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Beginning Robotics with Raspberry Pi and Arduino: Using Python and OpenCV 2nd Edition Jeff Cicolani 2024 scribd download

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TECHNOLOGY IN AC TION™

Beginning Robotics
with Raspberry Pi
and Arduino
Using Python and OpenCV

Second Edition

Jeff Cicolani
Beginning Robotics
with Raspberry Pi
and Arduino
Using Python and OpenCV
Second Edition

Jeff Cicolani
Beginning Robotics with Raspberry Pi and Arduino: Using Python
and OpenCV
Jeff Cicolani
Pflugerville, TX, USA

ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-6890-2 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-6891-9


https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6891-9

Copyright © 2021 by Jeff Cicolani


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The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if
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While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of
publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal
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source-­code.
Printed on acid-free paper
For Martha, my beautiful and patient wife,
for putting up with random robot parts strewn
about the house, pretty much constantly
Table of Contents
About the Author���������������������������������������������������������������������������������xi
About the Technical Reviewer�����������������������������������������������������������xiii
Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������xv

Chapter 1: Introduction to Robotics�����������������������������������������������������1


Robotics Basics�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������2
Linux and Robotics������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������3
Sensors and GPIO��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������4
Motion and Control������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������5
Raspberry Pi and Arduino�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������5
Project Overview���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������7
The Robot��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������8
Bill of Materials (BOM)�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������9
Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������14

Chapter 2: An Introduction to Raspberry Pi����������������������������������������15


Downloading and Installing Raspberry Pi OS������������������������������������������������������15
Raspberry Pi OS with OpenCV�����������������������������������������������������������������������16
The “Hard” Way���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������17
The “Easy” Way���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������20
Connecting Raspberry Pi�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������21

v
Table of Contents

Configuring Your Pi����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������23


Users�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������28
Going Headless���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������30
Remote Access����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������30
Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������38

Chapter 3: A Crash Course in Python��������������������������������������������������39


Python Overview�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������41
Downloading and Installing Python���������������������������������������������������������������������41
Python Tools��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������42
The Python Shell��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������43
The Python Editor������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������44
The Zen of Python������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������47
Writing and Running a Python Program��������������������������������������������������������������48
Hello World����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������49
Basic Structure����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������50
Running a Program����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������53
Programming in Python��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������54
Variables��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������54
Data Types�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������55
A Final Note on Variables�������������������������������������������������������������������������������66
Control Structures�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������67
Functions�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������73
Adding Functionality Through Modules���������������������������������������������������������77
Classes����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������83
Styling�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������91
Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������93

vi
Table of Contents

Chapter 4: Raspberry Pi GPIO�������������������������������������������������������������95


Raspberry Pi GPIO�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������95
Pin Numbering�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������97
Connecting to the Raspberry Pi���������������������������������������������������������������������98
Limitations of Raspberry Pi’s GPIO����������������������������������������������������������������99
Accessing GPIO with Python������������������������������������������������������������������������100
Simple Output: LED Example�����������������������������������������������������������������������102
Simple Input������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������108
Summary����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������118

Chapter 5: Raspberry Pi and Arduino�����������������������������������������������119


Raspberry Pi’s GPIO in Review��������������������������������������������������������������������������120
Real-Time or Near-Real-Time Processing���������������������������������������������������120
Analog Input������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������121
Analog Output����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������121
Arduino to the Rescue���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������122
Using Arduino����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������124
Installing the Arduino IDE����������������������������������������������������������������������������125
Connecting an Arduino��������������������������������������������������������������������������������125
Programming Arduino����������������������������������������������������������������������������������126
Sketches������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������135
A Brief Introduction to the Arduino Language���������������������������������������������������139
Including Other Files������������������������������������������������������������������������������������140
Variables and Data Types�����������������������������������������������������������������������������140
Control Structures���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������145
Working with Pins����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������153

vii
Table of Contents

Objects and Classes������������������������������������������������������������������������������������157


Serial�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������158
Arduino to Pi and Back Again����������������������������������������������������������������������162
Pinguino������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������172
Setting Up the Circuit����������������������������������������������������������������������������������173
Summary����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������176

Chapter 6: Driving Motors����������������������������������������������������������������179


Motors and Drivers��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������180
Types of Motors�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������180
Motor Properties������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������184
Motor Drivers�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������187
Working with Motor Controllers������������������������������������������������������������������������187
Adafruit DC & Stepper Motor HAT����������������������������������������������������������������188
L298N Generic Motor Driver������������������������������������������������������������������������208
Summary����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������219

Chapter 7: Assembling the Robot�����������������������������������������������������221


Assembling the Chassis������������������������������������������������������������������������������������222
Choosing a Material�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������222
The Whippersnapper�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������223
Mounting the Electronics����������������������������������������������������������������������������������231
Wiring����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������238
Mounting Sensors���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������241
The Finished Robot�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������244
Making the Robot Mobile�����������������������������������������������������������������������������245
Summary����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������258

viii
Table of Contents

Chapter 8: Working with Infrared Sensors���������������������������������������259


Infrared Sensors�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������259
Types of IR Sensors�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������260
Working with IR Sensors�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������264
Connecting an IR Sensor�����������������������������������������������������������������������������264
Mounting the IR Sensors�����������������������������������������������������������������������������267
The Code������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������269
Understanding PID Control��������������������������������������������������������������������������������280
Control Loops����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������280
Implementing the PID Controller�����������������������������������������������������������������283
Summary����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������287

Chapter 9: An Introduction to OpenCV����������������������������������������������289


Computer Vision������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������289
OpenCV��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������291
Selecting a Camera�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������297
Installing the Camera����������������������������������������������������������������������������������298
OpenCV Basics��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������299
Working with Images�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������300
Capturing Images����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������302
Image Transformations��������������������������������������������������������������������������������311
Working with Color��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������314
Blobs and Blob Detection����������������������������������������������������������������������������320
Ball-Chasing Bot�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������328
Summary����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������336

ix
Table of Contents

Chapter 10: Conclusion���������������������������������������������������������������������337


Types of Robotics����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������338
Tools������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������338
Software������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������339
Hardware�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������345
Summary����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������348

Index�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������349

x
About the Author
Jeff Cicolani currently lives in the Austin,
Texas, area with his wife, two dogs, and
dozen or so robots. He is currently working
as an embedded systems engineer, building
robotic and automated platforms for an AI
(artificial intelligence) company in Austin.
His journey to robotics was circuitous, taking
him through an odd career path that included
systems analysis and design and database
programming. In 2012, he joined The Robot
Group in Austin, where he joined a group of
robotics enthusiasts and began building robots as a hobby. In 2016, he
became president of The Robot Group. In this role, he leads the group in
their mission to promote STEM (science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics) education through robotics. He is currently working to
develop a better understanding of advanced robotics through ROS
(Robot Operating System) and machine learning.

xi
About the Technical Reviewer
Massimo Nardone has more than 22 years
of experience in security, web/mobile
development, cloud, and IT architecture. His
true IT passions are security and Android.
He has been programming and teaching
how to program with Android, Perl, PHP, Java,
VB, Python, C/C++, and MySQL for more than
20 years.
He holds a Master of Science degree in
Computing Science from the University of
Salerno, Italy.
He has worked as a project manager, software engineer, research
engineer, chief security architect, information security manager, PCI/
SCADA auditor, and senior lead IT security/cloud/SCADA architect for
many years.

xiii
Introduction
Robotics does not have to be difficult. In this book, I introduce you to the
field of robotics. The journey will be challenging; it’s intended to be. But
by the end of the book, you will have hands-on exposure to many of the
fundamental—and not so fundamental—aspects of robotics. You will work
with hardware, assemble and solder a circuit board, write code in two
programming languages, install and configure a Linux environment, and
work with computer vision. Everything else you do with robots will be an
extension of the lessons learned in this book.

Whom This Book Is For


This book is for those who are new to electronics and IoT, those who have
never used a Raspberry Pi or Arduino separately, let alone together.
This book is for the hobbyist who is interested in learning a little more
about working with robots. Perhaps you’ve built a few circuits with an
Arduino or a custom home entertainment system with a Raspberry Pi, and
now you are curious about what goes into building a robot. You will learn
how these two devices work together to provide very powerful capabilities.
This book is for the entrepreneur who needs to learn more about
technology; someone who doesn’t necessarily have the time to read
through many different books on Arduino, Raspberry Pi, electronics,
or programming; someone who is looking for a broad yet condensed
introduction to some of the fundamentals.

xv
Introduction

This book is also for the student who wants to take their robot-building
experience beyond bricks and puzzle-piece programming, someone who
wants to work with hardware and software that more closely resembles
what they might see in college or in the professional world.
No assumptions are made about experience or background in
technology. As you go through the chapters, you may find parts that you
are already familiar with and you can skip ahead. But if you are new to
these topics, I try to provide you with a quick but easy introduction.

