Chapter I: Part 1

READERS & WRITERS

Readers and Writers
(1917-1921)

By
R. H. C. (A. R. Orage)

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1

_First published in 1922_

_All rights reserved_

Preface

Under the title of “Readers and Writers” and over the initials “R. H. C.” I contributed to the _New Age_, during a period of seven or eight years, a weekly literary causerie of which the present volume, covering the years 1917-1921, is a partial reprint. My original design was to treat literary events from week to week with the continuity, consistency and policy ordinarily applied to comments on current political events; that is to say, with equal seriousness and from a similarly more or less fixed point of view as regards both means and end. This design involved of necessity a freedom of expression rather out of fashion, though it was the convention of the greatest period of English literature, namely, the Eighteenth Century; and its pursuit in consequence brought the comments into somewhat lively disrepute. That, however, proved not to be the greatest difficulty. Indeed, within the last few years an almost general demand for more serious, more outspoken and even more “savage” criticism has been heard, and is perhaps on the way to being satisfied, though literary susceptibilities are still far from being as well-mannered as political susceptibilities. The greatest difficulty is encountered in the fact that literary events, unlike political events, occur with little apparent order, and are subject to no easily discoverable or demonstrable direction. In a single week every literary form and tendency may find itself illustrated, with the consequence that any attempt to set the week’s doings in a relation of significant development is bound to fall under the suspicion of impressionism or arbitrariness. I have no other defence against these charges than Plato’s appeal to good judges, of whom the best because the last is Time. Time will pronounce as only those living critics can whose present judgments are an anticipation of Time’s. Time will show what has been right and what wrong. Already, moreover, a certain amount of winnowing and sifting has taken place. Some literary values of this moment are not what they were yesterday or the day before. A few are greater; many of them are less. My most confident prediction, however, remains to be confirmed: it is that the perfect English style is still to be written. That it may be in our own time is both the goal and the guiding-star of all literary criticism that is not idle chatter.

A. R. ORAGE.

_The New Age_, 38 CURSITOR STREET, E.C. 4.

