Francis William Lauderdale Adams

“ The fact remains that in 'Locksley Hall' he wrote some exceedingly fine verse, and, when he arrived at his more lucid moods, was able to compose some love-songs to a woman as perfect in their way as his love-elegiacs to his friend. Here and there 'Maud' reaches to real passion and the perfected expression of it. Her love has made his life 'a perfumed altar flame.' 'He has walked awake with Truth' for the first time in his life, and he takes us with him. And the poignant note—the tone of the agony of loss, 'deep as first love and wild with all regret'—he has won it at last. ”

“ A savage Stoicism holds all things cheap, even death. 'Bah! how these Christians funk death!' It is the grim and contemptuous jeer of the eternal heathen, whose heart says to him with a fraternal candour, 'Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return, and what on earth does it matter?' Yet what a depth of passion and emotion lies in these Stoics, and how paltry and factitious all other men seem beside them—children babbling of the moon or cowards sucking at their spiritual opium pipes to drug their 'funk' into 'faith'! ”

“ If we turn from the merely technical aspects of his work, the same timid artificiality still meets us at all points. He juggles away everything which he cannot transmute into the frail and gracious loveliness which feeds his senses. When he erects a Palace of Art and hangs up some paintings of the poets, Shakespeare figures under the semblance of one 'bland and mild.' Tennyson likes him bland and mild: it is so much nicer, you know, than strenuous and heart-sick, and this is his criticism of literature. ”

“ He paused, looking out into the far and all but cloudless east, where the first glimmerings of the approaching dawn expanded imperceptibly.
'That,' he said, 'is one's thought—one's dream—one's vision; the ideal, the heaven of the race, and its realisation, is possible—possible through developments of ever-increasing beauty, and force, and wonder. Who shall say No? But one thing is certain: the human problem must be settled first. The danger of the ruined web must be permanently averted. Every faculty of man must be bent to the great work. We must have all mankind to choose from. ”

“ Oh! we pity Labour—we pity the masses—we pity the rank and file. But what is that pitifulness of theirs beside the tragedy of the men of intelligence, the poets, painters, musicians, sculptors, the writers of talent and genius, the scientists, the inventors, the discoverers? Do you say Labour is exploited? Heavens! if Labour is exploited 5 per cent., talent and genius are exploited 50 and 500. It is brains we want—it is brains which alone can save us, which alone can help us to solve the deadly riddle of the Sphinx. With brains, I say, all things are possible ”

“ Wilson smiled.
'You are giving them up to me right off,' he said. 'Our ancestors! our ancestors make us do this or that! And what on earth have our ancestors to do with our hunt for happiness? No more than our friends and relations, and the community generally, which also makes us do that and this, whether it concerns us or not.'
'You are a devil,' growled Randal. 'You think things out. Thank God! I never did. If I had, I should have laundered all my poetry the way you have laundered most of your painting. Art should be simple and sensuous, as even the theologico-idealist Milton saw. ”

“ I agree.'
'The truth is,' said Randal, 'that Italy is a mistake for both of us. I went there once with a woman I loved, who is dead. You planned to go there once with a woman you loved, who is also dead. Yours was the better fate, because the illusion of your problematical happiness still remains with you. For me it exists no longer. Alas!' he sighed, 'women are bad travelling companions. At every step they betray the appalling conventionality of their outlook. They see nothing, because they know nothing, observe nothing, recognise nothing. ”

“ Socialism was the ideal; Labour organisation, first in unions and then as a political party, the practical means at hand with which to forward the realisation of this ideal. It was not pity alone for the suffering of those people that produced this in me. I knew that in some respects their life was little more piteous than that of the lower and even of the central middle-class above them. In other respects I knew that the masses were absolutely better off. Their existence, if they have health and strength, is often less hopelessly dull and soullessly corrupt. ”

“ There is only one standard by which we can attempt to judge any serious writer, and that is by the highest and best which we know of. The judgment we may hold of Lord Tennyson now may be hopelessly irreconcilable with that which we held once, if judgment it could be called, and not the blind acceptance of the enthusiasm of the generation that immediately preceded us. But so is our judgment of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Byron and Shelley and Keats. ”

“ Only from a superb rank and file can we hope for a superb army from which we can choose our saviours. We have but one single foe—Nature—the deadliest foe of all, the foe which can be conquered only by intelligence, and enslaved only by comprehension, and which can hold no other place but that of either victor or vanquished, master or servant. Nothing that runs counter to the final settlement of this, the one vital problem of humanity, is to be tolerated. If we cannot read her riddle aright, our Sphinx will surely devour us, just as she has devoured all the others. ”

“ It is certain that at this moment I could turn my back on Italy without regret. Six years ago I should have held such a temper impossible. Spain attracts me more.'
'My dear fellow,' said Randal, 'at thirty, let me repeat, the taste for lollipops deserts us, and we find them no longer endurable, except, perhaps, in the shape of acid drops. Italian music wearies me to death. The lovely nullity of the Italian women's faces is only the same thing in another shape. It makes you feel brutal. Spain is still pungent. ”

“ Randal grinned drily, while the other went on:
'Your chasse au bonheur in an individual, based as it is on cruelty and egotism, ends inevitably in disgust and isolation, in disillusionment, hatred, and despair. As it is with an individual, so is it with a community, a nation, a race, a civilisation. The hero of Le Rouge et le Noir finishes on the guillotine, and, though his tragic fate is, half of it, an indictment of his time, yet the other half is certainly an indictment of himself. ”

“ Life justifies the individualist—the poor devil you have been jumping upon as "the man of talent"—quite as much as the socialist. I venture to believe that a large proportion of humanity is made up of secret drinkers, in some shape or other, and that proportion would reach to the half, I dare say, of the more intelligent. Individualistic civilisations, you confess, have had magnificent results, but have always failed, you declare, to achieve anything like permanency or success. Have socialistic civilisations achieved even the magnificent results, to say nothing of the permanency or success? ”

