Chapter V: Part II: Some Contemporaries (1)

1

GEORGE SANTAYANA

Mr Logan Pearsall Smith, for whom most of us have a deep admiration, reads George Santayana because he finds in this philosopher "much writing like that of the older Essayists on large human subjects, which seemed ... more interesting and in many ways more important than anything ... in the works of other contemporary writers ... it has been his aim to reconstruct our modern, miscellaneous, shattered picture of the world, and to build, not of clouds, but of the materials of this common earth, an edifice of thought, a fortress or temple for the modern mind, in which every natural impulse could find, if possible, its opportunity for satisfaction, and every ideal aspiration its shrine and altar."

In a word, then, we should read Mr Santayana because he has a definite philosophy, a rational conception of the world and man's allotted place in it. But what, you will ask, does a modern novelist want with a general philosophy when he has made it his business merely to describe what he observes in the particular lives of individual men and women? To which I would reply that though the philosopher has his eyes steadily turned to the infinite and contemplates eternal values in the round, by the light of reason, the novelist at times likes to turn from transcribing the trivial incidents of everyday life and from probing the characters of men and women to join the philosopher in his serene detachment. What is good for the novelist is good for every man.

Even the business man or the sportsman occasionally thinks of a future life either vividly and with acute misery when he has suffered an irreparable loss or loosely and vaguely when he attends the religious rites of his church. To such men--that is, to all of us who are not philosophers--such a passage as the following acts like a tonic or tests our courage.

"To imagine a second career is a pleasing antidote for ill-fortune: the poor soul wants another chance. But how should a future life be constituted if it is to satisfy this demand, and how long need it last? It would evidently have to go on in an environment closely analogous to earth; I could not, for instance, write in another world the epics which the necessity of earning my living may have stifled here, did that other world contain no time, no heroic struggles, or no metrical language. Nor is it clear that my epics, to be perfect, would need to be quite endless. If what is foiled in me is really poetic genius and not simply a tendency toward perpetual motion, it would not help me if in heaven, in lieu of my dreamt-of epics, I were allowed to beget several robust children. In a word, if hereafter I am to be the same man improved I must find myself in the same world corrected."

In a moment we feel as if the windows were opened for the first time in our minds and the pure air of Reason allowed to circulate in our weak lungs. Such clarity of thought may kill us by its freshness; on the other hand, it may restore us to real health. May not our pathetic clinging to a belief in immortality be only a gross form of selfish terror? The philosopher would raise us to a higher plane of thought.

"What a despicable creature must a man be, and how sunk below the level of the most barbaric virtue, if he cannot bear to live and die for his children, for his art, or for his country...." "Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome...." "Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on any how and in any shape: a spirit with any honour is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all."

"While the primitive and animal side of man may continue to cling to existence at all hazards and to find the thought of extinction intolerable, his reason and finer imagination will build a new ideal on reality better understood, and be content that the future he looks to should be enjoyed by others...."

"The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it."

So we are bidden to follow the advice of Horace:

"He lives happy and master over himself who can say daily, I have lived."

It is this fierce determination to face the truth of things and not to take refuge in comfortable superstitions that endears the philosopher to us and makes us sympathise with his scorn for the irrationality of Browning.

"It [Browning's "philosophy"] is in spirit the direct opposite of the philosophic maxim of regarding the end, of taking care to leave a finished life and a perfect character behind us. It is the opposite, also, of the religious _memento mori_, of the warning that time is short before we go to our account. According to Browning, there is no account: we have an infinite credit ... his notion is simply that the game of life, the exhilaration of action, is inexhaustible ... but it is unmeaning to call such an exercise heaven ... it is a mere euphemism to call this perpetual vagrancy a development of the soul."

Closely related to his thoughts on Immortality are Mr Santayana's caustic comments on fame.

"The highest form of vanity is love of fame. It is a passion easy to deride but hard to understand, and in men who live at all by imagination almost impossible to eradicate. The good opinion of posterity can have no possible effect on our fortunes, and the practical value which reputation may temporarily have is quite absent in posthumous fame.... What comfort would it be to Virgil that boys still read him at school, or to Pindar that he is sometimes mentioned in a world from which everything he loved has departed?" ... But yet the ancients "often identified fame with immortality, a subject on which they had far more rational sentiments than have since prevailed.... Fame consists in the immortality of a man's work, his spirit, his efficacy, in the perpetual rejuvenation of his soul in the world."

The whole essence of Mr Santayana's teaching on this point is that we become a portion of that loveliness which once we made more lovely. It is a wholesome, sanative doctrine this ... it leads us to the belief that if we are butterflies, we have a real immortality in that we have added something to the eternal beauty of the world: if we are beetles ... and are squashed, I take it that one more piece of beastliness is suppressed at our extinction and we ought to be glad at that. Consequently, if we accept his theory of the finitude of life, we are braced up to do our part while we can. We strive to round off each day with the phrase, "I have lived," and we see our immortality in our oneness with the Universe, not in the endless projection of our own feeble personality.

And after the philosophy of life we turn naturally to thoughts on Love.

