At Large Part 7

"Well, take another instance," said Musgrave. "Look at Scott. He speaks himself of his 'hurried frankness of execution.' His proof-sheets are the most extraordinary things, full of impossible sentences, lapses of grammar, and so forth. He did not do much correcting himself, but I believe I am right in saying that his publishers did, and spent hours in reducing the chaos to order."

"Oh, of course I don't deny," said Herries, "that volume and vitality are what matters most. Scott's imagination was at once prodigious and profound. He seems to me to have said to his creations, 'Let the young men now arise and play before us.' But I don't think his art was the better for his carelessness. Great and n.o.ble as the result was, I think it would have been greater if he had taken more pains. Of course one regards men of genius like Scott and Shakespeare with a kind of terror--one can forgive them anything; but it is because they do by a sort of prodigal instinct what most people have to do by painful effort. If one's imagination has the poignant rightness of Scott's or Shakespeare's, one's hurried work is better than most people's finished work. But people of lesser force and power, if they get their st.i.tches wrong, have to unpick them and do it all over again. Sometimes I have an uneasy sense, when I am writing, that my characters are feeling as if their clothes do not fit. Then they have to be undressed, so to speak, that one may see where the garments gall them. Now, take a book like Madame Bovary, painfully and laboriously constructed--it seems obvious enough, yet the more one reads it the more one becomes aware how every stroke and detail tell. What almost appals me about that book is the way in which the end is foreseen in the beginning, the way in which Flaubert seems to have carried the whole thing in his head all the time, to have known exactly where he was going and how fast he was going."

"That is perfectly true," I said. "But take an instance of another of Flaubert's books, Bouvard et Pecuchet, where the same method is pursued with what I can only call deplorable results. Every detail is perfect of its kind. The two grotesque creatures take up one pursuit after another, agriculture, education, antiquities, horticulture, distilling perfumes, making jam. In each they make exactly the absurd mistakes that such people would have made; but one loses all sense of reality, because one feels that they would not have taken up so many things; it is only a collection of typical absurdities. Given the men and the particular pursuit, it is all natural enough, but one wearies of the same process being applied an impossible number of times, just as Flaubert was often so intolerable in real life, because he ran a joke to death, and never knew when to put it down. The result in Bouvard et Pecuchet is a lack of proportion and subordination. It is like one of the early Pre-Raphaelite pictures, in which every detail is painted with minute perfection. It was all there, no doubt, and it was all exactly like that; but that is not how the human eye apprehends a scene. The human mind takes a central point, and groups the accessories round it. In art, I think everything depends upon centralisation. Two lovers part, and the birds' faint chirp from the leafless tree, the smouldering rim of the sunset over misty fields, are true and symbolical parts of the scene; but if you deal in botany and ornithology and meteorology at such a moment, you cloud and dim the central point--you digress when you ought only to emphasise."

"Oh yes," said Herries with a sigh, "that is all right enough--it all depends upon proportion; and the worst of all these discussions on points of art is that each person has to find his own standard--one can't accept other people's standards. To me Bouvard et Pecuchet is a piece of almost flawless art--it is there--it lives and breathes. I don't like it all, of course, but I don't doubt that it happened so.

There must be an absolute rightness behind all supreme writing. Art must have laws as real and immutable and elaborate as those of science and metaphysics and religion--that is the central article of my creed."

"But the worst of that theory is," I said, "that one lays down canons of taste, which are very neat and pretty; and then there comes some new writer of genius, knocks all the old canons into fragments, and establishes a new law. Canons of art seem to me sometimes nothing more than cla.s.sifications of the way that genius works. I find it very hard to believe that there is a pattern, so to speak, for the snuffers and the candlesticks, revealed to Moses in the mount. It was Moses' idea of a pair of snuffers, when all is said."

"I entirely agree," said Musgrave; "the only ultimate basis of all criticism is, 'I like it because I like it'--and the connoisseurs of any age are merely the people who have the faculty of agreeing, I won't say with the majority, but with the majority of competent critics."

"No, no," said Herries, raising his mournful eyes to Musgrave's face, "don't talk like that! You take my faith away from me. Surely there must be some central canon of morality in art, just as there is in ethics.

