The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than

Away with us he's going, The solemn-eyed: He'll hear no more the lowing

45 Of the calves on the warm hillside Or the kettle on the hob Sing peace into his breast, Or see the brown mice bob Round and round the oatmeal-chest.

For he comes, the human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand,

From a world more full of weeping than

you can understand.

you can understand.

you can understand.

he can understand.

1886,1889

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2024 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Down by the Salley Gardens1

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet; She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet. She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree; But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

5 In a field by the river my love and I did stand, And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand. She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;� dams But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

1889

The Rose of the World1

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream? For these red lips, with all their mournful pride, Mournful that no new wonder may betide, Troy2 passed away in one high funeral gleam,

5 And Usna's children died.3

We and the labouring world are passing by: Amid men's souls, that waver and give place Like the pale waters in their wintry race, Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,

10 Lives on this lonely face.

Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode: Before you were, or any hearts to beat, Weary and kind one lingered by His seat; He made the world to be a grassy road

15 Before her wandering feet.

1892,1895

1. Originally titled "An Old Song Resung," with Yeats's footnote: "This is an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballysodare, Sligo, who often sings them to herself." "Salley": a variant of sallow, a species of willow tree. 1. The Platonic idea of eternal beauty. "I notice upon reading these poems for the first time for several years that the quality symbolized as The Rose differs from the Intellectual Beauty of Shelley and of Spenser in that I have imagined it as suffering with man and not as something pursued and seen from afar" [Yeats, in 1925]. Yeats wrote this poem to Maud Gonne.

2. Ancient city destroyed by the Greeks, according to legend, after the abduction of the beautiful Helen. 3. In Old Irish legend the Ulster warrior Naiose, son of Usna or Usnach (pronounced Uskna) carried off the beautiful Deirdre, whom King Conchubar of Ulster had intended to marry, and with his two brothers took her to Scotland. Eventually Conchubar lured the four of them back to Ireland and killed the three brothers.

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THE SORROW OF LOVE / 2025

The Lake Isle of Innisfree1

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles2 made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

5 And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

10 I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core.

1890 1890,1892

The Sorrow of Love1

The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves, The brilliant moon and all the milky sky, And all that famous harmony of leaves, Had blotted out man's image and his cry.

5 A girl arose that had red mournful lips And seemed the greatness of the world in tears, Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships And proud as Priam murdered with his peers;2

Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves,

10 A climbing moon upon an empty sky, And all that lamentation of the leaves, Could but compose man's image and his cry.

1891 1892,1925

1. Inis Fraoigh (Heather Island) is a small island in Lough Gill, near Sligo, in the west of Ireland. In his autobiography Yeats writes: "I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree . . . and when walking through Fleet Street [in London] very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music."

2. Stakes interwoven with twigs or branches. 1. For earlier versions of this poem, see "Poems in Process," in the appendices to this volume. 2. Odysseus (whom the Romans called Ulysses) is the hero of Homers Odyssey, which describes how, after having fought in the siege of Troy, he wandered for ten years before reaching his home, the Greek island of Ithaca. Priam was king of Troy at the time of the siege and was killed when the Greeks captured the city.

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2026 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

When You Are Old1

When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

5 How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,2

10 Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

1891 1892,1899

Who Goes with Fergus?1

Who will go drive with Fergus now, And pierce the deep wood's woven shade, And dance upon the level shore? Young man, lift up your russet brow,

5 And lift your tender eyelids, maid, And brood on hopes and fear no more.

And no more turn aside and brood Upon love's bitter mystery; For Fergus rules the brazen cars,0 bronze chariots

10 And rules the shadows of the wood, And the white breast of the dim sea And all dishevelled wandering stars.

The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland

He stood among a crowd at Drumahair;1

His heart hung all upon a silken dress,

1. A poem suggested by a sonnet by the French gus, "king of the proud Red Branch Kings," gave poet Pierre de Ronsard (1524�1585); it begins: up his throne voluntarily to King Conchubar of "Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, a la chan-Ulster to learn by dreaming and meditating the bitdelle" (When you are quite old, in the evening by ter wisdom of the poet and philosopher. candlelight). 1. This and other place-names in the poem refer 2. I.e., of the grate. to places in County Sligo. I. In a late version of this Irish heroic legend, Fer

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THE MAN WHO DREAMED OF FAERYLAND / 2027

And he had known at last some tenderness, Before earth took him to her stony care; 5

But when a man poured fish into a pile, It seemed they raised their little silver heads, And sang what gold morning or evening sheds Upon a woven world-forgotten isle Where people love beside the ravelled2 seas;

10 That Time can never mar a lover's vows Under that woven changeless roof of boughs: The singing shook him out of his new ease.

He wandered by the sands of Lissadell; His mind ran all on money cares and fears,

15 And he had known at last some prudent years Before they heaped his grave under the hill; But while he passed before a plashy place, A lug-worm with its grey and muddy mouth Sang that somewhere to north or west or south

20 There dwelt a gay, exulting, gentle race Under the golden or the silver skies; That if a dancer stayed his hungry foot It seemed the sun and moon were in the fruit: And at that singing he was no more wise.

25 He mused beside the well of Scanavin, He mused upon his mockers; without fail His sudden vengeance were a country tale, When earthy night had drunk his body in; But one small knot-grass growing by the pool

so Sang where�unnecessary cruel voice� Old silence bids its chosen race rejoice, Whatever ravelled waters rise and fall Or stormy silver fret the gold of day, And midnight there enfold them like a fleece

35 And lover there by lover be at peace. The tale drove his fine angry mood away.

He slept under the hill of Lugnagall; And might have known at last unhaunted sleep Under that cold and vapour-turbaned steep,

40 Now that the earth had taken man and all: Did not the worms that spired about his bones Proclaim with that unwearied, reedy cry That God has laid His fingers on the sky, That from those fingers glittering summer runs

45 Upon the dancer by the dreamless wave. Why should those lovers that no lovers miss Dream, until God burn Nature with a kiss? The man has found no comfort in the grave.

1891,1930

2. Tangled; here turbulent.

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2028 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Adam's Curse1

We sat together at one summer's end, That beautiful mild woman, your close friend, And you and I,2 and talked of poetry. I said, "A line will take us hours maybe;

5 Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. Better go down upon your marrow-bones And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

10 For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world."

And thereupon

15 That beautiful mild woman for whose sake There's many a one shall find out all heartache On finding that her voice is sweet and low Replied, "To be born woman is to know� Although they do not talk of it at school�

20 That we must labour to be beautiful."

I said, "It's certain there is no fine thing Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring. There have been lovers who thought love should be So much compounded of high courtesy

25 That they would sigh and quote with learned looks Precedents out of beautiful old books; Yet now it seems an idle trade enough."

We sat grown quiet at the name of love; We saw the last embers of daylight die,

30 And in the trembling blue-green of the sky A moon, worn as if it had been a shell Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one's but your ears:

35 That you were beautiful, and that I strove To love you in the old high way of love; That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

Nov. 1902 1902, 1922

1. When Adam was evicted from the Garden of 2. The two women in the poem are modeled on Eden, God cursed him with a life of toil and labor Maud Gonne and her sister, Kathleen Pilcher (Genesis 3.17-19). (1868-1919).

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A COA T / 202 9 No Second Troy 510Why should I blame her1 that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire? What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?2 Dec. 1908 1910 The Fascination of What's Difficult1 510The fascination of what's difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt2 That must, as if it had not holy blood Nor on Olympus3 leaped from cloud to cloud, Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays That have to be set up in fifty ways, On the day's war with every knave and dolt, Theatre business, management of men. I swear before the dawn comes round again I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt. Sept. 1909�Mar. 1910 1910 A Coat I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat;

1. Maud Gonne, whose revolutionary activities are at issue in the poem. 2. Helen of Troy was the legendary cause of the Trojan War and thus of Troy's destruction. 1. Written when Yeats was director-manager of the Abbey Theatre. "Subject. To complain of the fascination of what's difficult. It spoils spontaneity and pleasure, and wastes time. Repeat the line ending difficult three times and rhyme on bolt, exalt, colt, jolt" [Yeats's diary for September 1909].

2. Pegasus, in Greek mythology a winged horse associated with poetry. 3. A mountain in Greece; the home of the gods.

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203 0 / WILLIA M BUTLE R YEATS 510 But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there's more enterprise In walking naked. 1912 1914 September 1913 5What need you,1 being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till0And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone; For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary2 in the grave. cash register 1015Yet they were of a different kind, The names that stilled your childish play, They have gone about the world like wind, But little time had they to pray For whom the hangman's rope was spun, And what, God help us, could they save? Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave. 20Was it for this the wild geese3 spread The grey wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,4 All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave. 25 Yet could we turn the years again, And call those exiles as they were

1. Members of the new, largely Roman Catholic middle class. When the art dealer Hugh Lane (d. 1915) offered to give his collection of French impressionist paintings to the city of Dublin, provided they were permanently housed in a suitable gallery, Yeats became angry over fierce public opposition to funding the project. 2. John O'Leary (1830-1907), Irish nationalist, who, after five years' imprisonment and fifteen years' exile, returned to Dublin in 1885; he rallied the young Yeats to the cause of literary nationalism. 3. Popular name for the Irish who, because of the penal laws against Catholics (1695�1727), were forced to flee to the Continent.

4. Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798), one of the chief founders of the United Irishmen (an Irish nationalist organization) and leader of the 1798 Irish Rising, committed suicide in prison. Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1763-1798), British officer who, after being dismissed from the army for disloyal activities, joined the United Irishmen, helped lead the 1 798 Irish Rising, and died in prison. Robert Emmet (1778-1803), a leader of the abortive 1803 Irish Nationalist Revolt, was hanged for treason.

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EASTER, 1916 / 2031

In all their loneliness and pain, You'd cry, "Some woman's yellow hair Has maddened every mother's son":

30 They weighed so lightly what they gave. But let them be, they're dead and gone, They're with O'Leary in the grave.

Sept. 1913 1913

Easter, 1916'

I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses.

5 I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done

10 Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley2 is worn:

15 All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent In ignorant good-will, Her nights in argument

20 Until her voice grew shrill. What voice more sweet than hers When, young and beautiful, She rode to harriers?' This man had kept a school

25 And rode our winged horse;4 This other his helper and friend5 Was coming into his force; He might have won fame in the end, So sensitive his nature seemed,

30 So daring and sweet his thought.

1. During the Easter Rising of 1916, Irish nation-2. The multicolored clothes of a jester. alists revolted against the British government and 3. Constance Gore-Booth (1868-1927), after- proclaimed an Irish Republic. Nearly sixteen hun-ward Countess Markievicz, took a prominent role dred Irish Volunteers and two hundred members in the uprising. Her death sentence was reduced of the Citizen Army seized buildings and a park in to imprisonment. The other rebel leaders to whom Dublin. The rebellion began on Easter Monday, Yeats refers were executed. April 24, 1916, and was crushed in six days. Over 4. Padraic Pearse (1879-1916), founder of a boys' the next two weeks fifteen of the leaders were exe-school in Dublin and poet�hence the "winged cuted by firing squad. Yeats knew the chief nation-horse," or Pegasus, the horse of the Muses. alist leaders personally. For more on the Easter 5. Thomas MacDonagh (1878-1916), poet and Rising, see "Imagining Ireland" at Norton Litera-dramatist. ture Online.

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2032 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout.6 He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart,

35 Yet I number him in the song; He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly:

40 A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream.

45 The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute they change; A shadow of cloud on the stream

50 Changes minute by minute; A horse-hoof slides on the brim, And a horse plashes within it; The long-legged moor-hens dive, And hens to moor-cocks call;

55 Minute by minute they live: The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. 0 when may it suffice?

60 That is Heaven's part, our part To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild.

65 What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death; Was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith For all that is done and said.7

70 We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? 1 write it out in a verse�

75 MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly8 and Pearse

6. Major John MacBride (1865-1916), Irish rev-World War I had suspended it, promising to impleolutionary and estranged husband of Maud ment it later. Gonne. 8. James Connolly (1870-1916), a trade-union 7. In 1914 the English government had passed organizer and military commander of the rebellion. Home Rule for Ireland into law, but because of

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THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE / 2033

Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly:

so A terrible beauty is born.

May-Sept. 1916 1916, 1920

The Wild Swans at Coole1

The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me Since I first made my count;2 I saw, before I had well finished, All suddenly mount And scatter wheeling in great broken rings Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, And now my heart is sore.

15 All's changed since I, hearing at twilight, The first time on this shore, The bell-beat of their wings above my head, Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

20 They paddle in the cold Companionable streams or climb the air; Their hearts have not grown old; Passion or conquest, wander where they will, Attend upon them still.

25 But now they drift on the still water, Mysterious, beautiful; Among what rushes will they build, By what lake's edge or pool Delight men's eyes when I awake some day

30 To find they have flown away?

Oct. 1916

1. Coole Park, in County Galway, was the estate 2. Yeats made his first long visit to Coole in 1897; of the Irish playwright Lady Augusta Gregory from then on he spent summers there, often stay( 1852-1932). ing into the fall.

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2034 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

In Memory of Major Robert Gregory1 Now that we're almost settled in our house I'll name the friends that cannot sup with us Beside a fire of turf0 in th' ancient tower,2 peat And having talked to some late hour 5 Climb up the narrow winding stair to bed: Discoverers of forgotten truth Or mere companions of my youth, All, all are in my thoughts to-night being dead. 2 Always we'd have the new friend meet the old IO And we are hurt if either friend seem cold, And there is salt to lengthen out the smart In the affections of our heart, And quarrels are blown up upon that head; But not a friend that I would bring 15 This night can set us quarrelling, For all that come into my mind are dead. 3 Lionel Johnson3 comes the first to mind, That loved his learning better than mankind, Though courteous to the worst; much falling he 20 Brooded upon sanctity Till all his Greek and Latin learning seemed A long blast upon the horn that brought A little nearer to his thought A measureless consummation that he dreamed. 4 25 And that enquiring man John Synge4 comes next, That dying chose the living world for text And never could have rested in the tomb But that, long travelling, he had come Towards nightfall upon certain set apart 30 In a most desolate stony place, Towards nightfall upon a race Passionate and simple like his heart.

1. Robert Gregory (1881-1918) was the only child of Lady Augusta Gregory. The first printing of this elegy included the following note: "(Major Robert Gregory, R.F.C. [Royal Flying Corps], M.C. [Military Cross], Legion of Honour, was killed in action on the Italian Front, January 23, 1918)." For another of Yeats's poems on Gregory's death, see "Representing the Great War" at Norton Literature Online. 2. In 1917 Yeats purchased the Norman tower Thor Ballylee, near Lady Gregory's home in Coole Park. While that residence was being renovated, Yeats and his wife were living in a house that Lady Gregory had lent Lhem.

3. English poet and scholar (1867�1902); he was "much falling" (line 19) because of his drinking. 4. Irish playwright (1871-1909), associated with the Irish literary renaissance and the Abbey Theatre. When Yeats first met Synge, in 1896, he encouraged him to travel to the Aran Islands ("a most desolate and stony place") and write about its rural residents.

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IN MEMOR Y OF MAJO R RORER T GREGOR Y / 203 5 And then 1 think of old George Pollexfen,1* In muscular youth well known to Mayo6 men 35 For horsemanship at meets or at racecourses, That could have shown how pure-bred horses And solid men, for all their passion, live But as the outrageous stars incline By opposition, square and trine;7 40 Having grown sluggish and contemplative. 6 They were my close companions many a year, A portion of my mind and life, as it were, And now their breathless faces seem to look Out of some old picture-book; 45 I am accustomed to their lack of breath, But not that my dear friend's dear son, Our Sidney8 and our perfect man, Could share in that discourtesy of death. 7 For all things the delighted eye now sees 50 Were loved by him;9 the old storm-broken trees That cast their shadows upon road and bridge; The tower set on the stream's edge; The ford where drinking cattle make a stir Nightly, and startled by that sound 55 The water-hen must change her ground; He might have been your heartiest welcomer. 8 When with the Galway foxhounds he would ride From Castle Taylor to the Roxborough side1 Or Esserkelly plain, few kept his pace; 60 At Mooneen he had leaped a place So perilous that half the astonished meet Had shut their eyes; and where was it He rode a race without a bit? And yet his mind outran the horses' feet. 9 65 We dreamed that a great painter had been born2 To cold Clare' rock and Galway rock and thorn, To that stern colour and that delicate line That are our secret discipline

5. Yeats's maternal uncle (1839-1910), with 9. Robert Gregory encouraged Yeats to buy the whom he had spent holidays in Sligo as a young tower. man. 1. Big country houses in County Galway. Roxbor6. County in western Ireland. ough was Lady Gregory's childhood home. 7. Terms from astrology, in which both Yeats and 2. "Robert Gregory painted the Burren Hills and his uncle were interested. thereby found what promised to grow into a great 8. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), English poet style, but he had hardly found it before he was and exemplar of the "Renaissance man"; like Greg-killed" (Yeats, "Ireland and the Arts"). ory, he was killed in battle. 3. County south of Galway.