"Not to believe in love is a great sign of dulness," we read. "It is a true natural religion ... it sanctifies a natural mystery ... it recognises that what it worshipped under a figure was truly the principle of all good. The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations. Love would never take so high a flight unless it sprung from something profound and elementary.... When the generative energy is awakened all that can ever be is virtually called up and made consciously potential; and love yearns for the universe of values.... As a harp, made to vibrate to the fingers, gives some music to the wind, so the nature of man, necessarily susceptible to woman, becomes simultaneously sensitive to other influences, and capable of tenderness toward every object."

And after love, religion.

He adds an all-important corollary to Bacon's well-known axiom that "a little philosophy inclineth men's minds to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."

"When Bacon penned the sage epigram," he continues, "he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them. It would be pitiful indeed if mature reflection bred no better conceptions than those which have drifted down the muddy stream of time, where tradition and passion have jumbled everything together."

I suppose that though most of us have had to listen to an amazing amount of nonsense about immortality and love, on the subject of religion we have rarely been taught anything that was not nonsense. Mr Santayana clears the ground as with a hatchet. We feel after reading him as if we were able to see clearly for the first time.

In _Prosaic Misunderstandings_ he makes us realise precisely what we mean by religion.

"Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretensions to be dealing with matters of fact.... The excellence of religion is due to an idealisation of experience which, while making religion noble if treated as poetry, makes it necessarily false if treated as science.... The mass of mankind is divided into two classes--the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad. The expedient of recognising facts as facts and accepting ideals as ideals, although apparently simple enough, seems to elude the normal human power of discrimination."

"A god is a conceived victory of mind over nature. A visible god is the consciousness of such a victory momentarily attained. The vision soon vanishes, the sense of omnipotence is soon dispelled by recurring conflicts with hostile forces: but the momentary illusion of that realised good has left us with the perennial knowledge of good as an ideal. Therein lies the essence and the function of religion."

Christianity conquered the world because it proclaimed a new poetry, a new ideal and a new God. "The moving power was a fable ... it carried the imagination into a new sphere ... it was a whole world of poetry descended among men."

The Christian drama, he tells us, is a magnificent poetic rendering of the fact that what is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values: while the existence of things must be understood by referring them to their causes, which are mechanical, their functions can only be explained by what is interesting in their results: in other words, by their relation to human nature and to human happiness ... so the whole of Christian doctrine is thus religious and efficacious only when it becomes poetry.

Christian fictions beguiled the intellect but they enlightened the imagination: they made man understand the pathos and nobility of his life, the necessity of discipline, the possibility of sanctity.

And though Mr Santayana would have us accept his dictum that matters of religion should never be matters of controversy, he does not hesitate to become controversial himself over what he calls Protestantism (which he would doubtless say is not a matter of religion at all). He lashes out in no uncertain tones: "It is sentimental, its ritual is meagre and unctuous, it expects no miracles, it thinks optimism akin to piety and regards profitable enterprise and practical ambition as a sort of moral vocation."

It is not surprising in view of what he has to say about the world of politics and religion to find that he expresses relief at being able to turn from them to almost any art, "where what is good is altogether and finally good and what is bad is at least not treacherous: ... how doubly blessed it becomes to find a sphere where limitation is an excellence, where diversity is a beauty, and where every man's ambition is consistent with every other man's and even favourable to it ... with an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colours of a child's eyes." But he ponders upon the rarity of æsthetic feeling. "Men are habitually insensible to beauty ... moralists are much more able to condemn than to appreciate the effects of the arts ... and beauty (in which he finds a hint of happiness) is something indescribable ... it is the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its possibility. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the prevalence of the good."

So we find that in his eyes the value of all art lies in making people happy " ... to discriminate happiness is the very soul of art, which expresses experience without distorting it." The queer thing is that though men ought to pursue happiness, they seldom do so ... by happiness Mr Santayana means friendship, wealth, reputation, power, and influence added to family life. "If, then, artists and poets are unhappy, it is, after all, because happiness does not interest them; they cannot seriously pursue it, because its components are not components of beauty, and being in love with beauty, they neglect and despise those unæsthetic social virtues in the operation of which happiness is found." On the other hand, those who pursue happiness conceived in terms of money, success, respectability and so on miss more often than not that real and fundamental part of happiness which flows from the senses and imagination. "This element is what the love of beauty can add to life: for beauty can also be a cause and a factor of happiness. Yet the happiness of loving beauty is either too sensuous to be stable, or else too ultimate, too sacramental, to be accounted happiness by the worldly mind."

When he descends to particularise upon the arts we are surprised to find that he has nothing to say about painting, and begins with music, music which he calls "essentially useless, as life is: but both lend utility to their conditions ... pure music is pure art. Its extreme abstraction is balanced by its entire spontaneity, and while it has no external significance, it bears no internal curse ... it is the chosen art of a mind to whom the world is still foreign ... it serves to keep alive the conviction that perfection is essentially possible; it reminds us that there are worlds far removed from the actual which are yet living and very near to the heart ..." and so while it is "the purest and most impressive of the arts, it is the least human and instructive of them."

Literature, according to his theory, takes a middle course between music and science and tries to subdue music, which for its purposes would be futile and too abstract, into conformity with general experience, making music thereby significant. Literature "looks at natural things with an incorrigibly dramatic eye, turning them into permanent unities (which they never are) and almost into persons. The literary man is an interpreter and hardly succeeds, as the musician may, without experience and mastery of human affairs. His art is half genius and half fidelity. He needs inspiration ... yet inspiration alone will lead him astray, for his art is relative to something other than its own formal impulse; it comes to clarify the real world, not to encumber it."

