John Cowper Powys

“ What "poetry" we do get is so vague and dim and wistful and forlorn that it makes us want to go out and "buy clothes" for someone. We veer between the abomination of city-reform and the desolation of Ultima Thule.
But Shakespeare is Shakespeare still. O those broken and gasped-out human cries, full of the old poignancy, full of the old enchantment! Shakespeare's poetry is the extreme opposite of any "cult." It is the ineffable expression, in music that makes the heart stop, of the feelings which have stirred every Jack and Jill among us, from the beginning of the world! ”

“ The world is a grim game, and we need sometimes the very courage of Lucifer to hold our enemies back. But in the chaos of it all, and the madness and frenzy, let us at least hold fast to that noble daughter of the gods men name Imagination. With that to aid us, we can console ourselves for many losses, for many defeats. For the life of the Imagination flows deep and swift, and in its flowing it can bear us to undreamed-of coasts, where the children of fantasy and the children of irony dance on—heedless of theory and argument. ”

“ Nothing else is needed. "Man must abide his going hence, even as his coming hither. Ripeness is all." When Courage fails us, it is—"as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport." When tenderness fails us, it is—"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time." When humour fails us, it is—"How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to me all the uses of this world!"
So much for Life! And when we come to Death, how true it is, as Charles Lamb says, that none has spoken of Death like Shakespeare! ”

“ The idea of the Superman, too, is an idea that could only have entered the brain of one, pushed on to think, at the spear-head of his own cruelty. It is a great and terrible idea, sublime and devastating, this idea of the human race yielding place to another race, stronger, wiser, fairer, sterner, gayer, and more godlike! Especially noble and compelling is Nietzsche's constant insistence that the moment has come for men to take their Destiny out of the blind power of Evolution, and to guide it themselves, with a strong hand and a clear will, towards a definite goal. ”

“ It is with Faust, in the cave of the abysmal "Mothers."
MILTON
It is outrageous, the way we modern world-children play with words. How we are betrayed by words! How we betray with words! We steal from one another and from the spirit of the hour; and with our phrases and formulas and talismans we obliterate all distinction. One sees the modern god as one who perpetually apologises and explains; and the modern devil as one who perpetually apologises and explains. Everything has its word-symbol, its word-mask, its word-garment, its word-disgrace. ”

“ Everything in a world so fluid is obviously relative. It is ridiculous to dream that there is any absolute standard—even of beauty itself. Those high and immutable Principles of The Good and True are as much an illusion as any other human dream. There are no such principles. Beauty is a Daughter of Life, and is forever changing as Life changes, and as we change who have to live. The lonely, tragic faith of certain great souls in that high, cold "Mathematic" of the Universe, the rhythm of whose ordered Harmony is the Music of the Spheres, is a Faith that may well inspire and solemnize us ”

“ Hardy had not had such sardonic emotions, such desire to "hit back" at the great "opposeless wills," and such Goblin-like glee at the tricks they play us, he would never have been able to write "Tess." Against the ways of God to this sweet girl he raises a hand of terrible revolt, but it is with more than human "pity" that he lays her down on the Altar of Sacrifice.
But, after all, it is in the supreme passages of pure imaginative grandeur that Mr. Hardy is greatest. Here he is "with Shakespeare" and we forget both Titan and Goblin. ”

“ They are the books which create a certain mood, a certain temper—the mood, in fact, which is prepared for incredible surprises—the temper which no surprise can overpower. These books of Dostoievsky must always take their place in this great roll, because, though he arrives at no conclusion and utters no oracle, the atmosphere he throws round us is the atmosphere in which Life and Death are "equal;" the gestures his people make, in their great darkness, are the gestures of that which goes upon its way, beyond Good and beyond Evil!
Dostoievsky is more than an artist. ”

