 Chapter 9 of Visions and Revisions by John Cooper-Pois This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Matthew Arnold It is easy to miss the special grandeur of Matthew Arnold's work. The airy purse of large of his prose, its reiterated lucidities, pleasing to some, irritating to others, but not a very important place in English literature. Even those magical and penetrating aphorisms, with which he has held the door open to so many religious and moral vistas, tease us a little now, and suggestive enough in their hour, do not deepen and deepen upon the intellect with the weight of aphorisms from Epictetus or Goethe. The stream of tendency that makes for righteousness runs a little shallow. It has so many pebbles under its clear wave. That word of his, the secret of Jesus, wears best of all. It was a happy thought to use the word secret, a thought upon which those whose religious creed binds them to the method rather than the secret may well ponder. As a critic too, though illuminating and reassuring, he is far from clairvoyant. A quaint vein of pure, good-tempered, ethical Philistanism prevents his rarely entering the evasive souls of Shelley or Keats or Hine. With words worth of Byron, he is more at home, but he misses many subtleties, even in their simple temperaments. He has no protests, no wizard of critical metampsychosis. For all his eerie wit, he is a plain blunt man who loves his friend. In fact, when one compares him as a sheer illuminator of psychological twilight to Walter Patter, one realises at once how easily a quite great man may render himself stupid by sprinkling himself with the holy water of fixed principles. No, it is neither of Arnold the theological freelance, nor of Arnold the critic of literature that I want to speak, but of Arnold the poet. Personally, I hold the opinion that he was a greater poet than either Tennyson or Browning. His philosophy is a far nobler, truer, and more permanent thing than theirs, and there are passages and single lines in his poetry which overtop by enormous distances anything that they achieved. You ask me what the philosophy of Matthew Arnold was. It is easy to answer that. It was the philosophy of all the greatest among mortal men. In his poetry, he passes completely out of the region of theological argument, and his attitude to life is the attitude of Sophocles and Virgil and Montaigne and Cervante, and Shakespeare and Goethe, those who read Matthew Arnold and love him, know that his intellectual tone is the tone of those great classical writers, and his conclusions, their conclusions. He never mocks our pain with foolish, unfounded hopes, and he never permits mad despair to paralyze him. He takes life as it is, and, as we all have to do, makes the best of its confusions. If we are here, as on a darkling plain, swept by confused alarms of struggling flight, where ignorant armies clash by night, we can at least be true to one another. One wonders sometimes if it be properly understood by energetic teachers of youth that there is only one intellectual attitude towards life, only one philosophy, only one ultimate mood. That is the mood of resignation, which from Homer to Matthew Arnold is alone adapted in the long run to the taste of our days upon Earth. The real elements of our situation have not altered in the remotest degree since our colleagues dragged Hector round the walls of Troy. Men and women still love and hate, still enjoy the sun and live light in the spring, still advance true friends and beat back dangerous foes, and upon them the same constellations look down, and upon them the same winds blow, and upon them the same sphinx glides through the obscurity with the same insoluble question. Nothing has really changed, the river of time may pass through various landscapes, but it is the same river, and at the last it brings to us as the banks fade dimmer away, and the stars come out, murmurs and scents of the same infinite sea. Yes, there is only one philosophy, as Disraeli said jesting, and Matthew Arnold, among the moderns, is the one who has been allowed to put it into his poetry. For though, before the Flamentia Moenia of the world's triple brass, we are famed to bow our heads inconsolably. There come those moments when a hand laid in ours, we think we know the hills whence our life flows. The flowing of the river of life, the washing of the waves of life, how well one recalls from Arnold's broken, and not always musical stanzas, referenced to that sound, to the sound so like the sound of those real sea tides, that Sophocles long ago heard in the Aegean, and listened, thinking of many things as we listen, and think of many things today. For we are like swimmers in the sea, poised on the top of a huge wave of fate, and whether it will lift us to the land, or whether it will bear us out to sea, back out to sea to the dark gulfs of death, we know not, only the event will teach us in its hour. I sometimes think that a certain wonderful blending of realism and magic in Matthew Arnold's poetry has received but scant justice. In the Forsaken Merman, for instance, there are many stanzas that make you smell the salt foam and imagine all that lies hidden and strange down there upon the glittering sand. That line where great whales go sailing by round the world forever and die has a liberating power that may often recur when one is, God knows, far enough from the spouting of any whale, and the whole poem has a wistful, haunting beauty that never grows tedious. Matthew Arnold is a true classical poet. It is strictly in accordance with authentic tradition to introduce those touches of light, quaint, playful eerie realism, into the most solemn poetry. It is what Virgil, Cachalus, Theocrates, Milton, Landor all did. Some persons grow angry with him for a certain tone of half gay, half sad, elusive tenderness when he speaks of Oxford, and the country round Oxford. I do not think there is anything unpleasing in this. So did Cachalus talk of Sermio, chorus of his farm, Milton of Dava wizard's stream, Landor of Sorrento and Demalphy. It is all of a piece with the resignation of a philosophy which does not expect that this or that change of dwelling will ease our pain of a philosophy that naturally loves to linger over familiar well-sides and roadways and meadow paths and hillsides, over the places where we went together when we still had theses. The nature poetry of Matthew Arnold touching us with the true classic touch, and yet with something I know not what, of more wistful tenderness added, is a great refreshment after the pseudo-magic, so vague and unsatisfying of so much modern verse. It matters not, Lightcomer, he has flown, but we have him in the sweet spring days, with whitening hedges and uncrumpled fern, and bluebells trembling by the forest ways and scent of hay new morn. Or that description of the latter season, too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high midsummer pumps come on, soon shall we have gold dusted snapdragon, sweet William with his homely cottage smell, and stocks in fragrant blow, roses that down the alleys shine afar, and open jasmine muffled lattices, and group under the dreaming garden trees, and the pale moon and the whitening evening star. True to the only philosophy, Matthew Arnold is content to indicate how for each one of us the real drama of life goes on with a certain, quite natural, quite homely, quite quiet background of the strip of earth where we first loved and dreamed, and were happy and were sad, and knew loss and regret, and the limits of man's power to change his fate. There is a large and noble calm about the poetry of this writer, which has the effect upon us of the falling of cool water into a dark fern fringe cave. He strips away lightly, delicately, gently all the trappings of our feverish worldliness, our vanity and ambition, and lifts open at one touch the great moon-bathed windows that look out upon the line of white foam and the patient sands. And never is this calm deeper than when he refers to death, for there, he says, speaking of that symmetry of foreens where his thirst is liars, for there thine earth forgetting eyelids keep, the morningless and unawaken sleep under the flowery oleander's pale. Sometimes, as in his tristram and assault, he has permitted little touches of a startling and penetrating beauty, such as returning to one's memory and lips, and very dusty and harrowed places, bring all the tears of half-forgotten romance back again to us, and restore to us the despair that is dearer than hope. Those lines, for instance, when Tristram, dying in his fire-lit tapestry-droom, tended by the pale e-sort of Brittany, knows that his death-longing is fulfilled, and that she, his other e-sort, has come to him at last. Have they not the very echo in them of what such weariness feels when, only not too late, the impossible happens? Little he cares for the rain beating on the roof, or the moan of the wind in the chimney, or the shadow on that tapestry-d warm, he listens as heart almost stops. What voices are those in the still night air? What light in the court? What steps on the stair? One wonders if the reader, too, knows and loves that strange fragmentary, unriamed poem called The Strayed Reveller, with its vision of Circa and the sleeping boy-form, and the waved-tossed wanderer and its background of the fitful earth murmurs and dreaming woods. Strangely down upon the weary child smiles the great enchantress, seeing the wine stains on his white skin and the berries in his hair. The thing is slight enough, but in its coolness and calmness, and sad, delicate beauty, it makes one pause and grow silent, as in the long-hushed galleries of the Vatican, one pauses and grows silent before some little-known, scarcely catalogued Greek vase. The spirit of life in youth is there, a mortal and tender, yet there, too, is the shadow of that pitiful in vain, with which the brevity of such beauty, arrested only in chilly marble, mocks us as we pass. It is life put life at a distance, life-refined, winnowed, sifted, purged. Yet, O Prince, what labour, O Prince, what pain? The world is perhaps tired of hearing from the mouths of its great lonely exiles, the warning to youth to sink into its own soul and let the mad throng clamour by with their beckoning idols and treacherous pleading. But never has this unregarded hand been laid so gently upon us, as in the poem called Self-Dependence. Heaven forgive us, we cannot follow its high teaching, and yet we too, we all, have felt that sort of thing. When standing at the prow of a great ship, we have watched the reflection of the stars in the fast-divided water, unafrighted by silence round them, undistracted by the sights they see, these demand not that the world about them yield them love, amusement, sympathy. But with joy the stars perform their shining, and the sea its long moon's silvered roll, self-poised they live, nor pine with noting all the favour of some differing soul. The one philosophy is, as Matthew Arnold himself puts it, a trunque paratus, prepared for either event, yet it leans, and how should