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2036 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Wherein the gazing heart doubles her might. 70 Soldier, scholar, horseman, he, And yet he had the intensity To have published all to be a world's delight. 10 What other could so well have counselled us In all lovely intricacies of a house 75 As he that practised or that understood All work in metal or in wood, In moulded plaster or in carven stone? Soldier, scholar, horseman, he, And all he did done perfectly so As though he had but that one trade alone. 11 Some burn damp faggots,4 others may consume The entire combustible world in one small room As though dried straw, and if we turn about The bare chimney is gone black out 85 Because the work had finished in that flare. Soldier, scholar, horseman, he, As 'twere all life's epitome, What made us dream that he could comb grey hair? 12 I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind 90 That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved Or boyish intellect approved, With some appropriate commentary on each; Until imagination brought 95 A fitter welcome; but a thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech. June 1918 1918

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre1

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 5 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.2

4. Bundles of sticks. of the character of the next age, is represented by 1. Yeats's term (pronounced with a hard g) for a the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest spiraling motion in the shape of a cone. He envi-expansion and of the other to that of its greatest sions the two-thousand-year cycle of the Christian contraction" [Yeats's note]. age as spiraling toward its end and the next histor-2. The poem was written in January 1919, in the ical cycle as beginning after a violent reversal: "the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revoend of an age, which always receives the revelation lution and on the eve of the Anglo-Irish War.

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A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER / 203 7

Surely some revelation is at hand;

10 Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming!3 Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi4 Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

15 A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep

20 Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem5 to be born?

Jan. 1919 1920, 1921

A Prayer for My Daughter

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid Under this cradle-hood and coverlid My child sleeps on.' There is no obstacle But Gregory's wood2 and one bare hill

5 Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind, Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed; And for an hour I have walked and prayed Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour

10 And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower, And under the arches of the bridge, and scream In the elms above the flooded stream; Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come,

15 Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught, Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,

20 Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend.

3. Christ's second coming is heralded by the com-5. Jesus' birthplace. ing of the Beast of the Apocalypse, or Antichrist (1 1. Yeats's daughter and first child, Anne Butler John 2.18). Yeats, was born on February 26, 1919, in Dublin 4. The spirit of the universe (Latin); i.e., Yeats and brought home to Yeats's refitted Norman said, "a general storehouse of images," a collective tower of Thoor Ballylee in Galway. unconscious or memory, in which the human race 2. Lady Gregory's wood at Coole, only a few miles preserves its past memories. from Thoor Ballylee.

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203 8 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

25 Helen being chosen found life flat and dull And later had much trouble from a fool,3 While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,4 Being fatherless could have her way Yet chose a bandy-legged smith for man.

30 It's certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat Whereby the Horn of Plenty5 is undone.

In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned; Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned

35 By those that are not entirely beautiful; Yet many, that have played the fool For beauty's very self, has charm made wise, And many a poor man that has roved, Loved and thought himself beloved,

40 From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree That all her thoughts may like the linnet" be, small songbird And have no business but dispensing round Their magnanimities of sound,

45 Not but in merriment begin a chase, Nor but in merriment a quarrel. O may she live like some green laurel Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,

50 The sort of beauty that I have approved, Prosper but little, has dried up of late, Yet knows that to be choked with hate May well be of all evil chances chief. If there's no hatred in a mind

55 Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman6 born

60 Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind?

65 Considering that, all hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting,

3. Menelaus, Helen's husband. Her abduction by 5. In Greek mythology the goat's horn that suck- Paris precipitated the Trojan War. led the god Zeus flowed with nectar and ambrosia; 4. Venus, born from the sea, was the Roman god-the cornucopia thus became a symbol of plenty. dess of love; her husband, Vulcan, was the lame 6. Maud Gonne. god of fire and metalwork (line 29).

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LEDA AND THE SWAN / 2039

70Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will; She can, though every face should scowl And every windy quarter howl Or every bellows burst, be happy still. 75soAnd may her bridegroom bring her to a house Where all's accustomed, ceremonious; For arrogance and hatred are the wares Peddled in the thoroughfares. How but in custom and in ceremony Are innocence and beauty born? Ceremony's a name for the rich horn, And custom for the spreading laurel tree. Feb.�June 1919 1919, 1921 Leda and the Swan1 A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. 5 How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? 10A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower2 And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? Sept. 1923 1924, 1928

1. In Greek mythology the god Zeus, in the form of a swan, raped Leda, a mortal. Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor, and Pollux were the children of this union. Yeats saw Leda's rape as the beginning of a new age, analogous with the dove's annunciation to Mary of Jesus' conception: "I imagine the annunciation that founded Greece as made to Leda, remembering that they showed in a Spartan temple, strung up to the roof as a holy relic, an unhatched egg of hers, and that from one of her eggs came love and from the other war" (A Vision). For the author's revisions while composing the poem, see "Poems in Process," in the appendices to this volume.

2. I.e., the destruction of Troy, caused by Helen's abduction by Paris. Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek army that besieged Troy, was murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, the other daughter of Leda and the swan.

.

204 0 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Sailing to Byzantium1

That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, �Those dying generations�at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, 5 Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. 2 An aged man is but a paltry thing, 10 A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing,2 and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; is And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium. 3 ; O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall,3 Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,4 20 And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. 4 25 Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;5 30 Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come. Sept. 1926 1927

1. Yeats wrote in A Vision: "I think that if I could of individual design, absorbed in their subject- be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend matter and that the vision of a whole people." it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium 2. The poet William Blake (1757-1827) saw the [now Istanbul] a little before Justinian opened St. soul of his dead brother rising to heaven, "clapping Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato [in the his hands for joy." 6th century c.e.]. .. . I think that in early Byzan-3. The mosaics in San Apollinaire Nuovo, in tium, maybe never before or since in recorded his-Ravenna, Italy, depict rows of Christian saints on tory, religious, aesthetic and practical life were a gold background; Yeats saw them in 1907. one, that architect and artificers . . . spoke to 4. I.e., whirl in a spiral. the multitude and the few alike. The painter, the 5. I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's mosaic worker, the worker in gold and silver, the palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and illuminator of sacred books, were almost imper-silver, and artificial birds that sang [Yeats's note]. sonal, almost perhaps without the consciousness

.

AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN / 2041

Among School Children

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher0 and to sing, do arithmetic To study reading-books and history,

5 To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way�the children's eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty-year-old smiling public man.1

2

I dream of a Ledaean2 body, bent

10 Above a sinking fire, a tale that she Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event That changed some childish day to tragedy� Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,

is Or else, to alter Plato's parable, Into the yolk and white of the one shell.'

3 And thinking of that fit of grief or rage I look upon one child or t'other there And wonder if she stood so at that age�

20 For even daughters of the swan can share Something of every paddler's heritage� And had that colour upon cheek or hair, And thereupon my heart is driven wild: She stands before me as a living child.

4

25 Her present image floats into the mind� Did Quattrocento4 finger fashion it Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind And took a mess of shadows for its meat? And I though never of Ledaean kind

30 Had pretty plumage once�enough of that, Better to smile on all that smile, and show There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

5 What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap Honey of generation had betrayed,

35 And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape As recollection or the drug decide,5

1. Yeats, as part of his work in the Irish Senate, and white); the resulting two beings come together visited a Montessori school in Waterford in 1926. in love to become one again. 2. A hody like Leda's. Yeats associated her daugh-4. I.e., the skill of a 15th-century Italian painter. ter, Helen of Troy, with Maud Gonne. 5. 1 have taken the "honey of generation" from 3. In the Symposium, by the Greek philosopher Porphyry's essay on "The Cave of Nymphs" [Yeats's Plato (ca. 428�ca. 348 b.c.e.), Aristophanesargues note]. Porphyry (ca. 234�ca. 305 c.e.) was a Neothat "the primeval man" was both male and female platonic philosopher. but was divided (like an egg separated into yoke

.

2042 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

40Would think her son, did she but see that shape With sixty or more winters on its head, A compensation for the pang of his birth, Or the uncertainty of his setting forth? 6 45Plato thought nature but a spume that plays Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;6 Solider Aristotle played the taws Upon the bottom of a king of kings;7 World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras8 Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard: Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird. 7 5055Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother's reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose. And yet they too break hearts�O Presences That passion, piety or affection knows, And that all heavenly glory symbolise� O self-born mockers of man's enterprise; 8 60Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?� O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? trunk

June 1926 1927

A Dialogue of Self and Soul1

1

My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair; Set all your mind upon the steep ascent, Upon the broken, crumbling battlement, Upon the breathless starlit air,

5 Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;

6. Plate thought nature merely an image of an his discovery of the mathematical basis of musical ideal world that exists elsewhere. intervals. His disciples, the Pythagoreans, vener7. Plato's student Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.) was ated their master as a god with a golden thigh. "solider" because he regarded this world as the I. In a letter of October 2, 1923, Yeats wrote: "I authentic one. He tutored Alexander the Great am writing a new tower poem 'Sword and Tower,' (356�323 b.c.e.), the "king of kings," and disci-which is a choice of rebirth rather than deliverance plined him with the "taws," or leather strap. from birth. 1 make my Japanese sword and its silk 8. Greek philosopher (ca. 580-500 b.C.e), known covering my symbol of life." Junzo Sato, a friend, for his doctrine of the harmony of the spheres and had given him the ceremonial sword in 1920.

.

A DIALOGU E O F SEL F AN D SOU L / 204 3 Fix every wandering thought upon That quarter where all thought is done: Who can distinguish darkness from the soul? 15My Self. The consecrated blade upon my knees Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was, Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass Unspotted by the centuries; That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn From some court-lady's dress and round The wooden scabbard bound and wound, Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn. My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war? Think of ancestral night that can, If but imagination scorn the earth And intellect its wandering To this and that and t'other thing, Deliver from the crime of death and birth. 25 My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it Five hundred years ago, about it lie Flowers from I know not what embroidery� Heart's purple�and all these I set For emblems of the day against the tower Emblematical of the night, And claim as by a soldier's right A charter to commit the crime once more. My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows And falls into the basin of the mind 35 That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind, For intellect no longer knows Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known� That is to say, ascends to Heaven; Only the dead can be forgiven; But when I think of that my tongue's a stone. 2 My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure? What matter if I live it all once more? 45Endure that toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain Brought face to face with his own clumsiness; The finished man among his enemies?�How in the name of Heaven can he escape That defiling and disfigured shape

.

2044 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

The mirror of malicious eyes Casts upon his eyes until at last He thinks that shape must be his shape?

And what's the good of an escape If honour find him in the wintry blast?

I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,

60 A blind man battering blind men; Or into that most fecund ditch of all, The folly that man does Or must suffer, if he woos A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

65 I am content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast

70 We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest.

July-Dec. 1927 1929

Byzantium1

The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong;

5 A starlit or a moonlit dome2 disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire� of human veins. deep mud

Before me floats an image, man or shade,

io Shade more than man, more image than a shade; For Hades' bobbin' bound in mummy-cloth May unwind the winding path;4 A mouth that has no moisture and no breath

1. On October 4. 1930, Yeats sent his friend the soul is purified, birds of hammered gold singing Sturge Moore a copy of this poem, saying: "The in the golden trees, in the harbour [dolphins] offer- poem originates from a criticism of yours. You ing their backs to the wailing dead that they may objected to the last verse of 'Sailing to Byzantium' carry them to Paradise." because a bird made by a goldsmith was just as 2. Of the great church of St. Sophia. natural as anything else. That showed me that the 3. Spool. Hades was the Greek god of the under- idea needed exposition." The previous April, Y'eats world, the realm of the dead. had noted in his dian7: "Subject for a poem": 4. I.e., the spool of people's fate, which spins their "Describe Byzantium as it is in the system towards destiny and which is wound like a mummy, may be the end of the first Christian millennium. A walk-unwound and lead to the timeless world of pure ing mummy. Flames at the street corners where spirit.

.

CRAZY JANE TALKS WITH THE BISHOP / 204 5

Breathless mouths may summon; 15 I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.5

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, More miracle than bird or handiwork, Planted on the starlit golden bough,

20 Can like the cocks of Hades crow, Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud In glory of changeless metal Common bird or petal And all complexities of mire or blood.

25 At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit Flames that no faggot0 feeds, nor steel has lit, bundle of sticks Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame, Where blood-begotten spirits come And all complexities of fury leave,

JO Dying into a dance, An agony of trance, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,6 Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,

35 The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles of the dancing floor Break bitter furies of complexity, Those images that yet Fresh images beget,

40 That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

Sept. 1930 1932

Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop1

I met the Bishop on the road And much said he and I. "Those breasts are flat and fallen now Those veins must soon be dry;

5 Live in a heavenly mansion, Not in some foul sty."

"Fair and foul are near of kin, And fair needs foul," I cried. "My friends are gone, but that's a truth

10 Nor grave nor bed denied,

5. On Roman tombstones the cock is a herald of Blessed. rebirth, thus of the continuing cycle of human life. 1. One of a series of poems about an old woman 6. In ancient mythology dolphins were thought to partly modeled on Cracked Mary, an old woman carry the souls of the dead to the Isles of the who lived near Lady Gregory.

.

2046 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Learned in bodily lowliness And in the heart's pride.

"A woman can be proud and stiff When on love intent;

15 But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent."

Nov. 1931 1932

Lapis Lazuli

(For Harry Clifton)'

I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay, For everybody knows or else should know

5 That if nothing drastic is done2 Aeroplane and Zeppelin3 will come out, Pitch like King Billy4 bomb-balls in Until the town lie beaten flat.

All perform their tragic play,

10 There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, That's Ophelia, that Cordelia; Yet they, should the last scene be there, The great stage curtain about to drop, If worthy their prominent part in the play,

is Do not break up their lines to weep. They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay; Gaiety transfiguring all that dread. All men have aimed at, found and lost; Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:

20 Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, And all the drop scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages, It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

25 On their own feet they came, or on shipboard, Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,

1. The English writer Harry Clifton (1908-1978) the east, that must raise the heroic cry" [Yeats to gave Yeats for his seventieth birthday a piece of Dorothy Wellesley, July 6, 1935]. lapis lazuli, a deep blue stone, "carved by some 2. Because Europe was (in 1936) close to war. Chinese sculptor into the semblance of a mountain 3. German Zeppelins, or airships, bombed London with temple, trees, paths, and an ascetic and pupil during World War I. about to climb the mountain. Ascetic, pupil, hard 4. King William III (William of Orange), who stone, eternal theme of the sensual east. The defeated the army of King James II at the Battle of heroic cry in the midst of despair. But no, I am the Boyne, in Ireland, in 1690. In a popular ballad, wrong, the east has its solutions always and "King William he threw his bomb-balls in, / And therefore knows nothing of tragedy. It is we, not set them on fire."

.

UNDER BEN BULBEN / 2047

Old civilisations put to the sword. Then they and their wisdom went to rack: No handiwork of Callimachus5

30 Who handled marble as if it were bronze, Made draperies that seemed to rise When sea-wind swept the corner, stands; His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem Of a slender palm, stood but a day;

35 All things fall and are built again And those that build them again are gay.

Two Chinamen, behind them a third, Are carved in Lapis Lazuli, Over them flies a long-legged bird

40 A symbol of longevity; The third, doubtless a serving-man, Carries a musical instrument.

Every discolouration of the stone,

Every accidental crack or dent

45 Seems a water-course or an avalanche, Or lofty slope where it still snows Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch Sweetens the little half-way house Those Chinamen climb towards, and I

50 Delight to imagine them seated there; There, on the mountain and the sky, On all the tragic scene they stare. One asks for mournful melodies; Accomplished fingers begin to play.

55 Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

July 1936 1938

Under Ben Bulben1

1

Swear by what the Sages spoke Round the Mareotic Lake2 That the Witch of Atlas knew, Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.

