Belcaro Part 5

Ruskin is no ordinary aesthetician, interested in art only inasmuch as it is a subject for thought, untroubled in the framing of histories, psychological systems of art philosophy by any personal likings and dislikings; Ruskin is essentially an artist, he thinks about art because he feels about art, and his sole object is morally to justify his artistic sympathies and aversions, morally to justify his caring about art at all. With him the instinctive likings and dislikings are the original motor, the system is there only for their sake. He cannot, therefore, like Lessing, or Hegel, or Taine, quietly shove aside any phenomenon of artistic preference which does not happen to fit into his system; he could, like Hegel, a.s.sign an inferior rank to painting, because painting has to fall into the category a.s.signed to romantic, that is to say, imperfect art; he could not, like Taine, deliberately stigmatise music as a morbid art because it had arisen, according to his theory, in a morbid state of society; with Ruskin everything must finally yield to the testimony of his artistic sense: everything which he likes must be legitimated, everything which he dislikes must be condemned; and for this purpose the system of artistic morality must for ever be altered, annotated, provided with endless saving-clauses, and special cases. And all this the more especially as, in the course of his studies, Ruskin frequently perceives that things which on superficial acquaintance displeased him, are in reality delightful, in consequence of which discovery a new legislation is required to annul their previous condemnation and provide for their due honour. Thus, having conceived a perhaps exaggerated aversion (due, in great part, to the injustice of his adversaries) to the manner of representing the nature of certain Dutch painters of the 17th century, Ruskin immediately formulated a theory that minute imitation of nature was base and sinful; and when he conceived a perhaps equally exaggerated admiration for the works of certain extremely careful and even servile English painters of our own times, he was forced to formulate an explanatory theory that minuteness of work was conscientious, appreciative, and distinctly holy. Had he been satisfied with mere artistic value, he need only have said that the Dutch pictures were ugly, and the English pictures beautiful; but having once established all artistic judgment upon an ethical basis, it became urgent that he should invent a more or less casuistic reason, something not unlike the _distinguo_ by means of which the Jesuit moralists rendered innocent in their powerful penitents what they had declared sinful in less privileged people, to explain that, under certain circ.u.mstances, minute imitation was the result of insolence and apathy, and in other cases the sign of humility and appreciation. Again, having been instinctively impressed by the coldness and insipidity of the schools of art which ostensibly refused to copy individual nature, and professed to reproduce only the more important and essential character of things, Ruskin annihilated these idealistic conventionalists by a charge of impious contempt for the details of individual peculiarities which G.o.d had been pleased to put into his work; and when, on the other hand, his growing love for mediaeval art and for mysticism began to draw him towards the Giottesque and even the pre-Giottesque artists, who left out of their work all except the absolutely essential and typical traits, Ruskin sanctified their conventionalism as the result of preference for the merely spiritual and morally interesting portion of the subject. The fact that the over refinement of the idealists of the 16th century ended in insipidity because it was due to a general organic decline in the art, and that the rudeness of the conventional artists of the 14th century possessed a certain n.o.bility because it was merely a momentary incapacity in a rapidly progressing art; this fact, and with it the knowledge that the development and decline of every art is due to certain necessities of general change, all that explains the life of any and every art, completely escapes Ruskin on account of his explanation by moral motives. In this way Ruskin has constructed a whole system of artistic ethics, extremely contradictory and, as we have remarked, bearing as great a resemblance to the text book, full of _distinguos_ and _directions of the intention_ of one of Pascal's Jesuits as a very morally pure and n.o.ble work can bear to a very base and depraved one.

