Chapter 9
The difficulty is to know at what point to draw the line. These limited enthusiasms may have an educative effect upon the persons who indulge them, but they may also have a stunting effect if they are pursued too long. A boy passes my window whistling shrill a stave of a popular song. He is obviously delighted with and intent upon his performance, and he is experiencing, no doubt, the artistic joy of creation; but if that boy goes on in life, as many artists do, limiting his musical aspirations to the best whistle that he can himself emit, his ideal will be a low one, however faithfully pursued. The ugly part of thus limiting our aspirations is that such petty enthusiasm is generally accompanied by an intense craving for the admiration of other people, and it is this which vitiates and poisons our own admirations. We do not merely think how fine a performance it is; we think how much we should like to impress and astonish other people, to arouse their envy and jealousy by a similar performance. The point is rather that we should enjoy effort, and that our aim should be rather to improve our own performances than to surpass the performances of others. The right spirit is that which Matthew Arnold displays in one of his letters. He was writing at a time when his own literary fame was securely established, yet he said that the longer he lived the more grateful he was for his own success. He added that the more people he came to know, the more strongly he felt the comparative equality of human endowments, and the more clearly he perceived that the successful writer _found_ rather than _invented_ the telling phrase, the stimulating thought. That is a very rare attitude of mind, and it is as noble as it is rare. The successful writer, as a rule, instead of being grateful for his good fortune in perceiving what others have not perceived, takes the credit to himself for having originated it, whereas he ought rather to conceive of himself as one of a company of miners, and be thankful for having lighted upon a richer pocket of auriferous soil than the rest.
Of course it sounds what is commonly called priggish when a man, in the style of Mr. Barlow, is always imploring the boy who wins a race or gets a prize to turn his thoughts higher and to take no credit to himself for what is only a piece of good fortune, and is not so great a performance after all. It is easy to say that this is but a pietistic quenching of natural and youthful delight; but much depends upon the way in which it is done, and it is probably the right line to take, though it is supposed to be merely the old-fashioned parental attitude of little goody books. The really modest and ingenuous boy does it for himself, and the boy who "puts on side" because of his triumphs is universally disapproved of. Moreover, as a rule, in the larger world, the greatest men are really apt to be among the most modest; and it is generally only the second-rate people who try to extort deference and admiration.
False enthusiasm is probably only one degree better than cynicism. Cynicism is generally the refuge of the disappointed and indolent, but there is, after all, a nobler kind of cynicism, which even religion must strive to develop, the cynicism which realises the essential worthlessness and pettiness of human endeavour. The cynicism that stops short at this point is the evil kind of cynicism, and becomes purely contemptuous and derisive. But there is a fruitful kind of cynicism, which faithfully contrasts the aspirations and possibilities of humanity with its actual performances and its failures, which makes the poet and the philosopher humble in the presence of infinite beauty and infinite knowledge.
It is the quality, the spirit, of a performance that matters. If a performance is the best of which a man is capable, and better than what he has hitherto done, he has achieved all that is possible. If he begins to reflect that it is better than what others have done, then his satisfaction is purely poisonous. But to estimate human possibilities high and human performances low, and to class one's own performances with the latter rather than the former, this is temperate and manly and strong.
XX
There is a picture of Rossetti's, very badly painted, I think, from the technical point of view, of Lucrezia Borgia. There are apologists who say that the wickedness of the Borgia family is grossly exaggerated, and that they were in reality very harmless and respectable people. But Rossetti thought of them, in painting this picture, as people stained with infamous and unspeakable crime, and he has contrived to invest the scene with a horror of darkness. Lucrezia sits in what is meant to be an attitude of stately beauty, and the figure contrives somehow to symbolise that; though she appears to be both stout and even blowsy in appearance. Her evil father, the Pope Alexander, sits leering beside her, while her brother Caesar leans over her and blows rose-leaves from her hair. There certainly hangs a hideous suggestiveness of evil over the group. In the foreground, a page of ten or twelve is dancing, together with a little girl of perhaps nine or ten. The page is slim and delicate, and watches his small companion with a tender and brotherly sort of air; both children are entirely absorbed in their performance, which they seem to have been bidden to enact for the pleasure of the three watchers. The children look innocent enough, though they too are rather dimly and clumsily painted; but one feels that they are somehow in the net, that they are growing up in a pestilential and corrupting atmosphere, and that the flowers of evil will soon burst into premature bloom in their tender souls. The whole scene is overhung with a close and enervating gloom; one apprehends somehow that the air swims with a heavy fragrance; and though one feels that the artist's hand failed to represent his thought, he was painting with a desperate intentness, and the dark quality of the conception contrives to struggle out. The art of it is great rather than good; it is the art of a man who realises the scene with a terrible insight, and in spite of a clumsy and smudgy handling, manages to bring it home perhaps even more impressively than if he had been fully master of his medium. There is a mingling of horror and pathos over it all, and the pretty, innocent gaiety of the children seems obscured as by a gathering thunder-cloud; as when the air grows close and still over some scene of rustic merriment, and the blitheness of the revellers sinks into torpor and faintness, not knowing what ails them. One feels that the performers of the dance will be rewarded with kisses and sweetmeats, and that they will draw the poison into their souls.