5. Athenian sculptor (5th century b.c.e.) , suppos-of it, in Drumcliff churchyard. edly the originator of the Corinthian column and 2. Lake Mareotis, near Alexandria, Egypt, was an of the use of the running drill to imitate folds in ancient center of Christian Neoplatonism and of drapery in statues. Yeats wrote of him: "With Cal-neo-Pythagorean philosophy. The lake is menlimachus pure Ionic revives again . . . and upon tioned in Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "The Witch the only example of his work known to us, a marble of Atlas." In an essay on Shelley, Yeats interprets chair, a Persian is represented, and may one not the witch as a symbol of timeless, absolute beauty; discover a Persian symbol in that bronze lamp, passing in a boat by this and another lake, she "sees shaped like a palm . . . ? But he was an archaistic all human life shadowed upon its waters . . . and workman, and those who set him to work brought because she can see the reality of things she is back public life to an older form" (A Vision). described as journeying 'in the calm depths' of 'the I. A mountain near Sligo; Yeats's grave is in sight wide lake' we journey over unpiloted."

.

204 8 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

5

Swear by those horsemen, by those women, Complexion and form prove superhuman,3 That pale, long visaged company That airs an immortality Completeness of their passions won;

10 Now they ride the wintry dawn Where Ben Bulben sets the scene.

Here's the gist of what they mean.

2

Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities,

is That of race and that of soul, And ancient Ireland knew it all. Whether man dies in his bed Or the rifle knocks him dead, A brief parting from those dear

20 Is the worst man has to fear. Though grave-diggers' toil is long, Sharp their spades, their muscle strong, They but thrust their buried men Back in the human mind again.

3

25 You that Mitchel's prayer have heard "Send war in our time, O Lord!"4 Know that when all words are said And a man is fighting mad, Something drops from eyes long blind

30 He completes his partial mind, For an instant stands at ease, Laughs aloud, his heart at peace, Even the wisest man grows tense With some sort of violence

35 Before he can accomplish fate Know his work or choose his mate.

4

Poet and sculptor do the work Nor let the modish painter shirk What his great forefathers did,

40 Bring the soul of man to God, Make him fill the cradles right.

3. Superhuman beings or fairies, like the Sidhe, 4. From Jail Journal, by the Irish nationalist John believed to ride through the countryside near Ben Mitchel (1815-1875). Bulben.

.

UNDER BEN BULBEN / 2049

Measurement began our might: Forms a stark Egyptian thought, Forms that gentler Phidias5 wrought.

45 Michael Angelo left a proof On the Sistine Chapel roof, Where but half-awakened Adam Can disturb globe-trotting Madam Till her bowels are in heat,

so Proof that there's a purpose set Before the secret working mind: Profane perfection of mankind.

Quattrocento6 put in paint,

On backgrounds for a God or Saint,

55 Gardens where a soul's at ease; Where everything that meets the eye Flowers and grass and cloudless sky Resemble forms that are, or seem When sleepers wake and yet still dream,

60 And when it's vanished still declare, With only bed and bedstead there, That Heavens had opened.

Gyres7 run on; When that greater dream had gone Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude"

65 Prepared a rest for the people of God, Palmer's9 phrase, but after that Confusion fell upon our thought.

5

Irish poets learn your trade

Sing whatever is well made,

TO Scorn the sort now growing up All out of shape from toe to top, Their unremembering hearts and heads Base-born products of base beds. Sing the peasantry, and then

75 Hard-riding country gentlemen, The holiness of monks, and after Porter-drinkers'1 randy laughter; Sing the lords and ladies gay That were beaten into the clay

5. Greek sculptor (fl. ca. 490-430 b.c.e.) . Wilson (1714�1782), English landscape painter 6. 15th-century Italian art. and disciple of Claude Lorraine (1600�1682), 7. Yeats's term for conelike spirals or cycles of his-French artist. torv. 9. Samuel Palmer (1805-1881), English land8. Edward Calvert (1799-1883), English vision-scape painter who admired Blake. ary artist and follower of William Blake (1757� 1. Drinkers of dark brown bitter beer. 1827), English mystical poet and artist. Richard

.

2050 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

80 Through seven heroic centuries;2 Cast your mind on other days That we in coming days may be Still the indomitable Irishry.

6

Under bare Ben Bulben's head

85 In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid, An ancestor was rector there3 Long years ago; a church stands near, By the road an ancient Cross. No marble, no conventional phrase,

90 On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!

Sept. 1938 1939

Man and the Echo

Man. In a cleft that's christened Alt Under broken stone I halt At the bottom of a pit That broad noon has never lit,

5 And shout a secret to the stone. All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night

10 And never get the answers right. Did that play of mine1 send out Certain men the English shot? Did words of mine put too great strain On that woman's reeling brain?2

15 Could my spoken words have checked That whereby a house3 lay wrecked? And all seems evil until I Sleepless would lie down and die.

Echo. Lie down and die.

2. Since the Norman conquest of Ireland, in the inspire the Easter Rising of 1916. 12th century. 2. Margot Ruddock (1907-1951), a young poet 3. Yeats's great-grandfather, the Reverend John with whom Yeats had a brief affair in the 1930s Yeats (1/74-1846), was rector of Drumcliff and to whom he offered financial support when Church, Sligo. she suffered a nervous breakdown. 1. Cathleen ni Houlihan, a nationalist play Yeats 3. Coole Park, Lady Gregory's home, in disrepair wrote with Lady Gregory and in which Maud since her death in 1932. Gonne played the title role in 1902. It helped

.

TH E CIRCU S ANIMALS ' DESERTIO N / 205 1 Man. That were to shirk 20 The spiritual intellect's great work And shirk it in vain. There is no release In a bodkin4 or disease, Nor can there be a work so great As that which cleans man's dirty slate. 25 While man can still his body keep Wine or love drug him to sleep, Waking he thanks the Lord that he Has body and its stupidity, But body gone he sleeps no more 30 And till his intellect grows sure That all's arranged in one clear view Pursues the thoughts that I pursue, Then stands in judgment on his soul, And, all work done, dismisses all 35 Out of intellect and sight And sinks at last into the night. Echo. Into the night. Man. O rocky voice Shall we in that great night rejoice? What do we know but that we face 40 One another in this place? But hush, for I have lost the theme Its joy or night seem but a dream; Up there some hawk or owl has struck Dropping out of sky or rock, 45 A stricken rabbit is crying out And its cry distracts my thought. 1938 1939

The Circus Animals' Desertion

1

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, I sought it daily for six weeks or so. Maybe at last being but a broken man, I must be satisfied with my heart, although

5 Winter and summer till old age began My circus animals were all on show, Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.'

4. Dagger. Cf. Hamlet 3.1.77�78: "When he him- riage of his play The Unicorn from the Stars (1908), self might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin." and the lion in several of his poems, including"The 1. Yeats refers to the ancient Irish heroes of his Second Coming." early work ("Those stilted boys"), the gilded car

.

2052 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

2 ioisWhat can I but enumerate old themes, First that sea-rider Oisin2 led by the nose Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams, Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose, Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems, That might adorn old songs or courtly shows; But what cared I that set him on to ride, I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride. 20And then a counter-truth filled out its play, "The Countess Cathleen"3 was the name I gave it, She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away, But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it. 1 thought my dear must her own soul destroy So did fanaticism and hate enslave it, And this brought forth a dream and soon enough This dream itself had all my thought and love. 25 And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;4 Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said It was the dream itself enchanted me: 30Character isolated by a deed To engross the present and dominate memory. Players and painted stage took all my love And not those things that they were emblems of. 3 35Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone I must lie down where all the ladders start 40 In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. 1939

2. In the long title-poem of Yeats's first successful book, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), the legendary poet warrior Oisin (pronounced Usheen) is enchanted by the beautiful fair}' woman Niamh (pronounced Neeve), who leads him to the Islands of Delight, of Many Fears, and of Forgetfulness. 3. A play (published in 1892) about an Irish countess (an idealized version of Maud Gonne) who sells her soul to the devil to buy food for the starving Irish poor but is taken up to heaven (for God "Looks always on the motive, not the deed").

4. In Yeats's play On Baile's Strand (1904), the legendary warrior Cuchulain (pronounced Cu- HOOlin by Yeats, KooHULLin in Irish), crazed by his discovery that he has killed his son, fights with the sea.

.

INTRODUCTION [A GENERAL INTRODUCTION FOR MY WORK] / 2053

From Introduction [A General Introduction for My Work]1

I. The First Principle A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedies, whatever it be, remorse, lost love or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria. Dante and Milton had mythologies, Shakespeare the characters of English history, of traditional romance; even when the poet seems most himself, when Raleigh and gives potentates the lie,2 or Shelley 'a nerve o'er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of mankind',3 or Byron when 'the heart wears out the breast as the sword wears out the sheath',4 he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been re-born as an idea, something intended, complete. A novelist might describe his accidence, his incoherence, he must not, he is more type than man, more passion than type. He is Lear, Romeo, Oedipus, Tiresias; he has stepped out of a play and even the woman he loves is Rosalind, Cleopatra, never The Dark Lady.5 He is part of his own phantasmagoria and we adore him because nature has grown intelligible, and by so doing a part of our creative power. 'When mind is lost in the light of the Self', says the Prashna Upanishad,6 'it dreams no more; still in the body it is lost in happiness.' 'A wise man seeks in Self', says the Chandogya Upanishad, 'those that are alive and those that are dead and gets what the world cannot give.' The world knows nothing because it has made nothing, we know everything because we have made everything.

II. Subject-Matter * * T am convinced that in two or three generations it will become generally known that the mechanical theory7 has no reality, that the natural and supernatural are knit together, that to escape a dangerous fanaticism we must study a new science; at that moment Europeans may find something attractive in a Christ posed against a background not of Judaism but of Druidism, not shut off in dead history, but flowing, concrete, phenomenal.

1 was born into this faith, have lived in it, and shall die in it; my Christ, a legitimate deduction from the Creed of St Patrick8 as I think, is that Unity of Being Dante compared to a perfectly proportioned human body, Blake's 'Imag

1. Written in 1937 and originally printed as "A General Introduction for lYly Work" in Essays and Introductions (1961), the text is excerpted from Later Essays, ed. William H. O'Donnell (1994), vol. 5 of The Collected Works ofW. B. Yeats. 2. From "The Lie," bv the English writer and explorer Sir Walter Ralegh (1552-1618): "Tell potentates, they live / Acting by others' action; / Not loved unless they give, / Not strong but by a faction: / If potentates reply, / Give potentates the lie." 3. From "Julian and Maddalo," by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). 4. Cf. "So, we'll go no more a roving," by the English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (p. 616, lines 5�6).

5. The woman to whom many of Shakespeare's de-idealizing sonnets are addressed. The rest of the names refer to characters in Shakespeare's plays and in Sophocles' ancient Greek drama Oedipus the King. 6. One of a series of ancient philosophical dialogues in Sanskrit. From Ten Principal Upanishads (1937), translated bv Yeats and the Indian monk Shri Purohit Swami'(1882-1 941). 7. Theory explaining the universe in strictly naturalistic, Newtonian terms. 8. From the second paragraph of "The Confession of St. Patrick, or His Epistle to the Irish," by the fifth-century saint, the apostle of Ireland.

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2054 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

ination',9 what the Upanishads have named 'Self': nor is this unity distant and therefore intellectually understandable, but imminent,1 differing from man to man and age to age, taking upon itself pain and ugliness, 'eye of newt, and leg of frog'.2

Subconscious preoccupation with this theme brought me A Vision,3 its harsh geometry an incomplete interpretation. The 'Irishry' have preserved their ancient 'deposit' through wars which, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became wars of extermination; no people, Lecky said at the opening of his Ireland in the Eighteenth Century/ have undergone greater persecution, nor did that persecution altogether cease up to our own day. No people hate as we do in whom that past is always alive; there are moments when hatred poisons my life and I accuse myself of effeminacy because I have not given it adequate expression. It is not enough to have put it into the mouth of a rambling peasant poet. Then I remind myself that, though mine is the first English marriage I know of in the direct line, all my family names are English and that I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake, perhaps to William Morris,5 and to the English language in which I think, speak and write, that everything I love has come to me through English; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate. I am like the Tibetan monk who dreams at his initiation that he is eaten by a wild beast and learns on waking that he himself is eater and eaten. This is Irish hatred and solitude, the hatred of human life that made Swift write Gulliver6 and the epitaph upon his tomb, that can still make us wag between extremes and doubt our sanity.

Again and again I am asked why I do not write in Gaelic; some four or five years ago I was invited to dinner by a London society and found myself among London journalists, Indian students and foreign political refugees. An Indian paper says it was a dinner in my honour, I hope not; I have forgotten though I have a clear memory of my own angry mind. I should have spoken as men are expected to speak at public dinners; I should have paid and been paid conventional compliments; then they would speak of the refugees, from that on all would be lively and topical, foreign tyranny would be arraigned, England seem even to those confused Indians the protector of liberty; I grew angrier and angrier; Wordsworth, that typical Englishman, had published his famous sonnet to Francois Dominique Toussaint, a Santo Domingo negro:

There's not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee7

in the year when Emmet conspired and died, and he remembered that rebellion as little as the half hanging and the pitch cap that preceded it by half a

9. In Jerusalem the English poet William Blake (1 757�1827) describes imagination as the "Divine body of the lord Jesus." Yeats's ideas about the Unity of Being are drawn from his reading of Dante's II Convito. 1. In manuscript Yeats wrote "imanent" (a misspelling of "immanent"), but he allowed "imminent" to stand in the typescript. 2. Ingredients of the witches' cauldron in Shakespeare's Macbeth 4.1. 3. Yeats's mystical writings (1925, 1937),inwhich he sketches out and schematizes many of his theories. 4. A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, by the Irish historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903). 5. English poet and designer (1834-1896). Edmund Spenser (1 552�1 599), English poet who, in addition to poetic works such as The Faerie Queene, wrote a treatise proposing the extermination of the Irish. 6. Gulliver's Travels, by the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift (1667�1745). Yeats's poem "Swift's Epitaph," a loose translation of the Latin on Swift's tomb, claims that "Swift has sailed into his rest; / Savage indignation there / Cannot lacerate his breast." 7. From "To Toussaint L'Ouverture," by the English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850). L'Ouverture (1743�1803) died in prison after rebelling against France's rule in Haiti.

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INTRODUCTION [A GENERAL INTRODUCTION FOR MY WORK] / 2055

dozen years.8 That there might be no topical speeches I denounced the oppression of the people of India; being a man of letters, not a politician, I told how they had been forced to learn everything, even their own Sanscrit, through the vehicle of English till the first discoverers of wisdom had become bywords for vague abstract facility. I begged the Indian writers present to remember that no man can think or write with music and vigour except in his mother tongue. I turned a friendly audience hostile, yet when I think of that scene I am unrepentant and angry.

I could no more have written in Gaelic than can those Indians write in English; Gaelic is my national language, but it is not my mother tongue.

III. Style and Attitude Style is almost unconscious. I know what I have tried to do, little what I have done. Contemporary lyric poems, even those that moved me�'The Stream's Secret', 'Dolores'9�seemed too long, but an Irish preference for a swift current might be mere indolence, yet Burns may have felt the same when he read Thomson and Cowper.1 The English mind is meditative, rich, deliberate; it may remember the Thames2 valley. I planned to write short lyrics or poetic drama where every speech [would] be short and concentrated, knit by dramatic tension, and I did so with more confidence because young English poets were at that time writing out of emotion at the moment of crisis, though their old slow-moving meditation returned almost at once. Then, and in this English poetry has followed my lead, I tried to make the language of poetry coincide with that of passionate, normal speech. I wanted to write in whatever language comes most naturally when we soliloquise, as I do all day long, upon the events of our own lives or of any life where we can see ourselves for the moment. I sometimes compare myself with the mad old slum women I hear denouncing and remembering; 'how dare you,' I heard one say of some imaginary suitor, 'and you without health or a home'. If I spoke my thoughts aloud they might be as angry and as wild. It was a long time before I had made a language to my liking; I began to make it when I discovered some twenty years ago that I must seek, not as Wordsworth thought words in common use,3 but a powerful and passionate syntax, and a complete coincidence between period and stanza. Because I need a passionate syntax for passionate subject-matter I compel myself to accept those traditional metres that have developed with the language. Ezra Pound, Turner, Lawrence, wrote admirable free verse, I could not.4 I would lose myself, become joyless like those mad old women. The translators of the Bible, Sir Thomas Browne,5 certain translators from the Greek when translators still bothered about rhythm, created a form midway between prose and verse that seems natural to impersonal meditation; but all

8. Paper caps filled with burning pitch were used 2. English river that runs through London. for torture during the martial law preceding and 3. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Words- following the Irish Rising of 1 798. Robert Emmet worth says that poetry should be written in "lan( 1778�1803), Irish nationalist executed after the guage really used by men." Irish rebellion of 1803. 4. In his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936),

9. Long poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-Yeats included free verse by the American poet 1882) and Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-Ezra Pound (1885-1972), the English poet Walter 1909), respectively. Turner (1889-1946), and the English poet and 1. James Thomson (1700-1748) and William novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930). Cowper (1731�1800), poets most famous for their 5. English physician and author (1605�1682) long poems. Robert Burns (1759�1796), Scottish with an elaborate prose style. poet of short lyrics.

