Low-hung ragged grey skies, heaven smeared with watery vapours fleeting, broken and mournful, from the west—these above me, as I stand by the old lichened gate of the high wind-swept field at the top of the wold. In front a stretch of rough common, the dark-brown heather, the young gorse, bluish-green, the rusty red of soaked bracken, the pale ochre-coloured grass, all blent into a rich tint that pleases the eye with its wild freshness. To the left, the wide flat level of the plain, with low hills rising on its verge; to the right, a pale pool of water at the bottom of a secret valley, reflecting the leafless bushes that fringe it, catches the sunset gleam that rises in the west; and then range after range of wolds, with pale-green pastures, dark copses, fawn-coloured ploughland, here and there an emerald patch of young wheat. The air is fresh, soft and fragrant, laden with rain; the earth smells sweet; and the wild woodland scent comes blowing to me out of the heart of the spinney. In front of me glimmer the rough wheel-tracks of a grassy road that leads out on to the heath, and two obscure figures move slowly nearer among the tufted gorse. They seem to me, those two figures, charged with a grave significance, as though they came to bear me tidings, messengers bidden to seek and find me, like the men who visited Abraham at the close of the day.
As I linger, the day grows darker, the colour fading from leaf and blade; bright points of light flash out among the dark ridges from secluded farms, where the evening lamp is lit.
Sometimes on days like this, when the moisture hangs upon the hedges, when the streams talk hoarsely to themselves in grassy channels, when the road is full of pools, one is weary, unstrung and dissatisfied, faint of purpose, tired of labour, desiring neither activity nor rest; the soul sits brooding, like the black crows that I see in the leafless wood beneath me, perched silent and draggled on the tree-tops, just waiting for the sun and the dry keen airs to return; but to-day it is not so; I am full of a quiet hope, an acquiescent tranquillity. My heart talks gently to itself, as to an unseen friend, telling its designs, its wishes, its activities. I think of those I hold dear, all the world over; I am glad that they are alive, and believe that they think of me. All the air seems full of messages, thoughts and confidences and welcomes passing to and fro, binding souls to each other, and all to God. There seems to be nothing that one needs to do to-day except to live one's daily life; to be kind and joyful. To-day the road of pilgrimage lies very straight and clear between its fences, in an open ground, with neither valley nor hill, no by-path, no turning. One can even see the gables and chimneys of some grave house of welcome, "a roof for when the dark hours begin," full of pious company and smiling maidens. And not, it seems, a false security; one is not elated, confident, strong; one knows one's weakness; but I think that the Lord of the land has lately passed by with a smile, and given command that the pilgrims shall have a space of quiet. These birds, these branching trees, have not yet lost the joy of His passing. There, along the grassy tracks, His patient footsteps went, how short a time ago! One does not hope that all the journey will be easy and untroubled; there will be fresh burdens to be borne, dim valleys full of sighs to creep through, dark waters to wade across; these feet will stumble and bleed; these knees will be weary before the end; but to-day there is no doubt about the pilgrimage, no question of the far-off goal. The world is sad, perhaps, but sweet; sad as the homeless clouds that drift endlessly across the sky from marge to marge; sweet as the note of the hidden bird, that rises from moment to moment from the copse beside me, again and yet again, telling of a little heart that is content to wait, and not ill-pleased to be alone with its own soft thoughts.
Down in the valley which runs below the house is a mill. I passed it to-day at dusk, and I thought I had never seen so characteristically English a scene. The wheel was silent, and the big boarded walls, dusted with flour, loomed up solemnly in the evening light. The full leat dashed merrily through the sluice, making holiday, like a child released from school. Behind was the stack-yard, for it is a farm as well as a mill; and in the byre I heard the grunting of comfortable pigs, and the soft pulling of the hay from the big racks by the bullocks. The fowls were going to roost, fluttering up every now and then into the big elder-bushes; while high above, in the apple-trees, I saw great turkeys settled precariously for the night. The orchard was silent, except for the murmur of the stream that bounds it. In the mill-house itself lights gleamed in the windows, and I saw a pleasant family-party gathered at their evening meal. The whole scene with its background of sloping meadows and budding woods so tranquil and contented—a scene which William Morris would have loved—for there is a pleasant grace of antiquity about the old house, a sense of homely and solid life, and of all the family associations that have gone to the making of it, generation after generation leaving its mark in the little alterations and additions that have met a need, or even satisfied a pleasant fancy.