_December 1921._

Contents

PAGE

PREFACE 5

FONTENELLE 15

BIOGRAPHY 16

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PRESS 17

CRITICS BEWARE 20

HENRY JAMES 22

TURGENEV 27

PLOTINUS 29

THE NEW EUROPE 31

THE FASHION OF ANTI-PURITANISM 32

POPULAR PHILOSOPHY 34

WAS CARLYLE PRUSSIAN? 36

IS NIETZSCHE FOR GERMANY? 37

NIETZSCHE IN FRAGMENTS 38

THE END OF FICTION 41

THE CRITERIA OF CULTURE 42

THE FATE OF SCULPTURE 45

THE TOO CLEVER 46

HOMAGE TO PROPERTIUS 49

MR. POUND AND MR. WYNDHAM LEWIS IN PUBLIC 52

MR. EZRA POUND AS METRICIST 57

MR. EZRA POUND ON RELIGION 60

MR. POUND, CARICATURIST 62

THE ADMIRABLE VICTORIANS 63

FRENCH CLARTÉ 65

WHEN SHALL WE TRANSLATE? 66

NATURE IN MIND 68

MR. CLIVE BELL’S POT 70

THE CRITICISM OF POETS 73

“JOHN EGLINTON” 74

IRISH HUMOUR 75

THE LITERARY DRAMA OF IRELAND 76

MR. STANDISH O’GRADY 79

MR. STANDISH O’GRADY, ENCHANTER 80

LES SENTIMENTS DE JULIEN BENDA 81

CONVALESCENCE AFTER NEWSPAPER 82

NATURE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 88

S.S.S. 90

STERNE CRITICISM 92

STERNE ON LOVE IN FRANCE 94

ENGLISH STYLE 95

LITERARY CULS-DE-SAC 98

THE DECLINE OF FREE INTELLIGENCE 98

LITERARY COPYRIGHT IN AMERICA 103

RIGHT CRITICISM 109

MAN’S SURVIVAL OF BODILY DEATH 111

BEARDSLEY AND ARTHUR SYMONS 115

“Æ’S” “CANDLE OF VISION” 117

HOW TO READ 134

THE OLD COUNTRY 135

LOOKING FOR THE DAWN 136

FIELDING FOR AMERICA 139

POOR AUTHORS! 140

ON GUARD 143

THE COMING RENAISSANCE 145

LEONARDO DA VINCI AS PIONEER 147

“SHAKESPEARE” SIMPLIFIED 151

THE “LONDON MERCURY” AND ENGLISH 152

MR. G. K. CHESTERTON ON ROME AND GERMANY 155

THE ORIGINS OF MARX 161

MARX AS POLITICIAN 163

JOHN MITCHEL AS THE SAME 166

NORSE IN ENGLISH 167

THE COMEDY OF IT 168

THE EPIC SERBS 171

ERNEST DOWSON 173

A SENTIMENTAL EXCURSION 175

THE NEWEST TESTAMENT 178

NOTHING FOREIGN 182

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 184

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE MYSTERIES 185

GENTLY WITH PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 188

A CAMBRIDGE “COCOON” 190

AN OXFORD MISCELLANY 195

THE IMPOTENCE OF SATIRE 196

THE “DIAL” OF AMERICA 199

AMERICA REGRESSING 206

THE BEST IS YET TO BE 209

INDEX 215

Readers and Writers

FONTENELLE.—There is a reason that Fontenelle has never before been translated into English. It is not that Mr. Ezra Pound, who has now translated a dozen of Fontenelle’s dialogues, was the first to think of it. Many readers of the original have tried their hand at the translation only to discover that somehow or other Fontenelle would not “go” in English as he goes in French. The reason is not very far to seek. Fontenelle wrote a French peculiarly French, a good but an untranslatable French. He must, therefore, be left and read in the original if he is to be appreciated at his intrinsic value. Mr. Pound has made a rash attempt at the impossible in these dialogues, and he has achieved the unreadable through no further fault of his own. The result was foregone. The dialogues themselves in their English form are a little more dull than are the _Conversations_ of Landor, which is to say that they are very dull indeed. Nothing at the first glance could be more attractive than dialogues between the great dead of the world. To every tyro the notion comes inevitably sooner or later, as if it were the idea for which the world were waiting. Nevertheless, on attempting it, the task is found to be beyond most human powers. Nobody has yet written a masterpiece in it. Fontenelle was not in any case the man to succeed in it from an English point of view. We English take the great dead seriously. We expect them to converse paradisaically in paradise, and to be as much above their own living level as their living level was above that of ordinary men. Here, however, is a pretty task for a writer of dead dialogues, for he has not only to imitate the style, but to glorify both the matter and style of the greatest men of past ages. No wonder that he fails; no wonder that in the vast majority of cases he produces much the same impression of his heroes as is produced of them at spiritualistic séances. The attempt, however, will always continue to be made. It is a literary cactus-form that blooms every fifty years or so. As I calculate its periodicity, some one should shortly be producing a new series.

BIOGRAPHY.—Very few biographers have been anywhere near the level of mind of their subjects, and fewer still have been able to describe even what they have understood. The character of a great man is so complex that a genius for grasping essentials must be assumed in his perfect biographer: at the same time, it is so tedious in the analysis that the narrative must be condensed to represent it. Between the subtlety to be described, and the simplicity with which it must be described, the character of a man is likely to fall in his portrait into the distortion of over-elaboration or into the sketch. Though difficult, however, the art has been frequently shown to be not impossible. We could not ask for a better portrait of Johnson than Boswell’s. Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_ is as good as we desire it to be. Plato’s _Socrates_ is truer than life; and there are others. On the whole, the modern gossiping method is not likely to become popular in a cultured country.

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PRESS.—From his little brush with the Press, Dr. Lyttelton has come off badly. It was not because his case was bad, but because he had not the moral courage to stick to his guns. His case was that Parliament had practically ceased to be the leader of the nation, and that its place had been taken by the Press. Unfortunately, however, the Press had come to depend for its living upon sensationalism, with the consequence that its tendency was to prefer fiction to fact. A perfectly good case, I say, who know more of Fleet Street than Dr. Lyttelton will ever know. Every word of the indictment is well within the truth. But when challenged by the Press to substantiate his charges, Dr. Lyttelton, instead of inviting the world simply to _look_ at the Press and to contrast its reports with facts, proceeded to exculpate the editors and to put the whole blame on the public. It is the public, he said, that is responsible, and there is no use in rating the editors, who merely supplied what the public wanted. But so long as public men adopt this cowardly attitude nothing can possibly be done, for the “public,” like a corporation, has neither a body to be kicked nor a soul to be damned. Relatively to the proprietors and editors of the Press the public consists of irresponsible individuals, who merely choose from among what is laid before them. They are mostly as innocent as children who deal at a tuck-shop, and, perchance, buy sweets and cakes that are bad for them as readily as things that are good for them. The responsible parties are the proprietors and editors, and, above them, the law. It is not an offence to buy articles at a shop that are illegally displayed for sale. The public supposition is that if they are on sale they can be bought. And, in fact, the Public Prosecutor, unlike Dr. Lyttelton, does not proceed against the purchasers of illegal articles, he proceeds against the vendors. In the case of our newspaper proprietors and editors the conditions of shop-keeping are parallel; they expose professed news and views for sale, with an implied guarantee that their goods are both good and fit for human consumption. The public cannot be expected to know which is which, or what is what, any more in the case of news and views than in the case of tea and potatoes. Rather less indeed, since the ill-effects of false news and unsound views are, as a rule, too long delayed and too subtle to be attributed to their proper causes. But the Press proprietors and editors know very well. They know whether the news they expose is true, or the views they vend are sound. They know also that in a large degree they are neither the one nor the other. Yet they continue to sell them, and even to expect public honours for their fraudulent dealings. The excuses made for them are such as could be made for any other fraudulent industry; that it pays, that the public swallows it, that honesty would not pay, that the public does not want truth and sincerity, that the public must learn to discriminate for itself. Reduced to a simple statement, all these mean, in effect, that the Press is prepared to trade on the ignorance and folly of the public. So long as editors and proprietors are allowed to sail off from responsibility under the plea that they are only satisfying a public demand, so long will it be possible for purveyors of other forms of indecent literature and vendors of other articles of public ill-fare to complain that they are unfairly treated. There is likely to be always a demand for fiction against fact, the plausible lie against the honest truth, the doctored news against the plain statement, and the pleasing superficial against the strenuous profound. A change of taste in these respects could only be brought about by a determined effort in education extending over a generation and applied not only to schools, but to the Press, the pulpit, and to book-publishing. But because the preference now exists, and is a profitable taste to pander to, it is not right to acquit the Press that thrives on it.