He rightly differentiates between the philosopher and the poet when he says that the philosopher in his best moments is a poet, while the poet "has his worst moments when he succeeds in being a philosopher."

"Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's-length.... The first element which the intellect rejects in forming its ideas of things is the emotion which accompanies the perception; and this emotion is the first thing the poet restores. He stops at the image, because he stops to enjoy.... Poetry takes every present passion and every private dream in turn for the core of the universe." He finds that the prosaic rendering of experience has a greater value, if only the experience covers enough human interests: youth and aspiration indulge in poetry ... for "youth, being as yet little fed by experience, can find volume and depth only in the soul; the half-seen, the supra-mundane, the inexpressible, seem to it alone beautiful and worthy of homage.... Mature interests centre on soluble problems and tasks capable of execution ... to dwell, as irrational poets do, on some private experience, on some emotion without representative or ulterior value, seems a waste of time. Fiction becomes less interesting than affairs, and poetry turns into a sort of incompetent whimper, a childish foreshortening of the outspread world."

On the other hand, Mr Santayana finds in the abstractness of prose its great defect. It must convey intelligence, but intelligence clothed in a language that lends the message an intrinsic value and makes it delightful to apprehend apart from its importance in ultimate theory or practice. It is in that measure a fine art ... a poetry "pervasively representative." In a most stimulating little essay on _The Supreme Poet_ the philosopher propounds his ideal for literature. "It might be throughout a work of art. It would become so not by being ornate, but by being appropriate: and the sense of a great precision and justness would come over us as we read or write. It would delight us; it would make us see how beautiful, how satisfying, is the art of being observant, economical, and sincere."

Furthermore, life has a margin of play which might become broader.... "To the art of working well a civilised race would add the art of playing well. To play with nature and make it decorative, to play with the over-tones of life and make them delightful, is a sort of art." The new poet of this double insight would "live in the continual presence of all experience, and respect it: he would at the same time understand nature, the ground of that experience; and he would also have a delicate sense for the ideal echoes of his own passions, and for all the colours of his possible happiness." It is sad to think that this supreme poet is in limbo still, but now that the path has been so clearly indicated for him, are we not justified in thinking that Mr Santayana is merely the herald of his great dawn?

Just as he sees no great poet even in embryo, so he laments the death of all great men:

"A great man need not be virtuous nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive, luminous character ... greatness is spontaneous ... simplicity, trust in some one clear instinct, are essential to it; but the spontaneous variation must be in the direction of some possible sort of order ... how should there be any great heroes, saints, artists, philosophers or legislators in an age when nobody trusts himself ... in an age when the word _dogmatic_ is a term of reproach? Greatness has character and severity, it is deep and sane, it is distinct and perfect. For this reason there is none of it to-day.... A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the mind. One-half the learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour, as Don Quixote did his helmet; deputing it, after a series of catastrophes, to be at last sound and invulnerable. The other half, the naturalists who have studied psychology and evolution, look at life from the outside, and the processes of Nature make them forget her uses."

These are hard words, but who can say that they are undeserved?

Not less scornful is he over our contempt for the intellect. "The degree of intelligence which this age possesses makes it so very uncomfortable that it asks for something less vital, and sighs for what evolution has left behind. In the presence of such cruelly distinct things as astronomy or such cruelly confused things as theology it feels _la nostalgie de la boue_." Instead of freeing their intelligence, our enslaved contemporaries elude it. They cannot rise to a detached contemplation of earthly things; they revert to sensibility: having no stomach for the ultimate, they burrow downwards towards the primitive. "To be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anæmia."

Yet Mr Santayana is not the sort of man to indulge in sweeping denunciations. There is a reverse to this picture of the modern world.

"Without great men and without clear convictions this age is nevertheless very active intellectually: it is studious, empirical, inventive, sympathetic. Its wisdom consists in a certain contrite openness of mind; it flounders, but at least in floundering it has gained a sense of possible depths in all directions."

But our poetry is the poetry of barbarism, because this age has no sense for perfection; its ideals are negative and partial, its moral strength is a blind vehemence. So we get no total vision, no grasp of the whole reality, no capacity for a sane and steady idealisation. In his little essays on Materialism and Morals we find this outspoken philosophy on the subject of war:

"There are panegyrists of war who say that without a periodical bleeding a race decays and loses its manhood. Experience is directly opposed to this shameless assertion. It is war that wastes a nation's wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation. Internecine war, foreign and civil, brought about the greatest set-back which the life of reason has ever suffered; it exterminated the Greek and Italian aristocracies. Instead of being descended from heroes, modern nations are descended from slaves: and it is not their bodies only that show it.... To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love."

But we read a philosopher mainly, I take it, to see how he himself reached his serene height of detached interest in the universe. We who have no philosophic bent fondly imagine that it is only after despairing of instinctive happiness that the philosopher turns his back on the struggle of life with his shout of "Sour Grapes." Reading Mr Santayana will correct this delusion.

