ON CERTAIN ADVANTAGES OF A BACKWATER
Though from a maritime point of view, Tyre was perhaps the chief centre
of conjunction for all the main streams of the world, from the point of
view of literature and any other art, it was an admitted backwater. Take
what art you pleased, Tyre was a dunce. Even to music, the most
persuasive of the arts, it was deaf. Surely, of all cities, it had not
been built to music. It possessed, indeed, one private-spirited
town-councillor, who insisted on presenting it with nude sculptures and
mysterious paintings which it furiously declined. If Tyre was to be
artistically great, it must certainly be with a greatness reluctantly
thrust upon it.
Still Henry and Ned had sense enough to be glad that they had been born
there. It was from no mere recognition of an inexpensively effective
background; perhaps they hardly knew why they were glad till later on.
But, meanwhile, they instinctively laid hold of the advantages of their
limitations. Had they been London-born and Oxford-bred, they would have
been much more fashionable in their tastes; but their very isolation,
happily, saved them from the passing superstitions of fashion; and they
were thus able to enjoy the antiquities of beauty with the same
freshness of appetite as though they had been novelties. If Henry was to
meet Ned some evening with the announcement that he had a wonderful new
book to share with him, it was just as likely to be Sir Philip Sidney's
"Astrophel and Stella," as any more recent publication--though, indeed,
they contrived to keep in touch with the literary developments of the
day with a remarkable instinct, and perhaps a juster estimate of their
character and value than those who were taking part in them; for it is
seldom that one can be in the movement and at the centre as well.
As a matter of fact, there was little that interested them, or which at
all events didn't disappoint and somewhat bewilder. The novel was
groaning under the thraldom of realism; poetry, with one or two
exceptions, was given up to bric-a-brac and metrical ingenuity. To
young men for whom French romanticism was still alive, who were still
content to see the world through the spiritual eyes of Shelley and
Keats, and who had not yet learned to belittle Carlyle, there seemed a
strange lack of generosity and, indeed, vitality in the literary ideals
of the hour. The novel particularly seemed barren and unprofitable to
them, more and more an instrument of science than a branch of
literature. Laughter had deserted it, as clearly as romance or pathos,
and more and more it was becoming the vehicle of cynical biology on the
one hand, and Unitarian theology on the other. Besides, strangest of
all, men were praised for lacking those very qualities which to these
boys had seemed essential to literature. The excellences praised were
the excellences of science, not literature. In fact, there seemed to be
but one excellence, namely, accuracy of observation; and to write a
novel with any eye to beauty of language was to err, as the writer of a
scientific treatise would err who endeavoured to add charm and grace to
the sober record of his investigations. Dull sociological analysts
reigned in the once laughing domain of Cervantes, of Fielding and
Thackeray, of Dumas and Dickens, of Hugo and Gautier and George Sand.
Were they born too late? Were they anachronisms from the forgotten age
of romanticism, or were they just born in time to assist at the birth of
another romantic, idealistic age? Would dreams and love and beautiful
writing ever come into fashion again? Would the poet be again a creature
of passion, and the novelist once more make you laugh and cry; and would
there be essayists any more, whose pages you would mark and whose
phrases you would roll over and over again on your tongue, with delight
at some mysterious magic in the words?
History may be held to have answered these questions since then, much in
favour of those young men, or at all events is engaged in answering
them; but, meanwhile, what a miraculous refreshment in a dry and thirsty
land was the new book Henry Mesurier had just discovered, and had
eagerly brought to share with Ned in their tavern corner one summer
evening in 1885.
Ned was late; but when Henry had sipped a little at his port, and turned
to the new-born exquisite pages, he hardly noticed how the minutes were
going by as he read. Presently he had come to the end of the first
volume, the only one he had with him, and he raised his eyes from the
closing page with that exquisite exaltation, that beatific satisfaction
of mind and spirit,--even almost one might say of body,--which for the
lover of literature nothing in the world like a fine passage can bring.
He turned again to the closing sentences: "_Yes; what was wanting was
the heart that would make it impossible to witness all this; and the
future would be with the forces that would beget a heart like that. His
favourite philosophy had said, Trust the eye. Strive to be right always,
regarding the concrete experience. Never falsify your impressions. And
its sanction had been at least effective here, in saying: It is what I
may not see! Surely, evil was a real thing; and the wise man wanting in
the sense of it, where not to have been, by instinctive election, on the
right side was to have failed in life_."