The miller is an elderly man now, fond of work, prosperous, good-humoured. His son lives with him, and the house is full of grandchildren. I do not say that it puzzles me to divine what is the miller's view of life, because I think I know it. It is to make money honestly, to bring up his grandchildren virtuously and comfortably, to enjoy his daily work and his evening leisure. He is never idle, never preoccupied. He enjoys getting the mill started, seeing the flour stream into the sacks, he enjoys going to market, he enjoys going prosperously to church on Sundays, he enjoys his paper and his pipe. He has no exalted ideas, and he could not put a single emotion into words, but he is thoroughly honest, upright, manly, kind, sensible. A perfect life in many ways; and yet it is inconceivable to me that a man should live thus, without an aim, without a hope, without an object. He would think my own life even more inconceivable—that a man could deliberately sit down day after day to construct a story about imaginary people; and such respect as he feels for me, is mainly due to the fact that my writings bring me in a larger income than he could ever make from his mill. But of course he is a man who is normally healthy, and such men as he are the props of rural life. He is a good master, he sees that his men do their work, and are well housed. He is not generous exactly, but he is neighbourly. The question is whether such as he is the proper type of humanity. He represents the simple virtues at their high-water mark. He is entirely contented, and his desires are perfectly proportioned to their surroundings. He seems indeed to be exactly what the human creature ought to be. And yet his very virtues, his sense of justice and honesty, his sensible kindliness, are the outcome of civilisation, and bear the stamp, in reality, of the dreams of saints and sages and idealists—the men who felt that things could be better, and who were made miserable by the imperfections of the world. I cannot help wondering, in a whimsical moment, what would have been the miller's thoughts of Christ, if he had been confronted with Him in the flesh. He would have thought of Him rather contemptuously, I think, as a bewildering, unpractical, emotional man. The miller would not have felt the appeal of unselfishness and unworldliness, because his ideal of life is tranquil prosperity. He would have merely wondered why people could not hold their tongues and mind their business: and yet he is a model citizen, and would be deeply annoyed if he were told he were not a sincere Christian. He accepts doctrinal statements as he would accept mathematical formulae, and he takes exactly as much of the Christian doctrine as suits him. Now when I compare myself with the miller, I feel that, as far as human usefulness goes, I am far lower in the scale. I am, when all is said and done, a drone in the hive, eating the honey I did not make. I do not take my share in the necessary labour of the world, I do not regulate a little community of labourers with uprightness and kindness, as he does. But still I suppose that my more sensitive organisation has a meaning in the scale of things. I cannot have been made and developed as I am, outside of the purpose of God. And yet my work in the world is not that of the passionate idealist, that kindles men with the hope of bettering and amending the world. What is it that my work does? It fills a vacant hour for leisurely people, it gives agreeable distraction, it furnishes some pleasant dreams. The most that I can say is that I have a wife whom I desire to make happy, and children whom I desire to bring up innocently, purely, vigorously.
Must one's hopes and beliefs be thus tentative and provisional? Must one walk through life, never fathoming the secret? I have myself abundance of material comfort, health, leisure. I know that for one like myself, there are hundreds less fortunate. Yet happiness in this world depends very little upon circumstances; it depends far more upon a certain mixture of selfishness, tranquillity, temperance, bodily vigour, and unimaginativeness. To be happy, one must be good-humouredly indifferent to the sufferings of others, and indisposed to forecast the possibilities of disaster. The sadness which must shadow the path of such as myself, is the sadness which comes of the power to see clearly the imperfections of the world, coupled with the inability to see through it, to discern the purpose of it all. One comforts oneself by the dim hope that the desire will be satisfied and the dream fulfilled; but has one any certainty of that? The temptation is to acquiesce in a sort of gentle cynicism, to take what one can get, to avoid as far as possible all deep attachments, all profound hopes, to steel oneself in indifference. That is what such men as my miller do instinctively; meanwhile one tries to believe that the melancholy that comes to such as Hamlet, the sadness of finding the world unintelligible, and painful, and full of shadows, is a noble melancholy, a superior sort of madness. Yet one is not content to bear, to suffer, to wait; one clutches desperately at light and warmth and joy, and alas, in joy and sorrow alike, one is ever and insupportably alone.
I have been reading Rousseau lately, and find him a very incomprehensible figure. The Confessions, it must be said, is a dingy and sordid book. I cannot quite penetrate the motive which induced him to write them. It cannot have been pure vanity, because he does not spare himself; he might have made himself out a far more romantic and attractive character, if he had suppressed the shadows and heightened the lights. I am inclined to think that it was partly vanity and partly honesty. Vanity was the motive force, and honesty the accompanying mood. I do not suppose there is any document so transparently true in existence, and we ought to be thankful for that. It is customary to say that Rousseau had the soul of a lackey, by which I suppose is meant that he had a gross and vulgar nature, a thievish taste for low pleasures, and an ill-bred absence of consideration for others. He had all these qualities certainly, but he had a great deal more. He was upright and disinterested. He had a noble disregard of material advantages; he had an enthusiasm for virtue, a passionate love of humanity, a deep faith in God. He was not an intellectual man nor a philosopher; and yet what a ridiculous criticism is that which is generally made upon him, that his reasoning is bad, his knowledge scanty, and that people had better read Hobbes! The very reason which made Rousseau so tremendous an influence was that his point of view was poetical rather than philosophical; he was not too far removed from the souls to which he prophesied. What they needed was inspiration, emotion, and sentimental dogma; these he could give, and so he saved Europe from the philosophers and the cynics. Of course it is a deplorable life, tormented by strong animal passion, ill-health, insanity; but one tends to forget the prevalent coarseness of social tone at that date, not because Rousseau made any secret of it, but because none of his contemporaries dared to be so frank. If Rousseau had struck out a dozen episodes from the Confessions the result would have been a highly poetical, reflective, charming book. I can easily conceive that it might have a very bad effect upon an ingenuous mind, because it might be argued from what he says that moral lapses do not very much matter, and that emotional experience is worth the price of some animalism. Still more perniciously it might induce one to believe that a man may have a deep sense of religion side by side with an unbridled sensuality, and that one whose life is morally infamous may yet be able to quicken the moral temperature of great nations.
