Chapter 20

"I can't make it out. You seem to be in the right, Baldwin, and yet I still seem to be justified in sticking to my ideas," said Cyril. "Do you see," he went on, "you have always preached to me that the highest aim of the artist is the perfection of his own work; you have always told me that art cannot be as much as it should if any extra-artistic purpose be given to it. And while listening to you I have felt persuaded that all this was most perfectly true. But then, an hour later, I have met the same idea--the eternal phrase of art for art's own sake--in the mouths and the books of men I completely despised; men who seemed to lose sight of all the earnestness and duty of life, who had even what seemed to me very base ideas about art itself, and at all events debased it by associating it with effeminate, selfish, sensual mysticism. So that the idea of art for art's own sake has come to have a disgusting meaning to me."

Baldwin had risen from the grass, and untied the horse from the trunk of the cypress.

"There is a storm gathering," he said, pointing to the grey masses of cloud, half-dissolved, which were gathering everywhere; "if we can get to one of the villages on the coast without being half-drowned while crossing the swamps, we shall be lucky. Get in, and we can discuss art for art's own sake, and anything else you please, on the way."

In a minute the gig was rattling down the hill, among the great blasted grey olives, and the vines with reddening foliage, and the farm-houses with their fig and orange trees, their great tawny pumpkins lying in heaps on the threshing-floor, and their autumn tapestry of strung-together maize hanging massy and golden from the eaves to the ground.

Baldwin resumed the subject where they had left it: "My own experience is, that the men who go in for art for art's own sake, do so mainly from a morbid shrinking from all the practical and moral objects which other folk are apt to set up as the aim of art; in reality, they do not want art, nor the legitimate pleasures of art: they want the sterile pleasure of perceiving mere ingenuity and dexterity of handling; they hanker vaguely after imaginary sensuous stimulation, spiced with all manner of mystical rubbish, after some ineffable half-nauseous pleasure in strange mixtures of beauty and nastiness; they enjoy above all things dabbling and dipping alternately in virtue and vice, as in the steam and iced water of a Turkish bath.... In short, these creatures want art not for its own sake, but for the sake of excitement which the respectabilities of society do not permit their obtaining, except in imaginative form. As to art, real art, they treat it much worse than the most determined utilitarian: the utilitarians turn art into a drudge; these æsthetic folk make her into a pander and a prostitute. My reason for restricting art to artistic aims is simply my principle that if things are to be fully useful they must be restricted to their real use, according to the idea of Goethe's Duke of Ferrara:--

'Nicht alles dienet uns auf gleiche Weise; Wer vieles brauchen will, gebrauche jedes In seiner Art, so ist er wohl bedient.'

I want art in general not to meddle with the work of any of our other energies, for the same reason that I want each art in particular not to meddle with the work of any other art. Sculpture cannot do the same as painting, nor painting the same as music, nor music the same as poetry; and by attempting anything beyond its legitimate sphere each sacrifices what it, and no other, can do. So, also, art in general has a definite function in our lives; and if it attempts to perform the work of philosophy, or practical benevolence, or science, or moralizing, or anything not itself, it will merely fail in that, and neglect what it could do."

"Oh yes," continued Baldwin after a minute, as they passed into the twilight of a wood of old olives, grey, silvery, mysterious, rising tier above tier on either side of the road, a faint flicker of yellow light between their feathery branches. "Oh yes, I don't doubt that were I a writer, and were I to expound my life-and-art philosophy to the world, the world would tax me with great narrowness! Things are always too narrow for people when they are kept in their place--kept within duty and reason. Of course there is an infinite grandeur in chaos--in a general wandering among the Unknown, in an universal straining and hankering after the Impossible; it is grand to see the arts writhing and shivering to atoms, like caged vipers, in their impotence to do what they cannot. Only it would be simpler to let those do it who can; and my system is the only one which can work. Despair is fine, and Nirvâna is fine; but successful and useful activity is a good deal finer. Wherefore I shall always say--'Each in his place and to his work;' and you, therefore, my dear Cyril, to yours, which is poetry."