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2056 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt. Once when I was in delirium from pneumonia I dictated a letter to George Moore6 telling him to eat salt because it was a symbol of eternity; the delirium passed, I had no memory of that letter, but I must have meant what I now mean. If I wrote of personal love or sorrow in free verse, or in any rhythm that left it unchanged, amid all its accident, I would be full of self-contempt because of my egotism and indiscretion, and I foresee the boredom of my reader. I must choose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must seem traditional. I commit my emotion to shepherds, herdsmen, camel-drivers, learned men, Milton's or Shelley's Platonist, that tower Palmer drew.7 Talk to me of originality and I will turn on you with rage. I am a crowd, I am a lonely man, I am nothing. Ancient salt is best packing. The heroes of Shakespeare convey to us through their looks, or through the metaphorical patterns of their speech, the sudden enlargement of their vision, their ecstasy at the approach of death, 'She should have died hereafter', 'Of many million kisses, the poor last', 'Absent thee from felicity awhile'; they have become God or Mother Goddess, the pelican, 'My baby at my breast',8 but all must be cold; no actress has ever sobbed when she played Cleopatra, even the shallow brain of a producer has never thought of such a thing. The supernatural is present, cold winds blow across our hands, upon our faces, the thermometer falls, and because of that cold we are hated by journalists and groundlings. There may be in this or that detail painful tragedy, but in the whole work none. 1 have heard Lady Gregory say, rejecting some play in the modern manner sent to the Abbey Theatre, 'Tragedy must be a joy to the man who dies.' Nor is it any different with lyrics, songs, narrative poems; neither scholars nor the populace have sung or read anything generation after generation because of its pain. The maid of honour whose tragedy they sing must be lifted out of history with timeless pattern, she is one of the four Maries,9 the rhythm is old and familiar, imagination must dance, must be carried beyond feeling into the aboriginal ice. Is ice the correct word? I once

boasted, copying the phrase from a letter of my father's, that I would write a poem 'cold and passionate as the dawn'.1

When I wrote in blank verse I was dissatisfied; my vaguely mediaeval Countess Cathleen fitted the measure, but our Heroic Age went better, or so I fancied, in the ballad metre of The Green Helmet.2 There was something in what I felt about Deirdre, about Cuchulain,3 that rejected the Renaissance and its characteristic metres, and this was a principal reason why I created in dance plays the form that varies blank verse with lyric metres. When I speak blank verse and analyse my feelings I stand at a moment of history when instinct, its traditional songs and dances, its general agreement, is of the past. I have

6. Irish novelist (1852-1933). 7. The English artist Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) drew "The Lonely Tower" (1879) as an illustration of Milton's poem about the pensive man, "II Penseroso" (1645), in which a scholar in a "high lonely tower" is dedicated to uncovering Plato's insights; in Shelley's "Prince Athanase," the idealistic hero searches for love. 8. From Macbeth 5.4, Anthony and Cleopatra 4.15. Hamlet 5.2, respectively. "Pelican": thought to feed its babies with its blood and thus often a symbol of self-sacrifice. 9. Mary, Queen of Scots (1542�1587) was served by four women named Mary. 1. From "The Fisherman" (1916): "Before I am old / I shall have written him one / Poem maybe as cold / And passionate as the dawn." 2. The Countess Cathleen (1892, later revised) is written in blank verse; The Green Helmet (1910), in iambic heptameter, which resembles the meter of a ballad (alternating between four- and three- stress lines). 3. The warrior hero of the Irish mythological Ulster Cycle; he also appears in Yeats's "dance" plays, derived from Japanese Noh drama. "Deirdre": in the Ulster Cycle, woman chosen to be queen of Ulster before she elopes with Naoise (pronounced Neesha).

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INTRODUCTION [A GENERAL INTRODUCTION FOR MY WORK] / 2057

been cast up out of the whale's belly though I still remember the sound and sway that came from beyond its ribs,4 and, like the Queen in Paul Fort's ballad, 5 I smell of the fish of the sea. The contrapuntal structure of the verse, to employ a term adopted by Robert Bridges,6 combines the past and present. If I repeat the first line of Paradise Lost so as to emphasise its five feet I am among the folk singers, 'Of man's first disobedience and the fruit', but speak it as I should I cross it with another emphasis, that of passionate prose, 'Of man's first disobedience and the fruit', or 'Of man's first disobedience and the fruit', the folk song is still there, but a ghostly voice, an unvariable possibility, an unconscious norm. What moves me and my hearer is a vivid speech that has no laws except that it must not exorcise the ghostly voice. I am awake and asleep, at my moment of revelation, self-possessed in self-surrender; there is no rhyme, no echo of the beaten drum, the dancing foot, that would overset my balance. When I was a boy I wrote a poem upon dancing that had one good line: 'They snatch with their hands at the sleep of the skies.' If I sat down and thought for a year I would discover that but for certain syllabic limitations, a rejection or acceptance of certain elisions, I must wake or sleep.

The Countess Cathleen could speak a blank verse which I had loosened, almost put out of joint, for her need, because I thought of her as mediaeval and thereby connected her with the general European movement. For Deirdre and Cuchulain and all the other figures of Irish legend are still in the whale's belly.

IV. WhitherP The young English poets reject dream and personal emotion; they have thought out opinions that join them to this or that political party; they employ an intricate psychology, action in character, not as in the ballads character in action, and all consider that they have a right to the same close attention that men pay to the mathematician and the metaphysician. One of the more distinguished has just explained that man has hitherto slept but must now awake.7 They are determined to express the factory, the metropolis, that they may be modern. Young men teaching school in some picturesque cathedral town, or settled for life in Capri or in Sicily, defend their type of metaphor by saying that it comes naturally to a man who travels to his work by Tube.8 I am indebted to a man of this school who went through my work at my request, crossing out all conventional metaphors,9 but they seem to me to have rejected also those dream associations which were the whole art of Mallarme.1 He had topped a previous wave. As they express not what the Upanishads call 'that ancient Self' but individual intellect, they have the right to choose the man in the Tube because of his objective importance. They attempt to kill the whale, push the Renaissance higher yet, out-think Leonardo;2 their verse kills the folk

4. Cf. Jonah 2.10: "And the Lord spake unto the Lewis (1904-1972). fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land." 8. London's underground railway. Lewis taught in 5. "La Reine a la Mer" ("The Queen of the Sea," the spa town of Cheltenham in the early 1930s. 1894-96), by the French poet Paul Fort (1872-D. H. Lawrence lived in Capri and Sicily in the 1960). early 1920s. 6. English poet (1844-1930), who stressed the 9. Ezra Pound did this circa 1910. poetic tension of the counterpoint between regular 1. StSphane Mallarme (1842-1898), French meters and the rhythm of poetry as actually spo-poet. ken. 2. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Italian artist 7. Perhaps W. H. Auden (1907-1973) or C. Day and inventor.

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2058 / E. M. FORSTER

ghost and yet would remain verse. I am joined to the 'Irishry' and I expect a counter-Renaissance. No doubt it is part of the game to push that Renaissance; I make no complaint; I am accustomed to the geometrical arrangement of history in A Vision, but I go deeper than 'custom' for my convictions. When I stand upon O'Connell Bridge3 in the half-light and notice that discordant architecture, all those electric signs, where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark and I am certain that wherever in Europe there are minds strong enough to lead others the same vague hatred rises; in four or five or in less generations this hatred will have issued in violence and imposed some kind of rule of kindred. I cannot know the nature of that rule, for its opposite fills the light; all I can do to bring it nearer is to intensify my hatred. I am no Nationalist, except in Ireland for passing reasons; State and Nation are the work of intellect, and when you consider what comes before and after them they are, as Victor Hugo said of something or other, not worth the blade of grass God gives for the nest of the linnet.4

1937 1961

3. Over Dublin's river Liffey. 4. Small finch. Victor Hugo (1802-1885), French writer. E. M. FORSTER 1879-1970 Born in London, Edward Morgan Forster was an infant when his father, an architect of Welsh extraction, died of consumption. An only child, Forster was raised by his paternal great-aunt and his mother, a member of a family distinguished over several generations for its evangelical religion and its philanthropic reformist activities. He was educated at Tonbridge School (the "Sawston" of his novel The Longest Journey), where he suffered from the cruelty of his classmates and other tribulations of being a day boy at a boarding school. As a student at King's College, Cambridge, he found an intellectual companionship that influenced his entire life. The friends he made were to become, with Forster, members of the "Bloomsbury Group"�so called because some of its prominent figures lived in the Bloomsbury district of London� which included the writers Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, the art historians Clive Bell and Boger Fry, and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Forster's main interest was always in personal relations, the "little society" we make for ourselves with our friends. He cast a wary eye on society at large, his point of view being always that of the independent liberal, suspicious of political slogans and catchwords, critical of Victorian attitudes and British imperialism.

After graduation from Cambridge, Forster visited Greece and spent some time in Italy in 1901, and this experience influenced him permanently; throughout his life he tended to set Greek and Italian peasant life in symbolic contrast to the stuffy and repressed life of middle-class England. Both Greek mythology and Italian Renaissance art opened up to him a world of vital exuberance, and most of his work is concerned with ways of discovering such a quality in personal relationships amid the complexities and distortions of modern life. He began writing as a contributor to the newly founded libera] Independent Review in 1903, and in 1905 published his first novel, Where

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THE OTHER BOAT / 2059

Angels Fear to Tread, a tragicomic projection of conflicts between refined English gentility and coarse Italian vitality.

Forster's second novel, The Longest Journey (1907), examines the differences between living and dead relationships with much incidental satire of English public- school education and English notions of respectability. A Room with a View (1908) explores the nature of love with a great deal of subtlety, using (as with his first novel) Italy as a liberating agent for the British tourists whom he also satirizes. Howards End (1910) involves a conflict between two families, one interested in art and literature and the other only in money and business, and probes the relation between inward feeling and outward action, between the kinds of reality in which people live. "Only connect!" exclaims one of the characters. "Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will soon be at its height." But no one knew better than Forster that this is more easily said than done and that false or premature connections, connections made by rule and not achieved through total realization of the personality, can destroy and corrupt.

A pacifist, Forster refused to fight in World War I and instead served in the International Red Cross in Egypt. In Alexandria he had his first significant sexual relationship, with Mohammed el Adl, an Egyptian tram conductor; he feared social disapproval less there than in England, where, not long after Oscar Wilde's infamous prosecution for homosexual offenses, he hid his personal life from public scrutiny.

He traveled to India in 1912 and 1922, and in his last (for Forster published no

more fiction during his life) and best-known novel, A Passage to India (1924), he takes

the fraught relations between British and colonized Indians in the subcontinent as a

background for the most searching and complex of all his explorations of the possi

bilities and limitations, the promises and pitfalls, of human relationships. Published

posthumously was another novel, Maurice, written more than fifty years before and

circulated privately during his life, in which he tried to define and do justice to homo

sexual love, which had played an important part in his life. In addition to fiction

Forster also wrote critical, autobiographical, and descriptive prose, notably Aspects of

the Novel (1927), which, as a discussion of the techniques of fiction by a practicing

novelist, has become a minor classic of criticism.

"The Other Boat," which concerns cross-ethnic homosexual attraction that collides

with the sexual taboos and racial hierarchies of empire, is an unusually long and rich

short story that Forster originally intended to turn into a novel, beginning it around

1913 but not completing it until 1957�58, and it was not published until after his

death, first appearing in The Life to Come and Other Stories (1972). The first part of

the story tells of a British family's journey by ship from India to England, and the rest

of the story, set some years later, reverses direction, the journey into the Mediterra

nean and on toward India becoming the backdrop for the loosening�and then drastic

reassertion�of British imperial norms of order, discipline, racial superiority, and

heterosexuality. As in other of Forster's works, the passage into another cultural geog

raphy calls into question British middle-class values, which exact a high price in

repression, tragically conflict with the protagonist's sensual and emotional desires,

and ultimately explode into violence.

The Other Boat

I

'Cocoanut, come and play at soldiers.'

'I cannot, I am beesy.'

'But you must, Lion wants you.'

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2060 / E. M. FORSTER

"Yes, come along, man,' said Lionel, running up with some paper cocked hats' and a sash. It was long long ago, and little boys still went to their deaths stiffly, and dressed in as many clothes as they could find.

'I cannot, I am beesy,' repeated Cocoanut.

'But man, what are you busy about?'

'I have soh many things to arrange, man.'

'Let's leave him and play by ourselves,' said Olive. 'We've Joan and Noel and Baby and Lieutenant Bodkin. Who wants Cocoanut?'

'Oh, shut up! I want him. We must have him. He's the only one who falls down when he's killed. All you others go on fighting long too long. The battle this morning was a perfect fast. Mother said so.'

Well, I'll die.'

'So you say beforehand, but when it comes to the point you won't. Noel won't. Joan won't. Baby doesn't do anything properly�of course he's too little�and you can't expect Lieutenant Bodkin to fall down. Cocoanut, man, do.'

'I�weel�not.'

'Cocoanut cocoanut cocoanut cocoanut cocoanut cocoanut,' said Baby.

The little boy rolled on the deck screaming happily. He liked to be pressed by these handsome good-natured children. 'I must go and see the m'm m'm m'm,' he said.

'The what?'

'The m'm m'm m'm. They live�oh, so many of them�in the thin part of the ship.' 'He means the bow,'2 said Olive. 'Oh, come along, Lion. He's hopeless.' 'What are m'm m'm m'm?' 'M'm.' He whirled his arms about, and chalked some marks on the planks. 'What are those?' 'M'm.' 'What's their name?' 'They have no name.' 'What do they do?' 'They just go so and oh! and so�ever�always ' 'Flying fish? . . . Fairies? . . . Noughts and crosses?'3 'They have no name.' 'Mother!' said Olive to a lady who was promenading with a gentleman, 'hasn't everything a name?'

'I suppose so.'

'Who's this?' asked the lady's companion.

'He's always hanging on to my children. I don't know.'

'Touch of the tar-brush,4 eh?'

'Yes, but it doesn't matter on a voyage home. I would never allow it going to India.' They passed on, Mrs March calling back, 'Shout as much as you like, boys, but don't scream, don't scream.' 'They must have a name,' said Lionel, recollecting, 'because Adam named all the animals when the Bible was beginning.' 'They weren't in the Bible, m'm m'm m'm; they were all the time up in the

1. Triangular hats worn in navy and army. 4. Appearance of having non-European ancestry, 2. Forward part of the ship. i.e., of having brown skin. 3. Tic-tac-toe.

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THE OTHER BOAT / 2061

thin part of the sheep, and when you pop out they pop in, so how could Adam

have?'

'Noah's ark is what he's got to now.'

Baby said 'Noah's ark, Noah's ark, Noah's ark,' and they all bounced up and down and roared. Then, without any compact, they drifted from the saloon5 deck on to the lower, and from the lower down the staircase that led to the forecastle,6 much as the weeds and jellies were drifting about outside in the tropical sea. Soldiering was forgotten, though Lionel said, 'We may as well wear our cocked hats.' They played with a fox-terrier, who was in the charge of a sailor, and asked the sailor himself if a roving life was a happy one. Then drifting forward again, they climbed into the bows, where the m'm m'm m'm were said to be.

Here opened a glorious country, much the best in the boat. None of the March children had explored there before, but Cocoanut, having few domesticities, knew it well. That bell that hung in the very peak-�it was the ship's bell and if you rang it the ship would stop. Those big ropes were tied into knots�twelve knots an hour. This paint was wet, but only as far as there. Up that hole was coming a Lascar.7 But of the m'm m'm he said nothing until asked. Then he explained in offhand tones that if you popped out they popped in, so that you couldn't expect to see them.

