LITERATURE AND PROGRESS
I
Let us turn, then, from science to literature: to the attempt made by
this age, or a certain section of it, to find self-conscious expression
for its praise or blame. I spoke at the beginning of the impeachment
of the nineteenth-century civilisation by its greater writers: their
conviction of a mortal disease. We have few great writers and far
less violence in denunciation. The change is becoming manifest as
comfort increases and wealth accumulates, which has been manifest
in all similar transformations. Literature loses its ardour and its
inspiration. It becomes critical rather than invigorating: sceptical,
questioning, sometimes with an appearance of frivolity, sometimes
torturing itself with angers and despairs. The note to-day is that of
a time of disenchantment. Here is reaction after the fashion of high
hopes: indignation at the bankruptcy of things which promised much and
accomplished so little; a conviction that the zest and sparkle has gone
from a society which suddenly feels itself growing old.
“The great evil of our age,” is the summary of one clear-sighted
critic, “is that we are constantly and terribly aware of evil.”
With wealth accumulated to the astonishment of mankind, tribute
sucked from all subject races, opulence which makes poorer nations
envious, literature reveals no content, no deliberate acceptances,
no high inspiration. “Our science, philosophies, and inventions and
manufactures and infinite complexities have conspired to make us more
discontented, even if we have not actually more cause for misery.”[19]
The verdict of the sceptic from the heart of a civilisation advancing
in material triumph and more comfortable in the world than ever before,
is a verdict of weariness and vanity.
The “ache of modernism” and the turmoil of Whitman’s “growing arrogance
of realism” confront the demands of the human spirit for adventure and
of the human heart for triumph over time and change. Science in its
buoyant beginnings had provided great inspiration, of wonderful gifts
for man’s enjoyment, of wonderful knowledge of the universal secret.
Sixty years ago it seemed to be offering humanity not only control of
material forces and cunning invention, but also the interpretation of
the secret of life and destiny. But science to-day--in the critic’s
examination--protests in literature the affirmation of a bankrupt
creed. The revelation of the secret has become the assertion of
Haeckel, that “consciousness, thought, and speculation are functions of
the ganglionic cells of the cortex of the brain.” And the inspiration
of the discovery sinks back into the declaration that “Democracy is an
expression of the constant desire for change, due to a hope that change
will bring some remedy for the really incurable ills of human nature.”
In such a critic as Mr. Hardy, reaction against this failure, the
bankruptcy of the creed of science, passes into an almost savage revolt
against the blind purposes of life; its clumsy cruelties, its lack of
guidance or intelligible meaning. “Hardy goes so far as to suggest that
God is either a defeated God or that He is indifferent, if not actually
hostile, to men.” “Human beings are for him worthy of praise and pity
because they have been laden with sorrows which they did not deserve,
and are kinder to one another than God is kind to them.”[20] This great
writer sees in vision the tragedy of “the modern vice of unrest,” of
“the view of life as a thing to be put up with, replacing that zest
for existence which was so intense in early civilisation.” “It is the
beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.”
In face of such disillusionment the men who attempt literature
attempt escape in various ways. And “escape” is the prominent aspect
of to-day’s art, in a deliberate turning away from the realities
of the present, which only a few accept as substance for artistic
interpretation. Some fling themselves out of the main stream of life
like the “Decadents,” finding satisfaction in sense-given impression,
repudiating ultimate purposes. To these the present is already in
Autumn, and its noises and tumults but the jarrings of a machine
running down; worn with the dust of its own grinding. Others, like
the psychological novelists, attempt analysis without affirmation
or denial. They exhibit the world as they see it, or a particular
select portion of it. They dissect a character or a situation in all
its implications and aspects. They would be the first to repudiate
either approval or criticism of this subject-matter of delicate and
refined writing. At the opposite pole are the apostles of protest--a
Gorky, a Wells, a Mark Rutherford, who stab and slash at a life so
remote from the ideal, in furious revolt against its complacencies
and cruelties. Some fall back on dreams and memories, finding, either
in a transfigured past or in the kingdom of fantasy which never was
upon the solid ground, satisfaction denied in a world which has become
“so unworthy.” And others seek refuge in dreams of a transfigured
humanity from the implacable defiance of present things; with pictures
of that new world which yet shall rise when “every life shall be a
song.” Beyond these are the fugitives who frankly take to flight;
like Lafcadio Hearn, turning first to the south, then to the east,
“to the unexplored Eastern mind which may yet afford a refuge from
‘modernism,’” and finding his latter days saddened by the aggressive
entrance of “modernism” even into these remote fastnesses, and
civilisation ravaging the simplicities of old Japan. In the near East,
Mr. Scott James found the challenge frankly flung down, and the two
forces--romanticism and “modernism”--joined at death grips. “‘Time!’
ejaculates the Montenegrin. ‘What is time? Time is nothing. You live,
and then you die.’” The same resistance, the same overthrow is being
revealed here as Mr. Fielding Hall discovered in a far East, and so
unforgetably stamped into literature, in his picture of the passing
of the soul of Burma before a conquering imperialism and a vigorous
commercial development. “I know what it means, this civilisation,” says
the priest of “Our Lady of the Rocks” in the remote mountain fastness
of the Balkans. “My poor people. They have no idea what life is, out in
the great world, and it is coming to them.” “Till now they have lived
with God and the mountains. It is so very little that one needs in this
life. We have so short a time here.”
