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.