Chapter C: K. S. M (5)

The fact remains that by the common consent of mankind lyrics alone--even the lyrics of a Heine, a Herrick, or a Burns--will not give a man rank with the greatest poetic artists. It may be that in Poe's sense a work of thousands of lines, which maintains the highest level of poetry, is impossible; that what Professor Quiller-Couch calls "the Capital Difficulty of Verse" is insuperable: but this does not invalidate the claim of the _Iliad_ or _Paradise Lost_ to be considered greater than _Lycidas_ or the songs of Meleager. That they share in some measure the defects of _The Purple Island_ and _Pharonnida_ does not prevent _The Fairy Queen_ and _Faust_ being the greatest of their respective authors' works. From a poet as from another we want something beyond "jewels five foot long," the loveliest impressions of the most beautiful particular scenes, reflections of moods, verbal chamber music, momentary vision, sensibility, song. By the common consent of mankind the greatest things in the world are those works which, while full of beautiful details and informed with the poetic spirit, are moulded to a larger conception and attempt a larger picture of the Universe, of the destiny of man, or of the moving life of the world. We can, therefore, to some extent sympathise with those, however broody and disgruntled, who, when they meet a volume of new and exquisite lyrics, complain that the author has not written an epic or a tragedy. Is it likely that the present imaginative revival, assuming it to exist, will produce tragedies or epics, or works on the scale of such?

* * * * *

To us it is difficult to believe that it will not: unless the nervous unrest, the absence of leisure and of the inclination so to employ leisure, are worse even than we suppose them to be. We see in much of the work of the younger men a vigour, a passion, a catholicity of interest, a zest for all life, that nothing but the most ambitious tasks could satisfy. But when we ask of what nature such works are likely to be we cannot answer. This one observation may be made: the demand for long poems is commonly coupled with a demand for doctrine. The poets are to add to scientific knowledge or to contribute new notions towards political or moral development: they are to dogmatise, to enlighten, to direct. Well, poets have done such things. But not all poets have considered it their business to be religious teachers, political liberators, or contentious intellectuals. The question: What did Shakespeare stand for? is disputed to this day. They have read many theories into him but got very few out of him. That he admired fidelity, hated cruelty, believed in honour, and loved his country, might be postulated of him; but the truths he stated there were old truths, and he stated them only incidentally: he did not write his plays with the primary object of illustrating principles, above all principles invented by himself. Milton has been called the poet of Puritanism, and Shelley the poet of Liberalism, but there is no "ism" for Shakespeare, and a very, very small one for Keats. The very persons who most insistently demand "ismatic" poetry are most contemptuous of the didactic, informative and disputatious parts of the works of the late Lord Tennyson, who began as a pure Keatsiam poet. _Non omnia possumus omnes_: and, over and above this, it is most important to remember that poets, like other men, are affected by the intellectual conditions of their own times. If there is a clear tendency some of the poets will be caught up in it. But the men are very rare who generate their own spiritual revelations in some secluded corner of an antipathetic world. Wordsworth and Shelley were what is called "philosophic poets," but their age was the age of Rousseau and Godwin, of the Libertarian movements that were part cause and part effect of the French Revolution. If the human spirit is moving in one definite direction at this moment we can only say that we do not know what that is. A generation of thorough and often conscienceless scepticism, followed by a breakdown of civilisation, has produced a mental and moral chaos, a welter of doubt amid which numbers of the doubters make random and mutually contradictory affirmations. Something concrete will, if the race is to live, emerge; but we are not yet in a position to see it. Nor are we, as mere holders up of the mirror of nature, in a position as yet to see the vast events in our own material world. For the great philosophic poem we have probably still many years to wait; for the epic of the German war we may have a century to wait; for a great drama we may arguably, owing to the peculiar conditions of the theatre, have to wait for a generally accepted scale of values which does not at present exist. But the imaginative temper is abroad, and the next generation may be a great era in English literature.

LITERARY INTELLIGENCE

The announcement of a new and especially sumptuous edition of the works of Mr. Thomas Hardy, to be known as the _Mellstock_, reminds us that there are other authors to whom the same process might be applied with equal benefit to themselves and to their readers. The collected edition presents a writer's career in an orderly shape and in proper perspective: it first permits a sober and probable judgment to be passed on his achievement. We understand that the works of Mr. Joseph Conrad will shortly be collected and issued as a whole; and this will certainly reveal in a definite manner what is now vaguely felt as to his greatness. We believe also that a definitive issue of the writings of Mr. Max Beerbohm is in contemplation. It is to be hoped that it will be found possible to include the full list of his drawings, in some shape not too incompatible with the rest of the volumes. The _Collected Poems_ of Mr. Walter de la Mare have been announced as in preparation; and this will, we think, mark a definite stage in the career of a poet whose real value is not yet fully appreciated. But there are authors, concerning whom no announcement is made, who might be added to the list with advantage. What might be called "selected-collected" editions of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton would very likely secure for these writers a much higher place in contemporary literature than current opinion is always ready to give them.

