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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In so far as it is true that “Germany” represents the “elemental instincts” always in revolt against “Rome,” “the representative of the supremacy of reason” (Hovelaque), there are grounds for believing that a psychological rapprochement is necessary to the psychic health no less than to the peace of Europe. Long before the war we heard, even in this country, criticism of the right of reason to supremacy; and, strangely enough, it was from the “Roman” Mr. Chesterton that the criticism came most powerfully. “Germany,” in that case, may certainly be said to have taken the lead in the active revolt against Rome; but it was, we must observe, against a Rome already weakened from within by the dissatisfaction with Romanism of many of the leading “Romans.” The fact is that the “supremacy of reason,” for which “Rome” stands, is always in danger, like every other supremacy, of degenerating into a dictatorship; and the dictatorship which reason was establishing before the war involved precisely the suppression of the “elemental instincts” attributed to Germany. The so-called encirclement of Germany was, in fact, and in psychological terms, the rational encirclement of instinct; and I must again observe that it was not in geographical Germany alone that the encirclement was felt to be oppressive, but in every “Germany within us,” in so far as each of us contained “elemental instincts” of any kind. The meaning of what I am saying is that the elemental instincts, call them German, or anything you please, cannot be permanently tyrannised over by “reason”; nor should they be. Nor is it necessary that reason should attempt such a dictatorship. Its rule should be that of a constitutional monarch under the direction of representatives, not of itself, but of the elemental instincts. The practical conclusion to be drawn is that the “eternal antagonism” of “Rome” and “Germany” is not a necessary fact in psychology. It becomes a fact only when “Rome” aims at a dictatorship of reason to the inevitable isolation and suppression of “Germany.” Reason must learn how to cultivate its instincts.

I do not imagine that Mr. Chesterton identifies “Rome” with the Holy See, though others, no doubt, do. It is interesting, however, to remark that before the war, and for a considerable period during the war, the policy of the Holy See was directed to the support of Germany. I have often wondered how a Catholic like M. Hovelaque accommodates his thesis with that fact. If the war, as he says, was only an episode in the secular conflict of Germany with Rome (meaning the Roman Church as the spiritual successor of the Roman Empire), how came it that before and during the war the directors of the Roman Church were pro-German? Something must surely be wrong here; for either the Roman Church did not take that view of Germany which M. Hovelaque has defined, or, as seems to me more probable, the Holy See had another end in view than victory over Germany, namely, alliance with a prospectively victorious Germany! With this key, I think, the mystery is unlocked for the ordinary man, however much it continues sealed to the faithful. As The Times Literary Supplement said: “Modernists understand no better than Newman the springs of Roman ecclesiastical policy, which is never fanatical or idealistic, but always based on cool political calculation.” And, undoubtedly, the “cool political calculation” of the Holy See, both before and during the first years of the war, was that Germany would win. If this was not the case, how are we to explain the sudden change over of policy when it began to appear that Germany, after all, was not to be the victor? That at a certain stage in the war such a change took place is well known to everybody, and it was openly admitted in the Catholic Dublin Review. “The pendulum of Catholicism,” said the Dublin Review, “has swung away from Germany ... with Austria and Spain ... and with the English-speaking peoples and their Latin Allies the Catholic order in the era of the future.” The “eternal conflict” theory must go by the board after this, for it obviously fails to fit the facts.

The Origins of Marx.—It is to be hoped that the reputation of Marx will not long survive the war unimpaired. I can scarcely think that the German Socialists will be so proud of their Marxism in the future as they have been in the past, since it will have clearly betrayed them into one of the most shameful moral surrenders in all history. It is dangerous for a man’s writings to be regarded as the “Bible” even of Socialists; and when, in addition, the Marxian Bible, unlike the other, aims at and, in a sense, achieves, logical consistency, the peril of it is greater upon minds lacking the inestimable virtue of common sense. Marx was not himself a slave of his own inspiration; he was anything but a Marxian in the sense in which his followers are Marxian. He had, indeed, a very sharp word for certain of the disciples whose breed, unfortunately, has not been extinguished by it. “Amateur anarchists,” he called them, who “make up by rabid declarations and bloodthirsty rampings for the utter insignificance of their political existence.” Groups of his disciples, answering perfectly to this description, are to be found to-day in English as well as in other Labour circles. In between their rampings they reveal their political insignificance by inquiring of each other such elementary facts about literature and history as schoolboys should be ashamed to have forgotten. And the surprising thing is that even these open confessions induce no reaction upon their conviction that they understand Marx.

