woman whom we pay to teach us, preach to us, and, above all, to write. July, 1917.

V

I do not know whether we people who have (or deem ourselves to have) the gift of words are, or are not, more impulsive, less restrained, than our mute inglorious readers; this war seems to have shown that there is not much to choose in this

way between them and us. What is certain, though less noticed, is that feelings, passions and all the imaginative apparatus connected with them, are the material in which, quite as much as in words, we writers work, and by working get what matters as much as daily bread or kudos, the satisfaction of the imperious needs of our special talents. This has been urged against actors; even musicians are suspected of cultivating their own passions in order to play upon the passions of their hearers. I don't know about actors. As to musicians, I hold them to be among mankind's greatest benefactors, just because they arouse and satisfy feelings while doing so in vacuo, or rather in a region disconnected with thought, belief, and, in so far, with action. Unluckily, literature is a dual art; and writers, specially in prose, are a hybrid race dealing in passion on the one hand and in reasons on the other; with the result, that nine times out of ten, the reasons are the mere excuses for passion, and the means of giving passions a longer lease of life, a more stable and reputable tenure than if left to themselves. You can test this by comparison with music; even the kind which (by gross exaggeration) is credited with action on people's "immoral " tendencies, does as a fact go in at one ear and come out at the other: Timotheus stops his strumming, and forthwith Alexander stops waving his torch about; besides on that occasion (vide Dryden) Alexander had been feasting on more than music. Once Wagner's insidious harmonies and diffluent melodies have died away, the audience returns to stockbroking, to chiffons and the practice of respectability. No one has collected the statistics of adultery at Bayreuth as compared with those of the Bach-Festival at Leipzig. And

if those statistics did prove greater leniency to conjugal irregularity after the one performance than the other, there remains to discount the effect of the story, the scenic representation, the situation of, say, Tristan or Kundry; above all, the words. For words (since I am back at words), besides arousing feelings, deal in description, in judgment and in praise or blame; words are what makes standards and codes and also unmakes them. The really dangerous part of literature is that, besides awakening passion, it justifies it. Now the justification, with its reasonable formulation, remains after the feeling has gone; let alone that it takes away the mistrust, that fear of the overwhelming, the dæmonic, which civilization has bred into all human beings much (pace Freud and his neurotics) to the general advantage. That element of literature which it has in common with music will rouse the longing to do and dare, to expand one's individuality, face danger, and incidentally, knock someone on the head, or wreck his furniture. And the element which literature shares with thought, observation, generalization and plain commonsense, instantly ups, exclaiming: "The cause for which you do all this is a just, a holy one," etc., when, in a good many cases, there is no cause at all, nothing about which justice or holiness can be predicated. Let us never forget that being rational creatures we employ our reason for the purpose nearest our heart, namely, to put us in conceit with our feelings, to make a show of asking for their passport, and in so doing give them a laissez passer to do whatever they please.

With this goes that every writer, just because he is a writer, becomes an expert in everything which can perform this double office. A writer has a training, an inborn intuition, not only in handling words as such, but in persuading, acting on the mind, of his readers. And he naturally loves the exercise and the material of his art; he likes all that is impressive, memorable, pathetic, noble, new, surprising, splendid, overpowering. Even if not born a creature of impulse (and of this see no evidence), he is, cæteris paribus, pretty sure to become one in the course of exercising his art. The more so that his art has not half as much as architecture, music, and painting, the purely aesthetic, formal, impersonal appeal. Unable to

build his Abt Vogler's temple out of sounds, or out of the soarings and expansions of lines and surfaces, or the irresistible combinations of colours, he is perpetually falling back upon ethical qualities for his æsthetic effects. Now it is not good for morals, they belonging to the life of Reality, to be treated as material for the æsthetic life of appearances. There are indeed qualities in common to the two domains; e.g., energy, balance, restraint and lucidity; but these are the qualities which literature seeks least, which tell least and which cannot compete with the facile, the brass-band or accordion, effects to be got out of heroism or the melting emotions. So the two latter, and everything of that kind, becomes, willy-nilly, the writers' habitual material. That is one reason, among others, why writers are so often prophets and moralists.