What treachery! How disappointing! Yet so ill-balanced were the children's minds that they never complained. Olive, in whom the instincts of a lady were already awaking, might have said a few well-chosen words, but when she saw her brothers happy she forgot too, and lifted Baby up on to a bollard8 because he asked her to. They all screamed. Into their midst came the Lascar and laid down a mat for his three-o'clock prayer. He prayed as if he was still in India, facing westward, not knowing that the ship had rounded Arabia so that his holy places now lay behind him.9 They continued to scream.

Mrs March and her escort remained on the saloon deck, inspecting the approach to Suez.1 Two continents were converging with great magnificence of mountains and plain. At their junction, nobly placed, could be seen the smoke and the trees of the town. In addition to her more personal problems, she had become anxious about Pharaoh. 'Where exactly was Pharaoh drowned?'2 she asked Captain Armstrong. 'I shall have to show my boys.' Captain Armstrong did not know, but he offered to ask Mr Hotblack, the Moravian3 missionary. Mr Hotblack knew�in fact he knew too much. Somewhat snubbed by the military element in the earlier part of the voyage, he now bounced to the surface, became authoritative and officious, and undertook to wake Mrs March's little ones when they were passing the exact spot. He spoke of the origins of Christianity in a way that made her look down her nose, saying that the Canal was one long genuine Bible picture gallery, that donkeys could still be seen going down into Egypt carrying Holy Families,'' and naked Arabs

5. Deck with large cabin(s) for passenger use. 6. Raised deck at the forward part of the ship. 7. An Indian sailor. 8. A thick post for securing ropes to. 9. Muslims pray facing Mecca. 1. Egyptian city at the south end of the Suez Canal (the shortest maritime route between Europe and India; it separates Asia from Africa). 2. In Exodus 14.21-23 Moses parts the Red Sea, but after the Israelites have passed, the sea closes, drowning Pharoah and his army.

3. Member of a Protestant denomination, originally from a 1 5th-century reform religious movement in Moravia and Bohemia. 4. In Matthew 2.13-15 the family of the baby Jesus, fleeing from King Herod, travels from Bethlehem into Egypt; the journey is often depicted as taking place by donkey.

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2062 / E. M. FORSTER

wading into the water to fish; 'Peter and Andrew by Galilee's shore, why, it hits the truth plumb.'5 A clergyman's daughter and a soldier's wife, she could not admit that Christianity had ever been oriental. What good thing can come out of the Levant/' and is it likely that the apostles7 ever had a touch of the tar-brush? Still, she thanked Mr Hotblack (for, having asked a favour of him, she had contracted an obligation towards him), and she resigned herself to greeting him daily until Southampton,8 when their paths would part.

Then she observed, against the advancing land, her children playing in the bows without their topis9 on. The sun in those far-off days was a mighty power and hostile to the Ruling Race.1 Officers staggered at a touch of it, Tommies2 collapsed. When the regiment was under canvas, it wore helmets at tiffin,3 lest the rays penetrated the tent. She shouted at her doomed offspring, she gesticulated, Captain Armstrong and Mr Hotblack shouted, but the wind blew their cries backwards. Refusing company, she hurried forward alone; the children were far too excited and covered with paint.

'Lionel! Olive! Olive! What are you doing?'

'M'm m'm m'm, mummy�it's a new game.'

'Go back and play properly under the awning at once�it's far too hot. You'll have sunstroke every one of you. Come, Baby!' 'M'm m'm m'm.' 'Now, you won't want me to carry a great boy like you, surely.' Baby flung himself round the bollard and burst into tears. 'It always ends like this,' said Mrs March as she detached him. 'You all

behave foolishly and selfishly and then Baby cries. No, Olive�don't help me. Mother would rather do everything herself.'

'Sorry,' said Lionel gruffly. Baby's shrieks rent the air. Thoroughly naughty, he remained clasping an invisible bollard.4 As she bent him into a portable shape, another mishap occurred. A sailor�an Englishman�leapt out of the hatchway with a piece of chalk and drew a little circle round her where she stood. Cocoanut screamed, 'He's caught you. He's come.'

'You're on dangerous ground, lady,' said the sailor respectfully. 'Men's quarters. Of course we leave it to your generosity.'

Tired with the voyage and the noise of the children, worried by what she had left in India and might find in England, Mrs March fell into a sort of trance. She stared at the circle stupidly, unable to move out of it, while Cocoanut danced round her and gibbered.

'Men's quarters�-just to keep up the old custom.'

'I don't understand.'

'Passengers are often kind enough to pay their footing,' he said, feeling awkward; though rapacious he was independent. 'But of course there's no compulsion, lady. Ladies and gentlemen do as they feel.'

'I will certainly do what is customary�Baby, be quiet.'

'Thank you, lady. We divide whatever you give among the crew. Of course not those chaps.' He indicated the Lascar. 'The money shall be sent to you. I have no purse.'

5. Peter and Andrew, Jesus' disciples, were fish-9. Pith helmets worn for protection from sun and ermen on the Sea of Galilee. heat. 6. Historical term for region of the eastern Med-1. I.e., the British. iterranean. 2. Nickname for British soldiers. 7. Jesus' disciples. 3. Lunch (Anglo-Indian). 8. Major port on the English Channel. 4. Post on a ship for securing ropes to.

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THE OTHER BOAT / 2063

He touched his forelock' cynically. He did not believe her. She stepped out

of the circle and as she did so Cocoanut sprang into it and squatted grinning. 'You're a silly little boy and I shall complain to the stewardess about you,' she told him with unusual heat. 'You never will play any game properly and you stop the others. You're a silly idle useless unmanly little boy.'

II

S. S. Normannia Red Sea October, 191

Hullo the Mater!

You may be thinking it is about time I wrote you a line, so here goes, however you should have got my wire sent before leaving Tilbury6 with the glad news that 1 got a last minute passage on this boat when it seemed quite impossible I should do so. The Arbuthnots are on it too all right, so is a Lady Manning who claims acquaintance with Olive, not to mention several remarkably cheery subalterns,7 poor devils, don't know what they are in for in the tropics. We make up two Bridge tables every night besides hanging together at other times, and get called the Big Eight, which I suppose must be regarded as a compliment. How I got my passage is curious. I was coming away from the S.S.S office after my final try in absolute despair when I ran into an individual whom you may or may not remember�he was a kid on that other boat when we cleared all out of India on that unlikely occasion over ten years ago�got called Cocoanut because of his peculiar shaped head. He has now turned into an equally weird youth, who has however managed to become influential in shipping circles, I can't think how some people manage to do things. He duly recognized me�dagoes9 sometimes have marvellous memories�and on learning my sad plight fixed me up with a (single berth) cabin, so all is well. He is on board too, but our paths seldom cross. He has more than a touch of the tar-brush, so consorts with his own dusky fraternity, no doubt to their mutual satisfaction.

The heat is awful and I fear this is but a dull letter in consequence. Bridge I have already mentioned, and there are the usual deck games, betting on the ship's log, etc., still I think everyone will be glad to reach Bombay and get into harness.1 Colonel and Mrs Arbuthnot are very friendly, and speaking confidentially I don't think it will do my prospects any harm having got to know them better. Well I will now conclude this screed2 and I will write again when I have rejoined the regiment and contacted Isabel. Best love to all which naturally includes yourself from

Your affectionate first born, Lionel March

PS. Lady Manning asks to be remembered to Olive, nearly forgot.

5. Lock of hair growing from the front of the head. 9. Disparaging term for foreigners. 6. Port on the river Thames estuary. 1. Get to work, especially w

.

2064 / E. M. FORSTER

When Captain March had posted this epistle he rejoined the Big Eight. Although he had spent the entire day with them they were happy to see him, for he exactly suited them. He was what any rising young officer ought to be� clean-cut, athletic, good-looking without being conspicuous. He had had wonderful professional luck, which no one grudged him: he had got into one of the little desert wars that were becoming too rare, had displayed dash and decision, had been wounded, and had been mentioned in despatches and got his captaincy early. Success had not spoiled him, nor was he vain of his personal appearance, although he must have known that thick fairish hair, blue eyes, glowing cheeks and strong white teeth constitute, when broad shoulders support them, a combination irresistible to the fair sex. His hands were clumsier than the rest of him, but bespoke hard honest work, and the springy gleaming hairs on them suggested virility. His voice was quiet, his demeanour assured, his temper equable. Like his brother officers he wore a mess3 uniform slightly too small for him, which accentuated his physique�the ladies accentuating theirs by wearing their second best frocks and reserving their best ones for India.

Bridge proceeded without a hitch, as his mother had been given to understand it might. She had not been told that on either side of the players, violet darkening into black, rushed the sea, nor would she have been interested. Her son gazed at it occasionally, his forehead furrowed. For despite his outstanding advantages he was a miserable card-player, and he was having wretched luck. As soon as the Normannia entered the Mediterranean he had begun to lose, and the 'better luck after Port Said,4 always the case' that had been humorously promised him had never arrived. Here in the Red Sea he had lost the maximum the Big Eight's moderate stakes allowed. He couldn't afford it, he had no private means and he ought to be saving up for the future, also it was humiliating to let down his partner: Lady Manning herself. So he was thankful when play terminated and the usual drinks circulated. They sipped and gulped while the lighthouses on the Arabian coast winked at them and slid northwards. 'Bedfordshire!'5 fell pregnantly from the lips of Mrs Arbuthnot. And they dispersed, with the certainty that the day which was approaching would exactly resemble the one that had died.

In this they were wrong.

Captain March waited until all was quiet, still frowning at the sea. Then with something alert and predatory about him, something disturbing and disturbed, he went down to his cabin.

'Come een,' said a sing-song voice.

For it was not a single cabin, as he had given his mother to understand. There were two berths, and the lower one contained Cocoanut. Who was naked. A brightly coloured scarf lay across him and contrasted with his blackish-grayish skin, and an aromatic smell came off him, not at all unpleasant. In ten years he had developed into a personable adolescent, but still had the same funny-shaped head. He had been doing his accounts and now he laid them down and gazed at the British officer adoringly.

'Man, I thought you was never coming,' he said, and his eyes filled with tears.

3. Mealtime. 5. County in the southeastern Midlands of 4. Egyptian city at the northern entrance to the England. Suez Canal.

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THE OTHER BOAT / 2065

'It's only those bloody Arbuthnots and their blasted bridge,' replied Lionel and closed the cabin door.

'I thought you was dead.'

'Well, I'm not.'

'I thought I should die.'

'So you will.' He sat down on the berth, heavily and with deliberate heavi

ness. The end of the chase was in sight. It had not been a long one. He had always liked the kid, even on that other boat, and now he liked him more than ever. Champagne in an ice-bucket too. An excellent kid. They couldn't associate on deck with that touch of the tar-brush, but it was a very different business down here, or soon would be. Lowering his voice, he said: 'The trouble is we're not supposed to do this sort of thing under any circumstances whatsoever, which you never seem to understand. If we got caught there'd be absolute bloody hell to pay, yourself as well as me, so for God's sake don't make a noise.'

'Lionel, O Lion of the Night, love me.'

'All right. Stay where you are.' Then he confronted the magic that had been worrying him on and off the whole evening and had made him inattentive at cards. A tang of sweat spread as he stripped and a muscle thickened up out of gold. When he was ready he shook off old Cocoanut, who was now climbing about like a monkey, and put him where he had to be, and manhandled him, gently, for he feared his own strength and was always gentle, and closed on him, and they did what they both wanted to do.

Wonderful, wonnerful . . .

They lay entwined, Nordic warrior and subtle supple boy, who belonged to no race and always got what he wanted. All his life he had wanted a toy that would not break, and now he was planning how he would play with Lionel for ever. He had longed for him ever since their first meeting, embraced him in dreams when only that was possible, met him again as the omens foretold, and marked him down, spent money to catch him and lime6 him, and here he lay, caught, and did not know it.

There they lay caught, both of them, and did not know it, while the ship carried them inexorably towards Bombay.

Ill

It had not always been so wonderful, wonnerful. Indeed the start of the affair had been grotesque and nearly catastrophic. Lionel had stepped on board at Tilbury entirely the simple soldier man, without an inkling of his fate. He had thought it decent of a youth whom he had only known as a child to fix him up with a cabin, but had not expected to find the fellow on board too� still less to have to share the cabin with him. This gave him a nasty shock. British officers are never stabled with dagoes, never, it was too damn awkward for words. However, he could not very well protest under the circumstances, nor did he in his heart want to, for his colour-prejudices were tribal rather than personal, and only worked when an observer was present. The first half- hour together went most pleasantly, they were unpacking and sorting things out before the ship started, he found his childhood's acquaintance friendly

6. Ensnare.

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2066 / E. M. FORSTER

and quaint, exchanged reminiscences, and even started teasing and bossing him as in the old days, and got him giggling delightedly. He sprang up to his berth and sat on its edge, swinging his legs. A hand touched them, and he thought no harm until it approached their junction. Then he became puzzled, scared and disgusted in quick succession, leapt down with a coarse barrack- room oath and a brow of thunder and went straight to the Master at Arms7 to report an offence against decency. Here he showed the dash and decision that had so advantaged him in desert warfare: in other words he did not know what he was doing.

The Master at Arms could not be found, and during the delay Lionel's rage abated somewhat, and he reflected that if he lodged a formal complaint he would have to prove it, which he could not do, and might have to answer questions, at which he was never good. So he went to the Purser8 instead, and he demanded to be given alternative accommodation, without stating any reason for the change. The Purser stared: the boat was chockablock full already, as Captain March must have known. 'Don't speak to me like that,' Lionel stormed, and shouldered his way to the gunwale9 to see England recede. Here was the worst thing in the world, the thing for which Tommies got given the maximum, and here was he bottled up with it for a fortnight. What the hell was he to do? Go forward with the charge or blow his own brains out or what?

On to him thus desperately situated the Arbuthnots descended. They were slight acquaintances, their presence calmed him, and before long his light military guffaw rang out as if nothing had happened. They were pleased to see him, for they were hurriedly forming a group of sahibs1 who would hang together during the voyage and exclude outsiders. With his help the Big Eight came into being, soon to be the envy of less happy passengers; introductions; drinks; jokes; difficulties of securing a berth. At this point Lionel made a shrewd move: everything gets known on a boat and he had better anticipate discovery. 'I got a passage all right,' he brayed, 'but at the cost of sharing my cabin with a wog.'2 All condoled, and Colonel Arbuthnot in the merriest of moods exclaimed, 'Let's hope the blacks don't come off on the sheets,' and Mrs Arbuthnot, wittier still, cried, 'Of course they won't, dear, if it's a wog it'll be the coffees.' Everyone shouted with laughter, the good lady basked in the applause, and Lionel could not understand why he suddenly wanted to throw himself into the sea. It was so unfair, he was the aggrieved party, yet he felt himself in the wrong and almost a cad. If only he had found out the fellow's tastes in England he would never have touched him, no, not with tongs. But could he have found out? You couldn't tell by just looking. Or could you? Dimly, after ten years' forgetfulness, something stirred in that faraway boat of his childhood and he saw his mother . . . Well, she was always objecting to something or other, the poor Mater. No, he couldn't possibly have known.

The Big Eight promptly reserved tables for lunch and all future meals, and Cocoanut and his set were relegated to a second sitting�for it became evident that he too was in a set: the tagrag and coloured bobtail3 stuff that accumulates in corners and titters and whispers, and may well be influential, but who cares?

7. Officer in charge of enforcing discipline on a 1. Respectful term for Europeans in colonial ship. India. 8. Ship's officer who keeps accounts and manages 2. Offensive term for a foreign person of color. provisions. 3. "Tagrag and bobtail" is another version of "rag, 9. Upper edge of a ship's side. tag, and bobtail," meaning the riffraff, or rabble.

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THE OTHER BOAT / 2067

Lionel regarded it with distaste and looked for a touch of the hangdog4 in his unspeakable cabin-mate, but he was skipping and gibbering on the promenade deck as if nothing had occurred. He himself was safe for the moment, eating curry by the side of Lady Manning, and amusing her by his joke about the various names which the cook would give the same curry on successive days. Again something stabbed him and he thought: 'But what shall I do, do, when night comes? There will have to be some sort of showdown.' After lunch the weather deteriorated. England said farewell to her children with her choppiest seas, her gustiest winds, and the banging of invisible pots and pans in the empyrean.5 Lady Manning thought she might do better in a deckchair. He squired her to it and then collapsed and re-entered his cabin as rapidly as he had left it a couple of hours earlier.

