Points of View

by Agnes Repplier

This is something very different from Ruskin’s ethics,—from the plain statement that we have no right to be happy while our brother suffers, no right to put feathers in our own child’s hat, while somebody else’s child goes featherless and ragged. But there is a certain staying power in the older and simpler doctrine, and an admirable truth in the gentle suggestion that we need not vex ourselves too deeply with the notion of our ultimate freedom from trial. It was not given to Madame de Rémusat, any more than it is given to us, to ride in untroubled gladness over a stony world. All that she attained, all that we can hope for, are distinct and happy moments, brief intervals from pain, or from that rational ennui which is inseparable from the conditions of human life. But I cannot agree with the long list of philosophers and critics, from Kant and Schopenhauer down to Mr. Dallas, who have taught that these passing moments are negative in their character; that they are hidden from our consciousness and elude our scrutiny,—existing while we are content simply to enjoy them, vanishing, if, like Psyche, we seek to understand our joy. The trained intelligence grasps its pleasures, and recognizes them as such; not after they have fled, and linger only, a golden haze, in memory, but alertly, in the present, while they still lie warm in the hollow of the heart. There is indeed a certain breathless and unconscious delight in life itself, which is born of our ceaseless struggle to live, a sweetness of honey snatched from the lion’s mouth. This delight is common to all men, and is probably keenest in those who struggle hardest. When society is reorganized on a Utopian basis, and nobody has any further need to elbow his own way through hardships and difficulties, there will be one joy less in the world; and, missing it, many people will realize that all which made life worth having has been softened and improved out of existence. They will cease to value, and refuse to possess, that which costs them nothing to preserve.

This fundamental happiness in life, and in the enforced activity by which it is maintained, is hidden from our consciousness. We feel the hardships, and do not especially feel any relish in ceaselessly combating them, though the relish is there; not keen enough for palpable felicity, but vital enough to keep the human race alive. All other pleasures, however, we should train ourselves to enjoy. They flow from many sources, and are fitted to many moods. They are fed alike by our most secret emotions and by our severest toil, by the simplest thing in nature and by the utmost subtlety of art. A primrose by a river’s brim often makes its appeal as vainly as does Hamlet, or the Elgin Marbles. What we need is, not more cultivation, but a recognized habit of enjoyment. There is, I am told, though I cannot speak from experience, a very high degree of pleasure in successfully working out a mathematical problem. Burton confesses frankly that his impelling motive, in long hours of research, was primarily his own gratification. “The delight is it I aim at, so great pleasure, such sweet content, there is in study.” I think the most beautiful figure in recent literature is Mr. Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, whose life, regarded from the outside, is but a succession of imperfect results, yet who, deserted and dying, counts over with a patient and glad heart the joys he has been permitted to know.

“Like a child thinking over the toys it loves, one after another, that it may fall asleep so, and the sooner forget all about them, he would try to fix his mind, as it were impassively, on all the persons he had loved in life,—on his love for them, dead or living, grateful for his love or not, rather than on theirs for him,—letting their images pass away again, or rest with him, as they would. One after another, he suffered those faces and voices to come and go, as in some mechanical exercise; as he might have repeated all the verses he knew by heart, or like the telling of beads, one by one, with many a sleepy nod between whiles.”

Here is a profound truth, delicately and reverently conveyed. That which is given us for our joy is ours as long as life shall last; not passing away with the moment of enjoyment, but dwelling with us, and enriching us to the end. The memory of a past pleasure, derived from any lawful source, is a part of the pleasure itself, a vital part, which remains in our keeping as long as we recognize and cherish it. Thus, the pleasure obtained from seeing the Venus of Milo or reading “The Eve of St. Agnes” is not ended when we have left the Louvre or closed the book. It becomes a portion of our inheritance, a portion of the joy of living; and the statue and the poem have fulfilled their allotted purpose in yielding us this delight. There is a curious fashion nowadays of criticising art and poetry, and even fiction, with scant reference to the pleasure for which they exist; yet a rational estimate of these things is hardly possible from any other standpoint. Mr. Ruskin, we know, has invented that pleasing novelty, ethical art-criticism, and, by its means, as Mr. Dallas frankly admits, he has made, not the criticism only, but the art itself, intelligible and palatable to his English readers. It would seem as if they hardly held themselves justified in enjoying a thing unless there was a moral meaning back of it, a moral principle involved in their own happiness. This meaning and this principle Mr. Ruskin has supplied, bringing to bear upon his task all the earnestness and sincerity of his spirit, all the wonderful charm and beauty of a winning and persuasive eloquence. It is well-nigh impossible to withstand his appeals, they are so irresistibly worded; and it is only when we have withdrawn from his seductive influence, to think a little for ourselves, that we realize how much of his criticism, as criticism, is valueless, because it consists in analyzing motives rather than in estimating results. He assumes that the first interest in a picture is, what did the painter intend? the second interest is, how did he carry out his intention? whereas the one really important and paramount consideration in art is workmanship. We have, many of us, the artist’s soul, but few the artist’s fingers. It is a pleasant pastime to decipher the mental attitude of the painter; it is essential to understand the quality and limit of his powers.

