OSCAR WILDE
The words he once used about himself—"I am a symbolic figure"—remain to this day the most significant thing that can be said of Oscar Wilde.
It is given to very few men of talent, this peculiar privilege—this privilege of being greater in what might be called theshadow of their personalitythan in any actual literary or artistic achievement—and Wilde possesses it in a degree second to none.
"My genius is in my life," he said on another occasion, and the words are literally and most fatally true.
In the confused controversies of the present age it is difficult to disentangle the main issues; but it seems certain that side by side with political and economic divisions, there is a gulf growing wider and wider every day between the adherents of what might be called the Hellenic Renaissance and the inert, suspicious, unintelligent mob; that mob the mud of whose heavy traditions is capable of breeding, at one and the same time, the most crafty hypocrisy and the most stupid brutality.
It would be hardly a true statement to say that the Renaissance referred to—this modern Renaissance, not less formidable than the historic revolt which bears that name—is an insurrection of free spirits against Christianity. It is much rather a reversion to a humane and classic reasonableness as opposed to mob-stupidity and middle-class philistinism—things which only the blundering of centuries of popular misapprehension could associate with the sublime and the imaginative figure of Christ.
It is altogether a mistake to assume that in "De Profundis" Wilde retracted his classic protest and bowed his head once more in the house of Rimmon.
What he did was to salute, in the name of the aesthetic freedom he represented, those enduring elements of human loveliness and beauty in that figure which three hundred years of hypocritical puritanism have proved unable to tarnish. What creates the peculiar savagery of hatred which his name has still the power to conjure up among the enemies of civilisation has little to do with the ambiguous causes of his final downfall. These, of course, gave him up, bound hand and foot, into their hands. But these, though the overt excuse of their rancour, are far from being its real motive-force. To reach that we must look to the nature of the formidable weapon which it was his habit, in season and out of season, to use against this mob-rule—I mean his sense of humour.
The stupid middle-class obscurantism, so alien to all humane reasonableness, which, in our Anglo-Saxon communities, masquerades under the cloak of a passionate and imaginative religion, is more sensitive to ridicule than to any other form of attack, and Wilde attacked it mercilessly with a ridicule that cut to the bone.
They are not by any means of equal value, these epigrams of his, with which he defended intelligence against stupidity and classical light against Gothic darkness.
They are not as humorous as Voltaire's. They are not as philosophical as Goethe's. Compared with the aphorisms of these masters they are light and frivolous. But for this very reason perhaps, they serve the great cause—the cause of humane and enlightened civilisation—better in our age of vulgar mob-rule than more recondite "logoi."
They pierce the hide of the thickest and dullest; they startle and bewilder the brains of the most crass and the most insensitive. And it is just because they do this that Wilde is so cordially feared and hated. It was, one cannot help feeling, the presence in him of a shrewd vein of sheer boyish bravado, mingled—one might go even as far as that—with a dash of incorrigible worldliness in his own temper, that made his hits so effective and wounding.
It is interesting, with this in mind, to compare Wilde's witticisms with those of Matthew Arnold or Bernard Shaw. The reason that Wilde's lash cuts deeper than either of these other champions of rational humanism, is that he goes, with more classical clearness, straight to the root of the matter.
The author of "Thyrsis" was not himself free from a certain melancholy hankering after "categorical imperatives," and beneath the cap and bells of his theological fooling, Shaw is, of course, as gravely moralistic as any puritan could wish.
Neither of these—neither the ironical schoolmaster nor the farcical clown of our Renaissance of intelligence—could exchange ideas with Pericles, say, or Caesar, without betraying a puritanical fussiness that would grievously bewilder the lucid minds of those great men.
The philosophy of Wilde's aesthetic revolt against our degraded mob-ridden conscience was borrowed from Walter Pater, but whereas that shy and subtle spirit moved darkly and mysteriously aside from all contact with the vulgar herd, Wilde, full of gay and wanton pride in his sacred mission, lost no opportunity of flaunting his classic orthodoxy in the face of the heretical mob.
Since the death of Wilde, the brunt of the battle for the spiritual liberties of the race has been borne by the sterner and more formidable figure of Nietzsche; but the vein of high and terrible imagination in this great poet of the Superman sets him much closer to the company of the saints and mystics than to that of the instinctive children of the pagan ideal.
Oscar Wilde's name has become a sort of rallying cry to all those writers and artists who suffer, in one degree or another, from the persecution of the mob—of the mob goaded on to blind brutality by the crafty incentives of those conspirators of reaction whose interest lies in keeping the people enslaved. This has come about, in a large measure, as much by the renown of his defects as by reason of his fine quality.
