🥀 Love is not a mystery in Japan. It would not have been a mystery in
Europe if a child—Dante—had not been in love. For mystery, religious and
passionate alike, has its source and sanction in the heart of childhood.
In like manner the love of Nature—of the landscape and the heavens—was a
spiritual mystery in the boyish hearts of Vaughan and Traherne (repeated
in that of their son and brother Wordsworth, the boy whom the cataract
haunted like a passion). By these boyhoods, remembered very seriously in
afterlife, European literature has been converted to two mystical
passions which, century by century, are its very life. Without those
boyhoods these two loves might have been fervent, exalting, poignant,
but not mysterious, not spiritual with the “golden purity,” the ignorant
spirituality of childhood.
🥀 It is said that our European manner of romantic love (strictly
speaking romantic) is scandalous to the Japanese. They can have had no
Dante. And, in spite of their pleasure in blossoms—their annual popular
tryst with cherry and chrysanthemum—it is doubtful whether the love of
Nature has ever taken an illustrious or mysterious form with these
little people. Their landscape art is gay, observant, and arbitrary; but
it is—as far as an Occidental student can interpret it—not passionate.
For landscape that proves a passion for Nature and for mystery—both the
legacies of man’s dead childhood—we must look to the great painters of
two countries, France and England; to Turner, Wilson, Crome, and Corot,
and thus especially to the country that produced the boyhoods of
Vaughan, Traherne, and Wordsworth. Many a child of our race has received
that early inspiration, and these men of early genius not only received
and remembered but put it on such record as to make it thenceforward a
part of our literature. It is accepted, it is orthodox, it is expected
of our poets. And this orthodoxy, due to these great men, is due
originally to these great boys.
🥀 But for them these wonders of childhood would have been forgotten, or
put away as childish things, by sensitive spirits who had likewise
experienced them. They would not, at any rate, have gained this high
literary honour and this literary authority. As it is, we are not
ashamed to remember what midsummer early morning was to us at nine years
old, because literature gives us authority. The light to our adult eyes
is lovely still, but the magic of its quality is gone, the memory
remaining, or the memory of the memory, or perhaps no more than the
grace of knowing that there was once a memory—
_Not to forget that I forget._
🥀 It is their own landscape, their own hour, that moves children not to
words but to emotions. Great views, I think, give them a more ordinary
and grown-up pleasure; they do not love formal gardens, even Italian
formal gardens; and on this point certainly the child is not the father
of the man. But hillsides in wild flower, calm summer seas, and those
aspects and phases of landscape to which Tennyson gave his perfect word
in return for a perfect emotion—these are wonderful to children. When
Tennyson is restored, after the indiscriminate honour and the
indiscriminate disesteem that have befallen him, to his own place, it
will be because his sense of landscape, his sense of light and of sun,
is like a child’s.
🥀 As to Dante’s love, the presence of an adult sentiment in a boy’s
heart—one should rather say in his soul and in the topmost places of his
soul—is a heavenly incident of human history and therefore may be
subject to the worst parody. I find, for example, an exceeding vulgarity
in the coquetting of boys and girls in certain kinds of American
stories. It is not a corruption of things innocent to evil; but it is
the corruption of an extreme and lofty wisdom, and that corruption, I
think, is silly.
🥀 Let us place next to Dante’s sacred love for a child the love of a man
not sacred but profane—a man in fiction as the great genius of Emily
Brontë conceived him. Heathcliff’s tempestuous love for Catherine
remains throughout the horrible story a child’s fresh love, even though
Heathcliff is worse than a man. And, albeit Catherine dies a woman, it
is to her childish ghost that he cries out of that window on the heights
before his own death; the ghost of a child, and she has been long a dead
woman, and he is old.