Reading Mr. Ruskin’s criticisms on Tintoret’s pictures in the Scuola di S. Rocco—on the Annunciation particularly—is very much like listening to a paper in a Browning Society. Perhaps the poet, perhaps the painter, did mean all that. It is manifestly impossible to prove they didn’t, inasmuch as death has removed them from any chance of interrogation. But by what mysterious and exclusive insight have Mr. Ruskin and the Browning student found it out? The interpretation is not suggested as feasible, it is asserted as a fact; though precisely how it has been reached we are not suffered to know. Many unkind and severe things have been said about judicial criticism, but Mr. Ruskin’s criticism is not judicial,—which infers an application of governing principles; it is dogmatic, the unhesitating expression of a personal sentiment. He shows you Giotto’s frescoes in the cloister of Santa Maria Novella; he pleads with you very prettily and charmingly to admire the Birth of the Virgin; he points out to you with rather puzzling precision exactly what the painter intended to imply by every detail of the work. This is pleasant enough; but suppose you don’t really care about the Birth of the Virgin when you see it; suppose you fail to follow the guiding finger that reveals to you its significance and beauty. What happens then? Mr. Ruskin retorts in the severest manner, and with a degree of scorn that seems hardly warranted by the contingency: “If you can be pleased with this, you can see Florence. But if not, by all means amuse yourself there, if you find it amusing, as long as you like; you can never see it.”

So Florence with all its loveliness is lost to you, unless you can sufficiently sympathize with one small fresco. It would be as reasonable to say that all English literature is lost to you, unless you truly enjoy “Comus;” that all music is lost to you, unless you delight in “Parsifal.” It is the special privilege of ethical criticism to take this exclusive and didactic form; to bid you admire a thing, not because it is beautiful in itself, but because it has a subtle lesson to convey,—a lesson of which, it is urbanely hinted, you stand particularly in need. On precisely the same principle, you are commanded to cleave to Tolstoï, not because he has written able novels, but because those novels teach a great many things which it is desirable you should know and believe; you are bidden to revere George Meredith, not because he has given the world some brilliant and captivating books, but because these books contain a tonic element fitted for your moral reconstruction. If you do not sufficiently value these admirable lessons, then you are told, in language every whit as contemptuous as Mr. Ruskin’s, to amuse yourself, by all means, with Lever, and Gaboriau, and Jules Verne; for all higher fiction is, like the art of Florence, a sealed book to your understanding.

“Most men,” says Mr. Froude, “feel the necessity of being on some terms with their conscience, at their own expense or at another’s;” and one very popular method of balancing their score is by exacting from art and literature that serious ethical purpose which they hesitate to intrude too prominently into their daily lives, rightly opining that it gives much less trouble in books. So prevalent is this tone in modern thought that even a consummate critic like Mr. Bagehot is capable of saying, in one of his supremely moral moments, that Byron’s poems “taught nothing, and therefore are forgotten.” Et tu, Brute! Such a sentence from such a pen makes me realize something of the bitterness with which the dying Cæsar covered up his face from his most trusted friend. That Lord Byron’s poems are forgotten is rather a matter of doubt; that they are given over entirely into the hands of “a stray schoolboy” is a hazardous assertion to make; but to say that they are forgotten because they teach nothing is to strike at the very life and soul of poetry. It does not exist to teach, but to please; it can cease to exist only when it ceases to give pleasure.

