Part 6

But let us, in solace, remember this about bad verse; that there are all round us, yes, and writing for the papers and very popular, too, many worthy men who, if they wrote verse at all, would write bad verse, and yet have the wisdom not to write verse, or at any rate not to publish what they have written--an admirable thing to say of any man. For my part, I admire such men for this very reticence of theirs more than I do for all else they have written in the modern fashion, whether to prove that there is no God, or that we should drink only water or that we should wear woollen boots or sleep with our windows open--or whatever else their gospel may be.

And, remembering that, being capable of writing execrable verse they have not written it, or at any rate not printed it, I forgive them all the rest.

THE UNITED POETS

Some years ago--long before the war--the startled Fauns first heard, then saw (as they peeped through the brushwood) a motor-lorry bumping and careering down the road. It had no hood; it was open. It was the more remarkable because in those days motor-lorries were rare. And it carried nor store nor sand nor any other merchandise, but all that were in those days the Poets of England--Swinburne being dead.

As motor-lorries, so Poets were in those days rare. The whole tale of these was eleven.

They had a Chief, or Master, or Mystagogue, who had gathered them together and was taking them on this perilous pilgrimage. I am not making this up. It is true.

So went they, so bumped they, with a prodigious clatter, and only one Prosator among them, the serf at the wheel; but they, all Poets, were clinging on for dear life in the wooden truck behind ... when--oh, my God!--a wheel struck something, and off the tumbril went into the ditch, and the Poets were flung far and wide. But Apollo stayed the hand of Death; they were the worse for nothing more than bruises. For Phœbus Apollo in his house of light saw Death going down through clouds upon England and he said, "Death, where go you?" and Death answered, "I go to make an end of Eleven Poets." But the Far-Darter answered him again saying, "Oh! Death, tarry a moment while I pour you out the dark wine of Africa which the Massillians have brought over the cloud-shadowed sea to the ports of home."

So Death tarried, and when he had drunk that wine he slept; but while he slept, the Eleven Poets were saved. The lorry was, I know not how, set on its wheels again, and continued, in a chastened fashion, a less violent career, towards The Goal.

That Goal was a house where I had the good fortune to meet them; for in those days I was always in luck's way. I met them for one brief hour. I was not allowed to eat with them. I was sent for after the meal, as children are allowed to come in for dessert.... Yet was I older than most of these.

I did not waste the occasion, but almost immediately after my introduction to the Eleven Poets I challenged the Mystagogue, an Irishman, the Chief of the Band, and asked him the great question which has intrigued my mind from childhood.

"How," said I, "is poetry written?"

He put into his eyes a far-away look, like that of a fish which is dead, and he said in a mournful tone (did the Mystagogue):

"I cannot tell you.... I cannot communicate it to you.... It is a Muse."

I was naturally annoyed, for it was no answer at all; and I said (perhaps a little too sharply):

"I am afraid I cannot accept that answer! The truth is, you are keeping something back from me. You desire to prevent competition in your trade, and to keep its great emoluments for your limited guild. But I _will_ find means to learn, in spite of you all!"

He shook his head, and still more his hair, and smiled in the shape of a capital V. He said it could not be done.

I went home and consulted one of my many thousand books, and then another, and discovered the rules of Poetry, and read descriptions of Poetry in encyclopædias and critics' books, and also much poetry direct in Anthologies, hoping to find out how it was done. But to this day I have never discovered the way.

There is a story of Taine taking some of Renan's work to the window, looking closely at it through a large reading-glass, and saying: "One cannot see how it is constructed!" So I with poetry. I can see how verse is done, but I cannot see how poetry is done. How is a startling of the soul produced by the collocation of few, simple words? What essence is it in their sound and their order which opens the blinding doors of vision?

_Chevauche Karle tout li port durant._

There, in one revelation, are the Passes of the Pyrenees! There are the solemn, menacing heights, the ceaseless waterfalls. There, in that line, are the gods of the unconquered hills. Yet it means in English exactly, word for word, "Charles rides up all the pass," and "Charles rides up all the pass" is not poetry.

I remember a leathery idiot giving, as an example to show that Homer was over-rated, the Catalogue of The Ships, and saying: "At any rate, you won't call that poetry!"--which showed he did not know what poetry was.

[Greek: to d'ama tessarakonta melainai uêes eponto] "_And forty dark ships followed him._"

If that is not poetry I will eat my hat.

I suppose what the man meant was that a catalogue could not be poetry. You might just as well say that the name of a man could not be poetry, or the listed names of many famous men.

