Part 15

Who knows whether, even in the full whirlwind of this most gigantic struggle, art work may not be produced which, in sum of its ultimate effect on mankind, will outlive and outweigh the total net result of that struggle, just as the work of Euripides, Shakespeare, Leonardo, Beethoven, and Tolstoi outweighed the net result of the Peloponnesian, sixteenth century, Napoleonic, and Crimean wars? War is so unutterably tragic, because—without it—Nature, given time, would have attained the same ends in other ways. A war is the spasmodic uprising of old savage instincts against the slow and gradual humanizing of the animal called man. It emanates from restless and so-called virile natures fundamentally intolerant of men’s progress towards the understanding of each other—natures that often profess a blasphemous belief in art, a blasphemous alliance with God. It still apparently suffices for a knot of such natures to get together, and play on mass fears and loyalties, to set a continent on fire. And at the end? Those of us who are able to look back from thirty years hence on this tornado of death will conclude with a dreadful laugh that if it had never come the state of the world would be very much the same.

It is not the intention of these words to deny the desperate importance of this conflict _now that it has been joined_. Humanism and Democracy have been forced into a sudden and spasmodic death-grapple with their arch-enemies; and the end of that struggle must be brought into conformity with the slow, sure, general progress of mankind. But if, by better fortune, this fearful conflict had not been forced upon civilization, the same victory would have made good, in course of time, by other processes. That is the irony. For, of a surety, wars or no wars—the future is to Humanism.

But art has no cause to droop its head, nor artists to be discouraged. They are the servants of the future every bit as much as, and more than, they have been the servants of the past; they are even the faithful servants of the present, for they must keep their powers in training, and their vision keen against the time when they are once more accounted of. A true picture is a joy that will move hearts some day, though it may not sell now, nor even for some years after the war; beauty none the less “the expression of what there is best in man” because the earth is being soaked with blood.

Monsieur Sologub, the Russian poet, speaking recently on the future of art, seems to have indicated his view that after the war art will move away from the paths of naturalism; and he defines the naturalists as “people who describe life from the standpoint of material satisfaction.” With that definition I do not at all agree, but it is never good to argue about words. Confusion in regard to the meaning of terms describing art activity is so profound that it is well to sweep them out of our minds, and, in considering what forms art ought to take, go deep down to the criterion of communication between heart and heart. The only essential is, that vision, fancy, feeling should be given the concrete clothing that shall best make them perceptible by the hearts of others; the simpler, the more direct and clear and elemental the form, the better; and that is all you can say about it. To seek remote, intricate, and “precious” clothings for the imagination is but to handicap vision and imperil communication and appeal; the artists who seek them are not usually of much account. The greatness of Blake is the greatness of his simpler work. Though, in this connection, it is as much affectation to pretend that men are more childish than they are, as to pretend that they all have the subtlety of a Robert Browning. If the range of an artist’s vision, the essential truth of his fancy, and the heat of his feeling be great, then, obviously, the simpler, the more accessible the form he takes, the wider will be his reach, the deeper the emotion he stirs, the greater the value of his art.

“What is wanted,” says Monsieur Sologub, “is true art.” Quite so! What is wanted in a work of art is an unforced natural and adequate correspondence between fancy and form, matter and spirit, so that one shall not be distracted by its naturalism, mysticism, cubism, whatnotism, but shall simply be moved in a deep impersonal way by perception of another’s vision. Two instances come into the mind: A picture of Spring, by Jean François Millet, in the Louvre. Therein, by simple selection, without any departure whatever from the normal representation of life, the very essence of Spring, the brooding and the white flash of it, the suspense and stir, the sense of gathered torrents, all the special emotion, which, every Spring of the year, is sooner or later felt by every heart, has been stored by the painter’s vision and feeling, and projected from his eyes and heart to other eyes and hearts.

And: Those chapters in a novel of Monsieur Sologub’s compatriot, Turgenev—“Fathers and Children”—which describe with the simplest naturalism the death of Bazarov. There, too, is the heart-beat of emotion as universal as it well can be, rendered so vividly that one is not conscious at all of how it is rendered.

These are two cases of that complete welding of form and spirit which is all one need or should demand of art; the rest is a mere question of the artist’s emotional quality and stature. Art, in fact, will take all paths after the war just as before; and now and then the artist will fashion that true blend of form and fancy which is the achievement of beauty.

For Monsieur Rodin, beauty is the adoration of all that man perceives with his spiritual senses. Yes. And the task of artists is to kneel before life till they rive the heart from it and with that heart twine their own; out of such marriages come precious offspring, winged messengers.