The majority of men of talent lack the spirit and the gall to defy the enemy on equal terms. But Wilde while possessing nobler faculties had an undeniable vein in him of sheer youthful insolence. To the impertinence of society he could oppose the impertinence of the artist, and to the effrontery of the world he could offer the effrontery of genius.
The power of personality, transcending any actual literary achievement, is what remains in the mind when one has done reading him, and this very faculty—of communicating to us, who never saw him or heard him speak, the vivid impact of his overbearing presence—is itself evidence of a rare kind of genius. It is even a little ironical that he, above all men the punctilious and precious literary craftsman, should ultimately dominate us not so much by the magic of his art as by the spell of his wilful and wanton individuality, and the situation is heightened still further by the extraordinary variety of his works and their amazing perfection in their different spheres.
One might easily conceive an artist capable of producing so clean-cut and crystalline a comedy as "The Importance of Being Earnest," and so finished and flawless a tragedy as "Salome," disappearing quite out of sight, in the manner so commended by Flaubert, behind the shining objectivity of his flawless creations. But so far from disappearing, Oscar Wilde manages to emphasise himself and his imposing presence only the more startlingly and flagrantly, the more the gem-like images he projects harden and glitter.
Astoundingly versatile as he was—capable of producing in "Reading Gaol" the best tragic ballad since "The Ancient Mariner," and in "Intentions" one of the best critical expositions of the open secret of art ever written at all—he never permits us for a second to lose touch with the wayward and resplendent figure, so full, for all its bravado, of a certain disarming childishness, of his own defiant personality.
And the fact remains that, perfect in their various kinds though these works of his are, they would never appeal to us as they do, and Oscar Wilde would never be to us what he is, if it were not for the predominance of this personal touch.
I sometimes catch myself wondering what my own feeling would be as to the value of these things—of the "Soul of Man," for instance, or "Intentions," or the Comedies, or the Poems—if the unthinkable thing could be done, and the emergence of this irresistible figure from behind it all could be drastically eliminated. I find myself conscious, at these times, of a faint disturbing doubt; as though after all, in spite of their jewel-like perfection, these wonderful and varied achievements were not quite the real thing, were not altogether in the "supreme manner." There seems to me—at the moments when this doubt arises—something too self-consciously (how shall I put it?)artisticabout these performances, something strained and forced and far-fetched, which separates them from the large inevitable utterances of classic genius.
I am ready to confess that I am not sure that this feeling is a matter of personal predilection or whether it has the larger and graver weight behind it of the traditional instincts of humanity, instincts out of which spring our only permanent judgments. What I feel at any rate is this: that there is an absence in Wilde's writings of that large cool spaciousness, produced by the magical influence of earth and sky and sea, of which one is always conscious in the greater masters.
"No gentleman," he is said to have remarked once, "ever looks out of the window"; and it is precisely this "never looking out of the window" that produces his most serious limitations.
In one respect I must acknowledge myself grateful to Wilde, even for this very avoidance of what might be called the "magical" element in things. His clear-cut palpable images, carved, as one so often feels, in ebony or ivory or gold, offer an admirable relief, like the laying of one's hand upon pieces of Hellenic statuary, after wandering among the vague mists and "beached margents."
Certainly if all that one saw when one "looked out of the window" were Irish fairies with dim hair drifting down pallid rivers, there would be some reason for drawing the curtains close and toying in the lamp-light with cameo-carved profiles of Antinous and Cleopatra!
But nature has more to give us than the elfish fantasies, charming as these may be, of Celtic legend—more to give us than those "brown fauns" and "hoofed Centaurs" and milk-white peacocks, which Wilde loves to paint with his Tiepolo-like brush. The dew of the morning does not fall less lightly because real autumns bring it, nor does the "wide aerial landscape" of our human wayfaring show less fair, or its ancient antagonist the "salt estranging sea" less terrible, because these require no legendary art to endow them with mystery.
Plausible and full of significance as these honeyed arguments in "Intentions" are—and fruitful as they are in affording us weapons wherewith to defend ourselves from the mob—it is still well, it is still necessary, to place against them the great Da Vinci saying, "Nature is the Mistress of the higher intelligences."
Wilde must be held responsible—along with others of his epoch—for the encouragement of that deplorable modern heresy which finds in bric-à-brac and what are called "objets d'art" a disproportionate monopoly of the beauty and wonder of the world. One turns a little wearily at last from the silver mirrors and purple masks. One turns to the great winds that issue forth out of the caverns of the night. One turns to the sun and to the rain, which fall upon the common grass.
However! It is not a wise procedure to demand from a writer virtues and qualities completely out of his rôle. In our particular race there is far more danger of the beauty and significance of art—together with all its subtler and less normal symbols—perishing under crude and sentimental Nature-worship, than of their being granted too large a place in our crowded house of thought.
