Tedder, the Librarian of the Athenæum, said to me when I told him (I have
only seen him twice) what poor success my books had met with:
“Yes, but you have made the great mistake of being useful.”
This, for the moment, displeased me, for I know that I have always tried
to make my work useful and should not care about doing it at all unless I
believed it to subserve use more or less directly. Yet when I look at
those works which we all hold to be the crowning glories of the world as,
for example, the _Iliad_, the _Odyssey_, _Hamlet_, the _Messiah_,
Rembrandt’s portraits, or Holbein’s, or Giovanni Bellini’s, the
connection between them and use is, to say the least of it, far from
obvious. Music, indeed, can hardly be tortured into being useful at all,
unless to drown the cries of the wounded in battle, or to enable people
to talk more freely at evening parties. The uses, again, of painting in
its highest forms are very doubtful—I mean in any material sense; in its
lower forms, when it becomes more diagrammatic, it is materially useful.
Literature may be useful from its lowest forms to nearly its highest, but
the highest cannot be put in harness to any but spiritual uses; and the
fact remains that the “Hallelujah Chorus,” the speech of Hamlet to the
players, Bellini’s “Doge” have their only uses in a spiritual world
whereto the word “uses” is as alien as bodily flesh is to a choir of
angels. As it is fatal to the highest art that it should have been done
for money, so it seems hardly less fatal that it should be done with a
view to those uses that tend towards money.
And yet, was not the _Iliad_ written mainly with a view to money? Did
not Shakespeare make money by his plays, Handel by his music, and the
noblest painters by their art? True; but in all these cases, I take it,
love of fame and that most potent and, at the same time, unpractical form
of it, the lust after fame beyond the grave, was the mainspring of the
action, the money being but a concomitant accident. Money is like the
wind that bloweth whithersoever it listeth, sometimes it chooses to
attach itself to high feats of literature and art and music, but more
commonly it prefers lower company . . .
I can continue this note no further, for there is no end to it. Briefly,
the world resolves itself into two great classes—those who hold that
honour after death is better worth having than any honour a man can get
and know anything about, and those who doubt this; to my mind, those who
hold it, and hold it firmly, are the only people worth thinking about.
They will also hold that, important as the physical world obviously is,
the spiritual world, of which we know little beyond its bare existence,
is more important still.