A few years ago I selected for criticism and for praise certain
contemporary writers who were refusing to take “opium.”[21] These set
themselves definitely in the heart of present affairs to endeavour to
understand and to interpret the meaning of their day and generation.
In almost every case the progress of things since that estimate has
taken them into darker and more ominous outlook upon the future of the
modern world. To Mr. Wells it is all a “spectacle of forces running to
waste, of people who use and do not replace; the story of a country
hectic with a wasting, aimless fever of trade and money-making and
pleasure-seeking.” The hero of his greatest novel reveals an experience
fragmentary and disconnected in a tumultuous world. Mr. Wells can
show that world in its rockings and upheavals, until beneath the
seeming calm and conventionality of the surface view, is heard the
very sound of the fractures and fallings; an age in the headlong
rush of change. George Ponderevo is at one time floating immense
financial companies, a king of speculation, courted by the great, one
of England’s “Conquerors.” At another he is quarrelling and forgiving
and quarrelling again with a little commonplace uncomprehending
wife down in a commonplace villa at Ealing. He is learning to fly,
absorbed in the work of scientific invention--the one real thing of
solid resistance in a universe of slush and mud and make-believe.
He is engaged in random, fantastic sociabilities at Beckenham or
Chislehurst, discussing, under the conflagrations of sun and star, the
respective merits, as domestic pets, of cat or dog. He is plunging,
in disconnected adventure, into a piratical raid into West Africa
after “quap,” a poisonous radio-active product of enormous value; and
again, emerging from that terrific battle with unclean and tenacious
forces, he is balancing toast on a tea-cup in a London drawing-room.
He tumbles into love, driven forward by blind, tyrannous forces which
overthrow reason and conventional restraint, against which he has never
been warned, in whose service he can find no meaning. And in problems
of sex which appear simple to the orthodox upholders of the existing
moral standards, and simple, again, to the orthodox revolters from
the existing moral standards, he can find nothing but perplexity and
confusion--no certain guidance at all.
At the beginning the child is reared under the shadow of Bladesover,
under the dominance of the great house, in the feudal tradition seen
from the underside. And here was a civilisation which could be
approved or condemned, but which at least stood as a coherent thing--a
rule of life, a code of conduct, an organic society. But as he grows
to manhood, Bladesover is sinking into decay, perishing, not knowing
that it is perishing, thinking that it will endure for ever. The man
who is living amid that long-drawn decline is wandering between two
worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. It is an age in
passing. What is coming to replace it? No one knows. The religion, the
moral affirmations and denials of Bladesover are vanishing with it.
Like the great house, the outward seeming still maintains an appearance
of life; still church steeple and feudal tower together dominate the
countryside. But the inner heart of it has gone. Man, as he achieves
maturity, as he achieves sincerity from the rubbish heap of dead and
dying assertions and denials in which he is being upreared, finds
himself naked and alone in the midst of all the clamour and violence
of encompassing hordes of his fellows. No pillar of cloud by day, no
pillar of fire by night, directs his onward journey. And the irony
of the experience is provided by the fact that the moment of the
apprehension of this loneliness is the moment also of the apprehension
of magnificence in material achievement--when civilisation, intoxicated
with the attainment of comfort, is crowning itself with flowers and
calling itself immortal. The effect is similar to that of the splendour
of a palace which is found to be designed by a madman.
It is a “new hotel population” revealed as the ascendant race: the
“multitude of economically ascendant people who are learning how to
spend money.” They are “running the world, practically, running it
faster and faster.” Of the fate of such an Age the hero here makes no
prophecy. The sadness of his frustrated life, the denial of the only
thing in life that he passionately desires, fills the whole scene with
the sense of baffled purposes, of a striving that ends in nothing. “It
may be,” he confesses at the end, “I see decay all about me because I
am, in a sense, decay. To others it may be a scene of achievement and
construction radiant with hope. I, too, have a sort of hope, but it is
a remote hope, a hope that finds no promise in this Empire or in any of
the great things of our time. How they will look in history I do not
know.”[22]
And here speaks the ordinary man in his moment of introspection: in
that rare moment when standing aside from the hurry and dust of it
all he asks himself whence? why? and to what end? The other qualified
critics of the time are scarcely less discomforting. Mr. Bernard
Shaw, after devoting half his lifetime to the satirising of the
advocates of order, seems determined to devote the other half to the
satirising of the advocates of change. Ridicule of the hypocrisy and
self-deceptions which are the permanent accompaniments of reform, is a
task not only easy in itself, but exceedingly agreeable to all those
to whom Reform itself is tiresome. The satirist enjoys, therefore, a
widespread popularity. The portrait of the blatent Liberal phrasemonger
in _John Bull’s Other Island_, the failure of philanthropy and the
triumph of efficiency in _Major Barbara_, the universal confusion
which falls upon the new moralists in the conversation in _Getting
Married_, seems extraordinarily pleasant to all those to whom Liberal
ideas and philanthropic ardours and new moralities are undesirable
intruders in a well-regulated existence. Only occasionally, and then
through the intervention of a “madman,” does the voice of the prophet
declare “woe” to a world of blindness and illusion. Little Rosscullen,
the Irish parallel to the remote Montenegrin village, invaded by
the representatives of “Progress” is found far from any condition
of idyllic innocence. Amid the splendour of the natural scene, the
granite rock and heather in the setting sun, poverty, selfishness,
superstition, ignorance, indifferent cruelty compete for mastery.