After all, the art which Wilde assures us adds so richly to Nature, "is an art which Nature makes." They are not lovers of what is rarest and finest in our human civilisation who would suppress everything which deviates from the common track.
Who has given these people—these middle-class minds with their dull intelligences—the right to decide what is natural or unnatural in the presence of the vast tumultuous forces, wonderful and terrible, of the life-stream which surrounds us?
The mad smouldering lust which gives a sort of under-song of surging passion to the sophisticated sensuality of "Salome" is as much an evocation of Nature as the sad sweet wisdom of that sentence in "De Profundis"—"Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow."
What, beneath all his bravado and his paradoxes, Wilde really sought, was the enjoyment of passionate and absorbing emotion, and no one who hungers and thirsts after this—be he "as sensual as the brutish sting itself"—can fail in the end to touch, if only fleetingly with his lips, the waters of that river of passion which, by a miracle of faith if not by a supreme creation of art, Humanity has caused to issue forth from the wounded flesh of the ideal.
It is in his "Soul of Man"—perhaps the wisest and most eloquent revolutionary tract ever written—that Wilde frees himself most completely from the superficial eccentricities of his aesthetic pose, and indicates his recognition of a beauty in life, far transcending Tyrian dyes and carved cameos and frankincense and satin-wood and moon-stones and "Silks from Samarcand."
It is impossible to read this noble defence of the natural distinction and high dignity of our human days when freed from the slavery of what is called "working for a living," without feeling that the boyish bravado of his insolent wit is based upon a deep and universal emotion. What we note here is an affiliation in revolt between the artist and the masses. And this affiliation indicates that the hideousness of our industrial system is far more offensive than any ancient despotism or slave-owning tyranny to the natural passion for light and air and leisure and freedom in the heart of man.
That Oscar Wilde, the most extreme of individualists, the most unscrupulous of self-asserters, the pampered darling of every kind of sophisticated luxury, should thus lift up his voice on behalf of the wage-earners, is an indication that a state of society which seems proper and inevitable to dull and narrow minds is, when confronted, not with any mere abstract theory of Justice or Political rights, but with the natural human craving for life and beauty, found to be an outrage and an insult.
Oscar Wilde by pointing his derisive finger at what the gross intelligence of our commercial mob calls the "honourableness of work" has done more to clear our minds of cant than many revolutionary speeches.
An age which breeds a world of uninteresting people whose only purpose in life is working for their living is condemned on the face of it. And it is just here that the association between your artist and your "labouring man" becomes physiologically evident. The labourer shows quite clearly that he regards his labour as a degradation, a burden, an interruption to life, a necessary evil.
The rôle of the capitalist-hired preacher is to condemn him for this and to regret the departure from the scene of that imaginary and extremely ridiculous figure, the worker who "took pleasure in his work." If there ever have been such people, they ought, as Wilde says, to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Any person who enjoys being turned into a machine for the best part of his days and regards it with pride, is no better than a blackleg or a scab—not a "scab" in regard to a little company of strikers, but a "scab" in regard to the human race; for he is one who denies that life in itself, life with all its emotional, intellectual and imaginative possibilities, can be endured without the gross, coarsening, dulling "anaesthetic" of money-making toil.
This is the word that the social revolution wanted—the word so much more to the point than discourses upon justice and equality and charity. And it is precisely here that the wage-earners of our present system are in harmony with the "intellectuals."
The "wage-earners," or those among them who have in them something more than the souls of scabs, despise and loathe their enforced labour. The artist also despises the second-rate tasks set him by the stupidity and bad taste of his middle-class masters.
The only persons in the community who are really happy in their life's work, as they fantastically call it, are those commercialruffianswhose brutal, self-righteous, puritanical countenances one is swamped by—as if by a flood of suffocating mediocrity—in the streets of all our modern cities.
Oscar Wilde is perfectly right. We are living in an age when the world for the first time in its history is literally under the rule of the stupidest, dullest, least intelligent and least admirable of all the classes in the community. Wilde's "Soul of Man" is the condemnation—let us hope the effective condemnation—of this epoch in the journey of the race.
The odium which France—always the protector of civilisation—has stamped upon the word "bourgeois" is no mere passing levity of an irresponsible Latin Quarter. It is the judgment of classic taste—the taste of the great artists and poets of all ages—upon the worst type of person, the type most pernicious to true human happiness, that has ever yet appeared upon the planet. And it is this type, the commercial type, the type that loves the money-making toil it is engaged upon, which rules over us now with an absolute authority, and creates our religion, our morality, our pleasures, our pastimes, our literature and our art.
Oscar Wilde must be forgiven everything in his gay impertinence which may jar upon our more sensitive moments, when one considers what he has done in dragging this great issue into the light and making it clear. He shows that what we have against us is not so much a system of society or a set of laws, as a definite and contemptible type of human character.