It is surely very difficult to analyse what this shadow of sin upon the world may be, because there is so large an element of subjectivity mingled with it. So much of it seems to depend upon the temper and beliefs of the time, so much of the shadow of conscience to be the fear of social and even legal penalty. Not to travel far for instances, one finds Plato speaking in a guileless and romantic fashion of a whole range of passions and emotions that we have grown to consider as inherently degrading and repulsive. Yet no shadow of the sense of sin seems to have brooded over that bright and clear Greek life, the elements of which, except in the regions which our morality condemns, seem so intensely desirable and ennobling. In ages, too, when life was more precarious, and men were so much less sensitive to the idea of human suffering, one finds a light-hearted cruelty practised which is insupportable to modern ideals. Those wars of extermination among the Israelites, when man and woman, boy and girl, were ruthlessly and sternly slain, because they were held to belong to some tribe abhorred by the God of Sabaoth; or when, in their own polity, some notorious sinner was put to death with all his unhappy family, however innocent--no shadow of conscience seems to have brooded over those destroyers: they rather had the inspiriting and ennobling sense of having performed a sacred duty, and carried out the commands of a jealous God. Viewing the matter, indeed, as dispassionately and philosophically as possible, it is hard to justify the ways of a Creator who slowly developed and matured a race, keeping them deliberately ignorant of light and truth, in order that they might at last be exterminated, in blood and pain, by a dominant and righteous race of invaders.
It would seem, indeed, as though the sense of sin did not reside in the act at all, but only in the sense that the act is committed in defiance of light and higher instinct. Even our own morality, on which we pride ourselves, how confused and topsy-turvy it is in many respects! How monstrous it is that a hungry man should be punished legally for theft, while an ill-tempered and unjust parent or schoolmaster should be allowed, year after year, to make the lives of the children about them into misery and heaviness. Life is full of such examples, where no agency whatever is, or can be, brought to bear by society upon a notorious wrecker of human happiness, so long as he is prudent and wary.
It is the slowness of it all that is so disheartening; the impossibility that dogs the efforts of the high-minded, the kind, the just, of prevailing against tradition and prejudice and stupidity; the grim acquiescence in sanctioned oppression that characterises a certain type of respectable virtue; the melancholy ineffectiveness of kindly persons, the lamentable lack of proportion that mars the work of the enthusiastic faddist--these things tempt one at times, in moments of despair and dreariness, to believe that the one lesson of life is meant to be a hopeless patience, a dull acquiescence in deeply-rooted evil. It is bewildering to see a world so out of joint, and to feel that the one force that has worked wonders is the discontent with things as they are. And even so the lesson is a hard one, because it has been the lot of so few of the great conquerors of humanity ever to see the hour of their triumph, which comes long after and late, when they have breathed out their ardent spirit in agony and despair.
But, after all, however much we may philosophise about sin or attempt to analyse its essence, there is some dark secret there, of which from time to time we are grievously conscious. Who does not know the sense of failure to overcome, of lapsing from a hope or a purpose, the burden of the thought of some cowardice or unkindness which we cannot undo and which we need not have committed? No resolute determinism can ever avail us against the stern verdict of that inner tribunal of the soul, which decides, too, by some instinct that we cannot divine, to sting and torture us with the memory of deeds, the momentousness and importance of which we should utterly fail to explain to others. There are things in my own past, which would be met with laughter and ridicule if I attempted to describe them, that still make me blush to recollect with a sense of guilt and shame, and seem indelibly branded upon the mind. There are things, too, of which I do not feel ashamed, which, if I were to describe them to others, would be received with a sort of incredulous consternation, to think that I could have performed them. That is the strange part of the inner conscience, that it seems so wholly independent of tradition or convention.