For instance, in ethics, is it conceivable that cruelty might become right, if only enough people thought it was right? Is there no absolute principle at all? In art, what about the great pictures and the great poems, which have approved themselves to the best minds in generation after generation? Their rightness and their beauty are only attested by critics, they are surely not created by them? My view is that there is an absolute law of beauty, and that we grow nearer to it by slow degrees. Sometimes, as with the Greeks, people got very near to it indeed. Is it conceivable, for instance, that men could ever come to regard the Venus of Milo as ugly?"

"Why yes," said Musgrave, laughing, "I suppose that if humanity developed on different lines, and a new type of beauty became desirable, we might come to look upon the Venus of Milo as a barbarous and savage kind of object, a dreadful parody of what we had become, like a female chimpanzee. To a male chimpanzee, the wrinkled brow, the long upper lip, the deeply indented lines from nose to mouth, of a female chimpanzee in the prime of adolescence, is, I suppose, almost intolerably dazzling and adorable--beauty can only be a relative thing, when all is said."

"We are drifting away from our point," I said. "The question really is whether, as art expands, the principles become fewer or more numerous.

My own belief is that the principles do become fewer, but the varieties of expression more numerous. Keats tried to sum it up by saying, 'Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty'; but it is not a successful maxim, because, as a peevish philosopher said, 'Why in that case have two words for the same thing?'"

"But it is true, in a sense, for all that," said Herries. "What we HAVE learnt is that the subject is of very little importance in art--it is the expression that matters. Genre pictures, plots of novels, incidents of plays--they are all rather elementary things. Flaubert looked forward to a time in art when there should be no subjects at all, when art should aspire to the condition of music, and express the intangible."

"I confess," said Musgrave, laughing, "that that statement conveys nothing to me. A painter, on that line, would depict nothing, but simply produce a sort of harmony of colour. A picture would become simply a texture of colour-vibrations. My own view is rather that it is a question of accurate observation, followed by an extreme delicacy and suggestiveness of expression. Some people would say that it was all a question of reality; and that the point is that the writer shall suggest a reality to his reader, even though the picture he evoked in the reader's mind was not the same as the picture in his own mind--but that is to me pure symbolism."

"Exactly," said Herries, "and the more symbolical that art becomes, the purer it becomes--that is precisely what I am aiming at."

"Well," I said, "that gives me an opportunity of making a confession.

I have never really been able to understand what technical symbolism in art is. A symbol in the plain sense is something which recalls or suggests to you something else; and thus the whole of art is pure symbolism. The flick of colour gives you a distant woodland, the phrase gives you a scene or an emotion. Five printed words upon a page make one suffer or rejoice imaginatively; and my idea of the most perfect art is not the art which gives one a sense of laborious finish, but the art in which you never think of the finish at all, but only of the thing described. The end of effort is to conceal effort, as the old adage says. Some people, I suppose, attain it through a series of misses; but the best art of all goes straight to the heart of the thing."

"Yes," said Musgrave, "my own feeling is that the mistake is to consider it can only be done in one way. Each person has his own way; but I agree in thinking that the best art is the most effortless."

"From the point of view of the onlooker, perhaps," said Herries, "but not from the point of view of the craftsman. The pleasure of art, for the craftsman, is to see what the difficulty was, and to discern how the artist triumphed over it. Think of the delightful individual roughness of old work as opposed to modern machine-made things. There is an appropriate irregularity, according to the medium employed. The workmanship of a gem is not the same as that of a building; the essence of the gem is to be flawless; but in the building there is a pleasure in the tool-dints, like the pleasure of the rake-marks on the gravel path. Of course music must be flawless too--firm, resolute, inevitable, because the medium demands it; but in a big picture--why, the other day I saw a great oil-painting, a n.o.ble piece of art--I came upon it in the Academy, by a side door close upon it. The background was a great tangled ma.s.s of raw crude smears, more like coloured rags patched together than paint; but a few paces off, the whole melted into a great river-valley, with deep water-meadows of summer gra.s.s and big clumps of trees. That is the perfect combination. The man knew exactly what he wanted--he got his effect--the structure was complete, and yet there was the added pleasure of seeing how he achieved it. That is the kind of finish I desire."