it not lean, in a world like this, to the sadder and more final. That version of a godless universe, rocking its obscure body to in fro, in ghastly space, is a vision that refuses to pass away, to the children of chance, as my Catholic philosopher says, chance would seem intelligible. But even if it be, if the whole confluent ocean of its experience be unintelligible and without meaning, it remains that mortal men must endure it, and comfort themselves with their little pleasures. The immoral cruelty of fate has been well expressed by Matthew Arnold, in his poem called Miserainus, where the virtuous king does not receive his reward. He, for his part, will revel in care not. There may be nobler, there may be happier, ways of waiting the end, but whether reveling or refraining, we're all waiting the end, waiting and listening half bitterly, half eagerly, seems the lot of man upon earth, and meanwhile that, power too great and strong, even for the gods to conquer or beguile, sweeps earth and heaven and man and gods along, like the broad volume of the insurgent Nile, and the great powers we serve themselves must be slaves of a tyrannous necessity. Matthew Arnold had, and at a rear gift in spite of his peaceful domestic life, and in spite of that interlude of the Marguerite poems, a noble and a chaste soul. Give me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me, prayed the psalmist, while this friend of Thersis had a clean heart and a right spirit, and these things in this turbulent age have their appeal. It was the purging of this high-sip that made it possible for him, even in the Marguerite poems, to write as only those can write whose passion is more than the craving of the flesh. Come to me in my dreams and then, and sleep I shall be well again, for then the night will more than pay, the hopeless longing of the day. It was the same chastity of the senses that made it possible for him to write those verses upon a young girl's death, which are so much more beautiful, though those are lovely too, than the ones Oscar Wilde wrote on the same subject. Strew on her roses, roses, but never a spray of you, for in silence she reposes a wood that I did too. Her cabin-dampel spirit had fluttered and failed for breath, to night it doth inherit the vasty halls of death. Matthew Arnold is one of the poets who have what might be called the hour of liberation. He liberates us from the hot fevers of our lusts. He liberates us from worldliness, our perversions, our mad preoccupations. He reduces things to their simple elements and gives us back air and water and land and sea. And he does this without demanding from us any unusual strain. We have no need to plunge into Dionysian ecstasies, or cry aloud after cosmic emotion. We have no need to relinquish our common sense, or to dress or eat or talk or dream in any strange manner. It is enough if we remember the fields where we were born. It is enough if we do not altogether forget out of what quarter of the sky Orion rises, and where the Lord Star Jupiter has his place. It is enough if we are not quite oblivious of the return of the spring and the sprouting of the first leaves. From the poetry of Matthew Arnold it is possible to derive an art of life, which carries us back to the beginnings of the world's history. He, the civilized Duxonian. He, the domestic moralist. He, the eerie playful scholar. Has yet the power of giving that epic solemnity to our sleep and our waking, to our going forth to our work and our labour until the evening, to the passing of the seasons over us, which is the ground and substance of all poetic imagination in which no change or progress or discovery can invade or spoil. For it is the nature of poetry to heighten and to throw into relief those eternal things in our common destiny which too soon get overlaid. And some things only poetry can reach. Religion may have small comfort for us when in the secret depths of our hearts we endure a craving of which we may not speak. A sickening aching longing for the lips so sweetly foresworn. But poetry is waiting for us there also with her rosemary into her room. Not one human heart but has its head in shrine before which the professional constraints are feigned to hold their peace. But even there, under the veiled figure itself some poor poetic jongleur de notre dame is permitted to drop his monk's robe and dance the dance that makes time and space nothing. End of chapter 9 Chapter 10 of Visions and Revisions by John Cooper Poeus This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Shelley One of the reasons why we find it hard to read the great poets is that they sadden us with their troubling beauty, sadden us and put us to shame. They compel us to remember the days of our youth and that is more than most of us are able to bear. What memories ye gods, what memories. And this is true above all of Shelley. His verses when we return to them again seem to have the very perfumed appliance of the spring of the spring of our frost but an age. Their sweetness has a poignancy and a pang. The sweetness of things too dear, of things whose beauty brings aching in a sense of bitter loss. It is the sudden uncovering of dead violets with the memory of the soil they were plucked from. It is a strain of music over wide waters and over wider years. These verses always had something about them that went further than their actual meaning. They were always a little like planetary melodies to which earthly words had been fitted. And now they carry us not only beyond words but beyond thought as stuff eternity. There is indeed a sadness such as one cannot be along and live about Shelley's poetry. It troubles our peace. It passes over the sterility of our poor comfort like a lost child's cry. It beats upon the door. It rattles the shut casement. It sobs with the rain upon the roof. This is partly because Shelley, more than any poet, has entered into the loneliness of the elements and given up his heart to the wind and his soul to the outer darkness. The other poets can describe these things but he becomes what they are. Listening to him we listen to them and who can bear to listen to them? Who in cold blood can receive the sorrows of the many mortars? Who can endure while the heavens that are themselves so old bend down with the burden of their secret? Not to describe but to share the life or the death and life of the thing you write of. That is the true poetic way. The arrowy odours of those first white violets he makes us feel darting forth from among the dead leaves. Do they leave us content with the art of their description? They provoke us with their fine essence. They trouble us with the fatality we have to share. The passing from its caverns of rain of the newborn cloud. We do not only follow it obedient to the spell of rhetoric. We are world forward with it laughing at its cenotaph and our own into unimagined aerial spaces. One feels all this and more under Shelley's influence but alas, as soon as one has felt it the old cynical realistic mood descends again heavy as frost and the vision of ourselves poor, straggling forked animals caught up in such regions shows but as a pantomimic farce and we awake, shamed and clothed in our right mind. With some poets, with Milton and Matthew Arnold for example, there is always a kind of implicit sub-reference accompanying the heroic gesture or the magical touch to our poor normal humanity. Others, with Tennyson or Browning for instance one is often rather absurdly aware of the worthy Victorian person behind the poetic mask singing his ethical ditty like a great self-conscious speckled thrush upon a prominent bow. But with Shelley everything is forgotten. It is the authentic fury, the divine madness and we pass out of ourselves and suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange into something strange perhaps rather than something rich. For the temperament of Shelley like that of Corot leads us to suppress the more glowing threads of nature's waft leads him to dissolve everything in filmy white light in the light of an impossible dawn. Has it been noticed how all material objects dissolve at his touch and float away as mists and vapours? He has it seems an almost insane predilection for white things white violets, white pansies, white windflowers white ghosts, white daisies and white moons shrill us as we read with an almost unearthly awe white death too the shadow of white corruption has replaced there and the appalling whiteness of lepers and corpses the liturgy he chance is the liturgy of the white mass and the white gradients of eternity is his real presence. Weird and fantastic though Shelley's dreams may appear it is more than likely that some of them will be realised before we expect it his passionate advocacy of what is now called feminism is a blind revolutionary hopes for the proletariat his denunciation of war his arraignment to so called law and order his indictment of conventional morality his onslaughts on outworn institutions his invectors against hypocrisy and stupidity and not by any means the blind utopian rhetoric that some have called them that crafty slur upon brave new thought which we know so well that how can you take him seriously attitude of the status quo rascals must not mislead us with regards to Shelley's philosophy he is a genuine philosopher as well as a dreamer or shall we say he is the only kind of philosopher who must be taken seriously the philosopher who creates the dreams of the young Shelley is indeed a most rare and invaluable thinker as well as a most exquisite poet his thought and his poetry can no more be separated than could the thought and poetry of the book of Job his poetry is the embodiment of his thought its swift and splendid incarnation strange though it may seem there are not very many poets who have the particular kind of ice cold intellect necessary if one is to detach oneself completely from the idols of the marketplace indeed the poetic temperament is only too apt out of the very warmth of its sensitive humanity to idealize the old traditions and throw a glamour around them that is why both in politics and religion there have been ever since Aristophanes so many great reactionary poets their warmth of human sympathy their nile alienum attitude nay their very sense of humour have made this inevitable there is so often too something chilly and unholy something pitiless and cruel about quite rational reform which alienates the poetic mind it must be remembered that the very thing that makes so many objects poetical I mean their traditional association with normal human life is the thing that has to be destroyed if the new birth is to take place the ice cold austerity of mind indicated in the superb contempt of the Nietzschean phrase human to human is a mood essential if the world is to cast off its weeds outworn change and growth when they are living and organic imply the element of destruction it is easy enough to talk smoothly about natural evolution what nature herself does as we are beginning to realise it last is to advance by leaps and bounds one of these mad