The conclusion of any book which has tried to throw into
momentary relief the great shadowy figures who have led and
misled humanity must necessarily be no more than a new suspension
of judgment; of judgment drawing its interest from the colour of the
mind of the individual making it, of judgment guarded from the
impertinence of judicial decision by its confessed implication of
radical subjectivity.
The conclusion of any critical essay must in large measure be lame
and halting; must indeed be a whispered warning to the reader to
take what has gone before, however ardently expressed, with that
wise pinch of true Attic salt which mitigates even a relative finality
in these high things.
One comes to feel more and more, as one reads many books, that
judicial decisions are laughable and useless in this rare atmosphere,
and that the mere utterance of such platitudinous decrees sets the
pronouncer of them outside the inner and exclusive pale.
One comes to feel more and more that all that any of us has a right
to do is to set down as patiently and tenderly as he may the
particular response, here or there, from this side or the other, as it
chances to happen, that is aroused in his own soul by those historic
works of art, which, whatever principle of selection it is that places
them in our hands, have fallen somehow across our path.
It might seem that a direct, natural and spontaneous response, of the
kind I have in my mind, to these famous works, were easy enough of
attainment. Nothing, on the contrary, is more difficult to secure or
more seldom secured.
One might almost hazard the paradox that the real art of criticism
only begins when we shake ourselves free of all books and win
access to that locked and sealed and uncut volume which is the book
of our own feelings.
The art of self-culture--one learns just that when youth's
outward-looking curiosity and passion begin to ebb--is the art of freeing
oneself from the influence of books so that one may enjoy what one
is destined to enjoy without pedantry or scruple. And yet, by the
profound law of the system of things, when one has thus freed
oneself from the tyranny of literary catchwords and the dead weight
of cultivated public opinion, one comes back to the world of books
with an added zest. It is then, and only then, that one reads with real
unscrupulousness, thinking solely of the pleasure, and nothing of the
rectitude or propriety or adequacy of what we take up.
And it is then that the great figures of the master-writers appear in
their true light; the light--that is to say--in which we, and not another,
have visualised them, felt them, and reacted from them.
It is wonderful what thrilling pleasures there are in store for us in
literature when once we have cut ourselves adrift from all this
superfluity of cultured opinion, and have given ourselves complete
leave to love what we like and hate what we like and be indifferent
to what we like, as the world swings round!
I think the secret of making an exquisite use of literature so that it
shall colour and penetrate our days is only a small part of what the
wisest epicureans among us are concerned with attaining. I think it
is one of the most precious benefits conferred on us by every new
writer that he flings us back more deeply than ever upon ourselves.
We draw out of him his vision, his peculiar atmosphere, his especial
quality of mental and emotional tone. We savour this and assimilate
it and store it up, as something which we have made our own and
which is there to fall back upon when we want it. But beyond our
enjoyment of this new increment to our treasury of feeling, we are
driven inwards once more in a kind of intellectual rivalry with the
very thing we have just acquired, and in precise proportion as it has
seemed to us exciting and original we are roused in the depths of our
mind to substitute something else for it; and this something else is
nothing less than the evocation of our own originality, called up out
of the hidden caverns of our being to claim its own creative place in
the communion between our soul and the world.
I can only speak for myself; but my own preference among writers
will always be for those whose genius consists rather in creating a
certain mental atmosphere than in hammering out isolated works of
art, rounded and complete.
For a flawless work of art is a thing for a moment, while that more
penetrating projection of an original personality which one calls a
mental or aesthetic atmosphere, is a thing that floats and flows and
drifts and wavers, far beyond the boundaries of any limited creation.
Such an atmosphere, such a vague intellectual music, in the air about
us, is the thing that really challenges the responsive spirit in
ourselves; challenges it and rouses it to take the part which it has a
right to take, the part which it alone _can_ take, in recreating the
world for us in accordance with our natural fatality.
It is only by the process of gradual disillusionment that we come at
last to recognise what we ourselves--undistracted now by any
external authority--need and require from the genius of the past. For
my own part, looking over the great names included in the foregoing
essays, I am at this moment drawn instinctively only to two among
them all--to William Blake and to Paul Verlaine; and this is an
indication to me that what my own soul requires is not philosophy or
psychology or wit or sublimity, but a certain delicate transmutation
of the little casual things that cross my way, and a certain faint, low,
sweet music, rumouring from indistinguishable horizons, and
bringing me vague rare thoughts, cool and quiet and deep and
magical, such as have no concern with the clamour and brutality of
the crowd.
The greater number of the writers who have dominated us, in the
pages that go before, belong to the Latin race, and I cannot but feel
that it is to this race that civilisation must come more and more to
return in its search for the grandeur and pathos, the humanity and
irony of that attitude of mind which serves our spirits best as we
struggle on through the confusions and bewilderments of our way.
There is a tendency observable here and there--though the genuinely
great minds who give their adherence to it are few and far between
--to speak as though the race-element in literature were a thing better
away, a thing whose place might be taken by a sort of attenuated
idealistic amalgam of all the race-elements in the world, or by
something which has no race-element in it at all--something
inter-national, inter-racial, humanitarian and cosmopolitan.
