lead quiet lives, refresh the spirit of joy within us by feeding our
eyes and minds with the beautiful sounds and sights of nature, the
birds' song, the opening faces of flowers, the spring woods, the
winter sunset; we must enter simply and freely into the life about us,
not seeking to take a lead, to impress our views, to emphasise our own
subjects; we must not get absorbed in toil or business, and still less
in plans and intrigues; we must not protest against these things, but
simply not care for them; we must not be burdensome to others in any
way; we must not be shocked or offended or disgusted, but tolerate,
forgive, welcome, share. We must treat life in an eager, light-hearted
way, not ruefully or drearily or solemnly. The old language in which
the Gospel comes to us, the formality of the antique phrasing, the
natural tendency to make it dignified and hieratic, disguise from us
how utterly natural and simple it all is. I do not think that
reverence and tradition and awe have done us any more grievous injury
than the fact that we have made the Saviour into a figure with whom
frank communication, eager, impulsive talk, would seem to be
impossible. One thinks of Him, from pictures and from books, as grave,
abstracted, chiding, precise, mournfully kind, solemnly considerate. I
believe it in my heart to have been wholly otherwise, and I think of
Him as one with whom any simple and affectionate person, man, woman,
or child, would have been entirely and instantly at ease. Like all
idealistic and poetical natures, he had little use, I think, for
laughter; those who are deeply interested in life and its issues care
more for the beauty than the humour of life. But one sees a flash of
humour here and there, as in the story of the unjust judge, and of the
children in the market-place; and that He was disconcerting or cast a
shadow upon natural talk and merriment I do not for an instant
believe.
And thus I think that the Christian has no right to be ashamed of
light-heartedness; indeed I believe that he ought to cultivate and
feed it in every possible way. He ought to be so unaffected, that he
can change without the least incongruity from laughter to tears,
sympathising with, entering into, developing the moods of those about
him. The moment that the Christian feels himself to be out of place
and affronted by scenes of common resort--the market, the bar, the
smoking-room--that moment his love of humanity fails him. He must be
charming, attractive, genial, everywhere; for the severance of
goodness and charm is a most wretched matter; if he affects his
company at all, it must be as innocent and beautiful girlhood affects
a circle, by its guilelessness, its sweetness, its appeal. I have
known Christians like this, wise, beloved, simple, gentle people,
whose presence did not bring constraint but rather a perfect ease, and
was an evocation of all that was best and finest in those near them. I
am not recommending a kind of silly mildness, interested only in
improving conversation, but rather a zest, a shrewdness, a bonhomie,
not finding natural interests common and unclean, but passionately
devoted to human nature--so impulsive, frail, unequal, irritable,
pleasure-loving, but yet with that generous, sweet, wholesome fibre
below, that seems to be evoked in crisis and trial from the most
apparently worthless human beings. The outcasts of society, the
sinful, the ill-regulated, would never have so congregated about our
Saviour if they had felt Him to be shocked or indignant at sin. What
they must rather have felt was that He understood them, loved them,
desired their love, and drew out all the true and fine and eager and
lovable part of them, because he knew it to be there, wished it to
emerge. "He was such a comfortable person!" as a simple man once said
to me of one of the best of Christians: "if you had gone wrong, he did
not find fault, but tried to see the way out; and if you were in pain
or trouble, he said very little; you only felt it was all right when
he was by."
XXIV
PROGRESS
We must always hopefully and gladly remember that the great movements,
doctrines, thoughts, which have affected the life of the world most
deeply, are those which are most truly based upon the best and truest
needs of humanity. We need never be afraid of a new theory or a new
doctrine, because such things are never imposed upon an unwilling
world, but owe their strength to the closeness with which they
interpret the aims and wants of human beings. Still more hopeful is
the knowledge which one gains from looking back at the history of the
world, that no selfish, cruel, sensual, or wicked interpretation of
life has ever established a vital hold upon men. The selfish and the
cruel elements of humanity have never been able to band themselves
together against the power of good for very long, for the simple
reason that those who are selfish and evil have a natural suspicion of
other selfish and evil people; and no combination of men can ever be
based upon anything but mutual trust and affection. And thus good has
always a power of combination, while evil is naturally solitary and
disjunctive.