"We cannot venerate anyone in whom appreciation is not divorced from desire. And this elevation and detachment of the heart need not follow upon any great disappointment; it is finest and sweetest where it is the gradual fruit of many affections now merged and mellowed into a natural piety. Indeed, we are able to frame our idea of the Deity on no other model.... There is perhaps no more frivolous notion than that a good, once attained, loses all its value.... We turn from a beautiful thing, as from a truth or a friend, only to return incessantly, and with increasing appreciation."

This, then, is the reason why we should read Mr Santayana, that we should clarify our aims, readjust our standards, and increase our capacity for appreciating the beautiful, for this is the royal road to the only happiness which is true, steadfast and eternal.

II

THE POEMS OF FRANCIS BRETT-YOUNG

Read but this one song:

"Why have you stolen my delight
In all the golden shows of spring
When every cherry-tree is white
And in the limes the thrushes sing,

O fickler than the April day,
O brighter than the golden broom,
O blyther than the thrushes' lay,
O whiter than the cherry-bloom,

O sweeter than all things that blow ...
Why have you only left for me
The broom, the cherry's crown of snow,
And thrushes in the linden-tree?"

Is there any need of further reason?

One concedes to that at once a word not often unlocked from one's vocabulary; loveliness is implicit in it, music, harmony, beauty are all there. Alas! that we should have to search among so many heaps of rubble for one rich gem, but this at any rate is well-nigh flawless: for the rest, Mr Brett-Young has approached excellence, achieved haunting lines and oftentimes failed to arouse any emotional feeling at all. He talks of the lovely words that wander through his brain, but they frequently refuse to leave their refuge. He is at his best when he is most simple, as here:

"High on the tufted baobab-tree
To-night a rain-bird sang to me
A simple song, of three notes only,
That made the wilderness more lonely;

For in my brain it echoed nearly,
Old village church bells chiming clearly:
The sweet cracked bells, just out of tune,
Over the mowing grass in June--

Over the mowing grass, and meadows
Where the low sun casts long shadows,
And cuckoos call in the twilight
From elm to elm, in level flight.

Now through the evening meadows move
Slow couples of young folk in love,
Who pause at every crooked stile
And kiss in the hawthorn's shade the while:

Like pale moths the summer frocks
Hover between the beds of phlox,
And old men, feeling it is late,
Cease their gossip at the gate,

Till deeper still the twilight grows,
And night blossometh, like a rose
Full of love and sweet perfume,
Whose heart most tender stars illume.

Here the red sun sank like lead,
And the sky blackened overhead;
Only the locust chirped at me
From the shadowy baobab-tree."

I don't deny that this trick of contrasting unpleasant existing conditions with pleasant conditions that surrounded one's past some time before was part of the stock-in-trade of every so-called war poet. I am not at all concerned to defend, nor am I interested in, the contrast. I merely chronicle the æsthetic pleasure that I derive from verses four and five, though neither of these even approaches perfection. But I do maintain that both the poems I have quoted are worth reading. I do maintain that Mr Brett-Young has the instinct of all true poets: he realises that "Beauty is an armour against fate," "that a lovely word is not an idle thing": he is a true lover of Beauty: listen to his confession of faith:

"Beauty and love are one,
Even when fierce war clashes:
Even when our fiery sun
Hath burnt itself to ashes,
And the dead planets race
Unlighted through blind space,
Beauty will still shine there:
Wherefore, I worship her."

He is, moreover, most successful when he invokes her:

"Whither, O my sweet mistress, must I follow thee?
For when I hear thy distant footfall nearing,
And wait on thy appearing,
Lo! my lips are silent: no words come to me.

Once I waylaid thee in green forest covers,
Hoping that spring might free my lips with gentle fingers;
Alas! her presence lingers
No longer than on the plain the shadow of brown kestrel hovers.

Through windless ways of the night my spirit followed after;--
Cold and remote were they, and there, possessed
By a strange unworldly rest,
Awaiting thy still voice heard only starry laughter.

The pillared halls of sleep echoed my ghostly tread.
Yet when their secret chambers I essayed
My spirit sank, dismayed,
Waking in fear to find the new-born vision fled.

Once indeed--but then my spirit bloomed in leafy rapture--
I loved; and once I looked death in the eyes:
So, suddenly made wise,
Spoke of such beauty as I may never recapture....

Whither, O divine mistress, must I then follow thee?
Is it only in love ... say, is it only in death
That the spirit blossometh,
And words that may match my vision shall come to me?"

It is because of these simple short poems that I like Mr Brett-Young's work: in his more ambitious and longer poems like _Thamar_ he leaves me untouched. He cannot convey in words the mysterious mingled effect that the combined colour, music and movement of the Russian ballet produces on the mind.

Let him remain content with the soft, sweet simplicity of Prothalamion and we shall love him the more:

"When the evening came my love said to me:
Let us go into the garden now that the sky is cool,
The garden of black hellebore and rosemary,
Where wild woodruff spills in a milky pool.

Low we passed in the twilight, for the wavering heat
Of day had waned, and round that shaded plot
Of secret beauty the thickets clustered sweet;
Here is heaven, our hearts whispered, but our lips spake not.

Between that old garden and seas of lazy foam
Gloomy and beautiful alleys of trees arise
With spire of cypress and dreamy beechen dome,
So dark that our enchanted sight knew nothing but the skies.

Veiled with soft air, drench'd in the roses' musk
Or the dusky, dark carnation's breath of clove;
No stars burned in their deeps, but through the dusk
I saw my love's eyes, and they were brimmed with love.

