There is a pleasant tale of some worthless, phrasing Frenchman, who was
taxed with ingratitude: “_Il faut savoir garder l’indépendance du cœur_,”
cried he. I own I feel with him. Gratitude without familarity,
gratitude otherwise than as a nameless element in a friendship, is a
thing so near to hatred that I do not care to split the difference.
Until I find a man who is pleased to receive obligations, I shall
continue to question the tact of those who are eager to confer them.
What an art it is, to give, even to our nearest friends! and what a test
of manners, to receive! How, upon either side, we smuggle away the
obligation, blushing for each other; how bluff and dull we make the
giver; how hasty, how falsely cheerful, the receiver! And yet an act of
such difficulty and distress between near friends, it is supposed we can
perform to a total stranger and leave the man transfixed with grateful
emotions. The last thing you can do to a man is to burthen him with an
obligation, and it is what we propose to begin with! But let us not be
deceived: unless he is totally degraded to his trade, anger jars in his
inside, and he grates his teeth at our gratuity.
We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In
real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is
received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented. We are all too
proud to take a naked gift: we must seem to pay it, if in nothing else,
then with the delights of our society. Here, then, is the pitiful fix of
the rich man; here is that needle’s eye in which he stuck already in the
days of Christ, and still sticks to-day, firmer, if possible, than ever:
that he has the money and lacks the love which should make his money
acceptable. Here and now, just as of old in Palestine, he has the rich
to dinner, it is with the rich that he takes his pleasure: and when his
turn comes to be charitable, he looks in vain for a recipient. His
friends are not poor, they do not want; the poor are not his friends,
they will not take. To whom is he to give? Where to find—note this
phase—the Deserving Poor? Charity is (what they call) centralised;
offices are hired; societies founded, with secretaries paid or unpaid:
the hunt of the Deserving Poor goes merrily forward. I think it will
take more than a merely human secretary to disinter that character.
What! a class that is to be in want from no fault of its own, and yet
greedily eager to receive from strangers; and to be quite respectable,
and at the same time quite devoid of self-respect; and play the most
delicate part of friendship, and yet never be seen; and wear the form of
man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature:—and all
this, in the hope of getting a belly-god Burgess through a needle’s eye!
O, let him stick, by all means: and let his polity tumble in the dust;
and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin
to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of
man! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness, there can be no
salvation: and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of
reason to the fool who looks for the Deserving Poor!
V
And yet there is one course which the unfortunate gentleman may take. He
may subscribe to pay the taxes. There were the true charity, impartial
and impersonal, cumbering none with obligation, helping all. There were
a destination for loveless gifts; there were the way to reach the pocket
of the deserving poor, and yet save the time of secretaries! But, alas!
there is no colour of romance in such a course; and people nowhere demand
the picturesque so much as in their virtues.
X
LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE THE CAREER OF ART
WITH the agreeable frankness of youth, you address me on a point of some
practical importance to yourself and (it is even conceivable) of some
gravity to the world: Should you or should you not become an artist? It
is one which you must decide entirely for yourself; all that I can do is
to bring under your notice some of the materials of that decision; and I
will begin, as I shall probably conclude also, by assuring you that all
depends on the vocation.
To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth
is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and
delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life.
These two unknowns the young man brings together again and again, now in
the airiest touch, now with a bitter hug; now with exquisite pleasure,
now with cutting pain; but never with indifference, to which he is a
total stranger, and never with that near kinsman of indifference,
contentment. If he be a youth of dainty senses or a brain easily heated,
the interest of this series of experiments grows upon him out of all
proportion to the pleasure he receives. It is not beauty that he loves,
nor pleasure that he seeks, though he may think so; his design and his
sufficient reward is to verify his own existence and taste the variety of
human fate. To him, before the razor-edge of curiosity is dulled, all
that is not actual living and the hot chase of experience wears a face of
a disgusting dryness difficult to recall in later days; or if there be
any exception—and here destiny steps in—it is in those moments when,
wearied or surfeited of the primary activity of the senses, he calls up
before memory the image of transacted pains and pleasures. Thus it is
that such an one shies from all cut-and-dry professions, and inclines
insensibly toward that career of art which consists only in the tasting
and recording of experience.
This, which is not so much a vocation for art as an impatience of all
other honest trades, frequently exists alone; and so existing, it will
pass gently away in the course of years. Emphatically, it is not to be
regarded; it is not a vocation, but a temptation; and when your father
the other day so fiercely and (in my view) so properly discouraged your
ambition, he was recalling not improbably some similar passage in his own
experience. For the temptation is perhaps nearly as common as the
vocation is rare. But again we have vocations which are imperfect; we
have men whose minds are bound up, not so much in any art, as in the
general _ars artium_ and common base of all creative work; who will now
dip into painting, and now study counterpoint, and anon will be inditing
a sonnet: all these with equal interest, all often with genuine
knowledge. And of this temper, when it stands alone, I find it difficult
to speak; but I should counsel such an one to take to letters, for in
literature (which drags with so wide a net) all his information may be
found some day useful, and if he should go on as he has begun, and turn
at last into the critic, he will have learned to use the necessary tools.
