Visions and Revisions Part 7

Where is that girl now, I wonder? Is she alive? Will she ever blush with anger at being thus gently lifted up, from beneath the kind Somersetshire mists, into an hour's publicity? Who can tell? We are all pa.s.sing one another, in mist-darkened barges, swift or slow. She is a wraith, a shadow, a receding phantom; but I wave my hand to her over the years! I shall always a.s.sociate her with Lotte; and I never smell the peculiar smell of Tarpaulin without thinking of "the Sorrows of Werter."

"Werter" has certainly the very droop and bewilderment of youth's first pa.s.sion. It is good to plunge one's hands, when one has grown cynical and old, into that innocent, if somewhat turbid, fountain.

When we pa.s.s to "Wilhelm Meister," we are in quite a different world. The earlier part of this book has the very stamp of the Goethean "truth and poetry." One can read it side by side with the great "Autobiography" and find the shrewd insight and oracular wisdom quite equally convincing in the invention and the reality.

What an unmistakable and unique character all these imaginary persons of Goethe's stories have! They are so different from any other persons in fiction! Wherein does the difference lie? It is hard to say. In a sense, they are more life-like and real. In another sense, they are more fantastic. Sometimes they seem mere dolls--like the figures in his own puppet-show--and we can literally "see the puppets dallying."

Jarno is a queer companion for a man to have. And what of the lady who, when she was asked whether she had ever loved, answered, "never or always"? Phillina is a very loving and an extremely vivacious wench. Goethe's sublime unconsciousness of ordinary moral qualms is never better observed than in the story of this extravagant young minx. Then, in the midst of it all, the arresting, ambiguous little figure of poor Mignon! What does she do--a child of pure lyrical poetry--a thing out of the old ballads--in this queer, grave, indecent company? That elaborate description of Mignon's funeral so carefully arranged by the Aesthetic "Uncle," has it not all the curious qualities of the Goethean vein--its clairvoyant insight into the under-truth of Nature--its cold-blooded pre-occupation with "Art"--its gentle irony--its mania for exact detail? The "gentle irony"

of which I speak has its opportunity in the account of the "Beautiful Soul" or "Fair Saint." It reads, in places, like the tender dissection of a lovely corpse by a genial, elderly Doctor.

But the pa.s.sage which, for me, is most precious is that Apprentice's "Indenture." I suppose in no other single paragraph of human prose is there so much concentrated wisdom. "To act is easy--to think is hard!" How extraordinarily true that is! But it is not the precise tune of the strenuous preachers of our time! The whole idea of the "Pedagogic Province," ruled over by that admirable Abbe, is so exquisitely in Goethe's most wise and yet most simple manner! The pa.s.sage about the "Three Reverences" and the "Creed" is as good an instance of that sublime Spinozistic way of dealing with the current religion as that amazing remark he made once to Eckerman about his own faith: "When I want scientific unity, I am a Pantheist. When I desire poetical multifariousness, I am a Polytheist. And when my moral nature requires a Personal G.o.d--_there is room for That also?"_

When one comes to speak of Faust, it is necessary for us to remember the words the great man himself used to his follower in speaking of this masterpiece. Eckermann teased him for interpretations. "What," said he to Goethe, "is the leading Idea in the Poem?" "Do you suppose," answered the Sage, "that a thing into which I have put the Life-Blood of all my days is able to be summoned up in anything so narrow and limited as an Idea?"

Personally, I do not hesitate to say that I think Faust is the most permanently _interesting_ of all the works that have proceeded from the human brain.

Its att.i.tude to life is one which ultimately has more to strengthen and sustain and put courage--if not the Devil--into us than anything I know. When I meet a man who shall tell me that the Philosophy of his life is the Philosophy of Faust, I bow down humbly before him. I did meet such a man once. I think he was a Commercial Traveller from Buffalo.

