Chapter 6

The danger of art as an occupation is that one uses life, looks at life, as so much material for one's art. Life becomes a province of art, instead of art being a province of life. That is all a sad mistake, perhaps an irreparable mistake! I walked to-day on the crisp frozen snow, down the valley, by field-paths, among leafless copses and wood-ends. The stream ran dark and cold, between its brambly banks; the snow lay pure and smooth on the high-sloping fields. It made a heart of whiteness in the covert, the trees all delicately outlined, the hazels weaving an intricate pattern. All perfectly and exquisitely beautiful. Sight after sight of subtle and mysterious beauty, vignette after vignette, picture after picture. If I could but sing it, or say it, depict or record it, I thought to myself! Yet I could not analyse what the desire was. I do not think I wished to interpret the sight to others, or even to capture it for myself. No matter at what season of the year I pass through the valley, it is always filled from end to end with beauty, ever changing, perishing, ever renewing itself. In spring the copse is full of tender points of green, uncrumpling and uncurling. The hyacinths make a carpet of steely blue, the anemones weave their starred tapestry. In the summer, the grove hides its secret, dense with leaf, the heavy-seeded grass rises in the field, the tall flowering plants make airy mounds of colour; in autumn, the woods blaze with orange and gold, the air is heavy with the scent of the dying leaf. In winter, the eye dwells with delight upon the spare low tints; and when the snow falls and lies, as it does to-day, the whole scene has a still and mournful beauty, a pure economy of contrasted light and gloom. Yet the trained perception of the artist does not dwell upon the thought of the place as upon a perpetual feast of beauty and delight. Rather, it shames me to reflect, one dwells upon it as a quarry of effects, where one can find and detach the note of background, the sweet symbol that will lend point and significance to the scene that one is labouring at. Instead of being content to gaze, to listen, to drink in, one thinks only what one can carry away and make one's own. If one's art were purely altruistic, if one's aim were to emphasise some sweet aspect of nature which the careless might otherwise overlook or despise; or even if the sight haunted one like a passion, and fed the heart with hope and love, it would be well. But does one in reality feel either of these purposes? Speaking candidly, I do not. I care very little for my message to the world. It is true that I have a deep and tender love for the gracious things of earth; but I cannot be content with that. One thinks of Wordsworth, rapt in contemplation, sitting silent for a whole morning, his eyes fixed upon the pool of the moorland stream, or the precipice with the climbing ashes. It was like a religion to him, a communion with something holy and august which in that moment drew near to his soul. But with me it is different. To me the passion is to express it, to embalm it, in phrase or word, not for my pride in my art, not for any desire to give the treasure to others, but simply, so it seems, in obedience to a tyrannous instinct to lend the thought, the sight, another shape. I despair of defining the feeling. It is partly a desire to arrest the fleeting moment, to give it permanence in the ruinous lapse of things, the same feeling that made old Herrick say to the daffodils, "We weep to see you haste away so soon." Partly the joy of the craftsman in making something that shall please the eye and ear. It is not the desire to create, as some say, but to record. For when one writes an impassioned scene, it seems no more an act of creation than one feels about one's dreams. The wonder of dreams is that one does not make them; they come upon one with all the pleasure of surprise and experience. They are there; and so, when one indulges imagination, one does not make, one merely tells the dream. It is this that makes art so strange and sad an occupation, that one lives in a beautiful world, which does not seem to be of one's own designing, but from which one is awakened, in terror and disgust, by bodily pain, discomfort, anxiety, loss. Yet it seems useless to say that life is real and imagination unreal. They are both there, both real. The danger is to use life to feed the imagination, not to use imagination to feed life. In these sad weeks I have been like a sleeper awakened. The world of imagination, in which I have lived and moved, has crumbled into pieces over my head; the wind and rain beat through the flimsy dwelling, and I must arise and go. I have sported with life as though it were a pretty plaything; and I find it turn upon me like a wild beast, gaunt, hungry, angry. I am terrified by its evil motions, I sicken at its odour. That is the deep mystery and horror of life, that one yields unerringly to blind and imperious instincts, not knowing which may lead us into green and fertile pastures of hope and happy labour, and which may draw us into thorny wildernesses. The old fables are true, that one must not trust the smiling presences, the beguiling words. Yet how is one to know which of the forms that beckon us we may trust. Must we learn the lesson by sad betrayals, by dark catastrophes? I have wandered, it seems, along a flowery path--and yet I have not gathered the poisonous herbs of sin; I have loved innocence and goodness; but for all that I have followed a phantom, and now that it is too late to retrace my steps, I find that I have been betrayed. I feel

"As some bold seer in a trance Seeing all his own mischance."

Well, at least one may still be bold!

December 22, 1888.