"Yes, of course," said Musgrave, "we should all agree about that; but my feeling would be that the way to do it is for the artist to fill himself to the brim with the subject, and to let it burst out. I do not at all believe in the painful pinching and pulling together of a particular bit of work. That sort of process is excellent practice, but it seems to me like the receipt in one of Edwin Lear's Nonsense Books for making some noisome dish, into which all sorts of ingredients of a loathsome kind were to be put; and the directions end with the words: 'Serve up in a cloth, and throw all out of the window as soon as possible.' It is an excellent thing to take all the trouble, if you throw it away when it is done; you will do your next piece of real work all the better; but for a piece of work to have the best kind of vitality, it must flow, I believe, easily and sweetly from the teeming mind. Take such a book as Newman's Apologia, written in a few weeks, a piece of perfect art--but then it was written in tears."

"But on the other hand," said I, "look at Ariosto's Orlando; it took ten years to write and sixteen more to correct--and there is not a forced or a languid line in the whole of it."

"Yes," said Musgrave, "it is true, of course, that people must do things in their own way. But, on the whole, the best work is done in speed and glow, and derives from that swift handling a unity, a curve, that nothing else can give. What matters is to have a clear sense of structure, and that, at all events, cannot be secured by poky and fretful treatment. That is where intellectual grasp comes in. But, even so, it all depends upon what one likes, and I confess that I like large handling better than perfection of detail."

"I believe," I said, "that we really all agree. We all believe in largeness and vitality as the essential qualities. But in the lesser kinds of art there is a delicacy and a perfection which are appropriate.

An attention to minutiae which the graving of a gem or the making of a sonnet demands is out of place in a cathedral or an epic. We none of us would approve of hasty, slovenly, clumsy work anywhere; all that is to be demanded is that such irregularity as can be detected should not be inappropriate irregularity. What we disagree about is only the precise amount of finish which is appropriate to the particular work. Musgrave would hold, in the case of Flaubert, that he was, in his novels, trying to give to the cathedral the finish of the gem, and polishing a colossal statue as though it were a tiny statuette."

"Yes," said Herries mournfully, "I suppose that is right; though when I read of Flaubert spending hours of torture in the search for a single epithet, I do not feel that the sacrifice was made in vain if only the result was achieved."

"But I," said Musgrave, "grudge the time so spent. I would rather have more less-finished work than little exquisite work--though I suppose that we shall come to the latter sometime, when the treasures of art have acc.u.mulated even more hopelessly than now, and when nothing but perfect work will have a chance of recognition. Then perhaps a man will spend thirty years in writing a short story, and twenty more in polishing it! But at present there is much that is unsaid which may well be said, and I confess that I do not hanker after this careful and troubled work. It reminds me of the terrible story of the Chinaman who spent fifty years in painting a vase which cracked in the furnace. It seems to me like the worst kind of waste."

"And I, on the other hand," said Herries gravely, "think that such a life is almost as n.o.ble a one as I can well conceive."

His words sounded to me like a kind of pontifical blessing p.r.o.nounced at the end of a liturgical service; and, dinner now being over, we adjourned to the library. Then Musgrave entertained us with an account of a squabble he had lately had with a certain editor, who had commissioned him to write a set of papers on literary subjects, and then had objected to his treatment. Musgrave had trailed his coat before the unhappy man, laid traps for him by dint of asking him ingenuous questions, had written an article elaborately constructed to parody derisively the editor's point of view, had meekly submitted it as one of the series, and then, when the harried wretch again objected, had confronted him with ill.u.s.trative extracts from his own letters. It was a mirthful if not a wholly good-natured performance. Herries had listened with ill-concealed disgust, and excused himself at the end of the recital on the plea of work.

As the door closed behind him, Musgrave said with a wink, "I am afraid my story has rather disgusted our young transcendentalist. He has no pleasure in a wholesome row; he thinks the whole thing vulgar--and I believe he is probably right; but I can't live on his level, though I am sure it is very fine and all that."