Lastly we come to those vocations which are at once decisive and precise;
to the men who are born with the love of pigments, the passion of
drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse to create with words, just as
other and perhaps the same men are born with the love of hunting, or the
sea, or horses, or the turning-lathe. These are predestined; if a man
love the labour of any trade, apart from any question of success or fame,
the gods have called him. He may have the general vocation too: he may
have a taste for all the arts, and I think he often has; but the mark of
his calling is this laborious partiality for one, this inextinguishable
zest in its technical successes, and (perhaps above all) a certain
candour of mind to take his very trifling enterprise with a gravity that
would befit the cares of empire, and to think the smallest improvement
worth accomplishing at any expense of time and industry. The book, the
statue, the sonata, must be gone upon with the unreasoning good faith and
the unflagging spirit of children at their play. _Is it worth
doing_?—when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that
question, it is implicitly answered in the negative. It does not occur
to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-room sofa, nor
to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the candour of the one and
the ardour of the other should be united in the bosom of the artist.
If you recognise in yourself some such decisive taste, there is no room
for hesitation: follow your bent. And observe (lest I should too much
discourage you) that the disposition does not usually burn so brightly at
the first, or rather not so constantly. Habit and practice sharpen
gifts; the necessity of toil grows less disgusting, grows even welcome,
in the course of years; a small taste (if it be only genuine) waxes with
indulgence into an exclusive passion. Enough, just now, if you can look
back over a fair interval, and see that your chosen art has a little more
than held its own among the thronging interests of youth. Time will do
the rest, if devotion help it; and soon your every thought will be
engrossed in that beloved occupation.
But even with devotion, you may remind me, even with unfaltering and
delighted industry, many thousand artists spend their lives, if the
result be regarded, utterly in vain: a thousand artists, and never one
work of art. But the vast mass of mankind are incapable of doing
anything reasonably well, art among the rest. The worthless artist would
not improbably have been a quite incompetent baker. And the artist, even
if he does not amuse the public, amuses himself; so that there will
always be one man the happier for his vigils. This is the practical side
of art: its inexpugnable fortress for the true practitioner. The direct
returns—the wages of the trade are small, but the indirect—the wages of
the life—are incalculably great. No other business offers a man his
daily bread upon such joyful terms. The soldier and the explorer have
moments of a worthier excitement, but they are purchased by cruel
hardships and periods of tedium that beggar language. In the life of the
artist there need be no hour without its pleasure. I take the author,
with whose career I am best acquainted; and it is true he works in a
rebellious material, and that the act of writing is cramped and trying
both to the eyes and the temper; but remark him in his study, when matter
crowds upon him and words are not wanting—in what a continual series of
small successes time flows by; with what a sense of power as of one
moving mountains, he marshals his petty characters; with what pleasures,
both of the ear and eye, he sees his airy structure growing on the page;
and how he labours in a craft to which the whole material of his life is
tributary, and which opens a door to all his tastes, his loves, his
hatreds, and his convictions, so that what he writes is only what he
longed to utter. He may have enjoyed many things in this big, tragic
playground of the world; but what shall he have enjoyed more fully than a
morning of successful work? Suppose it ill paid: the wonder is it should
be paid at all. Other men pay, and pay dearly, for pleasures less
desirable.
Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure only; it affords besides
an admirable training. For the artist works entirely upon honour. The
public knows little or nothing of those merits in the quest of which you
are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavours. Merits of design,
the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a certain cheap
accomplishment which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires—these
they can recognise, and these they value. But to those more exquisite
refinements of proficiency and finish, which the artist so ardently
desires and so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac)
he must toil “like a miner buried in a landslip,” for which, day after
day, he recasts and revises and rejects—the gross mass of the public must
be ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest pitch
of merit, posterity may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so probable,
you fall by even a hair’s breadth of the highest, rest certain they shall
never be observed. Under the shadow of this cold thought, alone in his
studio, the artist must preserve from day to day his constancy to the
ideal. It is this which makes his life noble; it is by this that the
practice of his craft strengthens and matures his character; it is for
this that even the serious countenance of the great emperor was turned
approvingly (if only for a moment) on the followers of Apollo, and that
sternly gentle voice bade the artist cherish his art.
And here there fall two warnings to be made. First, if you are to
continue to be a law to yourself, you must beware of the first signs of
laziness. This idealism in honesty can only be supported by perpetual
effort; the standard is easily lowered, the artist who says “_It will
do_,” is on the downward path; three or four pot-boilers are enough at
times (above all at wrong times) to falsify a talent, and by the practice
of journalism a man runs the risk of becoming wedded to cheap finish.
