'Ah! did you stab at Shelley's heartWith silly sneer and cruel lie?And Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Keats,To murder did you nobly try?You failed, 'tis true; but what of that?The world remembers still your name—'Tis fame,for you, to be the curThat barks behind the heels of Fame.'
'Ah! did you stab at Shelley's heartWith silly sneer and cruel lie?And Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Keats,To murder did you nobly try?
'Ah! did you stab at Shelley's heart
With silly sneer and cruel lie?
And Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Keats,
To murder did you nobly try?
You failed, 'tis true; but what of that?The world remembers still your name—'Tis fame,for you, to be the curThat barks behind the heels of Fame.'
You failed, 'tis true; but what of that?
The world remembers still your name—
'Tis fame,for you, to be the cur
That barks behind the heels of Fame.'
Any one who is fortunate enough to have enemies will know that all this is far from being fanciful. If one's enemies have any otherraison d'êtrebeyond the fact of their being our enemies—what is it? They are neither beautiful nor clever, wise nor good, famous nor, indeed, passably distinguished. Were they any of these, they would not have taken to so humble a means of getting their living. Instead of being our enemies, they could then have afforded to employ enemies on their own account.
Who, indeed, are our enemies? Broadly speaking, they are all those people who lack what we possess.
If you are rich, every poor man is necessarily your enemy. If you are beautiful, thegreat democracy of the plain and ugly will mock you in the streets. It will be the same with everything you possess. The brainless will never forgive you for possessing brains, the weak will hate you for your strength, and the evil for your good heart. If you can write, all the bad writers are at once your foes. If you can paint, the bad painters will talk you down. But more than any talent or charm you may possess, the pearl of price for which you will be most bitterly hated will be your success. You can be the most wonderful person that ever existed, so long as you don't succeed, and nobody will mind. 'It is the sunshine,' says some one, 'that brings out the adder.' So powerful, indeed, is success that it has been known to turn a friend into a foe. Those, then, who wish to engage a few trusty enemies out of place need only advertise among the unsuccessful.
P.S.—For one service we should be particularly thankful to our enemies—they save us so much in stimulants. Their unbelief so helps our belief, their negatives make us so positive.
It is a curious truth that, whereas in every other art deliberate choice of method and careful calculation of effect are expected from the artist, in the greatest and most difficult art of all, the art of life, this is not so. In literature, painting, or sculpture you first evolve your conception, and then, after long study of it, as it glows and shimmers in your imagination, you set about the reverent selection of that form which shall be its most truthful incarnation, in words, in paint, in marble. Now life, as has been said many times, is an art too. Sententious morality from time past has told us that we are each given a part to play, evidently implying, with involuntary cynicism, that the art of life is—the art of acting.
As with the actor, we are each given acertain dramatic conception for the expression of which we have precisely the same artistic materials—namely, our own bodies, sometimes including heart and brains. One has often heard the complaint of a certain actor that he acts himself. On the metaphorical stage of life the complaint and the implied demand are just the reverse. How much more interesting life would be if only more people had the courage and skill to act themselves, instead of abjectly understudying some one else! Of course, there are supers on the stage of life as on the real stage. It is proper that these should dress and speak and think alike. These one courteously excepts from the generalisation that the composer of the play, as Marcus Aurelius calls him, has given each of us a certain part to play—that part simply oneself: a part, need one say, by no means as easy as it seems; a part most difficult to study, and requiring daily rehearsal. So difficult is it, indeed, that most people throw up the part, and join the ranks of the supers—who, curiously enough, are paid much more handsomely than the principals. They enter oneof the learned or idle professions, join the army or take to trade, and so speedily rid themselves of the irksome necessity of being anything more individual than 'the learned counsel,' 'the learned judge,' 'my lord bishop,' or 'the colonel,' names impersonal in application as the dignity of 'Pharaoh,' whereof the name and not the man was alone important. Henceforth they are the Church, the Law, the Army, the City, or that vaguer profession Society. Entering one of these, they become as lost to the really living world as the monk who voluntarily surrenders all will and character of his own at the threshold of his monastery: bricks in a prison wall, privates in the line, peas in a row. But, as I say, these are the parts that pay. For playing the others, indeed, you are not paid, but expected to pay—dearly.
It is full time we turned to those on whom falls the burden of those real parts. Such, when quite young, if they be conscientious artists, will carefully consider themselves, their gifts and possibilities, study to discover their artisticraison d'êtreand how best tofulfil it. He or she will say: Here am I, a creature of great gifts and exquisite sensibilities, drawn by great dreams, and vibrating to great emotions; yet this potent and exquisite self is as yet, I know, but unwrought material of the perfect work of art it is intended that I should make of it—but the marble wherefrom, with patient chisel, I must liberate the perfect and triumphant ME! As a poet listening with trembling ear to the voice of his inspiration, so I tremulously ask myself—what is the divine conception that is to become embodied in me, what is the divine meaning of ME? How best shall I express it in look, in word, in deed, till my outer self becomes the truthful symbol of my inner self—till, in fact, I have successfully placed the best of myself on the outside —for others besides myself to see, and know and love?
What is my part, and how am I to play it?
