Part 8 (1/2)

Let us for a moment put aside our own intellectual prejudices, our preconceptions, and follow Mr. Chesterton along his path of common sense. He himself, in his book on _Orthodoxy_, throws over the intellectuals. It is not that he refutes them--that would be a denial of his own method; nor that he has completely studied them--that would be a denial of his own character; but he does show us what havoc their methods may work upon the mind, what an overthrow of our workaday notions, our most vivid and keen impressions. If all the things that we seem to know the best, the emotions most natural to men ”fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea”--if all these things stand for nothing, if they are not to be thought about by our philosophers, what have we got left? The cosmos? ”The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.” He finds that the great popular thinkers--and it is right that he, a potent popular writer, should concern himself with these rather than with the systematic philosophers who observe conventions incomprehensible to the common mind--are each and all of them p.r.o.ne to follow exclusively some strange bent of thought, leading by pure reason to one of those awful conclusions which ”tend to make a man lose his wits:” Tolstoy, for instance, reaching an unthinkable doctrine of self-sacrifice, Nietzsche an equally unthinkable doctrine of egoism, Ibsen, Haeckel, Mr. Shaw, Mr.

McCabe--that never-to-be-forgotten Mr. McCabe--each of them by sheer force of logic betrayed into insanity.

Just as I am affected by the maniac, so I am affected by most modern thinkers. That unmistakable mood or note that I hear from Hanwell, I hear also from half the chairs of science and seats of learning to-day; and most of the mad doctors are mad doctors in more senses than one. They all have exactly that combination we have noted; the combination of one expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense. They are universal only in the sense that they take one thin explanation and carry it very far. But a pattern can stretch for ever and still be a small pattern. They see a chess-board white on black, and if the universe is paved with it, it is still white on black. Like the lunatic, they cannot alter their standpoint, they cannot make a mental effort and suddenly see it black on white.

Madness, he says, is ”reason used without root, reason in the void.”

”Madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental helplessness.” For he notes how some of the rationalists, in doubting everything, have cast doubt even on the validity of thought. The complete sceptic says, ”I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.” The intellect has destroyed, but has not constructed; there is no proposition which is not doubted, no ideal which is not an object of attack; there is no rebel who has a sure faith in his own revolt, no fanatic except the fanatic about nothing.

Where are the common things--the things we used to know and care about--the self-contradictory things if you like, but the realities--the things which make men kill their enemies, go gladly to the stake, or shut themselves in a hermitage?

All these are things which, Mr. Chesterton thinks, the intellectual is willing to throw overboard at the bidding of intellect. But he would rather throw over intellectualism. He prefers to abide by the ”test of the imagination,” the ”test of fairyland.” ”The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, 'charm,' 'spell,' 'enchantment.' They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a _magic_ tree. Water runs down-hill because it is bewitched.”

The so-called ”laws of nature” are not one whit less mysterious because of their uniformity. And again: ”It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clock-work.” Mr. Chesterton supposes exactly the opposite. ”Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, 'Do it again;' and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps G.o.d is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that G.o.d says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun, and every evening, 'Do it again' to the moon.... Repet.i.tion may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop.”

Is not this, someone will say, only the _Religio Medici_ over again? Is it not more than two and a half centuries since Sir Thomas Browne said: ”That there was a deluge once seems not to me so great a miracle as that there is not one always;” and ”where I cannot satisfy my reason, I love to humour my fancy;” and ”I can answer all the objections of Satan and every rebellious reason, with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, _Certum est quia impossibile est?_” Yes, it has all been expressed in the _Religio_; but it is no small matter that, in spite of Spencer, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, and Mr. Sidney Webb, there should still be a modern and a popular way of using the thoughts of Sir Thomas Browne. Mr. Chesterton has been driven into this apparent reaction by the scientific thinkers to whom he was introduced with the scantiest preparation. ”It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back to Orthodox theology.” His supernaturalism, which he identifies with orthodox Christianity, I should prefer to call the Romance of Christianity--Romance implying not falsity, but the desirable and the ideal. He deliberately takes that which he and other people _admire_ or _want_ as the standard of truth. ”I want to love my neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I.” ”The _heart_ of humanity, especially of European humanity, is certainly much more _satisfied_ by the strange hints and symbols that gather round the Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy pleads as well as justice....” Mr. Chesterton defends what he calls Christianity not so much on the ground that it is credible, but on the ground that it is satisfying, that it is agreeable.