It is a common supposition among Marx’s followers that not only has he left nothing to be said on the subject of economics, but that nothing was said before him. One German Socialist, at any rate, has rid himself of this notion, for Dr. Menger has remarked that “Marx was completely under the influence of the earlier English Socialists, and more particularly of William Thompson.” In a valuable essay upon Marx, by Professor Alfred Rahilly, the facts are let out. Marx, it appears, came across Thompson’s work on The Distribution of Wealth (1824) in the British Museum, and read it with great profit. From Thompson he took practically all his chief doctrines, with the exception of his peculiar interpretation of history in terms of economics. The theory of Value as measured by labour-power, the distinction between capital and capitalism, the law of decreasing utility, and, above all, the very phrase as well as the very idea of Surplus Value—all of these “Marxian” doctrines Marx found in Thompson. I am not arguing that Marx was the less for having been indebted to his English predecessors. He would, indeed, in my opinion, have been a greater man if he had borrowed more of Thompson, for Thompson possessed the common sense to realise that it was possible that the concentration of capital might take place simultaneously, with a diffusion of ownership—an idea which would have spared Marx the ignominy of many of his most fanatical disciples. What, on the other hand, was great in Marx, was his capacity for large generalisations, and his industry in establishing them. In this respect he belonged to the great Victorians, and, as such, he deserves more credit than his present-day followers will permit him to receive.

Marx as Politician.—The centenary celebrations of Marx ought not to conclude without a tribute to his astonishing political insight. Philosophically Marx was confused; as an economist he has suffered from his disciples; but as a political critic he has seldom been surpassed. Particular attention may be drawn to his analysis of the circumstances of Bismarck’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, and to his forecast of the consequences. Though writing in London, and without our historic knowledge of the Ems telegram, or our present knowledge of the world-war, Marx might have written his manifesto to-day; but, in that case, I doubt whether he would be published in Germany, or read with much attention by Marx’s followers in this country. It is a strange reflection, indeed, upon the fate of the works of Marx that it is precisely the most clear and prophetic part of them which his professed followers neglect. For his dubious forecasts and his riddling analyses they have a reverence that transcends bibliolatry; but, concerning his most absolute and explicit political policies—not a word!

The war of 1870, as we all know, was for Germany a declared war of defence, exactly like the present war. Germany is always defending herself at the world’s expense. No sooner, however, had the ostensible motive of defence been satisfied by Sedan, than the real objects of German militarism began to be revealed. Unhindered by the earlier protestations of the Emperor William that Germany was at war only with Napoleon and not with France, the militarists inspired the German liberal bourgeoisie to press for annexations in the name of race and security. They dared to pretend, said Marx, that the people of the two provinces were burning to be annexed to Germany, and they adopted without reflection the excuse of the military party that a rectification of the Imperial frontiers was a strategic necessity. Thus, concluded Marx, they insisted upon sowing in the terms of peace the seeds of new wars—the phrase is Marx’s own. And what wars, too! Marx was not blind to their probable character. History, he said, would not measure the German offence by the number of miles of territory annexed, but by the significance of the fact of annexation. This significance was no less than a declaration of “a policy of conquest,” from which might be anticipated in logical order a German racial war against “the Slav and Latin races combined.” The war of 1870, having thus ended, would, he said, be the precursor of a series of international wars, in the course of which it was probable that the working-classes everywhere would succumb to the forces of militarism and capitalism. What comment has the Call or any of our contemporary Marxian pacifists to make upon this? It is not right that they should ignore it, more especially when it is recalled that Marx paid a tribute to the English working-classes of his day, who “protested with all their might against the dismemberment of France.”

John Mitchel as the Same.—Marx, however, was not the only observer of the events of 1870 to be moved to prophecy by them. As a matter of fact, everything has been foreseen. John Mitchel, the Irish Nationalist, whose name is invoked by Sinn Feiners to-day, was in Paris before the 1870 war, and wrote of the events of the war in the Irish Citizen and elsewhere during its progress. He, too, had no illusions concerning the nature of Prussian militarism, and though his sympathies were mainly with France, he had a word of warning for England. “Prussia,” he said, “cannot be England’s friend. Prussia has her own aspirations and ambitions; one of these is to be a great maritime power, or rather the great maritime Power of Europe; and nothing in the future can be more sure than that Prussia, if successful in this struggle with France, will take Belgium, and threaten from Antwerp the mouth of the Thames.” Things have not worked out exactly as Mitchel prophesied, but they have worked out nearly enough to justify his political clairvoyance. Like Marx, he was not deceived by the events before him, and both saw in them the shadows of the events which have now befallen us. I remark with irony that just as the self-styled followers of the economist Marx ignore the political judgments of their master, the professed inheritors of the Nationalist opinions of Mitchel ignore his international opinions. It is in this way that the garments of the great are divided, and the seamless coat shredded to make partisan ribbons.

