THE PRESENT STATE OF LITERATURE III.-PROPHECY

Tun remedy is at hand. We need do no more than take a firm hold of our shoe-laces-and lift ourselves out of the

present. We breathe and eat this age : our bodies and minds are built of it : we feel and think and act in its idiom. Is it, then, likely that we can shake ourselves free from it and start a new age by some little trick of thought, or by a small expense of spirit ? No : to be removed so far from the present that we can see it whole, and know how to change it, is next to impossible. The only hope we can allow our- selves to entertain is hope of accomplishing the impossible.

For every rebellion against our conditions is subject to our conditions : we get no nearer to a new age by repudiating this. We must be clean out of it, and careless of it, if we are to have our destinies in our own keeping. There is an easy way of determining how much free will we possess.

How many of our actions are unique, performed for the first time in history, in no part dictated by circumstance or precedent, fully conscious and deliberate ? Such are the actions of free will and genius. Such are the only actions unembarrassed by the chains of necessity : only they can block the old course of history and- divert it into new channels. And it is not hard to formulate the rules for the attainment of genius : it happens, though, that only a genius could follow them. Yet it would be absurd to propound any scheme for the salvation of the world which was not in this way impossible.

Certainly the conquest of fact will not come through fantasy. It seems tempting, at first, to assert that the best means to revive the greatness of our literature would be to create a world of the imagination in which we might take refuge ; to turn our backs on barren actuality and live in beautiful dreams. But fantasy is a betrayal of art ; and it was never so full a betrayal as now. It is hope squandered ; it is a searching for the Age of Innocence ; a shrinking from any contact with the world. The Romantics have poured into us the fallacy that poetry is somehow otherworldly ; that a poet should walk in the splendid visions of the past ; that his reveries and the far wanderings of his mind are of value ; that he should dream and idealize and sigh for beauty and, if need be, take opium. But in truth poetry is the formation of a new world from the stuff of the old ; it is exactly this free exercise of awareness, turning the current of time. And now, if any man flouts the difficulties of our age, and casts back into romance and fable and pretence, he is bound to be insincere and artificial and weak in fibre— or, as we shall see, most unfortunate. We have been rationalized too far for a belief in fairy lands to be deep Or profitable. Mr. de In Mare, with all his delicacy and sweetness, deals only in mechanical and pretty fairies, not in beauty. He is an expert craftsman, clever enough, almost, to take us all in ; but he falls into the heresy of believing, that subject matter makes poetry. And hi is wholly at

fault in his attempts to -persuade us- into- childishness : the truth is, as you may notice, that no child, even, believes in those fairies without the persistent and determined ex- hortations of its parents. Let me set it down as dogma that if a poem mentions fairies, fauns, or leprechauns, Pierrot, Harlequin, -Pan, bluebells or pomanders, dryads, houris, unicorns or Hy Brasil, then it may serve to pass the time agreeably, but at root- it is vulgar and insincere ; the writes has treated us cavalierly and has worked out from his sensa- tions no gift worth acceptance.

It shows an equal lack of fire in Mr. W. B. Yeats that he should turn- to minor conjurations and attempt to make the acquaintance of Celtic gods. His fantasies, too, are held with reservations, and he is moved by a conviction that a poet should be fabulous rather than by a direct and un- deniable vision. Let me set down another dogma : there. is one spell only which can draw down an angel ; and the first step towards that spell is the freeing of sensation from memory and emotion and the absolute stilling of thought. Any other spell will attract nothing better than an odd ghost or two, and the contempt of heaven.

In our Pyrrhonic age, only one -type of fantasy is whole- hearted ; that is insanity. There we see in its purest form the triumph of the dream, and the escape from life. Praise for sincerity can therefore be given to those of our writers who display definite-signs of the disorganization of their faculties ; • but no praise can be given to them for any mastery of their art. There is a school of disorganization ; the most notable among them is Miss Gertrude Stein.- I rep,ret that her works are not by me ; for it would be instructive to parallel her method of writing (I can only recall " Certainly the union of oxygen with ostriches is not that of a taught tracer ") with the- method of speech of " the classic example of meaningless delusional ideas in dementia praecox " in Burglailzli Asylum. This patient made such remarks as these : " Excursions are made by breathing in chemistry,. and by suffocation regions are destroyed," and " The monopoly fixed the sorrows which are not in the body and do not fly about in the air." Miss Steia's writings are precisely to this pattern. But I have lapsed a little from seriousness, and I was wishing to make clear how very serious and intent any struggle to escape from our restrictions must be. I shall pull myself back, then, by recounting the rules for the attainment of genius.