This is the danger on the one side; there is not less upon the other.
The consciousness of how much the artist is (and must be) a law to
himself, debauches the small heads. Perceiving recondite merits very
hard to attain, making or swallowing artistic formulæ, or perhaps falling
in love with some particular proficiency of his own, many artists forget
the end of all art: to please. It is doubtless tempting to exclaim
against the ignorant bourgeois; yet it should not be forgotten, it is he
who is to pay us, and that (surely on the face of it) for services that
he shall desire to have performed. Here also, if properly considered,
there is a question of transcendental honesty. To give the public what
they do not want, and yet expect to be supported: we have there a strange
pretension, and yet not uncommon, above all with painters. The first
duty in this world is for a man to pay his way; when that is quite
accomplished, he may plunge into what eccentricity he likes; but
emphatically not till then. Till then, he must pay assiduous court to
the bourgeois who carries the purse. And if in the course of these
capitulations he shall falsify his talent, it can never have been a
strong one, and he will have preserved a better thing than
talent—character. Or if he be of a mind so independent that he cannot
stoop to this necessity, one course is yet open: he can desist from art,
and follow some more manly way of life.
I speak of a more manly way of life, it is a point on which I must be
frank. To live by a pleasure is not a high calling; it involves
patronage, however veiled; it numbers the artist, however ambitious,
along with dancing girls and billiard markers. The French have a
romantic evasion for one employment, and call its practitioners the
Daughters of Joy. The artist is of the same family, he is of the Sons of
Joy, chose his trade to please himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing
others, and has parted with something of the sterner dignity of man.
Journals but a little while ago declaimed against the Tennyson peerage;
and this Son of Joy was blamed for condescension when he followed the
example of Lord Lawrence and Lord Cairns and Lord Clyde. The poet was
more happily inspired; with a better modesty he accepted the honour; and
anonymous journalists have not yet (if I am to believe them) recovered
the vicarious disgrace to their profession. When it comes to their turn,
these gentlemen can do themselves more justice; and I shall be glad to
think of it; for to my barbarian eyesight, even Lord Tennyson looks
somewhat out of place in that assembly. There should be no honours for
the artist; he has already, in the practice of his art, more than his
share of the rewards of life; the honours are pre-empted for other
trades, less agreeable and perhaps more useful.
But the devil in these trades of pleasing is to fail to please. In
ordinary occupations, a man offers to do a certain thing or to produce a
certain article with a merely conventional accomplishment, a design in
which (we may almost say) it is difficult to fail. But the artist steps
forth out of the crowd and proposes to delight: an impudent design, in
which it is impossible to fail without odious circumstances. The poor
Daughter of Joy, carrying her smiles and finery quite unregarded through
the crowd, makes a figure which it is impossible to recall without a
wounding pity. She is the type of the unsuccessful artist. The actor,
the dancer, and the singer must appear like her in person, and drain
publicly the cup of failure. But though the rest of us escape this
crowning bitterness of the pillory, we all court in essence the same
humiliation. We all profess to be able to delight. And how few of us
are! We all pledge ourselves to be able to continue to delight. And the
day will come to each, and even to the most admired, when the ardour
shall have declined and the cunning shall be lost, and he shall sit by
his deserted booth ashamed. Then shall he see himself condemned to do
work for which he blushes to take payment. Then (as if his lot were not
already cruel) he must lie exposed to the gibes of the wreckers of the
press, who earn a little bitter bread by the condemnation of trash which
they have not read, and the praise of excellence which they cannot
understand.
And observe that this seems almost the necessary end at least of writers.
_Les blancs et les Bleus_ (for instance) is of an order of merit very
different from _Le Vicomte de Braglonne_; and if any gentleman can bear
to spy upon the nakedness of _Castle Dangerous_, his name I think is Ham:
let it be enough for the rest of us to read of it (not without tears) in
the pages of Lockhart. Thus in old age, when occupation and comfort are
most needful, the writer must lay aside at once his pastime and his
breadwinner. The painter indeed, if he succeed at all in engaging the
attention of the public, gains great sums and can stand to his easel
until a great age without dishonourable failure. The writer has the
double misfortune to be ill-paid while he can work, and to be incapable
of working when he is old. It is thus a way of life which conducts
directly to a false position.
For the writer (in spite of notorious examples to the contrary) must look
to be ill-paid. Tennyson and Montépin make handsome livelihoods; but we
cannot all hope to be Tennyson, and we do not all perhaps desire to be
Montépin. If you adopt an art to be your trade, weed your mind at the
outset of all desire of money. What you may decently expect, if you have
some talent and much industry, is such an income as a clerk will earn
with a tenth or perhaps a twentieth of your nervous output. Nor have you
the right to look for more; in the wages of the life, not in the wages of
the trade, lies your reward; the work is here the wages. It will be seen
I have little sympathy with the common lamentations of the artist class.
