The Chimney Sweeper

Comparative Literature 250
English 242 G
Literature & Culture
Professor Leroy Searle
University of Washington
Autumn, 2012

Comparative Literature 250 & English 242G
Course Reader
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
POEMS
William Blake: From Songs of Innocence and Of Experience 1
The Book of Thel 7
Visions of the Daughters of Albion 11
Wallace Stevens: “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself” 19
Rainer Maria Rilke: “Archaic Torso of Apollo” 20
William Butler Yeats: “The Second Coming” 21
ESSAYS
Ezra Pound: “How to Read” 22
Charles Sanders Peirce: “A Neglected Argument for 48
the Existence of God”
Short FICTION
Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Ethan Brand” 71
Zakaria Tamer: #19: Huda & the Hanged Man 83
from Breaking Knees

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For all Blake’s engravings: http://www.blakearchive.org
Frontispiece: Songs of Innocence
Introduction
Piping down the valleys wild
Piping songs of pleasant glee
On a cloud I saw a child.
And he laughing said to me.
Pipe a song about a Lamb;
So I piped with merry chear,
Piper pipe that song again--
So I piped, he wept to hear.
Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe
Sing thy songs of happy chear,
So I sung the same again
While he wept with joy to hear
Piper sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read--
So he vanish'd from my sight.
And I pluck'd a hollow reed.
And I made a rural pen,
And I stain'd the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear

The Lamb
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
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Frontispiece: Songs of Experience
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Introduction. (Experience)
Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees
Whose ears have heard,
The Holy Word,
That walk'd among the ancient trees.
Calling the lapsed Soul
And weeping in the evening dew:
That might controll,
The starry pole;
And fallen fallen light renew!
O Earth O Earth return!
Arise from out the dewy grass;
Night is worn,
And the morn
Rises from the slumberous mass,
Turn away no more:
Why wilt thou turn away
The starry floor
The watry shore
Is giv'n thee till the break of day.
EARTH'S Answer.
Earth rais'd up her head,
From the darkness dread & drear.
Her light fled:
Stony dread!
And her locks cover'd with grey despair.
Prison'd on watry shore
Starry jealousy does keep my tent
Cold and hoar
Weeping o'er
I hear the Father of the ancient men
Selfish father of men
Cruel jealous selfish fear
Can delight
Chain'd in night
The virgins of youth and morning bear.
Does spring hide its joy
When buds and blossoms grow?
Does the sower?
Sow by night?
Or the plowman in darkness plow?
Break this heavy chain,
That does freeze my bones around
Selfish! vain!
Eternal bane!
That free Love with bondage bound.
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The Chimney Sweeper: The Chimney Sweeper:
Innocence Experience
The Chimney Sweeper THE Chimney Sweeper
When my mother died I was very young, A little black thing among the snow:
And my father sold me while yet my tongue, Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep. Where are thy father & mother? say?
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep, They are both gone up to the church to pray.
Theres little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head Because I was happy upon the heath,
That curl'd like a lambs back, was shav'd, so I said. And smil'd among the winter's snow:
Hush Tom never mind it, for when your head's bare, They clothed me in the clothes of death,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair. And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
And so he was quiet, & that very night, And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
As Tom was a sleeping he had such a sight, They think they have done me no injury:
That thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe, Ned & Jack And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black, Who make up a heaven of our misery.
And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open'd the coffins & set them all free.
Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run
And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.
Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind.
And the Angel told Tom if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father & never want joy.
And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark
And got with our bags & our brushes to work.
Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm,
So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

Nurses Song: Innocence Nurses Song: Experience
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Nurse's Song (Innocence) NURSES Song (Experience)
When the voices of children are heard on the green When the voices of children, are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill, And whisprings are in the dale:
My heart is at rest within my breast The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
And every thing else is still My face turns green and pale.
Then come home my children, the sun is gone down Then come home my children, the sun is gone down
And the dews of night arise And the dews of night arise
Come come leave off play, and let us away Your spring & your day, are wasted in play
Till the morning appears in the skies And your winter and night in disguise.
No no let us play, for it is yet day
And we cannot go to sleep
Besides in the sky, the little birds fly
And the hills are all coverd with sheep
Well well go & play till the light fades away
And then go home to bed
The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh'd
And all the hills ecchoed

The Book of Thel (1789) William Blake
Thel's Motto
Does the Eagle know what is in the pit,
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod,
Or Love in a golden bowl?
The daughters of Mne Seraphim led round their sunny flocks,
All but the youngest. She in paleness sought the secret air,
To fade away like morning beauty from her mortal day.
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Down by the river of Adona her soft voice is heard,
And thus her gentle lamentation falls like the morning dew;
'O life of this our spring! why fades the lotus of the water?
Why fade these children of the spring, born but to smile & fall?
Ah! Thel is like a wat'ry bow, and like a parting cloud,
Like a reflection in a glass, like shadows in the water,
Like dreams of infants, like a smile upon an infant's face,
Like the dove's voice, like transient day, like music in the air.
Ah! gentle may I lay me down and gentle rest my head,
And gentle sleep the sleep of death, and gentle hear the voice
Of him that walketh in the garden of the evening time.'
The Lilly of the Valley, breathing in the humble grass,
Answer'd the lovely maid and said: 'I am a wat'ry weed,
And I am very small and love to dwell in lowly vales;
So weak the gilded butterfly scarce perches on my head;
Yet I am visited from heaven, and he that smiles on all
Walks in the valley, and each morn over me spreads his hand
Saying, "Rejoice, thou humble grass, thou new-born lilly flower,
Thou gentle maid of silent valleys and of modest brooks;
For thou shalt be clothed in light, and fed with morning manna,
Till summer's heat melts thee beside the fountains and the springs
To flourish in eternal vales". Then why should Thel complain?
Why should the mistress of the vales of Har utter a sigh?
She ceas'd & smil'd in tears, then sat down in her silver shrine.
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Thel answer'd: 'O thou little virgin of the peaceful valley,
Giving to those that cannot crave, the voiceless, the o'erfired;
Thy breath doth nourish the innocent lamb, he smells thy milky garments,
He crops thy flowers while thou sittest smiling in his face,
Wiping his mild and meekin mouth from all contagious taints.
Thy wine doth purify the golden honey; thy perfume,
Which thou dost scatter on every little blade of grass that springs,
revives the milked cow, & tames the fire-breathing steed.
But Thel is like a faint cloud kindled at the rising sun:
I vanish from my pearly throne, and who shall find my place?'
'Queen of the vales,' the Lilly answer'd, 'ask the tender cloud,
And it shall tell thee why it glitters in the morning sky,
And why it scatters its bright beauty thro' the humid air.
Descend, O little cloud, & hover before the eyes of Thel.'
The Cloud descended, and the Lilly bow'd her modest head,
And went to mind her numerous charge among the verdant grass.

II
'O little cloud,' the virgin said, 'I charge thee to tell to me
Why thou complainest not when in one hour thou fade away;
Then we shall seek thee, but not find. Ah! Thel is like to thee:
I pass away; yet I complain, and no one hears my voice.'
The Cloud then shew'd his golden head, & his bright form emerg'd,
Hovering and glittering on the air before the face of Thel:
'O virgin, know'st thou not? Our steeds drink of the golden springs
Where Luvah doth renew his horses. Look'st thou onmy youth,
And fearest thou, because I vanish and am seen no more,
Nothing remains? O maid, I tell thee, when I pass away,
It is to tenfold life, to love, to peace and raptures holy.
Unseen descending, weigh my light wings upon balmy flowers,
And court the fair eyed dew to take me to her shining tent.
The weeping virgin trembling kneels before the riding sun,
Till we arise link'd in a golden band, and never part,
But walk united, bearing food to our tender flowers.'
'Dost thou, O little Cloud? I fear that I am not like thee;
For I walk thro' the vales of Har, and smell the sweetest flowers,
But I feed not the little flowers. I hear the warbling birds,
but i feed not the warbling birds; they fly and seek their food.
But Thel delights in these no more, because I fade away;
And all shall say, "Without a use this shining woman liv'd,
Or did she only live to be at death the food of worms?" '
The Cloud reclin'd upon his airy throne and answer'd thus:
'Then if thou art the food of worms, O virgin of the skies,
How great thy use, how great thy blessing! Everything that lives
Lives not alone, nor for itself. Fear not, and I will call
The weak worm from its lowly bed, and thou shalt hear its voice.
Come forth, worm of the silent valley, to thy pensive queen.'
The helpless worm arose, and sat upon the Lilly's leaf,
And the bright Cloud sail'd on, to find his partner in the vale.
III
Then Thel astonish'd view'd the Worm upon its dewy bed:
'Art thou a Worm? image of weakness, art thou but a Worm?
I see thee like an infant wrapped in the Lilly's leaf.
Ah weep not, little voice, thou canst not speak, but thou can weep.
Is this a worm? I see thee lay helpless & naked, weeping,
And none to answer, none to cherish thee with mother's smiles.'
The Clod of Clay heard the Worm's voice, & rais'd her pitying head;
She bow'd over the weeping infant, and her life exhal'd
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In milky fondness; then on Thel she fix'd her humble eyes;
'O beauty of the vales of Har, we live not for ourselves.
Thou seest me the meanest thing, and so I am indeed:
My bosom of itself is cold, and of itself is dark,
But he that loves the lowly pours his oil upon my head,
And kisses me, and binds his nuptial bands around my breast,
And says: "Thou mother of my children, I have loved thee,
And I have given thee a crown that none can take away."
But how this is, sweet maid, I know not, and I cannot know;
I ponder, and I cannot ponder, yet I live and love.'
The daughter of beauty wip'd her pitying tears with her white veil,
And said: Alas! I knew not this, and therefore did I weep.
That God would love a Worm I knew, and therefore did I weep;
And I complain'd in the mild air, because i fade away,
And lay me down in thy cold bed, and leave my shining lot.'
'Queen of the vales,' the matron Clay answer'd, 'I heard thy sighs,
And all thy moans flew o'er my roof, but I have call'd them down.
Wilt thou, O Queen, enter my house? 'Tis given thee to enter
And to return; fear nothing; enter with thy virgin feet.'
IV
The eternal gates' terrific porter lifted the northern bar.
Thel enter'd in & saw the secrets of the land unknown.
She saw the couches of the dead, & where the fibrous roots
Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists:
A land of sorrows & of tears where never smile was seen.
She wander'd in the land of clouds thro' valleys dark, list'ning
Dolours and lamentations; waiting oft beside a dewy grave
She stood in silence, list'ning to the voices of the ground,
Till to her own grave plot she came, & there she sat down,
And heard this voice of sorrow breathed from the hollow pit:
'Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction?
Or the glist'ning Eye to the poison of a smile?
Why are Eyelids stor'd with arrows ready drawn,
Where a thousand fighting men in ambush lie?
Or an Eye of gifts & graces, show'ring fruits and coined gold?
Why a Tongue impress'd with honey from every wind?
Why an Ear a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in?
Why a Nostril wide inhaling terror, trembling & affright?
Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy?
Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?'
The Virgin started from her seat, & with a shriek
Fled back unhinder'd till she came into the vales of Har.
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Visions of the Daughters of Albion
William Blake (1793)
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VISIONS of the Daughters of Albion
The Eye sees more than the Heart knows.
Printed by William Blake: 1793.
PLATE iii
The Argument
I loved Theotormon
And I was not ashamed
I trembled in my virgin fears
And I hid in Leutha's vale!
I plucked Leutha's flower,
And I rose up from the vale;
But the terrible thunders tore
My virgin mantle in twain.
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PLATE 1 Visions
ENSLAV'D, the Daughters of Albion weep: a trembling lamentation
Upon their mountains; in their valleys. sighs toward America.
For the soft soul of America, Oothoon wanderd in woe,
Along the vales of Leutha seeking flowers to comfort her;
And thus she spoke to the bright Marygold of Leutha's vale
Art thou a flower! art thou a nymph! I see thee now a flower;
Now a nymph! I dare not pluck thee from thy dewy bed!
The Golden nymph replied; pluck thou my flower Oothoon the mild
Another flower shall spring, because the soul of sweet delight
Can never pass away. she ceas'd & closd her golden shrine.
Then Oothoon pluck'd the flower saying, I pluck thee from thy bed
Sweet flower. and put thee here to glow between my breasts
And thus I turn my face to where my whole soul seeks.
Over the waves she went in wing'd exulting swift delight;
And over Theotormons reign, took her impetuous course.
Bromion rent her with his thunders. on his stormy bed
Lay the faint maid, and soon her woes appalld his thunders hoarse
Bromion spoke. behold this harlot here on Bromions bed,
And let the jealous dolphins sport around the lovely maid;
Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north & south:
Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun:
They are obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourge:
Their daughters worship terrors and obey the violent:
PLATE 2
Now thou maist marry Bromions harlot, and protect the child
Of Bromions rage, that Oothoon shall put forth in nine moons time
Then storms rent Theotormons limbs; he rolld his waves around.
And folded his black jealous waters round the adulterate pair
Bound back to back in Bromions caves terror & meekness dwell
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At entrance Theotormon sits wearing the threshold hard
With secret tears; beneath him sound like waves on a desart shore
The voice of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money.
That shiver in religious caves beneath the burning fires
Of lust, that belch incessant from the summits of the earth
Oothoon weeps not: she cannot weep! her tears are locked up;
But she can howl incessant writhing her soft snowy limbs.
And calling Theotormons Eagles to prey upon her flesh.
I call with holy voice! kings of the sounding air,

Rend away this defiled bosom that I may reflect.
The image of Theotormon on my pure transparent breast.
The Eagles at her call descend & rend their bleeding prey;
Theotormon severely smiles. her soul reflects the smile;
As the clear spring mudded with feet of beasts grows pure & smiles.
The Daughters of Albion hear her woes. & eccho back her sighs.
Why does my Theotormon sit weeping upon the threshold;
And Oothoon hovers by his side, perswading him in vain:
I cry arise O Theotormon for the village dog
Barks at the breaking day. the nightingale has done lamenting.
The lark does rustle in the ripe corn, and the Eagle returns
From nightly prey, and lifts his golden beak to the pure east;
Shaking the dust from his immortal pinions to awake
The sun that sleeps too long. Arise my Theotormon I am pure.
Because the night is gone that clos'd me in its deadly black.
They told me that the night & day were all that I could see;
They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up.
And they inclos'd my infinite brain into a narrow circle,
And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning
Till all from life I was obliterated and erased.
Instead of morn arises a bright shadow, like an eye
In the eastern cloud: instead of night a sickly charnel house;
That Theotormon hears me not! to him the night and morn
Are both alike: a night of sighs, a morning of fresh tears;
PLATE 3
And none but Bromion can hear my lamentations.
With what sense is it that the chicken shuns the ravenous hawk?
With what sense does the tame pigeon measure out the expanse?
With what sense does the bee form cells? have not the mouse & frog
Eyes and ears and sense of touch? yet are their habitations.
And their pursuits, as different as their forms and as their joys:
Ask the wild ass why he refuses burdens: and the meek camel
Why he loves man: is it because of eye ear mouth or skin
Or breathing nostrils? No. for these the wolf and tyger have.
Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave, and why her spires
Love to curl round the bones of death; and ask the rav'nous snake
Where she gets poison: & the wing'd eagle why he loves the sun
And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old.
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Silent I hover all the night, and all day could be silent.
If Theotormon once would turn his loved eyes upon me;
How can I be defild when I reflect thy image pure?
Sweetest the fruit that the worm feeds on. & the soul prey'd on by woe
The new wash'd lamb ting'd with the village smoke & the bright swan
By the red earth of our immortal river: I bathe my wings.
And I am white and pure to hover round Theotormons breast.

Then Theotormon broke his silence. and he answered.
Tell me what is the night or day to one o'erflowd with woe?
Tell me what is a thought? & of what substance is it made?
Tell me what is a joy? & in what gardens do joys grow?
And in what rivers swim the sorrows? and upon what mountains
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PLATE 4
Wave shadows of discontent? and in what houses dwell the wretched
Drunken with woe forgotten. and shut up from cold despair.
Tell me where dwell the thoughts forgotten till thou call them forth
Tell me where dwell the joys of old! & where the ancient loves?
And when will they renew again & the night of oblivion past?
That I might traverse times & spaces far remote and bring
Comforts into a present sorrow and a night of pain
Where goest thou O thought? to what remote land is thy flight?
If thou returnest to the present moment of affliction
Wilt thou bring comforts on thy wings. and dews and honey and balm;
Or poison from the desart wilds, from the eyes of the envier.
Then Bromion said: and shook the cavern with his lamentation
Thou knowest that the ancient trees seen by thine eyes have fruit;
But knowest thou that trees and fruits flourish upon the earth
To gratify senses unknown? trees beasts and birds unknown:
Unknown, not unpercievd, spread in the infinite microscope,
In places yet unvisited by the voyager. and in worlds
Over another kind of seas, and in atmospheres unknown:
Ah! are there other wars, beside the wars of sword and fire!
And are there other sorrows, beside the sorrows of poverty!
And are there other joys, beside the joys of riches and ease?
And is there not one law for both the lion and the ox?
And is there not eternal fire, and eternal chains?
To bind the phantoms of existence from eternal life?
Then Oothoon waited silent all the day. and all the night,
PLATE 5
But when the morn arose, her lamentation renewd,
The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, & eccho back her sighs.
O Urizen! Creator of men! Mistaken Demon of heaven:
Thy joys are tears! thy labour vain, to form men to thine image.
How can one joy absorb another? are not different joys
Holy, eternal, infinite! and each joy is a Love.
Does not the great mouth laugh at a gift? & the narrow eyelids mock
At the labour that is above payment, and wilt thou take the ape
For thy councellor? or the dog, for a schoolmaster to thy children?
Does he who contemns poverty, and he who turns with abhorrence
From usury: feel the same passion or are they moved alike?

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How can the giver of gifts experience the delights of the merchant?
How the industrious citizen the pains of the husbandman.
How different far the fat fed hireling with hollow drum;
Who buys whole corn fields into wastes, and sings upon the heath:
How different their eye and ear! how different the world to them!
With what sense does the parson claim the labour of the farmer?
What are his nets & gins & traps. & how does he surround him
With cold floods of abstraction, and with forests of solitude,
To build him castles and high spires. where kings & priests may dwell.
Till she who burns with youth. and knows no fixed lot; is bound
In spells of law to one she loaths: and must she drag the chain
Of life, in weary lust! must chilling murderous thoughts. obscure
The clear heaven of her eternal spring? to bear the wintry rage
Of a harsh terror driv'n to madness, bound to hold a rod
Over her shrinking shoulders all the day; & all the night
To turn the wheel of false desire: and longings that wake her womb
To the abhorred birth of cherubs in the human form
That live a pestilence & die a meteor & are no more.
Till the child dwell with one he hates. and do the deed he loaths
And the impure scourge force his seed into its unripe birth
E'er yet his eyelids can behold the arrows of the day.
Does the whale worship at thy footsteps as the hungry dog?
Or does he scent the mountain prey, because his nostrils wide
Draw in the ocean? does his eye discern the flying cloud
As the ravens eye? or does he measure the expanse like the vulture?
Does the still spider view the cliffs where eagles hide their young?
Or does the fly rejoice. because the harvest is brought in?
Does not the eagle scorn the earth & despise the treasures beneath?
But the mole knoweth what is there, & the worm shall tell it thee.
Does not the worm erect a pillar in the mouldering church yard?
PLATE 6
And a palace of eternity in the jaws of the hungry grave
Over his porch these words are written. Take thy bliss O Man!
And sweet shall be thy taste & sweet thy infant joys renew!
Infancy, fearless, lustful, happy! nestling for delight
In laps of pleasure; Innocence! honest, open, seeking
The vigorous joys of morning light; open to virgin bliss.
Who taught thee modesty, subtil modesty! child of night & sleep
When thou awakest, wilt thou dissemble all thy secret joys
Or wert thou not awake when all this mystery was disclos'd!
Then com'st thou forth a modest virgin knowing to dissemble
With nets found under thy night pillow, to catch virgin joy,
And brand it with the name of whore; & sell it in the night,
In silence. ev'n without a whisper, and in seeming sleep:
Religious dreams and holy vespers, light thy smoky fires:
Once were thy fires lighted by the eyes of honest morn
And does my Theotormon seek this hypocrite modesty!

