 Chapter 4 of Visions and Revisions by Jean-Coupapoulos This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. El Greco The emerging of a great genius into long-retarded preeminence is always attended by certain critical misunderstandings. To a cynical observer on the lookout for characteristic temperamental lapses, two recent interpretations of El Greco may be especially commended. I mean, The Secret of Toledo by Maurice Barais and an article in the Contemporary of April 1914 by Mr Aubrey Bell. Barais, Frenchman of Frenchman, sets off with captivating implausible logic to generalise into reasonable harmlessness this formidable madman. He interprets Toledo, appreciates Spain and patronises Domenico Theotokopoulos. The Secret of Toledo is a charming book with illuminating passages, but it is too logical, too plausible, too full of the precocity of dainty generalisation to reach the dark and arbitrary soul either of Spain or of Spain's great painter. Mr Bell, on the contrary, far from turning El Greco into an Epicurean cult, drags him with a somewhat heavy hand before the footlights of English idealism. He makes of him an excuse for disparaging Valerque and launches into a discourse upon the higher reality and the inner truth which leaves one with a very dreary feeling. And by some ponderous application of spiritual ropes and pulleys, seeks to jerk into empty space all that is most personal and arresting in the artist. If it is insulting to the ghostly Toledoan to smooth him out into picturesque harmony with castilian dances, gothic cloisters and Morris songs, it is worse to transform him into a rampant idealist of the conventional kind. He belongs neither to their aesthetics nor to the idealists. He belongs to every individual soul whose taste is sufficiently purged, sufficiently perverse and sufficiently passionate to enter the enchanted circle of his tyrannical spell. When in that dark Toledo church one presses one's face against the iron bars, that separate one from the burial of count or gaz. It is neither as a dilettante nor an idealist that one holds one's breath. Those youthful, pontifical saints so richly arrayed, offering with slender royal hands that beautiful body to the dust. Is the mysterious gesture only the rhythm of the secret of death? Those chastened and winnowed spectators were there withdrawn, remote detachment, not sadness. Are they the initiated sentinels of the House of Corruption? At what figured symbol points their episcene child? Sumptuous is the raiment of the dead, and the droop of his limbs has a regal finality. But look up, stark naked, and in the abandoned weakness, the liberated soul shudders itself into the presence of God. The old Greco House and Museum in Toledo contains amazing things. Every one of those apostles that gaze out from the wall upon our casual devotion has his own furtive madness, his own impossible dream. The Saint John is a thing one can never forget. Our Greco has painted his hair as if it were literally live flame, and the exotic tints of his flesh have an emphasis laid upon them that makes one think of the texture of certain wood orchids. How irrelevant seem and sure but ease watercolour sketches of prancing moors and learned Jews and picturesque visigoths. As soon as one gets a direct glimpse into these unique perversions, and why cannot one go a step with this dreamer of dreams without dragging in the higher reality? To regard work as mad and beautiful as this as anything but individual imagination is to insult the mystery of personality. Al Greco recreates the world in pure, lonely, fantastic arbitrariness. His art does not present the secret truth of the universe or the everlasting movement. It represents the humour of Al Greco. Every artist mesmerises us into his personal vision, a traveller drinking wine in one of those cafes in the crowded Sokadova. His head full of these amazing fantasies might well let the greater fantasy of the world slip by, a dream within a dream. With Al Greco for a companion, the gaunt waiter at the table takes the form of some incarcerated Don Quixote, and the beggar at the window appears like gods in disguise. This great painter, like the Russian Dostoyevsky, has a mania for abandoned weakness. The nearer to God his heroic degenerates get, the more feverishly enfeebled becomes their human will. Their very faces, with those retreating chins, rich rosé noses, loose lips, quivering nostrils, and sloping brows seem to express the abandonment of all human resolution or restraint in the presence of the beautific vision. Like the creatures of Dostoyevsky, they seem to plunge into the ocean of the foolishness of God, as much wiser than the wisdom of men, as divers plunge into a bath. There is not much attempt among these ecstatics to hold on to the dignity of their reason or the reticence of their self-respect. Naked they fling themselves into the arms of nothingness, this passionate movement of life, of which Mr. Bell, quoting painter's famous quotation from Heraclitus, makes so much is, after all, only the rush of the wind through the garments of the world refuter as he plunges into eternity. Like St. John of the Cross, El Greco's visionaries pass from the night of reason to the night of senses, from the night of senses to the night of the soul, and if this final night is nothing less than God himself, the divine submersion does not bring back any mortal daylight. Domenico's portraits have a character somewhat different from his vision, here into these elongated bearded hermits, into these grave intellectual maniacs, whose look is like the look of workers in some unlit mine. He puts what he knows and feels of his own identity. They are diverse masks and mirrors, these portraits, surfaces of deep water in various lonely valleys, but from the depths of them rises up the shadow of the same lost soul, and they are all ruffled by the breath of the same midnight. The crucifixion in the Prado, and that other, which by some freak of providence, has found its way to Philadelphia, have backgrounds which carry our imagination very far. In this primordial ice, with its livid, steel-blue shadows, the stuff out of which the gods made other planets than ours dead planets without either sun or star. Are these the sheer precipices of chaos against which the Redeemer hangs, or the frozen edges of the grave of all life? El Greco's magnificent contempt for material truth is a lesson to all artists. We are reminded of William Blake and Aubrey Bedsley. He seems to regard the human frame as so much soft clay upon which he can trace his ecstatic hieroglyphs. In defiance both of anatomy and nature, El Greco is the true precursor of our present day. Matests and futurists, he as they, has the courage to strip his imagination of all mechanical restrictions, and let it go free to mould the world at its fancy. What stray visited to Madrid would guess the vastness of the intellectual sensation awaiting him in that quiet rose-coloured building. As you enter the museum and pass those magnificent tichéons, crowded so close together, large and mellow spaces, from a more opulent world than ours, greener branches, bluer skies, and a more luminous air, a world through which naturally, and at ease, the Divine Christ may move, grand, majestic, health-giving, a veritable God, a world from whose grapes the blood of satyrs may be quickened, from whose corn the hearts of heroes may be made strong, and cum bolt upon El Greco's glacial northern lights, you feel that no fixed objective truth and no traditional ideal has a right to put boundaries to the imagination of man. Not less striking than any of these is the extraordinary portrait of Loro Eferinand in the Great Gallery of the Louvre. The artist has painted the king as one grown weary of his difference from other men. His moon-white armour and silver crown show like the ornaments of the dead, misty and wavering, the long shadows upon the high, strange brow, seem thrown there by the passing of all mortal illusions. Phantom-like in his gleaming ornaments, a king of lost Atlantis, he waits the hour of his release. And not only is he the king of shadows, he is also the king of players, the player king. El Greco has painted him holding two sceptres, one of which resembling a fool's bauble, he is tipped with the image of a naked hand, a dead false-hand symbol of the illusion of power. The very crown he wears, shimmering and unnaturally heavy, is like the crown a child might have made in play out of shells and seaweed. The disenchanted irony upon the face of this figure, that look as of one who, as Plato would have us do with kings, has been dragged back from contemplation to the vulgarity of gruelling men, has been deliberately blent by a most delicate art with a queer sort of fantastic whimsicality. Loroe Ferdinand might almost be an enlarged reproduction of some little girl's doll king, dressed up in silver tinsel and left out of doors by mistake some rainy evening. Something about him, one fancies, would make an English child think of the white knight and Alice through the looking glass, so helpless and simple he looks, this poor revenant, propped up by youthful imagination and with the Jew of night upon his armour. You may leave these pictures far behind you as you recross the channel, but you can never quite forget El Greco. In the dreams of night, the people of his queer realm will return and surround you ebbing and flowing, these passionate shadows stretching out vain arms after the infinite and crying aloud for the rest they cannot win. Yes, in the land of dreams we know him, this proud despiser of earth. From our safe inland retreat we watch the passing of his dance of death, and we know that what they seek, these