Perhaps what Mr. Bagehot meant to imply is that it would be a difficult task to review Byron’s poetry after the approved modern fashion; to assign him, as we assign more contemplative and analytic poets, a moral raison d’être. Pick up a criticism of Mr. Browning, for example, and this is the first thing we see: “What was the kernel of Browning’s ethical teaching, and how does he apply its principles to life, religion, art, and love?”[3] It would be as manifestly absurd to ask this question about Byron as it would be to review Fielding from the standpoint adapted for Tolstoï, or to discuss Sheridan from the same field of view as Ibsen. With the earlier writers it was a question of workmanship; with our present favorites it has become a question of ethics. Yet when we seek for simple edification, as our plain-spoken grandfathers understood the word, as many innocent people understand it now, the new school seems as remote from furnishing it as the old. Browning, Tolstoï, and Ibsen have their own methods of dealing with sin, and richly suggestive and illustrative methods they are. The lessons taught may be of a highly desirable kind, but I doubt their practical efficacy in our common working lives; and I cannot think this possible efficacy warrants their intrusion into art. Great truths, unconsciously revealed and as unconsciously absorbed, have been, in all ages, the soul of poetry, the subtle life of fiction. These truths, always in harmony with the natural world and with the vital sympathies of man, were not put forward crudely as lessons to be learned, but primarily as pleasures to be enjoyed; and through our “sweet content,” as Burton phrased it, we came into our heritage of knowledge. To-day both poetry and fiction have assumed a different and less winning attitude. They have grown sensibly didactic, are at times almost reproachful in their tone, and, so far from striving to yield us pleasure, to increase our “sweet content” with life, they endeavor, with very tolerable success, to prevent our being happy after our own limited fashion. Their principal mission is to worry us vaguely about our souls or our neighbors’ souls, or the social order which we did not establish, and the painful problems that we cannot solve. Our spirits, at all times restless and troubled, respond with quick alarm to these dismal agitations; our serenity is not proof against the strain; our sense of humor is not keen enough to cure us with wholesome laughter; and nineteenth-century cultivation consists in being miserable for misery’s sake, and in saying solemnly to one another at proper intervals, “This is the eternal progress of the ages.”

[3] Quarterly Review.

It was a curious and rather melancholy experience, a year ago, to hear the comments of those patient women who devoted their afternoons to Ibsen readings, and to turning over in their minds the new and unprofitable situations thus suggested. The discussions that followed were in variably ethical, never critical; they had reference always to some moral conundrum offered by the play, never to the artistic or dramatic excellence of the play itself. Was Nora Helmer justified, or was she not, in abandoning her children with explicit confidence to the care of Mary Ann? Had Dr. Wangel a right, or had he not, to annul his own marriage tie with the primitive simplicity of the king of Dahomey? To answer such questions as these has become our notion of literary recreation, and there is something pathetically droll in the earnestness with which we bend our wits to the task. Indeed, poor little Nora’s matrimonial infelicities threatened to become as important in their way as those of Catherine of Aragon or Josephine Beauharnais, and we talked about them quite seriously and with a certain awe. The unflinching manner in which Ibsen has followed Sir Thomas Browne’s advice, “Strive not to beautify thy corruption!” commends him, naturally, to that large class of persons who can tolerate sin only when it is dismal; and Baudelaire, praying for a new vice, was jocund in comparison with our Norwegian dramatist, unwearyingly analyzing the old one. Yet what have we gained from the rankness of these disclosures, from these horrible studies of heredity, these hospital and madhouse sketches, these incursions of pathology into the realms of art? What shall we ever gain by beating down the barriers of reserve which civilized communities have thought fit to rear, by abandoning that wholesome reticence which is the test of self-restraint? We try so hard to be happy,—we have such need, each of his little share of happiness; yet Ibsen, troubling the soul more even than he troubles the senses, has chosen to employ his God-given genius in deliberately lessening our small sum of human joy. When shall we cease to worship at such dark altars? When shall we recognize, with Goethe, that “all talent is wasted if the subject be unsuitable”? When shall we understand and believe that “the gladness of a spirit is an index of its power”?