Chapter 2
It is not in the least a question of the apparent and outward adventurousness of one's life. Foolish people sometimes write and think as though one could not have had adventures unless one has hung about at bar-room doors and in billiard-saloons, worked one's passage before the mast in a sailing-ship, dug for gold among the mountains, explored savage lands, shot strange animals, fared hardly among deep-drinking and loud-swearing men. It is possible, of course, to have adventures of this kind, and, indeed, I had a near relative whose life was fuller of vicissitudes than any life I have ever known: he was a sailor, a clerk, a policeman, a soldier, a clergyman, a farmer, a verger. But the mere unsettledness of it suited him: he was an easy comrade, brave, reckless, restless; he did not mind roughness, and the one thing he could not do was to settle down to anything regular and quiet. He did not dislike life at all, even when he stood half-naked, as he once told me he did, on a board slung from the side of a ship, and dipped up pails of water to swab it, the water freezing as he flung it on the timbers. But with all this variety of life he did not learn anything particular from it all; he was much the same always, good-natured, talkative, childishly absorbed, not looking backward or forward, and fondest of telling stories with sailors in an inn. He learned to be content in most companies and to fare roughly; but he gained neither wisdom nor humour, and he was not either happy or independent, though he despised with all his heart the stay-at- home, stick-in-the-mud life.
But we are not all made like this, and it is only possible for a few people to live so by the fact that most people prefer to stay at home and do the work of the world. My cousin was not a worker, and, indeed, did no work except under compulsion and in order to live; but such people seem to belong to an older order, and are more like children playing about, and at leisure to play because others work to feed and clothe them. The world would be a wretched and miserable place if all tried to live life on those lines.
It would be impossible to me to live so, though I dare say I should be a better man if I had had a little more hardship of that kind; but I have worked hard in my own way, and though I have had few hairbreadth escapes, yet I have had sharp troubles and slow anxieties. I have been like the man in the story, between the lion and the lizard for many months together; and I have had more to bear, by temperament and fortune, than my roving cousin ever had to endure; so that because a life seems both sheltered and prosperous, it need not therefore have been without its adventures and escapes and its haunting fears.
The more one examines into life and the motives of it, the more does one perceive that the imagination, concerning itself with hopes of escape from any conditions which hamper and confine us, is the dynamic force that is transmuting the world. The child is for ever planning what it will do when it is older, and dreams of an irresponsible choice of food and an unrestrained use of money; the girl schemes to escape from the constraints of home by independence or marriage; the professional man plans to make a fortune and retire; the mother dreams ambitious dreams for her children; the politician craves for power; the writer hopes to gain the ear of the world--these are only a few casual instances of the desire that is always at work within us, projecting us into a larger and freer future out of the limited and restricted present. That is the real current of the world, and though there are sedate people who are contented with life as they see it, yet in most minds there is a fluttering of little tremulous hopes forecasting ease and freedom; and there are also many tired and dispirited people who are not content with life as they have it, but acquiesce in its dreariness; yet all who have any part in the world's development are full of schemes for themselves and others by which the clogging and detaining elements are somehow to be improved away. Sensitive people want to find life more harmonious and beautiful, healthy people desire a more continuous sort of holiday than they can attain, religious people long for a secret ecstasy of peace; there is, in fact, a constant desire at work to realise perfection.
And yet, despite it all, there is a vast preponderance of evidence which shows us that the attainment of our little dreams is not a thing to be desired, and that satisfied desire is the least contented of moods. If we realise our programme, if we succeed, marry the woman we love, make a fortune, win leisure, gain power, a whole host of further desires instantly come in sight. I once congratulated a statesman on a triumphant speech.
"Yes," he said, "I do not deny that it is a pleasure to have had for once the exact effect that one intended to have; but the shadow of it is the fear that having once reached that standard, one may not be able to keep it up."
The awful penalty of success is the haunting dread of subsequent failure, and even sadder still is the fact that in striving eagerly to attain an end, we are apt to lose the sense of the purpose which inspired us. This is more drearily true of the pursuit of money than of anything else. I could name several friends of my own who started in business with the perfectly definite and avowed intention of making a competence in order that they might live as they desired to live; that they might travel, read, write, enjoy a secure leisure. But when they had done exactly what they meant to do, the desires were all atrophied. They could not give up their work; they felt it would be safer to have a larger margin, they feared they might be bored, they had made friends, and did not wish to sever the connection, they must provide a little more for their families: the whole programme had insensibly altered. Even so they were still planning to escape from something--from some boredom or anxiety or dread.
