Part 7 (1/2)
”Do you think any writer ever was intentionally immoral, Cyril?”
”Well, I mean that these men really intend doing good. They think that if only some subjects be treated seriously, without any sn.i.g.g.e.ring or grimacing, there ceases to be any harm in them. They say that they wish to rescue from out of the mire where prudery has thrown it, that which is clean in itself; they wish to show that the whole of Nature is holy; they wish to purify by sanctifying.”
Baldwin listened with a smile of contempt. ”Of course such words seem very fine,” he said; ”but a thing is either holy or is not holy: all the incense of poetry and all the hocus-pocus words of mysticism cannot alter its nature by a t.i.tle. And woe betide us if we once think that any such ceremony of sanctification can take place; woe betide us if we disguise the foul as the innocent, or the merely indifferent as the holy! There is in Nature a great deal which is foul: in that which men are pleased to call unnatural, because Nature herself chastises it after having produced it: there is in Nature an infinite amount of abominable necessity and abominable possibility, which we have reason and conscience to separate from that which within Nature itself is innocent or holy. Mind, I say innocent _or_ holy; for innocence and holiness are very different things. All our appet.i.tes, within due limits, are innocent, but they are not therefore holy; and that is just what mystico-sensual poetry fails to perceive, and in giving innocence the rank of holiness it makes it sinful. Do you know what is the really holy? It is that of which the world possesses too little, and can never possess too much: it is justice, charity, heroism, self-command, truthfulness, lovingness, beauty, genius--these things are holy. Place them, if you will, on a poetic altar, that all men may see them, and know them, and love them, and seek after them life-long without ever wearying. But do not enshrine in poetic splendours the merely innocent; that which bestows no merit on its possessor, that which we share with every scoundrel and every animal, that which is so universal that it must for ever be kept in check, and which, unless thus checked by that in ourselves which is truly holy, will degrade us lower than beasts.
For in so doing--in thus attempting to glorify that in which there is nothing glorious--you make men think that self-indulgence is sanct.i.ty, you let them consume their lives in mere acquiescence with their l.u.s.ts and laziness, while all around is raging the great battle between good and evil. Worst of all, in giving them this wors.h.i.+p of a mystic Ashtaroth or Belial, you hide from them the knowledge of the true G.o.d, of the really and exclusively holy, of good, truth, beauty, to know and receive which into our soul we must struggle lifelong with the world and with ourselves; yes, struggle for the sake of the really holy with that mere innocence which is for ever threatening to become guilt.”
Baldwin paused; then resumed after a moment: ”I believe that mankind as it exists, with whatever n.o.ble qualities it possesses, has been gradually evolved out of a very inferior sort of mankind or brutekind, and will, I hope, be evolved into a very superior sort of mankind. And I believe, as science teaches us, that this has been so far effected, and will be further effected henceforward, by an increased activity of those n.o.bler portions of us which have been developed as it were by their own activity; I believe, in short, that we can improve only by becoming more and more different from the original brutes that we were. I have said this to explain to you my feelings towards a young poet of my acquaintance, who is very sincerely smitten with the desire to improve mankind; and has deliberately determined to devote a very fine talent to the glorification of what he calls pure pa.s.sion, pure in the sense that it can be studied in its greatest purity from the cats on the house tops.”
Cyril made a grimace of disgust.
”No, indeed,” continued Baldwin, ”that poet is not one of the aesthetic-sensual lot you seem to think. He is pure, conscientious, philanthropic; but he is eminently unreasoning. He is painfully impressed by the want of seriousness and holiness with which mankind regards marriage, and his ambition is to set mankind right on this subject, even as another young poet-philanthropist tried to improve family relations in his 'Laon and Cythna.' Now, if you were required to use your poetical talents in order to raise the general view of marriage, in order to show the sanct.i.ty of the love of a man and a woman, how would you proceed?”
”I have often thought about that,” answered Cyril; ”but it has been done over and over again, and I think with most deliberate solemnity and beauty by Schiller and Goethe in the 'Song of the Bell' and in 'Hermann and Dorothea.' Well, I think that poetry can do good work in this line only if the poet see where the real holiness of such love lies; in the love not of the male and the female, but of the man and the woman. For there is nowhere, I think, greater room for moral beauty and dignity than in the choosing by a man of the one creature from whom only death can separate him; of the one friend, not of a phase of his life, but of his whole life; of the one soul which will grow and mature always by the side of his, and having blossomed and borne fruit of good, will gently fade and droop together with his. But this is not the most holy part of the choice, for he is choosing also the mother of his children, the woman who is to give half their nature, half their training, to what children must mean to every honest man: the one chance he possesses of living as he would have wished to have lived, of being what he should wish to have been, his one chance of redeeming his errors, of fulfilling his hopes, of realizing in a measure his own ideals. And to me such a choice, and love in the sense of such a choice, become not merely coldly deliberate, but pa.s.sionately instinctive, are holy with the holiness that, as you say, is the only real one; holy in all it implies of recognized beauty and goodness, of trust and hope, of all the excellence of which it is at least the supposed forerunner; and its holiness is that upon which all other holiness, all the truthfulness and justice and beauty and goodness of mankind, depends. This is how I view the sanct.i.ty of the love between man and woman; how all the greatest poets, from Homer to Schiller, and from Schiller to Mrs. Browning, have viewed it; and it is the only possible view that I can conceive.”