And it is from this sense of a burden, borne without hope of redemption, that we would all of us give our most prized possessions to be free; it is this which has cast such an awful power into the hands of the unscrupulous people who have claimed to be able to atone for, to loose, to set free the ailing soul. Face to face with the terror of darkness, there is hardly anything of which mankind will not repent; and I have sometimes thought that the darkest and heaviest temptation in the whole world is the temptation to yield to a craven fear, when the sincere conscience does not condemn.
XXI
I listened the other day, at a public function, to an eloquent panegyric, pronounced by a man of great ability and sympathetic cultivation, on the Greek spirit. I fell for the moment entirely under the spell of his lofty rhetoric, his persuasive and illuminating argument. I wish I could reproduce what he said; but it was like a strain of beautiful music, and my mind was so much delighted by his rich eloquence, his subtle transitions, his deft modulations, that I had neither time nor opportunity to commit what he said to memory. One thing he said which struck me very much, that the Greek spirit resembled rather the modern scientific spirit than any other of the latter-day developments of thought. I think that this is true in a sense, that the Greeks were penetrated by an insatiable curiosity, and desired to study the principles and arrive at the truth of things. But I do not, upon reflection, think that it is wholly true, because the modern spirit is greatly in love with classification and with detail, while the Greek spirit rather aimed at beauty, and investigated the causes of things with wonder and delight, in what may be called the romantic, the poetical spirit.
The mistake that the orator seemed to me to make was that he implied, or appeared to imply, that the Greek spirit could be attained by the study of Greek. My own belief is that the essence of the Greek spirit was its originality, its splendid absence of deference, its disregard of what was traditional. The Greeks owed nothing to outside influences. If the dim origins of their art were Egyptian, they strode forward for themselves, and spent no time in investigating the earlier traditions. Again, in literature, they wasted no force in attempting to imbibe culture from outside influences; they merely developed the capacities of their own sonorous and graceful language; they infused it with their own vivid and beautiful personality.
Of course, it may be urged that there probably did not exist in the world at that date treasures of ancient literature and art. The question is what the Greeks would have done if they had found themselves in a later world, stocked, and even overstocked, with old masterpieces and monuments of human intellect and energy and skill. The doubt is whether the creative impulse would have died away, and whether the Greeks would have tended to fling themselves into the passionate study, the eager apprehension, of the beautiful inheritance of the ages. I cannot myself believe it. They would have had, I believe, an intense and ardent appreciation of what had been, but the desire to see and hear some new thing of which St. Paul spoke, the deep-seated desire for self-expression, would have kept them free from any tame surrender to tradition, any danger of basing their cultivation on what had been represented or thought or sung by their human predecessors. I cannot, for instance, conceive of the Greeks as devoting themselves to erudition; I cannot imagine their giving themselves up to the same minute appreciation of ancient forms of expression which we give to the Greek literature itself.
Moreover, unless we concede to the Greek literature the position of the high-water mark of human expression, and believe that the intellect of man had since that day suffered decline and eclipse, we ought not to allow an ancient literature to overshadow our own energies, or to give up the hope of creating a vivid literature, at once classical and romantic, of our own.
And even if we did concede to Greek literature this august supremacy, I cannot believe that our best intellect ought to be practised in the awestruck submissiveness of mind that too often results from our classical education. That is why I admire the American spirit in literature. The Americans seem to have little of the reverent, exclusive attitude which we value so highly. They are preoccupied in their own native inspiration. They will speak, without any sense of absurdity, of Shakespeare and E.A. Poe, of Walter Scott and Hawthorne, as comparable influences. They are like children, entirely absorbed in the interest and delight of intent creation. But though their productions are at present, with certain notable exceptions, lacking in vitality and quality, this spirit is, I believe, the spirit in which new ideas and new literatures are produced. I do not desire to see the Americans more critical of the present or more deferential to the past. I do not desire to see them turn with a hopeless wonder to the study of the great English masterpieces. Indeed, I think that our own tendency in England to reverence, our constant appeal to classical standards, is an obstacle to our intellectual and artistic progress. We are like elderly writers who tend to repeat their own beloved mannerisms, and who contemn and decry the work of younger men, despairing of the future. A nation may reach a point, like an ancient and noble dynasty of princes, where it is overshadowed and overweighted by its own past glories, and where it learns to depend upon prestige rather than upon vigour, to wrap itself in its own dignity. What I would rather see is an elasticity, a recklessness, a prodigal trying of experiments, a discontented underrating of past traditions, than a meek acquiescence in their supremacy. What is our present condition? We have few poets of the first rank, few essayists or reflective writers, few dramatists, few biographers. I do not at all wish to underrate the immense vitality of our imaginative faculties, which shows itself in our vast output of fiction; but even here we have few masters, and our critics know and care little for style; they are entirely preoccupied with plot and incident and situation. What we lack is true originality, tranquil force; we are all occupied in trying to startle and surprise, to make a sensation. How little the Greeks cared for that! It was beauty and charm, delicate colour, fine subtlety of which they were, in search; they held all things holy, yet nothing solemn. Their dignity was not a pompous dignity, but the dignity of high tragedy, of unconquerable courage and ruthless fate; not the dignity of the well-appointed house and the tradition of excellent manners.
