And so the value of these studies in the Apocalypse. They wake the imagination and give us at moments a new universe to live in. We may think it is the old cosmos of the Babylonians, but it isn’t. We can never recover an old vision, once it has been supplanted. But what we can do is to discover a new vision in harmony with the memories of old, far-off, far, far-off experience that lie within us. So long as we are not deadened or drossy, memories of Chaldean experience still live within us, at great depths, and can vivify our impulses in a new direction, once we awaken them.
Therefore we ought to be grateful for a book like this of the Dragon. What does it matter if it is confused? What does it matter if it repeats itself? What does it matter if in parts it is not very interesting, when in other parts it is intensely so, when it suddenly opens doors and lets out the spirit into a new world, even if it is a very old world! I admit that I cannot see eye to eye with Mr. Carter about the Apocalypse itself. I cannot, myself, feel that old John of Patmos spent his time on his island lying on his back and gazing at the resplendent heavens; then afterwards writing a book in which all the magnificent cosmic and starry drama is deliberately wrapped up in Jewish-Christian moral threats and vengeances, sometimes rather vulgar.
But that, no doubt, is due to our different approach to the book. I was brought up on the Bible, and seem to have it in my bones.
From early childhood I have been familiar with Apocalyptic language and Apocalyptic image: not because I spent my time reading Revelation, but because I was sent to Sunday School and to Chapel, to Band of Hope and to Christian Endeavour, and was always having the Bible read at me or to me. I did not even listen attentively. But language has a power of echoing and re-echoing in my unconscious mind. I can wake up in the night and “hear” things being said — or hear a piece of music — to which I had paid no attention during the day. The very sound itself registers. And so the sound of Revelation had registered in me very early, and I was as used to: “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, saying: I am Alpha and the Omega” — as I was to a nursery rhyme like “Little Bo-Peep”! I didn’t know the meaning, but then children so often prefer sound to sense. “Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.” The Apocalypse is full of sounding phrases, beloved by the uneducated in the chapels for their true liturgical powers. “And he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.”
No, for me the Apocalypse is altogether too full of fierce feeling, fierce and moral, to be a grand disguised star-myth. And yet it has intimate connexion with star-myths and the movement of the astrological heavens: a sort of submerged star-meaning. And nothing delights me more than to escape from the all-too-moral chapel meaning of the book, to another wider, older, more magnificent meaning. In fact, one of the real joys of middle age is in coming back to the Bible, reading a new translation, such as Moffatt’s, reading the modern research and modern criticism of some Old Testament books, and of the Gospels, and getting a whole new conception of the Scriptures altogether. Modern research has been able to put the Bible back into its living connexions, and it is splendid: no longer the Jewish-moral book and a stick to beat an immoral dog, but a fascinating account of the adventure of the Jewish — or Hebrew or Israelite nation, among the great old civilized nations of the past, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia: then on into the Hellenic world, the Seleucids, and the Romans, Pompey and Anthony. Reading the Bible in a new translation, with modern notes and comments, is more fascinating than reading Homer, for the adventure goes even deeper into time and into the soul, and continues through the centuries, and moves from Egypt to Ur and to Nineveh, from Sheba to Tarshish and Athens and Rome. It is the very quick of ancient history.
And the Apocalypse, the last and presumably the latest of the books of the Bible, also comes to life with a great new life, once we look at its symbols and take the lead that they offer us. The text leads most easily into the great chaotic Hellenic world of the first century: Hellenic, not Roman. But the symbols lead much further back.
They lead Frederick Carter back to Chaldea and to Persia, chiefly, for his skies are the late Chaldean, and his mystery is chiefly Mith- raic. Hints, we have only hints from the outside. But the rest is within us, and if we can take a hint, it is extraordinary how far and into what fascinating worlds the hints can lead us. The orthodox critics will say: Fantasy! Nothing but fantasy! But then, thank God for fantasy, if it enhances our life.
