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JOYOUS GARD
ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1913
TO
ALL MY FRIENDS
KNOWN AND UNKNOWN
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
PREFACE
_It is a harder thing than it ought to be to write openly and frankly
of things private and sacred. "Secretum meum mihi!"--"My secret is my
own!"--cried St. Francis in a harrowed moment. But I believe that the
instinct to guard and hoard the inner life is one that ought to be
resisted. Secrecy seems to me now a very uncivilised kind of virtue,
after all! We have all of us, or most of us, a quiet current of
intimate thought, which flows on, gently and resistlessly, in the
background of our lives, the volume and spring of which we cannot
alter or diminish, because it rises far away at some unseen source,
like a stream which flows through grassy pastures, and is fed by rain
which falls on unknown hills from the clouds of heaven. This inner
thought is hardly affected by the busy incidents of life--our work,
our engagements, our public intercourse; but because it represents the
self which we are always alone with, it makes up the greater part of
our life, and is much more our real and true life than the life which
we lead in public. It contains the things which we feel and hope,
rather than what we say; and the fact that we do not speak our inner
thoughts is what more than anything else keeps us apart from each
other.
In this book I have said, or tried to say, just what I thought, and as
I thought it; and since it is a book which recommends a studied
quietness and a cheerful serenity of life, I have put my feelings to a
vigorous test, by writing it, not when I was at ease and in leisure,
but in the very thickest and fullest of my work. I thought that if the
kind of quiet that I recommended had any force or weight at all, it
should be the sort of quiet which I still could realise and value in a
life full of engagements and duties and business, and that if it could
be developed on a background of that kind, it might have a worth which
it could not have if it were gently conceived in peaceful days and
untroubled hours.
So it has all been written in spaces of hard-driven work, when the day
never seemed long enough for all I had to do, between interruptions
and interviews and teaching and meetings. But the sight and scent that
I shall always connect with it, is that of a great lilac-bush which
stands just outside my study window, and which day by day in this
bright and chilly spring has held up its purple clusters, overtopping
the dense, rich, pale foliage, against a blue and cloudless sky; and
when the wind has been in the North, as it has often been, has filled
my room with the scent of breaking buds. How often, as I wrote, have I
cast a sidelong look at the lilac-bush! How often has it appeared to
beckon me away from my papers to a freer and more fragrant air
outside! But it seemed to me that I was perhaps obeying the call of
the lilac best--though how far away from its freshness and
sweetness!--if I tried to make my own busy life, which I do not
pretend not to enjoy, break into such flower as it could, and give out
what the old books call its 'spicery,' such as it is.
Because the bloom, the colour, the scent, are all there, if I could
but express them. That is the truth! I do not claim to make them, to
cause them, to create them, any more than the lilac could engender the
scent of roses or of violets. Nor do I profess to do faithfully all
that I say in my book that it is well to do. That is the worst, and
yet perhaps it is the best, of books, that one presents in them one's
hopes, dreams, desires, visions; more than one's dull and mean
performances. 'Als ich kann!' That is the best one can do and say.
It is our own fault, and not the fault of our visions, that we cannot
always say what we think in talk, even to our best friends. We begin
to do so, perhaps, and we see a shadow gather. Either the friend does
not understand, or he does not care, or he thinks it all unreal and
affected; and then there falls on us a foolish shyness, and we become
not what we are, but what we think the friend would like to think us;
and so he 'gets to know' as he calls it, not what is really there, but
what he chooses should be there.
But with pen in hand, and the blessed white paper before one, there is
no need to be anything in the world but what one is. Our dignity must
look after itself, and the dignity that we claim is worth nothing,
especially if it is falsely claimed. But even the meanest flower that
blows may claim to blossom as it can, and as indeed it must. In the
democracy of flowers, even the dandelion has a right to a place, if it
can find one, and to a vote, if it can get one; and even if it cannot,
the wind is kind to it, and floats its arrowy down far afield, by wood
and meadow, and into the unclaimed waste at last._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. JOYOUS GARD, PRELUDE 1
II. IDEAS 7
III. POETRY 10
IV. POETRY AND LIFE 15
V. ART 22
VI. ART AND MORALITY 35
VII. INTERPRETATION 46
VIII. EDUCATION 54
IX. KNOWLEDGE 59
X. GROWTH 69
XI. EMOTION 77
XII. MEMORY 86
XIII. RETROSPECT 98
XIV. HUMOUR 107
XV. VISIONS 119
XVI. THOUGHT 126
XVII. ACCESSIBILITY 136
XVIII. SYMPATHY 148
XIX. SCIENCE 157
XX. WORK 166
XXI. HOPE 173
XXII. EXPERIENCE 184
XXIII. FAITH 193
XXIV. PROGRESS 204
XXV. THE SENSE OF BEAUTY 212
XXVI. THE PRINCIPLE OF BEAUTY 220
XXVII. LIFE 228
JOYOUS GARD
I
PRELUDE
The Castle of _Joyous Gard_ in the _Morte D'Arthur_ was Sir Lancelot's
own castle, that he had won with his own hands. It was full of
victual, and all manner of mirth and disport. It was hither that the
wounded knight rode as fast as his horse might run, to tell Sir
Lancelot of the misuse and capture of Sir Palamedes; and hence
Lancelot often issued forth, to rescue those that were oppressed, and
to do knightly deeds.