* * * * *

Mr. Chesterton will shortly start for the Holy Land. He intends to write a book about it. The book may, and probably will, be his best, for obvious reasons. It is commonly remarked even by those who think him one of the greatest natural geniuses and, at bottom, one of the wisest men of our time that he has never yet written the books of which he is capable. His best books, such as _The Ballad of the White Horse_ and _A Short History of England_, are, for all their fine qualities, too slight to give his powers full room for display. As a rule, though he cannot be accused of a lack of energy, he has seemed never to put into a whole book that last effort which is necessary if a work is to be completely satisfactory; he has bothered too little, content to waste his imaginative largesse on hastily-written romances and polemical articles. How good _The Flying Inn_ might have been had a little more trouble been taken with it! In Palestine, away from politics and journalism, with a new and romantic landscape around him, in the home of our religion and on the fields of the Crusades, he may provide the last answer to those who do not see an artist in him.

* * * * *

Mr. Percy Lubbock's edition of Henry James's letters will, it is expected, be published in the spring. Mr. Edmund Gosse, with the letters as a starting-point, has written his memories of James. These will be published, in two instalments, in the LONDON MERCURY.

* * * * *

It is five years since James Elroy Flecker died and over three since his _Collected Poems_ were published. Some of his other literary remains will probably appear this year. There will be a collected volume of prose studies and critical articles, and another volume containing his play _Hassan_, which is awaiting production by Mr. Basil Dean. Some of those who have read this play say that it is the best tragedy since Shakespeare. The claim is not so large a one as it may appear at first sight. There are Ford and Webster. There is _Venice Preserved_ and there is _The Cenci_, which last is not a great acting play, though it has magnificent scenes in it and contains sublime poetry. He who reflects on the history of the English drama since the age of Elizabeth and James I will be surprised at the paucity of plays of permanent interest, other than comedies, that have been produced.

* * * * *

Monsieur Yves Delage has presented before the Académie des Sciences a most interesting note by Monsieur V. Galippe on micro-organisms in paper. It was, of course, known that paper-making materials of all kinds abounded with these low forms of life, but it was generally assumed that they were destroyed by the chemicals and heat employed during the processes of manufacture. Monsieur Galippe's exhaustive experiments prove that this is not the case, and, moreover, the micro-organisms retain their vitality even in printing paper, apparently irrespective of the lapse of time. Ovoid bacilli were found both free in the mass and in the fibres of papers of all ages.

The method of examination employed was the following: The paper was reduced to fragments and steeped in sterilised distilled water, being frequently stirred. The paper was then dried and again steeped for several hours in sterilised water saturated with ether. After once more drying, cultures were taken from the paper.

Eighteenth-century paper thus treated gave positive results within twenty-four hours, microscopic examination revealing large numbers of rodlike organisms as well as ovoid diplo-bacilli. A leaf from a printed book of 1496 gave a quantity of large micrococci, those from the mass being endowed with movement, and those from the fibre remaining immobile, though preserving the faculty of multiplication. Old Chinese manuscripts and Egyptian papyri dating back ten centuries gave similar results. It is to be noted that exposure to light and air does not appear to have the slightest influence on these organisms.

Although the bibliophile is more particularly concerned in problems relating to fox-marks and the ravages of the borer insect, nevertheless these experiments are of great interest. These investigations, if carried further, may well furnish some explanation of the processes leading to the ageing of paper. From such a vantage-point the technologist might possibly go forward to discover a palliative against the decay of documents and printed paper. Pessimists would probably consider this a doubtful blessing, but, on the whole, it would prove a great boon.

POETRY

_A Glimpse from the Train_

At nine in the morning there passed a church,
At ten there passed me by the sea,
At twelve a town of smoke and smirch,
At two a forest of oak and birch,
And then, on a platform, she.

Her I could see, though she saw not me:
I queried, "Get out to her do I dare?"
But I kept my seat in my search for a plea,
And the wheels moved on. O could it but be
That I had alighted there!

THOMAS HARDY

_Tarantella_

Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of the tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the dark of the vine verandah)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
Who hadn't got a penny,
And who weren't paying any,
And the hammer at the doors and the Din?
And the Hip! Hop! Hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the twirl and the swirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of the clapper to the spin
Out and in----
And the Ting, Tong, Tang of the Guitar!
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?

Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar:
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the Halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground.
No sound:
Only the boom
Of the far Waterfall like Doom.

H. BELLOC

_Lines Written in Gallipoli_[8]

[8] _The author of this poem, a Fellow of All Souls, went
out to Gallipoli in the Royal Naval Division with
Charles Lister, Rupert Brooke, and Denis Browne. He
was afterwards killed in France._

I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die,
I ask and cannot answer
If otherwise wish I.

Fair broke the day this morning
Against the Dardanelles,
The breeze blew soft, the morn's cheeks
Were cold as cold sea shells.

But other shells are waiting
Across the Ægean sea,
Shrapnel and high explosive,
Shells and hells for me.

O Hell of ships and cities,
Hell of men like me,
Fatal second Helen,
Why must I follow thee?

Achilles came to Troyland,
And I to Chersonese:
He turned from wrath to battle,
And I from three days' peace.

Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knowest and I know not,
So much the happier I.

I will go back this morning
From Imbros over the sea.
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and shout for me.

PATRICK SHAW-STEWART

_November_

As I walk the misty hill
All is languid, fogged and still;
Not a note of any bird,
Nor any motion's hint is heard
Save from soaking thickets round
Trickle or water's rushing sound,
And from ghostly trees the drip
Of runnel dews or whispering slip
Of leaves, which in a body launch
Listlessly from the stagnant branch,
To strew the marl, already strown
With litter sodden as its own.

