It is such a perennial mystery to me what beauty is; it baffles me entirely. No one has ever helped me to discover in what region of the spirit it abides. The philosopher begins by telling you that the simplest and most elementary form of beauty which appeals to every one, the beauty of human beings, has its root originally only in desire; but I cannot follow that, because that would only account for one's admiring a certain kind of fresh and youthful beauty, and in admiring human beauty less and less as it declines from that. But this is not the case at all; because there is a beauty of age which is often, in its way, a more impressive and noble thing than the beauty of youth. And there is, too, the beauty of expression, a far more subtle and moving thing than mere beauty of feature: we must have often seen, for instance, a face which by all the canons of beauty might be pronounced admirable, yet the effect of which is wholly unattractive; while, on the other hand, we have known faces that, from some ruggedness or want of proportion, seemed at first sight even repellent, which have yet come to hold for one an extraordinary quality of attractiveness, from the beauty of the soul being somehow revealed in them, and are yet as remote from any sense of desire as the beauty of a tree or a crag.
And then, again, in dealing with the beauty of nature, I have heard philosophers say that the appeal which it makes is traceable to a sense of prosperity or well-being; and that the love of landscape has grown up out of the sense of satisfaction with which our primaeval ancestors saw a forest full of useful timber and crowded with edible game. But that again is entirely contradicted by my experience.
I went to-day on a vague walk in the country, taking attractive by-ways and field-paths, and came in the course of the afternoon to a lonely village among wide pastures which I had never visited before. The bell-like sound of smitten metal, ringing cheerfully from a smithy, outlined against the roar of a blown fire, seemed to set my mind in tune. I turned into the tiny street. The village lies on no high-road; it is remote and difficult of access, but at one time it enjoyed a period of prosperity because of a reputation for dairy produce; and there were half-a-dozen big farm-houses on the street, of different dates, which testified to this. There was an old timbered Grange, deserted, falling into ruin. There was a house with charming high brick gables at either end, with little battlemented crow-steps, and with graceful chimney-stacks at the top. There was another solid Georgian house, with thick white casements and moss-grown tiling—all of them showing signs of neglect and fallen fortunes.
But the ruined Grange, with a moat round it full of willows and big water-plants, approached by a pretty bridge with ruinous parapets, had the perfect quality of beauty. Yet all the associations that it aroused were sad ones. It spoke of an old and prosperous family life, full of simple happiness, brought to an end of desertion and desolation. It seemed to say, like the Psalmist, "I see that all things come to an end." Just opposite was a new and comfortable farm-house, the only prosperous house in the village, with a trim lawn, and big barns covered with corrugated iron roofing. Everything about it spoke of comfort and security. Yet the only appeal that it made to the spirit was that one wished it out of sight, while the ruined Grange touched the heart with yearning and pathos, and even with a far-off and beautiful hope. The transfiguring hand of time was laid gently upon it, and there was not a single detail of the scene which was not filled with a haunting sense of delight and sweetness.
It was just at sunset that I saw it; and as the sun went down and the colour began to ebb out of bush and wall, the sense of its beauty and grace became every instant more and more acute. A long train of rooks, flying quietly homeward, drifted across the rose-flushed clouds. Everything alike spoke of peace, of a quiet ending, of closed eyes and weary hearts at rest. And yet the sense was not a joyful one, for it was all overshadowed by a consciousness of the unattainable. What increased the mystery was that the very thought that it could not be attained, the yearning for the impossible, was what seemed to lend the deepest sense of beauty to the scene. Who can interpret these things? Who can show why it is that the sense of beauty, that deep hunger of the heart, is built up on the fact that the dream cannot be realised? Yet so it is. The sense of beauty, whatever it may be, seems to depend upon the fact that the soul there catches a glimpse of something that waits to bless it—and upon which it cannot lay its hand; or is aware that if it does for a moment apprehend it, yet that a moment later it will be dragged rudely back into a different region. The sense of beauty is then of its nature accompanied by sadness; it is essentially evanescent. A beautiful thing with which we grow familiar stands often before us dumb and inarticulate, with no appeal to the spirit. Then perhaps in a sudden movement, the door of the spirit is unlatched, and the soul for a moment discerns the sweet essence, to which an instant before it had been wholly unresponsive, and which an instant later will lose its power. It seems to point to a possible satisfaction; and yet it owes its poignancy to the fact that the heart is still unsatisfied.
I once wrote and published a personal and intimate book; it was a curious experience. There was a certain admixture of fiction in it, but in the main it was a confession of opinions; for various reasons the book had a certain vogue, and though it was published anonymously, the authorship was within my own circle detected. I saw several reviews of it, and I was amused to find that the critics perspicuously conjectured that because it was written in the first person it was probably autobiographical. I had several criticisms made on it by personal friends: some of them objected to the portraiture of persons in it being too life-like, selecting as instances two characters who were entirely imaginary; others objected to the portraiture as not being sufficiently life-like, and therefore tending to mislead the reader. Others determined to see in the book a literal transcript of fact, set themselves to localise and identify incidents which were pure fiction, introduced for reasons of picturesqueness. It brought me, too, a whole crop of letters from unknown people, many of which were very interesting and touching, letters which pleased and encouraged me greatly, because they proved that the book had made its way at all events to certain hearts.
But one old friend, whose taste and judgment I have every reason to respect, took me to task very seriously for writing the book. He said: "You will not misunderstand me, I know; but I cannot help feeling that the deliberate exposure of a naked soul before the public has something that is almost indecent about it." I did not misunderstand him, nor did I at all resent the faithful criticism, even though I could not agree with it.
I had written books before, and I have written books since, but none which made that particular personal appeal. I may proudly say that it contained nothing that was contrary either to faith or morals; it was quite unobjectionable. It aimed at making thought a little clearer, hope a little brighter; at disentangling some of the complex fibres of beauty and interest which are interwoven into the fabric of life. I tried to put down very plainly some of the things that had helped me, some of the sights that had pleased me, some of the thoughts that had fed me. I do not really know what else is the purpose of writing at all; it is only a kind of extended human intercourse. I am not a good conversationalist; my thoughts do not flow fast enough, do not come crowding to the lips; moreover, the personalities of those with whom I talk affect me too strongly. There are people with whom one cannot be natural or sincere. There are people whose whole range of interests is different from one's own. There are critical people who love to trip one up and lay one flat, boisterous people who disagree, ironical people who mock one's sentiment, matter-of-fact people who dislike one's fancies. But one can talk in a book withoutgêneor restraint. It is like talking to a perfectly sympathetic listener when no third person is by. I wrote the book without premeditation and without calculation, just as the thoughts rose to my mind, as I should like to speak to the people I met, if I had the art and the courage. Well, it found its way, I am glad to think, to the right people; and as for exposing my heart for all the world to read, I cannot see why one should not do that! I am not ashamed of anything that I said, and I have no sort of objection to any one knowing what I think, if they care to know. I spoke, if I may say so without conceit, just as a bird will sing, careless who listens to it. If the people who wander in the garden do not like the song, the garden is mine as well as theirs; they need not listen, or they can scare the bird with ugly gestures out of his bush if they will. I have never been able to sympathise with that jealous sense of privacy about one's thoughts, that is so strong in some people. I like to be able to be alone and to have my little stronghold; but that is because the presence of conventional and unsympathetic people bores and tires me. But in a book it is different. One is not intruded upon or gazed at; one may tell exactly as much of one's inner life as one will—and there are, of course, many things which I would not commit to the pages of a book, or even tell a friend. But I put nothing in my book that I would not have said quite readily to a friend whom I loved and trusted; and I like to feel that the book has made me several gentle and unknown friends, whose company the laws of time and space forbid me to frequent. And more than that, there might be things about the people who liked my book which I should not like; superficial things such as manner or look; I might not even like their opinions on certain points; but now, by writing this book, the best part of me, I think, has made friends with the best part of them. All art depends upon a certain kinship of spirit between the man who produces and the men who perceive; and just as a painter may speak to kindred spirits in a picture, or as a preacher may show his own heart in a sermon, so a writer may reveal himself in a book, if he is so inclined. The best kind of friendship is made in that way, the friendship that is not at the mercy of superficial appearances, habits, modes of breeding, conventions, which erect a barrier in this mysterious world between the souls of men.
