"But it is the only thing I _can_ do--do you understand? I can't write
poetry any more. Perhaps that may be the only thing for which I was ever
fit, but I am fit for it no longer. I cannot do what I have got to despise
and detest. For I do despise and detest the sort of poetry which I should
write--mere ornamental uselessness, so much tapestry work or inlaid
upholstery. You believe in Art for Art's own sake--Goethianism--that
sort of thing, I know. It is all very well for you, who have an active
practical life with your Maremma drainings and mine diggings, a life in
which art, beauty, so forth, have only their due share, as repose and
refreshment. It was all very well in former days also, when the people
for whom artists worked had a deal of struggle and misery, and required
some pure pleasure to make life endurable; but now-a-days, and with the
people for whom I should write, things are different. What is wanted
now-a-days is not art, but life. By whom do you think, would all the
beautiful useful things I could write, all the fiddle-faddle about
trees and streams and statues and love and aspiration (fine aspiration,
which never takes a practical shape!) be read? By wretched overworked
creatures, into whose life they might bring a moment of sweetness,
like a spray of apple blossom or a bunch of sweet-peas into some black
garret? Nothing of the kind. They would be read by a lot of intellectual
Sybarites, shutting themselves out, with their abominable artistic
religion, from all crude real life; they would be merely so much more
hothouse scents or exotic music (_con sordino_), to make them snooze
their lives away. Of course it is something to be a poet like those of
former days; something to be Tasso, and be read by that poor devil of a
fever-stricken watchmaker whom we met down in the plain of Lucca; but
to be a poet for the cultured world of to-day--oh, I would rather be a
French cook, and invent indigestible dishes for epicures without any
appetite remaining to them."
So saying, Cyril jumped out of the gig, and ran up the steep last ascent
of the hill. He had persuaded himself of his moral rightness and felt
quite happy.
Suddenly the road made a sharp bend between the overhanging rocks, grown
in all their fissures with dark ilex tufts and yellow broom and pale
pink cyclamen; it turned, and widened into a flat grass-grown place,
surrounded by cypresses on the top and ridge of the hill. Cyril ran to
the edge and gave a cry of pleasure. Below was stretched a wide strip of
Maremma swamp-land, mottled green and brown--green where the grass was
under water, brown where it was burned into cinders by the sun; with
here and there a patch of shining pond or canal; and at the extremity of
this, distinguishable from the greyish amber sky only by its superior
and intense luminousness, the sea--not blue nor green, but grey,
silvery, steel-like, as a mirror in the full sunshine. Baldwin stopped
the gig beneath the cypresses.
"Look there," he said, pointing with his whip to a dark greenish band,
scarcely visible, which separated the land from the sea: "those are the
pine woods of Viareggio. It was into their sand and weeds that the sea
washed Shelley's body. Do you think we should be any the better off if
he had taken to practical work which he could not do, and declared that
poetry was a sort of French cookery?"
Baldwin tied the reins to the stem of a cypress, and threw himself down
on the warm sere grass on the brow of the hill, overlooking the tangle
of olive and vine and fig-trees of the slopes below.
"In Shelley's time," answered Cyril, leaning his head and shoulders
against one of the cypresses, and looking up into its dark branches,
compact in the centre, but delicate like feather and sparkling like
jet where their extremities stood out against the pale blue sky--"in
Shelley's time, things were rather different from what they are now.
There was a religion of progress to preach and be stoned for; there was
a cause of liberty to fight for--there were Bourbons and Lord Eldons,
and there was Greece and Spain and Italy. There was Italy still when
Mrs. Browning wrote: had she looked out of Casa Guidi windows now, on
to the hum-drum, shoulder-shrugging, penny-haggling, professorial,
municipal-councillorish Italy of to-day she could scarcely have felt in
the vein. The heroic has been done--"
"There is Servia and Montenegro, and there are Nihilists and Democrats,"
answered Baldwin.
"I know--but we can't sing about barbarous ruffians, nor about
half-besotten, half-knavish regicides; we can't be Democrats
now-a-days--at least I can't. Would you have a man sing parliamentary
debates, or High Church squabbles, or Disestablishment, or Woman's
rights, or anti-communism? sing the superb conquests of man over nature,
&c., like your Italian friends, your steam-engine and mammoth poet
Zanella? The wonders of science!--six or seven thousand dogs and cats
being flayed, roasted, baked, disembowelled, artificially ulcerated,
galvanized on ripped-up nerves, at Government expense, in all the
laboratories of Christendom, in order to discover the soul-secreting
apparatus, and how to cure old maids of liver complaint! Thank you. My
muse aspires not thereunto. What then? Progress? But it is assured. Why,
man, we can't even sing of despair, like the good people of the year
'20, since we all know that (bating a few myriads of sufferers and a
few centuries of agony) all is going to come quite right, to be quite
comfortable in this best of all possible worlds. What then remains,
again? Look around you. There remains the poetry of beauty--oh yes,
of pure beauty, to match the newest artistic chintzes; the poetry of
artistic nirvana, of the blissful sleep of all manliness and energy, to
the faint sound (heard through dreams) of paradisiac mysticism sung to
golden lutes, or of imaginary amorous hysterics, or of symphonies in
alliteration. And this when there is so much error, so much doubt, so
much suffering, when all our forces are required to push away a corner
of the load of evil still weighing on the world: this sort of thing I
cannot take to." And Cyril fiercely plucked out a tuft of lilac-flowered
thyme, and threw it into the precipice below, as if it had been the
poetry of which he was speaking.
"Do you know, Baldwin," went on Cyril, "you have destroyed successively
all my gods; you have shown me that my Holy Grails, in whose service,
one after another I felt happy and peaceful to live, like another
Parzival, or Galahaso, are not the sacred life-giving cup brought down
by angels, but mere ordinary vessels of brittle earth or stinking
pewter, mere more or less useful, but by no means holy things; ordinary
pots and pans, barber's basins like Mambrino's helmet, or blue china
teapots (worst degradation of all) like the Cimabue-Browns'. I believed
in the religion of Nature, and you showed me that Nature was sometimes
good and sometimes bad; that she produced the very foulness, physical
and moral, which she herself chastised men for; you showed me whole
races destined inevitably to moral perversion, and then punished for it.
So I gave up Nature. Then I took up the fashionable religion of Science,
and you showed me that it was the religion of a sort of Moloch, since it
accustomed us to acquiesce in all the evil which is part and parcel of
Nature, since it made us passive investigators into wrong when we ought
to be judges. After the positive, I threw myself into the mystic--into
the religion of all manner of mysterious connections and redemptions;
you showed me that the connections did not exist, and that all attempted
sanctification of things through mysticism was an abomination, since it
could not alter evil, and taught us to think it might be good. O my poor
Holy Grails! Then I took up the religion of love; and you proceeded to
expound to me that if love was restricted to a few worthy individuals,
it meant neglect of the world at large; and that if it meant love of
the world at large, it meant love of a great many utterly unworthy and
beastly people. You deprived me of humanitarianism, of positivism, of
mysticism; and then you did not even let me rest peaceably in pessimism,
telling me that to say that all was for the worst was as unjust as to
say that all was for the best. With a few of your curt sentences you
showed me that all these religions of mine were mere idolatries, and
that to rest in them for the sake of peace was to be utterly base. You
left me nothing but a vague religion of duty, of good; but you gave me
no means of seeing where my duty lay, of distinguishing good from evil.
