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Title: Escape and Other Essays

Author: Arthur Christopher Benson

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ESCAPE

AND OTHER ESSAYS



By ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON

I love people that leave some traces of their journey behind them,
and I have strength enough to advise you to do so while you can.
--Thomas Gray.

NEW YORK

1915






TABLE OF CONTENTS





Introduction
1. Escape
2. Literature and Life
3. The New Poets
4. Walt Whitman
5. Charm
6. Sunset
7. The House of Pengersick
8. Villages
9. Dreams
10. The Visitant
11. That Other One
12. Schooldays
13. Authorship
14. Herb Moly and Heartsease
15. Behold, This Dreamer Cometh






NOTE





I desire to recourd my obligations to the Editor of the Century
Magazine, and to the Editor of the Cornhill Magazine, for their
permission to include in this volume certain essays which appeared
first in their pages.

A. C. B.






INTRODUCTION

1





I walked to-day down by the river side. The Cam is a stream much
slighted by the lover of wild and romantic scenery; and its chief
merit, in the eyes of our boys, is that it approaches more nearly
to a canal in its straightness and the deliberation of its slow
lapse than many more famous floods--and is therefore more adapted
for the maneuvres of eight-oared boats! But it is a beautiful
place, I am sure; and my ghost will certainly walk there, "if our
loves remain," as Browning says, both for the sake of old memories
and for the love of its own sweet peaceableness. I passed out of
the town, out of the straggling suburbs, away from tall, puffing
chimneys, and under the clanking railway bridge; and then at once
the scene opens, wide pasture-lands on either side, and rows of old
willows, the gnarled trunks holding up their clustered rods. There
on the other side of the stream rises the charming village of Fen
Ditton, perched on a low ridge near the water, with church and
vicarage and irregular street, and the little red-gabled Hall
looking over its barns and stacks. More and more willows, and then,
lying back, an old grange, called Poplar Hall, among high-standing
trees; and then a little weir, where the falling water makes a
pleasant sound, and a black-timbered lock, with another old house
near by, a secluded retreat for the bishops of Ely in medieval
times. The bishop came thither by boat, no doubt, and abode there
for a few quiet weeks, when the sun lay hot over the plain; and a
little farther down is a tiny village called Horningsea, with a
battlemented church among orchards and thatched houses, with its
own disused wharf--a place which gives me the sense of a bygone age
as much as any hamlet I know. Then presently the interminable fen
stretches for miles and miles in every direction; you can see, from
the high green flood-banks of the river, the endless lines of
watercourses and far-off clumps of trees leagues away, and perhaps
the great tower of Ely, blue on the horizon, with the vast spacious
sky over-arching all. If that is not a beautiful place in its
width, its greenness, its unbroken silence, I do not know what
beauty is! Nothing that historians call an event has ever happened
there. It is a place that has just drifted out of the old lagoon
life of the past, the life of reed-beds and low-lying islands, of
marsh-fowl and fishes, into a hardly less peaceful life of
cornfield and pasture. No one goes there except on country
business, no armies ever marshalled or fought there. The sun goes
down in flame on the far horizon; the wild duck fly over and settle
in the pools, the flowers rise to life year by year on the edges of
slow watercourses; the calm mystery of it can be seen and
remembered; but it can hardly be told in words.


2


Now side by side with that I will set another picture of a
different kind.

A week or two ago I was travelling up North. The stations we passed
through were many of them full of troops, the trains were crammed
with soldiers, and very healthy and happy they looked. I was struck
by their friendliness and kindness; they were civil and modest;
they did not behave as if they were in possession of the line, as
actually I suppose they were, but as if they were ordinary
travellers, and anxious not to incommode other people. I saw
soldiers doing kind little offices, helping an old frail woman
carefully out of the train and handing out her baggage, giving
chocolates to children, interesting themselves in their fellow-
travellers. At one place I saw a proud and anxious father, himself
an old soldier, I think, seeing off a jolly young subaltern to the
front, with hardly suppressed tears; the young man was full of
excitement and delight, but did his best to cheer up the spirits of
"Daddy," as he fondly called him. I felt very proud of our
soldiers, their simplicity and kindness and real goodness. I was
glad to belong to the nation which had bred them, and half forgot
the grim business on which they were bent. We stopped at a
junction. And here I caught sight of a strange little group. There
was a young man, an officer, who had evidently been wounded; one of
his legs was encased in a surgical contrivance, and he had a
bandage round his head. He sat on a bench between two stalwart and
cheerful-looking soldiers, who had their arms round him, and were
each holding one of his hands. I could not see the officer clearly
at first, as a third soldier was standing close in front of him and
speaking encouragingly to him, while at the same time he sheltered
him from the crowd. But he moved away, and at the same moment the
young officer lifted his head, displaying a drawn and sunken face,
a brow compressed with pain, and looked wildly and in a terrified
way round him, with large melancholy eyes. Then he began to beat
his foot on the ground, and struggled to extricate himself from his
companions; and then he buried his head in his chest and sank down
in an attitude of angry despair. It was a sight that I cannot
forget.

Just before the train went off an officer got into my carriage, and
as we started, said to me, "That's a sad business there--it is a
young officer who was taken prisoner by the Germans--one of our
best men; he escaped, and after enduring awful hardships he got
into our lines, was wounded, and sent home to hospital; but the
shock and the anxiety preyed on his mind, and he has become, they
fear, hopelessly insane--he is being sent to a sanatorium, but I
fear there is very little chance of his recovery; he is wounded in
the head as well as the foot. He is a wealthy man, devoted to
soldiering, and he is just engaged to a charming girl . . ."


3


Now there is a hard and bitter fact of life, very different from
the story of the fenland. I am not going to argue about it or
discuss it, because to trace the threads of it back into life
entangles one at once helplessly in a dreadful series of problems:
namely, how it comes to pass that a calamity, grievous and
intolerable beyond all calamities in its pain and sorrow and waste,
a strife abhorred and dreaded by all who are concerned in it,
fruitful in every shade of misery and wretchedness, should yet have
come about so inevitably and relentlessly. No one claims to have
desired war; all alike plead that it is in self-defence that they
are fighting, and maintain that they have laboured incessantly for
peace. Yet the great mills of fate are turning, and grinding out
death and shame and loss. Everyone sickens for peace, and yet any
proposal of peace is drowned in cries of bitterness and rage. The
wisest spend their time in pointing out the blessings which the
conflict brings. The mother hears that the son she parted with in
strength and courage is mouldering in an unknown grave, and chokes
her tears down. The fruit of years of labour is consumed, lands are
laid desolate, the weak and innocent are wronged; yet the great
war-engine goes thundering and smashing on, leaving hatred and
horror behind it; and all the while men pray to a God of mercy and
loving-kindness and entreat His blessing on the work they are
doing.

Is there then, if we are confronted with such problems as these,
anything to do except to stay prostrate, like Job, in darkness and
despair, just enduring the stroke of sorrow? Is there any excuse
for bringing before the world at such a time as this the delightful
reveries, the easy happiness, the gentle schemes of serener and
less troubled days? The book which follows was the work of a time
which seems divided from the present by a dark stream of
unhappiness. Is it right, is it decent, to unfold an old picture of
peace before the eyes of those who have had to look into chaos and
destruction? Would it not be braver to burn the record of the
former things that have passed away? Or is it well to fix our gaze
firmly upon the peaceful things that have been and will be once
more?


4


Yes, I believe that it is right and wholesome to do this, because
the most treacherous and cowardly thing we can do is to disbelieve
in life. Those old dreams and visions were true enough, and they
will be true again. They represent the real life to which we must
try to return. We must try to build up the conception afresh, not
feebly to confess that we were all astray. We cannot abolish evil by
confessing ourselves worsted by it; we can only overcome it by
holding fast to our belief in labour and order and peace. It is a
temptation which we must resist, to philosophise too much about war.
Very few minds are large enough and clear enough to hold all the
problems in their grasp. I do not believe for an instant that war
has falsified our vision of peace. We must cling to it more than
ever, we must emphasize it, we must dwell in it. I regard war as I
regard an outbreak of pestilence; the best way to resist it is not
to brood over it, but to practise joy and health. The ancient
plagues which devastated Europe have not been overcome by philosophy,
but by the upspringing desire of men to live cleaner and more
wholesome lives. That instinct is not created by any philosophy or
persuasion; it just arises everywhere and finds its way to the
light.

To brood over the war, to spend our time in disentangling its
intricate causes, seems to me a task for future historians. But a
lover of peace, confronted by the hideousness of war, does best to
try, if he can, to make plain what he means by peace and why he
desires it. I do not mean by peace an indolent life, lost in gentle
reveries. I mean hard daily work, and mutual understanding, and
lavish help, and the effort to reassure and console and uplift. And
I mean, too, a real conflict--not a conflict where we set the best
and bravest of each nation to spill each other's blood--but a
conflict against crime and disease and selfishness and greediness
and cruelty. There is much fighting to be done; can we not combine
to fight our common foes, instead of weakening each other against
evil? We destroy in war our finest parental stock, we waste our
labour, we lose our garnered store; we give every harsh passion a
chance to grow; we live in the traditions of the past, and not in
the hopes of the future.


5


And yet there is one thing in the present war which I do in my
heart of hearts feel to be worth fighting for, and that is for the
hope of liberty. It is hard to say what liberty is, because the
essence of it is the subjugation of personal inclinations. The
Germans claim that they alone know the meaning of liberty, and that
they have arrived at it by discipline. But the bitterness of this
war lies in the fact that the Germans are not content to set an
example of attractive virtue, and to leave the world to choose it;
but that if the world will not choose it, they will force it upon
them by violence and the sword. It is this which makes me feel that
the war may be a vast protest of the nations, which have the spirit
of the future in their hearts, against a theory of life that
represents the spirit of the past. And I thus, with some seeming
inconsistency, believe that the war may represent the hope of peace
at bay. If the nations can keep this clearly before them, and not
be tempted either into reprisals, or into rewarding themselves by
the spoils of victory, if victory comes; if it ends in the Germans
being sincerely convinced that they have been misled and poisoned
by a conception of right which is both uncivilised and unchristian,
then I believe that all our sufferings may not be too great a price
to pay for the future well-being of the world. That is the largest
and brightest hope I dare to frame; and there are many hours and
days when it seems all clouded and dim.


