It is an interesting circumstance in the lives of those persons who are
called either heretics or reformers, according to the mental attitudes
or antecedent prejudices of their critics, that they always begin by
hinting their views with equal modesty and moderation. It is only when
rubbed sore by friction, when hard driven and half spent, that they
venture into the open, and define their positions before the world
in all their bald malignity. Now I have a certain sneaking sympathy,
not with heretics or reformers, either, but with that frame of mind
which compels a hunted and harried creature suddenly to assume the
offensive, cast prudence to the winds, nail his thesis conspicuously
to the doorpost, and snortingly await developments. He is not, while
so occupied, a winning or beautiful figure, when judged by the strict
standards of sweetness and light; but he is eminently human, and is
entitled to the forbearance of humanity.
It is now over a year since, in an article called “Fiction in the
Pulpit,” and published in the “Atlantic Monthly,” I ventured to say,
or rather I said without any consciousness of being venturesome, that
the sole business of a novel-writer was to give us pleasure; his
sole duty was to give it to us within decent and prescribed limits.
It seemed to me then that the assertion was so self-evident as to be
hardly worth the making; it was a little like saying an undisputed
thing “in such a solemn way.” I have learned since how profoundly I
was mistaken in the temper, not of writers only, but of readers as
well,--how far remote I stood from the current of ethical activity.
It is needless to state that this later knowledge has been brought to
me by the mouths of critics: sometimes by professional critics, who
said their say in print; sometimes by amateur and neighborly critics,
who expressed theirs frankly in speech. It is needless, also, to state
that, of the two, the professional critics--brothers and sisters of my
own household I count them--have been infinitely more tolerant of my
shortcomings, more lenient in their remonstrances, more persuasive
and even flattering in their lines of argument. The ordinary reviewer,
anonymous or otherwise, is not the ruthless destroyer, “ferocious,
dishonest, butcherly,” whom Mr. Howells so graphically portrays, but
rather a kindly, indifferent sort of creature, who cares so little what
you think that even his reproaches wear an air of gentle and friendly
unconcern.
In all cases, however, the verdict reached was practically the same.
The business of fiction is to elevate our moral tone; to teach us the
stern lessons of life; to quicken our conceptions of duty; to show us
the dark abysses of fallen nature; to broaden our spiritual vistas;
to destroy our old comfortable creeds; to open our half-closed eyes;
to expand our souls with the generous sentiments of humanity; to vex
us with social problems and psychological conundrums; to gird us with
chain armor for our daily battles; to do anything or everything, in
short, except simply give us pleasure. It is not forbidden us, to be
sure, to take delight, if we can, in the system of instruction; a good
child, we are told, should always love its lessons; but the really
important thing is to study and know them by heart. Verily
“This rugged virtue makes me gasp”!
Why should the word “pleasure,” when used in connection with
literature, send a cold chill down our strenuous nineteenth-century
spines? It is a good and charming word, caressing in sound and softly
exhilarating in sense. As in a dream, it shows us swiftly rich minutes
by a winter firelight, with “The Eve of St. Agnes” held in our happy
hands; long, lazy summer afternoons spent right joyously in company
with Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley; or, perhaps, hours of content,
lost in the letters of Charles Lamb, dear to us alike in all seasons
and in all moods, a heritage of delight as long as life shall last.
I do not, indeed, as I have been accused of doing, employ the word
“pleasure” as synonymous with amusement. Amusement is merely one side
of pleasure, but a very excellent side, against which, in truth, I
have no evil word to urge. The gods forbid such base and savorless
ingratitude! This is not at best a merry world. “There is a certain
grief in things as they are, in man as he has come to be;” and the
background of our lives is a steady, undeviating sadness. Who, then,
has not felt that sudden lifting of the spirits, that quick purging
of black, melancholy vapors from the brain, as wise old Burton would
express it, when some fine jest appeals irresistibly to one’s sense
of humor! There comes to the alert mind at such a moment a distinct
revelation of contentment; a conscious thought that it is well to
be alive, and to hear that nimble witticism which has so warmed and
tickled one’s fancy. “Live merrily as thou canst,” says Burton, “for by
honest mirth we cure many passions of the mind. A gay companion is as a
wagon to him that is wearied by the way.”
