The Silent Isle

by Arthur Christopher Benson

XXIX

We artists who try to discern beauty, and endeavour to rule our lives to be as tranquil, as perceptive, as joyful as possible, are apt to be too impatient of the petty, mean, and sordid things with which the fabric of life is so much interwoven—the ugly words of spiteful people, little fretting ailments, unsympathetic criticisms, coldness and indifference, tiresome business, wearisome persons. It is a deep-seated mistake. We cannot cast these things away as mere débris. They must be used, applied, accommodated. These are our materials, which we must strive to combine and adapt. To be disgusted with them, to allow them to disturb our serenity, is as though a painter should sicken at the odour of his pigments and the offscourings of his palette. The truer economy is to exclude all such elements as we can, consistently with honour, tenderness, and courage. Then we must not be dismayed with what remains; we must suffer it quietly and hopefully, letting patience have her perfect work. After all it is from the soul of the artist that his work arises; and it is through these goads and stings, through pain and weariness joyfully embraced, that the soul wins strength and subtlety. They are as the implements which cleave and break up the idle fallow, and without their work there can be no prodigal or generous sowing.

I suppose that I put into my observation of Nature—and perhaps into my hearing of music—the same thing that many people experience only in their relations with other people. To myself relations with others are cheerful enough, interesting, perplexing—but seldom absorbing, or overwhelming; such experiences never seem to say the ultimate word or to sound the deeper depth. I suppose that this is the deficiency of the artistic temperament. I write looking out upon a pale wintry sunset. There, at least, is something deeper than myself. I do not suppose that the strange pageant of clouds and burning light, above the leafless grove, the bare fields, is set there for my delight But that I should feel its inexpressible holiness, its solemn mystery—feel it with a sense of pure tranquillity, of satisfied desire—is to me the sign that it holds some sacred secret for me. I suppose that other men have the same sense of sacredness and mystery about love and friendship. They are deep and beautiful things for me, but they are things seen by the way, and not waiting for me at the end of my pilgrimage. Music holds within it the same sort of hidden influence as the beauty of nature. It is not so with pictorial art, or even with writing, because the personality, the imperfections, of the artist come in between me and the thought. One cannot make the pigments and the words say what one means. Even in music, the art sometimes comes between one and the thing signified But the plain, sweet, strong chords themselves bring the fulness of joy, just as these broken lights and ragged veils of cloud do. I remember once going to dine at the house of a great musician; I was a minute or two before the time, and I found him sitting in his room at a grand piano, playing the last cadence of some simple piece, unknown to me. He made no sign of recognition; he just finished the strain; a lesser man would have put the sense of hospitality first, and would have leapt up in the midst of an unfinished chord. But not till the last echo of the last chord died away did he rise to receive me. I felt that he was thus obeying a finer and truer instinct than if he had made haste to end.

Everyone must find out for himself what are the holiest and most permanent things in life, and worship them sincerely and steadfastly, allowing no conventionality, no sense of social duty, to come in between him and his pure apprehension. Thus, and thus only, can a man tread the path among the stars. Thus it is, I think, that religious persons, like artists, arrive at a certain detachment from human affections and human aims, which is surprising and even distressing to men whose hearts are more knit to the things of earth. Those who see in the dearest and most intimate of human relations, the purest and highest gift of God, will watch with a species of terror, and even repulsion, the aloofness, the solitariness of the mystic and the artist. It will seem to them a sort of chilly isolation, an inhuman, even a selfish thing; just as the mystic and the artist will see in the normal life of men a thing fettered and bound with sad and small chains. It is impossible to say which is the higher life—no dogmatism is possible—all depends upon the quality of the emotion; it is the intensity of the feeling rather than its nature that matters. The impassioned lover of human relations is a finer being than the unimpassioned artist, just as the impassioned artist is a finer being than the man who loves sensually and materialistically. All depends upon whether the love, whatever it be—the love of nature or of art, of things spiritual or divine, the love of humanity, the sense of brotherly companionship—leads on to something unfulfilled and high, or whether it is satisfied. If our desire is satisfied, we fail; if it is for ever unsatisfied, we are on the right path, though it leads us none can tell whither, to wildernesses or paradises, to weltering seas or to viewless wastes of air. If the artist rests upon beauty itself, if the mystic lingers among his ecstasies, they have deserted the pilgrim's path, and must begin the journey over again in weariness and in tears. But if they walk earnestly, not knowing what the end may be, never mistaking the delight of the moment for the joy that shines and glows beyond the furthest horizon, then they are of the happy number who have embraced the true quest. Such a faith will give them a patient and beautiful kindliness, a deep affection for fellow-pilgrims, and, most of all, for those in whose eyes and lips they can discern the wistful desire to see behind the shadows of mortal things. But the end will be beyond even the supreme moment of love's abandonment, beyond the fairest sights of earth, beyond the sweetest music of word or chord. And we must, above all things, forbear to judge another, to question other motives, to condemn other aims; for we shall feel that for each a different path is prepared. And we shall forbear, too, to press the motives that seem to us the fairest upon other hearts. We must give them utterance as faithfully as we can, for they may be a step in another's progress. But the thought of interfering with the design of God will be impious, insupportable. Our only method will be a perfect sincerity, which will indeed lead us to refrain from any attempt to overbalance or to divert ingenuous minds from their own chosen path. To accuse our fellow-men of stupidity or of prejudice is but to blaspheme God.

