Visions and Revisions Part 11

It now only remains for us to return to the familiar human Stage; to the "Gala-Night, within the lonesome latter years," and be gay, and "hard," and "superficial"!

That ice-bound Promontory into the Truth of Things has only known one Explorer whose "Eloi, Eloi Lama Sabachthani" was not the death-cry of his Pity. And that Explorer--did we only dream of his Return?

THOMAS HARDY

With a name suggestive of the purest English origin, Mr. Hardy has become identified with that portion of England where the various race-deposits in our national "strata" are most dear and defined. In Wess.e.x, the traditions of Saxon and Celt, Norman and Dane, Roman and Iberian, have grown side by side into the soil, and all the villages and towns, all the hills and streams, of this country have preserved the rumour of what they have seen.

In Celtic legend the country of the West Saxons is marvellously rich.

Camelot and the Island of Avalon greet one another across the Somersetshire vale. And Dorsetshire, Hardy's immediate home, adds the Roman traditions of Casterbridge to tragic memories of King Lear. Tribe by tribe, race by race, as they come and go, leaving their monuments and their names behind, Mr. Hardy broods over them, noting their survivals, their lingering footprints, their long decline.

In his well-loved Dorchester we find him pondering, like one of his own spirits of Pity and Irony, while the moonlight shines on the haunted amphitheatre where the Romans held their games. He devotes much care to noting all those little "omens by the way" that make a journey along the great highways of Wess.e.x so full of imaginative suggestion.

It is the history of the human race itself that holds him with a mesmeric spell, as century after century it unrolls its acts and scenes, under the indifferent stars. The continuity of life! The long, piteous "ascent of man," from those queer fossils in the Portland Quarries--to what we see today, so palpable, so real! And yet for all his tragic pity, Mr. Hardy is a sly and whimsical chronicler. He does not allow one point of the little jest the G.o.ds play on us--the little long-drawn-out jest--to lose its sting. With something of a goblin-like alertness he skips here and there, watching those strange scene shifters at their work. The dual stops of Mr. Hardy's country pipe are cut from the same reed. With the one he challenges the Immortals on behalf of humanity; with the other he plays such a shrewd Priapian tune that all the Satyrs dance.

I sometimes think that only those born and bred in the country can do justice to this great writer. That dual pipe of his is bewildering to city people. They over emphasize the "magnanimity" of his art, or they over emphasize its "miching-mallecho." They do not catch the secret of that mingled strain. The same type of cultured "foreigner"

is puzzled by Mr. Hardy's self-possession. He ought to commit himself more completely, or he ought not to have committed himself at all! There is something that looks to them--so they are tempted to express it--like the cloven hoof of a most Satyrish cunning, about his att.i.tude to certain things. That little caustic by-play, for instance, with which he girds at the established order, never denouncing it wholesale like Sh.e.l.ley, or accepting it wholesale like Wordsworth--and always with a tang, a dash of gall and wormwood, an impish malice.

The truth is, there are two spirits in Mr. Hardy, one infinitely sorrowful and tender, the other whimsical, elfish and malign.

The first spirit rises up in stern Promethean revolt against the decrees of Fate. The second spirit deliberately allies itself in wanton, bitter glee, with the humorous provocation of humanity, by the cruel Powers of the Air. The psychology of all this is not hard to unravel.

The same abnormal sensitiveness that makes him pity the victims of destiny makes him also not unaware of what may be sweet to the palate of the G.o.ds in such "merry jests." These two tendencies seem to have grown upon him as years went on and to have become more and more p.r.o.nounced. Often, with artists, the reverse thing happens.

Every human being has his own secretive reaction, his own furtive recoil, from the queer trap we are all in,--his little private method of retaliation. But many writers are most unscrupulously themselves when they are young. The changes and chances of this mortal life mellow them into a more neutral tint. Their revenge upon life grows less personal and more objective as they get older. They become balanced and resigned. They attain "the wisdom of Sophocles."

The opposite of this has been the history of Mr. Hardy's progression.

He began with quite harmless rustic realism, fanciful and quaint.

Then came his masterpieces wherein the power and grandeur of a great artist's inspiration fused everything into harmony. At the last, in his third period, we have the exaggeration of all that is most personal in his emotion intensified to the extreme limit.