6


We cannot at this time disengage our thoughts from the war; we
cannot, and we ought not. Still less can we take refuge from it in
idle dreams of peace and security; but at a time when every paper
and book that we see is full of the war and its sufferings, there
must be men and women who would do well to turn their hearts and
minds for a little away from it. If we brood over it, if we feed
our minds upon it, especially if we are by necessity non-
combatants, it is all apt to turn to a festering horror which makes
us useless and miserable. Whatever happens, we must try not to be
simply the worse for the war--morbid, hysterical, beggared of faith
and hope, horrified with life. That is the worst of evils; and I
believe that it is wholesome to put as far as we can our cramped
minds in easier postures, and to let our spirits have a wider
range. We know how a dog who is perpetually chained becomes fierce
and furious, and thinks of nothing but imaginary foes, so that the
most peaceful passer-by becomes an enemy. I have felt, since the
war began, a certain poison in the air, a tendency towards
suspicion and contentiousness and vague hostility. We must exorcise
that evil spirit if we can; and I believe it is best laid by
letting our minds go back to the old peace for a little, and
resolving that the new peace which we believe is coming shall be of
a larger and nobler quality; we may thus come to appreciate the
happiness which we enjoyed but had not earned; and lay our plans
for earning a new kind of happiness, the essence of which shall be
a mutual trust, that desires to give and share whatever it enjoys,
instead of hoarding it and guarding it.

A wise and unselfish woman wrote to me the other day in words which
will long live in my mind; she had sent out one whom she dearly
loved to the front, and she was fighting her fears as gallantly as
she could. "Whatever happens, we must not give way to dread," she
wrote. "It does not do to dread anything for our own treasures."

That is the secret! What we must not do, in the time of war, is to
indicate to everyone else what their sacrifices ought to be; we
must just make our own sacrifices; and perhaps the man who loves
and values peace most highly does not sacrifice the least. But even
he may try to realise that life does not contradict itself; but
that the parts of it, whether they be delightful or dreadful, do
work into each other in a marvellous way.






I

ESCAPE





All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality--the
story of an escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and
at all times--how to escape. The stories of Joseph, of Odysseus, of
the prodigal son, of the Pilgrim's Progress, of the "Ugly
Duckling," of Sintram, to name only a few out of a great number,
they are all stories of escapes. It is the same with all love-
stories. "The course of true love never can run smooth," says the
old proverb, and love-stories are but tales of a man or a woman's
escape from the desert of lovelessness into the citadel of love.
Even tragedies like those of OEdipus and Hamlet have the same
thought in the background. In the tale of OEdipus, the old blind
king in his tattered robe, who had committed in ignorance such
nameless crimes, leaves his two daughters and the attendants
standing below the old pear-tree and the marble tomb by the sacred
fountain; he says the last faint words of love, till the voice of
the god comes thrilling upon the air:

"OEdipus, why delayest thou?"

Then he walks away at once in silence, leaning on the arm of
Theseus, and when at last the watchers dare to look, they see
Theseus afar off, alone, screening his eyes with his hand, as if
some sight too dreadful for mortal eyes had passed before him; but
OEdipus is gone, and not with lamentation, but in hope and wonder.
Even when Hamlet dies, and the peal of ordnance is shot off, it is
to congratulate him upon his escape from unbearable woe; and that
is the same in life. If our eye falls on the sad stories of men and
women who have died by their own hand, how seldom do they speak in
the scrawled messages they leave behind them as though they were
going to silence and nothingness! It is just the other way. The
unhappy fathers and mothers who, maddened by disaster, kill their
children are hoping to escape with those they love best out of
miseries they cannot bear; they mean to fly together, as Lot fled
with his daughters from the city of the plain. The man who slays
himself is not the man who hates life; he only hates the sorrow and
the shame which make unbearable that life which he loves only too
well. He is trying to migrate to other conditions; he desires to
live, but he cannot live so. It is the imagination of man that
makes him seek death; only the animal endures, but man hurries away
in the hope of finding something better.

It is, however, strange to reflect how weak man's imagination is
when it comes to deal with what is beyond him, how little able he
is to devise anything that he desires to do when he has escaped
from life. The unsubstantial heaven of a Buddhist, with its
unthinkable Nirvana, is merely the depriving life of all its
attributes; the dull sensuality of the Mohammedan paradise, with
its ugly multiplication of gross delights; the tedious outcries of
the saints in light which make the medieval scheme of heaven into
one protracted canticle--these are all deeply unattractive, and
have no power at all over the vigorous spirit. Even the vision of
Socrates, the hope of unrestricted converse with great minds, is a
very unsatisfying thought, because it yields so little material to
work upon.

The fact, of course, is that it is just the variety of experience
which makes life interesting,--toil and rest, pain and relief, hope
and satisfaction, danger and security,--and if we once remove the
idea of vicissitude from life, it all becomes an indolent and
uninspiring affair. It is the process of change which is
delightful, the finding out what we can do and what we cannot,
going from ignorance to knowledge, from clumsiness to skill; even
our relations with those whom we love are all bound up with the
discoveries we make about them and the degree in which we can help
them and affect them. What the mind instinctively dislikes is
stationariness; and an existence in which there was nothing to
escape from, nothing more to hope for, to learn, to desire, would
be frankly unendurable.

The reason why we dread death is because it seems to be a
suspension of all our familiar activities. It would be terrible to
have nothing but memory to depend upon. The only use of memory is
that it distracts us a little from present conditions if they are
dull, and it is only too true that the recollection in sorrow of
happy things is torture of the worst kind.

Once when Tennyson was suffering from a dangerous illness, his
friend Jowett wrote to Lady Tennyson to suggest that the poet might
find comfort in thinking of all the good he had done. But that is
not the kind of comfort that a sufferer desires; we may envy a good
man his retrospect of activity, but we cannot really suppose that
to meditate complacently upon what one has been enabled to do is
the final thought that a good man is likely to indulge. He is far
more likely to torment himself over all that he might have done.

It is true, I think, that old and tired people pass into a quiet
serenity; but it is the serenity of the old dog who sleeps in the
sun, wags his tail if he is invited to bestir himself, but does not
leave his place; and if one reaches that condition, it is but a
dumb gratitude at the thought that nothing more is expected of the
worn-out frame and fatigued mind. But no one, I should imagine,
really hopes to step into immortality so tired and worn out that
the highest hope that he can frame is that he will be let alone for
ever. We must not trust the drowsiness of the outworn spirit to
frame the real hopes of humanity. If we believe that the next
experience ahead of us is like that of the mariners,


     In the afternoon they came unto a land
     In which it seemed always afternoon,


then we acquiesce in a dreamless sort of sleep as the best hope of
man.

No, we must rather trust the desires of the spirit at its
healthiest and most vigorous, and these are all knit up with the
adventure of escape, as I have said. There is something hostile on
our track: the copse that closes in upon the road is thick with
spears; presences that do not wish us well move darkly in the wood
and keep pace with us, and the only explanation we can give is that
we need to be spurred on by fear if we are not drawn forward by
desire or hope. We have to keep moving, and if we will not run to
the goal, we must at least flee, with backward glances at something
which threatens us.

There is an old and strange Eastern allegory of a man wandering in
the desert; he draws near to a grove of trees, when he suddenly
becomes aware that there is a lion on his track, hurrying and
bounding along on the scent of his steps. The man flees for safety
into the grove; he sees there a roughly built water-tank of stone,
excavated in the ground, and built up of masonry much fringed with
plants. He climbs swiftly down to where he sees a ledge close on
the water; as he does this, he sees that in the water lies a great
lizard, with open jaws, watching him with wicked eyes. He stops
short, and he can just support himself among the stones by holding
on to the branches of a plant which grows from a ledge above him.
While he thus holds on, with death behind him and before, he feels
the branches quivering, and sees above, out of reach, two mice, one
black and one white, which are nibbling at the stems he holds and
will soon sever them. He waits despairingly, and while he does so,
he sees that there are drops of honey on the leaves which he holds;
he puts his lips to them, licks them off, and finds them very
sweet.

The mice stand, no doubt, for night and day, and the honey is the
sweetness of life, which it is possible to taste and relish even
when death is before and behind; and it is true that the utter
precariousness of life does not, as a matter of fact, distract us
from the pleasure of it, even though the strands to which we hold
are slowly parting. It is all, then, an adventure and an escape;
but even in the worst insecurity, we may often be surprised to find
that it is somehow sweet.

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.

There is an interesting story of how Tennyson once stayed with
Bradley, when Bradley was headmaster of Marlborough, and said
grimly one evening that he envied Bradley, with all his heart, his
life of hard, fruitful, necessary work, and owned that he sometimes
felt about his own poetry, what, after all, did all this elaborate
versifying amount to, and who was in any way the better or happier
for it?

The truth is that the man of letters forgets that this is exactly
the same thought as that which haunts the busy man after, let us
say, a day of looking over examination-papers or attending
committees. The busy man, if he reflects at all, is only too apt to
say to himself, "Here have I been slaving away like a stone-
breaker, reading endless scripts, discussing an infinity of petty
details, and what on earth is the use of it all?" Yet Sir Alfred
Lyall once said that if a man had once taken a hand in big public
affairs, he thought of literature much as a man who had crossed the
Atlantic in a sailing-yacht might think of sculling a boat upon the
Thames. One of the things that moved Dr. Johnson to a tempest of
wrath was when on the death of Lord Lichfield, the Lord Chancellor,
Boswell said to him that if he had taken to the law as a
profession, he might have been Lord Chancellor, and with the same
title. Johnson was extremely angry, and said that it was unfriendly
to remind a man of such things when it was too late.

