The Mantra 7himself lived in them and helped both to direct and to form.
Mr. Cousins’ positive criticism is almost always fine, just
and inspired by a warm glow of sympathy and understanding
tempered by discernment, restraint and measure; whatever the
future critic, using his scales and balance, may have to take away
from it, will be, one would imagine, only by way of a slight
alteration of stress here and there. His depreciations, though
generally sound enough, are not, I think, invariably as just as his
appreciations. Thus his essay on the work of J. M. Synge, “The
Realist on the Stage”, is, in sharp distinction from the rest of
the book, an almost entirely negative and destructive criticism,
strong and interesting, but written from the point of view of the
ideals and aims of the Irish literary movement against a principle
of work which seemed entirely to depart from them; yet we are
allowed to get some glimpse of a positive side of dramatic power
which the critic does not show us, but leaves us rather to guess
at. Mr. Cousins seems to me to take the dramatist’s theory of his
own art more seriously than it should be taken; for the creator
can seldom be accepted — there may of course be exceptions,
rare instances of clairvoyant self-sight — as a sound exponent
of his own creative impulse. He is in his central inspiration the
instrument of a light and power not his own, and his account
of it is usually vitiated, out of focus, an attempt to explain the
workings of this impersonal power by motives which were the
contribution of his own personal effort, but which are often
quite subordinate or even accidental side-lights of the lower
brain-mind, not the central moving force.
Mr. Cousins has pointed out clearly enough that art can
never be a copy of life. But it is also true, I think, that that
is not the secret object of most realism, whatever it may say
about itself; realism is in fact a sort of nether idealism, or, per-
haps more correctly, sometimes an inverse, sometimes a perverse
romanticism which tries to get a revelation of creative truth
by an effective force of presentation, by an intensity, often an
exaggeration at the opposite side of the complex phenomenon
of life. All art starts from the sensuous and sensible, or takes it
as a continual point of reference or, at the lowest, uses it as a