There is a picture of Francesca’s in the Louvre, too much restored—some say it is not a Francesca, but if not, then neither are they Francescas in the English National Gallery, and those, so far as I know, are not disputed—a picture of the Virgin, with hands pressed together, before her naked Babe, in a landscape of hills and waters. Her kneeling figure has in it I cannot tell what of devotion and beauty, which makes the heart turn over within one. With his spiritual senses the painter has perceived, and in adoration set down what he has seen, mingling with it the longings of his own heart. And they who look on that picture know for evermore what devotion and beauty are. And if they be artists, they go away fortified again to the taking up of a long quest.

This is the utility of art. It plays between men like light, showing the heights and depths of nature, beckoning on, or warning of destruction, and ever through emotion revealing heart to heart. It is the priestess of Humanism, confirming to us our future, reassuring our faltering faith in our own approach to the Unknowable, till the tides of the Creative Purpose turn, and our world gets cold; and Man, having lived his day to the uttermost, finds gradual sleep.

TRE CIME DI LAVAREDO

(From the _Book of Italy_, 1916.)

Most of us who have lived a good long time have found some part of the world to look on as the happy hunting-ground of our spirits, the place most blessed by memory. And within that sacred circle there will be some spot, above all others, enchanted.

Tre Cime di Lavaredo! Drei Zinnen! You three rock mountains above Misurina of the Italian Tyrol—how many times have we not climbed up, to lie on your high stony slopes, steeping our eyes in wild form and colour, wherefrom even a dull spirit must take wings and soar a little! Width of thought is surely born, in some sort, of majestic sights—cloud forms, and a burning sky, rock pinnacles, and wandering, deep-down valleys, the gray-violet shadows on the hills, the frozen serenity of far snows. All the outspread miracle there lies fan-shaped to the south, south-east, south-west, having that warmth which so makes the heart rejoice the moment one passes over and looks southward from any mountain. What traveller does not feel strange loveliness steal up into his soul from southern slopes? Domodossola below the Simplon; Val d’Aosta beyond the Matterhorn; Bormio beneath the Stelvio; and many another holy place. It is not merely charm and mellowness—the South can be savage as the North—it is some added poignancy of form and colour, and a look of being blessed.

Tre Cime di Lavaredo! Music comes drifting up your slopes, from pasture far down enough to give magic to cow-bells.

But now, where but three years ago we watched a little white cow licking its herd’s sprained hand, men are fighting to the death. Batteries must be adorning that steep forcella running from the refuge hut. A new kind of thunder reverberates, in whose roar the stones that were for ever falling will have lost their voices. And the beasts, the gray, the dun, the white, mild-eyed—their pasture below must be a desert! Even the goats surely have gone. Or do they and their young masters attend placidly on these new mysteries, just pricking their ears now and again at some too raucous clap and clatter of guns?

Let those who are killed up there be buried in their tracks! Out of their bodies on the lower slopes a few more flowers will spring—gentian, mountain-dandelion, alpen-rose; and higher, nearer those peaks, they will be grateful food for root of edelweiss. And may their spirits—if men have such after death—stay up on those wild heights! Nowhere else could they have such free flitting space! Friend-spirit, foe-spirit, they will fight no more, but on the winter nights in comradeship haunt the frozen hills, where no shred of man or beast or bird or plant is left, till Spring comes again.

To fight up here, where Nature has designed one vast demonstration of her own fierce untameness, of all the stubborn face she opposes to the crafts of man! What irony! Up in this wild stony citadel, among these rock minarets and red-and-gold-stained bastions, above ravines remote from man—up here, where in winter all is ice, and even in summer no green thing grows; on these invincible outposts of an earth not yet subdued by incalculable human toil throughout a million years; among these sublime unconquered monuments, reminding us of labour and peril infinite in our long death-grip with Nature—up here man has fellow-man by the throat. Yea! Irony complete! Nor the less perfect in that each soldier on these heights who in duty clubs his fellow-Christian’s brains out, or sends forth the shell that shall mingle his body with the rock rubble and the edelweiss, and sets up a little cross, perhaps, to the departed soul, is a true hero, holding his life in his hand, throwing it down grandly for his country’s honour. Verily we are strange animals, we men—little walking magazines of too great vitality! Out of our sheer rampancy comes war; as though superfluity of vital fluid were for ever accumulating, to free ourselves of which we have found as yet no better way than this. Shall we never learn to spend the surplus of our vital force in efforts of salvation rather than destruction? If the mountains cannot teach us, and the wide night skies above them, sparkling with other worlds, then nothing will. For on mountains and beneath such skies man feels at his greatest, flies far in fancy, dreams of nobility; yet does he perceive what a puny midget of a creature walks on his two feet, glad of any little help he can get or give, glad of good-will from any living thing. In loneliness up here he would soon be frozen and starved, or slip to death. His tiny strength, his feeble cunning, would avail him but short span. Unroped to other men, he is but a sigh in the night, a cross of bleaching lime in to-morrow’s sunlight. . . .