You are a very useful rooter up of error, Baldwin; but you leave one's
soul as dry and barren and useless as sea shingle. You have taken away
all the falsehoods from my life, but you have not replaced them by
truths."
Baldwin listened quietly.
"Would you like to have the falsehoods back, Cyril?" he asked. "Would
you now like to be the holy knight, adoring and defending the pewter
basin or blue china teapot of humanitarianism, or positivism, or
mysticism, or aestheticism? And what becomes of the only religion which I
told you was the true one--the religion of good, of right? Do you think
it worthless now?"
"I think it is the religion of the Unknown God. Where shall I find Him?"
"In yourself, if you will look, Cyril."
Cyril was silent for a moment. "What is right?" he said. "In the
abstract--(oh, and it is so easy to find out in the abstract, compared
to the concrete!)--in the abstract, right is to improve things in the
world, to make it better for man and beast; never to steal justice, and
always to give mercy; to do all we can which can increase happiness,
and refrain from doing all which can diminish it. That is the only
definition I can see. But how vague!--and who is to tell me what I am to
do? And when I see a faint glimmer of certainty, when I perceive what
seems to me the right which I must do, who again interferes? My friend
Baldwin, who, after preaching to me that the only true religion is the
religion of diminishing evil and increasing good for the sake of so
doing, coolly writes to me, in half-a-dozen letters, that the sole duty
of the artist is to produce good art, and that good art is art which has
no aim beyond its own perfection. Why, it is a return to my old aesthetic
fetish worship, when I thought abstract ideas of beauty would set the
world right, as Amphion's harp set the stones building themselves.... Am
I justified in saying that you merely upset my beliefs, without helping
me to build up any; yes, even when I am striving after that religion of
right doing which you nominally call yours--?"
"You always rush to extremes, Cyril. If you would listen to, or read, my
words without letting your mind whirl off while so doing--"
"I listen to you far too much, Baldwin," interrupted Cyril, who would
not break the thread of his own ideas; "and first I want to read you a
sonnet."
Baldwin burst out laughing. "A sonnet! one of those burnt at Dresden--or
written in commemoration of your decision to write no more?"
"It is not by me at all, so there's an end to your amusement. I want you
to hear it because it embodies, and very nobly, what I have felt. I have
never even seen the author, and know nothing about her except that she
is a woman."
"A woman!" and Baldwin's tone was disagreeably expressive.
"I know you don't believe in women poets or women artists."
"Not much, so far, excepting Sappho and Mrs. Browning, certainly. But,
come, let's hear the sonnet. I do abominate women's verses, I confess;
but there are such multitudes of poetesses that Nature may sometimes
blunder in their production, and make one of them of the stuff intended
for a poet."
"Well then, listen," and Cyril drew a notebook from his pocket, and read
as follows:--
"God sent a poet to reform His earth
But when he came and found it cold and poor
Harsh and unlovely, where each prosperous boor
Held poets light for all their heavenly birth,
He thought--Myself can make one better worth
The living in than this--full of old lore,
Music and light and love, where saints adore
And angels, all within mine own soul's girth.
But when at last he came to die, his soul
Saw Earth (flying past to Heaven) with new love,
And all the unused passion in him cried:
'O God, your Heaven I know and weary of,
Give me this world to work in and make whole.'
God spoke: 'Therein, fool, thou hast lived and died.'"
Cyril paused for a moment. "Do you understand, Baldwin, how that
expresses my state of feeling?" he then asked.
"I do," answered the other, "and I understand that both you and the
author of the sonnet seem not to have understood in what manner God
intended that poets should improve the earth. And here I return to my
former remark, that when I said that the only true religion was the
religion not of nature, nor of mankind, nor of science, nor of art, but
the religion of good, and that the creation of perfect beauty is the
highest aim of the artist, I was not contradicting myself, but merely
stating two parts--a general and a particular--of the same proposition.
I don't know what your definition of right living may be; mine, the more
I think over the subject, has come to be this:--the destruction of the
greatest possible amount of evil and the creation of the greatest
possible amount of good in the world. And this is possible only by the
greatest amount of the best and most complete activity, and the greatest
amount of the best activity is possible only when everything is seen in
its right light, in order that everything may be used in its right
place. I have always preached to you that life must be activity; but
activity defeats itself if misapplied; it becomes a mere Danaides' work
of filling bottomless casks--pour and pour and pour in as much as you
will, the cask will always be empty. Now, in this world there are two
things to be done, and two distinct sets of people to do them: the one
work is the destruction of evil, the other the creation of good. Mind, I
say the _creation_ of good, for I consider that to do good--that is to
say, to act rightly--is not necessarily the same as to _create_ good.
Every one who does his allotted work is doing good; but the man who
tends the sick, or defends the oppressed, or discovers new truths, is
not creating good, but destroying evil--destroying evil in one of a
hundred shapes, as sickness, or injustice, or falsehood. But he merely
removes, he does not give; he leaves men as poor or as rich as they
would have been, had not disease, or injustice, or error stolen away
some of their life. The man who creates good is the one who not merely
removes pain, but adds pleasure to our lives. Through him we are
absolutely the richer. And this creator of good, as distinguished from
destroyer of evil, is, above all other men, the artist. The scientific
thinker may add pleasure to our lives, but in reality this truth of his
is valuable, not for the pleasure it gives, but for the pain it removes.
Science is warfare; we may consider it as a kind of sport, but in
reality it is a hunting down of the most dangerous kind of wild
animal--falsehood. A great many other things may give pleasure to our
lives--all our healthy activities, upper or lower, must; but the lower
ones are already fully exercised, and, if anything, require restraint;
so that French cooks and erotic poets ought rather to be exterminated
as productive of evil than encouraged as creative of good. And moral
satisfaction and love give us the best pleasures of all; but these are
pleasures which are not due to any special class created on purpose
for their production. Oh, I don't say that any artist can give you
the pleasure you have in knowing yourself to be acting rightly, or in
sympathizing and receiving sympathy; but the artist is the instrument,
the machine constructed to produce the only pleasures which can come
near these. Every one of us can destroy evil and create pleasure, in a
sort of incidental, amateurish way, within our own immediate circle;
but as the men of thought and of action are the professional destroyers
of evil, so the artists are the professional creators of good--they
work not for those immediately around them, but for the world at large.
So your artist is your typical professional creator of pleasure; he
is fitted out, as other men are not, to do this work; he is made of
infinitely finer stuff than other men, not as a whole man, but as an
artist: he has much more delicate hearing, much keener sight, much
defter fingers, much farther-reaching voice than other men; he is
specially prepared to receive and transmit impressions which would be
as wasted on other creatures, as the image in the camera on unprepared,
ordinary paper. Now, what I maintain is simply this, that if, according
to my definition, the object of destroying as much evil and creating as
much good can be attained only by the greatest activity rightly applied,
it is evident that a man endowed to be an artist--that is to say, a
creator of good for the whole world--is simply failing in his duty by
becoming a practical worker; that is to say, an amateur destroyer of
evil. What shall we say of this artist? We shall say that, in order
to indulge in the moral luxury, the moral amusement, of removing an
imperceptible amount of pain, he has defrauded the world of the immense
and long-lasting pleasure placed in his charge to give; we shall say
that, in order to feel himself a little virtuous, this man has simply
acted like a cheat and a thief."