One may conclude from such incidents and confessions that even some
of the most eminent men of letters have been haunted by the sense
that in following literature they have not chosen the best part,
and that success in public life is a more useful thing as well as
more glorious.

But one has to ask oneself what exactly an imaginative man means by
success, and what it is that attracts him in the idea of it.
Putting aside the more obvious and material advantages,--wealth,
position, influence, reputation,--a man of far-reaching mind and
large ideas may well be haunted by a feeling that if he had entered
public life, he might by example, precept, influence, legislation,
have done something to turn his ideas and schemes into accomplished
facts, have effected some moral or social reform, have set a mark
on history. It must be remembered that a great writer's fame is
often a posthumous growth, and we must be very careful not to
attribute to a famous author a consciousness in his lifetime of his
subsequent, or even of his contemporary, influence. It is
undoubtedly true that Ruskin and Carlyle affected the thought of
their time to an extraordinary degree. Ruskin summed up in his
teaching an artistic ideal of the pursuit and influence of beauty,
while Carlyle inculcated a more combative theory of active
righteousness and the hatred of cant. But Ruskin's later years were
spent in the shadow of a profound sense of failure. He thought that
the public enjoyed his pretty phrases and derided his ideas; while
Carlyle felt that he had fulminated in vain, and that the world was
settling down more comfortably than ever into the pursuit of
bourgeois prosperity and dishonest respectability.

And yet if, on the other hand, one compares the subsequent fame of
men of action with the fame of men of letters, the contrast is
indeed bewildering. Who attaches the smallest idea to the
personality of the Lord Lichfield whom Dr. Johnson envied? Who that
adores the memory of Wordsworth knows anything about Lord Goderich,
a contemporary prime minister? The world reads and re-reads the
memoirs of dead poets, goes on pilgrimage to the tiny cottages
where they lived in poverty, cherishes the smallest records and
souvenirs of them. The names of statesmen and generals become dim
except to professed historians, while the memories of great
romancers and lyrists, and even of lesser writers still, go on
being revived and redecorated. What would Keats have thought, as he
lay dying in his high, hot, noisy room at Rome, if he had known
that a century later every smallest detail of his life, his most
careless letters, would be scanned by eager eyes, when few save
historians would be able to name a single member of the cabinet in
power at the time of his death?

There is a charming story told by Lord Morley, of how he once met
Rossetti in the street at Chelsea when a general parliamentary
election was going on, and it transpired, after a few remarks, that
Rossetti was not even aware that this was the case. When he was
informed, he said with some hesitation that he supposed that one
side or other would get in, and that, after all, it did not very
much matter. Lord Morley, telling the anecdote, said that he
himself had forgotten which side DID get in, from which he
concluded that it had not very much mattered.

The truth is that national life has to go on, and that very
elaborate arrangements are made by statesmen and politicians for
its administration. But it is in reality very unimportant. The
wisest statesman in the world cannot affect it very much; he can
only take advantage of the trend of public opinion. If he outruns
it, he is instantly stranded; and perhaps the most he can do is to
foresee how people will be thinking some six weeks ahead. But
meanwhile the writer is speaking from the soul and to the soul; he
is suggesting, inspiring, stimulating; he is presenting thoughts in
so beautiful a form that they become desirable and adorable; and
what the average man believes to-day is what the idealist has
believed half a century before. He must take his chance of fame;
and his best hope is to eschew rhetoric, which implies the
consciousness of opponents and auditors, and just present his
dreams and visions as serenely and beautifully as he can. The
statesman has to argue, to strive, to compromise, to convert if he
can, to coerce if he cannot. It is a dusty encounter, and he must
sacrifice grace and perhaps truth in the onset. He may gain his
point, achieve the practicable and the second best; but he is an
opportunist and a schemer, and he cannot make life into what he
wills, but only into what he can manage. Of course the writer in a
way risks more; he may reject the homely, useful task, and yet not
have the strength to fit wings to his visions; he may live
fruitlessly and die unpraised, with the thought that he has lost
two birds in the hand for one which is not even in the bush. He may
turn out a mere Don Quixote, helmeted with a barber's basin and
tilting against windmills; but he could not choose otherwise, and
he has paid a heavier price for his failure than many a man has
paid for his success.

It is probably a wholly false antithesis to speak of life as a
contrast to literature; one might as well draw a distinction
between eating and drinking. What is meant as a rule is that if a
man devotes himself to imaginative creation, to the perception and
expression of beauty, he must be prepared to withdraw from other
activities. But the imagination is a function of life, after all,
and precisely the same holds good of stockbroking. The real fact is
that we Anglo-Saxons, by instinct and inheritance, think of the
acquisition of property as the most obvious function of life. As
long as a man is occupied in acquiring property, we ask no further
questions; we take for granted that he is virtuously employed, as
long as he breaks no social rules: while if he succeeds in getting
into his hands an unusual share of the divisible goods of the
world, we think highly of him. Indeed, our ideals have altered very
little since barbarous times, and we still are under the impression
that resourcefulness is the mark of the hero. I imagine that
leisure as an occupation is much more distrusted and disapproved of
in America than in England; but even in England, where the power to
be idle is admired and envied, a man who lives as heroic a life as
can be attained by playing golf and shooting pheasants is more
trusted and respected than a rich man who paints or composes music
for his amusement. Field sports are intelligible enough; the
pursuit of art requires some explanation, and incurs a suspicion of
effeminacy or eccentricity. Only when authorship becomes a source
of profit is it thoroughly respectable.

I had a friend who died not very long ago. He had in his younger
days done a little administrative work; but he was wealthy, and at
a comparatively early age he abandoned himself to leisure. He
travelled, he read, he went much into society, he enjoyed the
company of his friends. When he died he was spoken of as an
amateur, and praised as a cricketer of some merit. Even his closest
friends seemed to find it necessary to explain and make excuses; he
was shy, he stammered, he was not suited to parliamentary life; but
I can think of few people who did so much for his friends or who so
radiated the simplest sort of happiness. To be welcomed by him, to
be with him, put a little glow on life, because you felt
instinctively that he was actively enjoying every hour of your
company. I thought, I remember, at his death, how hopeless it was
to assess a man's virtue and usefulness in the terms of his career.
If he had entered Parliament, registered a silent vote, spent his
time in social functions, letter-writing, lobby-gossip, he would
have been acclaimed as a man of weight and influence; but as it
was, though he had stood by friends in trouble, had helped lame
dogs over stiles, had been the centre of good-will and mutual
understanding to a dozen groups and circles, it seemed impossible
to recognise that he had done anything in his generation. It is not
to be claimed that his was a life of persistent benevolence or
devoted energy; but I thought of a dozen men who had lived
selfishly and comfortably, making money and amassing fortunes,
without a touch of real kindness or fine tenderness about them, who
would yet be held to have done well and to have deserved respect,
when compared with this peace-maker!

And then I perceived how intolerably false many of our cherished
ideals are; that apart from lives of pure selfishness and
annexation, many a professed philanthropist or active statesman is
merely following a sterile sort of ambition; that it is rare on the
whole for so-called public men to live for the sake of the public;
while the simple, kindly, uncalculating, friendly attitude to life
is a real source of grace and beauty, and leaves behind it a
fragrant memory enshrined in a hundred hearts.

So, too, when it comes to what we call literature. No one supposes
that we can do without it, and in its essence it is but an
extension of happy, fine, vivid talk. It is but the delighted
perception of life, the ecstasy of taking a hand in the great
mystery, the joy of love and companionship, the worship of beauty
and desire and energy and memory taking shape in the most effective
form that man can devise. There is no real merit in the
accumulation of property; only the people who do the necessary work
of the world, and the people who increase the joy of the world are
worth a moment's thought, and yet both alike are little regarded.

Of course where the weakness of the artistic life really lies is
that it is often not taken up out of mere communicativeness and
happy excitement, as a child tells a breathless tale, but as a
device for attracting the notice and earning the applause of the
world; and then it is on a par with all other self-regarding
activities. But if it is taken up with a desire to give rather than
to receive, as an irrepressible sharing of delight, it becomes not
a solemn and dignified affair, but just one of the most beautiful
and uncalculating impulses in the world.

Then there falls another shadow across the path; the unhappiest
natures I know are the natures of keen emotion and swift perception
who yet have not the gift of expressing what they feel in any
artistic medium. It is these, alas! who cumber the streets and
porticoes of literature. They are attracted away from homely toil
by the perilous sweetness of art, and when they attempt to express
their raptures, they have no faculty or knack of hand. And these
men and women fall with zealous dreariness or acrid contemptuousness,
and radiate discomfort and uneasiness about them.

"A book," said Dr. Johnson, "should show one either how to enjoy
life or how to endure it"--was ever the function of literature
expressed more pungently or justly? Any man who enjoys or endures
has a right to speak, if he can. If he can help others to enjoy or
to endure, then he need never be in any doubt as to his part in
life; while if he cannot ecstatically enjoy, he can at least good-
humouredly endure.






III

THE NEW POETS





There's a dark window in a gable which looks out over my narrow
slip of garden, where the almond-trees grow, and to-day the dark
window, with its black casement lines, had become suddenly a
Japanese panel. The almond was in bloom, with its delicious, pink,
geometrical flowers, not a flower which wins one's love, somehow;
it is not homely or sweet enough for that. But it is unapproachably
pure and beautiful, with a touch of fanaticism about it--the
fanaticism which comes of stainless strength, as though one woke in
the dawn and found an angel in one's room: he would not quite
understand one's troubles!

But when I looked lower down, there was a sweeter message still,
for the mezereon was awake, with its tiny porcelain crimson flowers
and its minute leaves of bright green, budding as I think Aaron's
rod must have budded, the very crust of the sprig bursting into
little flames of green and red.