“ No natural person can read him without feeling the pulse of extreme personal passion behind everything he writes.
And this pulse of personal passion is always expressing itself in Poetry. He will let the probabilities of a character vanish into air, or dwindle into a wistful note of attenuated convention, when once such a one has served his purpose as a reed to pipe his strange tunes through. He will whistle the most important personage down the wind, lost to interest and identity, when once he has put into his mouth his own melancholy brooding upon life—his own imaginative reaction. ”

“ It is the history of the human race itself that holds him with a mesmeric spell, as century after century it unrolls its acts and scenes, under the indifferent stars. The continuity of life! The long, piteous "ascent of man," from those queer fossils in the Portland Quarries—to what we see today, so palpable, so real! And yet for all his tragic pity, Mr. Hardy is a sly and whimsical chronicler. He does not allow one point of the little jest the gods play on us—the little long-drawn-out jest—to lose its sting. ”

“ Shelley's "spirituality" is a living, growing, creative thing. In its intrinsic nature it is not egoistic at all, but profoundly altruistic. It uses Sex to leave Sex behind. In its higher levels it is absolutely Sexless. It may transcend humanity, but it springs from humanity. It is, in fact, humanity's dream of its own transmutation. For all its ethereality and remoteness, it yearns, "like a God in pain," over the sorrows of the world. With infinite planetary pity, it would heal those sorrows.
Edgar Allen's "spirituality" has not the least flicker of a longing to "leave Sex behind." ”

“ One feels, as one reads Milton, that his ultimate view of the universe is a great chaotic battlefield, amid the confused elements of which rise up the portentous figures of "Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, and Powers," and in the struggle between these, the most arbitrary, the most tyrannical, the most despotic, conquers the rest, and, planting his creative Gonfalon further in the Abyss than any, becomes "God"; the God whose personal and unrestrained Caprice creates the Sun, the Moon and the Stars, out of Chaos; and Man out of the dust of the Earth. ”

“ And, as every child knows, too, they tune their souls up to the pitch of their "masks." The surface of things is the heart of things; and the protruded goblin-tongue, the wagged head, the groping fingers, the shuffling step, are just as significant of the mad play-motif as any hidden thoughts. People think with their bodies, and their looks and gestures; nay! their very garments are words, tones, whispers, in their general Confession.
The world of Dickens' fantastic creations is all the nearer to the truth of our life because it is so arbitrary and "impossible." ”

“ The great surging antipodal tides of life lash one another into foam. Out of chaos stars are born. And it may be the madness of a dream even so much as to speak of "unity" while creation seethes and hisses in its terrible vortex. Mockingly laugh the imps of irony, while the Saints keep their vigil. Man is a surprising animal; by no means always bent on his own redemption; sometimes bent on his own destruction!
And meanwhile the demons of life dance on. Dante may build up his great triple universe in his great triple rhyme, and encase it in walls of brass. ”

“ He takes life as it is, and, as we all have to do, makes the best of its confusions. If we are here "as on a darkling plain, swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night," we can at least be "true to one another."
One wonders sometimes if it be properly understood by energetic teachers of youth that there is only one intellectual attitude towards life, only one philosophy, only one ultimate mood. This is that mood of "resignation," which, from Homer to Matthew Arnold, is alone adapted, in the long run, to the taste of our days upon earth. ”

“ For it is not sensitive enough to feel that the Universe cannot be pardoned for the cry of one tortured creature, and that all "the worlds we shall traverse" cannot make up for the despair of one human child.
To be "cheerful" about the Universe in the manner of these people is to insult the Christ who died. It is to outrage the "little ones" over whose bodies the Wheel has passed. When Nietzsche, the martyr of his own murdered pity, calls upon us to "love Fate," he does not shout so lustily. His laughter is the laughter of one watching his darling stripped for the rods. ”

“ While the sun shines and the moon draws the tides, men and women will ache from jealousy, and the lover will not be the beloved! Long after a quite new set of "interesting modern ideas" have replaced the present, children will break the hearts of their parents, and parents will break the hearts of their children. Mr. Hardy is indignant enough over the ridiculous conventions of Society, but he knows that, at the bottom, what we suffer from is "the dust out of which we are made;" the eternal illusion and disillusion which must drive us on and "take us off" until the planet's last hour. ”