Returning to the latter image, there are two difficulties that beset one in playing a part on the stage of life, right at the outset. You are not allowed to 'look' it, or 'dress' it! What would an actor think, who, asked toplay Hamlet, found that he would be expected to play it without make-up and in nineteenth-century costume? Yet many of us are in a like dilemma with similar parts. Actors and audience must all wear the same drab clothes and the same immobile expression. It is in vain you protest that you do not really belong to this absurd and vulgar nineteenth century, that you have been spirited into it by a cruel mistake, that you really belong to mediæval Florence, to Elizabethan, Caroline, or at latest Queen Anne England, and that you would like to be allowed to look and dress as like it as possible. It is no use; if you dare to look or dress like anything but your own tradesmen—and other critics—it is at your peril. If you are beautiful, you are expected to disguise a fact that is an open insult to every other person you look at; and you must, as a general rule, never look, wear, feel, or say what everybody else is not also looking, wearing, feeling, or saying.
Thus you get some hint of the difficulty of playing the part of yourself on this stage of life.
In these matters of dressing and looking your part musicians seem granted an immunity denied to all their fellow-artists. Perhaps it is taken for granted that the musician is a fool—the British public is so intuitive. Yet it takes the same view of the poet, without allowing him a like immunity. And, by the way, what a fine conception of his part had Tennyson—of the dignity, the mystery, the picturesqueness of it! Tennyson would have felt it an artistic crime to look like his publisher; yet what poet is there left us to-day half so distinguished-looking as his publisher?
Indeed, curiously enough, among no set of men does the desire to look as commonplace as the rest of the world seem so strong as among men of letters. Perhaps it is out of consideration for the rest of the world; but, whatever the reason, immobility of expression and general mediocrity of style are more characteristic of them at present than even the military.
It is surely a strange paradox that we should pride ourselves on schooling to foolish insensibility, on eliminating from them everymark of individual character, the faces that were intended subtly and eloquently to image our moods—to look glad when we are glad, sorry when we are sorry, angry in anger, and lovely in love.
The impassivity of the modern young man is indeed a weird and wonderful thing. Is it a mark to hide from us the appalling sins he none the less openly affects? Is it meant to conceal that once in his life he paid a wild visit to 'The Empire'—by kind indulgence of the County Council? that he once chucked a barmaid under the chin, that he once nearly got drunk, that he once spoke to a young lady he did not know—and then ran away?
One sighs for the young men of the days of Gautier and Hugo, the young men with red waistcoats who made asses of themselves at first nights and on the barricades, young men with romance in their hearts and passion in their blood, fearlessly sentimental and picturesquely everything.
The lover then was not ashamed that you should catch radiant glimpses of his love in his eyes—nay! if you smiled kindly on him,he would take you by the arm and insist on your breaking a bottle with him in honour of his mistress. Joy and sorrow then wore their appropriate colours, according, so to say, to the natural sumptuary laws of the emotions—one of which is that the right place for the heart is the sleeve.
It is the duty of those who are great, or to whom great destinies of joy or sorrow have been dealt, to wear their distinctions for the world to see. It is good for the world, which in its crude way indicates the rudiments of this dramatic art of life, when it decrees that the bride shall walk radiant in orange blossom, and the mourner sadden our streets with black—symbols ever passing before us of the moving vicissitudes of life.
The mourner cannot always be sad, or the bride merry; the bride indeed sometimes weeps at the altar, and the mourner laughs a savage cynical laugh at the grave; but for those moments in which they awhile forget parts more important than themselves, the tailor and the dressmaker have provided symbolical garments, just as military decorations have been provided for heroeswithout the gift of looking heroic, and sacerdotal vestments for the priest, who, like a policeman, is not always on duty.
In playing his part the conscientious artist in life, like any other actor, must often seem to feel more than he really feels at a given moment, say more than he means. In this he is far from being insincere—though he must make up his mind to be accused daily of insincerity and affectation. On the contrary, it will be his very sincerity that necessitates his make-believe. With his great part ever before him in its inspiring completeness, he must be careful to allow no merely personal accident of momentary feeling or action to jeopardise the general effect. There are moments, for example, when a really true lover, owing to such masterful natural facts as indigestion, a cold, or extreme sleepiness, is unable to feel all that he knows he really feels. To 'tell the truth,' as it is called, under such circumstances, would simply be a most dangerous form of lying. There is no duty we owe to truth more imperative than that of lying stoutly on occasion—for, indeed, there is often no other way of conveying the whole truth than by telling the part-lie.
A watchful sincerity to our great conception of ourselves is the first and last condition, of our creating that finest work of art—a personality; for a personality, like a poet, is not only born but made.