Baldwin had spoken rapidly and earnestly, with a sort of uniform or only
gradually rising warmth, very different from the hesitating, fluctuating
sort of passion of his companion. There was a short silence; Cyril was
still seated under the tall, straight cypress, whose fallen fruit, like
carved balls of wood, strewed the sere grass, and whose compact hairy
trunk gave out a resinous scent, more precious and strange than that
of the fir: he felt that he was momentarily crushed, but had a vague
sense that there lurked somewhere reasons, and very potent ones, which
prevented his friend being completely victorious; and Baldwin was
patiently waiting for him to muster his ideas into order before
continuing the discussion. A slight breeze from the over-clouded sea
sent a shiver across the olives into the ravine below, turning their
feathery tops into a silver ripple, as of a breaking wave; the last
belated cicalas, invisible in the thick plumy branches of the cypresses,
sawed slowly and languidly in the languid late afternoon; and from
the farms hidden in the olive yards of the slope came faint sounds of
calling voices and barking dogs--just sound enough to make the stillness
more complete. "All that is very true," said Cyril at last, "and yet--I
don't know how to express it--I feel that there is still remaining to me
all my reason for doubt and dissatisfaction. You say that artistic work
is morally justifiable to the artist, since he is giving pleasure to
others. From this point of view you are perfectly right. But what I
feel is, that the pleasure which the artist thus gives is not morally
valuable to those who enjoy it. Do you follow? I mean that the
artist may be nobly and generously employed, and yet, by some fatal
contradiction, the men and women who receive his gifts are merely
selfishly gratified. He might not, perhaps, be better employed than in
giving pleasure, but they might surely be better employed than in merely
receiving it; and thus the selfishness of the enjoyment of the gift
seems to diminish the moral value of giving it. When an artist gives to
other men an hour of mere enjoyment, I don't know whether he ought to
be quite proud or not."
Baldwin merely laughed. "It is droll to see what sort of hypermoral
scruples some people indulge in now-a-days. So, your sense of the
necessity of doing good is so keen that you actually feel wretched at
the notion of your neighbours being simply happy, and no more, for an
hour. You are not sure whether, by thus taking them away for a moment
from the struggle with evil, letting them breathe and rest in the middle
of the battle, you may not be making them sin and be sinning yourself!
Why, my dear Cyril, if you condemn humanity to uninterrupted struggle
with evil, you create evil instead of destroying it; if mankind could
be persuaded to give up all of what you would call useless and selfish
pleasure, it would very soon become so utterly worn out and disheartened
as to be quite powerless to resist evil. If this is the system on which
poets would reform the world, it is very fortunate that they don't think
of it till they are flying to heaven."
"I can't make it out. You seem to be in the right, Baldwin, and yet I
still seem to be justified in sticking to my ideas," said Cyril. "Do you
see," he went on, "you have always preached to me that the highest aim
of the artist is the perfection of his own work; you have always told me
that art cannot be as much as it should if any extra-artistic purpose be
given to it. And while listening to you I have felt persuaded that all
this was most perfectly true. But then, an hour later, I have met the
same idea--the eternal phrase of art for art's own sake--in the mouths
and the books of men I completely despised; men who seemed to lose sight
of all the earnestness and duty of life, who had even what seemed to
me very base ideas about art itself, and at all events debased it by
associating it with effeminate, selfish, sensual mysticism. So that the
idea of art for art's own sake has come to have a disgusting meaning to
me."
Baldwin had risen from the grass, and untied the horse from the trunk of
the cypress.
"There is a storm gathering," he said, pointing to the grey masses of
cloud, half-dissolved, which were gathering everywhere; "if we can get
to one of the villages on the coast without being half-drowned while
crossing the swamps, we shall be lucky. Get in, and we can discuss art
for art's own sake, and anything else you please, on the way."
In a minute the gig was rattling down the hill, among the great blasted
grey olives, and the vines with reddening foliage, and the farm-houses
with their fig and orange trees, their great tawny pumpkins lying
in heaps on the threshing-floor, and their autumn tapestry of
strung-together maize hanging massy and golden from the eaves to
the ground.
Baldwin resumed the subject where they had left it: "My own experience
is, that the men who go in for art for art's own sake, do so mainly from
a morbid shrinking from all the practical and moral objects which other
folk are apt to set up as the aim of art; in reality, they do not want
art, nor the legitimate pleasures of art: they want the sterile pleasure
of perceiving mere ingenuity and dexterity of handling; they hanker
vaguely after imaginary sensuous stimulation, spiced with all manner of
mystical rubbish, after some ineffable half-nauseous pleasure in strange
mixtures of beauty and nastiness; they enjoy above all things dabbling
and dipping alternately in virtue and vice, as in the steam and iced
water of a Turkish bath.... In short, these creatures want art not for
its own sake, but for the sake of excitement which the respectabilities
of society do not permit their obtaining, except in imaginative form. As
to art, real art, they treat it much worse than the most determined
utilitarian: the utilitarians turn art into a drudge; these aesthetic
folk make her into a pander and a prostitute. My reason for restricting
art to artistic aims is simply my principle that if things are to be
fully useful they must be restricted to their real use, according to the
idea of Goethe's Duke of Ferrara:--
'Nicht alles dienet uns auf gleiche Weise;
Wer vieles brauchen will, gebrauche jedes
In seiner Art, so ist er wohl bedient.'
I want art in general not to meddle with the work of any of our other
energies, for the same reason that I want each art in particular not to
meddle with the work of any other art. Sculpture cannot do the same as
painting, nor painting the same as music, nor music the same as poetry;
and by attempting anything beyond its legitimate sphere each sacrifices
what it, and no other, can do. So, also, art in general has a definite
function in our lives; and if it attempts to perform the work of
philosophy, or practical benevolence, or science, or moralizing, or
anything not itself, it will merely fail in that, and neglect what it
could do."
"Oh yes," continued Baldwin after a minute, as they passed into the
twilight of a wood of old olives, grey, silvery, mysterious, rising tier
above tier on either side of the road, a faint flicker of yellow light
between their feathery branches. "Oh yes, I don't doubt that were I a
writer, and were I to expound my life-and-art philosophy to the world,
the world would tax me with great narrowness! Things are always too
narrow for people when they are kept in their place--kept within duty
and reason. Of course there is an infinite grandeur in chaos--in a
general wandering among the Unknown, in an universal straining and
hankering after the Impossible; it is grand to see the arts writhing and
shivering to atoms, like caged vipers, in their impotence to do what
they cannot. Only it would be simpler to let those do it who can; and my
system is the only one which can work. Despair is fine, and Nirvana is
fine; but successful and useful activity is a good deal finer. Wherefore
I shall always say--'Each in his place and to his work;' and you,
therefore, my dear Cyril, to yours, which is poetry."