wanderers upon the wind, is not our ideal, nor our real, nor our earth or our heaven, but a strange, fairy-like navana where, around the pools of nothingness, the children of twilight gamble in play. The suggestive power of genius plays us indeed, strange tricks. I have sometimes fancied that the famished craving in the eyes and nostrils of El Greco's saints are the queer survival of that tragic look which that earlier Greek, Scopus the sculptor, took such pains to throw upon the eyelids of his half-human amphibians. It might even seem to us, dreaming over these pictures, as the gusts of an English autumn blow the fur branches against the window, as though all that weird population of Tamanica's brains were tossing their wild white arms out there and emitting thin, bat-like cries under the drifting moon. The moon, one must admit that at least, rather than the sun, was ever the mistress of El Greco's genius. He will come more and more to represent for us those vague and easy feelings that certain inanimate and elemental objects have the power of rousing. It is of him that one must think when this or that rock-hasm cries aloud for its demon or this or that deserted roadway, mutters of its unreturning dead. There will always be certain great artists, and they are the most original of all who refuse to submit to any of our logical categories, whether scientific or ideal, to give oneself up to them is to be led by the hand into the country of pure imagination into the Altoma Thul of impossible dreams. Like Edgar Allan Poe, this great painter can make splendid use of the human probabilities of religion and science, but it's none of these things that one finally thinks, as one comes to follow him, but of things more subtle, more remote, more trans-luna and far more imaginative. One may walk the streets of Toledo to seek the impress of El Greco's going and coming, but the soul of Domenico Theotokopolis is not there. It is withfaust in the cave of the abysmal mothers. End of chapter 4. Chapter 5 of Visions and Revisions by John Cooper Poeus. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Milton It is outrageous the way we modern world-children play with words. How we are betrayed by words. How we betray with words. We steal from one another and from the spirit of the hour. And with our phrases and formulas and talismans, we obliterate all distinction. One sees the modern God as one who perpetually apologizes and explains. Everything has its word symbol. Its word mask. Its word garment. Its word disgrace. Nothing comes out clear and to the open. Unspeakable and inexplicable and strikes us dumb. That is what great artists do. Who laugh at our word play. That is what Milton does. Who in the science and art of handling words. That is what great artists do. That is what great artists do. Who in the science and art of handling words. Has never been equaled. Milton indeed remains by a curious fate the only one of the very great poets who has never been interpreted or appreciated or recreated by any critical modern. And they have left him alone. They have been frightened of him. Have not dared to slime their words from him. For the very reason that he is the supreme artist in words. He is so great an artist that his creations detach themselves from all dimness. From all such dimness as modern appreciation loves. And stand out clear and cold and unsympathetic to be bowed down before and worshiped Milton as a man's poet. It would be a strange thing if women loved him. Modern criticism is a half tipsy hermaphrodite in love only with what is on the point of turning into something else. Milton is always himself. His works of art are always themselves. He and they are made of the same marble of the same metal. They are never likely to turn into anything else. Milton is like all the great artists a man of action. He so learned in words, in their history, in their weight, in their origin, in their evocations. He the scholar of scholars is a man, not of words but of deeds. That is why the style of Milton is the thing that you can touch with your outstretched fingers. It has been hammered into shape by a hand that could grasp a sword. It has been moulded into form by a brain that could dominate a council chamber. No wonder we, word maniacs, fear to approach him. He repels us. He holds us back. He hides his workshop from us, and his art smites us into silent hatred. For Milton himself, though, he is the artist of artists. Art is not the first thing. It is only the first thing with us, because we are life slaves and not its masters. Art is what we protect ourselves with from life. For us it is a religion and a drug. To Milton it was a weapon and a plaything. Milton was more interested in the struggle of ideas and the struggle of races and the struggle of immortal principles and the struggle of gods and the great creative struggle of life and death that he was interested in the exquisite cadences of words or the laborious arrangement. A modern artist's heart's desire is to escape from the world to some happy valley, and there sitting cross-legged like a Chinese idol between the mortal bushes and the lotus to make beautiful things and detachment forever. One by one with no pause or pain Milton's desire was to take the whole round world between his hands with all the races and nations who dwell upon it and mould that and nothing less into the likeness of what he believed. And in what did he believe this lord of time and space this accomplice of Jehovah? He believed in himself. He had the unquestioning unphilosophical belief in himself which great men of action have which the Caesar's Alexander's and Napoleon's have and which Shakespeare seems to have lacked. Milton, though people have been misled into thinking of him as very different from that was in reality the incarnation of the Nietzschean ideal. He was hard, he was cold, he was contemptuous, he was magnanimous. He remembered his whip when he went with women. He loved war for its own sake and he dwelt alone on the top of the mountains. To Milton the world presented itself as a place where the dominant power and the dominant interest was the wrestling of will with will. Why need we always fuss ourselves about logical names? Milton in reality in his temperament and his mood was just as convinced of will being the ultimate secret as Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or Bergson or the modern pragmatist. Nothing seemed to him noble or dramatic or true that did not imply the struggle to the death of opposing wills. Milton in reality is less of a Christian than any European writer since the gospels appeared in his heart like Nietzsche. He regarded the binding into one volume of those two testaments and insult to the great style. He does indeed in a manner find a place for Christ but it is the place of one demigod amongst other demigods the conqueror's place possibly but still the place of one in a hierarchy not of one alone. It is absurd to quarrel with Milton's deification of the Judaic Jehovah. Every man has his own God the God he has a right to and the Jewish Jehovah after all is no mean figure. He like Milton was a God of war. He like Milton found will, human and divine will. The central cosmic fact he like Milton regarded God as evil, not as universal principles but as arbitrary commands issued by eternal personal antagonists. It is one of the absurd mistakes into which our conceptual and categorical minds so easily fall this tendency to eliminate Milton's theology as mere puritanical convention dull and uninteresting. Milton's theology was the most personal creation that any great poet has ever dared to launch upon more personal even than the theology of Milton's favorite Greek poet Euripides. Milton's feeling for the more personal, more concrete aspects of God goes entirely well with the rest of his philosophy. He was at heart a savage dualist who lapsed occasionally into pluralism. He was above all an individualist of the most extreme kind an individualist so hard so positive, so inflexible that for him nothing in the world really mattered or counted except the clash of definite clear-cut wills contending against one another. Milton is the least mystical the least pantheistic the least monistic of all writers. That magic sense of the brooding sliver soul which thrills a soul and gird his poetry never touches his pages the words worthian intimations of something far more deeply interfused never crossed his sensibility and as far as he is concerned Plato might never have existed. One feels as one reads Milton that his ultimate view of the universe is a great chaotic battlefield amid the confused elements of which rise up the pretentious figures of thrones dominations principalities and powers and in the struggle between these the most arbitrary the most tyrannical the most despotic conquers the rest and planting his creative gonfelin further in the abyss than any becomes god the god whose personal and unrestrained caprice creates the sun the moon and the stars out of chaos and man out of the dust of the earth thus it is bought about that what this god wills is good and what his strongest and most forbiddable antagonist wills is evil between good and evil there is no eternal difference except in the eternal difference between the conquering personality of Jehovah and the conquered personality of Lucifer so far from it being true that Milton is the dull transcriber of mere traditional Protestantism a very little investigation reveals the astounding fact that the current popular evangelical views of the origin of things and the drama of things is based not upon the bible at all but upon Milton's poem in this respect he is a true classic poet a maker of mythology a Delphic