If amusement can help us so materially in our daily life, which is a
daily struggle as well, how much more pleasure!--pleasure which is
the rightful goal of art, just as knowledge is the rightful goal of
science. “Art,” says Winckelmann, “is the daughter of Pleasure;” and
as Demeter sought for Persephone with resistless fervor and desire,
so Pleasure seeks for Art, languishing in sunless gloom, and, having
found her, expresses through her the joy and beauty of existence,
and lives again herself in the possession of her fair child, while
the whole earth bubbles into laughter. We cannot separate these two
without exchanging sunlight for frost and the cold, dark winter nights.
Mr. E. S. Dallas, who, in those charming volumes pleadingly entitled
“The Gay Science,” has made a gallant fight for pleasure as the end
of art, and for criticism as the path by which that end is reached,
shows us very clearly and very persuasively that, in all ages and in
all nations, there has been a natural, wholesome, outspoken conviction
that art exists for pleasure, and, pleasing, instructs as well. There
is a core of truth, he grants, in the Horatian maxim that art may be
profitable as well as delightful, “since it always holds that wisdom’s
ways are ways of pleasantness, that enduring pleasure comes only out
of healthful action, and that amusement, as mere amusement, is in its
own place good if it be but innocent. There is profit in art, as there
is gain in godliness, and policy in an honest life. But we are not to
pursue art for profit, nor godliness for gain, nor honesty because it
is politic.”
This, then, is the earliest lesson that the student of art has to
learn: that it exists for pleasure, but for a pleasure that may
be profitable, and that stands in no sort of opposition to truth.
“Science,” says Mr. Dallas, “gives us truth without reference to
pleasure, but immediately and chiefly for the sake of knowledge. Art
gives us truth without reference to knowledge, but immediately and
mainly for the sake of pleasure.” The test of science, then, must
always be an increase of knowledge, of proven and demonstrable facts;
the test of art must always be an increase of pleasure, of conscious
and sentient joy. “What is good only because it pleases,” says Dr.
Johnson, “cannot be pronounced good until it has been found to please.”
The joy that is born of art is not always a simple or easily analyzed
emotion. The pleasure we take in looking at the soft, white, dimpled
Venus of the Capitol is something very different from that strange
tugging at our heart-strings when we first see the sad and scornful
beauty of the Venus of Milo, or the curious pity with which we watch
the dejected Cupid of the Vatican hanging his lovely head. But with
both the Venus of Milo and the Vatican Cupid, the sensation of pleasure
they afford is greater than the sensation of pain, or pity, or regret.
It triumphs wholly over our other emotions, and gains fullness from the
conflict of our thoughts. We feel many things, but we feel pleasure
most of all, and this is the final test; and the final victory of art.
In the same manner, the mixed emotions with which we listen to music
resolve themselves ultimately to pleasure in that music; and the mixed
emotions with which we read poetry resolve themselves ultimately to
pleasure in that poetry. If it were otherwise, we should know that the
music and the poetry had failed in their crucial trial. If we did not
feel more pleasure than pain in the tragedy of “Othello,” it would not
be a great play. That we do feel more pleasure than pain, that our
pleasure is subtly fed by our pain, proves it to be a masterpiece of
art.
There is still another point to urge. While art may instruct as well
as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but
not without pleasing. The former quality is accidental, the latter
essential, to its being. “Enjoyment,” says Schiller, “may be only
a subordinate object in life; it is the highest in art.” We cannot
say that “The Eve of St. Agnes” teaches us, directly or indirectly,
anything whatever. The trembling lovers, the withered Angela, the
revelers,
“The carved angels, ever eager-eyed,”
the storm without, the fragrant warmth and light within, are all
equally innocent of moral emphasis. Even the Beadsman is not worked up,
as he might have been, into a didactic agent. But every beauty-laden
line is rich in pleasure, the whole poem is an inheritance of delight.