And throughout this system scattered fragmentarily throughout his various books, every artistic merit or demerit is disposed of as a virtuous action or a crime; the moral principle established for the explanation of one case naturally involving the prejudgment of another case; and the whole system explaining by moral delinquencies the artistic inferiority of a given time or people, and, on the other hand, attributing the moral and social ruin of a century or a nation to the artistic abominations it had perpetrated. The arrangements of lintels and columns, the amount of incrustation of coloured marble on to brick, the degree to which window traceries may be legitimately attenuated and curled, the value of Greek honeysuckle patterns as compared with Gothic hedge-rose ornaments, all these and a thousand other questions of mere excellence of artistic effect, are discussed on the score of their morality or baseness, of their truthfulness, or justice, or humility; and Ruskin's madness against any kind of cheating or deception goes to the length, in one memorable pa.s.sage in the _Seven Lamps of Architecture_, of condemning Correggio's ceiling of St. Paolo at Parma because, as real children might be climbing in a real vine trellise above our heads, there is possibility of deception and of sin; whereas, as none of us expect to see the heavens open above us, there is no possibility of deception, and consequently no sin in Correggio's glory of angels in the Parma Cathedral; thus absolving on the score of morality a rather confused and sprawling composition, and condemning as immoral one of the most graceful and childlike works of the Renaissance.

The result of this system of explaining all artistic phenomena by ethical causes is, as we have remarked, that the real cause of any phenomenon, the explanation afforded us by history, is entirely overlooked or even ignominiously rejected. Thus Ruskin attributes the decay of Gothic architecture to "one endeavour to a.s.sume, in excessive flimsiness of tracery, the semblance of what it was not"--to its having "sacrificed a single truth." Now the violation of the nature and possibilities of the material, what Ruskin in ethical language calls the endeavour to trick, was not the cause but the effect of a gradual decline in the art. The lace work of 15th century Gothic is not a _lie_, it is an effete form. The perfect forms had been obtained, and as the growth of the art could not be checked, imperfect ones naturally succeeded them; the workman had hewn enough, had diminished the stone surfaces sufficiently, had carved the leaf.a.ge as much as was compatible with beauty; the succeeding generations of workmen continued to work, and what happened? They hewed away too much, they diminished the stone surface too much, they carved the leaf.a.ge too deep, each generation cutting away more and more, until the whole fabric had reached such a degree of flimsiness that, had not the Renaissance swept its cobwebs away, they would have been torn to shreds by the Gothic artists themselves. An art corrupts and dies of its own vital principles, as does every other living and changing thing, as a flower withers of its own life: you begin by chipping, you end, as in Gothic architecture, by chipping into nothingness. You begin with grouping: you end with grouping, like Michelangiolo and Parmegianno, into knots and lumps; you begin by raising your figures out of the background: you end, like Ghiberti, by tying them on with the narrowest slip of bronze; you begin with modulating: you end, like Raff, Brahms, and other Wagnerists, by modulating into chaos. Art, if it lives, must grow, and if it grows it must grow old and die. And this fact gradually, though instinctively, beginning to be felt by all thinkers on art, Ruskin, with his theory of moral aesthetics, could never recognize. For him the corruption of the art is due to the moral corruption of the artist: if the artist remained truthfully modest, the perfection of the art would continue indefinitely.

