Visions and Revisions: A Book of Literary Devotions

by John Cowper Powys

Ah, gentle and tender reader; thou whose heart, it may be has never cried all night for what it must not name, did you think Swinburne or Byron were the poets of "love"? Perhaps you do not know that the only "short story" on the title-page of which Guy de Maupassant found it in him to write that word is a story about the wild things we go out to kill?

Walt Whitman, too, does not confine his notions of love to normal human coquetries. The most devastating love-cry ever uttered, except that of King David over his friend, is the cry this American poet dares to put into the heart of "a wild-bird from Alabama" that has lost its mate. I wonder if critics have done justice to the incredible genius of this man who can find words for that aching of the soul we do not confess even to our dearest? The sudden words he makes use of, in certain connections, awe us, hush us, confound us, take our breath,—as some of Shakespeare's do—with their mysterious congruity. Has my reader ever read the little poem called "Tears"? And what purity in the truest, deepest sense, lies behind his pity for such tragic craving; his understanding of what love-stricken, banished ones feel. I do not speak now of his happily amorous verses. They have their place. I speak of those desperate lines that come, here and there, throughout his work, where, with his huge, Titanic back set against the world-wall, and his wild-tossed beard streaming in the wind, he seems to hold open by main, gigantic force that door of hope which Fate and God and Man and the Laws of Nature are all endeavoring to close! And he holds it open! And it is open still. It is for this reason—let the profane hold their peace!—that I do not hesitate to understand very clearly why he addresses a certain poem to the Lord Christ! Whether it be true or not that the Pure in Heart see God, it is certainly true that they have a power of saving us from God's Law of Cause and Effect! According to this Law, we all "have our reward" and reap what we have sown. But sometimes, like a deep-sea murmur, there rises from the poetry of Walt Whitman a Protest that must be heard! Then it is that the Tetrarchs of Science forbid in vain "that one should raise the Dead." For the Dead are raised up, and come forth, even in the likeness wherein we loved them! If words, my friends; if the use of words in poetry can convey such intimations as these to such a generation as ours, can anyone deny that Walt Whitman is a great poet?

Deny it, who may or will. There will always gather round him—as he predicted—out of City-Tenements and Artist-Studios and Factory-Shops and Ware-Houses and Bordelloes—aye! and, it may be, out of the purlieus of Palaces themselves—a strange, mad, heart-broken company of life-defeated derelicts, who come, not for Cosmic Emotion or Democracy or Anarchy or Amorousness, or even "Comradeship," but for that touch, that whisper, that word, that hand outstretched in the darkness, which makes them know—against reason and argument and all evidence—that they may hope still—for the Impossible is true!

CONCLUSION

We have been together, you who read this—and to you, whoever you are, whether pleased or angry, I make a comrade's signal. Who knows? We might be the very ones to understand each other, if we met! We have been together, in the shadow of the presences that make life tolerable; and now we must draw our conclusion and go our way.

Our conclusion? Ah! that is a hard matter. The world we live in lends itself better to beginnings than conclusions. Or does anything, in this terrible flowing tide, even begin? End or beginning, we find ourselves floating upon it—this great tide—and we must do what we can to get a clear glimpse of the high stars before we sink. I wonder if, in the midst of the stammered and blurted incoherences, the lapses and levities, of this quaint book, a sort of "orientation," as the theologians say now, has emerged at all? I feel, myself, as though it had, though it is hard enough to put it into words. I seem to feel that a point of view, not altogether irrelevant in our time, has projected a certain light upon us, as we advanced together.

Let me try to catch some few filmy threads of this before it vanishes, even though, like a dream in the waking, its outlines waver and recede and fade, until it is lost in space. We gather, then, I fancy, from this kind of hurried passing through enchanted gardens, a sort of curious unwillingness to let our "fixed convictions" deprive us any more of the spiritual adventures to which we have a right. We begin to understand the danger of such convictions, of such opinions, of such "constructive consistency." We grow prepared to "give ourselves up" to "yield ourselves willingly," to whatever new Revelation of the Evasive One chance may throw in our way. It is in such yieldings, such surprises by the road, such new vistas and perspectives, that life loves to embody itself. To refuse them is to turn away from Life and dwell in the kingdom of the shadow.

"Why not?" the Demon who has presided over our wanderings together seems to whisper—"why not for a little while try the experiment of having no 'fixed ideas,' no 'inflexible principles,' no 'concentrated aim'? Why not simply react to one mysterious visitor after another, as they approach us, and caress or hurt us, and go their way? Why not, for an interlude, be Life's children, instead of her slaves or her masters, and let Her lead us, the great crafty Mother, whither she will?"

There will be much less harm done by such an embracing of Fate, and such a cessation of foolish agitations, than many might suppose. And more than anything else, this is what our generation requires! We are over-ridden by theorists and preachers and ethical water-carriers; we need a little rest—a little yawning and stretching and "being ourselves"; a little quiet sitting at the feet of the Immortal Gods. We need to forget to be troubled, for a brief interval, if the Immortal Gods speak in strange and variable tongues, and offer us diverse-shaped chalices. Let us drink, dear friends, let us drink, as the most noble prophetess Bacbuc used to say! There are many vintages in the kingdom of Beauty; and yet others—God knows! even outside that. Let us drink, and ask no troublesome questions. The modern puritan seeks to change the nature of our natural longing. He tells us that what we need is not less labor but more labor, not less "concentrated effort," but more "concentrated effort"; not "Heaven," in fact, but "Hell."