Perhaps one of the greatest interests and pleasures we have in life is the realising of different temperaments and different points of view. It is not only interesting, it is wholesome and bracing. It helps us out of egotism; it makes us sympathetic; and I wish with all my heart that people would put more of their own unadulterated selves into books; that would be real, at all events. But what writers so often do is to tell the adventures of imaginary people, write plays where persons behave as no one ever behaves in real life; or they turn to what is called serious literature, and write a history of things of which no one can ever know the truth; or they make wise and subtle comments on the writings of great authors, covering them with shining tracks, as when snails crawl over a wall and leave their mucus behind them. And there are many other sorts of books which I need not define here, some of them useful, no doubt, and some of them wearisome enough. But the books of which we can never have enough are the books which tell us what people are really like, because our true concern is with the souls of men; and if we are all bound, as I believe we are, upon a progress and a pilgrimage, though the way is dark and the goal remote, the more we can know of our fellow-pilgrims the better for ourselves. This knowledge can teach us, perhaps, to avoid mistakes, or can make us ashamed of not being better than we are; or, best of all, it may lead us to love and pity those who are like ourselves, to bear their burdens when we can, to comfort, to help. I think it would be far better if we could talk more simply and openly to each other of our hopes and fears—what we love, what we dread, what we avoid. The saddest thing in the world is to feel that we are alone; the best thing in the world is to feel that we are loved and needed.
However, as things are, the sad fact remains that in common talk we speak of knowing a man whom we have met and spoken to a dozen times, while it would never occur to us to use the word of a man whose books we might have read a dozen times and yet never have seen; though as matter of fact we know the latter's real mind, or a part of it, while we may only know the healthy or pathetic face of the former.
If we make writing the business of our lives, it will be necessary to give up many things for it, things which are held to be the prizes of the world—position, station, wealth—or, rather, to give up the pursuit of these things; probably, indeed, if we really love our art we shall be glad enough to give up what we do not care about for a thing about which we do care. But there will be other things to be given up as well, which we may not like resigning, and one of these things is the multiplication of pleasant relations with other people, which cannot indeed be called friendships, but which rank high among the easy pleasures of life. We must give them up because they mean time, and time is one of the things that the artist cannot throw away. Of course the artist must not lose his hold on life; but if he is working in a reflective medium, it is his friendships that help him, and not his acquaintances. He must learn to be glad to be alone, for it is in solitude that an idea works itself out, very often quite unconsciously, by a sort of secret gestation. How often have I found that to put an idea in the mind and to leave it there, even if one does not consciously meditate upon it, is sufficient to clothe the naked thought with a body of appropriate utterance, when it comes to the birth. But casual social intercourse, the languid interchange of conventional talk, mere gregariousness, must be eschewed by an artist, for the simple reason that his temptation will be to expend his force in entering into closer relations with the casual, and possibly unintelligent, person than the necessities of the situation warrant. The artist is so impatient of dulness, so greedy of fineness, in all his relations, that he is apt to subject himself to a wasteful strain in talking to unperceptive and unappreciative persons. It is not that he desires to appear brilliant; it is that he is so intolerant of tedium that he sacrifices himself to fatiguing efforts in trying to strike a spark out of a dull stone. The spark is perhaps struck, but he parts with his vital force in striking it. He will be apt to be reproached with being eremitical, self-absorbed, unsociable, fastidious; but he must not care for that, because the essence of his work is to cultivate relations of sympathy with people whose faces he may never see, and he must save his talk, so to speak, for his books. With his friends it is different, for talking to congenial people with whom one is familiar is a process at once stimulating and tranquillising, and it is at such moments that ideas take swift and brilliant shape.
Those who may read these words will be apt to think that it is a selfish business after all; yet that is only because so many people consider the life of the writer an otiose and unnecessary life; but the sacrifices of which I speak are only those that all men who follow an absorbing profession have to make—barristers, politicians, physicians, men of business. No one complains if they seclude themselves at certain hours. Of course, if a writer finds that general society makes no demands upon his nervous force, but is simply a recreation, there is no reason why he should not take that recreation; though I have known men who just missed being great writers because they could not resist the temptation of general society.
The conclusion of the matter is that an artist must cultivate a strict sense of responsibility; if he has a certain thing to say, he must say it with all his force; and he must be content with a secret and silent influence, an impersonal brotherliness, deep and inner relations of soul with soul, that may never express themselves in glance or gesture, in hand-clasp or smile, but which, for all that, are truer and more permanent relations than word or gesture or close embrace can give; a marriage of souls, a bodiless union.
I have often thought that in Art, judging by the analogy of previous development, we ought to be able to prophesy more or less the direction in which development is likely to take place. I mean that in music, for instance, the writers of the stricter ancient music might have seen that the art was likely to develop a greater intricacy of form, an increased richness of harmony, a larger use of discords, suspensions, and chromatic intervals, a tendency to conceal superficial form rather than to emphasise it, and so forth. Yet it is a curious question whether if Handel, say, could have heard an overture of Wagner's he would have thought it an advance in beauty or not—whether it would have seemed to him like the realisation of some incredible dream, a heavenly music, or whether he would have thought it licentious, and even shapeless. Of course, one knows that there is going to be development in art, but the imagination is unable to forecast it, except in so far as it can forecast a possibility of an increased perfection of technique. It is the same with painting. It is a bewildering speculation what Raffaelle or Michelangelo would have thought of the work of Turner or Millais: whether they would have been delighted by the subtle evolution of their own aims, or confused by the increase of impressional suggestiveness—whether, indeed, if Raffaelle or Michelangelo had seen a large photograph, say, of a winter scene, or a chromo-lithograph such as appears as a supplement to an illustrated paper, they might not have flung down their brush in a mixture of rapture and despair.
There is the same difficulty when we come to literature. What would Chaucer or Spenser have thought of Browning or Swinburne? Would such poetry have seemed to them like an inspired product of art, or a delirious torrent of unintelligible verbiage? Of course, they would not have understood the language, to begin with; and the thought, the interfusion of philosophy, the new problems, would have been absolutely incomprehensible. Probably if one could have questioned Spenser, he would have felt that the last word had probably been said in poetry, and would not have been able to conceive of its development in any direction.
The great genius who is also effective is generally the man who is not very far ahead of his age, but just a little ahead of it—who foresees not the remote possibilities of artistic development, but just the increased amount of colour and quality which the received forms can bear, and which are consequently likely to be acceptable to people of artistic perceptions. If a Tennyson had lived in the time of Pope, he would doubtless have used the heroic couplet faithfully, and put into it just a small increase of melody, a slightly more graceful play of thought, a finer observation of natural things—but he probably would not have strayed beyond the accepted forms of art.
