Visions and Revisions: A Book of Literary Devotions

by John Cowper Powys

It is too fatally easy, in these days, when machinery—that "Star called Wormwood"—dominates the world, to fall into a state of hard and flippant cynicism, or into a yet more hopeless and weary irony. The unintelligent cheerfulness of the crowd so sickens one; the disingenuous sophistry of its hired preachers fills one with such blank depression that it seems sometimes as though the only mood worthy of normal intelligence were the mood of callous indifference and universal mockery.

All men are liars, and "the Ultimate Futility" grins horribly from its mask. Well! It is precisely at these hours, at the hours when the little pincers of the gods especially nip and squeeze, that it is good to turn the pages of Fyodor Dostoievsky. He brings us his "Balm of Gilead" between the hands of strange people, but it is a true "alabaster box of precious ointment," and though the flowers it contains are snatched from the House of the Dead, one knows at whose feet it was once poured forth, and for whose sake it was broken!

The books that are the most valuable in this world are not the books that pretend to solve life's mystery with a system. 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. He is, perhaps—who can tell?—the founder of a new religion. And yet the religion he "founds" is a religion which has been about us for more years than human history can count. He, more than anyone, makes palpable and near—too palpable—O Christ! The terror of it!—that shadowy, monstrous weight of oppressive darkness, through which we signal to each other from our separate Hells. It sways and wavers, it gathers and re-gathers, it thickens and deepens, it lifts and sinks, and we know all the while that it is the Thing we ourselves have made, and the intolerable whispers whereof it is full are the children of our own thoughts, of our lusts, of our fears, of our terrible creative dreams.

Dostoievsky's books seem, as one handles them, to flow mysteriously together into one book, and this book is the book of the Last Judgment. The great obscure Land he leads us over, so full of desolate marshes, and forlorn spaces, and hemlock-roots, and drowned tree-trunks, and Golgothas of broken shards and unutterable refuse, is the Land of those visions which are our inmost selves, and for which we are answerable and none else.

Across this Land we wander, feeling for some fingers, cold and dead as our own, to share that terror with, and, it may be, finding none, for as we have groped forward we have been pitiless in the darkness, and, half-dead ourselves, have trodden the dead down, and the dead are those who cannot forgive; for murdered "love" has no heart wherewith it should forgive:—Will the Christ never come?

EDGAR ALLEN POE

One does not feel, by any means, that the last word has been uttered upon this great artist. Has attention been called, for instance, to the sardonic cynicism which underlies his most thrilling effects? Poe's cynicism is itself a very fascinating pathological subject. It is an elaborate thing, compounded of many strange elements. There is a certain dark, wilful melancholy in it that turns with loathing from all human comfort. There is also contempt in it, and savage derision. There is also in it a quality of mood that I prefer to call Saturnian—the mood of those born under the planet Saturn. There is cruelty in it, too, and voluptuous cruelty, though cold, reserved, and evasive. It is this "cynicism" of his which makes it possible for him to introduce into his poetry—it is of his poetry that I wish to speak—a certain colloquial salt, pungent and acrid, and with the smell of the tomb about it. It is colloquialism; but it is such colloquialism as ghosts or vampires would use.

Poe remains—that has been already said, has it not?—absolutely cold while he produces his effects. There is a frozen contempt indicated in every line he writes for the poor facile artists "who speak with tears." Yet the moods through which his Annabels and Ligeias and Ulalumes lead us are moods he must surely himself have known. Yes, he knew them; but they were, so to speak, so completely the atmosphere he lived in that there was no need for him to be carried out of himself when he wrote of them; no need for anything but icy, pitiless transcription. Has it been noticed how inhumanly immoral this great poet is? Not because he drank wine or took drugs. All that has been exaggerated, and, anyway, what does it matter now? But in a much deeper and more deadly sense. It is strange! The world makes such odd blunders. It seems possessed of the idea that absurd amorous scamps like Casanova reach the bottom of wickedness. They do not even approach it. Intrinsically they are quite stupidly "good." Then, again, Byron is supposed to have been a wicked man. He himself aspired to be nothing less. But he was everything less. He was a great, greedy, selfish, swaggering, magnanimous infant! Oscar Wilde is generally regarded as something short of "the just man made perfect," but his simple, babyish passion for touching pretty things, toying with pretty people, wearing pretty clothes, and drinking absinthe, is far too naive a thing to be, at bottom, evil. No really wicked person could have written "The Importance of Being Earnest," with those delicious, paradoxical children rallying one another, and "Aunt Augusta" calling aloud for cucumber-sandwiches! Salome itself—that Scarlet Litany—which brings to us, as in a box of alabaster, all the perfumes and odours of amorous lust, is not really a "wicked" play; not wicked, that is to say, unless all mad passion is wicked. Certainly the lust in "Salome" smoulders and glows with a sort of under-furnace of concentration, but, after all, it is the old, universal obsession. Why is it more wicked to say, "Suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan!" than to say, "Her lips suck forth my soul—see where it flies!"? Why is it more wicked to say, "Thine eyes are like black holes, burnt by torches in Tyrian tapestry!" than to cry out, as Antony cries out, for the hot kisses of Egypt? Obviously the madness of physical desire is a thing that can hardly be tempered down to the quiet stanzas of Gray's Elegy. But it is not in itself a wicked thing; or the world would never have consecrated it in the great Love-Legends. One may admit that the entrance of the Nubian Executioner changes the situation; but, after all, the frenzy of the girl's request—the terror of that Head upon the silver charger—were implicit in her passion from the beginning; and are, God knows! never very far from passion of that kind.