knowledge is a useless burden; or if we think so, why do we think it?
I have very little doubt in my own mind that why so many young men
despise and even deride knowledge is because knowledge has been
presented to them in so arid a form, so little connected with anything
that concerns them in the remotest degree. We ought, I think, to wind
our way slowly back into the past from the present; we ought to start
with modern problems and modern ideas, and show people how they came
into being; we ought to learn about the world, as it is, first, and
climb the hill slowly. But what we do is to take the history of the
past, Athens and Rome and Judæa, three glowing and shining realms, I
readily admit; but we leave the gaps all unbridged, so that it seems
remote, abstruse, and incomprehensible that men should ever have lived
and thought so.
Then we deluge children with the old languages, not teaching them to
read, but to construe, and cramming the little memories with hideous
grammatical forms. So the whole process of education becomes a dreary
wrestling with the uninteresting and the unattainable; and when we
have broken the neck of infantile curiosity with these uncouth
burdens, we wonder that life becomes a place where the only aim is to
get a good appointment, and play as many games as possible.
Yet learning need not be so cumbrously carried after all! I was
reading a few days ago a little book by Professor Ker, on mediæval
English, and reading it with a species of rapture. It all came so
freshly and pungently out of a full mind, penetrated with zest and
enjoyment. One followed the little rill of literary craftsmanship so
easily out of the plain to its high source among the hills, till I
wondered why on earth I had not been told some of these delightful
things long ago, that I might have seen how our great literature took
shape. Such scraps of knowledge as I possess fell into shape, and I
saw the whole as in a map outspread.
And then I realised that knowledge, if it was only rightly directed,
could be a beautiful and attractive thing, not a mere fuss about
nothing, dull facts reluctantly acquired, readily forgotten.
All children begin by wanting to know, but they are often told not to
be tiresome, which generally means that the elder person has no answer
to give, and does not like to appear ignorant. And then the time comes
for Latin Grammar, and Cicero de Senectute, and Cæsar's Commentaries,
and the bewildered stripling privately resolves to have no more than
he can help to do with these antique horrors. The marvellous thing
seems to him to be that men of flesh and blood could have found it
worth their while to compose such things.
Erudition, great is thy sin! It is not that one wants to deprive the
savant of his knowledge; one only wants a little common-sense and
imaginative sympathy. How can a little boy guess that some of the most
beautiful stories in the world lie hid among a mass of wriggling
consonants, or what a garden lurks behind the iron gate, with [Greek:
blôskô] and [Greek: moloumai] to guard the threshold?
I am not going here to discuss the old curriculum. "Let 'em 'ave it!"
as the parent said to the schoolmaster, under the impression that it
was some instrument of flagellation--as indeed it is, I look round my
book-lined shelves, and reflect how much of interest and pleasure
those parallel rows have meant to me, and how I struggled into the use
of them outside of and not because of my so-called education; and how
much they might mean to others if they had not been so conscientiously
bumped into paths of peace.
"Nothing," said Pater, speaking of art in one of his finest passages,
"nothing which has ever engaged the great and eager affections of men
and women can ever wholly lose its charm." Not to the initiated,
perhaps! But I sometimes wonder if anything which has been taught with
dictionary and grammar, with parsing and construing, with detention
and imposition, can ever wholly regain its charm. I am afraid that we
must make a clean sweep of the old processes, if we have any intention
of interesting our youth in the beauty of human ideas and their
expression. But while we do not care about beauty and interest in
life, while we conscientiously believe, in spite of a cataract of
helpless facts, in the virtues of the old grammar-grind, so long shall
we remain an uncivilised nation. Civilisation does not consist in
commercial prosperity, or even in a fine service of express trains.
It resides in quick apprehension, lively interest, eager sympathy ...
at least I suspect so.