I thought at the sight of all this that some good fortune was about
to befall me; and so it did. When I came back there came a friend
to see me whom I seldom see and much enjoy seeing. He is young, but
he plays a fine part in the world, and he carries about with him
two very fine qualities; one is a great and generous curiosity
about what our writers are doing. He is the first man from whom I
hear of new and beautiful work; and he praises it royally, he
murmurs phrases, he even declaims it in his high, thin voice, which
wavers like a dry flame. And what makes all this so refreshing is
that his other great quality is an intensely critical spirit, which
stares closely and intently at work, as through a crystalline lens.

After we had talked a little, I said to him: "Come, praise me some
new writers, you herald of the dawn! You always do that when you
come to see me, and you must do it now." He smiled secretly, and
drew out a slim volume from his pocket and read me some verses; I
will not be drawn into saying the name of the poet.

"How do you find that?" he said.

"Oh," I said, "it is very good; but is it the finest gold?"

"Yes," he said, "it is that." And he then read me some more.

"Now," I said, "I will be frank with you. That seems to me very
musical and accomplished; but it has what is to me the one
unpardonable fault in poetry: it is literary. He has heard and
read, that poet, so much sweet and solemn verse, that his mind
murmurs like a harp hung among the trees that are therein; the
winds blow into music. But I don't want that; I want a fount of
song, a spring of living water." He looked a little vexed at that,
and read me a few more pages. And then he went on to praise the
work of two or three other writers, and added that he believed
there was going to be a great outburst of poetry after a long
frost.

"Well," I said, "I am sure I hope so. And if there is one thing in
the world that I desire, it is that I may be able to recognise and
love the new voices."

And then I told him a story of which I often think. When I was a
young man, very much pre-occupied with Tennyson and Omar Khayyam
and Swinburne, I went to stay with an elderly business man, a
friend of my family. He was a great stout, rubicund man, very good-
natured, and he had a voice like the cry of an expiring mouse,
shrill and thin. We were sitting after dinner in his big dining-
room, several of us, looking out into a wide, dusty garden, when
the talk turned on books, and I suppose I praised Swinburne, for he
asked me to say some, and I quoted the poem which says


        And even the weariest river
          Winds somewhere safe to sea.


He heard me attentively enough, and said it was pretty good; but
then he said that it was nothing to Byron, and in his squeaky voice
he quoted a quantity of Byron, whose poetry, I am sorry to say, I
regarded as I might regard withered flowers or worse. His eyes
brimmed with tears, and they fell on to his shirt-front; and then
he said decisively that there had been no poetry since Byron--none
at all. Tennyson was mere word music, Browning was unintelligible,
and so forth. And I remember how, with the insolence of youth, I
thought how dreadful it was that the old man should have lost all
sympathy and judgment; because poetry then seemed to me a really
important matter, full of tones and values. I did not understand
then, as I understand now, that it is all a question of signals and
symbols, and that poetry is but, as the psalm says, what happens
when one day telleth another and one night certifieth another. I
know now that there can be no deceit about poetry, and that no poet
can make you feel more than he feels himself, though he cannot
always make another feel as much; and that the worth of his art
exists only just in so far as he can say what he feels; and then I
thought of my old friend's mind as I might think of a scarecrow
among lonely fields, a thing absurd, ragged, and left alone, while
real men went about their business. I did not say it, but I thought
it in my folly. So I told my young friend that story; and I said:

"I know that it does not really matter what one loves and is moved
by as long as one loves something and is moved by its beauty. But,
still, I do not want that to happen to me; I do not want to be like
a pebble on the beach, when the water draws past it to the land. I
want to feel and understand the new signals. In the nursery," I
said, "we used to anger our governess when she read us a piece of
poetry, by saying to her, 'Who made it up?' 'You should say, "Who
wrote it?"' she would say. But I feel now inclined to ask, 'Who
made it up?' and I feel, too, like the sign-painter on his rounds,
who saw a new sign hung up at an inn, and said in disgust, 'That
looks as if some one had been doing it himself.' Your poet seems to
me only a very gifted and accomplished amateur."

"Well," he said rather petulantly, "it may be so, of course; but I
don't think that you can hope to advance, if you begin by being
determined to disapprove."

"No, not that," I said. "But one knows of many cases of inferior
poets, who were taken up and trumpeted abroad by well-meaning
admirers, whom one sees now to have had no significance, but to be
so many blind alleys in the street of art; they led nowhere; one
had just to retrace one's steps, if one explored them. Indeed," I
said, "I had rather miss a great poet than be misled by a little
one."

"Ah, no," he said, "I don't feel that. I had rather be thrilled and
carried away, even if I discovered afterwards that it was not
really great."

"If you will freely admit that this may not be great," I said, "I
am on your side. I do not mind your saying, 'This touches me with
interest and delight; but it is not to be reckoned among the lords
of the garden.' What I object to is your saying, 'This is great and
eternal.' I feel that I should be able to respond to the great
poet, if he flashed out among us; but he must be great, and
especially in a time when there really is a quantity of very
beautiful verse. I suspect that perhaps this time is one that will
furnish a very beautiful anthology. There are many people alive who
have written perhaps half a dozen exquisite lyrics, when the spring
and the soaring thought and the vision and the beautiful word all
suddenly conspired together. But there is no great, wide, large,
tender heart at work. No, I won't even say that; but is there any
great spirit who has all that and a supreme word-power as well? I
believe that there is more poetry, more love of beauty, more
emotion in the world than ever; and a great many men and women are
living their poetry who just can't write it or sing it."

"A perverse generation seeking after a sign," he said rather
grimly, "and there is no sign forthcoming except the old sign, that
has been there for centuries! I don't care," he added, "about the
sign of the thing. It is the quality that I want; and these new
poets of whom I have been speaking have got the quality. That is
all I ask for."

"No," I said, "I want a great deal more than that! Browning gave us
the sense of the human heart, bewildered by all the new knowledge,
and yet passionately desiring. Tennyson--"

"Poor old Tennyson!" he said.

"That is very ungracious," I said. "You are as perverse as I was
about Byron when the old banker quoted him with tears. I was going
to say, and I will say it, that Tennyson, with all his faults, was
a great lord of music; and he put into words the fine, homely
domestic emotion of the race--the poetry of labour, order, and
peace. It was new and rich and splendid, and because it seems to
you old-fashioned, you call it mere respectability; but it was the
marching music of the world, because he showed men that faith was
enlarged and not overturned by science. These two were great,
because they saw far and wide; they knew by instinct just what the
ordinary man was thinking, who yet wished his life to be set to
music. These little men of yours don't see that. They have their
moments of ecstasy, as we all have, in the blossoming orchard full
of the songs of birds. And that will always and for ever give us
the lyric, if the skill is there. But I want something more than
that; I, you, thousands of people, are feeling something that makes
the brain thrill and the heart leap. The mischief is that we don't
know what it is, and I want a great poet to come and tell us."

"Ah," he said, "I am afraid you want something ethical, something
that satisfies the man in Tennyson who


     Walked between his wife and child
     And now and then he gravely smiled.


But we have done with all that. What we want is people who can
express the fine, rare, unusual thoughts of highly organised
creatures, and you want a poet to sing of bread and butter!"

"Why, yes," I said, "I think I agree with Fitz-Gerald that tea and
bread and butter are the only foods worth anything--the only things
one cannot do without. And it is just the things that one cannot do
without that I want the new great poet to sing of. I agree with
William Morris that art is the one thing we all want, the
expression of man's joy in his work. And the more that art retires
into fine nuances and intellectual subtleties, the more that it
becomes something esoteric and mysterious, the less I care about
it. When Tennyson said to the farmer's wife, 'What's the news?' she
replied, 'Mr. Tennyson, there's only one piece of news worth
telling, and that is that Christ died for all men.' Tennyson said
very grandly and simply, 'Ah, that's old news and good news and NEW
news!' And that is exactly what I want the poets to tell us. It is
a common inheritance, not a refined monopoly, that I claim."

He laughed at this, and said:

"I think that's rather a mid-Victorian view; I will confute you out
of the Tennyson legend. When Tennyson called Swinburne's verse
'poisonous honey, brought from France,' Swinburne retorted by
speaking of the laureate's domestic treacle. You can't have both.
If you like treacle, you must not clamour for honey."

"Yes, I prefer honey," I said, "but you seem to me to be in search
of what I called LITERARY poetry. That is what I am afraid of. I
don't want the work of a mind fed on words, and valuing ideas the
more that they are uncommon. I hate what is called 'strong' poetry;
that seems to me to be generally the coarsest kind of romanticism--
melodrama in fact. I want to have in poetry what we are getting in
fiction--the best sort of realism. Realism is now abjuring the
heroic theory; it has thrown over the old conventions, the
felicitous coincidences, life arranged on ideal lines; and it has
gone straight to life itself, strong, full-blooded, eager life,
full of mistakes and blunders and failures and sharp disasters and
fears. Life goes shambling along like a big dog, but it has got its
nose on the scent of something. It is a much more mysterious and
prodigious affair than life rearranged upon romantic lines. It
means something very vast indeed, though it splashes through mud
and scrambles through hedges. You may laugh at what you call
ethics, but that is only a name for one of many kinds of
collisions. It is the fact that we are always colliding with
something, always coming unpleasant croppers, that is the exciting
thing. I want the poet to tell me what the obscure winged thing is
that we are following; and if he can't explain it to me, I want to
be made to feel that it is worth while following. I don't say that
all life is poetical material. I don't think that it is; but there
is a thing called beauty which seems to me the most maddeningly
perfect thing in the world. I see it everywhere, in the dawn, in
the far-off landscape, with all its rolling lines of wood and
field, in the faces and gestures of people, in their words and
deeds. That is a clue, a golden thread, a line of scent, and I
shall be more than content if I am encouraged to follow that."