And yet it seems very difficult for any person to realise what is the philosophical conclusion, namely, that the work of each of us matters very little to the world, but that it matters very much to ourselves that we should have some work to do. We seem to be a very feeble-minded race in this respect, that we require to be constantly bribed and tempted by illusions. I have known men of force and vigour both in youth and middle life who had a strong sense of the value and significance of their work; as age came upon them, the value of their work gradually disappeared; they were deferred to, consulted, outwardly reverenced, and perhaps all the more scrupulously and compassionately in order that they might not guess the lamentable fact that their work was done and that the forces and influences were in younger hands. But the men themselves never lost the sense of their importance. I knew an octogenarian clergyman who declared once in my presence that it was ridiculous to say that old men lost their faculty of dealing with affairs.
"Why," he said, "it is only quite in the last few years that I feel I have really mastered my work. It takes me far less time than it used to do; it is just promptly and methodically executed." The old man obviously did not know that his impression that his work consumed less time was only too correct, because it was, as a matter of fact, almost wholly performed by his colleagues, and nothing was referred to him except purely formal business.
It seems rather pitiful that we should not be able to face the truth, and that we cannot be content with discerning the principle of it all, which is that our work is given to us to do not for its intrinsic value, but because it is good for us to do it.
The secret government of the world seems, indeed, to be penetrated by a good-natured irony; it is as if the Power controlling us saw that, like children, we must be tenderly wooed into doing things which we should otherwise neglect, by a sense of high importance, as a kindly father who is doing accounts keeps his children quiet by letting one hold the blotting-paper and another the ink, so that they believe that they are helping when they are merely being kept from hindering.
And this strange sense of escape which drives us into activity and energy seems given us not that we may realise our aims, which turn out hollow and vapid enough when they are realised, but that we may drink deep of experience for the sake of its beneficent effect upon us. The failure of almost all Utopias and ideal states, designed and planned by writers and artists, lies in the absence of all power to suggest how the happy folk who have conquered all the ills and difficulties of life are to employ themselves reasonably and eagerly when there is nothing left to improve. William Morris, indeed, in his News from Nowhere, confessed through the mouth of one of his characters that there would be hardly enough pleasant work, like hay-making and bridge-building and carpentering and paving, left to go round; and the picture of life which he draws, with its total lack of privacy, the shops where you may ask for anything that you want without having to pay, the guest-houses, with their straw-coloured wine in quaint carafes, the rich stews served in grey earthenware dishes streaked with blue, the dancing, the caressing, the singular absence of all elderly women, strikes on the mind with a quite peculiar sense of boredom and vacuity, because Morris seems to have eliminated so many sources of human interest, and to have conformed every one to a type, which is refreshing enough as a contrast, but very tiresome in the mass. It will not be enough to have got rid of the combative and sordid and vulgar elements of the world unless a very active spirit of some kind has taken its place. Morris himself intended that art should supply the missing force; but art is not a sociable thing; it is apt to be a lonely affair, and few artists have either leisure or inclination to admire one another's work.
Still more dreary was the dream of the philosopher J. S. Mill, who was asked upon one occasion what would be left for men to do when they had been perfected on the lines which he desired. He replied, after a long and painful hesitation, that they might find satisfaction in reading the poems of Wordsworth. But Wordsworth's poems are useful in the fact that they supply a refreshing contrast to the normal thought of the world, and nothing but the fact that many took a different view of life was potent enough to produce them.
So, for the present at all events, we must be content to feel that our imagination provides us with a motive rather than with a goal; and though it is very important that we should strive with all our might to eliminate the baser elements of life, yet we must be brave and wise enough to confess how much of our best happiness is born of the fact that we have these elements to contend with.
Edward FitzGerald once said that a fault of modern writing was that it tried to compress too many good things into a page, and aimed too much at omitting the homelier interspaces. We must not try to make our lives into a perpetual feast; at least we must try to do so, but it must be by conquest rather than by inglorious flight; we must face the fact that the stuff of life is both homely and indeed amiss, and realise, if we can, that our happiness is bound up with energetically trying to escape from conditions which we cannot avoid. When we are young and fiery-hearted, we think that a tame counsel; but, like all great truths, it dawns on us slowly. Not until we begin to ascend the hill do we grasp how huge, how complicated, how intricate the plain, with all its fields, woods, hamlets, and streams is; we are happy men and women if in middle age we even faintly grasp that the actual truth about life is vastly larger and finer than any impatient youthful fancies about it are, though it is good to have indulged our splendid fancies in youth, if only for the delight of learning how much more magnificent is the real design.