Tre Cime di Lavaredo! Golden sounds of a golden speech! When, if ever, we see your beloved rocks again, that may be your only name; no longer perhaps will the words Drei Zinnen compete for you . . . But will you know the difference? As of old, gigantic, silent, or, clamorously, in the loosening rains and heat, casting down your stones—you will lift up your black defiance in the clear mountain nights, your grandeur to the sun by day.

Once we saw you with the young moon flying toward, like a white swallow, like an arrow aimed at your hearts, as it might be in duel between bright swiftness and dark strength. The moon was vanquished—for she flew into you that stood unmoved.

Tre Cime di Lavaredo! You will outlast the race of men upon this earth. When we, quarrelsome midget heroes that we be, are all frozen from this planet, you will be there, whitened for ever from head to foot. You will have no name, then—neither of North nor South!

SECOND THOUGHTS ON THIS WAR

(From _Scribner’s Magazine_, 1915.)

§ 1.

I went out into the wind—the first south-west wind after many days of easterly drought. All the morning it had rained, but now the gray sky was torn; the sun shone, and long white clouds were driven over pools of blue, or piled up into heavenly mountains. The land of moor and valley, the hills and fields and woods gleamed in the sunlight, or were shadowed dark by the drifting clouds. Moss on the top of the old gray walls was wet, but warm to the touch; the birds—daws, pigeons, hawks—flung themselves at the wind. And the scent! Every frond of the bracken, each sprig of the gorse and the heather, all the soughing boughs of young pine-tree and oak, and the grass, gray-powdered with rain, were exhaling their fragrance so that each breath drawn was a draught of wild perfume.

And in one’s heart rose an ecstasy of love for this wind-sweetened earth, for the sun, and the clouds, the rain, and the wind, the trees and the flowering plants, for the streams and the rocks—for this earth which breeds us all, and into which we reabsorb, a passion as untutored, wild, and natural as the love of life in the merest dumb thing that knows nothing of ideals, of country, realms and policies, nothing of war.

Germany calls the war “this English war;” we English as fervently believe it a Prussian war, having deep root in Prussian will, and history. One thing is certain: At the last moment the world, desperately balancing, was thrust over the edge of the abyss by a sudden swoop of the Prussian war party.

“Pourtales (German Ambassador to Russia) called Sazonoff’s attention in the most serious manner to the fact that nowadays measures of mobilization would be a highly dangerous form of diplomatic pressure; for in that event the purely military consideration of the question by the General Staffs would find expression, and that _if that button were once touched in Germany_ the situation would get out of control.” (Count Szapary, Austrian Ambassador to Russia. Austrian Book, No. 28.)[8]

In a Europe teeming with mutual fears a few men, perhaps not a score in all, have had the power to strip from millions their meed of life on this wind-sweetened earth! For myths conceived in a few ambitious brains, and the “strike-first” theory of a knot of strategists, the whole world must pay with grief and agony! What can we do, when this war is over, to insure that we shall not again be stampeded by professional soldiers, and those—in whatever country—who dream paper dreams of territory, trade, and glory, caring nothing for the lives of the simple, knowing nothing of the beauty of the earth which is their heritage.

[8] Since this was written Maximilian Harden in his paper _Zukunft_ has used these words: “Germany is calumniated when it is said that she wanted war, not to defend herself, but in order to conquer. But it is equally false to suppose that England, France, or Russia, who were either not armed at all, or only half ready . . . deliberately planned an attack. The outbreak of the war could not be arrested; because at the decisive moment _the Will of the Strategists was stronger than the Will of the Statesmen_.”

§ 2.

“No corn planted, more men wanted!”—words of the Old Dalmatian song!

It is no use crying over spilt milk, and no good throwing down the instruments in the middle of an operation. But there is every use in keeping before oneself perpetually the thought that this war _is_ an operation to excise the trampling instinct; for there are many among us willing to speak of an operation while it serves their purpose, who unconsciously believe in that which they profess to be cutting out. Human nature is much the same all the world over. The Prussian Junker is but a specially favoured variety of a well-marked type that grows in every land. And the business of other men is to keep circumstances from being favourable to its development and ascendancy.