"Ah," he said, "now I partly agree with you. It is precisely that
which the new men are after; they take the pure gold of life and
just coin it into word and phrase, and it is that which I discern
in them."

"Yes," I said, "but I want something a great deal bigger than that.
I want to see it everywhere and in everything. I don't want to have
to wall in a little space and make it silent and beautiful, and
forget what is happening outside. I want a poet to tell me what it
is that leaps in the eyes and beckons in the smiles of people whom
I meet--people whom often enough I could not live with,--the more's
the pity,--but whom I want to be friends with, all the same. I want
the common joys and hopes and visions to be put into music. And
when I find a man, like Walt Whitman, who does show me the beauty
and wonder and the strong affections and joys of simple hearts, so
that I feel sure that we are all desiring the same thing, though we
cannot tell each other what it is, then I feel I am in the presence
of a poet indeed."

My young friend shut up the little book which he had been holding
in his hand.

"Yes," he said, "that would be a great thing; but one can't get at
things in that way now. We must all specialise; and if you want to
follow the new aims and ideals of art, you must put aside a great
deal of what is called our common humanity, and you must be content
to follow a very narrow path among the stars. I do not mind
speaking quite frankly. I do not think you understand what art is.
It is essentially a mystery, and the artist is a sort of hermit in
the world. It is not a case of 'joys in widest commonalty spread,'
as Daddy Wordsworth said. That is quite a different affair; but art
has got to withdraw itself, to be content to be misunderstood; and
I think that you have just as much parted company with it as your
old friend the banker."

"Well," I said, "we shall see. Anyhow, I will give your new poets a
careful reading, and I shall be glad if I can really admire them,
because, indeed, I don't want to be stranded on a lee shore."

And so my friend departed; and I began to wonder whether the art of
which he spoke was not, after all, as real a thing as the beauty of
my almond-flower and my mezereons! If so, I should like to be able
to include it and understand it, though I do not want to think that
it is the end.






IV

WALT WHITMAN





1


There come days and hours in the lives of the busiest, most active,
most eager of us, when we suddenly realise with a shock or a
shudder, it may be, or perhaps with a sense of solemn mystery, that
has something vast, inspiring, hopeful about it, the solidity and
the isolation of our own identity. Much of our civilised life is an
attempt, not deliberate but instinctive, to escape from this. We
organise ourselves into nations and parties, into sects and
societies, into families and companies, that we may try to persuade
ourselves that we are not alone; and we get nearest to persuading
ourselves that we are at one, when we enter into the secrets of
love or friendship, and feel that we know as we are known. But even
that vision fades, and we become aware, at sad moments, that the
comradeship is over; the soul that came so close to us, smiled in
our eyes, was clasped to our heart, has left us, has passed into
the darkness, or if it still lives and breathes, has drawn away
into the crowd. And then one sees that no fusion is possible, that
half the secrets of the heart must remain unguessed and untold.
That even if one had the words to do it, one could not express the
sense of our personality, much of which escapes even our own
conscious and critical thought. One has, let us say, a serious
quarrel with a close friend, and one hears him explaining and
protesting, and yet he does not know what has happened, cannot
understand, cannot even perceive where the offence lay; and at such
a moment it may dawn on us that we too do not know what we have
done; we have exhibited some ugly part of ourselves, of which we
are not conscious; we have stricken and wounded another heart, and
we cannot see how it was done. We did not intend to do it, we cry.
Or again we realise that we regard some one with a causeless
aversion, and cannot give any reason for it; or we see that we
ourselves have the same freezing and disconcerting effect upon
another; and so after hundreds of such experiences, we become aware
at last that no real, free, entire communication is possible; that
however eagerly we tell our thoughts and display our temperaments,
there must always remain something which is wrapped in darkness,
the incommunicable essence of ourself that can blend with no other
soul.

But again it is true that all human souls who have an instinct for
expression--writers, painters, musicians--have always been trying
to do this one thing, to make signals, to communicate, to reveal
themselves, to "unpack the heart in words"; and what has often
hindered the process and nullified their efforts has been an uneasy
dignity and vanity, that must try to make out a better case than
the facts justify. For a variety of motives, and indeed for the
best of motives, men and women suppress, exalt, refine the
presentment of themselves, because they desire to be loved, and
think that they must therefore be careful to be admired, just as
the lover adorns himself and puts his best foot forward, and hides
all that may disconcert interest or sympathy. So that it happens in
life that often when we most desire to be real, we are most unreal.

What differentiates Walt Whitman from all other writers that I
know, is that he tried to reveal himself, and on the whole
contrived to do so with less reserve than any other human being.

"I know perfectly well my own egotism," he wrote; "I know my
omnivorous lines, and must not write any less." He was not
disconcerted by any failure of art, or any propriety, or any
apparent discrepancy.


     Do I contradict myself?
     Very well then, I contradict myself.
     I am large, I contain multitudes.


He had no artistic conscience, as we say.


  Easily written, loose-finger'd chords--I feel the thrum of your
    climax and close.


In the curious and interesting essay called "A Backward Glance
over Travel's Roads," which he wrote late in life, surveying his
work, he admits that he has not gained acceptance, that his book is
a failure, and has incurred marked anger and contempt; and he good-
humouredly quotes a sentence from a friend's letter, written in
1884, "I find a solid line of enemies to you everywhere." And yet,
he says, for all that, and in spite of everything, he has had "his
say entirely his own way, and put it unerringly on record." It is
simply "a faithful, and doubtless self-willed record," he says.

That then was Walt Whitman's programme, surely in its very scope
and range worthy of some amazement and respect! Because it is not
done insolently or with any braggadocio, in spite of what he calls
"the barbaric yawp." I do not think that anything is more notable
than the good-humour and the equanimity of it all. He is not
interested in himself in a morbid or self-conscious way; he has not
the slightest wish to make himself out to be fine or magnificent or
superior--it is quite the other way. He is merely going to try to
break down the barriers between soul and soul, to let the river of
self ripple and welter and wash among the grasses at the feet of
man. He does not wish you to admire it, though he hopes you may
love it; there are to be no excuses or pretences; he does not wish
to be seen at certain angles or in subdued lights. He casts himself
down in his nakedness, and lets who will observe him; and all this
not because he is either hero or saint; his proudest title is to be
an average man, one of the crowd, with passions, weaknesses,
uglinesses, even deformities. He is there, he is just so, and you
may take it or leave it; but he is not ashamed or sensitive, nor in
any way abashed; he smiles his frank, good-natured smile; and
suddenly one perceives the greatness of it! He is neither fanatic
nor buffoon; he is not performing like the boxer or wrestler, nor
is he sitting mournfully and patiently for the sake of the pence,
like the fat man at the fair; he is merely trying to say what he
thinks and feels, and if he has any aim at all, it is to tempt
others into unabashed sincerity. He cries to man, "If you would
only recognise yourself as you are, without pretences or excuses,
the dignity which your subterfuges are meant to secure would be
yours without question." It is not a question of good, bad, or
indifferent. Everyone has a right to be where he is, and there is a
reason for him and a justification too. That is the gospel of Walt
Whitman; it may be a bad gospel, or an ugly one, or an indecorous
one; but no one can pretend that it is not a big one.


2


One immense and fruitful discovery Walt Whitman made, and yet
one can hardly call it a discovery; it is more perhaps an inspired
doctrine, unsupported by argument, wholly unphilosophical,
proclaimed with a childlike loudness and confidence, but yet
probably true: the doctrine, that is, of the indissoluble union
between body and soul. Indissoluble, one calls it, and yet nothing
is more patent than the fact that it is a union which is invariably
and inevitably dissolved in death; while on the other hand, one
sees in certain physical catastrophes, such as paralysis, brain-
concussion, senile decay, insanity, the soul apparently reduced to
the condition of a sleeping partner, or so far deranged as to be
unable to express anything but some one dominant emotion; or, more
bewildering still, one sees the moral sense seemingly suspended by
a physical disorder. And yet for all that, the doctrine may be
essentially and substantially true; the vitality of the soul may be
bound up with its power of expressing itself in material terms. It
may be that the soul-stuff, which we call life, has an existence
apart from its material manifestation, and that individuality, as
we see it, may be a mere phenomenon of the passage of a force, like
the visibility of electricity under certain conditions; indeed it
seems more probable that matter is a function of thought rather
than thought a function of matter. It is likely enough that animals
have no conscious sense of any division of aims, any antagonism
between physical and mental desires; but as the human race
develops, the imagination, the sense of the opposition between the
reason and the appetite, begins to emerge. Man becomes aware that
his will and his wish may not coincide; and thus develops the
medieval theory of asceticism, the belief that the body is
essentially vile, and suggests base desires to the mind, which the
mind has the power of controlling. That conception fitted closely
to the feudal theory of government, in which the interests of the
ruler and the subject did not necessarily coincide; the ruler
governed with his own interests in view, and coerced his subjects
if he could; but the new theory of government does not separate the
ruler from the state. The government of a state with democratic
institutions is the will of the people taking shape, and the
phenomena of rule are but those of the popular will expressing
itself, the object being that each individual should have his due
preponderance; the ultimate end being as much individual liberty as
is consistent with harmonious co-operation.