This knowing, artful, secret, fearful, cautious, trembling hypocrite.
Then is Oothoon a whore indeed! and all the virgin joys
Of life are harlots: and Theotormon is a sick mans dream
And Oothoon is the crafty slave of selfish holiness.
But Oothoon is not so, a virgin fill'd with virgin fancies
Open to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears
If in the morning sun I find it: there my eyes are fix'd
PLATE 7
In happy copulation; if in evening mild. wearied with work;
Sit on a bank and draw the pleasures of this free born joy.
The moment of desire! the moment of desire! The virgin
That pines for man; shall awaken her womb to enormous joys
In the secret shadows of her chamber; the youth shut up from
The lustful joy. shall forget to generate. & create an amorous image
In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow.
Are not these the places of religion? the rewards of continence?
The self enjoyings of self denial? Why dost thou seek religion?
Is it because acts are not lovely, that thou seekest solitude,
Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire.
Father of jealousy. be thou accursed from the earth!
Why hast thou taught my Theotormon this accursed thing?
Till beauty fades from off my shoulders darken'd and cast out,
A solitary shadow wailing on the margin of non-entity.
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I cry, Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love! free as the mountain wind!
Can that be Love, that drinks another as a sponge drinks water?
That clouds with jealousy his nights, with weepings all the day:
To spin a web of age around him. grey and hoary! dark!
Till his eyes sicken at the fruit that hangs before his sight.
Such is self-love that envies all! a creeping skeleton
With lamplike eyes watching around the frozen marriage bed.
But silken nets and traps of adamant will Oothoon spread,
And catch for thee girls of mild silver, or of furious gold;
I'll lie beside thee on a bank & view their wanton play
In lovely copulation bliss on bliss with Theotormon:
Red as the rosy morning, lustful as the first born beam,
Oothoon shall view his dear delight, nor e'er with jealous cloud
Come in the heaven of generous love; nor selfish blightings bring.
Does the sun walk in glorious raiment. on the secret floor
PLATE 8
Where the cold miser spreads his gold? or does the bright cloud drop
On his stone threshold? does his eye behold the beam that brings
Expansion to the eye of pity? or will he bind himself
Beside the ox to thy hard furrow? does not that mild beam blot

The bat, the owl, the glowing tyger, and the king of night.
The sea fowl takes the wintry blast. for a cov'ring to her limbs:
And the wild snake, the pestilence to adorn him with gems & gold.
And trees. & birds. & beasts. & men. behold their eternal joy.
Arise you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy!
Arise and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy!
Thus every morning wails Oothoon. but Theotormon sits
Upon the margind ocean conversing with shadows dire.
The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, & eccho back her sighs.
The End
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Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
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Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.
That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
Archaischer Torso Apollos
Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,
sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.
Sonst stünde dieser Stein enstellt und kurz
unter der Shultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;
und brächte nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.
Archaic Torso of Apollo * trans. Leroy Searle
We did not know his fabulous head
Wherein the apples of his eyes ripened. But
his torso glows like a candelabra
in which his gaze, now covertly burning
holds and shines. How else could the curve
of the breast so blind you, or in the slight turn
of the loins, how could that smile slide
to the middle, where procreation starts?
Otherwise this stone would stand maimed, cut off
under the translucent plunge of the shoulders,
not shimmering like a tiger's pelt
Nor breaking out of all its borders
like a star: there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 20

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
The Second Coming
CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 21
From Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Churchtown, Dundrum: The Cuala Press,
1920))
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
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.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
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
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

HOW TO READ'
CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 22
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION
Largely Autobiographical, Touching the Present, and More or Less
Immediately Past,'State ofAffairs'.
Literary instruction in our 'institutions of learning'2 was, at the
beginning of this century, cumbrous and inefficient. I dare say it still is. Certain more
or less mildly exceptional professors were affected by the `beauties' of various authors
(usually deceased), but the system, as a whole, lacked sense and co-ordination. I dare
say it still does. When studying physics we are not asked to investigate the biographies of
all the disciples of Newton who showed interest in science, but who failed to make
any discovery. Neither are their unrewarded gropings, hopes, passions, laundry bills,
or erotic experiences thrust on the hurried student or considered germane to the
subject.
The general contempt of `scholarship', especially any part of it connected with
subjects included in university `Arts' courses; the shrinking of people in general from
any book supposed to be `good'; and, in another mode, the flamboyant advertisements
telling 'how to seem to know it when you don't', might long since have indicated to the
sensitive that there is something defective in the contemporary methods of purveying
letters.
As the general reader has but a vague idea of what these methods are at the
`centre', i.e. for the specialist who is expected to serve the general reader, I shall
lapse or plunge into autobiography.
In my university I found various men interested (or uninterested) in their subjects,
but, I think, no man with a view of literature as a whole, or with any idea whatsoever
of the relation of the part he himself taught to any other part.
Those professors who regarded their `subject' as a drill manual rose most
rapidly to positions of executive responsibility (one case
1 New York Herald Tribune, 'Books', 1929. [Literary Essays of E P. 1935]
2 Foot-note a few decades later: The proper definition would be 'Institutions for the
obstruction of learning.'
15
:

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 23
is now a provost). Those professors who had some natural aptitude for comprehending
their authors and for communicating a general sense of comfort in the presence of
literary masterwork remained obscurely in their less exalted positions.
A professor of Romanics admitted that the Chanson de Roland was inferior to the
Odyssey, but then the Middle Ages were expected to present themselves with
apologies, and this was, if I remember rightly, an isolated exception. English novelists
were not compared with the French. 'Sources' were discussed; forty versions of a
Chaucerian anecdote were 'compared', but not on points of respective literary merit.
The whole field was full of redundance. I mean that what one had learned in one class,
in the study of one literature, one was told again in some other.
One was asked to remember what some critic (deceased) had said, scarcely to consider
whether his views were still valid, or ever had been very intelligent.
In defence of this dead and uncorrelated system, it may be urged that authors like
Spengler, who attempt a synthesis, often do so before they have attained sufficient
knowledge of detail: that they stuff expandable and compressible objects into rubber-bag
categories, and that they limit their reference and interest by supposing that the pedagogic
follies which they have themselves encountered, constitute an error universally
distributed, and encountered by every one else. In extenuation of their miscalculations
we may admit that any error or clumsiness of method that has sunk into, or been
hammered into one man, over a period of years, probably continues as an error-- not
merely passively, but as an error still being propagated, consciously or unconsciously,
by a number of educators, from laziness, from habits, or from natural cussedness.
`Comparative literature' sometimes figures in university curricula, but very few people
know what they mean by the term, or approach it with a considered conscious method.
To tranquillize the low-brow reader, let me say at once that I do not wish to muddle
him by making him read more books, but to allow him to read fewer with greater result.
(I am willing to discuss this privately with the book trade.) I have been accused of
wanting to make people read all the classics; which is not so. I have been accused of
wishing to provide a 'portable substitute for the British Museum', which I would do, like
a shot, were it possible. It isn't.
16

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 24
American 'taste' is less official than English taste, but more derivative. When I
arrived in England (A.D. 1908), I found a greater darkness in the British 'serious press' than
had obtained on the banks of the Schuylkill. Already in my young and ignorant years
they considered me 'learned'. It was impossible, at first, to see why and whence the current
opinion of British weeklies. It was incredible that literate men—men literate enough, that
is, to write the orderly paragraphs that they did write constantly in their papers-believed
the stupidities that appeared there with such regularity. (Later,, for two years, we ran
fortnightly in the Egoist, the sort of fool-column that the French call a sottisier, needing
nothing for it but quotations from the Times Literary Supplement. Two issues of the
Supplement yielding, easily, one page of the Egoist.) For years I awaited
enlightenment. One winter I had lodgings in Sussex. On the mantelpiece of the humble
country cottage I found books of an earlier era, among them an anthology printed in 183o,
and yet another dated 1795, and there, there by the sox of Jehosaphat was the British
taste of this century, 191o, 1915, and even the present, A.D. 1931.
I had read Stendhal's remark that it takes eighty years for anything to reach the
general public, and looking out on the waste heath, under the December drizzle, I believed
him. But that is not all of the story. Embedded in that naive innocence that does, to their
credit, pervade our universities, I ascribed the delay to mere time. I still thought: With
the attrition of decades, ah, yes, in another seventy, in another, perhaps, ninety years,
they will admit that . . . etc.
I mean that I thought they wanted to, but were hindered.
Later it struck me that the best history of painting in London was the National Gallery,
and that the best history of literature, more particularly of poetry, would be a twelvevolume
anthology in which each poem was chosen not merely because it was a nice
poem or a poem Aunt Hepsy liked, but because it contained an invention, a definite
contribution to the art of verbal expression. With this in mind, I approached a
respected agent. He was courteous, he was even openly amazed at the list of three
hundred items which I offered as an indication of outline. No autochthonous Briton
had ever, to his professed belief, displayed such familiarity with so vast a tinge, but he was
too indolent to recast my introductory letter into a form suited to commerce. He, as they
say, 'repaired' to an equally august and long-established publishing house (which had
already
17

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 25
served his and my interest). In two days came a hasty summons: would I see
him in person. I found him awed, as if one had killed a cat in the sacristy. Did I
know what I had said in my letter? I did. Yes, but about Palgrave? I did. I had said:
'It is time we had something to replace that doddard Palgrave.' But don't you
know', came the awstruck tones, 'that the whole fortune of X & Co. is founded on
Palgrave's Golden Treasury?'
From that day onward no book of mine received a British imprimatur until
the appearance of Eliot's castrated edition of my poems.
I perceived that there were thousands of pounds sterling invested in electro-plate,
and the least change in the public taste, let alone swift, catastrophic changes,
would depreciate the value of those electros (of Hemans, let us say, or of Collins,
Cowper, and of Churchill, who wrote the satiric verses, and of later less blatant cases,
touched with a slighter flavour of mustiness).
I sought the banks of the Seine. Against ignorance one might struggle, and even
against organic stupidity, but against a so vast vested interest the lone odds were too
heavy.
Two years later a still more august academic press reopened the question. They had
ventured to challenge Palgrave: they had been Interested'—would I send back my
prospectus? I did. They found the plan 'too ambitious'. They said they might do
'something', but that if they did it would be 'more in the nature of gems'.
FOR A METHOD
Nevertheless, the method I had proposed was simple, it is perhaps the only one that
can give a man an orderly arrangement of his perception in the matter of letters. In
opposition to it, there are the forces of superstition, of hang-over. People regard
literature as something vastly more flabby and floating and complicated and
indefinite than, let us say, mathematics. Its subject-matter, the human consciousness, is
more complicated than are number and space. It is not, however, more complicated
than biology, and no one ever supposed that it was. We apply a loose-leaf system to
book-keeping so as to have the live items separated from the dead ones. In the
study of physics we begin with simple mechanism; wedge, lever and fulcrum,
pulley and inclined plane, all of them still as useful as when they were first invented.
We proceed by a study of discoveries.
{18}

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 26
We are not asked to memorize a list of the parts of a side-wheeler engine.
And we could, presumably, apply to the study of literature a little of the
common sense that we currently apply to physics or to biology. In poetry there are
simple procedures, and there are known discoveries, clearly marked. As I have said in
various places in my unorganized and fragmentary volumes: in each age one or two
men of genius find something, and express it. It may be in only a line or in two lines,
or in some quality of a cadence; and thereafter two dozen, or two hundred, or two
or more thousand followers repeat and dilute and modify.
And if the instructor would select his specimens from works that contain these
discoveries and solely on the basis of discovery—which may lie in the dimension
of depth, not merely of some novelty on the surface—he would aid his student far
more than by presenting his authors at random, and talking about them in tow.
Needless to say, this presentation would be entirely independent of consideration
as to whether the given passages tended to make the student a better republican,
monarchist, monist, dualist, rotarian, or other sectarian. To avoid confusion, one
should state at once that such method has nothing to do with those allegedly
scientific methods which approach literature as if it were something not literature,
or with scientists' attempts to sub-divide the elements in literature according to some
non-literary categoric division.
You do not divide physics or chemistry according to racial or religious categories.
You do not put discoveries by Methodists and Germans into one category, and
discoveries by Episcopalians or Americans or Italians into another.
DEFECTIVE RELATIVITIES
It is said that in America nothing is ever consciously related to anything else. I
have cited as an exception the forty versions of the Chaucerian anecdote; they and
the great edition of Horace with the careful list and parallel display of Greek sources for
such line or such paragraph, show how the associative faculty can be side-tracked. Or
at any rate they indicate the first gropings of association. Let us grant that some
bits of literature have been, in special cases, displayed in relation to some other bits;
usually some verbose gentleman
19

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 27
writes a trilogy of essays, on three grandiose figures, comparing their `philosophy' or
personal habits.
Let us by all means glance at 'philology' and the `germanic system'. Speaking as
an historian, `we' may say that this system was designed to inhibit thought. After 1848 it
was, in Germany, observed that some people thought. It was necessary to curtail this
pernicious activity, the thinkists were given a china egg labelled scholarship, and were
gradually unfitted for active life, or for any contact with life in general. Literature was
permitted as a subject of study. And its study was so designed as to draw the mind of the
student away from literature into inanity.
WHY BOOKS?
This simple first question was never asked.
The study of literature, or more probably of morphology, verb-roots, etc., was
permitted the German professor in, let us say, x 88o-- 1905, to keep his mind off life
in general, and off public life in particular.
In America it was permitted from precedent; it was known to be permitted in
Germany; Germany had a `great university tradition', which it behoved America to equal
and perhaps to surpass.
This study, or some weaker variety of it, was also known to be permitted at Oxford,
and supposed to have a refining influence on the student.
II
The practice of literary composition in private has been permitted since `age
immemorial', like knitting, crocheting, etc. It occupies the practitioner, and, so long as
he keeps it to himself, ne suit pas aux wares, it does not transgress the definition of
liberty which we find in the declaration of the Droits de l'Homme: Liberty is the right to
do anything which harms not others. All of which is rather negative and unsatisfactory.
III
It appears to me quite tenable that the function of literature as a generated prizeworthy
force is precisely that it does incite humanity to continue living; that it eases the
mind of strain, and feeds it, I mean definitely as nutrition of impulse.
20
I

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 28
This idea may worry lovers of order. Just as good literature does often worry them. They
regard it as dangerous, chaotic, subversive. They try every idiotic and degrading wheeze to
tame it down. They try to make a bog, a marasmus, a great putridity in place of a sane and
active ebullience. And they do this from sheer simian and pig-like stupidity, and from
their failure to understand the function of letters.
IV
Has literature a function in the state, in the aggregation of humans, in the republic,
in the rat publica, which ought to mean the public convenience (despite the slime of
bureaucracy, and the execrable taste of the populace in selecting its rulers)? It has.
And this function is not the coercing or emotionally persuading, or bullying or
suppressing people into the acceptance of any one set or any six sets of opinions as
opposed to any other one set or half-dozen sets of opinions.
It has to do with the clarity and vigour of 'any and every' thought and opinion. It has to
do with maintaining the very cleanliness of the tools, the health of the very matter of
thought itself. Save in the rare and limited instances of invention in the plastic arts,
or in mathematics, the individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the
governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws, without words, and the
solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati.
When their work goes rotten—by that I do not mean when they express indecorous
thoughts—but when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application
of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the
whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot. This is a
lesson of history, and a lesson not yet half learned.
The great writers need no debunking.
The pap is not in them, and doesn't need to be squeezed out. They do not lend
themselves to imperial and sentimental exploitations. A civilization was founded on Homer,
civilization not a mere bloated empire. The Macedonian domination rose and grew
after the sophists. It also subsided.
It is not only a question of rhetoric, of loose expression, but also of the loose
use of individual words. What, the renaissance
21

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 29
gained in direct examination of natural phenomena, it in part lost in losing the feel
and desire for exact descriptive terms. I mean that the medieval mind had little but
words to deal with, and it was more careful in its definitions and verbiage. It did
not define a gun in terms that would just as well define an explosion, nor
explosions in terms that would define triggers.
Misquoting Confucius, one might say: It does not matter whether the author
desire the good of the race or acts merely from personal vanity. The thing is
mechanical in action. In proportion as his work is exact, i.e., true to human
consciouness and to the nature of man, as it is exact in formulation of desire, so
is it durable and so is it `useful'; I mean it maintains the precision and clarity of
thought, not merely for the benefit of a few dilettantes and 'lovers of literature', but
maintains the health of thought outside literary circles and in non-literary
existence, in general individual and communal life.
Or ce genre on n'emeut que par la clarté. One 'moves' the reader only by
clarity. In depicting the motions of the 'human heart' the durability of the writing
depends on the exactitude. It , is the thing that is true and stays true that keeps
fresh for the new reader.
With this general view in mind, and subsequent to the events already set
forth in this narrative, I proposed (from the left bank of the Seine, and to an
American publishing house), not the twelve-volume anthology, but a short guide to
the subject. That was after a few years of 'pause and reflection'. The subject was
pleasantly received and considered with amity, but the house finally decided that
it would pay neither them to print nor me to write the book, because we 'weren't in
the text-book ring'. For the thing would have been a text-book, its circulation would
have depended on educators, and educators have been defined as 'men with no
intellectual interests'.
Hence, after a lapse of four years, this essay, dedicated to Mr Glenn Frank,
and other starters of ideal universities, though not with any great hope that it will
rouse them.
PART II: OR WHAT MAY BE AN INTRODUCTION
TO METHOD
It is as important for the purpose of thought to keep language
efficient as it is in surgery to keep tetanus bacilli out of one's bandages.
22

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 30
In introducing a person to literature one would do well to have
him examine works where language is efficiently used; to devise a system for getting
directly and expeditiously at such works, despite the smokescreens erected by halfknowing
and half-thinking critics. To get at them, despite the mass of dead matter
that these people have heaped up and conserved round about them in the proportion:
one barrel of sawdust to each half-bunch of grapes.
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible
degree.
When we set about examining it we find that this charging has been done by
several clearly definable sorts of people, and by a periphery of less determinate sorts.
(a) The inventors, discoverers of a particular process or of more than one mode
and process. Sometimes these people are known, or discoverable for example, we know,
with reasonable certitude, that Arnaut Daniel introduced certain methods of rhyming,
and we know that certain finenesses of perception appeared first in such a troubadour
or in G. Cavalcanti. We do not know, and are not likely to know, anything definite
about the precursors of Homer.
(6) The masters. This is a very small class, and there are very few real ones.
The term is properly applied to inventors who, apart from their own inventions, are
able to assimilate and co-ordinate a large number of preceding inventions. I mean
to say they either start with a core of their own and accumulate adjuncts, or they
digest a vast mass of subject-matter, apply a number of known modes of expression,
and succeed in pervading the whole with some special quality or some special
character of their own, and bring the whole to a state of homogeneous fullness.
(c) The diluters, these who follow either the inventors or the `great writers', and
who produce something of lower intensity, some flabbier variant, some diffuseness or
tumidity in the wake of the valid.
(d) (And this class produces the great bulk of all writing.) The men who do more
or less good work in the more or less good style of a period. Of these the delightful
anthologies, the song books, are full, and choice among them is the matter of taste,
for you prefer Wyatt to Donne, Donne to Herrick, Drummond of Hawthornden to
Browne, in response to some purely personal sympathy, these people add but some
slight personal flavour, some minor variant of a mode, without affecting the main course
of the story. {23}