The priest tyrannises and bullies, the farmer cheats the labourer;
furtive cunning and idleness and revengeful memories occupy the
place of the simple devotion and pastoral rejoicings of the popular
picture. But the new world which is to civilise this dreary swamp
of humanity out of existence offers to the observer food no more
satisfying to the hungry heart of man. The “Progress” which modern
life here unfolds to the medieval is a “progress” which terminates
in blind endings--the product of the Town of Vanity. “I shall bring
money here,” is the twentieth-century promise to all Rosscullens.
“I shall raise wages. I shall found public institutions, a library,
a polytechnic (undenominational, of course), a gymnasium, a cricket
club, perhaps an art school. I shall make a garden city of Rosscullen.
The round tower shall be thoroughly repaired and restored.” To which
the twelfth century replies in an epitaph written over the graves
of many kings. “Believe me, I do every justice to the efficiency of
you and your syndicate. Mr. Broadbent will get into Parliament most
efficiently; which is more than St. Patrick could do if he were alive
now. You may even build the hotel efficiently, if you can find enough
efficient masons, carpenters, and plumbers, which I rather doubt.
When the hotel becomes insolvent your English business habits will
secure the thorough efficiency of the liquidation. You will reorganise
the scheme efficiently. You will legislate its second bankruptcy
efficiently. You will get rid of its original shareholders efficiently,
after efficiently ruining them. And you will finally profit very
efficiently by getting that hotel for a few shillings in the pound.
Besides these efficient operations, you will foreclose your mortgages
most efficiently. You will drive Haffigan to America very efficiently.
You will find a use for Barney Doran’s foul mouth and bullying temper
by employing him to slave-drive your labourers very efficiently. And
when at last this poor desolate countryside becomes a busy mint in
which we shall all slave to make money for you, with our Polytechnic
to teach us how to do it efficiently, and our library to fuddle the
few imaginations your distilleries will spare, and our repaired Round
Tower, with admission sixpence, and refreshments and penny-in-the-slot
mutoscopes to make it interesting, then no doubt your English and
American shareholders will spend all the money we make for them very
efficiently in shooting and hunting, in operations for cancer and
appendicitis, in gluttony and gambling; and you will devote what they
save to fresh land-development schemes. For four wicked centuries the
world has dreamt this foolish dream of efficiency. And the end is not
yet. But the end will come.”[23]
Which outburst, like the denunciation of the American millionaires by
the preacher whom they pay for such services, excites no resentment,
but rather applause. “Too true,” replies Mr. Broadbent, “only too true,
and most eloquently put.” “He has made me feel a better man,” is the
grateful verdict. “I feel now as I never did before, that I am right
in devoting my life to the cause of Ireland. Come along and help me to
choose the site for the new hotel.”
Nor are the younger writers of to-day entirely free from this
infection of fatigue and of revolt against the triumphant forces of
the modern world. In the days of the Reaction in politics, a few were
conspicuous both for the vigour of their attacks against its falsities
and cowardices, and also for their undismayed assertion of another
ideal. Yet after that Reaction’s overthrow they seem to find little
satisfaction: and reveal in their criticism a rejection, not merely
of systems of government or worship of false gods in modern life,
but of the whole soul of a civilisation visibly--as it appears to
them--sick unto death. Mr. Belloc--one of our few living masters of
irony--has advanced from the limited survey of “Mr. Burden” an attack,
with some kindliness and some good nature, upon a particular phase of
financial manipulation, to the bitter and mirthless impeachment of
“Mr. Clutterbuck”--an attack on modern life itself as fundamentally a
thing unclean. Rich men struggle for money or worldly honour as dogs
fight over offal. Middle classes, vacuous in intelligence, humourless
in daily existence, reveal as sole ambition, longing for wealth and
rank and social advancement. Behind is a shadowy background of inert,
vacant “populace,” ignorant, violent, despicable, only appearing in
the scene to be cajoled and deluded in popular elections. The general
result is the picture of a Society afflicted with an incurable decay,
a carcase eaten of maggots and worms. Mr. Chesterton, again, first
entered the arena of controversy in another spirit: crashing upon the
stage sword in hand, and with a breath of jolly fresh air offering to
lead all humanity to the downfall of Doubting Castle. His challenge and
defiance were to all pessimisms and life denials, to all who refused
to affirm that to-day was the first of days, and every dawn a miracle.