People to whom this thin thing appeals often speak quite lightly of
blending the traditions of East and West, of Saxon and Celt, of Latin
and Teuton, of Scandinavian and Slav.
They do not see that you might as well speak of blending the
temperaments of two opposite types of human personality. They do
not see that the whole interest of life depends upon these contrasts.
You cannot blend traditions in this academic way, any more than
you can blend two human souls that are diametrically different, or
two soils or climates which are mutually excluding. This ideal of a
cosmopolitan literature that shall include all the local traditions and
racial instincts is the sort of thing that appeals to the type of mind
which remains essentially dull to the high qualities of a noble style.
No; it is not cosmopolitan literature that we want. It was not of
cosmopolitan literature that Goethe was thinking when he used that
term "I am a good European," which Nietzsche found so suggestive;
it was of classical literature, of literature which, whatever its racial
quality, has not lost touch with the civilised traditions of Athens and
Rome.
In art, as in everything else, we must "worship our dead"; and the
attempt to substitute a vague idealised cosmopolitanism for the
living passionate localised traditions that spring like trees and
flowers out of a particular soil, out of a soil made dear to us by the
ashes of our fathers and consecrated by a thousand pious usages, is
an attempt that can result in no great magical works.
Walt Whitman, for all his celebrations of the huge "ensemble" of the
world, remains and must always remain profoundly and entirely
American.
When Romain Rolland, the author of "Jean Christophe,"--the book
of all books most penetrated by the spirit of race distinctions--appalled
by the atrocity of the war, calls upon us to substitute the
Ideal of Humanity for the ideas of the various tribes of men, he is
really (in re-action from the dreadful scenes around him) renouncing
those flashes of prophetic insight which gave him such living
visions of the diverse souls of the great races. Romain Rolland may
speak rhetorically of the "Ideal of Humanity" to be realised in art
and letters. The thing is a word, a name, a phrase, an illusion. What
we actually have are individuals--individual artists, individual
races--each with its own beautiful and tragical fatality.
And what is true of races is true of persons both in life and in
criticism. All that is really interesting in us springs in the first place
from the traditions of the race to which we belong, springs from the
soil that gave us birth and from our sacred dead and the usages and
customs and habits which bind us to the past; and in the second
place from what is uniquely and peculiarly personal to ourselves,
belonging to our intrinsic and integral character and refusing to be
swamped by any vague cult of "humanity in general."
To talk of literature becoming universal and planetary, becoming a
logical synthesis of the traditions of races and the visions of
individuals, is to talk of something that in its inherent nature is
contrary to the fundamental spirit of art. It implies a confusion
between the spheres of art and philosophy. The function of
philosophy is to synthesise and unite. The function of art is to
differentiate and distinguish. Philosophy and ethics are perfectly
justified in concerning themselves with a "regenerated humanity" in
which race-instincts and race-traditions are blotted out. Let them
produce such a humanity if they can! But while there are any artists
left in the world, or any lovers of art, it will always be to the old
inalienable traditions that they will turn; to the old local customs,
local pieties, local habits, local altars, and local gods.
To talk vaguely of cosmopolitan art uniting the nations, is to talk
foolishly, and it is to talk irreverently. The people who deal in such
theories are endeavouring to betray the dead of their own race and
the noble pieties and desperate courage of those who made them
what they are. It is a sacrilege, this speculation, and a sacrifice of
beauty upon the altar of a logical morality.
What one comes more and more to feel is that everything which
belongs to poetry and art belongs to the individual, to the individual
nation and the individual person. The great modern democracies,
with their cult of the average man and their suspicion of the
exceptional man, are naturally only too ready to hail as ideal and
wonderful any doctrine about literature which flatters their pride.
One of the most plausible forms of rhetorical cant is the cant about
the soul of average humanity expressing itself in art, in an art which
has sloughed off like an outworn skin all ancient race-instincts and
all individual egoism.
There has never been such art in the history of the world as this
average man's art, free from tradition and free from personal colour.
There will never be such art, unless it be the great, idealistic,
humanitarian, cosmopolitan art of the Moving Picture Show.
But the idea sounds well in popular oratory, and it has a most
soothing ointment for the souls of such artists as have neither
reverence nor imagination.
It is quite possible that for the general comfort of the race at large
--even if not for its happiness--it would be a good thing if
philosophers and moralists between them could get rid of the
imagination of races as well as the imagination of individuals.
The common crowd are naturally suspicious of imagination of any
kind, as they are suspicious of genius of any kind; and this new
doctrine of a literature largely and purely "human," wherein the
general soul of humanity may find its expression, free from the
colour of race-feeling and free from the waywardness of individual
men of genius, is just the sort of thing to flatter the unthinking mob.
Why not have art and literature harnessed once and for all to the
great rolling chariot of popular public opinion? Why not abolish all
individualism at one stroke as a thing dangerous to the public
welfare--a thing uncomfortable, undesirable, upsetting?