CRITICS BEWARE.—Mr. Crees, the author of a new study of George Meredith, has first pointed out one of the dangers in writing about Meredith and then fallen into it. Everybody knows what it is; it is writing in epigram, or, as Mr. Crees calls it, “miscarrying with abortive epigram.” That phrase alone should have warned Mr. Crees how near he was to ignoring his own counsel; but apparently he saw only the idea and not the fact, for a passage soon occurs in which he illustrates the danger perfectly. He is writing of the difficulty encountered by a certain kind of intellectual—Meredith, for example—in winning any public recognition; and this is the way he miscarries on:

The idol of the future is the Aunt Sally of the present. The
pioneer of intellect ploughs a lonely furrow. He is assailed by
invective, beset by contumely, the butt of ridicule, the Saint
Sebastian of the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism.
He is depressed by disregard, chilled by the icy waters of
contempt, haunted by the dread of beggary, the recompense of
strictness of conviction.... And when detraction recites its
palinode, his sole compensation is to reply (from the Elysian
fields), “I told you so.”

There are many untruths contained in this passage, some flattering and others not, to the “intellectual,” and they are properly expressed—if untruths ever can be—in the style. The style is one in which the truth cannot be told; and it perfectly illustrates the axiom that critical writing cannot be too simple and unaffected. It is a common practice for a critic to approximate his style to the style of his subject; for example, to write about poetry poetically, about a “grand impassioned writer” in a grand and impassioned manner. By so doing it is supposed that a critic shows his sympathy and his understanding of his subject. But the method is wrong. Criticism is not a fine art. The conversational tone is its proper medium, and it should be an absolute rule never to write in criticism what cannot be imagined as being easily said.

HENRY JAMES.—The “Henry James Number” of the _Little Review_ is devoted to essays by various hands upon the works and characteristics of the late novelist. The most interesting essay in the volume is one by Miss Ethel Coburn Mayne reporting the first appearance and subsequent development of Henry James as witnessed by the writers for the famous _Yellow Book_, of whom Miss Mayne was not the least characteristic. What a comedy of misunderstanding it all was, and how Henry James must have smiled about it! At the outset the _Yellow Book_ writers had the distinct impression that Henry James was one of themselves; and they looked forward to exploiting the new worlds which he brought into their ken. But later on, to their disappointment, he fell away, receded from their visibility, and became, as Miss Mayne puts it, concerned less with the “world” than with the “drawing-room.” The fault, however, was not with James, nor was the change in him. The _Yellow Book_ too readily assumed that because James wrote in it, he was willing to be identified with the tendency of the school; and they thought him lacking in loyalty when afterwards it appeared that he was powerfully hostile. But how could they have deceived themselves into supposing that a progress towards the ghostly could always keep step with a progress towards the fleshly? The two were worlds apart, and if for a single moment they coincided in an issue or two of the _Yellow Book_, their subsequent divergence was only made the more obvious. I, even I, who was still young when the _Yellow Book_ began to appear, could have told its editors that Henry James was not long for their world. Between the method employed in, say, the _Death of the Lion_ and the method of Henry Harland, Max Beerbohm, Miss Mayne herself, and, subsequently, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, there was, and could be, only an accidental and momentary sympathy. James was in love with the next world, or the next state of consciousness; he was always exploring the borderland between the conscious and the super-conscious. The _Yellow Book_ writers were positively reactionary to him, for their borderland was not between men and angels, but between men and beasts. James’s “contemptuous” word for Mr. D. H. Lawrence—which Miss Mayne still groans to think of—was the most natural and inevitable under the circumstances. It might have been foreseen from the moment Henry James put his pen into the _Yellow Book_. If there are any critics left who imagine that the _Yellow Book_ was anything but a literary _cul de sac_, I commend to them this present essay by Miss Mayne. Under the disguise of criticism of Henry James, it is a confession.

* * * * *

Henry James’s _Middle Years_ is a fragment of the autobiography begun some years before the author’s death. We are told that this fragment was “dictated” by Henry James and that it was never revised by himself, both of which facts explain a little of the peculiarity of his style. If the style of the earlier books was mazy, the style of _Middle Years_ is mazier. If the earlier style consisted of impressions impassionately conveyed, the present is more elusive still. Henry James was always difficult to pin down; in _Middle Years_ his fluttering among words never rests a sentence. Nobody, I am convinced, who is not either a genuine devotee of Henry James or one of the paper-audience his friends cultivated for him, will succeed in reading through this work. An infinitely leisurely mind or an infinite interest in just Henry James’s way of looking at things is necessary to the endurance of it. But given one of these, and in particular the latter, and the reading of _Middle Years_ becomes an exhilarating exercise in sensing ghosts.