Take such an attempt as that of Nietzsche to establish a new theory of
life. His theory of the superman is simply this, that the future of
the world was in the hands of strong, combative, powerful, predatory
people. Those are the supermen, a natural aristocracy of force and
unscrupulousness and vigour. But such individuals carry with them the
seed of their own failure, because even if Nietzsche's view that the
weak and broken elements of humanity were doomed to perish, and ought
even to be helped to perish, were a true view, even if his supermen at
last survived, they must ultimately be matched one against another in
some monstrous and unflinching combat.
Nietzsche held that the Christian doctrine of renunciation was but a
translating into terms of a theory the discontent, the disappointment,
the failure of the weak and diseased element of humanity, the slavish
herd. He thought that Christianity was a glorification, a consecration
of man's weakness and not of his strength. But he misjudged it wholly.
It is based in reality upon the noble element in humanity, the power
of love and trust and unselfishness which rises superior to the ills
of life; and the force of Christianity lies in the fact that it
reveals to men the greatness of which they are capable, and the fact
that no squalor or wretchedness of circumstances can bind the thought
of man, if it is set upon what is high and pure. The man or woman who
sees the beauty of inner purity cannot ever be very deeply tainted by
corruption either of body or of soul.
Renunciation is not a wholly passive thing; it is not a mere suspicion
of all that is joyful, a dull abnegation of happiness. It is not that
self-sacrifice means a frame of mind too despondent to enjoy, so
fearful of every kind of pleasure that it has not the heart to take
part in it. It is rather a vigorous discrimination between pleasure
and joy, an austerity which is not deceived by selfish, obvious,
apparent pleasure, but sees what sort of pleasure is innocent,
natural, social, and what sort of pleasure is corroding, barren, and
unreal.
In the Christianity of the Gospel there is very little trace of
asceticism. The delight in life is clearly indicated, and the only
sort of self-denial that is taught is the self-denial that ends in
simplicity of life, and in the joyful and courageous shouldering of
inevitable burdens. Self-denial was not to be practised in a
spiritless and timid way, but rather as a man accepts the fatigues and
dangers of an expedition, in a vigorous and adventurous mood. One does
not think of the men who go on some Arctic exploration, with all the
restrictions of diet that they have to practise, all the uncomfortable
rules of life they have to obey, as renouncing the joys of life; they
do so naturally, in order that they may follow a livelier inspiration.
It is clear from the accounts of primitive Christians that they
impressed their heathen neighbours not as timid, anxious, and
despondent people, but as men and women with some secret overflowing
sense of joy and energy, and with a curious radiance and brightness
about them which was not an affected pose, but the redundant happiness
of those who have some glad knowledge in heart and mind which they
cannot repress.
Let us suppose the case of a man gifted by nature with a great
vitality, with a keen perception of all that is beautiful in life, all
that is humorous, all that is delightful. Imagine him extremely
sensitive to nature, art, human charm, human pleasure, doing
everything with zest, interest, amusement, excitement. Imagine him,
too, deeply sensitive to affection, loving to be loved, grateful,
kindly, fond of children and animals, a fervent lover, a romantic
friend, alive to all fine human qualities. Suppose, too, that he is
ambitious, desirous of fame, liking to play an active part in life,
fond of work, wishing to sway opinion, eager that others should care
for the things for which he cares. Well, he must make a certain
choice, no doubt; he cannot gratify all these things; his ambition may
get in the way of his pleasure, his affections may interrupt his
ambitions. What is his renunciation to be? It obviously will not be an
abnegation of everything. He will not feel himself bound to crush all
enjoyment, to refuse to love and be loved, to enter tamely and
passively into life. He will inevitably choose what is dearest to his
heart, whatever that may be, and he will no doubt instinctively
eliminate from his life the joys which are most clouded by
dissatisfaction. If he sets affection aside for the sake of ambition,
and then finds that the thought of the love he has slighted or
disregarded wounds and pains him, he will retrace his steps; if he
sees that his ambitions leave him no time for his enjoyment of art or
nature, and finds his success embittered by the loss of those other
enjoyments, he will curb his ambition; but in all this he will not act
anxiously and wretchedly. He will be rather like a man who has two
simultaneous pleasures offered him, one of which must exclude the
other. He will not spoil both, but take what he desires most, and
think no more of what he rejects.