In an essay on Vauvenargues Mr. John Morley speaks with characteristic causticity of those epigrammatists 'who persist in thinking of man and woman as two different species,' and who make verbal capital out of the fancied distinction in the form of smart epigrams beginning 'Les femmes.' It is one of Shakespeare's cardinal characteristics thathe understood woman. Mr. Meredith's fame as a novelist is largely due to the fact that he toounderstands women. The one spot on the sun of Robert Louis Stevenson's fame, so we are told, is that he couldnever draw a woman. His capacity for drawing men counted for nothing, apparently, beside this failure. Evidently the Sphinx has not the face of a woman for nothing. That is why no one has read her riddle, translatedher mystic smile. Yet many people smile mysteriously, without any profound meanings behind their smile, with no other reason than a desire to mystify. Perhaps the Sphinx smiles to herself just for the fun of seeing us take her smile so seriously. And surely women must so smile as they hear their psychology so gravely discussed. Of course, the superstition is invaluable to them, and it is only natural that they should make the most of it. Man is supposed to be a complete ignoramus in regard to all the specialised female 'departments'—from the supreme mystery of the female heart to the humble domestic mysteries of a household. Similarly, men are supposed to have no taste in women's dress, yet for whom do women clothe themselves in the rainbow and the sea-foam, if not to please men? And was not the high-priest of that delicious and fascinating mystery a man—if it be proper to call the late M. Worth a man,—as the best cooks are men, and the best waiters?
It would seem to be assumed from all this mystification that men are beings clear as daylight, both to themselves and to women.Poor, simple, manageable souls, their wants are easily satisfied, their psychology—which, it is implied, differs little from their physiology—long since mapped out.
It may be so, but it is the opinion of some that men's simplicity is no less a fiction than women's mysterious complexity, and that human character is made up of much the same qualities in men and women, irrespective of a merely rudimentary sexual distinction, which has, of course, its proper importance, and which the present writer would be the last to wish away. From that quaint distinction of sex springs, of course, all that makes life in the smallest degree worth living, from great religions to tiny flowers. Love and beauty and poetry; Shakespeare's plays, Burne-Jones's pictures, and Wagner's operas—all such moving expressions of human life, as science has shown us, spring from the all-important fact that 'male and female created He them.'
This everybody knows, and few are fools enough to deny. Many people, however, confuse this organic distinction of sex with its time-worn conventional symbols; justas religion is commonly confused with its external rites and ceremonies. The comparison naturally continues itself further; for, as in religion, so soon as some traditional garment of the faith has become outworn or otherwise unsuitable, and the proposal is made to dispense with or substitute it, an outcry immediately is raised that religion itself is in danger—so with sex, no sooner does one or the other sex propose to discard its arbitrary conventional characteristics, or to supplement them by others borrowed from its fellow-sex, than an outcry immediately is raised that sex itself is in danger.
Sex—the most potent force in the universe—in danger because women wear knickerbockers instead of petticoats, or military men take to corsets and cosmetics!
That parallel with religion may be pursued profitably one step further. In religion, the conventional test of your faith is not how you live, not in your kindness of heart or purity of mind, but how you believe—in the Trinity, in the Atonement; and do you turn to the East during the recital of the Apostles' Creed? These and such, as everyone knows, are the vital matters of religion. And it is even so with sex. You are not asked for the realities of manliness or womanliness, but for the shadows, the arbitrary externalities, the fashions of which change from generation to generation.
To be truly womanly you must never wear your hair short; to be truly manly you must never wear it long. To be truly womanly you must dress as daintily as possible, however uncomfortably; to be truly manly you must wear the most hideous gear ever invented by the servility of tailors—a strange succession of cylinders from head to heel; cylinder on head, cylinder round your body, cylinders on arms and cylinders on legs. To be truly womanly you must be shrinking and clinging in manner and trivial in conversation; you must have no ideas, and rejoice that you wish for none; you must thank Heaven that you have never ridden a bicycle or smoked a cigarette; and you must be prepared to do a thousand other absurd and ridiculous things. To be truly manly you must be and do the opposite of all these things, with this exception—that with youthe possession of ideas is optional. The finest specimens of British manhood are without ideas; but that, I say, is, generally speaking, a matter for yourself. It is indeed the only matter in which you have any choice. More important matters, such as the cut of your clothes and hair, the shape of your face, the length of your moustache and the pattern of your cane—all these are very properly regulated for you by laws of fashion, which you could never dream of breaking. You may break every moral law there is—or rather, was—and still remain a man. You may be a bully, a cad, a coward and a fool, in the poor heart and brains of you; but so long as you wear the mock regimentals of contemporary manhood, and are above all things plain and undistinguished enough, your reputation for manhood will be secure. There is nothing so dangerous to a reputation for manhood as brains or beauty.
In short, to be a true woman you have only to be pretty and an idiot, and to be a true man you have only to be brutal and a fool.
From these misconceptions of manlinessand womanliness, these superstitions of sex, many curious confusions have come about. They so to say, professional differentiation between the sexes had at one time gone so far that men were credited with the entire monopoly of a certain set of human qualities, and women with the monopoly of a certain other set of human qualities; yet every one of these are qualities which one would have thought were proper to, and necessary for, all human beings alike, male and female.
In a dictionary of a date (1856) when everything on earth and in heaven was settled and written in penny cyclopædias and books of deportment, I find these delicious definitions—
Manly: becoming a man; firm; brave; undaunted; dignified; noble; stately; not boyish or womanish.
Womanly: becoming a woman; feminine; aswomanlybehaviour.
UnderWomanwe find the adjectives—soft, mild, pitiful and flexible, kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender, timorous, modest.