"I think your philosophy is quite right, Baldwin, only--only, somehow, I
can't get it to suit my moral condition," answered Cyril. "I do feel
quite persuaded that sculptors must not try to be painters, nor
musicians try to be poets, nor any of them try to be anything beyond
what they are. It is all quite rational, and right, and moral, but still
I am not satisfied about poetry. You see a poet is not quite in the same
case as any other sort of artist. The musician, inasmuch as musician,
knows only notes, has power only over sounds; and the painter similarly
as to form and colours; if either be something more, it is inasmuch as
he is a mere man, not an artist. But a poet, inasmuch as he is a poet,
knows, sees, feels a great many things which have a practical and moral
meaning: just because he is a poet, he knows that there is something
beyond poetry; he knows that there are in the world such things as
justice and injustice, good and evil, purity and foulness: he knows all
this, which the mere musician, the mere painter, does not--and knowing
it, perceiving, feeling, understanding it, with more intensity than
other men, is he to sweep it all out of his sight? is he to say to
justice and injustice, good and evil, purity and foulness, 'I know you,
but my work lies not with you?' Is he to do this? Oh, Baldwin, if he be
a man and an honest one, he surely cannot: he cannot set aside these
ideas and devote himself to his art for its own sake."
Baldwin listened attentively to the passionate words of his companion,
and twitching at a sprig of olive as a branch swept across their heads
in their rapid movement through the wood, he answered quietly:
"He will not set aside the ideas of justice and injustice, of good and
evil, of purity and impurity, Cyril. He will make use of them even as
the musician uses his sounds, or the painter uses his colours. Such
ideas are at least one-half of the poet's material, of the stuff out of
which he creates--the half which belongs exclusively to him, which he
does not share with any other artist; the half which gives poetry a
character in many respects different from that of painting or music. I
have always laughed at the Ruskinian idea of morality or immorality in
architecture, or painting, or music, and said that their morality and
immorality were beauty and ugliness. I have done so because moral ideas
don't enter into the arts of line, or colour, or sound, but only into
the subjects to which their visible and audible works are (usually
arbitrarily) attached. But with poetry the case is different; and if
the poet has got a keener perception (or ought to have) of right and
wrong than other men, it is because a sense of moral right and wrong is
required in his art, as a sense of colour is required in painting. I
have said 'art for art's own sake,' but I should have been more precise
in saying 'art for beauty's sake.' Now, in poetry, one half of beauty
and ugliness is purely ethical, and if the poet who deals with this
half, the half which comprises human emotion and action, has no sense
of right and wrong, he will fail as signally as some very dexterous
draughtsman, who should have no sense of physical beauty and ugliness,
and spend his time making wonderful drawings of all manner of diseased
growths. Of course, you may be a poet who does _not_ deal with the human
element, who writes only about trees and rivers, and in this case your
notions of right and wrong are as unnecessary to you as an artist as
they would be to a landscape painter. You use them in your life, but not
in your art. But as soon as a poet deals with human beings, and their
feelings and doings, he must have a correct sense of what, in such
feelings and doings, is right and what is wrong. And if he have not this
sense, he will not be in the same case as the painter or musician who is
deficient in the sense of pictorial or musical right and wrong. The
wise folk who have examined into our visual and acoustic nerves seem
to think, what to me seems extremely probable, that the impression of
aesthetic repulsion which we get from badly combined lines, or colours,
or sounds, is a sort of admonition that such combinations are more or
less destructive to our nerves of sight or of hearing; so, similarly,
the quite abstract aversion which we feel to an immoral effect in
literature, seems to me to be the admonition (while we are still
Platonically viewing the matter, and have not yet come personally into
contact with it) that our moral sense--what I may call our nerves of
right and wrong--is being disintegrated by this purely intellectual
contact with evil. And, moreover, our nerves of right and wrong are,
somehow, much less well protected than our visual or acoustic nerves:
they seem to be more on the surface of our nature, and they are much
more easily injured: it takes a good deal of bad painting and bad music
to deprave a man's eye or ear, and more than we can well conceive to
make him blind or deaf; but it takes less than we think of base
literature to injure a man's moral perception, to make him see and hear
moral things completely wrong. You see the good, simple, physical senses
look after themselves--are in a way isolated; but the moral sense is a
very complex matter, and interfered with in every possible manner by the
reason, the imagination, the bodily senses--so that injuring it through
any of these is extremely easy. And the people whom bad painting or
bad music had made half-blind or half-deaf would be less dangerous to
themselves and to others than those who had been made half-immoral by
poetry."
"But at that rate," said Cyril, "we should never be permitted to write
except about moral action; if the morally right is the same for the poet
as the pictorially right for the painter. Baldwin, I think, I fear, that
all these are mere extemporized arguments for the purpose of making me
satisfied with poetry, which I never shall be again, I feel persuaded."
"Not at all," answered Baldwin. "I mean that the moral right or wrong of
poetry is not exactly what you mean. If we were bound never to write
except about good people, there would be an end to half the literature
of the world."
"That is exactly what I saw, and what showed me the hollowness of your
theory, Baldwin."
"Because you mistook my theory. There could be no human action or
interest if literature were to avoid all representation of evil: no more
tragedy, at any rate, and no more novels. But you must remember that the
impression given by a play or a poem is not the same as that given by a
picture or statue. The picture or statue is all we see; if it be ugly,
the impression is ugly. But in a work of literature we see not only the
actors and their actions, but the manner in which they are regarded by
the author; and in this manner of regarding them lies the morality or
immorality. You may have as many villains as you please, and the
impression may still be moral; and you may have as many saints as you
please, and the impression may still be immoral."
The road had suddenly emerged out of the olive woods covering the lowest
hill ranges, and in a few minutes they were driving through a perfect
desert. The road, a narrow white ribbon, stretched across a great flat
tract of country: field after field of Indian corn, stripped of its
leaves and looking like regiments of spindles, and of yellowish green
grass, half under water; on either side a ditch full of water-lilies,
widening into sedge-fringed canals, in which the hay of coarse long
grass was stacked in boats for sheer want of dry soil, or expanding into
shallow patches of water scarcely covering the grass, and reflecting,
against the green of the meadow below, the boldly peaked marble
mountains of Carrara, bare, intensely ribbed, veined, and the blue sky
and rainy black clouds. Green brown fields, tufts of reed, hill and sky
reflected in the inundated grass--nothing more, not a house, or shed, or
tree for miles around--in front only the stormy horizon where it touched
the sea.
"This is beautiful," cried Cyril. "I should like to come and live here.
It is much lovelier and more peaceful than all the woods and valleys in
creation."
Baldwin laughed. "It might be a good beginning for final Nirvana," he
said. "These are the sea-swamps, the _padule_, where the serene Republic
of Lucca sent its political offenders. You were locked up in a tower,
the door bricked up, with food enough to last till your keeper came back
once a fortnight; the malaria did the rest."
"It is like some of our modern literature," answered Cyril, with a
shudder; "Maremma poetry--we have that sort of thing, too."
"By the way," went on Baldwin; "I don't think we quite came to the end
of our discussion about what a poet ought to do with his moral
instincts, if he has any."
"I know," answered Cyril, "and _I_ have meanwhile returned to my
previous conclusion that, now that all great singable strifes are at
an end, poetry cannot satisfy the moral cravings of a man."
