 Preface of visions and revisions. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Kerry Ford. Visions and revisions by John Cooper Powis. Preface. What I aim at in this book is little more than to give complete reflection to those great figures in literature which have so long obsessed me. This poor reflection of them passes as they pass, image by image, idolin by idolin, in the flowing stream of my own consciousness. Most books of literary essays take upon themselves an unpardonable effrontery to weigh and judge from their own petty suburban pedestal the great shadows they review. It is an insolence. How should Professor this or Doctor that, whose furthest experiences of dangerous living, have been squalid for landering with their neighbour's wives, bring an ethical synthesis to bear that shall put Shakespeare and Hardy, Milton and Rubbley into appropriate niches? Every critic has a right to his own aesthetic principles, to his own ethical convictions, but when it comes to applying these and tiresome pedantic agitation to Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Lamb, we must beg leaf to cry off. What we want is not the formulating of new critical standards and the dragging in of the great masters before our last miserable theory of art. What we want is an honest downright and quite personal articulation as to how these great things in literature really hit us when they find us for the moment natural and off our guard. When they find us as men and women and not as ethical gramophones. My own object in these sketches is not to convert the reader to whatever opinions I may have formulated in the course of my spiritual adventures. It is to divest myself of such opinions and in pure, passionate humility to give myself up, absolutely and completely, to the various visions and temperaments of these great dead artists. There is an absurd notion going about among those half educated people who frequent ethical platforms that literary criticism must be constructive. Oh, that word constructive. How in the name of the mystery of genius can criticism be anything else than an idolatry, a worship, a metamorphosis, a love affair? The pathetic mistake these people make is to fancy that the great artists only lived and wrote in order to buttress up such poor riches as these are upon the particular little, thin cardboard platform which is at present the moral security and refuge. No one has a right to be a critic whose mind cannot with protein receptivity. Take first one form and then another as the great spells one by one are thrown and withdrawn. Who wants to know what Professor So-and-so's view of life may be? We want to use Professor So-and-so as a mirror, as a medium, as a go-between, as a sensitive plate so that we may once more get the thrill of contact with this or that dead spirit. He must keep his temperament our critic, his peculiar angle of receptivity, his capacity for personal reaction, but it is the reaction of his own natural nerves that we require, not the pallid second hand reaction of his tedious formulated opinions. Why cannot he see that, as a natural man, physiologically, nervously, temperamentally, pathologically different from other men, he is an interesting spectacle as he comes under the influence first of one great artist and then another, while as a silly little preaching schoolmaster he is only a blot upon the world mirror. It is thus that I, Moi qui vous parle, claim my humble and modest role, if in my reaction from Rabelais for instance, I find myself responding to his huge laughter at love and other things, and a moment later in my reaction from Thomas Hardy, feeling as if love and the rest were the only important matters in the universe. This psychological variability, itself of interest as a curious human phenomena, has made it possible to get these reflections, each absolute in its way, of the two great artists as they advance and recede. If I had tried to dilute or prune and correct the one, so as to make it fit in with the other, in some stiff ethical theory of my own, where would be the interest for the reader, besides, who am I to improve upon Rabelais? It is because so many of us are so limited in our capacity for variable reaction, that there are so few good critics. But we are all, I think, more multiple sold than we care to admit. It is our foolish pride of consistency, our absurd desire to be constructive that makes us so dull. A critic need not necessarily approach the world from the pluralistic angle, but there must be something of such pluralism in his natural temper, or the writers he can respond to will be very few. Let it be quite plainly understood. It is impossible to respond to a great genius halfway. It is a case of all or nothing. If you lack the courage or the variability to go all the way with very different masters, and to let your constructive consistency take care of itself, you may become perhaps an admirable moralist. You will never be a clairvoyant critic. All this having been admitted, it still remains that one has a right to draw out, from the great writers, one love certain universal aesthetic tests, with which to discriminate between modern productions. But even such tests are personal and relative. They are not to be foisted on one's readers as anything, ex cathedra. One such test is the test of what has been called the grand style, that grand style against which, as Arnold says, the peculiar vulgarity of our race beats in vain. I do not suppose I shall be accused of perverting my devotion to the grand style into an academic narrow way, through which I would force every writer I approach, some most winning and irresistible artists never come near it. And yet, what a thing it is, and with what relief do we return to it, after the wallowings and rhapsodies, the agitations and prostitutions of those who have it not. It is, one must recognize that, the thing, and the only thing that, in the long run, appeals. It is because of the absence of it, that one can read so few modern writers twice. They have flexibility, originality, cleverness, insight, but they lack distinction. They fatally lack distinction. And what are the elements, the qualities, that go to make up this grand style? Let me first approach the matter negatively. There are certain things that cannot, because of something essentially ephemeral in them, be dealt with in the grand style. Such are, for instance, our modern controversies about the problem of sex. We may be feminists or anti-feminists, what you will. And we may be able to throw interesting light on those complicated relations, but we cannot write of them, either in prose or poetry, in the grand style. Because the whole discussion is ephemeral, because, with all its gravity, it is irrelevant to the things that ultimately matter. Such, to take another example, are our elaborate arguments about the interpretation, ethical or otherwise, of Christian doctrine. We can be very entertaining, very moral, very eloquent, very subtle in this particular sphere, but we cannot deal with it in the great style. Because the permanent issues that really count lie out of reach of such discussion and remain unaffected by it. Let me make myself quite clear. Hector and Andromache can talk to one another of their love, of their eternal parting, of their child, and they can do this in the great style. But if they fell into dispute over the particular sex conventions that existed in their age, they might be attractive still, but they would not be uttering words in the great style. Matthew Arnold may argue eloquently about the true modernistic interpretation of the word Elohim, and very cleverly and wittily give his reasons for translating it, the eternal or the shining one. But into what a different atmosphere we are immediately transported, when in the midst of such discussion, the actual words of the psalmist return to our mind. My soul is a thirst for God, yea, even for the living God. When shall I come to appear before the presence of God? The test is always that of permanence and of immemorial human association. It is at bottom nothing but human association that makes the great style what it is. Things that have for centuries upon centuries been associated with human pleasures. Human sorrows and the great recurrent dramatic moments of our lives can be expressed in this style and only such things. The great style is a sort of organic self-evolving work of art, to which the innumerable units of the great human family have all put their hands. That is why so large a portion of what is written in the great style is anonymous, like Homer and much of the Bible and certain old ballads and songs. It is for this reason that Walter Pater is right when he says that the important thing in religion is the ceremony, the litany, the ritual, the liturgical chance, and not the creeds or commandments or discussion upon creeds and commandment. Creeds change. Morality changes. Mysticism