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mind. The poet is not concerned because ideals do not correspond to realities (a great source of pessimistic poetry); he is hardly concerned with ideals at all. His bewilderment springs from something far more complex the feeling that reality itself has broken down, that even the simple emotions, the instinctive reactions, are disorientated and lead us astray. This bewilderment has not the absoluteness of pessimism, but it is nevertheless more completely without consolations. There is a satisfaction in making an end of the matter and saying, like Leopardi:

Non val cosa nessuna

I moti tuoi; e fango è il mondo.

But the contemporary poet is not so sure that 'the world is mud'; he does not know, indeed, what it is; for if even the physical reactions appear doubtful, anything may be true. The suffering that is reflected in his poetry is, therefore, the suffering of uncertainty, which, unlike all other kinds of suffering, has no power to distill its own alleviation. To him the miseries of the world are not even misery; for he cannot give them a meaning, or find a place for them in human life. Everything is conditional, everything is potential. Modern thought and modern life present the poet with a number of possible worlds, but not with the one that he needs if he is to feel, as well as speculate upon, reality. His temptation in this quandary is to accept these possible worlds provisionally, and build fanciful hypotheses round them.

This is what Mr. Graves has done in his later poetry. Miss Sitwell and Mr. Eliot describe the bewilderment and misery of the mind surrounded by uncertainty. Mr. Graves too has described that bewilderment and misery, but he has turned more and more of late years to a poetry whose chief implication is

that anything may be true. It is a highly theoretical, very laborious, and intellectually serious, poetry of escape; and it is difficult to see what other kind of poetry the age presented to a poet with a philosophical turn. Donne, as Professor Grierson points out, 'was in the first place a Catholic,' and had moreover 'a vast and growing store of the same scholastic learning, the same Catholic theology, as controlled Dante's thought, but jostling already with the new learning of Copernicus and Paracelsus.' With that new learning Donne furnished the scholastic, Catholic mansion anew, transforming it so that from the inside at any rate it seemed something completely novel; yet the original edifice remained. But Mr. Graves, in whose mind the theories of Professor Freud, Dr. Rivers, Butler, and Sir James G. Frazer jostle one another, has no cosmos in which to assemble them; the age provides none, and it is the lack of a framework of reality that makes his fancies remain merely fancies where Donne's are as concrete as ornaments on a great design. It is this that makes us feel, when Mr. Graves describes the transmigration of Alexander the Great's soul into the body of a Chinese soldier, that it is a mere hypothesis, whereas Donne's fantasy of the soul's transit to Heaven is pure passion and imagination:

Who if she meet the body of the sun,

Goes through, not waiting till his course be run;
Who finds in Mars his camp no corps of guard,
Nor is by Jove, nor by his father barr'd;
But ere she can consider how she went,
At once is at, and through the firmament.

What makes this passage of almost absurd fancy so moving, so serious, is Donne's absolute acceptance of the premises from which he starts. Without an unconditional belief in the immortality of the soul, and in time and eternity as its two states, poetry such as this could not be written. It is the

lack of any metaphysical foundations to Mr. Graves's fancies that makes them sometimes so singularly cold, so unconvincing.

Why might we not approve adulterous license
Increasing pleasurable experience?

What could the soul lose through the body's rapture

With a body not its mate, where thought is pure?

The difference between the poetry of Donne and poetry such as this is the difference between absolute and conditional utterance, between what is true and what may or may not be true, between the poetry of a man living in a real world and that of one torn between several hypothetical ones, none of them acceptable. Donne's hypotheses started from problems that he had resolved by experience or by faith; Mr. Graves's start from this premise or that, and in general from the unresolved problems of the age. Poetry of this kind may be witty, ironical, or suggestive, but it is not serious enough for its purpose, it is not effectual. For the pressing need of any age of transition is to cease to be one, to attain to a resolution of its problems, not to poetize them.

