A Soul's Progress.

(P. W. Robertson. London; Arnold; 1920.)

The five chapters of "A Soul's Progress" are symbolical representations, in the form of impersonal narrative, of successive phases, or experiences, of the spirit. Taking their colour from diverse ages and civilisations, differing widely in context and character, they are bound together by the thread of a characterstic intellectual and moral attitude, easier to feel than to define: and of conscientiously artistic, workmanship. It is a book to be read leisurely, with body at ease and mind in harmony, attuned to thoughts of permanent import. For here is much thoughtful perplexity, indeed, and unsatisfied groping of the soul; but no hint of the turmoil of mind characteristic of our age, horror-struck at the recrudescence of atavistic savagery, and irked by the splitting vesture of established economic and political ideas. We can imagine the author, with an understanding smile just touched with gentle mockery, relegating such preoccupations to their rightful place, in the realm of Maya.

The first of the "stories." which Professor Robertson in his introduction seems inclined to disparage, will seem to many of his readers the most attractive of the five: partly, because it represents in his own experience the discovery of the quality of sheer joyousness in art—a discovery which, among the compensations for life, holds at any rate the second place; partly because his symbolisation of that experience is singularly happy in its dainty grace. There is at Parma a famous painting by Correggio, the "Virgin and St. Jerome"—a painting so transfused with light that the Italians (of his time) nicknamed it "The Day;" in it there is a figure, the Magdalen, that no man who has seen it is likely to forget, and also an angel showing a book to the infant Christ; a girl of fifteen or less (Professor Robertson can hardly be right in making her seventeen); such an eager, honest face, firm-willed, with lips broad-parted in a smile of keen intelligence; and about her he has woven a fanciful legend to which he gives a cunning air of reality, delighting in such ingenious mystification. A cameo Romola. After all, no two men would read such a face exactly alike, and to many the Magdalen would, for the time, shut out all other thoughts; an interpretation like Professor Robertson's is no more than a complete revelation of personality; the gracious, dignified serenely joyous figure of Monna Betulla, a charming creation in itself, suggests a mental poise of underlying serenity, the spirit of Leonardo as against that of Michael Angelo.

[A detail of the "Virgin and St. Jerome," showing the angel's head, is reproduced in this issue.]

"Duilius of Danzig." like Monna Betulla, rests on a supposititious document, but with less convincing effect. The character of the man, a sort of half-Italian Amiel, and the setting of the story, are less attractive. Professor Robertson, indeed, is singularly sensitive to the less obvious aspects of the beautiful, and makes us feel that the grey mists of the Vistula appeal to him at least as much as the page 40 mediæval quaintness of the city. But the shores of the Baltic during the Thirty Years' War, the company of a poetaster like Hoffmannswaldan, offer small attractions compared to Italy of the Renaissance. The chief interest of Duilius will lie in the Lingering care with which Professor Robertson has dwelt on the gropings of his own mind after canons of esthetic judgment.

Very different is the impression created by the next episode, the "Burmese Monk." If Duilius seems most closely to follow the author's thought development, the Burmese monk gives the strongest impression of being true in the literal sense—a compound, no doubt, of several real experiences. It symbolises that stage of the soul, so well known to all Eastern thought, where "the Path," "the Way," the mode of seeking, seems the one important thing, not yet merged in the realisation that seeking is finding. It would have been surprising if such pre-occupations had not led to an anxious investigation of the solution suggested by Christian doctrine and Christian emotional experience; and this he symbolises for us in "Lysippus the Osirian;" and for these few pages, he has plunged deep into Egyptian lore, with a thoroughness worthy of Anatole France or Pierre Louys. And hardly has he emerged from the atmosphere of first-century Alexandria, than he plunges into the newly-opened ocean of Chinese literature. Professor Robertson seems to "work off" a new emotion, artistic or intellectual, by casting it into a literary symbol, and though his soul has found an answer to the great quest, we may hope that he will experience many another need of such catharsis. And the fiction of a Chinese MS. enables him to introduce detached thoughts which we should be sorry indeed to have lost, such as

"The reality of the past is as thin as the heart of autumn, for if we touch it ever so lightly with the fingers of desire, it bursts like a bubble. The past is but a shimmering illusion like the present."

Unlike Mr. Burke, of "Limehouse" infamy, who gratuitously invents sayings of Lao Tzu, Professor Robertson's touch is infinitely gentle and discreet. One can enjoy the aroma of that exotic world of thought, so deftly caught, without claiming to know how deeply a cultured Chinaman would be impressed.

Of the personality that these symbolisations reveal, the most astonishing feature is the man of science, who is a metaphysician and a humanist; whose training has been abstract and inductive, and whose outlook is concrete and intuitional; who can speak of a scientific theory "hinting at the very secrets which are eventually to bring about its overthrow," like any neo-pragmatist. His style is the man, too. It is often suggestive of Pater, and of a predilection for the decadent; hut no one could say of him, as of Pater, that his style is like the face of an old woman enamelled. Through it all runs a fresh, healthy catholicity of feeling; it is skilled craftsman ship, without either the seventy attempts of Plato at a sentence, or Flaubert's "affres du style." Thundering cataracts of liquid gold there are none, but also very little "emblazoned fruit"—a discreet chiaroscuro, and a genuine power of evoking the suggestive aspects of nature. The best comment with which to close this appreciation is that "A Soul's Progress" is a book which it is an enhanced pleasure to re-read.

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