The more that such a man loves life, the less is he likely to be
deceived by the shows of life; the more wisely will he judge what part
of it is worth keeping, and the less will he be tempted by anything
which distracts him from life itself. It is fulness of life, after
all, that he is aiming at, and not vacuity; and thus renunciation
becomes not a feeble withdrawal from life, but a vigorous affirmation
of the worth of it.
But of course we cannot all expect to deal with life on this
high-handed scale. The question is what most of us, who feel ourselves
sadly limited, incomplete, fractious, discontented, fitful, unequal to
the claims upon us, should do. If we have no sense of eager adventure,
but are afraid of life, overshadowed by doubts and anxieties, with no
great spring of pleasure, no passionate emotions, no very definite
ambitions, what are we then to do?
Or perhaps our case is even worse than that; we are meanly desirous of
comfort, of untroubled ease, we have a secret love of low pleasures, a
desire to gain rather than to deserve admiration and respect, a
temptation to fortify ourselves against life by accumulating all sorts
of resources, with no particular wish to share anything, but aiming to
be left alone in a circle which we can bend to our will and make
useful to us; that is the hard case of many men and women; and even if
by glimpses we see that there is a finer and a freer life outside, we
may not be conscious of any real desire to issue from our stuffy
parlour.
In either case our duty and our one hope is clear; that we have got
somehow, at all costs and hazards, to find our way into the light of
day. It is such as these, the anxious and the fearful on the one hand,
the gross and sensual on the other, who need most of all a _Joyous
Gard_ of their own. Because we are coming to the light, as Walt
Whitman so splendidly says:--"The Lord advances and yet advances ...
always the shadow in front, always the reach'd hand bringing up the
laggards."
Our business, if we know that we are laggards, if we only dimly
suspect it, is not to fear the shadow, but to seize the outstretched
hands. We must grasp the smallest clue that leads out of the dark, the
resolute fight with some slovenly and ugly habit, the telling of our
mean troubles to some one whose energy we admire and whose disapproval
we dread; we must try the experiment, make the plunge; all at once we
realise that the foundations are laid, that the wall is beginning to
rise above the rubbish and the débris; we must build a home for the
new-found joy, even if as yet it only sings drowsily and faintly
within our hearts, like the awaking bird in the dewy thicket, when the
fingers of the dawn begin to raise the curtain of the night.
XXV
THE SENSE OF BEAUTY
There is one difficulty which stands at the threshold of dealing with
the sense of beauty so as to give it due importance and preponderance,
and that is that it seems with many people to be so frail a thing, and
to visit the mind only as the last grace of a mood of perfect serenity
and well-being. Many people, and those not the least thoughtful and
intelligent, find by experience that it is almost the first thing to
disappear in moments of stress and pressure. Physical pain, grief,
pre-occupation, business, anxiety, all seem to have the power of
quenching it instantaneously, until one is apt to feel that it is a
thing of infinite delicacy and tenderness, and can only co-exist with
a tranquillity which it is hard in life to secure. The result of this
no doubt is that many active-minded and forcible people are ready to
think little of it, and just regard it as a mood that may accompany a
well-earned holiday, and even so to be sparingly indulged.
It is also undoubtedly true that in many robust and energetic people
the sense of what is beautiful is so far atrophied that it can only be
aroused by scenes and places of almost melodramatic picturesqueness,
by ancient buildings clustered on craggy eminences, great valleys with
the frozen horns of mountains, wind-ravaged and snow-streaked, peering
over forest edges, the thunder and splendour of great sea-breakers
plunging landward under rugged headlands and cliff-fronts. But all
this pursuit of sensational beauty is to mistake its quality; the
moment it is thus pursued it ceases to be the milk and honey of life,
and it becomes a kind of stimulant which excites rather than
tranquillises. I do not mean that one should of set purpose avoid the
sight of wonderful prospects and treasure-houses of art, or act as the
poet Gray did when he was travelling with Horace Walpole in the Alps,
when they drew up the blinds of their carriage to exclude the sight of
such prodigious and unmanning horrors!