I never read it without being reminded afresh of that remonstrance
offered so gently by Keats to Shelley,--by Keats, who was content to
be a poet, to Shelley, who would also be a reformer: “You will, I am
sure, forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your
magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your
subject with ore.” Load every rift of your subject with ore,--there
spoke the man who claimed no more for himself than that he had loved
“the principle of beauty in all things,” and to whose hushed and
listening soul the cry of Shelley’s “divine discontent” rang jarringly
in the stillness of the night. If the poetry of Keats, a handful of
scattered jewels left us by a dying boy, is, as Matthew Arnold admits,
more solid and complete than Shelley’s superb and piercing song, to
what is this due, save that Keats possessed, in addition to his poetic
gift, the tranquil artist soul; content, as Goethe was content, to love
the principle of beauty, and to be in sympathy with the great living
past which has nourished, and still nourishes, the living present. The
passion for reconstructing society, and for distributing pamphlets
as a first step in the reconstruction, had no part in his artistic
development. The errors of his fellow-mortals touched him lightly;
their superstitions did not trouble him at all; their civil rights and
inherited diseases were not matters of daily thought and analysis.
But what he had to give them he gave unstintedly, and we to-day are
rich in the fullness of his gift. “The proper and immediate object of
poetry,” says Coleridge, “is the communication of immediate pleasure;”
and are our lives so joyous that this boon may go unrecognized and
unregarded? Which is best for us in this chilly world,--that which
pleases, but does not instruct, like “The Eve of St. Agnes,” or that
which instructs, but does not please, like Dr. Ibsen’s “Ghosts”? I
do not say, which is true art? because the relative positions of the
two authors forbid comparison; but, judged by the needs of humanity,
which is the finer gift to earth? If, with Pliny, we seek an escape
from mortality in literature, which shall be our choice? If, with Dr.
Johnson, we require that a book should help us either to enjoy life or
to endure it, which shall we take for a friend?
“Everything that is any way beautiful is beautiful in itself, and
terminates in itself,” says Marcus Aurelius; and the pleasure we
derive from a possession of beauty has characteristic completeness
and vitality. This pleasure is not only, as we are so often told, a
temporary escape from pain; it is not a negation, a mere cessation of
suffering; it is not necessarily preceded by craving or followed by
satiety; it is emphatically not a matter of prospect as Shelley would
have us believe;[1] it is a matter of conscious possession. “Vivre,
c’est penser et sentir son âme;” and when a happy moment, complete and
rounded as a pearl, falls into the tossing ocean of life, it is never
wholly lost. For our days are made up of moments and our years of days,
and every swift realization of a lawful joy is a distinct and lasting
gain in our onward flight to eternity.
[1] “Pain or pleasure, if subtly analyzed, will be found to
consist entirely in prospect.”
It seems to me strangely cruel that this philosophy of pleasure should
be so ruthlessly at variance with the ethical criticism of our day.
If it has come down to us as a gracious gift from the most cheerful
and not the least wholesome of heathens, it has been broadened and
brightened into fresh comeliness by the spirit of Christianity, which
is, above all things, a spirit of lawful and recognized joy. Nothing
is more plain to us in the teaching of the early Church than that
asceticism is for the chosen few, and enjoyment, diffused, genial,
temperate, and pure enjoyment, is for the many. “Put on, therefore,
gladness that hath always favor with God, and is acceptable unto him,
and delight thyself in it; for every man that is glad doeth the things
that are good, and thinketh good thoughts, despising grief.”[2] Through
all the centuries, rational Christianity has still taught us bravely
to endure what we must, and gratefully to enjoy what we can. There is
a very charming and sensible letter on this point, written by the Abbé
Duval to Madame de Rémusat, who was disposed to reproach herself a
little for her own happiness, and to think that she had no right to be
so comfortable and so well content.
[2] _Shepherd of Hermas._
“You say that you are happy,” writes this gentlest and wisest of
confessors; “why then distress yourself? Your happiness is a proof of
God’s love toward you; and if in your heart you truly love Him, can
you refuse to respond to the divine benevolence?... Engrave upon your
conscience this fundamental truth: that religion demands order above
all things; and that, since the institutions of society have been
allowed and consecrated, there is encouragement for those duties by
which they are maintained.... But especially banish from your mind the
error that our pains alone are acceptable to God. A general willingness
to bear trial is enough. Never fear but life and time will bring it.
