There is a poet in every nice Englishman; there is a little fund of
free vitality deep down in him which the exigencies of his life do
not tap and which no art at his command can render articulate. He
is able to draw upon it, and to drink in the refreshment and joy of
inner freedom, only in silent or religious moments. He feels he is
never so much himself as when he has shed for the time being all his
ordinary preoccupations. That is why his religion is so thin or (as
he might say) so pure: it has no relevance to any particular passions
or events; a featureless background, distant and restful, like a pale
clear sky. That is why he loves nature, and country life, and hates
towns and vulgar people; those he likes he conceives emasculated,
sentimentalized, and robed in white. The silent poet within him is
only a lyric poet. When he returns from those draughts of rare and
abstract happiness, he would find it hard to reconcile himself to the
world, or to himself, did he not view both through a veil of convention
and make-believe; he could not be honest about himself and retain his
self-respect; he could not be clear about other people and remain kind.
Yet to be kind to all, and true to his inner man, is his profound
desire; because even if life, in its unvarnished truth, is a gross
medley and a cruel business, it is redeemed for him, nevertheless, by
the perfect beauty of soul that here and there may shine through it.
Hamlet is the classic version of this imprisoned spirit; the skylark
seems a symbol of what it would be in its freedom.
Poor larks! Is the proportion of dull matter in their bodies, I wonder,
really less than in ours? Must they not find food and rear their
young? Must they not in their measure work, watch, and tremble? Cold,
hunger, and disease probably beset them more often and more bitterly
than they do most of us. But we think of them selfishly, as of actors
on the stage, only in the character they wear when they attract our
attention. As we walk through the fields we stop to watch and to listen
to them performing in the sky, and never think of their home troubles;
which they, too, seem for the moment to have eluded; at least they
have energy and time enough left over from those troubles for all this
luxury of song. It is this glorious if temporary emancipation, this
absolute defiant emphasis laid with so much sweetness on the inner life
that the poet in every nice Englishman loves in the lark; it seems to
reveal a brother-spirit more fortunate than oneself, almost a master
and a guide.
Larks made even Shelley envious, although no man ever had less
reason to envy them for their gift, either in its rapture or in its
abstraction. Even the outer circumstances of Shelley's life were very
favourable to inspiration and left him free to warble as much and as
ardently as he chose; but perhaps he was somewhat deceived by the
pathos of distance and fancied that in Nephelococcygia bad birds and
wicked traditions were less tyrannous than in parliamentary England.
He seems to have thought that human nature was not really made for
puddings and port wine and hunting and elections, nor even for
rollicking at universities and reading Greek, but only for innocent
lyrical ecstasies and fiery convictions that nevertheless should
somehow not render people covetous or jealous or cruelly disposed,
nor constrain them to prevent any one from doing anything that any
one might choose to do. Perhaps in truth the cloisters of Oxford and
the streets of London are quite as propitious to the flights of which
human nature is really capable as English fields are to the flights of
larks; there is food in them for thought. But Shelley was impatient
of human nature; he was horrified to find that society is a web of
merciless ambitions and jealousies, mitigated by a quite subsidiary
kindness; he forgot that human life is precarious and that its only
weapon against circumstances, and against rival men, is intelligent
action, intelligent war. The case is not otherwise with larks, on the
fundamental earthly side of their existence; yet because their flight
is bodily, because it is a festive outpouring of animal vitality, not
of art or reflection, it suggests to us a total freedom of the inner
man, a freedom which is impossible.