A rheum, like blight, hangs on the briers,
And from the clammy ground suspires
A sweet frail sick autumnal scent
Of stale frost furring weeds long spent,
And wafted on, like one who sleeps,
A feeble vapour hangs or creeps,
Exhaling on the fungus mould
A breath of age, fatigue and cold.

Oozed from the bracken's desolate track,
By dark rains havocked and drenched black,
A fog about the coppice drifts
Or slowly thickens up and lifts
Into the moist despondent air.

Mist, grief, and stillness everywhere....

And in me, too, there is no sound
Save welling as of tears profound
Where in me cloud, grief, stillness reign,
And an intolerable pain
Begins.

Rolled on as in a flood there come
Memories of childhood, boyhood, home
And that which, sudden, pangs me most,
Thought of the first-beloved, long lost,
Too easy lost! My cold lips frame
Tremulously the familiar name,
Unheard of her upon my breath:
"Elizabeth! Elizabeth!"

No voice answers on the hill.
All is shrouded, sad and still ...
Stillness, fogged brakes and fog on high.
Only in me the waters cry
Who mourn the hours now slipped for ever.
Hours of boding, joy and fever,
When we loved, by chance beguiled,
I a boy and you a child;
Child! But with an angel's air.
Astonished, eager, unaware,
Or elfin, wandering with grace
Foreign to any fireside race;
And with a gaiety unknown
In the light feet and hair back-blown;
And with a sadness yet more strange
In meagre cheeks which knew to change
Or faint or fired more swift than sight,
And forlorn hands and lips pressed white,
And fragile voice and head downcast
To hide tears, lifted at the last
To speed with one pale smile the wise
Glance of the grey immortal eyes.

How strange it was that we should dare
Compound a miracle so rare
As, twixt this pace and Time's next pace,
Each to discern th' elected's face;
Yet stranger that the high sweet fire,
In hearts nigh foreign to desire,
Could burn, sigh, weep and burn again,
As oh, it never has since then!
Most strange of all that we so young
Dared learn but would not speak love's tongue,
Love pledged but in the reveries
Of our sad and dreaming eyes....

Now upon such journey bound me,
Grief, disquiet and stillness round me,
As bids me where I cannot tell,
Turn I and sigh, unseen, farewell:
Breathe the name as soft as mist,
Lips, which nor kissed her nor were kissed,
And again--a sigh, a death--
"Elizabeth! Elizabeth!"

No voice answers, but the mist
Glows for a moment amethyst
Ere the hid sun dissolves away,
And dimness, growing dimmer gray,
Hides all ... until I nothing see
But the blind walls enclosing me,
And no sound and no motion hear
But the vague water throbbing near,
Sole voice upon the darkening hill,
Where all is blank and dead and still.

ROBERT NICHOLS

_Draft for "A First and Last Song"_

Deep in the harvest of the night the sickle of the moon is
sweeping,
We have sowed, O my desire, now is the time for reaping!

Turn not your face, O heart, give not your love
To aught of heaven or the stars above,
These dauntless robbers purloined long ago
The crown of Kaous, the belt of Kai Khosro;
And what have we to search for in the skies
Who have the blue pavilion of your eyes?
Or what need of the gold gates flung apart
Having the crimson portals of your heart?
... So shall it be when some day by and by
You mount the glitt'ring ramparts of the sky,
Loud to the wheeling heavens you shall boast:
"O sun and moon and Pleiads at the most
You're worth a wisp of barley or of straw
Unseen, unheeded, on Love's threshing floor:
And God the praises that your angels sing
Are all celestial but can never bring
The simple wonder of a mortal's doubt
Upon those faces upturned and devout
That every blessing of Your work recall,
Nor ever need to ask: What means it all?"

Be peace! The hour is passing. Here or there
The curtain swings to lay life's secret bare.
Ah, when the dawn of ending breaks around,
Be it that in Love's garden I am found.

To immortality I leave but this:
Your head reclining in a swoon of bliss,
Your hand uplifted to pour out the wine,
The minstrels singing this one song of mine.

COLERIDGE KENNARD

_A Country Mood_

Take now a country mood,
Resolve, distil it:
Nine Acre swaying alive,
June flowers that fill it,

Spicy sweetbriar bush,
The uneasy wren
Fluttering from ash to birch
And back again,

Milkwort on its low stem,
Spread hawthorn-tree,
Sunlight patching the wood,
A hive-bound bee,

Girls riding nim-nim-nim.
Ladies, trot-trot,
Gentlemen hard at gallop,
Shouting, steam-hot.

Now over the rough turf
Bridles go jingle,
And there's a well-loved pool
By Fox's Dingle

Where Sweetheart, my brown mare,
Old Glory's daughter,
May loll her leathern tongue
In snow-cool water.

ROBERT GRAVES

_Scirocco_

Out of that high pavilion
Where the sick, wind-harassed sun
In the whiteness of the day
Ghostly shone and stole away--
Parchèd with the utter thirst
Of unnumbered Libyan sands,
Thou, cloud-gathering spirit, burst
Out of arid Africa
To the tideless sea, and smote
On our pale, moon-coolèd lands
The hot breath of a lion's throat.

And that furnace-heated breath
Blew into my placid dreams
The heart of fire from whence it came:
Haunt of beauty and of death
Where the forest breaks in flame
Of flaunting blossom, where the flood
Of life pulses hot and stark,
Where a wing'd death breeds in mud
And tumult of tree-shadowed streams--
Black waters, desolately hurled
Through the uttermost, lost, dark,
Secret places of the world.

