All men are liars, and "the Ultimate Futility" grins horribly from its mask. Well! It is precisely at these hours, at the hours when the little pincers of the gods especially nip and squeeze, that it is good to turn the pages of Fyodor Dostoievsky. He brings us his "Balm of Gilead" between the hands of strange people, but it is a true "alabaster box of precious ointment," and though the flowers it contains are snatched from the House of the Dead, one knows at whose feet it was once poured forth, and for whose sake it was broken!

The books that are the most valuable in this world are not the books that pretend to solve life's mystery with a system. They are the books which create a certain mood, a certain temper—the mood, in fact, which is prepared for incredible surprises—the temper which no surprise can overpower. These books of Dostoievsky must always take their place in this great roll, because, though he arrives at no conclusion and utters no oracle, the atmosphere he throws round us is the atmosphere in which Life and Death are "equal;" the gestures his people make, in their great darkness, are the gestures of that which goes upon its way, beyond Good and beyond Evil!

Dostoievsky is more than an artist. He is, perhaps—who can tell?—the founder of a new religion. And yet the religion he "founds" is a religion which has been about us for more years than human history can count. He, more than anyone, makes palpable and near—too palpable—O Christ! The terror of it!—that shadowy, monstrous weight of oppressive darkness, through which we signal to each other from our separate Hells. It sways and wavers, it gathers and re-gathers, it thickens and deepens, it lifts and sinks, and we know all the while that it is the Thing we ourselves have made, and the intolerable whispers whereof it is full are the children of our own thoughts, of our lusts, of our fears, of our terrible creative dreams.

Dostoievsky's books seem, as one handles them, to flow mysteriously together into one book, and this book is the book of the Last Judgment. The great obscure Land he leads us over, so full of desolate marshes, and forlorn spaces, and hemlock-roots, and drowned tree-trunks, and Golgothas of broken shards and unutterable refuse, is the Land of those visions which are our inmost selves, and for which we are answerable and none else.

Across this Land we wander, feeling for some fingers, cold and dead as our own, to share that terror with, and, it may be, finding none, for as we have groped forward we have been pitiless in the darkness, and, half-dead ourselves, have trodden the dead down, and the dead are those who cannot forgive; for murdered "love" has no heart wherewith it should forgive:—Will the Christ never come?



EDGAR ALLEN POE

One does not feel, by any means, that the last word has been uttered upon this great artist. Has attention been called, for instance, to the sardonic cynicism which underlies his most thrilling effects? Poe's cynicism is itself a very fascinating pathological subject. It is an elaborate thing, compounded of many strange elements. There is a certain dark, wilful melancholy in it that turns with loathing from all human comfort. There is also contempt in it, and savage derision. There is also in it a quality of mood that I prefer to call Saturnian—the mood of those born under the planet Saturn. There is cruelty in it, too, and voluptuous cruelty, though cold, reserved, and evasive. It is this "cynicism" of his which makes it possible for him to introduce into his poetry—it is of his poetry that I wish to speak—a certain colloquial salt, pungent and acrid, and with the smell of the tomb about it. It is colloquialism; but it is such colloquialism as ghosts or vampires would use.