In the flight of larks, however, by a rare favour of fortune, all seems
to be spontaneity, courage, and trust, even within this material
sphere; nothing seems to be adjustment or observation. Their life
in the air is a sort of intoxication of innocence and happiness in
the blind pulses of existence. They are voices of the morning, young
hearts seeking experience and not remembering it; when they seem to
sob they are only catching their breath. They spring from the ground
as impetuously as a rocket or the jet of a fountain, that bursts
into a shower of sparks or of dew-drops; they circle as they rise,
soaring through veil after veil of luminous air, or dropping from
level to level. Their song is like the gurgling of little rills of
water, perpetual through its delicate variations, and throbbing with
a changed volume at every change in the breeze. Their rapture seems
to us seraphic, not merely because it descends to us invisibly from
a luminous height, straining our eyes and necks--in itself a cheap
sublimity-v but rather because the lark sings so absolutely for the
mad sake of singing. He is evidently making high holiday, spending his
whole strength on something ultimate and utterly useless, a momentary
entrancing pleasure which (being useless and ultimate) is very like an
act of worship or of sacrifice. Sheer life in him has become pure. That
is what we envy; that is what causes us, as we listen, to draw a deeper
breath, and perhaps something like tears to come to our eyes. He seems
so triumphantly to attain what all our labours end by missing, yet what
alone would justify them: happiness, selflessness, a moment of life
lived in the spirit. And we may be tempted to say to ourselves: Ah, if
I could only forget, if I could cease to look before and after, if the
pale cast of thought did not make a slave of me, as well as a coward!
Vital raptures such as the lark's are indeed not unknown even to man,
and the suggestion of them powerfully allures the Englishman, being
as he is a youth morally, still impelled to sport, still confident of
carrying his whole self forward into some sort of heaven, whether in
love, in politics, or in religion, without resigning to nature the
things that are nature's nor hiding in God the things that are God's.
Alas, a sad lesson awaits him, if he ever grows old enough to learn
it. Vital raptures, unless long training or a miracle of adaptation
has antecedently harmonized them with the whole orchestration of
nature, necessarily come to a bad end. Dancing and singing and love
and sport and religious enthusiasm are mighty ferments: happy he who
vents them in their season. But if ever they are turned into duties,
pumped up by force, or made the basis of anything serious, like morals
or science, they become vicious. The wild breath of inspiration is gone
which hurried them across the soul like a bright cloud. Inspiration,
as we may read in Plato between the lines, inspiration is animal. It
comes from the depths, from that hearth of Hestia, the Earth-Mother,
which conservative pagans could not help venerating as divine. Only
art and reason, however, are divine in a moral sense, not because
they are less natural than inspiration (for the Earth-Mother with her
seeds and vapours is the root of everything) but because they mount
towards the ultimate heaven of order, beauty, intellectual light,
and the achievement of eternal dignities. In that dimension of being
even featherless bipeds can soar and sing with a good grace. But
space is not their element; airmen, now that we have them, are only
a new sort of sailor. They fly for the sake of danger and of high
wages; it is a boyish art, with its romantic glamour soon tarnished,
and only a material reward left for all its skill and hardships. The
only sublimity possible to man is intellectual; when he would be
sublime in any other dimension he is merely fatuous and bombastic. By
intelligence, so far as he possesses it, a man sees things as they are,
transcends his senses and his passions, uproots himself from his casual
station in space and time, sees all things future as if they were past,
and all things past as for ever present, at once condemns and forgives
himself, renounces the world and loves it. Having this inner avenue
open to divinity, he would be a fool to emulate the larks in their kind
of ecstasy.
His wings are his intelligence; not that they bring ultimate success
to his animal will, which must end in failure, but that they lift his
failure itself into an atmosphere of laughter and light, where is his
proper happiness. He cannot take his fine flight, like the lark, in the
morning, in mad youth, in some irresponsible burst of vitality, because
life is impatient to begin: that sort of thing is the fluttering of
a caged bird, a rebellion against circumstance and against commonness
which is a sign of spirit, but not spirit in its self-possession, not
happiness nor a school of happiness. The thought which crowns life at
its summit can accompany it throughout its course, and can reconcile us
to its issue. Intelligence is Homeric in its pervasive light. It traces
all the business of nature, eluding but not disturbing it, rendering it
in fact more amiable than it is, and rescuing it from vanity.