Who can doubt that the dictionary maker defined and distributed his adjectives arightfor the year 1856? Since then, however, many alarming heresies have taken root in our land, and some are heard to declare that both these sets of adjectives apply to men and women alike, and are, in fact, necessities of any decent human outfit. Otherwise the conclusion is obvious, that no one desirous of the adjective 'manly' must ever be—soft, mild, pitiful and flexible, kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender, timorous, or modest; and no one desirous of the adjective 'womanly' be—firm, brave, undaunted, dignified, noble, or stately.
But surely the essentials of 'manliness' and 'womanliness' belong to man and woman alike—the externals are purely artistic considerations, and subject to the vagaries of fashion. In art no one would think of allowing fashion any serious artistic opinion. It is usually the art which is out of fashion that is most truly art. Similarly, fashions in manliness or womanliness have nothing to do with real manliness or womanliness. Moreover, the adjectives 'manly' or 'womanly,' applied to works of art, or the artistic surfaces of men and women, areirrelevant—that is to say, impertinent. You have no right to ask a poem or a picture to look manly or womanly, any more than you have any right to ask a man or a woman to look manly or womanly. There is no such thing as looking manly or womanly. There is looking beautiful or ugly, distinguished or commonplace, individual or insignificant. The one law of externals is beauty in all its various manifestations. To ask the sex of a beautiful person is as absurd as it would be to ask the publisher the sex of a beautiful book. Such questions are for midwives and doctors.
It was once the fashion for heroes to shed tears on the smallest occasion, and it does not appear that they fought the worse for it; some of the firmest, bravest, most undaunted, most dignified, most noble, most stately human beings have been women; as some of the softest, mildest, most pitiful and flexible, most kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender, timorous and modest human beings have been men. Indeed, some of the bravest men that ever trod this planet have worn corsets, and it needs more couragenowadays for a man to wear his hair long than to machine-gun a whole African nation. Moreover, quite the nicest women one knows ride bicycles—in the rational costume.
It is, I am given to understand, a familiar axiom of mathematics that no number of ciphers placed in front of significant units, or tens or hundreds of units, adds in the smallest degree to the numerical value of those units. The figure one becomes of no more importance however many noughts are marshalled in front of it—though, indeed, in the mathematics of human nature this is not so. Is not a man or woman considered great in proportion to the number of ciphers that walk in front of him, from a humble brace of domestics to guards of honour and imperial armies?
A parallel profound truth of mathematics is that a nought, however many times it be multiplied, remains nought; but again we find the reverse obtain in the mathematics of human nature. One might have supposedthat the result of one nobody multiplied even fifty million times would still be nobody. However, such is far from being the case. Fifty million nobodies make—a nation. Of course, there is no need for so many. I am reckoning as a British subject, and speak of fifty million merely as an illustration of the general fact that it is the multiplication of nobodies that makes a nation. 'Increase and multiply' was, it will be remembered, the recipe for the Jewish nation.
Nobodies of the same colour, tongue, and prejudices have but to congregate together in a crowd sufficiently big for other similar crowds to recognise them, and then they are given a name of their own, and become recognised as a nation—one of the 'Great Powers.'
Beyond those differences in colour, tongue, and prejudices there is really no difference between the component units—or rather ciphers—of all these several national crowds. You have seen a procession of various trades-unions filing toward Hyde Park, each section with its particular banner with a strange device: 'The United Guild of Paperhangers,''The Ancient Order of Plumbers,' and so on. And you may have marvelled to notice how alike the members of the various carefully differentiated companies were. So to say, they each and all might have been plumbers; and you couldn't help feeling that it wouldn't have mattered much if some of the paper-hangers had by mistake got walking amongst the plumbers, orvice versa.
So the great trades-unions of the world file past, one with the odd word 'Russia' on its banner; another boasting itself 'Germany'—this with a particularly bumptious and self-important young man walking backward in front of it, in the manner of a Salvation Army captain, and imperiously waving an iron wand; still another 'nation' calling itself 'France'; and yet another boasting the biggest brass band, and called 'England.' Other smaller bodies of nobodies, that is, smaller nations, file past with humbler tread—though there is really no need for their doing so. For, as we have said, they are in every particular like to those haughtier nations who take precedence of them. In fact, one or two of them, such as Norwayand Denmark—were a truer system of human mathematics to obtain—are really of more importance than the so-called greater nations, in that among their nobodies they include a larger percentage of intellectual somebodies.