There, O swift and terrible
Being, wast thou born; and thence,
Like a demon loosed from hell,
Stripped with rending wings the dense
Echoing forests, till their bowed
Plumes of trees like tattered cloud
Were toss'd and torn, and cried aloud
As the wood were rack'd with pain:
Thence thou freed'st thy wings, and soon
From the moaning, stricken plain
In whorlèd eagle-soarings rose
To melt the sun-defeating snows
Of the Mountains of the Moon,
To dull their glaciers with fierce breath,
To slip the avalanches' rein,
To set the laughing torrents free
On the tented desert beneath,
Where men of thirst must wither and die
While the vultures stare in the sun's eye;
Where slowly sifting sands are strown
On broken cities, whose bleaching bones
Whiten in moonlight stone on stone

Over their pitiful dust thy blast
Passed in columns of whirling sand,
Leapt the desert and swept the strand
Of the cool and quiet sea,
Gathering mighty shapes, and proud
Phantoms of monstrous, wave-born cloud,
And northward drove this panoply
Till the sky seemed charging on the land....

Yet, in that plumèd helm, the most
Of thy hot power was cooled or lost,
So that it came to me at length,
Faint and tepid and shorn of strength,
To shiver an olive-grove that heaves
A myriad moonlight-coloured leaves,
And in the stone-pine's dome set free
A murmur of the middle sea:
A puff of warm air in the night
So spent by its impetuous flight
It scarce invades my pillar'd closes,--
To waft their fragrance from the sweet
Buds of my lemon-coloured roses
Or strew blown petals at my feet:
To kiss my cheek with a warm sigh
And in the tired darkness die.

FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG

Anacapri

THE CREATURES

By WALTER DE LA MARE

It was the ebbing light of evening that recalled me out of my story to a consciousness of my whereabouts. I dropped my little red book to my knee and glanced out of the narrow and begrimed oblong window. We were skirting the eastern coast of cliffs, to the very edge of which a ploughman, stumbling along behind his two great horses, was driving the last of his dark furrows. In a cleft far down between the rocks a cold and idle sea was soundlessly laying its frigid garlands of foam. I stared over the flat stretch of waters, then turned my head, and looked with a kind of suddenness into the face of my one fellow-traveller.

He had entered the carriage, all but unheeded, yet not altogether unresented, at the last country station. His features were a little obscure in the fading daylight that hung between our four narrow walls, but apparently his eyes had been fixed on my face for some little time.

He narrowed his lids at this unexpected confrontation, jerked back his head, and cast a glance out of his mirky glass at the bit of greenish-bright moon that was struggling into its full brilliance above the dun, swelling uplands.

"It's a queer experience, railway-travelling," he began abruptly, in a low, almost deprecating voice, drawing his hand across his eyes. "One is cast into a passing privacy with a fellow-stranger and then is gone." It was as if he had been patiently awaiting the attention of a chosen listener.

I nodded, looking at him. "_That_ privacy, too," he ejaculated, "all that!" My eyes turned towards the window again: bare, thorned, black January hedge, inhospitable salt coast, flat waste of northern water. Our engine-driver promptly shut off his steam, and we slid almost noiselessly out of sight of sky and sea into a cutting.

"It's a desolate country," I ventured to remark.

"Oh, yes, 'desolate'!" he echoed a little wearily. "But what always frets me is the way we have of arrogating to ourselves the offices of judge, jury, and counsel all in one. For my part, I never forget it--the futility, the presumption. It _leads_ nowhere. We drive in--into all this silence, this--this 'forsakenness,' this dream of a world between her lights of day and night time. Consciousness!... What itching monkeys men are!" He recovered himself, swallowed his indignation with an obvious gulp. "As if," he continued in more chastened tones--"as if that other gate were not for ever ajar, into God knows what of peace and mystery." He stooped forward, lean, darkened, objurgatory. "Don't we _make_ our world? Isn't _that_ our blessed, our betrayed responsibility?"

I nodded, and ensconced myself, like a dog in straw, in that basest of all responses to a rare, even if eccentric, candour--caution.

"Well," he continued, a little weariedly, "that's the indictment. Small wonder if it will need a trumpet to blare us into that last 'Family Prayers.' Then perhaps a few solitaries--just a few--will creep out of their holes and fastnesses, and draw mercy from the merciful on the cities of the plain. The buried talent will shine none the worse for the long, long looming of its napery spun from dream and desire.

"Years ago--ten, fifteen, perhaps--I chanced on the queerest specimen of this order of the 'talented.' Much the same country, too. This"--he swept his glance out over a now invisible sea--"this is a kind of dwarf replica of it. More naked, smoother, more sudden and precipitous, more 'forsaken,' moody. Alone! The trees are shorn there, as if with monstrous shears, by the winter gales. The air's salt. It is a country of stones and emerald meadows, of green, meandering, aimless lanes, of farms set in their clifts and valleys like rough time-bedimmed jewels, as if by some angel of humanity, wandering between dark and daybreak.

"I was younger then--in body: the youth of the mind is for men of an age--yours, maybe, and mine. Even then, even at that, I was sickened of crowds, of that unimaginable London--swarming wilderness of mankind in which a poor lost thirsty dog from Otherwhere tastes first the full meaning of that idle word 'forsaken.' 'Forsaken by whom?' is the question I ask myself now. Visitors to my particular paradise were few then--as if, my dear sir, we were not all of us visitors, visitants, revenants, on earth, panting for time in which to tell and share our secrets, roving in search of the marks that shall prove our quest not vain, not unprecedented, not a treachery. But let that be.