“ One of the most laughable things in the world is the attempt some simple critics make to turn Nietzsche into an ordinary "Honest Infidel," a kind of poetic Bradlaugh-Ingersoll, offering to humanity the profound discovery that there is no God, and that when we die, we die! The absurdity is made complete when this naive, revivified "Pagan" is made to assure us—us, "the average sensual men"—that the path of wisdom lies, not in resisting, but in yielding to temptation; not in spiritual wrestling to "transform" ourselves, but in the brute courage "to be ourselves," and "live out our type"! ”

“ How, in the name of the mystery of genius, can criticism be anything else than an idolatry, a worship, a metamorphosis, a love affair! The pathetic mistake these people make is to fancy that the great artists only lived and wrote in order to buttress up such poor wretches as these are upon the particular little, thin, cardboard platform which is at present their moral security and refuge.
No one has a right to be a critic whose mind cannot, with Protean receptivity, take first one form and then another, as the great Spells, one by one, are thrown and withdrawn. ”

“ The universe to him, for all its loveliness, remains an outrageous jest. The cosmic is the comic. Anything may be expected of this "pendant world," except what we expect; and when it is a question of "falling back," we can only fall back on human-made custom. We live by Illusions, and when the last Illusion fails us, we die. After reading Shakespeare, the final impression left upon the mind is that the world can only be justified as an aesthetic spectacle. To appreciate a Show at once so sublime and so ridiculous, one needs to be very brave, very tender, and very humorous. ”

“ Long reading of Dickens' books, like long living with children, gives one a wholesome dread of cynicism and flippancy. Children's games are more serious than young men's love-affairs, and they must be treated so. It is not exactly that life is to be "taken seriously." It is to be taken for what it is—an extraordinary Pantomime. The people who will not laugh with Pierrot because his jokes are so silly, and the people who will not cry with Columbine because her legs are so thin, may be shrewd psychologists and fastidious artists—but, God help them! ”

“ We know the world-shaking effort he made—and to have made it at all, quite apart from its success, marks him a unique genius!—to write poetry about every mortal thing that exists, and to bring the whole breathing palpable world into his Gargantuan Catalogues. It is absurd to grumble at these Inventories of the Round Earth. They may not all move to Dorian flutes, but they form a background—like the lists of the Kings in the Bible and the lists of the Ships in Homer—against which, as against the great blank spaces of Life itself, "the writing upon the wall" may make itself visible. ”

“ Art can be founded on every other Negation. But not on that one—never on that one! Certainly they have a right to experiment; to invent—if they can—new forms. But they must invent them. They must not just arrange their lines to look like poetry, and leave it at that.
Walt Whitman's New Form of Verse was, as all such things must be, as Mr. Hardy's strange poetry, for instance, is, a deliberate and laborious struggle—ending in what is a struggle no more—to express his own personality in a unique and recognisable manner. ”

“ The moon—one must admit that, at least—rather than the sun, was ever the mistress of El Greco's genius. He will come more and more to represent for us those vague uneasy feelings that certain inanimate and elemental objects have the power of rousing. It is of him that one must think, when this or that rock-chasm cries aloud for its Demon, or this or that deserted roadway mutters of its unreturning dead.
There will always be certain great artists, and they are the most original of all who refuse to submit to any of our logical categories, whether scientific or ideal. ”

“ The ultimate drama of the world, a drama never-ending, lies between the children of Zeus and the children of Prometheus; between the hosts of Jehovah and the Sons of the Morning. God and Lucifer still divide the stage, and in Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, and Goethe the great style is never more the great style than when it brings these eternal Antagonists face to face, and compels them to cross swords. What matter if, in reality, they have their kingdoms in the heart of man rather than the Empyrean or Tartarus? ”