C
 hapter Overview
You start by learning about the Raspberry Pi and how to work with it.
You download and install the Raspbian operating system (OS) and then
configure the Pi for our project. The goal is to set up your system to be able
to easily access your robot and write your code directly on it.
Once you are able to access your Pi remotely, in Chapter 3, you delve
into programming with Python. I show you how to write simple programs
on the Raspberry Pi. I also take you beyond the basics and cover some
intermediate topics, such as modules and classes. This is one of the longest
chapters since there is a lot of material to cover.
From there, you learn how to interface the Raspberry Pi with external
electronics, such as sensors and LEDs, through the Pi’s GPIO (general-­
purpose input/output) header. Chapter 4 discusses the different ways
of addressing the pins on the header, some of the functionality exposed
through the header, and how to use an ultrasonic rangefinder to detect
objects. This gets you ready for the next chapter, which introduces the
Arduino.
In Chapter 5, you connect the Arduino to the Raspberry Pi. I discuss
some of the reasons you want to do this. I show you how to work with the
Arduino IDE (integrated development environment) to write programs.

xvi
Introduction

I cover serial communication between the two boards and how to pass
information back and forth between them. We do this using the same
ultrasonic rangefinder used in the previous chapter.
Chapter 6 has you turning motors with your Raspberry Pi. You use a
special board called a hat, or plate, to control the motors. This is where I
introduce another skill that you will inevitably need in robotics: soldering.
The header and terminals need to be soldered onto the board that was
selected for this purpose. The nice thing about soldering headers and
terminal blocks is that it’s hard to damage anything, and you will get plenty
of practice.
Chapter 7 is where we bring it all together. You build the robot, and I
discuss some of the physical characteristics of robotics. I cover some of
the design considerations that you will need to keep in mind when you
design your own chassis. Although I am listing a specific chassis kit for this
project, you do not need to use the same one. In fact, I encourage you to
explore other options to find the one that is right for you.
In Chapter 8, I introduce another type of sensor—the IR sensor—and
I show you how to use a very common control algorithm called a PID
(proportional, integral, and derivative) controller. I talk about the various
types of IR sensors and where you want to use them. This chapter also
discusses what PID control is and why you want to use it.
Chapter 9 is about computer vision, where you see the true power of
the Raspberry Pi. In this chapter, I cover an open source package called
OpenCV. By the end of this chapter, your little robot will be chasing a ball
around the table.
I leave you with some parting thoughts in Chapter 10. I provide a few
tips that I picked up, and I give you a glimpse into my workflow and tools.
After that, you will be ready to begin your own adventures in robotics.

xvii
Introduction

Second Edition Notes


This book has been updated for the Raspberry Pi 4. In updating the board,
I also updated to the most recent version of the OS. Since the writing of the
first edition, there were several changes in downloading the OS, now called
Raspberry Pi OS, as well as changes in the installation.
The motor controller libraries have been updated to the newer Adafruit
MotorKit libraries. This means there have been updates to the motor driver
code. These changes do make the board easier to use.

xviii
CHAPTER 1

Introduction
to Robotics
The word robotics can mean a lot of things. For some people, it is anything
that moves by itself; kinetic art is robotics. To other people, robotics means
something that is mobile or something that can move itself from place to
place. There is actually a field called mobile robotics; automatic vacuum
cleaners, such as a Roomba or a Neato, fall into this category. To me,
robotics falls somewhere in between kinetic art and mobile robotics.
A robot is technology that applies logic to perform a task in an
automated manner. This is a fairly broad definition, but robotics is a fairly
broad field. It can cover everything from a child’s toy to the automatic
parallel parking capabilities in some automobiles. We build a small mobile
robot in this book.
Many of the principles that you are exposed to in this book are easily
transferable to other areas. In fact, we will go through the entire process
of building a robot from beginning to end. A little later in this chapter, I go
over the project that we will build. At that time, I will provide a list of the
parts used in this book. These parts include sensors, drivers, motors, and
so forth. You are welcome to use whatever you have on hand because, for
the most part, everything we go through in this book can be applied to
other projects.

© Jeff Cicolani 2021 1


J. Cicolani, Beginning Robotics with Raspberry Pi and Arduino,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6891-9_1
Chapter 1 Introduction to Robotics

Robotics Basics
I like to tell people who are new to robotics, or are just robotics curious,
that a robot consists of three elements:

• The ability to gather data

• The ability to process or do something with the


gathered data

• The ability to interact with the environment

In the following chapters, we apply this principle to build a small


mobile robot. We will use ultrasonic rangefinders and infrared sensors
to gather data about the environment. Specifically, we will identify when
there is an object to be avoided, when we are about to drive off the edge of
a table, and the contrast between the table and the line that we will follow.
Once we have this data, we will apply logic to determine the appropriate
response.
We will use Python in a Linux environment to process the information
and send commands to our motors. I chose Python as the programming
language because it is easy to learn and you don’t have to have a complex
development environment to build some pretty complex applications.
Our interaction with the environment will be simply to control the
speed and direction of motors. This will allow our robot to move about
freely on the table or floor. There really isn’t much to driving a motor.
We will look at two ways of doing it: with a motor driver made for the
Raspberry Pi and with a common motor controller.
This book is intended to be challenging. I cover some pretty complex
material and I do it quickly. There is no way that I can provide detailed
coverage on any of these topics, but I hope to get you to a functional robot
by the end of the book. In each chapter, I try to provide you with more
resources to follow up on the topics discussed. You will struggle at times;
I did and I frequently still do.

2
Chapter 1 Introduction to Robotics

Not everyone will be interested in all the subjects. The expectation is


that you will expand on the areas that interest you the most outside of this
book. Persistence pays off.
At the end of the book, I add a little more challenge. In Chapter 9, we
begin leveraging the real power of the Raspberry Pi. We look at computer
vision. Specifically, we look at an open source package called OpenCV
(CV stands for computer vision). It is a common and very powerful
collection of utilities that make working with images and video streams
very easy. It’s also a six-hour build on the most recent version of the
Raspberry Pi. To make things a little easier and a lot less time-consuming,
I have available for download a version of the operating system with
OpenCV already installed. I discuss this more in Chapter 2.

L inux and Robotics


Linux is a Unix-based operating system. It is very popular with
programmers and computer scientists because it’s simple and
straightforward. They seem to enjoy the text-based interface of the
terminal. Yet, for many others, including me, Linux can be very
challenging. So why in the world would I choose this environment for an
introduction-to-robotics book? The answer to that question is threefold.
First, when you work with robotics, you eventually have to confront
Linux. That’s just a fact. You can do a lot without ever typing a single sudo
command, but you will have limited capabilities. The sudo command
stands for super user do in Linux. This tells the operating system that you
are about to perform a protected function that requires more than general
user access. You will learn more about this when we begin working with
the Raspberry Pi.
Second, Linux is challenging. As I stated before, this book will
challenge you. If you have worked in Linux before, then this reason
doesn’t apply to you. However, if you are new to Linux, the Raspberry Pi,

3
Chapter 1 Introduction to Robotics

or working in a command line, then some of the things that we do will be


challenging. And that’s good. You’re learning something new and it should
be a challenge.
Third, and this is by far the most important, the Raspberry Pi uses
Linux. Yes, you can install other operating systems on the Pi, but it was
designed and intended to use Linux. In fact, the Raspberry Pi has its
own flavor of Linux called Raspbian. This is the recommended operating
system, so it is what we’ll use. One of the nice things about using a prebuilt
operating system, besides its ease of use, is many of the tools are already
installed and ready to go.
Since we are using Linux, we will use command-line instructions
extensively. This is where most new users have problems. Command-line
code is entered via a terminal. Raspbian has a Windows-style interface
that we will use, but much of it uses the terminal. A terminal window
is available in the graphical user interface (GUI), so we will use that.
However, when we set up the Pi, we will set it up to boot into terminal
mode by default. Getting to the GUI is only a simple startx command.
All of this is covered in Chapter 2.