changes. Philosophy changes. But the word of our God, the word of humanity and gesture and ritual in the heart's natural crying abideth forever. Why do the eloquent arguments of an ethical orator explaining to us our social duties go a certain way and never go further? Whereas we have only to hear the long-drawn Vox humana, old as the world, older certainly than any creed. Santa Maria, Matade, ora pro nobis, peccatoribus, nonchetan, ora motis nostre. And we are struck, disarmed, pierced to the marrow, smitten to the bone, shot through. Tutotromente, because argument and reasoning, because morality and logic are not of the nature of the great style, while the cry save us from eternal death, addressed by the passions and remorse of despair of our human heart to the unbearing universe, takes that great form as naturally as a man breathes. Why, of all the religious books in the world, have the Psalms of David, whether in Hebrew or Latin or English, touched men's souls and melted and consoled them? They are not philosophical, they are not logical, they are not argumentative, they are not moral and yet they break our hearts with their beauty and their appeal. It is the same with certain well-known words. Is it understood, for instance, why the word sword is always poetical and in the grand style, while the word zeppelin or submarine or gatlingun or howitzer can only be introduced by free versifiers who let the grand style go to the devil? The word sword, like the word plough, has gathered about it the human associations of innumerable centuries and it is impossible to utter it without feeling something of their pressure and their strain. The very existence of the grand style is a protest against any false views of progress and evolution. Man may alleviate his lot in a thousand directions, he may build up one utopia after another, but the grand style will remain as the ultimate expression of those aspects of his life that cannot change while he remains man. If there is any unity in these essays, it will be found in a blurred and stammered attempt to indicate how far it may be possible, in spite of the limitations of our ordinary nature, to live in the light of the grand style. I do not mean that we, the far-off worshippers of these great ones, can live as they thought and felt, but I mean that we can live in the atmosphere, the temper, the mood, the attitude towards things which the grand style they use evolves and sustains. I want to make this clear. There are a certain number of solitary spirits moving among us who have a way of tumbling us by their aloofness, from our controversies, our disputes, our arguments, our great problems. We call them epicures, pagans, heathen, egoists, hedonists, and virtuosos, and yet not one of these words exactly fits them. What they are really doing is living in the atmosphere and the temper of the grand style, and that is why they are so irritating and provocative. To them the most important thing in the world is to realise to the fullest limit of their consciousness what it means to be born a man. The actual drama of our mortal existence reduced to the simplest terms is enough to occupy their consciousness and their passion in the sphere of the inevitable things of human life. Everything becomes to them a sacrament, not a symbol, be it noted, but a sacrament, the food they eat, the wine they drink, the waking and sleeping, the hesitancies and reluctances of their devotions, the swift anger of their recoils and retreats, their long loyalties, their savage reversions, their sudden lashings out, their hate and their love and their affection. The simplicities of these everlasting moods are in all of us, become every one of them, matters of sacramental efficiency, to regard each day as it dawns as a last day, and to make of its sunrise, of its noon, of its sunsetting, a rhythmic antiphony of the eternal gods that is to live in the spirit of the grand style. It has nothing to do with right or wrong. Saints may practice it and sometimes do. Sinners often practice it. The whole thing consists in growing vividly conscious of those moods and events which are permanent and human, as compared with those other moods and events which are transitory and unimportant. When a man or woman experiences desire, lust, hate, jealousy, devotion, admiration, passion, they are victims of the eternal forces that can speak if they will in the great style. When a man or woman argues or explains or moralizes or preaches, they are victims of the accidental dust storms which rises from futility and return to vanity. That is why rhetoric, as rhetoric, can never be in the great style. That is why certain great revolutionary anarchists, those who have the genius to express in words the heroic defiance of the something rotten in Denmark, move us more and assume a grander outline than the equally admirable and possibly more practical arguments of the scientific socialists. It is the eternal appeal we want to what is basic and primitive and undying in our tempestuous human nature. The grand style announces and commands, it weeps and it pleads, it utters oracles and it wrestles with angels. It never apologizes, it never rationalizes and it never explains. That is why the great ineffable passages in the Supreme Masters take us by the throat and strike us dumb. Deep calls unto deep in the end and our heart listens and is silent to do good scientific thinking and the cause of humanity has its well-earned reward, but the gods throw incense on a different temper. The fine issues that reach them in their remoteness and their disdain are the fine issues of an antagonist worthy of their own swift wrath, their own swift vengeance and their own swift love. The ultimate drama of the world, a drama never ending, lies between the children of Zeus and the children of Prometheus, between the hosts of Jehovah and the sons of the morning. God and Lucifer still divide the stage and in Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton and Goethe, the great style is never more the great style than when it brings these eternal antagonists face to face and compels them to cross swords. What matter if in reality they have their kingdoms in the heart of man rather than in the Imperium or Tartarus? The heart of man and its interchangeable character must ever remain the true Colosseum of the world. We're the only interesting, the only dramatic, the only beautiful, the only classical things are born and turned into music. Beauty, that is what we all, even the grossest of us, in our heart of hearts are seeking. Lust seeks it, love creates it, the miracle of faith finds it, but nothing less. Neither truth nor wisdom nor morality nor knowledge, neither progress nor reaction can quench the thirst we feel. Yes it is beauty we crave and yet, how often, in the strain and stress of life, it seems as though the strange impossible presence rising thus, like the figure in the picture, beside the waters, of the fate that carries us, were too remote, too high in Transluna, to afford us the aid we need. Hine tells us somewhere how, driven by the roar of street fighting, into the calm cool galleries of the Louvre, sick and exhausted in mind and body, he fell down at the feet of the goddess of beauty, there standing as she stands still, at the end of that corridor of mute witnesses. And as he looked at her for help, he knew that she could never bend down to him, or lift him up out of his weariness, for they had broken her long ago, and she had no arms. Alas, it is true enough that there are moments when, under the pressure of the engines of fate, we can only salute her, the immortal one, afar off. But if we have the courage, the obstinacy, the endurance to wait, even a short while longer, she will be near us again, and the old magical spell, transforming the world, will thrill through us like the breath of spring. Why should we attempt to deceive ourselves? We cannot always live with those liberating ears, blowing upon our foreheads. We have to bear the burden of the unallumined hours, even as our fathers before us and our children after us. Enough if we keep our souls so prepared that when the touch, the glimpse, the word, the gesture that carries with it the thrilling revelation of the grand manner, returns to us in its appointed hour, it shall find us not unworthy of our inheritance. End of Preface Chapter 1, Rabale, of Visions and Revisions by John Cooper Poeus This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Rabale There are certain great writers who make their critics feel even as children who picking up stray wreckage and broken shells from the edge of the sea waves return home to show their companions what the sea is like. The huge suggestiveness of this tremendous spirit is not easy to communicate in the space of a little essay, but something can be done if it only take the form of modest advice to the reader. Is it a pity one asks oneself, or is it a profound advantage, that