Then there comes in a new and interesting question as to whether it is possible that any new species of art will be developed, or whether all the forms of art are more or less in our hands. It is possible to conceive that music may in the future desert form in favour of colour; it is possible to conceive that painters might produce pictures of pure colour, quite apart from any imitation of natural objects, in which colour might aspire more to the condition of music, and modulate from tone to tone.
In literary art, the movement in the direction of realistic art, as opposed to idealistic, is the most marked development of later days. But I believe that there is still a further possibility of development, a combination of prose and poetry, which may be confidently expected in the future.
It is clear, I think, that the old instinct which tended to make a division between poetry and prose is being gradually obliterated. The rhythmical structure of poetry, and above all the device of rhyme, is essentially immature and childish: the use by poets of rhythmical beat and verbal assonance is simply the endeavour to captivate what is a primeval and even barbarous instinct. The pleasure which children take in beating their hands upon a table, in rapping out a tattoo with a stick, in putting together unmeaning structures of rhyme, is not necessarily an artistic thing at all; what lies at the root of it is the pleasure of the conscious perception of similarity and regularity. This same tendency is to be seen in our buildings, in the love of geometrical forms, so that the elementary perception is better pleased by contemplating a building with a door in the middle and the same number of windows on each side, than in contemplating the structure of a tree. Uneducated people are far more charmed by the appearance of a rock which has a resemblance to something else—a human face or an animal—than by a beautifully proportioned and irregular crag. The uncultivated human being, again, loves geometrical forms in nature, such as the crystal and the basalt column, or the magnified snowflake, better than it loves forms of lavish wildness. We gather about our dwellings flowers which please by their sharply defined tint, and their correspondence of petal with petal; and yet there is just as precisely ordered a structure in natural objects, which appear to be fortuitous in shape and outline, as there is in things whose outline is more strictly geometrical. The laws which regulate the shape of a chalk down or an ivy tendril are just as severe as the laws which regulate the monkey-puzzle tree or the talc crystal. My own belief is that the trained artistic sense is probably only in its infancy, and that it will advance upon the line of the pleased apprehension of the existence of less obvious structure.
If we apply this to literature, it is my belief that the love of human beings for the stanza and the rhyme is probably an elementary thing, like the love of the crystal and the flower-shape, and that it is the love not so much of the beautiful as of the kind of effect that the observer could himself produce. The child feels that, given the materials, he could and would make shapes like crystals and flowers; but to make things of more elaborate structure would be outside his power.
To confine ourselves, then, to one single literary effect, it appears to me that the poetry of the future will probably not develop very much further in the direction of metre and rhyme. Indeed, it is possible to see, not to travel far for instances, in the work of such writers as Mr. Robert Bridges or Mr. Stephen Phillips, a tendency to write lines which shall conceal as far as possible their rhythmical beat. It is indeed a very subtle pleasure to perceive the effect of lines which are unmetrical superficially but which yet confine themselves to a fixed structure below, by varying the stresses and compensating for them. It is possible, though I do not think it very likely, that poetry may develop largely in this direction. I do not think it likely, because such writing is intricate and difficult, and ends too often in being a meretour de force; the pleasure arising from the discovery that, after all, the old simple structure is there, though strangely disguised, I think it more probable that the superficial structure will be frankly given up. If we consider what rhyme is, and what detestable limitations it enforces on the writer for the sake of gratifying what is, after all, not a dignified pleasure, the only wonder is that such a tradition should have survived so long.
What I rather anticipate is the growth among our writers of a poetical prose, with a severe structure and sequence of thought underlying it, but with an entire irregularity of outline. The pleasure to be derived from perfectly proportioned lucid prose is a far subtler and more refined pleasure than that derived from the rhythmical beat of verse. Take, for instance, such works asThe Ring and the BookandAurora Leigh. Is there anything whatever to be gained by the relentless drumming, under the surface of these imaginative narratives, of the stolid blank verse? Would not such compositions have gained by being written in pure poetical prose? The quality which at present directs writers to choosing verse-forms for poetical expression, apart from the traditions, is the need of condensation, and the sense of proportion which the verse-structure enforces and imparts. But I should look forward to the writing of prose where the epithets should be as diligently weighed, the cadence as sedulously studied; where the mood and the subject would indicate inevitably the form of the sentence, the alternation of languid, mellifluous streams of scented and honied words with brisk, emphatic, fiery splashes of language. Indeed, in reading even great poetry, is one not sometimes sadly aware, as in the case of Shelley or Swinburne, that the logical sequence of thought is loose and indeterminate, and that this is concealed from one by the reverberating beat of metre, which gives a false sense of structure to a mood that is really invertebrate?
What I am daily hoping to see is the rise of a man of genius, with a rich poetical vocabulary and a deep instinct for poetical material, who will throw aside resolutely all the canons of verse, and construct prose lyrics with a perfect mastery of cadence and melody.
The experiment was made by Walt Whitman, and in a few of his finest lyrics, such asOut of the Cradle endlessly rocking, one gets the perfection of structure and form. But he spoilt his vehicle by a careless diffuseness, by a violent categorical tendency, and by other faults which may be called faults of breeding rather than faults of art—a ghastly volubility, an indiscretion, a lust for description rather than suggestion; and thus he has numbered no followers, and only a few inconsiderable imitators.
I think, too, that Whitman was, in position, just a little ahead, as I have indicated, of the taste of his time; and he was not a good enough artist to enforce the beauty and the possibilities of his experiment upon the world.
There is, moreover, this further difficulty in the way of the literary experimentalist. Whitman, in virtue of his strength, his vitality, his perception, his individuality, rather blocks the way; it is difficult to avoid imitating him, though it is easy to avoid his errors. It is difficult in such poetry not to apostrophise one's subject as Whitman did.
It may be asked, in what is this poetical prose to differ from the prose of great artists who have written melodious, reflective, essentially poetical prose—the prose of Lamb, of Ruskin, of Pater? The answer must be that it must differ from Lamb in sustained intention, from Ruskin in firmness of structure, from Pater in variety of mood. Such prose as I mean must be serious, liquid, profound. It must probably eschew all broad effects of humour; it must eschew narrative; it must be in its essence lyrical, an outburst like the song of the lark or the voice of the waterfall. It must deal with beauty, not only the beauty of natural things, but the beauty of human relations, though not trenching upon drama; and, above all, it must take into itself the mystery of philosophical and scientific thought. Science and philosophy are deeply and essentially poetical, in that they are attempts to build bridges into the abyss of the unknown. The work of the new lyrist must be to see in things and emotions the quality of beauty, and to discern and express the magic quickening thrill that creeps like a flame through the material form, and passes out beyond the invisible horizon, leaping from star to star, and from the furthest star into the depths of the ancient environing night.
A few days ago an old friend of mine, who has been a good friend to me, who is more careful of my reputation even than myself, gave me some serious advice. He said, speaking with affectionate partiality, that I had considerable literary gifts, but that I was tending to devote myself too much to ephemeral and imaginative literature, and that I ought to take up a task more worthy of my powers, write a historical biography such as a Life of Canning, or produce a complete annotated edition of the works of Pope, with a biography and appendices. I assured him that I had no talents for research, and insufficient knowledge for a historical biography. He replied that research was a matter of patience, and that as for knowledge, I could acquire it.