We have a host of theories, then, but among them no ruling theory; a mass of enlightenment, but no faith in enlightenment; a number of ideals of society, but no hope that they will be realized. The world has changed around us, but we are not conscious of having changed it; and the future is still more uncertain than the present. We have lost, in other words, the things that in a period of transition are always lost, but that with its passing return again, somewhat changed by the fact that it happened. Among these are such conceptions as the cosmos, society, humanity, a general purpose, and, as an inevitable expression of these, such literary categories as the tragic, the

pathetic, the comic. The present dislike for the pathetic fallacy' and for katharsis is peculiar to a society that is not integrated. Once postulate a great order and these things become inevitable, for any enduring belief, the belief of a civilization in God, in humanity, or in itself, makes certain things pathetic and tragic, giving its meaning naturally and involuntarily to the varied accidents of life. Ages of transition cannot give this significance to the accidents of their existence; in them accordingly the peculiarly significant categories of literature are questioned or are denied. Yet, if we could write in the great pathetic vein, we should not question the validity of pathos; if we could attain to a katharsis, our doubts about its desirability would be resolved. We live in an interregnum, between a world that has passed and a world not born not in a new order, but rather in the chaos where a new order must be preparing. For, if civilized societies change, they also tend perpetually to reintegrate themselves; at its moment, the stable order of life and thought, better or worse than its preceding type,

returns.

The service of a period of transition is to make us conscious of the problems that the dead order could not solve. These problems accumulate; the old order thrusts them aside, goes on as long as it can, as if they did not exist. Then the crash comes; the order no longer is there; the problems, these and these alone, fill our minds. There is hardly an aspect of life, hardly a feeling or a general conception, that the universal questioning of our age has left untouched; and when order rises again we feel that everything will be changed. The progress of industrialism and the growth of cities have modified our feelings, our relations, our desires. The discoveries and theories of science have

altered our conception of the nature of life, and of the origin and destiny of mankind and of the world.

With these revolutions the last great era of literature, the Victorian, could do little. Nor can we do very much with them, for we are not so much conscious of them as of the universal uncertainty into which they plunge everything. Yet gradually that uncertainty must resolve into something else, which will not be a dogma, nor a theory, but a living complex of beliefs, experiences, acceptances a new adaptation. The universe of science will then become real; we shall recognize it not merely as intellectually valid, but as the actual universe in which we live. 'If the time should come,' Wordsworth says, 'when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of men.' The poet will do so because nothing is wholly real until it finds an image as well as a formula for itself. For the image is the record that a conception has been steeped in the unconscious, and there accepted by the deeper potencies of the mind.

Because it was once accepted in this way, the cosmogony of the Bible is still in one sense more real than that of modern science; for, while we no longer accept it, we cannot but visualize it. God creating the world in seven days, 'making' Adam and Eve and the animals and fishes, setting Heaven above us and Hell beneath, calling the world to account on the Day of Judgment— these are still as vivid as dreams, because once for a long time they had such reality that men could see them as if they were happening before their eyes. It is the measure of the mere intellectuality of the evolutionary theory of

creation that it has never become a picture. It is hypothesis, not imaginative reality. Yet 'the remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, the Mineralogist,' to quote Wordsworth again, 'will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.' The discoveries of modern science are certainly 'material to us as enjoying and suffering human beings.' They have revolutionized our conception of the three problems that chiefly concern poetry and mankind—the problems of creation, destiny, and the nature of life: how we came to be, whither we go, and what we are. The reason why the poet has not taken these discoveries as the objects of his art can only be because they are not really familiar to him, because, while he accepts them intellectually, his unconscious has not accepted them.

If all this is so, there need be no wonder that poetry to-day is hard to write. Living in a world intellectually formulated, the poet has to make it into a real one. His task is not so much to treat the universe of life as to evoke it. That world will sometime be evoked; the universe of science will become as real to us as the universe of the Bible was to our predecessors; the geologic ages, the dragons before the Flood, our first ancestors - these will become 'genuine inmates of the household of man.' They have already been absorbed into the science of psychology; they will be absorbed into poetry because they must, because until they are they will not be humanized, and because if they are not humanized they will remain a remnant of defeated experience. There have been a few magnificent but abor

tive attempts to absorb them, the greatest of these Also sprach Zarathustra, with its new table of values, its acceptance of a world not anthropomorphic, its use of mythological material, its profound recognition of the unconscious, which forestalled so strikingly the later attitude of psychoanalysis. The universe to which Nietzsche tried to orient himself was indeed the universe that modern knowledge had revealed, but he rarely reached past a will-to-acceptance to

acceptance itself. Yet we cannot feel that he failed because he came too soon. The fault lay rather within himself; his inspiration as a poet was impure, like Shelley's. The resolution of the modern world into poetry might, one feels, have been achieved by him had his fanaticism and his ambition been less. The time was ripe, if he had been. As it is, the work of resolution has still to be done. When it is done the condition of a new productive era will be in existence.