Yes, that is the phrase to describe what Henry James was always after. He was always after sensing ghosts. His habitat has been said to be the inter-space between the real and the ideal; but it can be more accurately defined as the inter-space between the dead and the living. You see his vision—almost his clairvoyance—actively engaged in this recovery of his experiences years before as a young man in London. See how he revelled in them, rolling them off his tongue in long circling phrases. Is it not obvious that he is most at home in recollection, in the world of memory, in the inter-world, once more, of the dead and the living? Observe, too, how only a little more exaggeratedly anfractuous and swirling his style becomes—but not, in any real sense, different—under the influence of memory, than when professing to be describing the present. It is plain that memory differs for him from present vision only in being a little more vivid, a little more real. In order to see a thing clearly, he had, in fact, to make a memory of it, and the present tense of memory is impression. What I am trying to say is that Henry James mentalised phenomenon; hence that he saw most clearly in the world of memory where this process had been performed for him by time; and that he saw less clearly in our actual world because the phenomena herein resisted immediate mentalisation. The difference for him was between the pre-digested and the to-be-digested; the former being the persons and events of memory, and the latter being the events and persons of his current experience.

Henry James will find himself very much at home with the discarnate minds who, it is presumed, are now his companions. Incarnation, embodiment, was for him a screen to be looked through, got over somehow, divined into, penetrated. He regarded it as a sort of magic curtain which concealed at the same time that under careful observation it revealed by its shadows and movements the mind behind it. And I fancy I see him sitting before the actual sensible world of things and persons with infinite patience watching for a significant gesture or a revealing shadow. And such motions and shadows he recorded as impressions which became the stuff of his analysis and synthesis of the souls that originated them. But if that was his attitude towards the material world—and it is further proved by his occasional excursions into the completely ghostly—may we not safely conclude that in the world he now inhabits his sense of impressions is more at home still. For there, as I take it, the curtain is drawn, and minds and souls are by one degree the more exposed to direct vision. With his marvellous insight into the actual, what would Henry James not make of the mental and psychic when these are no longer concealed by the material? On the whole, nobody is likely to be happier “dead” than Henry James.

TURGENEV.—Both in Mr. Conrad’s Introduction and Mr. Edward Garnett’s critical study of Turgenev I observe the attitude of defence. They are defending rather than praising Turgenev. But Turgenev has been so long the victim of polemics that it is about time some judge summed up the contentions and delivered judgment. Neither Mr. Conrad nor Mr. Garnett, however, is qualified for this task by either temper or the power of judgment itself. Mr. Conrad is a great writer, but he is not a great critic, and as for Mr. Garnett, he is not even a great writer; and the temper of both is shown in their common tendency to abuse not only the plaintiff’s attorney but the jury as well. But there is no use in abusing the jury—in other words, the reading public of the world—even if some gain may be got by polemics with this or that critic. I am content to hear Mr. Maurice Baring and M. Haumont told that they are merely echoes of Russian partisanship and incapable of feeling the fine shades of “truth” in Turgenev; for both these writers are quite capable of hitting back. But when Mr. Conrad satirically remarks that Turgenev had qualities enough to ruin the prospects of any writer, and Mr. Garnett echoes _him_ to the effect that Turgenev owes his “unpopularity” to “an exquisite feeling for balance” which nowadays is “less and less prized by modern opinion,” I feel that the defence of Turgenev is exceeding the limits of discretion. For it is not by any means the case that the “unpopularity” of Turgenev is confined to the mob that has no feeling for balance or is jealous of his possession of too many qualities. Critics as good as Mr. Garnett and with no Russian political prejudices against Turgenev can come to the same conclusion as the innumerable anonymous gentlemen of the jury, to wit, that Turgenev was a great artist on a small scale whose faults were large. That is certainly my own case. While I agree (or affirm, for I am quite willing to take the initiative), that Turgenev’s art is more exquisite, more humane, more European than that of any other Russian writer, I must also maintain that in timidity of thought, in sentimentality, in occasional pettiness of mind, he is no more of a great writer than, let us say, Mr. Hall Caine. To compare the whole of him with the whole of Dostoievski is to realise in an instant the difference between a writer great in parts and a writer great even in his faults. Turgenev at his best is a European, I would rather say a Parisianised Russian; but Dostoievski, while wholly Russian, belongs to the world. An almost exact parallel is afforded by the case of Ibsen and Björnson, about whose respective values Norway used to dispute as now Mr. Garnett would have us dispute concerning the respective values of Dostoievski and Turgenev. The world has settled the first in favour of Ibsen—with Norway dissenting; the world will similarly settle the latter in favour of Dostoievski, with Mr. Garnett dissenting.