I thanked him sincerely for his thoughtful kindness, and said that I would hear it in mind.
The result of my reflections is that the only kind of literature worth writing is literature with some original intention. Solid works have a melancholy tendency to be monumental, in the sense that they cover the graves of literary reputations. Historical works are superseded with shocking rapidity. One remembers the description which FitzGerald gave of the labours of his friend Spedding upon Bacon. Spedding gave up the whole of his life, said FitzGerald, to editing works which did not need editing, and to whitewashing a character which could not be whitewashed. It is awful to reflect how many years Walter Scott gave to editing Dryden and Swift and to writing a Life of Napoleon—years which might have given us more novels and poems. Did Scott, did anyone, gain by the sacrifice? Of course one would like to write a great biography, but the biographies that live are the lives of men written by friends and contemporaries, living portraits, like Boswell'sJohnsonor Stanley'sArnold. To write such a book, one needs to have been in constant intercourse with a great personality, to have seen him in success and failure, in happiness and depression, in health and sickness, in strength and weakness. Such an opportunity is given to few.
Of course, if one has a power of wide and accurate historical survey, a trustworthy memory, a power of vitalising the past, one may well give one's life to producing a wise and judicious historical work. But here a man must learn his limitations, and one can only deal successfully with congenial knowledge. I have myself a very erratic and unbusinesslike mind. There are certain things, like picturesque personal traits, landscape, small details of life and temperament, that lodge themselves firmly in my mind; but when I am dealing with historical facts and erudite matters, though I can get up my case and present it for the time being with a certain cogency, the knowledge all melts in my mind; and no one ought to think of attempting historical work unless his mind is of the kind that can hold an immense amount of knowledge in solution. I have a friend, for instance, who can put all kinds of details into his mind—he has an insatiable appetite for them—and produce them again years afterwards as sharp and definite in outline as when he put them away. His mind is, in fact, a great spacious and roomy warehouse, where things are kept dry and in excellent order. But with myself it is quite different. To store knowledge of an uncongenial kind in my own mind is just as though I put away a heap of snowballs. In a day or two their outline is blurred and blunted; in a few months they have melted away and run down the gutters. So much for historical work.
Then there comes the question of editorial work: and here again I have the greatest admiration for men like Dr. Birkbeck Hill or Professor Masson, who will devote a lifetime to patiently amassing all the facts that can be gleaned about some great personality. But this again requires a mind of a certain order, and there is no greater mistake in literary work than to misjudge the quality and force of one's mind.
My own work, I am certain, must be of a literary kind; and when one goes a little further back and asks oneself what it is that makes great personalities, like Milton or Dr. Johnson, worth spending all this labour about, why one cares to know about their changes of lodgings and their petty disbursements, it is, after all, because they are great personalities, and have displayed their greatness in imaginative writings or in uttering fertile and inspiring conversational dicta. Imagine what one's responsibility would have been if one could have persuaded Charles Lamb to have taken up the task of editing the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, and to have deserted his ephemeral contributions to literature. Or if one could have induced Shelley to give up writing his wild lyrics, and devote himself to composing a work on Political Justice. Jowett, who had a great fancy for imposing uncongenial tasks on his friends, is recorded to have said that Swinburne was a very brilliant, young man but that he would never do anything till he had given up wasting his time in poetry. Imagine the result if Jowett had had his way!
Of course, it all depends upon what one desires to achieve and the sort of success one sets before oneself. If one is enamoured of academical posts or honorary degrees, why, one must devote oneself to research and be content to be read by specialists. That is a legitimate and even admirable ambition—admirable all the more because it brings a man a slender reputation and very little of the wealth which the popular writer hauls in.
The things which live in literature, the books which make a man worth editing a century or two after he is dead, are, after all, the creative and imaginative books. It is not in the hope of being edited that imaginative authors write. Milton did not composeL'Allegroin the spirit of desiring that it might be admirably annotated by a Scotch professor. Keats did not writeLa Belle Dame sans Merciin order that it might be printed in a school edition, with a little biography dealing with the paternal livery-stable. It may be doubted whether any very vital imaginative work is ever produced with a view to its effect even upon its immediate readers. A great novelist does not write with a moral purpose, and still less with an intellectual purpose. He sees the thing like a picture; the personalities move, mingle, affect each other, appear, vanish, and he is haunted by the desire to give permanence to the scene. For the time being he is under the thrall of a strong desire to make something musical, beautiful, true, life-like. It is a criticism of life that all writers, from the highest to the humblest, aim at. They are amazed, thrilled, enchanted by the sight and the scene, by the relationships and personalities they see round them. These they must depict; and in a life where so much is fleeting, they must seek to stamp the impression in some lasting medium. It is the beauty and strangeness of life that overpowers the artist. He has little time to devote himself to things of a different value, to the getting of position or influence or wealth. He cannot give himself up to filling his leisure pleasantly, by society or amusement. These are but things to fill a vacant space of weariness or of gestation. For him the one important thing is the shock, the surprise, the delight, the wonder of a thousand impressions on his perceptive personality. And his success, his effect, his range, depend upon the uniqueness of his personality in part, and in part upon his power of expressing that personality.
Of course, there are natures whose perceptiveness outruns their power of expression—and these are, as a rule, the dissatisfied, unhappy temperaments that one encounters; there are others whose power of expression outruns their perceptiveness, and these are facile, fluent, empty, agreeable writers.
There are some who attain, after infinite delays, a due power of expression, and these are often the happiest of all writers, because they have the sense of successful effort. And then, lastly, there are a divine few, like Shakespeare, in whom both the perception and the power of expression seem limitless.
But if a man has once embraced the artistic ideal, he must embark upon what is the most terrible of all risks. There is a small chance that he may find his exact subject and his exact medium, and that the subject may be one which is of a widespread interest. But there are innumerable chances against him. Either the fibre of his mind is commonplace; or he is born out of his due time, when men are not interested in what are his chief preoccupations; or he may miss his subject; or he may be stiff, ungainly, puerile in expression.
All of these are our literary failures, and life is likely to be for them a bitter business. I am speaking, of course, of men who embrace the matter seriously; and the misery of their position is that they will be confounded with the dilettantes and amateurs who take up literature as a fancy or as a hobby, or for even less worthy motives.
A man such as I have described, who has the passion for authorship, and who fails in the due combination of gifts, must face the possibility of being regarded as a worse than useless being; as unpractical, childish, slipshod, silly, worth no one's attention. He is happy, however, if he can find a solace in his own work, and if he is sustained by a hopefulness that makes light of results, if he finds pleasure in the mere doing of unrecognised work.
And thus, in my own case, I have no choice, I must perfect my medium as far as I can, and I must look diligently for a congenial subject. I must not allow myself to be discouraged by advice, however kindly and well-intentioned, to devote myself to some more dignified task. For if I can but see the truth, and say it perfectly, these writings, which it is so easy to call ephemeral, will become vital and enriching. It is not the subject that gives dignity; it is not wholly the treatment either; it is a sort of fortunate union of the two, the temperament of the writer exactly fitting the mould of his subject—no less and no more.