Remembering that percentage of wise men, the formula of a nation were perhaps more truly stated in our first mathematical image. The wise men in a nation are as the units with the noughts in front of them. And when I say wise men I do not, indeed, mean merely the literary men or the artists, but all those somebodies with some real force of character, people with brains and hearts, fighters and lovers, saints and thinkers, and the patient, industrious workers. Such, if you consider, are really no integral part of the nation among which they are cast. They have no part in what are grandiloquently called national interests—war, politics, and horse-racing to wit. A change of Government leaves them as unmoved as an election for the board of guardians. They would as soon think of entering Parliament or the County Council, as of yearning to manage the gasworks, or to go aboutwith one of those carts bearing the legend 'Aldermen and Burgesses of the City of London' conspicuously upon its front. Their main concern in political changes is the rise and fall of the income-tax, and, be the Cabinet Tory or Liberal, their rate papers come in for the same amount. It is likely that national changes would affect them but little more. What more would a foreign invasion mean than that we should pay our taxes to French, Russian, or German officials, instead of to English ones? French and Italians do our cooking, Germans manage our music, Jews control our money markets; surely it would make little difference to us for France, Russia, or Germany to undertake our government. The worst of being conquered by Russia would be the necessity of learning Russian; whereas a little rubbing up of our French would make us comfortable with France. Besides, to be conquered by France would save us crossing the Channel to Paris, and then we might hope for cafés in Regent Street, and an emancipated literature. As a matter of fact, so-called national interests are merely certainprivate interests on a large scale, the private interests of financiers, ambitious politicians, soldiers, and great merchants. Broadly speaking, there are no rival nations—there are rival markets; and it is its Board of Trade and its Stock Exchange rather than its Houses of Parliament that virtually govern a country. Thus one seaport goes down and another comes up, industries forsake one country to bless another, the military and naval strengths of nations fluctuate this way and that; and to those whom these changes affect they are undoubtedly important matters—the great capitalist, the soldier, and the politician; but to the quiet man at home with his wife, his children, his books, and his flowers, to the artist busied with brave translunary matters, to the saint with his eyes filled with 'the white radiance of eternity,' to the shepherd on the hillside, the milkmaid in love, or the angler at his sport—what are these pompous commotions, these busy, bustling mimicries of reality? England will be just as good to live in though men some day call her France. Let the big busybodies divide her amongst themas they like, so that they leave one alone with one's fair share of the sky and the grass, and an occasional, not too vociferous, nightingale.
The reader will perhaps forgive the hackneyed references to Sir Thomas Browne peacefully writing hisReligio Mediciamid all the commotions of the Civil War, and to Gautier calmly correcting the proofs of his new poems during the siege of Paris. The milkman goes his rounds amid the crash of empires. It is not his business to fight. His business is to distribute his milk—as much after half-past seven as may be inconvenient. Similarly, the business of the thinker is with his thought, the poet with his poetry. It is the business of politicians to make national quarrels, and the business of the soldier to fight them. But as for the poet—let him correct his proofs, or beware the printer.
The idea, then, of a nation is a grandiloquent fallacy in the interests of commerce and ambition, political and military. All the great and good, clever and charming people belong to one secret nation, for which there is no name unless it be the ChosenPeople. These are the lost tribes of love, art, and religion, lost and swamped amid alien peoples, but ever dreaming of a time when they shall meet once more in Jerusalem.
Yet though they are thus aliens, taking and wishing no part in the organisation of the 'nations' among which they dwell, this does not prevent those nations taking part and credit in them. And whenever a brave soldier wins a battle, or an intrepid traveller discovers a new land, his particular nation flatters itself, as though it—the million nobodies—had done it. With a profound indifference to, indeed an active dislike of, art and poetry, there is nothing on which a nation prides itself so much as upon its artists and poets, whom, invariably, it starves, neglects, and even insults, as long as it is not too silly to do so.
Thus the average Englishman talks of Shakespeare—as though he himself had written the plays; of India—as though he himself had conquered it. And thus grow up such fictions as 'national greatness' and 'public opinion.'
For what is 'national greatness' but theglory reflected from the memories of a few great individuals? and what is 'public opinion' but the blustering echoes of the opinion of a few clever young men on the morning papers?
For how can people in themselves little become great by merely congregating into a crowd, however large? And surely fools do not become wise, or worth listening to, merely by the fact of their banding together.
A 'public opinion' on any matter except football, prize-fighting, and perhaps cricket, is merely ridiculous—by whatever brutal physical powers it may be enforced—ridiculous as a town council's opinion upon art; and a nation is merely a big fool with an army.
Ignorant, as I inevitably am, dear reader, of your intellectual and spiritual upbringing, I can hardly guess whether the title of my article will impress you as a platitude or as a paradox. Goodness knows, some men and women think quite enough of themselves as it is, and, from a certain momentary point of view, there may seem little occasion indeed to remind man of his importance.
I refer to your intellectual and spiritual upbringing, because I venture to wonder if it was in the least like my own. I was brought up, I rejoice to say, in the bosom of an orthodox Puritan family. I was led and driven to believe that man was everybody, and that God was somebody—and that not merely the Sabbath, but the whole universe, was made for man: that the stars were his bedtime candles, and that the sunarose to ensure his catching the 8.37 of a morning.
On this belief I acted for many years. Every young man believes that there is no god but God, and that he is born to be His prophet—though perhaps that belief is not so common nowadays. I am speaking of many years ago.
Science, however, has long since changed all that. Those terrible Muses, geology, astronomy, and particularly biology, have reduced man to a humility which, if in some degree salutary, becomes in its excess highly dangerous. Why should one maggot in this great cheese of the world take itself more seriously than others? Why dream mightily and do bravely if we are but a little higher than the beasts that perish? Nature cares nothing about us, and her giant forces laugh at our fancies. The world has no such meaning as we thought. Poets and saints, deluded by unhealthy imaginations, have misled us, and it is quite likely that the wild waves are really saying nothing more important than 'Beecham's Pills.'