leaps having produced the human brain it is for us to follow her example and slow off another past man is that which has to be left behind we thus begin to see what I must be allowed to call the essential inhumanity of the true prophet the false prophet is known by nothing so easily as by his crying peace his crying hands off enough it is tragic to think how little the world has changed since Shelley's time and how horribly relevant to the present hour are his outcries against militarism capitalism and privilege if evidence were wanted the profound moral value of Shelley's revolutionary thought one has only to read the proclamations of any international school of socialistic propaganda and find how they are fighting now, what he fought then his ideas have never been more necessary than they are today Tolstoy has preached some of them furniture others and HG Wells yet others but none of our modern rebels have managed to give to their new thought quite the comprehensiveness endearing which we find in him and he has achieved this by the intensity of his devotion modern literary anarchists are so inclined to fall into jocularity and irony and human to human humor their hamlet like consciousness of the many mansions of truth tends to paralyze the impetus of their challenge they are so often to dramatists and novelists rather than prophets and their work while it gains in sympathy and subtlety loses in directness the immense encouragement given to really drastic original thought by Nietzsche's writings is an evidence of the importance of what might be called cruel positivity in human thinking Shelley has however an advantage over Nietzsche in his recognition of the transformative power of love in this respect iconoclast though he is, he is rather with the Buddha and the Christ than with the modern and to no means his mania for love one can call it nothing else frees his revolutionary thought from that arbitrary isolation that savage subjectivity which one notes in many philosophical anarchists his platonic insistence too on the more spiritual aspect of love separates his anti-christian immorality from the easy going pleasant hedonism of such a bold individualist as Remy de Gaumont Shelley's individualism is always a thing with open doors a thing with corridors into eternity it never conveys that sad cynical pessimistic sense of eating and drinking before we die which one is so familiar with just now it is precisely this fact that those who reprobate Shelley's immorality should consider with him love was truly a mystical initiation a religious sacrament to means of getting into touch with the cosmic secret and path and perhaps the only path to the beatific vision it is not wise to turn away from Shelley because of his lack of humour of his lack of a sense of proportion the mystery of the world whatever it may be shows itself sometimes quite as indifferent as Shelley to these little nuances we hear it crying aloud in the night with no humorous cry and it is too often to stop our ears to what we hear that we jest so lightly it is doubtful where the nature cares greatly for our sense of proportion to his poetry his poetry the remarkable thing about Shelley's verse is the manner in which his whole physical and psychic temperament is passed into it this is so in a measure with all poets but it is so especially with him his beautiful, episcene face his boyish figure his unearthly sensitiveness haunt us as we read his lines their lure and baffle us while on the lips of the Mona Lisa one has the impression of listening to a being who has really traversed the ways of the sea and returned with its secret how else could those indescribable pearly shimmerings those opal tints and rosy shadows be communicated to our poor language the very purity of his nature that ethereal quality in it that strikes a chill in the heart of normal humanity lends a magic like the reflection of moonlight upon ice to those interluna melodies the same ethereal transparency of passion which excites by reason of its sublime immorality the gross fury of the cynical in the base gives an immortal beauty cold and distant and beyond the shadow of our night to his planetary melodies it is indeed the old Pythagorean music of the spheres audible at last again such sounds has the silence that descends upon us when we look up above the roofs of the city atachurus or oddbaran to return to Shelley from the turmoil of our gross excitements and cramped domesticities is to bathe our foreheads in the dew of the morning and cool our hands in the ultimate sea whatever in us transcends the vicious circle of personal desire whatever in us belongs to that life which lasts while we and our individual cravings perish whatever in us underlies and overlooks this mad procession of births and forgettings whatever in us becomes from the abode where the eternal are rises to meet this celestial harmony and slows off the muddy vesture that would grossly close it in what separates Shelley from all other poets is that with them art is the paramount concern and after art morality with him one thinks little of art little of the substance of any material teaching one is simply transported into the high cold regions where the creative gods build like children domes of many coloured glass with radiance of eternity and after such a plunge into the antinatal reservoirs of life we may if we can go on spitting venom and raking in the gutter with the old to human zest and let the ineffectual madman pass and be forgotten I said that the effect of his writing is to trouble and sadden us it was as a man I spoke that in us which responds to Shelley's verse is precisely what dreams of the transmutation of man and to beyond man that which saddens humanity beyond words is the daily food of the immortals and yet even in the circle of in unnatural moods there is something sometimes that responds to such strains as when the lamp is shattered and one word is too often profaned perhaps only those who have known what it is to love as children love and to lose hope with the absolute wherewith children lose it can enter completely into this delicate despair it is indeed the long pitiful sobbing cry bewildered disenchantment that breaks the heart of youth when it first learns of what gross clay earth and men are made and the artless simplicity of Shelley's technique much more really simple than the conscious childishness exquisite though that is of a blank or valine lends itself so wonderfully to the expression of youth's eternal sorrow his best lyrics use words that fall into their places with the dying fall of an actual fit of sobbing and they are so naturally chosen his images and metaphors even when they seem most remote they are such as frail young hearts cannot help happening upon they soothe their love laden souls in secret hour the infallible test of genuine poetry is that it forces us to recall emotions that we ourselves have had with the very form and circumstance of the passion and who can read the verses of Shelley without recalling such that peculiar poignancy of memory like a sharp spear which arrests us at the smell of certain plants or nameless earth mould or grasses on the edge of rafters rotting away that poignancy which brings back the indescribable balm of spring and the bittersweetness of irremediable loss who can communicate it like Shelley there are lovely touches of foreign scenery in his poems particularly of the vineyards and olive gardens and clear cut hill towns of Italy but for English readers it will always be the rosemary that is for remembrance and the pansies that are for thought that give their perfume to the feelings he excites other poets may be remembered at other times but it is when the sun warmed woods smell of the first primroses and the daffodils coming before the swallowed deers lift up their heads above the grass that the sting of the sweetness to exquisite to last beyond a moment brings its intolerable hope and its intolerable regret End of Chapter 10 Chapter 11 of Visions and Revisions by John Cooper Poeas this Lubrivox recording is in the public domain Keats it is well that there should be at least one poet of beauty of beauty alone of beauty and naught else it is well that one should dare to follow that terrible goddess even to the bitter end that pitiless marble altar has its victims as the other altars the white and placable Aphrodite cries aloud for blood for the blood of our dearest affections for the blood of our most cherished hopes for the blood of our integrity and faith for the blood of our reason she drags us blinds us torches us, maddens us and slays us and yet we follow her to the bitter end Beauty hath her martyrs as the rest and of these Keats is the protagonist the youngest and the fairest the most enamoured victim from those extraordinary letters of his to his friends and to his love we gather that this fierce beauty was not without his philosophy the philosophy of Keats as we gather up the threads of it one by one in those fleeting confessions is nothing but the old polytheistic paganism reduced to terms of modern life he was a born pluralist to use the modern phrase and for him in this congruence of separate and unique miracles which we call the world neither unity nor progress nor purpose nor over soul nothing but the mystery of beauty and the memory of great men his way of approaching nature his way of approaching every event in life was pluralistic he did not ask that things should come in upon him in logical order or in rational coherence he only asked that each unique person who appeared each unique hillside or meadow or hedgerow or vineyard or flower or tree should be for him a new incarnation of beauty a new avatar of the merciless one he followed never has there been a poet less mystical never a poet less moral the ground and soil and subsoil of his nature was sensuality a rich quivering tormented sensuality if you will you may use for what he was the word materialistic but such a word gives an absurdly wrong impression the physical nerves of his abnormally troubled senses were too exquisitely, too passionately stirred to let their vibrations die away in material bondage they quiver off into remotest psychic waves their shaken strings send them shuddering into the high regions of the spirit for a nature like this with the fever of consumption wasting his tissues and the fever of his thirst for beauty ravaging his soul it was nothing less than the cruelest tragedy that he should have been driven by the phantom flame of sex illusion to find all the magic and wonder of the mystery he worshiped caught, imprisoned closed, blighted in the poisonous loveliness of one capricious girl an anarchist at heart as so many great artists are Keats hated with a furious hatred any bastard claims and privileges that insolently intrude themselves between the godlike senses of man and the divine madness of the quest society the public, moral opinion intellectual fashion the manners and customs of the upper classes what were all these but feign and pertinences interrupting his desperate pursuit every gentleman he cried