Dispose yourself beforehand to resignation, and meanwhile thank God
incessantly for the peace which pervades your lot.”
This is something very different from Ruskin’s ethics,--from the plain
statement that we have no right to be happy while our brother suffers,
no right to put feathers in our own child’s hat, while somebody else’s
child goes featherless and ragged. But there is a certain staying
power in the older and simpler doctrine, and an admirable truth in
the gentle suggestion that we need not vex ourselves too deeply with
the notion of our ultimate freedom from trial. It was not given
to Madame de Rémusat, any more than it is given to us, to ride in
untroubled gladness over a stony world. All that she attained, all
that we can hope for, are distinct and happy moments, brief intervals
from pain, or from that rational _ennui_ which is inseparable from
the conditions of human life. But I cannot agree with the long list
of philosophers and critics, from Kant and Schopenhauer down to
Mr. Dallas, who have taught that these passing moments are negative
in their character; that they are hidden from our consciousness and
elude our scrutiny,--existing while we are content simply to enjoy
them, vanishing, if, like Psyche, we seek to understand our joy. The
trained intelligence grasps its pleasures, and recognizes them as such;
not after they have fled, and linger only, a golden haze, in memory,
but alertly, in the present, while they still lie warm in the hollow
of the heart. There is indeed a certain breathless and unconscious
delight in life itself, which is born of our ceaseless struggle to
live, a sweetness of honey snatched from the lion’s mouth. This
delight is common to all men, and is probably keenest in those who
struggle hardest. When society is reorganized on a Utopian basis, and
nobody has any further need to elbow his own way through hardships and
difficulties, there will be one joy less in the world; and, missing it,
many people will realize that all which made life worth having has been
softened and improved out of existence. They will cease to value, and
refuse to possess, that which costs them nothing to preserve.
This fundamental happiness in life, and in the enforced activity by
which it is maintained, is hidden from our consciousness. We feel
the hardships, and do not especially feel any relish in ceaselessly
combating them, though the relish is there; not keen enough for
palpable felicity, but vital enough to keep the human race alive. All
other pleasures, however, we should train ourselves to enjoy. They flow
from many sources, and are fitted to many moods. They are fed alike
by our most secret emotions and by our severest toil, by the simplest
thing in nature and by the utmost subtlety of art. A primrose by a
river’s brim often makes its appeal as vainly as does Hamlet, or the
Elgin Marbles. What we need is, not more cultivation, but a recognized
habit of enjoyment. There is, I am told, though I cannot speak from
experience, a very high degree of pleasure in successfully working out
a mathematical problem. Burton confesses frankly that his impelling
motive, in long hours of research, was primarily his own gratification.
“The delight is it I aim at, so great pleasure, such sweet content,
there is in study.” I think the most beautiful figure in recent
literature is Mr. Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, whose life, regarded
from the outside, is but a succession of imperfect results, yet who,
deserted and dying, counts over with a patient and glad heart the joys
he has been permitted to know.
“Like a child thinking over the toys it loves, one after another, that
it may fall asleep so, and the sooner forget all about them, he would
try to fix his mind, as it were impassively, on all the persons he had
loved in life,--on his love for them, dead or living, grateful for his
love or not, rather than on theirs for him,--letting their images pass
away again, or rest with him, as they would. One after another, he
suffered those faces and voices to come and go, as in some mechanical
exercise; as he might have repeated all the verses he knew by heart, or
like the telling of beads, one by one, with many a sleepy nod between
whiles.”
Here is a profound truth, delicately and reverently conveyed. That
which is given us for our joy is ours as long as life shall last; not
passing away with the moment of enjoyment, but dwelling with us, and
enriching us to the end. The memory of a past pleasure, derived from
any lawful source, is a part of the pleasure itself, a vital part,
which remains in our keeping as long as we recognize and cherish it.