Some of the critics of Rousseau speak as though a man whose moral code was so loose, and whose practice was so libidinous, ought almost to have held his tongue on matters of high moral import. But this is a very false line of argument. A man may see a truth clearly, even if he cannot practise it; and an affirmation of a passionate belief in virtue is emphasised and accentuated when it comes from the lips of one who might be tempted rather to excuse his faults by preaching the irresistible character of evil.
To any one who reads wisely, and not in a censorious and Pharisaical spirit, this sordid record, which is yet interspersed with things so fragrant and beautiful, may have a sobering and uplifting effect. One sees a man hampered by ill-health, by a temperament childishly greedy of momentary pleasure, by irritability, suspicion, vanity and luxuriousness, again and again expressing a deep belief in unselfish emotion, a passionate desire to help struggling humanity onward, a child-like confidence in the goodness and tenderness of the Father of all. Disgust and admiration struggle strangely together. One cannot sympathise and yet one dare not condemn. One feels a horrible suspicion that there are dark and slimy corners, vile secrets, ugly memories, in the minds of hundreds of seemingly respectable people; the book brings one face to face with the mystery of evil; and yet through the gloom there steals a silvery radiance, a far-off hope, an infinite compassion for all weakness and imperfection. One can hardly love Rousseau, though one does not wonder that there were many found to do so; and instead of judging him, one cries out with horror at the slime of the pit where he lay bound.
A delusion of which we must beware is the delusion that we can have a precise and accurate knowledge of spiritual things. This is a delusion into which the exponents of settled religions are apt to fall. The Roman Catholic, with his belief in the infallible Church, as the interpreter of God's spirit, which is nothing more than a belief in the inspiration of the majority, or even a belief in the inspiration of a bureaucracy, is the prey of this delusion. The Protestant, too, with his legal creed, built up of texts and precedents, in which the argumentative dicta of Apostles and Evangelists are as weighty and important as the words of the Saviour Himself, falls under this delusion. I read the other day a passage from a printed sermon of an orthodox type, an acrid outcry against Liberalism in religion, which may illustrate what I mean.
"To St. Paul and St. John," said the preacher, "the natural or carnal man is hopelessly remote from God; the same Lord who came to make possible for man this intimate communion with God is careful to make it clear that this communion is only possible to redeemed, regenerate man; prior to new birth into the Kingdom of God, far from being a son of God, man is, according to the Lord Himself, a child of the devil, however potentially capable of being translated from death into life."
Such teaching is so horrible and abominable that it is hard to find words to express one's sense of its shamefulness. To attribute it to the Christ, who came to seek and save what is lost, is an act of traitorous wickedness. If Christ had made it His business to thunder into the ears of the outcasts, whom He preferred to the Scribes and Pharisees, this appalling message, where would His teaching be? What message of hope would it hold for the soul? Such a view of Christianity as this insults alike the soul and the mind and the heart; it deliberately insults God; the message of Christ to the vilest human spirit is that it is indeed, in spite of all its corruption, its falls, its shame, in very truth God's own child; it calls upon the sinner to recognise it, it takes for granted that he feels it. The people whom Christ denounced with indignation so fiery, so blasting, that it even seems inconsistent with His perfect gentleness, were the people who thus professed to know and interpret the mind of God, who bade the sinner believe that He was a merciless judge, extreme to mark what is done amiss, when the one secret was that He was the tenderest and most loving of Fathers. But according to this preacher's terrible doctrine God pours into the world a stream of millions of human beings, all children of the devil, with instincts of a corrupt kind, hampered by dreadful inheritances, doomed, from their helpless and reluctant birth, to be sinful here and lost hereafter, and then prescribes to them a hard and difficult path, beset by clamorous guides, pointing in a hundred different directions, bidding them find the intricate way to His Heart, or perish. The truth is the precise opposite. The divine voice says to every man: "Hampered and sore hindered as you are, you are yet My dearly beloved son and child; only turn to Me, only open your heart to Me, only struggle, however faintly, to be what you can desire to be, and I will guide and lead you to Myself; all that is needed is that your heart should be on My side in the battle. Even your sins matter little, provided that you can say sincerely, 'If it were mine to choose and ordain, I would never willingly do evil again.' I know, better even than you yourself know, your difficulties, your temptations, your weaknesses; the sorrow they bring upon you is no dreary and vindictive punishment, it is the loving correction of My hand, and will bring you into peace yet, if only you will trust Me, and not despair."
