PARTISAN REVIEW
Yet I am grateful even for artistic experiences which I now
recognize to have been false, for the false which within a few years
time I was to condemn so easily, was actually a form of incomplete
worship of true values which inevitably accompanies true worship.
Since the young have a strong sense of what is worshipped and little
sense of the form or the authenticity of prayer, they may nevertheless
be directed by way of the false towards the true to which it in its
hypocritical vagueness nevertheless points. For the development of
our own values, it is necessary that at a certain age We should
be
undiscriminating enthusiasts, at another age harsh .and abusive judges.
Later there comes perhaps a tolerance which is based on disillusion
rather than lack of discernment.
Moreover, when I was young, perhaps I had more discrimination
than I
think.
My mind as it were passed over with a certain puzzle–
ment what it could not take, and perhaps there was something delicate
in this silent refusal. For example, when I read the line
0
world be nobler for her sake,
I merely felt within myself a certain lack of response. I didn't feel,
as I would now, that it was rather absurd of Mr. Binyon to invoke
the world to
be
nobler for the sake of Mrs. Binyon, or that perhaps
even the world might not be so unworthy of Mrs. Binyon as the line
seems to imply. Nor could I go still deeper into the matter and reflect
that after all, the emotion, although a little absurd, is genuine, and
that it is the expression which is perhaps at fault, the simplicity really
being mistaken and tactless, where,
if
the poet had created a mem–
orable image of a saintly or beautiful woman, then the emotion would
arise out of this picture of nobility.
As
I say, I did not think about
all this, and perhaps there was something sacred in my not thinking
in this way, which is slightly sacrilegeous.
At this time, until I was twenty, I wrote a good deal of poetry.
My attitude towards creating was as indiscriminate as towards read–
ing. I wrote when I was in a mood of vague excitement about some
subject which struck me as poetic-usually a tragic one; fatal love,
death, the sadness of being young (which struck me very much).
There was a whirl of words in my mind. These encountered a series
of more or less fatal accidents when they banged against the edges
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