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 31
(e)
At their faintest `Ifs n'existent pas, leur ambiance fear confert tine existence.' They do
not exist: their ambience confers existence upon them. When they are most prolific they
produce dubious cases like Virgil and Petrarch, who probably pass, among the less
exigeant, for colossi.
(e) Belles Lewes. Longus, Prevost, Benjamin Constant, who are not exactly 'great
masters', who can hardly be said to have originated a form, but who have nevertheless
brought some mode to a very high development.
(f) And there is a supplementary or sixth class of writers, the starters of crazes,
the Ossianic McPhee sons, the Gongorasi whose wave of fashion flows over writing
for a few centuries or a few decades, and then subsides, leaving things as they were.
It will be seen that the first two classes are the more sharply defined: that the
difficulty of classification for particular lesser authors increases as one descends
the list, save for the last class, which is again fairly clear.
The point is, that if a man knows the facts about the first two categories, he can
evaluate almost any unfamiliar book at first sight. I mean he can form a just estimate
of its worth, and see how and where it belongs in this schema.
As to crazes, the number of possible diseases in literature is perhaps not very
great, the same afflictions crop up in widely separated countries without any previous
communication. The good physician will recognize a known malady, even if the
manifestation be superficially different.
The fact that six different critics will each have a different view concerning what
author belongs in which of the categories here given, does not in the least invalidate
the categories. When a man knows the facts about the first two categories, the reading
of work in the other categories will not greatly change his opinion about those in the
first two.
LANGUAGE
Obviously this knowledge cannot be acquired without knowledge of
various tongues. The same discoveries have served a number of
races. If a man has not time to learn different languages he can at
1 One should perhaps apologize, or express a doubt as to the origin of Gon-
gorism, or redefine it or start blaming it on some other Spaniard.
24

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 32
least, and with very little delay, be told what the discoveries were. If he wish to be
a good critic he will have to look for himself.
Bad critics have prolonged the use of demoded terminology, usually a
terminology originally invented to describe what had been done before 300 B.C., and to
describe it in a rather exterior fashion. Writers of second order have often tried to
produce works to fit some category or term not yet occupied in their own local
literature. If we chuck out the classifications which apply to the outer shape of the
work, or to its occasion, and if we look at what actually happens, in, let us say, poetry,
we will find that the language is charged or energized in various manners.
That is to say, there are three 'kinds of poetry':
MELOPOELIA, wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning,
with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning.
PHANOPOEIA, which is a casting of images upon the visual imagination.
LOGOPOEIA 'the dance of the intellect among words', that is to say, it employs
words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of
usage, of the context we expect to find with the word, its usual concomitants, of its
known acceptances, and of ironical play. It holds the aesthetic content which is
peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation, and cannot possibly be contained in
plastic or in music. It is the latest come, and perhaps most tricky and undependable
mode.
The melopoeia can be appreciated by a foreigner with a sensitive ear, even though
he be ignorant of the language in which the poem is written. It is practically impossible
to transfer or translate it from one language to another, save perhaps by divine
accident, and for half a line at a time.
Phanopceia can, on the other hand, be translated almost, or wholly, intact. When it is
good enough, it is practically impossible for the translator to destroy it save by very
crass bungling, and the neglect of perfectly well-known and formulative rules.
Logopoeia does not translate; though the attitude of mind it expresses may
pass through a paraphrase. Or one might say, you can not translate it 'locally', but
having determined the original author's state of mind, you may or may not be able to
find a derivative or an equivalent.
25

PROSE
CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 33
The language of prose is much less highly charged, that is perhaps the only
availing distinction between prose and poesy. Prose permits greater factual
presentation, explicitness, but a much greater amount of language is needed. During
the last century or century and a half, prose has, perhaps for the first time, perhaps
for the second or third time, arisen to challenge the poetic pre-eminence. That is
to say, Coeur Simple, by Flaubert, is probably more important than
Theophile Gautier's Carmen, etc.
The total charge in certain nineteenth-century prose works possibly
surpasses the total charge found in individual poems of that period; but that merely
indicates that the author has been able to get his effect cumulatively, by a greater
heaping up of factual data; imagined fact, if you will, but nevertheless
expressed in factual manner.
By using several hundred pages of prose, Flaubert, by force of architectonics,
manages to attain an intensity comparable to that in Villon's Heaulmiere, or his
prayer for his mother. This does not invalidate my dissociation of the two
terms: poetry, prose.
In Phanopoeia we find the greatest drive toward utter precision of word; this
art exists almost exclusively by it.
In melopoeia we find a contrary current, a force tending often to lull, or to
distract the reader from the exact sense of the language. It is poetry on the
borders of music and music is perhaps the bridge between consciousness and the
unthinking sentient or even insentient universe.
All writing is built up of these three elements, plus 'architectonics' or 'the form of
the whole', and to know anything about the relative efficiency of various works one
must have some knowledge of the maximum already attained by various authors,
irrespective of where and when.'
It is not enough to know that the Greeks attained to the greatest skill in
melopoeia, or even that the Provençaux added certain diverse developments and
that some quite minor, nineteenth-century Frenchmen achieved certain
elaborations.
It is not quite enough to have the general idea that the Chinese
2 Lacuna at this point to be corrected in criticism of Hindemith's
Schwanendreher'. E.P. Sept. 1938.
26

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 34
(more particularly Rihaku and Omakitsu) attained the known maximum of
phanopoeia, due perhaps to the nature of their written ideograph, or to wonder whether
Rimbaud is, at rare moments, their equal. One wants one's knowledge in more definite
terms.
It is an error to think that vast reading will automatically produce any such
knowledge or understanding. Neither Chaucer with his forty books, nor Shakespeare
with perhaps half a dozen, in folio, can be considered illiterate. A man can learn more
music by working on a Bach fugue until he can take it apart and put it together, than
by playing through ten dozen heterogeneous albums.
You may say that for twenty-seven years I have thought consciously about this
particular matter, and read or read at a great many books,
4and that with the subject never really out of my mind, I don't yet know half
there is to know about melopoeia.
There are, on the other hand, a few books that I still keep on my desk, and a great
number that I shall never open again. But the books that a man needs to know in order
to 'get his bearings', in order to have a sound judgement of any bit of writing that may
come before him, are very few. The list is so short, indeed, that one wonders that people,
professional writers in particular, are willing to leave them ignored and to continue
dangling in mid-chaos emitting the most imbecile estimates, and often vitiating their
whole lifetime's production.
Limiting ourselves to the authors who actually invented something, or who are
the 'first known examples' of the process in working order, we find:
OF THE GREEK& Homer, Sappho. (The 'great dramatists' decline from Homer,
and depend immensely on him for their effects; their `charge’, at its highest potential,
depends so often, and so greatly on their being able to count on their audience's
knowledge of the Iliad. Even Aeschylus is rhetorical.) 1
OF THE ROMANS: As we have lost Philetas, and most of Callimachus, we may
suppose that the Romans added a certain sophistication; at any rate, Catullus, Ovid,
Propertius, all give us some-
' thing we cannot find now in Greek authors.
A specialist may read Horace if he is interested in learning the precise
demarcation between what can be learned about writing, and
2 E.P.'s later and unpublished notes, revise all this in so far as they demand
much greater recognition of Sophokles.
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what cannot. I mean that Horace is the perfect example of a man who acquired all that is
acquirable, without having the root. I beg the reader to observe that I am being
exceedingly iconoclastic, that I am omitting thirty established names for every two I
include. I am chucking out Pindar, and Virgil, without the slightest compunction. I
do not suggest a 'course' in Greek or Latin literature, I name a few isolated writers; five
or six pages of Sappho. One can throw out at least one-third of Ovid. That is to say,
I am omitting the authors who can teach us no new or no more effective method of
`charging words.
OF THE MIDDLE AGES: The Anglo-Saxon Seafarer, and some more cursory
notice of some medieval narrative, it does not so greatly matter what narrative,
possibly the Beowulf, the Poema del Cid, and the sagas of Grettir and Burnt Nial.
And then, in contrast, troubadours, perhaps thirty poems in Provençal, and for
comparison with them a few songs by Von Morungen, or Wolfram von Essenbach,
and von der Vogelweide; and then Bion's Death. of Adonis.
From which mixture, taken in this order, the reader will get his bearings on the
art of poetry made to be sung; for there are three kinds of melopoeia; ( 1) that made
to be sung to a tune; (2) that made to be intoned or sung to a sort of chant; and (3)
that made to be spoken; and the art of joining words in each of these kinds is different,
and cannot be clearly understood until the reader knows that there are three
different objectives.
OF THE ITALIANS: Guido Cavalcanti and Dante; perhaps a dozen and a half poems of
Guido's, and a dozen poems by his contemporaries, and the Divine Commedia.
In Italy, around the year 1300, there were new values established, things said that
had not been said in Greece, or in Rome or elsewhere.
VILLON: After Villon and for several centuries, poetry can, be considered as fioritura, as
an efflorescence, almost an effervescence, and without any new roots. Chaucer is an
enrichment, one might say ,a more creamy version of the 'matter of France', and he in
some measure preceded the verbal richness of the classic revival, but beginning with
the Italians after Dante, coming through the Latin writers of the Renaissance, French,
Spanish, English, Tasso, Ariosto, etc., the Italians always a little in the lead, the
whole is elaboration, medieval basis, and wash after wash of Roman or Hellenic
influence. I mean
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one need not read any particular part of it for purpose of learning one's comparative
values.
If one were studying history and not poetry, one might discover the medieval
mind more directly in the opening of Mussato's Ecerinus than even in Dante. The
culture of Chaucer is the same as that which went contemporaneously into
Ferrara, with the tongue called' francoveneto'
One must emphasize one's contrasts in the quattrocento. One can take Vilion as pivot
for understanding them. After Villon, and having begun before his time, we find this foritura,
and for centuries we find little else, Even in Marlowe and Shakespeare there is this
embroidery of language, this talk about the matter, rather than presentation. I doubt if
anyone ever acquired discrimination in studying `The Elizabethan?. You have grace,
richness of language, abundance, but you have probably nothing that isn't replaceable
by something else, no ornament that wouldn't have done just as well in some other
connection, or for which some other figure of rhetoric couldn't have served, or which
couldn't have been distilled from literary antecedents.
The `language' had not been heard on the London stage, but it had been heard in the
Italian law courts, etc.; there were local attempts, all over Europe, to teach the public (in
Spain, Italy, England) Latin
diction. 'Poetry' was considered to be (as it still is considered by a great number of
drivelling imbeciles) synonymous with 'lofty and flowery language'.
One Elizabethan specialist has suggested that Shakespeare, disgusted with his
efforts, or at least despairing of success, as a poet, took to the stage. The drama is a mixed
art; it does not rely on the charge that can be put into the word, but calls on gesture
and mimicry and 'impersonation' for assistance. The actor must do a good half of the
work. One does no favour to drama by muddling the two sets of problems.
Apologists for the drama are continually telling us in one way or another that drama
either cannot use at all, or can make but a very limited use of words charged to their
highest potential. This is perfectly true. Let us try to keep our minds on the problem
we started with, i.e., the art of writing, the art of 'charging' language with meaning.
After 1450 we have the age of fioritura; after Marlowe and
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Shakespeare came what was called a 'classic' movement, a movement that
restrained without inventing. Anything that happens to mind in England has
usually happened somewhere else first. Someone invents something, then someone
develops, or some dozens develop a frothy or at any rate creamy enthusiasm or overabundance,
then someone tries to tidy things up. For example, the estimable
Pleiad emasculating the French tongue, and the French classicists, and the English
classicists, etc., all of which things should be relegated to the subsidiary zone: period
interest, historical interest, bric-a-brac for museums.
At this point someone says: '0, but the ballads'. All right, I will allow the
voracious peruser a half-hour for ballads (English and Spanish, or Scottish, Border,
and Spanish). There is nothing easier than to be distracted from one's point, or from
the main drive of one's subject by a desire for utterly flawless equity and omniscience.
Let us say, but directly in parenthesis, that there was a very limited sort of
logopoeia in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century satire. And that Rochester and Dorset
may have introduced a new note, or more probably re-introduced an old one, that
reappears later in Heine.
Let us also cut loose from minor details and minor exceptions: the main fact is that
we 'have come' or that 'humanity came' to a point where verse-writing can or could no
longer be clearly understood without the study of prose-writing.
Say, for the sake of argument, that after the slump of the Middle Ages, prose 'came
to' again in Machiavelli; admit that various sorts of prose had existed, in fact nearly all
sorts had existed. Herodotus wrote history that is literature. Thucydides was a
journalist. (It is a modern folly to suppose that vulgarity and cheapness have the
merit of novelty; they have always existed, and are of no interest in themselves.)
There have been bombast, oratory, legal speech, balanced sentences, Ciceronian
impressiveness; Petronius had written a satiric novel, Longus had written a delicate
nouvelle. The prose of the Renaissance leaves us Rabelais, Brantôme, Montaigne. A
determined specialist can dig interesting passages, or sumptuous passages, or even
subtle passages out of Pico, the medieval mystics, scholastics, platonists, none of
which will be the least use to a man trying to learn the art of 'changing language'.
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I mean to say mat from the beginning of literature up to A.D. 1750 poetry was the
superior art, and was so considered to be, and if we read books written before that
date we find the number of interesting books in verse at least equal to the number
of prose books still readable; and the poetry contains the quintessence. When
we want
to know what people were like before 1750, when we want to know that they had
blood and bones like ourselves, we go to the poetry of the period.
But, as I have said, the 'fioritura business' set in. And one morning Monsieur
Stendhal, not thinking of Homer, or Villon, or Catullus, but having a very keen
sense of actuality, noticed that 'poetry', la poesie, as the term was then understood,
the stuff written by his French contemporaries, or sonorously rolled at him from the
French stage, was a damn nuisance. And he remarked that poetry, with its bagwigs
and its bobwigs, and its padded calves and its periwigs, its `fustian a la Louis XIV',
was greatly inferior to prose for conveying a clear idea of the diverse states of our
consciousness (les mouvements du cceur').
And at that moment the serious art of writing `went over to prose', and for some
time the important developments of language as means of expression were the
developments of prose. And a man cannot clearly understand or justly judge the
value of verse, modern verse, any verse, unless he has grasped this.
PART III: CONCLUSIONS, EXCEPTIONS,
CURRICULA
Before Stendhal there is probably nothing in prose that does not also exist in
verse or that can't be done by verse just as well as by prose. Even the method of
annihilating imbecility employed by Voltaire, Bayle, and Lorenzo Valla can be
managed quite as well in rhymed couplets.
Beginning with the Renaissance, or perhaps with Boccaccio, we have prose
that is quite necessary to the clear comprehension of things in general: with
Rabelais, Brantome, Montaigne, Fielding, Sterne, we begin to find prose recording
states of consciouness that their verse-writing contemporaries scamp. And this
fuller consciousness, in more delicate modes, appears in l'Abbe Prevost,
Benjamin Constant, Jane Austen. So that Stendhal had already
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`something back of him' when he made his remarks about the inferiority of `La
Poesie'.
During the nineteenth century the superiority, if temporary, is at any rate
obvious, and to such degree that I believe no man can now write really good verse
unless he knows Stendhal and Flaubert. Or, let us say, Le Rouge et le Noir, the first
half of La Chartreuse, Madame Bovary, L'Education, Les Trois Contes, Bouvard et
Pecuchet. To put it per-haps more strongly, he will learn more about the art of charging
words from Flaubert than he will from the floribund sixteenth-century dramatists.
The main expression of nineteenth-century consciousness is in prose. The art
continues in Maupassant, who slicked up the Flaubertian mode. The art of popular
success lies simply in never putting more on any one page than the most ordinary
reader can lick off it in his normally rapid, half-attentive skim-over. The
Goncourts strug-gled with praiseworthy sobriety, noble, but sometimes dull.
Henry James was the first person to add anything to the art of the nineteenthcentury
novel not already known to the French.
Thought was churned up by Darwin, by science, by industrial machines,
Nietzsche made a temporary commotion, but these things are extraneous to our subject,
which is the art of getting meaning into words. There is an 'influence of Ibsen', all for the
good, but now exploited by cheap-jacks. Fabre and Frazer are both essential to
contemporary clear thinking. I am not talking about the books that have poured
something into the general consciousness, but of books that show how the pouring is
done or display the implements, newly discovered, by which one can pour.
The nineteenth-century novel is such an implement. The Ibsen play is, or
perhaps we must say was, such an implement.
It is for us to think whether these implements are more effective than poetry: (a)
as known before 1800; (b) as known during the nineteenth century and up to the
present.
FRANCE
The decline of England began on the day when Landor packed his trunks and
departed to Tuscany. Up till then England had been able to contain her best authors;
after that we see Shelley, Keats, Byron, Beddoes on the Continent, and still later
observe the edifying spectacle of Browning in Italy and Tennyson in Buckingham
Palace.
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In France, as the novel developed, spurred on, shall we say, by the activity in
the prose-media, the versifiers were not idle.
Departing from Albertus, Gautier developed the medium we find in the Emaux
et Camées. England in the 'nineties had got no further than the method of the
Albertus. If Corbière invented no process he at any rate restored French verse to the
vigour of Villon and to an intensity that no Frenchman had touched during the
intervening four centuries.
Unless I am right in discovering logopoeia in Propertius (which means unless
the academic teaching of Latin displays crass insensitivity as it probably does), we
must almost say that Laforgue invented logopoeia observing that there had
been a very limited range of logopoeia in all satire, and that Heine occasionally
employs something like it, together with a dash of bitters, such as can (though he
may not have known it) be found in a few verses of Dorset and Rochester. At
any rate Laforgue found or refound logopoeia. And Rimbaud brought back to
phanopoeia its clarity and directness.
All four of these poets, Gautier, Corbière, Laforgue, Rimbaud, redeem poetry
from Stendhal's condemnation. There is in Corbière something one finds nowhere
before him, unless in Villon.
Laforgue is not like any preceding poet. He is not ubiquitously like Propertius.
In Rimbaud the image stands clean, unencumbered by nonfunctioning
words; to get anything like this directness of presentation one must go back to
Catullus, perhaps to the poem which contains dentes habet.
If a man is too lazy to read the brief works of these poets, he cannot hope to
understand writing, verse writing, prose writing, any writing.
ENGLAND
Against this serious action England can offer only Robert Browning. He has no
French or European parallel. He has, indubitably, grave limitations, but The Ring
and the Book is serious experimentation. He is a better poet than Landor, who
was perhaps the only complete and serious man of letters ever born in these islands.
We are so encumbered by having British literature in our foreground that even
in this brief survey one must speak of it in disproportion. It was kept alive during
the last century by a series of
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exotic injections. Swinburne read Greek and took English metric in hand; Rossetti
brought in the Italian primitives; FitzGerald made the only good poem of the time that
has gone to the people; it is called, and is to a great extent, a trans- or mistranslation.
There was a faint waft of early French influence. Morris translated sagas, the
Irish took over the business for a few years; Henry James led, or rather preceded,
the novelists, and then the Britons resigned en bloc; the language is now in the
keeping of the Irish (Yeats and Joyce); apart from Yeats, since the death of Hardy,
poetry is being written by Americans. All the developments in English verse since
1910 are due almost wholly to Americans. In fact, there is no longer any reason to
call it English verse, and there is no present reason to think of England at all.
We speak a language that was English. When Richard Coeur de Lion first heard
Turkish he said: 'He spik lak a fole Britain.’ From which orthography one judges that
Richard himself probably spoke like a French-Canadian.
It is a magnificent language, and there is no need of, or advantage in, minimizing
the debt we owe to Englishmen who died before 1620. Neither is there any point in
studying the 'History of English Literature' as taught. Curiously enough, the
histories of Spanish and Italian literature always take count of translators. Histories of
English literature always slide over translation—I suppose it is inferiority complex—
yet some of the best books in English are translations. This is important for two
reasons. First, the reader who has been appalled by the preceding parts and said,
'Oh, but I can't learn all these languages', may in some measure be comforted. He
can learn the art of writing precisely where so many great local lights learned it if
not from the definite poems I have listed, at least from the men who learned it from
those poems in the first place.
We may count the Seafarer, the Beowulf, and the remaining Anglo-Saxon fragments
as indigenous art; at least, they dealt with a native subject, and by an art not newly
borrowed. Whether alliterative metre owes anything to Latin hexameter is a
question open to debate; we have no present means of tracing the debt. Landor
suggests the problem in his dialogue of Ovid and the Prince of the Gaetae.
After this period English literature lives on translation, it is fed by
translation; every new exuberance, every new heave is stimu-
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lated by translation, every allegedly great age is an age of translations, beginning with
Geoffrey Chaucer, Le Grand Translateur, translator of the Romaunt of the Rose,
paraphraser of Virgil and Ovid, condenser of old stories he had found in Latin,
French, and Italian.
After him even the ballads that tell a local tale tell it in art indebted to Europe. It
is the natural spreading ripple that moves from the civilized Mediterranean centre
out through the half-civilized and into the barbarous peoples.
The Britons never have shed barbarism; they are proud to tell you that Tacitus
said the last word about Germans. When Mary Queen of Scots went to Edinburgh
she bewailed going out among savages, and she herself went from a sixteenthcentury
court that held but a barbarous, or rather a drivelling and idiotic and
superficial travesty of the Italian culture as it had been before the debacle of 1527. The
men who tried to civilize these shaggy and uncouth marginalians by bringing
them news of civilization have left a certain number of translations that are better
reading today than are the works of the ignorant islanders who were too proud to
translate. After Chaucer we have Gavin Douglas's Eneados, better than the
original, as Douglas had heard the sea. Golding's Metamorphoses, from which
Shakespeare learned so much of his trade. Marlowe's translation of Ovid's Amores.
We have no satisfactory translation of any Greek author. Chapman and Pope have
left Iliads that are of interest to specialists; so far as I know, the only translation of
Homer that one can read with continued pleasure is in early French by Hugues Salel;
he, at least, was intent on telling the story, and not wholly muddled with accessories.
I have discussed the merits of these translators elsewhere. I am now trying to tell the
reader what he can learn of comparative literature through translations that are in
themselves better reading than the 'original verse' of their periods. He can study the
whole local development, or, we had better say, the sequence of local fashion in
British verse by studying the translations of Horace that have poured in
uninterrupted sequence from the British Press since 165o. That is work for a
specialist, an historian, not for a man who wants simply to establish his axes of
reference by knowing the best of each kind of written thing; as he would establish
his axes of reference for painting by knowing a few pictures by Cimabue, Giotto,
Piero della Francesca, Ambrogio de Predis, etc.; Velasquez, Goya, etc.
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It is one thing to be able to spot the best painting and quite another and far
less vital thing to know just where some secondary or tertiary painter learned certain
defects.
Apart from these early translations, a man may enlarge his view of international
poetry by looking at Swinburne's Greek adaptations. The Greeks stimulated
Swinburne; if he had defects, let us remember that, apart from Homer, the Greeks often
were rather Swinburnian. Catullus wasn't, or was but seldom. From which one may
learn the nature of the Latin, non-Greek contribution to the art of expression.'
Swinburne's Villon is not Villon very exactly, but it is perhaps the best Swinburne
we have. Rossetti's translations were perhaps better than Rossetti, and his Pita Nuova
and early Italian poets guide one to originals, which he has now and again
improved. Our contact with Oriental poetry begins with FitzGerald's Rubáiyát.
Fenollosa's essay on the Chinese written character opens a door that the earlier
students had, if not 'howled without', at least been unable to open.
In mentioning these translations, I don't in the least admit or imply that any
man in our time can think with only one language. He may be able to invent a new
carburettor, or even work effectively in a biological laboratory, but he probably won't even
try to do the latter without study of at least one foreign tongue. Modern science has
always been multilingual. A good scientist simply would not be bothered to limit
himself to one language and be held up for news of discoveries. The writer or reader
who is content with such ignorance simplyadmits that his particularmind is of less
importance than his kidneys or his automobile. The French who know no English
are as fragmentary as. the Americans who know. no French. One simply leaves half
of one's thought untouched in their company.
Different languages --I mean the actual vocabularies, the idioms—have worked out
certain mechanisms of communication and registration. No one language is complete.
A master may be continually expanding his own tongue, rendering it fit to bear
some charge hitherto borne only by some other alien tongue, but the process does not
stop with any one man. While Proust is learning Henry James, preparatory to
breaking through certain French paste-board partitions, the whole American speech
is churning and chugging, and every other tongue doing likewise.
To be 'possible' in mentally active company the American has to
1 To be measured against the Sophoklean economy.
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learn French, the Frenchman has to learn English or American. The Italian has for some
time learned French. The man who does not know the Italian of the duocento and
trecento has in him a painful lacuna, not necessarily painful to himself, but there
are simply certain things he don't know, and can't; it is as if he were blind to
some part of the spectrum. Because of the determined attempt of the patriotic
Latinists of Italy in the renaissance to 'conquer' Greek by putting every Greek
author effectively into Latin it is now possible to get a good deal of Greek through
Latin cribs. The disuse of Latin cribs in Greek study, beginning, I suppose, about
1820, has caused no end of damage to the general distribution of 'classic
culture'.
Another point miscomprehended by people who are clumsy at
languages is that one does not need to learn a whole language in order to
understand some one or some dozen poems. It is often enough to
understand thoroughly the poem, and every one of the few dozen or few hundred
words that compose it.
This is what we start to do as small children when we memorize some lyric of
Goethe or Heine. Incidentally, this process leaves us for life with a measuring rod (a)
for a certain type of lyric, (6) for the German language, so that, however bored we
may be by the Grundriss von Groeber, we never wholly forget the feel of the language.
VACCINE
Do I suggest a remedy? I do. I suggest several remedies. I suggest that we throw
out all critics who use vague general terms. Not merely those who use vague terms
because they are too ignorant to have a meaning; but the critics who use vague terms to
conceal their meaning, and all critics who use terms so vaguely that the reader can think
he agrees with them or assents to their statements when he doesn't.
The first credential we should demand of a critic is his ideograph of the good; of
what he considers valid writing, and indeed of all his general terms. Then we know
where he is. He cannot simply stay in London writing of French pictures that his readers
have not seen. He must begin by stating that such and such particular works seem to him
`good', 'best', 'indifferent', 'valid', 'non-valid'. I suggest a definite curriculum in place of
the present emiettements, of breaking the
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subject up into crumbs quickly dryable. A curriculum for instructors, for
obstreperous students who wish to annoy dull instructors, for men who
haven't had time for systematized college courses. Call it the minimum basis for
a sound and liberal education in letters (with French and English 'aids' in
parenthesis).
CONFUCIUS—In full (there being no complete and intelligent English version,
one would have either to learn Chinese or make use of the French version by
Pauthier).
HOMER—in full (Latin cribs, Hugues Salel in French, no satisfactory English,
though Chapman can be used as reference).
Ovid—And the Latin 'personal' poets, Catullus and Propertius. (Golding's
Metamorphoses, Marlowe's Amores. There is no useful English version of Catullus.)
A PROVENCAL SONG Book—With cross reference to Minnesingers, and to Bion,
perhaps thirty poems in all.
DANTE—`And his circle'; that is to say Dante, and thirty poems by his
contemporaries, mostly by Guido Cavalcanti.
VILLON-
PARENTHETICALLY—Some other medieval matter might be added, and some
general outline of history of thought through the Renaissance.
VOLTAIRE—That is to say, some incursion into his critical writings,
not into his attempts at fiction and drama, and some dip into his
contemporaries (prose).
STENDHAL—(At least a book and half).
FLAUBERT (omitting Salambo and the Tentation)—And the Goncourts.
GAUTIER, CORBIERE, RIMBAUD.
This would not overburden the three- or four-year student. After this
inoculation he could be `with safety exposed' to modernity or anything else in
literature. I mean he wouldn't lose his head or ascribe ridiculous values to
works of secondary intensity. He would have axes of reference and, would I think,
find them dependable.
For the purposes of general education we could omit all study of monistic
totemism and voodoo for at least fifty years and study of Shakespeare for thirty on
the ground that acquaintance with these subjects is already very widely diffused,
and that one absorbs quite enough knowledge of them from boring circumjacent
conversation.
This list does not, obviously, contain the names of every author
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who has ever written a good poem or a good octave or sestet. It is the result of twentyseven
years' thought on the subject and a resume of conclusions. That may be a
reason for giving it some consideration. It is not a reason for accepting it as a finality.
Swallowed whole it is useless. For practical class work the instructor should try,
and incite his students to try, to pry out some element that I have included and to
substitute for it something more valid. The intelligent lay reader will instinctively try
to do this for himself.
I merely insist that without this minimum the critic has almost no chance of sound
judgment. Judgment will gain one more chance of soundness if he can be persuaded
to consider Fenollosa's essay or some other, and to me unknown but equally effective,
elucidation of the Chinese written character.
Before I die I hope to see at least a. few of the best Chinese works printed
bilingually, in the form. that Mori and Ariga prepared certain texts for Fenollosa, a 'crib',
the picture of each letter accompanied ' by a full explanation.
For practical contact with all past poetry that was actually sung in its own day I
suggest that each dozen universities combine in employing a couple of singers who
understand the meaning of words. Men like Yves Tinayre and Robert Maitland are
available. A half-dozen hours spent in listening to the lyrics actually performed would
give the student more knowledge of that sort of melopoeia than a year's work in
philology. The Kennedy-Frasers have dug up music that fits the Beowulf. It was being
used for heroic song in the Hebrides. There is other available music, plenty of it, from at
least the time of Faidit A.D. 1190).
I cannot repeat too often or too forcibly my caution against so-called critics who
talk 'all around the matter', and who do hot define their terms, and who won't say
frankly that certain authors are demnition bores. Make a man tell you first and
specially what writers he thinks are good writers, after that you can listen to his
explanation.
Naturally, certain professors who have invested all their intellectual capital, i.e.,
spent a lot of time on some perfectly dead period, don't like to admit they've been
sold, and they haven't often the courage to cut a loss. There is no use in following
them into the shadows.
In the above list I take full responsibility for my omissions. I
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have omitted `the Rhooshuns'. All right. Let a man judge them after he has encountered
Charles Bovary; he will read them with better balance. I have omitted practically all
the fustian included in curricula of French literature in American universities
(Bossuet, Corneille, etc.) and in so doing I have not committed an oversight. I have
touched German in what most of you will consider an insufficient degree. All right. I have
done it. I rest my case.
If one finds it convenient to think in chronological cycles, and wants to 'relate
literature to history', I suggest the three convenient `breaks' or collapses. The fall of
Alexander's Macedonian empire; the fall of the Roman empire; the collapse of Italy after i
Soo, the fall of Lodovico Moro, and the sack of Rome. That is to say, human lucidity
appears to have approached several times a sort of maximum, and then suffered a set-back.
The great break in the use of language occurs, however, with the change from
inflected to uninflected speech. It can't be too clearly understood that certain procedures
are good for a language in which every word has a little final tag telling what part of
speech it is, and what case if is in, and whether it is a subject, or an object or an
accessory; and that these procedures are not good in English or French. Milton got
into a mess trying to write English as if it were Latin. Lack of this dissociation is
largely responsible for late renaissance floridity. One cannot at this point study all the
maladies and all their variations. The study of misguided Latinization needs a treatise to
itself.'
1 Argument of this essay is elaborated in the author's ABC of Reading
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From Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, ed by Charles Hartshorne
and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), vol. 6.
The numbers refer to paragraphs, following the now standard protocol for
citation. Each number should be prefaced by 6.?e.g. 6.452- 6.493.
CHAPTER 3
A NEGLECTED ARGUMENT FOR THE REALITY OF GODn1
n1. MUSEMENT
452. The word "God," so "capitalized" (as we Americans say), is the
definable proper name, signifying Ens necessarium; in my belief Really
creator of all three Universes of Experience.
Some words shall herein be capitalized when used, not as
vernacular, but as terms defined. Thus an "idea" is the substance of an
actual unitary thought or fancy; but "Idea," nearer Plato's idea of {idea},
denotes anything whose Being consists in its mere capacity for getting
fully represented, regardless of any person's faculty or impotence to
represent it.
453. "Real" is a word invented in the thirteenth century to signify having
Properties, i.e. characters sufficing to identify their subject, and
possessing these whether they be anywise attributed to it by any single
man or group of men, or not. Thus, the substance of a dream is not Real,
since it was such as it was, merely in that a dreamer so dreamed it; but
the fact of the dream is Real, if it was dreamed; since if so, its date, the
name of the dreamer, etc. make up a set of circumstances sufficient to
distinguish it from all other events; and these belong to it, i.e. would be
true if predicated of it, whether A, B, or C Actually ascertains them or not.
The "Actual" is that which is met with in the past, present, or future.
454. An "Experience" is a brutally produced conscious effect that
contributes to a habit, self-controlled, yet so satisfying, on deliberation, as
to be destructible by no positive exercise of internal vigour. I use the word
"self-controlled" for "controlled by the thinker's self," and not for
"uncontrolled" except in its own spontaneous, i.e. automatic, selfdevelopment,
as Professor J. M. Baldwin n2 uses the word. Take for
illustration the sensation undergone by a child that puts its forefinger into
a flame with the acquisition of a habit of keeping all its members out of all
flames. A compulsion is "Brute," whose immediate efficacy nowise consists
in conformity to rule or reason.
455. Of the three Universes of Experience familiar to us all n1, the first
comprises all mere Ideas, those airy nothings to which the mind of poet,
pure mathematician, or another might give local habitation and a name
within that mind. Their very airy-nothingness, the fact that their Being