That is a rough analogy of the doctrine of Walt Whitman; namely,
that the individual, soul and body, is a polity; and that the true
life is to be found in a harmonious co-operation of body and soul.
The reason is not at liberty to deride or to neglect the bodily
desires, even the meanest and basest of them, because every desire,
whether of soul or body, is the expression of something that exists
in the animating principle. Take, for example, the case of physical
passion. That, in its ultimate analysis, is the instinct for
propagating life, the transmission and continuance of vitality. The
reason must not ignore or deplore it, but direct it into the proper
channels; it may indicate the dangers that it incurs; but merely to
thwart it, to regard it with shame and horror, is to establish an
internecine warfare. The true function is rather to ennoble the
physical desire by the just concurrence of the soul. But the
essence of the situation is co-operation and not coercion; and each
must be ready to compromise. If the physical nature will not
compromise with the reason, the disasters of unbridled passion
follow; if the reason will not co-operate with the physical
desire, the result is a sterile intellectualism, a life of starved
and timid experience. It was here, of course, that Walt Whitman's
view gave offence; he thought of civilisation as a conventional
system, cultivating a false shame and an ignoble reserve about
bodily processes. But the vital truth of his doctrine lies in the
fact that many of our saddest, because most remediable, disasters
are caused by a timid reticence about the strongest force that
animates the world, the force of reproduction. Whitman felt, and
truly felt, that reason and sentiment have outrun discretion. It
may be asked, indeed, how this terror of all outspokenness has
developed in the human race, so that parents cannot bear to speak
to their children about an experience which they will be certain to
make acquaintance with in some far more violent and base form. Does
this shrinking delicacy, this sacred reserve, mean nothing, it may
be asked? Well, it may be said, if this sensitiveness is so
valuable that it must not be required to anticipate tenderly and
faithfully what will be communicated in a grosser form, then
silence is justified, and not otherwise. But to transfer this
reticence about a matter of awful concern to some other region of
morals, what should we think of the parent who so feared to lessen
the affection of a child by rebuking it for a lie or a theft as to
let it go out into the world ignorant that either was reprobated?
Whitman's argument would rather be that a parent should say to a
child, "There is a force within you which will to a large extent
determine the happiness of your life; it must be guarded and
controlled. You will probably not be able to ignore or disregard
it, and you must bring it into harmonious co-operation with mind
and reason and duty. There is nothing that is shameful about its
being there; indeed, it is the dominant force in the world. The
shameful thing is to use it shamelessly." Yet the attitude of
parents too often is to treat the subject, not as if it were
sacred, but as if it were unmentionable; so that the very fact of
the child's own origin would seem to be an essentially shameful
thing.

The Greeks, it is true, had an instinct for the thought of the
vital interdependence of body and soul; but they thought too much
of the glowing manifestation of the health and beauty of youth, and
viewed the decay and deformity of the human frame too much as a
disgrace and an abasement. But here again comes in the largeness of
Whitman's presentment, that whatever disasters befall the body,
whether through drudgery or battle, disease or sin, they are all
parts of a rich and large experience, not necessarily interrupting
the co-operation of mind and matter. This is the strongest proof of
Whitman's faith in the essential brotherhood of man, that such
horrors and wretchednesses do not seem to him to interrupt the
design, or to destroy the possibility of a human sympathy which is
instinctive rather than a matter of devout effort. Whitman is here
on the side of the very greatest and finest human spirits, in that
he is shocked and appalled by nothing. He does not call it the best
of worlds, but it is the only world that he knows; and the glowing
interest, the passionate emotion, the vital rush and current of it,
prove beyond all doubt that we are in touch with something very
splendid and magnificent indeed, and that no misdeed or disaster
forfeits our share in the inheritance. He is utterly at variance
with the hideous Calvinistic theory, that God sent some of His
creatures into the world for their pain and ruin. Whatever happens
to your body or your soul, says Whitman, it is worth your while to
live and to have lived. He adopts no facile system of compensations
and offsets. He rather protests with all his might that, however
broken your body or fatuous your mind, it is a good thing for you
to have taken a hand in the affair; and that the essence of the
whole situation has not been your success, your dignity, your
comfortable obliteration of half your faculties, or on the other
hand your failure, your vileness, or your despair, but that just at
the time and place at which the phenomenon called yourself took
place, that intricate creature, with its bodily needs and desires,
its joys of the senses, its outlook on the strange world, took
shape and made you exactly what you are, and nothing else. As he
says in one of his finest apologues:


   Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided,
      nothing is scanted.

   Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui,
      what you are picks its way.


3


Then too Walt Whitman claims to be the poet, not of the past or
even only of the present, but the singer of the future. He says in
The Backward Glance, which I have already quoted, and which must be
carefully read by anyone who wishes to understand his work--at
least in so far as he understood it himself,--"Isolated advantages
in any rank or grace or fortune--the direct or indirect threads of
all the poetry of the past--are in my opinion distasteful to the
republican genius. . . . Established poems, I know, have the very
great advantage of chanting the already performed, so full of
glories, reminiscences dear to the minds of men." And he says too
that, "The educated world seems to have been growing more and more
ennuied for ages, leaving to our time the inheritance of it all."
And he further says: "The ranges of heroism and loftiness with
which Greek and feudal poets endow'd their godlike or lordly born
characters, I was to endow the democratic averages of America. I
was to show that we, here and to-day, are eligible to the grandest
and the best--more eligible now than any times of old were."

This is a lofty claim, boldly advanced and maintained; and here I
am on uncertain ground, because I do not suppose that I can realise
what the democratic spirit of America really is. Granted, however,
that it is a free and a noble spirit, I feel a doubt as to whether
it is possible for any nation, at any time in the world's history,
really to take a new start. The American nation is not a new
nation; it is in a sense a very old' nation. It has had a perfectly
new and magnificent field for its energies, and it has made a sweep
of the old conventions; but it cannot get rid of its inheritance of
temperament; and I think that, so far as I can judge, it is too
anxious to emphasize its sense of revolt, its consciousness of
newness of life. Whitman himself would not be so anxious to declare
the ennui of the old, if he did not feel himself in a way
trammelled by it. The moment that a case is stated with any
vehemence, that moment it is certain that the speaker has
antagonists in his eye. There is a story of Professor Blackie at
Edinburgh making a tirade against the stuffiness of the old English
universities to Jowett, the incisive Master of Balliol. At the end,
he said generously, "I hope you people at Oxford do not think that
we are your enemies up here?" "No," said Jowett drily; "to tell the
truth, we don't think about you at all!" The man who is really
making a new beginning, serenely confident in his strength, does
not, as Professor Blackie did, concern himself with his
predecessors at all. Perhaps, indeed, the democratic spirit of
America may be quietly glorying in its strength, and may be merely
waiting till it suits it to speak. But I do not think it can be
said to have found full expression. It seems to me--I may well be
wrong--that in matters of culture, the American is far more
seriously bent on knowing what has been done in the past even than
the Englishman. The Englishman takes the past for granted; he is
probably more deeply and instinctively penetrated with its
traditions than he knows; but ever since the Romantic movement
began in England, about a century ago, the general tendency is
anarchical and anti-classical. Writers like Wordsworth, Browning,
Carlyle, Ruskin, had very little deference about them. They did not
even trouble to assert their independence; they said what they
thought, and as they thought it. But the spirit of American
literature does not on the whole appear to me to be a democratic
spirit. It has not, except in the case of Walt Whitman himself,
shown any strong tendency to invent new forms or to ventilate new
ideas. It has not broken out into crude, fresh, immature
experiments. It has rather worked as the Romans did, who anxiously
adopted and imitated Greek models, admiring the form but not
comprehending the spirit. A revolt in literary art, such as the
Romantic movement in England, has no time to concern itself with
the old forms and traditions. Writers like Wordsworth, Keats,
Shelley, Byron, Walter Scott, had far too much to say for
themselves to care how the old classical schools had worked. They
used the past as a quarry, not as a model. But the famous American
writers have not originated new forms, or invented a different use
of language; they have widened and freshened traditions, they have
not thrown them overboard. Neither, if I interpret facts rightly,
have the Americans developed a new kind of aristocracy. Whitman's
talk of democratic averages is beside the point. The process of
levelling up and levelling down only produces low standards. What
the world needs, whether in England or America, is a new sort of
aristocracy--simple, disinterested, bold, sympathetic,
enthusiastic men, of clear vision and free thought. And what the
democracy needs is not an envious dislike of all prominence and
greatness, but an eye for all greatness, and an admiration for all
courage and largeness of soul. England suspects, perhaps
erroneously, that America has founded an aristocracy of wealth and
influence and physical prowess, rather than an aristocracy of
simplicity and fearlessness. One believes that the competitive, the
prize-winning spirit, is even more dominant in America than in
England. No one doubts the fierce energy and the aplomb of America;
but can it be said that IDEAS, the existence of which is the
ultimate test of national vigour, are really more prevalent in
America than in England? It all depends, of course, upon whether
one values the Greek or the Roman ideal more highly, the interest,
that is, of life, or the desire to rule and prosper. If the aim of
civilisation is orderliness, then the Roman aim is the better; but
if the aim is spiritual animation, then the Greeks are the winners.
Yet in the last century, England has been more fruitful in ideas
than America, although America is incomparably more interested in
education than England is.

But it is hard to balance these things. What remains is the fact
that Walt Whitman has drawn a fine democratic ideal. His democrat
is essentially a worker, with every sort of vigorous impulse,
living life in an ecstasy of health and comradeship, careless of
money and influence and position, content to live a simple life,
finding beauty, and hope, and love, and labour, enough, in the
spirit of the great dictum of William Morris, that the reward of
labour is life--not success or power or wealth, but the sense of
living fully and freely.

I do not claim that this spirit exists in England yet; but does it
exist in America? What, in fact, constitutes the inspiration of the
average American; what does he expect to find in life, and to make
of life? Whitman has no doubt at all. But in what other American
writer does this ideal find expression?


4


It remains to say a few words about the artistic methods of Walt
Whitman. He himself claims no artistic standard whatever. He says
that he wishes to create an atmosphere; and that his one aim has
been suggestiveness. "I round and finish little, if anything; and
could not consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have
his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine."

He says that his purpose has been "not to carry out in the approved
style some choice plot of fortune or misfortune, or fancy, or fine
thoughts, or incidents or courtesies--all of which has been done
overwhelmingly and well, probably never to be excelled . . . but to
conform with and build on the concrete realities and theories of
the universe furnished by science, and henceforth the only
irrefragable basis for anything, verse included--to root both
influences in the emotional and imaginative action of the modern
time, and dominate all that precedes or opposes them." He adds, "No
one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a
literary performance, or attempt at such performance, or as aiming
mainly toward art or aestheticism."