No star their secret ravished, no wasting moon
Mocked the sad transience of those eternal hours:
Only the soft, unseeing heaven of June,
The ghosts of great trees, and the sleeping flowers.

For doves that crooned in the leafy noonday now
Were silent; the night-jar sought his secret covers,
Nor even a mild sea-whisper moved a creaking bough--
Was ever a silence deeper made for lovers?

Was ever a moment meeter made for love?
Beautiful are your closed lips beneath my kiss;
And all your yielding sweetness beautiful--
Oh, never in all the world was such a night as this!"

III

THE POEMS OF IRIS TREE

Iris Tree is worth reading for her vivacity, her hatred of shams, her intellectual fireworks, her simple love of the beautiful, her youthful rebellion, her sense of colour, her harmony, her humour, but most of all for this:

"Many things I'd find to charm you,
Books and scarves and silken socks,
All the seven rainbow colours,
Black and white with 'broidered clocks.
Then a stick of polished whalebone
And a coat of tawny fur,
And a row of gleaming bottles
Filled with rose-water and myrrh.
Rarest brandy of the 'fifties,
Old liqueurs in leather kegs,
Golden Sauterne, copper sherry
And a nest of plovers' eggs.
Toys of tortoise-shell and jasper,
Little boxes cut in jade;
Handkerchiefs of finest cambric,
Damask cloths and dim brocade,
Six musicians of the Magyar,
Madness making harmony;
And a bed austere and narrow
With a quilt from Barbary.
You shall have a bath of amber,
A Venetian looking-glass,
And a crimson-chested parrot
On a lawn of terraced grass.
Then a small Tanagra statue
Found anew in ruins old,
Or an azure plate from Persia,
Or my hair in plaits of gold;
Or my scalp that like an Indian
You shall carry for a purse,
Or my spilt blood in a goblet ...
Or a volume of my verse."

If this doesn't make you rush out and buy her poems, nothing will. It is the topmost level of her achievement, and it is an achievement that even so musical a poet as Walter de la Mare would not be ashamed of having written. Where, I would know, has the love of little material things been so deliciously, so naïvely confessed by any other poet? Listen to her in rebellious mood:

"You preach to me of laws, you tie my limbs
With rights and wrongs and arguments of good,
You choke my song and fill my mouth with hymns,
You stop my heart and turn it into wood.

I serve not God, but make my idol fair
From clay of brown earth, painted bright with blood,
Dressed in sweet flesh and wonder of wild hair
By Beauty's fingers to her changing mood.

The long line of the sea, the straight horizon,
The toss of flowers, the prance of milky feet,
And moonlight clear as grass my great religion,
And sunrise falling on the quiet street.

The coloured crowd, the unrestrained, the gay,
And lovers in the secret sheets of night
Trembling like instruments of music, till the day
Stands marvelling at their sleeping bodies white."

Here, surely, is that love of beauty, finely expressed, which is the first thing we look for in any true poet. She invokes the aid of her "three musketeers of faithful following," Love, Humour and Rebellion, and these three stalwarts never desert her, and one finds oneself wishing that some other poets had had the good sense to recruit the services of such helpful henchmen.

Especially pleasant is it to find that she has not yet outgrown her youthful pessimism: once youth has passed, time cries for self-expression in other ways than these:

"There are songs enough of love, of joy, of grief:
Roads to the sunset, alleys to the moon:
Poems of the red rose and the golden leaf,
Fantastic faery and gay ballad tune.

The long road unto nothing I will sing,
Sing on one note, monotonous and dry,
Of sameness, calmness and the years that bring
No more emotion than the fear to die.

Grey house, grey house and after that grey house,
Another house as grey and steep and still:
An old cat tired of playing with a mouse,
A sick child tired of chasing down the hill."

There are nothing like enough songs of love or of joy, and no one knows that better than Iris Tree, but Youth loves to drench itself in hopeless greyness, if only to run through the whole gamut of human emotions, "just for fun." It is like a child's dressing up in a myriad different costumes:

"I see myself in many different dresses ...
I see myself the child of many races,
Poisoners, martyrs, harlots and princesses;
Within my soul a thousand weary traces
Of pain and joy and passionate excesses...."

Much more significant of maturity is her bizarre _Sonnet for Would-be Suicides_ (that is my title for it, not hers):

"How often, when the thought of suicide
With ghostly weapon beckons us to die,
The ghosts of many foods alluring glide
On golden dishes, wine in purple tide
To drown our whim. Things danced before the eye
Like tasselled grapes to Tantalus: the sly
Blue of a curling trout, the battened pride
Of ham in frills, complacent quails that lie
Resigned to death like heroes--July peas,
Expectant bottles foaming at the brink--
White bread, and honey of the golden bees--
A peach with velvet coat, some prawns in pink,
A slice of beef carved deftly, Stilton cheese,
And cups where berries float and bubbles wink."

One at least of her faithful musketeers has served her to excellent purpose in this eminently philosophical poem. Uncle Max's eyes must twinkle with sheer merriment every time he reads this: it must be pleasant to have a niece so capable of profiting by his genius. Another friend of the family, Rupert Brooke, must have appreciated the panegyric on Worms. He may have directly inspired it:

"Mouth of the dust I kiss, corruption absolute,
Worm, that shall come at last to be my paramour,
Envenomed, unseen wanderer who alone is mute,
Yet greater than gods or heroes that have gone before.