How wisely Goethe deals in Faust with the problem--if it be a problem--of Evil! His suggestion seems to be that the spirit of Evil in the world--"part of that Nothing out of which came the All"--plays an absolutely essential role. "By means of it G.o.d fulfils his most cherished purposes." Had Faust not seduced poor little Gretchen, he would never have pa.s.sed as far as he did along the road of Initiation, and the spirit of his Victim--in her translunar Apotheosis--would not have been _there_ to lift him Heavenwards at the last. And yet no one could say that Goethe disparages the enormity of Faust's crime. That ineffable retort of Mephistopheles, when, on those "black horses," they are whirled through the night to her dungeon, "She is not the first," has the essence of all pity and wrath in its cruel sting. Mephistopheles himself is the most interesting of all Devils. And he is so because, although he knows perfectly well--queer Son of Chaos as he is--that he is bound to be defeated, he yet goes on upon his evil way, and continues to resist the great stream of Life which, according to his view, had better never have broken loose from primeval Nothingness.

That is ultimately Goethe's contribution to the disputes about what we call "G.o.d." The name does not matter. "Feeling is all in all. The name is sound and smoke." "G.o.d," or "the Good," is to Goethe simply the eternal stream of life, working slowly upwards, onwards, to unknown goals. All that opposes itself to this Life-stream is evil.

Morality, a man-made local convention, is our present blundering method of a.s.sisting this great Force, and preventing its sterility, or dissipation. In his conception of the nature of this Life-stream Goethe is more Catholic and more subtle than Nietzsche.

_Self-realization?_ Certainly! That is an aspect of it which was not likely to be forgotten by the great Egoist whose sole object, as he confessed, was to "build up the Pyramid of his Existence" from the broadest possible base. But not only self-realization. The "dying to live" of the Christian, as well as "the rising above one's body" of the Platonist, have their part there. Ascetism itself, with all its degrees of pa.s.sionate or philosophical purity, is as much an evocation of the world-spirit--of the essential nature of the System of Things--as is the other.

It is, of course, ultimately, quite a mad hope to desire to _convert_ "the Spirit that Denies." He, too, under the Lord, is an accomplice of the Life-stream. He helps it forward, even while he opposes himself to it, just as a bulwark of submerged rocks make the tide leap landward with more foaming fury!

Goethe's idea of the "Eternal Feminine" leading us "upward and on"

is not at all the sentimental nonsense which Nietzsche fancied it. In a profound sense it is absolutely true. Nor need the more anti-feminist among us be troubled by such a Truth. We have just seen that the Devil himself is a means, and a very essential means, for leading us "upward and on."

Goethe is perfectly right. The "love of women," though a destructive force, and a frightful force as far as certain kinds of "art" and "philosophy" are concerned, cannot be looked upon as anything but "a provocation to creation," when the whole large scheme of existence is taken into account.

I think myself that it is easy to make too much of Goethe's Pantheism. The Being he worshipped was simply "Whatever Mystery" lies behind the ocean of Life. And if no "mystery" lies behind the ocean of life,--very well! A Goethean disciple is able, then, to worship Life, with no mystery behind it! It is rather the custom among clever, tiresome people to disparage that _second part of Faust,_ with its world-panoramic procession of all the G.o.ds and demi-G.o.ds and angels and demons that have ever visited this earth. I do not disparage it. I have never found it dull. Dull would he be, as "the fat weed that rots itself in case on Lethe's wharf," who found nothing curious and provocative about these Sirens and Centaurs and Lemures and Larvae and Cabiri and Phorkyads! I can myself endure very pleasantly even the society of those "Blessed Boys" which some have found so distressing. As for the Devil, in the end, making "indecent overtures" to the little Heavenly b.u.t.terflies, who pelt him with roses--even that does not confuse my mind or distract my senses. It is the "other side of the Moon"--the under-mask of the world-comedy, and the incidental "saving" of Dr.

Faust is not more essential in the great mad game!

Read Faust, both portions of it, dear reader, and see if you do not feel, with me, that, in the last resort, one leaves this rich, strange poem with a n.o.bler courage to endure life, and a larger view of its amazing possibilities!

I wonder if that curious novel of Goethe's called the "Elective Affinities" is perused as widely as it deserves? That extraordinary company of people! And the patient, portentious interest Goethe compels us to take in the laying out of gardens and the beautifying of church-yards! "The Captain," "the Architect"--not to speak of the two bewildering women--do they not suggest fantastic figures out of one's memories of remotest childhood? I suppose to a world-child like Goethe, watching, with grave super-human interest, all our little pre-occupations, we have all of us something of the sweet pedantry of these people--we are all of us "Captains" and "Architects" with some odd twist in our quiet heads.