It is, of course, quite true that no writer is bound by traditions
of art, and there is no one who need consider how the thing has
been done before, or follow a prescribed code. But for all that,
art is not a thing of rules made and enforced by critics. All that
critics can do is to determine what the laws of art are; because
art has laws underlying it which are as certain as the laws of
gravity, even if they are not known. The more permanent art is, the
more it conforms to these laws; because the fact is that there is a
vital impulse in the human mind towards the expression of beauty,
and a vital discrimination too as to the form and method of that
expression. Architecture, for instance, and music, are alike based
upon instinctive preferences in human beings, the one for
geometrical form, the other for the combination of vibrations. It
is a law of music, for instance, that the human being prefers an
octave in absolute unison, and not an octave of which one note is a
semitone flat. That is not a rule invented by critics; it is a law
of human perception and preference. Similarly there is undoubtedly
a law which determines human preferences in poetry, though a far
more complicated law, and not yet analysed. The new poet is not a
man who breaks the law, but one who discovers a real extension of
it.

The question then, roughly, is this: Whitman chose to express
himself in a species of poetry, based roughly upon Hebrew poetry,
such as we have in the Psalms and Prophets. If this is a true
expansion of the aesthetic law of poetry, then it is a success; if
it is not a true expansion, but only a wilful variation, not
consonant with the law, it is a failure.

Now there are many effects in Whitman which are, I believe,
inconsistent with the poetical law. Not to multiply instances, his
grotesque word-inventions--"Me imperturbe!" "No dainty dolce
affettuoso I," "the drape of the day"--his use of Greek and Latin
and French terms, not correctly used and not even rightly spelt,
his endless iterations, lists, catalogues, categories, things not
clearly visualised or even remotely perceived, but swept
relentlessly in, like the debris of some store-room, all these are
ugly mannerisms which simply blur and encumber the pages. The
question is not whether they offend a critical and cultured mind,
but whether they produce an inspiring effect upon any kind of mind.

Then too his form constantly collapses, as though he had no fixed
scheme in his mind. There are many poems which begin with an ample
sweep, and suddenly crumble to pieces, as though he were merely
tired of them.

Then again there seem to me to be some simply coarse, obscene,
unpleasant passages, not of relentless realism but of dull
inquisitiveness. They do not attract or impress; they do not
provide a contrast or an emphasis. They simply lie, like piles of
filth, in rooms designed for human habitation. If it is argued that
art may use any materials, I can only fall back upon my belief that
such passages are as instinctively repulsive to the artistic sense
as strong-smelling cheeses stacked in a library! There is no moral
or ethical law against such a practice; but the aesthetic conscience
of humanity instinctively condemns it. When I examine the
literature which has inspired and attracted the minds of humanity,
whether trained or untrained, I find that they avoid this hideous
intrusion of nastiness; and I am inclined to infer that writers who
introduce such episodes, and readers who like them, have some other
impulse in view, which is neither the sense of beauty nor the
perception of art. But if Whitman, or anyone else, can convert the
world to call this art, and to enjoy it as art, then he will prove
that he understands the law of preference better than I do.

But when all this has been said and conceded, there yet remain
countless passages of true and vital beauty, exquisite phrases,
haunting pictures, glimpses of perfect loveliness. His poems of
comradeship and the open air, his pictures of family life, have
often a magical thrill of passion, leaving one rapturous and
unsatisfied, believing in the secrets behind the world, and hoping
for a touch of like experience.

If I may take one poem as typical of the best that is in Whitman--
and what a splendid best!--it shall be "Out of the Cradle Endlessly
Rocking," from the book called Sea-drift. I declare that I can
never read this poem without profound emotion; it is here that he
fully justifies his claim to atmosphere and suggestiveness; the
nesting birds, the sea's edge, with its "liquid rims and wet
sands"--what a magical phrase!--the angry moan of the breakers
under the yellow, drooping moon, the boy with his feet in the
water, and the wind in his hair--this is all beyond criticism.


    Demon or bird! (said the boy's soul)
    Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it mostly to me?
    For I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping, now I have
       heard you
    Now in a moment I know what I am for,--I awake,
    And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer,
       louder and more sorrowful than yours,
    A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me,
       never to die.


   And then he cries to the waves to tell him what they have been
whispering all the time.


    Whereto answering, the sea,
    Delaying not, hurrying not,
    Whisper'd me through the night and very plainly before day-break,
    Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death.


This theme, it will be remembered, is worked out more fully in
the Lincoln poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," with
the "Song of Death," too long, alas, to quote here--it would be
delightful even to inscribe the words--which seems to me for
splendour of language, sweetness of rhythm, and stateliness of
cadence--to say nothing of the magnificence of the thought--to be
incontestably among the very greatest poems of the world.

If Whitman could always have written so! Then he need hardly have
said that the strongest and sweetest songs remained to be sung; but
this, and many other gems of poetry, lie in radiant fragments among
the turbid and weltering rush of his strange verse; and thus one
sees that if there is indeed a law of art, it lies close to the
instinct of suppression and omission. One may think anything; one
may say most things; but if one means to sway the human heart by
that one particular gift of words, ordered and melodiously
intertwined, one must heed what experience tells the aspirant--that
no fervour of thought, or exuberance of utterance, can make up for
the harmony of the firmly touched lyre, and the music of the
unuttered word.






V

CHARM





There is a little village here near Cambridge the homely, summer-
sounding name of which is Haslingfield. It is a straggling hamlet
of white-walled, straw-thatched cottages, among orchards and old
elms, full of closes of meadow-grass, and farmsteads with ricks and
big-timbered barns. It has a solid, upstanding Tudor church, with
rather a grand tower, and four solid corner turrets; and it has,
too, its little bit of history in the manor-house, of which only
one high-shouldered wing remains, with tall brick chimneys. It
stands up above some mellow old walls, a big dove-cote, and a row
of ancient fish-ponds. Here Queen Elizabeth once spent a night upon
the wing. Close behind the village, a low wold, bare and calm, with
a belt or two of trees, runs steeply up.

The simplest and quietest place imaginable, with a simple and
remote life, hardly aware of itself, flowing tranquilly through it;
yet this little village, by some felicity of grouping and
gathering, has the rare and incomparable gift of charm. I cannot
analyse it, I cannot explain it, yet at all times and in all
lights, whether its orchards are full of bloom and scent, and the
cuckoo flutes from the holt down the soft breeze, or in the bare
and leafless winter, when the pale sunset glows beyond the wold
among the rifted cloud-banks, it has the wonderful appeal of
beauty, a quality which cannot be schemed for or designed, but
which a very little mishandling can sweep away. The whole place has
grown up out of common use, trees planted for shelter, orchards set
for fruit, houses built for convenience. Only in the church and the
manor is there any care for seemliness and stateliness. There are a
dozen villages round about it which have sprung from the same
needs, the same history; and yet these have missed the unconsidered
charm of Haslingfield, which man did not devise, nor does nature
inevitably bring, but which is instantly recognisable and strangely
affecting.

Such charm seems to arise partly out of a subtle orderliness and a
simple appropriateness, and partly from a blending of delicate and
pathetic elements in a certain unascertained proportion. It seems
to touch unknown memories into life, and to give a hint of the
working of some half-whimsical, half-tenderly concerned spirit,
brooding over its work, adding a touch of form here and a dash of
colour there, and pleased to see, when all is done, that it is
good.

If one looks closely at life, one sees the same quality in
humanity, in men and women, in books and pictures, and yet one
cannot tell what goes to the making of it. It seems to be a thing
which no energy or design can capture, but which alights here and
there, blowing like the wind at will. It is not force or
originality or inventiveness; very often it is strangely lacking in
any masterful quality at all; but it has always just the same
wistful appeal, which makes one desire to understand it, to take
possession of it, to serve it, to win its favour. It is as when the
child in Francis Thompson's poem seems to say, "I hire you for
nothing." That is exactly it: there is nothing offered or bestowed,
but one is at once magically bound to serve it for love and
delight. There is nothing that one can expect to get from it, and
yet it goes very far down into the soul; it is behind the maddening
desire which certain faces, hands, voices, smiles excite--the
desire to possess, to claim, to know even that no one else can
possess or claim them, which lies at the root of half the jealous
tragedies of life.

Some personalities have charm in a marvellous degree, and if, as
one looks into the old records of life, one discovers figures that
seem to have laid an inexplicable hold on their circles, and to
have passed through life in a tempest of applause and admiration,
one may be sure that charm has been the secret.

Take the case of Arthur Hallam, the inspirer of "In Memoriam." I
remember hearing Mr. Gladstone say, with kindled eye and emphatic
gesture, that Arthur Hallam was the most perfect being physically,
morally, and intellectually that he had ever seen or hoped to see.
He said, I remember, with a smile: "The story of Milnes Gaskell's
friendship with Hallam was curious. You must know that people fell
in love very easily in those days; there was a Miss E-- of whom
Hallam was enamoured, and Milnes Gaskell abandoned his own
addresses to her in favour of Hallam, in order to gain his
friendship."

Yet the portrait of Hallam which hangs in the provost's house at
Eton represents a rosy, solid, rather heavy-featured young man,
with a flushed face,--Mr. Gladstone said that this was caused by
overwork,--who looks more like a young country bumpkin on the
opera-bouffe stage than an intellectual archangel.

Odder still, the letters, poems, and remains of Hallam throw no
light on the hypnotic effect he produced; they are turgid,
elaborate, and wholly uninteresting; nor does he seem to have been
entirely amiable. Lord Dudley told Francis Hare that he had dined
with Henry Hallam, the historian, who was Arthur Hallam's father,
in the company of the son, in Italy, adding, "It did my heart good
to sit by and hear how the son snubbed the father, remembering how
often the father had unmercifully snubbed me."