enjoyment of Rabale should be so limited? At least there are no false versions to demolish here, no idealisations to unmask. The reading of Rabale is not easy to everyone, and perhaps to those for whom it is least easy, it would be most medicinal. What in this mad world do we lack, my dear friends? Is it possibly courage? Well Rabale is, of all writers, the one best able to give us that courage. If only we had courage, how the great tides of existence might sweep us along, and we not wine or wince at all. To read Rabale is to gather, as if from the earth gods, spirit to endure anything. Naturally he uses wine and every kind of wanton liquor to serve as symbols of the intoxication he would produce. For we must be rendered drunk to swallow life at this rate, to swallow it as the gods swallow it. We must be drunk but not mad, for in the spiritual drunkenness that Rabale produces, there is not the remotest touch of insanity. He is the sanest of all the great writers, perhaps the only sane one. What he has the power of communicating to us is a renewal of that physiological energy, which alone makes it possible to enjoy this monstrous world. Other writers interpret things, or warn us against things. Rabale takes us by the hand, shows us the cup of life deep as eternity, and bids us drink and be satisfied. What else could he use, if not wine, as a symbol for such quenching of such thirst, and after wine sakes? There is no other who treats sakes as Rabale does, who treats it so completely as it ought to be treated. Walt Whitman is too obsessed by it, too grave over it. Rabale enjoys it, fools with it, plunges into it, wallows in it, and then, with multitudinous laughter, shakes himself free, and bids it go to the devil. The world will have to come to this sooner or later, to the confusion of the vicious and the virtuous. The virtuous and the vicious play indeed into each other's hands, and neither of them love laughter. Sexual dalliance is either too serious a matter to be mocked by sata laughter, or it is too sad and deplorable to be laughed at at all. In a few hundred years, surely the human race will recognise its absolute right to make mock. At the grotesque elements in the sex comedy, and such laughter will clear the air of much virtue and much vice. Wine is his first symbol of the large, sane, generous mood he bequeaths to us, the focusing of the poetry of life, and the glow and daring of it, and its eternal youthfulness. But it is more than a symbol, it is a sacrament and an initiation. It is the sap that rises in the world's recurrent spring. It is the icor, the quintessence of the creative mystery. It is the blood of the suns of the morning. It is the dew upon the periodic fields. It is the red rose light upon the feet of those who dance upon graves. Wine is a sign to us how there is required a certain generous, insane intoxication, a certain large and equitable friendliness, and dealing with people and things and ideas. It is a sign that the earth calls aloud for the passionate dreamer. It is a sign that the truth of truth is not in labour and sorrow, but in joy and happiness. It is a sign that gods and men have a right to satisfy their heart's desire with joy and pleasure and splendid freedom. And just as he uses wine, so he uses meat, bread that strengthens man's heart, and bologna sausages, gammons of bacon, or what you will else. This also is a symbol and a sacrament, and it is indeed more. For one must remember that rubberly was a great doctor of medicine, as well as of utopian theology. And the stomach, with the wise indulgence thereof, is the final master of all arts. Let it be understood that in rubberly, sex is treated with the same reverence and the same humour as meat and wine. Why not? Is not the body of man the temple of the Holy Ghost? Is it not sacrosanct and holy within and without? And yet, at the same time, is it not a huge and palpable absurdity? Those who suffer most from rubberly's manner of treating sex are incurably vicious. The rarely evil, libidinous people, that is to say the spiteful, the mean, the base and inhuman, fly from his presence, and for the obvious reason that he makes sex pleasure so generous, so gay, so natural, so legitimate, that their dark, morbid, perverted natures can get no more joy out of it. Their lust, their lettery, is a cold, dead, saurian thing, a thing with the gravity of a slow worm. And when this great laughing and generous sage comes forth into the sunshine with his noble companies of amorous and happy people, their shadow-lovers, their loot-lovers, their fleshy sentimentalists writhe and shane, and seek refuge in a deeper darkness, how strained and inhuman too, and one might add how mad and irrelevant that high, cold, disdainful, transloona scorn with which the moral immoralism of nature scourges our poor flesh and blood. One turns with relief to Zarathustra after associating with poise people, but after Abelay, even that terrific psychologist seems contorted and thin. For after all, it is generosity that we cry out for, courage without generosity, hugs its knees in hell. From the noble pleasures of meat and drink and sex, thus generously treated, we must turn to another aspect of Abelay's work, his predilection for excrement. This also, though few would admit it, is a symbolic secret. This also is a path of initiation. In this peculiarity, Abelay is completely alone among the writers of the earth. Others have, for various reasons, dabbled in this sort of thing. But none have ever piled it up manure heap upon manure heap until the animal refuse of the whole earth seems to reek to the stars. There is not the slightest reason to regret this thing or to expogate it. Rubble is not rubble, just as life is not life without it. It is indeed the way of salvation for certain neurotic natures. Has that been properly understood? There are people who suffer frightfully, and they are often rare natures too, though they are sometimes very vicious. From their loathing of the excremental side of life, Swift was one of these. The disgusting in his writing is a pathological form, not at all unusual of such a loathing, but Rubble is no Dean Swift. Nor is there the remotest resemblance between them. Rubble may really save us from our loathing by the huge, all-embracing friendliness of his sense of humour. There are certain people, no doubt, who would prefer the grave enthusiasm of Whitman in regard to this matter, to the freer rubber-lasian touch. I cannot say that my personal experience agrees with this view. I have found both mean and valuable, but I think as far as dealing with the cloaker maxima side of things as consumed, Rubble has been the braver in inspiration. In these little matters one can only say, Some are born rubber-lasian, and some are required to have Rubble thrust upon them. Surely it is wisdom in us terrestrial mortals to make what imaginative use we can of every phase of our earthly condition. Imagination has a right to play with everything that exists, and humour has a right to laugh at everything that exists. Everything in life is sacred, and everything is a huge jest. It is the association of this excrement aspect of life, with those high sacraments of meat and drink and sex, which some find so hard to endure. Be not afraid, my little ones, the great and numerous gods have arranged for this also, and have seen to it that no brave, generous, amorous, sunburnt emotion shall ever be hurt by such associations. If a person is hurt by them, that is only an indication that they are in grievous need of the wholesome, purgative medicine of the great doctor. When one comes to speak of the actual contents of these books, criticism itself must borrow Gaginchua's mouth. What characters, the three great royal giants, Gragosia, Gaginchua and Pintagruel, have there ever been such kings and the noble servants of such noble masters? The whole atmosphere is so large, so genial, so courteous, so sweet-tempered, so entirely what the life of man upon earth should be. Even the military exploits of Freyjaun, even the navish tricks of Pinerj, cannot spoil our tenderness for these dear bully boys, these mellow and magnanimous rogues. Certain paragraphs in Rebelly recur to one's mind daily, that laudation of Socrates at the beginning, and the description of the little boxes called silent, that outside have so grotesque and adornment, but within are full of ambergris, and mur, and all manner of precious odours. In the picture of the banquet, when they fell to the chat of the afternoon's collation, and began great goblets to ring, great bowls to ting, great gammons to trot, poor me out the fair Greek wine, the extravagant wine, the good wine, La Crima Christi Supernaculum, and above all the most holy Abbey of Thalama, over the gate of which was written the words that are never far from the heart of wise utopian Christians, the profound words, the philosophical words, the most trued, cabalistic words, and the