S
 ensors and GPIO
GPIO stands for general-purpose input/output. It represents all the various
connections to devices. The Raspberry Pi has a lot of GPIO options: HDMI,
USB, audio, and so forth. However, when I talk about GPIO in this book, I’m
generally referring to the 40-pin GPIO header. This header provides direct
access to most of the board’s functionality. I discuss this in Chapter 2.
Arduino also has GPIO. In fact, one could argue that Arduino is all
GPIO and nothing else. This isn’t far from the truth given that all the other
connections are there to allow you to communicate with and power the
AVR chip at the heart of the Arduino.

4
Chapter 1 Introduction to Robotics

All of these headers and GPIO connections are there so we can access
sensors outside the boards themselves. A sensor is a device that gathers
data. There are many different types of sensors, and all serve a purpose.
Sensors can be used for detecting light levels, the range to an object,
temperature, speed, and so forth. In particular, we will use GPIO headers
with an ultrasonic rangefinder and an IR detector.

M
 otion and Control
One thing that most definitions of a robot have in common is that it needs
to be able to move. Sure, you can have a robot that doesn’t actually move,
but this type of device generally falls under the moniker of IoT, the Internet
of Things.
There are many ways to add motion to your project. The most common
is the use of motors. But you can also use solenoids, air, or water pressure.
I discuss motors more in Chapter 6.
Although it is possible to drive a motor directly off a Raspberry Pi
or an Arduino board, it is strongly discouraged. Motors tend to draw
more current than the processors on the boards can handle. Instead,
it is recommended that you use a motor controller. Like motors, motor
controllers come in many forms. The motor control board that we will use
is accessed through the Raspberry Pi’s header. I also discuss how to drive
motors with an L298N dual motor controller.

Raspberry Pi and Arduino


We will use a Raspberry Pi (see Figure 1-1) in conjunction with an Arduino
(see Figure 1-2) as our robot’s processing platform.

5
Chapter 1 Introduction to Robotics

Figure 1-1. Raspberry Pi 3 B+

Figure 1-2. Arduino Uno

The Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer that is about the size of


a credit card. Despite its small size, it is a very capable device. The Pi runs
a version of Linux that was customized to work on the ARM processor
that drives it. This puts a lot of functionality into a small device that is
easy to embed into things like robots. But, although it is a great computer,

6
Chapter 1 Introduction to Robotics

there are a few places where it does not excel. One area is interfacing with
external devices. It can work with sensors and external devices, but the
Arduino does this much better.
Arduino is another small processing device that is readily available and
easy to use. Unlike a Raspberry Pi, however, it does not have the capacity
for a full operating system. Rather than running a microprocessor like the
ARM, it uses a different type of chip called a microcontroller. The difference
is that a microcontroller is specifically designed to interact with sensors,
motors, lights, and all kinds of devices. It directly interacts with these
external devices. The Pi works through many layers of processing before it
ever reaches the pins that a device is connected to.
By combining the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino, we are able to
leverage what each does best. The Raspberry Pi offers the high-level
processing power of a full computer. Arduino provides the raw control over
external devices. The Pi allows us to process a video stream from a simple
USB camera, whereas the Arduino allows us to gather the information
from the various sensors and apply logic to make sense of all that data and
then return concise findings to the Pi.
You will learn more about the Raspberry Pi in Chapter 2. Later on, you
will connect an Arduino to the Pi and learn about programming it, as well
as how to pass information back and forth between the Arduino and the Pi.

P
 roject Overview
In this book, we will build a small mobile robot. The robot is designed to
demonstrate the lessons that you learn in each chapter. However, before
we can actually build the robot, we need to cover a lot of material and lay
the foundation for future lessons.

7
Chapter 1 Introduction to Robotics

T he Robot
The robot that we will build is a small two- or four-wheeled autonomous
rover. It will be able to detect obstacles and the edge of a table and to
follow a line. The chassis that I selected is a four-wheeled robot, but there
are other designs suitable for this project (see Figures 1-3 and 1-4).

Figure 1-3. The front of our robot shows the ultrasonic sensors and Pi
T-Cobbler on a breadboard

Figure 1-4. The back of our robot shows the Raspberry Pi and motor
control board
8
Chapter 1 Introduction to Robotics

Although I provide a list of the parts that I used for the project, you are
welcome to use whatever parts you wish. The important thing is that they
behave in a similar manner as those I have listed.

Bill of Materials (BOM)


For the most part, I tried to keep the list of materials as generic as possible.
There are a couple of items that are vendor specific. I chose them because
they provide a lot of functionality and convenience. The DC & Stepper
motor controller and the Pi T-Cobbler are from an online retailer called
Adafruit, which is a great resource for parts, tutorials, and inspiration.
The chassis kit is from an online retailer called ServoCity, which produces
many mechanical parts for robotics.
The following are the specialty parts (shown in Figure 1-5) that we use
in this book:

• Junior Runt Rover robot chassis from ServoCity.com

• Adafruit DC & Stepper Motor HAT for Raspberry


Pi – Mini Kit, PID 2348

• GPIO Stacking Header for Pi A+/B+, Pi 2, Pi 3 – Extra-­


long 2 × 20 pins, PID 2223 (allows the use of additional
plates and the Cobbler to attach to the breadboard)

• Assembled Pi T-Cobbler Plus (GPIO Breakout) – Pi A+/B+,


Pi 2, Pi 3, Pi Zero; PID 2028

9
Chapter 1 Introduction to Robotics

Figure 1-5. Runt Rover chassis parts and the Pi T-Cobbler, ribbon
cable, motor control hat, and extended header

The following parts (shown in Figure 1-6) are fairly generic and can be
purchased from most vendors:

• Raspberry Pi 4 Model B – 4 G RAM


• Arduino Uno

• 4 × AA battery holder with on/off switch (powers the


motors)

• USB battery pack – 2200 mAh capacity, 5 V 1 A output,


PID 1959 (powers the Raspberry Pi)

• Half-size breadboard
• Ultrasonic sensors – HC-SR04

10
Chapter 1 Introduction to Robotics

You may want to get a few of these. As you will discover, ultrasonic
sensors are unreliable at angles, and it is good to have an array of them.
I use at least three on most of my projects.

• A collection of jumper wires (see Figure 1-7)

You need both male-to-male jumpers and male­to-­female jumpers.


It is a good idea to get them in a number of colors. Black and red are used
for powering your devices. A collection of other colors helps you make
sense of your circuits. Fortunately, you can get jumpers of all types made
out of a multicolored ribbon cable.

• USB cables for your Arduino

• A micro USB cable for your Raspberry Pi

• A common USB phone charger, preferably one for a


modern smartphone or tablet that can provide 2 amps
of power

• An HDMI TV or computer monitor

Most computer monitors do not have HDMI ports on them. You can
get HDMI-to-DVI converters that allow you to use your existing monitor,
however.
• A USB keyboard and mouse (I like the Logitech K400
wireless keyboard and touchpad combination, but
there are countless options out there)

• A network-connected computer

• Wi-Fi or Ethernet cable for the Pi

11
Chapter 1 Introduction to Robotics

Figure 1-6. Common parts: Raspberry Pi, Arduino Uno, ultrasonic


sensor, battery holder, and breadboard

Figure 1-7. Jumpers in ribbon cable form. Pull off what you need

12
Chapter 1 Introduction to Robotics

You don’t need to get fancy with the monitor and keyboard. Once you
read Chapter 2, where we install and configure the Raspberry Pi, you no
longer need them. I have a couple of the wireless keyboards because I
usually have several projects going at once. For a monitor, I simply use one
of my computer monitors with an HDMI-to-DVI adapter.
If you are not using a chassis kit with motors and wheels included, you
also need the following parts (see Figure 1-8):

• Hobby gearmotor – 200 RPM (pair)

• Wheel – 65 mm (rubber tire, pair)

Figure 1-8. DC geared motor and wheels

If you do not want to use the Adafruit DC & Stepper Motor HAT, you
can also use virtually any motor controller, although each one has a
different interface and code. A common and fairly popular option is the
L298N dual motor controller (see Figure 1-9).