It was true that Lancelot afterwards named it _Dolorous Gard_, but
that was because he had used it unworthily, and was cast out from it;
but it recovered its old name again when they conveyed his body
thither, after he had purged his fault by death. It was on the
morning of the day when they set out, that the Bishop who had been
with him when he died, and had given him all the rites that a
Christian man ought to have, was displeased when they woke him out of
his sleep, because, as he said, he was so merry and well at ease. And
when they inquired the reason of his mirth, the Bishop said, "Here was
Lancelot with me, with more angels than ever I saw men upon one day."
So it was well with that great knight at the last!
I have called this book of mine by the name of _Joyous Gard_, because
it speaks of a stronghold that we can win with our own hands, where we
can abide in great content, so long as we are not careful to linger
there in sloth and idleness, but are ready to ride abroad at the call
for help. The only time in his life when Lancelot was deaf to that
call, was when he shut himself up in the castle to enjoy the love that
was his single sin. And it was that sin that cost him so dear, and
lost the Castle its old and beautiful name. But when the angels made
glad over the sinner who repented, as it is their constant use to do,
and when it was only remembered of Lancelot that he had been a
peerless knight, the name came back to the Castle; and that name is
doubtless hidden now under some name of commoner use, whatever and
wherever it may be.
In the _Pilgrim's Progress_ we read how willing Mr. Interpreter was,
in the House that was full of so many devices and surprises, to
explain to the pilgrims the meaning of all the fantastic emblems and
comfortable sights that he showed them. And I do not think it spoils a
parable, but rather improves it, that it should have its secret
meaning made plain.
The Castle of _Joyous Gard_ then, which each of us can use, if we
desire it, is the fortress of beauty and joy. We cannot walk into it
by right, but must win it; and in a world like this, where there is
much that is anxious and troublesome, we ought, if we can, to gain
such a place, and provide it with all that we need, where we may have
our seasons of rest and refreshment. It must not be idle and selfish
joyance that we take there; it must be the interlude to toil and fight
and painful deeds, and we must be ready to sally out in a moment when
it is demanded of us. Now, if the winning of such a fortress of
thought is hard, it is also dangerous when won, because it tempts us
to immure ourselves in peace, and only observe from afar the plain of
life, which lies all about the Castle, gazing down through the high
windows; to shut out the wind and the rain, as well as the cries and
prayers of those who have been hurt and dismayed by wrongful usage. If
we do that, the day will come when we shall be besieged in our Castle,
and ride away vanquished and disgraced, to do what we have neglected
and forgotten.
But it is not only right, it is natural and wise, that we should have
a stronghold in our minds, where we should frequent courteous and
gentle and knightly company--the company of all who have loved beauty
wisely and purely, such as poets and artists. Because we make a very
great mistake if we allow the common course and use of the world to
engulph us wholly. We must not be too dainty for the work of the
world, but we may thankfully believe that it is only a mortal
discipline, and that our true life is elsewhere, hid with God. If we
grow to believe that life and its cares and business are all, we lose
the freshness of life, just as we lose the strength of life if we
reject its toil. But if we go at times to our _Joyous Gard_, we can
bring back into common life something of the grace and seemliness and
courtesy of the place. For the end of life is that we should do humble
and common things in a fine and courteous manner, and mix with simple
affairs, not condescendingly or disdainfully, but with all the
eagerness and modesty of the true knight.
This little book then is an account, as far as I can give it, of what
we may do to help ourselves in the matter, by feeding and nurturing
the finer and sweeter thought, which, like all delicate things, often
perishes from indifference and inattention. Those of us who are
sensitive and imaginative and faint-hearted often miss our chance of
better things by not forming plans and designs for our peace. We
lament that we are hurried and pressed and occupied, and we cry,
_"Yet, oh, the place could I but find!"_
But that is because we expect to be conducted thither, without the
trouble of the journey! Yet we can, like the wise King of Troy, build
the walls of our castle to music, if we will, and see to the fit
providing of the place; it only needs that we should set about it in
earnest; and as I have often gratefully found that a single word of
another can fall into the mind like a seed, and quicken to life while
one sleeps, breaking unexpectedly into bloom, I will here say what
comes into my mind to say, and point out the towers that I think I
discern rising above the tangled forest, and glimmering tall and
shapely and secure at the end of many an open avenue.
II
IDEAS
There are certain great ideas which, if we have any intelligence and
thoughtfulness at all, we cannot help coming across the track of, just
as when we walk far into the deep country, in the time of the
blossoming of flowers, we step for a moment into a waft of fragrance,
cast upon the air from orchard or thicket or scented field of bloom.