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consists in mere capability of getting thought, not in anybody's Actually
thinking them, saves their Reality. The second Universe is that of the
Brute Actuality of things and facts. I am confident that their Being
consists in reactions against Brute forces, notwithstanding objections
redoubtable until they are closely and fairly examined. The third Universe
comprises everything whose being consists in active power to establish
connections between different objects, especially between objects in
different Universes. Such is everything which is essentially a Sign -- not
the mere body of the Sign, which is not essentially such, but, so to speak,
the Sign's Soul, which has its Being in its power of serving as intermediary
between its Object and a Mind. Such, too, is a living consciousness, and
such the life, the power of growth, of a plant. Such is a living constitution -
- a daily newspaper, a great fortune, a social "movement."
456. An "Argument" is any process of thought reasonably tending to
produce a definite belief.n2 An "Argumentation" is an Argument
proceeding upon definitely formulated premisses.
457. If God Really be, and be benign, then, in view of the generally
conceded truth that religion, were it but proved, would be a good
outweighing all others, we should naturally expect that there would be
some Argument for His Reality that should be obvious to all minds, high
and low alike, that should earnestly strive to find the truth of the matter;
and further, that this Argument should present its conclusion, not as a
proposition of metaphysical theology, but in a form directly applicable to
the conduct of life, and full of nutrition for man's highest growth. What I
shall refer to as the N.A. -- the Neglected Argument -- seems to me best to
fulfill this condition, and I should not wonder if the majority of those
whose own reflections have harvested belief in God must bless the
radiance of the N.A. for that wealth. Its persuasiveness is no less than
extraordinary; while it is not unknown to anybody. Nevertheless, of all
those theologians (within my little range of reading) who, with
commendable assiduity, scrape together all the sound reasons they can
find or concoct to prove the first proposition of theology, few mention this
one, and they most briefly. They probably share those current notions of
logic which recognize no other Arguments than Argumentations.
458. There is a certain agreeable occupation of mind which, from its
having no distinctive name, I infer is not as commonly practiced as it
deserves to be; for indulged in moderately -- say through some five to six
per cent of one's waking time, perhaps during a stroll -- it is refreshing
enough more than to repay the expenditure. Because it involves no
purpose save that of casting aside all serious purpose, I have sometimes
been half-inclined to call it reverie with some qualification; but for a frame
of mind so antipodal to vacancy and dreaminess such a designation would
be too excruciating a misfit. In fact, it is Pure Play. Now, Play, we all know,
is a lively exercise of one's powers. Pure Play has no rules, except this very

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law of liberty. It bloweth where it listeth. It has no purpose, unless
recreation. The particular occupation I mean -- a petite bouch?e with the
Universes -- may take either the form of aesthetic contemplation, or that of
distant castle-building (whether in Spain or within one's own moral
training), or that of considering some wonder in one of the Universes, or
some connection between two of the three, with speculation concerning its
cause. It is this last kind -- I will call it "Musement" on the whole -- that I
particularly recommend, because it will in time flower into the N.A. One
who sits down with the purpose of becoming convinced of the truth of
religion is plainly not inquiring in scientific singleness of heart, and must
aways suspect himself of reasoning unfairly. So he can never attain the
entirety even of a physicist's belief in electrons, although this is avowedly
but provisional. But let religious meditation be allowed to grow up
spontaneously out of Pure Play without any breach of continuity, and the
Muser will retain the perfect candour proper to Musement.
459. If one who had determined to make trial of Musement as a favorite
recreation were to ask me for advice, I should reply as follows: The dawn
and the gloaming most invite one to Musement; but I have found no watch
of the nychthemeron that has not its own advantages for the pursuit. It
begins passively enough with drinking in the impression of some nook in
one of the three Universes. But impression soon passes into attentive
observation, observation into musing, musing into a lively give and take of
communion between self and self. If one's observations and reflections are
allowed to specialize themselves too much, the Play will be converted into
scientific study; and that cannot be pursued in odd half hours.
460. I should add: Adhere to the one ordinance of Play, the law of liberty. I
can testify that the last half century, at least, has never lacked tribes of Sir
Oracles, colporting brocards to bar off one or another roadway of inquiry;
and a Rabelais would be needed to bring out all the fun that has been
packed in their airs of infallibility. Auguste Comte, notwithstanding his
having apparently produced some unquestionably genuine thinking, was
long the chief of such a band. The vogue of each particular maxim of theirs
was necessarily brief. For what distinction can be gained by repeating
saws heard from all mouths? No bygone fashion seems more grotesque
than a panache of obsolete wisdom. I remember the days when a
pronouncement all the rage was that no science must borrow the methods
of another; the geologist must not use a microscope, nor the astronomer a
spectroscope. Optics must not meddle with electricity, nor logic with
algebra. But twenty years later, if you aspired to pass for a commanding
intellect, you would have to pull a long face and declare that "It is not the
business of science to search for origins." This maxim was a masterpiece,
since no timid soul, in dread of being thought naive, would dare inquire
what "origins" were, albeit the secret confessor within his breast compelled
the awful self-acknowledgment of his having no idea into what else than
"origins" of phenomena (in some sense of that indefinite word) man can

