It is because of their sincerity and their passion for the unsifted truth, that poets will always form an aristocracy, leaving service to the servile class, just now mostly composed of women. You remember the curse laid upon Eve. The doctrine of service brings people together in gregarious multitudes. The poets' quest of truth separates poets even from poets.

October 19, 1917.

It is my belief that if the whole world had spoken Greek we should not have their great literature.

and

The other day I was at was maintaining that after the Hohenzollern and their dynasty we should next have to face a more insidious autocracy that of the mob, and that the only thing to be done was to disestablish and disendow the great democracies and in their place start small democracies. For, said I, the mob is the danger, big democracies meaning big mobs and small democracies small mobs. Just then-arrived and we received him with enthusiasm and I told him my argument. At once he made a very important modification. He said the mob is not the danger but the mob psychology.

The mob psychology is already in the world control and we are all busy in finding out how to flatter it. It is the heir of the old autocracies, a forceful and pushing 'chip of the old block,' and it has the charm of youth, and some of us have discovered that the movement or philosophy of internationalism and of no patriotism is the nicest titbit we can offer to this new minotaur. What between facility in acquiring foreign languages and good translation, a book published in one corner of the world rapidly passes and circulates everywhere. It is as if

November 2, 1917.

Until the war came to upset our calculations, life had become exceedingly pleasant and exciting to live, yet not worth thinking about. In ancient days, in Elizabethan times, life was terrible to live and tremendous to think about. Quiet men must have died of fright. I am sure they did, even if sometimes it was only a living death; and yet poets found the food by which they live.

In the great lights and shadows of Macbeth and Hamlet and Othello, and in the drama of Webster, people saw reflected the life they knew, and as they believed, the only kind of life possible on this sinful earth, an audience metaphysical, fear-struck, wonder-struck, or melted in pity, and all thinking about Fortune and the image of life and death in a word a poetical audience. Smilingly we go to the plays of G. B. Shaw or Ibsen to admire the cleverness of the playwright or for a logical satisfaction and we come away discussing the issues of tea-drinking or vegetarianism or that storm in a teacup, married incompatibility—or the birth control.

November 18, 1916.

There is the artist who is sociable in his work and there is the solitary artist. To the first order belongs Meredith. Dostoievsky is a solitary. Meredith possessed every kind of pride. Intellectually, and as a man of class, he was proud. He was insularly proud, like the Englishman. Pride comes from conscious relation to his fellow man. Dostoievsky never sought for social relations and so these various kinds of pride that Meredith enjoyed

and sometimes reveled in, were unknown to him. His nature was not social, and his convict life and strange experience forced him away to live in his own company. A clever man, a man of genius, entering into society meets with so much stupidity and antagonism that he is forced to armor himself in the panoply of some kind of pride. Dostoievsky escaped the necessity, but if his convict life and experience did not make him social, how could this? They taught him something infinitely more valuable to the artist. If you are forced to live with people and you won't, often can't, live socially, there is only one thing to do that you may live, and that is to study these people exhaustively, so as to find the something that may lubricate a little the painful contact.

A hard, insensitive mind would find it in a continual contempt; the affectionate and sensitive Dostoievsky found it in pity and love and tenderness. He could not exchange ideas and words with these people. Had he attempted to speak his thoughts they would have been insulted, and revenged themselves by constant insults. So he watched and loved and pitied and understood. Thus he became the great writer. He found in human nature his own particular world of truth and as he learned its secrets and its scope he bent before its magnitude of suffering and before its splendor of possibility, and this gradually came to mean deepest humility. The solitary man at all times, if he be really a solitary, is humble for a man can only be proud when he is eminent and distinguished in society. A man alone with himself perforce very quickly realizes that he is only an atom in presence of the sun and moon, the past and the future. He may, indeed, hope that being a man he is chief of created things, but that