Demiurge one of the most difficult questions in the world to answer would be the question of how far Milton believed simply and directly in the god he thus half created possibly he did believe more than his daring arbitrary creations would lead us to suppose his nature demanded positive and concrete facts skepticism and mysticism were both apparent to him and it is more likely than not that in the depths of his strange cold unapproachable heart a terrible and passionate prayer went up day and night to the god of Isaac and Jacob that the lord should not forget his servant the grandeur and granite like weight of Milton's learning was fed by the high traditions of Greece and Rome but in his heart of hearts far deeper than anything that moved him in a shillis or verge was the devotion he had for the religion of Israel and the fear of him who sitteth between the cherubims it is often forgotten amid the welter of modern ethical ideals and modern mystical theosophies how grand and unique a thing is this religion of Israel a religion whose god is at once personal and invisible after all what do we know a prince of righteousness a king of Zion a shepherd of his people such a living god as David cries out upon with those dramatic cries that remain until today the most human and tragic of all our races wrestling with the unknown is this not a faith as white as possible and far more moving than all the over souls and imminent all fathers and streams of tendency which have been substituted for it by unimaginative modern breath of mind it is time that it was made clear that the alternative at present for all noble souls is between the reign of crass casualty and the reign of him who makeeth the clouds and walketh upon the wings of the wind those who with democratis set the world upon chance have a right to worship their Jesus of Nazareth and in him the eternal protest against the cruelty of life but if life is to be deified if life is to be accepted if life is to be worshipped if courage not love but the secret of the cosmic system then let us call aloud upon it under personal and palpable symbols in the old imaginative poetic way rather than fool ourselves with thin mysticities vague intuitions and the sounding brass of ethical ideals the earlier poems of Milton are among the most lovely in the English language licidus for those who understand what poetry means the most lovely of all there is nothing anywhere quite like this poem the lingering elaborate harmonies interrupted in pause after pause by lines of reverberating finality and yet sweetly slowly leading on to the climax of such eerie lucid calm it is one's hope beyond hope of what a poem should be the absence of vulgar sentiment the classic reserve the gentle melancholy the delicate gaiety the subtle interweaving of divine rhythmic cadences the ineffable lightness of touch as of cunning fingers upon reluctant clay is there anything in poetry to equal these things one does not even regret the apparition of that two-handed engine at the door for one remembers how wickedly how mercilessly the beauty of life is even now being spoiled by these accursed hirelings and now as then nothing said the nativity hymn owes half the charm of its easy natural grace to the fact that the victory of Mary's infant son best is treated as if it were the victory of one pagan god over another the final triumph being to him who is the most gentle and beautiful of all the gods in the famous argument between the lady and her tempter in commerce we have an exquisite example of the sweet grave refinement of virginal taste which shuns grossness as a false note of commerce if so area thing can be supposed to have a doctrine is not very different from the doctrine of Marius the Epicurean one were foolish to follow the bestial enchanta not so much because it is wrong to do so because then one would lose the finer edge of that heavenly music which turns the outward shape to the soul's essence Milton sonnets occupy a place by themselves in English literature and they may well be pondered upon by those who think that the relinquishing of the old forms makes it easier to express one's personality it makes it as a matter of fact much harder just as the stripping from human beings of their characteristic outer garments makes them so dreadfully so devastatingly alike nothing could be more personal than a Miltonic sonnet the rigid principles of form, adhered to so scrupulously in the medium used, intensify rather than detract from his individualistic character that Miltonic wit so granite like so mordant, how well it goes with the magical whispers that syllable man's names all Milton's personal prejudices may be found in the sonnets from his hatred of those frightful scotch appellations that would make Quintilian gasp to his longing for classic companionship and attic wine and immortal notes and tuskin ears as one reads on, laughing gently at the folly of those who have so misunderstood him one is conscious more and more of that high, cold, clear, lonely tenderness which found so little satisfaction in the sentiments of the rabble and still less in the endearments of woman as in the case of sad electris poet his own favourite it is easy to grow angry about his misogyny and take Christian exception to his preference for mistresses over wives it is true that Milton's view of marriage is more than he then but one has to remember that in these matters of purely personal taste no public opinion has a right to intervene when the well-married brownings of our age succeed in writing poetry in the grand style it will be time and perhaps not even then to let the dogs of democratic domesticity loose upon this austere lover of the classic way what a retort was Paradise Lost to the lewd rivalers who would have profaned his aristotic isolation with howlings and brutalities and fullestine uproar Milton despised priests and kings from the heights of a pride loftier than their own and he did not love the vulgar mob much better and Paradise Lost he can feel himself into the sublime tyranny of God as well as into the sublime revolt of Lucifer neither the one nor the other stooped to solicit popular voices the thing to avoid as one reads this great poem are the paraphrases from the Book of Genesis here's some odd scrupulousness of scholarly conscience seems to prevent him launching out into his native originality but putting this aside what majestic pandemoniums of terrific imagination he is powered to call up the opening books are as sublime as the Book of Job and more arresting than a shillis the basic secrets of his blank verse can never be revealed but one is struck dumb with wonder in the presence of this eagle of poetry as we attempt to follow him flight beyond flight hovering as he gets nearer and nearer to the sun it is by single paragraphs all the same and by single lines that I would myself prefer to see him judged long poems have been written before and will be written again but no one will ever write no one but Dante has ever written such single lines as one reads in Milton curiously enough the uttering of these superb passages are interludes and delusions rather than integral episodes in the story and not only interludes but interludes in the Hagan manner second only to those Luciferian defiances which seem able to inspire even us poor worms with the right attitude towards fate I am tempted to place certain references to Astarte, Storoth and Adonis Astarte, Queen of Heaven with crescent horns to whose bright image nightly by the moon Sidonian virgins paid their vows in songs or of Adonis whose annual wound in Lebanon allured the Syrian damsels to lament his fate in amorous ditties all a summer's day that single line whose annual wound in Lebanon seems to me better than any other that could be quoted to evoke the awe and the thrill and the seduction of all true poetry then those great mysterious illusions to the planetary orbits and the fixed stars in the primeval spaces of land and sea what a power they have of spreading wide before us the huge horizons of the world's edge who can forget a lacy star that bears andromeda far off Atlantic seas or the phrase about the sailors stemming nightly to the pole or the sudden terror of that guarded, paradiscic gate with deceitful faces thronged and fiery arms the same extraordinary beauty of single passages may be found in Paradise Regained a poem which is much finer than many guess the descriptions there of the world cities Athens, Rome, Jerusalem have the same classic thrill of reserved awe and infinite reverence that some of Dante's lines possess only with Milton the thing is longer drawn out and more grand eloquent Satan's speech about his own implacable fatality his harbour and ultimate repose and that allusion to our Lord's gentleness make the cool intermission of a summer's cloud are both in the manner we love it is only however when one comes to Samson agonisties that the full power of Milton's genius is felt written in a style which the devotees of free verse in our time would do well to analyse it is the most complete expression of his own individual character that he ever attained after the captain of Jehovah hear the champion of light against darkness of pride against humility of man against woman finds his opportunity and his hour out of his blindness out of his loneliness out of the welter of hedonists and amorists and feminists and fantasists who crowd upon him the great terrible egoist strikes his last blow no one can read Samson agonisties without being moved and those who look deeper into our present age may well be moved the most one almost feels as if some great overpowering tide of all the brutalities and crudities and false sentiments and cunning