'Give us a definition of life,' I asked acertain famous scientist and philosopher whom I am privileged to call my friend.
'Nothing easier!' he gaily replied. 'Life is a product of solar energy, falling upon the carbon compounds, on the outer crust of a particular planet, in a particular corner of the solar system.'
'And that,' I said, 'really satisfies you as a definition of life—of all the wistful wonder of the world!' And as I spoke I thought of Moses with mystically shining face upon the Mount of the Law, of Ezekiel rapt in his divine fancies, of Socrates drinking his cup of hemlock, of Christ's agony in the garden; the golden faces of the great of the world passed as in a dream before me,—soldiers, saints, poets, and lovers. I thought of Horatius on the bridge, of the holy and gentle soul of St. Francis, of Chatterton in his splendid despair, and in fancy I went with the awestruck citizens of Verona to reverently gaze at the bodies of two young lovers who had counted the world well lost if they might only leave it together.
The carbon compounds!
I took downRomeo and Juliet, listenedto its passionate spheral music, and the carbon compounds have never troubled me again.
Love laughs at the carbon compounds, and a great book, a noble act, a beautiful face, make nonsense of such cheap formula for the mystery of human life.
Yet this parable of the carbon compounds is a fair sample of all that science can tell us when we come to ultimates. We go away from its oracles with a mouthful of sounding words, which may seem very impressive till we examine their emptiness. What, for example, is all this rigmarole about solar energy and the carbon compounds but a more pompous way of putting the old scriptural statement that man was made of the dust of the ground? To say that God took a handful of dust and breathed upon it and it became man, is no harder to realise than that solar rays falling upon that dust should produce humanity and all the various phantasmagoria of life. If anything, it is more explanatory. It leaves us with an inspiring mystery for explanation.
In saying this, I do not forget our debt toscience. It has done much in clearing our minds of cant, in popularising more systematic thinking, and in instituting sounder methods of observation. In some directions it has deepened our sense of wonder. It has broadened our conception of the universe, though I fear it has been at the expense of narrowing our conception of man. With Hamlet it contemptuously says, 'What is this quintessence of dust!' It is so impressed by the mileage and tonnage of the universe, so abased before the stupendous measurements of the cosmos, the appalling infinity and eternity of its space and time, that it forgets the marvel of the mind that can grasp all these conceptions, forgets, too, that, big and bullying as the forces of nature may be, man has been able in a large measure to control, indeed to domesticate, them. Surely the original fact of lightning is little more marvellous than the power of man to turn it into his errand-boy or his horse, to light his rooms with it, and imprison it in pennyworths, like the genius in the bottle, in the underground railway. Mere size seems unimpressive when we contemplate such an extreme of littleness as say the ant, that pin-point of a personality, that mere speck of being, yet including within its infinitesimal proportions a clever, busy brain, a soldier, a politician, and a merchant. That such and so many faculties should have room to operate within that tiny body—there is a marvel before which, it seems to me, the billions of miles that keep us from falling into the jaws of the sun, and the tonnage of Jupiter, are comparatively insignificant and conceivable.
No, we must not allow ourselves to be frightened by the mere size and weight of the universe, or be depressed because our immediate genealogy is not considered aristocratic. Perhaps, after all, we are sons of God, and as Mr. Meredith finely puts it, our life here may still be
'... a little holdingTo do a mighty service.'
'... a little holding
To do a mighty service.'
'Things of a day!' exclaims Pindar. 'What is a man? What is a man not?'
It is good for our Nebuchadnezzars, the kings of the world, and conceited, successful people generally, to measure themselvesagainst the great powers of the universe, to humble their pride by contemplation of the fixed stars; but a too humble attitude toward the Infinite, a too constant pondering upon eternity, is not good for us, unless, so to say, we can live with them as friends, with the inspiring feeling that, little as we may seem, there is that in us which is no less infinite, no less cosmic, and that our passions and dreams have, as Mr. William Watson puts it, 'a relish of eternity.'
Readers of Amiel's 'Journal' will know what a sterilising, petrifying influence his trance-like contemplation of the Infinite had upon his life. Amiel was simply hypnotised by the universe, as a man may hypnotise himself by gazing fixedly at a star.
Mr. Pater, you will remember, has a remarkable study of a similar temperament in hisImaginary Portraits. Sebastian van Storck, like Amiel, had become hypnotised by the Infinite. It paralysed in him all impulse or power 'to be or do any limited thing.'
'For Sebastian, at least,' we read, 'the world and the individual alike had beendivested of all effective purpose. The most vivid of finite objects, the dramatic episodes of Dutch history, the brilliant personalities which had found their parts to play in them, that golden art, surrounding one with an ideal world, beyond which the real world was discernible indeed, but etherealised by the medium through which it came to one; all this, for most men so powerful a link to existence, only set him on the thought of escape—into a formless and nameless infinite world, evenly grey.... Actually proud, at times, of his curious, well-reasoned nihilism, he could but regard what is called the business of life as no better than a trifling and wearisome delay.'