words that lovers alone can understand. Faque se voldrei do as thou wilt. Little they know of Rebelly, who call him a lewd buffoon. The profanest of Montabanks. He was one of those rare spirits that redeemed humanity to open his book, though the steam of the grossness of it rises to heaven, is to touch the divine fingers, the fingers that heal the world. How that style of his, that great oceanic avalanche of learning and piety and obscenity, and gigantic mirrorments smell with the honest earth. How with all his huge scholarship, he loves to depend for his richest, most human effects upon his own peasant people of terrain, the proverbs of the countryside, the wisdom of tavern wit, the shrewdness and fantasy of old wives' tales, the sly earthly humours of farmers and vine-tenders, and goat-herds and goose-girls. These are things out of which he distills his vision, his oracles, his courage. There is also, who could help observe it, a certain large and patriarchal homeliness, a kind of royal domesticity about much that he writes. Those touches, as when Gargantua, his little dog in advance, enters the dining hall when they are discussing Pernurge's marriage. And they all rise to do him honour, as when Gargantua bids Pintagroyal farewell, and gives him a benediction so wise and tender, remains in the mind like certain passages in the Bible. These are the things that aesthetic fools, with varnished faces, easily overlook and misunderstand. But good simple folks, honest collins, as Rabelais would say, are struck to the heart by them, how proud the man might be, who in the turmoil of this troublesome world, and beneath the mystery of la grande pudetra, could answer to the ultimate question, I am a Christian of the faith of Rabelais. Such a one, under the spell of such a master, might indeed be able to comfort the sick and sorry, and to whisper in their ears that cosmic secret. Bon espoir y gestor font, good hope lies at the bottom, good hope for all, for the best and the worst, for the whole miserable welter of this chaotic farce. Therefore, with angels and archangels, let us bow our heads and hold our tongues. Those who fancy Rabelais to be lacking in the kind of religious feeling that great souls respect, let them read that passage in the voyage of Pintagroyal that speaks of the death of Pan. Various accounts are given, various explanations made of the great cry, that the sailors coming from Palloda heard over land and sea. At the last Pintagroyal himself speaks, and he tells them, that to him it refers to nothing less than the death of him, whom the scribes and the Pharisees and priests of Jerusalem slew. And well as he called Pan, which in the Greek means all, for in him is all we are, or have or hope. And having said this, he fell into silence, and tears large as ostrich eggs rolled down his cheeks. To all who read Rabelais and love him, one can offer no better wish than that the mystic wine of his holy bottle may fulfill heart's desire. Happy indeed, those who are not unwillingly drawn by the fate, we all must follow. Go now, my friends, say as the strange priestess, and may that circle, whose centre is everywhere and its circumference nowhere, keep you in his almighty protection. End of chapter 1. Chapter 2 of Visions and Revisions by John Cooper Pois This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Dante The history of Dante's personal and literary appeal would be an extremely interesting one. No great writer has managed to excite more opposite emotions. One thing may be especially noted as significant. Woman have always been more attracted to him than men. He is in a peculiar sense, the woman's great poet. There is a type of masculine genius, which has always opposed him. Goethe cared little for him. Faultier laughed at him. Nietzsche called him a hyena, poetising among the tombs. The truth is, woman loved Dante for the precise reason that these men hate him. He makes sex the centre of everything. One need not be deceived by the fact that Dante worships purity, while Faultier, Goethe and Nietzsche are little concerned with it. This varied laudation of continents is itself an emphasis upon sex. These others would play with amorous propensities, trifle with them in their life, in their art, in their philosophy, and then that dangerous plaything. Late aside would, as Machiavell puts it, assume suitable attire and return to the company of their equals, the great sages of antiquity. Now it is quite clear that this pagan attitude towards sex, this tendency to enjoy it in its place and leave it there, is one that more than anything else is irritating to woman. If, as a German thinker says, every woman is a courtesan or a mother, it is obvious that the artists and thinkers who refuse alike the beguilements of the one and the ironic tenderness of the other are not people to be loved. Dante refuses neither, and he has further that peculiar mixture of harsh strength and touching weakness, which is so especially appealing to woman. They are reluctantly overcome, not without pleasure, by his fierce authority, and they can play the little mother to his weakness. The maternal instinct is as ironical as it is tender, it smiles at the high ideals of the eccentric child at pets, but it would not have him different. What a woman does not like, whether she is mother or courtesan, is that other kind of irony, the irony of the philosopher, which undermines both her maternal feeling and her passionate caresses. Woman too, even quite good woman, have the stress of the sexual difference constantly before them. Indeed it may be said that the class of women who are least sex-conscious are those who have habitually to sell themselves, it all matters so little to them. How fiercely is the interest of the most virtuous aroused when any question of a love affair is rumoured? In this sense every woman is a born go-between. Sex is not with them a thing apart, an exciting volcanic thing liable to mad outbursts, to weird perversions, but often completely forgotten. It is never completely forgotten, it is diffused, it is everywhere, it lurks in a thousand innocent gestures and intimations, the savage purity of an atomist is no real exception. Sex is a thing too pressing to be delied with, it is all or nothing. One cannot play with fire. When we make observations of this kind, we do not derogate from the charm or dignity of woman. It is no aspersion upon them, they did not ask to have it so, it is so. Domestic life as the European nations have evolved it is a queer compromise. Its restraints weigh heavily and alternate discord upon both sexes. Masculine depravity rebells against it and the whole modern feministic movement shakes it to the base. It remains to be seen where the nature will admit satisfactory readjustment. Certainly as far as revert acts are concerned, women are far purer than men. It is only when we leave the sphere of outward acts and enter the sphere of cerebral undercurrents that all this has changed. There the biblical story finds its proof and the daughters of Eve revert to their mother. This is the secret of that mania for the personal, which characterises woman's conversations. She can say fine things and do fine work. But both in her wit and her art, one is conscious of a mind that has voluptuously welcomed or vindictively repulsed the approach of a particular invasion. Never of a mind that, in its abstract love for the beautiful, cannot even remember how it came to give birth to such thoughts. It is the close psychological association between the emotion of religion and the emotion of sex, which has always made women more religious than men. This is perhaps only to say that women are nearer the secret of the universe than men. It may well be so. Man's rationalising, tendency to divorce his intelligence from his intuition may not be the precise key which opens these magic doors. Sanctity itself, that most exquisite flower of the art of character, is profoundly feminine thing. The most saintly saints, that is to say those who wear the indescribable distinction of their master, are always pressed of a certain feminine quality. Sanctity is women's ideal, morality is man's. The one is based upon passion and by means of love lives up above law. The other is based upon vice and the recoil from vice and has no horizon of any sort. That is why the countries where the imagination is profoundly feminine, like Russia and France, have sanctity as their ideal, whereas England has its Puritan morality and Germany its scientific efficiency. These later ages ought to sit at Dante's feet to learn the secret of the beautific vision that is as far beyond morality as it is outside science. There are, it is true, certain moments when the Italian poet leads us up into the cold, rarefied air of that intellectual love of God, which leaves sex as it leaves other human feelings infinitely behind. But this spinozistic mood is not the natural climate of his soul. He is