In saying this I am not claiming to be a Walter Scott or a Charles Lamb. But I can imagine a friend of the latter imploring him not to waste his time, with his critical gifts, upon writing slender, trifling essays; and I maintain that if Charles Lamb knew that such essays were the work that he did best, with ease and delight, he had the right to rebuff the hand that held out a volume of Marlowe and begged him to annotate it. What spoils our hold on life for so many of us is this false sense of conventional dignity. In art there is no great and small. Whatever a mind can conceive clearly and express beautifully, that is good art, whether it be a harrowing tragedy in which murders and adulteries cluster as thick as flies, or the shaking of a reed in a stream as the current plucks it softly from below. If a man can communicate to others his amazed bewilderment in the presence of the tragedy, or his exquisite delight in the form and texture and motion of the reed, he is an artist. Of course, there will always be more people who will be affected by a melodrama, by strange and ghastly events, by the extremes of horror and pathos, than will be affected by the delicate grace of familiar things—the tastes of the multitude are coarse and immature. But a man must not measure his success by the range of his audience, though the largest art will appeal to the widest circle. Art can be great and perfect without being large and surprising. And thus the function of the artist is to determine what he can see clearly and perfectly, and to take that as his subject. It may be to build a cathedral or to engrave a gem; but the art will be great in proportion as he sees his end with absolute distinctness, and loves the detail of the labour that makes the execution flawless and perfect. The artist, if he would prevail, must not be seduced by any temptation, any extraneous desire, any peevish criticism, any well-meant rebuke, into trying a subject that he knows is too large for him. He must be his own severest critic. No artistic effort can be effective, if it is a joyless straining after things falteringly grasped. Joy is the essential quality; it need not always be a present, a momentary joy. There are weary spaces, as when a footsore traveller plods along the interminable road that leads him to the city where he would be. But he must know in his heart that the joy of arrival will outweigh all the dreariness of the road, and he must, above all things, mean to arrive. If at any moment the artist feels that he is not making way, and doubts whether the object of his quest is really worth the trouble, then he had better abandon the quest; unless, indeed, he has some moral motive, apart from the artistic motive, in continuing it. For the end of art is delight and the quickening of the pulse of emotion; and delight cannot be imparted by one who is weary of the aim, and the pulse cannot be quickened by one whose heart is failing him. There may, as I say, be moral reasons for perseverance, and if a man feels that it is his duty to complete a work when his artistic impulse has failed him, he had better do it. But he must have no delusions in the matter. He must not comfort himself with the false hope that it may turn out to be a work of art after all. His biographer draws a terrible picture of Flaubert pacing in his room, flinging himself upon his couch, rising to pace again, an agonised and tortured medium, in the search of the one perfect word. But the misery was worth it if the word was found, and the fierce faint joy of discovery was worth all the ease and serenity of declining upon the word that sufficed, instead of straining after the word required.
We artists who try to discern beauty, and endeavour to rule our lives to be as tranquil, as perceptive, as joyful as possible, are apt to be too impatient of the petty, mean, and sordid things with which the fabric of life is so much interwoven—the ugly words of spiteful people, little fretting ailments, unsympathetic criticisms, coldness and indifference, tiresome business, wearisome persons. It is a deep-seated mistake. We cannot cast these things away as mere débris. They must be used, applied, accommodated. These are our materials, which we must strive to combine and adapt. To be disgusted with them, to allow them to disturb our serenity, is as though a painter should sicken at the odour of his pigments and the offscourings of his palette. The truer economy is to exclude all such elements as we can, consistently with honour, tenderness, and courage. Then we must not be dismayed with what remains; we must suffer it quietly and hopefully, letting patience have her perfect work. After all it is from the soul of the artist that his work arises; and it is through these goads and stings, through pain and weariness joyfully embraced, that the soul wins strength and subtlety. They are as the implements which cleave and break up the idle fallow, and without their work there can be no prodigal or generous sowing.
I suppose that I put into my observation of Nature—and perhaps into my hearing of music—the same thing that many people experience only in their relations with other people. To myself relations with others are cheerful enough, interesting, perplexing—but seldom absorbing, or overwhelming; such experiences never seem to say the ultimate word or to sound the deeper depth. I suppose that this is the deficiency of the artistic temperament. I write looking out upon a pale wintry sunset. There, at least, is something deeper than myself. I do not suppose that the strange pageant of clouds and burning light, above the leafless grove, the bare fields, is set there for my delight But that I should feel its inexpressible holiness, its solemn mystery—feel it with a sense of pure tranquillity, of satisfied desire—is to me the sign that it holds some sacred secret for me. I suppose that other men have the same sense of sacredness and mystery about love and friendship. They are deep and beautiful things for me, but they are things seen by the way, and not waiting for me at the end of my pilgrimage. Music holds within it the same sort of hidden influence as the beauty of nature. It is not so with pictorial art, or even with writing, because the personality, the imperfections, of the artist come in between me and the thought. One cannot make the pigments and the words say what one means. Even in music, the art sometimes comes between one and the thing signified But the plain, sweet, strong chords themselves bring the fulness of joy, just as these broken lights and ragged veils of cloud do. I remember once going to dine at the house of a great musician; I was a minute or two before the time, and I found him sitting in his room at a grand piano, playing the last cadence of some simple piece, unknown to me. He made no sign of recognition; he just finished the strain; a lesser man would have put the sense of hospitality first, and would have leapt up in the midst of an unfinished chord. But not till the last echo of the last chord died away did he rise to receive me. I felt that he was thus obeying a finer and truer instinct than if he had made haste to end.
Everyone must find out for himself what are the holiest and most permanent things in life, and worship them sincerely and steadfastly, allowing no conventionality, no sense of social duty, to come in between him and his pure apprehension. Thus, and thus only, can a man tread the path among the stars. Thus it is, I think, that religious persons, like artists, arrive at a certain detachment from human affections and human aims, which is surprising and even distressing to men whose hearts are more knit to the things of earth. Those who see in the dearest and most intimate of human relations, the purest and highest gift of God, will watch with a species of terror, and even repulsion, the aloofness, the solitariness of the mystic and the artist. It will seem to them a sort of chilly isolation, an inhuman, even a selfish thing; just as the mystic and the artist will see in the normal life of men a thing fettered and bound with sad and small chains. It is impossible to say which is the higher life—no dogmatism is possible—all depends upon the quality of the emotion; it is the intensity of the feeling rather than its nature that matters. The impassioned lover of human relations is a finer being than the unimpassioned artist, just as the impassioned artist is a finer being than the man who loves sensually and materialistically. All depends upon whether the love, whatever it be—the love of nature or of art, of things spiritual or divine, the love of humanity, the sense of brotherly companionship—leads on to something unfulfilled and high, or whether it is satisfied. If our desire is satisfied, we fail; if it is for ever unsatisfied, we are on the right path, though it leads us none can tell whither, to wildernesses or paradises, to weltering seas or to viewless wastes of air. If the artist rests upon beauty itself, if the mystic lingers among his ecstasies, they have deserted the pilgrim's path, and must begin the journey over again in weariness and in tears. But if they walk earnestly, not knowing what the end may be, never mistaking the delight of the moment for the joy that shines and glows beyond the furthest horizon, then they are of the happy number who have embraced the true quest. Such a faith will give them a patient and beautiful kindliness, a deep affection for fellow-pilgrims, and, most of all, for those in whose eyes and lips they can discern the wistful desire to see behind the shadows of mortal things. But the end will be beyond even the supreme moment of love's abandonment, beyond the fairest sights of earth, beyond the sweetest music of word or chord. And we must, above all things, forbear to judge another, to question other motives, to condemn other aims; for we shall feel that for each a different path is prepared. And we shall forbear, too, to press the motives that seem to us the fairest upon other hearts. We must give them utterance as faithfully as we can, for they may be a step in another's progress. But the thought of interfering with the design of God will be impious, insupportable. Our only method will be a perfect sincerity, which will indeed lead us to refrain from any attempt to overbalance or to divert ingenuous minds from their own chosen path. To accuse our fellow-men of stupidity or of prejudice is but to blaspheme God.