For you I sheave the harvest of my hair,
For you the whiteness of my flesh, my passion's valour,
For you I throw upon the grey screen of the air
My prism-like conceptions, my gigantic colour.

For you the delicate hands that fashion to make great
Clay, and white paper, plant a tongue in silence,
For you the battle-frenzy, and the might of hate,
Science for giving wounds, and healing science.

For you the heart's wild love, beauty, long care,
Virginity, passionate womanhood, perfected wholeness,
For you the unborn child that I prepare,
You, flabby, boneless, brainless, senseless, soulless!"

More childishness, but how delightful, how exactly in the spirit of Donne.

One string on which she continually harps is found most lucidly expressed in this stanza:

"Loneliness I love,
And that is why they have called me forth into the streets.
Loneliness I love,
But the crowd has clutched at me with fawning hands ...
My spirit speaks
In the scented quietness of a divine melancholy
Murmuring the tunes
For which my dreams are the delicate instruments.
The shadowy silences
Have made me beautiful and dressed me in velvet dignities,
And that is why
The noise of the tambourines has maddened my soul into dancing,
And I am clad
In the lust-lipped whispering of future caresses,
Holiness I love,
And touching the virginal pierced feet of martyrs,
The crucified feet
Nestled among lilies and hallowing candles.
Holiness I love
And the melodious absolution falling on my sins.
But that is why
Blasphemous priests have forced my hands to tear
The vesture of secrecy
Which hides the human nakedness of God."

That is a very definitely true cry from the depths and it is oft-repeated.

"To fashion for my love one perfect song" has been ever her aim, but her generation has been too much for her.

"Subconscious visions hold us and we fashion
Delirious verses, tortured statues, spasms of paint,
Make cryptic perorations of complaint,
Inverted religion, and perverted passion."

This may not be good poetry, but it is an admirably concise epitaph of the age.

Sometimes she escapes into riotous, wanton imagery as a refuge:

"Moonlight flows over me,
Spreads her bright, watery hair over my face,
Full of illicit, marvellous perfumes
Wreathed with syringa, and plaited with hyacinths;
Hair of the moonlight falling about me,
Straight and cool as the drooping tresses of rain."

But in the end she comes back, gloriously sure of herself, in a poem which is worthy to stand by the one I first quoted:

"I know what happiness is--
It is the negation of thought,
The shutting off
Of all those brooding phantoms that surround
As dank trees in a forest
Cutting the daylight into rags,
Caging the sun
In rusted prison bars.
Happiness loves to lie at a river's edge
And make no song,
But listen to the water's murmuring wisdom,
The kissing touch of leaves wind-bowed together,
The feathery swish of cloud wings on a hill:
Opening wide the violet-petalled doors
Of every shy and cloistered sense,
That all the scent and music of the world
May rush into the soul.
And happiness expands
The rainbow arch for a procession of dreams,
For moth-like fancies winged with evening,
For dove-breasted silences,
For shadowy reveries
And starry pilgrims ...
I know what happiness is--
It is the giving back to Earth
Of all our furtive thefts,
The lurid jewels that we stole away
From passion, sin and pain,
Because they glittered strangely, luring us
With their forbidden beauty.
Because our childish fingers curiously
Crave the pale secrets of the moon
And grope for dangerous toys.
Happiness comes in giving back to Earth
The things we took from her with violent hands,
Remembering only
That her dust is our garment,
Her fruits our endeavour,
Her waters our priestess,
Her leaves our interpreters to God,
Her hills our infinite patience."

That is a brave cry: "I know what happiness is." Happy indeed is the man or woman who has found this elixir of life--thrice happy is the poet who not only has found it, but is able to give exact and musical expression to the discovery. Iris Tree has matured: we watch her in the process of discarding her childish things.... When next we read her we shall find a full-fledged poet. There is earnest already of great things to come. That is why we should read her now. To watch a poet try her wings, soar and fall, only to soar again, is to be counted one of life's finer joys.

IV

THE POEMS OF ALDOUS HUXLEY

We read Aldous Huxley because we see in his work another real poet in embryo, but a poet working in as different a medium from that in which Iris Tree works as it is possible to imagine. He has been called the "neurasthenic Rabelais of 1920," and in so far as this connotes a perversity of intellect it is an accurate label. For there is no getting away from the cleverness of Mr Huxley: he is almost too intellectual. His brain, which helps him so admirably in his short stories, acts as an obstruction in his pursuit of beauty.

"The problem which the most authentic modern poetry is endeavouring to solve is to give beauty a fuller content by exploring unfamiliar paths of sensation and perception," but Mr Huxley most nearly approximates to beauty when he is most familiar. It is perhaps permissible to doubt whether these new, unfamiliar paths can lead anywhere but to cul-de-sac or cesspool.

At any rate, in Mr Huxley's opinion, "Your centaurs are your only poets." He finds beauty "no far-fetched, dear-bought gem; no pomander to be smelt only when the crowd becomes too stinkingly insistent: it is not a birth of rare oboes or violins, not visible only from ten to six by state permission at a nominal charge, not a thing richly apart, but an ethic, a way of belief and of practice, of faith and works, medieval in its implication with the very threads of life." He desires "no Paphian cloister of pink monks. Rather a rosy Brotherhood of Common Life, eating, drinking; marrying and giving in marriage; taking and taken in adultery; reading, thinking, and when thinking fails, feeling immeasurably more subtly, sometimes perhaps creating."