Thinking about Henry James, I wonder why he is so obscure; truly one's attention goes to sleep or wanders off when trying to make him out. I think it is for one thing that he has a very limited vocabulary with a great many shades of meaning to describe and only a few words. Necessarily, he again and again uses the same word or the same phrase in widely different senses and that is bewildering to the reader who has not much time to spare. Then he varies very little the shape of his sentences. He writes as if he dictated and did it for his own ease in a sing-song voice. He ought to have taken for amanuensis somebody who was at once a critic and a friend and not too much of an admirer somebody who would insist on understanding and who would not be put off. I said in my lecture that one can hear the very voice of Shakespeare and how various is that voice and how it provokes and engages the attention. It is his own music, yet he would have you follow it, so that he leans toward you and sings it into your ear, or stands away and makes it resound to all the echoes. Another source of our difficulty in reading Henry James is that it is only almost at the very end of his book that we see his people. Tolstoi's first care is that you may see his people and then comes the comment and the long unfolding. In both there is suspense, without which a story does not exist. But in James it is his cunning to make that suspense dull and tiresome, holding you in spite of yourself. In Tolstoi the suspense is terrible from the first,

but so fascinating that you do not look to the end of the story, so as to lose none of it. If you gazed long enough at a tapestried wall perhaps the figures would begin to move. It is only after many readings that I enjoy a novel by Henry James.

October 25, 1917.

I have just read a novel of Turgenieff. He differs from Conrad in that he gives way occasionally, with artistic restraint, to emotion, and it is right that he should do so. Conrad is too proud, too much the aristocrat of letters. Art and poetry should reflect life and, like life, contain everything. That again is the dramatic poet's opportunity; prose, comedy, humor, tragedy, and all the emotions as well as the feelings. I have already said to you that I think emotion is feeling which has passed into the nerves, and takes possession of the nerves. The feeling, indeed, is weakened, there is loss of intensity, but the recompense is great, for it has become a pleasure. Niobe weeping for her children would refuse emotion as she would refuse all pleasure, but poetry is not always high tragedy. In this country they worship pleasure, and have come to think that emotion is all in all, and that is bad for poor literature and for everything else. But American ladies like it and they are supreme, being, as they are, the irresponsible sex. It was not so when they were mothers with large families. Then the man was the irresponsible sex, who would risk everything on a throw of the dice, quite happy if he could only weep or laugh or be angry.

September 12, 1916.

The realistic artist has for his object to spread his sense of the pleasing. He is like unto a mother, with an ugly child she knows the child is

ugly, the averted looks of her friends have told her so; besides she knows the standards of taste and that they are all against her. And yet, though she knows it so well she is not convinced. The child to her is pleasing.

That anything is pleasing is not enough to make it beautiful. That it be beautiful, the springs of excitement must be touched. In an affectionate woman's heart these springs are often touched - when there is no one near to put her out of countenance she finds her child beautiful. If this excitement, this exaltation of affection visits the realistic artist, he not only makes the ugliness he has created pleasing, he makes it beautiful. Falstaff is always pleasing. There are moments when even he is not quite - yet almost beautiful. The poor and the miserable who live in the midst of the ugly, are grateful to the realistic artist who helps them to make their lives pleasing. Mirabeau spoke of his own ugliness and of what a help it was in his career of demagogue, and he once spoke of his 'sublime' ugliness. He was an artist of genius and knew how to make it pleasing and the people, surrounded by ugliness, were grateful; it was a ray of sunshine in their dim lives and doubtless his ugliness at times was sublime, so that it shot a ray not merely of sunshine, but of lightning and storm in among these people until they were proud of their ugly faces and of their ugly lives and ways which at once became, for them, the symbols of energy and power. To this day it often happens in Paris, that the ugliest women are the ones preferred.

Imagination mounts with a slow wing and shuns crowds. Congestion is the essence of democracies and imagination in a democracy is oftener a stranger and an outcast. For I

think poetical imagination is simply affection. The man with a poetical mind finds his happiness and himself becoming absorbed in some person or some thing which is other than himself; and since this is a matter of time and place and opportunity a man of affection will get away to be alone with his friend or with his garden, or to be beside his lake or his sweetheart. He wants a deeper acquaintance with these things. Affection is studious, with the passion of the student for learning new and deeper things. We speak of love as the central feeling in art, and what is love but the exaltation of affection? and is not the poet's 'love' nothing more than affection familiar to us

all, and especially to women and children, crowned and endiademed. The acorn of poetic genius is nourished by the most amiable of all the feelings the gentlest, tenderest, and the weakest.

August 20, 1917.