Poe remains—that has been already said, has it not?—absolutely cold while he produces his effects. There is a frozen contempt indicated in every line he writes for the poor facile artists "who speak with tears." Yet the moods through which his Annabels and Ligeias and Ulalumes lead us are moods he must surely himself have known. Yes, he knew them; but they were, so to speak, so completely the atmosphere he lived in that there was no need for him to be carried out of himself when he wrote of them; no need for anything but icy, pitiless transcription. Has it been noticed how inhumanly immoral this great poet is? Not because he drank wine or took drugs. All that has been exaggerated, and, anyway, what does it matter now? But in a much deeper and more deadly sense. It is strange! The world makes such odd blunders. It seems possessed of the idea that absurd amorous scamps like Casanova reach the bottom of wickedness. They do not even approach it. Intrinsically they are quite stupidly "good." Then, again, Byron is supposed to have been a wicked man. He himself aspired to be nothing less. But he was everything less. He was a great, greedy, selfish, swaggering, magnanimous infant! Oscar Wilde is generally regarded as something short of "the just man made perfect," but his simple, babyish passion for touching pretty things, toying with pretty people, wearing pretty clothes, and drinking absinthe, is far too naive a thing to be, at bottom, evil. No really wicked person could have written "The Importance of Being Earnest," with those delicious, paradoxical children rallying one another, and "Aunt Augusta" calling aloud for cucumber-sandwiches! Salome itself—that Scarlet Litany—which brings to us, as in a box of alabaster, all the perfumes and odours of amorous lust, is not really a "wicked" play; not wicked, that is to say, unless all mad passion is wicked. Certainly the lust in "Salome" smoulders and glows with a sort of under-furnace of concentration, but, after all, it is the old, universal obsession. Why is it more wicked to say, "Suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan!" than to say, "Her lips suck forth my soul—see where it flies!"? Why is it more wicked to say, "Thine eyes are like black holes, burnt by torches in Tyrian tapestry!" than to cry out, as Antony cries out, for the hot kisses of Egypt? Obviously the madness of physical desire is a thing that can hardly be tempered down to the quiet stanzas of Gray's Elegy. But it is not in itself a wicked thing; or the world would never have consecrated it in the great Love-Legends. One may admit that the entrance of the Nubian Executioner changes the situation; but, after all, the frenzy of the girl's request—the terror of that Head upon the silver charger—were implicit in her passion from the beginning; and are, God knows! never very far from passion of that kind.

But all this is changed when we come to Edgar Allen Poe. Here we are no longer in Troy or Antioch or Canopus or Rimini. Here it is not any more a question of ungovernable passion carried to the limit of madness. Here it is no more the human, too human, tradition of each man "killing" the "thing he loves." Here we are in a world where the human element, in passion, has altogether departed, and left something else in its place; something which is really, in the true sense, "inhumanly immoral." In the first place, it is a thing devoid of any physical emotion. It is sterile, immaterial, unearthly, ice-cold. In the second place, it is, in a ghastly sense, self-centered! It feeds upon itself. It subdues everything to itself. Finally, let it be said, it is a thing with a mania for Corruption. The Charnel-House is its bridal-couch, and the midnight stars whisper to one another of its perversion. There is no need for it "to kill the thing it loves," for it loves only what is already dead. Favete linguis! There must be no profane misinterpretation of this subtle and delicate difference. In analysing the evasive chemistry of a great poet's mood, one moves warily, reverently, among a thousand betrayals. The mind of such a being is as the sand-strewn floor of a deep sea. In this sea we poor divers for pearls, and stranger things, must hold our breath long and long, as we watch the great glittering fish go sailing by, and touch the trailing, rose-coloured weeds, and cross the buried coral. It may be that no one will believe us, when we return, about what we have seen! About those carcanets of rubies round drowned throats and those opals that shimmered and gleamed in dead men's skulls!

At any rate, the most superficial critic of Poe's poetry must admit that every single one of his great verses, except the little one "to Helen," is pre-occupied with Death. Even in that Helen one, perhaps the loveliest, though, I do not think, the most characteristic, of all, the poet's desire is to make of the girl he celebrates a sort of Classic Odalisque, round whose palpable contours and lines he may hang the solemn ornaments of the Dead—of the Dead to whom his soul turns, even while embracing the living! Far, far off, from where the real Helen waits, so "statue-like"—the "agate lamp" in her hands—wavers the face of that other Helen, the face "that launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium."

The longer poem under the same title, and apparently addressed to the same sorceress, is more entirely "in his mood." Those shadowy, moon-lit "parterres," those living roses—Beardsley has planted them since in another "enchanted garden"—and those "eyes," that grow so luminously, so impossibly large, until it is almost pain to be "saved" by them—these things are in Poe's true manner; for it is not "Helen" that he has ever loved, but her body, her corpse, her ghost, her memory, her sepulchre, her look of dead reproach! And these things none can take from him. The maniacal egoism of a love of this kind—its frozen inhumanity—can be seen even in those poems which stretch yearning hands towards Heaven. In "Annabel Lee," for instance, in that sea-kingdom where the maiden lived who had no thought—who must have no thought—"but to love and be loved by me"—what madness of implacable possession, in that "so all the night-tide I lie down by the side of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride, in her sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the sounding sea!"