"But what do you really think of his work?" I said. "It is very promising, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Musgrave reflectively, "that is just what it is--he has got a really fine literary gift; but he is too uncompromising. Idealism in art is a deuced fine thing, and every now and then there comes a man who can keep it up, and can afford to do so. But what Herries does not understand is that there are two sides to art--the theory and the practice. It is just the same with a lot of things--education, for instance, and religion. But the danger is that the theorists become pedantic. They get entirely absorbed in questions of form, and the plain truth is that however good your form is, you have got to get hold of your matter too. The point after all is the application of art to life, and you have got to condescend. Things of which the ultimate end is to affect human beings must take human beings into account. If you aim at appealing only to other craftsmen, it becomes an erudite business: you become like a carpenter who makes things which are of no use except to win the admiration of other carpenters. Of course it may be worth doing if you are content with indicating a treatment which other people can apply and popularise. But if you isolate art into a theory which has no application to life, you are a savant and not an artist. You can't be an artist without being a man, and therefore I hold that humanity comes first. I don't mean that one need be vulgar. Of course I am a mere professional, and my primary aim is to earn an honest livelihood.

I frankly confess that I don't pose, even to myself, as a public benefactor. But Herries does not care either about an income, or about touching other people. Of course I should like to raise the standard.

I should like to see ordinary people capable of perceiving what is good art, and not so wholly at the mercy of conventional and melodramatic art. But Herries does not care twopence about that. He is like the Calvinist who is sure of his own salvation, has his doubts about the minister, and thinks every one else irreparably d.a.m.ned. As I say, it is a lofty sort of ideal, but it is not a good sign when that sort of thing begins. The best art of the world--let us say Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare--was contributed by people who probably did not think about it as art at all. Fancy Homer going in for questions of form! It is always, I believe, a sign of decadence when formalism begins. It is just like religion, which starts with a teacher who has an overwhelming sense of the beauty of holiness; and then that degenerates into theology.

These young men are to art what the theologians are to religion.

They lose sight of the object of the whole thing in codification and definition. My own idea of a great artist is a man who finds beauty so hopelessly attractive and desirable that he can't restrain his speech.

It all has to come out; he cannot hold his peace. And then a number of people begin to see that it was what they had been vaguely admiring and desiring all the time; and then a few highly intellectual people think that they can a.n.a.lyse it, and produce the same effects by applying their a.n.a.lysis. It can't be done so; art must have a life of its own."

"Yes," I said, "I think you are right. Herries is ascetic and eremitical--a beautiful thing in many ways; but there is no transmission of life in such art; it is a sterile thing after all, a seedless flower."

"Let us express the vulgar hope," said Musgrave, "that he may fall in love; that will bring him to his moorings! And now," he added, "we will go to the music-room and I will see if I cannot tempt the shy bird from his roost." And so we did--Musgrave is an excellent musician. We flung the windows open; he embarked upon a great Bach "Toccata"; and before many bars were over, our idealist crept softly into the room, with an air of apologetic forgiveness.

XIV. A MIDSUMMER DAY'S DREAM

I suppose that every one knows by experience how certain days in one's life have a power of standing out in the memory, even in a tract of pleasant days, all lit by a particular brightness of joy. One does not always know at the time that the day is going to be so crowned; but the weeks pa.s.s on, and the one little s.p.a.ce of sunlight, between dawn and eve, has...o...b..d itself

"into the perfect star We saw not, when we moved therein."

The thing that in my own case most tends to produce this "grace of congruity," as the schoolmen say, is the presence of the right companion, and it is no less important that he should be in the right mood. Sometimes the right companion is tiresome when he should be gracious, or boisterous when he should be quiet; but when he is in the right mood, he is like a familiar and sympathetic guide on a mountain peak. He helps one at the right point; his desire to push on or to stop coincides with one's own; he is not a hired a.s.sistant, but a brotherly comrade. On the day that I am thinking of I had just such a companion.

He was cheerful, accessible, good-humoured. He followed when I wanted to lead, he led when I was glad to follow. He was not ashamed of being unaffectedly emotional, and he was not vaporous or quixotically sentimental. He did not want to argue, or to hunt an idea to death; and we had the supreme delight of long silences, during which our thoughts led us to the same point, the truest test that there is some subtle electrical affinity at work, moving viewlessly between heart and brain.