It is absurd to turn away from these books, books like Jude the Obscure and the Well-Beloved. If Mr. Hardy had not had such sardonic emotions, such desire to "hit back" at the great "opposeless wills," and such Goblin-like glee at the tricks they play us, he would never have been able to write "Tess." Against the ways of G.o.d to this sweet girl he raises a hand of terrible revolt, but it is with more than human "pity" that he lays her down on the Altar of Sacrifice.

But, after all, it is in the supreme pa.s.sages of pure imaginative grandeur that Mr. Hardy is greatest. Here he is "with Shakespeare"

and we forget both t.i.tan and Goblin. How hard it is exactly to put into words what this "imaginative grandeur" consists of! It is, at any rate, an intensification of our general consciousness of the Life-Drama as a whole, but this, under a poetic, rather than a scientific, light, and yet with the scientific facts,--they also not without their dramatic significance--indicated and allowed for. It is a clarifying of our mental vision and a heightening of our sensual apprehension. It is a certain withdrawing from the mere personal pull of our own fate into a more rarified air, where the tragic beauty of life falls into perspective, and, beholding the world in a clear mirror, we escape for a moment from "the will to live."

At such times it is as though, "taken up upon a high mountain, we see, without desire and without despair, the kingdoms of the world and the glories of them." Then it is that we feel the very wind of the earth's revolution, and the circling hours touch us with a palpable hand.

And the turmoil of the world grown so distant, it is then that we feel at once the greatness of humanity and the littleness of what it strives for. We are seized with a shuddering tenderness for Man. This bewildered animal--wrestling in darkness with he knows not what.

And gazing long and long into this mirror, the poignancy of what we behold is strangely softened. After all, it is something, whatever becomes of us, to have been conscious of all this. It is something to have out.w.a.tched Arcturus, and felt "the sweet influences" of the Pleiades. Congruous with such a mood is the manner in which, while Mr. Hardy opposes himself to Christianity, he cannot forget it.

He cannot "cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart." It troubles and vexes him. It haunts him.

And his work both gains and suffers. He flings gibe after gibe at "G.o.d," but across his anger falls the shadow of the Cross. How should it not be so? "All may be permitted," but one must not add a feather's weight to the wheel that breaks our "little ones."

It is this that separates Mr. Hardy's work from so much modern fiction that is clever and "philosophical" but does not satisfy one's imagination. All things with Mr. Hardy--even the facts of geology and chemistry--are treated with that imaginative clairvoyance that gives them their place in the human comedy. And is not Christianity itself one of these facts? How amazing that such a thing should have appeared at all upon the earth! When one reads Meredith, with his brilliant intellectual cleverness, one finds Christianity "taken for granted," and dismissed as hardly relevant to modern topics.

But Mr. Hardy is too pagan, in the true sense, too fascinated by the poetry of life and the essential ritual of life, to dismiss any great religion in this way. The thing is always with him, just as the Gothic Tower of St. Peter's Church in Casterbridge is always with him. He may burst into impish fury with its doctrines, but, like one of those queer demons who peep out from such consecrated places, yet never leave them, his imagination requires that atmosphere. For the same reason, in spite of his intellectual realization of the mechanical processes of Fate, their engine-like dumbness and blindness, he is always being driven to _personify_ these ultimate powers; to personify them, or _it,_ as something that takes infernal satisfaction in fooling its luckless creations; in provoking them and scourging them to madness.

Mr. Hardy's ultimate thought is that the universe is blind and unconscious; that it knows not what it does. But, standing among the graves of those Wess.e.x churchyards, or watching the twisted threads of perverse destiny that plague those hapless hearts under a thousand village roofs, it is impossible for him not to long to "strike back" at this d.a.m.ned System of Things that alone is responsible. And how can one "strike back" unless one converts unconscious machinery into a wanton Providence? Where Mr. Hardy is so incomparably greater than Meredith and all his modern followers is that in these Wess.e.x novels there is none of that intolerable "ethical discussion"

which obscures "the old essential candours" of the human situation.

The reaction of men and women upon one another, in the presence of the solemn and the mocking elements; this will outlast all social readjustments and all ethical reforms.