The slums of the cities were stupendous, the suburbs sublime. Each
fat red pillar-box was a symbol of enchantment. Dragons’ eyes glared
from the lights of engines, and the lamp-posts shouted, like the sons
of God, for joy that they were made. But to-day in our solitary and
splendid optimist the rejoicing has already become sickled o’er with
the pale cast of doubt. The music of his rustic flute has kept not for
long its happy country tone, and has taken a stormier note from the
tempest-tossed children of mankind. So the sunlight fades in the vision
of a people which has abandoned Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, of
political parties bought for ignoble ends, a nation which has turned
its back upon the clean ways of progress, and lies deferential and
prostrate before an oligarchy of rich men; who only cannot be bought
because they have sold themselves already.
And in a thousand lesser ways in various efforts through industrious
novelists and essayists, in the newspaper and the pulpit, there is
made manifest this bewilderment, doubt, and uncertainty of the future.
“Neither hast Thou saved Thy people at all,” is the summary of many who
hoped so much from the discoveries and progresses of the last century,
and now find their hopes unexpectedly baffled. The majority of writers
are in revolt against the organisation of present-day society. Some
call themselves Socialists. But by “Socialist” they mean little but an
impeachment of the present. With some that impeachment is definitely of
certain specific and economic evils. Poverty in the midst of plenty,
extravagance of wealth helpless before extravagance of penury, a
growing absorption in pleasure, lack of simplicity, of patriotism, or
of impersonal ideals, are the subjects which fill their pages with
lamentation. There are others, however, in whom the criticism goes
deeper, with whom complaint against life’s ironies and injustices has
passed into complaint against life itself. They can see present wrongs,
but if all these wrongs were righted, they can see no rational or
satisfying ideal. Level the poor to the rich, convert Poplar or Wapping
into Belgravia or Mayfair, make every labourer’s cottage, as by the
waving of a fairy wand, into the security and splendour of the country
house. What after all, they declare, have you accomplished but the
conversion of a society scourged with hunger and cold into a society
afflicted with a great weariness. Humanity, at last self-conscious,
has understood the meaning of the World Process and will be no longer
fooled by its futile, irrational demands.
What can be discovered, in this evidence of wasting and decay, of
another character: of a literature which accepts the present with
rejoicing, or looks through the present to a transfigured future, or
sees the present itself transfigured by a perpetual benediction? Can
there still be descried, under grey skies and in an age of comfort
rather than of inspiration, those who still assert the reality of the
Vision Splendid, and essay adventure down all the great ways of the
world.
Still two voyages are being accepted: a voyage without, in the actual
encounter with primitive and hostile forces, and in a universe of salt
and bracing challenges; and a voyage within, across distant horizons
and to stranger countries than any visible to the actual senses.
In the latter there is revealed a continuous tradition through the
older mystics, of those who are secure in whatever wild whirlpools or
stretches of sullen marsh the river of time may flow, because their
goods are gathered
“Where change is not, nor parting any more,
Nor revolution of the moon and sun.”
The Reverend Thomas Treherne, in a quiet corner of seventeenth-century
England, could declare that “all Time was Eternity and a perpetual
Sabbath.” “The corn was orient, and immortal wheat which never should
be reaped, nor was ever sown. The dust and stones of the streets
were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the
world.” “Everything was at rest, free and immortal. I know nothing
of sickness or death, or rents or exactions, either for tribute or
bread. In the absence of these I was entertained like an Angel with
the works of God in their splendour and glory. I saw all in the
peace of Eden.”[24] A hundred years later Blake in the dusty byways
of dead cities could carry on the tradition of those who accept and
yet rejoice--perpetually charging themselves in Whitman’s cheerful
proclamation with “contentment and triumph.” Seeing God visibly with
the naked eye, angels “with bright angelic wings bespangling every
bough with stars” in the trees of Peckham Rye, and the sun not as a
golden guinea hung in the sky, but as a multitude of the heavenly host
singing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” this master mystic could defiantly proclaim
that “though on earth things seem permanent, they are less permanent
than a shadow, as we all know too well.” A century afterwards the
tradition still abides, and life is still illuminated by an adventure
through and beyond the sense-given impression of the outward show,
into a universe of fire and splendour. To some it is effort towards a
secret, a refusal to accept the knowledge which is given as the last
word on the matter: an attempt to get once more behind both science and
revelation to the Quiet which lies beyond all the noises of the world.
To others it is a spiritual pilgrimage, not so much towards knowledge
as towards attainment; an attempt through the will, in the business of
life, to identify life as a journey: along a “road which leads to a
light on the far horizon and beyond to the presence of God.” In each
there is an escape from a tyranny of a present offering grey streets
encompassing grey people, evolving itself into a future which offers
more grey streets encompassing more grey people. Against so desolate a
prospect sounds the summons of high enterprise, in the affirmation of a
splendour not yet revealed, of shadowy presences and casements opening
upon the perilous seas of fairyland.
In the other voyage, that enterprise is offered in no shadowy region
of dreams, but amid the hard and tangible materials of to-day: in that
“Romance” whose habitation is everlasting, and kingdom without end.