"I think your philosophy is quite right, Baldwin, only--only, somehow, I can't get it to suit my moral condition," answered Cyril. "I do feel quite persuaded that sculptors must not try to be painters, nor musicians try to be poets, nor any of them try to be anything beyond what they are. It is all quite rational, and right, and moral, but still I am not satisfied about poetry. You see a poet is not quite in the same case as any other sort of artist. The musician, inasmuch as musician, knows only notes, has power only over sounds; and the painter similarly as to form and colours; if either be something more, it is inasmuch as he is a mere man, not an artist. But a poet, inasmuch as he is a poet, knows, sees, feels a great many things which have a practical and moral meaning: just because he is a poet, he knows that there is something beyond poetry; he knows that there are in the world such things as justice and injustice, good and evil, purity and foulness: he knows all this, which the mere musician, the mere painter, does not--and knowing it, perceiving, feeling, understanding it, with more intensity than other men, is he to sweep it all out of his sight? is he to say to justice and injustice, good and evil, purity and foulness, 'I know you, but my work lies not with you?' Is he to do this? Oh, Baldwin, if he be a man and an honest one, he surely cannot: he cannot set aside these ideas and devote himself to his art for its own sake."

Baldwin listened attentively to the passionate words of his companion, and twitching at a sprig of olive as a branch swept across their heads in their rapid movement through the wood, he answered quietly:

"He will not set aside the ideas of justice and injustice, of good and evil, of purity and impurity, Cyril. He will make use of them even as the musician uses his sounds, or the painter uses his colours. Such ideas are at least one-half of the poet's material, of the stuff out of which he creates--the half which belongs exclusively to him, which he does not share with any other artist; the half which gives poetry a character in many respects different from that of painting or music. I have always laughed at the Ruskinian idea of morality or immorality in architecture, or painting, or music, and said that their morality and immorality were beauty and ugliness. I have done so because moral ideas don't enter into the arts of line, or colour, or sound, but only into the subjects to which their visible and audible works are (usually arbitrarily) attached. But with poetry the case is different; and if the poet has got a keener perception (or ought to have) of right and wrong than other men, it is because a sense of moral right and wrong is required in his art, as a sense of colour is required in painting. I have said 'art for art's own sake,' but I should have been more precise in saying 'art for beauty's sake.' Now, in poetry, one half of beauty and ugliness is purely ethical, and if the poet who deals with this half, the half which comprises human emotion and action, has no sense of right and wrong, he will fail as signally as some very dexterous draughtsman, who should have no sense of physical beauty and ugliness, and spend his time making wonderful drawings of all manner of diseased growths. Of course, you may be a poet who does _not_ deal with the human element, who writes only about trees and rivers, and in this case your notions of right and wrong are as unnecessary to you as an artist as they would be to a landscape painter. You use them in your life, but not in your art. But as soon as a poet deals with human beings, and their feelings and doings, he must have a correct sense of what, in such feelings and doings, is right and what is wrong. And if he have not this sense, he will not be in the same case as the painter or musician who is deficient in the sense of pictorial or musical right and wrong. The wise folk who have examined into our visual and acoustic nerves seem to think, what to me seems extremely probable, that the impression of æsthetic repulsion which we get from badly combined lines, or colours, or sounds, is a sort of admonition that such combinations are more or less destructive to our nerves of sight or of hearing; so, similarly, the quite abstract aversion which we feel to an immoral effect in literature, seems to me to be the admonition (while we are still Platonically viewing the matter, and have not yet come personally into contact with it) that our moral sense--what I may call our nerves of right and wrong--is being disintegrated by this purely intellectual contact with evil. And, moreover, our nerves of right and wrong are, somehow, much less well protected than our visual or acoustic nerves: they seem to be more on the surface of our nature, and they are much more easily injured: it takes a good deal of bad painting and bad music to deprave a man's eye or ear, and more than we can well conceive to make him blind or deaf; but it takes less than we think of base literature to injure a man's moral perception, to make him see and hear moral things completely wrong. You see the good, simple, physical senses look after themselves--are in a way isolated; but the moral sense is a very complex matter, and interfered with in every possible manner by the reason, the imagination, the bodily senses--so that injuring it through any of these is extremely easy. And the people whom bad painting or bad music had made half-blind or half-deaf would be less dangerous to themselves and to others than those who had been made half-immoral by poetry."

"But at that rate," said Cyril, "we should never be permitted to write except about moral action; if the morally right is the same for the poet as the pictorially right for the painter. Baldwin, I think, I fear, that all these are mere extemporized arguments for the purpose of making me satisfied with poetry, which I never shall be again, I feel persuaded."