So much for his theory: in practice he has given us many tentative exercises which reek of the intellectual, are rich in humour, deadly in their irony, and one long poem, _Leda_, which has much beauty (though it has been called the beauty of self-indulgence rather than that pure beauty of self-discipline), and passages of surprising ugliness. Whenever a poet seeks to retell a well-known story, like Keats in _Endymion_ and _Hyperion_, we invariably find ourselves comparing the effect with that which a parson gives when he translates a Biblical fable into the modern jargon which passes for English prose in the pulpit.

In the latter case we shiver with disgust; in the former it is the test of the poet's genius that we are uplifted and find the original vastly improved by the fresh treatment.

Mr Brett-Young does nothing to improve our impression of Thamar, Mr Huxley infuses into the old story of _Leda_ a thousand new concepts. Let your mind dwell on this picture:

"The tunic falls about her feet, and she
Steps from the crocus folds of drapery,
Dazzlingly naked, into the warm sun.
God-like she stood; then broke into a run,
Leaping and laughing in the light, as though
Life through her veins coursed with so swift a flow
Of generous blood and fire that to remain
Too long in statued queenliness were pain
To that quick soul, avid of speed and joy.
She ran, easily bounding, like a boy, ...
Narrow of haunch and slim and firm of breast.
Lovelier she seemed in motion than at rest,
If that might be, when she was never less,
Moving or still, than perfect loveliness."

Small wonder that Jove, scourged by his libido with itching memories of bliss, should turn his sickened sight from the monstrous shapes that met his eyes in Africa (this is the passage of surpassing ugliness) where

"Among unthinkable flowers, they pause and grin
Out through a trellis of suppurating lips,
Of mottled tentacles barbed at the tips
And bloated hands and wattles and red lobes
Of pendulous gristle and enormous probes
Of pink and slashed and tasselled flesh"

to young Leda where she stood, poised on the river-side. Straightway his heart held but one thought: he must possess that perfect form or die. Have her he must:

"Gods, men, earth, heaven, the whole
Vast universe was blotted from his thought
And nought remained but Leda's laughter, nought
But Leda's eyes. Magnified by his lust,
She was the whole world now; have her he must, he must...."

He goes to Aphrodite to plan the rape

" ... While she,
Who was to be their victim, joyously
Laughed like a child in the sudden breathless chill
And splashed and swam, forgetting every ill
And every fear and all, save only this:
That she was young, and it was perfect bliss
To be alive where suns so goldenly shine,
And bees go drunk with fragrant honey-wine,
And the cicadas sing from morn till night,
And rivers run so cool and pure and bright ...
Stretched all her length, arms under head, she lay
In the deep grass, while the sun kissed away
The drops that sleeked her skin. Slender and fine
As those old images of the gods that shine
With smooth-worn silver, polished through the years
By the touching lips of countless worshippers,
Her body was; and the sun's golden heat
Clothed her in softest flame from head to feet
And was her mantle, that she scarcely knew
The conscious sense of nakedness. The blue,
Far hills and the faint fingers of the sky
Shimmered and pulsed in the heat uneasily,
And hidden in the grass, cicadas shrill
Dizzied the air with ceaseless noise, until
A listener might wonder if they cried
In his own head or in the world outside."

Lazily she looks up into the sky and sees there the conflict between the eagle and her lovely, hapless swan. Pity (the mother of voluptuousness) is roused in Leda's heart and she opens her arms to receive the transformed god.

"Crouched on the flowery ground
Young Leda lay, and to her side did press
The swan's proud-arching opulent loveliness ...
Closer he nestled, mingling with the slim
Austerity of virginal flank and limb
His curved and florid beauty, till she felt
That downy warmth strike through her flesh and melt
The bones and marrow of her strength away....
And over her the swan shook slowly free
The folded glory of his wings, and made
A white-walled tent of soft and luminous shade
To be her veil and keep her from the shame
Of naked light and the sun's noonday flame.

Hushed lay the earth and the wide, careless sky.
Then one sharp sound, that might have been a cry
Of utmost pleasure or of utmost pain,
Broke sobbing forth, and all was still again."

There is a sensuous beauty in this poem which makes it altogether lovely. Certainly in thinking of the fable of Leda in the future our minds will first fly back to Mr Huxley's poem and that is probably the highest tribute we can pay it. But the rest of his poems aim at something very different from the simple, sensuous and passionate and are on a different plane.

He deals cynically with the transitory nature of human passions, he laughs at Jonah as he sits praying and singing on "the convex mound of one vast kidney" of the whale that swallowed him; in his philosophers' songs he likes to sing of man as "a poor degenerate from the ape" and of God as a fool.

"If, O my Lesbia, I should commit,
Not fornication, dear, but suicide,
My Thames-blown body (Pliny vouches it)
Would drift face upwards on the oily tide
With the other garbage, till it putrefied.