In the Pilgrim's Progress, at the very outset of the journey, Evangelist asks Christian why he is standing still. He replies:
"Because I know not whither to go."
Evangelist, with a certain grimness of humour, thereupon hands him a parchment roll. One supposes that it will be a map or a paper of directions, but all that it has written in it is, "Fly from the wrath to come!"
Well, it is no longer that of which we are afraid, a rain of fire and brimstone, storm and tempest! The Power behind the world has better gifts than these; but we still have to fly, where we can and as fast as we can; and when we have traversed the dim leagues, and have seen things wonderful at every turn, and have passed through the bitter flood, we shall find--at least this is my hope--no guarded city of God from which we shall go no more out, but another road passing into wider fields and dimmer uplands, and to things more and more wonderful and strange and unknown.
II
LITERATURE AND LIFE
There is a tendency, not by any means among the greater writers, but among what may be called the epigoni,--the satellites of literature, the men who would be great if they knew how,--to speak of the business of writing as if it were a sacred mystery, pontifically celebrated, something remote and secret, which must be guarded from the vulgar and the profane, and which requires an initiation to comprehend. I always feel rather suspicious of this attitude; it seems to me something of a pose, adopted in order to make other people envious and respectful. It is the same sort of precaution as the "properties" of the wizard, his gown and wand, the stuffed crocodile and the skeleton in the corner; for if there is a great fuss made about locking and double-locking a box, it creates a presumption of doubt as to whether there is anything particular in it. In my nursery days one of my brothers was fond of locking up his private treasures in a box, producing it in public, unfastening it, glancing into it with a smile, and then softly closing it and turning the key in a way calculated to provoke the most intense curiosity as to the contents; but upon investigation it proved to contain nothing but the wool of sheep, dried beans, and cases of exploded cartridges.
So, too, I have known both writers and artists who made a mystery out of their craft, professed a holy rapture, as if the business of imagination and the art of setting things down were processes that could not be explained to ordinary people, but were the property of a brotherhood. And thus grow up cliques and coteries, of people who, by mutual admiration, try to console one another for the absence of the applause which the world will not concede them, and to atone for the coldness of the public by a warmth of intimate proximity.
This does not in the least apply to groups of people who are genuinely and keenly interested in art of any kind, and form a congenial circle in which they discuss, frankly and enthusiastically, methods of work, the books, ideas, pictures, and music which interest them. That is quite a different thing, a real fortress of enthusiasm in the midst of Meshech and Kedar. What makes it base and morbid is the desire to exclude for the sake of exclusion; to indulge in solitary raptures, hoping to be overheard; to keep the tail of the eye upon the public; to attempt to mystify; and to trade upon the inquisitive instinct of human beings, the natural desire, that is, to know what is going on within any group that seems to have exciting business of its own.
The Pre-Raphaelites, for instance, were a group and not a coterie. They were engaged in working and enjoying, in looking out for artistic promise, in welcoming and praising any performance of a kind that Rossetti recognised as "stunning." They were sure of their ground. The brotherhood, with its magazine, The Germ, and its mystic initials, was all a gigantic game; and they held together because they were revolutionary in this, that they wished to slay, as one stabs a tyrant, the vulgarised and sentimental art of the day. They did not effect anything like a revolution, of course. It was but a ripple on the flowing stream, and they diverged soon enough, most of them, into definite tracks of their own. The strength of the movement lay in the fact that they hungered and thirsted after art, clamouring for beauty, so Mr. Chesterton says, as an ordinary man clamours for beer. But their aim was not to mystify or to enlarge their own consequence, but to convert the unbeliever, and to produce fine things.
There is something in the Anglo-Saxon temperament which is on the whole unfavourable to movements and groups; the great figures of the Victorian time in art and literature have been solitary men, anarchical as regards tradition, strongly individualistic, working on their own lines without much regard for schools or conventions. The Anglo-Saxon is deferential, but not imitative; he has a fancy for doing things in his own way. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron-- were there ever four contemporary poets so little affected by one another's work? Think of the phrase in which Scott summed up his artistic creed, saying that he had succeeded, in so far as he had succeeded, by a "hurried frankness of composition," which was meant to please young and eager people. It is true that Wordsworth had a solemn majesty about his work, practised a sort of priestly function, never averse to entertaining ardent visitors by conducting them about his grounds, and showing them where certain poems had been engendered. But Wordsworth, as Fitz-Gerald truly said, was proud, not vain--proud like the high-hung cloud or the solitary peak. He felt his responsibility, and desired to be felt rather than to be applauded.