While the sun shines and the moon draws the tides, men and women will ache from jealousy, and the lover will not be the beloved! Long after a quite new set of "interesting modern ideas" have replaced the present, children will break the hearts of their parents, and parents will break the hearts of their children. Mr. Hardy is indignant enough over the ridiculous conventions of Society, but he knows that, at the bottom, what we suffer from is "the dust out of which we are made;" the eternal illusion and disillusion which must drive us on and "take us off" until the planet's last hour.

Mr. Hardy's style, at its best, has an imaginative suggestiveness which approaches, though it may not quite reach, the indescribable touch of the Shakespearean tragedies. There is also a quality in it peculiar to himself--threatening and silencing; a thunderous suppression, a formidable reserve, an iron tenacity. Sometimes, again, one is reminded of the ancient Roman poets, and not unfrequently, too, of the rhythmic incantations of Sir Thomas Browne, that majestic and perverted Latinist.

The description, for instance, of Egdon Heath, at the beginning of the Return of the Native, has a dusky architectural grandeur that is like the Portico of an Egyptian Temple. The same thing may be noted of that sudden apparition of Stonehenge, as Tess and Angel stumble upon it in their flight through the darkness.

One thinks of the words of William Blake: "He who does not love Form more than Colour is a coward." For it is, above all, Form that appeals to Mr. Hardy. The iron plough of his implacable style drives pitilessly through the soft flesh of the earth until it reaches the architectural sub-structure. Whoever tries to visualize any scene out of the Wess.e.x Novels will be forced to see the figures of the persons concerned "silhouetted" against a formidable skyline. One sees them, these poor impa.s.sioned ones, moving in tragic procession along the edge of the world, and, when the procession is over, darkness re-establishes itself. The quality that makes Mr. Hardy's manner such a refuge from the levities and gravities of the "reforming writers" is a quality that springs from the soil. The soil has a gift of "proportion"

like nothing else. Things fall into due perspective on Egdon Heath, and among the water-meadows of Blackmoor life is felt as the tribes of men have felt it since the beginning.

The modern tendency is to mock at s.e.xual pa.s.sion and grow grave over social and artistic problems. Mr. Hardy eliminates social and artistic problems and "takes nothing seriously"--not even "G.o.d"--except the love and the hate of men and women, and the natural elements that are their accomplices. It is for this lack in them, this uneasy levity over the one thing that really counts, that it is so hard to read many humorous and arresting modern writers, except in railway trains and cafes. They have thought it clever to dispossess the pa.s.sion of our poor heart of its essential poetry. They have not understood that man would sooner suffer the bitterness of death than be deprived of his _right_ to suffer the bitterness of love.

It must be, I suppose, that these flippant triflers are so optimistic about their reforms and their ethical ideals and their sanitary projects that to them such things as how the sun rises over Shaston and sinks over Budmouth; such things as what Eustacia felt when she walked, "talking to herself," across the blasted heath; such things as the mood of Henchard when he cursed the day of his birth, are mere accidents and irrelevancies, by no means germane to the matter.

Well, perhaps they are wise to be so hopeful. But for the rest of us, for whom the world does not seem likely to "improve" so fast, it is an unspeakable relief that there should be at least one writer left interested in the things that interested Sophocles and Shakespeare, and possessed of a style that does not, remembering the work of such hands, put our generation altogether to shame.

WALTER PATER

What are the qualities that make this shy and furtive Recluse, this Wanderer in the shadow, the greatest of critics? Imagination, in the first place, and then that rare, unusual, divine gift of limitless Reverence for the Human Senses. Imagination has a two-fold power.

It visualizes and it creates. With clairvoyant ubiquity it floats and flows into the most recondite recesses, the most reluctant sanctuaries, of other men's souls. With clear-cut, architectural volition it builds up its own Byzantium, out of the quarried debris of all the centuries.

One loves to think of Pater leaving that Olney country, where he "hated" to hear anything more about "the Poet Cowper," and nursing his weird boy-fancies in the security of the Canterbury cloisters. The most pa.s.sionate and dedicated spirit he--to sulk, and dream, and hide, and love, and "watch the others playing," in that quiet retreat--since the great soul of Christopher Marlowe flamed up there into consciousness!