What, after all, is the essence of the artistic life, the artist's ideal? I think the reason why it is so often misconceived and misunderstood is because of the fact that it is a narrow path and is followed whole-heartedly by few. Moreover, in England at the present time, when we are all so tolerant and imagine ourselves to be permeated by intelligent sympathy with ideas, there seem to me to be hardly any people who comprehend this point of view at all. There is a good deal of interest in England in moral ideals, though even much of that is of a Puritan and commercial type. The God that we ignorantly worship is Success, and our interest in moral ideas is mainly confined to our interest in what is successful. We are not in love with beautiful, impracticable visions at all; we measure a man's moral intensity by the extent to which he makes people respectable and prosperous. We believe in an educator when he makes his boys do their work and play their games; in a priest, when he makes people join clubs, find regular employment, give up alcohol. We believe in a statesman when he makes a nation wealthy and contented. We have no intellectual ideals, no ideals of beauty. Our idea of poetry is that people should fall in love, and our idea of art is the depicting of rather obvious allegories. These things are good in their way, but they are very elementary. Our men of intellect become scientific researchers, historians, erudite persons. How few living writers there are who unite intellect with emotion! The truth is that we do not believe in emotion; we think it a thing to play with, a thing to grow out of, not a thing to live by. If a person discourses or writes of his feelings we think him a sentimentalist, and have an uneasy suspicion that he is violating the canons of good taste. The result is that we are a sensible, a good-humoured, and a vulgar nation. When we are dealing with art, we have no respect for any but successful artists. If the practice of art results in fame and money, we praise the artist in a patronising way; when the artist prophesies, we think him slightly absurd until he commands a hearing, and then we worship him, because his prophecies have a wide circulation. If the artist is unsuccessful, we consider him a mere dilettante. Then, too, art suffers grievously from having been annexed by moralists, who talk about art as the handmaid of religion, and praise the artist if he provides incentives for conduct of a commercial type. It would be better for art if it were frankly snubbed rather than thus unctuously encouraged. We look upon it all as a matter of influence, for the one thing that we desire is to be felt, to affect other people, to inspire action. The one thing that we cannot tolerate is that a man should despise and withdraw from the busy conventional world. If he ends by impressing the world we admire him, and people his solitude with ugly motives. The fact is that there was never a more unpromising soil for artists than this commonplace, active, strenuous century in which we live. The temptations we put in the artist's way are terribly strong; when we have done our work, we like to be amused by books and plays and pictures, and we are ready to pay high prices to the people who can give our heavy souls small sensations of joy and terror and sorrow. And wealth is a fierce temptation to the artist, because it gives him liberty, freedom of motion, comfort, things of beauty and consideration. The result is that too many of the artists who appear among us fall victims to the temptations of the world, and become a kind of superior parasite and prostitute, believing in their dignity because they are not openly humiliated.
But the true artist, like the true priest, cares only for the beautiful quality of the thought that he pursues. The true priest is the man who loves virtue, disinterestedness, truth, and purity with a kind of passion, and only desires to feed the same love in faithful hearts. He seeks the Kingdom of God first; and if the good things of the world are strewn, as they are apt to be strewn, in the path of the virtuous person, he is never for a moment seduced into believing that they are the object of his search. His desire is that souls should glow and thrill with high, sacred, and tender emotions, which are their own surpassing reward.
So, too, the artist is concerned solely with the beautiful thing—whether it is the beauty of the eager relationships of men and women, or the ever-changing exquisite forms and colours of nature, or the effect of all these things upon the desirous soul of man. And it is here that his danger lies, that he may grow to be preoccupied with the changing and blended texture of his own soul, into which flow so many sweet influences and gracious visions—if, like the Lady of Shalott, he grows to think of the live things that move on the river-side only as objects that may minister to the richness of the web that he weaves. He must keep his eye intent upon the power, whatever it may be, that is behind all these gracious manifestations; they must all be symbols to him of some unrevealed mystery, or he will grow to love the gem for its colour, the flower for its form, the cloud for its whiteness or empurpled gloom, the far-off hill for its azure tints, and so forget to discern the spirit that thus gleams and flashes from its shrouding vapours.
And then, too, in art as in love, the artist must lose himself that he may find himself. If he considers all things in relation to his own sensitive and perceptive temperament, he will become immured in a chilly egotism, a narrow selfishness, from which he will not dare to emerge. He must fling himself whole-heartedly into a passionate worship of what is beautiful, not desiring it only that it may thrill and satisfy him, but longing to draw near to its innermost essence. The artist may know, indeed, that he is following the wrong path when he loves the artistic presentation of a thing better than the thing presented, when he is moved more by a single picture of a perfect scene than by the ten thousand lovely things which he may see in a single country walk. He must, indeed, select emotions and beautiful objects by their quality; he must compare and distinguish; but if he once believes that his concern is with representation rather than with life, he goes downward. He must not be concerned for a single instant with the thought, "How will this that I perceive affect others as I represent it?" but he must rather be so amazed and carried out of himself by the beauty of what he sees, that the representing of it is only a necessary consequence of the vision; as a child may tell an adventure breathlessly and intently to its mother or its nurse, absorbed in the recollection.
And thus the true artist will not weigh and ponder the most effective medium for his expression; the thought must be so overpowering that the choice of a medium will be a matter of pure instinct. The most, indeed, of what he feels and perceives he will recognise to be frankly untranslatable in speech or pigment or musical notes, too high, too sacred, too sublime. His work will be no more selfish than the work of the pilot or the general is selfish. The responsibility, the crisis, the claim of the moment, will outweigh and obliterate all personal, all fruitless considerations. He must have no thought of success; if it comes, he may rejoice that he has been a faithful interpreter, and has shared his joy with others; if it does not come, his joy is not lessened.
Then, too, in ordering his life, he must be humble, sincere, and simple. He must keep his eye and his mind open to all generous admirations. He must let no lust or appetite, no ambition of pride, cloud his vision. He must take delight in the work of other artists, and strive to see the beautiful and perfect rather than the false and feeble. He must rejoice if he can see his own dream more seriously and sweetly depicted than he can himself depict it, for he must care for nothing but the triumph of beauty over ugliness, of light over darkness. And thus the true artist may be most easily told by his lavish appreciation of the work of other artists, rather than by his censure and disapproval.
And, again, he must be able to take delight in the smallest and humblest beauties of life. He must not need to travel far and wide in the search for what is romantic, but he must find it lying richly all about him in the simplest scene. He must not crave for excitement or startling events or triumphs or compliments; he must not desire to know or to be known by famous persons, because his joys must all flow from a purer and clearer fountain-head. He must find no day nor hour dreary, and his only fatigue must be the wholesome fatigue that follows on patient labour, not the jaded fatigue of the strained imagination.