There is a hint of beauty in the dark eyes and the down-dropped
curve of the mobile lip in the portrait, and one need not quote "In
Memoriam" to prove how utterly the charm of Hallam subjugated the
Tennyson circle. Wit, swiftness of insight, beauty, lovableness--
all seem to have been there; and it remains that Arthur Hallam was
worshipped and adored by his contemporaries with a fierce jealousy
of devotion. Nothing but the presence of an overmastering charm can
explain this conspiracy of praise; and perhaps there is no better
proof of it than that his friends could detect genius in letters
and poems which seem alike destitute of promise and performance.

There is another figure of earlier date who seems to have had the
same magnetic gift in an even more pre-eminent degree. There is a
portrait by Lawrence of Lord Melbourne that certainly gives a hint,
and more than a hint, of the extraordinary charm which enveloped
him; the thick, wavy hair, the fine nose, the full, but firmly
moulded, lips, are attractive enough. But the large, dark eyes
under strongly marked eyebrows, which are at once pathetic,
passionate, ironical, and mournful, evoke a singular emotion. Every
gift that men hold to be advantageous was showered upon Melbourne.
He was well born, wealthy, able; he was full of humour, quick to
grasp a subject, an omnivorous reader and student, a famous
sportsman. He won the devotion of both men and women. His marriage
with the lovely and brilliant Lady Caroline Ponsonby, whose heart
was broken and mind shattered by her hopeless passion for Byron,
showed how he could win hearts. There is no figure of all that
period of whom one would rather possess a personal memoir. Yet
despite all his fame and political prestige, he was an unhappy,
dissatisfied man, who tasted every experience and joy of life, and
found that there was nothing in it.

The dicta of his that are preserved vibrate between cynicism,
shrewdness, wisdom, and tenderness. "Stop a bit," he said, as the
cabinet went downstairs after a dinner to discuss the corn laws.
"Is it to lower the price of bread or isn't it? It doesn't much
matter which, but we must all say the same thing." Yet, after all,
it is the letters and diaries of Queen Victoria that reveal the
true secret of Melbourne's charm. His relation to his girl-
sovereign is one of the most beautiful things in latter-day
history. Melbourne loved her half paternally, half chivalrously,
while it is evident that the Queen's affection for her gallant and
attractive premier was of a quality which escaped her own
perception. He humoured her, advised her, watched over her; in
return, she idolised him, noted down his smallest sayings,
permitted him to behave and talk just as he would. She lovingly
records his little ways and fancies--how he fell asleep after
dinner, how he always took two apples, and hid one in his lap while
he ate the other.

"I asked him if he meant to cat it. He thought not, and said, 'But
I like to have the power of doing so.' I observed, hadn't he just
as well the power of doing so when the apples were in the dish on
the table? He laughed and said, 'Not the FULL power.'"

Melbourne was full of prejudices and whims and hatreds, but his
charity was boundless, and he always had a good word for an enemy.
He excused the career of Henry VIII to the Queen by saying, "You
see, those women bothered him so." And when he was superseded by
Peel, he combated the Queen's dislike of her new premier, and did
his best to put Peel in a favourable light. When Peel made his
first appearance at Windsor, shy and awkward, and holding himself
like a dancing-master, it was Melbourne who broke the awkward pause
by going up to Peel, and saying in an undertone, "For God's sake,
go and talk to the Queen!" When I was privileged to work through
all Melbourne's letters to the Queen, so carefully preserved and
magnificently bound, I was greatly touched by the sweetness and
tenderness of them, the gentle ironical flavour, the delicate
freedom, and the little presents and remembrances they exchanged up
to the end.

Melbourne can hardly be called a very great man,--he had not the
purpose or tenacity for that, and he thought both too
contemptuously and too indulgently of human nature,--but I know of
no historical figure who is more wholly transfused and penetrated
by the aroma of charm. Everything that he did and said had some
distinction and unusualness: perceptive observation, ripe wisdom,
and, with it all, the petulant attractiveness of the spoiled and
engaging child. And yet even so, one is baffled, because it is not
the profundity or the gravity of what he said that impresses; it is
rather the delicate and fantastic turn he gave to a thought or a
phrase that makes his simplest deductions from life, his most
sensible bits of counsel, appear to have something fresh and
interesting about them, though prudent men have said much the same
before, and said it heavily and solemnly.

Not that charm need be whimsical and freakish, though it is perhaps
most beautiful when there is something of the child about it,
something naive and unconventional. There are men, of whom I think
that Cardinal Newman was pre-eminently one, who seem to have had
the appeal of a pathetic sort of beauty and even helplessness.
Newman seems to have always been surprised to find himself so
interesting to others, and perhaps rather over-shadowed by the
responsibility of it. He was romantically affectionate, and the
tears came very easily at the call of emotion. Such incidents as
that when Newman said good-bye to his bare room at Littlemore, and
kissed the door-posts and the bed in a passion of grief, show what
his intensity of feeling might be.

It is not as a rule the calm and controlled people who have this
attractiveness for others; it is rather those who unite with an
enchanting kind of playfulness an instinct to confide in and to
depend upon protective affection. Very probably there is some deep-
seated sexual impulse involved, however remotely and unconsciously,
in this species of charm. It is the appeal of the child that exults
in happiness, claims it as a right, uses it with a pretty
petulance,--like the feigned enmity of the kitten and the puppy,--
and when it is clouded over, requires tearfully that it shall be
restored. That may seem an undignified comparison for a prince of
the church. But Newman was artist first, and theologian a long way
afterward; he needed comfort and approval and even applause; and he
evoked, together with love and admiration, the compassion and
protective chivalry of his friends. His writings have little
logical or intellectual force; their strength is in their ineffable
and fragrant charm, their ordered grace, their infinite pathos.

The Greek word for this subtle kind of beauty is charis, and the
Greeks are worth hearing on the subject, because they, of all the
nations that ever lived, were penetrated by it, valued it, looked
out for it, worshipped it. The word itself has suffered, as all
large words are apt to suffer, when they are transferred to another
language, because the big, ultimate words of every tongue connote a
number of ideas which cannot be exactly rendered by a single word
in another language. Let us be mildly philological for a moment,
and realise that the word charis in Greek is the substantive of
which the verb is chairo, to rejoice. We translate the word charis
by the English word "grace," which means, apart from its theological
sense, a rich endowment of charm and beauty, a thing which is
essentially a gift, and which cannot be captured by taking thought.
When we say that a thing is done with a perfect grace, we mean that
it seems entirely delightful, appropriate, seemly, and beautiful.
It pleases every sense; it is done just as it should be done,
easily, courteously, gently, pleasantly, with a confidence which is
yet modest, and with a rightness that has nothing rigid or
unamiable about it. To see a thing so done, whatever it may be,
leaves us with an envious desire that we might do the thing in the
same way. It seems easy and effortless, and the one thing worth
doing; and this is where the moral appeal of beauty lies, in the
contagious sort of example that it sets. But when we clumsily
translate the word by "grace," we lose the root idea of the word,
which has a certain joyfulness about it. A thing done with charis
is done as a pleasure, naturally, eagerly, out of the heart's
abundance; and that is the appeal of things so done to the ordinary
mind, that they seem to well up out of a beautiful and happy
nature, as the clear spring rises from the sandy floor of the pool.
The act is done, or the word spoken, out of a tranquil fund of joy,
not as a matter of duty, or in reluctant obedience to a principle,
but because the thing, whatever it is, is the joyful and beautiful
thing to do.

And so the word became the fundamental idea of the Christian life:
the grace of God was the power that floods the whole of the earlier
teaching of the gospel, before the conflict with the ungracious and
suspicious world began--the serene, uncalculating life, lived
simply and purely, not from any grim principle of asceticism, but
because it was beautiful to live so. It stood for the joy of life,
as opposed to its cares and anxieties and ambitions; it was
beautiful to share happiness, to give things away, to live in love,
to find joy in the fresh mintage of the earth, the flowers, the
creatures, the children, before they were clouded and stained by
the strife and greed and enmity of the world. The exquisite quality
of the first soft touches of the gospel story comes from the fact
that it all rose out of a heart of joy, an overflowing certainty of
the true values of life, a determination to fight the uglier side
of life by opposing to it a simplicity and a sweetness that claimed
nothing, and exacted nothing but a right to the purest sort of
happiness--the happiness of a loving circle of friends, where the
sacrifice of personal desires is the easiest and most natural thing
in the world, because such sacrifice is both the best reward and
the highest delight of love. It was here that the strength of
primitive Christianity lay, that it seemed the possession of a
joyful secret that turned all common things, and even sorrow and
suffering, to gold. If a man could rejoice in tribulation, he was
on his way to be invulnerable.

It is not a very happy business to trace the decay of a great and
noble idea; but one can catch a glimpse of the perversion of
"grace" in the hands of our Puritan ancestors, when it became a
combative thing, which instead of winning the enemies of the Lord
by its patient sweetness, put an edge on the sword of holiness, and
enabled the staunch Christian to hew the Amalekites hip and thigh;
so that the word, which had stood for a perfectly peaceful and
attractive charm, became the symbol of righteous persecution, and
flowered in cries of anguish and spilled blood.

We shall take a long time before we can crawl out of the shadow of
that dark inheritance; but there are signs in the world of an
awakening brotherliness; and perhaps we may some day come back to
the old truth, so long mishandled, that the essence of all religion
is a spirit of beauty and of joy, bent on giving rather than
receiving; and so at last we may reach the perception that the
fruitful strength of morality lies not in its terror, its
prohibitions, its coercions, but in its good-will, its tolerance,
its dislike of rebuke and censure, its rapturous acceptance of all
generous and chivalrous and noble ways of living.

And thus, then, I mean by charm not a mere superficial gracefulness
which can be learned, as good manners are learned, through a
certain code of behaviour, but a thing which is the flower and
outward sign of a beautiful attitude to life; an eagerness to
welcome everything which is fine and fresh and unstained
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