It now seemed full of darkies, who rose to their feet as he retched,6 assisted him up to his berth and loosened his collar, after which the gong summoned them to their lunch. Presently Cocoanut and his elderly Parsee7 secretary looked in to inquire and were civil and helpful and he could not but thank them. The showdown must be postponed. Later in the day he felt better and less inclined for it, and the night did not bring its dreaded perils or indeed anything at all. It was almost as if nothing had happened�almost but not quite. Master Cocoanut had learned his lesson, for he pestered no more, yet he skilfully implied that the lesson was an unimportant one. He was like someone who has been refused a loan and indicates that he will not apply again. He seemed positively not to mind his disgrace�incomprehensibly to Lionel, who expected either repentance or terror. Could it be that he himself had made too much fuss?

In this uneventful atmosphere the voyage across the Bay of Biscay8 proceeded. It was clear that his favours would not again be asked, and he could not help wondering what would have happened if he had granted them. Propriety was re-established, almost monotonously; if he and Cocoanut ever overlapped in the cabin and had to settle (for instance) who should wash first, they solved the problem with mutual tact.

And then the ship entered the Mediterranean.

Resistance weakened under the balmier sky, curiosity increased. It was an exquisite afternoon�their first decent weather. Cocoanut was leaning out of the porthole to see the sunlit rock of Gibraltar.9 Lionel leant against him to look too and permitted a slight, a very slight familiarity with his person. The ship did not sink nor did the heavens fall. The contact started something whirling about inside his head and all over him, he could not concentrate on after-dinner bridge, he felt excited, frightened and powerful all at once and kept looking at the stars. Cocoa, who said weird things sometimes, declared that the stars were moving into a good place and could be kept there.

That night champagne appeared in the cabin, and he was seduced. He never could resist champagne. Curse, oh curse! How on earth had it happened? Never again. More happened off the coast of Sicily, more, much more at Port Said, and here in the Red Sea they slept together as a matter of course.

4. Sneaky or despicable person. 8. Arm of the Atlantic bordered by the west coast 5. Sky. of France and the north coast of Spain. 6. Stretched. 9. Limestone promontory at the southern tip of 7. Indian follower of Zoroastrianism, an ancient Spain. religion originating in Iran.

.

2068 / E.M. FORSTER

IV

And this particular night they lay motionless for longer than usual, as though something in the fall of their bodies had enchanted them. They had never been so content with each other before, and only one of them realized that nothing lasts, that they might be more happy or less happy in the future, but would never again be exactly thus. He tried not to stir, not to breathe, not to live even, but life was too strong for him and he sighed.

All right?' whispered Lionel.

�Yes.' 'Did I hurt?' "Yes.' 'Sorry.' 'Why?' 'Can I have a drink?' "You can have the whole world.' 'Lie still and I'll get you one too, not that you deserve it after making such a noise.'

'Was I again a noise?'

'You were indeed. Never mind, you shall have a nice drink.' Half Ganymede, half Goth,' he jerked a bottle out of the ice-bucket. Pop went a cork and hit the partition wall. Sounds of feminine protest became audible, and they both laughed. 'Here, hurry up, scuttle up and drink.' He offered the goblet, received it back, drained it, refilled. His eyes shone, any depths through which he might have passed were forgotten. 'Let's make a night of it,' he suggested. For he was of the conventional type who once the conventions are broken breaks them into little pieces, and for an hour or two there was nothing he wouldn't say or do.

Meanwhile the other one, the deep one, watched. To him the moment of ecstasy was sometimes the moment of vision, and his cry of delight when they closed had wavered into fear. The fear passed before he could understand what it meant or against what it warned him, against nothing perhaps. Still, it seemed wiser to watch. As in business, so in love, precautions are desirable, insurances must be effected. 'Man, shall we now perhaps have our cigarette?' he asked.

This was an established ritual, an assertion deeper than speech that they belonged to each other and in their own way. Lionel assented and lit the thing, pushed it between dusky lips, pulled it out, pulled at it, replaced it, and they smoked it alternately with their faces touching. When it was finished Cocoa refused to extinguish the butt in an ashtray but consigned it through the porthole into the flying waters with incomprehensible words. He thought the words might protect them, though he could not explain how, or what they were.

'That reminds me . . .' said Lionel, and stopped. He had been reminded, and for no reason, of his mother. He did not want to mention her in his present state, the poor old Mater, especially after all the lies she had been told.

'Yes, of what did it remind you, our cigarette? Yes and please? I should know.'

]. An uncouth or uncivilized person. "Ganymede": in Greek mythology a Trojan boy whom Zeus, attracted by his great beauty, carried away to be the gods' cupbearer.

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THE OTHER BOAT / 2069

'Nothing.' And he stretched himself, flawless except for a scar down in the

groin. 'Who gave you that?' 'One of your fuzzy-wuzzy cousins.' 'Does it hurt?' 'No.' It was a trophy from the little desert war. An assegai2 had nearly

unmanned him, nearly but not quite, which Cocoa said was a good thing. A dervish,3 a very holy man, had once told him that what nearly destroys may bring strength and can be summoned in the hour of revenge. 'I've no use for revenge,' Lionel said.

'Oh Lion, why not when it can be so sweet?'

He shook his head and reached up for his pyjamas, a sultan's gift. It was presents all the time in these days. His gambling debts were settled through the secretary, and if he needed anything, or was thought to need it, something or other appeared. He had ceased to protest and now accepted indiscriminately. He could trade away the worst of the junk later on�some impossible jewelry for instance which one couldn't be seen dead in. He did wish, though, that he could have given presents in return, for he was anything but a sponger. He had made an attempt two nights previously, with dubious results. 'I seem always taking and never giving,' he had said. 'Is there nothing of mine you'd fancy? I'd be so glad if there was.' To receive the reply: "Yes. Your hairbrush'� 'My hairbrush?'�and he was not keen on parting with this particular object, for it had been a coming-of-age gift from Isabel. His hesitation brought tears to the eyes, so he had to give in. 'You're welcome to my humble brush if you want it, of course. I'll just comb it out foryou first'�'No, no, as it is uncombed,' and it was snatched away fanatically. Almost like a vulture snatching. Odd little things like this did happen occasionally, m'm m'm m'ms he called them, for they reminded him of oddities on the other boat. They did no one any harm, so why worry? Enjoy yourself while you can. He lolled at his ease and let the gifts rain on him as they would�a Viking at a Byzantine court, spoiled, adored and not yet bored.

This was certainly the life, and sitting on one chair with his feet on another he prepared for their usual talk, which might be long or short but was certainly the life. When Cocoanut got going it was fascinating. For all the day he had slipped around the ship, discovering people's weaknesses. More than that, he and his cronies were cognizant of financial possibilities that do not appear in the City columns,4 and could teach one how to get rich if one thought it worth while. More than that, he had a vein of fantasy. In the midst of something ribald and scandalous�the discovery of Lady Manning, for instance: Lady Manning of all people in the cabin of the Second Engineer�he imagined the discovery being made by a flying fish who had popped through the Engineer's porthole, and he indicated the expression on the fish's face.

Yes, this was the life, and one that he had never experienced in his austere apprenticeship: luxury, gaiety, kindness, unusualness, and delicacy that did not exclude brutal pleasure. Hitherto he had been ashamed of being built like a brute: his preceptors had condemned carnality or had dismissed it as a waste

2. Slender spear. 4. Newspapers of the City of London, the finan3. Member of any of various Muslim ascetic cial district, orders.

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2070 / E. M. FORSTER

of time, and his mother had ignored its existence in him and all her children; being hers, they had to be pure.

What to talk about this pleasurable evening? How about the passport scandal? For Cocoanut possessed two passports, not one like most people, and they confirmed a growing suspicion that he might not be altogether straight. In England Lionel would have sheered off at once from such a subject, but since Gibraltar they had become so intimate and morally so relaxed that he experienced nothing but friendly curiosity. The information on the passports was conflicting, so that it was impossible to tell the twister's5 age, or where he had been born or indeed what his name was. 'You could get into serious trouble over this,' Lionel had warned him, to be answered by irresponsible giggles. 'You could, you know. However, you're no better than a monkey, and I suppose a monkey can't be expected to know it's own name.' To which the reply had been 'Lion, he don't know nothing at all. Monkey's got to come along to tell a Lion he's alive.' It was never easy to score. He had picked up his education, if that was the word for it, in London, and his financial beginnings in Amsterdam, one of the passports was Portuguese, the other Danish, and half the blood must be Asiatic, unless a drop was Negro.

'Now come along, tell me the truth and nothing but the truth for a change,' he began. 'Ah, that reminds me I've at last got off that letter to the Mater. She adores news. It was a bit difficult to think of anything to interest her, however I filled it up with tripe about the Arbuthnots, and threw you in at the end as a sort of makeweight.'

'To make what sort of weight?'

'Well, naturally I didn't say what we do. I'm not stark staring raving mad. I merely mentioned I'd run into you in the London office, and got a cabin through you, that is to say single-berth one. I threw dust in her eyes all right.'

'Dear Lionel, you don't know how to throw dust or even where it is. Of mud you know a little, good, but not dust. Why bring me into the matter at all?'

'Oh, for the sake of something to say.'

'Did you say I too was on board?'

'I did in passing,' he said irritably, for he now realized he had better not have. I was writing that damned epistle, not you, and I had to fill it up. Don't worry�she's forgotten your very existence by this time.'

The other was certain she hadn't. If he had foreseen this meeting and had worked towards it through dreams, why should not an anxious parent have foreseen it too? She had valid reasons for anxiety, for things had actually started on that other boat. A trivial collision between children had alerted them towards each other as men. Thence had their present happiness sprung, thither might it wither, for the children had been disturbed. That vengeful onswishing of skirts . . . ! 'What trick can I think of this time that will keep him from her? I love him, I am clever, I have money. I will try.' The first step was to contrive his exit from the Army. The second step was to dispose of that English girl in India, called Isabel, about whom too little was known. Marriage or virginity or concubinage for Isabel? He had no scruples at perverting Lionel's instincts in order to gratify his own, or at endangering his prospects of paternity. All that mattered was their happiness, and he thought he knew what that was. Much depended on the next few days: he had to work hard and to work with the stars. His mind played round approaching problems,

5. One who speaks or acts to evade the truth.

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THE OTHER BOAT / 2071

combining them, retreating from them, and aware all the time of a further problem, of something in the beloved which he did not understand. He half- closed his eyes and watched, and listened through half-closed ears. By not being too much on the spot and sacrificing shrewdness to vision he sometimes opened a door. And sure enough Lionel said, 'As a matter of fact the Mater never liked you,' and a door opened, slowly.

'Man, how should she? Oh, when the chalk went from the hand of the sailor round the feet of the lady and she could not move and we all knew it, and oh man how we mocked her.'

'I don't remember�well, I do a little. It begins to come back to me and does sound like the sort of thing that would put her off. She certainly went on about you after we landed, and complained that you made things interesting when they weren't, funny thing to say, still the Mater is pretty funny. So we put our heads together as children sometimes do '

'Do they? Oh yes.'

'�and Olive who's pretty bossy herself decreed we shouldn't mention you again as it seemed to worry her extra and she had just had a lot of worry. He actually�I hadn't meant to tell you this, it's a dead secret.'

'It shall be. I swear. By all that is without me and within me I swear.' He became incomprehensible in his excitement and uttered words in that unknown tongue. Nearly all tongues were unknown to Lionel, and he was impressed.

'Well, he actually '

'Man, of whom do you now speak?'

'Oh yes, the Mater's husband, my Dad. He was in the Army too, in fact he attained the rank of major, but a quite unspeakable thing happened�he went native somewhere out East and got cashiered6�deserted his wife and left her with five young children to bring up, and no money. She was taking us all away from him when you met us and still had a faint hope that he might pull himself together and follow her. Not he. He never even wrote�remember, this is absolutely secret.'

'Yes, yes,' but he thought the secret a very tame one: how else should a middle-aged husband behave? 'But, Lionel, one question to you the more. For whom did the Major desert the Mater?'

'He went native.'

'With a girl or with a boy?'

'A boy? Good God! Well, I mean to say, with a girl, naturally�I mean, it was somewhere right away in the depths of Burma.' 'Even in Burma there are boys. At least I once heard so. But the Dad went native with a girl. Ver' well. Might not therefore there be offspring?'

'If there were, they'd be half-castes.7 Pretty depressing prospect. Well, you know what I mean. My family�Dad's, that's to say�can trace itself back nearly two hundred years, and the Mater's goes back to the War of the Roses. It's really pretty awful, Cocoa.'

The half-caste smiled as the warrior floundered. Indeed he valued him most when he fell full length. And the whole conversation�so unimportant in itself�gave him a sense of approaching victory which he had not so far entertained. He had a feeling that Lionel knew that he was in the net or almost in

6. Dishonorably discharged. 7. Offensive term for people of mixed racial descent.

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2072 / E. M. FORSTER

it, and did not mind. Cross-question him further! Quick! Rattle him! 'Is Dad dead?' he snapped.

'I couldn't very well come East if he wasn't. He has made our name stink in these parts. As it is I've had to change my name, or rather drop half of it. He called himself Major Corrie March. We were all proud of the "Corrie" and had reason to be. Try saying "Corrie March" to the Big Eight here, and watch the effect.'

'You must get two passports, must you not, one with and one without a "Corrie" on it. I will fix it, yes? At Bombay?' 'So as I can cheat like you? No, thank you. My name is Lionel March and that's my name.' He poured out some more champagne.

'Are you like him?'

'I should hope not. I hope I'm not cruel and remorseless and selfish and self-indulgent and a liar as he was.' 'I don't mean unimportant things like that. I mean are you like him to look at?'

'You have the strangest ideas of what is important.'

'Was his body like yours?'

'How should I know?'�and he was suddenly shy. 'I was only a kid and the Mater's torn up every photograph of him she could lay her hands on. He was a hundred per cent Aryan all right and there was plenty of him as there certainly is of me�indeed there'll be too much of me if I continue swilling at this rate. Suppose we talk about your passports for a change.'

'Was he one in whom those who sought rest found fire, and fire rest?'

'I've not the least idea what you're talking about. Do you mean I'm such a one myself?' I do.' 'I've not the least idea ' Then he hesitated. 'Unless . . . no, you're daft8

as usual, and in any case we've spent more than enough time in dissecting my unfortunate parent. I brought him up to show you how much the Mater has to put up with, one has to make endless allowances for her and you mustn't take it amiss if she's unreasonable about you. She'd probably like you if she got the chance. There was something else that upset her at the time .. . I seem to be bringing out all the family skeletons in a bunch, still they won't go any further, and I feel like chattering to someone about everything, once in a way. I've never had anyone to talk to like you. Never, and don't suppose I ever shall. Do you happen to remember the youngest of us all, the one we called Baby?'

'Ah, that pretty Baby!' 'Well, a fortnight after we landed and while we were up at my grandfather's looking for a house, that poor kid died.'

'Die what of?' he exclaimed, suddenly agitated. He raised his knees and rested his chin on them. With his nudity and his polished duskiness and his strange-shaped head, he suggested an image crouched outside a tomb.

'Influenza, quite straightforward. It was going through the parish and he caught it. But the worst of it was the Mater wouldn't be reasonable. She would insist that it was sunstroke, and that he got it running about with no topi on when she wasn't looking after him properly in this very same Red Sea.'

'Her poor pretty Baby. So I killed him for her.'

'Cocoa! How ever did you guess that? It's exactly what she twisted it round

8. Foolish.

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THE OTHER BOAT / 2073

to. We had quite a time with her. Olive argued, grandfather prayed . . . and I could only hang around and do the wrong thing, as I generally do.'

'But she�she saw me only, running in the sun with my devil's head, and m'm m'm m'm all you follow me till the last one the tiny one dies, and she, she talking to an officer, a handsome one, oh to sleep in his arms as I shall in yours, so she forgets the sun and it strikes the tiny one. I see.'

'Yes, you see in a wrong sort of way'; every now and then came these outbursts which ought to be rubbish yet weren't. Wrong of course about his mother, who was the very soul of purity, and over Captain Armstrong, who had become their valued family adviser. But right over Baby's death: she actually had declared that the idle unmanly imp had killed him, and designedly. Of recent years she had not referred to the disaster, and might have forgotten it. He was more than ever vexed with himself for mentioning Cocoanut in the letter he had recently posted to her.