Perhaps my trial comes to me that it may test my faith in art; perhaps to show me that the artist's creed is a false and shallow one after all. What is it that we artists do? In a happy hour I should have said glibly that we discern and interpret beauty. But now it seems to me that no man can ever live upon beauty. I think I have gone wrong in busying myself so ardently in trying to discern the quality of beauty in all things. I seem to have submitted everything--virtue, honour, life itself--to that test. I appear to myself like an artist who has devoted himself entirely to the appreciation of colour, who is suddenly struck colour-blind; he sees the forms of things as clearly as ever, but they are dreary and meaningless. I seem to have tried everything, even conduct, by an artistic standard, and the quality which I have devoted myself to discerning has passed suddenly out of life. And my mistake has been all the more grievous, because I have always believed that it was life of which I was in search. There are three great writers--two of them artists as well--whose personality has always interested me profoundly--Ruskin, Carlyle, Rossetti. But I have never been able wholly to admire the formal and deliberate products of their minds. Ruskin as an art-critic--how profoundly unfair, prejudiced, unjust he is! He has made up his mind about the merit of an artist; he will lay down a principle about accuracy in art, and to what extent imagination may improve upon vision; and then he will abuse Claude for modifying a scene, in the same breath, and for the same reasons, with which he will praise Turner for exaggerating one. He will use the same stick that he throws for one dog to fetch, to beat another dog that he dislikes. Of course he says fine and suggestive things by the way, and he did a great work in inspiring people to look for beauty, though he misled many feeble spirits into substituting one convention for another. I cannot read a page of his formal writings without anger and disgust. Yet what a beautiful, pathetic, noble spirit he had! The moment he writes, simply and tenderly, from his own harrowed heart, he becomes a dear and honoured friend. In Praeterita, in his diaries and letters, in his familiar and unconsidered utterances, he is perfectly delightful, conscious of his own waywardness and whimsicality; but when he lectures and dictates, he is like a man blowing wild blasts upon a shrill trumpet. Then Carlyle--his big books, his great tawdry, smoky pictures of scenes, his loud and clumsy moralisations, his perpetual thrusting of himself into the foreground, like some obstreperous showman; he wearies and dizzies my brain with his raucous clamour, his uncouth convolutions. I saw the other day a little Japanese picture of a boat in a stormy sea, the waves beating over it; three warriors in the boat lie prostrate and rigid with terror and misery. Above, through a rent in the clouds, is visible an ugly grotesque figure, with a demoniacal leer on his face, beating upon a number of drums. The picture is entitled "The Thunder-God beats his drums." Well, Carlyle seems to me like that; he has no pity for humanity, he only likes to add to its terrors and its bewilderment. He preached silence and seclusion to men of activity, energy to men of contemplation. He was furious, whatever humanity did, whether it slept or waked. His message is the message of the booming gale, and the swollen cataract. Yet in his diaries and letters, what splendid perception, what inimitable humour, what rugged emotion! I declare that Carlyle's thumbnail portraits of people and scenes are some of the most admirable things ever set down on paper. I love and admire the old furious, disconsolate, selfish fellow with all my heart; though he was a bad husband, he was a true friend, for all his discordant cries and groans. Then there is Rossetti--a man who wrote a few incredibly beautiful poems, and in whom one seems to feel the inner fire and glow of art. Yet many of his pictures are to me little but voluptuous and wicked dreams; and his later sonnets are full of poisonous fragrance--poetry embroidered and scented, not poetry felt. What a generous, royal prodigal nature he had, till he sank into his drugged and indulgent seclusion! Here then are three great souls. Ruskin, the pure lover of things noble and beautiful, but shadowed by a prim perversity, an old-maidish delicacy, a petulant despair. Carlyle, a great, rugged, and tumultuous heart, brutalised by ill-health, morbidity, selfishness. Rossetti, a sort of day-star in art, stepping forth like an angel, to fall lower than Lucifer. What is the meaning of these strange catastrophes, these noble natures so infamously hampered? In the three cases, it seems to be that melancholy, brooding over a world, so exquisitely designed and yet so unaccountably marred, drove one to madness, one to gloom, one to sensuality. We believe or try to believe that God is pure and loving and true, and that His Heart is with all that is noble and hopeful and high. Yet the more generous the character, the deeper is the fall! Can such things be meant to show us that we have no concern with art at all; and that our only hope is to cling to bare, austere, simple, uncomforted virtue? Ought we to try to think of art only as an innocent amusement and diversion for our leisure hours? As a quest to which no man may vow himself, save at the cost of walking in a vain shadow all his days? Ought we to steel our hearts against the temptation, which seems to be implanted as deep as anything in my own nature--nay, deeper--to hold that what one calls ugliness and bad taste is of the nature of sin? But what then is the meaning of the tyrannous instinct to select and to represent, to capture beauty? Ought it to be enough to see beauty in the things around us, in flowers and light, to hear it in the bird's song and the falling stream--to perceive it thus gratefully and thankfully, and to go back to our simple lives? I do not know; it is all a great mystery; it is so hard to believe that God should put these ardent, delicious, sweet, and solemn instincts into our spirits, simply that we may learn our error in following them. And yet I feel with a sad certainty to-day that I have somehow missed the way, and that God cannot or will not help me to find it. Are we then bidden and driven to wander? Or is there indeed some deep and perfect secret of peace and tranquillity, which we are meant to find? Does it perhaps lie open to our eyes--as when one searches a table over and over for some familiar object, which all the while is there before us, plain to touch or sight?