The same desperate, irrational, immoral imagination which inspires
races with a strange madness, inspires individuals too with a strange
madness.
Art and Literature are, after all, and there is little use denying it, the
last refuge and sanctuary, in a world ruled by machinery and
sentiment, of the free, wild, reckless, irresponsible, anarchical
imagination of such as refuse to sacrifice their own dreams for the
dreams--not less illusive--of the general herd.
We have to face the fact--bitter and melancholy though it may
be--that in our great bourgeois-dominated democracies the majority of
people would like to trample out the flame of genius altogether;
trample it out as something inimical to their peace.
Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, were all completely aware of
this instinctive hatred with which the mob of men regard what is
exceptional and rare. The Hamlet-spirit of the author of Coriolanus
must chuckle bitterly in that grave in Stratford-on-Avon when he
learns that the new ideal is the ideal of cosmopolitan literature
expressing the soul of the average man.
The clash is bound to come sooner or later between public opinion,
concerned to preserve the comfort of its illusions, and the art of the
individual artist playing, in noble irresponsibility, with all illusions.
It was his consciousness of this--of the natural antagonism of the
mob and its leaders to all great literature--that made Goethe draw
back so coldly and proudly from the popular tendencies of his time,
and seek refuge among the great individualistic spirits of the classic
civilisations. And what Goethe--the good European--did in his hour,
the more classical among European writers of our own day do still.
The great style--the style which is like gold and bronze in an age of
clay and rubble--remains as the only sure refuge we have from the
howling vulgarities of our generation. If books were taken from
us--the high, calm, beautiful, ironical books of classic tradition--how, in
this age, could the more sensitive among us endure to live at all?
With brutality and insanity and ruffianism, with complacency and
stupidity and sentimentalism, jostling us and hustling us on all sides,
how could we live, if it were not for the great, calm, scornful
anarchists of the soul, whose high inviolable imaginations
perpetually refresh and re-create the world?
And we who find this refuge, we who have to win our liberty every
day anew by bathing in these classic streams, we too will do well to
remember that the most precious things in life are the things that the
world can neither give nor take away.
We too--encouraged by these great individualists--have a right to
fall back upon whatever individuality may have been left to us; and,
resting upon that, sinking into the soul of that, to defy all that public
opinion and the voice of the majority may be able to do.
And we shall be wise also if we recognise, before it is too late, that
what is most intrinsic and inalienable in ourselves is just that very
portion of us which has nothing to do with our work in life, nothing
to do with our duty to the community.
We shall be wise if we recognise, before it is too late, that the thing
most sacred in us is that strange margin of unoccupied receptivity,
upon which settle, in their flight over land and sea, the beautiful
wild birds of unsolicited dreams.
We shall be wise if, before we die, we learn a little of the art of
suspending our judgment--the art of "waiting upon the spirit."
For it is only when we have suspended our judgment; it is only when
we have suspended our convictions, our principles, our ideals, our
moralities, that "the still small voice" of the music of the universe,
sad and sweet and terrible and tender, drifts in upon us, over the face
of the waters of the soul.
The essence of us, the hidden reality of us, is too rare and delicate a
thing to bear the crude weight of these sturdy opinions, these
vigorous convictions, these social ardours, without growing dulled
and hardened.
We all have to bear the burden of humanity; and the artists among us
may be thankful that the predatory curse resting upon the rich is
very seldom ours: but the burden of humanity must not be allowed
to press all joy, all originality, all waywardness, all interest, all
imagination out of our lives.
It is not for long, at best or worst, that we know what it is to be
conscious of being living children of the human race upon this
strange planet.
The days pass quickly, and the seasons and the years. From the
graves of the darlings of our souls there comes a voice and a cry. A
voice bidding us sink into our own true selves before we too are
numbered with the dead; a cry bidding us sacrifice everything before
we sacrifice the prerogative of our inmost identity, the right to feel
and think and dream as persons born into a high inheritance, the
inheritance of the mind that has the right to question all things and to
hold fast what pleases it in defiance of opinion and logic and
probability and argument.
For it is only when we suspend our judgments and leave arguing and
criticising, that the quiet gods of the moonlit shores of the world
murmur their secrets in our ears.
They come without our seeking for them, these rare intimations;
without our seeking for them, and, sometimes, without our desiring
them; but when they come they come as revelations of something
deeper in us than any mere soul of humanity. They come from a
region that is as far beyond humanity as it is beyond nature. They
come from the fairy-land of that mysterious country wherein dwell
the dreams and the fancies of those lonely ones among the sons of
men who have been possessed by imagination. They come from the
unknown land where those inhabit who are, as the Psalmist says,
"free among the dead." They come from the land which we left
when we were born, and to which we return when we die. And
whether this is a land of nothingness and oblivion none knoweth; for
none hath returned to tell us. Meanwhile we can imagine what we
will; and we can suspend our last judgment until we ourselves are
judged.