"You think so?" asked Baldwin, looking rather contemptuously at his
companion. "You think so? Well, therein lies your mistake. I think, on
the contrary, that poetry requires more moral sense and energy than most
men can or will give to it. Do you know what a poet has to deal with,
at least a poet who does not confine himself to mere description of
inanimate things? He has to deal with the passions and actions of
mankind--that is to say, with a hundred problems of right and wrong. Of
course, men who have deliberately made up their mind on any question
of right and wrong, are not shaken by anything in a book; nay, they
probably scarcely remark it. But if you remember that in the inner life
of every man there must be moments of doubt and hesitation, there must
be problems vaguely knocking about, you will understand that for every
man there is the danger that in such a moment of doubt his eyes may fall
upon a sentence in a book--a sentence to other men trivial--which will
settle that doubt for ever, rightly or wrongly. There are few of us
so strong that the moment does not come when we would ask, as a good
Catholic does of a confessor, what is right and what is wrong, and take
the answer which is one of the two that have been struggling within
himself, as definite; and to us, who do not go to confession, a book,
any book casually taken up, may be this terribly powerful spiritual
director. People used to exaggerate the influence of books, because they
imagined that they could alter already settled opinions; now-a-days I
deliberately think that they underrate this influence, because they
forget how it may settle fluctuating opinion. The power of literature
is in this way very great."
"It has been formerly--yes, I grant it," answered Cyril; "but it is no
longer what it was; in our cut-and-dry days it is necessarily smaller."
"On the contrary, much greater now than perhaps almost at any other
time. These are not cut-and-dry days, Cyril, but the very reverse; you
must not let yourself be deceived by a certain superficial regularity,
by railway journeys and newspapers, and a general civilization of
hand-books and classes. In reality there is more room for indirect moral
perversion or enervation in our days than there has been for a good
while; for the upsetting of ideas, the infiltration of effete or foreign
modes of thought and feeling, is much greater in this quiet nineteenth
century than it was, for instance, in the Renaissance or the eighteenth
century. With all their scepticism, the people of those days had a great
fund of tradition about everything; they were floating about a good
deal, I admit, but they were fully persuaded of the existence of certain
very solid moral rocks, to which they might always tie their boat when
it grew over-rough; rocks of religion or deistic mysticism, or of social
_convenances_, which we have now discovered to be by no means granite,
but some sort of sea deposit, of hardened sand, whose formation we
understand and no longer rely upon. The most arrant sceptics of the past
had always one great safety, that they were in a groove; they saw,
understood, sympathized with only their own civilization. What they
thought right they had never seen questioned--they never imagined any
one could regard as wrong; hence the most liberal thinkers of former
days always strike us, with their blindness to all but their own
civilization, as such Philistines. Things have changed since then;
they began to change already, as soon as men began to look at other
civilizations; and the suggestive first-fruit of this early ethnographic
eclecticism may be seen in Diderot's very beastly books: he found that
the South Sea Islanders had not, on the subject of incest, the same
views as Christian folk; whereupon it struck him that those views
might be due to prejudice. It was not the development of the natural
sciences, but rather of the historic and ethnographic, which upset
people's ideas; it was the discovery of how our institutions, moral and
social (hitherto regarded as come straight from heaven), had formed
themselves, and how they were subject to variation. Speaking of poets,
look at a pure man, I believe a very pure man, Shelley, if you want to
understand the necessity of poets having a greater solidity of moral
judgment than the mere Jones and Browns who stick to their shop, and are
not troubled with theories. Add to the influence of scientific doubt,
of the doubt created by books on the origin of ideas and institutions
(showing of what moonshine they are often made), the utterly confusing
effect of our modern literary eclecticism, our comprehension and
sympathy with so many and hostile states of civilization, our jumbling
together of antique and mediaeval, of barbarous and over-ripe and effete
civilizations, our intellectual and moral absorption of incompatible
past stages of thought and feeling, with the follies and vices inherent
in each;--sum up all this, and you will see that, with our science
and our culture, our self-swamping with other folk's ideas, we are
infinitely less morally steady than the good sceptics of the days of
Voltaire, who always believed in the supremacy of their own century,
their own country, their own institutions, their own conventionalities;
who were in danger only from their own follies and uncertainties, while
we are in danger from the follies and uncertainties of every past
century from which we have inherited. And you will see, if you look,
that that sceptical eighteenth century, which was very much more
credulous and conservative than ours, was very little divided and upset
in its ideas; certain things were universally admitted, and certain
other things universally rejected; in that day there was always the
master of the ceremonies--Propriety. He knew exactly what could be
permitted: in the dining-room, drunkards yelling filthy jests; in the
drawing-room, polite gentlemen stalking or tripping through their
minuets. It is different now-a-days."
Cyril nodded. "I understand what you mean," he said; "but I don't see
the application yet."
"Well," answered Baldwin, "I will show you one instance of the
application. Have you ever thought over the question of--how shall I
call it?--the ethics of the indecent?"
Cyril stared. "No, it never struck me that there were any. I don't write
indecent things, it doesn't amuse me. I feel not the smallest desire to
do so; if anything, I feel rather sick at such things; that is all."
"That is all for you, but not all for other people. You don't feel
attracted to write on some subjects; well, other people not only feel
attracted, but imagine that it is their duty even if they are not."
"They are swine; I have nothing to do with them." And Cyril looked as if
he had settled the matter.
"But they are not swine; at least, not all of them; or they are not
entirely swine, by any means," insisted Baldwin. "You are not going to
tell me that a man like Walt Whitman is a mere pig. Still there are
things of his which to you are simply piggish. Either Whitman is a beast
or you are a prude."
"That depends upon difference of nature," said Cyril quickly, vaguely
desirous of putting an end to a discussion which brought forward an
anomaly.
"That is merely repeating what I said," replied Baldwin. "But in reality
I think it is _not_ a difference of nature. I think it depends on a
difference of reasoned opinion; in short, upon a sophistication of ideas
on the part of Whitman. I think it depends in him and the really pure
men who uphold his abominations upon a simple logical misconception; a
confusion of the fact that certain phenomena have been inevitable, with
the supposition that those same certain phenomena are therefore
desirable--a confusion between what has been, and could not help being,
and what may be and ought to be. It is the attempt to solve a moral
problem by an historical test."
"I don't understand in the least, Baldwin."
"Why, thus: our modern familiarity with the intellectual work of all
times and races has made people perceive that in past days indecency was
always part and parcel of literature, and that to try to weed it out
is to completely alter the character of at least a good half of the
literature of the past. Hence, some of us moderns, shaken as we are in
all our conventional ideas, have argued that this so-called indecency
is a legitimate portion of all literature, and that the sooner it is
re-introduced into that of the present the better, if our literature is
to be really vital and honest. Now, these people do not perceive that
the literature of the past contained indecencies, merely because,
being infinitely less self-conscious, less responsible than now, the
literature of those days contained fragments of every portion of the
civilization which produced it. For besides what I might call absolute
indecency, in the sense of pruriency, the literature of the past is full
of filth pure and simple, like some Eastern town; a sure proof this,
that if certain subjects which we taboo were not tabooed then, it was
not from any conscious notion of their legitimacy, but from a general
habit of making literature, like the street of some Oriental or mediaeval
town, the scene of every sort of human action, important or trifling,
noble or vile; regarding it as the place for which the finest works were
painted or carved, and into which all the slops were emptied. Hence, in
our wanderings through the literature of the past, our feet are for
ever stumbling into pools of filth, while our eyes are seeking for the
splendid traceries, the gorgeous colours above; our stomachs are turned
by stenches even while we are peeping in at some wonderful rose garden
or fruit orchard. I think you might almost count on your fingers the
books up to the year 1650, in which you are sure of encountering no
beastliness--choice gardens or bowers of the soul, or sacred chapels
kept carefully tidy and pure--viz., Milton, Spenser, the _Vita Nuova_,
Petrarch, Tasso--things, you see, mainly sacred or spiritualistic--sort
of churches where only devotion of some sort goes on; but if we go out
to where there is real life, life complete and thoughtless--Shakspeare,
Rabelais, Moliere, Ariosto, Cervantes, Aristophanes, Horace--the evil
odours meet us again at every step. Well, now-a-days this has all been
misunderstood. People have imagined that an inevitable nuisance of the
past ought also to be a deliberately chosen nuisance of the present: a
line of argument which appears to me to be similar to that of a man,
who, because the people of Lisbon used, in the days of my grandfather,
to practise a very primitive system of sewerage, should recommend that
the inhabitants of modern London should habitually empty their slops on
to the heads of passers-by. I am crude? Well, it is by calling nasty
things by beautiful names that we are able to endure their existence. I
think that people who should attempt such literary revivals ought to be
fined, as the more practical revivers of old traditions certainly would
be."