The world is full of dreadful things, pains and sorrow and miseries, but the worst of all are the dreary wretchednesses of our own devising. The old detestable doctrine of Hell, the idea that the stubborn and perverse spirit can defy God, and make its black choice, is simply an attempt to glorify the strength of the human spirit and to belittle the Love of God. It denies the truth that God, if He chose, could show the darkest soul the beauty of holiness in so constraining a way that the frail nature must yield to the appeal. To deny this, is to deny the omnipotence of the Creator. No man would deliberately reject peace and joy, if he could see how to find them, in favour of feverish evil and ceaseless suffering. If we believe that God is perfect love, it is inconceivable that He should make a creature capable of defying His utmost tenderness, unless He had said to Himself, "I will make a poor wretch who shall defy Me, and he shall suffer endlessly and mercilessly in consequence." The truth is that God's Omnipotence is limited by His Omnipotence; He could not, for instance, abolish Himself, nor create a power that should be greater than He. But if He indeed can give to evil such vitality that it can defy Him for ever, then He is creating a power that is stronger than Himself.
While the mystery of evil is unexplained, we must all be content to know that we do not know; for the thing is insoluble by human thought. If God be all-pervading, all-in-all, it is impossible to conceive anything coming into being alien to Himself, within Himself. If He created spirits able to choose evil, He must have created the evil for them to choose, for a man could not choose what did not exist; if man can defy God, God must have given him the thought of defiance, for no thought can enter the mind of man not permitted by God.
With this mystery unsolved, we cannot pretend to any knowledge of spiritual things; all that we can do is to recognise that the principle of Love is stronger than the principle of evil, and cling so far as we can cling to the former. But to set ourselves up to guide and direct other men, as the preacher did whose words I have quoted, is to set oneself in the place of God, and is a detestable tyranny. Only by our innate sense of Justice and Love can we apprehend God at all; and thus we are safe in this, that whenever we find any doctrine preached by any human being which insults our sense of justice and love, we may gladly reject it, saying that at least we will not believe that God gives us the power, on the one hand, to recognise our highest and truest instincts, and on the other directs us to outrage them. Such teaching as this we can infallibly recognise as a human perversion and not as a divine message; and we may thankfully and gratefully believe that the obstacles and difficulties, the temptations and troubles, which seem to be strewn so thickly in our path, are to develop rather than to thwart our strivings after good, and assuredly designed to minister to our ultimate happiness, rather than to our ultimate despair.
I found to-day on a shelf a Manual of Preparation for Holy Communion, which was given me when I was confirmed. I stood a long time reading it, and little ghosts seemed to rustle in its pages. How well I remember using it, diligently and carefully, trying to force myself into the attitude of mind that it inculcated, and humbly and sincerely believing myself wicked, reprobate, stony-hearted, because I could not do it successfully. Shall I make a curious confession? From quite early days, the time of first waking in the morning has been apt to be for me a time of mental agitation; any unpleasant and humiliating incident, any disagreeable prospect, have always tended to dart into my brain, which, unstrung and weakened by sleep, has often been disposed to view things with a certain poignancy of distress at that hour—a distress which I always knew would vanish the moment I felt my feet on the carpet. I used to take advantage of this to use my Manual at that hour, because by that I secured a deeper intensity of repentance, and I have often succeeded in inducing a kind of tearful condition by those means, which I knew perfectly well to be artificial, but which yet seemed to comply with the rules of the process.