"I would start off morning after morning, bread and cheese in pocket, from the bare old house I lodged in, bound for that unforeseen nowhere for which the heart, the fantasy aches. Lingering hot noondays would find me stretched in a state half-comatose, yet vigilant, on the close-flowered turf of the fields or cliffs, on the sun-baked sands and rocks, soaking in the scene and life around me like some pilgrim chameleon. It was in hope to lose my way that I would set out. How shall a man find his way unless he lose it? Now and then I succeeded. That country is large, and its land and sea marks easily cheat the stranger. I was still of an age, you see, when my 'small door' was ajar, and I planted a solid foot to keep it from shutting. But how could I know what I was after? One just shakes the tree of life, and the rare fruits come tumbling down, to rot for the most part in the lush grasses.

"What was most haunting and provocative in that far-away country was its fleeting resemblance to the country of dream. You stand, you sit, or lie prone on its bud-starred heights, and look down; the green, dispersed, treeless landscape spreads beneath you, with its hollows and mounded slopes, clustering farmstead, and scatter of village, all motionless under the vast wash of sun and blue, like the drop-scene of some enchanted playhouse centuries old. So, too, the visionary bird-haunted headlands, veiled faintly in a mist of unreality above their broken stones and the enormous saucer of the sea.

"You cannot guess there what you may not chance upon, or whom. Bells clash, boom, and quarrel hollowly on the edge of darkness in those breakers. Voices waver across the fainter winds. The birds cry in a tongue unknown yet not unfamiliar. The sky is the hawks' and the stars'. _There_ one is on the edge of life, of the unforeseen, whereas our cities--are not our desiccated jaded minds ever continually pressing and edging further and further away from freedom, the vast unknown, the infinite presence, picking a fool's journey from sensual fact to fact at the tail of that he-ass called Reason? I suggest that in that solitude the spirit within us realises that it treads the outskirts of a region long since called the Imagination. I assert we have strayed, and in our blindness abandoned----"

My stranger paused in his frenzy, glanced out at me from his obscure corner as if he had intended to stun, astonish me with some violent heresy. We puffed out slowly, laboriously, from a "Halt" at which in the gathering dark and moonshine we had for some while been at a standstill. Never was wedding-guest more desperately at the mercy of ancient mariner.

"Well, one day," he went on, lifting his voice a little to master the resounding heart-beats of our steam-engine--"one late afternoon, in my goal-less wanderings, I had climbed to the summit of a steep grass-grown cart-track, winding up dustily between dense, untended hedges. Even then I might have missed the house to which it led, for, hair-pin fashion, the track here abruptly turned back on itself, and only a far fainter footpath led on over the hill-crest. I might, I say, have missed the house and--and its inmates, if I had not heard the musical sound of what seemed like the twangling of a harp. This thin-drawn, sweet, tuneless warbling welled over the close green grass of the height as if out of space. Truth cannot say whether it was of that air or of my own fantasy. Nor did I ever discover what instrument, whether of man or Ariel, had released a strain so pure and yet so bodiless.

"I pushed on and found myself in command of a gorse-strewn height, a stretch of country that lay a few hundred paces across the steep and sudden valley in between. In a V-shaped entry to the left, and sunwards, lay an azure and lazy tongue of the sea. And as my eye slid softly thence and upwards and along the sharp, green horizon line against the glass-clear turquoise of space, it caught the flinty glitter of a square chimney. I pushed on, and presently found myself at the gate of a farmyard.

"There was but one straw-mow upon its staddles. A few fowls were sunning themselves in their dust-baths. White and pied doves preened and cooed on the roof of an outbuilding as golden with its lichens as if the western sun had scattered its dust for centuries upon the large slate slabs. Just that life and the whispering of the wind, nothing more. Yet even at one swift glimpse I seemed to have trespassed upon a peace that had endured for ages; to have crossed the viewless border that divides time from eternity. I leaned, resting, over the gate, and could have remained there for hours, lapsing ever more profoundly into the blessed quietude that had stolen over my thoughts.

"A bent-up woman appeared at the dark entry of a stone shed opposite to me, and, shading her eyes, paused in prolonged scrutiny of the stranger. At that I entered the gate and, explaining that I had lost my way and was tired and thirsty, asked for some milk. She made no reply, but after peering up at me, with something between suspicion and apprehension on her weather-beaten old face, led me towards the house which lay to the left on the slope of the valley, hidden from me till then by plumy bushes of tamarisk.

"It was a low grave house, grey-chimneyed, its stone walls traversed by a deep shadow cast by the declining sun, its dark windows rounded and uncurtained, its door wide open to the porch. She entered the house, and I paused upon the threshold. A deep unmoving quiet lay within, like that of water in a cave renewed by the tide. Above a table hung a wreath of wild flowers. To the right was a heavy oak settle upon the flags. A beam of sunlight pierced the air of the staircase from an upper window.

"Presently a dark long-faced gaunt man appeared from within, contemplating me, as he advanced, out of eyes that seemed not so much to fix the intruder as to encircle his image, as the sea contains the distant speck of a ship on its wide blue bosom of water. They might have been the eyes of the blind; the windows of a house in dream to which the inmate must make something of a pilgrimage to look out upon actuality. Then he smiled, and the long, dark features, melancholy yet serene, took light upon them, as might a bluff of rock beneath a thin passing wash of sunshine. With a gesture he welcomed me into the large, dark-flagged kitchen, cool as a cellar, airy as a belfry, its sweet air traversed by a long oblong of light out of the west.

