THERE are at least two ways of looking at books and at the
personalities books express. In its chief but rarer aspect literature
is the medium of art, and as such can raise no ethical problems.
Whatever morality or immorality art may hold is quiescent, or lifted
into an atmosphere of radiant immortality where questioning is
irrelevant. Of the literature that is all art we need not even speak,
unless by chance we too approach it as artists, trying to grasp it by
imaginative insight. In literature, as elsewhere, art should only be
approached as we would approach Paradise, for the sake of its joy.
It would be well, indeed, if we could destroy or forget all that has
ever been written about the world’s great books, even if it were once
worth while to write those books about books. How happy, for instance,
the world might be if there were no literature about the Bible, if
Augustine and Aquinas and Calvin and thousands of smaller men had not
danced on it so long, stamping every page of it into mire, that now the
vision of a single line, in its simple sense, is almost an effort of
inspiration. All my life long I have been casting away the knowledge I
have gained from books about literature, and from opinions about life,
and coming to literature itself or to life itself, a slow and painful
progress towards that Heaven of knowledge where a child is king.
But there is another kind of literature, a literature which is not all
art--the literature of life. Literature differs from design or music
by being closer to life, by being fundamentally not an art at all, but
merely the development of ordinary speech, only rising at intervals
into the region of art. It is so close to life that largely it comes
before us much as the actual facts of life come before us. So that
while we were best silent about the literature of art, sanctified by
time and the reverence of many men, we cannot question too keenly the
literature of life. In this book I deal with questions of life as they
are expressed in literature, or as they are suggested by literature.
Throughout I am discussing morality as revealed or disguised by
literature. I may not care, indeed, to pervert my subjects in order
to emphasise my opinions, but I frankly take my subjects chiefly on
those sides which suit my own pleasure, and I select them solely
because they do that so well. I use them as the ancient device of the
stalking-horse was used, to creep up more closely to the game that my
soul loves best.
So far as possible I dwell most on those aspects of my subjects which
are most questionable. It was once brought against me that I had a
predilection for such aspects. Assuredly it is so. If a subject is not
questionable it seems to me a waste of time to discuss it. The great
facts of the world are not questionable; they are there for us to
enjoy, or to suffer, in silence, not to talk about. Our best energies
should be spent in attacking and settling questionable things that so
we may enlarge the sphere of the unquestionable--the sphere of real
life--and be ready to meet new questions as they arise. It is only by
dealing with the questionable aspects of the world that criticism of
life can ever have any saving virtue for us. It is waste of life to
use literature for pawing over the unquestionable. Even a healthy dog,
having once ascertained the essential virtue of a bone, contentedly
eats it, or buries it.
And yet, it may well be, there is a time for affirming the simple
eternal facts of life, a time, even, when those simple eternal facts
have drifted so far from us that we count them also questionable.
The present moment has seemed to me a fitting one to set a few such
affirmations in order. The century now nearly over has performed many
dirty and laborious tasks; it has had to organise its own unwieldiness,
to cleanse its Augean stables of the filth it has itself deposited,
to pull down the buildings it has itself erected. When we witness
such work carried out--blunderingly, it may be, but yet, we thought,
humbly--we may well point out what splendid fellows these modest,
begrimed toilers really were, what useful and noble work they were
engaged in, how large a promise they bear for the future. That was my
own point of view. But the case is altered when these yet unwashed
toilers rise up around us in half-intoxicated jubilation over the
triumphs of their own little epoch, well assured that there never was
such an age or such a race since the world began. Then we may well
pause. It is time to recall the simple eternal facts of life. It is
time to affirm the existence of those verities which are wrought into
our very structure everywhere and always, and in the face of which the
paltry triumphs of an “era” fall back into insignificance.
Yet every man must make his own affirmations. The great questions
of life are immortal, only because no one can answer them for his
fellows. I claim no general validity for my affirmations. It has been
well said that certain books possess a value that is in the ratio of
the spiritual vigour of those who use them, acting as a tonic to the
strong, still further dissolving and enfeebling the weakness of the
weak. It would be presumptious to claim any potent and peculiar energy
for this book; but the observation is one which a reader may do well
always to bear in mind. The final value of any book is not in the
beliefs which it may give us or take away from us, but in its power to
reveal to us our own real selves. If I can stimulate any one in the
search for his own proper affirmations, he and I may well rest content.
He is welcome to cast aside mine as the idle conclusions of a dreamer
lying in the sunshine. Our own affirmations are always the best. Let us
but be sure that they are our own, that they have grown up slowly and
quietly, fed with the strength of our own blood and brain. Only with
the help of such affirmations can we find a staff to comfort us through
the valley of life. It is only when they utter affirmations, one has
said, that the wands of the angels blossom.