Thus, the pleasure obtained from seeing the Venus of Milo or reading
“The Eve of St. Agnes” is not ended when we have left the Louvre or
closed the book. It becomes a portion of our inheritance, a portion of
the joy of living; and the statue and the poem have fulfilled their
allotted purpose in yielding us this delight. There is a curious
fashion nowadays of criticising art and poetry, and even fiction, with
scant reference to the pleasure for which they exist; yet a rational
estimate of these things is hardly possible from any other standpoint.
Mr. Ruskin, we know, has invented that pleasing novelty, ethical
art-criticism, and, by its means, as Mr. Dallas frankly admits, he
has made, not the criticism only, but the art itself, intelligible
and palatable to his English readers. It would seem as if they hardly
held themselves justified in enjoying a thing unless there was a moral
meaning back of it, a moral principle involved in their own happiness.
This meaning and this principle Mr. Ruskin has supplied, bringing to
bear upon his task all the earnestness and sincerity of his spirit,
all the wonderful charm and beauty of a winning and persuasive
eloquence. It is well-nigh impossible to withstand his appeals, they
are so irresistibly worded; and it is only when we have withdrawn from
his seductive influence, to think a little for ourselves, that we
realize how much of his criticism, as criticism, is valueless, because
it consists in analyzing motives rather than in estimating results. He
assumes that the first interest in a picture is, what did the painter
intend? the second interest is, how did he carry out his intention?
whereas the one really important and paramount consideration in art
is workmanship. We have, many of us, the artist’s soul, but few the
artist’s fingers. It is a pleasant pastime to decipher the mental
attitude of the painter; it is essential to understand the quality and
limit of his powers.
Reading Mr. Ruskin’s criticisms on Tintoret’s pictures in the Scuola
di S. Rocco--on the Annunciation particularly--is very much like
listening to a paper in a Browning Society. Perhaps the poet, perhaps
the painter, did mean all that. It is manifestly impossible to prove
they didn’t, inasmuch as death has removed them from any chance of
interrogation. But by what mysterious and exclusive insight have Mr.
Ruskin and the Browning student found it out? The interpretation is
not suggested as feasible, it is asserted as a fact; though precisely
how it has been reached we are not suffered to know. Many unkind
and severe things have been said about judicial criticism, but Mr.
Ruskin’s criticism is not judicial,--which infers an application of
governing principles; it is dogmatic, the unhesitating expression of a
personal sentiment. He shows you Giotto’s frescoes in the cloister of
Santa Maria Novella; he pleads with you very prettily and charmingly
to admire the Birth of the Virgin; he points out to you with rather
puzzling precision exactly what the painter intended to imply by every
detail of the work. This is pleasant enough; but suppose you don’t
really care about the Birth of the Virgin when you see it; suppose you
fail to follow the guiding finger that reveals to you its significance
and beauty. What happens then? Mr. Ruskin retorts in the severest
manner, and with a degree of scorn that seems hardly warranted by the
contingency: “If you can be pleased with this, you can see Florence.
But if not, by all means amuse yourself there, if you find it amusing,
as long as you like; you can never see it.”
So Florence with all its loveliness is lost to you, unless you
can sufficiently sympathize with one small fresco. It would be as
reasonable to say that all English literature is lost to you, unless
you truly enjoy “Comus;” that all music is lost to you, unless
you delight in “Parsifal.” It is the special privilege of ethical
criticism to take this exclusive and didactic form; to bid you admire
a thing, not because it is beautiful in itself, but because it has a
subtle lesson to convey,--a lesson of which, it is urbanely hinted,
you stand particularly in need. On precisely the same principle, you
are commanded to cleave to Tolstoï, not because he has written able
novels, but because those novels teach a great many things which it
is desirable you should know and believe; you are bidden to revere
George Meredith, not because he has given the world some brilliant and
captivating books, but because these books contain a tonic element
fitted for your moral reconstruction. If you do not sufficiently value
these admirable lessons, then you are told, in language every whit as
contemptuous as Mr. Ruskin’s, to amuse yourself, by all means, with
Lever, and Gaboriau, and Jules Verne; for all higher fiction is, like
the art of Florence, a sealed book to your understanding.
