Late Lyrics and Earlier | Page 2

is submitted to them with great hesitation at so belated a date. Insistent
practical reasons, however, among which were requests from some
illustrious men of letters who are in sympathy with my productions, the
accident that several of the poems have already seen the light, and that
dozens of them have been lying about for years, compelled the course
adopted, in spite of the natural disinclination of a writer whose works
have been so frequently regarded askance by a pragmatic section here
and there, to draw attention to them once more.
I do not know that it is necessary to say much on the contents of the
book, even in deference to suggestions that will be mentioned presently.
I believe that those readers who care for my poems at all--readers to
whom no passport is required--will care for this new instalment of them,
perhaps the last, as much as for any that have preceded them. Moreover,
in the eyes of a less friendly class the pieces, though a very mixed
collection indeed, contain, so far as I am able to see, little or nothing in
technic or teaching that can be considered a Star-Chamber matter, or so
much as agitating to a ladies' school; even though, to use Wordsworth's
observation in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, such readers may suppose
"that by the act of writing in verse an author makes a formal
engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association:
that he not only thus apprises the reader that certain classes of ideas and
expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully
excluded."

It is true, nevertheless, that some grave, positive, stark, delineations are
interspersed among those of the passive, lighter, and traditional sort
presumably nearer to stereotyped tastes. For-- while I am quite aware
that a thinker is not expected, and, indeed, is scarcely allowed, now
more than heretofore, to state all that crosses his mind concerning
existence in this universe, in his attempts to explain or excuse the
presence of evil and the
incongruity of penalizing the irresponsible--it
must be obvious to open intelligences that, without denying the beauty
and faithful service of certain venerable cults, such disallowance of
"obstinate questionings" and "blank misgivings" tends to a paralysed

intellectual stalemate. Heine observed nearly a hundred years ago that
the soul has her eternal rights; that she will not be darkened by statutes,
nor lullabied by the music of bells. And what is today, in allusions to
the present author's pages, alleged to be
"pessimism" is, in truth, only
such "questionings" in the exploration of reality, and is the first step
towards the soul's betterment, and the body's also.
If I may be forgiven for quoting my own old words, let me repeat what
I printed in this relation more than twenty years ago, and wrote much
earlier, in a poem entitled "In Tenebris":
If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst:
that is to say, by the exploration of reality, and its frank recognition
stage by stage along the survey, with an eye to the best consummation
possible: briefly, evolutionary meliorism. But it is called pessimism
nevertheless; under which word, expressed with condemnatory
emphasis, it is regarded by many as some pernicious new thing (though
so old as to underlie the Christian idea, and even to permeate the Greek
drama); and the subject is charitably left to decent silence, as if further
comment were needless.
Happily there are some who feel such Levitical passing-by to be, alas,
by no means a permanent dismissal of the matter; that comment on
where the world stands is very much the reverse of needless in these
disordered years of our prematurely afflicted century: that amendment
and not madness lies that way. And looking down the future these few

hold fast to the same: that whether the human and kindred animal races
survive till the exhaustion or destruction of the globe, or whether these
races perish and are succeeded by others before that conclusion comes,
pain to all upon it, tongued or dumb, shall be kept down to a minimum
by lovingkindness, operating through scientific knowledge, and
actuated by the modicum of free will conjecturally possessed by
organic life when the mighty necessitating forces-- unconscious or
other--that have "the balancings of the clouds," happen to be in
equilibrium, which may or may not be often.
To conclude this question I may add that the argument of the socalled
optimists is neatly summarized in a stern pronouncement
against me
by my friend Mr. Frederic Harrison in a late essay of his, in the words:
"This view of life is not mine." The solemn declaration does not seem
to me to be so annihilating to the said "view" (really a series of fugitive
impressions which I