roughly described as the middle class--homes, that is, which are
removed from the urgent, daily pressure of wage-earning; homes
where there is a certain security of outlook, of varying wealth,
with professional occupation in the background; homes in which
there is some leisure; and some possibility of stimulating, by
reading, by talk, by societies, an interest in ideas. It is not a
tough, intellectual interest, but it ends in a very definite desire
to idealise life a little, to harmonise it, to give colour to it,
to speculate about it, to lift it out of the region of immediate,
practical needs, to try experiments, to live on definite lines,
with a definite aim in sight--that aim being to enlarge, to adorn,
to enrich life.
I am perfectly sure that this instinct is greatly on the increase;
but the significant thing about it is this, that whereas formerly
religion supplied to a great extent the poetry and inspiration of
life for such households, there is now a desire for something as
well of a more definitely artistic kind; to put it simply, I
believe that more people are in search of beauty, in the largest
sense. This instinct does not run counter to religion at all, but
it is an impulse not only towards a rather grim and rigid
conception of righteousness, but towards a wider appreciation of
the quality of life, its interest, its grace, its fineness, and its
fulness.
I am always sorry when I hear people talking about art as if it
were a rather easy and not very useful profession, when, as a
matter of fact, art is one of the sharp, swordlike things, like
religion and patriotism, which run through life, and divide it, and
separate people, and make men and women misunderstand each other.
Art means a temperament, and a method, and a point-of-view, and a
way of living. There are accomplished people who believe in art and
talk about it and even practise it, who do not understand what it
is; while there are people who know nothing about what is
technically called art, who are yet wholly and entirely artistic in
all that they do or think. Those who have not got the instinct of
art are wholly incapable of understanding what those who have got
the instinct are about; while those who possess it recognise very
quickly others who possess it, and are quite incapable of
explaining what it is to those who do not understand it.
I am going to make an attempt in this essay to explain what I
believe it to be, not because I hope to make it plain to those who
do not comprehend it. They will only think this all a fanciful sort
of nonsense: and I would say in passing that whenever in this world
one comes across people who talk what appears to be fantastic
nonsense, and who yet obviously understand each other and
sympathise with each other, one may take for granted that one is in
the presence of one of the hidden mysteries, and that if one does
not understand, it is because one does not see or hear something
which is perfectly plain to those who describe it. It is impossible
to do a more stupid thing than to fulminate against secrets which
one does not know, and say that "it stands to reason" that they
cannot be true. The belief that one has all the experience worth
having is an almost certain sign that one ranks low in the scale of
humanity!
But what I do hope is that I may make the matter a little plainer
to people who do partly understand it, and would like to understand
it better; because art is a very big thing, and if it is even dimly
understood, it can add much significance and happiness to life.
Everyone must recognise the happiness which radiates from the
people who have a definite point-of-view and a definite aim. They
do not always make other people happy, but there is never any doubt
about their own happiness; and when one meets them and parts
company with them, it is impossible to think of them as lapsing
into any dreariness or depression; they are obviously going back to
comfortable schemes and businesses of their own; and we know that
whenever we meet them, we shall have just that half-envious feeling
that they know their own mind, never want to be interested or
amused, but are always occupied in something that continues to
interest them, even if they are ill or unfortunate.
To be happy, we all need a certain tenacity and continuity of aim
and view; and I would like to persuade people who are only half-
aware of it, that they have a power which they could use if they
would, and which they would be happier for using. For the best of
the art of which I speak is that it does not need rare experiences
of expensive materials to apply it, but can be applied to
commonplace and quiet ways of life just as easily as to exciting
and exceptional circumstances.
Let me say then that art, as a method and a point-of-view, has not
necessarily anything whatever to do with poetry or painting or
music. These are all manifestations of it in certain regions; but
what it consists in, to put it as simply as I can, is in the
perception and comparison of quality. If that sounds a heavy sort
of formula, it is because all formulas sound dull. But the faculty
of which I am speaking is that which observes closely all that
happens or exists within range--the sky, the earth, the trees, the
fields, the streets, the houses, the people; and then it goes
further and observes not only what people look like, but how they
move and speak and think; and then we come down to smaller things
still, to animals and flowers, to the colour and shape of things of
common use, furniture and tools, everything which is used in
ordinary life.