"The wide shelves of the painted dresser were laden with crockery. A wreath of freshly-gathered flowers hung over the chimney-piece. As we entered, a twittering cloud of small birds, robins, hedge-sparrows, chaffinches fluttered up a few inches from floor and sill and window-seat, and once more, with tiny starry-dark eyes observing me, soundlessly alighted.

"I could hear the infinitesimal _tic-tac_ of their tiny claws upon the slate. My gaze drifted out of the window into the garden beyond, a cavern of clearer crystal and colour than that which astounded the eyes of young Aladdin. Apart from the twisted garland of wild flowers, the shining metal of range and copper candlestick, and the bright-scoured crockery, there was no adornment in the room except a rough frame, hanging from a nail in the wall, and enclosing what appeared to be a faint patterned fragment of blue silk or fine linen. The chairs and table were old and heavy. A low light warbling, an occasional _skirr_ of wing, a haze-like drone of bee and fly--these were the only sounds that edged a quiet intensified in its profundity by the remote stirrings of the sea.

"The house was stilled as by a charm, yet thought within me asked no questions; speculation was asleep in its kennel. I sat down to the milk and bread, the honey and fruit which the old woman laid out upon the table, and her master seated himself opposite to me, now in a low sibilant whisper--a tongue which they seemed to understand--addressing himself to the birds, and now, as if with an effort, raising those strange grey-green eyes of his to bestow a quiet remark upon me. He asked, rather in courtesy than with any active interest, a few questions, referring to the world, its business and transports--_our_ beautiful world--as an astronomer in the small hours might murmur a few words to the chance-sent guest of his solitude concerning the secrets of Uranus or Saturn. There is another, an inexplorable side to the moon. Yet he said enough for me to gather that he, too, was of that small tribe of the aloof and wild to which our cracked old word 'forsaken' might be applied, hermits, clay-matted fakirs, and such-like, the snowy birds that play and cry amid mid-oceanic surges, the living of an oasis of the wilderness, which share a reality only distantly dreamed of by the time-driven, thought-corroded congregations of man.

"Yet so narrow and hazardous I somehow realised was the brink of fellow-being (shall I call it?) which we shared, he and I, that again and again fantasy within me seemed to hover over that precipice Night knows as fear. It was he, it seemed, with that still embracive contemplation of his, with that far-away yet reassuring smile, that kept my poise, my balance. 'No,' some voice within him seemed to utter, 'you are safe; the bounds are fixed; though hallucination chaunt its decoy, you shall not irretrievably pass over. Eat and drink, and presently return to "life."' And I listened, and, like that of a drowsy child in its cradle, my consciousness sank deeper and deeper, stilled, pacified, into the dream amid which, as it seemed, this soundless house of stone now reared its walls.

"I had all but finished my meal when I heard footsteps approaching on the flags without. The murmur of other voices, distinguishably shrill yet guttural, even at a distance, and in spite of the dense stones and beams of the house which had blunted their timbre, had already reached me. Now the feet halted. I turned my head--cautiously, even perhaps apprehensively--and confronted two figures in the doorway.

"I cannot now guess the age of my entertainer. These children--for children they were in face and gesture and effect, though as to form and stature apparently in their last teens--these children were far more problematical. I say 'form and stature,' yet obviously they were dwarfish. Their heads were sunken between their shoulders, their hair thick, their eyes disconcertingly deep-set. They were ungainly, their features peculiarly irregular, as if two races from the ends of the earth had in them intermingled their blood and strangeness, as if rather animal and angel had connived in their creation.

"But if some inward light lay on the still eyes, on the gaunt, sorrowful, quixotic countenance that now was fully and intensely bent on mine, emphatically that light was theirs also. He spoke to them, they answered--in English, my own language, without a doubt: but an English slurred, broken, and unintelligible to me, yet clear as bell, haunting, penetrating, pining as voice of nix or siren. My ears drank in the sound as an Arab parched with desert sand falls on his dried belly and gulps in mouthfuls of crystal water. The birds hopped nearer, as if beneath the rod of an enchanter. A sweet continuous clamour arose from their small throats. The exquisite colours of plume and bosom burned, greened, melted in the level sun-ray, in the darker air beyond.

"A kind of mournful gaiety, a lamentable felicity, such as rings in the cadences of an old folk-song, welled into my heart. I was come back to the borders of Eden, bowed and outwearied, gazing out of dream into dream, homesick, 'forsaken.'

"Well, years have gone by," muttered my fellow-traveller deprecatingly, "but I have not forgotten that Eden's primeval trees and shade.

"They led me out, these bizarre companions, a he and a she, if I may put it as crudely as my apprehension of them put it to me then. Through a broad door they conducted me--if one who leads may be said to be conducted--into their garden. Garden! A full mile long, between undiscerned walls, it sloped and narrowed towards a sea at whose dark unfoamed blue, even at this distance, my eyes dazzled. Yet how can one call that a garden which reveals no ghost of a sign of human arrangement, of human slavery, of spade or hoe?

