SITTING in slippered ease before the fire, in that ripe hour when the
violence of flame has given place to a calm and penetrating glow, one
hears the wind without as if it were a tumult in some other world. The
great waves of sound follow each other in swift succession, but they
break and wreck themselves on a shore so remote that one meditates
unconcerned in the warmth of the wide-throated chimney. The sense of
repose and ease within is too deep to be disturbed by the roar that
fills the wintry night without. And yet how fragile are the walls that
guard our glowing comfort from the storm of the vast world, and how
small a space of light and heat is ours in the great sweep of elemental
forces!
The policing of the world and the suppression of the cut-throat and
the savage secure, at times, an order so pervasive and so stable that
we forgot the possibilities of revolt and tragedy which underlie
human society in its most serene as in its most agitated moments.
The elemental forces which plant the seeds of tragedy in every human
life, play as freely and powerfully through society to-day as in those
turbulent periods when strong natures made laws for themselves and
gave full vent to individual impulse. As a rule, these forces expend
themselves in well-defined and orderly channels; but they have lost
nothing of their old destructiveness if for any reason they leave these
channels or overflow their narrow courses. Conventions are more rigidly
enforced and more widely accepted to-day than ever before; but the tide
of life is as deep and full and swift as of old, and when its current
is set it sweeps conventions before it as fragile piers are torn up and
washed out by furious seas.
In our slippered ease, protected by orderly government, by written
constitutions, by a police who are always in evidence, we sometimes
forget of what perilous stuff we are made, and how inseparable from
human life are those elements of tragedy which from time to time
startle us in our repose, and make us aware that the most awful pages
of history may be rewritten in the record of our own day. It will be a
dull day if the time ever comes when uncertainty and peril are banished
from the life of men. When the seas are no longer tossed by storms, the
joy and the training of eye, hand, and heart in seamanship will go out.
The antique virtues of courage, endurance, and high-hearted sacrifice
cannot perish without the loss of that which makes it worth while
to live; but these qualities, which give heroic fibre to character,
cannot be developed if danger and uncertainty are to be banished from
human experience. A stable world is essential to progress, but a
world without the element of peril would comfort the body and destroy
the soul. In some form the temper of the adventurer, the explorer,
the sailor, and the soldier must be preserved in an orderly and
peaceful society; that sluggish stability for which business interests
are always praying would make money abundant, but impoverish the
money-getters. There would be nothing worth buying in a community in
which men were no longer tempted and life had no longer that interest
which grows out of its dramatic possibilities.
That order ought to grow, and will grow, is the conviction of all who
believe in progress; but society will be preserved from stagnation by
the fact that every man who comes into the world brings with him all
the possibilities which the first man brought. For men are born, not
made, in spite of all our superior mechanism; and although a man is
born to-day into conditions more favorable to acceptance and growth
than to rejection and revolt, he must still solve his personal problem
as in the stormier ages, and make his own adjustment to his time. And
in the making of that adjustment lie all the elements of the human
tragedy. The policing of the world will grow more complete from age to
age, but every man born into this established order will bring with him
the perilous stuff of revolt and revolution. Without this background of
tragic possibility life would lose that perpetual spell which it casts
upon the artistic spirit in every generation; it would cease to be the
drama to which a thousand pens have striven to give form, before which
a thousand thousand spectators have sat in a silence more affecting
than the most rapturous tumult of applause.
In these “piping times of peace” perhaps the artist renders no greater
service to his kind than by keeping the tragic background of life in
clear view. Men sorely need to be reminded of the immeasurable space
which surrounds them and the bottomless gulfs which open beneath them.
In this trafficking age, when so many slowly or swiftly coin strength,
time, and joy into money, the constant vision of the human drama, with
its deep and fruitful suggestiveness, is a necessity, and it can hardly
be a matter of coincidence that the tragic side of the drama has so
strongly appealed to men of artistic temper in recent years. Whatever
may be said about the sanity of view and of art of Flaubert, Zola,
and De Maupassant; of Ibsen and Maeterlinck; of George Moore, William
Sharp, and the group of younger writers who, with varying degrees of
success, are breaking from the beaten paths, it is certain that they
have laid bare the primitive elements in the human problem. The dramas
of Ibsen and Maeterlinck have brought not peace but a sword into recent
discussion of the province and nature of art; but whatever may be our
judgment of the truth and quality of these end-of-the-century readings
and renderings of the great drama, there is no question about their
departure from the conventional point of view. They may be partial,
even misleading, in the interpretation of life and its meaning which
they suggest, but they disturb and agitate us; they make us realize
how fragile are the structures which so many men and women build over
the abysses. If they do nothing more than irritate us, they render us a
service; for irritation is better than the repose of unconsciousness;
it brings us back to the sense of life; it makes us aware of the deeper
realities.
Mr. Sharp’s “Vistas” seems at first reading a book out of another
century, so dominant is its tragic note, so remote its themes, so
elemental its consciousness. It is a book of glimpses only; but these
glimpses open up the recesses and obscurities where destiny is swiftly
or slowly shaped. Lawmaking and the police seem very superficial
assurances and guardians of order in a world in which, beyond their
ken or reach, such tremendous forces of good and evil are slumbering;
traffic and finance seem matters of secondary interest or occupation
when such passions are stirring and striving. And yet “Vistas” is
peculiarly a book of our time; it registers the revolt which the man
of insight and artistic temper always makes when conventions begin
to cut to the quick, and the air becomes close and heavy. The human
spirit must have room and sweep; it must feel continually the great
forces which play through it; it must carry with it the continual
consciousness of its possibilities of good and evil. And the more
orderly society becomes the greater will be the need of keeping alive
the sense of peril and uncertainty from forces which may be quiescent
but which are never dead; of remembering that there must be freedom as
well as restraint, and that the policeman must represent an order which
is accepted as well as enforced.
The dramatists and the novelists continually shatter our sense of
security by reminding us that if Arthur Dimmesdale is dead, Philip
Christian survives; that if Isolde has perished, Anna Karenina
still lives; that if Francesca da Rimini is no longer swept by the
relentless blasts, Tess is not less tragically borne on to her doom.
The commonplace man sees the commonplace so constantly that he needs
in every age his kinsman of keener sight and finer spirit to remind
him that life is not in things; and that neither peace for traffic
nor order for quietness of mind is its supreme end. And, after all,
the singing of the open fire is the sweeter for the tumult beyond the
walls.