The man of perfect genius is he who empties himself so cleanly and completely of every moment of consciousness in life that there is nothing left of him occluded in his mind ; that lie becomes no longer a person, but a mode of extra- version for the universal impulse. The whole of himself is transferred into history ; his sole being is in history ; he has in truth killed his private life, his life to himself, his egotism, in order that all of himself may live eternally in the concern of other men. It is only through this emptying and blankness of mind that the full awareness and the full sensation of any particular moment may strike in its newness and fullness and wonder ; it is only by the immediate emptying of consciousness in action or creation that the mind can be kept pure and open for the next moment. Such is the man of perfect genius ; his whole life is outside himself ; not a drop of his blood, not a breath of his body, is wasted. The whole, translated into thought, continues amongst us. lie only has justified the fact of his existence.

Such genius is typical, not attainable. Nevertheless, any exercise of high genius is the same in quality. We know that there is little hope of any man's being a genius from cradle to grave ; but if a man has one moment of genius, it is in virtue of the same absolute self-sacrifice and self-emptying. In the past genius has come mainly and notoriously by the grace of God, by inspiration. A poet (we shall say) has suffered such an influx of awareness that he has been compelled for relief to rid himself of it by-communication. But now we arc involved in a time when so many casual thoughts, echoes, traditions, associations choke up our minds that ,sensations can rarely come energetically and with illumination to our consciousness. It has suggested itself, therefore, to many people that some . reduction of ourselves to a cleanliness and decency of percep. tion is necessary before we can hope to find inspiration once more at work. It seems, that is, that there may be a technique of genius, a way in which genius may be, not concocted, but evoked.

Such was Nietzsche's argument ; but he erred in his belief that a retrogression to a slave-system was a first necessity. lie held in himself the contradiction to that doctrino ; hesaw clearly enough, at base, that men differed in essence, and should differ in opportunity only as they differed in the degree of their hopes and the ease with which they could be con- tented. The social system should be so organized that men might be able to fulfil their ambitions ; and if a man would be content with less than genius, with bodily ease or with the exercise of his own craftsmanship, then he should have a. chance of obtaining his individual peace.

To a man avid for genius in our modern world the first commandment is that he raise himself above all diversities of purpose and all lethargies of sensuous gratification. What comes to him as sensation (and in that I include the whole impact of life upon him) should not be distrained upon to pacify his bodily hungers ; he should so detach himself from necessities and cravings, that his nerves deliver up to him as observer, as awareness, as the god of his own body, the whole content of pleasure and pain in every moment. And to encourage this state of spiritual virginity, it is imperative that he should fight every instinct that springs up in him ; he should bring into subjection and understanding the laws and categories and processes of his own mind.; so that he knows not only what he is II inking. but also by what entanglements and appetites of his mind he is brought to think like that. His task is the creation of a self behind hiniselfbeyond himself—in whose control the whole of his activities shall be. As we look upon our bodies, and, because we look and find them externalized in space, know that they are not truly ourselves but our instruments, so he shall look upon himself looking, shall look upon the stream of his thought, and know that this is not himself ; as we can order our hands to do this or that, so he shall order his mind to think this or that, his emotions to feel this or that. - And at the same time he shall train himself in expression ; in altruism, that is to say. We see enough of the uselessness of thought that stays at home, and we should be warned against all tightness and vanity of mind. A man can bring himself to alertness only by conflict and companionship with his fellows. Otherwise he may do what he choose • with himself : he will develop nothing but a disastrous megalomania and that fantasy of madness. He must see- himself in men ; he must sec himself in animals, plants and minerals, even. For the stuff of inspiration is the whole life of the world. And lest he should have the dregs of old thought hidden in himself and compelling his reactions, he must get rid of it in bounty upon every possible occasion.

Such a man at last would be free of his age ; for he would be offering the thoughts and practices of his age to that in him that is unchanging. I have said that there was no easy consolation for us ; that there is no advice readily acceptable which could cure any of our maladies. We should need an asceticism far more difficult than any humilia- tion of the body ; and the more difficult since a withdrawal from life would be the worst cowardice. But only by approach to this dominion of the kingdom within. us could genius now. be bro'ght to flower. The multiplicity of detail and informa- tion would no longer trouble us ; for the mind would leave nothing unresolved to muddle -and_ perplex us ; life to us • would be life at this moment, life now ; the only detail would be the detail in this Situation ; we should not drag over a train of yesterdays.

And I believe tkat, if anyone should be able to devote himself completely to the evocation of his genius the result would in truth be greater than any genius the world has known. For the technique of genius would be all-inclusive ; no part of life would be unexplored. A man of self-created genius would not be great in this way or great in that : his greatness would be central and would shine equally upon all his activities.

And let those who can find hope in the severity of this ideal. They will need the utmost fire of . hope, I imagine, if they are to draw from it anything but bitterness.

41,A11" PORTER.

(This article is the last of a series of three. The others were „published in our issues of November 8th and November 29th.)