13
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
up his pacifism—or, as Mr. Graves calls it with reforming zeal, his
“pacificism”—as a result of his generous sympathy with insurgent
Italians and Hungarians. That was the thin end of the wedge. Having
once drawn the sword, Punch found it even more enjoyable than
drawing cartoons. He drew it fiercely against the Russians in the
Crimean War. He drew it fiercely against the Indians in the Indian
Mutiny. He drew it on behalf of General Eyre after the negro
outbreak in Jamaica. He drew it against Lincoln in the American Civil
War. Mr. Graves ought, for historical reasons, to have reprinted
Punch’s parody on one of Lincoln’s speeches. He is content, however,
to describe it as “a truly lamentable performance, in which the
President claims dictatorial powers, calls for whipcord to whip the
rebels, abuses the ‘rotten old world,’ talks with the utmost cynicism
of the blacks, and in general behaves like a vulgar buffoon.” Mr.
Graves, with an impartiality which cannot be too highly praised,
reminds the Punch of those days that “the magnanimous Lincoln
would never allow” the Southerners to be called rebels in his
presence—a significant reminder when we recall how Mr. Lloyd
George drew on the Lincoln parallel in defending his treatment of the
Irish. But, for the ironist, the most amusing of all Punch’s blunders in
regard to foreign policy is the welcome he offered to the birth of the
German Navy in an article called “Bravo, Bismarck!” “Britannia
through her Punch,” he wrote, “rejoices to weave among her naval
azures a new shade—Prussian blue.” It is only fair to say that Punch
was not consistent in his attitude to Germany. But he has shown a
curious capacity for backing the wrong horse—the horse that
seemed to “get away” at the start, but that was ultimately
disqualified by the stern judge, history. He gave up championing lost
causes and took to championing causes that would be lost a
generation later.
In the result, Mr. Graves, though a wit of distinction, has
produced in Mr. Punch’s History of Modern England a book that is
pathetic rather than amusing. It is a cemetery of dead jokes—the
offspring of a little gentleman with a long nose who was cross more
often than he was funny. Punch, indeed, has been for the most part
a grinner rather than a wit. It has had, and still has, brilliant writers
on its staff. But its temper is not the temper of its most brilliant
contributors. Its attitude is that of the prosperous clubman who
dislikes the advance both of the new rich and of the old poor. It has
undoubtedly made itself the most successful comic paper in the
world, but one sometimes wonders whether it has done so as a
result of allying itself with comedy or of allying itself with success.
Yet the fact remains that other men have started rivals to Punch,
and that they have not only been not so successful as Punch but not
so comic. Punch always baits the hook of its odious politics with a
reasonable amount of comedy about things in general, and in the
comedy of things in general, even if we think it might be done still
better, it has at least always been ahead of its rivals. There have
been men who have dreamed of a Punch that would bring the spirit
of comedy to bear on all sides impartially. There are others who
have dreamed of bringing the spirit of comedy to bear on the right
side. One would not, perhaps, mind what side Punch was on if only
it were a little more generous—if only it purveyed the human
comedy as a comedy, and not, as in the case of working men,
Irishmen, and non-Allied foreigners, as a sinister crook melodrama.
X
MR. H. M. TOMLINSON

Mr. Tomlinson is a born traveller. There are two sorts of travellers—


those who do what they are told and those who do what they
please. Mr. Tomlinson has never moved about the world in obedience
to a guide-book. He would find it almost as difficult to read a guide-
book as to write one. He never echoes other men’s curiosity. He
travels for the purpose neither of information nor conversation. He
has no motive but whim. His imagination goes roaming; and, his
imagination and his temper being such as they are, he is out on his
travels even if he gets no farther than Limehouse or the Devonshire
coast. He has, indeed, wandered a good deal farther than
Limehouse and Devonshire, as readers of The Sea and the Jungle
know. Even in his more English volumes of sketches, essays,
confessions, short stories—how is one to describe them?—he takes
us with him to the north coast of Africa, to New York, and to France
in war time. But the English sketches—the description of the crowd
at a pit-mouth after an explosion in a coal mine, the account of a
derelict railway station and a grocer’s boy in spectacles—almost
equally give us the feeling that we are reading the narrative of one
who has seen nothing except with the fortunate eyes of a stranger.
It is all a matter of eyes. To see is to discover, and all Mr. Tomlinson’s
books are, in this sense, books of discoveries.
As a recorder of the things he has seen he has the three great
gifts of imagery, style and humour. He sees the jelly-fish hanging in
the transparent deeps “like sunken moons.” A boat sailing on a
windy day goes skimming over the inflowing ridges of the waves
“with exhilarating undulations, light as a sandpiper.” A queer Lascar
on a creeping errand in an East-end street “looked as uncertain as a
candle-flame in a draught.” How well again Mr. Tomlinson conveys to
us in a sentence or two the vision of Northern Africa on a wet day:

As for Bougie, these African villages are built but for


sunlight. They change to miserable and filthy ruins in the rain,
their white walls blotched and scabrous, and their paths mud
tracks between the styes. Their lissome and statuesque
inhabitants become softened and bent, and pad dejectedly
through the muck as though they were ashamed to live, but
had to go on with it. The palms which look so well in sunny
pictures are besoms up-ended in a drizzle.

Mr. Tomlinson has in that last sentence captured the ultimate secret
of a wet day in an African village. Even those of us who have never
seen Africa save on the map, know that often there is nothing more
to be said. Mr. Tomlinson, however, is something of a specialist in
bad weather, as, perhaps, any man who loves the sea as he does
must be. The weather fills the world for the seaman with gods and
demons. The weather is at once the day’s adventure and the day’s
pageant. Mr. Conrad has written one of the greatest stories in the
world simply about the weather and the soul of man. He may be
said to be the first novelist writing in English to have kept his
weather-eye open. Mr. Tomlinson shares Mr. Conrad’s sensitive care
for these things. His description of a storm of rain bursting on the
African hills makes you see the things as you read. In its setting,
even an unadorned and simple sentence like——

As Yeo luffed, the squall fell on us bodily with a great


weight of wind and white rain, pressing us into the sea,

compels our presence among blowing winds and dangerous waters.


But, weather-beaten as Mr. Tomlinson’s pages are, there is more
in them than the weather. There is an essayish quality in his books,
personal, confessional, go-as-you-please. The majority of essays
have egotism without personality. Mr. Tomlinson’s sketches have
personality without egotism. He is economical of discussion of his
own tastes. When he does discuss them you know that here is no
make-believe of confession. Take, for instance, the comment on
place-names with which he prefaces his account of his
disappointment with Tripoli:

You probably know there are place-names, which, when


whispered privately, have the unreasonable power of
translating the spirit east of the sun and west of the moon.
They cannot be seen in print without a thrill. The names in
the atlas which do that for me are a motley lot, and you, who
see no magic in them, but have your own lunacy in another
phase, would laugh at mine. Celebes, Acapulco, Para, Port
Royal, Cartagena, the Marquesas, Panama, the Mackenzie
River, Tripoli of Barbary—they are some of mine. Rome should
be there, I know, and Athens, and Byzantium. But they are
not, and that is all I can say about it.

That is the farthest Mr. Tomlinson ever gets on the way towards
arrogance. He ignores Rome and Athens. They are not among the
ports of call of his imagination. He prefers the world that sailors tell
about to the world that scholars talk about. He will not write about—
he will scarcely even interest himself in—any world but that which he
has known in the intimacy of his imaginative or physical experience.
Places that he has seen and thought of, ships, children, stars, books,
animals, soldiers, workers—of all these things he will tell you with a
tender realism, lucid and human because they are part of his life.
But the tradition that is not his own he throws aside as a burden. He
will carry no pack save of the things that have touched his heart and
his imagination.
I wish all his sketches had been as long as “The African Coast.”
It is so good that it makes one want to send him travelling from star
to star of all those names that mean more to him than Byzantium.
One desires even to keep him a prisoner for a longer period among
the lights of New York. He should have written about the blazing city
at length, as he has written about the ferries. His description of the
lighted ferries and the woman passenger who had forgotten Jimmy’s
boots, remains in the memory. Always in his sketches we find some
such significant “thing seen.” On the voyage home from New York on
a floating hotel it is the passing of a derelict sailing ship, “mastless
and awash,” that suddenly recreates for him the reality of the ocean.
After describing the assaults of the seas on the doomed hulk, he
goes on:

There was something ironic in the indifference of her


defenceless body to these unending attacks. It mocked this
white and raging post-mortem brutality, and gave her a
dignity that was cold and superior to all the eternal powers
could now do. She pitched helplessly head first into a hollow,
and a door flew open under the break of her poop; it
surprised and shocked us, for the dead might have signed to
us then. She went astern of us fast, and a great comber ran
at her, as if it had just spied her, and thought she was
escaping. There was a high white flash, and a concussion we
heard. She had gone. But she appeared again far away,
forlorn on a summit in desolation, black against the sunset.
The stump of her bowsprit, the accusatory finger of the dead,
pointed at the sky.