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inquire. That human reason can comprehend some causes is past denial,
and once we are forced to recognize a given element in experience, it is
reasonable to await positive evidence before we complicate our
acknowledgment with qualifications. Otherwise, why venture beyond direct
observation? Illustrations of this principle abound in physical science.
Since, then, it is certain that man is able to understand the laws and the
causes of some phenomena, it is reasonable to assume, in regard to any
given problem, that it would get rightly solved by man, if a sufficiency of
time and attention were devoted to it. Moreover, those problems that at
first blush appear utterly insoluble receive, in that very circumstance, as
Edgar Poe remarked n1 in his "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," their
smoothly-fitting keys. This particularly adapts them to the Play of
Musement.
461. Forty or fifty minutes of vigorous and unslackened analytic thought
bestowed upon one of them usually suffices to educe from it all there is to
educe, its general solution. There is no kind of reasoning that I should
wish to discourage in Musement; and I should lament to find anybody
confining it to a method of such moderate fertility as logical analysis. Only,
the Player should bear in mind that the higher weapons in the arsenal of
thought are not playthings but edge-tools. In any mere Play they can be
used by way of exercise alone; while logical analysis can be put to its full
efficiency in Musement. So, continuing the counsels that had been asked
of me, I should say, "Enter your skiff of Musement, push off into the lake
of thought, and leave the breath of heaven to swell your sail. With your
eyes open, awake to what is about or within you, and open conversation
with yourself; for such is all meditation." It is, however, not a conversation
in words alone, but is illustrated, like a lecture, with diagrams and with
experiments.
462. Different people have such wonderfully different ways of thinking that
it would be far beyond my competence to say what courses Musements
might not take; but a brain endowed with automatic control, as man's
indirectly is, is so naturally and rightly interested in its own faculties that
some psychological and semi-psychological questions would doubtless get
touched; such, in the latter class, as this: Darwinians, with truly
surprising ingenuity, have concocted, and with still more astonishing
confidence have accepted as proved, one explanation for the diverse and
delicate beauties of flowers, another for those of butterflies, and so on; but
why is all nature -- the forms of trees, the compositions of sunsets --
suffused with such beauties throughout, and not nature only, but the
other two Universes as well? Among more purely psychological questions,
the nature of pleasure and pain will be likely to attract attention. Are they
mere qualities of feeling, or are they rather motor instincts attracting us to
some feelings and repelling others? Have pleasure and pain the same sort
of constitution, or are they contrasted in this respect, pleasure arising

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upon the forming or strengthening of an association by resemblance, and
pain upon the weakening or disruption of such a habit or conception?n1
463. Psychological speculations will naturally lead on to musings upon
metaphysical problems proper, good exercise for a mind with a turn for
exact thought. It is here that one finds those questions that at first seem
to offer no handle for reason's clutch, but which readily yield to logical
analysis. But problems of metaphysics will inevitably present themselves
that logical analysis will not suffice to solve. Some of the best will be
motived by a desire to comprehend universe-wide aggregates of
unformulated but partly experienced phenomena. I would suggest that the
Muser be not too impatient to analyze these, lest some significant
ingredient be lost in the process; but that he begin by pondering them
from every point of view, until he seems to read some truth beneath the
phenomena.
464. At this point a trained mind will demand that an examination be
made of the truth of the interpretation; and the first step in such
examination must be a logical analysis of the theory. But strict
examination would be a task a little too serious for the Musement of hour
fractions, and if it is postponed there will be ample remuneration even in
the suggestions that there is not time to examine; especially since a few of
them will appeal to reason as all but certain.
Let the Muser, for example, after well appreciating, in its breadth
and depth, the unspeakable variety of each Universe, turn to those
phenomena that are of the nature of homogeneities of connectedness in
each; and what a spectacle will unroll itself! As a mere hint of them I may
point out that every small part of space, however remote, is bounded by
just such neighbouring parts as every other, without a single exception
throughout immensity. The matter of Nature is in every star of the same
elementary kinds, and (except for variations of circumstance), what is
more wonderful still, throughout the whole visible universe, about the
same proportions of the different chemical elements prevail. Though the
mere catalogue of known carbon-compounds alone would fill an unwieldy
volume, and perhaps, if the truth were known, the number of amino-acids
alone is greater, yet it is unlikely that there are in all more than about 600
elements, of which 500 dart through space too swiftly to be held down by
the earth's gravitation, coronium being the slowest-moving of these. This
small number bespeaks comparative simplicity of structure. Yet no
mathematician but will confess the present hopelessness of attempting to
comprehend the constitution of the hydrogen-atom, the simplest of the
elements that can be held to earth.
465. From speculations on the homogeneities of each Universe, the Muser
will naturally pass to the consideration of homogeneities and connections
between two different Universes, or all three. Especially in them all we find

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one type of occurrence, that of growth, itself consisting in the
homogeneities of small parts. This is evident in the growth of motion into
displacement, and the growth of force into motion. In growth, too, we find
that the three Universes conspire; and a universal feature of it is provision
for later stages in earlier ones. This is a specimen of certain lines of
reflection which will inevitably suggest the hypothesis of God's Reality. It is
not that such phenomena might not be capable of being accounted for, in
one sense, by the action of chance with the smallest conceivable dose of a
higher element; for if by God be meant the Ens necessarium, that very
hypothesis requires that such should be the case. But the point is that
that sort of explanation leaves a mental explanation just as needful as
before. Tell me, upon sufficient authority, that all cerebration depends
upon movements of neurites that strictly obey certain physical laws, and
that thus all expressions of thought, both external and internal, receive a
physical explanation, and I shall be ready to believe you. But if you go on
to say that this explodes the theory that my neighbour and myself are
governed by reason, and are thinking beings, I must frankly say that it will
not give me a high opinion of your intelligence. But however that may be,
in the Pure Play of Musement the idea of God's Reality will be sure sooner
or later to be found an attractive fancy, which the Muser will develop in
various ways. The more he ponders it, the more it will find response in
every part of his mind, for its beauty, for its supplying an ideal of life, and
for its thoroughly satisfactory explanation of his whole threefold
environment.
n2. THE HYPOTHESIS OF GOD E
466. The hypothesis of God is a peculiar one, in that it supposes an
infinitely incomprehensible object, although every hypothesis, as such,
supposes its object to be truly conceived in the hypothesis. This leaves the
hypothesis but one way of understanding itself; namely, as vague yet as
true so far as it is definite, and as continually tending to define itself more
and more, and without limit. The hypothesis, being thus itself inevitably
subject to the law of growth, appears in its vagueness to represent God as
so, albeit this is directly contradicted in the hypothesis from its very first
phase. But this apparent attribution of growth to God, since it is
ineradicable from the hypothesis, cannot, according to the hypothesis, be
flatly false. Its implications concerning the Universes will be maintained in
the hypothesis, while its implications concerning God will be partly
disavowed, and yet held to be less false than their denial would be. Thus
the hypothesis will lead to our thinking of features of each Universe as
purposed; and this will stand or fall with the hypothesis. Yet a purpose
essentially involves growth, and so cannot be attributed to God. Still it will,
according to the hypothesis, be less false to speak so than to represent
God as purposeless.

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 54
467. Assured as I am from my own personal experience that every man
capable of so controlling his attention as to perform a little exact thinking
will, if he examines Zeno's argument about Achilles and the tortoise, come
to think, as I do, that it is nothing but a contemptible catch,n1 I do not
think that I either am or ought to be less assured, from what I know of the
effects of Musement on myself and others, that any normal man who
considers the three Universes in the light of the hypothesis of God's Reality,
and pursues that line of reflection in scientific singleness of heart, will
come to be stirred to the depths of his nature by the beauty of the idea
and by its august practicality, even to the point of earnestly loving and
adoring his strictly hypothetical God, and to that of desiring above all
things to shape the whole conduct of life and all the springs of action into
conformity with that hypothesis. Now to be deliberately and thoroughly
prepared to shape one's conduct into conformity with a proposition is
neither more nor less than the state of mind called Believing that
proposition, however long the conscious classification of it under that head
be postponed.n2
n3. THE THREE STAGES OF INQUIRYE
468. There is my poor sketch of the Neglected Argument, greatly cut down
to bring it within the limits assigned to this article. Next should come the
discussion of its logicality; but nothing readable at a sitting could possibly
bring home to readers my full proof of the principal points of such an
examination. I can only hope to make the residue of this paper a sort of
table of contents, from which some may possibly guess what I have to say;
or to lay down a series of plausible points through which the reader will
have to construct the continuous line of reasoning for himself. In my own
mind the proof is elaborated, and I am exerting my energies to getting it
submitted to public censure. My present abstract will divide itself into
three unequal parts. The first shall give the headings of the different steps
of every well-conducted and complete inquiry, without noticing possible
divergencies from the norm. I shall have to mention some steps which
have nothing to do with the Neglected Argument in order to show that they
add no jot nor tittle to the truth which is invariably brought just as the
Neglected Argument brings it. The second part shall very briefly state,
without argument (for which there is no room), just wherein lies the logical
validity of the reasoning characteristic of each of the main stages of
inquiry. The third part shall indicate the place of the Neglected Argument
in a complete inquiry into the Reality of God, and shall show how well it
would fill that place, and what its logical value is supposing the inquiry to
be limited to this; and I shall add a few words to show how it might be
supplemented.

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 55
469. Every inquiry whatsoever takes its rise in the observation, in one or
another of the three Universes, of some surprising phenomenon, some
experience which either disappoints an expectation, or breaks in upon
some habit of expectation of the inquisiturus; and each apparent
exception to this rule only confirms it. There are obvious distinctions
between the objects of surprise in different cases; but throughout this
slight sketch of inquiry such details will be unnoticed, especially since it is
upon such that the logic-books descant. The inquiry begins with
pondering these phenomena in all their aspects, in the search of some
point of view whence the wonder shall be resolved. At length a conjecture
arises that furnishes a possible Explanation, by which I mean a syllogism
exhibiting the surprising fact as necessarily consequent upon the
circumstances of its occurrence together with the truth of the credible
conjecture, as premisses.n1 On account of this Explanation, the inquirer
is led to regard his conjecture, or hypothesis, with favor. As I phrase it, he
provisionally holds it to be "Plausible"; this acceptance ranges in different
cases -- and reasonably so -- from a mere expression of it in the
interrogative mood, as a question meriting attention and reply, up through
all appraisals of Plausibility, to uncontrollable inclination to believe. The
whole series of mental performances between the notice of the wonderful
phenomenon and the acceptance of the hypothesis, during which the
usually docile understanding seems to hold the bit between its teeth and
to have us at its mercy, the search for pertinent circumstances and the
laying hold of them, sometimes without our cognizance, the scrutiny of
them, the dark laboring, the bursting out of the startling conjecture, the
remarking of its smooth fitting to the anomaly, as it is turned back and
forth like a key in a lock, and the final estimation of its Plausibility, I
reckon as composing the First Stage of Inquiry. Its characteristic formula
of reasoning I term Retroduction,n1 i.e. reasoning from consequent to
antecedent. In one respect the designation seems inappropriate; for in
most instances where conjecture mounts the high peaks of Plausibility --
and is really most worthy of confidence -- the inquirer is unable definitely
to formulate just what the explained wonder is; or can only do so in the
light of the hypothesis. In short, it is a form of Argument rather than of
Argumentation.
470. Retroduction does not afford security. The hypothesis must be tested.
This testing, to be logically valid, must honestly start, not as
Retroduction starts, with scrutiny of the phenomena, but with
examination of the hypothesis, and a muster of all sorts of conditional
experiential consequences which would follow from its truth. This
constitutes the Second Stage of Inquiry. For its characteristic form of
reasoning our language has, for two centuries, been happily provided with
the name Deduction.

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471. Deduction has two parts. For its first step must be by logical analysis
to Explicate the hypothesis, i.e. to render it as perfectly distinct as possible.
This process, like Retroduction, is Argument that is not Argumentation.
But unlike Retroduction, it cannot go wrong from lack of experience, but
so long as it proceeds rightly must reach a true conclusion. Explication is
followed by Demonstration, or Deductive Argumentation. Its procedure is
best learned from Book I of Euclid's Elements, a masterpiece which in real
insight is far superior to Aristotle's Analytics; and its numerous fallacies
render it all the more instructive to a close student. It invariably requires
something of the nature of a diagram; that is, an "Icon," or Sign that
represents its Object in resembling it. It usually, too, needs "Indices," or
Signs that represent their Objects by being actually connected with them.
But it is mainly composed of "Symbols," or Signs that represent their
Objects essentially because they will be so interpreted. Demonstration
should be Corollarial when it can. An accurate definition of Corollarial
Demonstration would require a long explanation; but it will suffice to say
that it limits itself to considerations already introduced or else involved in
the Explication of its conclusion; while Theorematic Demonstration resorts
to a more complicated process of thought.n1
472. The purpose of Deduction, that of collecting consequents of the
hypothesis, having been sufficiently carried out, the inquiry enters upon
its Third Stage, that of ascertaining how far those consequents accord with
Experience, and of judging accordingly whether the hypothesis is sensibly
correct, or requires some inessential modification, or must be entirely
rejected. Its characteristic way of reasoning is Induction. This stage has
three parts. For it must begin with Classification, which is an Inductive
Non-argumentational kind of Argument, by which general Ideas are
attached to objects of Experience; or rather by which the latter are
subordinated to the former. Following this will come the testingargumentations,
the Probations; and the whole inquiry will be wound up
with the Sentential part of the Third Stage, which, by Inductive reasonings,
appraises the different Probations singly, then their combinations, then
makes self-appraisal of these very appraisals themselves, and passes final
judgment on the whole result.
473. The Probations, or direct Inductive Argumentations, are of two kinds.
The first is that which Bacon ill described as "inductio illa qu? procedit per
enumerationem simplicem." So at least he has been understood. For an
enumeration of instances is not essential to the argument that, for
example, there are no such beings as fairies, or no such events as miracles.
The point is that there is no well-established instance of such a thing. I
call this Crude Induction.n2 It is the only Induction which concludes a
logically Universal Proposition. It is the weakest of arguments, being liable
to be demolished in a moment, as happened toward the end of the
eighteenth century to the opinion of the scientific world that no stones fall
from the sky. The other kind is Gradual Induction,n1 which makes a new

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 57
estimate of the proportion of truth in the hypothesis with every new
instance; and given any degree of error there will sometime be an estimate
(or would be, if the probation were persisted in) which will be absolutely
the last to be infected with so much falsity. Gradual Induction is either
Qualitative or Quantitative and the latter either depends on measurements,
or on statistics, or on countings.
n4. THE VALIDITY OF THE THREE STAGES
474. Concerning the question of the nature of the logical validity
possessed by Deduction, Induction, and Retroduction, which is still an
arena of controversy, I shall confine myself to stating the opinions which I
am prepared to defend by positive proofs. The validity of Deduction was
correctly, if not very clearly, analyzed by Kant.n2 This kind of reasoning
deals exclusively with Pure Ideas attaching primarily to Symbols and
derivatively to other Signs of our own creation; and the fact that man has
a power of Explicating his own meaning renders Deduction valid.
Induction is a kind of reasoning that may lead us into error; but that it
follows a method which, sufficiently persisted in, will be Inductively
Certain (the sort of certainty we have that a perfect coin, pitched up often
enough, will sometime turn up heads) to diminish the error below any
predesignate degree, is assured by man's power of perceiving Inductive
Certainty. In all this I am inviting the reader to peep through the big end
of the telescope; there is a wealth of pertinent detail that must here be
passed over.
475. Finally comes the bottom question of logical Critic,n3 What sort of
validity can be attributed to the First Stage of inquiry? Observe that
neither Deduction nor Induction contributes the smallest positive item to
the final conclusion of the inquiry. They render the indefinite definite;
Deduction Explicates; Induction evaluates: that is all. Over the chasm that
yawns between the ultimate goal of science and such ideas of Man's
environment as, coming over him during his primeval wanderings in the
forest, while yet his very notion of error was of the vaguest, he managed to
communicate to some fellow, we are building a cantilever bridge of
induction, held together by scientific struts and ties. Yet every plank of its
advance is first laid by Retroduction alone, that is to say, by the
spontaneous conjectures of instinctive reason; and neither Deduction nor
Induction contributes a single new concept to the structure. Nor is this
less true or less important for those inquiries that self-interest prompts.
476. The first answer we naturally give to this question is that we cannot
help accepting the conjecture at such a valuation as that at which we do
accept it; whether as a simple interrogation, or as more or less Plausible,
or, occasionally, as an irresistible belief. But far from constituting, by itself,
a logical justification such as it becomes a rational being to put forth, this

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pleading, that we cannot help yielding to the suggestion, amounts to
nothing more than a confession of having failed to train ourselves to
control our thoughts. It is more to the purpose, however, to urge that the
strength of the impulse is a symptom of its being instinctive. Animals of all
races rise far above the general level of their intelligence in those
performances that are their proper function, such as flying and nestbuilding
for ordinary birds; and what is man's proper function if it be not
to embody general ideas in art-creations, in utilities, and above all in
theoretical cognition? To give the lie to his own consciousness of divining
the reasons of phenomena would be as silly in a man as it would be in a
fledgling bird to refuse to trust to its wings and leave the nest, because the
poor little thing had read Babinet,n1 and judged aerostation to be
impossible on hydrodynamical grounds. Yes; it must be confessed that if
we knew that the impulse to prefer one hypothesis to another really were
analogous to the instincts of birds and wasps, it would be foolish not to
give it play, within the bounds of reason; especially since we must
entertain some hypothesis, or else forego all further knowledge than that
which we have already gained by that very means. But is it a fact that man
possesses this magical faculty? Not, I reply, to the extent of guessing right
the first time, nor perhaps the second; but that the well-prepared mind
has wonderfully soon guessed each secret of nature is historical truth. All
the theories of science have been so obtained. But may they not have come
fortuitously, or by some such modification of chance as the Darwinian
supposes? I answer that three or four independent methods of
computation show that it would be ridiculous to suppose our science to
have so come to pass. Nevertheless, suppose that it can be so "explained,"
just as that any purposed act of mine is supposed by materialistic
necessitarians to have come about. Still, what of it? Does that materialistic
explanation, supposing it granted, show that reason has nothing to do
with my actions? Even the parallelists will admit that the one explanation
leaves the same need of the other that there was before it was given; and
this is certainly sound logic. There is a reason, an interpretation, a logic,
in the course of scientific advance, and this indisputably proves to him
who has perceptions of rational or significant relations, that man's mind
must have been attuned to the truth of things in order to discover what he
has discovered. It is the very bedrock of logical truth.
477. Modern science has been builded after the model of Galileo, who
founded it, on il lume naturale. That truly inspired prophet had said that,
of two hypotheses, the simpler is to be preferred;n1 but I was formerly one
of those who, in our dull self-conceit fancying ourselves more sly than he,
twisted the maxim to mean the logically simpler, the one that adds the
least to what has been observed, in spite of three obvious objections: first,
that so there was no support for any hypothesis; secondly, that by the
same token we ought to content ourselves with simply formulating the
special observations actually made; and thirdly, that every advance of
science that further opens the truth to our view discloses a world of
unexpected complications. It was not until long experience forced me to

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realize that subsequent discoveries were every time showing I had been
wrong, while those who understood the maxim as Galileo had done, early
unlocked the secret, that the scales fell from my eyes and my mind awoke
to the broad and flaming daylight that it is the simpler Hypothesis in the
sense of the more facile and natural, the one that instinct suggests, that
must be preferred; for the reason that, unless man have a natural bent in
accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.
Many tests of this principal and positive fact, relating as well to my own
studies as to the researches of others, have confirmed me in this opinion;
and when I shall come to set them forth in a book, their array will
convince everybody. Oh, no! I am forgetting that armour, impenetrable by
accurate thought, in which the rank and file of minds are clad! They may,
for example, get the notion that my proposition involves a denial of the
rigidity of the laws of association: it would be quite on a par with much
that is current. I do not mean that logical simplicity is a consideration of
no value at all, but only that its value is badly secondary to that of
simplicity in the other sense.
If, however, the maxim is correct in Galileo's sense, whence it follows
that man has, in some degree, a divinatory power, primary or derived, like
that of a wasp or a bird, then instances swarm to show that a certain
altogether peculiar confidence in a hypothesis, not to be confounded with
rash cocksureness, has a very appreciable value as a sign of the truth of
the hypothesis. I regret I cannot give an account of certain interesting and
almost convincing cases. The N.A. excites this peculiar confidence in the
very highest degree.
n5. PRAGMATICISM n1
478. We have now to apply these principles to the evaluation of the N.A.
Had I space I would put this into the shape of imagining how it is likely to
be esteemed by three types of men: the first of small instruction with
corresponding natural breadth, intimately acquainted with the N.A., but to
whom logic is all Greek; the second, inflated with current notions of logic,
but prodigiously informed about the N.A.; the third, a trained man of
science who, in the modern spirit, has added to his specialty an exact
theoretical and practical study of reasoning and the elements of thought,
so that psychologists account him a sort of psychologist, and
mathematicians a sort of mathematician.
479. I should, then, show how the first would have learned that nothing
has any kind of value in itself -- whether ?sthetic, moral, or scientific --
but only in its place in the whole production to which it appertains; and
that an individual soul with its petty agitations and calamities is a zero
except as filling its infinitesimal place, and accepting his little futility as
his entire treasure. He will see that though his God would not really (in a