And even so, the “reproach” is not quite just. The Apocalypse has an old, submerged astrological meaning, and probably even an old astrological scheme. The hints are too obvious and too splendid: like the ruins of an old temple incorporated in a Christian chapel. Is it any more fantastic to try to reconstruct the embedded temple, than to insist that the embedded images and columns are mere rubble in the Christian building, and have no meaning? It is as fantastic to deny meaning when meaning is there, as it is to invent meaning when there is none. And it is much duller. For the invented meaning may still have a life of its own.
REVIEWS OF BOOKS
Georgian Poetry: 1911-1912
Georgian Poetry is an anthology of veise which has been published during the reign of our present king, George V. It contains one poem of my own, but this fact will not, I hope, preclude my reviewing the book.
This collection is like a big breath taken when we are waking up after a night of oppressive dreams. The nihilists, the intellectual, hopeless people — Ibsen, Flaubert, Thomas Hardy — represent the dream we are waking from, ft was a dream of demolition. Nothing was, but was nothing. Everything was taken from us. And now our lungs are full of new air, and our eyes see it is morning, but we have not forgotten the terror of the night. We dreamed we were falling through space into nothingness, and the anguish of it leaves us rather eager.
But we are awake again, our lungs are full of new air, our eyes of morning. The first song is nearly a cry, fear and the pain of remembrance sharpening away the pure music. And that is this book.
The last years have been years of demolition. Because faith and belief were getting pot-bound, and the Temple was made a place to barter sacrifices, therefore faith and belief and the Temple must be broken. This time art fought the battle, rather than science or any new religious faction. And art has been demolishing for us: Nietzsche, the Christian religion as it stood; Hardy, our faith in our own endeavour; Flaubert, our belief in love. Now, for us, it is all smashed, we can see the whole again. We were in prison, peeping at the sky through loop-holes. The great prisoners smashed at the loop-holes, for lying to us. And behold, out of the ruins leaps the whole sky.
It is we who see it and breathe in it for joy. God is there, faith, belief, love, everything. We are drunk with the joy of it, having got away from the fear. In almost every poem in the book comes this note of exultation after fear, the exultation in the vast freedom, the illimitable wealth that we have suddenly got.
But send desire often forth to scan
The immense night that is thy greater soul,
says Mr. Abercrombie. His deadly sin is Prudence, that will not risk to avail itself of the new freedom. Mr. Bottomley exults to find men for ever building religions which yet can never compass all.
Yet the yielding sky
Invincible vacancy was there discovered.
Mr. Rupert Brooke sees
every glint
Posture and jest and thought and tint
Freed from the mask of transiency
Triumphant in eternity,
Immote, immortal
and this at Afternoon Tea. Mr. John Drinkwater sings:
We cherish every hour that strays
Adown the cataract of days:
We see the clear, untroubled skies,
We see the glory of the rose —
Mr. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson hears the “terror turned to tenderness,” then
I watched the mother sing to rest
The baby snuggling on her breast.
&n
bsp; And to Mr. Masefield:
When men count
Those hours of life that were a bursting fount
Sparkling the dusty heart with living springs.
There seems a world, beyond our earthly things,
Gated by golden moments.
It is all the same — hope, and religious joy. Nothing is really wrong. Every new religion is a waste-product from the last, and every religion stands for us for ever. We love Christianity for what it has brought us, now that we are no longer upon the cross.
The great liberation gives us an overwhelming sense of joy, joie d’etre, joie de vivre. This sense of exceeding keen relish and appreciation of life makes romance. I think I could say every poem in the book is romantic, tinged with a love of the marvellous, a joy of natural things, as if the poet were a child for the first time on the seashore, finding treasures. “Best trust the happy moments,” says Mr. Masefield, who seems nearest to the black dream behind us. There is Mr. W. H. Davies’s lovely joy, Mr. De La Mare’s perfect appreciation of life at still moments, Mr. Rupert Brooke’s brightness, when he “lived from laugh to laugh,” Mr. Edmund Beale Sargant’s pure, excited happiness in the woodland — it is all the same, keen zest in life found wonderful. In Mr. Gordon Bottomley it is the zest of activity, of hurrying, labouring men, or the zest of the utter stillness of long snows. It is a bookful of Romance that has not quite got clear of the terror of realism.