The same remorseless "laying on of hands" upon what God himself cannot save from us may be discerned in that exquisite little poem which begins:

"Thou wast all to me, love, For which my soul did pine; A green isle in the Sea, love, A Fountain and a Shrine All wreathed with Fairy fruits and flowers; And all the flowers were mine!"

That "dim-gulf" o'er which "the spirit lies, mute, motionless, aghast"—how well, in Poe's world, we know that! For still, in those days of his which are "trances," and in those "nightly dreams" which are all he lives for, he is with her; with her still, with her always;

"In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams!"

The essence of "immorality" does not lie in mad Byronic passion, or in terrible Herodian lust. It lies in a certain deliberate "petrifaction" of the human soul in us; a certain glacial detachment from all interests save one; a certain frigid insanity of preoccupation with our own emotion. And this emotion, for the sake of which every earthly feeling turns to ice, is our Death-hunger, our eternal craving to make what has been be again, and again, forever!

The essence of immorality lies not in the hot flame of natural, or even unnatural, desire. It lies in that inhuman and forbidden wish to arrest the processes of life—to lay a freezing hand—a dead hand—upon what we love, so that it shall always be the same. The really immoral thing is to isolate, from among the affections and passions and attractions of this human world, one particular lure; and then, having endowed this with the living body of "eternal death," to bend before it, like the satyr before the dead nymph in Aubrey's drawing, and murmur and mutter and shudder over it, through the eternal recurrence of all things!

Is it any longer concealed from us wherein the "immorality" of this lies? It lies in the fact that what we worship, what we will not, through eternity, let go, is not a living person, but the "body" of a person; a person who has so far been "drugged," as not only to die for us—that is nothing!—but to remain dead for us, through all the years!

In his own life—with that lovely consumptive Child-bride dying by his side—Edgar Allen Poe lived as "morally," as rigidly, as any Monk. The popular talk about his being a "Drug-Fiend" is ridiculous nonsense. He was a laborious artist, chiselling and refining his "artificial" poems, day in and day out. Where his "immorality" lies is much deeper. It is in the mind—the mind, Master Shallow!—for he is nothing if not an absolute "Cerebralist." Certainly Poe's verses are "artificial." They are the most artificial of all poems ever written. And this is natural, because they were the premeditated expression of a premeditated cult. But to say they are artificial does not derogate from their genius. Would that there were more such "artificial" verses in the world!

One wonders if it is clearly understood how the "unearthly" element in Poe differs from the "unearthly" element in Shelley. It differs from it precisely as Death differs from Life.

Shelley's ethereal spiritualism—though, God knows, such gross animals are we, it seems inhuman enough—is a passionate white flame. It is the thin, wavering fire-point of all our struggles after purity and eternity. It is a centrifugal emotion, not, as was the other's, a centripedal one. It is the noble Platonic rising from the love of one beautiful person to the love of many beautiful persons; and from that onward, through translunar gradations, to the love of the supreme Beauty itself. Shelley's "spirituality" is a living, growing, creative thing. In its intrinsic nature it is not egoistic at all, but profoundly altruistic. It uses Sex to leave Sex behind. In its higher levels it is absolutely Sexless. It may transcend humanity, but it springs from humanity. It is, in fact, humanity's dream of its own transmutation. For all its ethereality and remoteness, it yearns, "like a God in pain," over the sorrows of the world. With infinite planetary pity, it would heal those sorrows.

Edgar Allen's "spirituality" has not the least flicker of a longing to "leave Sex behind." It is bound to Sex, as the insatiable Ghoul is bound to the Corpse he devours. It is not concerned with the physical ecstasies of Sex. It has no interest in such human matters. But deprive it of the fact of Sex-difference, and it drifts away whimpering like a dead leaf, an empty husk, a wisp of chaff, a skeleton gossamer. The poor, actual, warm lips, "so sweetly forsworn," may have had small interest for this "spiritual" lover, but now that she is dead and buried, and a ghost, they must remain a woman's lips forever! Nor have Edgar Allen's "faithful ones" the remotest interest in what goes on around them. Occupied with their Dead, their feeling towards common flesh and blood is the feeling of Caligula. "What have I done to thee?" that proud, reserved face seems to say, as it looks out on us from its dusty title-page; "what have I done to thee, that I should despise thee so?"

