he must do, saying: "This man was
just and comely, as it were a sea of righteousness. It was
not fitting I should summon such an one by my servants,
and therefore I myself am come hither."
Thereupon Yama bound the soul of Satyavant in his
noose, and by force drew it from the body, as it were a
little man the size of your thumb. And when the life was
out and the breath gone, straightway the body grew still




SAVITRI


175


and inglorious and repulsive to the eyes. But Yama, having bound the soul, set forth with his face towards the
south; and Savitri followed sorrowfully after Yama, perfect in her vows, faithful to her lord.
YAMA SPEAKS: Turn back, 0 Savitri; go and perform the rites of
the dead. Thou hast fulfilled thy wifely duty; thou hast come
as far as may be.
SAVITRI SPEAKS: Whither my husband is led, or whither he goeth
of himself, thither I too must go; and this is my eternal duty.
I implore thee, as I have done penance and cherished my
parents, as I have loved my husband and kept my vows, I
implore thee by thy own misericord,-turn me not back from
following. Thou art the King of Righteousness; hear me a
little while I speak thy praise:
Still virtue guides us in the master's house,
Or if we dwell in groves, or under vows
We roam as eremites.
Nay, virtue of herself hathfound the road
Of sweet release, and needeth not the load
Of any burdened rites.
YAMA SPEAKS: Turn back, 0 woman without blame! I am
pleased with thy well-ordered song of praise. Choose for
thyself a boon; excepting the life of thy husband I grant thee
any boon.
SAVITRI SPEAKS: My new father has fallen from his realm, and
now, a blind old man, dwells in his forest hermitage. By thy
grace may the king receive again his sight and strength, and
shine like the sun in splendour.
YAMA SPEAKS: I grant thy boon; and as thou sayest, so it shall
be done. Yet now I see that thou art weary from travel; turn
back, go thy way, lest faintness overcome thee.
SAVITRI SPEAKS: How shall I be faint in the presence of my lord?
Where my lord is, there I must surely go; and whither thou
leadest my lord, thither I must follow. Again hear my song, O
Master of the Gods:




176       THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
Communion with the good is friendship's root,
that dieth not until our death;
And on the boughs hangs ever goldenfruit:And this is friendship, the world saith.
YAMA SPEAKS: Pleasant is thy speech and salutary and increasing wisdom. Excepting again the life of Satyavant, choose
now for thyself a second boon.
SAVITRI SPEAKS: My new father has long been exiled from his
realm: may the king receive his own once more, and may he
depart not from justice. This second boon I crave.
YAMA SPEAKS: In a little while the king shall recover his own
realm, and he shall not depart from justice. Now I have fulfilled thy desire, O Princess; turn back, go thy way, lest faintness overcome thee.
SAVITRi SPEAKS: O thou that compellest all creatures by thy
power, and by compulsion leadest them according to thy
pleasure,-hear once more the song I utter:
Kindness to all in thought and word and deed,
Goodwill and alms,-behold the eternal creed,
And none may higher go.
Before thee, 2ama, mortals have no skill,
And all are weak; yet would a good man still
Pity afallenfoe.
YAMA SPEAKS: Like water to the thirsty, so is thy speech to me.
Excepting again the life of Satyavant, choose now a boon, fair
woman, according to thy pleasure.
SAVITRi SPEAKS: My own father, the king, is without children:
may a hundred sons be born to him, giving increase to the
family. This is the third boon I ask of thee.
YAMA SPEAKS: A hundred glorious sons shall be born to thy
father, giving increase to the family. And now I have fulfilled thy desire, 0 Princess; turn back, for thou hast come a
far journey.
SAVITR1 SPEAKS: It is not far in the company of my husband,
and my heart runs further on before. O thou that rulest these




SAVITRI


177


creatures by the unaltering law of right, and art called
Dharmaraja, King of Righteousness, hear me now as we go,
hear still the song I utter:
Ourselves we doubt, our hearts we hardly know,
We leanfor guidance on afriend:
Aye, on a righteous man we'dfain bestow
Ourfaith, andfollow to the end.
YAMA SPEAKS: Never before, fair Lady, have I heard such words
as thou speakest, and I am content with them. Excepting the
life of this man, choose a fourth boon, and then go.
SAVITRi SPEAKS: May a hundred sons, strong and glorious, be
born to Satyavant and me, giving increase to the family. This
fourth boon I ask of thee.
YAMA SPEAKS: A hundred sons, strong and glorious, shall indeed
give thee joy, O woman. But now, lest faintness overcome
thee, turn back, O Princess; for thou hast come a far journey.
SAVITRI SPEAKS:
Ever the righteous walk the eternal path
Of law, nor stumble on the way for wrath,
Norfail through mortalfear.
By truth the righteous guide upon his course
The rolling sun, and stay the earth byforce
Of penitence austere.
They are the refuge of the worlds outworn,
And worlds that lurk in darkness still are born
Because they tarry here.
YAMA SPEAKS: As thy words are righteous, and pleasing to the
heart, and wise, so my love for thee is magnified to the uttermost. Choose now for thyself, O loyal woman, thy dearest
boon.
SAVITRI SPEAKS: Now is the end of thy promise not deprived of
grace, as were thy former favours. I choose my boon, Let
Satyavant live!-for without my lord I am as one dead. I care
not for happiness without my lord; I care not for heaven