Now every one of these things has a certain quality--of suitability
or unsuitability, of proportion or disproportion. Let me take a few
quite random instances. Look at a spade, for instance. The sensible
man proceeds to call it a spade, and thinks he has done all that is
necessary; the wise man considers what length of experience and
practice has gone to make it perfectly adapted for its purpose, its
length and size, the ledge for the foot to rest on, the hole for
the fingers to pass through as they clasp it; all the tools and
utensils of men are human documents of far-reaching interest. Or
take the strange shapes and colours of flowers, the snapdragon with
its blunt lips, the nasturtium with its round flat leaves and
flaming horns--they are endless in variety, but all expressing
something not only quite definite, but remotely inherited. Or take
houses--how perfectly simple and graceful an old homestead can be,
how frightfully pretentious and vulgar the speculative builder's
work often is, how full of beauty both of form and colour almost
all the houses in certain parts of the country are, as in the
Cotswolds, where the soft stone has tempted builders to try
experiments, and to touch up a plain front with a little delicate
and well-placed ornament. Or take the aspect of men, women, and
children; how attractive some cannot help being, whatever they do;
how helplessly unattractive and uninteresting others can be, and
yet how, even so, a fine and sweet nature can make beautiful the
plainest and ungainliest of faces. And then in a further region
still there are the thoughts and habits and prejudices of people,
all wholly distinct, some beautiful and desirable, and others
unpleasant and even intolerable.
I could multiply instances indefinitely; but my point is that art
in the largest sense is or can be concerned with observing and
comparing all these separate qualities, wherever they appear. Of
course every one's observation does not extend to everything. There
are some people who are wholly unobservant, let us say, of scenery
or houses, who are yet very shrewd judges of character.
It is not only the beauty of things that one may observe; they may
be dreary, hideous, even horrible. The interest of quality does not
by any means depend upon its beauty. The point is whether it is
strongly and markedly itself. What could be more crammed with
quality than an enormous old pig, with its bristles, its
elephantine ears, its furtive little eyes, its twitching snout?
What a look it has of a fallen creature, puzzled by its own
uncleanliness and yet unable to devise any way out!
All this is only to show that life wherever it is lived affords a
rich harvest for eye and mind. And if one dives but a very little
way beneath the surface, one is instantly in the presence of the
darkest and deepest of mysteries. Who set this all going, and why?
Whose idea is it all? What is it all driving at? What is the
meaning of our being set down here, in our own particular shape,
feeling entirely distinct from it all, with very little idea what
our place in it is or what we are intended to do? and above all
that strange sense that we cannot be compelled to do anything
unless we choose--a sense which remains with us, even though day
after day and all day long we are doing things that we would not
choose to do, if we could help it.
The whole thing indeed is so strange as to be almost frightening,
the moment that we dare to think at all: and yet we feel on the
whole at our ease in it, and in our place; and the one thing that
does terrify us is the prospect of leaving it.
What I mean, then, by art in its largest sense is the faculty we
have of observing and comparing and wondering; and the people who
make the most of life are the people who give their imagination
wings; and then, too, comes in the further feeling, which leads us
to try and shape our own life and conduct on the lines of what we
admire and think beautiful; the dull word duty means that, that we
choose what is not necessarily pleasant because for some mysterious
reason we feel happier so; because, however much we may pretend to
think otherwise, we are all of us at every moment intent upon
happiness, which is a very different thing from pleasure, and
sometimes quite contrary to it.
And so we come at last to the art of living, which is really a very
delicate balancing and comparing of reasons, an attempt, however
blind and feeble, to get at happiness; and the moment that this
attempt ceases and becomes merely a dull desire to be as
comfortable as we can, that moment the spirit begins to go down
hill, and the value of life is over; unless perhaps we learn that
we cannot afford to go down hill, and that every backward step will
have to be painfully retraced, somewhere or other.