January 3, 1889.

There is a tiny vignette of Blake's, a woodcut, I think, in which one sees a ladder set up to the crescent moon from a bald and bare corner of the globe. There are two figures that seem to be conversing together; on the ladder itself, just setting his foot to the lowest rung, is the figure of a man who is beginning to climb in a furious hurry. "I want, I want," says the little legend beneath. The execution is trivial enough; it is all done, and not very well done, in a space not much bigger than a postage-stamp--but it is one of the many cases in which Blake, by a minute symbol, expressed a large idea. One wonders if he knew how large an idea it was. It is a symbol for me of all the vague, eager, intense longing of the world, the desire of satisfaction, of peace, of fulfilment, of perfection; the power that makes people passionately religious, that makes souls so much greater and stronger than they appear to themselves to be. It is the thought that makes us at moments believe intensely and urgently in the justice, the mercy, the perfect love of God, even at moments when everything round us appears to contradict the idea. It is the outcome of that strange right to happiness which we all feel, the instinct that makes us believe of pain and grief that they are abnormal, and will be, must be, set right and explained somewhere. The thought comes to me most poignantly at sunset, when trees and chimneys stand up dark against the fiery glow, and when the further landscape lies smiling, lapt in mist, on the verge of dreams; that moment always seems to speak to me with a personal voice. "Yes," it seems to say, "I am here and everywhere--larger, sweeter, truer, more gracious than anything you have ever dreamed of or hoped for--but the time to know all is not yet." I cannot explain the feeling or interpret it; but it has sometimes seemed to me, in such moments, that I am, in very truth, not a child of God, but a part of Himself--separated from Him for a season, imprisoned, for some strange and beautiful purpose, in the chains of matter, remembering faintly and obscurely something that I have lost, as a man strives to recall a beautiful dream that has visited him. It is then that one most desires to be strong and free, to be infinitely patient and tender and loving, to be different. And then one comes back to the world with a sense of jar and shock, to broken purposes, and dull resentments, to unkindly thoughts, and people who do not even pretend to wish one well. I have been trying with all my might in these desolate weeks to be brave and affectionate and tender, and I have not succeeded. It is easy enough, when one is happily occupied for a part of the day, but when one is restless, dissatisfied, impatient, ineffective, it is a constant and a weary effort. And what is more, I dislike sympathy. I would rather bear a thing in solitude and silence. I have no self-pity, and it is humiliating and weakening to be pitied. Yet of course Maud knows that I am unhappy; and the wretchedness of it is that it has introduced a strain into our relations which I have never felt before. I sit reading, trying to pass the hours, trying to stifle thought. I look up and see her eyes fixed on me full of compassion and love--and I do not want compassion. Maud knows it, divines it all; but she can no more keep her compassion hidden than I can keep my unrest hidden. I have grown irritable, suspicious, hard to live with. Yet with all my heart and soul I desire to be patient, tolerant, kindly, sweet-tempered. FitzGerald said somewhere that ill-health makes all of us villains. This is the worst of it, that for all my efforts I get weaker, more easily vexed, more discontented. I do not and cannot trace the smallest benefit which results to me or any one else from my unhappiness. The shadow of it has even fallen over my relations with the children, who are angelically good. Maggie, with that divine instinct which women possess--what a perfectly beautiful thing it is!--has somehow contrived to discern that things are amiss with me, and I can perceive that she tries all that her little heart and mind can devise to please, soothe, interest me. But I do not want to be ministered to, exquisite as the instinct is in the child; and all the time I am as far off my object as ever. I cannot work, I cannot think. I have said fine things in my books about the discipline of reluctant suffering; and now my feeling is that I could bear any other kind of trial better. It seems to be given to me with an almost demoniacal prescience of what should most dishearten me.