This mood, once confined to a few mystics is likely to become a common one, is already, one imagines, far from infrequent—so the increase of suicide would lead us to suppose. Robbed of his hope of a glorious immortality, stripped of his spiritual significance, bullied and belittled by science on every hand, man not unnaturally begins to feel that it is no use taking his life seriously, that, in fact, it betrays a lack of humour to do so. Whilehe was a supernatural being, a son of God, it was with him a case ofnoblesse oblige; and while he is happy and comfortable he doesn't mind giving up the riddle of the world. It is only the unhappy that ever really think. But what is he to do when agony and despair come upon him, when all that made his life worth living is taken from him? How is he to sustain himself? where shall he look for his strength or his hope? He looks up at the sky full of stars, but he is told that God is not there, that the city of God is long since a ruin, and that owls hoot to each other across its moss-grown fanes and battlements; he looks down on the earth, full of graves, a vast necropolis of once radiant dreams, with the living for its phantoms,—and there is no comfort anywhere. Happy is he if some simple human duty be at hand, which he may go on doing blindly and dumbly—till, perhaps, the light come again. It is difficult to offer comfort to such a one. Comfort is cheap, and we know nothing. When life holds nothing for our love and delight, it is difficult to explain why we should go on living it—except onthe assumption that it matters, that it is, in some mystical way, supremely important, how we live it, and what we make of those joys and sorrows which, say some, are but meant as mystical trials and tests.
Sebastian van Storck refused 'to be or do any limited thing,' but the answer to his mysticism is to be found in a finer mysticism, that which says that there is no limited act or thing, but that the significance, as well as the pathos, of eternity is in our smallest joys and sorrows, as in our most everyday transactions, and the greatness of God incarnate in His humblest child.
This, the old doctrine of the microcosm, seems in certain moments, moments one would wish to say, of divination, strangely plain and clear—when, in Blake's words, it seems so easy to
'... see a world in a grain of sand,And a heaven in a wild flower;Hold infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour.'
'... see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.'
Perhaps in the street, an effect of light, a passing face, yes, even the plaintive grind of a street organ, some such everyday circumstance, affects you suddenly in quite a strange way. It has become universalised. It is no longer a detail of the Strand, but a cryptic symbol of human life. It has been transfigured into a thing of infinite pathos and infinite beauty, and, sad or glad, brings to you an inexplicable sense of peace, an unshakable conviction that man is a spirit, that his life is indeed of supreme and lovely significance, and that his destiny is secure and blessed.
Matthew Arnold, ever sensitive to such spiritual states, has described these trance-like visitations in 'The Buried Life'—
'Only, but this is rare—When a beloved hand is laid in ours,When, jaded with the rush and glareOf the interminable hours,Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,When our world-deafen'd earIs by the tones of a loved voice caress'd—A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again:The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.A man becomes aware of his life's flow,And hears its winding murmur; and he seesThe meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.'And there arrives a lull in the hot raceWherein he doth for ever chaseThat flying and elusive shadow, rest.An air of coolness plays upon his face,And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.And then he thinks he knowsThe hills where his life rose,And the sea where it goes.'
'Only, but this is rare—When a beloved hand is laid in ours,When, jaded with the rush and glareOf the interminable hours,Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,When our world-deafen'd earIs by the tones of a loved voice caress'd—A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again:The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.A man becomes aware of his life's flow,And hears its winding murmur; and he seesThe meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
'Only, but this is rare—
When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen'd ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd—
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again:
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life's flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
'And there arrives a lull in the hot raceWherein he doth for ever chaseThat flying and elusive shadow, rest.An air of coolness plays upon his face,And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.And then he thinks he knowsThe hills where his life rose,And the sea where it goes.'
'And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.'
'To be or do any limited thing'! What indeed, we ask in such hours, is a limited thing, when all the humble interests of our daily life are palpably big with eternity? Is the first kiss of a great love a limited thing? though there is, unhappily, no denying that it comes to an end! When a young husband and wife smile across to each other above the sleep of their little child—is that a limited thing? When the siren voices of the world blend together on the lips of a young poet, and with rapt eyes and hot heart he makes a song as of the morning stars—is that a limited thing? Are love, and genius, and duty done in the face of death—are these limited things? I think not—and man, indeed, knows better.
Greatness is not relative. It is absolute. It is not for man to depress himself by measuring himself against the eternities and the immensities external to him. What hehas to do is to look inward upon himself, to fathom the eternities and the immensities in his own heart and brain.
And the more man sees himself forsaken by the universe, the more opportunity to vindicate his own greatness. Is there no kind heart beating through the scheme of things?—man's heart shall still be kind. Will the eternal silence make mock of his dreams and his idealisms, laugh coldly at 'the splendid purpose in his eyes'? Well, so be it. His dreams and idealisms are none the less noble things, and if the gods do thus make mock of mortal joy and pain—let us be grateful that we were born mere men.