PLOTINUS.—Plotinus, of whom Coleridge said that “no writer more wants, better deserves, or is less likely to obtain a new and more correct translation,” has lately been translated into excellent English by Mr. Stephen Mackenna (_not_ the author of _Sonia_, by the way). For all Coleridge’s demand and Mr. Mackenna’s supply, however, Plotinus is not likely to be read as much as he deserves. Abstract thought, or thinking in ideas without images, is a painful pleasure, comparable to exercises designed and actually effective to physical health. There is no doubt whatever that mental power is increased by abstract thought. Abstract thinking is almost a recipe for the development of talent. But it is so distasteful to mental inertia and habit that even people who have experienced its immense profit are disinclined to persist in it. It was by reason of his persistence in an exercise peculiarly irksome to the Western mind that Plotinus approached the East more nearly in subtlety and purity of thought than all but a few Western thinkers before or after him. In reading him it is hard to say that one is not reading a clarified Shankara or a Vyasa of the Bhishma treatises of the _Mahabharata_. East and West met in his mind.

Plotinus’s aim, like that of all thinkers in the degree of their conception, is, in Coleridge’s words, “the perfect spiritualisation of all the laws of Nature into laws of intuition and intellect.” It is the subsumption of phenomena in terms of personality, the reduction of Nature to the mind of man. Conversely it will be seen that the process may be said to personalise Nature; in other words, to assume the presence in natural phenomena of a kind of personal intelligence. If this be animism, I decline to be shocked by it on that account; for in that event the highest philosophy and one of the lowest forms of religion coincide, and there is no more to be said of it. The danger of this reasoning from mind to Nature and from Nature to mind is anthropomorphism. We tend to make Nature in our own image, or, conversely, _à la_ Nietzsche, to make ourselves after the image of Nature. But the greater the truth the greater is the peril of it; and thinkers must be on their guard to avoid the dangers, while nevertheless continuing the method. Plotinus certainly succeeded in avoiding the anthropomorphic no less than the crudely animistic dangers of his methods; but at the cost of remaining unintelligible to the majority of readers.

THE NEW EUROPE.—It should be possible before long to begin to discern some of the outlines of the new continent that will arise from the flood of the present war. That it will be a new continent is certain, and that it will contain as essential features some of the aspects of the Slav soul is probable. For what has been spiritually most apparent during the war has been the struggle of the Slav soul to find expression in the Western medium. Russia, we may say, has sought to Europeanise herself; or, rather, Russia has sought to impress upon Europe Russian ideas; with this further resemblance in her fate to the fate of the pioneers of every great new spiritual impulse, that she has been crucified in her mission. The crucifixion of Slavdom, however, is the sign in which Russian ideals—or, let us say Slav ideals—will in the end conquer. They will not submerge our Western ideas; the new continent will be the old continent over again; but they will profoundly modify our former configurations, and compel us to draw our cultural maps afresh. In what respect, it may be asked, will our conceptions be radically changed? The reply is to be found confusedly in the events of the Russian Revolution; in the substitution of the pan-human for the national ideal, and in the attempt, this time to be made with all the strength at the disposal of intelligence, to create a single world-culture—a universal Church of men of good-sense and good-will. This appears to me to be the distinguishing feature of the new continent about to be formed; and we shall owe it to the Slavs.

THE FASHION OF ANTI-PURITANISM.—The anti-Puritanism of the professed anti-Puritans is very little, if any, better than the Puritanism they oppose. The two parties divide the honours of our dislike fairly evenly between them. Puritanism is a fanatical devotion to a single aspect of virtue—namely, to morality. It assumes that Life is moral and nothing else; that Power, Wisdom, Truth, Beauty, and Love are all of no account in comparison with Goodness; and doing so it offends our judgment of the nature of Virtue, which is that Virtue is wholeness or a balance of all the aspects of God. Anti-Puritanism, on the other hand, denies all the affirmations of Puritanism, but without affirming anything on its own account. It denies that Life is exclusively moral, but it does not affirm that Life is anything else; it destroys the false absolute of Puritanism, but it is silent to the extent of tacitly denying that there is any absolute whatsoever. This being the case, our choice between Puritanism and anti-Puritanism is between a false absolute and no absolute, between a one-sided truth and no truth at all. We are bound to be half-hearted upon either side, since the thing itself is only half a thing.

I am not likely to revise my opinions about virtue from the school of Marx and his disciple Kautsky. Marx was another flamen, a priest, that is to say, of one aspect only of reality—in this case the economic. That the moral cant of a particular age tends to represent the economic interest of the dominant class, is, of course, a truism; but there is a world of difference between moral cant and morality—and the latter is as uniform throughout all history as the former is variable. Moreover, it is not by any means always the case that the interests of the dominant class of capitalism are identical with Puritanism. The interests of capitalism to-day are decidedly with anti-Puritanism, in so far as the effects of anti-Puritanism are to break up family life, to restrict births and to cultivate eugenics. What could suit capitalism better than to atomise the last surviving natural grouping of individuals and to breed for the servile State? The anti-Puritan propagandas of Malthusianism and eugenics are not carried on, either, by Marxians, but by the wealthy classes. Because he is a shopkeeper, the Anglo-Saxon is to-day an anti-Puritan in these matters.

