I

I looked at a stream running over rocks and wondered whether the water really moved; it may very well be that it was only the waves at the surface. I do not believe that anyone is sincere past a limit; ideals, demonstrations or symptoms of sickness. Rather, I cannot conceive otherwise, no deeply sincere affections, because that would force me to admire, to build a new mode of life. Our whole existence would be changed if it were possible "to advance one honest mind," one image to trust, one man sincere beyond our own restrictions.

II

No, comrade, do not read Hous-man. Yeats said: "It has sometimes seemed of late years as if the poet could at any moment write a poem by recording the fortuitous scene or thought perhaps it might be enough to put into some fashionable rhythm: I am sitting in a chair—there are three dead [unclear: flies] at the corner of the ceiling." It is true; in Dutch there is a poem: "Lonely I listen to Daven-try / on the tabletop watching a fly." It goes deeper: "I am a-weary, a-weary / I would that I were dead." Would this have been the moment for Atropia to intervene and end the promising young poet? Nothing but a more or less fortuitous mood, a whim, a pose. Houseman is the worst example; he had, amazingly many strings on his poetic bow, all easily struck, tremendously beautiful; feelings someone might have, forcefully expressed. He himself experienced them passingly, or rather, as abstract conceptions arbitrarily chosen and applied to his own personality. Satisfied to be hypocrites and not to be hypocrites since they admit so, Housman's readers, "half-baked intellectuals," know he was not fat because he drove fat oxen home, that the feelings he describes are imaginary, and consequently completely useless. They are not worried finding whether these emotions are real and sincere; not able to discern between engineers of their true and their imaginary soul. These are nice things to say; they are pleased with Housman.

III

There is a great emptiness since we cannot admire it really. We take this substitute for emotion, since we ourselves are too inept to experience any emotion, real or unreal—it is the same to us, if it is unreal it makes it [unclear: more] easy to follow.

(Les jambes en Pair comme une femme lubrique,
Brulante et suant des poisons
Ouvrait d'une facon nonchalante et cynique
Son ventre pleln d'exnalaisoas.)

We could not understand Baude laire's "Une Charogne"; perhaps his comparison to une femme Iubrique. But what does son ventre plein d'ex-halaisons mean? We can admire female abdomens in "Pix," "Life," "Illustrated," wherever we wish, and of New York ballet girls too—we really cannot comprehend what cruel mystery there could be in this woman suddenly showing her belly. This cruelty is no Victorian conception, a surrender of great horror, danger ously sophisticated, merely not visible to those who enjoy tragedy only in substitutes.

IV

Et vous avez pas su la lumiere et l'honneur,
D'une amour brave et fort;
Joyeux dans le maheur grave dans le bonheur,
Jeune jusque a la mort.

We also fail to understand Dawson's "Flos Lunae": I would not alter thy cold eyes. What are cold eyes; what are warm eyes; what are wild eyes? These may to some be prim ary conceptions, but I would have to see eyes and have the sensation that they are cold before I can follow this line. I would need to know what expressions are in any eyes. To us eyes are things to look through. There is no culture in eyes, know ledge of slight nuances, refined varieties.' Such eyes as expect affection are distinguished by a commercial twinkle, a stupid uniformed gladness, but not no that we might say "glad eyes," [unclear: because] there is [unclear: no] gladness in the person behind them but banality and the subconscious awareness that there are 1,000,000 spins ters of marriable age in England. If the culture of eyes dies out like that of cobalt glass colouring this poem is going to be incomprehensible, every line of it except one; "Desiring thee, desiring sleep." We under stand this fully. You may sit in your room for days waiting for some intimation of poetic childhood to appear, but you will not succeed: this is a dying culture.

V

But, comrade, do not read Housman. Stand up and end you, if your sickness is your soul. We think our love has died, and how sad it would be if it had really died—the head that I shall dream of, that will not dream of me. But we will not do anything about it, "smooth our hair with automatic hand, and put a record on the [unclear: gramophone.]" What is the use of poetry? We know this, and think that we are no longer hypocrites because we know we are even if we know we are. With this I want to say that a chilling insincerity has invaded our tastes, since we are interested in accounts of emotions only imagined but never really experienced, written by persons as uninteresting as we ourselves are. Art can only be produced by the stimulant of continuous excitement. It does not save Housman that he knew it.

Ho, everyone that thirsteth,
And hath the price to give;
Come to the stolen waters,
Come, and your soul shall live.

Housman's sedentary existence, im passive and dull, could only lend itself to artificial stimuli and, au fond, artificial excitement.

This is the logical conclusion of the poet's tendency to substitute for "a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing to the creative power" his books and "a kind of semblance of it in his own mind."

Morpheus.