The passage referred to the Roman gladiatorial shows, and to the
philosophic detachment by which Marcus Aurelius was able to see and yet
not to see them; and the whole book was the spiritual story of a young
Roman's soul, a priestlike artistic temperament, born in the haunted
twilight between the setting sun of pagan religion and philosophy and
the dawn of the Christian idea. The theme presented many fascinating
analogies to the present time; and in the hero's "sensations and ideas"
Henry found many correspondences with his own nature. In him, too, was
united that same joy in the sensuous form, that same adoration of the
spiritual mystery, the temperaments in one of artist and priest. He,
too, in a dim fashion indeed, and under conditions of culture less
favourable, had speculated and experimented in a similar manner upon the
literary art over which as yet he had acquired--how crushingly this
exquisite book taught him--such pathetically uncertain mastery. That
impassioned comradeship in books beautiful, was it not to-day Ned's and
his, as all those years before it had been that of Marius and Flavian?
And where in the world _was_ Ned? How he would kindle at a passage like
this: "_To keep the eye clear by a sort of exquisite personal alacrity
and cleanliness, extending even to his dwelling-place; to discriminate,
ever more and more exactly, select form and colour in things from what
was less select; to meditate much on beautiful visible objects, on
objects, more especially, connected with the period of youth,--on
children at play in the morning, the trees in early spring, on young
animals, on the fashions and amusements of young men; to keep ever by
him, if it were but a single choice flower, a graceful animal or
sea-shell, as a token and representation of the whole kingdom of such
things; to avoid jealously, in his way through the world, everything
repugnant to sight; and, should any circumstance tempt him to a general
converse in the range of such objects, to disentangle himself from that
circumstance at any cost of place, money, or opportunity: such were, in
brief outline, the duties recognised, the rights demanded, in this new
formula of life_."
And again, what gleaming single phrases, whole counsels of existence in
a dozen words! He must copy out some of them for Esther. This, for
example: "_Not pleasure, but fulness, completeness of life generally_,"
or this: "_To be able to make use of the flower when the fruit, perhaps,
was useless or poisonous_" or again this: "_To be absolutely virgin
towards a direct and concrete experience_"--and there were a
hundred more.
Then for the young craftsman what an insight into, what a compassionate,
childish remembrance of the moods and the little foolish accidents of
creation: "_His dilettanteism, his assiduous preoccupation with what
might seem but the details of mere form or manner, was, after all, bent
upon the function of bringing to the surface, sincerely and in their
integrity, certain strong personal intuitions, certain visions or
apprehensions of things as being, with important results, in this way
rather than that--apprehensions which the artistic or literary
expression was called upon to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay,
clothing the model within it. Flavian, too, with his fine, clear mastery
of the practically effective, had early laid hold of the principle, as
axiomatic in literature: That 'to know when one's self is interested, is
the first condition of interesting other people'"_ And once more: "_As
it oftenest happens also, with natures of genuinely poetic quality,
those piecemeal beginnings came suddenly to harmonious completeness
among the fortunate incidents, the physical heat and light, of one
singularly happy day_."
And, over all, what a beauty! a beauty at once so sensuous and so
spiritual--the beauty of flowering laurel, the beauty of austerity
aflower. Here the very senses prayed. Surely this was the most
beautiful prose book ever written! It had been compared, he saw, with
Gautier's "Mademoiselle de Maupin;" but was not the beauty of that
masterpiece, in comparison with the beauty of this, as the beauty of a
leopard-skin to the beauty of a statue of Minerva, withdrawn in a
grove of ilex.
Still Ned delayed, and, meanwhile, the third glass of port had come and
gone, and at length, reluctantly, Henry emerged from his tavern-cloister
upon the warm brilliancy of the streets. All around him the lights
beaconed, and the women called with bright eyes. But to-night there was
no temptation for him in these things. They but recalled another
exquisite quotation from his new-found treasure, which he stopped under
a lamp to fix in his memory: "_And, as the fresh, rich evening came on,
there was heard all over Rome, far above a whisper, the whole town
seeming hushed to catch it distinctly, the living, reckless call to
'play,' from the sons and daughters of foolishness to those in whom
their life was still green_--Donec virenti canities abest! Donec virenti
canities abest! _Marius could hardly doubt how Cornelius would have
taken the call. And as for himself, slight as was the burden of
positive moral obligation with which he had entered Rome, it was to no
wasteful and vagrant affections, such as these, that his Epicureanism
had committed him_."
But what could have happened to Ned?