always ready to revert, always anxious to drag Beatrice in. Wagner's Parseval is perhaps the most flagrant example of this ambiguous association between religion and sex. The sentimental blasphemy of that feet-washing scene is an evidence of the depth of sexual morbidity and to which this voluptuous religion of pity can lead us. Oh, that figure in the white nightgown blessing his reformed harlot. It is a pity Wagner ever touched the Celtic legend. German sentimentality and Celtic romance need a hind to deal with them. It is indeed a difficult task to write as the relations between romantic love and devotional religion and to do it in the grand style. That is where Dante is so supremely great and that is why for all his greatness his influence upon modern arts has been so morbid and evil. The aureus sensuality of the so-called pre-Raphaelite school, a sensuality drenched with holy water and perfumed with incense, has a smell of corruption about it that ought never to be associated with Dante's name. The worst of modern poets, the most affected and the most meticulous, are all anxious to seal themselves of the tribe of Dante, but they are no more like that defying poet than the flies that feed on dead Caesar alike the hero they cause to stink. Albrey Vosca understood him. Some of the most exquisite passages and intentions referred to his poetry was the divine comedy to clear-cut and trenchant for Walter Pater. It is strange how Dante has been left to second-rate interpreters. His illustrators too owe their sentimentalists with their Beatrice's crossing the Ponte Vecchio and their sad youths looking on. All this is an insult, sacrilege, to the proudest, most aristocratic spirit whoever dwelt on earth. Why did not Albrey Birdsley stop that beautiful boy on the threshold? He who was the model of his Ava Atquavale might have well served for Cassella, singing among the cold reeds in the white dawn. For there are scenes in Dante which have the strange remote perverted archaic loveliness of certain figures on the walls of Egyptian temples or on the earliest Greek phasers. Here the real artist in him forgets God and Beatrice and the whole hierarchy of the saints, and it is because of things of this kind that many curious people are found to be his worshipers who will never themselves paths forth to rebehold the stars. They are unwise to find Dante so bitter and theological, so platonic and devoted that they cannot open his books. They little know what ambiguous planets, what dark heathen meteors move on the fringes of his great starlit road. His earthly lady, as well as his heavenly lady, may have the moon beneath her feet. But neither of them know, as does their worshiper and lover, what lies on the other side of the moon. What Dante leaves to us as his ultimate gift, as his pride and his humility, one answers the other. And both put us to shame. He alone of great artists holds in his hand the true sword of the Spirit. For the dividing asunder of men and things, there is no necessity to lay all the stress upon the division between the lover and the higher love. Between hell and heaven there are other distinctions in life than these. And between all distinctions, between all those differences which separate the fine from the base, the noble from the noble, the beautiful from the hideous, the generous from the mean, Dante draws the pitiless sword stroke of that, eternal separation which is the most tragic thing in the world in the truest sense of tragic. For so many things and so many people that must be thus cut off are among those who harrow our hearts with the deadliest attraction and are so wistful in their weakness. Through the mists and mephitic smoke of our confused age, our age that cries out to be beyond the good when it is beneath the beautiful. Through the thick air of indolence masquerading as tolerance and indifference posing as sympathy, flashes the scorching sword of the Florentine's disdain, dividing the just from the unjust, the true from the false, and the heroic from the commonplace. What matter if this division is not our division? His formula, our formula, it is good for us to be confronted with such disdain. It brings us back once more to values and whether our values are values of taste or values of devotion. What matter, life becomes once more arresting, the everlasting drama recovers its tone and the high liturgy of the last delusion rolls forward to its own music. That angel of God, who when their hearts were shaken with fear before the flamelet walls of dis, came so straight across the waters and quelled the insolence of hell. With what disdain he turns away his face, even from those he has come to save. These messengers of God, who have so superb a contempt for all created things, does one not meet them sometimes, even in this life, as they pass us by upon their secret errands. The beginning of the Inferno contains the crawlest judgement upon our generation ever uttered. It is so exactly adapted to the spirit of this age that hearing it once daggers as if from a stab. Are we not this very tribe of catiffs who have committed the great refusal? Are we not these very wretches whose blind life is so base that they envy every other fate? Are we not those who are neither for God or for his enemies, but are for themselves? Those who may not even take refuge in hell, lest the one damned get glory of them. The very terror of this clear-cutting sword sweep, dividing us bone from bone, may nay probably will send us back to our gentle lovers of humanity who, knowing everything, pardon everything. But one sometimes wonders whether a life all irony, all pity, all urbane interest, would not lose the savour of its taste. There is a danger, not only to our moral sense, but to our immoral sense, in that genial air of universal acceptance which has become the fashion. What if, after all, even though this universe be so poor of farce, the mad lovers and haters, the terrible prophets and artists were right? Suppose the farce had a climax, a catastrophe. One loves to repeat all as possible, but that particular possibility has little attraction. It would be indeed an anticlimax if the queer comedy we have so daintily been patronising turned out to be a divine comedy and ourselves the point of the chest. Not that this is very likely to occur. It is more in accordance with what we know of the terrestrial stage that in the wager of faith with unfaith, neither will ever discover who really won. But Dante's disdain is not confined to the winners in the cosmic dicing match. There are heroic hearts in hell who, for all their despair, still yield not nor abate a jot of their courage. Such one was that great gibberline chief who was lost for denying immortality if my people fled from thy people that more torments me than this flame. In one aspect, Dante is beyond doubt the greatest poet of the world. I mean in his power of heightening the glory and the terribleness of the human race. Across the threefold kingdom of his Terceryma passes in tragic array the whole procession of human history and each figure there, each solitary person whether of the blessed or of the purged or the condemned wears like a garment of fire the dreadful dignity of having been a man. The moving sword point that flashes first upon one and then upon another amid our dim transactions is nothing but the angry arm of human imagination molding life to grander issues creating if not discovering sublima laws in conveying the thrilling sense of the momentousness of human destiny which beyond anything else certain historic names evoke none can surpass them the brief branding lines with which the enemies of God are engraved upon their monuments more lasting than brass seem to add glory to damnation. Who can forget how that Simonist and son of Sodom lifts his head up out of the deepest pit and makes the fig at God take it, God, for at thee I aim it there is a sting of furious blasphemy in this personal outrage that goes beyond all limits yet who is there but does not feel glad that the Paestonian uttered what he uttered out of hell to his maker is not human right when he says that the heart of man does not naturally love God but perhaps in the whole poem nothing is more beautiful than the great role of honour of the uncristened dead who make up the company of the noble heathen sad but not unhappy they walk to and fro in their pagan hares and occupy themselves as evolved and discourse upon philosophy and poetry in the mystery of life those single lines devoted to such names are unlike anything else in literature that Caesar and Armour with Girfalcon eyes challenges one Abesience as a great shout of his own legionnaires while that alone by himself the sultan bows to the dust our Christian pride as the turbaned commando of the faithful with his ghostly crescent blade strikes past dreaming of the desert it is in touches like these surely rather than in the Beatrice scenes or the Devil scenes that