Chapter 19

"I am sorry you think so ill of me," he said sadly, "and I dare say I have given you good cause. I dare say I am all the things you say--vain, and womanish, and insolently dissatisfied with myself, and idiotically heroic. But not in this case, I assure you. I will explain why I thought it right to do that. You see I know myself very well now. I know my dangers; I am not like you--I am easily swayed. Had those poems remained in existence, had I taken them to England, I am sure I should not have resisted the temptation of showing them to my old encouragers, of publishing them probably; and then, after the success of my other book, and all their grand prophecies, the critics would have had to praise up this one too; and I should have been drifted back again into being a poet. Now, as I wrote you several times--only, of course, you thought it all humbug and affectation--such a poet as I could be I am determined I will not be. It was an act of self-defence--defence of whatever of good there may be in me."

Baldwin groaned. "Defence of fiddlesticks! Defence of your vanity!"

"I don't think so," replied Cyril, "and I don't think you understand me at all in this instance. There was no vanity in this matter. You know that since some time I have been asking myself what moral right a man has to consume his life writing verses, when there is so much evil to remove, and every drop of thought or feeling we have is needed to make the great river which is to wash out this Augean stable of a world. I tried to put the doubt behind me, and to believe in Art for Art's own sake, and such bosh. But the doubt pricked me. And when suddenly my uncle left me all he had, I felt I must decide. As long as I was a mere penniless creature I might write poetry, because there seemed nothing else for me to do. But now it is different. This money and the power it gives are mine only as long as I live; after my death they may go to some blackguard; so, while I have them, I must give all my energies to doing with them all the good that I possibly can."

"In that case better give them over to people who know best what to do with them--societies or hospitals, or that sort of thing--and write your verses as before. For I don't think your thoughts will add much to the value of your money, Cyril. You've not a bit of practical head. Of course you may, if you choose, look on idly while other people are using your money. But I don't think it is specially worth doing."

Cyril sighed, hesitated, and then burst out rapidly--

"But it is the only thing I _can_ do--do you understand? I can't write poetry any more. Perhaps that may be the only thing for which I was ever fit, but I am fit for it no longer. I cannot do what I have got to despise and detest. For I do despise and detest the sort of poetry which I should write--mere ornamental uselessness, so much tapestry work or inlaid upholstery. You believe in Art for Art's own sake--Goethianism--that sort of thing, I know. It is all very well for you, who have an active practical life with your Maremma drainings and mine diggings, a life in which art, beauty, so forth, have only their due share, as repose and refreshment. It was all very well in former days also, when the people for whom artists worked had a deal of struggle and misery, and required some pure pleasure to make life endurable; but now-a-days, and with the people for whom I should write, things are different. What is wanted now-a-days is not art, but life. By whom do you think, would all the beautiful useful things I could write, all the fiddle-faddle about trees and streams and statues and love and aspiration (fine aspiration, which never takes a practical shape!) be read? By wretched overworked creatures, into whose life they might bring a moment of sweetness, like a spray of apple blossom or a bunch of sweet-peas into some black garret? Nothing of the kind. They would be read by a lot of intellectual Sybarites, shutting themselves out, with their abominable artistic religion, from all crude real life; they would be merely so much more hothouse scents or exotic music (_con sordino_), to make them snooze their lives away. Of course it is something to be a poet like those of former days; something to be Tasso, and be read by that poor devil of a fever-stricken watchmaker whom we met down in the plain of Lucca; but to be a poet for the cultured world of to-day--oh, I would rather be a French cook, and invent indigestible dishes for epicures without any appetite remaining to them."

So saying, Cyril jumped out of the gig, and ran up the steep last ascent of the hill. He had persuaded himself of his moral rightness and felt quite happy.

Suddenly the road made a sharp bend between the overhanging rocks, grown in all their fissures with dark ilex tufts and yellow broom and pale pink cyclamen; it turned, and widened into a flat grass-grown place, surrounded by cypresses on the top and ridge of the hill. Cyril ran to the edge and gave a cry of pleasure. Below was stretched a wide strip of Maremma swamp-land, mottled green and brown--green where the grass was under water, brown where it was burned into cinders by the sun; with here and there a patch of shining pond or canal; and at the extremity of this, distinguishable from the greyish amber sky only by its superior and intense luminousness, the sea--not blue nor green, but grey, silvery, steel-like, as a mirror in the full sunshine. Baldwin stopped the gig beneath the cypresses.

"Look there," he said, pointing with his whip to a dark greenish band, scarcely visible, which separated the land from the sea: "those are the pine woods of Viareggio. It was into their sand and weeds that the sea washed Shelley's body. Do you think we should be any the better off if he had taken to practical work which he could not do, and declared that poetry was a sort of French cookery?"