'Did I kill him for you also?'

'For me? Of course not. I know the difference between influenza and sunstroke, and you don't develop the last-named after a three weeks' interval.' 'Did I kill him for anyone�or for anything?' Lionel gazed into eyes that gazed through him and through cabin walls into

the sea. A few days ago he would have ridiculed the question, but tonight he was respectful. This was because his affection, having struck earthward, was just trying to flower. 'Something's worrying you? Why not tell me about it?' he said.

'Did you love pretty Baby?'

'No, I was accustomed to see him around but he was too small to get interested in and I haven't given him a thought for years. So all's well.' 'There is nothing between us then?' 'Why should there be?' 'Lionel�dare I ask you one more question?' 'Yes, of course.' 'It is about blood. It is the last of all the questions. Have you ever shed

blood?'

'No�oh, sorry, I should have said yes. I forgot that little war of mine. It goes clean out of my head between times. A battle's such a mess-up, you wouldn't believe, and this one had a miniature sandstorm raging to make confusion more confounded. Yes, I shed blood all right, or so the official report says. I didn't know at the time.' He was suddenly silent. Vividly and unexpectedly the desert surged up, and he saw it as a cameo,9 from outside. The central figure�a grotesque one�was himself going berserk, and close to him was a dying savage who had managed to wound him and was trying to speak.

'I hope I never shed blood,' the other said. 'I do not blame others, but for me never.' 'I don't expect you ever will. You're not exactly cut out for a man of war. All the same, I've fallen for you.'

He had not expected to say this, and it was the unexpectedness that so delighted the boy. He turned away his face. It was distorted with joy and suffused with the odd purplish tint that denoted violent emotion. Everything had gone fairly right for a long time. Each step in the stumbling confession had brought him nearer to knowing what the beloved was like. But an open

9. Vividly carved stone.

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2074 / E. M. FORSTER

avowal�he had not hoped for so much. 'Before morning I shall have enslaved him,' he thought, 'and he will begin doing whatever I put into his mind.' Even now he did not exult, for he knew by experience that though he always got what he wanted he seldom kept it, also that too much adoration can develop a flaw in the jewel. He remained impassive, crouched like a statue, chin on knees, hands round ankles, waiting for words to which he could safely reply.

'It seemed just a bit of foolery at first,' he went on. 'I woke up properly ashamed of myself after Gib, I don't mind telling you. Since then it's been getting so different, and now it's nothing but us. I tell you one thing though, one silly mistake I've made. I ought never to have mentioned you in that letter to the Mater. There's no advantage in putting her on the scent of something she can't understand; it's all right what we do, I don't mean that.'

'So you want the letter back?'

'But it's posted! Not much use wanting it.'

'Posted?' He was back to his normal and laughed gaily, his sharp teeth gleaming. 'What is posting? Nothing at all, even in a red English pillar-box. Even thence you can get most things out, and here is a boat. No! My secretary comes to you tomorrow morning: 'Excuse me, Captain March, sir, did you perhaps drop this unposted letter upon the deck?' You thank secretary, you take letter, you write Mater a better letter. Does anything trouble you now?'

'Not really. Except '

'Except what?'

'Except I'm�I don't know. I'm fonder of you than I know how to say.'

'Should that trouble you?'

O calm mutual night, to one of them triumphant and promising both of them peace! O silence except for the boat throbbing gently! Lionel sighed, with a happiness he couldn't understand. 'You ought to have someone to look after you,' he said tenderly. Had he said this before to a woman and had she responded? No such recollection disturbed him, he did not even know that he was falling in love. 'I wish I could stay with you myself, but of course that's out of the question. If only things were a little different I Come along, let's get our sleep.'

'You shall sleep and you shall awake.' For the moment was upon them at last, the flower opened to receive them, the appointed star mounted the sky, the beloved leaned against him to switch off the light over by the door. He closed his eyes to anticipate divine darkness. He was going to win. All was happening as he had planned, and when morning came and practical life had to be re-entered he would have won.

'Damn!'

The ugly stupid little word rattled out. 'Damn and blast,' Lionel muttered. As he stretched towards the switch, he had noticed the bolt close to it, and he discovered that he had left the door unbolted. The consequences could have been awkward. 'Pretty careless of me,' he reflected, suddenly wide awake. He looked round the cabin as a general might at a battlefield nearly lost by his own folly. The crouched figure was only a unit in it, and no longer the centre of desire. 'Cocoa, I'm awfully sorry,' he went on. 'As a rule it's you who take the risks, this time it's me. I apologize.'

The other roused himself from the twilight where he had hoped to be joined, and tried to follow the meaningless words. Something must have miscarried, but what? The sound of an apology was odious. He had always loathed the English trick of saying 'It's all my fault'; and if he encountered it in business

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THE OTHER BOAT / 2075

it provided an extra incentive to cheat, and it was contemptible on the lips of a hero. When he grasped what the little trouble was and what the empty 'damns' signified, he closed his eyes again and said, 'Bolt the door therefore.'

'I have.'

'Turn out the light therefore.'

'I will. But a mistake like this makes one feel all insecure. It could have meant a courtmartial.'

'Could it, man?' he said sadly�sad because the moment towards which they were moving might be passing, because the chances of their convergence might be lost. What could he safely say? 'You was not to blame over the door, dear Lion,' he said. 'I mean we was both to blame. I knew it was unlocked all the time.' He said this hoping to console the beloved and to recall him to the entrance of night. He could not have made a more disastrous remark.

'You knew. But why didn't you say?'

'I had not the time.'

'Not the time to say "Bolt the door"?'

'No, I had not the time. I did not speak because there was no moment for such a speech.' 'No moment when I've been here for ages?' 'And when in that hour? When you come in first? Then? When you embrace

me and summon my heart's blood. Is that the moment to speak? When I rest in your arms and you in mine, when your cigarette burns us, when we drink from one glass? When you are smiling? Do I interrupt then? Do I then say, "Captain March, sir, you have however forgotten to bolt the cabin door?" And when we talk of our faraway boat and of poor pretty Baby whom I never killed and I did not want to kill, and I never dreamt to kill�of what should we talk but of things far away? Lionel, no, no. Lion of the Night, come back to me before our hearts cool. Here is our place and we have so far no other and only we can guard each other. The door shut, the door unshut, is nothing, and is the same.'

'It wouldn't be nothing if the steward had come in,' said Lionel grimly.

'What harm if he did come in?'

'Give him the shock of his life, to say the least of it.'

'No shock at all. Such men are accustomed to far worse. He would be sure of a larger tip and therefore pleased. "Excuse me, gentlemen . . ." Then he goes and tomorrow my secretary tips him.'

'Cocoa, for God's sake, the things you sometimes say . . The cynicism repelled him. He noticed that it sometimes came after a bout of high faluting. It was a sort of backwash.' 'You never seem to realize the risks we run, either. Suppose I got fired from the Army through this.'

'Yes, suppose?'

'Well, what else could I do?'

'You could be my assistant manager at Basra.'2

'Not a very attractive alternative.' He was not sure whether he was being laughed at or not, which always rattled him, and the incident of the unbolted door increased in importance. He apologized again 'for my share in it' and added, 'You've not told that scruffy Parsee of yours about us, I do trust.'

'No. Oh no no no no and oh no. Satisfied?'

1. Motion of a receding wave. 2. City in what is now southeast Iraq.

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2076 / E. M. FORSTER

'Nor the Goanese' steward?'

'Not told. Only tipped. Tip all. Of what other use is money?'

I shall think you've tipped me next.'

'So 1 have.'

'That's not a pretty thing to say.'

I am not pretty. I am not like you.' And he burst into tears. Lionel knew that nerves were on edge, but the suggestion that he was a hireling hurt him badly. He whose pride and duty it was to be independent and command! Had he been regarded as a male prostitute? 'What's upset you?' he said as kindly as possible. 'Don't take on so, Cocoa, there's no occasion for it.'

The sobs continued. He was weeping because he had planned wrongly. Rage rather than grief convulsed him. The bolt unbolted, the little snake not driven back into its hole�he had foreseen everything else and ignored the enemy at the gate. Bolt and double-bolt now�they would never complete the movement of love. As sometimes happened to him when he was unhinged, he could foretell the immediate future, and he knew before Lionel spoke exactly what he was going to say.

'I think I'll go on deck for a smoke.'

'Go.'

'I've a bit of a headache with this stupid misunderstanding, plus too much booze. I want a breath of fresh air. Then I'll come back.'

When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.'

Further tears. Snivellings. 'We're both to blame,' said Lionel patiently, taking up the cigarette-case. 'I'm not letting myself off. I was careless. But why you didn't tell me at once I shall never understand, not if you talk till you're blue. I've explained to you repeatedly that this game we've been playing's a risky one, and honestly I think we'd better never have started it. However, we'll talk about that when you're not so upset.' Here he remembered that the cigarette-case was one of his patron's presents to him, so he substituted for it a favourite old pipe. The change was observed and it caused a fresh paroxysm. Like many men of the warm-blooded type, he was sympathetic to a few tears but exasperated when they persisted. Fellow crying and not trying to stop. Fellow crying as if he had the right to cry. Repeating 'I'll come back' as cordiallv as he could, he went up on deck to think the whole situation over. For there were several things about it he didn't like at all.

Cocoanut stopped weeping as soon as he was alone. Tears were a method of appeal which had failed, and he must seek comfort for his misery and desolation elsewhere. What he longed to do was to climb up into Lionel's berth above him and snuggle down there and dream that he might be joined. He dared not. Whatever else he ventured, it must not be that. It was forbidden to him, although nothing had ever been said. It was the secret place, the sacred place whence strength issued, as he had learned during the first half-hour of the voyage. It was the lair of a beast who might retaliate. So he remained down in his own berth, the safe one, where his lover would certainly never return. It was wiser to work and make money, and he did so for a time. It was still wiser to sleep, and presently he put his ledger aside and lay motionless. His eyes closed. His nostrils occasionally twitched as if responding to something which the rest of his body ignored. The scarf covered him. For it was one of

3. From Goa, India.

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THE OTHER BOAT / 2077

his many superstitions that it is dangerous to lie unclad when alone. Jealous of what she sees, the hag comes with her scimitar,4 and she .. . Or she lifts up a man when he feels lighter than air.

V

Up on deck, alone with his pipe, Lionel began to recover his poise and his sense of leadership. Not that he and his pipe were really alone, for the deck was covered with passengers who had had their bedding carried up and now slept under the stars. They lay prone in every direction, and he had to step carefully between them on his way to the railing. He had forgotten that this migration happened nightly as soon as a boat entered the Red Sea; his nights had passed otherwise and elsewhere. Here lay a guileless subaltern, cherry- cheeked; there lay Colonel Arbuthnot, his bottom turned. Mrs Arbuthnot lay parted from her lord in the ladies' section. In the morning, very early, the Goanese stewards would awake the sahibs and carry their bedding back to their cabins. It was an old ritual�not practised in the English Channel or the Bay of Biscay or even in the Mediterranean�and on previous voyages he had taken part in it.

How decent and reliable they looked, the folk to whom he belonged! He had been born one of them, he had his work with them, he meant to marry into their caste. If he forfeited their companionship he would become nobody and nothing. The widened expanse of the sea, the winking lighthouse, helped to compose him, but what really recalled him to sanity was this quiet sleeping company of his peers. He liked his profession, and was rising in it thanks to that little war; it would be mad to jeopardize it, which he had been doing ever since he drank too much champagne at Gibraltar.

Not that he had ever been a saint. No�he had occasionally joined a brothel expedition, so as not to seem better than his fellow officers. But he had not been so much bothered by sex as were some of them. He hadn't had the time, what with his soldiering duties and his obligations at home as eldest son, and the doc said an occasional wet dream was nothing to worry about. Don't sleep on your back, though. On this simple routine he had proceeded since puberty. And during the past few months he had proceeded even further. Learning that he was to be posted to India, where he would contact Isabel, he had disciplined himself more severely and practised chastity even in thought. It was the least he could do for the girl he hoped to marry. Sex had entirely receded�only to come charging back like a bull. That infernal Cocoa�the mischief he had done. He had woken up so much that might have slept.

For Isabel's sake, as for his profession's, their foolish relationship must stop at once. He could not think how he had yielded to it, or why it had involved him so deeply. It would have ended at Bombay, it would have to end now, and Cocoanut must cry his eyes out if he thought it worth while. So far all was clear. But behind Isabel, behind the Army, was another power, whom he could not consider calmly; his mother, blind-eyed in the midst of the enormous web she had spun�filaments drifting everywhere, strands catching. There was no reasoning with her or about her, she understood nothing and controlled everything. She had suffered too much and was too high-minded to be judged like

4. Curved Asian sword.

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2078 / E. M. FORSTER

other people, she was outside carnality and incapable of pardoning it. Earlier in the evening, when Cocoa mentioned her, he had tried to imagine her with his father, enjoying the sensations he was beginning to find so pleasant, but the attempt was sacrilegious and he was shocked at himself. From the great blank country she inhabited came a voice condemning him and all her children for sin, but condemning him most. There was no parleying5 with her�she was a voice. God had not granted her ears�nor could she see, mercifully: the sight of him stripping6 would have killed her. He, her first-born, set apart for the redemption of the family name. His surviving brother was too much a bookworm to be of any use, and the other two were girls.

He spat into the sea. He promised her 'Never again'. The words went out into the night like other enchantments. He said them aloud, and Colonel Arbuthnot, who was a light sleeper, woke up and switched on his torch.

'Hullo, who's that, what's there?'

'March, sir, Lionel March. I'm afraid I've disturbed you.'

'No, no, Lionel, that's all right, I wasn't asleep. Ye gods, what gorgeous pyjamas the fellow's wearing. What's he going about like a lone wolf for? Eh?' 'Too hot in my cabin, sir. Nothing sinister.' 'How goes the resident wog?' 'The resident wog he sleeps.' 'By the way, what's his name?' 'Moraes, I believe.' 'Exactly. Mr Moraes is in for trouble.' 'Oh. What for, sir?' 'For being on board. Lady Manning has just heard the story. It turns out

that he gave someone in the London office a fat bribe to get him a passage though the boat was full, and as an easy way out they put him into your cabin. I don't care who gives or takes bribes. Doesn't interest me. But if the Company thinks it can treat a British officer like that it's very much mistaken. I'm going to raise hell at Bombay.'

'He's not been any particular nuisance,' said Lionel after a pause.

'I daresay not. It's the question of our prestige in the East, and it is also very hard luck on you, very hard. Why don't you come and sleep on deck like the rest of the gang?'

'Sound idea, I will.' 'We've managed to cordon off this section of the deck, and woe betide anything black that walks this way, if it's only a beetle. Good night.' 'Good night, sir.' Then something snapped and he heard himself shouting, 'Bloody rubbish, leave the kid alone.'

'Wh�what's that, didn't catch,' said the puzzled Colonel.

'Nothing sir, sorry sir.' And he was back in the cabin.

Why on earth had he nearly betrayed himself just as everything was going right? There seemed a sort of devil around. At the beginning of the voyage he had tempted him to throw himself overboard for no reason, but this was something more serious. 'When you come back to the cabin you will not be you,' Cocoa had said; and was it so?

However, the lower berth was empty, that was something, the boy must have gone to the lav, and he slipped out of his effeminate pyjamas and prepared

5. Mutual conversation. 6. Forster's substitution for his original phrase, "topping a dago." "Topping": copulating with.

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THE OTHER BOAT / 2079

to finish the night where he belonged�a good sleep there would steady him. His forearm was already along the rail, his foot poised for the upspring, when he saw what had happened.

'Hullo, Cocoanut, up in my berth for a change?' he said in clipped officer- tones, for it was dangerous to get angry. 'Stay there if you want to, I've just decided to sleep on deck.' There was no reply, but his own remarks pleased him and he decided to go further. 'As a matter of fact I shan't be using our cabin again except when it is absolutely necessary,' he continued. 'It's scarcely three days to Bombay, so I can easily manage, and I shan't, we shan't be meeting again after disembarkation. As I said earlier on, the whole thing has been a bit of a mistake. I wish we . . . ' He stopped. If only it wasn't so difficult to be kind! But his talk with the Colonel and his communion with the Mater prevented it. He must keep with his own people, or he would perish. He added, 'Sorry to have to say all this.'