“ The result is that his most ambitious work—work which should have proved a masterpiece and which contains the elements of a masterpiece—has absolutely missed its aim and falls away. 'This sort cometh not out save by prayer and fasting.'
Yes, truly there are moments in which one does not realise how supremely rare anything really admirable is. At such moments one is prone to regret that the man who had painted a pig perfectly had not expended his energy on the painting of a man, as if perfectly painted pigs were so common! ”

“ Hardy's early books might, and in all probability would, have been eradicated if from the beginning he had had to face anything like genuine criticism, anything like a genuinely critical public. But, as it was, he was praised for his bad work and blamed for his good, until the faculty of distinction in him became hopelessly blurred and bewildered. The grotesque worthlessness of the criticism which he, like all the rest of us, received and receives in the ravenous and whirling columns of the Press, he must soon have learned to rate at its true value for a serious writer. ”

“ Swinburne's masterpiece should be found in an elegy, and in an elegy on Charles Baudelaire, are not far enough to seek to need expressing here. It suffices to remark that the poem is (let us, then, say it) flawless, perfect, and that its equals in our time are to be counted on the fingers of one hand. Our modern paganism has found its final expression, if not of life, then of death. Our Catullus has journeyed over many lands and seas, dark with doubt and despair, to tell us of whatsoever of good and sweet death has for us, death that is and death that will be. ”

“ Civilisation must refuse to forget the honour due to the man who, at the crisis of life and death, imperiously declared for life, and struggle, and the claim of victory. Shelley at this crisis did nothing—could do nothing. He had no readers, no public. Byron was an English lord, an English aristocrat, and the start this gave him in the race was then enormous. Europe, lying under the feet of English Toryism and the Holy Alliance, suddenly saw an English noble strike blow after blow at its oppressors. Even Wellington, the sacred peace-monger of the world, was not safe. Byron bemocked his nose! ”

“ Jeanne d'Arc was a visionary, but that did not in the least prevent her from being a shrewd and sensible young woman, wonderfully in touch with the actualities of things. She knew what life and living meant, which is to say that she knew what men and women were like, and this was why she was able not only to achieve so much herself, but also to remain one of the perpetually inspiring figures of history. Shelley achieved little or nothing, even in his own small circle, and his personal blunders were the cause of catastrophe after catastrophe. ”

“ Barrie. He has only seen, and can only render, what is directly obvious to the myopic gaze of everyday love. He gives all the soulless pettiness, the ravenous snobbery, of these poor people. He gives also their sombre, inarticulate passions of affection and endurance, but nothing more. They remain isolated, baseless, suspended in mid-air, so to say. To him, men and women are merely 'pilgrims and strangers' of the earth—not children, not organic products of it. ”

“ Shakespeare achieves his unique effects through a verbal magic unequalled in the world's literature. No man ever created such lines and phrases. Dante (to take his case alone) wins by something quite different—by a sheer and simple sincerity of outlook. He watches, and watches, and watches, till he sees things before him with an actuality that burns achingly into his sight, and what he sees he puts down simply—as he sees it; but style in the sense of Sophokles, verbal magic in the sense of Shakespeare, he has little or none of either. ”

“ The greatest men have the most grave limitations. They have the limitations of their time, the limitations of their temperaments. How can it be otherwise? There is room for plenty of destructive criticism on them all, before we have passed through the empty thunder and spectacular lightning, and can hear 'the still small voice' that is the clear and eternal note of the Godhead. Since we speak of Shelley, let us speak of him with absolute simplicity and candour. ”

“ Tennyson 'wouldn't live' unless he thought that a profit and loss system like this assured us that 'our griefs were our gains.' 'If the wages of virtue,' he exclaims, 'be dust, would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?' He has not a single idea on the subject; it is the mere primæval religious barter of the infantile savage. He knows of no justification for virtue in itself, in the happiness it affords, in the consciousness that our salvation as individuals and as a community lies demonstratively and scientifically on these lines, and on none other. ”

“ Swinburne's democracy has not the genuine ring. The trail of the amateur-enthusiast is over it all. What democracy is, what it means, and what it wants, is wholly outside his view, as indeed it is, with perhaps one or two exceptions, outside the view of every well-known writer of our time. Indeed, this pseudo-democracy, this apotheosis by light-headed schoolboys of the 'People, the gray-grown, speechless Christ,' is, unless viewed as a merely poetical exercise, rather disgusting. ”

“ Why do you want to disintegrate us? There is no firmer foundation for anything like happiness than the comprehension of one's fellows. When you cannot understand the look in their eyes, you feel like a mournful pilgrim in an alien country. A glance, a smile, that makes a man articulate to you and you to him, strikes a note of pleasure in you, and makes the world the habitat of intelligence.'
'In theory. In practice I find the banality of the smiles and glances only disgusts and wearies me. There is nothing new. The essential want of variety in things is ghastly. ”

“ The weary, heart-sick tale of the ignorant human spider, continuously spinning his continuously ruined web, goes on from age to age, and sardonic and savage Nature, still unsated, contemplates our insane and fratricidal strife, never more fratricidal and insane than at this very hour. She ruins us through our stupidity. As the capitalistic monopolist, in this her true incarnation, exploits the masses of humanity by merely letting them compete among themselves; so Nature exploits cities, nations, and races. ”

“ Their only originality lies in the forms of their passion. All the rest is mere decorative accessory—the mise en scène for love-making or for the social farce. And the worst is, that if you cannot persuade them to hold their tongues, you also will see nothing of what passes before you. Italy has very little to say to you and me just at present, and it has this melancholy association for both of us. ”