Democracy may well appear the most hopeless and lamentable failure in the government of men that history has ever known—but this is only due to the fact that the working classes have until now meekly and mildly received from the commercial classes their notions as to what democracy means.
No one could suppose for a moment that such a thing as the puritanical censorship of art and letters which now hangs, like a leaden weight, round the neck of every writer of original power, would be thrust upon us by the victims of sweatshops and factories. It is thrust upon us, like everything else which is degrading and uncivilised in our present system, by the obstinate stupidity and silly sentiment of the self-righteous middle class, the opponents of everything that is joyous and interesting and subtle and imaginative. It is devoutly to be hoped that, when the revolution arrives, the human persons who force their way to the top and guide the volcanic eruption will be such persons as are absolutely free from every kind of middle-class scruple.
There are among us to-day vigorous and indignant minds who find in the ugliness and moral squalor of our situation, the unhappy influence of Christ and his saints. They are wrong. The history of Oscar Wilde's writings shows that they are wrong.
It is the self-satisfied moralist who stands in the way, not the mystic or the visionary. They spoil everything they touch, these people. They turn religion into a set of sentimental inhibitions that would make Marcus Aurelius blush. They turn faith into pietism, sanctity into morality, and righteousness into a reeking prurience.
After all, it is not on the strength of his opinions, wise and sound as these may be, that Wilde's reputation rests. It rests on the beauty, in its own way never equalled, of the style in which he wrote. His style, as he himself points out, is one which seems to compel its readers to utter its syllables aloud. Of that deeper and more recondite charm which lies, in a sense, outside the sphere of vocal articulation, of that rhythm of the very movements of thought itself which lovers of Walter Pater catch, or dream they catch, in those elaborate delicately modulated sentences, Wilde has little or nothing.
What he achieves is a certain crystalline lucidity, clear and pure as the ring of glass upon glass, and with a mellifluous after-tone or echo of vibration, which dies away upon the ear in a lingering fall—melancholy and voluptuous, or light and tender as the hour and the moment lead.
He is at his best, or at any rate his style shows itself at its best, not in the utterances of those golden epigrams, the gold of which, as days pass, comes in certain cases to look lamentably like gilt, but in his use of those far-descended legendary images gathered up into poetry and art again and again till they have acquired the very tone of time itself, and a lovely magic, sudden, swift and arresting, like the odour of "myrrh, aloes, and cassia."
The style of Wilde is one of the simplest in existence, but its simplicity is the very apex and consummation of the artificial. He uses Biblical language with that self-conscious preciosity—like the movements of a person walking on tiptoe in the presence of the dead—which is so different from the sturdy directness of Bunyan or the restrained rhetoric of the Church of England prayers. There come moments when this premeditated innocence of tone—this lisping in liturgical monosyllables—irritates and annoys one. At such times the delicate unction of his naïvetéstrikes one, in despite of its gravity, as something a little comic; as though some very sophisticated and experienced person suddenly joined in a children's game and began singing in a plaintive tenderly pitched voice—
"This is the way we wash our hands, wash our hands, wash our hands—This is the way we wash our hands,On a cold and frosty morning!"
But it were absurd to press this point too far. Sophisticated though the simplicity of Wilde is, it does actually spring with all its ritualistic tiptoeing straight out of his natural character. He was born artificial, and he was born with more childishness than the great majority of children.
I like to picture him as a great Uranian baby, full of querulousness and peevishness, and eating greedily, with a sort of guileless wonder that anyone should scold him for it, every species of forbidden fruit that grows in the garden of life! How infantile really, when one thinks of it, and how humorously solemn the man's inordinate gravity over the touch of soft fabrics and the odour of rare perfumes! One seems to see him, a languid-limbed "revenant," with heavy-lidded drowsy eyes and voluptuous lips, emerging all swathed and wrapped in costly cerements out of the tomb of some Babylonian king.
After all, it remains a tremendous triumph of personality, the manner in which this portly modern Antinous has taken captive our imagination. His influence is everywhere, like an odour, like an atmosphere, like a diffused flame. We cannot escape from him.
In those ridiculous wit-contests with Whistler, from which he always emerged defeated, how much more generous and careless and noble he appears than the wasp-like artist who could rap out so smartly the appropriate retort! He seems like a great lazy king, at such times, caught off his guard by some skipping and clever knave of his spoilt retinue. Perhaps even now no small a portion of the amused and astonished wonder he excites is due to the fact that he really had, what so few of us have, a veritable passion for precious stuffs and woven fabrics and ivory and cedar wood and beads of amber and orchid-petals and pearl-tinted shells and lapis-lazuli and attar of roses.