POPULAR PHILOSOPHY.—The difficulty of popular philosophical discussion is not insuperable. It is all a matter of style. Mr. Bertrand Russell, for example, manages by means of an excellent style to make philosophy as easy to understand and as entrancing to follow as certain writers have made the equally difficult subject of economics. It is, in fact, the business of professional thinkers to popularise their subject and to procure for their Muse as many devotees as possible. In the case of Mr. Bertrand Russell, his admirable style has been put into the service of the most abominable philosophy ever formulated. He is an accidentalist of the most thorough-going kind who denies that life has any meaning or purpose. Life appeared, he says, by chance, and will disappear, probably for good, with the cooling of the sun; and he sings like a doomed cricket on a dissolving iceberg. But it is all the more strange in my judgment that a man who thinks thus can write as Mr. Russell writes. There is a contradiction somewhere between the simple richness of his style and the Spartan poverty of his ideas. He thinks glacially, but his style is warm. I suspect that if he were psycho-analysed Mr. Bertrand Russell would turn out to be a walking contradiction. In a word, I don’t believe he believes a word he says! That tone, that style, them there gestures—they betray the stage-player of the spirit.

A philosophy written in a popular style is not, of course, the same thing as a popular philosophy. “From a popular philosophy and a philosophical populace, good sense deliver us,” said Coleridge, meaning to say that a philosophy whose substance and not whose expression only has been adapted to the populace is in all probability false and is certainly superficial. For in his _Lay Sermons_, published a hundred years ago, Coleridge supplemented the foregoing remark by deploring the “long and ominous eclipse of philosophy, the usurpation of that venerable name by physical and psychological empiricism, and the non-existence of a learned and philosophical _public_.” Between a philosophic public and a philosophic populace there is the same distinction as between the “public” that reads, let us say, Sedlák, and the “populace” that reads, let us say, Mr. H. G. Wells. Mr. Wells is a popular philosopher; but that is manifestly not the same thing as a writer who is trying to make philosophy popular.

WAS CARLYLE PRUSSIAN?—In the _International Journal of Ethics_, Mr. Herbert Stewart makes a chivalrous attempt to deliver Carlyle from the charge recently brought home to him of having been a Prussian. Militarist Prussianism, he says, rests upon a postulate which would have filled Carlyle with horror, the postulate, namely, that an autocracy must be organised for war. I am not satisfied, however, that Carlyle would have been filled with anything but admiration. It is true that he did not adopt the Prussian error of identifying Might with Right. “Is Arithmetic,” he asked, “a thing more fixed by the Eternal than the laws of justice are?” Could Justice or Right, therefore, be allowed to vary with the amount of Might at its disposal—a deduction inevitable from the Prussian hypothesis? On the other hand, Carlyle cannot be said to have been equally free from the more subtle error of Prussianism, the assumption that Might can be accumulated only by Right means. Might, he said in effect, being an attribute of God, can be obtained by man only as a result of some virtue. Hence its possession presumes the possession of a proportionate virtue, and a man of Might is to that extent a man of Right also. This subtlety led Carlyle into some strange company for the moral fanatic he was. It led him to glorify Frederick the Great and to condone Frederick’s crime against Silesia. It led him to despise France and to defend West Indian slavery. Mr. Stewart must make his choice between Carlyle as a confused ethical philosopher and Carlyle as a Prussian. If he was not the latter, he was the former.

IS NIETZSCHE FOR GERMANY?—Nietzsche, we are told, is being read as never before in Germany. It is certain that Nietzsche was taken, if taken at all, in the wrong sense in Germany before the war. The Germans did with him precisely what the mob everywhere does with the satirist; they swallowed his praise and ignored his warnings. He is still, however, more of a danger than a saviour to post-war Germany, if only for the reason that his vocabulary is for the most part militarist. Culture is usually presented by Nietzsche in the terms of combat, and the still small voice of perfection is only heard in the silences of his martial sentences. Now that Germany has begun to re-read Nietzsche, will it read him any more intelligently than before? Is not a critique of Nietzsche a necessary condition of safely reading him—in Germany? There are, undoubtedly, authors who are most dangerous to the nation in which they appear. Rousseau was particularly dangerous to France. Whitman is inimical to American culture. Dr. Johnson has been a blight upon English thought. And Nietzsche, it may well be, is only a blessing outside of Germany. Art and thought, it is commonly said, are beyond nationality and beyond race; and from this it follows that it is only a happy accident when a great writer or thinker is peculiarly suited to the nation in which he happens to be born. He is addressed to the world—why should his message be specially adapted to the language and people of his parentage? A nation runs risks in accenting as its own the doctrines of the great men who chance to appear among it. Equally, a nation runs the risk of missing its real chosen unless it examines all the great men of the world. Chauvinism, either by choice or by exclusion, is always dangerous. We must take the good where we find it.

NIETZSCHE IN FRAGMENTS.—The English mind is easily “put off” a subject, and particularly easily off a subject as uncongenial as Nietzsche; and it has been known to remain in this state for a century or more. Several of our own greatest thinkers and writers have had to wait a long period for their readers, and by the time that the English mind has recovered itself, they are often quite dead. It is likely to be the same with Nietzsche. Having the plausible excuse for being “off” Nietzsche which the war provided, the English intellectual classes—note that I do not say the intellectual English classes, for there are none—will continue to neglect Nietzsche until he has been superseded, as I believe he will be before very long. Psycho-analysis has taken a good deal of Nietzsche in its stride, and it is quite possible that the re-reading of Indian philosophy in the light of psycho-analysis will gather most of the remainder.