Still I think that if one is on the right track, and if beauty has its
due place and value in life, there will be less and less impulse to go
far afield for it, in search of something to thrill the dull
perception and quicken it into life. I believe that people ought to be
content to live most of their lives in the same place, and to grow to
love familiar scenes. Familiarity with a scene ought not to result in
the obliteration of all consciousness of it: one ought rather to find
in use and affection an increased power of subtle interpretation, a
closer and finer understanding of the qualities which underlie the
very simplest of English landscapes. I live, myself, for most of the
year in a countryside that is often spoken of by its inhabitants as
dull, tame, and featureless; yet I cannot say with what daily renewal
of delight I wander in the pastoral Cambridge landscape, with its long
low lines of wold, its whitewalled, straw-thatched villages embowered
in orchards and elms, its slow willow-bound streams, its level
fenland, with the far-seen cloud-banks looming overhead: or again in
the high-ridged, well-wooded land of Sussex, where I often live, the
pure lines of the distant downs seen over the richly coloured
intervening weald grow daily more dear and intimate, and appeal more
and more closely to the deepest secrets of sweetness and delight. For
as we train ourselves to the perception of beauty, we become more and
more alive to a fine simplicity of effect; we find the lavish
accumulation of rich and magnificent glories bewildering and
distracting.
And this is the same with other arts; we no longer crave to be dazzled
and flooded by passionate and exciting sensation, we care less and
less for studied mosaics of word and thought, and more and more for
clearness and form and economy and austerity. Restless exuberance
becomes unwelcome, complexity and intricacy weary us; we begin to
perceive the beauty of what Fitzgerald called the 'great still books.'
We do not desire a kaleidoscopic pageant of blending and colliding
emotions, but crave for something distinctly seen, entirely grasped,
perfectly developed. Because we are no longer in search of something
stimulating and exciting, something to make us glide and dart among
the surge and spray of life, but what we crave for is rather a calm
and reposeful absorption in a thought which can yield us all its
beauty, and assure us of the existence of a principle in which we can
rest and abide. As life goes on, we ought not to find relief from
tedium only in a swift interchange and multiplication of sensations;
we ought rather to attain a simple and sustained joyfulness which can
find nurture in homely and familiar things.
If again the sense of beauty is so frail a thing that it is at the
mercy of all intruding and jarring elements, it is also one of the
most patient and persistent of quiet forces. Like the darting fly
which we scare from us, it returns again and again to settle on the
spot which it has chosen. There are, it is true, troubled and anxious
hours when the beauty round us seems a cruel and intrusive thing,
mocking us with a peace which we cannot realise, and torturing us with
the reminder of the joy we have lost. There are days when the only way
to forget our misery is to absorb ourselves in some practical energy;
but that is because we have not learned to love beauty in the right
way. If we have only thought of it as a pleasant ingredient in our cup
of joy, as a thing which we can just use as we can use wine, to give
us an added flush of unreasonable content, then it will fail us when
we need it most. When a man is under the shadow of a bereavement, he
can test for himself how he has used love. If he finds that the loving
looks and words and caresses of those that are left to him are a mere
torture to him, then he has used love wrongly, just as a selfish and
agreeable delight; but if he finds strength and comfort in the
yearning sympathy of friend and beloved, reassurance in the strength
of the love that is left him, and confidence in the indestructibility
of affection, then he has used love wisely and purely, loving it for
itself, for its beauty and holiness, and not only for the warmth and
comfort it has brought him.
So, if we have loved beauty well, have seen in it a promise of
ultimate joy, a sign of a deliberate intention, a message from a power
that does not send sorrow and anxiety wantonly, cruelly and
indifferently, an assurance of something that waits to welcome and
bless us, then beauty is not a mere torturing menace, a heartless and
unkind parading of joy which we cannot feel, but a faithful pledge of
something secure and everlasting, which will return to us again and
again in ever fuller measure, even if the flow of it be sometimes
suspended.
We ought then to train and practise our sense of beauty, not selfishly
and luxuriously, but so that when the dark hour comes it may help us
to realise that all is not lost, may alleviate our pain by giving us
the knowledge that the darkness is the interruption, but that the joy
is permanent and deep and certain.