VI

There is, of course, further mischief, or possibility of mischief, in a circumstance independent of the essential nature of words and the art of using them: namely, in the particular status which we writers have taken over from our predecessors, the prophets, priests, spiritual directors and doctors of the Church. The mischief that, instead of seeing ourselves as mere searchers after truth, implying thereby that we have not yet got, and perhaps may never get, hold of it, we take for granted that truth is already in our keeping, with the consequent duty of bringing others to its due recognition. Moreover that what we have is the whole truth, or at least nothing but the truth. And that is scarcely likely. The harm we do is not merely that we employ methods of persuasion, i.e., of biasing feeling and re-arranging facts, and of juggling with values; it is also that we employ these literary arts under the conviction that we are imparting eternal verities. Like the sacred books of all religions we still say: It is; instead of employing the formula, unsuitable for prophets and sibyls, but eminently suited to ourselves; I think that it is.

October, 1918.

VII

We writers seek completeness in our work, not so much, I fear, because we are athirst for consistency and harmony, as that we want the universe to have no sides which our individual thought cannot face and tackle. At the very least our microcosm is to fit exactly into the circle of the macrocosm; our tiny personal lens to cover what Whitman calls the Great Rondeur.

And more particularly do we writers feel that our teaching, our guidance, our individual work has to answer every question and organize every synthesis.

Now this is not the case. The use of a writer is not that he is the only one, but that he is of a great number of others past and present. His little piece of self-expression may fill up a gap left by that of his fellows; fill it up, not in a complete and sole picture of the universe, but in that fluctuating mass of fragmentary thought and emotion which all rational and sensitive minds share and increase.

The writer is surely not much more than the particular leaven which is to make thought ferment and rise; rise, moreover, to neutralize much of his own, in the mind of some particular reader, perhaps with luck, in the minds of two or three.

That is not how we writers think of ourselves, and perhaps never will cease thinking, in however a modest secrecy of our soul. Each one of us feels called upon (and the organization of the book market does call on half a dozen of us fairly at random) to feed those thirty thousand disciples on the seven loaves and fishes, leaving twelve basketfuls for an expectant and grateful posterity.

The twelve basketfuls of broken spiritual victuals encumber the shelves of our libraries. It is about the thirty thousand disciples that I feel in doubt, whether they got sufficient mental sustenance from our labours; and even more whether they are really thirty thousand, thirty, or three, or indeed are there at all, except in our fancy. June, 1918.

VIII

You will remark that in all these charges I have brought against us dealers in words and makers of black-and-white

word-magic, there is no mention of what our ancestors called the Venal Pen. The belief in its existence belongs to the same comfortable creed as the belief in the divine mission of the writer. I have ceased to hold either; trying dully to see things as they are, without extracting from their sight the joys of enthusiasm and invective. But I was young once; and can remember declaring " that the writer must needs be either a Priest or a Prostitute."

66

Additional experience, and the amusing study of ancient religions and rituals, have led me to suspect that, as in those places where Syrian damsels "mourned young Adonis all a summer's day," and also sundry other countries, the two vocations may be cumulated in the selfsame individual. Thus the literary surrender to lucrative complaisances may be carried on as bona fide union with the supreme good.

I know little about journalists; and cannot therefore deny that such persons may be gifted with recognition of reality commensurate with their willingness to prepare lies for other people's reading. I really have no opinion on the subject. But as to writers of the sort whose utterances, being addressed to Eternity, are printed on more durable paper, bound in what is called cloth and kept on shelves, I can see absolutely no reason why they should ever write what they do not think, since it is part of their particular gift (wherein, however unworthy, I participate) to think whatever they write.

October, 1918.