Shelley's clear, erotic passion is always a "cosmic" thing. It is the rhythmic expression of the power that creates the world. But there is nothing "cosmic" about the enclosed gardens of Edgar Allen Poe; and the spirits that walk among those Moon-dials and dim Parterres are not of the kind who go streaming up, from land and ocean, shouting with joy that Prometheus has conquered! But what a master he is—what a master! In the suggestiveness of names—to mention only one thing—can anyone touch him? That word "Porphyrogene"—the name of the Ruler of, God knows what, Kingdom of the Dead—does it not linger about one—and follow one—like the smell of incense?

But the poem of all poems in which the very genius Edgar Allen is embodied is, of course, "Ulalume." Like this, there is nothing; in Literature—nothing in the whole field of human art. Here he is, from beginning to end, a supreme artist; dealing with the subject for which he was born! That undertone of sardonic, cynical humour—for it can be called nothing else—which grins at us in the background like the grin of a Skull; how extraordinarily characteristic it is! And the touches of "infernal colloquialism," so deliberately fitted in, and making us remember—many things!—is there anything in the world like them?

"And now as the night was senescent, And the star-dials hinted of morn, At the end of our path a liquescent And nebulous lustre was born, Out of which a miraculous crescent Arose with a duplicate horn— Astarte's be-diamonded crescent, Distinct with its duplicate horn!"

"And I said"—but let us pass to his Companion. The cruelty of this conversation with "Psyche" is a thing that may well make us shudder. The implication is, of course, double. Psyche is his own soul; the soul in him which would live, and grow, and change, and know the "Vita Nuova." She is also "the Companion," to whom he has turned for consolation. She is the Second One, the Other One, in whose living caresses he would forget, if it might be, that which lies down there in the darkness!

"Then Psyche, uplifting her finger, Said, 'sadly this star I mistrust, Its pallor I strangely mistrust. O hasten! O let us not linger! O fly! Let us fly! for we must!'"

Thus the Companion; thus the Comrade; thus the "Vita Nuova"!

Now mark what follows:

"Then I pacified Psyche and kissed her, And tempted her out of her gloom. And conquered her scruples and gloom. And we passed to the end of a Vista, But were stopped by the door of a Tomb. By the door of a Legended Tomb, And I said: 'What is written, sweet sister, On the door of this legended Tomb?' She replied, Ulalume—Ulalume— Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"

The end of the poem is like the beginning, and who can utter the feelings it excites? That "dark tarn of Auber," those "Ghoul-haunted woodlands of Weir" convey, more thrillingly than a thousand words of description, what we have actually felt, long ago, far off, in that strange country of our forbidden dreams.

What a master he is! And if you ask about his "philosophy of life," let the Conqueror Worm make answer:

"Lo! Tis a Gala-Night Within the lonesome latter years—"

Is not that an arresting commencement? The word "Gala-Night"—has it not the very malice of the truth of things?

Like Heine, it gave this poet pleasure not only to love the Dead, but to love feeling himself dead. That strange poem about "Annie." with its sickeningly sentimental conclusion, where the poet lies prostrate, drugged with all the drowsy syrops in the world, and celebrates his euthanasia, has a quality of its own. It is the "inverse" of life's "Danse Macabre." It is the way we poor dancers long to sleep. "For to sleep you must slumber in just such a bed!" The old madness is over now; the old thirst quenched. It was quenched in a water that "does not flow so far underground." And luxuriously, peacefully, we can rest at last, with the odour of "puritan pansies" about us, and somewhere, not far off, rosemary and rue!

Edgar Allen Poe's philosophy of Life? It may be summed up in the lines from that little poem, where he leaves her side who has, for a moment, turned his heart from the Tomb. The reader will remember the way it begins: "Take this kiss upon thy brow." And the conclusion is the confusion of the whole matter:

"All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream."

Strangely—in forlorn silence—passes before us, as we close his pages, that procession of "dead, cold Maids." Ligeia follows Ulalume; and Lenore follows Ligeia; and after them Eulalie and Annabel; and the moaning of the sea-tides that wash their feet is the moaning of eternity. I suppose it needs a certain kindred perversion, in the reader, to know the shudder of the loss, more dear than life, of such as these! The more normal memory of man will still continue repeating the liturgical syllables of a very different requiem:

"O daughters of dreams and of stories, That Life is not wearied of yet— Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores, Felise, and Yolande and Julette!"