Baldwin tied the reins to the stem of a cypress, and threw himself down on the warm sere grass on the brow of the hill, overlooking the tangle of olive and vine and fig-trees of the slopes below.

"In Shelley's time," answered Cyril, leaning his head and shoulders against one of the cypresses, and looking up into its dark branches, compact in the centre, but delicate like feather and sparkling like jet where their extremities stood out against the pale blue sky--"in Shelley's time, things were rather different from what they are now. There was a religion of progress to preach and be stoned for; there was a cause of liberty to fight for--there were Bourbons and Lord Eldons, and there was Greece and Spain and Italy. There was Italy still when Mrs. Browning wrote: had she looked out of Casa Guidi windows now, on to the hum-drum, shoulder-shrugging, penny-haggling, professorial, municipal-councillorish Italy of to-day she could scarcely have felt in the vein. The heroic has been done--"

"There is Servia and Montenegro, and there are Nihilists and Democrats," answered Baldwin.

"I know--but we can't sing about barbarous ruffians, nor about half-besotten, half-knavish regicides; we can't be Democrats now-a-days--at least I can't. Would you have a man sing parliamentary debates, or High Church squabbles, or Disestablishment, or Woman's rights, or anti-communism? sing the superb conquests of man over nature, &c., like your Italian friends, your steam-engine and mammoth poet Zanella? The wonders of science!--six or seven thousand dogs and cats being flayed, roasted, baked, disembowelled, artificially ulcerated, galvanized on ripped-up nerves, at Government expense, in all the laboratories of Christendom, in order to discover the soul-secreting apparatus, and how to cure old maids of liver complaint! Thank you. My muse aspires not thereunto. What then? Progress? But it is assured. Why, man, we can't even sing of despair, like the good people of the year '20, since we all know that (bating a few myriads of sufferers and a few centuries of agony) all is going to come quite right, to be quite comfortable in this best of all possible worlds. What then remains, again? Look around you. There remains the poetry of beauty--oh yes, of pure beauty, to match the newest artistic chintzes; the poetry of artistic nirvana, of the blissful sleep of all manliness and energy, to the faint sound (heard through dreams) of paradisiac mysticism sung to golden lutes, or of imaginary amorous hysterics, or of symphonies in alliteration. And this when there is so much error, so much doubt, so much suffering, when all our forces are required to push away a corner of the load of evil still weighing on the world: this sort of thing I cannot take to." And Cyril fiercely plucked out a tuft of lilac-flowered thyme, and threw it into the precipice below, as if it had been the poetry of which he was speaking.

"Do you know, Baldwin," went on Cyril, "you have destroyed successively all my gods; you have shown me that my Holy Grails, in whose service, one after another I felt happy and peaceful to live, like another Parzival, or Galahaso, are not the sacred life-giving cup brought down by angels, but mere ordinary vessels of brittle earth or stinking pewter, mere more or less useful, but by no means holy things; ordinary pots and pans, barber's basins like Mambrino's helmet, or blue china teapots (worst degradation of all) like the Cimabue-Browns'. I believed in the religion of Nature, and you showed me that Nature was sometimes good and sometimes bad; that she produced the very foulness, physical and moral, which she herself chastised men for; you showed me whole races destined inevitably to moral perversion, and then punished for it. So I gave up Nature. Then I took up the fashionable religion of Science, and you showed me that it was the religion of a sort of Moloch, since it accustomed us to acquiesce in all the evil which is part and parcel of Nature, since it made us passive investigators into wrong when we ought to be judges. After the positive, I threw myself into the mystic--into the religion of all manner of mysterious connections and redemptions; you showed me that the connections did not exist, and that all attempted sanctification of things through mysticism was an abomination, since it could not alter evil, and taught us to think it might be good. O my poor Holy Grails! Then I took up the religion of love; and you proceeded to expound to me that if love was restricted to a few worthy individuals, it meant neglect of the world at large; and that if it meant love of the world at large, it meant love of a great many utterly unworthy and beastly people. You deprived me of humanitarianism, of positivism, of mysticism; and then you did not even let me rest peaceably in pessimism, telling me that to say that all was for the worst was as unjust as to say that all was for the best. With a few of your curt sentences you showed me that all these religions of mine were mere idolatries, and that to rest in them for the sake of peace was to be utterly base. You left me nothing but a vague religion of duty, of good; but you gave me no means of seeing where my duty lay, of distinguishing good from evil. You are a very useful rooter up of error, Baldwin; but you leave one's soul as dry and barren and useless as sea shingle. You have taken away all the falsehoods from my life, but you have not replaced them by truths."

Baldwin listened quietly.