'Kiss me.'

The words fell quietly after his brassiness and vulgarity and he could not answer them. The face was close to his now, the body curved away seductively into darkness.

'Kiss me.'

'No.'

'Noah? No? Then I kiss you.' And he lowered his mouth on to the muscular forearm and bit it. Lionel yelped with the pain. 'Bloody bitch, wait till I . . . ' Blood oozed between the gold-bright hairs.

"You wait . . . ' And the scar in his groin reopened. The cabin vanished. He was back in a desert fighting savages. One of them asked for mercy, stumbled, and found none.

The sweet act of vengeance followed, sweeter than ever for both of them, and as ecstasy hardened into agony his hands twisted the throat. Neither of them knew when the end came, and he when he realized it felt no sadness, no remorse. It was part of a curve that had long been declining, and had nothing to do with death. He covered again with his warmth and kissed the closed eyelids tenderly and spread the bright-coloured scarf. Then he burst out of the stupid cabin on to the deck, and naked and with the seeds of love on him he dived into the sea.

The scandal was appalling. The Big Eight did their best, but it was soon all over the boat that a British officer had committed suicide after murdering a half-caste. Some of the passengers recoiled from such news. Others snuffled for more. The secretary of Moraes was induced to gossip and hint at proclivities, the cabin steward proved to have been overtipped, the Master at Arms had had complaints which he had managed to stifle, the Purser had been suspicious throughout, and the doctor who examined the injuries divulged that strangulation was only one of them, and that March had been a monster in human form, of whom the earth was well rid. The cabin was sealed up for further examination later, and the place where the two boys had made love and the tokens they had exchanged in their love went on without them to Bombay. For Lionel had been only a boy.

His body was never recovered�the blood on it quickly attracted the sharks. The body of his victim was consigned to the deep with all possible speed. There was a slight disturbance at the funeral. The native crew had become interested in it, no one understood why, and when the corpse was lowered were heard

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2080 / VIRGINIA WOOLF

betting which way it would float. It moved northwards�contrary to the prevailing current�and there were clappings of hands and some smiles.

Finally Mrs March had to be informed. Colonel Arbuthnot and Lady Manning were deputed for the thankless task. Colonel Arbuthnot assured her that her son's death had been accidental, whatever she heard to the contrary; that he had stumbled overboard in the darkness during a friendly talk they had had together on deck. Lady Manning spoke with warmth and affection of his good looks and good manners and his patience 'with us old fogies at our Bridge.' Mrs March thanked them for writing but made no comment. She also received a letter from Lionel himself�the one that should have been intercepted in the post�and she never mentioned his name again.

1913-58 1972

VIRGINIA WOOLF 1882-1941

Virginia Woolf was born in London, daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth, a member of the Duckworth publishing family, and Leslie (later Sir Leslie) Stephen, the Victorian critic, philosopher, biographer, and scholar. She grew up within a large and talented family, educating herself in her father's magnificent library, meeting in childhood many eminent Victorians, and learning Greek from the essayist and critic Walter Pater's sister. Writing and the intellectual life thus came naturally to her. But her youth was shadowed by suffering: her older half-brother sexually abused her; her mother died in 1895, precipitating the first of her mental breakdowns; a beloved half- sister died in childbirth two years later; her father died of cancer in 1904; and a brother died of typhoid in 1906.

After her father's death she settled with her sister and two brothers in Bloomsbury, the district of London that later became associated with the group among whom she moved. The "Bloomsbury Group" was an intellectual coterie frequented at various times by the biographer Lytton Strachey, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the art critic Boger Fry, and the novelist E. M. Forster. When her sister, Vanessa, a notable painter, married Clive Bell, an art critic, in 1907, Woolf and her brother Adrian took another house in Bloomsbury, and there they entertained their literary and artistic friends at evening gatherings, where the conversation sparkled. The Bloomsbury Group thrived at the center of the middle-class and upper-middle-class London intelligentsia. Their intelligence was equaled by their frankness, notably on sexual topics, and the sexual life of Bloomsbury provided ample material for discussion and contributed to Woolf's freedom of thinking about gender relations. The painter Duncan Grant, for example, was at different times the lover of Keynes, Woolf's brother Adrian, and her sister, whose daughter, Angelica, he fathered. Woolf too was bisexual; and thirteen years after her marriage to the journalist and essayist Leonard Woolf, she fell passionately in love with the poet Vita [Victoria] Sackville-West, wife of the bisexual diplomat and author Harold Nicolson. Woolf's relationship with this aristocratic lesbian inspired the most lighthearted and scintillating of her books, Orlando (1928), a novel about a transhistorical androgynous protagonist, whose identity shifts from masculine to feminine over centuries.

Underneath Woolf's liveliness and wit�qualities so well known among the Blooms- bury Group�lay psychological tensions created partly by her childhood wounds and partly by her perfectionism, she being her own most exacting critic. The public was

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VIRGINIA WOOLF / 2081

unaware until her death that she had been subject to periods of severe depression, particularly after finishing a book. In March 1941 she drowned herself in a river, an act influenced by her dread of World War II (she and Leonard would have been arrested by the Gestapo had the Nazis invaded England) and her fear that she was about to lose her mind and become a burden on her husband, who had supported her emotionally and intellectually. (In 1917 the Woolfs had founded the Hogarth Press, which published some of the most interesting literature of their time, including

T. S. Eliot's Poems [1919], fiction by Maxim Gorky, Katherine Mansfield, and E. M. Forster, the English translations of Freud, and Virginia's novels.) As a fiction writer Woolf rebelled against what she called the "materialism" of novelists such as her contemporaries Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, who depicted suffering and social injustice through gritty realism, and she sought to render more delicately those aspects of consciousness in which she felt the truth of human experience lay. In her essay "Modern Fiction" she defines the task of the novelist as looking within, as conveying the mind receiving "a myriad impressions," as representing the "luminous halo" or "semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." In her novels she abandoned linear narratives in favor of interior monologues and stream of consciousness narration, exploring with great subtlety problems of personal identity and personal relationships as well as the significance of time, change, loss, and memory for human personality. After two conventionally realistic novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), she developed her own style, a carefully modulated flow that brought into prose fiction something of the rhythms and imagery of lyric poetry. While intensely psychological and interior, her novels also found inspiration and material in the physical realities of the body and in the heavily trafficked and populated streets of London. In Monday or Tuesday (1921), a series of sketches, she explored the possibilities of moving between action and contemplation, between retrospection and anticipation, between specific external events and delicate tracings of the flow of consciousness. These technical experiments made possible those later novels in which her characteristic method is fully developed�the elegiac Jacob's Room (1922); Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the first completely successful realization of her style; To the Lighthouse (1927), which in part memorializes her parents; The Waves (1931), the most experimental and difficult of her novels; and Between the Acts (1941), which includes a discontinuous pageant of English history and was published after her death.

Woolf was also a prodigious reviewer and essayist. She began to write criticism in 1905 for the Times Literary Supplement and published some five hundred reviews and essays for it and other periodicals, collected in The Common Reader (1925) and The Second Common Reader (1932); her prose presents itself as suggestive rather than authoritative and has an engaging air of spontaneity. In marked contrast to the formal language of the lecture hall or philosophical treatise, arenas and forms of learning from which women were historically barred, she writes in an informal, personal, playfully polemical tone, which is implicitly linked to her identity as a female writer. In her essays she is equally concerned with her own craft as a writer and with what it was like to be a quite different person living in a different age. At once more informal and more revealing are the six volumes of her Letters (1975�80) and five volumes of her Diary (1977�84), which she began to write in 1917. These, with their running commentary on her life and work, resemble a painter's sketchbooks and serve as a reminder that her writings, for all their variety, have the coherence found only in the work of the greatest literary artists.

Over the course of her career, Woolf grew increasingly concerned with the position of women, especially professional women, and the constrictions under which they suffered. She wrote several cogent essays on the subject, and women's social subjection also arises in her fiction. Her novel The Years (1937) was originally to have reflections on the position of women interspersed amid the action, but she later decided to publish them as a separate book, Three Guineas (1938). In A Room of

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2082 / VIRGINIA WOOLF

One's Own (1929), an essay based on two lectures on "Women and Fiction" delivered to female students at Cambridge, Woolf discusses various male institutions that historically either were denied to or oppressed women. Refused access to education, wealth, and property ownership, women lacked the conditions necessary to write and were unable to develop a literature of their own. Woolf advocated the creation of a literature that would include women's experience and ways of thinking, but instead of encouraging an exclusively female perspective, she proposed literature that would be "androgynous in mind" and resonate equally with men and women.

The Mark on the Wall

Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it. . . . If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature�the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way�an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were�very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.

But for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was made by a nail after all; it's too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be able to say for certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; the inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have�what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilisation�let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses�what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble�three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops,

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THE MARK ON THE WALL / 2083

the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle1 board, the hand organ�all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube2 at fifty miles an hour�landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows3 like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard. . . .

But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one won't be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour�dim pinks and blues�which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become�I don't know what. . . .

And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not being a very vigilant housekeeper�look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say, buried Troy4 three times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe.

The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane. .. . I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes . . . Shakespeare. . . . Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so� A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through the open door�for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer's evening� But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn't interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself; that is the beauty of them; they are thoughts like this:

"And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how I'd seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. 5 The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?" I asked�(but I don't

1. Game played on oblong table with cue and ogy asphodel flowers grow in the Elysian fields). balls. "Coal-scuttle": metal pail for carrying coal. 4. Legendary site of ancient war chronicled in 2. The London underground railway, or subway. Homer's Greek epic The Iliad. 3. I.e., heaven, the next world (in Greek mythol-5. Street in London.

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remember the answer). Tall flowers with purple tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the time I'm dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking-glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people�what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists in future will realise more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps�but these generalisations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers� a whole class of things indeed which, as a child, one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation. Generalisations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits�like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker's Table of Precedency,6 which has become, I suppose, since the war, half a phantom to many men and women, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer7 prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom�if freedom exists. .. .

In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth

6. Whitaker's Almanack, an annua] compendium 7. Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1802-1873), ol" information, prints a "Table of Precedency," English painter, reproductions of whose Slag at which shows the order in which the various ranks Bay, Monarch of the Glen, and similar animal in public life and society proceed on formal occa-paintings were often found in Victorian homes. sions.

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THE MARK ON THE WALL / 2085

tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs8 which are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people, and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf. . . . There must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name. . . . What sort of a man is an antiquary, 1 wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged labourers to the top here, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy, which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrow-heads necessitates cross- country journeys to the country towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam or to clean out the study, and have every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and, being opposed, indites a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead there, which is now in the case at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handtul of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wineglass that Nelson9 drank out of�proving I really don't know what.

No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really�what shall we say?�the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain?� Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases. . . . Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one's thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs. . . . How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections�if it were not for Whitaker's Almanack�if it were not for the Table of Precedency!

1 must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is�a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood? Here is Nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some

8. A range of low hills in southeastern England. 9. Horatio Nelson (1758�1805), British admiral. "Barrows": mounds of earth or stones erected by "Tudor": 15th-century English, prehistoric peoples, usually as burial places.

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collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker's Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can't be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall.

I understand Nature's game�her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action�men, we assume, who don't think. Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.

Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of. . . . Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don't know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers�all things one likes to think about. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles slowly raising domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself: first of the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap; I like to think of it, too, on winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes. . . . One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn't done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, living rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately� but something is getting in the way. . . . Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs?1 Whitaker's Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can't remember a thing. Everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanishing. . . . There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying:

"I'm going out to buy a newspaper."

1. Part of the sea off the east coast of Kent.

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"Yes?"

"Though it's no good buying newspapers. . . . Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war! . . . All the same, I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall."

Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.

1921

Modern Fiction

In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction, it is difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the art is somehow an improvement upon the old. With their simple tools and primitive materials, it might be said, Fielding1 did well and Jane Austen even better, but compare their opportunities with ours! Their masterpieces certainly have a strange air of simplicity. And yet the analogy between literature and the process, to choose an example, of making motor cars scarcely holds good beyond the first glance. It is doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage-ground. On the flat, in the crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to those happier warriors, whose battle is won and whose achievements wear so serene an air of accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us. It is for the historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know that certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert; and of this perhaps it may be worth while to attempt some account.

Our quarrel, then, is not with the classics, and if we speak of quarrelling with Mr Wells, Mr Bennett, and Mr Galsworthy;2 it is partly that by the mere fact of their existence in the flesh their work has a living, breathing, everyday imperfection which bids us take what liberties with it we choose. But it is also true, that, while we thank them for a thousand gifts, we reserve our unconditional gratitude for Mr Hardy, for Mr Conrad, and in much lesser degree for the Mr Hudson of The Purple Land, Green Mansions, and Far Away and Long Ago.3 Mr Wells, Mr Bennett, and Mr Galsworthy have excited so many hopes and disappointed them so persistently that our gratitude largely takes the form of thanking them for having shown us what they might have done but have not done; what we certainly could not do, but as certainly, perhaps, do not wish to do. No single phrase will sum up the charge or grievance which

1. Henry Fielding (1707-1754), English novelist. writer, was born in Argentina, although he later 2. H. G. Wells (1866-1946), Arnold Bennett lived in London. The Purple Land (1885) is about (1867-1931), John Galsworthy (1867-1933), South America; Green Mansions (1904), a novel English novelists. set in South America, was his first real success. 3. W. H. Hudson (1841-1922), naturalist and

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we have to bring against a mass of work so large in its volume and embodying so many qualities, both admirable and the reverse. If we tried to formulate our meaning in one word we should say that these three writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its back upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its soul. Naturally, no single word reaches the centre of three separate targets. In the case of Mr Wells it falls notably wide of the mark. And yet even with him it indicates to our thinking the fatal alloy in his genius, the great clod of clay that has got itself mixed up with the purity of his inspiration. But Mr Bennett is perhaps the worst culprit of the three, inasmuch as he is by far the best workman. He can make a book so well constructed and solid in its craftsmanship that it is difficult for the most exacting of critics to see through what chink or crevice decay can creep in. There is not so much as a draught between the frames of the windows, or a crack in the boards. And yet�if life should refuse to live there? That is a risk which the creator of The Old Wives' Tale, George Cannon, Edwin Clayhanger,4 and hosts of other figures, may well claim to have surmounted. His characters live abundantly, even unexpectedly, but it remains to ask how do they live, and what do they live for? More and more they seem to us, deserting even the well- built villa in the Five Towns,' to spend their time in some softly padded first- class railway carriage, pressing bells and buttons innumerable; and the destiny to which they travel so luxuriously becomes more and more unquestionably an eternity of bliss spent in the very best hotel in Brighton.6 It can scarcely be said of Mr Wells that he is a materialist in the sense that he takes too much delight in the solidity of his fabric. His mind is too generous in its sympathies to allow him to spend much time in making things shipshape and substantial. He is a materialist from sheer goodness of heart, taking upon his shoulders the work that ought to have been discharged by Government officials, and in the plethora of his ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to realize, or forgetting to think important, the crudity and coarseness of his human beings. Yet what more damaging criticism can there be both of his earth and of his Heaven than that they are to be inhabited here and hereafter by his Joans and his Peters?7 Does not the inferiority of their natures tarnish whatever institutions and ideals may be provided for them by the generosity of their creator? Nor, profoundly though we respect the integrity and humanity of Mr Galsworthy, shall we find what we seek in his pages.

If we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on which is one word, materialists, we mean by it that they write of unimportant things; that they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.

We have to admit that we are exacting, and, further, that we find it difficult to justify our discontent by explaining what it is that we exact. We frame our question differently at different times. But it reappears most persistently as we drop the finished novel on the crest of a sigh�Is it worth while? What is the point of it all? Can it be that, owing to one of those little deviations which

4. Characters in Arnold Bennett's novels; The Old west coast of England. Wives' Tale (1908) is the best-known. 7. In his novel Joan and Peter: The Stor)' of an Edu5. The pottery towns of Staffordshire in which cation (1918), Wells advocates education to much of Bennett's fiction was set. address social problems. 6. Once-fashionable seaside resort on the south

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the human spirit seems to make from time to time, Mr Bennett has come down with his magnificent apparatus for catching life just an inch or two on the wrong side? Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while. It is a confession of vagueness to have to make use of such a figure as this, but we scarcely better the matter by speaking, as critics are prone to do, of reality. Admitting the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this?