We find in “The Ruins” (which is a sketch of a town in France just


evacuated by the Germans) an equally imaginative use made of a
key incident. First, we have the description of the ruined town itself:

House-fronts had collapsed in rubble across the road.


There is a smell of opened vaults. All the homes are blind.
Their eyes have been put out. Many of the buildings are
without roofs, and their walls have come down to raw
serrations. Slates and tiles have avalanched into the street, or
the roof itself is entire, but has dropped sideways over the
ruin below as a drunken cap over the dissolute.

And so on till we come to the discovery of a corn-chandler’s ledger


lying in the mud of the roadway. Only an artist could have made a
tradesman’s ledger a symbol of hope and resurrection on a shattered
planet as Mr. Tomlinson has done. He picks out from the disordered
procession of things treasures that most of us would pass with
hardly a glance. His clues to the meaning of the world are all of his
own finding. It is this that gives his work the savour and freshness of
literature.
As for clues to Mr. Tomlinson’s own mind and temper, do we not
discover plenty of them in his confessions about books? He is a man
who likes to read The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms in bed. Heine and
Samuel Butler and Anatole France are among his favourite authors.
There is nothing in his work to suggest that he has taken any of
them for his models. But there is a vein of rebellious irony in his
writing that enables one to realise why his imagination finds in Swift
good company. He, too, has felt his heart lacerated, especially in
these late days of the world’s corruption. His writing would be bitter,
one feels, were it not for the strength of his affections. Humanity
and irony contend in his work, and humanity is fortunately the
winner. In the result, the world in his books is not permanently a
mud-ball, but a star shining in space. Perhaps it is in gratitude for
this that we find it possible at last even to forgive him his
contemptuous references to Coleridge’s Table-talk—that cache of
jewels buried in metaphysical cotton-wool.
XI
THE ALLEGED HOPELESSNESS OF TCHEHOV

A Russian critic has said that Tchehov had nothing to give his fellows
but a philosophy of hopelessness. He committed the crime of
destroying men’s faith in God, morals, progress, and art. This is an
accusation that takes one’s breath away. If ever there was a writer
who had a genius for consolation—a genius for stretching out a hand
to his floundering fellow-mortals—it was Tchehov. He was as active
in service as a professional philanthropist. His faith in the decency of
men was as inextinguishable as his doubt. His tenderness was a
passion. He was open-hearted to all comers. He never shut his door
either on a poor man needing medicine, or on a young man needing
praise. He was equally generous as author, doctor and reformer. He
who has been represented as a disbeliever in anything was no
disbeliever even in contemporary men of genius. His attitude to
Tolstoy was not one of idolatry, but it came as near being idolatrous
as is possible for a clever man. “I am afraid of Tolstoy’s death,” he
wrote in 1900. “If he were to die there would be a big, empty place
in my life.... I have never loved any man as much as him. I am not a
believing man, but of beliefs I consider his the nearest and most
akin to me.” In his gloomier moods he thought little enough of the
work either of himself or his younger contemporaries. “We are stale,”
he wrote; “we can only beget gutta-percha boys.” But this was
because he was on his knees before everything that is greatest in
literature. In a letter to his friend, Suvorin, editor of the Novoe
Vremya, he wrote:
The writers, who we say are for all time or are simply
good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very
important characteristic—they are going towards something
and summoning you towards it, too, and you feel, not with
your mind but with your whole being, that they have some
object, just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who did not
come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have
more immediate objects—the abolition of serfdom, the
liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka,
like Denis Davgdov; others have remote objects—God, life
beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The
best of them are idealists, and paint life as it is, but, through
every life’s being soaked in the consciousness of an object,
you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and
that captivates you.

If this is the confession of an unbeliever, a philosopher of


hopelessness, we may reasonably ask for a new definition of belief.
Tchehov, indeed, was born with an impulse towards reverence
and faith. Though he denied that he was either a Liberal or a
Conservative, he excited himself about causes like a schoolboy
revolutionary. He had a religious sense of justice. He was ardently on
Zola’s side during the Dreyfus excitement. “Let Dreyfus be guilty,” he
declared, “and Zola is still right, since it is the duty of writers not to
accuse, not to persecute, but to champion even the guilty once they
have been condemned and are enduring imprisonment.... There are
plenty of accusers, persecutors, and gendarmes without them, and
in any case the rôle of Paul suits them better than that of Saul.” He
quarrelled with Suvorin for attacking Zola. “To abuse Zola when he is
on his trial—that is unworthy of literature.”
We find the same ardent reforming spirit running through the
whole of Tchehov’s life. At one time he is engrossed in a project for
building in Moscow a “People’s Palace,” with a library, reading-rooms,
a lecture-room, a museum, and a theatre. At another time, he is off
to the island of Saghalin to study with his own eyes the horrors of
the Siberian penal system. “My God,” he writes in the course of his
investigations, “how rich Russia is in good people! If it were not for
the cold which deprives Siberia of the summer, and if it were not for
the officials who corrupt the peasants, Siberia would be the richest
and happiest of lands.” In another letter he looks forward to building
a school “in the village where I am a school-warden.” When a plague
of cholera breaks out, we find Tchehov once more living for others
with the same saintly unselfishness. At times, no doubt, he cursed
the cholera and he cursed his patients like a human being; but his
cries were the cries of an exhausted body; they were merely a proof
of the zeal that had worn him out. There is an attractive portrait of
Tchehov at this time in the biographical sketch that precedes the
English translation of his letters:

He returned home shattered and exhausted, but always


behaved as though he were doing something trivial; he
cracked little jokes and made everyone laugh as before, and
carried on conversations with his dachshund Quinine, about
her supposed sufferings.

This may be consistent with the philosophy of despair. It is


certainly very unlike the practice of despair. But that Tchehov’s creed
was the opposite of a creed of despair may be seen in letter after
letter. In one letter he writes:

I believe in individual people. I see salvation in individual


personalities scattered here and there all over Russia—
educated people or peasants—they have strength though
they are few.

In another letter he says:


Modern culture is only the first beginning of work for a
great future, work which will perhaps go on for tens of
thousands of years, in order that man may, if only in the
remote future, come to know the truth of the real God—that
is not, I conjecture, by seeking in Dostoievsky, but by clear
knowledge, as one knows twice two are four.

If one thing is obvious, it is that the writer of these sentences is


an enthusiast. Take him, again, when he is protesting against “trade-
marks and labels” for artists, and announcing his creed:

My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence,


talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom—
freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may
take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great
artist.

In regard to literature, he believed not in the disheartening sort


of realism but in a temperate idealism, as we learn from an excellent
parable:

Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham


only noticed that his father was a drunkard, and completely
lost sight of the fact that he was a genius, that he had built
an ark and saved the world. Writers must not imitate Ham....

On the other hand, Tchehov was always alert to defend the


practice of honest realism in literature. He refused to admit that it is
the object of literature to “unearth the pearl from the refuse-heap”:

A writer is not a confectioner, not a provider of cosmetics,


not an entertainer; he is a man bound, under contract, by his
sense of duty and his conscience; having put his hand to the
plough, he mustn’t turn back, and however distasteful, he
must conquer his squeamishness and soil his imagination with
the dirt of life. He is just like any ordinary reporter. What
would you say if a newspaper correspondent, out of a feeling
of fastidiousness or from a wish to please his readers, would
describe only honest mayors, high-minded ladies, and
virtuous railway contractors?