And then Oxford. And it is meet and right, at such a point as this, to lay our offering, modest, secret, shy--a shadow, a nothing--at the feet of this gracious Alma Mater; "who needs not June for Beauty's heightening!" One revolts against her sometimes. The charm is too exclusive, too withdrawn. And something--what shall I say?--of ironic, supercilious disillusion makes her forehead weary, and her eyelids heavy. But after all, to what exquisite children, like rare, exotic flowers, she has the power to give birth! But did you know, you for whom the syllables "Oxford" are an Incantation, that to the yet more subtle, yet more withdrawn, and yet more elaborate soul of Walter Pater, Oxford Herself appeared, as time went on, a little vulgar and silly?

Indeed, he fled from her, and took refuge-sometimes with his sisters, for, like Charles Lamb, Pater was "Conventual" in his taste--and sometimes with the "original" of Marius the Epicurean. But what matter where he fled--he who always followed the "shady side" of the road? He has not only managed to escape, himself, with all his "Boxes of Alabaster," into the sanctuary of the Ivory Tower, that even Oxford cannot reach, but he has carried us thither with him.

And there, from the opal-clouded windows of that high place, he shows us still the secret kingdoms of art and philosophy and life, and the remotest glories of them. We see them all--from those windows--a little lovelier, a little rarer, a little more "selective,"

than, perchance, they really are. But what matter? What does one expect when one looks through opal-clouded windows? And, after all, those are the kinds of windows from which it is best to look at the dazzling limbs of the immortal G.o.ds!

Not but what, sometimes, he permits us to throw those "magic cas.e.m.e.nts" wide open. And then, in how lucid an air, in how clean and fresh a morning of reality, those pure forms and G.o.dlike figures stand out, their naked feet in the cold, clear dew!

For one must note two things about Walter Pater. He is able to throw the glimmering mantle of his own elaborate _sophistry of the senses_ over comparatively fleeting, unarresting objects. And he is able to compel us to follow, line by line, curve by curve, contour by contour, the very palpable body and presence of the Beauty that pa.s.seth not away.

In plainer words, he is a great and exact scholar--laborious, patient, indefatigable, reserved; and, at the same time, a Protean Wizard, breathing forbidden life into the Tyrian-stained writhings of many an enchanted Lamia! At a thousand points he is the only modern literary figure who draws us towards him with the old Leonardian, Goethean spell. For, like Goethe and Da Vinci, he is never far from those eternal "Partings of the Ways." which alone make life interesting.

He is, for instance, more profoundly drenched, dyed, and endued in "Christian Mythology" than any mortal writer, short of the Saints themselves. He is more native to the pure h.e.l.lenic air than any since Walter Savage Landor. And he is more subtle, in his understanding of "German Philosophy" as opposed to "Celtic Romance," than all--outside the most inner circles--since Hegel--or Heine! The greedy, capricious "Uranian Babyishness" of his pupil Oscar, with its peevish clutching at all soft and provocative and glimmering things, is mere child's play, compared with the deep, dark Vampirism with which this furtive Hermit drains the scarlet blood of the Vestals of every Sanctuary.

How little the conventional critics have understood this master of their own craft! What hopeless people have "rushed in" to interpret this super-subtle Interpreter! Mr. Gosse has, however, done one thing for us. Somewhere, somehow, he once drew a picture of Walter Pater "gambolling," in the moonlight, on the velvet lawn of his own secluded Oxford garden, like a satin-pawed Wombat! I always think of that picture. It is a pleasanter one than that of Mark Pattison, running round his Gooseberry bushes, after great screaming girls. But they are both touching sketches, and, no doubt, very indicative of Life beneath the shadow of the Bodleian.

Why have the professional philosophers--ever since that Master of Baliol who used to spend his time boring holes in the Ship that carried him--"fought shy" of Pater's Philosophy? For a sufficient reason! Because, like Protagoras the Sophist, and like Aristippus the Cyrenean, he has undermined Metaphysic, _by means of Metaphysic._

For Walter Pater--is that clearly understood?--was an adept, long before Nietzsche's campaign began, at showing the human desire, the human craving, the human ferocity, the human spite, hidden behind the mask of "Pure Reason."

He treats every great System of Metaphysic as a great work of Art--with a very human, often a too human, artizan behind it--a work of Art which we have a perfect right to appropriate, to enjoy, to look at the world through, and then _to pa.s.s on!_

Every Philosophy has its "secret," according to Pater, its "formula,"