hypocrisies and evil voluptuousness of all the Philistias that have ever been is actually rushing to overwhelm us Garth and Ascalon and gross triumph must this thing be will the Lord of hosts lift no finger to help his own and then the end comes and the Euripidean messenger brings the great news he has dared our champion but in his death he slew more than in his life nothing is here for unworthy sorrow nothing that need make us knock the breast no weakness, no contempt dispraise or blame nothing but well in fear and what may quiet us in a death so noble and the end of Samson agonisties is as the end of Milton's own life awaited in calm dignity as a Roman soldier might wait for Caesar's word death has claimed its own but let not the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph grandeur and nobility beauty and heroism live still and while these live what matter though our bravest and our fierce perish it only remains to let the thunderbolt when it does fall find us prepared find us in calm of mind all passions spent End of Chapter 5 Chapter 6 of Visions and Revisions by John Cooper Pois this LibriVox recording of Domain Charles Lamb Charles Lamb occupies a very curious position in English literature and a very enviable one he is perhaps the most widely known and widely spoken of of any stylist we possess and the least understood it was his humour while living to create misunderstanding and he creates it still and yet he is recognised on all sides as the classic of the unapproachable breed Charles Lamb has among his admirers more uninteresting people than any great artist has ever had accept that query he has more academic people in his train than anyone has ever had accept Shakespeare and more severe elderly pedantic persons profess to love him than love any other mortal writer these people all read Lamb talk Lamb but they do not suggest Lamb they do not smack as our ancestors used to say of the true earlier vein but the immense humour of the situation does not stop here not only has this evasive city clerk succeeded in fooling the good people he has fooled the wicked ones I have myself in the circle of my acquaintance more than half a dozen charming people of the type who enjoy Aubrey Beardsley and have a mania for Oscar Wilde and sometimes dip into Remy de Gamal and not one of them can read Charles Lamb he has succeeded in fooling them and making them suppose he is something quite different from what he is he used to tell his friends that every day he felt himself growing more official and moral he even swore he had been taken for a verger or a church warden well our friends of the enclosed gardens still take him for a verger but he is a more remarkable verger than they dream as a matter of fact there were some extremely daring and modern spirits in alias and tourage spirits who went further in an antinomian direction then I devoutly pray my friends are ever likely to go and their scandalous ones adored him and for his part he seemed to have liked them more than he ought it is indeed very curious and interesting the literary fate of Charles Lamb jocular bishops archly toying rural deans rectors with a penchant for anecdote scholarly cannons with a weakness for rum punch are all inclined to speak as if in some odd way he was of their own very tribe he had absolutely nothing in common with them except a talent for giving false impressions with regard to the devotion to him which certain gentle and old fashioned ladies have one's great aunts for instance I am inclined to think that much more might be said there is a quality a super refined exquisite quality and one with a pinch of true ironic salt in it which the more thick skinned among us sensationalists may easily miss it is all very well for us to talk of burning with a hard gem like flame when as a matter of fact we move along dullers cavemen to some of the finest aesthetic effects in the world not to appreciate the humour of that rarest and sweetest of all human types the mischievous tongueed great aunts to be nothing short of a profane fool but Charles Lamb is a very different person from our goldsmiths and coopers in Austins and their modern representatives it needs something else and a great aunt than old fashioned irony to appreciate him it needs an imagination that is very nearly Shakespearean and it needs a passion for beautiful style of which a floor bear might be proud so here we have the old sly Alia fooling people now as he fooled them in his lifetime and riddle both to the godly and the ungodly the great Goethe who's well-perguised knight he apes made Alia put out his tongue read, we learn, with no little pleasure some fantastic skit of this incorrigible one did he discern the sublime Olympian what a cunning flute player lurked under the queer mask something between a Jew, a gentleman and an angel he liked to fancy he looked and one must confess that in the subtlest of all sense of that word a gentleman he was Lamb's essays were written on offer hours when he could escape from his office once completely freed from the necessity of office work as writing lost its magic his genius was of that peculiarly delicate texture which requires the stimulus of reaction one cannot be too grateful that the incomparable Pater after Lamb himself perhaps the greatest master of English prose found it necessary to utter his appreciation Pater as usual hits the mark with an infallible hand when he speaks of that overhanging Sophoclean tragedy which darkened Lamb's earlier days and never quite left him it is of course this the sense of one living always on the edge of a precipice that gives such frequency and charm to Alia's mania for little things well mighty turn to little things when great things his son and his moon had been turned for him to blood but as Pater suggests there is philosophy in all this and more philosophy than many suppose it is unfortunate that the unworldly Coleridge and the worldly Thackeray should have pitched upon Lamb's saintliness to make copy of nothing infuriated him more than such a tone towards himself and he was right to be infuriated his unselfishness, his sweetness of which these good men make so much were only one aspect of the philosophy of his whole life Lamb was in his life a great Epicurean philosopher as in all probability many other saints have been the thing in him that fretted Carlisle his fits of intoxication his outbursts of capricious impishness his perversity and his irony were just as much part of the whole scheme as were his celibacy and his relation to his sister what one can really gather from Lamb is nothing less than a very wise and very subtle way of life a way that amid many outrageous experiences will be found singularly lucky in the first place let it be noted Lamb deliberately cultivates the art of transforming the common place it is absurd to deny the evidence of this element from which we all suffer as it is to maintain that it cannot be changed it can be changed that is precisely what this kind of rear genius does it is a miracle of course but everything in art is a miracle nature tosses out indiscriminately her motley productions and if you are born for such universalism you may swallow them wholesale the danger of such a downright manner of going to work is that it blunts one's critical sense if you will swallow everything just as it is you taste very little but Charles Lamb is nothing if not critical nothing if not an epicure and its manner of dealing with the common place sharpens rather than blunts the edge of one's taste and what is this manner it is nothing less than an indescribable blending of christianity and paganism Hein, another of Carlisle's black guards achieves the same synthesis it is this spiritual achievement at once a religious and an aesthetic triumph which makes Elia for all his weaknesses such a really great man the Wordsworths and Colerages who patronized him were too self-opinionated and individualistic to be able to enter into either tradition Wordsworth is neither a Christian nor a pagan he is a moral philosopher Elia is an artist who understands the importance of ritual in life but of naturalness in ritual how difficult whether as a thinker or a man is it to be natural in one's loves and hates how many quite authoritative Philistines never really let the world know how bohemian at heart they are and how much of our modern is a pure affectation now, whatever Elia was not he was wantonly wickedly whimsically natural he never concealed his religious feelings his superstitious feelings he never concealed his fancies his fads his manias, his vices he never concealed his emotion when he felt a thrill of passionate faith he never concealed it when he felt a thrill of blasphemous doubt he accepted life's little pleasures as they appeared and did not hesitate to make cults of the ones that appeared most appealing if he had Philistine feelings he indulged them without shame if he had Wreckendite and artistic feelings he indulged them also without shame he is one of the few great men not afraid to be unoriginal and hence he is the most original of all I cannot say as he sit and think books think for me well, books did think for him for he managed to press the books of the great poets into his service as no mortal writer has ever dared to do before and he could do it without impairing his originality because he was as original as the great poets he used we say deliberately poets for as Pater points out to find Lamb's rivals and share imaginative genius we have to leave the company of those who write prose do the humorous ecclesiastics and scholarly tutors who profess to understand earlier ever peep into the essay called witches or that essay called a child angel there are things there