In Tchehov’s view, it is the duty of the artist to tell the truth


about his characters, not to draw morals from them. “The artist,” he
declares, “must not be the judge of his characters and of their
conversations, but merely an impartial witness.” The artist must, no
doubt, strive after some such impartiality as this. But the great artist
will never quite attain to it. Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tchehov
himself, all lavished affection on some of their characters and
withheld it from others.
On the other hand, the artist must be tolerant to a degree that
frequently shocks the orthodox moralist. He approaches individual
men, not as a censor, but as a recorder. Tchehov, writing to a friend
from his country estate, relates, for instance: “The village priest
often comes and pays me long visits; he is a very good fellow, a
widower, and has some illegitimate children.” To the stern moralist, a
priest who is a very good fellow with some illegitimate children is an
unthinkable paradox. To the artist it is a paradox that exists in
nature: he accepts it with a smile. It is not that Tchehov was
indifferent to the vices of the flesh. We find him writing on one
occasion to a great journalist: “Why do they write nothing about
prostitution in your paper? It is the most fearful evil, you know. Our
Sobelev street is a regular slave-market.”
Tchehov, indeed, like every great artist, was a man divided. He
had the artist’s passion for describing his fellow-men: he had also
the doctor’s passion for helping them. He was in a sense pulled in
opposite directions by these rival passions. Luckily, the tug-of-war,
instead of weakening, positively strengthened his genius. The great
artist is a reformer transformed. Shakespeare is sometimes held to
have lived aloof from the reformer’s temporary passions. But that
repeated summons to reconciliation in his plays is the credo of a
man who has plumbed the great secret of the liberalism of his time
and, equally, of ours. Pity, tenderness, love, or whatever you choose
to call it, is an essential ingredient of the greatest genius, whether in
reform or in art. It is the absence of pity that is the final
condemnation of most of the literature, painting, and sculpture of
our time. When pity is exhausted, the best part of genius is
exhausted, and there is little but cleverness left. In Tchehov, more
than in almost any other author of recent years, truth and
tenderness are united. He tells us the truth even when it is most
cruel, but he himself is kind. He often writes like a doctor going his
rounds in a sick world. But he cares for the sick world. That is why
his stories delight us as the synthetic golden syrup of more
optimistic authors never does.
XII
NIETZSCHE: A NOTE

“And thus I wander alone like a rhinoceros.” Nietzsche writes in one


of his letters that he had discovered this “strong closing sentence” in
an English translation of the sacred books of the Buddhists and had
made it a “household word.” It is at once a grotesque and an apt
image of his isolation in a world of men and women. His solitude
made him perilous: it ultimately exalted his egoism into madness.
There are few more amazing passages in the annals of literature
than those containing the last letters between the mad Nietzsche
and the mad Strindberg. Nietzsche, signing himself “Nietzsche
Cæsar,” wrote on New Year’s Eve, 1888:

I have appointed a meeting day of monarchs in Europe. I


shall order ... to be shot.
Au revoir! For we shall surely see each other again.
On one condition only. Let us divorce.

Strindberg, writing on the same date and signing himself “The best,
the highest God,” began his letter to Nietzsche: “I will, I will be
raving mad,” and concluded it:

Meanwhile, let us rejoice in our madness. Fare you


well and be true to your
Strindberg
(The best, the highest God).
Nietzsche’s reply was:

Mr. Strindberg:
Alas! ... no more! Let us divorce!
“The Crucified.”

Dr. Oscar Levy, in his introduction to an English selection from


Nietzsche’s letters, vigorously objects to the emphasis that has been
laid by some critics on Nietzsche’s madness. It is a reasonable
protest, if the accusation is put forward in order to damage
Nietzsche’s fame as an artist among philosophers. Dr. Levy, however,
goes so far on the other side that he almost leaves us with a picture
of Nietzsche as a perfectly normal man with all the normal “slave
virtues.” “A good friend, a devoted son, an affectionate brother, and
a generous enemy”—“not the slightest trace of any lack of
judgment”—“perfectly healthy and lucid”—such are the phrases in
which the Nietzsche of these letters is portrayed. We are told that
“even the curious last letter to Georg Brandes still gives a perfect
sense.” Here is the letter:

To the Friend Georg.


Having been discovered by you no trick was
necessary for the others to find me. The difficulty is now
to get rid of me.
“The Crucified.”

It would, I agree, be ridiculous to dwell on the madness at the


close of Nietzsche’s life, if such extravagant claims had not been
made for him by his followers. But the madness of Nietzsche is
relevant enough in a criticism of his philosophy, if we are asked to
accept him as one of the inspired guides to life.
Nietzsche himself was at once terrified and intoxicated by his
sense of his own abnormal difference from common men. He knew,
in part of his nature, that this aloofness was an evil. He craved for
sympathy so passionately at times that he cried to one of his friends:
“The whole of my philosophy totters after one hour’s sympathetic
intercourse even with total strangers!” About the same time—it was
in 1880—he wrote:

One ceases from loving oneself properly when one ceases


from exercising oneself in love towards others, wherefore the
latter (the ceasing from exercising, etc.) ought to be strongly
deprecated. (This is from my own experience.)

Even before that, however he had definitely decided on the


egocentric life. Writing to a friend on the subject of marriage, he
declared: “I shall certainly not marry; on the whole, I hate the
limitations and obligations of the whole civilised order of things so
very much that it would be difficult to find a woman free-spirited
enough to follow my lead.” He was himself the measure by which he
measured all the values of life. “I am not quite satisfied with Nature,”
he had said in an early letter, “who ought to have given me a little
more intellect as well as a warmer heart.” But this mood of modesty
did not last. At that time, he saw in his egoism his greatest
weakness. “One begins to feel constantly as if one were covered
with a hundred scars and every movement were painful.” As his
consciousness of his genius grew, every scar and every pain seemed
to him to bear witness, not to his egoism, but to his greatness. He
assures his sister in 1883 that he is grateful even for his physical
suffering because through it “I was torn away from an estimate of
my life-task which was not only false but a hundred times too low.”
He declares that he naturally belonged to “the modest among men,”
so that “some violent means were necessary in order to recall me to
myself.” He was unquestionably heroic in the way in which he
accepted all the miseries of his life as the natural lot of a saviour of
mankind. He boasted of his isolation and his sufferings magnificently.
No sooner, however, did the world begin to smile on him than he
began to boast on a more normal plane of delighted vanity. His most
attractive braggings were addressed to his mother. He wrote to her
from Turin:

Oh, if you only knew on what terms the foremost


personages of the world express their loyalty to me—the most
charming women, a Madame la Princesse Tenichefl not by any
means excepted. I have genuine geniuses among my
admirers—to-day there is no name that is treated with as
much distinction and respect as my own. You see that is the
feat—sans name, sans rank, and sans riches, I am
nevertheless treated like a little prince here, by everybody,
even down to my fruit-stall woman, who is never satisfied till
she has picked me out the sweetest bunch from among her
grapes.

Grateful though he was for the practical admiration of the fruit-stall


woman, however he liked to pick and choose among his admirers.
After he had received an enthusiastic greeting from a coterie of
Viennese disciples, he wrote scornfully to his mother of “such
adolescent advances.” “I do not,” he declared, “write for men who
are fermenting and immature.” He sneered if he was praised; he was
infuriated if he was ignored. At one moment he would sneer at the
barbarous Germans who did not understand him. At another, he
would show how deeply he felt this want of appreciation in his own
country for his “unrelenting subterranean war against all that
mankind has hitherto honoured and loved.” Shortly before he went
mad, he wrote to a friend:

... Although I am in my forty-fifth year and have


published about fifteen books (—among them that non plus
ultra “Zarathustra”), no one in Germany has yet succeeded in
producing even a moderately good review of a single one of
my works. They are now getting out of the difficulty with such
words as “eccentric,” “pathological,” “psychiatric.” There have
been evil and slanderous hints enough about me, and in the
papers both scholarly and unscholarly, the prevailing attitude
is one of ungoverned animosity—but how is it that no one
protests against this? How is it that no one feels insulted
when I am abused? And all these years no comfort, no drop
of human sympathy, not a breath of love.

He reproached even his sister for her want of understanding.


“You do not seem to be even remotely conscious,” he told her, “of
the fact that you are next of kin to the man and his destiny, in which
the question of millenniums has been decided—speaking quite
literally, I hold the Future of mankind in my hand.” It is because his
correspondence is so full of passages in this and similar moods that
we find in Nietzsche’s letters little of the intimacy that we expect in
good letters. It is as though he were suffering from an obsession
about his fame. Many of his letters are merely manifestoes about
himself. He was not greatly interested in other people or in the little
ordinary things that interest other people. His most enjoyable
passages might be described as outbursts, and towards the end of
his life he chose as his correspondents Strindberg and Brandes, who
also had the genius of outburst but in a less superb degree. It was
Brandes who wrote to him with regard to Dostoievsky:

He is a true and great poet, but a vile creature, absolutely


Christian in his way of thinking and living, and at the same
time quite sadique. His morals are wholly what you have
christened “Slave Morality.”