It is open to doubt whether even among artists, there are many who share Wilde's Hellenic ecstasy in these things. This at any rate was no pose. He posed as a man of the world. He posed as an immoralist. He posed as a paradoxist. He posed in a thousand perverse directions. But when it comes to the colour and texture and odour and shape of beautiful and rare things—there, in his voluptuous delight in these, he was undeniably sincere.
He was of course no learned virtuoso. But what does that matter? The real artist is seldom a patient collector or an encyclopedic authority. That is the rôle of Museum people and of compilers of hand-books. Many thoroughly uninteresting minds know more about Assyrian pottery and Chinese pictures than Oscar Wilde knew about wild flowers.
Knowledge, as he teaches us himself, and it is one of the profoundest of his doctrines, is nothing. Knowledge is external and incidental. The important thing is that one's senses should be passionately alive and one's imagination fearlessly far-reaching.
We can embrace all the treasures of the Herods and all the riches of the Caesars as we lay our fingers upon a little silver coin, if the divine flame is within us, and, if not, we may excavate a thousand buried cities and return learned and lean and empty. Well, people must make their own choice and go their own way. The world is wide, and Nature has at least this in common with Heaven, that it has many mansions.
The feverish passion for fair things which obsessed Oscar Wilde and carried him so far is not for all the sons of men; nor even, in every hour of their lives, for those who most ardently answer to it. That feverishness burns itself out; that smouldering fire turns to cold ashes. Life flows on, though Salome, daughter of Herodias, lies crushed under the piled-up shields, and though in all the prisons of the world "the damned grotesques make arabesques, like the wind upon the sand."
Life flows on, and the quips and merry jests of Oscar Wilde, his artful artlessness, his insolence, his self-pity, his loyalty and fickleness, his sensuality and tenderness, only fill after all a small space in the heart's chamber of those who read him and stare at his plays and let him go.
But there are a few for whom the tragic wantonness of that strange countenance, with the heavy eyelids and pouting mouth, means something not easily forgotten, not easily put by.
To have seen Oscar Wilde and talked with him gives to such persons a strange significance, an almost religious value. One looks long at them, as if to catch some far-off reflection from the wit of the dead man. They do not seem to us quite like the rest. They have seen Oscar Wilde, and "They know what they have seen." For when all has been said against him that can be said it remains that Oscar Wilde, for good and for evil, in innocence and in excess, in orthodoxy and in rebellion, is a "symbolic figure."
It is indeed easy enough, when one is under the spell of the golden gaiety of his wit, to forget the essential and irresistible truth of so many of his utterances.
That profound association between the "Sorrow that endureth forever" and the "Pleasure that abideth for a moment," which he symbolises under the parable of the Image of Bronze, has its place throughout all his work.
It is a mistake to regard De Profundis as a recantation. It is a fulfilment, a completion, a rounding off. Like a black and a scarlet thread running through the whole tapestry of his tragic story are the two parallel "motifs," the passion of the beauty which leads to destruction and the passion of the beauty which leads to life.
It matters little whether he was or was not received into the Church before he died. In the larger sense he was always within those unexcluding walls, those spacious courts of the Ecclesia of humanity. There was no trace in him, for all his caprices, of that puritanism of denial which breaks the altars and shatters the idols at the bidding of scientific iconoclasm.
What the anonymous instinct of humanity has rendered beautiful by building into it the golden monuments of forlorn hopes and washing it with the salt tears of desperate chances remained beautiful to him. From the narcissus-flowers growing on the marble ledges of Parnassus, where Apollo still weeps for the death of Hyacinth and Pan still mourns the vanishing of Syrinx, to the passion-flowers growing on the slopes of Calvary, he, this lover of eidola and images, worships the white feet of the bearers of dead beauty, and finds in the tears of all the lovers of all the lost a revivifying rain that even in the midst of the dust of our degeneracy makes bloom once more, full of freshness and promise, the mystical red rose of the world's desire.
The wit of his "Golden lads and girls" in those superb comedies may soon fall a little faint and thin upon our ears. To the next generation it may seem as faded and old-fashioned as the wit of Congreve or Sheridan. Fashions of humour change more quickly than the fashions of manner or of dress. The only thing that gives immortality to human writing is the "eternal bronze" of a noble and imaginative style. Out of such divine material, with all his petulances and perversities, Oscar Wilde's style was hammered and beaten. For there is only one quarry of this most precious metal, and the same hand that shapes from it the "Sorrow that endureth forever" must shape from it the "Pleasure that abideth for a moment," and the identity of these two with that immortal bronze is the symbol of the mystery of our life.
The senses that are quickened by the knowledge of this mystery are not far from the ultimate secret. As with the thing sculptured, so with the sculptor.
Oscar Wilde is a symbolic figure.