The marvel is that this essence, Poetry, whatever it is, survives, like the human soul surviving death. It survives a complete breach in continuity. The way in which the language was pronounced may be lost; the shades of meaning may be lost; sometimes even the plain meaning of a word or two in a passage of true Poetry may be lost. And yet the poetic essence survives. It survives in full strength--again like the human soul--and if there were a resurrection for languages, as there is for human beings, then the poetic soul meeting the poetic body would be quite at its ease, not enfeebled by so long a separation.

Thus when I hear it argued (with every probability behind it) that French poetry, on account of its extreme subtlety, will not--some centuries hence--survive that most lasting of our languages, I traverse. For men sometimes say that English poetry and Spanish poetry will survive the end of our civilisation, because they are dependent on lilt or stress. But how shall the glory of French verse remain which wholly reposes upon such tiny modulations of the tongue? The answer is that Greek undoubtedly reposed upon these same necessities; yet I take it that Greek poetry has survived.

Moreover, if you look at it, the English effects are a great deal more than lilt or stress, though lilt or stress is never absent from them. Some of the most desperately successful efforts in the English lyric are as slight in their nuance as the French. It is rare, no doubt; but you can find cases. For instance:

"_Ah me, whilst thee the shores and sounding seas wash far away._"

Here is in English what a French line is: a line with hardly any primary emphasis, a level line wholly dependent for its enormous effect upon the vowel sounds and the slightest modulations. And now for the miracle.

Imagine a time, a few generations hence, when the British _th_ shall be blunted into _d_ by Colonials of every blood and colour, when the short _o_ of "wash" has turned to the popular "worsh" and when the long _o_ in "shore" had come to be pronounced like our _oo_, when the _s_ of the plural has in every position come to be pronounced like _z_, when the final _d_ in "and" has become silent, and also the final _g_ in "ing," and the characteristic _a_ of the cultivated has become the popular "oi." "Whoilst dee de zhoores an zoundin zeas worsh far awoi." How could the line survive such changes? But it will survive; though I am damned if I understand how!

There is something very consoling for poor mortals in all this. We are here, in this world, all out of scale. We are hurried, we are grotesquely subject to change, though by our every appetite we protest against change, and hunger and thirst for victory over change. We are fast-rooted things, mocked by ceaseless fading; we are immemorial lovers carried on by a river of progressive forgetfulness; we are deathless within, and yet a death goes on about us (ah! and _within_ us) all the time.

And there is in the midst of such a trial no temporal symbol of our real, our ultimate, security except Poetry. The intellect may convince us (if it is strong enough) of our immortality. Faith will always accept the sensible doctrine of our not time-bound fate, and of the concurrent doctrine of Resurrection. But you do not find any stuff around you to confirm you--except Poetry. Religion assures: but nothing man-made supports the vision of heaven, save the completed line. That endures. That is outside time.

It is no answer to say that a poet may be lost, his writings forgotten. Of course they may--or they may be found again. The point is that the great poetic line is not subject to decay. So long as it is there at all, it is there in its fulness. And this is true of nothing else among the works of men.

On this account I envy those Eleven Poets from the lorry whom I met so long ago, and the Head Poet, or Mystagogue, their leader. I often wish I could meet them again.

These men were secure of something which no great soldier, no great painter, nor sculptor, nor architect--not even any great Secretary of State for Home Affairs or Master of the Buckhounds or Chief Whip--can boast. They had achieved the unique thing, the only deathless thing--that is, supposing they were Poets.

I suppose they must have been Poets, because they came labelled as Poets and were received as Poets; and, in fine, were by all external and social criteria, Poets. Just as a Lord is a Lord, or as a Judge is a Judge, so were they Poets. I really do not know what the definition is, but they were Poets. They were the possessors, the authors, the creators of that which no one could take from them and which will endure for ever--something that will never grow old. What a consolation for the memory of death! What a foretaste of immortality!

It is a fine thing to be able to say, and I can imagine one of these Eleven British Poets saying it:

"I have awkward manners and a foolish smile. I cannot earn more than a few hundreds a year, and my father left me nothing. I cut a poor figure among you all. But I have myself _made_: I am, therefore, a complete possessor. I am father and _master_ of something entirely different from anything which you command: whether you command wealth, or lineage, or beauty, or any one of the talents which delight mankind in song or in instrument of music, or with the pencil, or even in building. I surpass you all, for I wrote this, that, or the other thing, and it will stand for ever."

Certainly of all boasts short of virtue it is the proudest boast a man can make.