What no doubt heightened the pleasure for me was that I had been pa.s.sing through a somewhat dreary period. Things had been going wrong, had tied themselves into knots. Several people whose fortunes had been bound up with my own had been acting perversely and unreasonably--at least I chose to think so. My own work had come to a standstill. I had pushed on perhaps too fast, and I had got into a bare sort of moorland tract of life, and could not discern the path in the heather. There did not seem any particular task for me to undertake; the people whom it was my business to help, if I could, seemed unaccountably and aggravatingly prosperous and independent. Not only did no one seem to want my opinion, but I did not feel that I had any opinions worth delivering. Who does not know the frame of mind? When life seems rather an objectless business, and one is tempted just to let things slide; when energy is depleted, and the springs of hope are low; when one feels like the family in one of Mrs. Walford's books, who all go out to dinner together, and of whom the only fact that is related is that "n.o.body wanted them." So fared it with my soul.

But that morning, somehow, the delicious sense had returned, of its own accord, of a beautiful quality in common things. I had sought it in vain for weeks; it had behaved as a cat behaves, the perverse, soft, pretty, indifferent creature. It had stared blankly at my beckoning hand; it had gambolled away into the bushes when I strove to capture it, and looked out at me when I desisted with innocent grey eyes; and now it had suddenly returned uncalled, to caress me as though I had been a long-lost friend, diligently and anxiously sought for in vain. That morning the very scent of breakfast being prepared came to my nostrils like the smoke of a sacrifice in my honour; the shape and hue of the flowers were full of gracious mystery; the green pasture seemed a place where a middle-aged man might almost venture to dance. The sharp chirping of the birds in the shrubbery seemed a concert arranged for my ear. We were soon astir. Like Wordsworth we said that this one day we would give to idleness, though the profane might ask to what that leisurely poet consecrated the rest of his days.

We found ourselves deposited, by a brisk train--the very stoker seemed to be engaged in the joyful conspiracy--at the little town of St. Ives.

I should like to expatiate upon the charms of St. Ives, its clear, broad, rush-fringed river, its quaint brick houses, with their little wharf-gardens, where the trailing nasturtium mirrors itself in the slow flood, its embayed bridge, with the ancient chapel b.u.t.tressed over the stream--but I must hold my hand; I must not linger over the beauties of the City of Destruction, which I have every reason to believe was a very picturesque place, when our hearts were set on pilgrimage. Suffice it to say that we walked along a pretty riverside causeway, under enlacing limes, past the fine church, under the hanging woods of Houghton Hill--and here we found a mill, a big, timbered place, with a tiled roof, odd galleries and projecting pent-houses, all pleasantly dusted with flour, where a great wheel turned dripping in a fern-clad cavern of its own, with the scent of the weedy river-water blown back from the plunging leat. Oh, the joyful place of streams! River and leat and back-water here ran clear among willow-clad islands, all fringed deep with meadow-sweet and comfrey and b.u.t.terbur and melilot. The sun shone overhead among big, white, racing clouds; the fish poised in mysterious pools among trailing water-weeds; and there was soon no room in my heart for anything but the joy of earth and the beauty of it. What did the weary days before and behind matter? What did casuistry and determinism and fate and the purpose of life concern us then, my friend and me? As little as they concerned the gnats that danced so busily in the golden light, at the corner where the alder dipped her red rootlets to drink the br.i.m.m.i.n.g stream.