is my natural enemy the feverish fanaticism of his devotion knew absolutely no limits his cry day and night was for new sensations in such sensationalism a mere epicurean indulgence to others was a lust, a madness, a frenzy a fury or rushing upon death to him how young he was how pitifully young when the foam-born jealous of him as she was jealous of her politice hurt him bleeding to the ground but what poetry he has left behind him there is nothing like it in the world nothing like it for sheer deadly draining frowsing, witchery of beauty it is the very cup of surcha the very filtra of sun poison a thing of beauty is a joy forever a joy yes but a joy drugged from its first pouring forth we follow we have to follow but oh the weariness of the way what an exultant him that is the one in honour of Pan which comes so soon the dim rich depths of the dark forest disturbed by it and its murmurs die away over the wailing spaces of the marshes obscure growths and drowsy weeds overhanging moonlight paths where fungoid things fumble for light and air hear that cry and their voluptuous dreams and move uneasily the dumb vegetable expectancy of young tree trunks is roused by it into sensual terror for this is the sound of the hoof of Pan stamping on the moist earth as he rages for syrinx no one has ever understood the torment of the wood god and his mad joy as the author of indimion understood him the tumultuous groundswell of this poet's insane craving for beauty must in the end have driven him on the rocks but there came sometime soft to gentler less-familiar tinctured moods which might have prolonged his days had he never met that girl the pot of basil expresses one of these wistful and heartbreaking it has attained a yearning pity in it a gentle melancholy brooding over the irremediable pain of love loss which haunts one like the sound of drowned angelic spells under a hushed sea the description of the appearance of the ghost of the dead boy and his vague troubled speech is like nothing else that has ever been written Saint Agnes Eve too in its more elaborate, more premeditated art has a beauty so poignant so sensuously unearthly that one dear not quote a line of it in a mere critical essay for fear of breaking such a spell the long-drawn solemn harmonies of Hyperion Miltonian and yet troubled by a thrilling sorcery that Milton never knew maddened the reader with anger that he never finished it an anger which has only increased when in that other version the influence of Dante becomes evident la belle dame sang messe ah there we find him there we await him the poet of the tragedy of bodily craving transferred with all its aching famished nerves to the psychic plane for la belle dame is the litany of the beauty maniac his death and life requiem his eternal dirge those who have ever met her this lady in the mead fallen beautiful, the fairy child whose foot was light and whose hair was long and whose eyes were wild will know and only they the meaning of the starved lips through the gloom with horrid warning gaping wide and his the secret of the gasping pours of that broken half-line where no birds sing borrowed originally from poor felias despair and echoed wonderfully by Mr Hardy and certain of his incomparable lyrics being conveyed to my reader but it is of course one of his five great odes that keeps his most supreme most entirely without question the unapproachable artist heaven forbid that I should shatter the sacred silence that such things produce by any profane repetition they leave behind them every one of them an echo, a vibration, a dying fall leaving us enchanted and trembling is when we have been touched before the twittering of the birds at dawn by the very finger of our lady of sweet pain is it possible that words mere words can work such miracles or are they not words at all but chalices and holy grails of human passion full of the lifeblood staining the lips that approach them scarlet of heart-drained pulse-weried ravishment certainly he has the touch ineffable final absolute of the supreme beauty and over it all over the ardours and ecstasies hangs the shadow of death and in the heart of it an adder in the deep-drugged cup coiled and waiting the poisonous bite of incurable anguish we may stand mesmerised spellbound amid the hushed, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-tired watching Psyche sleep we may open those charmed magic casements towards the perilous foam we may linger with Ruth sick for home amid the alien corn we may gaze awed and hushed at the dead cold little mountain-built town emptied of its folk we may glut our sorrow on the morning rose or on the wealth of globed peonies we may imprison our mistresses soft-hand and gaze deep deep within her peerless eyes we may brood quieted and sweetly sad upon the last melancholy oozing of the rich year's vintage but across all these things lies like a streak of red breath-catching spilled heart's blood the knowledge of what it means to have been able to turn all this into poetry it means torment it means despair it means that cry out of the dust of the symmetry of Rome oh God oh God has there ever been such pain as my pain I suppose Keats suffered more in his brief life than any mortal child of the muses these ultimate creations of supreme beauty are evoked in no other way everything has to be sacrificed everything if we are to be like the God's creators of life for life is a thing that can only be born in that soil only planted where the wound goes deepest only watered when we strike where that fountain flows he wrote for himself the crowd, the verdict of his friends what did all that matter he wrote for himself and for those who dared to risk the taste of that wine which turns the taste of all else of our wearied irrelevance one is unwilling to leave our Adonis whose annual wound in Lebanon allures us thus fatally with nothing but such a bitter cry one has a pathetic human longing to help him as he was in those few moments of unalloyed pleasure the Gods allowed him before consumption in that girl poisoned the springs of his life in those moments how they have passed into his poetry like the breath of the spring when the grand obsession was not upon him who like Keats can make us feel the cool sweet wholesome touch of our great mother the earth that deep full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing which the breast that suckled Persephone alone can give may heal us also for a brief while we too on this very morning listen reader may wreath a flowerband to bind us to the earth spite of despondence some shape of beauty may yet move away the pale from our dark spirits even with old satin under his weight of grief we may drink deep of the loveliness of those green-robed senators of mighty woods tall oaks branch charmed by the earnest stars and in the worst of our moods we can still call aloud to the things of beauty that pass not away we can even call out to them from her very side who is the cause, the cause my soul of what we suffer bright star would I worse steadfast as thou art not in lone splendour hung aloft the night and watching with the turn or lids apart like nature's patient, sleepless aeromite the moving waters at their preslaked task of pure ablution round earth's human shores this desperate sensuous pain which makes us cry out to the midnight that we might cease upon it need not harden our hearts before we pass hence the slowest twittering in the sky of our little interludes of peace may still attune us to some strange sad thankfulness that we have been born into life and even though life tuned out to mean this and the vibrating stricken nerves of our too great devotion may have at least the balm of feeling that they have not languished untouched by the fingers that thrill while they slay after all we have lived we also and we would not change places with those happy innocents who have never known the madness of what it may be to have been born a son of man but let none be deluded the tragic life upon earth is not the life of the spirit but the life of the senses the senses are the aching doors to the greatest mystery of all the mystery of our tyranny over one another does anyone think that love is greater more real and more poignant which can stand over the dead body of its one of all and dream of encounters and reconciliations in other worlds it is not so what we have loved is cold cold and dead and has become that thing we scarcely recognize can any vague spiritual reunion make up for the loss of the little touches the little ways we shall never through all eternity know again are those reluctances and hesitations over now quite over now are those fretful pleadings those strange withdrawals those unheated protests nothing less than nothing and mere memories when the life of the senses invades the affection of the heart then then one informed comes the pitch and the sting and this is what happens with such doomed sensualists as Keats was what tortured him in death was the thought that he must leave his darling and the actual look touch air ways and presence of her forever vain as that inspired lover Emily Bronte cries vain unutterably vain are all the creeds that would console tired of hearing simple truth miscalled simplicity tired of all the weariness of life from these we would be gone save that to die we leave our love alone but it is not only in the fatal danger of eternal separation from the flesh that has become to us more necessary than sun or moon that the tragedy of the senses lies it lies in the very intensity with which we have sifted winnowed tormented and refined these panthers of holy lust those who understand the poetry of Keats recognise that in the passion which burns him for the heavenly quintessence there is also the ghastly danger of reaction the pitiless hands of joy are ever at his lips bidding adieu and failed melancholy has her sovereign shrine in the heart of all delight there is a curse upon those who follow the supreme beauty that is to say the beauty that belongs not to ideas and ideals but to living forms they are driven by the gross pressure of circumstance to forsake her to leave her to turn aside and eat husks with the swine it is the same with the supreme mystery of words themselves out of which such an artist as this one was creates his spells in a sorcery how after tasting drop by drop that draft of lingering sweetness long drawn out of his unequaled style can we bear to fall back upon the jabbering and screeching the howling and hissing of the voices we have to listen to in common resort ah child child think carefully before you turn your candid innocent eyes to the fatal entrance to these mysteries it is better never to have known with the high terrible loveliness of her of malice is than having seen her to pass the rest of our days with these copies and prostitutions and profanities and parodies which mimic humanity so abominably that is the worst of it that is the sting of it all the great quests in this world tempt us and destroy us for though they may touch our famished lips once and again before we perish one thing they