“Most men,” says Mr. Froude, “feel the necessity of being on some terms
with their conscience, at their own expense or at another’s;” and one
very popular method of balancing their score is by exacting from art
and literature that serious ethical purpose which they hesitate to
intrude too prominently into their daily lives, rightly opining that it
gives much less trouble in books. So prevalent is this tone in modern
thought that even a consummate critic like Mr. Bagehot is capable of
saying, in one of his supremely moral moments, that Byron’s poems
“taught nothing, and therefore are forgotten.” Et tu, Brute! Such a
sentence from such a pen makes me realize something of the bitterness
with which the dying Cæsar covered up his face from his most trusted
friend. That Lord Byron’s poems are forgotten is rather a matter of
doubt; that they are given over entirely into the hands of “a stray
schoolboy” is a hazardous assertion to make; but to say that they are
forgotten _because_ they teach nothing is to strike at the very life
and soul of poetry. It does not exist to teach, but to please; it can
cease to exist only when it ceases to give pleasure.
Perhaps what Mr. Bagehot meant to imply is that it would be a difficult
task to review Byron’s poetry after the approved modern fashion;
to assign him, as we assign more contemplative and analytic poets,
a moral _raison d’être_. Pick up a criticism of Mr. Browning, for
example, and this is the first thing we see: “What was the kernel of
Browning’s ethical teaching, and how does he apply its principles to
life, religion, art, and love?”[3] It would be as manifestly absurd
to ask this question about Byron as it would be to review Fielding
from the standpoint adapted for Tolstoï, or to discuss Sheridan from
the same field of view as Ibsen. With the earlier writers it was a
question of workmanship; with our present favorites it has become a
question of ethics. Yet when we seek for simple edification, as our
plain-spoken grandfathers understood the word, as many innocent people
understand it now, the new school seems as remote from furnishing it
as the old. Browning, Tolstoï, and Ibsen have their own methods of
dealing with sin, and richly suggestive and illustrative methods they
are. The lessons taught may be of a highly desirable kind, but I doubt
their practical efficacy in our common working lives; and I cannot
think this possible efficacy warrants their intrusion into art. Great
truths, unconsciously revealed and as unconsciously absorbed, have
been, in all ages, the soul of poetry, the subtle life of fiction.
These truths, always in harmony with the natural world and with the
vital sympathies of man, were not put forward crudely as lessons to
be learned, but primarily as pleasures to be enjoyed; and through our
“sweet content,” as Burton phrased it, we came into our heritage of
knowledge. To-day both poetry and fiction have assumed a different and
less winning attitude. They have grown sensibly didactic, are at times
almost reproachful in their tone, and, so far from striving to yield
us pleasure, to increase our “sweet content” with life, they endeavor,
with very tolerable success, to prevent our being happy after our own
limited fashion. Their principal mission is to worry us vaguely about
our souls or our neighbors’ souls, or the social order which we did not
establish, and the painful problems that we cannot solve. Our spirits,
at all times restless and troubled, respond with quick alarm to these
dismal agitations; our serenity is not proof against the strain; our
sense of humor is not keen enough to cure us with wholesome laughter;
and nineteenth-century cultivation consists in being miserable for
misery’s sake, and in saying solemnly to one another at proper
intervals, “This is the eternal progress of the ages.”
[3] _Quarterly Review._
It was a curious and rather melancholy experience, a year ago, to
hear the comments of those patient women who devoted their afternoons
to Ibsen readings, and to turning over in their minds the new and
unprofitable situations thus suggested. The discussions that followed
were in variably ethical, never critical; they had reference always
to some moral conundrum offered by the play, never to the artistic or
dramatic excellence of the play itself. Was Nora Helmer justified,
or was she not, in abandoning her children with explicit confidence
to the care of Mary Ann? Had Dr. Wangel a right, or had he not, to
annul his own marriage tie with the primitive simplicity of the king
of Dahomey? To answer such questions as these has become our notion
of literary recreation, and there is something pathetically droll
in the earnestness with which we bend our wits to the task. Indeed,
poor little Nora’s matrimonial infelicities threatened to become as
important in their way as those of Catherine of Aragon or Josephine
Beauharnais, and we talked about them quite seriously and with a
certain awe. The unflinching manner in which Ibsen has followed Sir
Thomas Browne’s advice, “Strive not to beautify thy corruption!”
