Essays in Rebellion Part 21

"I could have painted pictures like that youth's Ye praise so!"

He would have had a painter's fame:

"But a voice changed it. Glimpses of such sights Have scared me, like the revels through a door Of some strange house of idols at its rites!

This world seemed not the world it was, before: Mixed with my loving, trusting ones, there trooped ... Who summoned those cold faces that begun To press on me and judge me? Though I stooped Shrinking, as from the soldiery a nun, They drew me forth, and spite of me ... enough!"

Unhappily, there are few souls so humble, so conventual as that. George Eliot, as Mr. Walkley recalled, was terrified lest ill-judged blame or ill-judged praise should discourage her production; but then she made it a strict rule never to read any criticism, so that, of course, it had no restraining effect upon her. Wordsworth seems to have read his critics, but though they did their utmost to restrain or silence him, he paid no heed. "Too petulant to be pa.s.sive to a genuine poet," he called them:

"Too petulant to be pa.s.sive to a genuine poet, and too feeble to grapple with him;--men of palsied imagination and indurated hearts; in whose minds all healthy action is languid, who therefore feed as the many direct them, or, with the many, are greedy after vicious provocatives;--judges, whose censure is auspicious, and whose praise ominous!"

In them there was no restraining power for such a man, any more than in Christopher North for Tennyson:

"When I heard from whom it came, I forgave you all the blame; I could not forgive the praise, Rusty Christopher!"

On this line, then, there is not much to be hoped from the critics.

Over-sensitive writers are too rare, and the productive impulse of the others is too self-confident for prudence to smother. Obviously, they care no more for the critics than Tom and Sal a century ago cared for Malthus. They disregard them. The most savage criticism only confirms their belief in the beauty and necessity of their progeny, just as a mother always fondles the child that its aunts consider plain. Against such obstinacy, what headway can the critics make? May we not advise them to drop the old method of frontal attack altogether? Let them adopt the methods of these new teachers of Eugenics, whom we have described as insisting on quality. For the teachers of Eugenics, as I understand, do not go about saying, "O parents, what inferior and degenerate children you have! How goose-faced, rabbit-mouthed, lantern-jawed, pot-bellied, spindle-shanked, and splay-footed they are! It was a most anti-social action to produce these puny monstrosities, and when you found yourselves falling in love, you ought to have run to opposite antipodes." That, I believe, is no longer the method of the Eugenic teacher. He now shows beforehand wherein the beauty and excellence of human development may lie. He insists upon quality, he raises a standard, he diffuses an unconscious fastidiousness of selection. He does not prevent Tom and Sal from falling in love, but he makes Tom, and especially Sal, less satisfied with the first that comes, less easily bemused with the tenth-rate rubbish of a man or girl.

By similar methods, it seems to us, the critics might even now relieve humanity from the oncoming host of spirits that threatens to overwhelm us. They find it useless to tell creative writers how hideous and mis-begotten their productions are--how deeply tainted with erotics, neurotics, hysteria, consumption, or fatty degeneration. Either the writers do not listen, or they reply, "Thank you, but neurotics and degeneracy are in the fashion, and we like them." Let the critics change their method by widely extending their action. Let them insist upon quality, and show beforehand what quality means. Let them rise from the position of reviewers, and apply to the general thought of the world that critical power of which Matthew Arnold was thinking when he wrote:

"The best spiritual work of criticism is to keep man from self-satisfaction which is r.e.t.a.r.ding and vulgarising, to lead him towards perfection by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things."

Such criticism, if persisted in by all critics for a generation, would act as so wholesome and tonic a course of Eugenic instruction, would so strongly insist upon quality, and so widely diffuse an unconscious fastidiousness of selection, that the locust cloud of phantoms which now darken the zenith might be dissipated, and again we should behold the sky which is the home of stars. For we may safely suppose that excellence will never be super-abundant, nor quality be found in hordes.