I say ”what he calls Christianity,” for his argument is p.r.o.ne to fall into a vicious circle; he arbitrarily calls all that is satisfying to him by the name of Christianity. It endorses, he says, a ”first loyalty to things” and enjoins the ”reform of things;” it commands a man ”not only to look inwards, but to look outwards.” G.o.d is a part of the cosmos, and yet he is distinct from it and from us, or we could not wors.h.i.+p him. Christianity commands us to desire to live, and it commands us to be glad to die (and this contradiction, he says, like all the others, is human, just as the virtue of courage is human; for does not courage mean ”a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die?”). It is against compromise, against the ”dilution of two things” neither of which ”is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour;” it endorses the extremes of pride and humility, anger and love, mercy and severity. It is full-blooded, allowing place for every human emotion, directing anger against the crime, and love towards the criminal. And he draws a fanciful and grotesque picture of the Christian Church as a ”heavenly chariot”

whirling through the ages ”fierce and fast with any war-horse,”

swerving ”to left and right, so as exactly to avoid enormous obstacles.”

I shall not examine this fanciful picture. The Christian Church may have indulged every extreme in human life, but the Christianity of the Bible takes sides more definitely. And as for the Catholic Church, embracing as it did so many seemingly contradictory elements, it is nevertheless true that at one time it failed to satisfy human nature because it was too ascetic, and at another time it caused b.l.o.o.d.y revolt because it was worldly and luxurious. I need not pursue this question, for the ”orthodoxy” which Mr. Chesterton defends is not the teaching of the Christian Churches. At first sight it seems to be anarchy modified by mysticism and friends.h.i.+p for persons. But it is more than that. Negatively it is a protest against false culture and cant, and we cannot fail to see that it is at the same time a protest against that virtue which is the predecessor of false culture--the incessant, arduous effort to seek truth with the help of the intellect and the reason. Positively, it champions the spiritual perceptions on the one hand, and the physical sensations on the other--the excellences of the manifold activities of the human body and soul.

Both in his view provide the proper avenues of truth. Every spiritual emotion and every animal pa.s.sion are in themselves good and excellent.

For him the struggle of life resolves itself into a romantic game, with immortality as its conclusion. The one discipline which he upholds, the only precept he has really taken from Christianity, is that arising from love for your neighbour. That unnamable quality in life which in every deeper feeling and every keen perception lights the spirit and charges it with intuitive knowledge is in his philosophy the love of G.o.d and the source of the love for persons.

V

SOME MODERN POETS

A few years ago it was the fas.h.i.+on to lament the dearth of promising authors, especially poets. But since then we have a.s.sured ourselves that we are still, after all, a poetical people. The reproach against the age was taken as a challenge by dozens of young adventurers, who resolved to prove in their own persons that the twentieth century was not without poets. Tiny volumes of verse fluttered forth from the press. Poetry Societies were started, and Poetry Reviews, and men and women met in the darkened hall of Clifford's Inn to hear Mr. Sturge Moore declaim sonorous verses. Publishers began to advertise new genius, and reviewers began to attend to poetry as if it were really a serious business. The opening pages of _The English Review_ were devoted to poems which seemed to be appreciated in proportion to their ever-increasing length. Mr. John Masefield had a success such as had been attained by no poet since Stephen Phillips in his prime. It is true that Mr. W.H. Davies might have starved if he had not received a Government pension; that Mr. Yeats--I believe I am right--never entertained the idea of supporting himself by poetry; that Mr. Doughty has not so much as been heard of by one Englishman in a thousand.

Nevertheless, poetry has now become a mentionable subject in decent society; and it is no longer synonymous with Tennyson or Mr. Kipling.

It has become a modern thing, lending itself to new experiments, a possible vehicle for new ideas, a means even of becoming notorious on a grand scale.

But before considering some of these younger authors who represent newer phases in poetry I should like to dwell a little upon the work of an elder--one who is not by any means so exquisite a poet as Mr.

Robert Bridges, who cannot compare in creative vigour with the greater poets who were contemporary with him, nor with his junior, Mr. W.B.