The kind of repentance indicated in the book as appropriate was a deep abasement, a horror and hatred of one's sinful propensities; and the language used seems to me now not only hollow and meaningless, but to insult the dignity of the soul, and to be indeed a profound confession of a want of confidence in the methods and purposes of God. Surely the right attitude is rather a manly, frank, and hopeful co-operation with God, than a degraded kind of humiliation. One was invited to contemplate God's detestation of sin, His awful and stainless holiness. How unreal, how utterly false! It is no more reasonable than to inculcate in human beings a sense of His hatred of weakness, of imperfection, of disease, of suffering. One might as well say that God's courage and beauty were so perfect that He had an impatient loathing for anything timid or ugly. If one said that being perfect He had an infinite pity for imperfection, that would be nearer the truth—but, even so, how far away! To believe in His perfect love and benevolence, one must also believe that all shortcomings, all temptations, all sufferings, somehow emanate from Him; that they are educative, and have an intense and beautiful significance—that is what one struggles, how hardly, to believe! Those childish sins, they were but the expression of the nature one received from His hand, that wilful, pleasure-loving, timid, fitful nature, which yet always desired the better part, if only it could compass it, choose it, love it. To hate one's nature and temperament and disposition, how impossible, unless one also hated the God who had bestowed them! And then, too, how inextricably intertwined! The very part of one's soul that made one peace-loving, affectionate, trustful was the very thing that led one into temptation. The very humility and diffidence that made one hate to seem or to be superior to others was the occasion of falling. The religion recommended was a religion of scrupulous saints and self-torturing ascetics; and the result of it was to make one, as experience widened and deepened, mournfully indifferent to an ideal which seemed so utterly out of one's reach. It is very difficult to make the right compromise. On the one hand, there is the sense of moral responsibility and effort, which one desires to cultivate; on the other hand, truth compels us to recognise our limitations, and to confess boldly the fact that moral improvement is a very difficult thing. The question is whether, in dealing with other people, we will declare what we believe to be the truth, or whether we will tamper with the truth for a good motive. Ought we to pretend that we think a person morally responsible and morally culpable, when we believe that he is neither, for the sake of trying to improve him?
My own practice now is to waste as little time as possible in ineffectual regrets, but to keep alive as far as I can in my heart a hope, a desire, that God will help to bring me nearer to the ideal that I can perceive and cannot reach. To-day, turning over the pages of the old Manual, with its fantastic strained phrases staring at me from the page, I cannot help wishing that some wise and tender person had been able to explain to me the conditions as I now see them. Probably the thing was incommunicable; one must learn for oneself both one's bitterness and one's joy.
It sometimes happens to me—I suppose it happens to every one—to hear some well-meaning person play or sing at a party. Last night, at the Simpsons', a worthy young man, who was staying there, sang some Schubert songs in a perfectly correct, weak, inexpressive voice, accompanying himself in a wooden and inanimate fashion—the whole thing might have been turned out by a machine. I was, I suppose, in a fretful mood. "Good God!" I thought to myself, "what is the meaning of this woeful performance?—a party of absurd dressed-up people, who have eaten and drunk too much, sitting in a circle in this hot room listening gravely to this lugubrious performance! And this is the best that Schubert can do! This is the real Schubert! Here have I been all my life pouring pints of subjective emotion into this dreary writer of songs, believing that I was stirred and moved, when it was my own hopes and aspirations all along, which I was stuffing into this conventional vehicle, just as an ecclesiastical person puts his emotion into the grotesque repetitions of a liturgy." I thought to myself that I had made a discovery, and that all was vanity. Well, we thanked the singer gravely enough, and went on, smiling and grimacing, to talk local gossip. A few minutes later, a young girl, very shy and painfully ingenuous, was hauled protesting to the piano. I could see her hands tremble as she arranged her music, and the first chords she struck were halting and timid. Then she began to sing—it was some simple old-fashioned song—what had happened? the world was somehow different; she had one of those low thrilling voices, charged with utterly inexplicable emotion, haunted with old mysterious echoes out of some region of dreams, so near and yet so far away. I do not think that the girl had any great intensity of mind, or even of soul, neither was she a great performer; but there was some strange and beautiful quality about the voice, that now rose clear and sustained, while the accompaniment charged and tinged the pure notes with glad or mournful visions, like wine poured into water; now the voice fell and lingered, like a clear stream among rocks, pathetic, appealing, stirring a deep hunger of the spirit, and at the same time hinting at a hope, at a secret almost within one's grasp. How can one find words to express a thing so magical, so inexpressible? But it left me feeling as though to sing thus was the one thing worth doing in the world, because it seemed to interpret, to reveal, to sustain, to console—it was as though one opened a door in a noisy, dusty street, and saw through it a deep and silent glen, with woodlands stooping to a glimmering stream, with a blue stretch of plain beyond, and an expanse of sunny seas on the rim of the sky.
I have had similar experiences before. I have looked in a gallery at picture after picture—bright, soulless, accomplished things—and asked myself how it was possible for men and women to spend their time so elaborately to no purpose; and then one catches sight of some little sketch—a pool in the silence of high summer, the hot sun blazing on tall trees full of leaf, and rich water-plants, with a single figure in a moored boat, musing dreamily; and at once one is transported into a region of thrilled wonder. What is it all about? What is this sudden glimpse into a life so rich and strange? In what quiet country is it all enacted, what land of sweet visions? What do the tall trees and the sleeping pool hide from me, and in what romantic region of joy and sadness does the dreamer muse for ever, in the long afternoon, so full of warmth and fragrance and murmurous sound? That is the joy of art, of the symbol—that it remains and rests within itself, in a world that seems, for a moment, more real and true than the clamorous and obtrusive world we move in.