There is no carpe diem touch. The joy is sure and fast. It is not the falling rose, but the rose for ever rising to bud and falling to fruit that gives us joy. We have faith in the vastness of life’s wealth. We are always rich: rich in buds and in shed blossoms. There is no winter that we fear. Life is like an orange tree, always in leaf and bud, in blossom and fruit.
And we ourselves, in each of us, have everything. Somebody said: “The Georgian poets are not love poets. The influence of Swinburne has gone.” But I should say the Georgian poets are just ripening to be love poets. Swinburne was no love poet. What are the Georgian poets, nearly all, but just bursting into a thick blaze of being? They are not poets of passion, perhaps, but they are essentially passionate poets. The time to be impersonal has gone. We start from the joy we have in being ourselves, and everything must take colour from that joy. It is the return of the blood, that has been held back, as when the heart’s action is arrested by fear. Now the warmth of blood is in everything, quick, healthy, passionate blood. I look at my hands as I write and know they are mine, with red blood running its way, sleuthing out Truth and pursuing it to eternity, and I am full of awe for this flesh and blood that holds this pen. Everything that ever was thought and ever will be thought, lies in this body of mine. This flesh and blood sitting here writing, the great impersonal flesh and blood, greater than me, which I am proud to belong to, contains all the future. What is it but the quick of all growth, the seed of all harvest, this body of mine? And grapes and corn and birds and rocks and visions, all are in my fingers. I am so full of wonder at my own miracle of flesh and blood that I could not contain myself, if I did not remember we are all alive, have all of us living bodies. And that is a joy greater than any dream of immortality in the spirit, to me. It reminds me of Rupert Brooke’s moment triumphant in its eternality; and of Michelangelo, who is also the moment triumphant in its eternality; just the opposite from Corot, who is the eternal triumphing over the moment, at the moment, at the very point of sweeping it into the flow.
Of all love poets, we are the love poets. For our religion is loving. To love passionately, but completely, is our one desire.
What is “The Hare” but a complete love poem, with none of the hackneyed “But a bitter blossom was born” about it, nor yet the Yeats, “Never give all the heart.” Love is the greatest of all things, no “bitter blossom” nor such-like. It is sex-passion, so separated, in which we do not believe. The Carmen and Tosca sort of passion is not interesting any longer, because it can’t progress. Its goal and aim is possession, whereas possession in love is only a means to love. And because passion cannot go beyond possession, the passionate heroes and heroines — Tristans and what-not — must die. We believe in the love that is happy ever after, progressive as life itself.
I worship Christ, I worship Jehovah, I worship Pan, I worship Aphrodite. But I do not worship hands nailed and running with blood upon a cross, nor licentiousness, nor lust. I want them all, all the gods. They are all God. But I must serve in real love. If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work. All of which I read in the anthology of Georgian Poetry.
German Books: Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann is perhaps the most famous of German novelists now writing. He, and his elder brother, Heinrich Mann, with Jakob Wassermann, are acclaimed the three artists in fiction of present-day Germany.
But Germany is now undergoing that craving for form in fiction, that passionate desire for the mastery of the medium of narrative, that will of the writer to be greater than and undisputed lord over the stuff he writes, which is figured to the world in Gustave Flaubert.
Thomas Mann is over middle age, and has written three or four books: Buddenbrooks, a novel of the patrician life of Lubeck; Tristan, a collection of six Novellen; Konigliche Hoheit, an unreal Court romance; various stories, and lastly, Der Tod in Venedig. The author himself is the son of a Lubeck Patrizier.