"Would you like to have the falsehoods back, Cyril?" he asked. "Would you now like to be the holy knight, adoring and defending the pewter basin or blue china teapot of humanitarianism, or positivism, or mysticism, or æstheticism? And what becomes of the only religion which I told you was the true one--the religion of good, of right? Do you think it worthless now?"

"I think it is the religion of the Unknown God. Where shall I find Him?"

"In yourself, if you will look, Cyril."

Cyril was silent for a moment. "What is right?" he said. "In the abstract--(oh, and it is so easy to find out in the abstract, compared to the concrete!)--in the abstract, right is to improve things in the world, to make it better for man and beast; never to steal justice, and always to give mercy; to do all we can which can increase happiness, and refrain from doing all which can diminish it. That is the only definition I can see. But how vague!--and who is to tell me what I am to do? And when I see a faint glimmer of certainty, when I perceive what seems to me the right which I must do, who again interferes? My friend Baldwin, who, after preaching to me that the only true religion is the religion of diminishing evil and increasing good for the sake of so doing, coolly writes to me, in half-a-dozen letters, that the sole duty of the artist is to produce good art, and that good art is art which has no aim beyond its own perfection. Why, it is a return to my old æsthetic fetish worship, when I thought abstract ideas of beauty would set the world right, as Amphion's harp set the stones building themselves.... Am I justified in saying that you merely upset my beliefs, without helping me to build up any; yes, even when I am striving after that religion of right doing which you nominally call yours--?"

"You always rush to extremes, Cyril. If you would listen to, or read, my words without letting your mind whirl off while so doing--"

"I listen to you far too much, Baldwin," interrupted Cyril, who would not break the thread of his own ideas; "and first I want to read you a sonnet."

Baldwin burst out laughing. "A sonnet! one of those burnt at Dresden--or written in commemoration of your decision to write no more?"

"It is not by me at all, so there's an end to your amusement. I want you to hear it because it embodies, and very nobly, what I have felt. I have never even seen the author, and know nothing about her except that she is a woman."

"A woman!" and Baldwin's tone was disagreeably expressive.

"I know you don't believe in women poets or women artists."

"Not much, so far, excepting Sappho and Mrs. Browning, certainly. But, come, let's hear the sonnet. I do abominate women's verses, I confess; but there are such multitudes of poetesses that Nature may sometimes blunder in their production, and make one of them of the stuff intended for a poet."

"Well then, listen," and Cyril drew a notebook from his pocket, and read as follows:--

"God sent a poet to reform His earth But when he came and found it cold and poor Harsh and unlovely, where each prosperous boor Held poets light for all their heavenly birth, He thought--Myself can make one better worth The living in than this--full of old lore, Music and light and love, where saints adore And angels, all within mine own soul's girth. But when at last he came to die, his soul Saw Earth (flying past to Heaven) with new love, And all the unused passion in him cried: 'O God, your Heaven I know and weary of, Give me this world to work in and make whole.' God spoke: 'Therein, fool, thou hast lived and died.'"

Cyril paused for a moment. "Do you understand, Baldwin, how that expresses my state of feeling?" he then asked.