It is so all along the line—the hard and soulless art of technique and rule, of tradition and precept, however accomplished, however perfect it is, is worth nothing; it is only another dreary form of labour, unless through some faculty of the spirit, some vital intensity, or even some inexplicable felicity, not comprehended, not designed, not intended by the artist, it has this remote and suggestive quality. And thus suddenly, in the midst of this weary beating of instruments, this dull laying of colour by colour, of word by word, there breaks in the awful and holy presence; and then one feels, as I have said, that this thrill, this message, this oracle, is the one thing in the world worth striving after, and that indeed one may forgive all the dull efforts of those who cannot attain it, because perhaps they too have felt the call, and have thrown themselves into the eternal quest.
And it is true too of life; one is brought near to many people, and one asks oneself in a chilly discomfort what is the use of it all, living thus in hard and futile habits, on dull and conventional lines; and then again one is suddenly confronted by some personality, rich in hope and greatness, touching the simplest acts of life with an unearthly light, making them gracious and beautiful, and revealing them as the symbols of some pure and high mystery. Sometimes this is revealed by a word, sometimes by a glance; perfectly virtuous, capable, successful people may miss it; humble, simple, quiet people may have it. One cannot analyse it or describe it; but one has instantaneously a sense that life is a thing of large issues and great hopes; that every action and thought, however simple or commonplace, may be touched with this large quality of interest, of significance. It is a great happiness to meet such a person, because one goes in the strength of that heavenly meat many days and nights, knowing that life is worth living to the uttermost, and that it can all be beautiful and lofty and gracious; but the way to miss it, to lose that fine sense, is to have some dull and definite design of one's own, which makes one treat all the hours in which one cannot pursue it, but as the dirt and debris of a quarry. One must not, I see, wait for the golden moments of life, because there are no moments that are not golden, if one can but pierce into their essence. Yet how is one to realise this, to put it into practice? I have of late, in my vacuous mood, fallen into the dark error of thinking of the weary hours as of things that must be just lived through, and endured, and beguiled, if possible, until the fire again fall. But life is a larger and a nobler business than that; and one learns the lesson sooner, if one takes the suffering home to one's soul, not as a tedious interlude, but as the very melody and march of life itself, even though it crash into discords, or falter in a sombre monotony.
The point is that when one seems to be playing a part to one's own satisfaction, when one appears to oneself to be brilliant, suggestive, inspiriting, and genial, one is not necessarily ministering to other people; while, on the other hand, when one is dull, troubled, and anxious, out of heart and discontented, one may have the chance of making others happier. Here is a whimsical instance; in one of my dreariest days—I was in London on business—I sate next to an old friend, generally a very lively, brisk, and cheerful man, who appeared to me strangely silent and depressed. I led him on to talk freely, and he told me a long tale of anxieties and cares; his health was unsatisfactory, his plans promised ill. In trying to paint a brighter picture, to reassure and encourage him, I not only forgot my own troubles, but put some hope into him. We had met, two tired and dispirited men, we went away cheered and encouraged, aware that we were not each of us the only sufferer in the world and that there were possibilities still ahead of us all, nay, in our grip, if we only were not blind and forgetful.
I saw the other day a great artist working on a picture in its initial stages. There were a few lines of a design roughly traced, and there was a little picture beside him, where the scheme was roughly worked out; but the design itself was covered with strange wild smears of flaring, furious colour, flung crudely upon the canvas. "I find it impossible to believe," I said,—"forgive me for speaking thus—that these ragged stains and splashes of colour can ever be subdued and harmonised and co-ordinated." The great man smiled. "What would you have said, I wonder," he replied, "if you had seen, as I did once, a picture of Rossetti's in an early stage, with the face and arms of one of his strange and mysterious figures roughly painted in in the brightest ultramarine? Many of these fantastic scraps of colour will disappear altogether from the eye, just lending tone to something which is to be superimposed upon them."
I have since reflected that this makes a beautiful parable of our lives. Some element comes into our experience, some suffering, some anxiety, and we tend to say impatiently: "Well, whatever happens, this at least can never appear just or merciful." But God, like a wise and perfect artist, foresees the end in the beginning. We, who live in time and space, can merely see the rough, crude tints flung fiercely down, till the thing seems nothing but a frantic patchwork of angry hues; but God sees the blending and the softening; how the soft tints of face and hand, of river and tree, will steal over the coarse background, and gain their strength and glory from the hidden stains. Perhaps we have sometimes the comfort of seeing how some old and ugly experience melted into and strengthened some soft, bright quality of heart or mind. Staring mournfully as we do upon the tiny circumscribed space of life, we cannot conceive how the design will work itself out; but the day will come when we shall see it too; and perhaps the best moments of life are those when we have a secret inkling of the process that is going so slowly and surely forward, as the harsh lines and hues become the gracious lineaments of some sweet face, and from the glaring patch of hot colour is revealed the remote and shining expanse of a sunlit sea.