Again, the necessity of referring all good art to morality and all bad art to immorality, obliges Ruskin to postulate that every period which has produced bad art has been a period of moral decay. The artistic habits which displease him must be a direct result of a vicious way of feeling and acting in all things: the decay of Venetian architecture and sculpture must be distinctly referable to the decay of Venetian morality in the 15th century; and the final corruption and ruin of the state must be traced to the moral obliquity which caused Venetians to adopt pseudo-cla.s.sic forms in the Riva facade of the Ducal palace; moral degradation and artistic degradation, acting and re-acting on each other, bring about, according to Ruskin, political ruin; the iniquities of the men who became apostates to Gothic architecture are visited upon their distant descendants, upon the Venetians of the days of Campo Formio. Now here again the ethical basis induces a complete historical misconception, a misconception not only in the history of art, but also in the history of civilization. For, just as his system of moral sin and artistic punishment blinds Ruskin to the necessities of change and decay in art, so, also, it prevents his seeing the inevitable necessity of political growth and decline. Ruskin seeks the cause of the fall of Venice in moral corruption manifested, or supposed to be manifested, in art; but the cause of the fall of Venice must be sought elsewhere. Look at this lagoon, this Adriatic, this Mediterranean: in the 14th century they are the source of the greatness of the Zenos and Pisanis; three or four hundred years later they will be the cause of the pettiness of the Morosinis and Emos. In the present, in this time of Dandolo, into which Ruskin has led us, it is to them that Venice owes the humiliation of Barbarossa in the porch of St. Mark's; to them in the future will be owed the triumph of Bonaparte and the tricolour waving from the flagstaff of the square. For in the middle ages the sea means the Mediterranean and the Baltic, the two great navigable, wealth-yielding lakes, and around them arises prosperity: Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, Venice, Lubeck, Dantzig, Brehmen; the men who live on the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean take the riches of the East and of India, and conquer Greece and the islands, and grow rich; and on this strip of marshland keep armies which can cope with the united forces of Europe. Such is the sea of the middle ages. But the sea of modern times is the ocean; give the means of navigating that, give to the barbarians who inhabit its coasts just enough civilization to build a ship and steer it, and those barbarians, yes, the boors of Frisia, the savages of England, and of Normandy, and of Portugal, will become the masters of the world, and Venetians and Genoese shall be their puppets, and the Mediterranean their pond. Since to the commerce of the Mediterranean they will oppose the commerce of the ocean, to the riches of Greece, of Asia Minor, Persia, and Egypt, the riches of Mexico and Peru, of India and of China, which will flow into the banks of London, of Lisbon, of Antwerp, and which will create armies to sweep all Italy out of the field. The Ocean has superseded the Mediterranean, the boundless the bounded; this is the explanation of the fall of Venice, of her political torpor and her consequent vices. It is a law of nature that the small and sheltered spots shall suffice while civilization is small, but that as it grows it will seek a wider field, and its original homes be abandoned. A small country, a small sea, made Greece and Italy greatest in antiquity and the middle ages; a small country, a narrow sea, make them smallest in modern times. And when the first galley of Prince Henry, the first pinnace of Amsterdam or London, nay, the first little Norman craft set sail for St. Brandan's Isle, the fate of Venice was sealed; Lodovico Manin, and Casanova, and Bonaparte, and Campo Formio, all that in Venetian history can mean corruption and disgrace, all was irrevocably fixed; the geographical chance which had raised the palaces of Venice has also caused them to moulder; time which made has also unmade, for life is movement and movement is change. That immorality is not the cause but the effect of political decline is as little conceived by Ruskin as that neither the one nor the other can be produced by artistic degradation; in his system which makes artistic inferiority the visible expression of moral corruption, and national misfortune its direct punishment, there can be no room for any of the great laws of development and decay which historical science is now beginning to perceive. All things must be carried on upon the miraculous system of Sunday school books, where planks of bridges give way from the cogent mechanical reason that the little boys pa.s.sing over them have just been telling lies or stealing apples; G.o.d is for ever busy unbolting trapdoors beneath the feet of the iniquitous and rolling stones down on the heads of blasphemers. And this same necessity of condemning morally a period whose artistic work in any particular line is aesthetically worthless in Ruskin's judgment, not only leads him into the most absurd misappreciation of the moral value of a time, but entirely forbids his recognizing the fact that the decay of one art is frequently coincident with, and in some measure due to, the efflorescence of another.

The independent development of painting required the decay of the architecture of the middle ages, whose symbolical, purely decorative tendency condemned painting to be a sort of allegorical or narrative Arabesque; whose well defined arches might not be broken through by daring perspective, whose delicate cornices might not enclose more than a mere rigid and simply tinted mosaic, or mosaic-like fresco. When, therefore, painting arose mature in the 16th century, architecture was necessarily crumbling. But to Ruskin the 16th century, being the century of bad architecture, is hopelessly immoral, and being immoral, its painting, Raphael, Michel Angelo, Correggio, all except a few privileged Venetians, must needs be swept away as so much rubbish; while the very imperfect painting of the Giottesques, because it belongs to a time whose morality must be high since its architecture is good, is considered as the ideal of pictorial art. Again, Ruskin perceives that the whole plastic art of the 18th century, architecture, sculpture, and painting, are as bad as bad can be; the cause must necessarily be found not in the inevitable decline of all plastic art since the Renaissance, but in the fiendish wickedness of the 18th century, that abominable age which first taught men the meaning of justice as distinguished from mercy, of humanity as distinguished from charity: which first taught us not to shrink from evil but to combat it. And thus, because the 18th century is proved by its smirking furbelowed G.o.ddesses and handkerchief-cravatted urns to be utterly, morally, abominable, the one great art which flourished in this period, the glorious music of Bach, and Gluck, and Marcello, and Mozart, must necessarily be silently carted off to the dust heap of artistic baseness.