Cyril paused a moment. "I think that these sort of offenders, like
Whitman, are not evil-doers, but merely snobs: they offend not good
morals, but good taste."
"That's just such an artistic and well-bred distinction as I should
expect from you," answered Baldwin, rather contemptuously. "I wonder
what that word 'good taste' signifies to your mind? Everything and
nothing. They are offenders against good taste, you say. Well, let
us see how. If I hang a bright green curtain close to a bright blue
wall-paper, you will say it is bad taste; if I set Gray's 'Elegy' to
one of Strauss's waltzes, that is bad taste also; and if I display all
my grand furniture and plate (supposing I had it) to my poor neighbour,
whose chintz chair is all torn, and who breakfasts out of a cup without
a handle, that also is bad taste. Each for a good reason, and a
different one; in each case I am inflicting an injury, too slight and
inadvertent to be sin, against something: the green curtain and blue
paper combination pains your eye; the Gray's 'Elegy' and Strauss's waltz
combination annoys your common sense; the contrast between my riches and
your poverty inflicts a wound on your feelings; you see that all sins
against taste are merely a hurting of something in somebody. So that, if
writing indecent poems is an offence against good taste, it means that
it also inflicts some such injury. That injury is simply, as the world
has vaguely felt all along, an injury to your neighbour's morals."
"But," put in Cyril, "such a man as Whitman has no immoral intention,
nor is he immoral in the sense that Ariosto and Byron are sometimes
immoral. The man is not a libertine, but a realist. He wishes people to
live clean lives; all he says is, that everything which is legitimate,
innocent, necessary in life, is also legitimate and innocent in
literature. And although I should rather select other subjects to write
about, and would rather he did so likewise, I cannot deny that there is
logic in saying that there can be no harm in speaking of that which
there is no harm in doing."
"Yes," said Baldwin, "that is just the argument of such men. And the
answer is simply that there are things which are intended to be done and
_not_ to be spoken about. What you call logic is no logic at all, but
a mere appeal to ignorance. It so happens that the case is exactly
reversed--that there are a great many things which there is not the
smallest immorality in speaking about, and which it would be the most
glaring immorality to do. No one shrinks from talking about murder or
treachery; nay, even in the very domain of sexual relations there need
not be the smallest immorality, nothing at all perverting, in a play
which, like the whole Orestes trilogy, or _Othello_, or _Faust_, turns
upon adultery or seduction; no one also has the slightest instinct of
immorality in talking about the most fearful wholesale massacres. Yet
the world at large, ever since it has had any ideas of good and evil,
has had an instinct of immorality in talking of that without which not
one of us would exist, that which society sanctions and the church
blesses. And this exactly because it is as natural as murder--of which
we speak freely--is the contrary. For, exactly because certain instincts
are so essential and indispensable, Nature has made them so powerful and
excitable; there is no fear of their being too dormant, but there is
fear of their being too active, and the consequences of their excess
are so hideously dangerous to Nature itself, so destructive of all the
higher powers, of all the institutions of humanity; the over-activity of
the impulses to which we owe our birth is so ruinous of all that for
which we are born, social, domestic, and intellectual good, nay, to
physical existence itself, that Nature even has found it necessary to
restrain them by a counter-instinct--purity, chastity--such as has not
been given us to counteract the other physical instincts, as that of
eating, which can at most injure an individual glutton, but not affect
the general social order. Hence, the slightest artificial stimulus is a
danger to mankind, and the giving thereof a crime; for the experience of
all times tells us what modern psychology is beginning to explain--viz.,
the strange connection between the imagination and the senses, the
hitherto mysterious power of awakening physical desires, of almost
reproducing sensation, possessed by the mind, even as the mention of
dainty food is said to make the mouth water, and the description of a
surgical operation to make the nerves wince. So that the old intuition,
now called conventionalism, which connects indecency with immorality, is
entirely justified. Crime may be spoken of just because it is crime, and
our nature recoils therefrom; indeed, I think that now-a-days, when our
destructive instinct (except in small boys and professors of physiology)
is becoming effete, there has ceased to be any very demoralizing
influence in talking even of horrors. But the immorality of indecency is
quite unlike the immorality of--how shall I distinguish?--of ordinary
immorality. In the case of the latter the mischief lies in the
sophistication of the reason or the perversion of the sympathies; as,
for instance, in Machiavel's 'Prince,' or any of a hundred French
novels. In the former case, that of indecency, the immorality lies in
the risk of inducing a mood which may lead to excess--that is, to evil.
And, as a rule, I think this inducing of a mood is the commonest source
of moral danger, whether the mood be a sensual or a destructive one."
"I don't see how you make that out; although I now understand what at
first seemed to me mere inexplicable instincts--founded on nothing."
"Some things are inexplicable, perhaps, but be sure instincts are not
founded on nothing. Misconceptions are mere false conceptions; but a
good half of what people call social convention is based upon a
perfectly correct conception, only mankind has forgotten what that
conception was. Well, I should place the various sorts of demoralization
of which literature is capable in this order: No. 1, and least
dangerous, sophistication of judgment; No. 2, and more dangerous,
perversion of sympathy; No. 3, and most dangerous, inducement of
questionable frame of mind. And I place them thus because it seems to me
that this is the order of facility, and, consequently, universality; I
mean that fewest people can be found who depend sufficiently on their
deliberate ideas, and most effort is required to sophisticate them;
whereas, least effort is required, and most effect produced, in the
matter of inducing a mood; the perversion of sympathy is half-way. Of
course, if we could imagine (as once or twice has actually been the
case) that the moral ideas of a whole people were sophisticated, that
would be the worst, because the least remediable; but, in the first
place, people act but little from ideas, or few persons do, and it
is difficult to alter people's ideas; and, in the second place, the
sophistication of conscience of single individuals is kept in check by
the steadfastness of the mass of mankind, and, consequently, as in such
men as Diderot, reduced to mere talk, without corresponding action. But
a mood is easily induced without the reason even perceiving it, and
the more necessary the mood is to nature, the more easily it will be
aroused--the more unnatural an evil, the less danger of it; the more an
evil is the mere excess of the necessary, the more danger there is of
it."
