Vanishing Roads and Other Essays Part 20

Take Horace, for example. Does he live merely because of his unique style, his masterly use of the Latin tongue? By means of that, of course, but only secondarily. Primarily, he is as alive today as he was when he sauntered through the streets of Rome, because he was so absolutely the type of the well-bred man of the world in all countries and times. He lived seriously in the social world as he found it, and felt no idealistic craving to have it remoulded nearer to the heart's desire. He was satisfied with its pleasures, and at one with its philosophy. Thus he is as much at home in modern Paris or London or New York as in ancient Rome, and his book is, therefore, forever immortal as the man of the world's Bible.

Take a name so different as that of Sh.e.l.ley. We have but to speak it to define all it now stands for. Though no one should read a line of Sh.e.l.ley's any more, the dream he dreamed has pa.s.sed into the very life-blood of mankind. Wherever men strive for freedom, or seek to attune their lives to the strange spiritual music that breathes through all things--music that none ever heard more clearly than he--there is Sh.e.l.ley like the morning star to guide them and inspire.

Think what Wordsworth means to the spiritual thought of the modern world. In his own day he was one of the most lonely and laughed at of poets, moping among his lakes and mountains and shepherds. Yet, as Matthew Arnold said, "we are all Wordsworthians nowadays," and the religion of nature that he found there for himself in his solitude bids fair to be the final religion of the modern world.

It is the same with every other great name one can think of, be it Bunyan or Heine, Schopenhauer or Izaak Walton. One has but to cast one's eyes over one's shelves to realize, as we see the familiar names, how literally the books that bear them are living men, merely transmigrated from their fleshly forms into the printed word.

Shakespeare and Milton, yes, even Pope; Johnson, Fielding, Sterne, Scott, d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Dumas, Balzac, Emerson, Th.o.r.eau, Hawthorne, Poe--their very faces seem to look out at us from the bindings, such vividly human beings were they, with a vision of the world, or a definition of character, so much their own and no one else's. One might almost call them patented human beings--patentees of spiritual discoveries, or of aspects of humanity, whose patents can never be infringed for all our cleverness.

Said Tennyson, in bitter answer to criticism that began to depreciate him because of the glibness of his imitators:

All can grow the flower now, For all have got the seed.

And certainly, as I have already said, the art of literary impersonation is carried to a pitch today that almost amounts to genius. Yet you have only to compare the real flower with the imitation, and you will soon understand the difference.

Take Walter Scott. It is a commonplace to say how much better we do the historical novel nowadays than he did. At first sight, we may seem to; in certain particulars, no doubt we do; but read him again, read _Rob Roy_ or _Quentin Durward_ again, and you will not be quite so sure. You will realize what an immortal difference there is, after all, between the pen with a man behind it, and the most brilliant literary machine.

Yes, "the mob of gentlemen that write with ease" is once more with us, but no real book was ever yet written with ease, and no book has ever survived, or ever can, in which we do not feel the presence of the fighting, dreaming, or merely enjoying soul of a man.

XXVIII

BULLS IN CHINA-SHOPS

There are some people of great value and importance in their own spheres, who, on the strength of the distinction gained there, are apt to intrude on other spheres of which they have no knowledge, where in fact they are irrelevant, and often indeed ridiculously out of place.

This, however, does not prevent their trying to a.s.sert an authority gained in their own sphere in those other spheres where they simply do not belong; and such is the power of a name that is won for any one thing that the mult.i.tude, unaccustomed to make distinctions, accepts them as authorities on the hundred other things of which they know nothing. Thus, to take a crude example, the New York Police, which is, without doubt, learned in its own world, and well-adapted and equipped for a.s.serting its authority there, sometimes intrudes, with its well-known _bonhomie_, into the worlds of drama and sculpture, and, because it is an acknowledged judge of crooks and grafters, presumes to be a judge and censor also of new plays and nude statues.

Of course, the New York Police is absurd in such a character, absurd as a bull in a china-shop is absurd; yet, as in the case of the bull with the china, it is capable of doing quite a lot of damage.

I take the New York Police merely, as I said, as a crude example of, doubtless, well-meant, but entirely misplaced energy. Actually, however, it is scarcely more absurd than many similar, if more distinguished, bulls gaily cras.h.i.+ng about on higher planes.

Such are statesmen who, because they are Prime Ministers or Presidents, deem themselves authorities on everything within the four winds, doctors of divinity, and general _arbitri elegantiarum_.

Such a bull in a china-shop in regard to literature was the late Mr.

Gladstone. It is no disrespect towards his great and estimable character to say, that while, of course, he was technically a scholar--"great Homeric scholar" was the accepted phrase for him--there were probably few men in England so devoid of the literary sense. Yet for an author to receive a post-card of commendation from Mr. Gladstone meant at least the sale of an edition or two, and a certain permanency in public appreciation. Her late Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria was Mr.

Gladstone's only rival as the literary destiny of the time. To Mr.

Gladstone we owe Mrs. Humphry Ward, to Her Majesty we owe Miss Marie Corelli.