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certain sense) adapt means to ends, it is nevertheless quite true that there
are relations among phenomena which finite intelligence must interpret,
and truly interpret, as such adaptations; and he will macarize himself for
his own bitterest griefs, and bless God for the law of growth with all the
fighting it imposes upon him -- Evil, i.e. what it is man's duty to fight,
being one of the major perfections of the Universe. In that fight he will
endeavour to perform just the duty laid upon him and no more. Though
his desperate struggles should issue in the horrors of his rout, and he
should see the innocents who are dearest to his heart exposed to torments,
frenzy and despair, destined to be smirched with filth, and stunted in their
intelligence, still he may hope that it be best for them, and will tell himself
that in any case the secret design of God will be perfected through their
agency; and even while still hot from the battle, will submit with adoration
to His Holy will. He will not worry because the Universes were not
constructed to suit the scheme of some silly scold.
480. The context of this I must leave the reader to imagine. I will only add
that the third man, considering the complex process of self-control, will
see that the hypothesis, irresistible though it be to first intention, yet
needs Probation; and that though an infinite being is not tied down to any
consistency, yet man, like any other animal, is gifted with power of
understanding sufficient for the conduct of life. This brings him, for testing
the hypothesis, to taking his stand upon Pragmaticism, which implies
faith in common sense and in instinct, though only as they issue from the
cupel-furnace of measured criticism. In short, he will say that the N.A. is
the First Stage of a scientific inquiry, resulting in a hypothesis of the very
highest Plausibility, whose ultimate test must lie in its value in the selfcontrolled
growth of man's conduct of life.
481.n1 Since I have employed the word Pragmaticism, and shall have
occasion to use it once more, it may perhaps be well to explain it. About
forty years ago, my studies of Berkeley, Kant, and others led me, after
convincing myself that all thinking is performed in Signs, and that
meditation takes the form of a dialogue, so that it is proper to speak of the
"meaning" of a concept, to conclude that to acquire full mastery of that
meaning it is requisite, in the first place, to learn to recognize the concept
under every disguise, through extensive familiarity with instances of it.
But this, after all, does not imply any true understanding of it; so that it is
further requisite that we should make an abstract logical analysis of it into
its ultimate elements, or as complete an analysis as we can compass. But,
even so, we may still be without any living comprehension of it; and the
only way to complete our knowledge of its nature is to discover and
recognize just what general habits of conduct a belief in the truth of the
concept (of any conceivable subject, and under any conceivable
circumstances) would reasonably develop; that is to say, what habits
would ultimately result from a sufficient consideration of such truth. It is
necessary to understand the word "conduct," here, in the broadest sense.

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If, for example, the predication of a given concept were to lead to our
admitting that a given form of reasoning concerning the subject of which it
was affirmed was valid, when it would not otherwise be valid, the
recognition of that effect in our reasoning would decidedly be a habit of
conduct.
482. In 1871, in a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I used
to preach this principle as a sort of logical gospel, representing the
unformulated method followed by Berkeley, and in conversation about it I
called it "Pragmatism."n2 In December [November] 1877 and January
1878 I set forth the doctrine in the Popular Science Monthly; and the two
parts of my essay were printed in French in the Revue Philosophique,
volumes vi and vii.n1 Of course, the doctrine attracted no particular
attention, for, as I had remarked in my opening sentence, very few people
care for logic. But in 1897 Professor James remodelled the matter, and
transmogrified it into a doctrine of philosophy,n2 some parts of which I
highly approved, while other and more prominent parts I regarded, and
still regard, as opposed to sound logic. About the time Professor Papini n3
discovered, to the delight of the Pragmatist school, that this doctrine was
incapable of definition, which would certainly seem to distinguish it from
every other doctrine in whatever branch of science, I was coming to the
conclusion that my poor little maxim should be called by another name;
and accordingly, in April, 1905 I renamed it Pragmaticism.n4 I had never
before dignified it by any name in print, except that, at Professor Baldwin's
request, I wrote a definition of it for his Dictionary of Psychology and
Philosophy.n5 I did not insert the word in the Century Dictionary, though
I had charge of the philosophical definitions of that work;n6 for I have a
perhaps exaggerated dislike of r?clame.
483. It is that course of meditation upon the three Universes which gives
birth to the hypothesis and ultimately to the belief that they, or at any rate
two of the three, have a Creator independent of them, that I have
throughout this article called the N.A., because I think the theologians
ought to have recognized it as a line of thought reasonably productive of
belief. This is the "humble" argument, the innermost of the nest.n7 In the
mind of a metaphysician it will have a metaphysical tinge; but that seems
to me rather to detract from its force than to add anything to it. It is just
as good an argument, if not better, in the form it takes in the mind of the
clodhopper.
484. The theologians could not have presented the N.A.; because that is a
living course of thought of very various forms. But they might and ought to
have described it, and should have defended it, too, as far as they could,
without going into original logical researches, which could not be justly
expected of them. They are accustomed to make use of the principle that
that which convinces a normal man must be presumed to be sound
reasoning; and therefore they ought to say whatever can truly be advanced

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to show that the N.A., if sufficiently developed, will convince any normal
man. Unfortunately, it happens that there is very little established fact to
show that this is the case. I have not pretended to have any other ground
for my belief that it is so than my assumption, which each one of us
makes, that my own intellectual disposition is normal. I am forced to
confess that no pessimist will agree with me. I do not admit that
pessimists are, at the same time, thoroughly sane, and in addition are
endowed in normal measure with intellectual vigour; and my reasons for
thinking so are two. The first is, that the difference between a pessimistic
and an optimistic mind is of such controlling importance in regard to every
intellectual function, and especially for the conduct of life, that it is out of
the question to admit that both are normal, and the great majority of
mankind are naturally optimistic. Now, the majority of every race depart
but little from the norm of that race. In order to present my other reason, I
am obliged to recognize three types of pessimists. The first type is often
found in exquisite and noble natures of great force of original intellect
whose own lives are dreadful histories of torment due to some physical
malady. Leopardi is a famous example. We cannot but believe, against
their earnest protests, that if such men had had ordinary health, life
would have worn for them the same colour as for the rest of us. Meantime,
one meets too few pessimists of this type to affect the present question.
The second is the misanthropical type, the type that makes itself heard. It
suffices to call to mind the conduct of the famous pessimists of this kind,
Diogenes the Cynic, Schopenhauer, Carlyle, and their kin with
Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, to recognize them as diseased minds. The
third is the philanthropical type, people whose lively sympathies, easily
excited, become roused to anger at what they consider the stupid
injustices of life. Being easily interested in everything, without being
overloaded with exact thought of any kind, they are excellent raw material
for litt?rateurs: witness Voltaire. No individual remotely approaching the
calibre of a Leibnitz is to be found among them.
485. The third argument, enclosing and defending the other two, consists
in the development of those principles of logic according to which the
humble argument is the first stage of a scientific inquiry into the origin of
the three Universes, but of an inquiry which produces, not merely
scientific belief, which is always provisional, but also a living, practical
belief, logically justified in crossing the Rubicon with all the freightage of
eternity. The presentation of this argument would require the
establishment of several principles of logic that the logicians have hardly
dreamed of, and particularly a strict proof of the correctness of the maxim
of Pragmaticism. My original essay, having been written for a popular
monthly, assumes, for no better reason than that real inquiry cannot
begin until a state of real doubt arises and ends as soon as Belief is
attained, that "a settlement of Belief," or, in other words, a state of
satisfaction, is all that Truth, or the aim of inquiry, consists in.n1 The
reason I gave for this was so flimsy, while the inference was so nearly the
gist of Pragmaticism, that I must confess the argument of that essay might

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with some justice be said to beg the question. The first part of the essay,n2
however, is occupied with showing that, if Truth consists in satisfaction, it
cannot be any actual satisfaction, but must be the satisfaction which
would ultimately be found if the inquiry were pushed to its ultimate and
indefeasible issue. This, I beg to point out, is a very different position from
that of Mr. Schiller and the pragmatists of today.n3 I trust I shall be
believed when I say that it is only a desire to avoid being misunderstood in
consequence of my relations with pragmatism, and by no means as
arrogating any superior immunity from error which I have too good reason
to know that I do not enjoy, that leads me to express my personal
sentiments about their tenets. Their avowedly undefinable position, if it be
not capable of logical characterization, seems to me to be characterized by
an angry hatred of strict logic, and even some disposition to rate any exact
thought which interferes with their doctrines as all humbug. At the same
time, it seems to me clear that their approximate acceptance of the
Pragmaticist principle, and even that very casting aside of difficult
distinctions (although I cannot approve of it), has helped them to a
mightily clear discernment of some fundamental truths that other
philosophers have seen but through a mist, and most of them not at all.
Among such truths -- all of them old, of course, yet acknowledged by few -
- I reckon their denial of necessitarianism; their rejection of any
"consciousness" different from a visceral or other external sensation; their
acknowledgment that there are, in a Pragmatistical sense, Real habits
(which Really would produce effects, under circumstances that may not
happen to get actualized, and are thus Real generals); and their insistence
upon interpreting all hypos
tatic abstractions in terms of what they would or might (not actually will)
come to in the concrete. It seems to me a pity they should allow a
philosophy so instinct with life to become infected with seeds of death in
such notions as that of the unreality of all ideas of infinity n1 and that of
the mutability of truth,n2 and in such confusions of thought as that of
active willing (willing to control thought, to doubt, and to weigh reasons)
with willing not to exert the will (willing to believe).n3Peirce: CP 6.486
Cross-Ref:??
n6. ADDITAMENT n4
486. A nest of three arguments for the Reality of God has now been
sketched, though none of them could, in the limits of a single article, be
fairly presented. The first is that entirely honest, sincere and unaffected,
because unprepense, meditation upon the Idea of God, into which the Play
of Musement will inevitably sooner or later lead, and which, by developing
a deep sense of the adorability of that Idea, will produce a truly religious
Belief in His Reality and His nearness. It is a reasonable argument,
because it naturally results in the most intense and living determination
(Bestimmung) of the soul toward shaping the Muser's whole conduct into
conformity with the Hypothesis that God is Real and very near; and such a

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determination of the soul in regard to any proposition is the very essence
of a living Belief in such proposition. This is that "humble argument," open
to every honest man, which I surmise to have made more worshippers of
God than any other.
487. The second of the nest is the argument which seems to me to have
been "neglected" by writers upon natural theology, consisting in showing
that the humble argument is the natural fruit of free meditation, since
every heart will be ravished by the beauty and adorability of the Idea,
when it is so pursued. Were the theologians able to perceive the force of
this argument, they would make it such a presentation of universal
human nature as to show that a latent tendency toward belief in God is a
fundamental ingredient of the soul, and that, far from being a vicious or
superstitious ingredient, it is simply the natural precipitate of meditation
upon the origin of the Three Universes. Of course, it could not, any more
than any other theological argumentation, have the value or the religious
vitality of the "Humble Argument"; for it would only be an apology -- a
vindicatory description -- of the mental operations which the Humble
Argument actually and actively lives out. Though this is properly the
neglected argument, yet I have sometimes used the abbreviation "the N.A."
for the whole nest of three.
488. The third argument of the nest consists in a study of logical
methodeutic, illuminated by the light of a first-hand acquaintance with
genuine scientific thought -- the sort of thought whose tools literally
comprise not merely Ideas of mathematical exactitude, but also the
apparatus of the skilled manipulator, actually in use. The student,
applying to his own trained habits of research the art of logical analysis --
an art as elaborate and methodical as that of the chemical analyst,
compares the process of thought of the Muser upon the Three Universes
with certain parts of the work of scientific discovery, and finds that the
"Humble Argument" is nothing but an instance of the first stage of all such
work, the stage of observing the facts, or variously rearranging them, and
of pondering them until, by their reactions with the results of previous
scientific experience, there is "evolved" (as the chemists word it) an
explanatory hypothesis. He will note, however, that this instance of
Retroduction, undeniable as this character is, departs widely from the
ordinary run of instances, especially in three respects. In the first place,
the Plausibility of the hypothesis reaches an almost unparalleled height
among deliberately formed hypotheses. So hard is it to doubt God's Reality,
when the Idea has sprung from Musements, that there is great danger that
the investigation will stop at this first stage, owing to the indifference of
the Muser to any further proof of it. At the same time, this very Plausibility
is undoubtedly an argument of no small weight in favor of the truth of the
hypothesis.

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489. In the second place, although it is a chief function of an explanatory
hypothesis (and some philosophers say the only one) to excite a clear
image in the mind by means of which experiential consequences of
ascertainable conditions may be predicted, yet in this instance the
hypothesis can only be apprehended so very obscurely that in exceptional
cases alone can any definite and direct deduction from its ordinary
abstract interpretation be made. How, for example, can we ever expect to
be able to predict what the conduct would be, even of [an] omniscient
being, governing no more than one poor solar system for only a million
years or so? How much less if, being also omnipotent, he be thereby freed
from all experience, all desire, all intention! Since God, in His essential
character of Ens necessarium, is a disembodied spirit, and since there is
strong reason to hold that what we call consciousness is either merely the
general sensation of the brain or some part of it, or at all events some
visceral or bodily sensation, God probably has no consciousness. Most of
us are in the habit of thinking that consciousness and psychic life are the
same thing and otherwise greatly to overrate the functions of
consciousness. (See James's paper "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" in Jour.
Phil., Psy., and Sci. Meth. I, 477; 1904, Sep. 1. But the negative reply is, in
itself, no novelty.)
490. The effects of the second peculiarity of the hypothesis are
counteracted by a third, which consists in its commanding influence over
the whole conduct of life of its believers. According to that logical doctrine
which the present writer first formulated in 1873n1 and named
Pragmatism, the true meaning of any product of the intellect lies in
whatever unitary determination it would impart to practical conduct under
any and every conceivable circumstance, supposing such conduct to be
guided by reflexion carried to an ultimate limit. It appears to have been
virtually the philosophy of Socrates. But although it is "an old way of
thinking," in the sense that it was practiced by Spinoza, Berkeley, and
Kant, I am not aware of its having been definitely formulated, whether as a
maxim of logical analysis or otherwise, by anybody before my publication
of it in 1878. Naturally, nobody ever heard of pragmatism. People don't
care for methods! they want results. Give them all the diamonds you make,
and you may have the method of making them for your own. So it was not
until in 1898n2 -- Professor James took hold of the old thing, dignified it
by calling it by its name in print (which I had never done even when I was
in charge of the philosophical part of the Century Dictionary), furbished it
up, and turned it into a philosophical doctrine -- that it had any vogue at
all. It did not, however, shine with its present effulgence until Professor
Papini n3 made the discovery that it cannot be defined -- a circumstance
which, I believe, distinguishes it from all other doctrines, of whatsoever
natures they may be, that were ever promulgated. Thereupon I thought it
high time to give my method a less distinguished designation; and I
rechristened it pragmaticism.n4 Pragmaticism, then, is a theory of logical
analysis, or true definition; and its merits are greatest in its application to
the highest metaphysical conceptions. At the same time, these merits can

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 66
only be appreciated as the result of long training. A full exposition of the
pragmaticistic definition of Ens necessarium would require many pages;
but some hints toward it may be given. A disembodied spirit, or pure mind,
has its being out of time, since all that it is destined to think is fully in its
being at any and every previous time. But in endless time it is destined to
think all that it is capable of thinking. Order is simply thought embodied
in arrangement; and thought embodied in any other way appears
objectively as a character that is a generalization of order, and that, in the
lack of any word for it, we may call for the nonce, "Super-order." It is
something like uniformity. The idea may be caught if it is described as that
of which order and uniformity are particular varieties. Pure mind, as
creative of thought, must, so far as it is manifested in time, appear as
having a character related to the habit-taking capacity, just as super-order
is related to uniformity. Now imagine, in such vague way as such a thing
can be imagined, a perfect cosmology of the three universes. It would
prove all in relation to that subject that reason could desiderate; and of
course all that it would prove must, in actual fact, now be true. But reason
would desiderate that that should be proved from which would follow all
that is in fact true of the three universes; and the postulate from which all
this would follow must not state any matter of fact, since such fact would
thereby be left unexplained. That perfect cosmology must therefore show
that the whole history of the three universes, as it has been and is to be,
would follow from a premiss which would not suppose them to exist at all.
Moreover, such premiss must in actual fact be true. But that premiss
must represent a state of things in which the three universes were
completely nil. Consequently, whether in time or not, the three universes
must actually be absolutely necessary results of a state of utter
nothingness. We cannot ourselves conceive of such a state of nility; but we
can easily conceive that there should be a mind that could conceive it,
since, after all, no contradiction can be involved in mere non-existence. A
state in which there should be absolutely no super-order whatsoever
would be such a state of nility. For all Being involves some kind of superorder.
For example, to suppose a thing to have any particular character is
to suppose a conditional proposition to be true of it, which proposition
would express some kind of super-order, as any formulation of a general
fact does. To suppose it to have elasticity of volume is to suppose that if it
were subjected to pressure its volume would diminish until at a certain
point the full pressure was attained within and without its periphery. This
is a super-order, a law expressible by a differential equation. Any such
super-order would be a super-habit. Any general state of things
whatsoever would be a super-order and a super-habit. In that state of
absolute nility, in or out of time, that is, before or after the evolution of
time, there must then have been a tohu bohu of which nothing whatever
affirmative or negative was true universally. There must have been,
therefore, a little of everything conceivable. There must have been here
and there a little undifferentiated tendency to take super-habits. But such
a state must tend to increase itself. For a tendency to act in any way,
combined with a tendency to take habits, must increase the tendency to

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act in that way. Now substitute in this general statement for "tendency to
act in any way" a tendency to take habits, and we see that that tendency
would grow. It would also become differentiated in various ways. But there
are some habits that carried beyond a certain point eliminate their
subjects from the universe. There are many ways in which this may
happen. Thus a tendency to lose mass will end in a total loss of mass. A
tendency to lose energy will end in removing its subject from perceptible
existence. A tendency to gain energy will end in the body's shooting
through the universe too rapidly to produce any effect, etc.
491. Among the many pertinent considerations which have been crowded
out of this article, I may just mention that it could have been shown that
the hypothesis of God's Reality is logically not so isolated a conclusion as
it may seem. On the contrary, it is connected so with a theory of the
nature of thinking that if this be proved so is that. Now there is no such
difficulty in tracing experiential consequences of this theory of thinking as
there are in attempting directly to trace out other consequences of God's
reality. In so short an article, it could not be expected that I should take
notice of objections. Yet objections, such as they are, are obvious enough,
and a few of them wear at first sight a redoubtable aspect. For example, it
may be said that since I compare man's power of guessing at the truth
with the instincts of animals, I ought to have noticed that these are
entirely explained by the action of natural selection in endowing animals
with such powers as contribute to the preservation of their different stocks;
and that there is evidence that man's power of penetrating the secrets of
nature depends upon this, in the fact that all the successful sciences have
been either mechanical in respect to their theories or psychological. Now,
some notions of mechanics are needed by all animals to enable them to get
food, and are needed most by man; while correct ideas of what passes in
his neighbours' minds are needed for the existence of society, and
therefore for the propagation of his kind.n1 Metaphysics, however, cannot
adapt the human race to maintaining itself, and therefore the presumption
[is] that man has no such genius for discoveries about God, Freedom, and
Immortality, as he has for physical and psychical science.
n7. KNOWLEDGE OF GOD n2
492. [We] can know nothing except what we directly experience. So all that
we can anyway know relates to experience. All the creations of our mind
are but patchworks from experience. So that all our ideas are but ideas of
real or transposed experiences. A word can mean nothing except the idea
it calls up. So that we cannot even talk about anything but a knowable
object. The unknowable about which Hamilton and the agnostics talk can
be nothing but an Unknowable Knowable. The absolutely unknowable is a
non-existent existence.n3 The Unknowable is a nominalistic heresy. The
nominalists in giving their adherence to that doctrine which is really held