that are written for a very different circle certain sentences in Dream Children too, have a beauty that takes a natural man's breath completely away touches the far off romance terrible and wistful as anonymous balance alternate with gestures of rabbilesian humor such as generous souls love alias style is the only thing in English prose that can be called absolutely perfect compared with the rich capricious willful lingering by the way of Lamb's manner Pater's is precise to lure and overgrave wilds fantastic and over provocative Ruskin's intolerably rhetorical into what other prose style could the magic of Shakespeare's little touches be drawn or the high melancholy of Milton's imagery be led without producing a frightful sense of the incongruous he can quote them both or any other great old master and if it were not for the inverted commas we should not be aware of the insertion alia cannot say anything not the simplest thing without giving it a turn a twist, a lift, a lightness a grace that would redeem the very grease pots of Ascalian's apron there is no style in the world like it Germany, France, Italy, Russia have no child's lamb their floor beers and dinanzios belong to a different tribe even Turgenev get on with his story cannot do precisely this every single one of the essays and most of the letters can be read over and over again and their cadences caressed as if they were living people's features and they are living they are as living as those Japanese prints so maddening to some among us or as the drawings of Leonardo are also in their place a pure line to use the ardent modern slang an unpolluted imaginative suggestion the mistake our aesthetics make these lovers of Egyptian dances and Babylonian masks is that they oppose the simplicity of lamb's subjects to Baham from the rear effect they little know the wistfulness of children and the quaint gestures of dead comedians and the fantasies of old worm-eaten folios and the shadows of sundials upon cloistered lawns and the heartbreaking evasions of such as can never know love and out of these things he can make a music as piteous and lovely as a feelier songs a furious indication of the lack of real poetic feeling in the feverish art neophytes of our age that they should miss these things in earlier one wonders if they have ever felt the remote transloona beauty that common faces and old dim pitiful things can wear sometimes it would seem not like Herod the tetrarch they must have peacocks the rain and the spreading of the tales brings down the moon they must have opals that burn with flame as cold as ice and onyxes and amber and the tapestries of tyre the pansies that are for thoughts touch them not and the voices of the street singers leave them cold it is precisely the lack of natural kindly humour in these people who must always be clutching cameos from Syracuse between their fingers which leads them when the tension of the gem-like flame can be borne no more into sheer garishness and brutality one knows it so well that particular tone the tone of the jaded amorist for whom the unspeakable rural solitudes and the sweet security of streets mean both of them boredom and desolation it is not the subtlety that makes them thus suffer it is the lack of it what? is the poignant world old play of poor mortal men and women with their absurdities and excesses their grotesque reserve and fantastic confessions their advances and withdrawals not interesting enough to serve it serves sufficiently it serves well enough when genius takes it in hand perhaps after all it is that which is lacking Charles Lamb went through the world with many avoidances but one thing he did not avoid the innocence of unmitigated foolishness he was able to give to the simple simons of this life that rabbilesian touch of magnanimous understanding which makes even the leanest wits among us glow he went through the world with strange timidities and no daring stride he loitered in its by-allies he drifted through its bizzars he sat with the crowd in its circuses he lingered outside its churches he ate his pot of honey among its graves and as he went his way irritable and freakish wayward in arbitrary he came by chance upon just those sidelights and intimations those rumours and whispers those figures traced on sand and dust and water which more than all the lore and the prophets draw near to the unuttered word end of chapter 6 chapter 7 of visions and revisions by John Cooper Paulus this Librivox recording is in the public domain Dickens it is absurd of course to think that it is necessary to hold a brief for Dickens but sometimes when one comes across charming and exquisite people who cannot read him one is tempted to give one's personal appreciation that kind of form Dickens is one of the great artists of the world and he is so in spite of the fact that in certain spheres in the sphere of sex for instance or the sphere of philosophy he is such a hopeless conventionalist it is because we are at this hour so preoccupied with sex and our desire to readjust a convention to society and morality towards it that a great artist who simply leaves it out altogether or treats it with a mixture of conventionality of the preacher and the worst foolishness of the crowd as an artist whose appeal is seriously handicapped yet given this lacuna this amazing gap in his work a deprivation much more serious than his want of philosophy Dickens is a writer of colossal genius whose originality and vision puts all our modern literatures to shame one feels this directly when opens any volume of his only a great creative genius could so dominate for instance his mere illustrators as to mesmerize them completely into his manner and certainly his illustrators are drugged with the Dickens atmosphere those hideous lovely persons whose legs and arms are so thin that it is impossible to suppose they ever remove their clothes do they not strut and layer and ogle and grin and stagger and weep in the very style of their author remembering my brief and the sort of jury among my friends I have to persuade I am not inclined in this sketch to launch out into panagyrics upon Mr. McCorber and Mrs. Gamp and Mr. Pixniff and Bill Sykes and Dick Swiverler and Bob Sawyer and Sam Weller and Mark Tapley and Old Scrooge the mere mention of these names which to some would suggest the music of the spheres to others would suggest forced merriment horrible early Victorian sentiment and that sort of hackneyed unction of sly moral elders which his youths is special hell much wiser were it as it seems to me to indicate what and Dickens and his style his method, his vision, his act actually appeals to one particular mind I think it is to be found in his childlike imagination now the modern cult for children has reached such fantastic limits that one has to be very careful when one uses that word but Dickens is childlike not as Oscar Wilde that Uranian baby or as Paul Villain that little pet lamb of God felt themselves to be childlike or as the artificial minded Robert Louis Stevenson fooled his followers into thinking him he is really and truly childlike his imagination and vision are literally the imagination and vision of children we have not all played at pirates and buccaneers we have not all dreamed of treasure islands and maroon sailors we have not all believed in fairies these rather tiresome and overrun upon aspects of children's fancies are after all very often nothing more than middle aged people's damned affectations children's cult at the present day plays strange tricks but Dickens from beginning to end has the real touch the authentic creation how should actual and living children presented by new educational methods glutted with toys depraved by understanding sympathy and worn out by performances of Peter Pan believe really and truly in fairies anymore but in spite of sentimental child worshipers let us not hesitate to whisper it doesn't matter in the least if they don't the enlightened and cultivated mothers who grow unhappy when they find their darlings cold to Titania and Oberon and to the more poetic modern fairies with the funny names may not rest in peace if the house they inhabit and the street they inhabit be not sanitised and art decorated beyond all human interest they may let their little ones alone they will dream their dreams they will invent their games they will talk to their shadows they will blow kisses to the moon and all will go well with the child and the house even if he has not so much as heard the bluebird if these uncomfortable childlike people read Dickens they would know how a child really does regard life and perhaps they would be a little shocked for it is by no means only the romantic and aesthetic side of things that appeals to children they have the nightmares poor imps and such devils follow them as older people never dream of Dickens knew all that and in his books the thrill of the supernatural as it hovers over chairs and tables and pots and pans is never far away it lurks that repelling alluring terror in a thousand simple places it moves in the darkness of very modern cupboards it hides in the recesses of very modern sellers it pounces out from the eaves of quite modern attics it is there halfway up the staircase it is there halfway down the passage and God knows whether it comes or where it goes to endow the little everyday objects that surround us a certain picture and a certain light a certain clock was stove and a certain shadow a certain corner of the curtain when the wind moves it the fresh magic of natural animism that is the real childlike trick and that is what Dickens does it is of course something not confined to people who are children in years it is the old sweet witch hag mystery