fill a long stocking with money or move a
girl's heart. They have not much to do with the speculations of science,
though they have a little, or with the speculations of metaphysics,
though they have a little. Their legs will tire on the road if there is
nothing in their hearts but vague sentiment, and though it is charming
to have an affectionate feeling about flowers, that will not pull the
cart out of the ditch. An exciting person, whether the hero of a play or
the maker of poems, will display the greatest volume of personal energy,
and this energy must seem to come out of the body as out of the mind. We
must say to ourselves continually when we imagine a character, 'Have I
given him the roots, as it were, of all faculties necessary for life?'
And only when one is certain of that may one give him the one faculty
that fills the imagination with joy. I even doubt if any play had ever a
great popularity that did not use, or seem to use, the bodily energies
of its principal actor to the full. Villon the robber could have
delighted these Irishmen with plays and songs, if he and they had been
born to the same traditions of word and symbol, but Shelley could not;
and as men came to live in towns and to read printed books and to have
many specialised activities, it has become more possible to produce
Shelleys and less and less possible to produce Villons. The last Villon
dwindled into Robert Burns because the highest faculties had faded,
taking the sense of beauty with them, into some sort of vague heaven &
left the lower to lumber where they best could. In literature, partly
from the lack of that spoken word which knits us to normal man, we have
lost in personality, in our delight in the whole man--blood,
imagination, intellect, running together--but have found a new delight,
in essences, in states of mind, in pure imagination, in all that comes
to us most easily in elaborate music. There are two ways before
literature--upward into ever-growing subtlety, with Verhaeren, with
Mallarme, with Maeterlinck, until at last, it may be, a new agreement
among refined and studious men gives birth to a new passion, and what
seems literature becomes religion; or downward, taking the soul with us
until all is simplified and solidified again. That is the choice of
choices--the way of the bird until common eyes have lost us, or to the
market carts; but we must see to it that the soul goes with us, for the
bird's song is beautiful, and the t