"Not at all," answered Baldwin. "I mean that the moral right or wrong of poetry is not exactly what you mean. If we were bound never to write except about good people, there would be an end to half the literature of the world."

"That is exactly what I saw, and what showed me the hollowness of your theory, Baldwin."

"Because you mistook my theory. There could be no human action or interest if literature were to avoid all representation of evil: no more tragedy, at any rate, and no more novels. But you must remember that the impression given by a play or a poem is not the same as that given by a picture or statue. The picture or statue is all we see; if it be ugly, the impression is ugly. But in a work of literature we see not only the actors and their actions, but the manner in which they are regarded by the author; and in this manner of regarding them lies the morality or immorality. You may have as many villains as you please, and the impression may still be moral; and you may have as many saints as you please, and the impression may still be immoral."

The road had suddenly emerged out of the olive woods covering the lowest hill ranges, and in a few minutes they were driving through a perfect desert. The road, a narrow white ribbon, stretched across a great flat tract of country: field after field of Indian corn, stripped of its leaves and looking like regiments of spindles, and of yellowish green grass, half under water; on either side a ditch full of water-lilies, widening into sedge-fringed canals, in which the hay of coarse long grass was stacked in boats for sheer want of dry soil, or expanding into shallow patches of water scarcely covering the grass, and reflecting, against the green of the meadow below, the boldly peaked marble mountains of Carrara, bare, intensely ribbed, veined, and the blue sky and rainy black clouds. Green brown fields, tufts of reed, hill and sky reflected in the inundated grass--nothing more, not a house, or shed, or tree for miles around--in front only the stormy horizon where it touched the sea.

"This is beautiful," cried Cyril. "I should like to come and live here. It is much lovelier and more peaceful than all the woods and valleys in creation."

Baldwin laughed. "It might be a good beginning for final Nirvâna," he said. "These are the sea-swamps, the _padule_, where the serene Republic of Lucca sent its political offenders. You were locked up in a tower, the door bricked up, with food enough to last till your keeper came back once a fortnight; the malaria did the rest."

"It is like some of our modern literature," answered Cyril, with a shudder; "Maremma poetry--we have that sort of thing, too."

"By the way," went on Baldwin; "I don't think we quite came to the end of our discussion about what a poet ought to do with his moral instincts, if he has any."

"I know," answered Cyril, "and _I_ have meanwhile returned to my previous conclusion that, now that all great singable strifes are at an end, poetry cannot satisfy the moral cravings of a man."

"You think so?" asked Baldwin, looking rather contemptuously at his companion. "You think so? Well, therein lies your mistake. I think, on the contrary, that poetry requires more moral sense and energy than most men can or will give to it. Do you know what a poet has to deal with, at least a poet who does not confine himself to mere description of inanimate things? He has to deal with the passions and actions of mankind--that is to say, with a hundred problems of right and wrong. Of course, men who have deliberately made up their mind on any question of right and wrong, are not shaken by anything in a book; nay, they probably scarcely remark it. But if you remember that in the inner life of every man there must be moments of doubt and hesitation, there must be problems vaguely knocking about, you will understand that for every man there is the danger that in such a moment of doubt his eyes may fall upon a sentence in a book--a sentence to other men trivial--which will settle that doubt for ever, rightly or wrongly. There are few of us so strong that the moment does not come when we would ask, as a good Catholic does of a confessor, what is right and what is wrong, and take the answer which is one of the two that have been struggling within himself, as definite; and to us, who do not go to confession, a book, any book casually taken up, may be this terribly powerful spiritual director. People used to exaggerate the influence of books, because they imagined that they could alter already settled opinions; now-a-days I deliberately think that they underrate this influence, because they forget how it may settle fluctuating opinion. The power of literature is in this way very great."

"It has been formerly--yes, I grant it," answered Cyril; "but it is no longer what it was; in our cut-and-dry days it is necessarily smaller."