SUSPENDED JUDGMENT
The conclusion of any book which has tried to throw into momentary relief the great shadowy figures who have led and misled humanity must necessarily be no more than a new suspension of judgment; of judgment drawing its interest from the colour of the mind of the individual making it, of judgment guarded from the impertinence of judicial decision by its confessed implication of radical subjectivity.
The conclusion of any critical essay must in large measure be lame and halting; must indeed be a whispered warning to the reader to take what has gone before, however ardently expressed, with that wise pinch of true Attic salt which mitigates even a relative finality in these high things.
One comes to feel more and more, as one reads many books, that judicial decisions are laughable and useless in this rare atmosphere, and that the mere utterance of such platitudinous decrees sets the pronouncer of them outside the inner and exclusive pale.
One comes to feel more and more that all that any of us has a right to do is to set down as patiently and tenderly as he may the particular response, here or there, from this side or the other, as it chances to happen, that is aroused in his own soul by those historic works of art, which, whatever principle of selection it is that places them in our hands, have fallen somehow across our path.
It might seem that a direct, natural and spontaneous response, of the kind I have in my mind, to these famous works, were easy enough of attainment. Nothing, on the contrary, is more difficult to secure or more seldom secured.
One might almost hazard the paradox that the real art of criticism only begins when we shake ourselves free of all books and win access to that locked and sealed and uncut volume which is the book of our own feelings.
The art of self-culture—one learns just that when youth's outward-looking curiosity and passion begin to ebb—is the art of freeing oneself from the influence of books so that one may enjoy what one is destined to enjoy without pedantry or scruple. And yet, by the profound law of the system of things, when one has thus freed oneself from the tyranny of literary catchwords and the dead weight of cultivated public opinion, one comes back to the world of books with an added zest. It is then, and only then, that one reads with real unscrupulousness, thinking solely of the pleasure, and nothing of the rectitude or propriety or adequacy of what we take up.
And it is then that the great figures of the master-writers appear in their true light; the light—that is to say—in which we, and not another, have visualised them, felt them, and reacted from them.
It is wonderful what thrilling pleasures there are in store for us in literature when once we have cut ourselves adrift from all this superfluity of cultured opinion, and have given ourselves complete leave to love what we like and hate what we like and be indifferent to what we like, as the world swings round!
I think the secret of making an exquisite use of literature so that it shall colour and penetrate our days is only a small part of what the wisest epicureans among us are concerned with attaining. I think it is one of the most precious benefits conferred on us by every new writer that he flings us back more deeply than ever upon ourselves. We draw out of him his vision, his peculiar atmosphere, his especial quality of mental and emotional tone. We savour this and assimilate it and store it up, as something which we have made our own and which is there to fall back upon when we want it. But beyond our enjoyment of this new increment to our treasury of feeling, we are driven inwards once more in a kind of intellectual rivalry with the very thing we have just acquired, and in precise proportion as it has seemed to us exciting and original we are roused in the depths of our mind to substitute something else for it; and this something else is nothing less than the evocation of our own originality, called up out of the hidden caverns of our being to claim its own creative place in the communion between our soul and the world.
I can only speak for myself; but my own preference among writers will always be for those whose genius consists rather in creating a certain mental atmosphere than in hammering out isolated works of art, rounded and complete.
For a flawless work of art is a thing for a moment, while that more penetrating projection of an original personality which one calls a mental or aesthetic atmosphere, is a thing that floats and flows and drifts and wavers, far beyond the boundaries of any limited creation. Such an atmosphere, such a vague intellectual music, in the air about us, is the thing that really challenges the responsive spirit in ourselves; challenges it and rouses it to take the part which it has a right to take, the part which it alonecantake, in recreating the world for us in accordance with our natural fatality.
It is only by the process of gradual disillusionment that we come at last to recognise what we ourselves—undistracted now by any external authority—need and require from the genius of the past. For my own part, looking over the great names included in the foregoing essays, I am at this moment drawn instinctively only to two among them all—to William Blake and to Paul Verlaine; and this is an indication to me that what my own soul requires is not philosophy or psychology or wit or sublimity, but a certain delicate transmutation of the little casual things that cross my way, and a certain faint, low, sweet music, rumouring from indistinguishable horizons, and bringing me vague rare thoughts, cool and quiet and deep and magical, such as have no concern with the clamour and brutality of the crowd.
The greater number of the writers who have dominated us, in the pages that go before, belong to the Latin race, and I cannot but feel that it is to this race that civilisation must come more and more to return in its search for the grandeur and pathos, the humanity and irony of that attitude of mind which serves our spirits best as we struggle on through the confusions and bewilderments of our way.
There is a tendency observable here and there—though the genuinely great minds who give their adherence to it are few and far between—to speak as though the race-element in literature were a thing better away, a thing whose place might be taken by a sort of attenuated idealistic amalgam of all the race-elements in the world, or by something which has no race-element in it at all—something inter-national, inter-racial, humanitarian and cosmopolitan.