the poet is most himself it needs perhaps a certain smouldering dramatic passion in regard to the whole spectacle of human life to do justice to such lines needs also the mixture of disdain and humility which is his own paramount attribute in the same smouldering furnace of reverence characterizes Dante's use of the older literatures no writer who has ever lived has such a dramatic sense of the great effects and style and the ritual of words that passage thou art my master and my author it is from thee I learnt the beautiful style that has done me so much honour with its reiteration of the rhythmic syllables of honour opens up a salutary field of aesthetic contemplation his quotations too from the Psalms and from the Roman liturgy become by their imaginative inclusion part of his own creative genius that vexilla oregis prudente inferne who can hear it without the same thrill as when Napoleonic trumpets heralded the emperor in the presence of such moments the whole elaboration of the Beatrice cult forms away that romantic perversion of the sex instinct is but the psychic motive force once started on a splendid and terrible road the poet forgets everything except the principle of beauty and the memory of great men parallel with these things is Dante's passion of reverence for the old historic places provinces, cities, rivers and valleys of his native Italy even when he lifts up his voice to curse them as he curses his own forensic it is but an inversion of the same mood the cities we mend dwelt then talk to themselves living personalities and Dante who in love and hate was Italian of the Italians was left indifferent by none of these how strange to modern ears this thrill of recognition when one exile even among the dead meets another of their common citizenship of no mean city of this classic patriotism the world requires a renaissance that we may be saved from the shallowness of artificial commercial empires the new internationalism is the sinister product of a generation that has grown to resonate that has lost its roots in the soil it is an Anglo-Germanic thing and opposed to it the proud tenacity of the Latin race turns even today to what bars calls the worship of ones dead Anglo-Saxon industrialism teutonic organization have their world place but it is to the Latin and it may be to the Slav also that the human spirit must turn in these subtler hours when it cannot live by bread alone the modern international empires may obliterate local boundaries and trample on local altars in spite of them and in defiance of them the soul of an ancient race lives on its saints and its artists forged the urn of its phoenix ashes Dante himself dreaming over the high Virgilian prophecy of a world state under a spiritual Caesar urn to restore the Pax Romana to a chaotic world such a vision such an Orbus Terrarium at the feet of Christ has no element in common with the material dominance of modern commercial empires and much more closely resembles certain utopias of the modern revolutionary and its spirit is not less Latin than the traditional customs of the city-states it would include its real implication may be found in the assimilative genius of the Catholic Church consecrating but not effacing local altars transforming but not destroying local paites who can deny that this formidable vision answers the deepest needs of the modern world the discovery of some planetary synthesis within the circle of which all the passionate race cults may flourish growing not less intense but more intense under the new world city this is nothing else than what the soul of earth dreaming on things to come may actually be evolving who knows if the prominence given by the war to Russian thought may not incredibly hasten such a vita nuova the pan-slavic dream even from the days of Ivan the Terrible has been of the spiritual unity and it may be remembered that it was always from beyond the Alps that Dante looked for the liberator who knows the great surging antipodal tides of life lash one another into foam out of chaos stars are born and it may be the madness of dream even so much so to speak of unity while creation seeds and hisses in its terrible vortex mockingly last the imps of irony while the saints keep their vigil man is a surprising animal by no means always bent on his own redemption sometimes bent on his own destruction and meanwhile the demons of life dance on Dante may build up his great triple universe in his great triple rhyme and encase it in walls of brass but still they dance on we may tremble at the supreme poet's pride and wonder at the passion of his humility but the damned grotesques make arabesques like the wind upon the sand end of chapter 2 chapter 3 of visions and revisions by John Cooper Pois this LibriVox recording is in the public domain there is something pathetic about the blind devotion of humanity to its famous names but how indiscriminate it is how lacking in discernment this is above all true of Shakespeare whose peculiar and quite personal genius has almost been buried under the weight of popular idolatry no wonder such critics as Voltaire Tolstoy and Mr Bernard Shaw have taken upon themselves to intervene the Frenchman's protest was an aesthetic one the more recent objectors have adopted moral and philosophic grounds but it is the unreasoning adoration of the mob which led to both attacks it is not difficult to estimate the elements which have gone to make up this Shakespeare God the voices of the priests behind the idol are only too clearly distinguishable we hear the academic voice the showman's voice and the voice of the ethical preacher they are all absurd but their different absurdities have managed to flow together into one powerful unified convention our popular orators gesticulate and clamour our professors talk Greek our ethical brutaces explain and the mob throw up their sweaty night caps while our poor Caesar of poetry sinks down out of sight helpless among them all Charles Lamb who understood him better than anyone and who loves plays does not hesitate to accuse our stage actors of being the worst of all in their misrepresentation he doubts whether even Garrick understood the subtlety of the roles he played and the few exceptions he allows in his own age make us wonder what he would say of ours finally there is the philosophic Shakespeare human appreciation and this we feel instinctively to be the least like the original of all the irony of it is that the author of Hamlet and the Tempest does not only live in a different world from that of these motley exponents he lives in an antagonistic one Shakespeare was as profoundly the enemy of scholastic pedantry as he was the enemy of Puritan squeamishness he was almost unkindly averse to the breath of the profane crowd and his melancholy skepticism with its half humorous ascent to the traditional paedias is that the extremist opposite pole from the truths of metaphysical reason the Shakespeare of the popular revivals is a fantastic caricature the Shakespeare of the college textbooks is a lean scarecrow but the Shakespeare of the philosophical moralists is a hobgoblin from whom one flees and dismay enjoy the plays themselves the interpreters forgotten a normally intelligent reader cannot fail to respond to a recognizable personality there a personality with apathies and antipathies with prejudices and pre-elections very quickly he will discern the absurd unreality of that monstrous idol that ubiquitous Hegelian God very soon he will recognize that in trying to make their poet everything they have made him nothing no one can read Shakespeare with direct and simple enjoyment without discovering in his plays a quite definite and personal attitude towards life Shakespeare is no absolute divinity reconciling all opposites and transcending all limitations he is not that cloud capped mountain too lofty to be scammed of Matthew Arnold's sonnet he is a sad and passionate artist using his bitter experiences to intensify his insight and playing with his humours and his dreams to soften the sting of that brutish reality which he was doomed to unmask the best way of indicating the personal mood which emerges as his final attitude is to describe it as that of the perfectly natural man confronting the universe of course there is no such perfectly natural man but he is a legitimate lay figure and we all approximate to him at times the natural man in his unsophisticated hours takes the universe at its surface value neither rejecting the delicate compensations nor mitigating the cruelty of the grotesque farce the natural man accepts what is given he swallows the chaotic surprises the extravagant accidents the whole fantastic palmel he accepts too the traditional pieties of his race their hope against hope their gracious ceremonial their consecration of birth and death he accepts these not because he is confident of their truth because they are there because they have been there so long and have