that sooner or later has us all by the throat and that is why to me Dickens is so great a writer since men have come to live so much in cities since houses and streets and rooms and passages and windows and basements have come to mean more to them than fields and woods it is essential that the old man covered with a mantle the ancient of ancients the disturber of rational dreams should move into the town too and mutter and murmur and its shadows how hard a thing is it to put into words traction in the strange terror which the dwelling of mortal men have the power of exciting to drift at nightfall into an unknown town and wander through its less frequented ways and peep into its dark empty churches and listen to the wind and the stunted trees that grow by its prison and watch some flickering particular light high up in some tall house the light of a harlot a priest an artist a murderer surely there is no imaginative experience equal to this then the thing one sees by chance by accident through half open doors and shutter chinks and behind lifted curtains fairly the ways of men upon earth are past finding out and their madness beyond interpretation it is not only children but there is children most of all who get the sense in a weird sudden flash of the demonic life of inanimate things why are our houses so full of things that one had better not look at things that, like the faces of Ceylon had better be seen in mirrors and things that must be forbidden to look at us the houses of mortal men are strange places they are sepulchres dungeons are they and prison cells not one of them but have murderous feet going up and down not one of them but have ravishes hands fumbling back and forth along the walls for the secret wishes and starved desires and mad cravings and furious revolts of the hearts of men and women living together decently in their homes grow by degrees palpable and real and gathered to themselves strange shapes no writer who has ever lived can touch tickens and indicating this sort of familiar sorcery and the secret of its terror for it is children more than any who are conscious how haunted all manner of places and things are and we ourselves the searching psychologists are led singularly astray they peer and pry and repine and all the while the real essence of the figure that is you and that is I lies in its momentary expression in its most superficial gesture tickens world is a world of gnomes and hobgoblins of ghouls and laughing angels the realist of the Thackeray school finds nothing but monstrous exaggeration here and fanatical mummery if he were right Pado if his sleek reality were all that there was alarm we were indeed betrayed but no the children are right, tickens is right neither realist or psychologist hit the mark when it comes to the true diablory of living people there is something more whimsical more capricious, more unreal than philosophers suppose about this human pantomime or are actually as every child knows much worse and much better than they ought to be and as every child knows too they tune their souls up to the pitch of their masks the surface of things is the heart of things and the protruding goblin tongue the wagging head the groping fingers the shuffling step are just as significant of the mad play motif of many hidden thoughts people think with their bodies and their looks and gestures nay, their very garments or words, tones, whispers in their general confession the world of dickens is fantastic creatures is all the nearer to the truth of our life because it is so arbitrary and impossible he seems to go backwards and forwards with a torch, throwing knobs chags, wrinkles corrugations protuberances cavities, horns and snouts into terrifying illumination but we are like that that is what we actually are that is how the pillar of fire sees us then again are we to limit our interest as the modern writers do to the beautiful people or the interesting people or the gross, emphatic people dickens is never more childlike than when he draws us wanderingly and confidingly to the stark knees of Mrs. Pipchin or when he drives us away an unaccountable panic terror from the rattling jet beads of Ms. Murdstone think of the vast queer dim-lighted world where in live and move all those funny dusty attenuated heart-breaking figures of such as we are the form of woman and yet may never know love it is wonderful when you think of it how much of absorbing interest is left in life when you have eliminated sex suppressed psychology and left philosophy out then appear all those queer attractions and repulsions which are purely superficial and even material and yet which are so dominant mother of God how unnecessary to bring in fairies and bluebirds she of some little seamstress and her sorceress hands in the quaint knotting of her poor wisp of hair would be enough to keep a child staring and dreaming for hours upon hours life in a great city is like life in an enchanted forest one never knows what hideous ogre or what exquisite hammer-dryad one may encounter and the little ways of all one scrabbling and burrowing and winking housemates to go through the world expecting adventures is to find them sooner or later but one need only in cross one's threshold to find one adventure the adventure of a new and known fellow creature full of suspicion, full of cloudy malice full of secretive dreams and yet ready to respond poor devil to a certain kind of signal long reading of Dickens's books is like long living with children gives one a wholesome dread of cynicism and flippancy children's games are more serious than young men's love affairs and they must be treated so it is not exactly that life is to be taken seriously it is to be taken for what it is an extraordinary pantomime the people who will not laugh with parot because his jokes are so silly and the people who will not cry with Columbine because her legs are so thin may be shrewd psychologists and fashionable artists but God help them, they are not in the game the romance of city life is one thing the romance of a particular city leads us further Dickens has managed to get the inner identity of London what is permanent in it what can be found nowhere else as not even Balzac got hold of Paris London is terrible and ghastly one knows that but the wretchedest of its gammons knows that it is something else also more than any place on earth it seems to have that weight that mass that depth that four square solidity which reassures and comforts in the midst of the illusions of life it descends so far from the huge human foundations that it gives one the impression of a monstrous concrete base sunk into eternity upon which, for all its accumulated litter and debris man will be able to build perhaps has begun already to build his herbs beata and Dickens entered with dramatic clairvoyance into every secret of this titanic mystery he knew its wafts, its bridges its viaducts, its alleys its dens, its parks its squares, its churches its morgues, its circuses its prisons, its hospitals and its mad houses and as the human atoms of that fantastic gesticulating, weeping, grinning crowd of his dance the crazy carmagnol we cannot but feel that somehow we must gather strength and friendliness enough to applaud his tremendous performance Dickens was too great a genius to confine his demonic touch to the town alone there are suggestions of his relating to country roads and country inns and country solitudes like nothing else except perhaps the vignettes of Buick he carries the same animism into this also and he notes and records sensations of the most evasive kind the peculiar terror we feel for instance mixed with a sort of mad pity when by chance we light upon some twisted root trunk to which the shadows have given out stretched arms the vague feeling too so absolutely unaccountable that the sight of a lonely gate or where or park railing or signpost or ruin shed or tumble down sheepfold suddenly arouse when we feel that in some weird manner we are the accomplices of the things tragedy a feeling that Dickens alone among writers seems to understand a road with no people upon it and the wind alone sobbing there with blind eyes and wrinkled forehead a pool by the edge of a wide marshland like the marshland in great expectations with oh no not what reflected in it and waiting always waiting for something that does not come a low bent knotted pine tree over which the ravens fly one by one shrieking these are the things that to some people to children for instance remain in the mind when all else of the country journey has forgotten there is no one but Dickens who has a style that can drag these into light his style shrieks sometimes like a ghoul tugging at the roots of a mandrake at other times it wails like a lost soul at other times it mutters and whimpers and pipes in its throat like an old man blinking at the moon at other times it roars and thunders like 10,000 drunken devils at other times it breaks into wistful tender little girl sobs and catches the rhythm of poetry it's in the death of now sometimes the character in Dickens will say something so humorously pregnant so direct from what we hear in the street in tavern that art itself gives up and deplores speechless after all it is meet and write that there should be one great author undistracted by psychology unsuduced by eroticism there remain a few quite important things to deal with when these are removed birth for instance the mystery of birth and the mystery of death one never forgets death in reading Dickens he has a thought for those things that once were men and women lying with their six feet of earth upon them in our English churchyards so horribly still while the mask of their sorrow yields to the yet