"Great boulders shouldered up, tessellated, embossed, powdered with a thousand various mosses and lichens, between a flowering greenery of weeds. Wind-stunted, clear-emerald, lichen-tufted trees smoothed and crisped the inflowing airs of the ocean with their leaves and spines, sibilating a thin scarce-audible music. Scanty, rank, and uncultivated fruits hung close their vivid-coloured cheeks to the gnarled branches. It was the harbourage of birds, the small embowering parlour of their house of life, under an evening sky, pure and lustrous as a water-drop. It cried 'Hospital' to the wanderers of the universe.

"As I look back in ever-thinning, nebulous remembrance, on my two companions, hear their voices gutturally sweet and shrill, catch again their being, so to speak, I realise that there was a kind of Orientalism in their effect. Their instant courtesy was not Western, the smiles that greeted me, whenever I turned my head to look back at them, were infinitely friendly, yet infinitely remote. So ungainly, so far from our notions of beauty and symmetry were their bodies and faces, those heads thrust heavily between their shoulders, their disproportioned yet graceful arms and hands, that the children in some of our English villages might be moved to stone them, while their elders looked on and laughed.

"Dusk was drawing near; soon night would come. The colours of the sunset, sucking its extremest dye from every leaf and blade and petal, touched my consciousness even then with a vague fleeting alarm.

"I remember I asked these strange and happy beings, repeating my question twice or thrice, as we neared the surfy entry of the valley upon whose sands a tiny stream emptied its fresh waters--I asked them if it was they who had planted this multitude of flowers, many of a kind utterly unknown to me and alien to a country inexhaustibly rich. 'We wait; we wait!' I think they cried. And it was as if their cry woke echo from the green-walled valleys of the mind into which I had strayed. Shall I confess that tears came into my eyes as I gazed hungrily around me on the harvest of their patience?

"Never was actuality so close to dream. It was not only an unknown country, slipped in between these placid hills, upon which I had chanced in my ramblings. I had entered for a few brief moments a strange region of consciousness. I was treading, thus accompanied, amid a world of welcoming and fearless life--oh, friendly to me!--the paths of man's imagination, the kingdom from which thought and curiosity, vexed scrutiny and lust--a lust it may be for nothing more impious than the actual--had prehistorically proved the insensate means of his banishment. 'Reality,' 'Consciousness': had he for 'the time being' unwittingly, unhappily missed his way? Would he be led back at length to that garden wherein cockatrice and basilisk bask, harmlessly, at peace?

"I speculate now. In that queer, yes, and possibly sinister, company, sinister only because it was alien to me, I did not speculate. In their garden, the familiar was become the strange--'the strange' that lurks in the inmost heart, unburdens its riches in trance, flings its light and gilding upon love, gives heavenly savour to the intemperate bowl of passion, and is the secret of our incommunicable pity. What is yet queerer, these beings were evidently glad of my company. They stumped after me (as might yellow men after some Occidental quadruped never before seen) in merry collusion of nods and wreathed smiles at this perhaps unprecedented intrusion.

"I stood for a moment looking out over the placid surface of the sea. A ship in sail hung phantom-like on the horizon. I pined to call my discovery to its seamen. The tide gushed, broke, spent itself on the bare boulders. I was suddenly cold and alone, and gladly turned back into the garden, my companions instinctively separating to let me pass between them. I breathed in the rare, almost exotic heat, the tenuous, honeyed, almond-laden air of its flowers and birds--gull, mandrake, plover, wagtail, finch, robin, which as I half-angrily, half-sadly realised fluttered up in momentary dismay only at _my_ presence, the embodied spectre of their enemy, man. Man? Then who were these?...

"I lost again a way lost early that morning, as I trudged inland at night. The dark came, warm and starry. I was tired, dejected, exhausted beyond words. That night I slept in a barn and was awakened soon after daybreak by the crowing of cocks. I went out, dazed and blinking into the sunlight, bathed face and hands in a brook near by, and came to a village before a soul was stirring. So I sat under a thrift-cushioned, thorn-crowned wall in a meadow, and once more drowsed off and fell asleep. When again I awoke, it was ten o'clock. The church clock in its tower knelled out its strokes, and I went into an inn for food.

"A corpulent, blonde woman, kindly and hospitable, with a face comfortably resembling her own sow's, that yuffed and nosed in at the open door as I sat on my stool, served me with what I called for. I described--not without some vanishing shame, as if it were a treachery--my farm, its whereabouts.

"Her small blue eyes 'pigged' at me with a fleeting expression which I failed to translate. The name of the farm, it appeared, was Trevarras. 'And did you see any of the Creatures?' she asked me in a voice not entirely her own. 'The Creatures'! I sat back for an instant and stared at her; then realised that Creature was the name of my host, and Maria and Christus (though here her dialect may have deceived me) the names of my two gardeners. She spun an absurd story, so far as I could tack it together and make it coherent. Superstitious stuff about this man who had wandered in upon the shocked and curious inhabitants of the district and made his home at Trevarras--a stranger and pilgrim, a 'foreigner,' it seemed, of few words, dubious manners, and both uninformative.

"Then there was something (she placed her two fat hands, one of them wedding-ringed, on the zinc of the bar-counter, and peered over at me, as if I were a delectable 'wash'), then there was something about a woman 'from the sea.' In a 'blue gown,' and either dumb, inarticulate, or mistress of only a foreign tongue. She must have lived in sin, moreover, those pig's eyes seemed to yearn, since the children were 'simple,' 'naturals'--as God intends in such matters. It was useless. One's stomach may sometimes reject the cold sanative aerated water of 'the next morning,' and my ridiculous intoxication had left me dry but not yet quite sober.