Baldwin nodded. ”This is how I also see the question. But my young poet is not satisfied with this: he wishes to make men believe in the holiness of that which is no more holy, and far oftener tends to be unholy, than eating or drinking; and in order to make mankind adore, he lavishes all his artistic powers on the construction of an aesthetical temple wherein to enshrine, on the preparation of poetic incense with which to surround, this species of holiness, carefully separated from any extraneous holiness, such as family affection, intellectual appreciation, moral sympathy; left in its complete unmixed simplicity of brute appet.i.te and physical longing and physical rapture; and the temple which he constructs out of all that is beautiful in the world is a harlot's chamber; and the incense which he cunningly distils out of all the sights and sounds of Nature are filthy narcotics, which leave the moral eyes dim, and the moral nerves tremulous, and the moral muscle unstrung. In his desire to moralize he demoralizes; in his desire to sanctify one item of life, he casts aside, he overlooks, forgets, all that which in life is already possessed of holiness. Thus my young poet, in wis.h.i.+ng to improve mankind, to raise it, undoes for the time being that weary work of the hundreds of centuries which have slowly changed l.u.s.t into love, the male and female into a man and a woman, the life of the body into the life of the soul; poetry, one of the highest human products, has, as it were, undone the work of evolution; poetry, which is essentially a thing of the self-conscient intellect, has taken us back to the time when creatures with two legs and no tail could not speak, but only whine and yell and sob--a mode of converse, by the way, more than sufficient for the intercourse of what he is pleased to call the typical Bride and Bridegroom.”
They had got out of the strange expanse of brown and green swamp, and after traversing a strip of meagre redeemed land, with stunted trees and yellowish vines, had reached the long narrow line of pine woods which met the beach. They pa.s.sed slowly through the midst of the woods, brus.h.i.+ng the rain-drops off the short, bright, green pines, their wheels creaking over the slippery fallen needles embedded in the sand; while the setting sun fell in hazy yellow beams through the brushwood, making the crisp tree-tufts sparkle like green spun-gla.s.s, and their scaly trunks flush rosy; and the stormy sea roared on the sands close by.
”I think your young poet ought to be birched,” remarked Cyril; ”and if anything could add to my aversion, not for poetry, but for the poetic profession, this would which you have just told me. You see how right I was in saying that I would have more moral satisfaction in being a French cook than in being a poet.”
”By no means,” answered Baldwin. ”In the first place, my young poet ought not to be birched; he ought to be made to reflect, to ask himself seriously and simply, in plain prose, what ideal of life he has been setting before his readers. He ought to be shown that a poet, inasmuch as he is the artist whose material is human feeling and action, is not as free an artist as the mere painter, or sculptor, or composer; he ought to be made to understand that now-a-days, when the old rules of conduct, religious and social, are for ever being questioned, every man who writes of human conduct is required, is bound, to have sound ideas on the subject: that, because now-a-days, for better or for worse, poetry is no longer the irresponsible, uncontrolled, helter-skelter performance of former times, but a very self-conscious, wide-awake, deliberate matter, it can do both much more harm and much more good than it could do before.”
They were slowly driving along the beach, among the stunted pine shoots and the rough gra.s.s and the yellow bindweed half buried in the sand, and the heaps of sea-blackened branches, and bits of wood and uncouth floating rubbish which the waves had deposited, with a sort of ironical regularity, in a neat band upon the sh.o.r.e; down here on the coast the storm had already broken, and the last thin rain was still falling, dimpling the grey sand. The sun was just going to emerge from amidst the thick blue-black storm-clouds and descend into a clear s.p.a.ce, like molten amber, above the black, white-crested, roaring sea; it descended slowly, an immense pale luminous globe, gilding the borders of the piled-up clouds above it, gilding the sheen of the waves and the wet sand of the sh.o.r.e; and as it descended, the clouds gathered above it into a vast canopy, a tawny orange diadem or reef of peaked vapours encircling the liquid topaz in which the sun moved; tawnier became this garland, larger the free sky, redder the black storm ma.s.ses above; till at last the reddening rays of the sun enlarged and divided into immense beams of rosy light, cutting away the dark and leaving uncovered a rent of purest blue. At last the yellow globe touched the black line of the horizon, gilding the waters; then sank behind it and disappeared. The wreath of vapours glowed golden, the pall of heaped-up storm-clouds flushed purple, and bright yellow veinings, like filaments of gold, streaked the pale amber where the sun had disappeared. The amber grew orange, the tawny purple, the purple a lurid red, as of ma.s.ses of flame-lit smoke; all around, the sky blackened, until at last there remained only one pile of livid purple clouds hanging over a streak of yellow sky, and gradually dying away into black, with but here and there a death-like rosy patch, mirrored deadlier red in the wet sand of the beach. The two friends remained silent, like men listening to the last bars, rolling out in broad succession of ma.s.sy, gradually resolving chords, of some great requiem ma.s.s--silent even for a while after all was over. Then Cyril asked, pointing to a row of houses glimmering white along the dark lines of coast, below the great marble crags of Carrara, rising dim in the twilight--
”Is that the place where my friends will pick me up?”
”Yes,” answered Baldwin, ”that's the place. You will be picked up there if you choose.”
”I must, you know.” And Cyril looked astonished, as if for the first time it struck him that there might be no _must_ in the matter. ”I must--at least, I suppose I ought to--go back to England with them.”