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by all philosophers of all stripes, namely, that experience is all we know,
understand experience in their nominalistic sense as the mere first
impressions of sense. These "first impressions of sense" are hypothetical
creations of nominalistic metaphysics: I for one deny their existence. But
anyway even if they exist, it is not in them that experience consists. By
experience must be understood the entire mental product. Some
psychologists whom I hold in respect will stop me here to say that, while
they admit that experience is more than mere sensation, they cannot
extend it to the whole mental product, since that would include
hallucinations, delusions, superstitious imaginations and fallacies of all
kinds; and that they would limit experience to sense-perceptions. But I
reply that my statement is the logical one. Hallucinations, delusions,
superstitious imaginations, and fallacies of all kinds are experiences, but
experiences misunderstood; while to say that all our knowledge relates
merely to sense perception is to say that we can know nothing -- not even
mistakenly -- about higher matters, as honor, aspirations, and love.
493. Where would such an idea, say as that of God, come from, if
not from direct experience? Would you make it a result of some kind of
reasoning, good or bad? Why, reasoning can supply the mind with nothing
in the world except an estimate of the value of a statistical ratio, that is,
how often certain kinds of things are found in certain combinations in the
ordinary course of experience. And scepticism, in the sense of doubt of the
validity of elementary ideas -- which is really a proposal to turn an idea
out of court and permit no inquiry into its applicability -- is doubly
condemned by the fundamental principle of scientific method --
condemned first as obstructing inquiry, and condemned second because it
is treating some other than a statistical ratio as a thing to be argued about.
No: as to God, open your eyes -- and your heart, which is also a perceptive
organ -- and you see him. But you may ask, Don't you admit there are any
delusions? Yes: I may think a thing is black, and on close examination it
may turn out to be bottle-green. But I cannot think a thing is black if there
is no such thing to be seen as black. Neither can I think that a certain
action is self-sacrificing, if no such thing as self-sacrifice exists, although
it may be very rare. It is the nominalists, and the nominalists alone, who
indulge in such scepticism, which the scientific method utterly condemns.
NOTES:
n1 Hibbert Journal, vol. 7, pp. 90-112 (1908).
n2 See his Thought and Things, p. 261, London (1906).
n1 Cf. 4.545ff.
n2 Cf. 2.266ff, 3.160.

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 69
n1 "It appears to me that this mystery is considered insoluble for the
very reason which should cause it to be regarded as easy of solution. I
mean the outr? character of its features."
n1 Cf. 1.333.
n1 See 177ff.
n2 See 5.397ff.
n1 Cf. 2.622ff.
n1 Or Abduction. See 2.708ff, 2.755 and vol. 5, bk. I, ch. 7.
n1 Cf. 2.267.
n2 Cf. 2.756ff.
n1 Cf. 2.758f.
n2 Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, A154-158; B193-197.
n3 See 2.93.
n1 Jacques Babinet (1794-1872), a popular writer on
hydrodynamics and many other scientific subjects.
n1 See "Dialogues Concerning the Two Great Systems of the World,"
in Mathematical Collections and Translations of Thomas Salisbury, vol. 1,
p. 301, London (1661).
n1 In a letter to William James, November 17, 1908, Peirce says, "I
had never contemplated the possibility of the last section's being
published."
n1 Cf. 3.457, 5.388ff.
n2 See 5.12f.
n1 See note to vol. 5, bk. II, Paper No. IV.
n2 See The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
(1897).
n3 See "What Pragmatism is Like," Popular Science Monthly, vol. 71,
p. 351 (1907).
n4 See 5.414.
n5 See 5.1f.
n6 See 1.106n, 5.13n.
n7 See 486.
n1 See 5.375.
n2 See 5.365ff.
n3 See 5.552, 5.555f.
n1 F. C. S. Schiller, Humanism, p. 314, note, London (1903);
Studies in Humanism, p. 295, London (1907).
n2 William James, Pragmatism, p. 59ff, New York (1908).
n3 William James, The Will to Believe, p. 11, New York (1899).
n4 c. 1910; 491 is from an alternative draft.
n1 See 482 and p. v of the Preface to vol. 5.

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n2 "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," The University
of California Chronicle, pp. 24ff (1898); reprinted in Collected Essays and
Reviews, pp. 406-437 (1920).
n3 "What Pragmatism is Like," Popular Science Monthly, p. 351, vol.
71 (1907).
n4 See 5.414.
n1 See 418.
n2 From an unpaginated fragment, c. 1896.
n3 See 5.255f.

From The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-told Tales, 1850, 1852
By Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864
________________________________________
Ethan Brand
A Chapter from an Abortive Romance
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BARTRAM the lime-burner, a rough, heavy-looking man, begrimed with
charcoal, sat watching his kiln, at nightfall, while his little son played at
building houses with the scattered fragments of marble, when, on the hillside
below them, they heard a roar of laughter, not mirthful, but slow, and
even solemn, like a wind shaking the boughs of the forest.
"Father, what is that?" asked the little boy, leaving his play, and
pressing betwixt his father's knees.
"O, some drunken man, I suppose," answered the lime-burner; "some
merry fellow from the bar-room in the village, who dared not laugh loud
enough within doors, lest he should blow the roof of the house off. So here
he is, shaking his jolly sides at the foot of Gray-lock."
"But, father," said the child, more sensitive than the obtuse, middleaged
clown, "he does not laugh like a man that is glad. So the noise
frightens me!"
"Don't be a fool, child!" cried his father, gruffly. "You will never make a
man, I do believe; there is too much of your mother in you. I have known
the rustling of a leaf startle you. Hark! Here comes the merry fellow, now.
You shall see that there is no harm in him."
Bartram and his little son, while they were talking thus, sat watching
the same lime-kiln that had been the scene of Ethan Brand's solitary and
meditative life, before he began his search for the Unpardonable Sin. Many
years, as we have seen, had now elapsed, since that portentous night
when the IDEA was first developed. The kiln, however, on the mountainside,
stood unimpaired, and was in nothing changed since he had thrown
his dark thoughts into the intense glow of its furnace, and melted them, as
it were, into the one thought that took possession of his life. It was a rude,
round, tower-like structure, about twenty feet high, heavily built of rough
stones, and with a hillock of earth heaped about the larger part of its
circumference; so that the blocks and fragments of marble might be drawn
by cart-loads, and thrown in at the top. There was an opening at the
bottom of the tower, like an oven-mouth, but large enough to admit a man
in a stooping posture, and provided with a massive iron door. With the
smoke and jets of flame issuing from the chinks and crevices of this door,
which seemed to give admittance into the hill-side, it resembled nothing so
much as the private entrance to the infernal regions, which the shepherds
of the Delectable Mountains were accustomed to show to pilgrims.
There are many such lime-kilns in that tract of country, for the purpose
of burning the white marble which composes a large part of the substance
of the hills. Some of them, built years ago, and long deserted, with weeds
growing in the vacant round of the interior, which is open to the sky, and
grass and wild-flowers rooting themselves into the chinks of the stones,

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look already like relics of antiquity, and may yet be overspread with the
lichens of centuries to come. Others, where the lime-burner still feeds his
daily and nightlong fire, afford points of interest to the wanderer among
the hills, who seats himself on a log of wood or a fragment of marble, to
hold a chat with the solitary man. It is a lonesome, and, when the
character is inclined to thought, may be an intensely thoughtful
occupation; as it proved in the case of Ethan Brand, who had mused to
such strange purpose, in days gone by, while the fire in this very kiln was
burning.
The man who now watched the fire was of a different order, and
troubled himself with no thoughts save the very few that were requisite to
his business. At frequent intervals, he flung back the clashing weight of
the iron door, and, turning his face from the insufferable glare, thrust in
huge logs of oak, or stirred the immense brands with a long pole. Within
the furnace were seen the curling and riotous flames, and the burning
marble, almost molten with the intensity of heat; while without, the
reflection of the fire quivered on the dark intricacy of the surrounding
forest, and showed in the foreground a bright and ruddy little picture of
the hut, the spring beside its door, the athletic and coal-begrimed figure of
the lime-burner, and the half-frightened child, shrinking into the
protection of his father's shadow. And when again the iron door was closed,
then reappeared the tender light of the half-full moon, which vainly strove
to trace out the indistinct shapes of the neighboring mountains; and, in
the upper sky, there was a flitting congregation of clouds, still faintly
tinged with the rosy sunset, though thus far down into the valley the
sunshine had vanished long and long ago.
The little boy now crept still closer to his father, as footsteps were heard
ascending the hill-side, and a human form thrust aside the bushes that
clustered beneath the trees.
"Halloo! who is it?" cried the lime-burner, vexed at his son's timidity,
yet half infected by it. "Come forward, and show yourself, like a man, or I'll
fling this chunk of marble at your head!"
"You offer me a rough welcome," said a gloomy voice, as the unknown
man drew nigh. "Yet I neither claim nor desire a kinder one, even at my
own fireside."
To obtain a distincter view, Bartram threw open the iron door of the
kiln, whence immediately issued a gush of fierce light, that smote full
upon the stranger's face and figure. To a careless eye there appeared
nothing very remarkable in his aspect, which was that of a man in a
coarse, brown, country-made suit of clothes, tall and thin, with the staff
and heavy shoes of a wayfarer. As he advanced, he fixed his eyes--which
were very bright--intently upon the brightness of the furnace, as if he
beheld, or expected to behold, some object worthy of note within it.
"Good evening, stranger," said the lime-burner; "whence come you, so
late in the day?"
"I come from my search," answered the wayfarer; "for, at last, it is
finished."

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 73
"Drunk!--or crazy!" muttered Bartram to himself. "I shall have trouble
with the fellow. The sooner I drive him away, the better."
The little boy, all in a tremble, whispered to his father, and begged him
to shut the door of the kiln, so that there might not be so much light; for
that there was something in the man's face which he was afraid to look at,
yet could not look away from. And, indeed, even the lime-burner's dull and
torpid sense began to be impressed by an indescribable something in that
thin, rugged, thoughtful visage, with the grizzled hair hanging wildly about
it, and those deeply-sunken eyes, which gleamed like fires within the
entrance of a mysterious cavern. But, as he closed the door, the stranger
turned towards him, and spoke in a quiet, familiar way, that made
Bartram feel as if he were a sane and sensible man, after all.
"Your task draws to an end, I see," said he. "This marble has already
been burning three days. A few hours more will convert the stone to lime."
"Why, who are you?" exclaimed the lime-burner. "You seem as well
acquainted with my business as I am myself."
"And well I may be," said the stranger; "for I followed the same craft
many a long year, and here, too, on this very spot. But you are a
newcomer in these parts. Did you never hear of Ethan Brand?"
"The man that went in search of the Unpardonable Sin?" asked
Bartram, with a laugh.
"The same," answered the stranger. "He has found what he sought, and
therefore he comes back again."
"What! then you are Ethan Brand himself?" cried the lime-burner, in
amazement. "I am a newcomer here, as you say, and they call it eighteen
years since you left the foot of Gray-lock. But, I can tell you, the good folks
still talk about Ethan Brand, in the village yonder, and what a strange
errand took him away from his lime-kiln. Well, and so you have found the
Unpardonable Sin?"
"Even so!" said the stranger, calmly.
"If the question is a fair one," proceeded Bartram, "where might it be?"
Ethan Brand laid his finger on his own heart.
"Here!" replied he.
And then, without mirth in his countenance, but as if moved by an
involuntary recognition of the infinite absurdity of seeking throughout the
world for what was the closest of all things to himself, and looking into
every heart, save his own, for what was hidden in no other breast, he
broke into a laugh of scorn. It was the same slow, heavy laugh, that had
almost appalled the lime-burner when it heralded the wayfarer's approach.
The solitary mountain-side was made dismal by it. Laughter, when out
of place, mistimed, or bursting forth from a disordered state of feeling, may
be the most terrible modulation of the human voice. The laughter of one
asleep, even if it be a little child--the madman's laugh--the wild, screaming
laugh of a born idiot--are sounds that we sometimes tremble to hear, and
would always willingly forget. Poets have imagined no utterance of fiends
or hobgoblins so fearfully appropriate as a laugh. And even the obtuse
lime-burner felt his nerves shaken, as this strange man looked inward at

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his own heart, and burst into laughter that rolled away into the night, and
was indistinctly reverberated among the hills.
"Joe," said he to his little son, "scamper down to the tavern in the
village, and tell the jolly fellows there that Ethan Brand has come back,
and that he has found the Unpardonable Sin!"
The boy darted away on his errand, to which Ethan Brand made no
objection, nor seemed hardly to notice it. He sat on a log of wood, looking
steadfastly at the iron door of the kiln. When the child was out of sight,
and his swift and light footsteps ceased to be heard treading first on the
fallen leaves and then on the rocky mountain path, the lime-burner began
to regret his departure. He felt that the little fellow's presence had been a
barrier between his guest and himself, and that he must now deal, heart
to heart, with a man who, on his own confession, had committed the one
only crime for which Heaven could afford no mercy. That crime, in its
indistinct blackness, seemed to overshadow him. The lime-burner's own
sins rose up within him, and made his memory riotous with a throng of
evil shapes that asserted their kindred with the Master Sin, whatever it
might be, which it was within the scope of man's corrupted nature to
conceive and cherish. They were all of one family; they went to and fro
between his breast and Ethan Brand's, and carried dark greetings from
one to the other.
Then Bartram remembered the stories which had grown traditionary in
reference to this strange man, who had come upon him like a shadow of
the night, and was making himself at home in his old place, after so long
absence that the dead people, dead and buried for years, would have had
more right to be at home, in any familiar spot, than he. Ethan Brand, it
was said, had conversed with Satan himself in the lurid blaze of this very
kiln. The legend had been matter of mirth heretofore but looked grisly now.
According to this tale, before Ethan Brand departed on his search, he had
been accustomed to evoke a fiend from the hot furnace of the lime-kiln,
night after night, in order to confer with him about the Unpardonable Sin;
the man and the fiend each laboring to frame the image of some mode of
guilt which could neither be atoned for nor forgiven. And, with the first
gleam of light upon the mountain-top, the fiend crept in at the iron door,
there to abide the intensest element of fire, until again summoned forth to
share in the dreadful task of extending man's possible guilt beyond the
scope of Heaven's else infinite mercy.
While the lime-burner was struggling with the horror of these thoughts,
Ethan Brand rose from the log, and flung open the door of the kiln. The
action was in such accordance with the idea in Bartram's mind, that he
almost expected to see the Evil One issue forth, red-hot from the raging
furnace.
"Hold! hold!" cried he, with a tremulous attempt to laugh; for he was
ashamed of his fears, although they overmastered him. "Don't, for mercy's
sake, bring out your devil now!"
"Man!" sternly replied Ethan Brand, "what need have I of the devil? I
have left him behind me, on my track. It is with such halfway sinners as
you that he busies himself. Fear not because I open the door. I do but act

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 75
by old custom, and am going to trim your fire, like a lime-burner, as I was
once."
He stirred the vast coals, thrust in more wood, and bent forward to gaze
into the hollow prison-house of the fire, regardless of the fierce glow that
reddened upon his face. The lime-burner sat watching him, and half
suspected his strange guest of a purpose, if not to evoke a fiend, at least to
plunge bodily into the flames, and thus vanish from the sight of man.
Ethan Brand, however, drew quietly back, and closed the door of the kiln.
"I have looked, said he, "into many a human heart that was seven times
hotter with sinful passions than yonder furnace is with fire. But I found
not there what I sought. No, not the Unpardonable Sin!"
"What is the Unpardonable Sin?" asked the lime-burner; and then he
shrank further from his companion, trembling lest his question should be
answered.
"It is a sin that grew within my own breast," replied Ethan Brand,
standing erect, with a pride that distinguishes all enthusiasts of his stamp.
"A sin that grew nowhere else! The sin of an intellect that triumphed over
the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed
everything to its own mighty claims! The only sin that deserves a
recompense of immortal agony! Freely, were it to do again, would I incur
the guilt. Unshrinkingly I accept the retribution!"
"The man's head is turned," muttered the lime-burner to himself. "He
may be a sinner, like the rest of us--nothing more likely--but, I'll be sworn,
he is a madman too."
Nevertheless he felt uncomfortable at his situation, alone with Ethan
Brand on the wild mountain-side, and was right glad to hear the rough
murmur of tongues, and the footsteps of what seemed a pretty numerous
party, stumbling over the stones and rustling through the underbrush.
Soon appeared the whole lazy regiment that was wont to infest the village
tavern comprehending three or four individuals who had drunk flip beside
the bar-room fire through all the winters, and smoked their pipes beneath
the stoop through all the summers, since Ethan Brand's departure.
Laughing boisterously, and mingling all their voices together in
unceremonious talk, they now burst into the moonshine and narrow
streaks of fire-light that illuminated the open space before the lime-kiln.
Bartram set the door ajar again, flooding the spot with light, that the
whole company might get a fair view of Ethan Brand, and he of them.
There, among other old acquaintances, was a once ubiquitous man,
now almost extinct, but whom we were formerly sure to encounter at the
hotel of every thriving village throughout the country. It was the stageagent.
The present specimen of the genus was a wilted and smoke-dried
man, wrinkled and red-nosed, in a smartly cut, brown, bob-tailed coat,
with brass buttons, who, for a length of time unknown, had kept his desk
and corner in the bar-room, and was still puffing what seemed to be the
same cigar that he had lighted twenty years before. He had great fame as a
dry joker, though, perhaps, less on account of any intrinsic humor than
from a certain flavor of brandy-toddy and tobacco-smoke, which
impregnated all his ideas and expressions, as well as his person. Another