These ideas are very various in quality; some of them deliciously
haunting and transporting, some grave and solemn, some painfully sad
and strong. Some of them seem to hint at unseen beauty and joy, some
have to do with problems of conduct and duty, some with the relation
in which we wish to stand or are forced to stand with other human
beings; some are questionings born of grief and pain, what the
meaning of sorrow is, whether pain has a further intention, whether
the spirit survives the life which is all that we can remember of
existence; but the strange thing about all these ideas is that we find
them suddenly in the mind and soul; we do not seem to invent them,
though we cannot trace them; and even if we find them in books that we
read or words that we hear, they do not seem wholly new to us; we
recognise them as things that we have dimly felt and perceived, and
the reason why they often have so mysterious an effect upon us is that
they seem to take us outside of ourselves, further back than we can
recollect, beyond the faint horizon, into something as wide and great
as the illimitable sea or the depths of sunset sky.
Some of these ideas have to do with the constitution of society, the
combined and artificial peace in which human beings live, and then
they are political ideas; or they deal with such things as numbers,
curves, classes of animals and plants, the soil of the earth, the
changes of the seasons, the laws of weight and mass, and then they are
scientific ideas; some have to do with right and wrong conduct,
actions and qualities, and then they are religious or ethical ideas.
But there is a class of thoughts which belong precisely to none of
these things, but which are concerned with the perception of beauty,
in forms and colours, musical sounds, human faces and limbs, words
majestic or sweet; and this sense of beauty may go further, and may be
discerned in qualities, regarded not from the point of view of their
rightness and justice, but according as they are fine and noble,
evoking our admiration and our desire; and these are poetical ideas.
It is not of course possible exactly to classify ideas, because there
is a great overlapping of them and a wide interchange. The thought of
the slow progress of man from something rude and beastlike, the
statement of the astronomer about the swarms of worlds swimming in
space, may awaken the sense of poetry which is in its essence the
sense of wonder. I shall not attempt in these few pages to limit and
define the sense of poetry. I shall merely attempt to describe the
kind of effect it has or may have in life, what our relation is or may
be to it, what claim it may be said to have upon us, whether we can
practise it, and whether we ought to do so.
III
POETRY
I was reading the other day a volume of lectures delivered by Mr.
Mackail at Oxford, as Professor of Poetry there. Mr. Mackail began by
being a poet himself; he married the daughter of a great and poetical
artist, Sir Edward Burne-Jones; he has written the _Life of William
Morris_, which I think is one of the best biographies in the language,
in its fine proportion, its seriousness, its vividness; and indeed all
his writing has the true poetical quality. I hope he even contrives to
communicate it to his departmental work in the Board of Education!
He says in the preface to his lectures, "Poetry is the controller of
sullen care and frantic passion; it is the companion in youth of
desire and love; it is the power which in later years dispels the ills
of life--labour, penury, pain, disease, sorrow, death itself; it is
the inspiration, from youth to age, and in all times and lands, of the
noblest human motives and ardours, of glory, of generous shame, of
freedom and the unconquerable mind."
In these fine sentences it will be seen that Mr. Mackail makes a very
high and majestic claim indeed for poetry: no less than the claim of
art, chivalry, patriotism, love, and religion all rolled into one! If
that claim could be substantiated, no one in the world could be
excused for not putting everything else aside and pursuing poetry,
because it would seem to be both the cure for all the ills of life,
and the inspirer of all high-hearted effort. It would be indeed the
one thing needful!
But what I do not think Mr. Mackail makes quite clear is whether he
means by poetry the expression in verse of all these great ideas, or
whether he means a spirit much larger and mightier than what is
commonly called poetry; which indeed only appears in verse at a single
glowing point, as the electric spark leaps bright and hot between the
coils of dark and cold wire.
I think it is a little confusing that he does not state more
definitely what he means by poetry. Let us take another interesting
and suggestive definition. It was Coleridge who said, "The opposite of
poetry is not prose but science; the opposite of prose is not poetry
but verse." That seems to me an even more fertile statement. It means
that poetry is a certain sort of emotion, which may be gentle or
vehement, but can be found both in verse and prose; and that its
opposite is the unemotional classification of phenomena, the accurate
statement of material laws; and that poetry is by no means the
rhythmical and metrical expression of emotion, but emotion itself,
whether it be expressed or not.
I do not wholly demur to Mr. Mackail's statement, if it may be held to
mean that poetry is the expression of a sort of rapturous emotion,
evoked by beauty, whether that beauty is seen in the forms and colours
of earth, its gardens, fields, woods, hills, seas, its sky-spaces and
sunset glories; or in the beauty of human faces and movements; or in
noble endurance or generous action. For that is the one essential
quality of poetry, that the thing or thought, whatever it is, should
strike the mind as beautiful, and arouse in it that strange and
wistful longing which beautiful things arouse. It is hard to define
that longing, but it is essentially a desire, a claim to draw near to
something desirable, to possess it, to be thrilled by it, to continue
in it; the same emotion which made the apostle say at the sight of his
Lord transfigured in glory, "Master, it is good for us to be here!"