Moreover, he has one great answer to the universe—the answer of courage. He is still Prometheus, and there is no limit to what he can bear. Let the vultures of pain rend his heart as they will, he can still hiss 'coward' in the face of the Eternal. Nay, he can even laugh at his sufferings—thanks to the spirit of humour, that most blessed of ministering angels, without which surely the heart of humanity had long since broken, bywhich man is able to look with a comical eye upon terrors, as it were taking themselves so seriously, coming with such Olympian thunders and lightnings to break the spirit of a mere six foot of earth!
But while his courage and his humour are defences of which he cannot be disarmed, whatever be the intention of the Eternal, it is by no means certain that nature does not mean kindly by man. Perhaps the pain of the world is but the rough horseplay of great powers that mean but jest—and kill us in it: as though one played at 'tick' with an elephant!
Perhaps, after all,—who knows?—God is love, and His great purpose kind.
Surely, when you think of it, the existence in man of the senses of love and pity implies the probability of their existence elsewhere in the universe too.
'Into that breast which brings the roseShall I with shuddering fall.'
'Into that breast which brings the rose
Shall I with shuddering fall.'
So runs the profoundest thought in modern poetry—and need I say it is Mr. Meredith's?
As the fragrance and colour of the rose must in some occult way be properties ofthe rude earth from which they are drawn by the sun, may not human love also be a kindly property of matter—that mysterious life-stuff in which is packed such marvellous potentialities? Evidently love must be somewhere in the universe—else it had not got into the heart of man; and perhaps pity slides down like an angel in the rays of the solar energy, while there is the potential beating of a human heart even in the hard crust of the carbon compounds.
I confess that this seems to me no mere fancy, but a really comforting speculation. Pain, we say, is inherent in the scheme of the universe; but is not love seen to be no less inherent, too?
There must be some soul of beauty to animate the lovely face of the world, some soul of goodness to account for its saints. If the gods are cruel, it is strange that man should be so kind, and that some pathetic spirit of tenderness should seem to stir even in the bosoms of beasts and birds.
Meanwhile, we cannot too often insist that, whatever uncertainties there be, man has one certainty—himself. Science hasreally adduced nothing essential against his significance. That he is not as big as an Alp, as heavy as a star, or as long-lived as an eagle, is nothing against his proper importance. Even a nobleman is of more significance in the world than his acres, and giants are not proverbial for their intellectual or spiritual qualities. The ant is of more importance than the ass, and the great eye of a beautiful woman is more significant than the whole clayey bulk of Mars.
After all the scientific mockery of the old religious ideal of the importance of man, one begins to wonder if his Ptolemaic fancy that he was the centre of the universe, and that it was all made for him, is not nearer the If truth than the pitiless theories which hardly allow him equality with the flea that perishes.
Suppose if, after all, the stars were really meant as his bedtime candles, and the sun's purpose in rising is really that he may catch the 8.37!
For, as Sir Thomas Browne says in his solemn English, 'there is surely a piece of Divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.'
The long winter of materialistic science seems to be breaking up, and the old ideals are seen trooping back with something more than their old beauty, in the new spiritual spring that seems to be moving in the hearts of men.
After all its talk, science has done little more than correct the misprints of religion. Essentially, the old spiritualistic and poetic theories of life are seen, not merely weakly to satisfy the cravings of man's nature, but to be mostly in harmony with certain strange and moving facts in his constitution, which the materialists unscientifically ignore.
It was important, and has been helpful, to insist that man is an animal, but it is still more important to insist that he is a spirit as well. He is, so to say, an animal by accident, a spirit by birthright: and, however homely his duties may occasionally seem, his life is bathed in the light of a sacred transfiguring significance, its smallest acts flash with divine meanings, its highest moments are rich with 'the pathos of eternity,' and its humblest duties mighty with the responsibilities of a god.
[This dialogue was written originally as a rejoinder to certain criticisms on a book of mine entitled,The Religion of a Literary Man—Religio Scriptoris—hence the names given to the two 'persons.' It was written in March 1894, before an event in the writer's life to which, erroneously, some have supposed it to refer.]
LECTOR. But do you really mean, Scriptor, that you have no desire for the life after death?
SCRIPTOR. I never said quite that, Lector, though perhaps I might almost have gone so far. What I did say was that we have been accustomed to exaggerate its importance to us here and now, that it really matters less to us than we imagine.
LECTOR. I see. But you must speak for yourself, Scriptor. I am sure that it mattersmuch to many, to most of us. It does, I know, to me.
SCRIPTOR. Less than you think, my dear Lector. Besides, you are really too young to know. It is true that, as years go, you are ten years my senior, but what of that? You have that vigorous health which is the secret of perpetual youth. You have not yet realised decay, not to speak of death. The immortality of the soul is a question wide of you, who have as yet practically no doubt of the immortality of the body. But I—well, it would be melodramatic to say that I face death every day. The metaphor applies but to desperate callings and romantic complaints. To some Death comes like a footpad, suddenly, and presents his pistol—and the smoke that curls upward from his empty barrel is your soul.
To another he comes featureless, a stealthily accumulating London fog, that slowly, slowly chokes the life out of you, without allowing you the consolation of a single picturesque moment, a single grand attitude. For you, probably, Death will only come when you die. I have to live with him as well. Ishall smoulder for years, you will be carried to heaven, like Enoch, in a beautiful lightning.