"Like a crane or a swallow, so did I chatter!" said the rueful
prophet. I do not write as a pessimist, hardly as a critic; still less
as a censor; to waste time in deriding others' theories of life is a
very poor substitute for enjoying it! I think we do very fairly well
as we are; only do not let us indulge in the cant in which educators
so freely indulge, the claim that we are interested in ideas
intellectual or artistic, and that we are trying to educate our youth
in these things. We do produce some intellectual athletes, and we
knock a few hardy minds more or less into shape; but meanwhile a great
river of opportunities, curiosity, intelligence, taste, interest,
pleasure, goes idly weltering, through mud-flats and lean promontories
and bare islands to the sea. It is the loss, the waste, the folly, of
it that I deplore.
X
GROWTH
As the years go on, what one begins to perceive about so many
people--though one tries hard to believe it is not so--is that somehow
or other the mind does not grow, the view does not alter; life ceases
to be a pilgrimage, and becomes a journey, such as a horse takes in a
farm-cart. He is pulling something, he has got to pull it, he does not
care much what it is--turnips, hay, manure! If he thinks at all, he
thinks of the stable and the manger. The middle-aged do not try
experiments, they lose all sense of adventure. They make the usual
kind of fortification for themselves, pile up a shelter out of
prejudices and stony opinions. It is out of the wind and rain, and the
prospect is safely excluded. The landscape is so familiar that the
entrenched spirit does not even think about it, or care what lies
behind the hill or across the river.
Now of course I do not mean that people can or should play fast and
loose with life, throw up a task or a position the moment they are
bored with it, be at the mercy of moods. I am speaking here solely of
the possible adventures of mind and soul; it is good, wholesome,
invigorating, to be tied to a work in life, to have to discharge it
whether one likes it or no, through indolence and disinclination,
through depression and restlessness. But we ought not to be immured
among conventions and received opinions. We ought to ask ourselves why
we believe what we take for granted, and even if we do really believe
it at all. We ought not to condemn people who do not move along the
same lines of thought; we ought to change our minds a good deal, not
out of mere levity, but because of experience. We ought not to think
too much of the importance of what we are doing, and still less of the
importance of what we have done; we ought to find a common ground on
which to meet distasteful people; we ought to labour hard against
self-pity as well as against self-applause; we ought to feel that if
we have missed chances, it is out of our own heedlessness and
stupidity. Self-applause is a more subtle thing even than self-pity,
because, if one rejects the sense of credit, one is apt to
congratulate oneself on being the kind of person who does reject it,
whereas we ought to avoid it as instinctively as we avoid a bad smell.
Above all, we ought to believe that we can do something to change
ourselves, if we only try; that we can anchor our conscience to a
responsibility or a personality, can perceive that the society of
certain people, the reading of certain books, does affect us, make our
mind grow and germinate, give us a sense of something fine and
significant in life. The thing is to say, as the prim governess says
in Shirley, "You acknowledge the inestimable worth of principle?"--it
is possible to get and to hold a clear view, as opposed to a muddled
view, of life and its issues; and the blessing is that one can do this
in any circle, under any circumstances, in the midst of any kind of
work. That is the wonderful thing about thought, that it is like a
captive balloon which is anchored in one's garden. It is possible to
climb into it and to cast adrift; but so many people, as I have said,
seem to end by pulling the balloon in, letting out the gas, and
packing the whole away in a shed. Of course the power of doing all
this varies very much in different temperaments; but I am sure that
there are many people who, looking back at their youth, are conscious
that they had something stirring and throbbing within them which they
have somehow lost; some vision, some hope, some faint and radiant
ideal. Why do they lose it, why do they settle down on the lees of
life, why do they snuggle down among comfortable opinions? Mostly, I
am sure, out of a kind of indolence. There are a good many people who
say to themselves, "After all, what really matters is a solid defined
position in the world; I must make that for myself, and meanwhile I
must not indulge myself in any fancies; it will be time to do that
when I have earned my pension and settled my children in life." And
then when the time arrives, the frail and unsubstantial things are all
dead and cannot be recovered; for happiness cannot be achieved along
these cautious and heavy lines.