cannot do one thing beauty herself the most sacred of all such quests cannot do and that is to make the arid intervals of our ordinary life tolerable when we have to return to the common world of people and things that stand gaping in that world like stupid steering idols but what matter let us pay the penalty let us pay the price is it not worth it beauty oh divine oh cruel mistress thee thee we must worship still and with thee the acolytes who bear thy senses for the secret of life is to take every risk without fear even the risk of finding oneself in exile with no shrine no grove no oracle no heat of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming in the land without memories without altars without thee end of chapter 11 chapter 12 visions and revisions by John Cooper Poeus this LibriVox recording is in the public domain nature it is not the hour in which to say much about nature the dissentient voices are silent the crowd has stopped howling but a worse thing is happening to him the thing of all others he dreaded most he is becoming accepted the preachers are quoting him and the theologians are explaining him what he would himself pray for now are enemies fierce irreconcilable enemies but our age cannot produce such it can only produce nearing disparagement or frightened conventional at probation what one would like to say at this particular juncture is that here or again there this deadly antagonist of God missed his aim but who can say that he aimed too surely no he did not miss his aim he went out to smite but one thing he could not smite he could neither smite it nor unmask it nor transvalue it I mean the earth itself the great shrewd wise all enduring mother of a soul who knows so much and remains so silent and sometimes one feels walking some country road with the smell of upturned solids and heavy leaf mould in one's nostrils and Lucifer himself is not as deep or strong or wise as his patient furrowed earth into blundering children a rough earth hint a ribolasian ditty a gross amazing jest a chuckle of deep satiric humour and the monstrous thickness of life it's friendly a plum and nonchalance it's grotesque reverence it's shy shrewd common sense it's tough fibres and potentious indifference to distinction tumbles us over in the mud for all our luthiness and roars over us like a romping bull calf the antidote to Nietzsche is not to be found in the company of the saints he was too much of a saint himself for that it is to be found in the company of Shakespearean Claude Hoppers and Ribolasian Topers serving winches in fact it is to be found as with the antidotes for other noble excesses and burying your face in rough moist earth and grubbing for pig nuts under the beach trees as summers stay in the woods with Audrey will put fatality into its place and remove the recurrence of all things to a very modest remoteness and this is not a relinquishing secret of life this is not a giving up of the supreme quest it is an opening of another door a letting in of a different year a reversion to a more primitive level of the mystery the way to reduce the tyranny of this proud spirit to its proper proportion is not to talk about love or morality or orthodoxy or the strength of the vulgar herd it is simply to call up in one's mind the motley procession of gross simple quaint bulbous irrepressible objects human and otherwise whose mere existence makes it as impossible for nature to deal with the massiveness of life as it is impossible for anyone else to deal with it no we shall not free ourselves from his intellectual predominance by taking refuge with the saints we shall not do this he himself was essentially a saint a saint in a martyr is it for me now to prove that it is realised I suppose what the history of his spiritual contest actually was it was a deliberate self inflicted crucifixion of the Christ in him as an offering to the Apollo in him nature was that cannot be denied an intellectual sadist and his intellectual sadism took the form as it can he as himself taught us so take many curious forms of deliberately arranging his own most sensitive nerves this is really what broke his reason in the end by a process of spiritual vivisection the suffering of which one dare not conceive he took his natural sanctity and carved it as a dish fit for the gods until it assumed in a polonian shape we must visualise nature not only as the philosopher with the hammer but as the philosopher with the chisel we must visualise him with such a sculptor's tool standing in the presence of the crucified figure of himself and altering one by one its natural liniments nature's own lacerated intellectual nerves with a vantage point of his spiritual vision he would write the antichrist because he had killed in his own nature the thing he loved it was for this reason that he had such a supernatural insight into the Christian temperament it was for this reason that he could pour vitriol upon its little secrets and hunt it to its last retreats let none think he did not understand the grandeur and the terrible intoxicating appeal of the thing he fought he understood these only too well what vibrating sympathy as for a kindred spirit may be read between the lines of his attack on Pascal Pascal the supreme type of the Christian philosopher it must be further realised for after all what are words and phrases that it was really nothing but the Christian conscience in him that forced him on so desperately to kick against the pricks it was the Christian conscience in him has he not himself analysed the voluptuous cruelty of that which drove him to seek something if possible nobler, austere, gayer more innocently wicked than christianity it was not in the interests of truth that he fought it true christian as he was at heart he never cared greatly for truth as truth it was in the interest of a higher ideal a more exacting less human ideal that he crushed it down the christian spirit in him set him upon strangling the christian spirit and all in the interest of a madness of nobility itself perforated with christian conscience was nature really greek compared with gerta let us say not for a moment it was in the desperation of his attempt to be so that he seized upon greek tragedy and made it dance to christian symbols this is let it be clearly understood the hidden secret of his mania for Dionysius Dionysius gave him his opportunity in the worship of this god also a wounded god be it remarked he was able to satisfy his perverted craving for ecstasy of laceration under the shadow of another name but after all as Gerta says feeling is all and all the name is sound and smoke what he felt were christian feelings the feelings of a mystic a visionary a fledgulent what matter by what name you call them christ Dionysius it is the secret creative passion of the human heart that sends them both forth upon their crusade is anyone simple enough to think that whatever secret cosmic power melts into human ecstasy it waits to be summoned by certain particular syllables that this arbitrary strangling of the christ in him never altogether ended is proved by the words of those tragic messages he sent to Casima Wagner from the aristocratic city of Turin when his tormented brain broke like a taught bow string those messages resembled arrows of fire shot into space and on one was written the words the crucified and on the other the word Dionysius the grand and heartbreaking appeal of this lonely victim of his own merciless scourge does not depend for its effect upon us upon any of the particular ideas he announced the idea of the eternal recurrence of all things to take the most terrible as clearly but another instance of his intellectual sadism the worst thing that could happen to those innumerable victims of life for whom he sought to kill his pity was that they should have to go through the same punishment again not once or twice but for an infinity of times and it was just that that he with immense pity for them took so long a killing suddenly felt must be what had to happen had to happen for no other reason that it was intolerable that it should happen again we may note it was not truth he sought but ecstasy and in this case the ecstasy of accepting the very worst kind of issue he could possibly imagine the idea of the superman too is an idea that could only have entered the brain of one pushed on to think at the spearhead of his own cruelty it is a great and terrible idea sublime and devastating this idea of the human race yielding place to another race stronger wiser, fairer, sterner gayer and more godlike especially noble and compelling as Nietzsche's constant insistence that the moment has come for men to take their destiny out of the blind power of evolution and to guide it themselves with a strong hand and a clear will towards a definite goal the fact that this striving force of cruelty to himself and through himself to humanity scourged him on to so formidable an illumination of our path is a proof how unwise it is to suppress any grain perversion such motive forces should be used as Nietzsche used his for purposes of intellectual insight not simply trampled upon as evil whether our poor human race ever will surpass itself as he demands and rise to something psychologically different may admit a wide solution it is not an unscientific idea it is not a a religious idea it has all the dreams of the prophets behind him but who can tell it is quite as possible that the spirit of destruction in us will wantonly ruin this great chance that we shall seize upon it man has many other impulses besides the impulse of creation perhaps he will never be seduced and even desiring such a goal far less willing it over long spaces of time the curious optimism of Nietzsche by means of which he sought to force himself into a mood of such Dionysia and ecstasy as to be able not only to endure fate as yet another example of the subterranean conscience of christianity working in him in the presence of such a mood and indeed in the presence of nearly all his great dramatic passions it is Nietzsche and not as humorous critic who is with our Lord in Gethsemane one does not drink of the cup of fate lovingly without bloody sweat the interesting thing to observe about Nietzsche's ideas is that the wider they depart from what was essentially christian in him the less convincing they grow one cannot help feeling he recognises this himself and infuriated by it strode further and further into the jungle for instance one cannot suppose that the cult of the blond beast and the cult of Caesar Borgia were anything but mad reprisals directed towards himself in savage revenge blind blows struck random against the lofty and penetrating spirituality in which he had indulged when writing Zarathustra but there is a point here of some curious psychological interest to which we are attracted by certain treacherous red glow upon his words when he speaks of the sultry crouching, spotted tail lashing mood why is it precisely this Borgian type this renaissance type among the world's various lust darlings that he chose to select why does he not