XXX

What, after all, is the essence of the artistic life, the artist's ideal? I think the reason why it is so often misconceived and misunderstood is because of the fact that it is a narrow path and is followed whole-heartedly by few. Moreover, in England at the present time, when we are all so tolerant and imagine ourselves to be permeated by intelligent sympathy with ideas, there seem to me to be hardly any people who comprehend this point of view at all. There is a good deal of interest in England in moral ideals, though even much of that is of a Puritan and commercial type. The God that we ignorantly worship is Success, and our interest in moral ideas is mainly confined to our interest in what is successful. We are not in love with beautiful, impracticable visions at all; we measure a man's moral intensity by the extent to which he makes people respectable and prosperous. We believe in an educator when he makes his boys do their work and play their games; in a priest, when he makes people join clubs, find regular employment, give up alcohol. We believe in a statesman when he makes a nation wealthy and contented. We have no intellectual ideals, no ideals of beauty. Our idea of poetry is that people should fall in love, and our idea of art is the depicting of rather obvious allegories. These things are good in their way, but they are very elementary. Our men of intellect become scientific researchers, historians, erudite persons. How few living writers there are who unite intellect with emotion! The truth is that we do not believe in emotion; we think it a thing to play with, a thing to grow out of, not a thing to live by. If a person discourses or writes of his feelings we think him a sentimentalist, and have an uneasy suspicion that he is violating the canons of good taste. The result is that we are a sensible, a good-humoured, and a vulgar nation. When we are dealing with art, we have no respect for any but successful artists. If the practice of art results in fame and money, we praise the artist in a patronising way; when the artist prophesies, we think him slightly absurd until he commands a hearing, and then we worship him, because his prophecies have a wide circulation. If the artist is unsuccessful, we consider him a mere dilettante. Then, too, art suffers grievously from having been annexed by moralists, who talk about art as the handmaid of religion, and praise the artist if he provides incentives for conduct of a commercial type. It would be better for art if it were frankly snubbed rather than thus unctuously encouraged. We look upon it all as a matter of influence, for the one thing that we desire is to be felt, to affect other people, to inspire action. The one thing that we cannot tolerate is that a man should despise and withdraw from the busy conventional world. If he ends by impressing the world we admire him, and people his solitude with ugly motives. The fact is that there was never a more unpromising soil for artists than this commonplace, active, strenuous century in which we live. The temptations we put in the artist's way are terribly strong; when we have done our work, we like to be amused by books and plays and pictures, and we are ready to pay high prices to the people who can give our heavy souls small sensations of joy and terror and sorrow. And wealth is a fierce temptation to the artist, because it gives him liberty, freedom of motion, comfort, things of beauty and consideration. The result is that too many of the artists who appear among us fall victims to the temptations of the world, and become a kind of superior parasite and prostitute, believing in their dignity because they are not openly humiliated.

But the true artist, like the true priest, cares only for the beautiful quality of the thought that he pursues. The true priest is the man who loves virtue, disinterestedness, truth, and purity with a kind of passion, and only desires to feed the same love in faithful hearts. He seeks the Kingdom of God first; and if the good things of the world are strewn, as they are apt to be strewn, in the path of the virtuous person, he is never for a moment seduced into believing that they are the object of his search. His desire is that souls should glow and thrill with high, sacred, and tender emotions, which are their own surpassing reward.

So, too, the artist is concerned solely with the beautiful thing—whether it is the beauty of the eager relationships of men and women, or the ever-changing exquisite forms and colours of nature, or the effect of all these things upon the desirous soul of man. And it is here that his danger lies, that he may grow to be preoccupied with the changing and blended texture of his own soul, into which flow so many sweet influences and gracious visions—if, like the Lady of Shalott, he grows to think of the live things that move on the river-side only as objects that may minister to the richness of the web that he weaves. He must keep his eye intent upon the power, whatever it may be, that is behind all these gracious manifestations; they must all be symbols to him of some unrevealed mystery, or he will grow to love the gem for its colour, the flower for its form, the cloud for its whiteness or empurpled gloom, the far-off hill for its azure tints, and so forget to discern the spirit that thus gleams and flashes from its shrouding vapours.

And then, too, in art as in love, the artist must lose himself that he may find himself. If he considers all things in relation to his own sensitive and perceptive temperament, he will become immured in a chilly egotism, a narrow selfishness, from which he will not dare to emerge. He must fling himself whole-heartedly into a passionate worship of what is beautiful, not desiring it only that it may thrill and satisfy him, but longing to draw near to its innermost essence. The artist may know, indeed, that he is following the wrong path when he loves the artistic presentation of a thing better than the thing presented, when he is moved more by a single picture of a perfect scene than by the ten thousand lovely things which he may see in a single country walk. He must, indeed, select emotions and beautiful objects by their quality; he must compare and distinguish; but if he once believes that his concern is with representation rather than with life, he goes downward. He must not be concerned for a single instant with the thought, "How will this that I perceive affect others as I represent it?" but he must rather be so amazed and carried out of himself by the beauty of what he sees, that the representing of it is only a necessary consequence of the vision; as a child may tell an adventure breathlessly and intently to its mother or its nurse, absorbed in the recollection.

And thus the true artist will not weigh and ponder the most effective medium for his expression; the thought must be so overpowering that the choice of a medium will be a matter of pure instinct. The most, indeed, of what he feels and perceives he will recognise to be frankly untranslatable in speech or pigment or musical notes, too high, too sacred, too sublime. His work will be no more selfish than the work of the pilot or the general is selfish. The responsibility, the crisis, the claim of the moment, will outweigh and obliterate all personal, all fruitless considerations. He must have no thought of success; if it comes, he may rejoice that he has been a faithful interpreter, and has shared his joy with others; if it does not come, his joy is not lessened.