Thus beauty, instead of being for us but as the melody swiftly played
when our hearts are high, a mere momentary ray, a happy accident that
befalls us, may become to us a deep and vital spring of love and hope,
of which we may say that it is there waiting for us, like the home
that awaits the traveller over the weary upland at the foot of the
far-looming hill. It may come to us as a perpetual sign that we are
not forgotten, and that the joy of which it makes mention survives all
interludes of strife and uneasiness. It is easy to slight and overlook
it, but if we do that, we are deluded by the passing storm into
believing that confusion and not peace is the end. As George Meredith
nobly wrote, during the tragic and fatal illness of his wife, "Here I
am in the very pits of tragic life.... Happily for me, I have learnt
to live much in the spirit, and see brightness on the other side of
life, otherwise this running of my poor doe with the inextricable
arrow in her flanks would pull me down too." The spirit, the
brightness of the other side, that is the secret which beauty can
communicate, and the message which she bears upon her radiant wings.
XXVI
THE PRINCIPLE OF BEAUTY
"I have loved," said Keats, "the _principle_ of beauty in all things."
It is that to which all I have said has been leading, as many roads
unite in one. We must try to use discrimination, not to be so
optimistic that we see beauty if it is not there, not to overwhelm
every fling that every craftsman has at beauty with gush and
panegyric; not to praise beauty in all companies, or to go off like a
ripe broom-pod, at a touch. When Walter Pater was confronted with
something which courtesy demanded that he should seem to admire, he
used to say in that soft voice of his, which lingered over emphatic
syllables, "Very costly, no doubt!"
But we must be generous to all beautiful intention, and quick to see
any faintest beckoning of the divine quality; and indeed I would not
have most people aim at too critical an attitude, for I believe it is
more important to enjoy than to appraise; still we must keep the
principle in sight, and not degenerate into mere collectors of
beautiful impressions. If we simply try to wallow in beauty, we are
using it sensually; while if on the other hand we aim at correctness
of taste, which is but the faculty of sincere concurrence with the
artistic standards of the day, we come to a sterile connoisseurship
which has no living inspiration about it. It is the temperate use of
beauty which we must aim at, and a certain candour of observation,
looking at all things, neither that we may condemn if we can, nor that
we may luxuriously abandon ourselves to sensation, but that we may
draw from contemplation something of the inner light of life.
I have not here said much about the arts--music, sculpture, painting,
architecture--because I do not want to recommend any specialisation in
beauty. I know, indeed, several high-minded people, diligent,
unoriginal, faithful, who have begun by recognising in a philosophical
way the worth and force of beauty, but who, having no direct instinct
for it, have bemused themselves by conventional and conscientious
study, into the belief that they are on the track of beauty in art,
when they have no real appreciation of it at all, no appetite for it,
but are only bent on perfecting temperament, and whose unconscious
motive has been but a fear of not being in sympathy with men whose
ardour they admire, but whose love of beauty they do not really share.
Such people tend to gravitate to early Italian painting, because of
its historical associations, and because it can be categorically
studied. They become what is called 'purists,' which means little more
than a learned submissiveness. In literature they are found to admire
Carlyle, Ruskin, and Browning, not because of their method of treating
thought, but because of the ethical maxims imbedded--as though one
were to love a conserve of plums for the sake of the stones!
One should love great writers and great artists not because of their
great thoughts--there are plenty of inferior writers who traffic in
great thoughts--but because great artists and writers are the people
who can irradiate with a heavenly sort of light common thoughts and
motives, so as to show the beauty which underlies them and the
splendour that breaks from them. It is possible to treat fine thoughts
in a heavy way so as to deprive them of all their rarity and
inspiration. The Gospel contains some of the most beautiful thoughts
in the world, beautiful because they are common thoughts which every
one recognises to be true, yet set in a certain light, just as the
sunset with its level, golden, remote glow has the power of
transfiguring a familiar scene with a glory of mystery and desire. But
one has but to turn over a volume of dull sermons, or the pages of a
dreary commentary, to find the thoughts of the Gospel transformed into
something that seems commonplace and uninspiring. The beauty of
ordinary things depends upon the angle at which you see them and the
light which falls upon them; and the work of the great artist and the
great writer is to show things at the right angle, and to shut off the
confusing muddled cross-lights which conceal the quality of the thing
seen.