No one can tell how fine, how fit, and few the children of our creative artists might then become. But, as in prophetic vision, we can picture the rarity of their beauty, and when they come knocking at our door, we will share with them the spiritual food that they demand from our brains, and give them a drink of our brief and irrevocable time.

x.x.xII

THE MEDICINE OF THE MIND

There are minds that run to maxims as Messrs. Holloway and Beecham ran to pills. From the fields and mines of experience they cull their secret ingredients, concentrate them in the alembic of wit, mould them into compact and serviceable form, and put them upon the market of publicity for the universal benefit of mankind. Such essence of wisdom will surely cure all ills; such maxims must be worth a guinea a box. When the wise and the worldly have condensed their knowledge and observation into portable shape, why go further and pay more for a medicine of the soul, or, indeed, for the soul's sustenance? Pills, did we say? Are there not tabloids that supply the body with oxygen, hydrogen, calorics, or whatever else is essential to life in the common hundredweights and gallons of bread, meat, and drink? Why not feed our souls on maxims, like those who spread the board for courses of a bovril lozenge apiece, two grains of phosphorus, three of nitrogen, one of saccharine, a dewdrop of alcohol, and half a scruple of caffeine to conclude?

It is a stimulating thought, encouraging to economy of time and s.p.a.ce.

We read to acquire wisdom, and no one grudges zeal in that pursuit. But still, the time spent upon it, especially in our own country, is what old journalists used to call "positively appalling," and in some books, perhaps, we may draw blank. Read only maxims, and in the twinkling of an eye you catch the thing that you pursue. It is not "Wisdom while you wait"; there is no waiting at all. It is a "lightning lunch," a "kill"

without the risk and fatigue of hunting. The find and the death are simultaneous. And as to s.p.a.ce, a poacher's pocket will hold your library; where now the sewers of Bloomsbury crack beneath the acc.u.mulating ma.s.ses of superfluous print, one single shelf will contain all that man needs to know; and Mr. Carnegie's occupation will be gone.

For these reasons, one heartily welcomes Messrs. Methuen's re-issue of an old and excellent translation of Rochefoucauld's _Maxims_, edited by Mr. George Powell. The book is a little large for tabloids. It runs to nearly two hundred pages, and it might have been more conveniently divided by ten or even by a hundred. But still, as Rochefoucauld is the very medicine-man of maxims, we will leave it at that. He united every quality of the moral and intellectual pill-doctor. He lived in an artificial and highly intellectualised society. He was a contemporary and friend of great wits. He haunted salons, and was graciously received by perceptive ladies, who never made a boredom of virtue. He mingled in a chaos of political intrigue, and was involved in burlesque rebellion.

He was intimate with something below the face-value of public men, and he used the language that Providence made for maxims. But, above all, he had the acid or tang of poison needed to make the true, the medicinal maxim. His present editor compares him with Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Bacon--great names, but gnomic philosophers rather than authors of maxims proper. Nor were the splendid figures of the eighteenth century, who wrote so eloquently about love, virtue, and humanity, real inventors of maxims. Their sugar-coating was spread too thick. Often their teaching was sugar to the core--a sweetmeat, not a pill; or, like the fraudulent patents in the trade, it revealed soft soap within the covering, and nothing more. George Meredith had a natural love of maxims, and an instinct for them. One remembers the "Pilgrim's Scrip" in _Richard Feverel_, and the Old Buccaneer in _The Amazing Marriage_. But usually his maxims want the bitter tang:

"Who rises from Prayer a better man, his Prayer is answered."

"For this reason so many fall from G.o.d, who have attained to Him; that they cling to Him with their weakness, not with their strength."

"No regrets; they unman the heart we want for to-morrow."

"My foe can spoil my face; he beats me if he spoils my temper."

One sees at once that these are not medicinal maxims, but excellent advice--concentrated sermons, after our English manner. "Friends may laugh: I am not roused. My enemy's laugh is a bugle blown in the night"--that has a keener flavour. So has "Never forgive an injury without a return blow for it." Among the living, Mr. Bernard Shaw is sometimes infected by an English habit of sermonising. "Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good," is a sermon. But he has the inborn love of maxims, all the same, and, though they are too often as long as a book, or even as a preface, his maxims sometimes have the genuine medicinal taste. These from _The Revolutionist's Handbook_, for instance, are true maxims:

"Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation."

"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."

"Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity."

"When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater."

"Home is the girl's prison, and the woman's workhouse."

"Decency is Indecency's Conspiracy of Silence."