ON CONVINCING PEOPLE

I have just been working at the "Provincials" of Pascal. They are full of lies, and full of errors. They would not convince the stupidest of readers who should seriously compare them with the original documents which Pascal attacked. But no reader has ever done so. My object in reading Pascal's book was to expose it, and therefore my object on a small stage was to do what Pascal did on a large one, that is, to convince people: with this only difference. Pascal had only to convince those who agreed with him in believing something that was not true, to wit, that Casuistry was immoral. But I set out to convince, of something that _was_ true (to wit, that Casuistry was both moral and necessary) those who heartily, save Maynard and Derome, disagreed with me.

This amiable exercise has set me thinking about the art of convincing people; and I say "of convincing" and not "of persuading," for I think that the two arts stand for two different processes. You can persuade a man to do a thing though he still disapproves of it in conscience and intellect. But conviction is something higher.

It is an appeal to the intelligence and the love of truth. It relies upon the production of proof. Very interested am I in ferreting out the process whereby the thing is done, and in discovering why it will succeed when it is done in one way, and fail when it is done in another.

I must make clearer my distinction between the mere production of a mood, persuading, and _conviction_.

The mere production of a mood is effected (according to the weakness of your subject) by some form of suggestion. The modern popular press works that way. Its weapon is mere iteration, and its victim is the many-headed beast. For the persuasion of the higher sort the thing must be done by some seductive art, rhetoric, or flattery, or even music. But in either case the end of the process is not a certitude of the intelligence, and therefore your result is not final. Your intended victim may be jerked out of his mood by any shock--especially by a shock of reality.

There is between the mere persuasion and conviction an intermediate thing, very common. It is advocacy: the advancing of selected arguments towards a certain selected end. The victim knows he is being played upon, yet he often succumbs. A man does not want to visit a particular place. The method of suggestion would be merely to repeat the name of the place over and over again, and the command to go there. Such are those advertisements which you see upon the walls of great cities in flaming letters commanding you to enter a dull playhouse. Advocacy would put before the man all the real advantages of the place it wanted him to visit and hide all the real disadvantages. It would act through the intelligence, but also by cheating the intelligence.

Now, conviction is in a different world. When you convince a person you make him really certain. It does not follow that you make him certain of a truth, but you make him certain through the intelligence and not through a mere mood. Nor do you put him, as advocacy does, between two issues, one of which he chooses. You make him wholly at one with the doctrine you give. You implant certitude to the exclusion of every alternative. When you have done that you have created something much more solid and permanent than a mood or even an action; you have achieved a much greater thing than any advocacy or suggestion can. You have established a mind.

I know that in saying this I am going flat against the opinion of my time, for in these days we revere much more the man who can get a mob to think the moon is made of green cheese and then, to-morrow, that it is made of Sapolio, than we do the man who can convince. And the reason we revere the baser method is that for the moment there is more money in it. For the amount of money that a man may get out of his fellows by a trick is our measure of his excellence. Nevertheless, I will maintain that to convince is, even in practical affairs, much the bigger business. For though you convince but a few in a certain time, yet what you do is to plant something durable, and something filled with the power of propagating itself. Conviction breeds.

When it comes to the methods of conviction, however, I hesitate. The great rules are fairly well known: to present an argument fed with concrete example, and in doing so to interest--not to fatigue. If you combine those two things, interest and illustration, you should, according to the rules, succeed. The point about not fatiguing is that however perfect your reasoning, however strong your illustration, both are useless if the mind to which they are addressed cannot receive them. Fatigue interrupts reception. The points about concrete example are, first, that a concrete example alone is vivid (even in mathematics you must have visible symbols); the next, that in the application of any idea, concrete example is the only test of value to man. You will never convince a man, for instance, that protection necessarily impoverishes a nation if he has before his eyes the example of nations becoming suddenly very rich after adopting high tariffs.

It is quite clear that the citation of admirable examples, and even their citation without boredom, is not sufficient. There is something else, some trick of presentation, which lies, I fancy, in the sense of proportion, and which achieves success. In this, by the way, Pascal had genius. A wag rewrote one or two of the "Provincials," substituting Jansenists for Jesuits, and thereby showed that they made just as good reading and were just as convincing in attacking friends as enemies.

Pascal had the art--which is most important in this matter--of leaving his readers under the impression that they had heard the whole case. It can be done honestly by actually stating the opposite case before giving the counter arguments. But it is more often done dishonestly (as Pascal did it) by making your reader think that he has heard all there is to hear, although he has, as a fact, heard hardly anything, or nothing, of the other side. Pascal was, of course, working on very favourable ground. He attacked what was at once powerful and unpopular, and what was not only powerful and unpopular, but sincere and therefore incapable of using poisoned weapons against himself. There is nothing more interesting in literature than to see how the honest men he attacked blundered in trying to refute him. They blundered because they were _too_ honest for controversy. They saw that he was lying, and they took it for granted he was telling simple lies of a childish sort. They accused him of mechanical inaccuracy and misquotation, which was not the way to set to work at all.