Nevertheless, the remaining fragments will be worth preserving, since indubitably they will be the fragments of a giant of thought. As Heraclitus is represented by a small collection of aphorisms, each so concentrated that one would serve for an ordinary man’s equipment for intellectual life, the Nietzsche of the future may be contained in a very small volume, chiefly of aphorisms. He aimed, he said, at saying in a sentence what other writers say in a book, and he characteristically added that he aimed at saying in a sentence what other writers did _not_ say in a book. And he very often succeeded. These successes are his real contribution to his own immortality, and they will, I think, ensure it. I should advise Dr. Oscar Levy to prepare such a volume without delay. It may be the case that Nietzsche will be read in his entirety again, though I doubt it; but, in any event, such a volume as I have in mind would serve either to reintroduce him or handsomely to bury the mortal part of him.

I cannot, however, really believe that Nietzsche is about to be read, as never before, in Germany. Dr. Levy has assured us, on the report of a Berlin bookseller, that this was indicated in the sales of Nietzsche in Germany; but the wish was father to the deduction from the very small fact. Nietzsche was, before anything else, a great culture-hero; as a critic of art he has been surpassed by no man. But is there any appeal in culture to a Germany situated as Germany is to-day? I am here only a literary _causeur_. With the dinosaurs and other monsters of international politics I cannot be supposed to be on familiar terms. My opinion, nevertheless, based upon my own material, is that Germany is most unlikely to resume the pursuit of culture where she interrupted it after 1870, or, indeed, to pursue culture at all. And the reason for my opinion is that Russia is too close at hand, too accessible, and, above all, too tempting to German cupidity. Think what the proximity to Germany—to a Germany headed off from the Western world—of a commercially succulent country like Russia really means. Germans are human, even if they are not sub-human, and the temptation of an El Dorado at their doors will prove to be more seductive than the cry from the muezzin to come to culture, come to culture. Nietzsche on the one side calling them to spiritual conquests will be met by the big bagmen calling them, on the other side, to commercial conquests. Who can doubt which appeal will be the stronger? Germany refused to attend to Nietzsche after 1870, when he spoke to them as one alive; they are less likely to listen to a voice from the dead after 1918. On second thoughts, I should advise Dr. Oscar Levy to publish his volume in Germany first. For there he would show by one satiric touch that no country needed it so much.

THE END OF FICTION.—Fiction nowadays, we are told, is not what it used to be. We are told that it is the modern university. It is certainly a very obliging medium. But on this very account it is as delusive as it is obliging. It receives impressions easily, readily adapts itself to every kind of material, and assumes at the word of command any and every mood. But precisely because it does these things, the effects it produces are transient. Lightly come, lightly go; and if, as has been said, fiction is the modern reader’s university, it is a school in which he learns everything and forgets everything. Modern as I am, and hopeful as I am of modernity, I cannot think that the predominance of fiction, even of such fiction as is written to-day, is a good sign; and when we see that it leads nowhere, that the people who read much of it never read anything else, and that it is an intellectual _cul-de-sac_, our alarm at the phenomenon is the greater. What kind of minds do we expect to develop on a diet of forty parts fiction to two of all other forms of literature? Assuming the free libraries to be the continuation schools of the public, what is their value if the only lessons taken in them are the lessons of fiction? I will not dwell on the obvious discouragement the figures are to every serious _writer_, for the effect on the readers must be worse.

THE CRITERIA OF CULTURE.—The suppression of the display of feeling, or, better, the control of the display of feeling, is the first condition of thought, and only those who have aimed at writing with studied simplicity, studied lucidity, and studied detachment realise the amount of feeling that has to be trained to run quietly in harness. The modern failure (as compared with the success of the Greeks) to recognise feeling as an essential element of lucidity and the rest of the virtues of literary form is due to an excess of fiction. Just because fiction expresses everything it really impresses nothing. Its feeling evaporates as fast as it exudes. The sensation, nevertheless, is pleasant, for the reader appears to be witnessing genuine feeling genuinely expressing itself; and he fails to remember that what is true of a person is likely to be true of a book, that the more apparent, obvious, and demonstrated the feelings, the more superficial, unreal, and transient they probably are. As a matter of cold-blooded fact, it has been clearly shown during the course of the war that precisely our most “passionate” novelists have been our least patriotic citizens. I name no names, since they are known to everybody.