But you, if all your lovers' frozen hearts
Conspired to send you, desperate, to drown--
Your maiden modesty would float face down,
And men would weep upon your hinder parts.
'Tis the Lord's doing. Marvellous is the plan
By which this best of worlds is wisely planned.
One law he made for woman, one for man:
We bow the head and do not understand."

This is certainly not poetry, but it is funny. The man with the wry face gets his laugh, even if we feel that to be facetious it is not necessary to be blasphemous.

He is happier in his rôle of Ninth Philosopher: he here attains a true expression of what is happening in the world of modern art.

"Beauty for some provides escape,
Who gain a happiness in eyeing
The gorgeous buttocks of the ape
Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying."

But _Frascati's_ shows him at his normal level of intellectual irony:

"Bubble-breasted swells the dome
Of this my spiritual home,
From whose nave the chandelier,
Schaffhausen frozen, tumbles sheer.
We in the round balcony sit,
Lean o'er and look into the pit
Where feed the human bears beneath,
Champing with their gilded teeth.
What negroid holiday makes free
With such priapic revelry?
What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?
What gods like wooden stalagmites?
What stream of blood or kidney pie?
What blasts of Bantu melody?
Rag-time.... But when the wearied Band
Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand.
And there we sit in blissful calm,
Quietly sweating palm to palm."

This is the vein which he expands in what Middleton Murry regards as his best poem, _Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt_, an attempt to "fish up a single day" from a dead friend's forgotten existence. John Ridley, as he calls him, wakes from a dream among his familiar books and pictures--

"Real as his dream? He wondered. Ten to nine.
Thursday. Wasn't he lunching at his aunt's?
Distressing circumstance.
But then he was taking Jenny out to dine,
Which was some consolation. What a chin!
Civilised ten thousand years, and still
No better way than rasping a pale mask
With imminent suicide, steel or obsidian:
Repulsive task!
And the more odious for being quotidian.
If one should live till eighty-five ...
And the dead, do they still shave? The horrible dead, are they
alive?...
Nine o'clock. Still in bed. Warm, but how lonely!
He wept to think of all those single beds,
Those desperate night-long solitudes,
Those mental salons full of nudes.
Shelley was great when he was twenty-four.
Eight thousand nights alone--minus, perhaps,
Six, or no! seven, certainly not more.
Five little bits of heaven
(Tum-do-rum, de-rum, de-rum),
Five little bits of heaven and one that was a lapse,
High-priced disgust: it stopped him suddenly
In the midst of laughter and talk with a tingling down the spine
(Like infants' impoliteness, a terrible infants' brightness),
And he would shut his eyes so as not to see
His own hot blushes calling him a swine."

At last he throws the nightmare of his blankets off, gets up and goes into the bathroom--

"Pitiable to be
Quite so deplorably naked when one strips.
There was his scar, a panel of old rose
Slashed in the elegant buff of his trunk hose;
Adonis punctured by his amorous boar,
Permanent souvenir of the Great War.
One of God's jokes, typically good,
That wound of his. How perfect that he should
Have suffered it for--what?"

He dresses, goes down to breakfast, letters and _The Times_: he reads some of his old work ...

"Yes, he had genius, if he chose to use it;
If he chose to--but it was too much trouble,
And he preferred reading. He lit his pipe,
Opened his book, plunged in and soon was drowned
In pleasant seas ... to rise again and find
One o'clock struck and his unshaven face
Still like a record in a musical-box,
And Auntie Loo miles off in Bloomsbury."

Mr Huxley wastes much satire on avuncular energies in war-time and makes his hero escape from his verbose relatives to walk the streets. Tired of this, he enters the inevitable café of the intellectual young novelist and moralises on the nightmare oppressiveness of profane love. He then sits out in the gardens of Leicester Square and finds comfort in regarding each hair and every pore on his hand. This palls soon enough, as one might expect, and then--

"Action, action! Quickly rise and do
The most irreparable things; beget,
In one brief consummation of the will,
Remorse, reaction, wretchedness, regret.
Action! This was no time for sitting still.
He crushed his hat down over his eyes
And walked with a stamp to symbolise
Action, action--left, right, left;
Planting his feet with flabby beat,
Taking strange Procrustean steps,
Lengthened, shortened to avoid
Touching the lines between the stones--
A thing which makes God so annoyed."

Action translates itself into spending three pounds on a book which he didn't want and pulling the bell of a chance house. He turns into a cinema house, goes to sleep, wakes at eight o'clock and so keeps "dear Jenny" waiting.

This dinner with Jenny is the most effective part of the poem, as we might expect:

"Food and drink, food and drink:
Olives as firm and sleek and green
As the breasts of a sea-god's daughter,
Swimming far down where the corpses sink
Through the dense shadowy water.
Silver and black on flank and back,
The glossy sardine mourns its head.
The red anchovy and the beetroot red,
With carrots, build a gorgeous stair--
Bronze, apoplexy and Venetian hair--
And the green pallor of the salad round
Sharpens their clarion sound....
Golden wine, pale as a Tuscan primitive,
And wine's strange taste, half loathsome, half delicious:
Come, my Lesbia, let us love and live....
'Jenny, adorable--' (what draws the line
At the mere word 'love'?) 'has anyone the right
To look so lovely as you look to-night,
To have such eyes, such a helmet of bright hair?'
But candidly, he wondered, do I care?"

The night goes on, comes the time to part--