Indeed we know very well what beauty is, or rather we have all within
us a standard by which we can instinctively test the beauty of a sight
or a sound; but it is not that we all agree about the beauty of
different things. Some see a great deal more than others, and some
eyes and ears are delighted and pleased by what to more trained and
fastidious senses seems coarse and shocking and vulgar. But that makes
little difference; the point is that we have within us an apprehension
of a quality which gives us a peculiar kind of delight; and even if it
does not give us that delight when we are dull or anxious or
miserable, we still know that the quality is there. I remember how
when I had a long and dreary illness, with much mental depression, one
of my greatest tortures was to be for ever seeing the beauty in
things, but not to be able to enjoy it. The part of the brain that
enjoyed was sick and uneasy; but I was never in any doubt that beauty
was there, and had power to please the soul, if only the physical
machinery were not out of gear, so that the pain of transmission
overcame the sense of delight.
Poetry is then in its essence the discerning of beauty; and that
beauty is not only the beauty of things heard and seen, but may dwell
very deep in the mind and soul, and be stirred by visions which seem
to have no connection with outside things at all.
IV
POETRY AND LIFE
Now I will try to say how poetry enters into life for most of us; and
this is not an easy thing to express, because one can only look into
the treasure of one's own experience, wander through the corridors and
halls of memory, and see the faded tapestries, the pictures, and,
above all, the portraits which hang upon the walls. I suppose that
there are many people into whose spirits poetry only enters in the
form of love, when they suddenly see a face that they have beheld
perhaps often before, and have vaguely liked, and realise that it has
suddenly put on some new and delicate charm, some curve of cheek or
floating tress; or there is something in the glance that was surely
never there before, some consciousness of a secret that may be shared,
some signal of half-alarmed interest, something that shows that the
two lives, the two hearts, have some joyful significance for each
other; and then there grows up that marvellous mood which men call
love, which loses itself in hopes of meeting, in fears of coldness, in
desperate desires to please, to impress; and there arise too all sorts
of tremulous affectations, which seem so petty, so absurd, and even so
irritating, to the spectators of the awakening passion; desires to
punish for the pleasure of forgiving, to withdraw for the joy of being
recalled; a wild elated drama in which the whole world recedes into
the background, and all life is merged for the lover in the
half-sweet, half-fearful consciousness of one other soul,
Whose lightest whisper moves him more
Than all the rangéd reasons of the world.
And in this mood it is curious to note how inadequate common speech
and ordinary language appear, to meet the needs of expression. Even
young people with no literary turn, no gift of style, find their
memory supplying for them all sorts of broken echoes and rhetorical
phrases, picked out of half-forgotten romances; speech must be
_soigneux_ now, must be dignified, to meet so uplifting an experience.
How oddly like a book the young lover talks, using so naturally the
loud inflated phrases that seem so divorced from common-sense and
experience! How common it is to see in law-reports, in cases which
deal with broken engagements of marriage, to find in the excited
letters which are read and quoted an irresistible tendency to drop
into doggerel verse! It all seems to the sane reader such a grotesque
kind of intoxication. Yet it is as natural as the airs and graces of
the singing canary, the unfurling of the peacock's fan, the held
breath and hampered strut of the turkey--a tendency to assume a
greatness and a nobility that one does not possess, to seem
impressive, tremendous, desirable. Ordinary talk will not do; it must
rhyme, it must march, it must glitter, it must be stuck full of gems;
accomplishments must be paraded, powers must be hinted at. The victor
must advance to triumph with blown trumpets and beaten drums; and in
solitude there must follow the reaction of despair, the fear that one
has disgraced oneself, seemed clumsy and dull, done ignobly. Every
sensitive emotion is awake; and even the most serene and modest
natures, in the grip of passion, can become suspicious and
self-absorbed, because the passion which consumes them is so fierce
that it shrivels all social restraints, and leaves the soul naked, and
bent upon the most uncontrolled self-emphasis.
But apart from this urgent passion, there are many quieter ways in
which the same spirit, the same emotion, which is nothing but a sense
of self-significance, comes into the soul. Some are so inspired by
music, the combinations of melodies, the intricate conspiracy of
chords and ordered vibrations, when the orchestra is at work, the
great droning horns with their hollow reluctant voices sustaining the
shiver and ripple of the strings; or by sweeter, simpler cadences
played at evening, when the garden scents wafted out of the fragrant
dusk, the shaded lamps, the listening figures, all weave themselves
together into a mysterious tapestry of the sense, till we wonder what
strange and beautiful scene is being enacted, and wherever we turn,
catch hints and echoes of some bewildering and gracious secret, just
not revealed!