"It is curious how you marshal ideas into their right places," said
Cyril. "There remains one thing to be said about the ethics of
impropriety. The people who go in for writing upon subjects which thirty
years ago would have distinctly been forbidden, do not all of them write
as Whitman does: they are not all what I should call openly beastly.
They do their best, on the contrary, to spiritualize the merely animal."
"That is just the most mischievous thing they could possibly do,"
interrupted Baldwin. "I know the sort of poets you mean. They are the
folk who say that things are pure or impure, holy or foul, according as
we view them. They are not the brutal, straightforward, naturalistic
school; they are the mystico-sensual. Of the two, they are infinitely
the worse. For the straightforward naturalistic hogs generally turn your
stomach before they have had a chance of doing you any harm; but these
persuade themselves and you that, while you are just gloating over
sensual images, you are improving your soul. They call brute desire
passion, and love lust, and prostitution marriage, and the body the
soul. Oh! I know them; they are the worst pests we have in literature."
"But I don't think they are intentionally immoral, Baldwin."
"Do you think any writer ever was intentionally immoral, Cyril?"
"Well, I mean that these men really intend doing good. They think that
if only some subjects be treated seriously, without any sniggering or
grimacing, there ceases to be any harm in them. They say that they wish
to rescue from out of the mire where prudery has thrown it, that which
is clean in itself; they wish to show that the whole of Nature is holy;
they wish to purify by sanctifying."
Baldwin listened with a smile of contempt. "Of course such words seem
very fine," he said; "but a thing is either holy or is not holy: all
the incense of poetry and all the hocus-pocus words of mysticism cannot
alter its nature by a title. And woe betide us if we once think that
any such ceremony of sanctification can take place; woe betide us if
we disguise the foul as the innocent, or the merely indifferent as the
holy! There is in Nature a great deal which is foul: in that which men
are pleased to call unnatural, because Nature herself chastises it after
having produced it: there is in Nature an infinite amount of abominable
necessity and abominable possibility, which we have reason and
conscience to separate from that which within Nature itself is innocent
or holy. Mind, I say innocent _or_ holy; for innocence and holiness are
very different things. All our appetites, within due limits, are
innocent, but they are not therefore holy; and that is just what
mystico-sensual poetry fails to perceive, and in giving innocence the
rank of holiness it makes it sinful. Do you know what is the really
holy? It is that of which the world possesses too little, and can
never possess too much: it is justice, charity, heroism, self-command,
truthfulness, lovingness, beauty, genius--these things are holy. Place
them, if you will, on a poetic altar, that all men may see them, and
know them, and love them, and seek after them life-long without ever
wearying. But do not enshrine in poetic splendours the merely innocent;
that which bestows no merit on its possessor, that which we share with
every scoundrel and every animal, that which is so universal that it
must for ever be kept in check, and which, unless thus checked by that
in ourselves which is truly holy, will degrade us lower than beasts.
For in so doing--in thus attempting to glorify that in which there is
nothing glorious--you make men think that self-indulgence is sanctity,
you let them consume their lives in mere acquiescence with their lusts
and laziness, while all around is raging the great battle between
good and evil. Worst of all, in giving them this worship of a mystic
Ashtaroth or Belial, you hide from them the knowledge of the true God,
of the really and exclusively holy, of good, truth, beauty, to know and
receive which into our soul we must struggle lifelong with the world and
with ourselves; yes, struggle for the sake of the really holy with that
mere innocence which is for ever threatening to become guilt."
Baldwin paused; then resumed after a moment: "I believe that mankind
as it exists, with whatever noble qualities it possesses, has been
gradually evolved out of a very inferior sort of mankind or brutekind,
and will, I hope, be evolved into a very superior sort of mankind. And I
believe, as science teaches us, that this has been so far effected, and
will be further effected henceforward, by an increased activity of those
nobler portions of us which have been developed as it were by their own
activity; I believe, in short, that we can improve only by becoming
more and more different from the original brutes that we were. I have
said this to explain to you my feelings towards a young poet of my
acquaintance, who is very sincerely smitten with the desire to improve
mankind; and has deliberately determined to devote a very fine talent to
the glorification of what he calls pure passion, pure in the sense that
it can be studied in its greatest purity from the cats on the house
tops."
Cyril made a grimace of disgust.
"No, indeed," continued Baldwin, "that poet is not one of the
aesthetic-sensual lot you seem to think. He is pure, conscientious,
philanthropic; but he is eminently unreasoning. He is painfully
impressed by the want of seriousness and holiness with which mankind
regards marriage, and his ambition is to set mankind right on this
subject, even as another young poet-philanthropist tried to improve
family relations in his 'Laon and Cythna.' Now, if you were required
to use your poetical talents in order to raise the general view of
marriage, in order to show the sanctity of the love of a man and a
woman, how would you proceed?"
"I have often thought about that," answered Cyril; "but it has been done
over and over again, and I think with most deliberate solemnity and
beauty by Schiller and Goethe in the 'Song of the Bell' and in 'Hermann
and Dorothea.' Well, I think that poetry can do good work in this line
only if the poet see where the real holiness of such love lies; in the
love not of the male and the female, but of the man and the woman. For
there is nowhere, I think, greater room for moral beauty and dignity
than in the choosing by a man of the one creature from whom only death
can separate him; of the one friend, not of a phase of his life, but of
his whole life; of the one soul which will grow and mature always by the
side of his, and having blossomed and borne fruit of good, will gently
fade and droop together with his. But this is not the most holy part of
the choice, for he is choosing also the mother of his children, the
woman who is to give half their nature, half their training, to what
children must mean to every honest man: the one chance he possesses of
living as he would have wished to have lived, of being what he should
wish to have been, his one chance of redeeming his errors, of fulfilling
his hopes, of realizing in a measure his own ideals. And to me such a
choice, and love in the sense of such a choice, become not merely coldly
deliberate, but passionately instinctive, are holy with the holiness
that, as you say, is the only real one; holy in all it implies of
recognized beauty and goodness, of trust and hope, of all the excellence
of which it is at least the supposed forerunner; and its holiness is
that upon which all other holiness, all the truthfulness and justice
and beauty and goodness of mankind, depends. This is how I view the
sanctity of the love between man and woman; how all the greatest poets,
from Homer to Schiller, and from Schiller to Mrs. Browning, have viewed
it; and it is the only possible view that I can conceive."
Baldwin nodded. "This is how I also see the question. But my young
poet is not satisfied with this: he wishes to make men believe in the
holiness of that which is no more holy, and far oftener tends to be
unholy, than eating or drinking; and in order to make mankind adore, he
lavishes all his artistic powers on the construction of an aesthetical
temple wherein to enshrine, on the preparation of poetic incense with
which to surround, this species of holiness, carefully separated from
any extraneous holiness, such as family affection, intellectual
appreciation, moral sympathy; left in its complete unmixed simplicity of
brute appetite and physical longing and physical rapture; and the temple
which he constructs out of all that is beautiful in the world is a
harlot's chamber; and the incense which he cunningly distils out of all
the sights and sounds of Nature are filthy narcotics, which leave the
moral eyes dim, and the moral nerves tremulous, and the moral muscle
unstrung. In his desire to moralize he demoralizes; in his desire to
sanctify one item of life, he casts aside, he overlooks, forgets, all
that which in life is already possessed of holiness. Thus my young poet,
in wishing to improve mankind, to raise it, undoes for the time being
that weary work of the hundreds of centuries which have slowly changed
lust into love, the male and female into a man and a woman, the life of
the body into the life of the soul; poetry, one of the highest human
products, has, as it were, undone the work of evolution; poetry, which
is essentially a thing of the self-conscient intellect, has taken us
back to the time when creatures with two legs and no tail could not
speak, but only whine and yell and sob--a mode of converse, by the way,
more than sufficient for the intercourse of what he is pleased to call
the typical Bride and Bridegroom."
