there were implanted in the mind of man everywhere and at all times
a certitude, as strong as our certitude of the universe about us,
that the individual soul survived death with a full, conscious, and
continuous memory, _and_, on the top of that, would be more interested
in what was going on here than in what was going on in its own place.
No such certitude has been granted to man. On the contrary, those who
hold the doctrine of immortality hold it as a special revelation and
defend it perilously. The mass of men have been very vague or sceptical
or negative about the whole affair. And as to the second part of the
proposition, the idea that, even granted this personal, conscious
and continuous survival, the soul would be more interested in things
happening here on earth than in the things of its own place, no one has
ever dreamt or could dream of saying anything so absurd. The farthest
to which St. Augustine went (and he went as far as anybody) was to say
that the soul, however blessed, retained the great human affections:
men hope that this is true, though it is hardly doctrine. But neither
St. Augustine nor any one else (that I know of) ever pretended that
the damned or beatified soul was worrying about what Smith, Jones and
Robinson thought about some verse it had produced, or was chagrined
by their neglect--after it had got rid of the limitations of this
world. Why, one does not even bother at fifty about what people may be
saying of one's work at twenty-five. Most of us would rather it were
forgotten, and some of us actually suppress it at great expense: buying
up the first edition and leaving strict injunctions in our wills that
any immature stuff shall not be reprinted after our death.
If this is our attitude towards a little development in the little
space of half a little mortal life, what do you suppose old Homer
cares, or the ever young Theocritus?
I say "young Theocritus." The adjective gives me pause. How old was
he when he died? His verse was young ... yes!... but I have, at the
moment of writing, no knowledge at all of the date when that remarkable
_littérateur_ gave up his trade. Bear with me a moment while I look it
up in a book of reference.
* * * * *
I find in my book of reference that he was born about 300 B.C., and
that "he lived for a long time" at the Court of Alexandria. But my book
does not tell me how long that "long time" was. Which reminds me of the
parish priest of whom the story goes that he preached his sermon from
this text: "Methuselah lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years and _he_
died." He first quoted the text, then made a solemn pause, then added:
"I have nothing more to say," and left the pulpit--a model to the rest
of his order.
Anyhow Theocritus is dead, and he wrote in a very young fashion. But he
would be a bold man who should say that Theocritus is caring now either
for what I am writing about him here, or even for that magnificent
sentence which Andrew Lang constructed in praise of him when he spoke
of the "many-coloured flame of Theocritus."
No. The thing is inexplicable. On the other hand, it is extremely
useful, as are hunger and thirst and several other little things of the
same sort. It is useful to the end of the works of man. If it were not
so, what works would man perform at all?
There was a school which had half a dozen adherents in London, and
two or three in Paris, genuinely attached to it (and many thousands
repeating its formulæ insincerely), and this school said that the
artist worked for his own sake or for the sake of art. Heaven knows
their productions might have persuaded us even of that impossible
theory. They were so bad; so very bad. But the artist, as we all
know, does not work for the sake of art, still less for some secret
pleasure of his own. He has that pleasure in working. He admires the
chance which guides his hand. But his driving motive is fame. It is the
driving motive, also, of all the failures--that is, of the great mass
of men. And you have this ridiculous paradox about it, that immediate
fame is everywhere suspected. Men everywhere have the uneasy sensation
that if they are too much praised before death, they will hardly be
sufficiently praised afterwards. And it is the longer praise afterwards
that they seek. Endurance between the lips of men: The monument of the
mind. That is, a fame of which they will know nothing, or for which,
even if they know of it, they will hardly care. The poet says (at it
again!)--
But in that part of Heaven where silent stand
The still remembering spirits, hearken down,
And warm again with home to hear the land,
To hear the land alive with your renown.
Nor peace nor strength nor laughter could I give
But these great wages: after death to live.
Not a bit of it. Even if he pulled it off, the poet, he only added a
little incense to a great cloud of glory and only a little note to an
enormous chorus. He only added a human thing to blessedness beyond the
scale of mortality; like a child who offers a little toy as a present
to his elders.
But there the appetite is--a spur to man and an excellent food for
irony.
The best thing, perhaps, in that book full of good things called "Seven
Men," which Mr. Max Beerbohm wrote, is the picture of the poet who has
sold his soul to the devil for a chance of looking up, in the British
Museum, references to his work made a hundred years after his death. He
finds one only reference (you will remember), and that in the shape of
a casual allusion made, not in connection with his own work at all, but
with another man's work--and in phonetic spelling to boot!
Ronsard brutally faced the problem and got out of it by a lie, or
rather by a quirk. He asked the Muses of what profit it was that he
should serve them, seeing that the Great Dead took no pleasure in their
fame. To which the Muses answered him that the soul is immortal--but
that is no reply. The Muses having answered thus, Ronsard goes on to
say that people who are devout and religious will always write good
verse.
What! Is every one that humbly does his duty and serves his God to be
accounted a writer of good verse?
Or again, is no good verse to be good verse because it was written by a
bad man? Why, here am I who have just been quoting Milton, a man rotten
with the two worst vices: falsehood and pride, but a Poet; and for that
matter, I can hardly remember one thoroughly good man who did write
good verse, unless it be the author of the "Pange Lingua."
I beg that the poets who read this may seek no quarrel with me. I am
not saying that their lives are bad: I am only saying that their verse
is bad. And, however bad their verse, you may lay to it that they will
go on writing it, in the vain pursuit of posthumous fame. Wherein they
resemble those little dogs, so numerous and so diverse, which, in the
year of gold (to be accurate, in the autumn of 1892) many others and I
led out to Cumnor Hill, and thence sent them following in a flash after
the scent of an aniseed bag till they killed nothing on the Martyrs'
Memorial at Oxford. They ran very hard, but they ran after nothing: and
so it is with the poets, and fame is but a savour and an air.