WHEN We think of Robinson Crusoe, we generally visualize a figure in a hairy hat and nondescript jerkin, hairy pantaloons and uncouth sandals, hairy waistcoat and ream-strung water-bag. That Alexander Selcraig, or Selkirk, the prototype of Defoe's immortal hero, did at one period of his turbulent existence present some such appearance is unquestionable; but it was not for long.

The real Crusoe, unlike the Crusoe familiar to our boyhood, wore for the greater part of his life just such apparel as that then in vogue. As youthful rustic he dressed like any other youthful rustic; as pirate like any other pirate; as naval officer like his brother officers. Only when we have divested him of his helmet, fleeced him of his 'gamp,' commandeered his parrot, can we form the slightest conception of what he looked like when by the 'wild

1From the English Review (London Conservative monthly), January

majestic Forth' he came in due time to unfold the burden of his love. At the time when our story begins, Selkirk had just returned from the adventure which little as he thought it at the time was one day to render him immortal. As he wandered about Largo, his native village, along the coast to Lundin Links, or in the opposite direction to Elie or Kilconquhar, little did he reckon that on the other side of the Border, and that before long, a book would be written that would carry his name and fame to every country in the world; make his history, indeed, the grand classic of the nurseries, not merely of the Old World, but also of the New. As a matter of fact the returned wanderer was feeling at the moment anything but self-congratulatory, when wandering in Keil's Den, within a few minutes' walk of his father's two-storied cot- he suddenly came across a vision destined ere long to alter his entire outlook. The

spectacle in question was that of a fair cotter, Sophia Bruce by name, tending her father's cattle.

According to Charles Reade, 'beauty is power, a smile is its sword.' So in good sooth Selkirk was to find. For many a day thereafter, all unknown to the girl herself, he used to sit watching her for hours together. At long last our adventurer resolved to accost this naiad of the carse, Sophia on her side apparently being nothing loath to meet his advances. The truth is that, long before Selkirk had discovered there was such a being in the world as this woodland divinity, the latter had not only heard his story, but, despite his hermitlike existence, had even caught an occasional glimpse of him.

Very differently was he dressed at present than on the occasion on which she had first beheld him. His jacket was now hodden gray - before it was of blue plush; his stockings were now homespun before they were silk; his headgear was now a 'straw' - before it was a shovel hat; to-day he carried a crook on the first occasion a silverheaded cane. And yet that first peep Sophia well knew she would never forget. The day in question was that on which his never-to-be-forgotten outlawry at an end Selkirk once more set foot in his native village.

Receiving no answer on tirling at his father's door on that occasion, Alexander was about to turn away in distress, when he was informed that his parents were at church. Thither he immediately directed his steps-Sophia, seated beside her parents in their old straight-backed pew, being a spectator of all that followed.

Never in the checkered history of that old sanctuary was beheld so singular a scene. The parson was holding forth with true Calvinistic ardor whether at the fifth head of his sermon or at the seventh, history does not

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At that moment who should wheel round in her pew but the newcomer's mother, who, unmindful of aught else but the fact that her boy her longlost Alec was returned, with a cry of joy leaped from her seat. The next moment mother and son were locked in an embrace profoundly touching to behold. One individual only viewed things rather differently- the preacher, who now took it upon himself, with lugubrious brow and solemn intonation, to censure the actors in this affecting drama. Poor man, his reproof all went for nothing. The Selkirks hurriedly left the church. As for the remainder of the peppermint-munchers, their attention was no longer to be looked for.

Not until the church was empty did Sophia learn the details of the incident that had caused so profound a sensation among the worshipers. The story affected her not a little. With the autocrat of the pulpit she felt highly indignant; with the feelings of the Selkirks warmly sympathetic. Thus, when Selkirk suddenly appeared from a clump of brushwood and stood before her in Keil's Den, he was in the presence of no disinterested party, little though he suspected it.

We can well imagine the effect the returned wanderer would be likely to make on this untutored cottager. At the period in question - the dawn of the eighteenth century it was not century—it at all uncommon for people to live and die without so much as ever leaving their native villages. Sophia Bruce, if she had ever been as far as Fife Ness