Thus the radical falsehood of the ethical system of aesthetics warps the whole of Ruskin's view of the genius and evolution of art, of its relations with national morality and political supremacy. But it does more than this. It warps also Ruskin's view of art itself; its sophisms force him to contradict, to stifle his own artistic instincts. For if, as Ruskin has established, we are not permitted to love the beautiful for its own sake, but only because it is supposed to represent a certain moral excellence, that moral excellence must be the sole valuable portion, and equally artistically valuable when separated from the beautiful; while the beautiful must in itself be worthless, and consequently dangerous. The absolutely ugly must, if it awaken virtuous emotion, have a greater artistic value than the beautiful if it awaken none; the macerated hermits, the lepers and cripples of the middle ages must be artistically preferable to the healthy and beautiful athletes of antiquity; compa.s.sion for the physically horrible is more virtuous than the desire for the physically beautiful, therefore Ruskin would replace the one by the other; forgetting, even as the middle ages forgot, that the beautiful, the healthy, are the best and happiest for all of us; that we are given sympathy with the physically evil only that we may endure its contact long enough to transform it into the physically good: that we compa.s.sionate disease only that we may cure it.

Thus this sophisticated sense of duty, which, applied to artistic interests where it has no place, has merely caused injustice of all sorts, and falsehood and unceasing contradiction: which has condemned the artistically pure for its juxta-position with the morally impure: which has preferred the inferior in art because it answered to the definition of the superior in morals: which has placed Giotto above Michel Angelo because the second could paint and the first only imagine: which has condemned Greek art as long as it seemed beautiful and acquitted it when it appeared ugly: which has legitimated colour art with one verse of the bible and anathematised linear art with another: which has so often rejected the excellent in art because it wanted the excellent in conduct: which has come to the point of preferring that disease and putrefaction which, in the physical world, are equivalent to sin and corruption in the moral--this sophisticated sense of morality, originally intended to sanction all that which in art is sanctioned by its mere innocence and delightfulness, has at length destroyed the very artistic system which it was to sustain. For the divine elements of justice, and mercy, and honour, cannot be wasted in this world; entrapped and imprisoned in order to consecrate by their presence the already holy, rendered sterile and useless among those artistic things with which they have no concern, they have at last sought for their field of action, for their legitimate objects, and have burst forth, shattering the whole edifice of art philosophy in which they were enclosed, mere useless talismans. And it has come home to Ruskin, once and again, that this virtue thus expended upon cornices and lintels, upon lines and colours, while evil raged outside, is no virtue: that this sanctified art is not holy; that, direct our intentions as we may, think of G.o.d as much as we like, we cannot make art one whit the less pa.s.sive and egotistic; it has come home to him, and with the n.o.ble candour of doubt which is his logical weakness and his moral strength, he has confessed that he had never known one man really and exclusively devoted to mere moral good, who cared for art at all. The elaborate system of ethical aesthetics, the ingeniously far-fetched explanations of physical beauty by moral excellence, the triumphant decision that art is the kingdom of G.o.d, has, after all and at last, failed to redeem the beautiful in the eyes of Ruskin. He has seen a ragged creature die of starvation on a dung heap; and all the cathedrals of Christendom, all the resplendent Turners and saintly Giottos in the world have seemed to him black and hideous. He has argued and stormed, and patched up once more his tattered theories, and talked more than ever of beauty being virtue, and its appreciation religion, and G.o.d being in all fair things; but all this latter talk has been vain; into the midst of art discussions have for ever crept doubts whether art should be at all. The placid paradise of art, whose every flower and gra.s.s blade is a generous thought, whose every fruit is a n.o.ble action, where every bubbling of waters and every bird's song is a hymn to the goodness of G.o.d, has become suspicious to its own creator now that he realises by what it is surrounded; to live in this sweet and n.o.ble impossible paradise, where beauty is the mere visible expression of virtue, while the foul world-swamp is stealthily being eaten into, washed away, absorbed by the surrounding flood of h.e.l.l: is this not a sin, this quiet dwelling in holiness, and a worse sin than any being committed in the darkness and jostle below?