“Just what I think,” replied Nietzsche.


Not that the letters are without an occasional touch of fun.
There is a delightful early letter in which Nietzsche tells how, being
invited to meet Wagner, he ordered a dress suit. It was brought
round to the house just in time to allow him to dress. The old
messenger, however, brought not only the parcel but the bill, and
presented it to Nietzsche:

I took it politely, but he declared he must be paid on


delivery. I was surprised, and explained that I had nothing to
do with him as the servant of my tailor, but that my dealings
were with his master to whom I had given the order. The man
grew more pressing, as did also the time. I snatched at the
things and began to put them on. He snatched them too and
did all he could to prevent me from dressing. What with
violence on my part and violence on his, there was soon a
scene, and all the time I was fighting in my shirt, as I wished
to get the new trousers.
At last, after a display of dignity, solemn threats, the
utterance of curses on my tailor and his accomplice, and vows
of vengeance, the little man vanished with my clothes.

There is another amusing letter to his sister, in which he tells her


how, one Christmas Day at Nice, he drank too much:

Then your famous animal drank three quite large glasses


of a sweet local wine, and was just the slightest bit top-
heavy; at least, not long afterwards, when the breakers drew
near to me, I said to them as one says to a bevy of farmyard
fowls, “Shsh! Shsh! Shshh!”

This incident is comically symbolic of much of Nietzsche’s philosophy.


It is hardly necessary to go into Dr. Levy’s defence of Nietzsche
against the charge that he was the “man who caused the war.” Dr.
Levy points out quite justly that Nietzsche was as severe a critic of
Prussians and Prussianism as any English leader-writer in war-time.
This, however, does not meet the point of the anti-Nietzscheans.
What they contend is that Prussianism is essentially the vulgar
application of the principles that underlie the Nietzschean
philosophy. It is obviously ridiculous to contend that Nietzsche
caused the war. It is arguable, however, that he was the supreme
poet of the supreme falsehood that is at the bottom of all unjust
wars.
In any case, like Carlyle, he will probably survive as an artist
rather than as a teacher. And even men who detest his gospel will
delight in the lightning of his phrase as it shoots out of the thunder-
clouds of his imagination.
XIII
MR. T. S. ELIOT AS CRITIC

Mr. Eliot, in his critical essays, is an undertaker rather than a critic.


He comes to bury Hamlet not to praise him. He has an essay on
“Hamlet and His Problems,” in which he assures us that, “so far from
being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an
artistic failure.” Now, there are several things about Hamlet that call
for explanation. But there is one thing that needs no explanation,
and that is its “artistic failure.” One might as well set out to explain
why the mid-Atlantic is shallow, why Mont Blanc is lower than
Parliament Hill, why Cleopatra was unattractive, why roses have an
offensive smell. It might be possible for a writer of paradoxes to
amuse himself and us on any of these themes. But Mr. Eliot is no
dealer in paradoxes. He is a serious censor of literature, who lives in
the gloom of a basement, and cannot believe in the golden pomp of
the sun outside. It might be unfair to say that what he is suffering
from is literary atheism. He has undoubtedly gods of his own. But he
worships them in the dark spirit of the sectarian, and his interest in
them is theological rather than religious in kind. He is like the
traditional Plymouth Brother whose belief in God is hardly so strong
as his belief that there are “only a few of us”—perhaps “only one of
us”—saved. We see the Plymouth-Brother mood in his reference to
“the few people who talk intelligently about Stendhal and Flaubert
and James.” This expresses an attitude which is intolerable in a critic
of literature, and should be left to the précieuses ridicules.
Mr. Eliot, however, does not merely say that Hamlet is an artistic
failure and leave it at that. He goes on to explain what he means. He
believes that:
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare’s, is a
play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son,
and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive
successfully upon the “intractable” material of the old play.

In so far as this is an attempt to explain the specifically new


Shakespearian emphasis in Hamlet, in contrast to those elements
which he borrowed from an earlier play, the first part of the
assertion is worth considering. But, as regards the completed play
that we possess, novelties, borrowings, and all, the entire sentence
gives us merely a false simplification. Shakespeare’s finished Hamlet
is a play dealing with many things besides the effect of a mother’s
guilt on her son. It is a play dealing with the effect of a whole circle
of ruinous events closing in on a man of princely nature, who was a
foreigner amid the baseness that surrounded him. Shakespeare
showed in Hamlet that it was possible, contrary to all the rules, to
write a play which combined the largeness of a biography with
essential dramatic unity. Mr. Eliot, however, clings to the idea that
Shakespeare failed in Hamlet because he was divided in interest
between the theme of the guilty mother and other intractable stuff
“that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate
into art.” Now, every great work of art is like the visible part of an
iceberg; it reveals less than it leaves hidden. The greatest poem in
the world is no more than a page from that inspired volume that
exists in the secret places of the poet’s soul. There is no need to
explain the mysteries that crowd about us as we read Hamlet by a
theory of Shakespeare’s failure. To summon these mysteries into the
narrow compass of a play is the surest evidence of a poet’s triumph.
Let us see, however, how Mr. Eliot, holding to his guilty-mother
theme, attempts to explain the quality of Shakespeare’s failure. He
writes:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is


by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of
objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the
formula of that particular emotion; such that when the
external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience,
are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine
any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find
this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of
Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to
you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory
impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s
death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these
words were automatically released by the last event in the
series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete
adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely
what is deficient in Hamlet.

“Hamlet (the man),” he adds, “is dominated by an emotion


which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they
appear.” Mr. Eliot has a curious view of the things that justify violent
emotion. I should have thought that the murder of a father by his
usurping brother, the infidelity of a mother and a mistress, the use of
former companions to spy on him, the failure of all that had once
seemed honest and fair, plots to murder him, the suicide of his
beloved, might have caused considerable perturbation even in the
soul of a fish. If ever there was a play in which the emotion is not in
excess of the facts as they appear, that play is Hamlet. The emotion
is “in excess” only in the sense that it expresses for us not merely
the personal emotion of one man, but the emotions of generation
after generation of fine and sensitive spirits caught in the gross toils
of disaster. Hamlet is a universal type as well as an individual. In this
he resembles such a figure as Prometheus to a degree which cannot
be claimed for Lear or Macbeth or Othello. That, perhaps, is the real
mystery that has bewildered Mr. Eliot.
Mr. Eliot will have it, however, that Shakespeare, and not he
himself, is to blame for his bewilderment. He concludes his essay:
We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a
problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it
at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what
experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly
horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts
in his biography; and we should like to know whether, and
when, and after or at the same time as what personal
experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii, “Apologie de Raimond
Sebond.” We should have, finally, to know something which is
by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an
experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the
facts. We should have to understand things which
Shakespeare did not understand himself.

