Literature, so long as it be idealistic, is the anodyne of the spirit,
the mother of faith, the nurse of hope! Literature records and
criticises, but does not make history: as we grow older we have to
recognise, slowly and sadly, the fact that the world is profoundly
incomplete. The more that we can keep our eyes from a vain attempt to
plumb the abyss, the more useful, practical, hopeful we become. And
literature, like society, athletics, politics, is one of the devices we
resort to, to hide from ourselves the horror of the gap. But the only
true consolation is our faith in the incompleteness of the world as we
see it, and in the ultimate completeness of the Divine plan. Realistic
literature can never help us to this faith: it can only plunge us deeper
in the mire--deeper in fact than we need be plunged, because realism
deludes us into accepting as typical what is only abnormal.
The Realist is a man who stands beside a drag-net that is being slowly
hauled ashore. He picks up and handles, not without a sickly creep of
horror, the viscous fleshy things, clammy polypi, bulging, translucent
cucumber-objects smelling of the peevish brine. They are struggling,
heaving, dying; on them, on these creatures of the silent, moving sea,
settles the nauseating faintness of the unsubstantial air. Such pleasure
as they give him is horrible, physiological, almost obscene.
But the Idealist, to use an exquisite simile of Mr. Henry James' in "The
Middle Years," is the man who visits "the great glazed tank of art."
There in the vivarium, through the glimmering panes, under the loops and
lines of light, and among the bursting bubbles, on the dim sand, in
dusky corners, on jutting shelves of the rock, the strange sea-monsters,
all humps and horns, lie at their ease. Strange they are and horrible;
but it is a cleanly, a spectacular horror. They are quiet, they are at
home. They twiddle their mandibles, they rise and walk, with clumsy
groping motions. But there is no vile invasion: they are safe behind the
crystal wall.
It is thus that I have tried to show my own gallery of persons. I have
not burrowed into their secrets, or tried to nose out scandals. Beyond
their studies I have not followed them. There has been none of that
"ripping up, like pigs," which Lord Tennyson so forcibly deprecated. I
have tried to respect the reticences of these persons, their
concealments, their caprices. They are not sliced into sections and
bottled, but sketched with what would fain be a careful and affectionate
hand.
We can never see too much of desirable people. Though my heroes did not
all deal with life in a sharp, business-like way, making the most of its
pleasures, and shirking its pains, yet they lived and wrote with
dignity.
Dignity! That is the saving quality! No matter how mean the
surroundings, how squalid the furniture of life, dignity is always
possible, always desirable. Victor Hugo's old rag-picker, cataloguing
the horrors she disinterred, with her plate, her pot, her basket,
respected herself and her calling, and thought her disposition of scraps
worthy of interested description.
Only, our dignity must not be a mere mask; it must not be studied for
itself; it must not be a robe sedulously arranged over a skeleton; but
it must be the outer radiance of truth and hope and courage. For of all
fates the most deplorable is, as the wise Greek said, to be opened and
found empty.