When we talk of safeguarding democracy, liberty, and the rights of small nations, we really only mean the muzzling of the Junkerism in human nature—the restraint of this trampling instinct. Who would give a rush for the immunity of any nation from the resurgence within itself of that instinct, unless it watches with lynx eyes? I cannot but think that, when peace comes and Prussian Junkerism is held harmless for a span, Junkerism in general will have a better chance of pushing up its hydra heads than it had before this war. Times will be very hard—the “have nots” and “they who have” will be very nakedly set over against each other. Circumstances will be favourable to civil strife; and civil strife, whichever side wins, fosters despotic leaderships and the trampling instinct. Those not merely hoping and meaning to try for a better world, after the war, but expecting one almost as a matter of course, forget that the devotion and unity, which men display under the shadow of a great fear and the stimulus of that most powerful and universal emotion, patriotism, will slip away from them when the fear and the emotion are removed. If before the war men were incapable of rising to great and united effort for their own betterment out of sheer desire for perfection, are they even as likely to be able when, after the war, economic stress puts a greater strain on each individual’s good-will?

The words of a certain prophet, “Literature, Art, Industry, Commerce, Politics, Statesmanship will, when this fighting day is over, come into a new and better era,” are soothing syrup. Let us by all means hope for and intend the best, but let us set ourselves to face the worst.

§ 3.

Because pens lie unused, or are but feebly wielded over the war, they would have us believe that modern literature has been found wanting. “Look,” they say, “how nobly the Greek and the Elizabethan pens rhymed the epic struggles of their ages. What a degenerate, nerveless creature is this modern pen! See how it fails when put to the touchstone of great events and the thrilling realities of war!” I think this is nonsense. The greatest pens of the past were strangers to the glamour of war. Euripides made it the subject of a dirge; Shakespeare of casual treatment; Cervantes of his irony. They were in advance of the feeling of their day about war; but now their feeling has become that of mankind at large; and the modern pen, good, bad, or indifferent, follows—_longo intervallo_—their prevision of war’s downfalling glory. In the words of a certain officer, war is now “damn dull, damn dirty, and damn dangerous.” The people of Britain, and no doubt of the other countries—however bravely they may fight—are fighting not because they love it, not because it is natural to them, but because—alas!—they must. This makes them the more heroic since the romance of war for them is past, belonging to cruder stages of the world’s journey.

In our consciousness to-day there is a violent divorce between our admiration for the fine deeds, the sacrifices, and heroisms of this war, and our feeling about war itself. A shadowy sense of awful waste hangs over it all in the mind of the simplest soldier as in that of the subtlest penman. It may be real that we fight for our conceptions of liberty and justice; but we feel all the time that we ought not to have had to fight, that these things should be respected of the nations; that we have grown out of such savagery; that the whole business is a kind of monstrous madness suddenly let loose on the world. Such feelings were never in the souls of ordinary men, whether soldiers or civilians, in the days of Elizabeth or Themistocles. They fought, then, as a matter of course. In those so-called heroic ages “the thrilling realities of war” were truly the realities of life and feeling. To-day they are but a long nightmare. We have discovered that man is a creature slowly, by means of thought and life and art, evolving from the animal he was into the human being he will be some day, and in that desperately slow progression sloughing off the craving for physical combat and the destruction of his fellow-man. This process does not apparently mean the loss of stoicism and courage, but rather the increase thereof, as millions in this war, after the most peaceful century in the world’s history, have proved. But we are a few paces farther on toward the fully evolved human being than were the compatriots of Themistocles or Elizabeth.

The true realities of to-day lie in peace. The great epic of our time is the expression of man’s slow emergence from the blood-loving animal he was. To that great epic the modern pen has long been consecrate, and is not likely to betray its trust.

§ 4.

One day we read in our journals how an enemy Socialist or Pacifist has raised his voice against the mob passions and war spite of his country, and we think: “What an enlightened man!” And the next day, in the same journals, we read that So-and-so has done the same thing in our own country, and we think: “My God! He ought to be hung!” To-day we listen with enthusiasm to orations of our statesmen about the last drop of our blood, and the last pennies in our purses, and we think: “That is patriotism!” To-morrow we read utterance by enemy notables about arming the cats and dogs, and exclaim: “What truculent insanity!” We learn on Monday that some disguised fellow-countryman has risked his life to secure information from the heart of the enemy’s country, and we think: “That was real courage!” And on Tuesday our bile rises at discovering that an enemy has been arrested in our midst for espionage, and we think: “The dirty spy!” Our blood boils on Wednesday at hearing of the scurvy treatment of one of ourselves resident in the enemy’s country. And on Thursday we read of the wrecking by our mob of aliens’ shops, and think: “Well, what could they expect, belonging to that nation!” When one of our regiments has defended itself with exceptional bravery, and inflicted great loss on the enemy, we justly call it _heroism_. When some enemy regiment has done the same, we use the word _ferocity_. The comic papers of the enemy guy us, and we think: “How childish!” Ours guy the enemy, and we cry: “Ah! that’s good!” Our enemies use a hymn of hate, and we despise them for it. We do our hate in silence, and feel ourselves the better for the practice.

Shall we not rather fight our fight, and win it, without these little ironies?

§ 5.