The solemn immorality, amounting to outrageous indecency, of those scenes between the a.s.sorted lovers when they make "double"

love, and behind the mask of their legitimate attachments follow their "elective affinities," is a thing that may well stagger the puritan reader. The puritan reader will, indeed, like old Carlyle, be tempted more than once to fling these grave, unblushing chronicles, with their deep, oracular wisdom and their shameless details, into the dust-heap. But it were wiser to refrain. After all, one cannot conceal from one's self that things are _like that_--and if the hyaena's howl, from the filthy marshes of earth's weird edge and the thick saliva on his oozing jaws, nauseates our preciosity, and besmirches our self-esteem, we must remember that this is the way the Lord of "the Prologue in Heaven" has willed that the scavengers of life's cesspools go about their work!

Probably it will not be the "indecency" of certain things in Goethe that will most offend our modern taste; it will be that curious, grave pre-occupation of his, so objective and stiff, with artistic details, and architectural details, and theatrical details!

One must remember his n.o.ble saying, "Earnestness alone makes life Eternity" and that other "saying" about Art having, as its main purpose, the turning of the "Transitory" into the "Permanent"! If the Transitory is really to be turned into the Permanent, we must take ourselves and our work very seriously indeed!

And such "seriousness," such high, patient, unwearied seriousness, is, after all, Goethe's bequest to our flippant and fanciful generation.

He knows well enough our deepest doubt, our most harrowing scepticism. He has long ago "been through all that." But he has "returned"--not exactly like Nietzsche, with a fierce, scornful, dramatic cry, to a contemptuous "superficiality"--he has returned to the actual possibilities that the world offers, "superficial" and otherwise, of turning the whole strange business into a solid, four-square "work of art." We must reject "evil," quietly and ironically; not because it is condemned by human morality, but because "we have our work to do"! We must live in "the good" and "the true," not because it is our "duty" so to do, but because only along this particular line does the "energy without agitation" of the "abysmal mothers" communicate itself to our labour.

And so we come back, like the grief-stricken children over Mignon's grave, to Life and Life's toil. There only, in the inflexible development of what taste, of what discernment, of what power, of what method, of what demonic genius, we may have been granted by the G.o.ds, lies "the cosmic secret." That is all we have in our human hands, that malleable stuff out of which Fate made us--and only in the shrewd, unwearied use of that shall we prove our love to the Being "who cannot love us in return" and make our illusion of Free-Will part of his universal Purpose!

MATTHEW ARNOLD

It is easy to miss the especial grandeur of Matthew Arnold's work.

The airy persiflage of his prose--its reiterated lucidities--pleasing to some, irritating to others, will have a place, but not a very important place, in English Literature. Even those magical and penetrating "aphorisms" with which he has held the door open to so many religious and moral vistas tease us a little now, and--suggestive enough in their hour--do not deepen and deepen upon the intellect with the weight of "aphorisms" from Epictetus or Goethe.

The "stream of tendency that makes for righteousness" runs a little shallow, and it has so many pebbles under its clear wave! That word of his, "the Secret of Jesus," wears best of all. It was a happy thought to use the word "secret"--a thought upon which those whose religious creed binds them to "the method" rather than "the secret,"

may well ponder!

As a critic, too, though illuminating and rea.s.suring, he is far from clairvoyant. A quaint vein of pure, good-tempered, ethical _Philistinism_ prevents his really entering the evasive souls of Sh.e.l.ley or Keats or Heine. With Wordsworth or Byron he is more at home. But he misses many subtleties, even in their simple temperaments. He is no Proteus, no Wizard of critical metempsychosis. For all his airy wit, he is "a plain, blunt man, who loves his friend." In fact, when one compares him, as a sheer illuminator of psychological twilights, to Walter Pater, one realizes at once how easily a quite great man may "render himself stupid" by sprinkling himself with the holy water of Fixed Principles!

No, it is neither of Arnold, the Theological Free-Lance, or of Arnold, the Critic of Literature, that I want to speak, but of Arnold, the Poet.

Personally I hold the opinion that he was a greater poet than either Tennyson or Browning. His philosophy is a far n.o.bler, truer, and more permanent thing than theirs, and there are pa.s.sages and single lines in his poetry which over-top, by enormous distances, anything that they achieved.