"It would not school the shuddering will To patience, were it sweet to bear,"

says an old poet; and it is true, I have no doubt; but, good God, to think that a man, so richly dowered as I am with every conceivable blessing, should yet have so small a reserve of faith and patience! Even now I can frame epigrams about it. "To learn to be content not to be content"--that is the secret--but meanwhile I stumble in dark paths, through the grove nullo penetrabilis astro, where men have wandered before now. It seems fine and romantic enough, when one thinks of another soul in torment. One remembers the old sage, reading quietly at a sunset hour, who had a sudden vision of the fate that should befall him. His book falls from his hands, he sits there, a beautiful and venerable figure enough, staring heavily into the void. It makes me feel that I shall never dare to draw the picture of a man in the grip of suffering again; I have had so little of it in my life, and I have drawn it with a luxurious artistic emotion. I remember once saying of a friend that his work was light and trivial, because he had never descended into hell. Now that I have myself set foot there, I feel art and love, and life itself, shrivel in the relentless chill--for it is icy cold and drearily bright in hell, not dark and fiery, as poets have sung! I feel that I could wrestle better with the loss of health, of wealth, of love, for there would be something to bear, some burden to lift. Now there is nothing to bear, except a blank purposelessness which eats the heart out of me. I am in the lowest place, in the darkness and the deep.

January 8, 1889.

Snow underfoot this morning; and a brown blink on the horizon which shows that more is coming. I have the odd feeling that I have never really seen my house before, the snow lights it all up so strangely, tinting the ceilings a glowing white, touching up high lights on the top of picture-frames, and throwing the lower part of the rooms into a sort of pleasant dusk.

Maud and the children went off this afternoon to an entertainment. I accompanied them to the door; what a pretty effect the snow background gives to young faces; it lends a pretty morbidezza to the colouring, a sort of very delicate green tinge to the paler shades. That does not sound as if it would be beautiful in a human face, but it is; the faces look like the child-angels of Botticelli, and the pink and rose flush of the cheeks is softly enriched and subdued; and then the soft warmth of fair and curly hair is delicious. I was happy enough with them, in a sort of surface happiness. The little waves at the top of the mind broke in sunlight; but down below, the cold dark water sleeps still enough. I left them, and took a long trudge among the valleys. Oh me! how beautiful it all was; the snowy fields, with the dark copses and leafless trees among them; the rich clean light everywhere, the world seen as through a dusky crystal. Then the sun went down in state, and the orange sky through the dark tree-stems brought me a thrill of that strange yearning desire for something--I cannot tell what--that seems so near and yet so far away. Yet I was sad enough too; my mind works like a mill with no corn to grind. I can devise nothing, think of nothing. There beats in my head a verse of a little old Latin poem, by an unhappy man enough, in whose sorrowful soul the delight of the beautiful moment was for ever poisoned by the thought that it was passing, passing; and that the spirit, whatever joy might be in store for it, could never again be at the same sweet point of its course. The poem is about a woodcock, a belated bird that haunted the hanging thickets of his Devonshire home. "Ah, hapless bird," he says, "for you to-day King December is stripping these oaks; nor any hope of food do the hazel-thickets afford." That is my case. I have lingered too late, trusting to the ease and prodigal wealth of the summer, and now the woods stand bare about me, while my comrades have taken wing for the South. The beady eye, the puffed feathers grow sick and dulled with hunger. Why cannot I rest a little in the beauty all about me? Take it home to my shivering soul? Nay, I will not complain, even to myself.

I came back at sundown, through the silent garden, all shrouded and muffled with snow. The snow lay on the house, outlining the cornices, cresting the roof-tiles, crusted sharply on the cupola, whitening the tall chimney-stacks. The comfortable smoke went up into the still air, and the firelight darted in the rooms. What a sense of beautiful permanence, sweet hopefulness, fireside warmth it all gave; and it is real as well. No life that I could have devised is so rich in love and tranquillity as mine; everything to give me content, except the contented mind. Why cannot I enter, seat myself in the warm firelight, open a book, and let the old beautiful thoughts flow into my mind, till the voices of wife and children return to gladden me, and I listen to all that they have seen and done? Why should I rather sit, like a disconsolate child among its bricks, feebly and sadly planning new combinations and fantastic designs? I have done as much and more than most of my contemporaries; what is this insensate hunger of the spirit that urges me to work that I cannot do, for rewards that I do not want? Why cannot I be content to dream and drowse a little?

"Rest, then, and rest And think of the best, 'Twixt summer and spring, When no birds sing."

That is what I desire to do, and cannot. It is as though some creeper that had enfolded and enringed a house with its tendrils, creeping under window-ledges and across mellow brickwork, had been suddenly cut off at the root, and hung faded and lustreless, not even daring to be torn away. Yet I am alive and well, my mind is alert and vigorous, I have no cares or anxieties, except that my heart seems hollow at the core.

January 12, 1889.