It is the inspiration of Stevenson and his successors: accepting all
things, delighting in all things with the solemn engrossing play of
children; living in “make-believe,” knowing it make-believe, and yet
not desiring to have it otherwise. “He seems to be marching through a
land and atmosphere,” says a critic, “where the men are strange men,
and the lights are garish, and there is a queer noise of music borne
upon the wind. And yet this land, for all its strangeness, is found to
be the land we knew before, but seen under a new perspective, upon a
more imaginative plane.” He has never lacked successors: some finding
in the actual adventure of so-called settled and orderly life all the
amazing romance of the vicissitudes of fortune: some, like Mr. Rudyard
Kipling, exhibiting just outside the ordered garden the riotous forces
of natural and untameable things--the hills and the sea--calling upon
man joyfully to an encounter which may be ruinous but is never dull.
So there is inspiration in such a great writer as Mr. Joseph Conrad,
with his sense of companionship, laughter, and fury in the defiance of
wind and tempest: in a lesser example, in that “Beloved Vagabond” who
discovered “why I was sent into the world. It was to play the fiddle up
and down the sunny land of France.”
II
But this, after all, is “make-believe”--the play of children; and
children grow tired of their toys. Dressed up in gorgeous garments,
marching through the world with helmet and tin sword, they may pretend
that tremendous events accompany every day. If, to the majority, these
tremendous events do not accompany every day, they are destined sooner
or later to be found out. Lives insurgent and confined may take delight
in the vision of strange countries and far horizons, just as Dick
Heldar at his window looking over the lights of the enormous city is
roused into a sickness of longing by the song of the “Men of the Sea.”
But to the general such emotions must remain a passion vicariously
experienced. We must seek elsewhere for a spirit, expressing itself
through literature, to which any large proportion of the citizens of
the twentieth century can respond. It must be a spirit which will
reveal the present as itself satisfying, apart from unknown to-morrows
and dead yesterdays. It must stand independent of all attainments
of political and social changes, as something by which human life
will find itself ennobled, when all the old wrongs are righted and an
economic basis of possible existence secured for all. It must be a
spirit of joy as well as of reason: yielding exultant satisfaction in
a delight which is beyond the mere momentary enjoyment of the senses
in the dull instincts of thrift and gain. And it must be independent
for the immediate future of supernatural securities and definite
theories as to the meaning and purpose of the world. Such theories will
continue, indeed, to be maintained with greater or less allegiances by
large sections and organisations of the new race. These are not likely
at any reckonable time to unite upon any single dominant philosophy of
life, or, in union, to impose that dominant philosophy upon the people
outside. For a large and probably an increasing proportion, relief from
a kind of life-weariness must come from some element in the world as
it is given; from renewed expression, either in response to the life
of the earth, or in the fulfilment of artistic and creative powers, or
in new forms of enthusiasm for their fellow-men, of the possibilities
before a people which sees existence less as a pilgrimage than as a
present boon.
Indications towards such a new inspiration are not lacking in Europe
and America. They are found in the works of such a writer as Whitman,
with his ecstasy at the “ever-returning miracle of the sunrise,” the
love of ferries and crowds, cities and men, and all the beauty of the
world. A more exotic but still hopeful creed is that of Maeterlinck,
with his delight in the white road, and the silence of the night, and
the splendour of the sunset; his vision of a humanity whose hearts will
grow more gentle with the weather, absorbed in persuading the earth to
bring forth ever more marvellous treasures of fruit and flowers. And in
England also, in such writings as those of William Morris and Richard
Jefferies, there would appear a kind of foretaste of a spirit which in
its acceptance and its rejoicing, may be found to build up behind the
deserts of life-weariness a triumphant affirmation of the greatness of
Present Things.
This exultant optimism would often seem to be entirely independent
of narrow circumstance or present discouragement. “You never enjoy
the world aright,” says Mr. Thomas Treherne, “till you so love the
beauty of enjoying it that you are covetous and earnest to persuade
others to enjoy it.” Most of those who in latter years of depression
and grey skies have revealed themselves as “covetous and earnest to
persuade others to enjoy it,” have been great physical sufferers. From
a life of physical torment, perhaps intensified and heightened by that
torment, they have been engaged in “corroborating for ever the triumph
of things.” Stevenson and Henley, Whitman and Jefferies, all those who
have “made to-day the first of days and this field Eden,” have learnt
the intoxication of present pleasure from association with present
pain. “He was a very marked case of hysteria in man,” was one medical
verdict upon Jefferies. In the long years of torture which terminated
in premature death, “in some way not yet to be explained,” says his
latest biographer, “the mortal pining of his body was related to the
intense vivacity of his last years.” “Some of my best work,” he wrote,
“was done in this intense agony.” In the midst of which agonies he
stands as typical of the company of “Life Worshippers” who, awakening
while other men were asleep, could behold something of the splendour
of the world, the magic of each moment as it passes, vindicating its
existence before it dies.