interwoven themselves with the chances and changes of the whole dramatic spectacle he accepts them spontaneously, humorously affectionately not anxious to improve them what would be the object of that and certainly not seeking to contribute them he reverences this religion of his race not only because it has its own sad, pathetic beauty but because it has got itself involved in the common burden lightning such a burden here making it perhaps a little heavier there but lending it a richer tone a subtler colour a more significant shape it does not trouble the natural man that religion should deal with the impossible where in such a world as this, does that begin he has no agitating desire to reconcile it with reason at the bottom of his soul he has a shrewd suspicion that it rather grew out of the earth than film from the sky but that does not concern him it may be based upon no natural verity it may lead to no certain issue it may be neither very useful or very moral but it is at any rate a beautiful work of imaginative art and it lends life a certain dignity that nothing can quite replace as a matter of fact the natural man's attitude to these things is much from the attitude of the great artists it is only that a certain lust for creation and a certain demonic curiosity scourge these letter on to something beyond passive resignation a da Vinci or a Goethe accepts religion and uses it but between it and the depths of his own mind remains forever a beautiful film of sceptical white light this qualified ascent is precisely what excites the fury of such individualistic thinkers as Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw it were amusing to note the difference between the humour of this letter and the humour of Shakespeare Shaw's humour consists in emphasising the absurdity of human custom compared with the good humour of the philosopher Shakespeare's humour consists of emphasising the absurdity of philosophers compared with the good sense of custom the one is the humour of the Puritan directed against the ordinary man on behalf of the universe the other is the humour of the artist directed against the universe on behalf of the ordinary man Shakespeare is at bottom the most extreme of pessimists he has no faith in progress no belief in eternal values no transcendental intuitions no zeal for reform the universe to him for all its loveliness remains an outrageous jest the cosmic is the comic anything may be expected of this parent world except what we expect and when it is a question of falling back we can only fall back on human made custom we live by illusions and when the last illusion fails us we die after reading Shakespeare the final impression left upon the mind is that the world can only be justified as an aesthetic spectacle to appreciate a show at once so sublime and so ridiculous one needs to be very brave very tender and very humorous nothing else is needed man must abide his going hence even as his coming hither ripeness is all when courage fails us it is as flies to wanton boys the gods they kill us for their sport when tenderness fails us it is tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time when humor fails us it is how weary stale, flat and unprofitable seems to me all the uses of this world so much for life and when we come to death how true it is as Charles Lamb says that none has spoken of death like Shakespeare and he has spoken of it so with such an absolute grasp of our mortal feeling about it because his mood in regard to it is the mood of the natural man of the natural man unsophisticated by false hopes undated by vain assurance his attitude towards death neither sweetens the unpalatable draft of mortality nor permits us to let go the balm of its eternal peace how frightful to lie in cold obstruction and to rot the sensible warm notion to become a needed clod and yet after life's fitful fever how blessed to sleep well what we know about this mood the mood of Shakespeare and the natural man is that it never for a moment deallies with philosophical fancies or mystic visions and thinks highly of the soul but in the natural not the metaphysical sense it is the attitude of Rubble and Montaigne not the attitude of Wordsworth or Browning it is the tone we know so well in the Homeric poems it is the tone of the Psalms of David we hear its voice and Ecclesiastes and the wisdom of Solomon the King is full of it and more recent times it is the feeling of those who veer between our races traditional hope and the dark gulf of eternal silence it's the Ort Christus Ort Neal of those who by means of metaphysics have dug a pit into which metaphysics has disappeared the gaiety and childlike animal spirits of Shakespeare's comedies need not deceive us why should we not forget the whips and scorns for a while and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden age such simple falling goes better with the irresponsibility of our fate than the more pungent wit of the moral comedians the tragic laughter which the confused issues of life excite and subtler souls is not lacking but the sweet obliquities of honest clowns carry us just as far Shakespeare loves fools who have loved them and it is often his humour to put into their mouths the ultimate wisdom it is remarkable that these plays should commence with the midsummer's night's dream and end with a tempest an interval the great somber passions of our race are sounded and dismissed but as he began with Titania so he ends with Ariel from the fairy forest to the enchanted island from a dream to a dream with Shakespeare there is no Wagnerian Ruridipian Apologya or Bacchanales from the meaningless tumult of mortal passions he returns with a certain ironic weariness to the magic of nature Prospero dismissing his spirits into thin air has the last word and the last word is as the first we are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded for the sleep the easygoing persons who reluctant the idea of a pessimistic Shakespeare should turn the pages of Troilus and Crusader measure for measure and timing of Athens what we guessed as we read Hamlet and Lear grows a certainty as we read these plays here the gentle Shakespeare does three things that are most unpardonable he unmasks virtue he betrays woman and he curses the gods the most intransigent of modern revolutionaries might learn a trick or two from this sacred poet in Lear he puts the very voice of Anarchy into the mouth of the king die for adultery no handy-dandy which is the magistrate and which is the thief a dog's obeyed in office have I succeeded in making clear what I feel about Shakespearean attitude at bottom it is absolutely skeptical deep yawns below deep and if we cannot read the writing upon the wall the reason may be there is no writing there having lifted a corner of the veil of Isis having glanced once into that death kingdom where grope the roots of the ash tree whose name is fear we return to the surface from Nader to Zenith and become superficial out of profundity the infinite spaces as Pascal said are frightful that way madness lies and those who would be saying upon earth must drug themselves with the experience or with the spectacle of the experience of human passion within this charmed circle and here alone they may be permitted to forget the outer terror the noble spirit is not the spirit that condescends to pamper in itself those inflated moods of false optimistic hope which springing from mere physiological well-being send us leaping and bounding with such boisterous assurance along the sunny road such pragmatic self-deception as an impertinence in the presence of a world like this it is the sign of what one might call a philosophically ill-bred nature it is the indecent gratitude of the pig over his trough it is the little yellow eye of sanctified bliss turned up to the god who must be in his heaven if we are so privileged this never-doubting good will triumph is rarely when one examines it nothing but the inverted prostration of the helot slave glad to have been allowed to get so totally drunk at plusters and swagger but at heart it is base and a noble for it is not sensitive enough to feel the universe cannot be pardoned for the cry of one tortured creature and that all the worlds we shall traverse cannot make out for the despair of one human child to be cheerful about the universe in the manner of these people is to insult the Christ who died it is to outrage the little ones of whose body the wheel has passed when Nietzsche the martyr of his own murdered pity calls upon us to love fate he does not shout so lustily as the laughter of one watching his darlings tripped for the rods he who would be in harmony with nature and whose murderous ministers who, in their blind abyss throw dice with chance must be in harmony with the giants of Jotunheim as well as with the lords of Valhalla he must be able to look on grimly while Asgard totters he must welcome the twilight of the gods to have a