Yes, Life and the Life-Lovers are enamoured still of these exquisite witches, these philtre-bearers, these Sirens, these children of Circe. But a few among us—those who understand the poetry of Edgar Allen—turn away from them, to that rarer, colder, more virginal Figure; to Her who has been born and has died, so many times; to Her who was Ligeia and Ulalume and Helen and Lenore—for are not all these One?—to Her we have loved in vain and shall love in vain until the end—to Her who wears, even in the triumph of her Immortality, the close-clinging, heavily-scented cerements of the Dead!

"The old bards shall cease and their memory that lingers Of frail brides and faithless shall be shrivelled as with fire, For they loved us not nor knew us and our lips were dumb, our fingers Could wake not the secret of the lyre. Else, else, O God, the Singer, I had sung, amid their rages, The long tale of Man, And his deeds for good and ill. But the Old World knoweth—'tis the speech of all his ages— Man's wrong and ours; he knoweth and is still."



WALT WHITMAN

I want to approach this great Soothsayer from the angle least of all profaned by popular verdicts. I mean from the angle of his poetry. We all know what a splendid heroic Anarchist he was. We all know with what rude zest he gave himself up to that "Cosmic Emotion," to which in these days the world does respectful, if distant, reverence. We know his mania for the word "en masse," for the words "ensemble," "democracy" and "libertad." We know his defiant celebrations of Sex, of amorousness, of maternity; of that Love of Comrades which "passeth the love of women." We know the world-shaking effort he made—and to have made it at all, quite apart from its success, marks him a unique genius!—to write poetry about every mortal thing that exists, and to bring the whole breathing palpable world into his Gargantuan Catalogues. It is absurd to grumble at these Inventories of the Round Earth. They may not all move to Dorian flutes, but they form a background—like the lists of the Kings in the Bible and the lists of the Ships in Homer—against which, as against the great blank spaces of Life itself, "the writing upon the wall" may make itself visible.

What seems much less universally realized is the extraordinary genius for sheer "poetry" which this Prophet of Optimism possessed. I agree that Walt Whitman's Optimism is the only kind, of that sort of thing, that one can submit to without a blush. At least it is not indecent, bourgeois, and ill-bred, like the fourth-hand Protestantism that Browning dishes up, for the delectation of Ethical Societies. It is the optimism of a person who has seen the American Civil War. It is the optimism of a man who knows "the Bowery" and "the road," and has had queer friends in his mortal pilgrimage.

It is an interesting psychological point, this difference between the "marching breast-forward" of Mrs. Browning's energetic husband, and the "taking to the open road" of Whitman. In some curious way the former gets upon one's nerves where the latter does not. Perhaps it is that the boisterous animal-spirits which one appreciates in the open air become vulgar and irritating when they are practised within the walls of a house. A Satyr who stretches his hairy shanks in the open forest is a pleasant thing to see; but a gentleman, with lavender-colored gloves, putting his feet on the chimney-piece is not so appealing. No doubt it is precisely for these Domestic Exercises that Mr. Chesterton, let us say, would have us love Browning. Well! It is a matter of taste.

But it is not of Walt Whitman's Optimism that I want to speak; it is of his poetry.

To grasp the full importance of what this great man did in this sphere one has only to read modern "libre vers." After Walt Whitman, Paul Fort, for instance, seems simply an eloquent prose writer. And none of them can get the trick of it. None of them! Somewhere, once, I heard a voice that approached it; a voice murmuring of

"Those that sleep upon the wind, And those that lie along in the rain, Cursing Egypt—"

But that voice went its way; and for the rest—what banalities! What ineptitudes! They make the mistake, our modern free-versifiers, of thinking that Art can be founded on the Negation of Form. Art can be founded on every other Negation. But not on that one—never on that one! Certainly they have a right to experiment; to invent—if they can—new forms. But they must invent them. They must not just arrange their lines to look like poetry, and leave it at that.