commends him, naturally, to that large class of persons who can
tolerate sin only when it is dismal; and Baudelaire, praying for a
new vice, was jocund in comparison with our Norwegian dramatist,
unwearyingly analyzing the old one. Yet what have we gained from the
rankness of these disclosures, from these horrible studies of heredity,
these hospital and madhouse sketches, these incursions of pathology
into the realms of art? What shall we ever gain by beating down the
barriers of reserve which civilized communities have thought fit to
rear, by abandoning that wholesome reticence which is the test of
self-restraint? We try so hard to be happy,--we have such need, each
of his little share of happiness; yet Ibsen, troubling the soul more
even than he troubles the senses, has chosen to employ his God-given
genius in deliberately lessening our small sum of human joy. When shall
we cease to worship at such dark altars? When shall we recognize, with
Goethe, that “all talent is wasted if the subject be unsuitable”? When
shall we understand and believe that “the gladness of a spirit is an
index of its power”?
“To live,” says Amiel, “we must conquer incessantly, we must have the
courage to be happy.” Enjoyment, then, is not our common daily portion,
to be stupidly ignored or carelessly cast away. It is something we
must seek courageously and intelligently, distinguishing the pure
sources from which it flows, and rightly persuaded that art is true
and good only when it adds to our delight. For this were our poets
and dramatists, our painters and novelists, sent to us,--to make us
lawfully happier in a hard world, to help us smilingly through the
gloom. And can it be they think this mission beneath their august
consideration, unworthy of their mighty powers? Why, to have given
pleasure to one human being is a recollection that sweetens life; and
what should be the fervor and transport of him to whom it has been
granted to give pleasure to generations, to add materially to the
stored-up gladness of the earth! “Science pales,” says Mr. Dallas, “age
after age is forgotten, and age after age has to be freshened; but the
secret thinking of humanity, embalmed in art, survives, as nothing else
in life survives.” This is our inheritance from the past,--this secret
thinking of humanity, embalmed in imperishable beauty, and enduring for
our delight. The thinking of that idle vicar, Robert Herrick, when he
sang, on a fair May morning:--
“Come, let us go, while we are in our prime,
And take the harmless folly of the time!
We shall grow old apace, and die
Before we know our liberty.”
The thinking of Theocritus, who, lying drowsily on the hillside, saw
the sacred waters welling from the cool caverns, and heard the little
owl cry in the thorn brake, and the yellow bees murmur and hum in the
soft spicy air:--
“All breathed the scent of the opulent summer, of the season of fruit.
Pears and apples were rolling at our feet; the tender branches, laden
with wild plums, were bowed to earth; and the four-year-old pitch seal
was loosened from the mouth of the wine-jars.”
Here is art attuned to the simplest forms of pleasure, yet as lasting
as the pyramids,--a whispered charm borne down the current of years to
soothe our fretted souls. But the tranquil enjoyment of what is given
us to enjoy has become a subtle reproach in these days of restless
disquiet, of morbid and conscious self-scrutiny, when we have forfeited
Our sympathy with the beliefs, the aspirations, and the “sweet content”
that linked the centuries together. We are suffering at present from a
glut of precepts, a surfeit of preceptors, and have grown sadly wise,
and very much cast down in consequence. We lack, as Amiel says, the
courage to be happy, and glorify our discontent into an intellectual
barrier, pluming ourselves on a seriousness that may not be diverted.
But if we will only consent to calm our fears, to quiet our scruples,
to humble our pride, and to take one glad look into the world of
art, we shall see it bathed in the golden sunlight of pleasure; and
we shall know very well that didacticism, whether masquerading as a
psychological drama or a socialistic forecast, as a Sunday-school story
or a deistical novel, is no guide to that enchanted land.