mind and yield to such conceptions a mind capable of remaining on such a verge is alone to be intellectually speaking what we call aristocratic when even with eyes like poor glosssters in the plane we can see this world wags it is slavish and plebeian to swear that it all means intensely and means well it is also to lie in one's throat no wonder Shakespeare treats reverently every superstition every anodyne and napenth offered to the inmates of this house of the incurable such sprinkling with holy water such rendering ourselves stupid is the only alternative anything else is the insight of the hero or the hypocrisy of the preacher has it been realized how curiously the interpreters of Shakespeare admit the principal thing they revel in his grammar his history, his biology his botany, his geography his psychology and his ethics they never speak of his poetry now Shakespeare is above everything a poet to poetry over and over again as our Puritans know well he sacrifices truth morality, probability nay, the very principles of art itself his dramas many of his plays are scandalously bad many of his characters fantastic one can put one's fingers in almost every case about the person and situations that interest him and upon those that did not and how carelessly he sketches in the letter so far from being the object of God of art they seek to make him he is the most wayward and subjective of all wandering souls no natural person can read him without feeling the pulse of extreme personal passion behind everything he writes and this pulse of personal passion is always expressing itself in poetry he will let the probabilities of a character vanish into air or dwindle into a wistful note of attenuated convention has served his purpose as a read to pipe his strange tunes through he will whistle the most important personage down the wind lost to interest and identity when once he is put into his mouth his own melancholy brooding upon life his own imaginative reaction and so it happens that in spite of all academic opinion those who understand Shakespeare best tease themselves leased over his dramatic lapses for let it be whispered at once without further scruple as far as the art of the drama is concerned Shakespeare is shameless the poetic instinct one might call it epical or lyrical for it is both theirs as far more dominant in our greatest dramatist than any of their conscience that is precisely why those among us who love poetry but find drama especially drama since Ibsen intolerably tiresome revert again and again to Shakespeare only absurd groups of culture Philistines can read these powerful modern productions more than once one knows not whether in preaching or their exasperating technical cleverness is the more annoying they may well congratulate themselves on being different from Shakespeare they are extremely different they are indeed nothing but as old enemies the Puritans translated like poor bottom and wearing the donkey's head of art for art's sake in place of their own simple foreheads art for art's sake the thing has become a decalogue of forbidding commandments as devastating as those 10 but as the new avatar of the moral sense carrying categorical insolence into the sphere of our one our session sanctuary I'm afraid Shakespeare was a very immoral artist I'm afraid as one of the profane but what of the Greeks the Greeks never let themselves go no and for a sufficient reason Greek drama was religion it was ritual and we know how a responsible ritual must be the gods must have their incense from the right kind of censor but you cannot evoke religion in vacuo not simply by assuming grave ears about your personal taste or even about the taste of your age give it that consecration beauty God knows what beauty is but I can tell you what it is not it is not the sectarian anxiety of any pompous little clique to get saved in the artistic narrow path it is much rather what Stendhal called it but he spoke so frivolously that I dare not quote him has it occurred to you gentle reader to note how Protestant the new artistic movement is Shakespeare in his aesthetic method as well as in his peyote had a Catholic soul in truth the hour has arrived when a renaissance of the free spirit of poetry and drama is required why must this monstrous shadow of the hyperborean Ibsen go on darkening the play instinct in us like some ugly domineering John Knox I suspect that there are many generous rebalasian souls who could lift our moral burden with oceanic merriment only the new movement frightens them they are afraid they would not be Greek enough or Scandinavian enough meanwhile the miserable populace have to choose between Babylonian pantomimes and Gaelic mythology if they are not driven out of a kind of spite into the region of wholesome domestic sunshine what in our hearts we natural men desire is to be delivered at one blow from the fairies with weird names so different from Paul to Tarnia and from the 3000 unities what poetry we do get so vague and dim and whistful and forlorn that it makes us want to go out and buy clothes for someone we veer between the abomination of city reform and the desolation of Ultima Thul but Shakespeare is Shakespeare's film oh those broken and gasped out human cries full of the old poignancy full of the old enchantment Shakespeare's poetry is the extreme opposite of any cult it is the ineffable expression and music that makes the heart stop of the feelings which have stirred every jack and jill among us from the beginning of the world it has the effect of these old songs of the countryside that hit the heart in us so shrewdly that one feels as though the wind had made them or the rain or the wayside grass for they know too much of what they tell to none it is the one touch of nature and how they break the rules these surpassing lines in which the emotions of this motley company gasped themselves away it is not so much in the great speeches noble as they are as in the brief tragic cry as the broken stammerings that is unapproachable felicity is found upon such sacrifices my gaudelia the gods themselves throw incense thick and fast they crowd upon our memory these little sentences these aching rhythms it is with the flesh and blood of the daily sacrifice of our common endurance that he celebrates his strange mass hands that smell of mortality lips that so sweetly were for sworn eyes that look their last on all they love these are the touches that make us bow down before the final terrible absolution and it is the same with nature not to Shakespeare do we go for the pseudo scientific pseudo ethical interpretations so crafty in their word painting so cunning in their natural analysis which we find in the rest a few fierce flung words from the hot heart of an amorist's lust and all the smouldering magic of the noonday woods takes your breath a sobbing death dirge from the bosom of a lovelorn child and the perfume of all the enclosed gardens in the world shudders through your veins and what about the ancient antagonist of the earth what about the great deep has anyone anywhere else gathered into words the human tremor and the human recoil that are excited universally when we go down upon the beached verge of the salt flood and once a day with his embossed froth the turbulent surge doth cover John Keats was haunted day and night by the simple refrain and leer hence thou not hear the sea charming idolists may count the petals of the cuckoo buns in the river pastures an untouched we admire but let old fall staff as he lies dying babble of green fields and all the long long thoughts of youths steal over us like a summer wind the modern critic with the philosophic bias is inclined to quarrel with the obvious human congruity as Shakespeare's utterances what is the use of this constant repetition of the obvious truism when we are born we cry that we have come to this great stage of fools no use my friends no earthly use and yet it is not a premeditated reflection put in for art's sake it is the poetry of the pinch of fate it is the human revenge we take upon the insulting irony of our life but Shakespeare does not always strike back at the gods with bitter blows in this queer world where we have no youth nor age but as it were in after-dinner sleep dreaming on both there come moments when the spirit has too sore wounded even to rise and revolt then in a sort of cheerful despair we can only wait the event and Shakespeare has his word for this also perhaps the worst of all the slings and arrows are the intolerable partings we have to submit to from the darlings of our soul and here while he offers us no false hope his tone loses its bitterness and grows gentle in solemn it is forever and forever farewell gaseous if we do meet again why then tis well if not this parting was well made and for the future oh that we knew the end of this day's business here it comes but it suffices that the day will end and then the end is known end of chapter 3