Some find it in pictures and statues, the mellow liquid pageant of
some old master-hand, a stretch of windspent moor, with its leaning
grasses and rifted crags, a dark water among glimmering trees at
twilight, a rich plain running to the foot of haze-hung mountains, the
sharp-cut billows of a racing sea; or a statue with its shapely limbs
and its veiled smile, or of the suspended strength of some struggling
Titan: all these hold the same inexplicable appeal to the senses,
indicating the efforts of spirits who have seen, and loved, and
admired, and hoped, and desired, striving to leave some record of the
joy that thrilled and haunted, and almost tortured them; and to many
people the emotion comes most directly through the words and songs of
poetry, that tell of joys lived through, and sorrows endured, of hopes
that could not be satisfied, of desires that could not know
fulfilment; pictures, painted in words, of scenes such as we ourselves
have moved through in old moods of delight, scenes from which the
marvellous alchemy of memory has abstracted all the base and dark
elements, leaving only the pure gold of remembered happiness--the wide
upland with the far-off plain, the garden flooded with sun, the
grasses crisped with frost, the snow-laden trees, the flaming autumn
woods, the sombre forest at shut of day, when the dusk creeps
stealthily along the glimmering aisles, the stream passing clear among
large-leaved water-plants and spires of bloom; and the mood goes
deeper still, for it echoes the marching music of the heart, its
glowing hopes, its longing for strength and purity and peace, its
delight in the nearness of other hearts, its wisdom, its nobility.
But the end and aim of all these various influences is the same; their
power lies in the fact that they quicken in the spirit the sense of
the energy, the delight, the greatness of life, the share that we can
claim in them, the largeness of our own individual hope and destiny;
and that is the real work of all the thoughts that may be roughly
called poetical; that they reveal to us something permanent and strong
and beautiful, something which has an irrepressible energy, and which
outlines itself clearly upon the dark background of days, a spirit
with which we can join hands and hold deep communication, which we
instinctively feel is the greatest reality of the world. In such
moments we perceive that the times when we descend into the meaner
and duller and drearier businesses of life are interludes in our real
being, into which we have to descend, not because of the actual worth
of the baser tasks, but that we may practise the courage and the hope
we ought to bring away from the heavenly vision. The more that men
have this thirst for beauty, for serene energy, for fulness of life,
the higher they are in the scale, and the less will they quarrel with
the obscurity and humility of their lives, because they are
confidently waiting for a purer, higher, more untroubled life, to
which we are all on our way, whether we realise it or no!
V
ART
It is not uncommon for me to receive letters from young aspirants,
containing poems, and asking me for an opinion on their merits. Such a
letter generally says that the writer feels it hardly worth while to
go on writing poetry unless he or she is assured that the poems are
worth something. In such cases I reply that the answer lies there!
Unless it seems worth while, unless indeed poetry is the outcome of an
irrepressible desire to express something, it is certainly not worth
while writing. On the other hand, if the desire is there, it is just
as well worth practising as any other form of artistic expression. A
man who liked sketching in water-colours would not be restrained from
doing so by the fear that he might not become an Academician, a person
who liked picking out tunes on a piano need not desist because there
is no prospect of his earning money by playing in public!
Poetry is of all forms of literary expression the least likely to
bring a man credit or cash. Most intelligent people with a little gift
of writing have a fair prospect of getting prose articles published.
But no one wants third-rate poetry; editors fight shy of it, and
volumes of it are unsaleable.
I have myself written so much poetry, have published so many volumes
of verse, that I can speak sympathetically on the subject. I worked
very hard indeed at poetry for seven or eight years, wrote little
else, and the published volumes form only a small part of my output,
which exists in many manuscript volumes. I achieved no particular
success. My little books were fairly well received, and I sold a few
hundred copies; I have even had a few pieces inserted in anthologies.
But though I have wholly deserted the practice of poetry, and though I
can by no means claim to be reckoned a poet, I do not in the least
regret the years I gave to it. In the first place it was an intense
pleasure to write. The cadences, the metres, the language, the
rhymes, all gave me a rapturous delight. It trained minute
observation--my poems were mostly nature-poems--and helped me to
disentangle the salient points and beauties of landscapes, hills,
trees, flowers, and even insects. Then too it is a very real training
in the use of words; it teaches one what words are musical, sonorous,
effective; while the necessity of having to fit words to metre
increases one's stock of words and one's power of applying them. When
I came back to writing prose, I found that I had a far larger and more
flexible vocabulary than I had previously possessed; and though the
language of poetry is by no means the same as that of prose--it is a
pity that the two kinds of diction are so different in English,
because it is not always so in other languages--yet it made the
writing of ornamental and elaborate prose an easier matter; it gave
one too a sense of form; a poem must have a certain balance and
proportion; so that when one who has written verse comes to write
prose, a subject falls easily into divisions, and takes upon itself a
certain order of course and climax.