more terrible grin of our mortality's last chest and to the last years like all children the lover of players every poor dog of public entertainer from the barrel organ man to him who pulls the ropes for punch and duty has his unqualified devotion the modern stage may see strange revolutions some of them by no means suitable for children but we need not be alarmed by saying the larger stage the stage of man's own exits and entrances and there at any rate while Dickens as their manager parole me weep and dance and parrot dance and weep knowing that they will not be long without their audience or long without their applause he was a vulgar writer why not England would not be England and what would London be a smack a sprinkling of that ingredient he was a shameless sentimentalist why not it is better to cry than to comb ones here all day with an ivory comb he was a monstrous melodramatist why not to be born is a melodrama to play hide and seek with death is a melodrama and some have found melodramatic satisfaction in letting themselves be caught all the world's a puppet show and if the big showman jerks his wires so extravagantly why should not the little showman do the same end of chapter 7 chapter 8 of visions and revisions by John Cooper Pois this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Goethe has the enigmatic wisdom of Goethe been exhausted after these years? and after the sudden transits across our sky of more flashing meteors ah, I deem not yet still he holds the entrance to the mysterious gate over the portals of which is written not lacyat ognis baranza but think of living a thunder rifted hearty bears but victory not defeat looks forth from his wide outward gazing eyes one hand holds the skull engraved with all the secret symbols of man's assent out of the bosom of nature engraved yes by all the cunningest tools of science and her unwirried research but the other raised a loft noble and welcoming carries the laurel crown of the triumph of imagination so between truth and poetry and guns and goot and shorn stands our lord of life exhausted the wisdom of Goethe ah, no hardly fathomed yet in its uppermost levels if it were really possible to put into words the whole complex world of impressions and visions of secrets and methods which that name suggests one would be a wiser disciple than Erkemen fragment by fragment morsel by morsel that figure limbs itself against the shadow of the years is it too presumptuous a task to seek to evoke taking first one impression of him and then another, first one reaction and then another what this mysterious name has come to mean for us one hears the word cosmic whispered it is whispered too often in these days but cosmic with its whitman-esque modern connotation does not exactly fit Goethe Goethe did not often abandon himself in Dionysian fury to the ultimate elements when he did in his earlier youth before the hardening process of his Italian journey had sealed his protection from such romantic lapses it was not quite in the strained desperate modern manner one feels certain thinking of what he was good at Leipzig, at Strausburg, at Weimar that he always kept a clear call Apollonian head mad and amorous though his escapades may sing I do not fancy that ever once did Goethe really give himself away or lose the four-square solidity of his balance in any wild staggering to left or right no, the Goethean temper the Goethean attitude cannot be described as cosmic while that word implies a certain complete yielding to a vague earth worship there was nothing vague about Goethe's intimacy if I may put it so, with the earth he and it seemed destined to understand one another most serenely in a shrewd and deliberate conspiracy the Goethean attitude to the universe is too self-poised and self-centred to be adequately rendered by any word that suggests complete abandonment it is too, what shall I say too sly and demonic too much inside the little secret of the great mother to be summed up in a word that suggests a sort of titanic whirlwind of embraces and yet, on the other hand it is quite as easy to exaggerate the Olympian aspect of Goethe when this is carried too far something in him something extraordinarily characteristic evaporates like a thin stream of panacean smoke how shall I express what this is perhaps it is the German in him for in spite of all niches mediterraneanising of this superman Goethe was profoundly and inveterately German the Rhine maidens rocked him in his cradle and though he might journey to Rome or Troy or Carthage it was to the Rhine maidens that he returned yes, I do not think that those understand him best who keep bowing to the ground and muttering Olympian am I carrying this particular taper light of discrimination too far when I say that there is to the Celtic mind at least something humorously naive and child-like in Goethe mixed in queally enough with all his rich mellow and even worldly wisdom one overtakes him now and then and catches him as it were off his guard in little pathetic lapses into a certain simplicity a simplicity gravide, pretentious and solemn almost like that of some great infant fawn trying very seriously to learn the difficult syllables of our human categorical imperative world child as he was the magic of the universe pouring through him one sometimes feels a strange dim hope with regard to that dubious final issue when we find him so confident about the presence of the mysterious being who worshipped and so transparently certain of his personal survival after death there is no one except Leonardo da Vinci in the whole history of our planet who gives us quite the sense of a person possessed of some secret illumination not granted to the rest of the world there is much reassurance in this more than has been perhaps realised for it is probable that in his caves of ice Leonardo also felt himself destructible by the arch enemy one thinks of those cable-istic words of old Glanville man does not yield himself to death saved by the weakness of his mortal will Goethe collecting fossils and crystals and specimens of rock strata Goethe visiting botanical gardens and pondering on the metamorphosis of plants Goethe climbing Strasburg Cathedral spire Goethe meeting the phantom of himself as he returned from the arms of Friderica Goethe experiencing the sensation of crossing the firing line Goethe announcing to Erkman that that worthy man had better avoid undertaking any great literary work Goethe sending frau von stein sausages from his breakfast table Goethe consoling himself in the dawn by observing his birth star Lucifer and thinking of the lake of Galilee are pictures of noble and humorous memory which reconcile one to the comedy of living How vividly returns to me the first time I read the Sorrows of Wurther in the little three-penny edition published by Monsieur's Castel It was in a barge towed by three horses on the river between Langport and Bridgewater in the county of Somerset The majority of the company were as rowdy a set of good-humoured bean-feasters as ever drank thin beer in a ramshack or tavern. But there was one of them. This is 25 years ago, reader. A girl as fragile as a peeled willow wand, and teased by the rude badinage of her companions we sheltered as the friendly mist rose under a great tarpaulin at the barge's stern Where is that girl now, I wonder Is she alive? Will she ever blush with anger at being thus gently lifted from beneath the kind Somerset mist into an hour's publicity? Who can tell? We're all passing one another and mist darkened barges swift or slow. She is a ray the shadow, a receding phantom, but I wave my hand to her over the years. I shall always associate her with lot. And I never smell the peculiar smell of tarpaulin without thinking of the sorrows of Verter. Verter has certainly the very droop and bewilderment of youth's first passion. It is good to plunge one's hands when one has grown cynical or old into that innocent, if somewhat turbid fountain. When we pass on to Wilhelm Meister we are in quite a different world. The earlier part of this book has a very stamp of Goethe and truth and poetry. One can read it side by side with the great autobiography and find the shrewd insight and miraculous wisdom, quite equally convincing in the inventions and the reality. What an unmistakable and unique character, all these imaginary persons of Goethe's stories have. They are so different from many other persons in fiction. We're in, does the difference lie and it's hard to say. In a sense they are more life-like and real. In another sense they are more fantastic. Sometimes they seem mere dolls like the figures in his own puppet show and we can literally see the puppets dallying. It's a queer companion for a man to have. In what of the lady who, when she was asked whether she had ever loved, danced, never or always. Philane is very loving and an extremely vivacious wench. Goethe's sublime unconsciousness of ordinary moral qualms is never better observed than in the story of this extravagant young minks. Then in the midst of it all, the arresting ambiguous little figure of poor Mignon. What does she do a child of pure lyrical poetry, a thing out of the old balance in this queer grave, a decent company. That elaborate description of Mignon's funeral so carefully arranged by the asthete uncle. Has it not all the curious qualities of the Goethean vein? It's a buoyant insight into the under-truth of nature. It's cold-blooded preoccupation with art. It's gentle irony, it's mania for exact detail. The gentle irony of which I speak has its opportunity in the account of the beautiful soul or fair saint. It reads in places like the tender dissection of a lovely corpse by a genial elderly doctor. But the