Walt Whitman's New Form of Verse was, as all such things must be, as Mr. Hardy's strange poetry, for instance, is, a deliberate and laborious struggle—ending in what is a struggle no more—to express his own personality in a unique and recognisable manner. This is the secret of all "style" in poetry. And it is the absence of this labour, of this premeditated concentration, which leads to the curious result we see on all sides of us, the fact, namely, that all young modern poets write alike. They write alike, and they are alike—just as all men are like all other men, and all women like all other women, when, without the "art" of clothing, or the "art" of flesh and blood, they lie down side by side in the free cemetery. The old poetic forms will always have their place. They can never grow old-fashioned; any more than Pisanello, or El Greco, or Botticelli, or Scopas, or any ancient Chinese Painter, can grow old-fashioned. But when a modern artist or poet sets to work to create a new form, let him remember what he is doing! It is not the pastime of an hour, this. It is not the casual gesture of a mad iconoclast breaking Classic Statues into mud, out of which to make goblins. It is the fierce, tenacious, patient, constructive work of a lifetime, based upon a tremendous and overpowering Vision! Such a vision Walt Whitman had, and to such constant inspired labour he gave his life—notwithstanding his talk about "loafing and inviting his soul"!

The "free" poetry of Walt Whitman obeys inflexible, occult laws, the laws commanded unto it by his own creative instinct. We need, as Nietzsche says, to learn the art of "commands" of this kind! Transvaluers of old values do not spend all their time sipping absinthe. Is it a secret still, then, the magical unity of rhythm, which Walt Whitman has conveyed to the words he uses? Those long, plangent, wailing lines, broken by little gurgling gasps and sobs; those sudden thrilling apostrophes and recognitions; those far-drawn flute-notes; those resounding sea-trumpets; all such effects have their place in the great orchestral symphony he conducts!

Take that little poem—quite spoiled before the end by a horrible bit of democratic vulgarity—which begins:

"Come, I will build a Continent indissoluble; I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon—"

Is it possible to miss the hidden spheric law which governs such a challenge? Take the poem which begins:

"In the growths, by the margins of pond-waters—"

Do you not divine, delicate reader, the peculiar subtlety of that reference to the rank, rain-drenched anonymous weeds, which every day we pass in our walks inland? A botanical name would have driven the magic of it quite away.

Walt Whitman, more than anyone, is able to convey to us that sense of the unclassified pell-mell, of weeds and stones and rubble and wreckage, of vast, desolate spaces, and spaces full of debris and litter, which is most of all characteristic of your melancholy American landscape, but which those who love England know where to find, even among our trim gardens! No one like Walt Whitman can convey to us the magical ugliness of certain aspects of Nature—the bleak, stunted, God-forsaken things; the murky pools where the grey leaves fall; the dead reeds where the wind whistles no sweet fairy tunes; the unspeakable margins of murderous floods; the tangled sea-drift, scurfed with scum; the black sea-winrow of broken shells and dead fishes' scales; the roots of willow trees in moonlit places crying out for demon-lovers; the long, moaning grass that grows outside the walls of prisons; the leprous mosses that cover paupers' graves; the mountainous wastes and blighted marshlands which only unknown wild-birds ever touch with their flying wings, and of which madmen dream—these are the things, the ugly, terrible things, that this great optimist turns into poetry. "Yo honk!" cries the wild goose, as it crosses the midnight sky. Others may miss that mad-tossed shadow, that heartbreaking defiance—but from amid the drift of leaves by the roadside, this bearded Fakir of Outcasts has caught its meaning; has heard, and given it its answer.

Ah, gentle and tender reader; thou whose heart, it may be has never cried all night for what it must not name, did you think Swinburne or Byron were the poets of "love"? Perhaps you do not know that the only "short story" on the title-page of which Guy de Maupassant found it in him to write that word is a story about the wild things we go out to kill?