Culture I define as being, amongst other things, a capacity for subtle discrimination of words and ideas. Epictetus made the discrimination of words the foundation of moral training, and it is true enough that every stage of moral progress is indicated by the degree of our perception of the meaning of words. Tell me what words have a particular interest for you, and I will tell you what class of the world-school you are in. Tell me what certain words mean for you and I will tell you what you mean for the world of thought. One of the most subtle words, and one of the key-words of culture, is simplicity. Can you discriminate between natural simplicity and studied simplicity, between Nature and Art? In appearance they are indistinguishable, but in reality, they are æons apart; and whoever has learned to distinguish between them is entitled to regard himself as on the way to culture. Originality is another key-word, and its subtlety may be suggested by a paradox which was a commonplace among the Greeks; namely, that the most original minds strive to conceal their originality, and that the master-minds succeed. Contrast this counsel of perfect originality with the counsels given in our own day, in which the aim of originality is directed to appearing original—you will be brought, thereby, face to face with still another key-idea of Culture, the relation of Appearance to Reality. All these exercises in culture are elementary, however, in comparison with the master-problem of “disinterestedness.” No word in the English language is more difficult to define or better worth attempting to define. Somewhere or other in its capacious folds it contains all the ideas of ethics, and even, I should say, of religion. The _Bhagavad Gita_ (to name only one classic) can be summed up in the word. Duty is only a pale equivalent of it. I venture to say that whoever has understood the meaning of “disinterestedness” is not far off understanding the goal of human culture.

THE FATE OF SCULPTURE.—The art-critic of _The Times_ having remarked that “the public hardly looks at the sculpture in the Academy, or outside it,” Mr. John Tweed, an eminent sculptor himself, has now uttered a public lamentation in agreement with him. Sculpture to-day, he says, is an art without an audience; and he quotes a Belgian artist who told him what heroes our contemporary sculptors in this country must be to continue their work in the face of a unanimous neglect. It is not certain, however, that the sculptors of to-day do not thoroughly well deserve the fate to which they now find themselves condemned. In the economy of the arts, or, if this phrase be preferred, in the strategy of æsthetics, nothing is more necessary from time to time in each of the arts than an iconoclast—by which I indicate not a destroyer simply, but a creator of new forms. Such a pioneer is of necessity a little rude to his immediate predecessors and to such of his contemporaries as are sheep. But in the end, nevertheless, if they will only accept and recognise him, he will revive their art for them. But in the case of sculpture the two such iconoclasts as have recently appeared—Mr. Epstein and the late Gaudier-Brzeska—were instantly set upon, not by the public, but by their contemporaries, and walled within a neglect far more complete than the neglect sculpture in general has received. Just when it appeared that they might be about to reawaken public interest in carven forms, the rest of the sculptors hurried to silence them, with the consequence that at this moment there is literally nobody engaged in sculpture in whom the intelligent public takes the smallest interest. As sculptors have treated sculpture, so the public now treats sculptors. It is a pretty piece of karma.

THE TOO CLEVER.—Neglect means nothing very much; success is a matter of time for everything that is really classic. On the other hand, deliberately to incur neglect by writing for the few involves the further risk of more and more deserving it. Whoever makes a boast of writing for a coterie sooner or later finds himself writing for a coterie of a coterie, and at last for himself alone. It cannot be otherwise. As the progress of the classic is from the one to the many, the progress of the romantic is from the many to the one; and the more sincerely the latter is a romantic, the sooner he arrives at his journey’s end. The involution of aim thus brought about is obvious already in the succession of works of the chief writers of the _Little Review_. They grow cleverer and cleverer, and, at the same time, more and more unintelligible. I am staggered by the cleverness of such a writer as Mr. Wyndham Lewis, and a little more so at the cleverness of Mr. James Joyce. But in the case of both of them I find myself growing more and more mystified, bewildered, and repelled. Is it, I ask, that they do not write for readers like me? Then their circle must be contracting, for I am one of many who used to read them with pleasure. And who are they gaining while losing us? Are their new readers more intensive if fewer, and better worth while for their quality than we were for our numbers? But I decline to allow the favourable answers. The fact is that the writers of the _Little Review_ are getting too clever even for coterie, and will soon be read only by each other, or themselves.

A characteristic example is to be found in the opening chapter of Mr. James Joyce’s new novel, _Ulysses_. This is how it begins:—

Stately, plump Buck Milligan came from the stairway, bearing
a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently
behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and
intoned....

Now it is clear that such a passage has not been written without a great deal of thought, and if thought were art, it might be called an artistic passage. But thought is not only not art, but the aim of art is to conceal thought. In its perfection art is indistinguishable from nature. The conspicuous thoughtfulness of the passage I have quoted is, therefore, an objection to it; and the more so since it provokes an inspection it is unable to sustain. Challenged to “think” about what the writer is saying, the reader at once discovers that the passage will not bear thinking about. He asks, for instance, _whence_ Buck Milligan came from the staircase; _how_ he managed to balance a crossed mirror and razor on a bowl’s edge—and, particularly, while bearing them aloft; and what mild air it was that sustained the tails of a man’s dressing-gown. To these questions deliberately provoked by the ostentatious care of the writer there is either no answer or none forthcoming without more thought than the detail is worth. The passage, in short, suffers from being aimed at a diminishing coterie; and it succeeds in satisfying, I imagine, only the writer of it who is alone in all its secrets. Mr. James Joyce had once the makings of a great writer—not a popular writer, but a classic writer. To become what he was he needed to be opened out, to be simplified, to conceal his cleverness, to write more and more for the world. But first in the _Egoist_ and now in the _Little Review_ he has been directed to cultivate his faults, his limitations, his swaddling clothes of genius, with the result that he is in imminent danger of brilliant provincialism.