Yeats--but interesting for purposes of comparison because his poetry, even his quite recent poetry, has in it the ring of a past age, of a poetic ideal to which we are not likely to return in this century. I allude to Mr. Edmund Gosse, whom we all think of as a distinguished student and critic of literature, but it is very seldom that we hear any allusion to his poetical work. ”Anyone who has the patience to turn over these pages,” he says in the Preface to his _Collected Poems_, ”will not need to be told that the voice is not of 1911--it is of 1872, or of a still earlier date--since my technique was determined more than forty years ago, and what it was it has remained.” When first I read these words they sounded strangely to me. It was only the other day that he began to edit a distinguished literary page for a daily paper. Still more recently I heard him speaking on a public platform. His activity does not seem to be a thing of yesterday, and it was he who wrote the most intimate and, perhaps, the most interesting biographical study of recent years; as editor and critic he is still amongst active living writers. In reading his later poems we can see how keen is his desire to retain sensibility to the full, not to become stereotyped by the past, or blind to the newer beauties.

He is conscious of the pa.s.sage of the Time-Spirit and the changed ways of men, and the pa.s.sionate desire of all vital minds to be fully percipient to the last.

So, if I pray for length of days, It is not in the barren pride That looks behind itself, and says, ”The Past alone is deified!”

Nay, humbly, shrinkingly, in dread Of fires too splendid to be borne-- In expectation lest my head Be from its Orphic shoulders torn--

I wait, till, down the eastern sky, Muses, like Maenads in a throng, Sweep my decayed traditions by, In startling tunes of unknown song.

In the 350 pages of the _Collected Poems_ there is nothing which were better omitted. Even the mere literary experiments, the rondeaus, the sestinas--the literary jokes in which every poet indulges--are neatly turned. Mr. Gosse has attempted, and succeeded with, a great variety of metres. His diction is almost unfailingly good; indeed, it is the very regularity and faultlessness of his verse that sometimes jars. It is the work of a man many-sided in his nature, many-sided in his moods. He can find himself in the atmosphere of a Coleridge, a Wordsworth, a Keats, a Rossetti, a Branger, and often his form insensibly glides into that of the precursor whose spirit he for the moment a.s.similates. He is by no means a mere imitator. His feeling is his own; but his genius seems to be rather a.s.similative than strictly creative. Scores of his poems have the beauty and the value of the literature written by the great poets, when they were not in their greatest moods.

And perhaps it is precisely the many-sidedness of Mr. Gosse's tastes and interests which has left him so few decisive poetic successes. He has ranged through literature with a catholic taste. He has helped to create reputations--the reputations, for instance, of Ibsen and Stevenson. There have been many calls upon his literary instinct, and it is not surprising that the most uniformly successful of his poems are those in praise of the great men of letters whom, with his faculty for friends.h.i.+p, he made his friends. In the poems on these men--Ibsen, Ruskin, Stevenson, Henry Sidgwick, Rossetti, and unnamed friends who have departed--there is dignity, fineness, and the pathos of a regret for that which he shared with them, though he lacked the power, or more probably the opportunity, fully to express it.

But not in vain beneath this lofty shade I danced awhile, frail plaything of the seas; Unfit to brave the ampler main with these; Yet, by the instinct which their souls obeyed, Less steadfast, o'er the trackless wave I strayed, And follow still their vanis.h.i.+ng trestle-trees.

The beauties of literature, of many kinds and in many languages, the feeling and perception of friends.h.i.+p, nature, and the whole life-process through which men pa.s.s to a green memory or to oblivion--these are to be found here, the full-bodied expression of a personality--for poetry is that, or nothing. It is no defect in it that it is of 1872--that there is a certain formality, a kind of austerity, even, in its flippancies. It is meditative poetry. It is poetry which is essentially concerned with the emotions, the fancies, or the reflections, the very personal and secluded reflections, of a mind still concerned about the private ways of the spirit. The emotions, the operations of the mind, and the objective things of life--they are the concern of Mr. Gosse as they were the concern of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, and many poets before them. For the most part the men of that age adhered to the traditions of poetry, whether they were romantic or cla.s.sical. At any rate on the formal side most of them--Browning is an exception--remained faithful to the accepted types. On the inner side it was an age which was much concerned about its soul, about nature, and about persons--yes, about persons. Whatever we may think about the Victorian age, from its literature at least we should conclude that it was an age when men valued friends.h.i.+ps. And so its best poetry was essentially emotional, personal and subjective.