This “Life Worship” becomes revealed as a gluttonous grasping at the
present, the sucking of the rind and core of its delights; a response
to the consciousness of the crowd; a refusal to accept any standard but
the standard of Life, before which many impulses and all inhibitions
stand judged and condemned. “I believe in the Body,” is the beginning
of the Creed. “I believe all manner of asceticism to be the vilest
blasphemy; blasphemy towards the whole of the human race. I believe in
the flesh and the body, which is worthy of worship.... The ascetics
are the only persons that are impure.” In Jefferies worship of natural
things became a kind of physical avidity; intensified by a sense of
touch and vision exceedingly delicate and violent. He devoured colour,
finding “every spot of it a sort of food.” In the later spring “the
ears listen and want more,” he writes: “the eyes are gratified with
gazing, and desire yet further; the nostrils are filled with sweet
odours of flower and sap. The touch, too, had its pleasures, dallying
with leaf and flower.” “Can you not almost grasp the odour-laden air,”
he asks, “and hold it in the hollow of the hand?” It is a riot of
sense-given impression, accepting, without questioning, very content.
These men are of the company who find the world “more to man since
he is fallen than it was before,” accepting the challenge of the
mystic--“you never enjoy the world aright till the Sea itself floweth
in your veins, till you are clothed with the Heavens and crowned with
the Stars.”
It is a pageant, the pageant of the moment which passes and yet
abides, ever old and ever young. It delights in “the old road, the
same flowers.” It accepts the wind’s whispering that “there never was
a yesterday, and never will be a to-morrow.” It finds “always hope
in the hills.” “All the grasses of the meadow were my pets,” wrote
Jefferies of his childhood’s days. “I loved them all.” Of poppies,
“there is genius in them,” he proclaims, “the genius of colour, and
they are saved.” With Thoreau he will abandon all for which most men
labour to hear one cricket sing. “I found from the dandelion,” he
cries, “that there were no books.” “The sunlight puts out the words
of the printed books as it puts out the fire; the very grass blades
confound the wise.” To that sunlight he brings as a testing instrument
all clamorous and appealing things: the hopes and dreams and perplexing
ways of men. He is a worshipper of the sun, falling in the afternoon in
Trafalgar Square, on the crowded Brighton promenade, in the woods of
high June, or under a cold November day. He applauds it stored in the
gold of the wheat or woven into the petals of the rose. “More sunshine;
more flowers” is a perpetual hope for the future of mankind. For this
sunshine is life--riotous, confident, unashamed; life congruous to
and illuminating all the physical beauty of the human body, of the
world of out of doors; the life which made him almost intoxicated with
the marbles in the British Museum, which drew him, resisting, to the
unknown city multitudes; which left him in childhood on the downs,
“utterly alone with the sun and the earth,” lost in an ecstasy, an
inflatus at “the inexpressible beauty of it all.”
And as “Life Worship” approves, it also condemns; all energies directed
towards blind alleys, burrowings underground; all that is unable
to encounter with exultation the test of that strong stimulus and
fever. It rebels always against the mechanic pacing to and fro; the
set grey life; the apathetic end. Its vision of modern England is of
the man with the muckrake, ever being offered the golden crown, ever
assiduously and with downcast eyes raking together the sticks and
small stones and the dust of the floor. “The pageantry of power,” says
Jefferies, “the still more foolish pageantry of wealth; the senseless
precedence of place; words fail me to express my utter contempt for
such pleasure or such ambitions.” He is dissatisfied that life for the
general is “so little and so mean.” “Back to the sun” he is always
preaching, from “house life”--“house life” which he denounces as the
creed of the half-alive. “Remain; be content; go round and round in
one barren path, a little money, a little food and sleep, some ancient
fables, old age, and death.” As a mystic he belongs to the class of
those who aspire, rather than of those who acquiesce. These are never
in danger of becoming quietists. Rejoicing in the moment, they are
never content with the moment, demanding always that which the moment,
with all its rich benefits, can never bestow. They ask “for a larger
frame, a longer day, more sunshine, a longer sleep.” They rise from
the banquet of life never satisfied, encouraging illimitable desires.
Longing--an invalid--for “the unwearied strength of Ninus to hunt
unceasingly in the fierce sun,” “still I should desire greater strength
and a stouter bow,” cries Jefferies; “wilder creatures to combat.” “The
intense life of the senses,” he asserts, “there is never enough of
them.” “I should like to be loved by every beautiful woman on earth.”
Meat and bread he finds pleasant and wine refreshing, but “these
are the least of all.” He has never had enough of the vehemence of
exertion, the vehemence of sunlight and life, the insatiate desire of
love, divine and beautiful, the uncontrollable desire of beauty. “Give
me these in greater abundance,” he prays, “than was ever known to man
or woman.” It is the prayer of a cripple, in poverty and pain, stricken
down ere the journey has well-nigh begun; so soon to pass to where all
journeys end.[25]
And what they desire for themselves they come to desire also for all
companions, as they march singing down the great roads of the universe.
It is a life which will transfer no affections to some problematical
future, but here and now will riot and rejoice in the glory of the sum
of things. Jefferies was perplexed and saddened by the confusion that
man has made of his world. “In twelve thousand written years the world
has not yet built itself a House, nor filled a Granary, nor organised
itself for its own comfort. It is so marvellous I cannot express the
wonder with which it fills me.” Yet he believes that there would be
enough for all, if only all were willing to share it. He brushes aside
the ordinary ambitions which inflame mankind: “money, furniture,
affected show, and the pageantry of wealth.” He longs for the coming of
a day when the ambition of the multitude will be fixed on the idea of
form and beauty. “I would submit to a severe discipline,” he declares,
“and to go without many things cheerfully, for the good and happiness
of the human race in the future.” “The labour of our predecessors in
this country, in all other countries of the earth, is entirely wasted.