People to whom this thin thing appeals often speak quite lightly of blending the traditions of East and West, of Saxon and Celt, of Latin and Teuton, of Scandinavian and Slav.
They do not see that you might as well speak of blending the temperaments of two opposite types of human personality. They do not see that the whole interest of life depends upon these contrasts. You cannot blend traditions in this academic way, any more than you can blend two human souls that are diametrically different, or two soils or climates which are mutually excluding. This ideal of a cosmopolitan literature that shall include all the local traditions and racial instincts is the sort of thing that appeals to the type of mind which remains essentially dull to the high qualities of a noble style.
No; it is not cosmopolitan literature that we want. It was not of cosmopolitan literature that Goethe was thinking when he used that term "I am a good European," which Nietzsche found so suggestive; it was of classical literature, of literature which, whatever its racial quality, has not lost touch with the civilised traditions of Athens and Rome.
In art, as in everything else, we must "worship our dead"; and the attempt to substitute a vague idealised cosmopolitanism for the living passionate localised traditions that spring like trees and flowers out of a particular soil, out of a soil made dear to us by the ashes of our fathers and consecrated by a thousand pious usages, is an attempt that can result in no great magical works.
Walt Whitman, for all his celebrations of the huge "ensemble" of the world, remains and must always remain profoundly and entirely American.
When Romain Rolland, the author of "Jean Christophe,"—the book of all books most penetrated by the spirit of race distinctions—appalled by the atrocity of the war, calls upon us to substitute the Ideal of Humanity for the ideas of the various tribes of men, he is really (in re-action from the dreadful scenes around him) renouncing those flashes of prophetic insight which gave him such living visions of the diverse souls of the great races. Romain Rolland may speak rhetorically of the "Ideal of Humanity" to be realised in art and letters. The thing is a word, a name, a phrase, an illusion. What we actually have are individuals—individual artists, individual races—each with its own beautiful and tragical fatality.
And what is true of races is true of persons both in life and in criticism. All that is really interesting in us springs in the first place from the traditions of the race to which we belong, springs from the soil that gave us birth and from our sacred dead and the usages and customs and habits which bind us to the past; and in the second place from what is uniquely and peculiarly personal to ourselves, belonging to our intrinsic and integral character and refusing to be swamped by any vague cult of "humanity in general."
To talk of literature becoming universal and planetary, becoming a logical synthesis of the traditions of races and the visions of individuals, is to talk of something that in its inherent nature is contrary to the fundamental spirit of art. It implies a confusion between the spheres of art and philosophy. The function of philosophy is to synthesise and unite. The function of art is to differentiate and distinguish. Philosophy and ethics are perfectly justified in concerning themselves with a "regenerated humanity" in which race-instincts and race-traditions are blotted out. Let them produce such a humanity if they can! But while there are any artists left in the world, or any lovers of art, it will always be to the old inalienable traditions that they will turn; to the old local customs, local pieties, local habits, local altars, and local gods.
To talk vaguely of cosmopolitan art uniting the nations, is to talk foolishly, and it is to talk irreverently. The people who deal in such theories are endeavouring to betray the dead of their own race and the noble pieties and desperate courage of those who made them what they are. It is a sacrilege, this speculation, and a sacrifice of beauty upon the altar of a logical morality.
What one comes more and more to feel is that everything which belongs to poetry and art belongs to the individual, to the individual nation and the individual person. The great modern democracies, with their cult of the average man and their suspicion of the exceptional man, are naturally only too ready to hail as ideal and wonderful any doctrine about literature which flatters their pride.
One of the most plausible forms of rhetorical cant is the cant about the soul of average humanity expressing itself in art, in an art which has sloughed off like an outworn skin all ancient race-instincts and all individual egoism.
There has never been such art in the history of the world as this average man's art, free from tradition and free from personal colour.
There will never be such art, unless it be the great, idealistic, humanitarian, cosmopolitan art of the Moving Picture Show.
But the idea sounds well in popular oratory, and it has a most soothing ointment for the souls of such artists as have neither reverence nor imagination.
It is quite possible that for the general comfort of the race at large—even if not for its happiness—it would be a good thing if philosophers and moralists between them could get rid of the imagination of races as well as the imagination of individuals.
The common crowd are naturally suspicious of imagination of any kind, as they are suspicious of genius of any kind; and this new doctrine of a literature largely and purely "human," wherein the general soul of humanity may find its expression, free from the colour of race-feeling and free from the waywardness of individual men of genius, is just the sort of thing to flatter the unthinking mob.
Why not have art and literature harnessed once and for all to the great rolling chariot of popular public opinion? Why not abolish all individualism at one stroke as a thing dangerous to the public welfare—a thing uncomfortable, undesirable, upsetting?
