war with one another, and the latter disguise themselves as messengers of light.

VI

Art, at the time of the Renaissance, opened its eyes on itself. It might be said that within the last fifty years a fresh attack of introspection has seized upon it, causing a revolution at least equally important. Work like that of Picasso shows for painting a terrible progress in selfknowledge. Its lesson is as useful to the philosopher as to the artist; that is why a philosopher may say a few words about it from his point of view.

In order to find a pure expression, free even from those human interpositions and that literature which comes from the pride of the eyes, and from their acquired science, Picasso is seen expending a heroic effort of will, attacking the unknown with force. After which painting will have advanced one step in its own mystery. Whenever he touches upon the sin of angelism, at the same heights another would fall into it; sometimes I imagine that by subjecting painting to itself alone and to its pure formal laws, he feels it fainting under his hand; it is then that he becomes enraged, and seizes on anything, which he nails to a wall still with an infallible sensibility. But he is always saved because he awakens in everything he touches an incomparable poetic substance.

It is because he is purely a painter that Picasso meets poetry: in this he is of the line of the masters and recalls to us one of their most useful teachings. As Cocteau remarks, his works do not despise reality, they resemble, with that spiritual resemblance-super-real, to use a word very true in itself-of which I have already spoken. Dictated by a demon or by a good angel, sometimes one hesitates to decide which. But not only are things transfigured as they pass from his eye to his hand, but at the

same time another mystery is divined: the soul and flesh of the painter are trying to substitute themselves for the objects that he paints, to drive out the substance, to enter and to give themselves under the appearances of these things of nothing depicted on a canvas, which live there another life than their own.

Thus the spiritual virtue of human art, when it has arrived at a certain height in its own heaven, perceives that it is translating into analogy and figure the movement of a higher inaccessible sphere. Rimbaud blasphemed at being unable to assuage that kind of eucharistic passion which he had discovered at the heart of poetry. We do not know, for we understand the spiritual but ill, to what depth-sometimes in the overthrown figures of sin—art pursues its analogy with the supernatural. At a certain degree of self-denial, of anguish, it awakes impossible desires; the poor human soul which has trusted itself to it, is thrown into a nameless world, as near to and as far from the truth as the image of your face in the deep water over which you lean; God alone, which the soul desires without knowing it, can henceforward content it; it has found what it seeks with but the thickness of a surface to cross, but it requires the help of omnipotence to take that step.

VII

Poetry (like metaphysics) is a spiritual food; but of a created savour which is not sufficient. There is but one eternal sustenance. Unhappy ye who think yourselves ambitious, and who excite an appetite for less than the three divine Persons and the humanity of Christ.

It is a mortal error to look to poetry for the supersubstantial food of man.

The search for the absolute, for perfect spiritual freedom, added to the lack of all metaphysical and religious certainty, has driven several of our contemporaries, after Rimbaud,

sh

e

S

t

e into this error. From poetry alone, in the midst of a er despair of which neither the sincerity nor the depth should be misunderstood, they look for an improbable solution of the problem of their life, the possibility of an escape to the superhuman. Rimbaud, however, had said: Charity is this Key'. In spite of this illuminating t saying, he remains the great personification of the error of which I speak.

3 Let us proceed by clear cut divisions following our scholastic method. We have seen that we must distinguish three terms: poetry, art, literature'. And I say that, in the last resort, Rimbaud's error consists partly in confusing the last two, in condemning as literature art properly so called,' and partly in separating the first two terms, and violently transferring poetry from the line of art to that of morality. This leads him to the exact opposite of Wilde's error. Wilde made of life a means to poetry; now poetry is made a means to life (and to death).

For result, we shall see men gifted with the sense of poetry loading poetry with burdens which are repugnant to its nature, onera importabilia; demanding of a picture, a piece of sculpture or a poem that it shall make our abstract knowledge properly so called take a step forward', shall open up a metaphysic to the heart, and reveal holiness to us. But poetry can give all this only by an ocular illusion; and we have mirages again: intimidation, blinding effects due to the irruption of alien magnitudes. The most violent effort of all literature to free itself will

3 Art begins with intelligence and freedom of choice. The spontaneous gush of images, without which there is no poetry, precedes and feeds the operation of the poet; and beyond doubt it is never the effect of premeditation and calculation. This should be insisted on. Normally, however, the mind not only controls but solicits this activity and polarises it. After this it awaits results, stops them on their passage, chooses among them, judges.

2 André Breton, Les Pas Perdus.

thus by the nature of things end in literature still. When we perceive that we shall put to the sack ourselves. But only to be deceived again.

With regard to the order of action itself and of human destiny, what can poetry, as a regulator of the moral and spiritual life, poetry to be realised in conduct, introduce but counterfeit. Counterfeit of the supernatural and the miraculous, of grace and the heroic virtues. Disguised as an angel of counsel, it will lead the human soul astray on false mystical paths. Its spirituality, turned aside from its own direction and proper place, under the guise of an internal drama entirely profane, will give a new issue to the old heresies of the free spirit. Purity! Purity is not where the flesh is not crucified, liberty where love is not. Man is called to supernatural contemplation; to offer him another night is to rob him of his property. A revolution which does not change the heart, merely turns over whited sepulchres.

1 The demonologists know that every passive state in which man puts himself is a door open to the devil.

THE

THREE SCHOLARS

By OSBERT BURDETT

I

room was dark and hushed, but the

Tedges of the blind that made an opaque shadow of

the tall Georgian window the afternoon sun slipped in. When an occasional breeze lifted the blind, the shadows of the clematis leaves outside rippled across the lace curtains, and seemed to bring with them the faint murmur of the traffic in Upper Baker Street. On the eastern side especially, in Regent's Park, the summer day was brilliant. The very dust sparkled in the dry, hot air. It was one of those summer afternoons in London on which a healthy person seeks the shade, but which gives to an invalid in bed the momentary illusion of convalescence. Even Mrs. Pemberthy, who had been bed-ridden for years, and had resigned such a hope long ago, felt the impulse; but for her it took the form of thinking that on just such an afternoon it would be good to die. When one had suffered so much and so long, the coming of the end on such a day would be a sort of recompense. It had been earned, she felt, if any invalid could earn it. She had forgotten no one and nothing: her letters and papers had been arranged or destroyed; her little personal belongings had been allotted to the people for whom each might have its associations. A blank cheque, to forestall any possible emergency, had been signed and handed to the nurse. These details, revolving in her mind, shaped themselves instinctively into a prayer. Surely God would indulge her in this! If He did not, another day would bring new demands upon her. She could not face, she was no longer