Perhaps they do not remember the hire of the field labourer; or do they
think no parallel will lie? Perhaps they have never observed what is the
retiring allowance of a field officer; or do they suppose their
contributions to the arts of pleasing more important than the services of
a colonel? Perhaps they forget on how little Millet was content to live;
or do they think, because they have less genius, they stand excused from
the display of equal virtues? But upon one point there should be no
dubiety: if a man be not frugal, he has no business in the arts. If he
be not frugal, he steers directly for that last tragic scene of _le vieux
saltimbanque_; if he be not frugal, he will find it hard to continue to
be honest. Some day, when the butcher is knocking at the door, he may be
tempted, he may be obliged, to turn out and sell a slovenly piece of
work. If the obligation shall have arisen through no wantonness of his
own, he is even to be commanded; for words cannot describe how far more
necessary it is that a man should support his family, than that he should
attain to—or preserve—distinction in the arts. But if the pressure
comes, through his own fault, he has stolen, and stolen under trust, and
stolen (which is the worst of all) in such a way that no law can reach
him.
And now you may perhaps ask me, if the débutant artist is to have no
thought of money, and if (as is implied) he is to expect no honours from
the State, he may not at least look forward to the delights of
popularity? Praise, you will tell me, is a savoury dish. And in so far
as you may mean the countenance of other artists you would put your
finger on one of the most essential and enduring pleasures of the career
of art. But in so far as you should have an eye to the commendations of
the public or the notice of the newspapers, be sure you would but be
cherishing a dream. It is true that in certain esoteric journals the
author (for instance) is duly criticised, and that he is often praised a
great deal more than he deserves, sometimes for qualities which he prided
himself on eschewing, and sometimes by ladies and gentlemen who have
denied themselves the privilege of reading his work. But if a man be
sensitive to this wild praise, we must suppose him equally alive to that
which often accompanies and always follows it—wild ridicule. A man may
have done well for years, and then he may fail; he will hear of his
failure. Or he may have done well for years, and still do well, but the
critics may have tired of praising him, or there may have sprung up some
new idol of the instant, some “dust a little gilt,” to whom they now
prefer to offer sacrifice. Here is the obverse and the reverse of that
empty and ugly thing called popularity. Will any man suppose it worth
the gaining?
XI
PULVIS ET UMBRA
WE look for some reward of our endeavours and are disappointed; not
success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our
ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our
virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the
sun. The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and we look
abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find them change with
every climate, and no country where some action is not honoured for a
virtue and none where it is not branded for a vice; and we look in our
experience, and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the
best a municipal fitness. It is not strange if we are tempted to despair
of good. We ask too much. Our religions and moralities have been
trimmed to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised,
and only please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the harsh
face of life, faith can read a bracing gospel. The human race is a thing
more ancient than the ten commandments; and the bones and revolutions of
the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more ancient
still.
I
Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful things
and all of them appalling. There seems no substance to this solid globe
on which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios
carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity that swings the
incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying
inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns and worlds
themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH3, and H2O.
Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies;
science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable
city for the mind of man.
But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us. We
behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the shards
and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting,
like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation. All of
these we take to be made of something we call matter: a thing which no
analysis can help us to conceive; to whose incredible properties no
familiarity can reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified by
the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life;
seized through all its atoms with a pediculous malady; swelling in
tumours that become independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy)
locomotory; one splitting into millions, millions cohering into one, as
the malady proceeds through varying stages. This vital putrescence of
the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional disgust,
and the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the air of a
marsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check our breathing so that
we aspire for cleaner places. But none is clean: the moving sand is
infected with lice; the pure spring, where it bursts out of the mountain,
is a mere issue of worms; even in the hard rock the crystal is forming.
In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the earth: the
animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the inversion of the other:
the second rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of its natal
mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects or towering
into the heavens on the wings of birds: a thing so inconceivable that, if
it be well considered, the heart stops. To what passes with the anchored
vermin, we have little clue, doubtless they have their joys and sorrows,
their delights and killing agonies: it appears not how. But of the
locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can tell more. These share
with us a thousand miracles: the miracles of sight, of hearing, of the
projection of sound, things that bridge space; the miracles of memory and
reason, by which the present is conceived, and when it is gone, its image
kept living in the brains of man and brute; the miracle of reproduction,
with its imperious desires and staggering consequences. And to put the
last touch upon this mountain mass of the revolting and the
inconceivable, all these prey upon each other, lives tearing other lives
in pieces, cramming them inside themselves, and by that summary process,
growing fat: the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than
the lion of the desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.
Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory life, and more
drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship,
scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks
to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety million miles away.