There used to be a favourite subject for scholastic disputation: WHETHER HERCULES IS IN THE MARBLE. The image is that of the sculptor, who sees the statue lie, so to speak, imbedded in the marble block, and whose duty is so to carve it, neither cutting too deep or too shallow, so that the perfect form is revealed. The idea of the disputation is the root-idea of idealistic philosophy. That each man is, as it were, a block of marble in which the ideal man is buried. The purpose of the educator ought to be to cut the form out, perikoptein, as Plato has it.
What a lofty and beautiful thought! To feel about oneself that the perfect form is there, and that the experience of life is the process of cutting it out—a process full of pain, perhaps, as the great splinters and flakes fly and drop—a rough, brutal business it seems at first, the hewing off great masses of stone, so firmly compacted, fused and concreted together. At first it seems unintelligible enough; but the dints become minuter and minuter, here a grain and there an atom, till the smooth and shapely limbs begin to take shape. At first it seems a mere bewildered loss, a sharp pang as one parts with what seems one's very self. How long before the barest structure becomes visible! but when one once gets a dim inkling of what is going on, as the stubborn temper yields, as the face takes on its noble frankness, and the shapely limbs emerge in all the glory of free line and curve, how gratefully and vehemently one co-operates, how little a thing the endurance of mere pain becomes by the side of the consciousness that one is growing into the likeness of the divine.
when Goethe was writing Werther he wrote to his friend Kestner, "I am working out my own situation in art, for the consolation of gods and men." That is a fine thing to have said, proceeding from so sublime an egoism, so transcendent a pride, that it has hardly a disfiguring touch of vanity about it. He did not add that he was also working in the situation of his friend Kestner, and Kestner's wife, Charlotte; though when they objected to having been thus used as material, Goethe apologised profusely, and in the same breath told them, somewhat royally, that they ought to be proud to have been thus honoured. But that is the reason why one admires Goethe so much and worships him so little. One admires him for the way in which he strode ahead, turning corner after corner in the untravelled road of art, with such insight, such certainty, interpreting and giving form to the thought of the world; but one does not worship him, because he had no tenderness or care for humanity. He knew whither he was bound, but he did not trouble himself about his companions. The great leaders of the world are those who have said to others, "Come with me—let us find light and peace together!"—but Goethe said, "Follow me if you can!" Some one, writing of that age, said that it was a time when men had immense and far-reaching desires, but feeble wills. They lost themselves in the melancholy of Hamlet, and luxuriated in their own sorrows. That was not the case with Goethe himself; there never was an artist who was less irresolute.
One of the reasons, I think, why we are weak in art, at the present time, is because we refer everything to conventional ethical standards. We are always arraigning people at the bar of morality, and what we judge them mainly by is their strength or weakness of will. Blake thought differently. He always maintained that men would be judged for their intellectual and artistic perception, by their good or bad taste.
But surely it is all a deep-seated mistake; one might as well judge people for being tall or short, ugly or beautiful. The only thing for which I think most people would consent to be judged, which is after all what matters, is whether they have yielded consciously to mean, prudent, timid, conventional motives in life. It is not a question of success or failure; it is rather whether one has acted largely, freely, generously, or whether one has acted politely, timidly, prudently.
In the Gospel, the two things for which it seems to be indicated that men will be judged are, whether they have been kind, and whether they have improved upon what has been given them. And therefore the judgment seems to depend rather upon what men desire than upon what they effect, upon attitude rather than upon performance. But it is all a great mystery, because no amount of desiring seems to give us what we desire. The two plain duties are to commit ourselves to the Power that made us, and to desire to become what He would have us become; and one must also abstain from any attempt to judge other people—that is the unpardonable sin.
In art, then, a man does his best if, like Goethe, he works his own situation into art for the consolation of gods and men. His own situation is the only thing he can come near to perceiving; and if he draws it faithfully and beautifully, he consoles and he encourages. That is the best and noblest thing he can do, if he can express or depict anything which may make other men feel that they are not alone, that others are treading the same path, in sunshine or cloud; anything which may help others to persevere, to desire, to perceive. The worst sorrows in life are not its losses and misfortunes, but its fears. And when Goethe said that it was for the consolation of gods as well as of men, he said a sublime thing, for if we believe that God made and loved us, may we not sympathise with Him for our blindness and hopelessness, for all the sad sense of injustice and perplexity that we feel as we stumble on our way; all the accusing cries, all the despairing groans? Do not such things wound the heart of God? And if a man can be brave and patient, and trust Him utterly, and bid others trust Him, is He not thereby consoled?
In these dark months, in which I have suffered much, there rises at times in my heart a strong intuition that it is not for nothing that I suffer. I cannot divine whom it is to benefit, or how it is to benefit any one. One thing indeed saddens me, and that is to reflect that I have often allowed the record of old sadnesses to heighten my own sense of luxurious tranquillity and security. Not so will I err again. I will rather believe that a mighty price is being paid for a mightier joy, that we are not astray in the wilderness out of the way, but that we are rather a great and loving company, guided onward to some far-off city of God, with infinite tenderness, and a love so great that we cannot even comprehend its depth and its intensity.