John Ruskin, much as we may admire him for his moral influence, and admire, or not admire, him for his prose, was a bull in a china-shop when he made his famous criticism on Whistler, and thus inadvertantly added to the gaiety of nations by provoking that delightful trial, which, farcical as it seemed at the moment, not merely evoked from Whistler himself some imperishable dicta on art and the relation of critics to art, but really did something towards the long-drawn awakening of that mysterious somnolence called the public consciousness on the strange mission of beauty in this world, and, incidentally of the status of those "eccentric" ministers of it called artists.

I do not mean to say that bulls in china-shops are without their uses.

John Ruskin is a s.h.i.+ning example to the contrary.

One of his contemporaries, Thomas Carlyle, for all his genius, was on one important subject--that of poetry--as much of a bull in a china-shop as Ruskin was in art. Great friends as were he and Tennyson, the famous anecdote _a propos_ of Tennyson's publication of _The Idylls of the King_--"all very fine, Alfred, but when are you going to do some work"--and many other such written deliverances suffice to show how absolutely out of court a great tragic humorist and rhetorician may be on an art practised by writers at least as valuable to English literature as himself, say Wordsworth, Sh.e.l.ley, Coleridge, and Keats.

Carlyle was a great writer, but the names of these four gentlemen who, according to his standard, never did any "work" have a strangely permanent look about them compared with that of the prophet-journalist of Chelsea and Ecclefechan.

A similar "sage," another of the great conversational brow-beaters of English literature, Samuel Johnson, though it was his chief business to be a critic of poetry, was hardly more in court on the matter than Carlyle. In fact, Dr. Johnson might with truth be described as the King Bull of all the Bulls of all the China-shops. There was no subject, however remote from his knowledge or experience on which he would hesitate to p.r.o.nounce, and if necessary bludgeon forth, his opinion.

But in his case, there is one important distinction to be made, a distinction that has made him immortal.

He disported his huge bulk about the china-shop with such quaintness, with such engaging st.u.r.diness of character, strangely displaying all the time so unique a wisdom of that world that lies outside and encloses all china-shops, so unparalleled a genius of common sense, oddly linked with that good old-time quality called "the fear of G.o.d," that in his case we felt that the china, after all, didn't matter, but that Dr. Samuel Johnson, "the great lexicographer," supremely did. His opinions of Scotsmen or his opinions of poetry in themselves amount to little--though they are far from being without their shrewd insight--and much of the china--such as Milton's poetry--among which he gambolled, after the manner of Behemoth, chanced to be indestructible. Any china he broke was all to the ultimate good of the china-shop. Yet, if we accept him so, is it not because he was such a wonderful bull in the china-shop of the world?

There have been other such bulls but hardly another so great, and with his name I will, for the moment at least, put personalities aside, and refer to droves rather than to individual bulls. A familiar type of the bull in the china-shop is the modern clergyman, who, apparently, insecure in his status of saint-hood, dissatisfied with that spiritual sphere which so many confiding human beings have given into his keeping, will be forever pus.h.i.+ng his way like an unwelcome, yet quite unauthoritative, policeman, into that turmoil of human affairs--of which politics is a sort of summary--where his opinion is not of the smallest value, though, perforce, it is received with a certain momentary respect--as though some beautiful old lady should stroll up to a battery of artillery, engaged in some difficult and dangerous attack, and offer her advice as to the sighting and management of the guns. The modern clergyman's interference in the working out of the secular problems of modern life has no such picturesque beauty--and it is even less effective.

One would have thought that to have the care of men's souls would be enough. What a world of suggestiveness there was in the old phrase "a cure of souls"! Men's souls need saving as much today as ever. Perhaps they were never in greater danger. Therefore, as the proverbial place for the cobbler is his last, so more than ever the place for the clergyman is his church, his pulpit, and those various spiritual offices for which he is presumably "chosen." His vows do not call upon him either to be a politician or a matinee idol, nor is it his business to sow doubt where he is paid for preaching faith. If the Church is losing its influence, it is largely because of its inefficient interference in secular affairs, and because of the small percentage of real spirituality amongst its clergy.

But there is a worse intrusion than that of clergymen into secular affairs. There is the intrusion of the cheap atheist, the small materialistic thinker, into a sphere of which certainly no clergyman or priest has any monopoly, that sphere of what we call the spiritual life, which, however undemonstrable by physical tests, has been real to so many men and women whose intellects can hardly be called negligible, from Plato to Newman. I have too much respect for their courageous sincerity, their n.o.bility of character, as well as for the necessary, if superficial, destructive work they did, when to do such work meant no little personal peril and obloquy to themselves, to cla.s.s Robert Ingersoll and Charles Bradlaugh with the small fry that resemble them merely in their imitative negations; yet this is certainly true of both of them that they were bulls in the china-shop to this extent--that they confounded real religion with the defective historical evidences of one religion, and the mythologic a.s.sertions and incongruities of its sacred book. They did splendid work in their iconoclastic criticism of "the letter" that "killeth," but of "the spirit" that "giveth life" they seem to have had but little inkling. To make fun of Jonah and the whale, or "the Mistakes of Moses," had no doubt a certain usefulness, but it was no valid argument against the existence of G.o.d, nor did it explain away the mysterious religious sense in man--however, or wherever expressed.