oppose to the christian ideal its true opposite the naive, artless fawn like pagan child of nature who has never known remorse the answer is clear he chooses the Borgian type the type which is not free from superstition which is always wrestling with superstition the type that sprinkles holy water upon its dagger because such a type is the inevitable product of the presence among us of the christian ideal the christian ideal has made a certain complication of wickedness possible which were impossible without it if nature had not been obsessed by christianity he would have selected as his ideal blonde beast that perfectly naive unfallen man of imperturbable nerves of classic nerves such as life abounded in before Christ came he makes indeed a pathetic struggle to idealise this type rather than the conscience stricken renaissance one he lets his fingers stray more than once over the red stained limbs of real son burnt Pompeii in heathenism he turns feverishly the wanton pages of Patronius to reach this unsullied imperial animal but he cannot reach him he never could reach him the consecrated dagger of the Borgia gleams and scintillates between even therefore in the sort of wickedness he evokes nature remains Christ ridden and Christ master the matter is made still more certain when one steals up silently so to speak behind the passages where he speaks of Napoleon Verrida has the remotest psychological clairvoyance he will be aware of a certain strain and tug a certain mental jerk and contortion whenever Napoleon is introduced yes he could engrave the fatal an over the mental piece at Phima to do so was the last solace of his wounded brain but he was never really at ease with the great emperor never did he in pure direct classic recognition greet him as the demonic master of destiny with the Goethean salutation had Goethe and Napoleon in their notorious encounter wherein they recognize one another this man been interrupted by the entrance of nature do you suppose they would not have stiffened and recoiled recognizing their natural enemy the cross bearer the Christ obsessed one Il Santo the difference between the two types can best be felt by recalling the way in which Napoleon and Goethe treated the Christ legion compared with Nietzsche's great wrestling Napoleon uses religion calmly and deliberately for his high policy and worldly statecraft Goethe uses religion calmly and deliberately for his aesthetic culture and his mystic symbolism neither of them are for one moment touched by it themselves they are born pagans and when this noble tortured soul brings himself at their feet in feverish worship one feels that out of their Homeric Cades they look wonderingly unintelligently at him one of the most laughable things in the world is the attempt some simple critics make to Nietzsche into an ordinary honest infidel a kind of poetic Brad Lohan offering to humanity the profound discovery that there is no God that when we die we die the absurdity is made complete when this naïve of a verified pagan is made to assure us us the average sensual man that the path of wisdom lies not in resisting but in yielding to temptation not in spiritual wrestling to transform ourselves but in the brute courage to transform ourselves and live out our type the good folk who play with such a childish illusion would do well to scan over again their pagan heroes branding and flaying of the philosopher Strauss Strauss was precisely what they tried to turn Nietzsche into a rancorous insensitive bullying materialistic heathen making sport of the cross and drinking lagerbier Nietzsche loathed lagerbier and the cross burnt day and night in his tormented Dionysian soul. It occurs to me sometimes that if there had been no German reformation and no overrunning of the world by simple evangelical Protestantism it would be still possible to bring into the circle of the church's development the lofty and desperate passion of this saintly Antichrist. After all, why should we concede that those agitated voluptuous secret devices to get saved those super-subliminal tricks of the weak and the perverted to be revenged on the beautiful and the brave which Nietzsche laments were ever bound up in the same cover as the Old Testament must remain forever a prominent note in the faith of Christendom While the successor of Caesar while the Pontifex Maximus of our spiritual realm still represents the infallible element of the world's nobler religious taste there is yet perhaps a remote chance that this sentimentalising of the mountain summits this cheapening of our planet's passion play characterized and eliminated and yet it is not likely much more likely is it that the real secret of Jesus together with the real secret of Nietzsche and they do not differ in any sense for all his bourgeois will remain the sweet and deadly fatalities that they have always been for the few the few who understand them for the final impression one carries away after reading Nietzsche is the impression of distinction of remoteness from vulgar brutality from sensual baseness from the clumsy compromises of the world it may not last this serathrustry and mood it lasts with some of us an hour with some of us a day with a few of us a handful of years but while it lasts it is a rare and high experience as from an icebound promontory stretching out over the abysmal gulfs we dare to look creation and annihilation for once full in the face liberated from our own lusts or using them contemptuously and indifferently as engines of vision we see the life and death of the worlds the slow, long drawn moonlit wave of universe drowning nothingness we see the races of men falling, rising, stumbling advancing and receding and we see the new race and the hours of the great noontide fulfilling the prophet's hope and we see the end of that also and seeing all this because the end of our watchtower is so ice cold and keen we neither tremble or blench the world is deep and deep is pain and deeper than pain is joy we have seen creation and have exalted in it we have seen destruction and have exalted in it we have watched the long quivering shadow of life shudder across our glacial promontory and we have watched that drowning tide receive it it is enough, it is well we have had our vision we know now what gives to the gods that look their faces wear it now only remains for us to return to the familiar human stage to the gala night within the lonesome latter years to be gay and hard and superficial that icebound promontory into the truth of things has only known one explorer who is Aloy Lama Sabattini was not the death cry of his pity and that explorer did we only dream of his return end of chapter 12 chapter 13 of visions and revisions by John Cooper Pollis this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Thomas Hardy same suggestive of the purest English origin Thomas Hardy has become identified with that portion of England where the various raised posits in our national strata are most clear and defined in Wessex the traditions of Saxon and Celt Norman and Dain Roman and Iberian have grown side by side into the soil and all the villages and towns and streams of this county have preserved the rumour of what they have seen in Celtic legion the country of the west Saxons is marvellously rich Camelot in the island of Avalon greet one another across the Somerset Shire Vale and Dorseture Hardy's immediate home adds the Roman traditions of Castorbridge to tragic memories of King Leia tribe by tribe race by race as they come and go leaving their monuments and their names behind Hardy broods over them noting their survivals their lingering footprints their long decline Inniswell loved Dorchester we find him pondering like one of his own spirits of pity and irony while the moonlight shines in his theatre where the Romans held their games he devotes much care in noting all those little omens by the way that make a journey along the highway of west six so full of imaginative suggestion it is the history of the human race itself that holds him with the mesmeric spell as century after century it unrolls its acts and scenes under the indifferent stars the continuity of life is his thing and the long pity is the scent of man from those queer fossils in the Portland quarries to what we see today so palpable so real and yet for all his tragic pity Hardy is a sly and whimsical chronicler he does not allow one point of the little jest the gods play on us the little long drawn out jest to lose its sting with something of a goblin-like alertness he skips here and there watching those strange scene shifters at their work the dual stops of Hardy's country pipe are cut from the same reed with the one he challenges the immortals on behalf of humanity with the other he plays such a shrewd priapian tune that all the satyrs dance I sometimes think that only those born and bred in the country can do justice to this great writer that dual pipe of his is bewildering to city people they overemphasize the magnanimity of his art or they overemphasize its mixing melico they do not catch the secret of that mingled strain the same type of cultured foreigner is puzzled by Hardy's self-position he ought to commit himself more completely or he ought not to have committed himself at all there is something looks to them so they are tempted to express it like the cloven hoof of a most satyrish cunning about his attitude to certain things this little caustic pipe play for instance with which he girds at the established order never denouncing at wholesale like Shelley or accepting at wholesale like Wordsworth and always with a tang a dash of gall and wormwood an impish malice the truth is there are two spirits in Hardy one infinitely sorrowful and tender and the other whimsical elfish and malign the first spirit rises up and stern Promethean revolt against the decrees of Zeus the second spirit deliberately allies itself in wanton bitigly with the humorous provocation of humanity by the cruel powers of the air the psychology of all this is not hard to unravel the same abnormal sensitiveness that makes him pity the victims of destiny makes him also, not unaware of what may be sweet to the pallet of the gods and such merry jests these two tendencies seem to have grown upon them and to have become more and more pronounced often with artists the reverse thing happens every human being has his own secretive reaction his own furtive recoil from the queer trap we are all in his little private method of retaliation but many writers are most unscrupulously themselves when they are young the changes and chances may mellow them into a more neutral tint their revenge upon life grows less personal and more objective as they get older they become balanced and resigned they attain the wisdom of Sophocles the opposite of this has been the history of Hardy's progression he began with quite harmless rustic realism, fanciful and quaint then came his masterpieces where in the power and grandeur of a great artist's inspiration fused everything into harmony at the last in his third period we have the exaggeration of all that is