Norse in English.—Professor C. H. Herford makes a meritorious attempt to recall attention to the influence and value of the Norse Myths upon English Poetry. William Morris was most powerfully and directly influenced by the Sagas, and of Morris Professor Herford says that “no other English poet has felt so keenly the power of Norse myth; none has done so much to restore its terrible beauty, its heroism, its earth-shaking humour, and its heights of tragic passion and pathos, to a place in our memories, and a home in our hearts.” It will not do, however, for (let me whisper it) who reads Morris’s poetry to-day? Has he a home in our hearts? Are his Norse enthusiasms really anything to us? I am not defending our generation for neglecting Morris, or for being indifferent to the Norse theogony, of which he was a prophet. Our age is one of prose, and the passion of prose is justice—reasonable and regulated justice. Terrible beauty, earth-shaking humour, tragic passion, and so on—the stuff of epic poetry—are relegated nowadays to the police court. Moreover, the Norse mythology is not only “pagan” in the sense of being non-Christian, it is pagan in the sense of being sub- as much as pre-Christian, differing in this respect from the Indian mythology of the Mahabharata, or the Egyptian mythology of the Book of the Dead. We can never return to it without committing an act of regression, since it is a paganism of a world inferior rather than superior to the “Christian” world. At the same time, since we must carry all our sheaves with us in order to enjoy the complete harvest of the human soul, it is necessary not to drop from consciousness the heroic past, albeit a past to which we may not return. Let it be enshrined and enjoyed in poetry and music now that it is no longer possible in life.

The Comedy of It.—Comedy still remains a secret hid from the English mind, and not all the efforts of Mr. John Francis Hope to bring it into popularity will succeed where the prior efforts of Meredith have failed. The reason, as Mr. Hope has often explained it, even more clearly than Meredith, is not only that the spirit of Comedy demands “a society of cultivated men and women, wherein ideas are current and perceptions quick”—a condition certainly not now existing—but the absence of three qualities, each of which, unfortunately, blooms luxuriantly among us—“sentimentalism, puritanism, and bacchanalianism.” Comedy, the play of the mind about real ideas, is quite incompatible with any one of these three vices. If you sentimentalise, play is over, and equally it is over if you are shocked, or if you carry the suggested humour of the situation too far. But one of these things the ordinary English man or woman is almost bound to do; and thus it comes about that “play,” the sparkle of common sense, is so rare among us.

Meredith certainly worked very hard to instil Comedy into the English mind. His essay is a classic, and our only classic on the subject. And he may be said to have written the whole of his novels in order to illustrate his idea. Meredith’s novels are much more than a mirror held up in Nature; they are a model held up to human nature; and, from this point of view, they are only an appendix to the Essay on Comedy. The serious way in which Meredith’s novels are read, however, is an evidence of his failure, and it would be interesting to hear his secret comment on the critics who acclaim him as the grand portrait-painter of women. Did Meredith even set himself to draw a woman? Was his art not rather to “draw out” a woman from the imperfect society his times provided him? Were not his “portraits,” in fact, constructive criticisms of the women he knew? I put these opinions into interrogation out of mere courtesy, for there is really no doubt whatever about them. Meredith drew women still to be, as he hoped they would become.