Do you think that a novel is a work of art if you have the desire to read it a second time? I have just read a novel which is here held of high account. Its story gripped me and there was passion in it, but I could not be induced to read it a second time. And yet I have also the conviction that anywhere but in America the writer would have produced a work of art. His passion is pity for the poor and wretched, incidentally he writes a good story and his people are alive. Yet in the front of his picture stands his argument. In Les Misérables of Victor Hugo the pages are flooded with sympathy for the poor and disinherited, and yet this is only a background against which we have placed creations of ethereal loveliness. Besides, there is the sombre romance in the life of the hero of the

book. There is also wit, satire, and laughter and humor, and because of these, we read again and again in that book. Those writers of propagandist literature for their own contentious purpose, if for nothing else, ought to study the philosophy and technique of art.

The American writer is a man named and I have an impression that he is at heart a journalist and that his altruistic passion is not really a passion, only an exploitation of a feeling which is just now current in novel-reading circles. If this be so, he is hopeless. You cannot make an artist out of a journalist.

Have you ever looked at Hogarth's pictures? His own idea of himself was that he was a moralist to teach moral lessons his only object in his rather combative and bustling existence, yet with the real passion of the eighteenth century, and not as a selfseeking journalist. Who now cares for his moral lessons? They are out of date. Yet Hogarth remains among the immortals because he created women of a tender and appealing beauty and because of his humor, wit, and humanity.

There is another remark I will make, as appertaining to modern conditions. I have just been reading a French novel. Its hero is a doctor who is revolutionizing medicine and surgery. He is also an atheist and a progressive. His friend, who is a radical politician, begs him to help him in his politics and the man answers with an emphatic 'non.' When asked for his reasons, he answers-Parce que c'est trop facile.' It is an ever-present temptation to artists and poets to leave their own task with its concentration and stern labors and infinitely deferred hopes, seeking some far-off synthesis of beauty to enter politics, where they can instantly be

put into possession of what looks exactly like their dream. Only - it is not the same; it is the substitution of the emotional for feeling, and the hero of the French novel, being an educated man, knows it. Of course the worldly advantages of the political choice are obvious. It was this drew Sheridan away from the writing of comedies. I wonder if he ever had any visitings of regret. Did the man of fashion sigh for his garret and Grub Street?

An artist and a poet should be too proud to enter politics, not because they are corrupt or mean, but Parce que c'est trop facile!

January 10, 1917.

There is a lurking doubt in most minds that poetry and the reading of it are a waste of time, yet poetry is merely affection trying for existence and for its triumph. Where the senses are feeble or easily dulled, the thinking faculty feeble, it is easy for affection to precipitate itself down the slopes of an abysmal sentimentality; and there are such poets, plenty of them, where the senses are all keyed up to their most perilous height, if you like to put it so. It is only the half-seen fact which misleads and where the thinking power is vigorous, the sophistries of passion and heat do not betray. In the true poet's mind, where the senses are keen and the reason strong, longing affection has a hard time of it. And then the poet has so many minds; the ordinary man has one mind that of ambition or success or domestic bliss, but in the poet there is, always and ever active, a sense of the past and a sense of the future and a sense of the present with hope and manifold fears and courage and all his inclinings of love or anger or pity. With all of these many minds, as I call them, affection must make her

peace. Like a tired litigant she goes from court to court pleading her cause. Poetry is the record of that long litigation begun centuries ago and not yet finished. With a mighty intellect far beyond that of any scientist or mathematician or statesman and with senses keen as the senses of animals, love stands before the world and pleads that she be allowed to ascend that throne upon the lowest steps of which she is barely permitted to seat herself.

And yet, though affection pleads with such soft eloquence, she is a warrior maid. I know there have been pusillanimous poets. In the Victorian days these sang of fact and truth as a despot to be propitiated, and I remember the words of Wesley who wrote on the education of children: 'Break their wills, break their wills, teach them to kiss the rod with tears,' and how this kind of teaching was echoed again and again even for the adult generations of Coleridge and Wordsworth and Tennyson. These men were false to their calling. Blake scorned! their unctuous submission and, rousing all his courage, fought against the despotism of fact and truth with a valor which is man's birthright and highest inspiration, and so he remains as compared with them a figure of glory and sincerity.

Poetry is at once the champion and the voice of the long history of affection and I will call none great among poets in whom I do not find intellect or what may be called judgment of the most vigorous kind, the keenest senses and, last of all, temperance; for extravagance is as fatal to a poet as sentimentality, since both are false and no one can enjoy a poet who deals in falsehood. And for this reason among others you cannot respect a poet who allows himself to be deceived, and for that reason his poetry is for