"On the contrary, much greater now than perhaps almost at any other time. These are not cut-and-dry days, Cyril, but the very reverse; you must not let yourself be deceived by a certain superficial regularity, by railway journeys and newspapers, and a general civilization of hand-books and classes. In reality there is more room for indirect moral perversion or enervation in our days than there has been for a good while; for the upsetting of ideas, the infiltration of effete or foreign modes of thought and feeling, is much greater in this quiet nineteenth century than it was, for instance, in the Renaissance or the eighteenth century. With all their scepticism, the people of those days had a great fund of tradition about everything; they were floating about a good deal, I admit, but they were fully persuaded of the existence of certain very solid moral rocks, to which they might always tie their boat when it grew over-rough; rocks of religion or deistic mysticism, or of social _convenances_, which we have now discovered to be by no means granite, but some sort of sea deposit, of hardened sand, whose formation we understand and no longer rely upon. The most arrant sceptics of the past had always one great safety, that they were in a groove; they saw, understood, sympathized with only their own civilization. What they thought right they had never seen questioned--they never imagined any one could regard as wrong; hence the most liberal thinkers of former days always strike us, with their blindness to all but their own civilization, as such Philistines. Things have changed since then; they began to change already, as soon as men began to look at other civilizations; and the suggestive first-fruit of this early ethnographic eclecticism may be seen in Diderot's very beastly books: he found that the South Sea Islanders had not, on the subject of incest, the same views as Christian folk; whereupon it struck him that those views might be due to prejudice. It was not the development of the natural sciences, but rather of the historic and ethnographic, which upset people's ideas; it was the discovery of how our institutions, moral and social (hitherto regarded as come straight from heaven), had formed themselves, and how they were subject to variation. Speaking of poets, look at a pure man, I believe a very pure man, Shelley, if you want to understand the necessity of poets having a greater solidity of moral judgment than the mere Jones and Browns who stick to their shop, and are not troubled with theories. Add to the influence of scientific doubt, of the doubt created by books on the origin of ideas and institutions (showing of what moonshine they are often made), the utterly confusing effect of our modern literary eclecticism, our comprehension and sympathy with so many and hostile states of civilization, our jumbling together of antique and mediæval, of barbarous and over-ripe and effete civilizations, our intellectual and moral absorption of incompatible past stages of thought and feeling, with the follies and vices inherent in each;--sum up all this, and you will see that, with our science and our culture, our self-swamping with other folk's ideas, we are infinitely less morally steady than the good sceptics of the days of Voltaire, who always believed in the supremacy of their own century, their own country, their own institutions, their own conventionalities; who were in danger only from their own follies and uncertainties, while we are in danger from the follies and uncertainties of every past century from which we have inherited. And you will see, if you look, that that sceptical eighteenth century, which was very much more credulous and conservative than ours, was very little divided and upset in its ideas; certain things were universally admitted, and certain other things universally rejected; in that day there was always the master of the ceremonies--Propriety. He knew exactly what could be permitted: in the dining-room, drunkards yelling filthy jests; in the drawing-room, polite gentlemen stalking or tripping through their minuets. It is different now-a-days."

Cyril nodded. "I understand what you mean," he said; "but I don't see the application yet."

"Well," answered Baldwin, "I will show you one instance of the application. Have you ever thought over the question of--how shall I call it?--the ethics of the indecent?"

Cyril stared. "No, it never struck me that there were any. I don't write indecent things, it doesn't amuse me. I feel not the smallest desire to do so; if anything, I feel rather sick at such things; that is all."

"That is all for you, but not all for other people. You don't feel attracted to write on some subjects; well, other people not only feel attracted, but imagine that it is their duty even if they are not."

"They are swine; I have nothing to do with them." And Cyril looked as if he had settled the matter.

"But they are not swine; at least, not all of them; or they are not entirely swine, by any means," insisted Baldwin. "You are not going to tell me that a man like Walt Whitman is a mere pig. Still there are things of his which to you are simply piggish. Either Whitman is a beast or you are a prude."

"That depends upon difference of nature," said Cyril quickly, vaguely desirous of putting an end to a discussion which brought forward an anomaly.

"That is merely repeating what I said," replied Baldwin. "But in reality I think it is _not_ a difference of nature. I think it depends on a difference of reasoned opinion; in short, upon a sophistication of ideas on the part of Whitman. I think it depends in him and the really pure men who uphold his abominations upon a simple logical misconception; a confusion of the fact that certain phenomena have been inevitable, with the supposition that those same certain phenomena are therefore desirable--a confusion between what has been, and could not help being, and what may be and ought to be. It is the attempt to solve a moral problem by an historical test."

"I don't understand in the least, Baldwin."