Neither Ingersoll nor Bradlaugh saw that the crudest Mumbo-Jumbo idolatry of the savage does really stand for some point of rapport between the seen and the unseen, and that, so long as the mysterious sacredness of life is acknowledged and reverenced, it matters little by what symbols we acknowledge it and do it reverence.

One may consider that the present age is an age of spiritual eclipse, though that is not the writer's opinion, and question with Matthew Arnold:

What girl Now reads in her bosom as clear As Rebekah read, when she sate At eve by the palm-shaded well?

Who guards in her breast As deep, as pellucid a spring Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?

What bard, At the height of his vision, can deem Of G.o.d, of the world, of the soul, With a plainness as near, As flas.h.i.+ng as Moses felt When he lay in the night by his flock On the starlit Arabian waste?

Can rise and obey The beck of the Spirit like him.

Yet the sight of one who sees is worth more than the blindness of a hundred that cannot see. Some people are born with spiritual antennae and some without. There is much delicate wonder in the universe that needs special organizations for its apprehension. "One eye," you remember, that of Browning's _Sordello_--

one eye In all Verona cared for the soft sky.

In these imponderable and invisible matters, many are in a like case with Hamlet's mother, when she was unable to see the ghost of his father which he so plainly saw. "Yet all there is I see!" exclaimed the queen--though she was quite wrong, as wrong as Mr. Ruskin when he could see nothing in that painting of Whistler's but a c.o.c.ks-comb throwing a paint-pot at a canvas and calling it a picture!

Many people who have sharp enough eyes and ears for their own worlds are absolutely blind and deaf when introduced into other worlds for which nature has not equipped them. But this by no means prevents their p.r.o.nouncing authoritative opinions in those worlds, opinions which would be amazing if they were not so impertinent. Many literary people proclaim their indifference to and even contempt for music--as if their announcement meant anything more than their music deafness, their unfortunate exclusion from a great art. Mark Twain used to advertise his preference for the pianola over the piano--as if that proved anything against the playing of Paderewski. Similarly, he acted the bull in the china-shop in regard to Christian Science, which cannot be the accepted creed of millions of men and women of intelligence and social value without deserving even in a critic the approach of some respect.

But humorists are privileged persons. That, no doubt, accounts for the astonis.h.i.+ng toleration of Bernard Shaw. Were it not that he is a _farceur_, born to write knock-about comedies--his plays, by the way, might be termed knock-about comedies of the middle-cla.s.s mind--he would never have got a hearing for his common-place blasphemies, and cheap intellectual antics. He is undeniably "funny," so we cannot help laughing, though we are often ashamed of ourselves for our laughter; for to him there is nothing sacred--except his press-notices, and--his royalties.

His so-called "philosophy" has an air of dangerous novelty only to those innocent middle-cla.s.ses born but yesterday, to whom any form of thought is a novelty. Methusaleh himself was not older than Mr. Shaw's "original ideas." In England, twenty years ago, we were long since weary of his egotistic buffooneries. Of anything "fine" in literature or art he is contemptuously ignorant, and from understanding of any of the finer shades of human life, or of the meaning of such words as "honour,"

"gentleman," "beauty," "religion," he is by nature utterly shut out. He laughs and sneers to make up for his deficiencies, like that Pietro Aretino who threw his perishable mud at Michael Angelo. So is it always with the vulgarian out of his sphere. Once he dared to talk vulgarly of G.o.d to a great man who believed in G.o.d--Count Tolstoi.

He had written to Tolstoi _a propos_ his insignificant little play _The Showing up of Blanco Posnet_, and in the course of his letter had said: "Suppose the world were only one of G.o.d's jokes, would you work any less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?" Tolstoi had hitherto been favourably inclined towards Shaw, owing to his friend and biographer Mr.

Aylmer Maude; but this cheap-jack sacrilege was too much for the great old man, who seemed to know G.o.d with almost Matthew Arnold's

plainness as near As flas.h.i.+ng as Moses felt,

and he closed the correspondence with a rebuke which would have abashed any one but the man to whom it was sent.

Tolstoi was like Walt Whitman--he "argued not concerning G.o.d." It is a point of view which people like Mr. Shaw can never understand; any more than he or his like can comprehend that there are areas of human feeling over which for him and other such bulls in china-shops should be posted the delicate Americanism--KEEP OUT.

XXIX

THE BIBLE AND THE b.u.t.tERFLY

Once, in my old book-hunting days, I picked up, on the Quai Voltaire, a copy of the _Proverbs of King Solomon_. Then it was more possible than today to make finds in that quaint open-air library which, still more than any library housed within governmental or diplomaed walls, is haunted by the spirit of those pa.s.sionate, dream-led scholars that made the Renaissance, and crowded to those lectures filled with that dangerous new charm which always belongs to the poetic presentation of new knowledge--those lectures, "musical as is Apollo's lute," being given up on the hill nearby, by a romantic young priest named Abelard.