They had got out of the strange expanse of brown and green swamp, and
after traversing a strip of meagre redeemed land, with stunted trees and
yellowish vines, had reached the long narrow line of pine woods which
met the beach. They passed slowly through the midst of the woods,
brushing the rain-drops off the short, bright, green pines, their wheels
creaking over the slippery fallen needles embedded in the sand; while
the setting sun fell in hazy yellow beams through the brushwood, making
the crisp tree-tufts sparkle like green spun-glass, and their scaly
trunks flush rosy; and the stormy sea roared on the sands close by.
"I think your young poet ought to be birched," remarked Cyril; "and if
anything could add to my aversion, not for poetry, but for the poetic
profession, this would which you have just told me. You see how right I
was in saying that I would have more moral satisfaction in being a
French cook than in being a poet."
"By no means," answered Baldwin. "In the first place, my young poet
ought not to be birched; he ought to be made to reflect, to ask himself
seriously and simply, in plain prose, what ideal of life he has been
setting before his readers. He ought to be shown that a poet, inasmuch
as he is the artist whose material is human feeling and action, is not
as free an artist as the mere painter, or sculptor, or composer; he
ought to be made to understand that now-a-days, when the old rules of
conduct, religious and social, are for ever being questioned, every man
who writes of human conduct is required, is bound, to have sound ideas
on the subject: that, because now-a-days, for better or for worse,
poetry is no longer the irresponsible, uncontrolled, helter-skelter
performance of former times, but a very self-conscious, wide-awake,
deliberate matter, it can do both much more harm and much more good than
it could do before."
They were slowly driving along the beach, among the stunted pine shoots
and the rough grass and the yellow bindweed half buried in the sand,
and the heaps of sea-blackened branches, and bits of wood and uncouth
floating rubbish which the waves had deposited, with a sort of ironical
regularity, in a neat band upon the shore; down here on the coast the
storm had already broken, and the last thin rain was still falling,
dimpling the grey sand. The sun was just going to emerge from amidst
the thick blue-black storm-clouds and descend into a clear space, like
molten amber, above the black, white-crested, roaring sea; it descended
slowly, an immense pale luminous globe, gilding the borders of the
piled-up clouds above it, gilding the sheen of the waves and the wet
sand of the shore; and as it descended, the clouds gathered above it
into a vast canopy, a tawny orange diadem or reef of peaked vapours
encircling the liquid topaz in which the sun moved; tawnier became this
garland, larger the free sky, redder the black storm masses above; till
at last the reddening rays of the sun enlarged and divided into immense
beams of rosy light, cutting away the dark and leaving uncovered a rent
of purest blue. At last the yellow globe touched the black line of the
horizon, gilding the waters; then sank behind it and disappeared. The
wreath of vapours glowed golden, the pall of heaped-up storm-clouds
flushed purple, and bright yellow veinings, like filaments of gold,
streaked the pale amber where the sun had disappeared. The amber grew
orange, the tawny purple, the purple a lurid red, as of masses of
flame-lit smoke; all around, the sky blackened, until at last there
remained only one pile of livid purple clouds hanging over a streak of
yellow sky, and gradually dying away into black, with but here and there
a death-like rosy patch, mirrored deadlier red in the wet sand of the
beach. The two friends remained silent, like men listening to the last
bars, rolling out in broad succession of massy, gradually resolving
chords, of some great requiem mass--silent even for a while after all
was over. Then Cyril asked, pointing to a row of houses glimmering white
along the dark lines of coast, below the great marble crags of Carrara,
rising dim in the twilight--
"Is that the place where my friends will pick me up?"
"Yes," answered Baldwin, "that's the place. You will be picked up there
if you choose."
"I must, you know." And Cyril looked astonished, as if for the first
time it struck him that there might be no _must_ in the matter. "I
must--at least, I suppose I ought to--go back to England with them."
"You know that best," replied Baldwin, shortly. "But before we get
there I want to finish what we were saying about the moral value of
poetry, if you don't mind. I gave you the instance of Whitman and the
mystico-sensual school merely because it is one of the most evident;
but it is only one of many I could give you of the truth of what I
said, that if a poet, inasmuch as he is a poet, has--what the painter,
or sculptor, or musician, inasmuch as they are such, have not--a keener
sense of moral right and wrong than other men, it is because his
art requires it. Consider what it is deliberately to treat of human
character and emotion and action; consider what a strange chaos,
an often inextricable confusion of clean and foul, of healthy and
pestilent, you get among, in penetrating into the life of the human
soul; consider that the poet must pick his way through all this, amidst
very loathsome dangers which he often cannot foresee; and not alone,
but carrying in his moral arms the soul of his reader--of each of his
thousands of readers--a soul which, if he see not clearly his way, if he
miss his footing, or tread in the soft, sinking soil (soft with filthy
bogs), may be bespattered and soiled, perhaps for ever--may be sucked
into the swamp pool or poisoned by the swamp air; and that he must thus
carry, not one soul, but thousands of souls, unknown to him--souls in
many cases weak, sometimes already predisposed to some loathsome moral
malady, and which, by a certain amount of contact with what to the poet
himself might be innocuous, may be condemned to life-long disease. I do
not think that the poet's object is to moralize mankind; but I think
that the materials with which he must work are such that, while
practising his art, he may unconsciously do more mischief than all the
professed moralists in Christendom can consciously do good. The poet
is the artist, remember, who deliberately chooses as material for
his art the feelings and actions of man; he is the artist who plays
his melodies, not on catgut strings or metal stops, but upon human
passions; and whose playing touches not a mere mechanism of fibres and
membranes like the ear, but the human soul, which in its turn feels and
acts; he is the artist who, if he blunders, does not merely fatigue a
nerve, or paralyze for a moment a physical sense, but injures the whole
texture of our sympathies and deafens our conscience. And I ask you,
does such an artist, playing on such an instrument, not require moral
feeling far stronger and keener than that of any other man, who, if he
mistake evil for good, injures only himself and the few around him? You
have been doubting, Cyril, whether poetry is sufficient work for a man
who feels the difference between good and evil; you might more worthily
doubt whether any man knows good from evil with instinct sure enough to
suffice him as a poet. You thought poetry morally below you: are you
certain that you are morally up to its level?"
Cyril looked vaguely about him: at the black sea breaking on the
twilight sands, at the dark outline of pine-wood against the pale sky,
at the distant village lights--vaguely, and as if he saw nothing of it
all. The damp sea breeze blew in their faces, the waves moaned sullenly,
the pines creaked in the wind; the moon, hidden behind clouds, slowly
silvered into light their looser, outer folds, then emerged, spreading a
broad white sheen on the sands and the water.
"Are you still too good for poetry?" asked Baldwin; "or--has poetry
become too good for you?"
"I don't know," answered Cyril, in the tone of a man before whose mental
eyes things are taking a new shape. "I don't know--perhaps."