178      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
without my lord; I care not for prosperity; I count it not gain
to live without my lord. Thou didst promise unto me a
hundred sons, yet my husband is taken from me. I choose my
boon, Let Satyavant live! So will thy word be made true.
Then Yama, the King of Righteousness, replied, "So
be it!" and relaxed the noose gladly, and said to Savitri:
"Behold, thy husband is set free, noble Lady; he shall
grow well and strong and prosperous. Four hundred years
shall he live with thee, and by sacrifice and justice shall
win renown in the world. Thou shalt bear him a hundred
sons, all warriors and brave men; and thy sons and thy
grandsons shall carry on thy name for ever."
Thus Yama granted her desire to Savitri, and departed
to his own home. But Savitri, having won again her husband, turned back when Yama was gone, and went to
where the dead body of her lord lay. And there she saw
him still lying on the ground; and she sat down on the
earth beside him, and rested his head in her lap. And
when he had regained consciousness he began to speak to
Savitri as if he had come back from a journey, and looked
up at her again and again in his love.
SATYAVANT SPEAKS: Ah me, I have slept very long; why did you
not wake me? and where is that black man who dragged me
with him?
SAVITRi SPEAKS: You have indeed slept long, my Prince, lying
in my lap. The divine lord has gone away, Yama, the compeller of men. You are rested now and no longer sleepy. Stand
up, if you have strength; see, the night is far advanced.
SATYAVANT SPEAKS: I came hither with you to gather fruit; and
then while I was cutting wood I felt a pain in my head, and
because of the anguish I could no longer stand, and so fell
asleep in your lap. That is all I remember, my fair one. But
while I slept in your care, my mind was stolen away: I seemed




SAVITRt


179


to see a fearful darkness and a man great and strong. If you
know what this means, tell me, my fair one. Was it a dream,
or did I in truth see him?
But Savitri only replied: "The night deepens; tomorrow
I will tell you all, my Prince. The sun is gone, and the
night is far advanced. Creatures of darkness roam about
and utter savage cries in their wantonness. I hear the
leaves rustle under the tread of wild beasts in the forest.
Far away the prowling jackals howl dismally, so that my
heart trembles."
SATYAVANT SPEAKS: The woods are fearsome; they are wrapt in
thick darkness. You will not know the path, and how can you
proceed?
SAVITRI SPEAKS: There was a forest fire today, and yonder a dry
log still burns. Here and there you can see the flames as the
wind blows. I will fetch a brand thence and kindle a fire for us
with these faggots. Do not worry then. If you are unable to
walk, I perceive it is because you are ill; and because darkness
envelops the forest, you cannot distinguish the path. Tomorrow when the dawn lightens the woods, we will go as you
wish. Let us pass the night here, if it please you.
SATYAVANT SPEAKS: The pain in my head is gone, and my limbs
have recovered their strength. With your aid I would go back
to my father and mother. Never yet have I been away from
the hermitage at eventide; always before the twilight falls
my mother expects my return. Even in the day when I am
away, my parents grieve for me and search for me among the
people of the hermitage. Often before this they have chidden
me sorrowfully, saying, "You return late today." Often in the
night my aged parents have said to me, weeping in their
sorrow and love: "Without you we could not live for a moment, dear son; we are old and blind; our seeing is in you; on
you depend our fame and all our family." Now I curse this
sleep that has brought anxiety to my father and my innocent
mother. No doubt even now the blind old man wanders about