We live--that is, we snatch an existence--and our works become nothing.
The piling up of fortunes, the building of cities, the establishment of
immense commerce, end in a cipher. These objects are so outside my idea
that I cannot understand them, and look upon the struggle in amazement.
Not even the pressure of poverty can force upon me an understanding
of, and sympathy with, these things.” But he does not despair of the
future. “Earth,” he asserts in _The Pageant of Summer_, “holds secrets
enough to give them the life of the favoured immortals.” His heart was
fixed firm and stable in the belief that “ultimately the sunshine and
the summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were,
interwoven into man’s existence.” “There is so much for us yet to
come,” he believes, “so much to be gathered and enjoyed.”
So these writers can look towards the future with hope. Their visions
and Utopias do not end in a sense of dust and ashes--an infinite
weariness. The cities ever growing higher of M. Anatole France, in the
heart of which men pile up wealth on a diet of sour milk and digestive
tablets, the fat, settled comfort of Mr. Bellamy, the roofed-in
labyrinthine airless ant-heaps of Mr. Wells’s nightmare all leave
an impression of emptiness and fatigue. But here is the sense of an
inspiration and splendour which could become part of the common life
of humanity. Nor does this splendour require, as in former appeals in
literature, assumptions which the modern world is finding impossible.
Wordsworth offered an escape from the tyrannies of a mechanical
civilisation, in an exaltation of the appeal of Nature and of the life
of the poor. But he demanded for his acceptance assumptions concerning
both Nature and the Poor which men to-day are by no means prepared
to give. He found the one charged with a spiritual presence, the
other transformed by unusual tranquillity and piety. Not through such
assumptions will society, in the immediate years to come, find the
satisfaction which is the goal of all its wandering. There is more hope
in the way of the Life Worshippers like Jefferies than of the Nature
Worshippers like Wordsworth. Wordsworth assumes a Nature benignant and
responsive, a spirit whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and
in the mind of man. The result is a kind of refined and sometimes too
rarefied Pantheism, which is compelled often to shut its eyes to the
Nature which is “red in tooth and claw,” and equally bestows increase
and destruction. Jefferies wove from his dawns and sunsets no roseate
scheme of natural religion. He acknowledged the “blunt cruelty” of
natural things. He always confessed no intelligence in human affairs:
outside, a Nature not so much hostile as utterly indifferent to all
the ardours of mankind. “The sea, the earth, the sun, the trees, the
hills, care nothing for human life.” He had no specific “humanitarian”
teaching, and in early days delighted in the work of devastation and of
slaughter. He was bored by the claims of science, and thought nothing
of the jargon of “Evolution.” The strength of his position rests in
his association of these realities with the overmastering “passion of
life.” To him it was an adventure always, into a region of fairyland,
occupied as to another modern mystic with “dust like the wreck of
temples and thistle-down like the ruin of stars.” His strength was in
himself. It was from that hidden, mysterious source of vitality that
the colours appeared which he sought in field and flower, that rain
of fairy gold which flung itself over the common things until every
bush was burning with fire. He did not find a Presence which disturbed
with the joy of elevating thoughts. He found a Glamour--inimitable,
inexplicable--which excited to passionate emotion. Others have demanded
Order, Understanding, evidence of Purpose or Compassion. He asked
only for Beauty. And that Beauty is not denied to the supplicant. The
Seasons pass in their procession; Birth and Death weave their webs of
being; men are seeking, and in vain, for sympathy and pity behind
the veil of visible things. Enough for him that here the sunlight
flickering on the stems of old trees, the sap creeping up through a
million tiny stems, the changes of expanding petals and of withered
autumn leaves, can reveal a magic and a mystery which time shall never
dim nor age destroy.
This unquestioning love of the Earth and the children of it is perhaps
the most hopeful element for future progress. In a century of doubts
and scepticisms it may serve to bridge the gulf between the old and the
new. Whilst men are still confused concerning the purposes of Nature,
and still doubtful concerning any definite or intelligent progress
towards a final end, it is much that inspiration and contentment can
be found in its present beauty and appeal. The “glory of the sum of
things” may thus come to be interpreted in some particular sense-given
experience, untroubled--in that present--by inquiry concerning a past
that is dead or a future that is not yet born. Forgetful of the cold
of a vanished winter, and of the inevitable fading of the flowers, man
can accept the summer day, from dawn to sunset, as an “Eternal moment,”
something that is good in itself apart from remembrance of what has
been or anticipation of what shall be. And if this acquiescence and
enjoyment be supplemented by the recreation of a creative energy,
in that special happiness which comes from the fashioning by human
handiwork of things of delight, the possibilities of an inspiration
can be discerned which even for a time, putting aside occupation in
ultimate mysteries, may “bring satisfaction to the ways of men.”