Sense is like a lively child always at our elbow, saying, Look, look,
what is that? Will is like an orator, indignantly demanding something
different. History and fiction and religion are like poets, continually
recomposing the facts into some tragic unity which is not in them. All
these forms of mind are spiritual, and therefore materially superfluous
and free; but their spirit is pious, it is attentive to its sources,
and therefore seems to be care-laden and not so gloriously emancipated
as the music of larks, or even of human musicians; yet thought is pure
music in its essence, and only in its subject-matter retrospective
and troubled about the facts. It must indeed be troubled about them,
because in man spirit is not a mere truant, as it seems to be in
the lark, but is a faithful chronicler of labour and wisdom. Man is
hard-pressed; long truancies would be fatal to him. He is tempted to
indulge in them--witness his languages and pyramids and mythologies;
yet his margin of safety is comparatively narrow, and he cannot afford
to spend such relatively prodigious amounts of energy in mere play as
the lark does with a light heart and in the grand manner. There are
words to man's music; he gives names to things; he tries to catch the
rhythm of his own story, or to imagine it richer and more sublime than
it is. His festivals are heavy with pathos; they mark the events on
which his existence turns--harvests, funerals, redemptions, wooings,
and wars. When he disregards all these tiresome things, he becomes a
fop or a fanatic. There is no worthy transport for him except sane
philosophy--a commentary, not a dream. His intelligence is most intense
and triumphant when there is least waste in his life; for if hard
thinking sometimes makes the head ache, it is because it comes hard,
not because it is thinking; our fuddled brain grates and repeats
itself in that it _can't_ think. But if your business is in order, it
requires no further pains to understand it. Intelligence is the flower
of war and the flower of love. Both, in the end, are comprehension. How
miraculously in our happy moments we understand, how far we jump, what
masses of facts we dominate at a glance! There is no labour then, no
friction or groping, no anxious jostling against what we do not know,
but only joy in this intricate outspread humorous world, intoxication
as ethereal as the lark's, but more descriptive. If his song is raised
above the world for a moment by its wantonness and idle rapture, ours
is raised above it essentially by its scope. To look before and after
is human; it would not be sincere nor manly in us not to take thought
for the morrow and not to pine for what is not. We must start on that
basis, with our human vitality (which is art) substituted for the
vegetative prayerfulness of the lily, and our human scope (which is
knowledge of the world) substituted for the outpourings of larks.
On this other plane we could easily be as happy as the larks, if we
were as liberal. Men when they are civilized and at ease are liberal
enough in their sports, and willing to _desipere in loco_, like
kittens, but it is strange how barbarous and illiberal, at least in
modern times, they have remained about thought. They wish to harness
thought like a waterfall, or like the blind Samson, to work for
them night and day, in the treadmill of their interests or of their
orthodoxy. Fie upon their stupidity and upon their slavishness! They do
not see that when nature, with much travail, brings something living
to birth, inevitable thought is there already, and gratis, and cannot
possibly be there before. The seething of the brain is indeed as
pragmatic as the habit of singing and flying, which in its inception
doubtless helped the larks to survive, as even the whiteness of the
lily may have done through the ministry of insects which it attracted;
but even material organs are bound to utility by a very loose tie.
Nature does not shake off her baroque ornaments and her vices until
they prove fatal, and she never thinks of the most obvious invention
or pressing reform, until some complication brings her, she knows
not how, to try the experiment. Nature, having no ulterior purpose,
has no need of parsimony or haste or simplicity. Much less need she
be niggardly of spirit, which lays no tax upon her, and consumes no
energy, but laughs aloud, a marvel and a mystery to her, in her very
heart. All animal functions, whether helpful or wasteful, have this
fourth dimension in the realm of spirit--the joy, or the pain, or the
beauty that may be found in them. Spirit loads with a lyric intensity
the flying moment in which it lives. It actually paints the lily
and casts a perfume on the violet; it turns into vivid presences a
thousand forms which, until its flame lighted them up, were merged in
the passive order and truth of things, like the charms of Lucy by the
springs of Dove, before Wordsworth discovered them. The smile of nature
is not ponderable; and the changing harmonies of nature, out of which
spirit springs, are like the conjunctions or eclipses of planets, facts
obvious enough to sense in their specious simplicity, yet materially
only momentary positions of transit for wayfarers bound each on his own
errand. The songs of larks are like shooting stars that drop downwards
and vanish; human intelligence is a part of the steadier music of the
spheres.
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