180      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
with troubled heart, questioning one hermit and then another. Not for myself I worry, but for my father, and for my
mother who follows about after her helpless mate.
And when he had said this, he lifted up his two hands
and wept aloud in sorrow and in love for his parents. But
Savitrl, seeing the affliction of her husband, wiped the
tears from his eyes, and said: "If ever I have done penance, and given alms, and made sacrifice, so now be this
night sanctified to thee and to thine. As I remember not
that ever willingly I spoke a false word, so by that truth
today may our parents find support."
SATYAVANT SPEAKS: Nay, I must see my father and my mother.
I cannot live if harm comes to them. Now if your heart is set
on goodness, if you care for my life, come, let us go back to
the hermitage.
So Savitri arose, and bound up her hair, and raised up
her husband, supporting him in her arms. And Satyavant,
when he had arisen, brushed his limbs clean with his
hand; and as he looked about him his eyes fell on the
basket. But Savitri said to him: "Tomorrow you shall
carry home the fruit, yet for safety I will now take the
axe." Then she hung the basket on the bough of a tree,
and took up the axe, and walked beside her lord, resting
his arm on her shoulder, and putting her own right arm
about his waist. And so they went.
SATYAVANT SPEAKS: Do not fear; often I have come this way,
and I know the path. By the moonlight breaking through the
trees I see the road we came, and where we gathered fruit.
Go on by the way we came, my fair one, tarry not. By yonder
tree the path divides in two; go on by the northern branch,
and tarry not. I am well, I am strong, I am eager to see my
parents.
And while he talked, ever he pressed on towards the
hermitage.




SAVITRI                   181
VI
In the meantime Dyumatsena had suddenly recovered
his sight, and saw everything. But in distress for his son
he visited all the hermitages with his wife; and all that
night they wandered about among the hermitages, the
rivers, and groves, and pools, seeking their children.
Whenever any sound was heard, they started, thinking it
was their son, and said one to the other, "Lo, Satyavant
comes with Savitri." And so they roamed hither and
thither, with feet pierced by the reeds, wounded and
covered with blood, with limbs torn by the thorns, witless
with grief. At last all the eremites of the forest came to
them, and led them back to their own hermitage, and
there comforted them with tales of bygone kings. But the
old couple in their sorrow recalled again the acts of their
son when a child, and cried aloud with piteous voice, "Ah
my son, ah noble wife! where art thou? where art thou?"
And while they called out they wept.
Then one of the Brahmins, Suvarcas, said to them: "So
truly as Savitri, his wife, hath done penance and hath
lived in self-restraint, so truly Satyavant liveth."
Then said Gautama, another Brahmin: "By much
penance have I learned to know all the motions of the
heart; and now I tell you of a certainty, Satyavant liveth."
And Gautama's pupil said: "So truly as the words that
fall from my teacher's mouth are never vain, so truly
Satyavant liveth."
And Dhaumya said: "So truly as thy son was endowed
with all virtues, and was dear to the people, and was
marked with the signs of long life, so truly Satyavant
liveth."
And even as they were talking in the night, at that very
moment Savitri approached with her husband, and entered the hermitage in gladness. And the Brahmins cried




182      THE DEMON OF THE ABSOLUTE
out to the king: "Now we behold thee united to thy son
and restored to sight, and we, all of us, wish thee increase
of joy, O King!"
Thereupon, having lighted a fire, all the holy men sat
down about Dyumatsena; and Satyavant and Savitri
also, who were standing apart, sat down as requested, and
forgot their grief. Then the forest-dwellers in curiosity
asked the king's son why he had not returned earlier, and
why he had returned so late in the night. And Satyavant
told them what had passed, bidding them not to lament
for there was no other cause.
GAUTAMA SPEAKS; Suddenly thy father received back his sight. If
then thou knowest not the cause of this, let SAVITRi speak.Thou, 0 SAVITRi, knowest what is past and what is to be;
thou art endowed with the powers of the goddess of thy
name. Thou knowest the cause of this; tell us then the truth,
if there be no secret here.
SAVITRI SPEAKS: There is no secret here, and I tell thee the
whole matter. The death of my lord was foretold me by
Narada, the seer; and because the fatal day was come, I
would not leave my lord. Yet while he slept, came Yama with
servants, and bound his soul in a noose, and led him away
towards the land where the Fathers dwell. But I extolled the
great god in truthful words, so that he granted me five boons.
Hear now what I chose: For my father here the recovery of
his sight and of his throne; to my own father shall be given a
hundred sons, and to myself a hundred sons; and Satyavant,
my lord, shall live through years four times a hundred. And
that vow I made for my husband's life. So I have related the
whole matter; and now my great sorrow has been converted
into this blessed future.
THE HOLY MEN SPEAK: The family of this great king was
plunged in misery as in a sea of darkness, but now by thy
virtues and thy vows it is raised up again, most noble Lady.




SAVITRI                  183
And when the holy men had thus praised Savitri, they
saluted the king and his son, and went away together in
gladness to their own homes.
THE END




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