In this way has Ruskin, one of the greatest thinkers on art and on ethics, made morality sterile and art base in his desire to sanctify the one by the other. Sterile and base, indeed, only theoretically: for the instinct of the artist and of the moralist has ever broken out in n.o.ble self-contradiction, in beautiful irrelevancies; in those wonderful, almost prophetic pa.s.sages which seem to make our souls more keen towards beauty and more hardy for good. But all this is incidental, this which is in reality Ruskin's great and useful work. He has made art more beautiful and men better without knowing it--accidentally, without premeditation, in words which are like the eternal truths, grand and exquisite, which lie fragmentary and embedded in every system of theology; the complete and systematic is worthless and even dangerous, for it is false; the irrelevant, the contradictory, is precious, because it is true to our better part. Ruskin has loved art instinctively, fervently, for its own sake; but he has constantly feared lest this love should be sinful or at least base. Like Augustine, he dreads that the Devil maybe lurking in the beautiful sunshine; lest evil be hidden in those beautiful shapes which distract his thoughts from higher subjects of good and G.o.d; he trembles lest the beautiful should trouble his senses and his fancy, and make him forget his promises to the Almighty.

He perceives that pleasure in art is more or less sensuous and selfish; he is afraid lest some day he be called upon to account for the moments he has not given to others, and be chastised for having permitted his mind to follow the guidance of his senses; he trembles and repeats the praise of G.o.d, the anathema of pride, he mumbles confused words about "corrupt earth"--and "sinful man,"--even while looking at his works of art, as some anchorite of old may instinctively have pa.s.sed his fingers across his beads and stammered out an _Ave_ when some sight of beauty crossed his path and made his heart leap with unwonted pleasure. Ruskin must tranquillize his conscience about art; he must persuade himself that he is justified in employing his thoughts about it; and lest it be a snare of the demon, he must make it a service of G.o.d. He must persuade himself that all the pleasure he derives from art is the pleasure in obeying G.o.d, in perceiving his goodness: that the pleasure he derives from a flower is pleasure not in its curves and colours and scent, but in its adaptation to its work, in its enjoyment of existence; that the enjoyment he derives from a grand view is enjoyment of the kindness of G.o.d, and the enjoyment in the sight of a n.o.ble face is enjoyment of the expression of harmony with G.o.d's will; in short, all artistic pleasure must become an act of adoration, otherwise, a jealous G.o.d, or a jealous conscience, will smite him for abandoning the true altar for some golden calf fashioned by man and inhabited by Satan. And to this constant moralising, hallowing, nay, purifying of art, are due, as we have seen, the greater number of Ruskin's errors; his system is false, and only evil can spring from it; it is a pretence at a perfection which does not exist, and which, like the pretence at the superhuman virtue of the anchorite and mystic, must end in lamentable folly: in making men lie to their own heart because they have sought to clothe all that is really pure in a false garb of sanct.i.ty and have blushed at its naked reality; because it makes a return to nature a return to sin, since what is natural has been forbidden and what is innocent has been crookedly obtained; because it tries to make us think we are nothing but soul, and therefore turns us to brutes when we remember that we are also body, and devils when we perceive that we are also reason. Because, in short, it is a lie, and only falsehood can be born of it. For, in his constant reference to a spiritual meaning, Ruskin has not only wasted and sterilised our moral impulses, but has reduced art to mere foulness; in his constant sanctifying of beauty he makes it appear impure. Above all, in his unceasing attempt to attach a moral meaning to physical beauty, he has lost sight of, he has denied, the great truth that all that which is innocent is moral; that the morality of art is an independent quality equivalent to, but separate from, the morality of action; that beauty is the morality of the physical, as morality is the beauty of the spiritual; that as the moral sense hallows the otherwise egotistic relations of man to man, so also the aesthetic sense hallows the otherwise brutish relations of man to matter; that separately but in harmony, equally but differently, these two faculties make our lives pure and n.o.ble. All this Ruskin has forgotten: he has made the enjoyment of mere beauty a base pleasure, requiring a moral object to purify it, and in so doing he has destroyed its own purifying power; he has sanctified the already holy, and defiled with holy water, which implies foulness, the dwelling of holiness.