You ask me what the Philosophy of Matthew Arnold was? It is easy to answer that. It was the philosophy of all the very greatest among mortal men! In his poetry he pa.s.ses completely out of the region of Theological argument, and his att.i.tude to life is the att.i.tude of Sophocles and Virgil and Montaigne and Cervantes and Shakespeare and Goethe. Those who read Matthew Arnold, and love him, know that his intellectual tone is the tone of those great cla.s.sical writers, and his conclusions their conclusions.

He never mocks our pain with foolish, unfounded hopes and he never permits mad despair to paralyse him. He takes life as it is, and, as we all have to do, makes the best of its confusions. If we are here "as on a darkling plain, swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night," we can at least be "true to one another."

One wonders sometimes if it be properly understood by energetic teachers of youth that there is only one intellectual att.i.tude towards life, only one philosophy, only one ultimate mood. This is that mood of "resignation," which, from Homer to Matthew Arnold, is alone adapted, in the long run, to the taste of our days upon earth.

The real elements of our situation have not altered in the remotest degree since Achilles dragged Hector round the walls of Troy.

Men and women still love and hate; still "enjoy the sun" and "live light in the Spring"; still "advance true friends and beat back dangerous foes"--and upon them the same Constellations look down; and upon them the same winds blow; and upon them the same Sphinx glides through the obscurity, with the same insoluble Question.

Nothing has really changed. The "river of time" may pa.s.s through various landscapes, but it is the same river, and, at the last, it brings to us, as "the banks fade dimmer away" and "the stars come out"

"murmurs and scents" of the same infinite Sea. Yes, there is only one Philosophy, as Disraeli said, jesting; and Matthew Arnold, among the moderns, is the one who has been allowed to put it into his poetry. For though, before the "Flamantia Moenia" of the world's triple bra.s.s, we are fain to bow our heads inconsolably, there come those moments when, a hand laid in ours, we think we know "the hills whence our life flows"!

The flowing of the river of life--the washing of the waves of life--how well one recalls, from Arnold's broken and not always musical stanzas, references to that sound--to the sound so like the sound of those real sea-tides that "Sophocles, long ago, heard in the Aegaean," and listened, thinking of many things, as we listen and think of many things today!

"For we are all like swimmers in the Sea, Poised on the top of a huge wave of Fate, And whether it will lift us to the land Or whether it will bear us out to Sea, Back out to Sea, to the dark gulfs of Death, We know not-- Only the event will teach us, in its hour."

I sometimes think that a certain wonderful blending of realism and magic in Matthew Arnold's poetry has received but scant justice.

In "The Forsaken Merman" for instance, there are many stanzas that make you smell the salt-foam and imagine all that lies, hidden and strange, down there upon the glittering sand. That line,

"Where great whales go sailing by Round the world for ever and aye,"

has a liberating power that may often recur, when one is, G.o.d knows, far enough from the spouting of any whale! And the whole poem has a wistful, haunting beauty that never grows tedious.

Matthew Arnold is a true cla.s.sical poet. It is strictly in accordance with the authentic tradition to introduce those touches of light, quaint, playful, airy realism into the most solemn poetry. It is what Virgil, Catullus, Theocritus, Milton, Landor, all did. Some persons grow angry with him for a certain tone of half-gay, half-sad, allusive tenderness, when he speaks of Oxford and the country round Oxford.

I do not think there is anything unpleasing in this. So did Catullus talk of Sirmio; Horace of his Farm; Milton of "Deva's wizard-stream"; Landor of Sorrento and Amalfi.

It is all of a piece with the "resignation" of a philosophy which does not expect that this or that change of dwelling will ease our pain; of a philosophy that naturally loves to linger over familiar well-sides and roadways and meadow-paths and hillsides, over the places where we went together, when we "still had Thyrsis."

The direct Nature-poetry of Matthew Arnold, touching us with the true cla.s.sic touch, and yet with something, I know not what, of more wistful tenderness added, is a great refreshment after the pseudo-magic, so vague and unsatisfying, of so much modern verse.

"It matters not. Light-comer he has flown!

But we shall have him in the sweet spring days, With whitening hedges and uncrumpling fern, And blue-bells trembling by the forest ways, And scent of hay new-mown--"