What, then, I would try to persuade anyone who is listening to me
is that we must use our wills somehow to try experiments, to
observe, to distinguish, to follow what we think fine and
beautiful. It may be said that this is only a sort of religion, and
indeed it is exactly that at which I am aiming. It is a religion,
which is within the reach of many people who cannot be touched by
what is technically called religion. Religion is a word that has
unhappily become specialised. It stands for beliefs, doctrines,
ceremonies, practices. But these may not, and indeed do not, suit
many of us. The worst of definite religions is that they are too
definite. They try to enforce upon us a belief in things which we
find incredible, or perhaps think to be simply unknowable; or they
make out certain practices to be important, which we do not think
important. We must never do violence to our minds and souls by
professing to believe what we do not believe, or to think things
certain which we honestly believe to be uncertain; but at the same
time we must remember that there is always something of beauty
inside every religion, because religion involves a deliberate
choice of better motives and better actions, and an attempt to
exclude the baser and viler elements of life.
Of course the objection to all this--and it is a serious one--is
that people may say, "Of course I see the truth of all that, and
the advantage of being actively and vividly interested in life; you
might as well preach the advantage of being happy; but my own
interest is fitful and occasional; sometimes for days together I
have no sense of the interest or quality of anything. I have no
time, I have no one to enjoy these things with. How am I to become
what I see it would be wise to be?" It is as when the woman of
Samaria said, "Thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is
deep!" It is true that civilisation does seem more and more to
create men and women with these instincts, and to set them in
circumstances where it is hard to gratify them. And then such
people are apt to say, "Is it after all worth while to aim at so
impossible a standard? Is it not better just to put it all aside,
and make oneself as comfortable as one can?" And that is the
practical answer which a good many people do make to the question;
and when such people get older, they are the most discouraging of
all advisers, because they ridicule the whole thing as nonsense,
which young men and young women had better get out of their heads
as soon as they can; as Jowett wrote of his pupil Swinburne, that
he was a clever fellow, and would do well enough as soon as he had
got rid of all this poetry and nonsense. I feel no doubt that these
ideas, this kind of interest in life, in the wonder and strangeness
of it, can be pursued by many who do not pursue it. It is like the
white deer, which in the old stories the huntsman was for ever
pursuing in the forest; he did not ever catch it, but the pursuit
of it brought him many high adventures.
Of course it is far easier if one has a friend who shares the same
tastes; but if one has not, there are always books, in which the
best minds can be found thinking and talking at their finest and
liveliest. But here again a good many people are betrayed by
reading books as one may collect stamps, just triumphing in the
number and variety of the repertory. I believe very little in
setting the foot on books, as sailors take possession of an unknown
isle. One must make experiments, just to see what are the kind of
books which nurture and sustain one; and then I believe in arriving
at a circle of books, which one really knows through and through,
and reads at all times and in all moods, till they get soaked and
enriched with all sorts of moods and associations. I have a dozen
such, which I read and mark and scribble in, write when and where I
read them, and who were my companions. Of course the same books do
not always last through one's course. You grow out of books as you
grow out of clothes; and I sometimes look at old favourites, and
find myself lost in wonder as to how I can ever have cared for them
like that! They seem now like little antechambers and corridors,
through which I have passed to something far more noble and
gracious. But all the time we must be trying to weave the books
really into life, not let them stand like ornaments on a shelf. It
is poetry that enkindles the mind most to dwell in the thoughts of
which I have been speaking. But it must not be read straight on; it
must rather be tasted, brooded over, repeated, learned by heart.