most personal in this emotion intensified to the extreme limit it is absurd to turn away from these books, books like Jude the Obscure and The Well Beloved if Hardy had not had such sadonic emotions such desire to hit back at the great opposeless wills and such goblin like Glee at the tricks they play us he would never have been able to write tests against the ways of God to this sweet girl he raises a hand of terrible revolt but it is with more than human pity that he lays her down on the altar of sacrifice but after all it is in the supreme passages of pure imaginative grandeur that Hardy is greatest here he is with Shakespeare and we forget both Titan and Goblin how hard it is to exactly put into words what this imaginative grandeur consists of it is at any rate the intensification of our general consciousness of the life drama as a whole but this under a poetic rather than a scientific light and yet with the scientific facts they also not without their dramatic significance indicated in a loud form it is the clarifying of our mental vision and a heightening of our sensual apprehension it is the certain withdrawing from the mere personal pawn of our own fate into a more rarefied air where the tragic beauty of life falls into perspective and beholding the world in a clear mirror we escape for a moment from the world to live at such times it is as though taken up upon a high mountain we see without desire and without despair the kingdom of the world and the glories of them then it is that we feel the very wind of the earth's revolution and the circling hours touch us with a palpable hand as the turmoil of the world grows so distant it is then we feel at once the greatness of humanity in the littleness of what it strives for we are seized with a shuttering tenderness for man this bewildered animal wrestling in darkness with he knows not what and gazing long and long into this mirror the poignancy of what we behold is strangely softened after all it is something that comes of us to have been conscious of all this it is something to have outwatched Arcturus and felt the sweet influence of the Pleiades Congress with such a mood is the manner in which Walhardy opposes himself to Christianity he cannot forget it he cannot cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart it troubles and vexes him and his work both gains and suffers he flings gybe after gybe at God but across his anger falls the shadow of the cross how should it not be so all may be permitted but one must not add a featherweight to the wheel that breaks our little ones it is this that separates Hardy's work from so much modern fiction that is clever and philosophical but does not satisfy one's imagination all things with Hardy even the facts of geology and chemistry are treated with the imaginative clairvoyance that gives them their place in the human comedy and is not Christianity itself one of these facts how amazing that such a thing should have appeared at all upon the earth when one reads Meredith and is brilliant and intellectual cleverness one finds Christianity taken for granted and dismissed as hardly relevant to modern topics but Hardy is too pagan in the true sense too fascinated with the poetry of life and the essential ritual of life to dismiss any great religion in this way the thing is always with him just as the gothic tower of Saint Peter's church and castbridge is always with him he may burst into impish fury with its doctrines but like one of those queer demons who peep out from such consecrated places yet never leave them his imagination requires that atmosphere for the same reason in spite of his intellectual realisation of the mechanical processes of fate their engine like dumbness and blindness he is always being driven to personify these ultimate powers to personify them or it as something that takes infernal satisfaction in falling its luckless creations in provoking them and scorching them to madness Hardy's ultimate thought is that the universe is blind and unconscious that it knows not what it does but standing among the graves of those wessex churchyards watching the twisted threads of perverse destiny that plague those hapless hearts under a thousand village roofs it is impossible for him not to long to strike back at this damned system of things that alone is responsible and how can one strike back unless one converts unconscious machinery into a wanton providence where Hardy is so incomparably greater than Meredith and all his modern followers as that in these wessex novels there is none of that intolerable ethical discussion which obscures the old essential candors of the human situation the reaction of men and women upon one another in the presence of the solemn and the mocking elements this will outlast all social readjustments and all ethical reforms while the sun shines and the moon draws the tides men and women will ache from jealousy and the lover will not be the beloved long after a quite new set of interesting modern ideas have replaced the present children will break the hearts of their parents and parents will break the hearts of their children Hardy is indignant enough over the ridiculous conventions of society but he knows that at the bottom what we suffer from is the dust out of which we are made the eternal illusion and dissolution which must drive us on and take us off until the planet's last hour Hardy's style at its best has an imaginative suggestiveness which approaches though it may not quite reach the indescribable touch of the Shakespearean tragedies there is also a quality in it peculiar to himself threatening and silencing a thunderous suppression a formidable reserve an iron tenacity sometimes again one is reminded of the ancient Roman poets and not unfrequently too of the rhymic incantations of Sir Thomas Brown that majestic and perverted Latinist the description for instance of Eddon Heath at the beginning of the return of the native has a dusky architectural grandeur that is like the portico of an Egyptian temple the same thing may be noted of that sudden apparition of Stonehenge as tests an angel stumble upon it in their flight through the darkness one thinks of the words of William Blake he who does not love form more than colour is a coward for it is above all form that appeals to Hardy Anne Plough of a simpleccable style drives pitilessly through the soft flesh of the earth until it reaches the architectural substructure whoever tries to visualise any scene out of the Wessex novels will be forced to see the figures of the persons concerned silhouetted against a formidable skyline one sees them, these poor impassioned ones moving in tragic procession the edge of the world and when the procession is over darkness re-establish itself the quality that makes Hardy's manner such a refuge from the levities and gravities of the reforming writers is a quality that springs from the soil the soil has a gift of proportion like nothing else things fall into due perspective on Eddon Heath and among the water meadows of Blackmore life as felt as the tribes of men have felt it since the beginning the modern tendency is to mock at sexual passion and grow grave over social and artistic problems Hardy eliminates social and artistic problems and takes nothing seriously not even God except the love and the hate of men and women and the natural elements that are their accomplices it is for this lack in them this uneasy levity over the one thing that really counts that it is so hard to read many humorous and arresting modern writers except in railway trains and cafes they have thought it clever to dispossess the passion of our poor heart of its essential poetry they have not understood that man would sooner suffer the bitterness of death than be deprived of his right to suffer the bitterness of love it must be I suppose these flippant trifles are so optimistic about their reforms and their ethical ideals and their sanitary projects that to them such things is how the sun rises over Shastain and sinks over Budmouth such things is what Eustachia felt when she walked talking to herself across the blasted heath such things is the mood of Hinchard when he cursed the day of his birth a mere accidents and irrelevance is by no means germane to the matter well perhaps they are wise to be so hopeful but for the rest of us for whom the world does not seem likely to improve so fast it is an unspeakable relief that there should be at least one writer left interested in the things that interested Sophocles and Shakespeare and possessed of a style that does not remembering the work of such hands put our generation all together to shame end of chapter 13 chapter 14 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 Walter Petter what are the qualities that make this shy and furtive recluse this wanderer in the shadows the greatest of critics imagination in the first place and then that rare unusual divine gift of limitless reverence for the human senses imagination is a twofold power it visualizes and it creates with clarity with clarity with clarity with clarity and it creates with clairvoyant ubiquity it floats and flows into the most Rekondite recesses the most reluctant sanctuaries of other men's souls with clear-cut architectural volition that builds up its own by Zhantium out of the quarry de tray of all the centuries one loves to think of Petter leaving the Ounie country the poet Cooper, and nursing his weird boy fancies in the security of the Cambridge Cloisters. The most passionate and dedicated spirit he, to soul can dream and hide and love, and watch the others playing in the quiet retreat since the great soul of Christopher Marlowe flamed up there into consciousness. And then Oxford, and it is meet and write at such a point as this, to lay our offering modest secret shy, a shadow or nothing, at the feet of this gracious Alma Mater, who needs not dune for beauty's heightening. One revolts against her sometimes. The charm is too exclusive to be drawn, and something, what shall I say, of ironic supercilious delusion makes her forehead weary, and her eyelids heavy. But after all, to what exquisite children, like rare exotic flowers, she has the power to give birth. But did you know, you for whom the syllables Oxford are an incantation, that to the yet more subtle, yet more withdrawn, and yet more elaborate soul of Walter Patta, Oxford herself appeared, as time went on, a little vulgar and silly. Indeed he fled from her, and took refuge sometimes with his sisters. For like Charles Lamb, Patta was conventional in his taste, and sometimes with the original of Markey, the Epicurean, but what matter where he fled. He who always followed the shady side of the road, he has not only managed to escape himself, with all his boxes of alabaster, into the sanctuary of the Ivory Tower, that even Oxford cannot reach, but he has carried us thither with him. And there, from the opal clouded windows of that high place, he shows us still the secret kingdoms of art and philosophy in life, and the remotest glories of them. We see them all, from those windows, a little lovelier, a