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 76
well-remembered though strangely altered face was that of Lawyer Giles,
as people still called him in courtesy; an elderly ragamuffin, in his soiled
shirt-sleeves and tow-cloth trousers. This poor fellow had been an attorney,
in what he called his better days, a sharp practitioner, and in great vogue
among the village litigants; but flip, and sling, and toddy, and cocktails,
imbibed at all hours, morning, noon, and night, had caused him to slide
from intellectual to various kinds and degrees of bodily labor, till, at last,
to adopt his own phrase, he slid into a soap-vat. In other words, Giles was
now a soap-boiler, in a small way. He had come to be but the fragment of a
human being, a part of one foot having been chopped off by an axe, and an
entire hand torn away by the devilish grip of a steam-engine. Yet, though
the corporeal hand was gone, a spiritual member remained; for, stretching
forth the stump, Giles steadfastly averred that he felt an invisible thumb
and fingers with as vivid a sensation as before the real ones were
amputated. A maimed and miserable wretch he was; but one, nevertheless,
whom the world could not trample on, and had no right to scorn, either in
this or any previous stage of his misfortunes, since he had still kept up the
courage and spirit of a man, asked nothing in charity, and with his one
hand--and that the left one--fought a stern battle against want and hostile
circumstances.
Among the throng, too, came another personage, who, with certain
points of similarity to Lawyer Giles, had many more of difference. It was
the village doctor; a man of some fifty years, whom, at an earlier period of
his life, we introduced as paying a professional visit to Ethan Brand
during the latter's supposed insanity. He was now a purple-visaged, rude,
and brutal, yet half-gentlemanly figure, with something wild, ruined, and
desperate in his talk, and in all the details of his gesture and manners.
Brandy possessed this man like an evil spirit, and made him as surly and
savage as a wild beast, and as miserable as a lost soul; but there was
supposed to be in him such wonderful skill, such native gifts of healing,
beyond any which medical science could impart, that society caught hold
of him, and would not let him sink out of its reach. So, swaying to and fro
upon his horse, and grumbling thick accents at the bedside, he visited all
the sick chambers for miles about among the mountain towns, and
sometimes raised a dying man, as it were, by miracle, or quite as often, no
doubt, sent his patient to a grave that was dug many a year too soon. The
doctor had an everlasting pipe in his mouth, and, as somebody said, in
allusion to his habit of swearing, it was always alight with hell-fire.
These three worthies pressed forward, and greeted Ethan Brand each
after his own fashion, earnestly inviting him to partake of the contents of a
certain black bottle, in which, as they averred, he would find something
far better worth seeking for than the Unpardonable Sin. No mind, which
has wrought itself by intense and solitary meditation into a high state of
enthusiasm, can endure the kind of contact with low and vulgar modes of
thought and feeling to which Ethan Brand was now subjected. It made
him doubt--and, strange to say, it was a painful doubt--whether he had
indeed found the Unpardonable Sin, and found it within himself. The

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whole question on which he had exhausted life, and more than life, looked
like a delusion.
"Leave me," he said, bitterly, "ye brute beasts, that have made
yourselves so, shrivelling up your souls with fiery liquors! I have done with
you. Years and years ago, I groped into your hearts, and found nothing
there for my purpose. Get ye gone!"
"Why, you uncivil scoundrel," cried the fierce doctor, "is that the way
you respond to the kindness of your best friends? Then let me tell you the
truth. You have no more found the Unpardonable Sin than yonder boy Joe
has. You are but a crazy fellow--I told you so twenty years ago--neither
better nor worse than a crazy fellow, and the fit companion of old
Humphrey, here!"
He pointed to an old man, shabbily dressed, with long white hair, thin
visage, and unsteady eyes. For some years past this aged person had been
wandering about among the hills, inquiring of all travellers whom he met
for his daughter. The girl, it seemed, had gone off with a company of
circus-performers; and occasionally tidings of her came to the village, and
fine stories were told of her glittering appearance as she rode on horseback
in the ring, or performed marvellous feats on the tight-rope.
The white-haired father now approached Ethan Brand, and gazed
unsteadily into his face.
"They tell me you have been all over the earth," said he, wringing his
hands with earnestness. "You must have seen my daughter, for she makes
a grand figure in the world, and everybody goes to see her. Did she send
any word to her old father, or say when she was coming back?"
Ethan Brand's eye quailed beneath the old man's. That daughter, from
whom he so earnestly desired a word of greeting, was the Esther of our
tale, the very girl whom, with such cold and remorseless purpose, Ethan
Brand had made the subject of a psychological experiment, and wasted,
absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process.
"Yes," murmured he, turning away from the hoary wanderer; "it is no
delusion. There is an Unpardonable Sin!"
While these things were passing, a merry scene was going forward in
the area of cheerful light, beside the spring and before the door of the hut.
A number of the youth of the village, young men and girls, had hurried up
the hill-side, impelled by curiosity to see Ethan Brand, the hero of so
many a legend familiar to their childhood. Finding nothing, however, very
remarkable in his aspect--nothing but a sun-burnt wayfarer, in plain garb
and dusty shoes, who sat looking into the fire, as if he fancied pictures
among the coals--these young people speedily grew tired of observing him.
As it happened, there was other amusement at hand. An old German Jew,
travelling with a diorama on his back, was passing down the mountainroad
towards the village just as the party turned aside from it, and, in
hopes of eking out the profits of the day, the showman had kept them
company to the lime-kiln.
"Come, old Dutchman," cried one of the young men, "let us see your
pictures, if you can swear they are worth looking at!"

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 78
"O, yes, Captain," answered the Jew--whether as a matter of courtesy
or craft, he styled everybody Captain--"I shall show you, indeed, some very
superb pictures!"
So, placing his box in a proper position, he invited the young men and
girls to look through the glass orifices of the machine, and proceeded to
exhibit a series of the most outrageous scratchings and daubings, as
specimens of the fine arts, that ever an itinerant showman had the face to
impose upon his circle of spectators. The pictures were worn out,
moreover, tattered, full of cracks and wrinkles, dingy with tobacco-smoke,
and otherwise in a most pitiable condition. Some purported to be cities,
public edifices, and ruined castles in Europe; others represented
Napoleon's battles and Nelson's sea-fights; and in the midst of these would
be seen a gigantic, brown, hairy hand--which might have been mistaken
for the Hand of Destiny, though, in truth, it was only the showman's-pointing
its forefinger to various scenes of the conflict, while its owner gave
historical illustrations. When, with much merriment at its abominable
deficiency of merit, the exhibition was concluded, the German bade little
Joe put his head into the box. Viewed through the magnifying glasses, the
boy's round, rosy visage assumed the strangest imaginable aspect of an
immense Titanic child, the mouth grinning broadly, and the eyes and
every other feature overflowing with fun at the joke. Suddenly, however,
that merry face turned pale, and its expression changed to horror, for this
easily impressed and excitable child had become sensible that the eye of
Ethan Brand was fixed upon him through the glass.
"You make the little man to be afraid, Captain," said the German Jew,
turning up the dark and strong outline of his visage, from his stooping
posture. "But look again, and, by chance, I shall cause you to see
somewhat that is very fine, upon my word!"
Ethan Brand gazed into the box for an instant, and then starting back,
looked fixedly at the German. What had he seen? Nothing, apparently; for
a curious youth, who had peeped in almost at the same moment, beheld
only a vacant space of canvas.
"I remember you now," muttered Ethan Brand to the showman.
"Ah, Captain," whispered the Jew of Nuremberg, with a dark smile, "I
find it to be a heavy matter in my show-box--this Unpardonable Sin! By
my faith, Captain, it has wearied my shoulders, this long day, to carry it
over the mountain."
"Peace," answered Ethan Brand, sternly, "or get thee into the furnace
yonder!"
The Jew's exhibition had scarcely concluded, when a great, elderly dog-
-who seemed to be his own master, as no person in the company laid
claim to him--saw fit to render himself the object of public notice. Hitherto,
he had shown himself a very quiet, well disposed old dog, going round
from one to another, and, by way of being sociable, offering his rough head
to be patted by any kindly hand that would take so much trouble. But now,
all of a sudden, this grave and venerable quadruped, of his own mere
motion, and without the slightest suggestion from anybody else, began to
run round after his tail, which, to heighten the absurdity of the proceeding,

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 79
was a great deal shorter than it should have been. Never was seen such
headlong eagerness in pursuit of an object that could not possibly be
attained; never was heard such a tremendous outbreak of growling,
snarling, barking, and snapping--as if one end of the ridiculous brute's
body were at deadly and most unforgivable enmity with the other. Faster
and faster, round about went the cur; and faster and still faster fled the
unapproachable brevity of his tail; and louder and fiercer grew his yells of
rage and animosity; until, utterly exhausted, and as far from the goal as
ever, the foolish old dog ceased his performance as suddenly as he had
begun it. The next moment he was as mild, quiet, sensible, and
respectable in his deportment, as when he first scraped acquaintance with
the company.
As may be supposed, the exhibition was greeted with universal laughter,
clapping of hands, and shouts of encore, to which the canine performer
responded by wagging all that there was to wag of his tail, but appeared
totally unable to repeat his very successful effort to amuse the spectators.
Meanwhile, Ethan Brand had resumed his seat upon the log, and
moved, it might be, by a perception of some remote analogy between his
own case and that of this self-pursuing cur, he broke into the awful laugh,
which, more than any other token, expressed the condition of his inward
being. From that moment, the merriment of the party was at an end; they
stood aghast, dreading lest the inauspicious sound should be reverberated
around the horizon, and that mountain would thunder it to mountain, and
so the horror be prolonged upon their ears. Then, whispering one to
another that it was late--that the moon was almost down--that the August
night was growing chill--they hurried homewards leaving the lime-burner
and little Joe to deal as they might with their unwelcome guest. Save for
these three human beings, the open space on the hill-side was a solitude,
set in a vast gloom of forest. Beyond that darksome verge, the fire-light
glimmered on the stately trunks and almost black foliage of pines,
intermixed with the lighter verdure of sapling oaks, maples, and poplars,
while here and there lay the gigantic corpses of dead trees, decaying on the
leaf-strewn soil. And it seemed to little Joe--a timorous and imaginative
child--that the silent forest was holding its breath, until some fearful thing
should happen.
Ethan Brand thrust more wood into the fire, and closed the door of the
kiln; then looking over his shoulder at the lime-burner and his son, he
bade, rather than advised, them to retire to rest.
"For myself, I cannot sleep," said he. "I have matters that it concerns
me to meditate upon. I will watch the fire, as I used to do in the old time."
"And call the devil out of the furnace to keep you company, I suppose,"
muttered Bartram, who had been making intimate acquaintance with the
black bottle above-mentioned. "But watch, if you like, and call as many
devils as you like! For my part, I shall be all the better for a snooze. Come,
Joe!"
As the boy followed his father into the hut, he looked back at the
wayfarer, and the tears came into his eyes, for his tender spirit had an

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intuition of the bleak and terrible loneliness in which this man had
enveloped himself.
When they had gone, Ethan Brand sat listening to the crackling of the
kindled wood, and looking at the little spirts of fire that issued through the
chinks of the door. These trifles, however, once so familiar, had but the
slightest hold of his attention, while deep within his mind he was
reviewing the gradual but marvellous change that had been wrought upon
him by the search to which he had devoted himself. He remembered how
the night dew had fallen upon him--how the dark forest had whispered to
him--how the stars had gleamed upon him--a simple and loving man,
watching his fire in the years gone by, and ever musing as it burned. He
remembered with what tenderness, with what love and sympathy for
mankind, and what pity for human guilt and woe, he had first begun to
contemplate those ideas which afterwards became the inspiration of his
life; with what reverence he had then looked into the heart of man, viewing
it as a temple originally divine, and, however desecrated, still to be held
sacred by a brother; with what awful fear he had deprecated the success of
his pursuit, and prayed that the Unpardonable Sin might never be
revealed to him. Then ensued that vast intellectual development, which, in
its progress, disturbed the counterpoise between his mind and heart. The
Idea that possessed his life had operated as a means of education; it had
gone on cultivating his powers to the highest point of which they were
susceptible; it had raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer to
stand on a star-lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth, laden
with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber after him. So
much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That, indeed, had
withered--had contracted--had hardened--had perished! It had ceased to
partake of the universal throb. He had lost his hold of the magnetic chain
of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or
the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, which
gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now a cold observer,
looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at length,
converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the wires that
moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded for his study.
Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment
that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with
his intellect. And now, as his highest effort and inevitable development--as
the bright and gorgeous flower, and rich, delicious fruit of his life's labor-he
had produced the Unpardonable Sin!
What more have I to seek? What more to achieve?" said Ethan Brand to
himself. "My task is done, and well done!"
Starting from the log with a certain alacrity in his gait, and ascending
the hillock of earth that was raised against the stone circumference of the
lime-kiln, he thus reached the top of the structure. It was a space of
perhaps ten feet across, from edge to edge, presenting a view of the upper
surface of the immense mass of broken marble with which the kiln was
heaped. All these innumerable blocks and fragments of marble were redhot
and vividly on fire, sending up great spouts of blue flame, which

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 81
quivered aloft and danced madly, as within a magic circle, and sank and
rose again, with continual and multitudinous activity. As the lonely man
bent forward over this terrible body of fire, the blasting heat smote up
against his person with a breath that, it might be scorched and shrivelled
him up in a moment.
Ethan Brand stood erect, and raised his arms on high. The blue flames
played upon his face, and imparted the wild and ghastly light which alone
could have suited its expression; it was that of a fiend on the verge of
plunging into his gulf of intensest torment.
"O Mother Earth," cried he, "who art no more my Mother, and into
whose bosom this frame shall never be resolved! O mankind, whose
brotherhood I have cast off, and trampled thy great heart beneath my feet!
O stars of heaven, that shone on me of old, as if to light me onward and
upward!--farewell all, and forever. Come, deadly element of Fire-henceforth
my familiar friend! Embrace me, as I do thee!"
That night the sound of a fearful peal of laughter rolled heavily through
the sleep of the lime-burner and his little son; dim shapes of horror and
anguish haunted their dreams, and seemed still present in the rude hovel,
when they opened their eyes to the daylight.
"Up, boy, up!" cried the lime-burner, staring about him. "Thank Heaven,
the night is gone, at last; and rather than pass such another, I would
watch my lime-kiln, wide awake, for a twelvemonth. This Ethan Brand,
with his humbug of an Unpardonable Sin, has done me no such mighty
favor, in taking my place!"
He issued from the hut, followed by little Joe, who kept fast hold of his
father's hand. The early sunshine was already pouring its gold upon the
mountain-tops; and though the valleys were still in shadow, they smiled
cheerfully in the promise of the bright day that was hastening onward. The
village, completely shut in by hills, which swelled away gently about it,
looked as if it had rested peacefully in the hollow of the great hand of
Providence. Every dwelling was distinctly visible; the little spires of the two
churches pointed upwards, and caught a fore-glimmering of brightness
from the sun-gilt skies upon their gilded weather-cocks. The tavern was
astir, and the figure of the old, smoke-dried stage-agent, cigar in mouth,
was seen beneath the stoop. Old Graylock was glorified with a golden
cloud upon his head. Scattered likewise over the breasts of the
surrounding mountains, there were heaps of hoary mist, in fantastic
shapes, some of them far down into the valley, others high up towards the
summits and still others, of the same family of mist or cloud, hovering in
the gold radiance of the upper atmosphere. Stepping from one to another
of the clouds that rested on the hills, and thence to the loftier brotherhood
that sailed in air, it seemed almost as if a mortal man might thus ascend
into the heavenly regions. Earth was so mingled with sky that it was a
day-dream to look at it.
To supply that charm of the familiar and homely, which Nature so
readily adopts into a scene like this, the stage-coach was rattling down the
mountain-road, and the driver sounded his horn, while echo caught up
the notes, and intertwined them into a rich and varied and elaborate

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 82
harmony, of which the original performer could lay claim to little share.
The great hills played a concert among themselves, each contributing a
strain of airy sweetness.
Little Joe's face brightened at once.
"Dear father," cried he, skipping cheerily to and fro, "that strange man
is gone, and the sky and the mountains all seem glad of it!"
"Yes," growled the lime-burner, with an oath, "but he has let the fire go
down, and no thanks to him if five hundred bushels of lime are not spoiled.
If I catch the fellow hereabouts again, I shall feel like tossing him into the
furnace!"
With his long pole in his hand, he ascended to the top of the kiln. After
a moment's pause, he called to his son.
"Come up here, Joe!" said he.
So little Joe ran up the hillock, and stood by his father's side. The
marble was all burnt into perfect, snow-white lime. But on its surface, in
the midst of the circle--snow-white too, and thoroughly converted into
lime--lay a human skeleton, in the attitude of a person who, after long toil,
lies down to long repose. Within the ribs--strange to say--was the shape of
a human heart.
"Was the fellow's heart made of marble?" cried Bartram, in some
perplexity at this phenomenon. "At any rate, it is burnt into what looks
like special good lime; and, taking all the bones together, my kiln is half a
bushel the richer for him."
So saying, the rude lime-burner lifted his pole, and, letting it fall upon
the skeleton, the relics of Ethan Brand were crumbled into fragments.

Zakaria Tamer (1931-)
CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 83
From Breaking Knees: Modern Arabic Short Stories from Syria, trans.
by Ibrahim Muhawi (London: Garnet Publishing, 2008)
-19- (Huda & the Hanged Man—untitled in the original)
Huda took care to wake up early and step quicly out of the house,
leaving her husband sleeping the sleep of the dead. She walked through
streets that were nearly empty, heading for a famous bakery. She bought
fresh, hot bread, which her husband liked more than meat or fruit and
would be very pleased to have for breakfast. Suddenly people started
running as fast as they could in the direction of the main square.
Curiosity got the better of Huda, and she followed without thinking. Once
there, she saw a gallows already in place, soldiers carrying guns, a man
about to be hanged, and a sun about to rise. The noose was already
around the condemned man’s neck, and he cast a glance upon the
spectators milling around the scaffold. He heard only the sounds they
made but saw no one except Huda, the woman with dark hair and fair
hands and face, staring at him with eyes as wide open as they could be.
She noticed that he had seen her, and she smiled like a child on whom
snow had fallen for the first time.
When the condemned man became aware that what he was standing
on was about to slip away from under his feet, he gave Huda a look that
appealed for help. She was amazed, for she had never thought that one
day a thin young man with a gentle face and gentle eyes would seek her
hep. For a few fleeing moments she felt he was her younger brother
hanging on to the edge of her dress asking for protection but she did not
know what to do. The hubbub and the crowd around the gallows grew
more dense, especially when the young man dangled, a lifeless corpse with
a blue face. Huda felt that she was about to suffocate and walked quickly
away, leaving the people behind and heading home before the bread got
cold. She came into the bedroom ad found her husband awake. “Now
that you’re awake,” she said, “I’ll make your breakfast.”
“The world won’t go to pieces,” he said as he reached for her, “if
breakfast is delayed.”
He started pulling at her clothes. She was disgusted and felt like
moving away from his hands, but she did not stir. She smiled, pretending
she could not wait for what was coming next, and her hands began to help
his. She was stunned by what she was doing and became angry at herself
for being so weak. She longed to cry out at the top of her voice, but she
jumped into the bed with a cheerful motion and slipped under the quilt as
she said, “A little while ago, I saw a man being hanged.”

CL 250 / ENGL 242 / 84
“Many are hanged every day,” he said, laughing, “without rope or
spectators.”
She said nothing. “What did he do to deserve hanging?” he asked.
“Disobey the traffic laws?”
“I heard the policemen and other people say he killed an entire
family because one of them had killed his brother,” Huda answered. “He
killed the men and the women, and the boys and the girls. He even killed
their cat, and felt sorry for no one except the cat.”
“This is the state of the world,” he said as he embraced her. “He
who kills only ten people is a criminal to be hanged. But he who kills
hundreds of thousands is a hero among heroes.”
In that silent room with the door bolted and the curtains drawn
Huda saw with half-closed eyes a man moving on top of a woman who had
around her neck a rope that forced her to gasp for breath, and he was
ready to choke her every time she tried to break free of him.
The man gave the woman a long, hard look, like a merchant who
had bought a cow and wanted to make sure he had not been cheated. She
felt embarrassed and closed her eyes and wanted to turn into lifeless flesh,
but her body paid no head and set to doing all that pleased it and made
her angry. She heard her husband say jokingly that after all this effort
she would certainly give birth in nine months. She was about to say
something disapproving, as she might to one who would never one day
father any child she would bring into the world, but she chose to say
nothing. She imagined that she had gone back to the gallows at night and
cut the noose surrounding the neck of the hanged man, and that he had
felt his neck with his fingers and with a distracted look had thanked her in
a halting voice and promised he would never kill another cat. At that
moment her husband stretched and yawned and asked about breakfast.
She wanted to tell him to hurry out to the nearest restaurant, but she
quickly put on some clothes and rushed into the kitchen.