But among the masters of the maxim, I suppose no one has come so near as Chamfort to the Master himself. There is a difference. If Chamfort brings rather less strength and bitterness to his dose, he presents it with a certain grace, a sense of mortal things, and a kind of pity mingled with his contempt that Rochefoucauld would have despised:

"Il est malheureux pour les hommes que les pauvres n'aient pas l'instinct ou la fierte de l'elephant, qui ne se reproduit pas dans la servitude."

"Otez l'amour-propre de l'amour, il en reste tres peu de chose."

"Il n'y a que l'inutilite du premier deluge qui empeche Dieu d'en envoyer un second."

"L'homme arrive novice a chaque age de la vie."

"Sans le gouvernement on ne rirait plus en France."

With a difference, these come very near Rochefoucauld's own. "Take self-love from love, and little remains," might be an extract from that Doomsday Book of Egoism in which Rochefoucauld was so deeply read.

"Self-love is the Love of a man's own Self, and of everything else, for his own Sake": so begins his terrible a.n.a.lysis of human motives, and no man escapes from a perusal of it without recognition of himself, just as there is no escape from Meredith's Egoist. All of us move darkly in that awful abyss of Self, and as the fourth Maxim says, "When a Man hath travelled never so far, and discovered never so much in the world of Self-love, yet still the Terra Incognita will take up a considerable part of the Map." On the belief that self-love prompts and pervades all actions, the greater part of the maxims are founded. The most famous of them all is the saying that "Hypocrisy is a sort of Homage which Vice pays to Virtue," but there are others that fly from mouth to mouth, and treat more definitely of self-love. "The reason why Ladies and their Lovers are at ease in one another's company, is because they never talk of anything but themselves"; or "There is something not unpleasing to us in the misfortunes of our best friends." These are, perhaps, the three most famous, though we doubt whether the last of them has enough truth in it for a first-rate maxim. Might one not rather say that the perpetual misfortunes of our friends are the chief plague of existence?

Goethe came nearer the truth when he wrote: "I am happy enough for myself. Joy comes streaming in upon me from every side. Only, for others, I am not happy." But Rochefoucauld had to play the cynic, and a dash of cynicism adds a fine ingredient to a maxim.

Nevertheless, after reading this book of _Maxims_ through again, all the seven hundred and more (a hideous task, almost as bad as reading a whole volume of _Punch_ on end), I incline to think Rochefoucauld's reputation for cynicism much exaggerated. It may be that the world grows more cynical with age, unlike a man, whose cynical period ends with youth. At all events, in the last twenty years we have had half a dozen writers who, as far as cynicism goes, could give Rochefoucauld fifty maxims in a hundred. In all artificial and inactive times and places, as in Rochefoucauld's France, Queen Anne's England, the London of the end of last century, and our Universities always, epigram and a dandy cynicism are sure to flourish until they often sicken us with the name of literature. But in Rochefoucauld we perceive glimpses of something far deeper than the cynicism that makes his reputation. It is not to a cynic, or to the middle of the seventeenth century in France, that we should look for such sayings as these:

"A Man at some times differs as much from himself as he does from other People."

"Eloquence is as much seen in the Tone and Cadence of the Eyes, and the Air of the Face, as in the Choice of proper Expressions."

"When we commend good Actions heartily, we make them in some measure our own."

Such sayings lie beyond the probe of the cynic, or the wit of the literary man. They spring from sympathetic observation and a quietly serious mind. And there is something equally fresh and unexpected in some of the sayings upon pa.s.sion:

"The Pa.s.sions are the only Orators that are always successful in persuading."

"It is not in the Power of any the most crafty Dissimulation to conceal Love long where it really is, nor to counterfeit it long where it is not."

"Love pure and untainted with any other Pa.s.sions (if such a Thing there be) lies hidden in the Bottom of our Heart, so exceedingly close that we scarcely know it ourselves."

"The more pa.s.sionately a Man loves his Mistress, the readier he is to hate her." (Compare Catullus's "Odi et amo.")

"The same Resolution which helps to resist Love, helps to make it more violent and lasting too. People of unsettled Minds are always driven about with Pa.s.sions, but never absolutely filled with any."