Walt Whitman, too, does not confine his notions of love to normal human coquetries. The most devastating love-cry ever uttered, except that of King David over his friend, is the cry this American poet dares to put into the heart of "a wild-bird from Alabama" that has lost its mate. I wonder if critics have done justice to the incredible genius of this man who can find words for that aching of the soul we do not confess even to our dearest? The sudden words he makes use of, in certain connections, awe us, hush us, confound us, take our breath,—as some of Shakespeare's do—with their mysterious congruity. Has my reader ever read the little poem called "Tears"? And what purity in the truest, deepest sense, lies behind his pity for such tragic craving; his understanding of what love-stricken, banished ones feel. I do not speak now of his happily amorous verses. They have their place. I speak of those desperate lines that come, here and there, throughout his work, where, with his huge, Titanic back set against the world-wall, and his wild-tossed beard streaming in the wind, he seems to hold open by main, gigantic force that door of hope which Fate and God and Man and the Laws of Nature are all endeavoring to close! And he holds it open! And it is open still. It is for this reason—let the profane hold their peace!—that I do not hesitate to understand very clearly why he addresses a certain poem to the Lord Christ! Whether it be true or not that the Pure in Heart see God, it is certainly true that they have a power of saving us from God's Law of Cause and Effect! According to this Law, we all "have our reward" and reap what we have sown. But sometimes, like a deep-sea murmur, there rises from the poetry of Walt Whitman a Protest that must be heard! Then it is that the Tetrarchs of Science forbid in vain "that one should raise the Dead." For the Dead are raised up, and come forth, even in the likeness wherein we loved them! If words, my friends; if the use of words in poetry can convey such intimations as these to such a generation as ours, can anyone deny that Walt Whitman is a great poet?

Deny it, who may or will. There will always gather round him—as he predicted—out of City-Tenements and Artist-Studios and Factory-Shops and Ware-Houses and Bordelloes—aye! and, it may be, out of the purlieus of Palaces themselves—a strange, mad, heart-broken company of life-defeated derelicts, who come, not for Cosmic Emotion or Democracy or Anarchy or Amorousness, or even "Comradeship," but for that touch, that whisper, that word, that hand outstretched in the darkness, which makes them know—against reason and argument and all evidence—that they may hope still—for the Impossible is true!



CONCLUSION

We have been together, you who read this—and to you, whoever you are, whether pleased or angry, I make a comrade's signal. Who knows? We might be the very ones to understand each other, if we met! We have been together, in the shadow of the presences that make life tolerable; and now we must draw our conclusion and go our way.

Our conclusion? Ah! that is a hard matter. The world we live in lends itself better to beginnings than conclusions. Or does anything, in this terrible flowing tide, even begin? End or beginning, we find ourselves floating upon it—this great tide—and we must do what we can to get a clear glimpse of the high stars before we sink. I wonder if, in the midst of the stammered and blurted incoherences, the lapses and levities, of this quaint book, a sort of "orientation," as the theologians say now, has emerged at all? I feel, myself, as though it had, though it is hard enough to put it into words. I seem to feel that a point of view, not altogether irrelevant in our time, has projected a certain light upon us, as we advanced together.

Let me try to catch some few filmy threads of this before it vanishes, even though, like a dream in the waking, its outlines waver and recede and fade, until it is lost in space. We gather, then, I fancy, from this kind of hurried passing through enchanted gardens, a sort of curious unwillingness to let our "fixed convictions" deprive us any more of the spiritual adventures to which we have a right. We begin to understand the danger of such convictions, of such opinions, of such "constructive consistency." We grow prepared to "give ourselves up" to "yield ourselves willingly," to whatever new Revelation of the Evasive One chance may throw in our way. It is in such yieldings, such surprises by the road, such new vistas and perspectives, that life loves to embody itself. To refuse them is to turn away from Life and dwell in the kingdom of the shadow.

"Why not?" the Demon who has presided over our wanderings together seems to whisper—"why not for a little while try the experiment of having no 'fixed ideas,' no 'inflexible principles,' no 'concentrated aim'? Why not simply react to one mysterious visitor after another, as they approach us, and caress or hurt us, and go their way? Why not, for an interlude, be Life's children, instead of her slaves or her masters, and let Her lead us, the great crafty Mother, whither she will?"

There will be much less harm done by such an embracing of Fate, and such a cessation of foolish agitations, than many might suppose. And more than anything else, this is what our generation requires! We are over-ridden by theorists and preachers and ethical water-carriers; we need a little rest—a little yawning and stretching and "being ourselves"; a little quiet sitting at the feet of the Immortal Gods. We need to forget to be troubled, for a brief interval, if the Immortal Gods speak in strange and variable tongues, and offer us diverse-shaped chalices. Let us drink, dear friends, let us drink, as the most noble prophetess Bacbuc used to say! There are many vintages in the kingdom of Beauty; and yet others—God knows! even outside that. Let us drink, and ask no troublesome questions. The modern puritan seeks to change the nature of our natural longing. He tells us that what we need is not less labor but more labor, not less "concentrated effort," but more "concentrated effort"; not "Heaven," in fact, but "Hell."