But these are only consequences and resulting advantages. The main
reason for writing poetry is and must be the delight of doing it, the
rapture of perceiving a beautiful subject, and the pleasure of
expressing it as finely and delicately as one can. I have given it up
because, as William Morris once said of himself, "to make poetry just
for the sake of making it is a crime for a man of my age and
experience!"
One's feelings lose poetic flow
Soon after twenty-seven or so!
One begins to think of experience in a different sort of way, not as a
series of glowing points and pictures, which outline themselves
radiantly upon a duller background, but as a rich full thing, like a
great tapestry, all of which is important, if it is not all beautiful.
It is not that the marvel and wonder of life is less; but it is more
equable, more intricate, more mysterious. It does not rise at times,
like a sea, into great crested breakers, but it comes marching in
evenly, roller after roller, as far as the eye can reach.
And then too poetry becomes cramped and confined for all that one
desires to say. One lived life, as a young man, rather for the sake
of the emotions which occasionally transfigured it, with a priestly
sense of its occasional splendour; there was not time to be leisurely,
humorous, gently interested. But as we grow older, we perceive that
poetical emotion is but one of many forces, and our sympathy grows and
extends itself in more directions. One had but little patience in the
old days for quiet, prosaic, unemotional people; but now it becomes
clear that a great many persons live life on very simple and direct
lines; one wants to understand their point of view better, one is
conscious of the merits of plainer stuff; and so the taste broadens
and deepens, and becomes like a brimming river rather than a leaping
crystal fount. Life receives a hundred affluents, and is tinged with
many new substances; and one begins to see that if poetry is the
finest and sweetest interpretation of life, it is not always the
completest or even the largest.
If we examine the lives of poets, we too often see how their
inspiration flagged and failed. Milton indeed wrote his noblest verse
in middle-age, after a life immersed in affairs. Wordsworth went on
writing to the end, but all his best poetry was written in about five
early years. Tennyson went on to a patriarchal age, but there is
little of his later work that bears comparison with what he wrote
before he was forty. Browning produced volume after volume, but, with
the exception of an occasional fine lyric, his later work is hardly
more than an illustration of his faults of writing. Coleridge deserted
poetry very early; Byron, Shelley, Keats, all died comparatively
young.
The Letters of Keats give perhaps a more vivid and actual view of the
mind and soul of a poet than any other existing document. One sees
there, naïvely and nobly expressed, the very essence of the poetical
nature, the very soil out of which poetry flowers. It is wonderful,
because it is so wholly sane, simple, and unaffected. It is usual to
say that the Letters give one a picture of rather a second-rate and
suburban young man, with vulgar friends and _banal_ associations, with
one prodigious and matchless faculty. But it is that very background
that constitutes the supreme force of the appeal. Keats accepted his
circumstances, his friends, his duties with a singular modesty. He was
not for ever complaining that he was unappreciated and underestimated.
His commonplaceness, when it appears, is not a defect of quality, but
an eager human interest in the personalities among whom his lot was
cast. But every now and then there swells up a poignant sense of
passion and beauty, a sacred, haunting, devouring fire of inspiration,
which leaps high and clear upon the homely altar.
Thus he writes: "This morning poetry has conquered--I have relapsed
into those abstractions which are my only life--I feel escaped from a
new, strange, and threatening sorrow.... There is an awful warmth
about my heart, like a load of immortality." Or again: "I feel more
and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live
in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds." And again: "I have
loved the principle of beauty in all things."
One sees in these passages that there not only is a difference of
force and passion, but an added quality of some kind in the mind of a
poet, a combination of fine perception and emotion, which
instantaneously and instinctively translates itself into words.
For it must never be forgotten how essential a part of the poet is the
knack of words. I do not doubt that there are hundreds of people who
are haunted and penetrated by a lively sense of beauty, whose emotions
are fiery and sweet, but who have not just the intellectual store of
words, which must drip like honey from an overflowing jar. It is a
gift as definite as that of the sculptor or the musician, an exuberant
fertility and swiftness of brain, that does not slowly and painfully
fit a word into its place, but which breathes thought direct into
music.
The most subtle account of this that I know is given in a passage in
Shelley's _Defence of Poetry_. He says: "A man cannot say 'I will
compose poetry'--the greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in
creation is like a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like
an inconstant wind, awakes to transitory brightness. The power arises
from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it
is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic
either of its approach or its departure. When composition begins,
inspiration is already on the decline."
That I believe is as true as it is beautiful. The best poetry is
written in a sudden rapture, and probably needs but little
reconsideration or retouching. One knows for instance how the _Ode to
the Nightingale_ was scribbled by Keats on a spring morning, in an
orchard at Hampstead, and so little regarded that it was rescued by a
friend from the volume into which he had crammed the slips of
manuscript. Of course poets vary greatly in their method; but one may
be sure of this, that no poem which was not a great poem in its first
transcript, ever becomes a great poem by subsequent handling. There
are poets indeed like Rossetti and FitzGerald who made a worse poem
out of a better by scrupulous correction; and the first drafts of
great poems are generally the finest poems of all. A poem has
sometimes been improved by excision, notably in the case of Tennyson,
whose abandoned stanzas, printed in his Life, show how strong his
instinct was for what was best and purest. A great poet, for instance,
never, like a lesser poet, keeps an unsatisfactory stanza for the sake
of a good line. Tennyson, in a fine homely image, said that a poem
must have a certain curve of its own, like the curve of the rind of a
pared apple thrown on the floor. It must have a perfect evolution and
progress, and this can sometimes be best arrived at by the omission
of stanzas in which the inconstant or flagging mind turned aside from
its design.