"Anyhow, this she told me, that my blue woman, as fair as flax, had died and was buried in the neighbouring churchyard (the nearest to, though miles distant from, Trevarras). She repeatedly assured me, as if I might otherwise doubt so sophisticated a fact, that I should find her grave there, her 'stone.'

"So indeed I did--far away from the elect, and in a shade-ridden northwest corner of the sleepy, cropless acre: a slab, scarcely rounded, of granite, with but a name bitten out of the dark rough surface, '_Femina Creature_.'"

ON BLAKE AS A PROPHET

By A. CLUTTON-BROCK

Men have always lost their heads over prophets, and prophets have often lost their heads over themselves. The word itself expresses a common misunderstanding. The prophet is not a tipster--if he has any power of foretelling, it is only a part of his wisdom; he is a man in whom the universal man speaks, not the lower or generic or animal universal, but that higher universal to which individuals and societies sometimes attain. You may, of course, disbelieve in it altogether, in which case the prophet is to you merely one who talks nonsense; but he himself is aware of it when it speaks in him, and it makes him vehement, hasty, impatient both of his own medium of language and of all opposition or failure to understand. It is to him an absolute which forces him to utter that, true always and everywhere; but he has to express it in human language, a medium relative to human wants and human conditions. So his expression is always imperfect and cannot be understood except with the goodwill of the hearer. This goodwill he demands, not from egotism, but because he is uttering the universal, and the refusal of it exasperates him. I have piped to you and you have not danced--is always the cry of the prophet. Argument he hates and the dialectic of Dons, because his universal is not to be proved, its convincing power is in itself. It is the truth which, like beauty, is believed when seen; and, if you will not believe it, that is because you refuse to see or hear it. You are like the deaf adder that stoppeth its ears, and you are refusing to see your own truth as well as his; you are refusing to find yourself in the universal. Who are you, says Whitman, that wanted a book to encourage you in your nonsense? Your nonsense is your private opposition to the universal, the obstacle which you set up in yourself to your own wisdom and happiness; and with this the prophet has no patience. He will make no terms with it; he will not attempt a worldly lucidity or even the contrivance of the artist. It is not he who speaks but the universal that speaks in him, often beautifully but careless even of beauty, finding what human words it can; and men must not look this gift-horse in the mouth, must not criticise him, for it is not he who speaks as an individual but--my father that speaketh in me.

So many men, whether they stone the prophet or accept him, misunderstand him always; after they have stoned or ignored him, they worship him as a magician. In the past he was to them one who foretold the future; now they find an equal value in all that he says and does. Any words of his have a biblical authority, and he is the one genuine prophet, compared with whom all others are impostors. They do not know that the chief reason for believing prophets is that they all say the same thing, that this universal of theirs is a real universal, _quod semper_, _quod ubique_, _quod ab omnibus_. When they assert that their particular prophet has a monopoly of the truth, they are depriving him of his chief authority, turning his universal into a particular; and this they do because they will not be at the pains to seek the universal in his works. It must be recognised by its own quality, and every man must recognise it for himself; but they, flinching from the effort of recognition, seek a gospel made authentic by the name of its author; the prophet has said it and it must be true.

Unfortunately the prophet himself often shares this infirmity and believes that he is always a prophet; he becomes a disciple of himself, and sets himself above criticism, not from mere egotism and conceit so much as because he too flinches from the task of discerning his own universal. The prophetic vehemence becomes a habit with him; and he despises the artist's patience and contrivance; he may even believe that he is a prophet because he himself does not clearly understand what he says; he may mistake the automatism, which lies in wait for everyone who constantly practises any art, for the universal speaking in him and imperiously snatching at language to express itself.

Now Blake was artist as well as prophet, a great artist in two arts; but everything conspired to make him confuse the functions of artist and prophet, which indeed are easily confused. A man is helped to understand himself by the understanding of others; and Blake had no one to understand him, as artist or as prophet. His masters were in the past; his own achievements belonged to the future; he lacked that contemporary education which is best worth having. There was no one even for him to talk to, but only a few listeners who were not sure that he was sane. As artist, he was a prophet in the literal sense; he did what men were going to do as well as what they had done long ago. Naturally he believed that, as artist, he was always right, while Reynolds and the other popular ones of his own time were always wrong. He had a blood-feud with them, and was in love with his own work; he believed that the universal, which sometimes possessed him, possessed him always, because his writing and his drawing were unlike those of other men of his time. So he made a myth about himself to express his lack of criticism, namely, that his works were dictated to him by an angel, they were not his, and it was not his business to improve or judge them.

In his own time he was neglected; but now he is subject to the other kind of misunderstanding. He has disciples who are as uncritical of his works as he was, for whom he is always prophet, never artist, or rather an infallible artist because a prophet. They tell us that, if we enjoy his poems as poems or his pictures as pictures, we have not found the key to them. With the key of his symbolism we can enter a sanctuary beyond beauty in which the secrets of the universe are revealed. But they cannot tell us what these secrets are any more than Blake could; and I would rather believe that he told us all he could by the methods proper to a writer, and that the faults of the artist are not the virtues of the prophet; that where in verse that begins beautifully he becomes incoherent, uses catchwords not to be understood except by reference to other writings and often not then, he is himself confusing the artist with the prophet and making the mistake of his disciples.