The same desperate, irrational, immoral imagination which inspires races with a strange madness, inspires individuals too with a strange madness.
Art and Literature are, after all, and there is little use denying it, the last refuge and sanctuary, in a world ruled by machinery and sentiment, of the free, wild, reckless, irresponsible, anarchical imagination of such as refuse to sacrifice their own dreams for the dreams—not less illusive—of the general herd.
We have to face the fact—bitter and melancholy though it may be—that in our great bourgeois-dominated democracies the majority of people would like to trample out the flame of genius altogether; trample it out as something inimical to their peace.
Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, were all completely aware of this instinctive hatred with which the mob of men regard what is exceptional and rare. The Hamlet-spirit of the author of Coriolanus must chuckle bitterly in that grave in Stratford-on-Avon when he learns that the new ideal is the ideal of cosmopolitan literature expressing the soul of the average man.
The clash is bound to come sooner or later between public opinion, concerned to preserve the comfort of its illusions, and the art of the individual artist playing, in noble irresponsibility, with all illusions.
It was his consciousness of this—of the natural antagonism of the mob and its leaders to all great literature—that made Goethe draw back so coldly and proudly from the popular tendencies of his time, and seek refuge among the great individualistic spirits of the classic civilisations. And what Goethe—the good European—did in his hour, the more classical among European writers of our own day do still.
The great style—the style which is like gold and bronze in an age of clay and rubble—remains as the only sure refuge we have from the howling vulgarities of our generation. If books were taken from us—the high, calm, beautiful, ironical books of classic tradition—how, in this age, could the more sensitive among us endure to live at all?
With brutality and insanity and ruffianism, with complacency and stupidity and sentimentalism, jostling us and hustling us on all sides, how could we live, if it were not for the great, calm, scornful anarchists of the soul, whose high inviolable imaginations perpetually refresh and re-create the world?
And we who find this refuge, we who have to win our liberty every day anew by bathing in these classic streams, we too will do well to remember that the most precious things in life are the things that the world can neither give nor take away.
We too—encouraged by these great individualists—have a right to fall back upon whatever individuality may have been left to us; and, resting upon that, sinking into the soul of that, to defy all that public opinion and the voice of the majority may be able to do.
And we shall be wise also if we recognise, before it is too late, that what is most intrinsic and inalienable in ourselves is just that very portion of us which has nothing to do with our work in life, nothing to do with our duty to the community.
We shall be wise if we recognise, before it is too late, that the thing most sacred in us is that strange margin of unoccupied receptivity, upon which settle, in their flight over land and sea, the beautiful wild birds of unsolicited dreams.
We shall be wise if, before we die, we learn a little of the art of suspending our judgment—the art of "waiting upon the spirit."
For it is only when we have suspended our judgment; it is only when we have suspended our convictions, our principles, our ideals, our moralities, that "the still small voice" of the music of the universe, sad and sweet and terrible and tender, drifts in upon us, over the face of the waters of the soul.
The essence of us, the hidden reality of us, is too rare and delicate a thing to bear the crude weight of these sturdy opinions, these vigorous convictions, these social ardours, without growing dulled and hardened.
We all have to bear the burden of humanity; and the artists among us may be thankful that the predatory curse resting upon the rich is very seldom ours: but the burden of humanity must not be allowed to press all joy, all originality, all waywardness, all interest, all imagination out of our lives.
It is not for long, at best or worst, that we know what it is to be conscious of being living children of the human race upon this strange planet.
The days pass quickly, and the seasons and the years. From the graves of the darlings of our souls there comes a voice and a cry. A voice bidding us sink into our own true selves before we too are numbered with the dead; a cry bidding us sacrifice everything before we sacrifice the prerogative of our inmost identity, the right to feel and think and dream as persons born into a high inheritance, the inheritance of the mind that has the right to question all things and to hold fast what pleases it in defiance of opinion and logic and probability and argument.
For it is only when we suspend our judgments and leave arguing and criticising, that the quiet gods of the moonlit shores of the world murmur their secrets in our ears.
They come without our seeking for them, these rare intimations; without our seeking for them, and, sometimes, without our desiring them; but when they come they come as revelations of something deeper in us than any mere soul of humanity. They come from a region that is as far beyond humanity as it is beyond nature. They come from the fairy-land of that mysterious country wherein dwell the dreams and the fancies of those lonely ones among the sons of men who have been possessed by imagination. They come from the unknown land where those inhabit who are, as the Psalmist says, "free among the dead." They come from the land which we left when we were born, and to which we return when we die. And whether this is a land of nothingness and oblivion none knoweth; for none hath returned to tell us. Meanwhile we can imagine what we will; and we can suspend our last judgment until we ourselves are judged.