And so I say that we must deliberately aim at something different
from the first. We must not block up the further views and wider
prospects; we must keep the horizon open. What I here suggest has
nothing whatever that is unpractical about it; it is only a deeper
foresight, a more prudent wisdom. We must say to ourselves that
whatever happens, the soul shall not be atrophied; and we should be as
anxious about it, if we find that it is losing its zest and freedom,
as we should be if we found that the body were losing its appetite!
It is no metaphor then, but sober earnest, when I say that when we
take our place in the working world, we ought to lay the foundations
of that other larger stronghold of the soul, _Joyous Gard_. All that
matters is that we should choose a fair site for it in free air and
beside still waters; and that we should plan it for ourselves, set out
gardens and plantations, with as large a scheme as we can make for it,
expecting the grace and greenery that shall be, and the increase which
God gives. It may be that we shall have to build it slowly, and we may
have to change the design many times; but it will be all built out of
our own mind and hope, as the nautilus evolves its shell.
I am not speaking of a scheme of self-improvement, of culture followed
that it may react on our profession or bring us in touch with useful
people, of mental discipline, of correct information. The _Gard_ is
not to be a factory or an hotel; it must be frankly built _for our
delight_. It is delight that we must follow, everything that brims the
channel of life, stimulates, freshens, enlivens, tantalises, attracts.
It must at all costs be beautiful. It must embrace that part of
religion that glows for us, the thing which we find beautiful in other
souls, the art, the poetry, the tradition, the love of nature, the
craft, the interests we hanker after. It need not contain all these
things, because we can often do better by checking diffuseness, and by
resolute self-limitation. It is not by believing in particular books,
pictures, tunes, tastes, that we can do it. That ends often as a mere
prison to the thought; it is rather by meeting the larger spirit that
lies behind life, recognising the impulse which meets us in a thousand
forms, which forces us not to be content with narrow and petty things,
but emerges as the energy, whatever it is, that pushes through the
crust of life, as the flower pushes through the mould. Our dulness,
our acquiescence in monotonous ways, arise from our not realising how
infinitely important that force is, how much it has done for man, how
barren life is without it. Here in England many of us have a dark
suspicion of all that is joyful, inherited perhaps from our Puritan
ancestry, a fear of yielding ourselves to its influence, a terror of
being grimly repaid for indulgence, an old superstitious dread of
somehow incurring the wrath of God, if we aim at happiness at all. We
must know, many of us, that strange shadow which falls upon us when we
say, "I feel so happy to-day that some evil must be going to befal
me!" It is true that afflictions must come, but they are not to spoil
our joy; they are rather to refine it and strengthen it. And those who
have yielded themselves to joy are often best equipped to get the best
out of sorrow.
We must aim then at fulness of life; not at husbanding our resources
with meagre economy, but at spending generously and fearlessly,
grasping experience firmly, nurturing zest and hope. The frame of mind
we must be beware of, which is but a stingy vanity, is that which
makes us say, "I am sure I should not like that person, that book,
that place!" It is that closing-in of our own possibilities that we
must avoid.
There is a verse in the Book of Proverbs that often comes into my
mind; it is spoken of a reprobate, whose delights indeed are not those
that the soul should pursue; but the temper in which he is made to
cling to the pleasure which he mistakes for joy, is the temper, I am
sure, in which one should approach life. He cries, "_They have
stricken me, and I was not sick; they have beaten me, and I felt it
not. When shall I awake? I will seek it yet again._"
XI
EMOTION
We are a curious nation, we English! Stendhal says that our two most
patent vices are bashfulness and cant. That is to say, we are afraid
to say what we think, and when we have gained the courage to speak, we
say more than we think. We are really an emotional nation at heart,
easily moved and liking to be moved; we are largely swayed by feeling,
and much stirred by anything that is picturesque. But we are strangely
ashamed of anything that seems like sentiment; and so far from being
bluff and unaffected about it, we are full of the affectation, the
pretence of not being swayed by our emotions. We have developed a
curious idea of what men and women ought to be; and one of our
pretences is that men should affect not to understand sentiment, and
to leave, as we rudely say, "all that sort of thing to the women." Yet
we are much at the mercy of clap-trap and mawkish phrases, and we like
rhetoric partly because we are too shy to practise it. The result of
it is that we believe ourselves to be a frank, outspoken, good-natured
race; but we produce an unpleasant effect of stiffness, angularity,
discourtesy, and self-centredness upon more genial nations. We defend
our bluffness by believing that we hold emotion to be too rare and
sacred a quality to be talked about, though I always have a suspicion
that if a man says that a subject is too sacred to discuss, he
probably also finds it too sacred to think about very much either; yet
if one can get a sensible Englishman to talk frankly and unaffectedly
about his feelings, it is often surprising to find how delicate they
are.