passage which for me is most precious is that apprentices and denture. I suppose in no other single paragraph of human prose is there so much concentrated wisdom to act as easy to think as hard. How extraordinarily true that is. But it is not the precise tune of the strenuous preachers of our time. The whole idea of the pedagogic province ruled over by that admirable abbey is so exquisitely in Goethe's most wise and yet most simple manner. The passage about the three reverences and the creed is as good an instance of that sublime spinoistic way of dealing with the current religion. It's that amazing remark he made once to irk him in about his own faith. When I want scientific unity, I am a pantheist. When I desire poetical multifariousness, I am a polytheist. And when my moral nature requires a personal god, there is room for that also. When one comes to speak of Faust it is necessary for us to remember the words the great man himself used to his follower and speaking of this masterpiece. Irkman teased him for interpretations. What said he to Goethe as the leading idea in the poem? Do you suppose answered the sage that a thing into which I have put the lifeblood of all my days is able to be summed up and anything so narrow and limited has an idea. Personally I do not hesitate to say that I think Faust is the most permanently interesting of all the works that have proceeded from the human brain. Its attitude to life is one which ultimately has more to strengthen and sustain and put courage if not the devil into us than anything I know. When I meet a man who shall tell me that the philosophy of his life is the philosophy of Faust I bow down humbly before him I did meet such a man once I think he was a commercial traveller from Buffalo. How wisely Goethe deals in Faust with the problem if it be a problem of evil. His suggestion seems to be that the spirit of evil in the world part of that nothing out of which came the all plays an absolutely essential role. By means of it God fulfills the most cherished purposes. Had Faust not seduced poor little Gretchen he would never have passed so far as he did along the road of initiation. And the spirit of his victim in her Transluna apotheosis would not have been there to lift him heavenward at the last. And yet no one could say that Goethe disparages the enormity of Faust's crime. That ineffable retort of Mephistopheles went on those black horses their world through the night to her dungeon. He is not the first has the essence of all pity and wrath in its cruel sting. Mephistopheles himself is the most interesting of all devils. He is so because although he knows perfectly well Queer son of chaos as he is that he is bound to be defeated he yet goes on upon his evil way and continues to resist the great stream of life which according to his view had better never have broken loose from primeval nothingness. That is ultimately Goethe's contribution to the disputes about what we call God. The name does not matter feeling is all in all the name is sound and smoke. God or the good is to Goethe simply the eternal stream of life working slowly upwards onwards to unknown goals all that opposes itself to this life stream is evil, morality a man made local convention is our present plundering method of assisting this great force and preventing its sterility or dissipation. In his conception of the nature of this life stream Goethe is more catholic and more subtle than nature. Self realisation certainly that is an aspect of it which was not likely to be forgotten by the great egoist whose sole object as he confessed was to build up the pyramid of his existence from the broadest possible base but not only self realisation the dying to live of the Christian as well as the rising above one's body of the Platonist have the part there of Buddhism itself with all its degrees of passionate or philosophical purity is as much an evocation of the world spirit of the essential nature of the system of things as is the other it is of course ultimately quite a mad hope to desire to convert the spirit that denies he too under the lord is an accomplice of the life stream he helps it forward even while he opposes himself to it just as a bulwark of submerged rocks makes the tide leap landward with more foaming fury Goethe's idea of the eternal feminine leading us upward and on is not at all the sentimental nonsense which in nature fancied it in a profound sense it is absolutely true nor need the more anti-feminists among us be troubled by such a truth we have just seen that the devil himself is a means in a very essential means for leading us upward and on Goethe is perfectly right the love of woman though a destructive force and a frightful force as far as certain kinds of art and philosophy are concerned cannot be looked upon as anything but a provocation to creation when the whole large scheme of existence comes into account I think myself that it is easy to make too much of Goethe's pantheism the being he worshipped was simply whatever mystery lies behind the ocean of life and if no mystery lies behind the ocean of life very well a Goethean disciple is able then to worship life with no mystery behind it it is rather the custom among clever ties some people to disparage that second part of Faust with its world panoramic precession of all the gods and demigods and angels and demons that have ever visited this earth I do not disparage it I have never found it dull dull would he be as the fat weed that rots itself in ease on Lethe's wharf he found nothing curious and provocative about these sirens and centaurs and lemurs and larvae and cabaret and folkkeads I can myself endure very pleasantly even the society of those blessed boys which some have found so distressing as for the devil in the end making indecent overtures to the little heavenly butterflies who pelt him with roses even that does not confuse my mind or distract my senses it is the other side of the moon the undermask of the world comedy and the incidental saving of Dr Faust is not more essential in the great mad game read Faust both portions of it dear reader and see if you do not feel with me that in the last resort one leaves this rich strange poem with a nobler courage to endure life and a larger view of its amazing possibilities I wonder if that curious novel of Goethe is called Elective Affinities as perused as widely as it deserves that extraordinary company of people and the patient potentious interest Goethe compels us to take in the laying out of gardens in the beautifying of church yards the captain the architect speak of the tube a wildering woman do they not suggest fantastic figures out of one's memories of remotest childhood I suppose to a world child like Goethe watching with grave superhuman interest all our little preoccupations we have all of us something of the sweet pedantry of these people we are all of us captains and architects with some odd twist in our quiet heads the solemn immorality amounting to outrageous indecency of those scenes between the assorted lovers when they make double love and behind the mask of their legitimate attachments follow their elective affinities as a thing that may well stagger the Puritan reader the Puritan reader will indeed like old Carlisle be tempted more than once to fling these grave unblushing chronicles with their deep irracula wisdom and their shameless details into the dust heap but it will wiser to refrain after all one cannot conceal from oneself that things are like that and if the hyenas howl from the filthy marshes of earth's weird edge and the thick saliva on his oozing jaws nauseates our preciosity this merges our self-esteem we must remember that this is the way the lord of the prologue in heaven has willed that the scavengers of life cesspools go about their work probably it will not be the indecency of certain things in Goethe that will most offend our modern taste it will be that curious grave preoccupation of his so objective and stiff with artistic details architectural details and theatrical details one must remember his noble saying earnestness alone makes life eternity and that other saying about art having as its main purpose the turning of the transitory into the permanent if the transitory is really to be turned into the permanent we must take ourselves in our work very seriously indeed and such seriousness such high patient unwearied seriousness is after all Goethe's bequest to our flippant and fanciful generation he knows well enough our deepest doubt our most harrowing skepticism he has long ago been through all that but he has returned not exactly like Nietzsche with a fierce scornful dramatic cry and tempestuous superficiality he has returned to the actual possibilities that the world offers superficial and otherwise of turning the whole strange business into a solid four square work of art we must reject evil quietly and ironically not because it is condemned by human morality but because we have our work to do we must live in the good true not because it is our duty so to do but because only along this particular line does the energy with our agitation of the abysmal mothers communicate itself to our labour and so we come back like the grief-stricken children over Mignon's grave to life in life's toil they are only in the inflexible development of what taste of what discernment what power of what method of what demonic genius we may have been granted by the gods lies the cosmic secret we all have in our human hands that malleable stuff out of which fate made us and only in that shrewd unwaryed use of that shall we prove our love to the being who cannot love us in return and make our illusion of free will part of his universal purpose end of chapter 8