The demand for more and fuller life, which attempts in empty effort,
in acceleration, in sense-given pleasure, in the mere blind and
laborious effort at the attainment of wealth, may be here pictured
as realising itself in no material or brutal fashion, through an
experience which itself is its own justification. In such a life as
that of William Morris there is the suggestion of a possibility of
progress, more satisfying and at the same time more hopeful than
Mill’s refuge in transcendental poetry. It is an advance on Jefferies
because more determined and alive: more positive in its proclamation
of life’s good things. It is the artist as craftsman on the one hand,
as lover of the earth on the other, who appears typical of the best
that can be expected in a world which has abandoned adventure beyond
the sense-given universe. His Socialism indeed led him amongst strange
companions and into mean unlovely regions of the Newer England.
But this Socialism was just the emotional revolt against all the
multitudinous ugliness and captivity and starved limited life of
those whose life could have been a thing so different. The very thing
that seemed to be intolerable, in a society which called itself a
civilisation, was that the variable, fascinating aspects of a changing
year should proclaim its appeal on wall and garden, and mankind pass
by, with blind uncomprehending gaze, in a pursuit after irrelevant
things; and that in the industry of a whole race of men engaged in
extravagant toil, there should be absent from that toil the delight
in inventiveness and original handwork which alone can convert labour
into a joy. His first allies had been absorbed in the effort at
escape: through Rossetti’s exotic twilight, or Burne Jones’s radiant
visions of a world beyond the world. He also had sought the consolation
which comes from far-off places, in a medieval England seen under a
light which never was on sea or land. He drew from this passion of
the past the best that the past could give; a sharp sense of the good
things which are still offered to a world of children living always
in fairyland: untroubled by present doubts and future fears. “With
him,” says his biographer, “the love of things had all the romance and
passion that is generally associated with the love of persons only.”
“It has come to be to me,” he wrote in 1882, of the Manor House at
Kelmscott, “the type of the pleasant places of the earth, and of the
homes of harmless, simple people, not overburdened with the intricacies
of life. And as others love the race of men through their lovers, so I
love the earth through that small space of it.”
“Children we twain are,” he could write of himself and his book,
“late made wise in love, but in all else most childish still.” Loving
the earth and the joy of it, seeking still the pleasure of the eyes,
exulting in its visible beauty, the waters gliding through the Hollow
Land where the hills are blue, a walled garden in the happy poplar
land, with old grey stones over which red apples shone “at the right
time of the year” he could always cherish the hope that “our small
corner of the world may once again become beautiful and dramatic
withal”: because the red apples and grey stones and blue hills were
possessions which required for their acceptance no impossible extension
of present human achievement. In his vision of satisfaction “now it is
a picture of some great room full of merriment,” says a critic, “now
of the winepress, now of the golden threshing-floor, now of an old
mill among apple trees, now of cool water after heat of the sun, now
of some well-sheltered, well-tilled place among woods or mountains,
where men and women live happily, knowing of nothing that is too far
off or too great for the affections.” The one cloud in the landscape
comes from the knowledge that it will change and vanish: that, behind,
are always the hurrying of the inexorable hours and the beating of the
great wings of Death. But if the transitoriness of love and beauty
causes some pang of sadness, the intensity of it is deepened by this
conviction of its passing. The shadow creeping slowly over the dial,
the vision of bare November with its ruined choirs in the splendour of
the August afternoon, can excite a longing wild with all regret. But
they can excite also an ever-deepening exultation in Beauty all the
more desirable because it is “Beauty that must die”; and a passion for
the love and labour of the day because so soon “the night cometh,” when
all love and labour are done.
* * * * *
Such are indications of a possible escape from a literature that
appears in the bulk in active warfare against “progress,” as the
word is understood in twentieth-century England. The critics and the
novelists, no less than the poets, would seem to have deserved Plato’s
rigorous sentence of expulsion from a civilisation against which they
are openly at war. They cry pitifully or passionately over the huge
ant-heap of modern industry, “What shall it profit?” Those who listen
to their crying will probably drop under in the struggle, from mere
inability--when the choice is offered--to fashion any intelligible goal
of attainment. They exhibit progress making inevitable more men, but by
no means better men. They demonstrate, as with the physical accuracy of
the dissector’s scalpel, the same selfishnesses and superstitions and
weaknesses and impulses of lust and cowardice and greed, multiplying
to-day as yesterday. They reveal in the few, as conspicuously as in
the many, life directed by prejudice rather than by reason, arrogance
and avarice and blindness exercising their ancient empire. They ask
sometimes with impatience, sometimes with deliberation, if this be the
final word in the matter: if the desirable things which are possible
to human experience are always to be sacrificed to Accumulation or
Acceleration, or a joyless extravagance, or (at the bottom) a mere
animal struggle for food and shelter. And Civilisation, in reply to
these “Anarchists,” speaks with voice less certain than in former days;
being itself perplexed why, after the long journey has been attempted
and all the miracle achieved, it cannot at last see clearly on the
horizon the walls and towers of the Golden City of men’s dreams.