little rarer, a little more selective than perchance they really are, but what matter. What does one expect when one looks through opal clouded windows, and after all, those are the kinds of windows from which it is best to look at the dazzling limbs of the immortal gods. Not but what, sometimes he permits us to throw those magic casements wide open, and then, and how lucid an air, and how clean and fresh a morning of reality, those pure forms and godlike figures stand out, their naked feet and the cold, clear dew. For one must note two things about Walter Patta. He is able to throw the glimmering mantle of his own elaborate sophistry of the senses, over comparatively fleeting, unarresting objects, and he is able to compel us to follow line by line, curve by curve, contour by contour, the very palpable body and presence of the beauty that passeth not away. In plainer words, he is a great and exact scholar, laborious, patient, indefatigable, reserved, and at the same time a protein wizard, breathing forbidden life into the tyrian stained writhings of many an enchanted lamia. At a thousand points, he is the only modern literary figure who draws us towards him with the old leonardian Gertian spell, for like Goethe and Da Vinci, he is never far from those eternal partings of the ways which alone make life interesting. He is, for instance, more profoundly drenched, dyed and impugned in Christian mythology than any mortal writer short of the saints themselves. He is more native to the pure Hellenic ear than any since Walter Savage Landau, and he is more subtle in his understanding of chum and philosophy as opposed to Celtic romance than all outside the most inner circle since Hegel or Hain. The greedy capricious uranium babyishness of his pupil Oscar, with its peevish clutching at all soft and provocative and glimmering things, is mere child's play compared with the deep dark vampirism with which this furtive hermit drains the scarlet blood of the vestals of every sanctuary. How little the conventional critics have understood this master of their own craft. What helpless people have rushed in to interpret this super-subtle interpreter? Edmund Goese has, however, done one thing for us. Somewhere, somehow, he once drew a picture of Walter Patta gambling in the moonlight on the velvet lawn of his own secluded Oxford garden, like a satin-poured wombat. I always think of that picture, it is pleasant to one, than that of Mark Patterson. Running round his gooseberry bushes after great screaming gulls. But they are both touching sketches, and no doubt very indicative of life beneath the shadow of the Bodleian. Why have the professional philosophers ever since the master of Belio, who used to spend his time pouring holes in the ship that carried him, fought shy of Patta's philosophy? For a sufficient reason. Was like Protagoras the Sophist, and like Aristopus the Serenian, he has undermined metaphysic by means of metaphysic. For Walter Patta, as that clearly understood, was an adept long before Nietzsche's campaign began, and showing the human desire, the human craving, the human ferocity, the human spite hidden beneath the mask of pure reason. He treats every great system of metaphysic as a great work of art, with a very human, often a too-human artisan behind it, a work of art which we have a perfect right to appropriate, to enjoy, to look at the world through and then to pass on. Every philosophy has its secret according to Patta, its formula, its lost Atlantis, and all it is for us to search it out, to take colour from its dim-lit underworld, to feed upon its wavering sea-lotus, and then returning to the surface to swim away in search of other diving grounds. No philosopher except Patta has dared to carry esoteric eclecticism quite as far as this, and be it understood, he has no frivolous deliton. Distraining the secret wine of the great and barmed sycophagi of thought, as his life lure, his secret madness, his grand obsession, while to Patta approaches a system of metaphysical thought, as a somewhat furtive amorist might approach a sleeping nymph, on light-stepping crafty, feety approaches, and the hand with which he twitches the sleeve, and the sleeper is as soft as the flutter of a moth's wing. I do not like, he said once, to be called a hedonist, it gives such a queer impression to the people who don't know Greek. Ardent young people sometimes come to me, when in the way fearing of my patient academic duties I speak about Patta, and ask me point-blank to tell them what his view-point, so they are pleased to express it really and truly was. Sweet reader, do you know the pain of these really and truly questions? I try to answer in some blundering manner like this. I try to explain how, for him, nothing in this world was certain or fixed, how everything flowed away, how all that we touch or taste or see vanished, changed its nature, became something else, even as we vanish as the years go on, and change our nature and become something else. I try to explain how, for him, we are ourselves but the meeting places of strange forces, journeying at large and by chance, through a shifting world, how we too, these very meeting places of such forces, waver and flicker and shift, and are transformed like dreams within dreams. I try to explain how this being so, and nothing being written in the sky, it is our right to test every single experience that life can offer, short of those which would make things bitterer, harder, narrower, less easy for the other person. And if my innocents ask, as they do sometimes, innocents are like that, why must we consider the other person? I answer for no reason and under no threat or danger or categorical imperative, but simply because we are grown to be that sort of animal, the sort of queer fish who cannot do things that he would. It is not, I try to indicate, a case of conscience, it is a matter of taste and there are certain things when it comes to that point, which an animal possessed of such taste cannot do, even though he desired to do them. And one of these things is to hurt the other trapped creatures who happen to have been caught in the same gin as our self. With regard to art and literature, Pater has the same method as with regard to philosophy. Everything in a world so fluid is obviously relative. It is ridiculous to dream that there is any absolute standard, even of beauty itself, those high and immutable principles of the good and true, are as much an illusion as any other human dream. There are no such principles. Beauty is a daughter of life and is forever changing as life changes. And as we change who have to live the lonely, tragic faith of certain great souls in that high, cold, mathematic of the universe. The rhythm of whose ordered harmony is the music of the spheres is a faith that may well inspire and solemnize us. It cannot persuade or convince us. Beauty is not mathematical. It is, if one may say so, physiological and psychological. And though that a steer severity of pure line and pure color, the impersonal technique of art has a seemingly preordained power of appeal. In reality, it is far less immutable than it appears and is far more in it of the arbitrariness of life and growth and change than we sometimes would care to allow. Walter Patter's magnetic spell is never more wonder-working than when he deals with the materials which artists use, and most of all with words. That material which is so stained and corrupted and outraged, and yet which is the richest of all. But how tenderly he always speaks of materials. What a limitless reverence he has for the subtle reciprocity and correspondence between the human senses and what, so thrillingly, so dangerously sometimes they apprehend. Word and clay and marble and bronze and gold and silver, these and the fabrics of cunning looms and deft insatiable fingers, he handles with the reverence of a priest touching consecrated elements. Not only the great main rivers of art's tradition, but the little streams and tributaries he loves. Perhaps he loves some of these best of all, for the pathways to their exquisite margins are less trodden than the others, and one is more apt to find oneself alone there. Perhaps of all his essays, three might be selected as most characteristic of certain recurrent moods. That one on Dennis Leverow, where the sweet, perilous legend of the exiled God, has he really been ever far from us? That treacherous son of scorched white flesh, let us so far, so strangely far. That one on Watau, the prince of court painters, where his passion for things faded and withdrawn reaches its climax. For Pater, like Antoine, is one of those always ready to turn a little wearily from the pressure of their own vivid days and seek a wistful escape in some fantastic valley of dreams. Watau's happy valley is indeed sadder than our most crowded hours. How should it not be, when it is no valley at all, but the melancholy cypress alleys of Versailles. But though sadder, it is so fine, so fine and drear and gay, and along the borders of it and under its clipped trees, by its fountains and ghostly lawns still still can one catch in the twilight, the shimmer of the dancing feet of the Phantom Perot, and the despair in a smile. For him too, for Giles the Mama, as for Antoine, Watau, and Walter Pater, the wistfulness of such places is not inconsistent with their levity. Soon the music must stop. Soon it must be only a garden. Only a garden of lanoitra correct, ridiculous, and charming. For the lips of the despair of Perot cannot always touch the lips of mockery of Columbine, and in the end the ultimate futility must turn them both to stone. And finally, that he say upon Leonardo, with the lines we say to our friend about her who is older than the rocks on which she sits. What really makes Pater so great, so wise, so salutary, a writer, is his perpetual insistence on the criminal mad foolishness of leading slip and silly chatter and vapid preaching, the unreturned days of our youth. Carry your youths and maidens, he seems to say. Carry with infinite devotion that far as of many odours, which is your life on earth. Spill as little as maybe of its unvalued wine. Let no raindrops or bryony dew or floating gossamer seed fall into it and spoil its taste. For it is all you have and it cannot last long. He is a great writer because from him we may learn the difficult and subtle art of drinking the cup of life so as to taste every drop. One could expatiate long upon his attitude to Christianity, his final desire to be ordained priest, his alternating piety and incredulities, his deliberate clinging to what experience brought him as the final test of truth, made it quite easy for him to dip his arms deep into the holy well. He might not find the grail, he might see nothing there but his own shadow. What matter? The well itself was so cool and chaste and dark and cavern-like that it was worth long summer days spent dreaming over it, dreaming over it in the cloistered garden, out of the dust in the folly and the grossness of the brutal world that knows neither Apollo or Christ. End of chapter 14.