[In the following excerpt, Lucas discusses Teasdale's Flame and Shadow.]

‘There is but one thing certain,’ says Pliny, with his curious mixture of matter-of-fact and melancholy, ‘that nothing is certain; and there is nothing more wretched or more proud than man.’ Human unhappiness and the pride that half causes it and half redeems—of the union of these two eternal contrasts Flame and Shadow is made. It is the utterance of a mood which all feel sometimes, some always; which all the generations have repeated, yet each of them yearns to hear expressed anew in the special accents of its own day—that particular kind of pessimism which feels the vanity, and yet the value, of life. And it needs to be restated still. For the present cannot live on the past, on dead men's words, alone; its own literature may be inferior, much of it must be, inevitably, minor; yet, as Homer had already learnt, men love the song which is new, and a living voice has in some ways an appeal that no dead eloquence can bring. This is the value of Flame and Shadow not that it contains new ideas, but that a view of life which our age in part accepts, in part struggles to avoid, is here once more expressed with sincerity and skill—the feeling that for all the agony of transience, all the disillusion of hopes in vain fulfilled, there are no consolations, but the bitter beauty of the Universe, and the frail human pride that confronts it, for a moment, undismayed. ‘There is nothing more wretched or more proud than man.’ It is always strange that sorrow should possess this higher beauty than laughter, even children's or lovers' laughter, can possess; that Tragedy is so fundamentally a greater thing than Comedy. But for this, the sadness of the world would be unbearable; thanks to this, from sorrow itself there is wrung a kind of joy—

Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,
          Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,
Let it be forgotten for ever and ever,
          Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.
If any one asks, say it was forgotten
          Long and long ago,
As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall
          In a long forgotten snow.
Even love that I built my spirit's house for
          Comes as a brooding and a baffled guest,
And music and men's praise and even laughter
          Are not so good as rest.
It is strange how often a heart must be broken
          Before the years will make it wise.

With a suspicion of insincerity the effect would be what Arnold called ‘a horrid falsetto’; some, perhaps, will suspect; but that is not the impression left by the book as a whole. For the quietness with which the passion is controlled throughout is perfect, like the quiet of a small unruffled pool clasping its dark reflection of a lowering heaven in stillness to its heart. And with this gentleness goes hand in hand another quality which makes the writer's attitude, though so familiar, new and individual—her deliberate restraint from bitterness. Bitterness has been the very salt of some of the intensest poetry from Archilochus and Juvenal to Hugo, from Wyatt and Webster to Hardy and Housman. It may be exaggerated or hideous or morbid—it is at least never insipid. And yet superb as scorn can be in its vibrant intensity, there is something a shade finer still in the ideal, though not, of course, therefore in the work, of a writer who rises above cursing the world for its cruelty to recognise its indifference, its lack of evil intent as well as good, and therefore to take alike its buffets and its beauty, in her own fine phrase—

with gay unembittered lips.

This indeed is one difference between Mrs. Teasdale and Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose general attitude and tone are so similar, though Miss Millay's is an intenser and more brilliant gift. It is easy, for instance, to seize the contrast between the resilience and resonance of—

White with daisies, and red with sorrel,
          And empty, empty under the sky!
Life is a quest and love a quarrel.
          Here is the place for me to lie,

and the quieter resolution of Flame and Shadow—

With earth hidden and heaven hidden,
          And only my own spirit's pride
To keep me from the peace of those
          Who are not lonely, having died.

One other piece in this new volume stands out as being not only charming, but true and new as well—

There never was a mood of mine,
          Gay or heart-broken, luminous or dull,
But you could ease me of its fever,
          And give it back to me more beautiful.
In many another spirit I broke the bread,
          And pledged the wine and played the happy guest,
But I was lonely, I remembered you;
          The heart belongs to him who knew it best.

It is good that this kind of poetry should go on being written. It is not only good as poetry; it keeps alive an attitude to which the human mind is perhaps destined to be more and more driven back—the poetic philosophy of life. So, at least, Arnold thought, when he wrote: ‘In poetry the spirit of our race will find, as time goes on and other helps fail, its consolation and its stay.’ Theologian and philosopher have always tended to look at everything as means to some end; and it has been the poet and the artist who valued things, not for the uses they can be put to or the promises they hold, but for the interest and significance of what they are. In that mood we know we cannot possess; we do not desire to possess; the verb ‘to have’ ceases to torture, and our pleasure is for once at least not a satisfaction that must be preceded and followed by the pain of craving. And if all is transient, transience too must be endured—

Denn aller schöner Dinge Schönheit ist
Dasz sie vergehen.

This is disinterestedness—loving life for its own sake. It is not a road for all, but for many; not an abiding place, but a refuge. It too is a blind alley in the end, but no mean or sordid one, nor one that is trodden with blinded eyes.