“To love comedy you must know the real world, and know men and women well enough not to expect too much of them, though you may still hope for good.” That is an almost complete summary of the conditions of the comic spirit; but there must be added the “sense of society,” the social sense, which is quite as important. This also introduces a considerable difficulty for us, since if “our English school had not clearly imagined society” in 1877, when Meredith wrote, it is less than ever probable to-day. In 1877, such people of intelligence as were living in England were still more or less homogeneous in their general views about life. They were not eighteenth century—the century of our highest English social culture; but they were not yet what we have subsequently become, discrete and warring atoms of intellectuality. It was possible when Meredith was alive for a group of people to meet, and to create something remotely resembling a salon. The hope of realising a “salon spirit” was not entirely dead. To-day nothing is more improbable than even an attempt to restore a salon. Not only would nobody undertake to do it, but to nobody would it occur that its restoration is highly desirable. But the salon is, as it were, the foyer of the theatre of Comedy, as the theatre of Comedy is itself the foyer of the Civilised Life of Brilliant Common Sense; and if we cannot re-create a salon it is perfectly certain that the greater mysteries are beyond us. We may continue, however, to “hope for good,” since that also is an essential of Comedy.

The Epic Serbs.—Kossovo: the Heroic Songs of the Serbs, translated by Miss Helen Rootham, has now been published for some months. If there is any “epic sense” alive in this country, it must surely be gratified by the appearance of these Serbian ballads, which are much more truly epic fragments than ballads as we understand the term. In the ballad proper the prevailing note is tragedy—sometimes individual, sometimes family, sometimes clan; but in the Serbian, as in the Homeric, the tragedy expressed in the popular poetry is more spacious even than the nation; the nation becomes the race, and the race symbolises a psychological power, which may very well be called a god—a suffering god. Grimm said of these ballads that there had been “nothing since Homer to compare with them; they were the best of all times and nations.” Goethe compared them to the Song of Songs. Certainly there is something Homeric in them; and since they are sung to-day, they can be regarded as unique. Long dwelling on them, with a view to discovering their innermost secret, convinces me, however, that they differ from the Homeric mood in their comparative hopelessness. Mr. Baring says in his Introduction that these Serbian ballad-writers “saw the world with the eyes of a child and the heart of a man.” “Child” is a word of multiple entente; and the difference between the Homeric and the Serbian “childhood” is that the latter appears doubtful whether it can grow up. Homer, we know, occasionally let fall a sad regret that his splendid heroes should still be children; and in the plays of Æschylus the high philosophical meditations of Homer are considerably elaborated. But in these Serbian ballads there does not appear to me any sign of the mind of a man, however much of the heart there may be. No Serbian Plato will ever find in them such a text as the Greek Plato found in Homer. It is not to be wondered at. Serbia has always been on the frontier of European civilisation, and perpetually in the trenches. Since 1389 Serbia has been in unbroken but unsubmissive captivity, and her deliverance from alien bondage is only an event of yesterday. But if the elements of the future are contained in the quintessence of these ballads, there is no sight of a new Athens in them.

Ernest Dowson.—Mr. Arthur Symons’s Introduction to the reprinted Poems and Prose of the late Ernest Dowson has all the characteristics of the age to which both he and Dowson belonged. It is delicately appreciative, and not lacking in good judgment. Mr. Symons says, for instance, that Dowson was small enough to be overwhelmed by experiences that would have been nourishing food to a great man. But the style and manner of passing judgment almost completely contradict the matter of the judgment itself, and leave us in doubt whether Mr. Symons is not judging against his judgment. Literary criticism does not need to be literature; least of all does it need to be belles-lettres. Yet Mr. Arthur Symons and his whole school seem to aim at precisely this effect, that of writing in the same style as the work criticised. Thus we find him saying of Dowson: “all the fever and turmoil and the unattained dreams of a life which had so much of the swift, disastrous, and suicidal impetus of genius”—words and phrases which might have been written by Dowson himself. They are apologiastic of the person when what we ask of criticism is judgment of the quality of the style, and in the unfortunate identification of genius with disaster and suicide they are almost an incentive to the little artists to trade on their neuroses. I do not know whether Mr. Symons knew Dowson personally; it is of no importance; but his bedside manner with ailing geniuses would have been anything but tonic.

It is symptomatic of Dowson’s state of mind, though Mr. Symons misses the subtlety of it, that he was always repeating Poe’s line: “the viol, the violet, and the vine.” A special affection for labials and liquids is conclusive evidence of minority, not to say infantilism; and stylists with any ambition to excel, and to develop both themselves and their style, will be wise to watch their “v’s” and “m’s” and “l’s,” in fact, their labials and liquids generally. Dowson wallowed in liquids and labials to the end of his short life; his vocabulary never grew up, and I have no doubt that, had he been asked to quote his own best lines, he would have pointed, not to the notorious “Cynara,” which is sufficiently pretty-pretty, but to these lines, in which he came as near to Poe as originality permits:—