This is the lesson to be derived from the attempt at n.o.ble self-delusion which Ruskin has practised upon himself. There is not in the world that harmony and perfection, nay, that a.n.a.logy of good to good and evil to evil for which our higher nature seeks. As we have said, there is contradiction and anomaly: anomaly the most horrible, since our logical sense must accept it, and our moral sense cannot: anomaly of good springing from evil, and evil from good, of pollution of the n.o.ble and hallowing of the foul by the force of inevitable sequence. There is also isolation of one sort of good from the other, and clashing of their interests. All this there is, and against it all our moral sense must for ever protest, and against it, whether free in our endeavour or merely pushed on by the universal necessity, we must struggle. We must seek for ever to resolve the discord between good and good, to disentangle the meshes of good and evil, to destroy the dreadful anomaly of things. But we can do so, however partially, we can really wish to do so, only if we have the courage to see that the lamentable discord and the horrible tangle do exist: only if we do not shrink from the battlefield of reality into an enervating Capua of moral idealism. And thus we should admit that only morality is really moral, and only virtue really virtuous; that physical beauty intrinsically possesses but an aesthetic value quite separate from all moral value; that above it must always remain a more generous world of feeling and endeavour. If we do not shrink from this painful truth we shall see that physical beauty and its egotistic enjoyment have yet a moral value of their own: the value of being, in the lives of others, absolute pleasure, the giving of which is positive good. For in this world all is not completed when we have destroyed evil; it must be replaced by good. We must all of us work, but we must work in different ways. One half of us are the destroyers of evil, the wrestlers with all that is wrong in itself or begets wrong, falsehood, injustice, disease, misery; sent to extirpate the bad, laboriously to weed it out blade by blade, or boldly to plough and burn it up by the sheaf, the field, the acre. But when this half of active mankind has done its work, what would remain? A mere joyless desert of painless vacuity; and the other half of the workers must come and sow and plant absolute good, positive joy in this redeemed life soil; nay, even while the work of destruction is far from completed, and most of all, perhaps, then, do we require that in the very shadow of the yet deep-rooted evil, the little tufts of good should rise up, and console and strengthen us with their sight and their scent. And of all these kinds of egotistic good which we must needs sow while evil is being cleared away, art is one of the n.o.blest and most necessary; and woe betide those who, having the power of creating beauty, would leave their allotted work and join the destroyers of falsehood and of evil. The amount of absolute good in the world is comparatively small, and we must seek to increase it for ever; but increased it cannot be except by the full employment of our activities, and our activities can be fully employed only in their own proper sphere. In every artist there is a man, and the moral perfection of the man is more important than the artistic perfection of the artist; but, in as far as the artist is an artist, he must be satisfied to do well in his art. For, though art has no moral meaning, it has a moral value; art is happiness, and to bestow happiness is to create good.

A DIALOGUE ON POETIC MORALITY.

G.o.d sent a poet to reform His earth.--A. MARY F. ROBINSON.

"And meanwhile, what have you written?" asked Baldwin, tickling the flies with his whip from off the horse's head, as they slowly ascended, in the autumn afternoon, the hill of Montetramito, which with its ilex and myrtle-grown black rocks, and its crumbling mounds, where the bright green spruce pine clings to the washed-away scarlet sand, separates the green and fertile plain of Lucca from the marshes of the Pisan sea-sh.o.r.e. The two friends had met only an hour or so before at the foot of the Apennine pa.s.s, and would part in not much more again. "And what have you written?" repeated Baldwin.

"Nothing," answered the younger man, drearily, leaning back languidly in the rickety little carriage. "Nothing, or rather too much; I don't know which. Is trash too much or too little? Anyhow, there's none of it remaining. I thrust all my ma.n.u.scripts into my stove at Dresden, and the chimney took fire in consequence. That's the tragic history of all my poetical labours of the last two years." And Cyril, lying back in the carriage with his arms folded beneath his head, smiled half-sadly, half whimsically in the face of his friend.