If one takes the later giants, Tennyson had a sense of magnificence, a childlike self-absorption. He said once in the same breath that the desire of the public to know the details of the artist's life was the most degrading and debasing curiosity,--it was ripping people up like pigs,--and added with a sigh that he thought that there was a congestion in the world about his own fame; he had received no complimentary letters for several days.
Browning, on the other hand, kept his raptures and his processes severely to himself. He never seems to have given the smallest hint as to how he conceived a poem or worked it out. He was as reticent about his occupation as a well-bred stockbroker, and did his best in society to give the impression of a perfectly decorous and conventional gentleman, telling strings of not very interesting anecdotes, and making a great point of being ordinary. Indeed, I believe that Browning was haunted by the eighteenth-century idea that there was something not quite respectable about professional literature, and that, like Gray, he wished to be considered a private gentleman who wrote for his amusement. When in later years he took a holiday, he went not for secret contemplation, but to recover from social fatigue. Browning is really one of the most mysterious figures in literature in this respect, because his inner life of poetry was so entirely apart from his outer life of dinner- parties and afternoon calls. Inside the sacred enclosure, the winds of heaven blow, the thunder rolls; he proclaims the supreme worth of human passion, he dives into the disgraceful secrets of the soul: and then he comes out of his study a courteous and very proper gentleman, looking like a retired diplomatist, and talking like an intelligent commercial traveller--a man whose one wish appeared to be as good-humouredly like everyone else as he conveniently could.
What, again, is one to make of Dickens, with his love of private theatricals, his florid waistcoats and watch-chains, his sentimental radicalism, his kindly, convivial, gregarious life? He, again, did his work in a rapture of solitary creation, and seemed to have no taste for discussing his ideas or methods. Then, too, Dickens's later desertion of his work in favour of public readings and money-making is curious to note. He was like Shakespeare in this, that the passion of his later life seemed to be to realise an ideal of bourgeois prosperity. Dickens seems to have regarded his art partly as a means of social reform, and partly as a method of making money. The latter aim is to a great extent accounted for by the miserable and humiliating circumstances of his early life, which bit very deep into him. Yet his art was hardly an end in itself, but something through which he made his way to other aims.
Carlyle, again, was a writer who put ideas first, despised his craft except as a means of prophesying, hated literary men and coteries, preferred aristocratic society, while at the same time he loved to say how unutterably tiresome he found it. Who will ever understand why Carlyle trudged many miles to attend parties and receptions at Bath House, where the Ashburtons lived, or what stimulus he discerned in it? I have a belief that Carlyle felt a quite unconscious pride in the fact that he, the son of a small Scotch farmer, had his assured and respected place among a semi- feudal circle, just as I have very little doubt that his migration to Craigenputtock was ultimately suggested to him by the pleasure and dignity of being an undoubted laird, and living among his own, or at least his wife's, lands. In saying this, I do not wish to belittle Carlyle, or to accuse him of what may be called snobbishness. He had no wish to worm himself by slavish deference into the society of the great, but he liked to be able to walk in and say his say there, fearing no man; it was like a huge mirror that reflected his own independence. Yet no one ever said harder or fiercer things of his own fellow-craftsmen. His description of Charles Lamb as "a pitiful rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering tom-fool" is not an amiable one! Or take his account of Wordsworth- -how instead of a hand-shake, the poet intrusted him with "a handful of numb unresponsive fingers," and how his speech "for prolixity, thinness, endless dilution" excelled all the other speech that Carlyle had ever heard from mortals. He admitted that Wordsworth was "a genuine man, but intrinsically and extrinsically a small one, let them sing or say what they will." In fact, Carlyle despised his trade: one of the most vivid and voluble of writers, he derided the desire of self-expression; one of the most continuous and brilliant of talkers, he praised and upheld the virtue of silence. He spoke and wrote of himself as a would-be man of action condemned to twaddle; and Ruskin expressed very trenchantly what will always be the puzzle of Carlyle's life--that, as Ruskin said, he groaned and gasped and lamented over the intolerable burden of his work, and that yet, when you came to read it, you found it all alive, full of salient and vivid details, not so much patiently collected, as obviously and patently enjoyed. Again there is the mystery of his lectures. They seem to have been fiery, eloquent, impressive harangues; and yet Carlyle describes himself stumbling to the platform, sleepless, agitated, and drugged, inclined to say that the best thing his audience could do for him would be to cover him up with an inverted tub; while as he left the platform among signs of visible emotion and torrents of applause, he thought, he said, that the idea of being paid for such stuff made him feel like a man who had been robbing hen-roosts.