Age, and even infirmity, does not dull the zest of such a nature; it merely substitutes a range of gentler and more tranquil emotions for the heroic and passionate enthusiasms of youth; for the true artist knows that the emotion of which he is in search is something far higher and purer and more vivid than his fiercest imaginations—and yet it has the calm of strength and the dignity of worth; the vehement impulses of youth "do it wrong, being so majestical." And he draws nearer to it when animal heat and the turbulence of youthful spirit has burnt clearer and hotter, throwing off its smoke and lively flame for a keener and purer glow.
And above all things, the artist must most beware of the complacency, the sense of victory, the belief that he has attained, has plumbed the depth, seen into the heart of the mystery. Rather as life draws on he must feel, in awe and hope, that it is infinitely mightier and greater than he thought in the days of potent impulse. His whole soul must be full of a sacred fear as he draws closer to the gate, the opening of which may give him a nearer glimpse of the secret. The humble sense of failure will be a bright and noble thought, because it will show him how much the mystery transcends the most daring hope and dream.
I was present in a great church the other day at a service held at the hour of sunset The dying light fell richly through the stained windows, lending a deep and beautiful mystery to the scenes there depicted. The pale faces of pictured saints, with their rich robes, were outlined with a pathetic sweetness against backgrounds of solemn buildings or confused woods. The lighted tapers of the choir threw a faint glow up to the intricate roof, which seemed flooded with a golden mist; the gilt pipes of the organ gleamed softly; the music began to roll and stir, with a grave melodious thunder, like the voice of a dreaming spirit. A procession of white-vested figures moved with a ceremonial dignity to their places, and then the service proceeded through soft gradations of prayer and praise, in words of exquisite and restrained felicity, all haunted with the echoes of the ages. I sate alone, a silent listener, and it seemed to me that every appeal which the beauty of art could make to the spirit was here delicately displayed. Eye and ear, emotion and intellect, were alike thrilled and satisfied. They sang the 119th Psalm, that perfect expression of holy quietude: "Thy testimonies are wonderful; therefore doth my soul seek them." Wonderful, indeed, and gracious, sweet as honey. The heart, in that glad moment, drew near to the tender Father of life, who seemed, as in the old parable, to see the repentant son of his heart wandering sadly a long way off, to go forth to meet him, and to fill the house with light and music, that he might feel it to be home indeed.
That the instinct that has drawn all the treasures of art into its service, and with them welcomes and sustains the wearied soul, is a pure and beautiful one, I make no doubt. But then I thought of all that lies outside: of crowded cities, of the ugly mirth, the sordid cares of men and women; of the dark laws that wound and slay; of pain and shame; of tired labour and cruelty and harshness, of lust and greediness.
I thought of how few there were of mankind to whom the sweet pomp which I sate to see and hear makes any appeal, I thought that for one to whom such beauty was desirable and satisfying, there were thousands who would prefer the brisk interchange of life, the race-course, the athletic spectacle, the restaurant, the tap-room. Was this, indeed, religion at all? I wondered. It did, indeed, use the language of religion, surround itself with the memories of saints, the holy wisdom of the ages. But what was the end of it? Did it inspire those who heard it with the desire to win, to sustain, to ameliorate other souls? Did it inculcate the tender affection, the self-sacrifice, the meek devotion that Christ breathed into life? Did it not rather tend to isolate the soul in a paradise of art, to consecrate the pursuit of individual emotion? It is hard to imagine that a spirit who has plunged into the intoxication of sensuous delight that such a solemnity brings would depart without an increased aversion to all that was loud and rude, wife an intensified reluctance to mingle with the coarser throng. Was it not utterly alien to the spirit of Christ thus to seclude oneself in light and warmth, among sweet strains of music and holy pictures? I do not doubt that these delights have a certain ennobling effect upon the spirit; but are they a medicine for the sorrows of the world? are they not rather the anodyne for sensitive spirits fond of tranquil ease?
I could not restrain the thought that if a man of sensitive nature is penetrated with the spirit of Christ first, if the passion of his soul to seek and save the lost is irresistible, if his faith runs clear and strong, he might win a holy refreshment from these peaceful, sweet solemnities. But the danger is for those who have no such unselfish enthusiasm, and who are tempted, under the guise of religion, to yield themselves with a sense of fastidious complacency to what are, after all, mere sensuous delights. Is it right to countenance such error? If piety frankly said, "These things are no part of religion at all; they are only a pure region of spiritual beauty, a garden of refreshment into which a pilgrim may enter by the way; only a mere halting-place, a home of comfort,"—then I should feel that it would be a consistent attitude. But if it is only a concession to the desire of beauty, if it distracts men from the purpose of Christ, if it is a mere bait for artistic souls, then I cannot believe that it is justified.
While I thus pondered, the anthem rose loud and sweet upon the air; all the pathos, the desire of the world, the craving for delicious rest, stirred and spoke in those moving strains—round a quiet minor air, sung by a deep grave voice of a velvety softness, a hundred mellow pipes wove their sweet harmonies: it told assuredly of a hope and of a truth far off; it drew the soul into a secret haven, where it listened contentedly to the roar of the surge outside. But the error seemed to be that one desired to rest there, like the Lotos-eaters in the enchanted land, and not to fare forth as a soldier of God. It spoke of delight, not of hardness; of acquiescence, not of effort.
Strange that the sight of a man being guillotined should inspire me with a burning desire to inflict the very thing which I see another suffer! What a violent metaphor for a very minute matter! It is only a review which I have been reading, in which a pompous, and I imagine clerical, critic comes down with all his might on a man whom I gather to be a graceful and mildly speculative writer. The critic asks ponderously. What right has a man who seems to be untrained in philosophy and theology to speculate on philosophical and religious matters? He then goes on to quote a passage in which the writer attacks the current view of the doctrine of the Atonement, and he adds that a man who is unacquainted with the strides which theology has made of late years in the direction of elucidating that doctrine ought not to presume to discuss it at all. No doubt, if the writer in question made any claim to be discussing the latest theological position on the subject of the Atonement, in a technical way, he would be a mere sciolist; but he is only claiming to discuss the Current conception of the Atonement; and, as far as I can judge, he states it fairly enough. The truth is that the current conceptions of old theological doctrines tend to be very much what the original framers of those doctrines intended them to be. All that later theologians can do, when the old doctrine is exploded, is to prove that the doctrine can be modified and held in some philosophical or metaphysical sense, which was certainly not in the least degree contemplated by the theologians who framed it; but they are quite unable to explain to the man in the street what the new form of the doctrine is; and their only chance of doing that is to substitute for an old and perfectly clear doctrine a new and perfectly clear doctrine. The tone adopted by this critic reminds me of the tone adopted by Newman to his disciples. Mark Pattison relates how on one occasion he advanced, in Newman's presence, some liberal opinion, in the days when he was himself numbered among the Tractarians; and that Newman deposited, as was his wont, an icy "Very likely!" upon the statement; after which, Pattison says, you were expected to go into a corner and think over your sins. Not so does thought make progress!