But it is certain that if the poet gets so much into the habit of
writing poetry, that even when he has no sense of inspiration he must
still write to satisfy a craving, the result will be worthless, as it
too often was in the case of Wordsworth. Because such poems become
literary instead of poetical; and literary poetry has no
justification.
If we take a book like Rossetti's _House of Life_, we shall find that
certain sonnets stand out with a peculiar freshness and brightness, as
in the golden sunlight of an autumn morning; while many of the sonnets
give us the sense of slow and gorgeous evolution, as if contrived by
some poetical machine. I was interested to find, in studying the
_House of Life_ carefully, that all the finest poems are early work;
and when I came to look at the manuscripts, I was rather horrified to
see what an immense amount of alternatives had been produced. There
would be, for instance, no less than eight or nine of those great
slowly moving words, like 'incommunicable' or 'importunate' written
down, not so much to express an inevitable idea as to fill an
inevitable space; and thus the poems seem to lose their pungency by
the slow absorption of painfully sought agglutinations of syllables,
with a stately music of their own, of course, but garnered rather than
engendered. Rossetti's great dictum about the prime necessity for
poetry being 'fundamental brainwork' led him here into error. The
brainwork must be fundamental and instinctive; it must all have been
done before the poem is conceived; and very often a poet acquires his
power through sacrificing elaborate compositions which have taught him
certainty of touch, but are not in themselves great poetry. Subsequent
brainwork often merely clouds the effect, and it was that on which
Rossetti spent himself in vain.
The view which Keats took of his own _Endymion_ is a far larger and
bolder one. "I will write independently," he said. "I have written
independently _without judgment_. I may write independently and _with
judgment_ hereafter. The genius of poetry must work out its own
salvation in a man. It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by
sensation and watchfulness in itself."
Of course, fine craftsmanship is an absolute necessity; but it is
craftsmanship which is not only acquired by practice, but which is
actually there from the first, just as Mozart, as a child of eight,
could play passages which would tax the skill of the most accomplished
virtuoso. It was not learnt by practice, that swift correspondence of
eye and hand, any more than the little swallow learns to fly; it knows
it all already, and is merely finding out what it knows.
And therefore there is no doubt that a man cannot become a poet by
taking thought. He can perhaps compose impressive verse, but that is
all. Poetry is, as Plato says, a divine sort of experience, some
strange blending of inherited characteristics, perhaps the fierce
emotion of some dumb ancestress combining with the verbal skill of
some unpoetical forefather. The receipt is unknown, not necessarily
unknowable.
Of course if one has poetry in one's soul, it is a tremendous
temptation to desire its expression, because the human race, with its
poignant desire for transfiguring visions, strews the path of the
great poet with bays, and remembers him as it remembers no other human
beings. What would one not give to interpret life thus, to flash the
loveliness of perception into desirous minds, to set love and hope
and yearning to music, to inspire anxious hearts with the sense that
there is something immensely large, tender, and significant behind it
all! That is what we need to be assured of--our own significance, our
own share in the inheritance of joy; and a poet can teach us to wait,
to expect, to arise, to adore, when the circumstances of our lives are
wrapped in mist and soaked with dripping rain. Perhaps that is the
greatest thing which poetry does for us, to reassure us, to enlighten
us, to send us singing on our way, to bid us trust in God even though
He is concealed behind calamity and disaster, behind grief and
heaviness, misinterpreted to us by philosophers and priests, and
horribly belied by the wrongful dealings of men.
VI
ART AND MORALITY
There is a perpetual debate going on--one of those moulting
shuttlecocks that serve to make one's battledore give out a merry
sound--about the relation of art to morals, and whether the artist or
the poet ought to attempt to _teach_ anything. It makes a good kind of
debate, because it is conducted in large terms, to which the
disputants attach private meanings. The answer is a very simple one.
It is that art and morality are only beauty realised in different
regions; and as to whether the artist ought to attempt to teach
anything, that may be summarily answered by the simple dictum that no
artist ought ever to attempt to teach anything, with which must be
combined the fact that no one who is serious about anything can
possibly help teaching, whether he wishes or no!
High art and high morality are closely akin, because they are both but
an eager following of the law of beauty; but the artist follows it in
visible and tangible things, and the moralist follows it in the
conduct and relations of life. Artists and moralists must be for ever
condemned to misunderstand each other, because the votary of any art
cannot help feeling that it is the one thing worth doing in the world;
and the artist whose soul is set upon fine hues and forms thinks that
conduct must take care of itself, and that it is a tiresome business
to analyse and formulate it; while the moralist who loves the beauty
of virtue passionately, will think of the artist as a child who plays
with his toys, and lets the real emotions of life go streaming past.