There we chartered a boat, and all that hot forenoon rowed lazily on, the oars grunting and dripping, the rudder clicking softly through avenues of reeds and water-plants, from reach to reach, from pool to pool. Here we had a glimpse of the wide-watered valley rich in gra.s.s, here of silent woods, up-piled in the distance, over which quivered the hot summer air. Here a herd of cattle stood knee-deep in the shallow water, lazily twitching their tails and snuffing at the stream. The birds were silent now in the glowing noon; only the reeds shivered and bowed. There, beside a lock with its big, battered timbers, the water poured green and translucent through a half-shut sluice. Now and then the springs of thought brimmed over in a few quiet words, that came and pa.s.sed like a breaking bubble--but for the most part we were silent, content to converse with nod or smile. And so we came at last to our goal; a house embowered in leaves, a churchyard beside the water, and a church that seemed to have almost crept to the brink to see itself mirrored in the stream. The place mortals call Hemingford Grey, but it had a new name for me that day which I cannot even spell--for the perennial difficulty that survives a hundred disenchantments, is to feel that a romantic hamlet seen thus on a day of pilgrimage, with its cl.u.s.tering roofs and chimneys, its waterside lawns, is a real place at all. I suppose that people there live dull and simple lives enough, buy and sell, gossip and back-bite, wed and die; but for the pilgrim it seems an enchanted place, where there can be no care or sorrow, nothing hard, or unlovely, or unclean, but a sort of fairy-land, where men seem to be living the true and beautiful life of the soul, of which we are always in search, but which seems to be so strangely hidden away. It must have been for me and my friend that the wise and kindly artist who lives there in a paradise of flowers had filled his trellises with climbing roses, and bidden the tall larkspurs raise their azure spires in the air. How else had he brought it all to such perfection for that golden hour? Perhaps he did not even guess that he had done it all for my sake, which made it so much more gracious a gift. And then we learned too from a little red-bound volume which I had thought before was a guide-book, but which turned out to-day to be a volume of the Book of Life, that the whole place was alive with the calling of old voices. At the little church there across the meadows the portly, tender-hearted, generous Charles James Fox had wedded his bride. Here, in the pool below, Cowper's dog had dragged out for him the yellow water-lily that he could not reach; and in the church itself was a little slab where two tiny maidens sleep, the sisters of the famous Miss Gunnings, who set all hearts ablaze by their beauty, who married dukes and earls, and had spent their sweet youth in a little ruined manor-house hard by. I wonder whether after all the two little girls, who died in the time of roses, had not the better part; and whether the great d.u.c.h.ess, who showed herself so haughty to poor Boswell, when he led his great dancing Bear through the grim North, did not think sometimes in her state of the childish sisters with whom she had played, before they came to be laid in the cool chancel beside the slow stream.

And then we sate down for a little on the churchyard wall, and watched the water-gra.s.ses trail and the fish poise. In that sweet corner of the churchyard, at a certain season of the year, grow white violets; they had dropped their blooms long ago; but they were just as much alive as when they were speaking aloud to the world with scent and colour; I can never think of flowers and trees as not in a sense conscious; I believe all life to be conscious of itself, and I am sure that the flowering time is the happy time for flowers as much as it is for artists.

Close to us here was a wall, with a big, solid Georgian house peeping over, blinking with its open windows and sun-blinds on to a smooth, shaded lawn, full of green glooms and leafy shelters. Why did it all give one such a sense of happiness and peace, even though one had no share in it, even though one knew that one would be treated as a rude and illegal intruder if one stepped across and used it as one's own?

This is a difficult thing to a.n.a.lyse. It all lies in the imagination; one thinks of a long perspective of sunny afternoons, of leisurely people sitting out in chairs under the big sycamore, reading perhaps, or talking quietly, or closing the book to think, the memory re-telling some old and pretty tale; and then perhaps some graceful girl comes out of the house with a world of hopes and innocent desires in her wide-open eyes; or a tall and limber boy saunters out bare-headed and flannelled, conscious of life and health, and steps down to the punt that lies swinging at its chain--one hears it rattle as it is untied and flung into the prow; and then the dripping pole is plunged and raised, and the punt goes gliding away, through zones of glimmering light and shadow, to the bathing-pool. All that comes into one's mind; one takes life, and subtracts from it all care and anxiety, all the shadow of failure and suffering, sees it as it might be, and finds it good. That is the first element of the charm. And then there comes into the picture a further and more reflective charm, that which Tennyson called the pa.s.sion of the past; the thought that all this beautiful life is slipping away, even as it forms itself, that one cannot stay it for an instant, but that the shadow creeps across the dial, and the church-clock tells the hours of the waning day. It is a mistake to think that such a sense comes of age and experience; it is rather the other way, for never is the regretful sense of the fleeting quality of things realised with greater poignancy than when one is young. When one grows older one begins to expect a good deal of dissatisfaction and anxiety to be mingled with it all, one finds the old Horatian maxim becoming true:

"Vitae summa brevis nos spem vitat inch.o.a.re longam,"