One of our chief faults is our love of property, and the consequence
of that is our admiration for what we call "businesslike" qualities.
It is really from the struggle between the instinct of possession and
the emotional instinct that our bashfulness arises; we are afraid of
giving ourselves away, and of being taken advantage of; we value
position and status and respectability very high; we like to know who
a man is, what he stands for, what his influence amounts to, what he
is worth; and all this is very injurious to our simplicity, because we
estimate people so much not by their real merits but by their
accumulated influence. I do not believe that we shall ever rise to
true greatness as a nation until we learn not to take property so
seriously. It is true that we prosper in the world at present, we keep
order, we make money, we spread a bourgeois sort of civilisation, but
it is not a particularly fine or fruitful civilisation, because it
deals so exclusively with material things. I do not wish to decry the
race, because it has force, toughness, and fine working qualities; but
we do not know what to do with our prosperity when we have got it; we
can make very little use of leisure; and our idea of success is to
have a well-appointed house, expensive amusements, and to distribute a
dull and costly hospitality, which ministers more to our own
satisfaction than to the pleasure of the recipients.
There really can be few countries where men are so contented to be
dull! There is little speculation or animation or intelligence or
interest among us, and people who desire such an atmosphere are held
to be fanciful, eccentric, and artistic. It was not always so with our
race. In Elizabethan times we had all the inventiveness, the love of
adventure, the pride of dominance that we have now; but there was then
a great interest in things of the mind as well, a lively taste for
ideas, a love of beautiful things and thoughts. The Puritan uprising
knocked all that on the head, but Puritanism was at least preoccupied
with moral ideas, and developed an excitement about sin which was at
all events a sign of intellectual ferment. And then we did indeed
decline into a comfortable sort of security, into a stale classical
tradition, with pompous and sonorous writing on the one hand, and with
neatness, literary finish, and wit rather than humour on the other.
That was a dull, stolid, dignified time; and it was focussed into a
great figure of high genius, filled with the combative common-sense
which Englishmen admire, the figure of Dr. Johnson. His influence, his
temperament, portrayed in his matchless biography, did indeed dominate
literary England to its hurt; because the essence of Johnson was his
freshness, and in his hands the great rolling Palladian sentences
contrived to bite and penetrate; but his imitators did not see that
freshness was the one requisite; and so for a generation the pompous
rotund tradition flooded English prose; but for all that, England was
saved in literature from mere stateliness by the sudden fierce
interest in life and its problems which burst out like a spring in
eighteenth-century fiction; and so we come to the Victorian era, when
we were partially submerged by prosperity, scientific invention,
commerce, colonisation. But the great figures of the century arose and
had their say--Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Ruskin, William Morris; it
was there all the time, that spirit of fierce hope and discontent and
emotion, that deep longing to penetrate the issues and the
significance of life.
It may be that the immense activity of science somewhat damped our
interest in beauty; but that is probably a temporary thing. The
influence exerted by the early scientists was in the direction of
facile promises to solve all mysteries, to analyse everything into
elements, to classify, to track out natural laws; and it was believed
that the methods and processes of life would be divested of their
secrecy and their irresponsibility; but the effect of further
investigation is to reveal that life is infinitely more complex than
was supposed, and that the end is as dim as ever; though science did
for a while make havoc of the stereotyped imaginative systems of faith
and belief, so that men supposed that beauty was but an accidental
emphasis of law, and that the love of it could be traced to very
material preferences.