Let me take a personal instance. As a boy I had no opinion of
Wordsworth, except that I admired one or two of the great poems
like the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" and the "Ode to
Duty," which no one who sets out to love poetry at all can afford
to ignore. Then, as I grew older, I began to see that quotations
from Wordsworth had a sort of grandeur in their very substance,
which was unlike any other grandeur. And then I took the whole of
the poems away for a vacation, and worked at them; and then I found
how again and again Wordsworth touches a thought to life, which is
like the little objects you pick up on the seashore, the evidence
of another life close at hand, indubitably there, and yet unknown,
which is being lived under the waste of waters. When Wordsworth
says such things as
And many love me, but by none
Am I enough beloved,
or when he says,
Some silent laws our hearts may make
Which they shall long obey--
then he seems to uncover the very secrets of the world, and to
speak as when in the prophet's vision the seven thunders uttered
their voices. Only to-day I was working with a pupil; in his essay
he had quoted Wordsworth, and we looked up the place. While I was
speaking, my eye fell upon "The Poet's Epitaph," and I saw,
Come hither in thy hour of strength,
Come, weak as is a breaking wave!
Those two lines of unutterable magic; he could not understand why I
stopped and faltered, nor could I have explained it to him. But it
was as Coleridge says,
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes in holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of paradise.
It is just a mystery of beauty that has been seen, not to be
explained or understood.
Of course there are people, there will be people, who will read
what I have just written in an agony of rationality, and say that
it is all rubbish. But I am describing an experience of ecstasy
which is not very common perhaps; but just as real an experience as
eating or drinking. I have had the experience before. I shall have
it again; I recognise it at once, and it is quite distinct from
other experiences. One cannot sit down to it as regularly as one
sits down to a meal, of course. It is not a thing to be proud of,
because I have had it as far back as I can remember. Nor am I at
all sure what the effect of it is. It does not transfigure life
except for the moment; and if I were in a dull frame of mind, it
might not visit me at all, though it is very apt to come if I am in
a sad or anxious frame of mind.
Then how do I interpret it? Very simply indeed; that there is a
region which I will call the region of beauty, to which the view of
life that I have called art does sometimes undoubtedly admit one;
though as I have also said the view of which I speak is concerned
with many perceptions which are not beautiful, and even sometimes
quite the opposite.
If I were frankly asked whether it is worth while trying to think
or imagine or thrust oneself into this particular kind of rapture,
I should say, "Certainly not!" It is very doubtful if it could be
genuinely attained unless it has been already experienced; and I do
not believe in the wholesomeness of self-suggested emotions.
But I do believe most firmly that it is worth while for anyone who
is interested in such effects at all to try experiments, by looking
at things critically, hearing things, observing, listening to other
people, reading books, trying in fact to practise observation and
judgment.
I was visiting some printing works the other day. The great
cylinders were revolving, the wheels buzzing, the levers clicking.
A boy perched on a platform by the huge machine lightly disengaged
a sheet of paper; it was drawn in, and a moment after a thing like
a gridiron flew up, made a sort of bow, and deposited a printed
sheet in a box, the sides of which kept moving, so as to pat the
papers into one solid pad.
I came away with the master-printer, and asked him idly whether the
boy knew what book he was printing. He laughed. "No," he said, "and
the less he is interested the better--his business is just to feed
the machine, and it becomes entirely mechanical." I felt a kind of
shame at the thought of a human being becoming so entirely and
completely a machine; but the boy looked cheerful, well, and
intelligent, and as if he had a very decisive little life of his
own quite apart from the whizzing engine, for ever bowing over and
putting a new sheet in the box.
But it is just that dull and mechanical handling of life which I
believe we ought to avoid. It is harder to avoid it for some people
than for others, and it is more difficult to escape from under
certain conditions. But all art and all artistic perception is just
a sign of the irresponsible and irrepressible joy of life, and an
attempt, as I said at first, to perceive and distinguish and
compare the quality of things. What I am here maintaining is that
art is not necessarily the production of something artistic; that
is the same impulse only when it rises in the heart of an
inventive, accomplished, deft-fingered, eager-minded craftsman. If
a man or a woman has a special gift of words, or a mastery of form
and colour, or musical phrases, the passion for beauty is bound to
show itself in the making of beautiful things--and such lives are
among the happiest that a man can live, though there is always the
shadow of realising the beauty that is out of reach, that cannot be
captured or expressed. And if it could be captured and expressed,
the quest would vanish!