I sit, as I write, in my quiet room, the fragrant evening air floating in, surrounded by all the beloved familiar things that have made my life sweet, easy, and delightful—books and pictures, that have brought me so many messages of beauty. I hear the voice of Maud overhead—she is telling the children a story, and I hear their voices break out every now and then into eager questions. Yet in the midst of all this peace and sweetness, I walk in loneliness and gloom, hardly daring, so faithless and despairing I am, to let my heart go out to the love and goodness round me, for fear of losing it all, for fear that those souls I love may be withdrawn from me or I from them. In this I know that I am sadly and darkly wrong—the prudent coldness, the fear of sorrow pulls me back; irresolute, cowardly, base! Yet even so I must trust the Hand that moulded me, and the Will that bade me be, just so and not otherwise.
It is a melancholy reflection how very little the highest and most elaborate culture effects in the direction of producing creative and original writing. Very few indeed of our great writers have been technically cultivated men. How little we look to the Universities, where a lifetime devoted to the study of the nuances of classical expression is considered well spent, for any literature which either raises the intellectual temperature or enriches the blood of the world! The fact is that the highly-cultivated man tends to find himself mentally hampered by his cultivation, to wade in a sea of glue, as Tennyson said. It is partly that highly-cultivated minds grow to be subservient to authority, and to contemn experiment as rash and obstreperous. Partly also the least movement of the mind dislodges such a pile of precedents and phrases and aphorisms, stored and amassed by diligent reading, that the mind is encumbered by the thought that most things worth saying have been so beautifully said that repetition is out of the question. Partly, too, a false and fastidious refinement lays hold of the mind; and an intellect trained in the fine perception of ancient expression is unable to pass through the earlier stages through which a writer must pass, when the stream flows broken and turbid, when it appears impossible to capture and define the idea which seems so intangible and indefinable.
What an original writer requires is to be able to see a subject for himself, and then to express it for himself. The only cultivation he needs is just enough to realise that there are differences of subject and differences of expression, just enough to discern the general lines upon which subjects can be evolved, and to perceive that lucidity, grace, and force of expression are attainable. The overcultivated man, after reading a masterpiece, is crushed and flattened under his admiration; but the effect of a masterpiece upon an original spirit, is to make him desire to say something else that rises in his soul, and to say it in his own words; all he needs in the way of training is just enough for him to master technique. The highly-cultivated man is as one dazzled by gazing upon the sun; he has no eyes for anything else; a bright disc, imprinted upon his eyes, floats between him and every other object.
The best illustration of this is the case of the great trio, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge. All three started as poets. Coleridge was distracted from poetry into metaphysics, mainly, I believe, by his indulgence in opium, and the torturing contemplation of his own moral impotence. He turned to philosophy to see if he could find some clue to the bewildering riddle of life, and he lost his way among philosophical speculations. Southey, on the other hand, a man of Spartan virtue, became a highly-cultivated writer; he sate in his spacious library of well-selected books, arranged with a finical preciseness, apportioning his day between various literary pursuits. He made an income; he wrote excellent ephemeral volumes; he gained a somewhat dreary reputation. But Wordsworth, with his tiny bookshelf of odd tattered volumes, with pages of manuscript interleaved to supply missing passages, alone kept his heart and imagination active, by deliberate leisure, elaborate sauntering, unashamed idleness.
The reason why very few uneducated persons have been writers of note, is because they have been unable to take up the problem at the right point. A writer cannot start absolutely afresh; he must have the progress of thought behind him, and he must join the procession in due order. Therefore the best outfit for a writer is to have just enough cultivation to enable him to apprehend the drift and development of thought, to discern the social and emotional problems that are in the air, so that he can interpret—that is the secret—the thoughts that are astir, but which have not yet been brought to the birth. He must know enough and not too much; he must not dim his perception by acquainting himself in detail with what has been said or thought; he must not take off the freshness of his mind by too much intellectual gymnastic. It is a race across country for which he is preparing, and he will learn better what the practical difficulties are by daring excursions of his own, than by acquiring a formal suppleness in prescribed exercises.
The originality and the output of the writer are conditioned by his intellectual and vital energy. Most men require all their energy for the ordinary pursuits of life; all creative work is the result of a certain superabundance of mental force. If this force is used up in social duties, in professional business, even in the pursuit of a high degree of mental cultivation, originality must suffer; and therefore a man whose aim is to write, ought resolutely to limit his activities. What would be idleness in another is for him a storing of forces; what in an ordinary man would be malingering and procrastination, is for the writer the repose necessary to allow his energies to concentrate themselves upon his chosen work.