The artist was for a time dismayed, at being confronted by the chemist
who held that he had explained emotion because he had analysed the
substance of tears; and for a time the scientific spirit drove the
spirit of art into cliques and coteries, so that artists were hidden,
like the Lord's prophets, by fifties in caves, and fed upon bread and
water.
What mostly I would believe now injures and overshadows art, is that
artists are affected by the false standard of prosperous life, are not
content to work in poverty and simplicity, but are anxious, as all
ambitious natures who love applause must be, to share in the spoils
of the Philistines. There are, I know, craftsmen who care nothing at
all for these things, but work in silence and even in obscurity at
what seems to them engrossing and beautiful; but they are rare; and
when there is so much experience and pleasure and comfort abroad, and
when security and deference so much depend upon wealth, the artist
desires wealth, more for the sake of experience and pleasure than for
the sake of accumulation.
But the spirit which one desires to see spring up is the Athenian
spirit, which finds its satisfaction in ideas and thoughts and
beautiful emotions, in mental exploration and artistic expression; and
is so absorbed, so intent upon these things that it can afford to let
prosperity flow past like a muddy stream. Unfortunately, however, the
English spirit is solitary rather than social, and the artistic spirit
is jealous rather than inclusive; and so it comes about that instead
of artists and men of ideas consorting together and living a free and
simple life, they tend to dwell in lonely fortresses and paradises,
costly to create, costly to maintain. The English spirit is against
communities. If it were not so, how easy it would be for people to
live in groups and circles, with common interests and tastes, to
encourage each other to believe in beautiful things, and to practise
ardent thoughts and generous dreams. But this cannot be done
artificially, and the only people who ever try to do it are artists,
who do occasionally congregate in a place, and make no secret to each
other of what they are pursuing. I have sometimes touched the fringe
of a community like that, and have been charmed by the sense of a more
eager happiness, a more unaffected intercourse of spirits than I have
found elsewhere. But the world intervenes! domestic ties, pecuniary
interests, civic claims disintegrate the group. It is sad to think how
possible such intercourse is in youth, and in youth only, as one sees
it displayed in that fine and moving book _Trilby_, which does
contrive to reflect the joy of the buoyant companionship of art. But
the flush dies down, the insouciance departs, and with it the ardent
generosity of life. Some day perhaps, when life has become simpler and
wealth more equalised, when work is more distributed, when there is
less production of unnecessary things, these groups will form
themselves, and the frank, eager, vivid spirit of youth will last on
into middle-age, and even into age itself. I do not think that this is
wholly a dream; but we must first get rid of much of the pompous
nonsense about money and position, which now spoils so many lives; and
if we could be more genuinely interested in the beauty and complex
charm and joy of life, we should think less and less of material
things, be content with shelter, warmth, and food, and grudge the time
we waste in providing things for which we have no real use, simply in
order that, like the rich fool, we may congratulate ourselves on
having much goods laid up for many years, when the end was hard at
hand!
XII
MEMORY
Memory is for many people the only form of poetry which they indulge.
If a soul turns to the future for consolation in a sad or wearied or
disappointed present, it is in religion that hope and strength are
sometimes found; but if it is a retrospective nature--and the poetical
nature is generally retrospective, because poetry is concerned with
the beauty of actual experience and actual things, rather than with
the possible and the unknown--then it finds its medicine for the
dreariness of life in memory. Of course there are many simple and
healthy natures which do not concern themselves with visions at
all--the little businesses, the daily pleasures, are quietly and even
eagerly enjoyed. But the poetical nature is the nature that is not
easily contented, because it tends to idealisation, to the thought
that the present might easily be so much happier, brighter, more
beautiful, than it is.
An eager soul that looks beyond
And shivers in the midst of bliss,
That cries, "I should not need despond,
If this were otherwise, and this!"