This is a subject upon which it is as well to hear the Greeks, because
the Greeks were of all people who ever lived the most absorbingly
interested in the problems of life, and judged everything by a
standard of beauty. The Jews, of course, at least in their early
history, had the same fiery interest in questions of conduct; but it
would be as absurd to deny to Plato an interest in morals as to
withhold the title of artist from Isaiah and the author of the Book
of Job!
Plato, as is well known, took a somewhat whimsical view of the work of
the poet. He said that he must exclude the poets from his ideal State,
because they were the prophets of unreality. But he was thinking of a
kind of man very different from the men whom we call poets. He thought
of the poet as a man who served a patron, and tried to gloze over his
patron's tyranny and baseness, under false terms of glory and majesty;
or else he thought of dramatists, and considered them to be men who
for the sake of credit and money played skilfully upon the sentimental
emotions of ordinary people; and he fought shy of the writers who used
tragic passions for the amusement of a theatre. Aristotle disagreed
with Plato about this, and held that poetry was not exactly moral
teaching, but that it disposed the mind to consider moral problems as
interesting. He said that in looking on at a play, a spectator
suffered, so to speak, by deputy, but all the same learned directly,
if unconsciously, the beauty of virtue. When we come to our own
Elizabethans, there is no evidence that in their plays and poetry they
thought about morals at all. No one has any idea whether Shakespeare
had any religion, or what it was; and he above all great writers that
ever lived seems to have taken an absolutely impersonal view of the
sins and affections of men and women. No one is scouted or censured or
condemned in Shakespeare; one sees and feels the point of view of his
villains and rogues; one feels with them that they somehow could
hardly have done otherwise than they did; and to effect that is
perhaps the crown of art.
But nowadays the poet, with whom one may include some few novelists,
is really a very independent person. I am not now speaking of those
who write basely and crudely, to please a popular taste. They have
their reward; and after all they are little more than mountebanks, the
end of whose show is to gather up pence in the ring.
But the poet in verse is listened to by few people, unless he is very
great indeed; and even so his reward is apt to be intangible and
scanty; while to be deliberately a lesser poet is perhaps the most
unworldly thing that a man can do, because he thus courts derision;
indeed, if there is a bad sign of the world's temper just now, it is
that men will listen to politicians, scientists, men of commerce, and
journalists, because these can arouse a sensation, or even confer
material benefits; but men will not listen to poets, because they have
so little use for the small and joyful thoughts that make up some of
the best pleasures of life.
It is quite true, as I have said, that no artist ought ever
deliberately to try to teach people, because that is not his business,
and one can only be a good artist by minding one's business, which is
to produce beautiful things; and the moment one begins to try to
produce improving things, one goes off the line. But in England there
has been of late a remarkable fusion of morality and art. Ruskin and
Browning are clear enough proof that it is possible to be passionately
interested in moral problems in an artistic way; while at the same
time it is true, as I have said, that if any man cares eagerly for
beauty, and does his best to present it, he cannot help teaching all
those who are searching for beauty, and only require to be shown the
way.
The work of all real teachers is to make great and arduous things seem
simple and desirable and beautiful. A teacher is not a person who
provides short-cuts to knowledge, or who only drills a character out
of slovenly intellectual faults. The essence of all real teaching is a
sort of inspiration. Take the case of a great teacher, like Arnold or
Jowett; Arnold lit in his pupils' minds a kind of fire, which was
moral rather than intellectual; Jowett had a power of putting a
suggestive brilliancy into dull words and stale phrases, showing that
they were but the crystallised formulas of ideas, which men had found
wonderful or beautiful. The secret of such teaching is quite
incommunicable, but it is a very high sort of art. There are many men
who feel the inspiration of knowledge very deeply, and follow it
passionately, who yet cannot in the least communicate the glow to
others. But just as the great artist can paint a homely scene, such as
we have seen a hundred times, and throw into it something mysterious,
which reaches out hands of desire far beyond the visible horizon, so
can a great teacher show that ideas are living things all bound up
with the high emotions of men.
And thus the true poet, whether he writes verses or novels, is the
greatest of teachers, not because he trains and drills the mind, but
because he makes the thing he speaks of appear so beautiful and
desirable that we are willing to undergo the training and drilling
that are necessary to be made free of the secret. He brings out, as
Plato beautifully said, "the beauty which meets the spirit like a
breeze, and imperceptibly draws the soul, even in childhood, into
harmony with the beauty of reason." The work of the poet then is "to
elicit the simplest principles of life, to clear away complexity, by
giving a glowing and flashing motive to live nobly and generously, to
renew the unspoiled growth of the world, to reveal the secret hope
silently hidden in the heart of man."