I do not know. There is much affectation abroad, and some hypocrisy. Puritans were ever addicted to hypocrisy. But because of these "virtuous" prophets of "action," are we to give up our Beatific Vision? Why not be honest for once, and confess that what Man, born of Woman, craves for in his heart is a little joy, a little happiness, a little pleasure, before "he goes hence and is no more seen"? We know that we know nothing. Why, then, pretend that we know the importance of being "up and doing"? There may be no such importance. The common burden of life we have, indeed, all to bear—and they are not very gracious or lovely souls who seek to put it off on others—but for this additional burden, this burden of "being consistent" and having a "strong character," does it seem very wise, in so brief an interval, to put the stress just there?

Somehow I think a constant dwelling in the company of the "great masters" leads us to take with a certain "pinch of salt" the strenuous "duties" which the World's voices make so clamorous! It may be that our sense of their greatness and remoteness produces a certain "humility" in us, and a certain mood of "waiting on the Spirit," not altogether encouraging to what this age, in its fussy worship of energy, calls "our creative work." Well! There is a place doubtless for these energetic people, and their strenuous characters, and their "creative work." But I think there is a place also for those who cannot rush about the market-place, or climb high Alps, or make engines spin, or race, with girded loins, after "Truth." I think there is a place still left for harmless spectators in this Little Theatre of the Universe, And such spectators will do well if they see to it that nothing of the fine or the rare or the exquisite escapes them. Somebody must have the discrimination and the detachment necessary to do justice to our "creative minds." The worst of it is, everybody in these days rushes off to "create," and pauses not a moment to look round to see whether what is being created is worth creating!

We must return to the great masters; we must return to the things in life that really matter; and then we shall acquire, perhaps, in our little way the art of keeping the creators of ugliness at a distance!

Let us at least be honest. The world is a grim game, and we need sometimes the very courage of Lucifer to hold our enemies back. But in the chaos of it all, and the madness and frenzy, let us at least hold fast to that noble daughter of the gods men name Imagination. With that to aid us, we can console ourselves for many losses, for many defeats. For the life of the Imagination flows deep and swift, and in its flowing it can bear us to undreamed-of coasts, where the children of fantasy and the children of irony dance on—heedless of theory and argument.

The world is deep, as Zarathustra says, and deep is pain; and deeper than pain is joy. I do not think that they have reached the final clue, even with their talk of "experience" and "struggle" and the "storming of the heights." Sometimes it is not from "experience," but from beyond experience, that the rumour comes. Sometimes it is not from the "struggle," but from the "rest" after the struggle, that the whisper is given. Sometimes the voice comes to us, not from the "heights," but from the depths.

The truth seems to be that if the clue is to be caught at all, it will be caught where we least expect it; and, for the catching of it, what we have to do is not to let our theories, our principles, our convictions, our opinions, impede our vision—but now and then to lay them aside; but whether with them or without them, to be prepared—for the Spirit bloweth where it listeth and we cannot tell whence it cometh, or whither it goeth!



ERRATA

For Edgar Allen Poe read Edgar Allan Poe.

Page 33, line 1, for "and goose-girls. These are the things" read "and goose-girls—these are the things."

Page 33, line 19, for "Penetre" read "Peut-etre."

Page 50, line 10, for "iron" read "urn."

Page 59, line 16, for "De Vinci" read "Da Vinci."

Page 129, line 8, for "Berwick" read "Bewick."

Page 138, line 25, for "Cabbalistic" read "Cabalistic."

Page 268/269, line 30, and line 1, for "dim-gulf," etc, read "That dim-gulf o'er which The spirit lies, mute, motionless, aghast—how well, in Poe's world, we know that! For still, in those days," etc.

Page 270, line 20, for Celebralist read Cerebralist.

Page 285, line 12, for "long-drawn" read "far-drawn."

THE END