Pascal's method was in part what may be called the suppressed alternative. It is a method which you often see used by demagogues also, and by any one of those who ridicule a superior to an inferior. Thus, on one occasion Pascal finds an author saying: "The obligation of a Christian to give alms out of his superfluity rarely arises." The man who wrote this used the technical theological word "obligation," but Pascal quotes him as though he used it in the loosest conversational sense. The man who wrote it decided (with obvious common-sense) that those cases were rare in which you could say that a Christian had done grievous wrong by _not_ giving alms on a particular occasion. Pascal presented the matter so that his reader thought that the writer he was attacking discountenanced giving alms at all.

You very often see the same sort of thing done by people who ridicule the definitions of law. There is nothing easier. The law says, for instance, that a minor, a young giant of twenty years, can avoid payment by pleading "infancy."

It is quite easy to make that appear nonsense. It is not nonsense, but it is made to appear nonsense by using the word "infancy" in two senses. In the same way one could say by strict definition that the law does not forbid you to murder your grandmother. What the law does is to hang you if you murder your grandmother, which is, in strict definition, quite another proposition. Great play one could make before some one who had never heard of courts of justice, by saying: "Just think! The law in this country actually allows one to murder one's grandmother!" leaving discreetly aside the legal consequences of the act, and using the word "allow" positively and negatively in the same breath. The "Provincial letters" are crammed with this trick of presenting a word in two senses: as who should play on the word "take" and denounce the injunction "take your neighbour's money quietly" as meaning "steal it on the sly," when all the author meant was "don't play the fussy and generous refuser over small payments due to you."

There are those who tell you that not only Pascal and a hundred others, but _every one_ who has _ever_ convinced has used dishonest methods, and that no one ever convinced by solid proof alone. There are those who will tell you that the admission of opposing arguments and their honest analysis would be either so dull or so damaging, or both, that those who adopt this, the only sincere method, will necessarily fail.

I do not agree. Thus only is it achieved once and for all. People who are too weak to follow out a close chain of reasoning are at first not affected by strict deduction and probity of evidence. But there is always a minority with brains enough and energy enough to follow an argument, and then at last lead the rest. The quality of such achievement is that it is final: it is never reversed. It is done once and for all. The few who have mastered the proof are fixed and have, henceforward, authority. To produce such final conviction is a very great action indeed. It is the making of the public mind. It is the ultimate direction of the State.

But its first victory is exceedingly restricted. In matters where men have interest against truth, conviction is so rare as to work at first almost imperceptibly. An insignificant body receive a truth. Often they are dispersed. In a century there is a multitude. Soon, the world.

ON CONTROVERSY

It is astonishing what a great part of energy goes in our civilised and lettered society to controversy.

This country is certainly as civilised as any in Europe and it is much more lettered than any other. That is, there are more people bothering about print than you will find anywhere else. It has something to do, I think, with living in great towns and depending upon newspapers, but, anyhow, there it is, and one of its effects is a continued occupation in controversy. It always astonishes the foreign visitor, and I think it usually irritates the foreign resident. It is a habit often attacked, but all this opposition to it is a foreign opposition at bottom. To the native controversy is food and drink, and no one would be without it.

Now there is much more in this habit of controversy than meets the eye. If you were to call it a passion for wrangling you would be exactly contradicting its nature. It is dearest to those who hate wrangling. It is carefully preserved from reality. It is a sort of game, and has in it much the same instinct as makes men play other games in a game-loving country. Its object is not conviction, but scoring under set conditions, and it is most interesting to watch how the rules grow up of themselves and how strict they become.

It would be the death of controversy to demand a real conquest. When people begin to get into that mood controversy ends and fighting begins. Nations which are intent on real results fall into civil wars. Nothing is more opposed to the spirit of controversy than this spirit of arms and a creed. Controversy is to the search after ultimate truth, or the desire for conviction, what fencing with foils is to slashing with cavalry swords, or what shooting for a challenge shield is to sniping from a tree at the other person in the mud.

Its weapon is advocacy. In pure, serene, absolute controversy the advocate will cheerfully take either side, but even in that less perfect controversy to which (alas!) our fallen nature condemns us, and in which there is some suspicion of real feeling, advocacy easily takes precedence over the statement of truth. And that is one of the delights of controversy, as no one knows better than they who have wasted and enjoyed their lives in this delicious pastime.