But the larger question is this. What right have philosophers or theologians to arrogate to themselves the sole right of speculation in these matters? If religion is a vital matter, and if all of us who have any thoughts at all about life and its issues are by necessity to a certain extent practical philosophers, why should we meekly surrender the stuff of speculation to technical disputants? Of course, there are certain regions of experiment that must be left to specialists, and a scientist who devoted himself to embryology might justly complain of a man who aired views on the subject without adequate study. But as far as life goes, any thoughtful and intelligent man who has lived and reflected is in a sense a specialist. In life and conduct, in morality and religion, we are all of us making experiments all day long, whether we will or no; and it may be fairly said that a middle-aged man who has lived thoughtfully has given up far more time to his subject than the greatest scientist has devoted to his particular branch. A church-goer, like myself, has been lectured once or twice a week on theology for as long as he can remember. For years I have speculated, with deep curiosity, on problems of religion, on the object and ultimate issues of life and death. Neither philosophers nor theologians have ever discovered a final solution which satisfies all the data. The theologian, indeed, is encumbered by a vast mass of human tradition, which he is compelled to treat more or less as divine revelation. The whole religious position has been metamorphosed by scientific discovery; and what theologian or philosopher has ever come near to solving the incompatibility of the apparent inflexibility of natural law with the no less apparent liberty of moral choice? Theologians and philosophers may, if they choose, attempt to crush the speculations of an experimentalist in life, though I think they would be better employed in welcoming them as an instance of how theological and metaphysical conceptions strike upon the ordinary mind; but they shall not prevent one who, like myself, has observed life closely under aspects which the technical student has had no opportunity of observing it, from making my comment upon what I see. It is possible that such comments may appeal to ordinary people with even more force than technical considerations are likely to appeal. We have all to sin and to suffer, to enjoy and to fear; we find our instinct at variance with our reason and our moral sense alike. We have in our souls conceptions of justice, truth, purity, generosity, and we find the natural law, which we would fain believe is the law of God, constantly thwarting and even insulting these conceptions; and yet these conceptions are as real and vivid to us as the law which takes no account of them. We find theologians basing their faith on documents which every day appear to be less and less historical, and on deductions drawn from these documents by men who believed them to be historical. I have the utmost sympathy with the position in which theologians find themselves; but they have mostly their own prudence to thank for it; they are so cautious about sifting the chaff from the grain, that they will not throw away the chaff for fear of casting away a single grain. They are so averse to unsettling the faith of the weak, that the vitality has ebbed away from the faith of the strong; they have clung so hard to tradition, that they have obscured fact; they would confine the limbs of manhood in the garb of childhood; and thus they have forfeited the confidence of intelligent men, and ranged themselves with the credulous, the comfortable, and the unenterprising. Intolerant persecution is out of date, and the question will be solved by the stranding of the theological hull, owing to the quiet withdrawal of the vital tide.
My way this afternoon lay through a succession of old hamlets, one closely bordering on another, that lie all along the base of the wold. I have no doubt that the reason for their position is simply that it is just along the base of the hills that the springs break out, and a village near a perennial and pure spring generally represents a very old human settlement indeed. Sometimes the wold drew near the road, sometimes lay more remote; its pale fallows, its faintly-tinted pastures, seemed to lie very quietly to-day under the grey laden sky. Here a chalk-pit showed its miniature precipices; here a leafless covert detached its wiry sprays against the light. The villages were pretty enough, with their quaint, irregular white cottages, comfortably thatched, among the little orchards and gardens; and in every village the ancient, beautiful church, each with a character of its own and a special feature of interest or beauty, lay nestled in trees, or held up its grey tower over ricks and barns. We are apt to forget what beautiful things these churches are, because they are so common, so familiar; if there were but a few of them, we should make careful pilgrimages to see them, but now we hardly turn off the road to visit them.
I often wonder what exactly the feeling and the spirit were that produced them, what the demand precisely was that created the supply. I suppose they were almost always the gift of some wealthy person; of course labour and perhaps materials were cheaper, but there must have been a much larger proportion of people employed in the trade of building than is the case nowadays; probably these churches were slowly and leisurely built, in the absence of modern mechanical facilities. It is difficult to conceive how the thing was carried out at all in places with so few resources—how the stone was conveyed thither over the infamous miry roads, how the carving was done, how the builders were lodged and fed. One would like, too, to know exactly what part the churches played in the social life of the place. Some people would have us believe that the country people of that date had a simple enjoyment of beauty and artistic instincts which caused them to take a pleasure, which they do not now feel, in these beautiful little sanctuaries. I do not know what the evidence is for that. I find it very hard to believe that our agricultural labourers have gone backwards in this respect; I should imagine it was rather the other way. My impression is that education has probably increased the power of perception and appreciation rather than diminished it. It is possible that the absence of excitement, of diffuse reading, of communication in those days may have tended to concentrate the affections and interests of agricultural people more on their immediate surroundings, but I rather doubt it; the problem is, considering the much greater roughness and coarseness of village life in the Middle Ages, how there could have existed a poetical and artistic instinct among villagers, which they have now forfeited.
These churches certainly indicate that a very different view of religion prevailed; they testify to a simpler and stronger sense of religion than now exists, but not, I think, to a truer sense of it. They stand, I do not doubt, for a much more superstitious and barbarous view of the relation of God to men; the people who built them had, I imagine, the idea of conciliating God by the gift of a seemly sanctuary, a hope of improving not only their spiritual prospects in the after-life, but of possibly advancing their material prosperity in this, by thus displaying their piety and zeal in God's service. I cannot believe that the churches were designed with the intention of making the rustic inhabitants of the place holier, more virtuous, more refined—except incidentally; they were built more in obedience to ecclesiastical tradition, in a time when rationalism had not begun to cast doubt on what I may call the Old Testament theory of the relation of God to men—the theory of a wrathful power, vindictive, jealous of recognition, withholding blessings from the impious and heaping them upon the submissive. As to those who worshipped there, I imagine that the awe and reverence they felt was based upon the same sort of view, and connected religious observance with the hope of prosperity and wealth, and the neglect of it with the fear of chastisement. If misfortune fell upon the godly, they regarded it as the chastening of God inflicted upon the sons of His love; if it fell upon the ungodly, it was a punishment for sin; religion was a process by which one might avert the punishment of sin, induce the bestowal of favours, and in any case improve one's future prospects of heaven. No doubt this form of religion produced a simpler kind of faith, and a profounder reverence; but I do not think that they were very beautiful qualities when so produced, because they seem to me very alien from the simplicity of the religion of Christ. The difficulty in which popular religion finds itself, nowadays, is that in a Protestant Church like our own, neither priest nor people believe in the old mechanical theories of religion, and yet the people are not yet capable of being moved by purer conceptions of it. A priest can no longer threaten his congregation sincerely with the penalties of hell for neglecting the observances of the Church; on the other hand, the conception of religion as a refining, solemnising attitude of soul, bringing tranquillity and harmony into life, is too subtle an idea to have a very general hold upon unimaginative persons. Thus the beauty of these exquisite and stately little sanctuaries, enriched by long associations and touched with a delicate grace by the gentle hand of time, has something infinitely pathetic about it. The theory that brought them into existence has lost its hold, while the spirit that could animate them and give them a living message has not yet entered them; the refined grace, the sweet solemnity of these simple buildings, has no voice for the plain, sensible villager; it cannot be interpreted to him. If all the inhabitants of a village were humble, simple, spiritually minded people, ascetic in life, with a strong sense of beauty and quality, then a village church might have a tranquil and inspiring influence. But who that knows anything of village life can anticipate even in the remote future such a type of character prevailing? Meanwhile the beautiful churches, with all the grace of antiquity and subtle beauty, must stand as survivals of a very different condition of life and belief; while we who love them can only hope that a more vital consciousness of religion may come back to the shrines from which somehow the significance seems to have ebbed away. They are now too often mere monuments and memorials of the past. Can one hope that they may become the inspiration and the sanctification of the present?