Of course our love of wealth and comfort is to a certain extent responsible for this. We have been thrown off our balance by the vast and rapid development of the resources of the earth, the binding of natural forces to do our bidding; it is the most complicated thing in the world nowadays to live the simple life; and not until we can gain a rich simplicity, not until we can recover an interest in ideas rather than an appetite for comforts, will our force and vitality return to us.
We are all too anxious to do the right thing and to be known to the right people; but unfortunately for us the right people are not the people of vivacity and intellectual zest, but the possessors of industrial wealth or the inheritors of scrupulous traditions and historical names. The sad fact, the melancholy truth, is that we have become vulgar; and until we can purge ourselves of vulgarity, till we can realise the ineffable ugliness of pomposity and pretension and ostentation, we shall effect nothing. Even our puritan forefathers, with their hatred of art, were in love with ideas. They sipped theology with the air of connoisseurs; they drank down Hebrew virtues with a vigorous relish. Then came a rococo and affected age, neat, conceited, and trim; yet in the middle of that stood out a great rugged figure like Johnson, full to the brim of impassioned force. Then again the intellect, the poetry of the nation stirred and woke. In Wordsworth, in Scott, in Keats and Shelley and Byron, in Tennyson and Browning, in Carlyle and Ruskin, came an age of passionate sincerity of protest against the dulness of prosperity. But now we seem to have settled down comfortably to sleep again, and are content to fiddle melodiously on delicate instruments. The trumpet and the horn are silent.
Perhaps we must content ourselves with the vigorous advance of science, the determination to penetrate secrets, to know all that is to be known, not to form conclusions without evidence. But the scientific attitude tends, except in the highest minds, to develop a certain dryness, a scepticism about spiritual and imaginative forces, a dulness of the inner apprehension, a hard quality of judgment. Not in such a mood as this does humanity fare further and higher. Men become cautious, prudent, and decisive thus, instead of generous, hopeful, and high-hearted.
But to despair too soon of an era, to despise and satirise an age, a national temper, is a deep and fatal mistake. The world moves onwards patiently and inevitably, obeying a larger and a mightier law. What is rather the duty of all who love what is noble and beautiful is not to carp and bicker over faulty conditions, but to realise their aims and hopes, to labour abundantly and patiently, to speak and feel sincerely, to encourage rather than to condemn, _Serviendum lietandum_ says the brave motto. To serve, one cannot avoid that; but to serve with blitheness, that is the secret.
XXII
I cannot help wondering what the substance was which my fellow-traveller to-day was consuming under the outward guise of cigarettes. It had a scent that was at once strange and afflicting. It was no more like tobacco than tobacco is like violets. It seemed as though it must have been carefully prepared and procured for some unknown purpose, but it was impossible to connect pleasure with it. It had a corroding mineral scent, and must have been digged, I think, out of the bowels of the surely not harmless earth. And the man himself! He was primly and precisely dressed, but he had an indefinable resemblance to a goat; his hair curled like horns; and he had the thin, restless, sneering lips, the impudent, inexpressive eyes of the goat. I found myself curiously oppressed by him. I hated his slow, deliberate movements; the idea that the air he breathed should mingle with the air of the carriage, and be transferred to my own lungs and blood, was horrible to me. I pitied those who had to serve him, and the relations compelled to own him. Yet I cannot trace the origin of this deep repugnance. There are innumerable natural objects far more hideous and outwardly repellent, but which yet do not possess this nauseating quality. Such shuddering hostility may lie far deeper than the outward appearance, and arise from some innate enmity of soul. It is a wholly unreasonable thing, no doubt, and yet it transcends all reason and surmounts all moral principle. I should not, I hope, refuse to help or succour such a man if he were in need or pain; but I do not wish to see him or to be near him, nor can I desire that he should continue to exist.