But there are innumerable hearts and minds which have the
perception of quality, though not the power of expressing it; and
these are the people whom I wish to persuade of the fact that they
hold in their hands a thread, which, like the clue in the old
story, can conduct a searcher safely through the dark recesses of
the great labyrinth. He tied it, the dauntless youth in the tale,
to the ancient thorn-tree that grew by the cavern's mouth; and then
he stepped boldly in, and let it unwind within his hand.
For many people, indeed for all people who have any part in the
future of the world, the clue of life must be found in beauty of
some kind or another; not necessarily in the outward beauties of
colours, sounds, and words, but in the beauty of conduct, in the
kind, sweet-tempered, pure, unselfish life. Those who choose such
qualities do so simply because they seem more beautiful than the
spiteful, angry, greedy, selfish life. There is a horror of
ugliness about that; and thus beauty of every kind is of the nature
of a signal to us from some mighty power behind and in the world.
Evil, ugly, hateful, base things are strong indeed; but no peace,
no happiness, lies in that direction. It is just that power of
distinguishing, of choosing, of worshipping the beautiful quality
which has done for the world all that has ever been done to improve
it; and to follow it is to take the side of the power, whatever it
may be, that is trying to help and guide the world out of confusion
and darkness and strife into light and peace. It may be gratefully
admitted, of course, that religion is one of the foremost
influences in this great movement; but it also needs to be said
that religion, by connecting itself so definitely as it does with
ecclesiastical life, and ceremony, and theological doctrine, has
become a specialised thing, and does not meet all the desires of
the heart. It is not everyone who finds full satisfaction for all
the visions of the mind and soul in a church organisation. Some
people, and those neither wicked nor heartless nor unsympathetic,
find a real dreariness in systematised religion, with its
conventional beliefs, its narrow instruction, its catechisings,
missionary meetings, gatherings, devotions, services. It may be all
true enough in a sense, but it often leaves the sense of beauty and
interest and emotion and poetry unfed; it does not represent the
fulness of life. The people who are dissatisfied with it all are
often dumbly ashamed of their dissatisfaction, but yet it does not
feed the heart; the kind of heaven that they are taught awaits them
is not a place that they recognise as beautiful or desirable. They
do not want to do wrong, or to rebel against morality at all, but
they have impulses which do not seem to be recognised by technical
religion: adventure, friendship, passion, beauty, the strange and
wonderful emotions of life. The work of great poets and artists and
musicians, the lovely scenes of earth, these seem to have no place
inside systematic religion, to be things rather timorously
permitted, excused, and apologised for. Men need something richer,
freer, and larger. They do not want to shirk their duty or to
follow evil; but many things seem to be insisted upon by religion
as important which seem unimportant, many beliefs spoken of as true
which seem at best uncertain. It is not that such people are
disloyal to God and to virtue, but they feel stifled and confined
in an atmosphere which dares not attribute to God many of the
finest and sweetest things in the world.
Such a feeling is not so much a rebellion against old ideas, as a
new wine which is too strong for the old bottles; it is a desire to
extend the range of ideals, to find more things divine.
I do not believe that this instinct is going to be crushed or
overcome; I believe it will grow and spread, and play an immense
part in the civilisation of the future. I hope indeed that religion
will open its arms to meet it, because the spirit of which I speak
is in the truest sense religious; since it is concerned with
purifying and enriching life, and in living life, not on base or
mean lines, but with constant reference to the message of a Power
which is for ever reminding us that life is full of fire and music,
great, free, and wonderful. That is the meaning of it all, an
increased sense of the largeness and richness of life, which
refuses to be bound inside a gloomy, sad, suspicious outlook. It is
all an attempt to trust God more rather than less, and to recognise
the worth of life in wider and wider circles.