Would it be possible to write a paragraph in which there was a


greater air of intellectual pursuit and a tinier reality of intellectual
achievement? It would not be easy to say more essentially irrelevant
things on a great subject. Mr. Eliot is like a man dissecting—and
dissecting with desperate earnestness—a corpse that isn’t there.
And his essays in praise have scarcely more of that vitality which
is a prerequisite of good criticism than his essays in blame. He
obviously admires Blake and Ben Jonson, but he leaves them as rigid
and as cold as though he were measuring them for their coffins. The
good critic communicates his delight in genius. His memorable
sentences are the mirrors of memorable works of art. Like the poet,
he is something of a philosopher, but his philosophy is for the most
part implicit. He is a light-bringer by means of quotation and
aphorism. He may destroy, but only in order to let in the light. His
business among authors is as glorious as was the business of
Plutarch among men of action. He may be primarily æsthetic, or
primarily biographical, or primarily expository; but in no kind of
criticism can he reach more than pedantry, unless he himself is a
man of imagination, stirred by the spectacle of the strange and
noble passions of the human soul. He knows that literature is not the
game of a coterie, but is a fruit of the tree of life, hanging from the
same boughs as the achievements of lovers and statesmen and
heroes. There is so little truth in Mr. Eliot’s statement that “a literary
critic should have no emotions except those immediately provoked
by a work of art—and these ... are, when valid, perhaps not to be
called emotional at all,” that one would be bound to tell ten times
more truth merely by contradicting it. The ideal critic would always
be able to disentangle relevant from irrelevant emotions as he
studied a work of art; but in practice all critics, save a few makers of
abstract laws, are human, and the rich personal experience of the
critic enters into his work for good as well as evil.
Mr. Eliot fails as a critic because he brings us neither light nor
delight. But this does not mean that he will always fail. He has some
of the qualities that go to the making of a critic. He has learning,
and he enjoys intellectual exercise. His essay on “Tradition and the
Individual Talent” shows that he is capable of ideas, though he is not
yet capable of expressing them clearly and interestingly. Besides
this, as one reads him, one is conscious of the presence of a serious
talent, as yet largely inarticulate, and wasting itself on the splitting
of hairs and metaphysical word-spinning. His failure at present is
partly a failure of generosity. If a critic is lacking in generous
responsiveness it is in vain for him to write about the poets. The
critic has duties as a destroyer, but chiefly in the same sense as a
gold-washer. His aim is the discovery of gold. Mr. Eliot is less of a
discoverer in this kind than any critic of distinction who is now
writing. Otherwise he could hardly have written the sort of attack he
writes on Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation of Euripides, in which
he overlooks the one supreme fact that calls for a critic’s explanation
—the fact that Professor Murray alone among English translators has
(whether imperfectly or not) brought Euripides to birth as an author
for the modern world. Let Mr. Eliot for the next ten years take as his
patron saint the woman in the New Testament who found the piece
of silver, instead of Johannes Agricola in joyless meditation. He will
find her not only better company, but a wiser counsellor. He may
even find his sentences infected with her cheerful excitement, for
want of which as yet they can break neither into a phrase nor into a
smile.
XIV
MR. NORMAN DOUGLAS’S DISLIKES

Mr. Norman Douglas has, in Alone, written a book of hatred


tempered with archæology and laughter. Luckily, there is very little
archæology and enough laughter to make the hatred enjoyable
without being infectious. It is not that Mr. Douglas does not like
some of his fellow-creatures. He likes heretics and jolly beggars. He
liked Ouida. But, if Mr. Douglas likes you, the danger is that he will
throw you at somebody else’s head. That is what he does with
Ouida, whom he glorifies as “the last, almost the last, of lady
authors.” He throws her at the head of the age in general—at “our
anæmic and wooly generation,” at “our actual womanscribes” with
“their monkey-tricks and cleverness,” at “our vegetarian world-
reformers who are as incapable of enthusiasm as they are of
contempt, because their blood temperature is invariably two degrees
below normal,” and finally at an American novelist described as “this
feline and gelatinous New Englander.” That gives a fair enough
impression of Mr. Douglas’s attitude to the human race as seen at
close quarters.
He has in a measure justified his attitude by making an amusing
book of it. Mr. Douglas has a well-stored and alert mind, full of by-
ways, that makes for good conversation. As we read him we feel
that we are listening to the racy monologues of a traveller with a
special gift for pouring out the comedy of his discomforts in abusive
form. He tells us how he landed—“with one jump—in Hell,” which is
his name for Siena in winter. “I hate Viareggio at all seasons,” he
tells us farther on, and he describes the inhabitants as “birds of
prey: a shallow and rapacious brood.” At Pisa, when he arrives, “the
Arno is the emblem of Despair ... like a torrent of liquid mud—
irresolute whether to be earth or water.” He finds a good landlady at
Corsanico, but he immediately remembers how he had “lived long at
the mercy of London landladies and London charwomen—having
suffered the torments of Hell, for more years than I care to
remember, at the hands of those pickpockets and hags and harpies
and drunken sluts” ... “those London sharks and furies.” At Rome the
remembrance of a “sweet old lady friend” sets him thinking also of
her husband, “a worm, a good man in the worst sense of the word,”
“the prince of moralisers, the man who first taught me how
contemptible the human race may become”—“what a face:
gorgonising in its assumption of virtue”—“he ought to have throttled
himself at his mother’s breast.” The absence of mosquitoes and the
fewness of the flies at Rome reminds him again of his sufferings at
the hands, so to speak, of flies in other places. “One of the most
cherished projects of my life,” he declares, “is to assemble, in a kind
of anthology, all the invectives that have been hurled since the
beginning of literature against this loathly dirt-born insect, this living
carrion, this blot on the Creator’s reputation—and thereto add a few
of my own.” The noise of the Roman trams leads him, while lying in
bed, to devote the morning hours to “the malediction of all modern
progress, wherein I include, with firm impartiality, every single
advancement in culture which happens to lie between my present
state and that comfortable cavern in whose shelter I can see myself
ensconced as of yore, peacefully sucking somebody’s marrow, while
my women, round the corner, are collecting a handful of acorns for
my dessert,” after which he goes on to denounce the telephone as
“that diabolic invention” and the Press for “cretinising” the public
mind. At Olevana, it is the nightingale that rouses him to
imprecations:

One of them elects to warble in deplorably full-throated


ease immediately below my bedroom window. When this
particular fowl sets up its din at about 3.45 a.m. it is a
veritable explosion: an ear-rending, nerve-shattering
explosion of noise.... It is that blasted bird clearing its throat
for a five-hours’ entertainment.... A brick. Methinks I begin to
see daylight....

Mr. Douglas, it is only fair to say, explains that Italian nightingales do


not sing like English nightingales. But I fancy that Mr. Douglas sat
down, when he began these sketches, in the mood for writing comic
scarifications, and neither bird nor man, city nor river, was safe from
his harsh laughter. He hurls a pen where King Saul in similar mood
hurled a spear, and we must concede that he hurls it with force.
Even nightingales, however, do not infuriate him as Victorians
and Puritans do. When he writes angrily about nightingales you feel
that he is only being amusing. When he writes about Victorians, you
realise that he is positively white with anger. “It was not Nero ...” he
cries, “but our complacent British reptiles, who filled the prisons with
the wailing of young children, and hanged a boy of thirteen for
stealing a spoon.” And again: “What a self-sufficient and inhuman
brood were the Victorians of that type, hag-ridden by their
nightmare of duty; a brood that has never been called by its proper
name.” Mr. Douglas, at any rate, has done his best. He even gives us
“a nation of canting shop-keepers,” but becomes more original with
“hermaphrodite middle-classes.” But his real objection is neither to
Victorianism nor to Puritanism; it is to Christianity, as we see when
he writes of self-indulgence:

Self-indulgence, I thought. Heavily fraught is that word;


weighted with meaning. The history of two thousand years of
spiritual dyspepsia lies embedded in its four syllables. Self-
indulgence—it is what the ancients blithely called “indulging
one’s genius.” Self-indulgence! How debased an expression
nowadays. What a text for a sermon on the mishaps of good
words and good things. How all the glad warmth and
innocence have faded out of the phrase. What a change has
crept over us.
Mr. Douglas is frankly on the side of the pagans—not the real pagans
who were rather like ordinary Christians, but the modern pagans
who detest Christianity. This paganism is merely egoism in its latest
form. It is anti-human, as when Mr. Douglas exclaims:

Consider well your neighbour, what an imbecile he is....


The sage will go his way, prepared to find himself growing
ever more out of sympathy with vulgar trends of opinion, for
such is the inevitable development of thoughtful and self-
respecting minds.

Such is his creed, and in the result his laughter, though often
amusing, is never happy. There is the laughter of sympathy, which is
Shakespeare’s, and there is the laughter of antipathy, which is Mr.
Douglas’s. That is, perhaps, why his publishers say that his is “a
book for the fastidious in particular.” You could not say of
Shakespeare that he is “for the fastidious in particular.”
We must grant an author his point of view, however, and the fact
remains that, however we may differ from Mr. Douglas’s preaching,
we go on reading him with pleasure, protest and curiosity. He puts
his life into his sentences, and so he stamps with experience even
such a piece of topographical information as:

From here, if you are in the mood, you may descend


eastward over the Italian frontier, crossing the stream which
is spanned lower down by the bridge of St. Louis, and find
yourself at Mortola Superiore (try the wine) and then at
Mortola proper (try the wine).

He is nearly always amusing about wine, whether it is good or bad.


But that is only one of his moods. He also talks to you as a
naturalist, as an archæologist, as a biologist, or will begin to make
some odd book that you are never likely to read live for you; he has
discovered an author called Ramage who is perhaps the most real
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