"I do," answered the other, "and I understand that both you and the author of the sonnet seem not to have understood in what manner God intended that poets should improve the earth. And here I return to my former remark, that when I said that the only true religion was the religion not of nature, nor of mankind, nor of science, nor of art, but the religion of good, and that the creation of perfect beauty is the highest aim of the artist, I was not contradicting myself, but merely stating two parts--a general and a particular--of the same proposition. I don't know what your definition of right living may be; mine, the more I think over the subject, has come to be this:--the destruction of the greatest possible amount of evil and the creation of the greatest possible amount of good in the world. And this is possible only by the greatest amount of the best and most complete activity, and the greatest amount of the best activity is possible only when everything is seen in its right light, in order that everything may be used in its right place. I have always preached to you that life must be activity; but activity defeats itself if misapplied; it becomes a mere Danaides' work of filling bottomless casks--pour and pour and pour in as much as you will, the cask will always be empty. Now, in this world there are two things to be done, and two distinct sets of people to do them: the one work is the destruction of evil, the other the creation of good. Mind, I say the _creation_ of good, for I consider that to do good--that is to say, to act rightly--is not necessarily the same as to _create_ good. Every one who does his allotted work is doing good; but the man who tends the sick, or defends the oppressed, or discovers new truths, is not creating good, but destroying evil--destroying evil in one of a hundred shapes, as sickness, or injustice, or falsehood. But he merely removes, he does not give; he leaves men as poor or as rich as they would have been, had not disease, or injustice, or error stolen away some of their life. The man who creates good is the one who not merely removes pain, but adds pleasure to our lives. Through him we are absolutely the richer. And this creator of good, as distinguished from destroyer of evil, is, above all other men, the artist. The scientific thinker may add pleasure to our lives, but in reality this truth of his is valuable, not for the pleasure it gives, but for the pain it removes. Science is warfare; we may consider it as a kind of sport, but in reality it is a hunting down of the most dangerous kind of wild animal--falsehood. A great many other things may give pleasure to our lives--all our healthy activities, upper or lower, must; but the lower ones are already fully exercised, and, if anything, require restraint; so that French cooks and erotic poets ought rather to be exterminated as productive of evil than encouraged as creative of good. And moral satisfaction and love give us the best pleasures of all; but these are pleasures which are not due to any special class created on purpose for their production. Oh, I don't say that any artist can give you the pleasure you have in knowing yourself to be acting rightly, or in sympathizing and receiving sympathy; but the artist is the instrument, the machine constructed to produce the only pleasures which can come near these. Every one of us can destroy evil and create pleasure, in a sort of incidental, amateurish way, within our own immediate circle; but as the men of thought and of action are the professional destroyers of evil, so the artists are the professional creators of good--they work not for those immediately around them, but for the world at large. So your artist is your typical professional creator of pleasure; he is fitted out, as other men are not, to do this work; he is made of infinitely finer stuff than other men, not as a whole man, but as an artist: he has much more delicate hearing, much keener sight, much defter fingers, much farther-reaching voice than other men; he is specially prepared to receive and transmit impressions which would be as wasted on other creatures, as the image in the camera on unprepared, ordinary paper. Now, what I maintain is simply this, that if, according to my definition, the object of destroying as much evil and creating as much good can be attained only by the greatest activity rightly applied, it is evident that a man endowed to be an artist--that is to say, a creator of good for the whole world--is simply failing in his duty by becoming a practical worker; that is to say, an amateur destroyer of evil. What shall we say of this artist? We shall say that, in order to indulge in the moral luxury, the moral amusement, of removing an imperceptible amount of pain, he has defrauded the world of the immense and long-lasting pleasure placed in his charge to give; we shall say that, in order to feel himself a little virtuous, this man has simply acted like a cheat and a thief."

Baldwin had spoken rapidly and earnestly, with a sort of uniform or only gradually rising warmth, very different from the hesitating, fluctuating sort of passion of his companion. There was a short silence; Cyril was still seated under the tall, straight cypress, whose fallen fruit, like carved balls of wood, strewed the sere grass, and whose compact hairy trunk gave out a resinous scent, more precious and strange than that of the fir: he felt that he was momentarily crushed, but had a vague sense that there lurked somewhere reasons, and very potent ones, which prevented his friend being completely victorious; and Baldwin was patiently waiting for him to muster his ideas into order before continuing the discussion. A slight breeze from the over-clouded sea sent a shiver across the olives into the ravine below, turning their feathery tops into a silver ripple, as of a breaking wave; the last belated cicalas, invisible in the thick plumy branches of the cypresses, sawed slowly and languidly in the languid late afternoon; and from the farms hidden in the olive yards of the slope came faint sounds of calling voices and barking dogs--just sound enough to make the stillness more complete. "All that is very true," said Cyril at last, "and yet--I don't know how to express it--I feel that there is still remaining to me all my reason for doubt and dissatisfaction. You say that artistic work is morally justifiable to the artist, since he is giving pleasure to others. From this point of view you are perfectly right. But what I feel is, that the pleasure which the artist thus gives is not morally valuable to those who enjoy it. Do you follow? I mean that the artist may be nobly and generously employed, and yet, by some fatal contradiction, the men and women who receive his gifts are merely selfishly gratified. He might not, perhaps, be better employed than in giving pleasure, but they might surely be better employed than in merely receiving it; and thus the selfishness of the enjoyment of the gift seems to diminish the moral value of giving it. When an artist gives to other men an hour of mere enjoyment, I don't know whether he ought to be quite proud or not."

Baldwin merely laughed. "It is droll to see what sort of hypermoral scruples some people indulge in now-a-days. So, your sense of the necessity of doing good is so keen that you actually feel wretched at the notion of your neighbours being simply happy, and no more, for an hour. You are not sure whether, by thus taking them away for a moment from the struggle with evil, letting them breathe and rest in the middle of the battle, you may not be making them sin and be sinning yourself! Why, my dear Cyril, if you condemn humanity to uninterrupted struggle with evil, you create evil instead of destroying it; if mankind could be persuaded to give up all of what you would call useless and selfish pleasure, it would very soon become so utterly worn out and disheartened as to be quite powerless to resist evil. If this is the system on which poets would reform the world, it is very fortunate that they don't think of it till they are flying to heaven."