But Baldwin did not laugh.

"Cyril," he answered, "do you remember on a birthday of yours--you were a tiny boy, brought up like a girl, with curls and beautiful hands--one of your sisters dared you to throw your presents into the garden well, and you did it, before a number of admiring little girls: you felt quite a hero or a little saint, didn't you? And then my little hero was suddenly collared by a big boy fresh from school, who was his friend Baldwin, and who pulled his ears soundly and told him to respect people's presents a little more. Do you remember that? Well; I now see that, with all your growing up, and writing, and philosophising, and talking about duty and self-sacrifice, you are just the self-same womanish and uncontrolled _poseur_, the same romantic braggadoccio that you were at seven. I have no patience with you!" And Baldwin whisked the whip angrily at the flies.

"Mere conceit: effeminate heroics again!" he went on. "Oh no, we must do the very best! Be Shakespeare at least! Anything short of that would be derogatory to our kingly nature! no idea of selecting the good (because in whatever you do there must be talent), and trying to develop it; no idea of doing the best with what gifts you have! For you are not going to tell me that two years of your work was mere rubbish--contained nothing of value. But, in point of fact, you don't care sufficiently for your art to be satisfied to be the most you can; 'tis mere vanity with you."

Cyril became very red, but did not interrupt.

"I am sorry you think so ill of me," he said sadly, "and I dare say I have given you good cause. I dare say I am all the things you say--vain, and womanish, and insolently dissatisfied with myself, and idiotically heroic. But not in this case, I a.s.sure you. I will explain why I thought it right to do that. You see I know myself very well now. I know my dangers; I am not like you--I am easily swayed. Had those poems remained in existence, had I taken them to England, I am sure I should not have resisted the temptation of showing them to my old encouragers, of publishing them probably; and then, after the success of my other book, and all their grand prophecies, the critics would have had to praise up this one too; and I should have been drifted back again into being a poet. Now, as I wrote you several times--only, of course, you thought it all humbug and affectation--such a poet as I could be I am determined I will not be. It was an act of self-defence--defence of whatever of good there may be in me."

Baldwin groaned. "Defence of fiddlesticks! Defence of your vanity!"

"I don't think so," replied Cyril, "and I don't think you understand me at all in this instance. There was no vanity in this matter. You know that since some time I have been asking myself what moral right a man has to consume his life writing verses, when there is so much evil to remove, and every drop of thought or feeling we have is needed to make the great river which is to wash out this Augean stable of a world. I tried to put the doubt behind me, and to believe in Art for Art's own sake, and such bosh. But the doubt p.r.i.c.ked me. And when suddenly my uncle left me all he had, I felt I must decide. As long as I was a mere penniless creature I might write poetry, because there seemed nothing else for me to do. But now it is different. This money and the power it gives are mine only as long as I live; after my death they may go to some blackguard; so, while I have them, I must give all my energies to doing with them all the good that I possibly can."

"In that case better give them over to people who know best what to do with them--societies or hospitals, or that sort of thing--and write your verses as before. For I don't think your thoughts will add much to the value of your money, Cyril. You've not a bit of practical head. Of course you may, if you choose, look on idly while other people are using your money. But I don't think it is specially worth doing."

Cyril sighed, hesitated, and then burst out rapidly--

"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 Ta.s.so, 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 appet.i.te 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 gra.s.s-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 gra.s.s was under water, brown where it was burned into cinders by the sun; with here and there a patch of shining pond or ca.n.a.l; 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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 gra.s.s on the brow of the hill, overlooking the tangle of olive and vine and fig-trees of the slopes below.

"In Sh.e.l.ley'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 Sh.e.l.ley'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, munic.i.p.al-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 a.s.sured. 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 G.o.ds; 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 pa.s.sive 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 G.o.d. 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 amus.e.m.e.nt. I want you to hear it because it embodies, and very n.o.bly, 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 mult.i.tudes 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:--

"G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion in him cried: 'O G.o.d, your Heaven I know and weary of, Give me this world to work in and make whole.'

G.o.d 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.