It is as an artist rather than as a story-teller that Germany worships Thomas Mann. And yet it seems to me, this craving for form is the outcome, not of artistic conscience, but of a certain attitude to life. For form is not a personal thing like style. It is impersonal like logic. And just as the school of Alexander Pope was logical in its expressions, so it seems the school of Flaubert is, as it were, logical in its aesthetic form. “Nothing outside the definite line of the book,” is a maxim. But can the human mind fix absolutely the definite line of a book, any more than it can fix absolutely any definite line of action for a living being?
Thomas Mann, however, is personal, almost painfully so, in his subject-matter. In “Tonio Kroger,” the long Novelle at the end of the Tristan volume, he paints a detailed portrait of himself as a youth and younger man, a careful analysis. And he expresses at some length the misery of being an artist. “Literature is not a calling, it is a curse.” Then he says to the Russian painter girl: “There is no artist anywhere but longs again, my love, for the common life.” But any young artist might say that. It is because the stress of life in a young man, but particularly in an artist, is very strong, and has as yet found no outltt, so that it rages inside him in Sturm und Drang. But the condition is the same, only more tragic, in the Thomas Mann of fifty-three. He has never found any outlet for himself, save his art. He has never given himself to anything but his art. This is all well and good, if his art absorbs and satisfies him, as it has done some great men, like Corot. But then there are the other artists, the more human, like Shakespeare and Goethe, who must give themselves to life as well as to art. And if these were afraid, or despised life, then with their surplus they would ferment and become rotten. Which is what ails Thomas Mann. He is physically ailing, no doubt. But his complaint is deeper: it is of the soul.
And out of this soul-ailment, this unbelief, he makes his particular art, which he describes, in “Tonio Kroger,” as “Wahlerisch, er- lesen, kostbar, fein, reizbar gegen das Banale, und aufs hochste empfindlich in Fragen des Taktes und Geschmacks.” He is a disciple, in method, of the Flaubert who wrote: “I worked sixteen hours yesterday, today the whole day, and have at last finished one page.” In writing of the Leitmotiv and its influence, he says: “Now this method alone is sufficient to explain my slowness. It is the result neither of anxiety nor indigence, but of an overpowering sense of responsibility for the choice of every word, the coining of every phrase ... a responsibility that longs for perfect freshness, and which, after two hours’ work, prefers not to undertake an important sentence. For which s
entence is important, and which not? Can one know before hand whether a sentence, or part of a sentence may not be called upon to appear again as Motiv, peg, symbol, citation or connexion? And a sentence which must be heard twice must be fashioned accordingly. It must — I do not speak of beauty — possess a certain high level, and symbolic suggestion, which will make it worthy to sound again in any epic future. So every point becomes a standing ground, every adjective a decision, and it is clear that such work is not to be produced off-hand.”
This, then, is the method. The man himself was always delicate in constitution. “The doctors said he was too weak to go to school, and must work at home.” I quote from Aschenbach, in Der Tod in Venedig. “When he fell, at the age of fifty-three, one of his closest observers said of him: ‘Aschenbach has always lived like this’ — and he gripped his fist hard clenched; ‘never like this’ — and he let his open hand lie easily on the arm of the chair.”
He forced himself to write, and kept himself to the work. Speaking of one of his works, he says: “It was pardonable, yea, it showed plainly the victory of his morality, that the uninitiated reader supposed the book to have come of a solid strength and one long breath; whereas it was the result of small daily efforts and hundreds of single inspirations.”
And he gives the sum of his experience in the belief: “dass beinahe alles Grosse, was dastehe, als ein Trotzdem dastehe, trotz Kummer und Qual, Armut, Verlassenheit, Korperschwache, Luster, Leidenschaft und tausend hemmnischen Zustande gekommen sei.” And then comes the final revelation, difficult to translate. He is speaking of life as it is written into his books:
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1028