Indications towards such a new inspiration are not lacking in Europe and America. They are found in the works of such a writer as Whitman, with his ecstasy at the “ever-returning miracle of the sunrise,” the love of ferries and crowds, cities and men, and all the beauty of the world. A more exotic but still hopeful creed is that of Maeterlinck, with his delight in the white road, and the silence of the night, and the splendour of the sunset; his vision of a humanity whose hearts will grow more gentle with the weather, absorbed in persuading the earth to bring forth ever more marvellous treasures of fruit and flowers. And in England also, in such writings as those of William Morris and Richard Jefferies, there would appear a kind of foretaste of a spirit which in its acceptance and its rejoicing, may be found to build up behind the deserts of life-weariness a triumphant affirmation of the greatness of Present Things.
This exultant optimism would often seem to be entirely independent of narrow circumstance or present discouragement. “You never enjoy the world aright,” says Mr. Thomas Treherne, “till you so love the beauty of enjoying it that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it.” Most of those who in latter years of depression and grey skies have revealed themselves as “covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it,” have been great physical sufferers. From a life of physical torment, perhaps intensified and heightened by that torment, they have been engaged in “corroborating for ever the triumph of things.” Stevenson and Henley, Whitman and Jefferies, all those who have “made to-day the first of days and this field Eden,” have learnt the intoxication of present pleasure from association with present pain. “He was a very marked case of hysteria in man,” was one medical verdict upon Jefferies. In the long years of torture which terminated in premature death, “in some way not yet to be explained,” says his latest biographer, “the mortal pining of his body was related to the intense vivacity of his last years.” “Some of my best work,” he wrote, “was done in this intense agony.” In the midst of which agonies he stands as typical of the company of “Life Worshippers” who, awakening while other men were asleep, could behold something of the splendour of the world, the magic of each moment as it passes, vindicating its existence before it dies.
This “Life Worship” becomes revealed as a gluttonous grasping at the present, the sucking of the rind and core of its delights; a response to the consciousness of the crowd; a refusal to accept any standard but the standard of Life, before which many impulses and all inhibitions stand judged and condemned. “I believe in the Body,” is the beginning of the Creed. “I believe all manner of asceticism to be the vilest blasphemy; blasphemy towards the whole of the human race. I believe in the flesh and the body, which is worthy of worship.... The ascetics are the only persons that are impure.” In Jefferies worship of natural things became a kind of physical avidity; intensified by a sense of touch and vision exceedingly delicate and violent. He devoured colour, finding “every spot of it a sort of food.” In the later spring “the ears listen and want more,” he writes: “the eyes are gratified with gazing, and desire yet further; the nostrils are filled with sweet odours of flower and sap. The touch, too, had its pleasures, dallying with leaf and flower.” “Can you not almost grasp the odour-laden air,” he asks, “and hold it in the hollow of the hand?” It is a riot of sense-given impression, accepting, without questioning, very content. These men are of the company who find the world “more to man since he is fallen than it was before,” accepting the challenge of the mystic—“you never enjoy the world aright till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the Heavens and crowned with the Stars.”
It is a pageant, the pageant of the moment which passes and yet abides, ever old and ever young. It delights in “the old road, the same flowers.” It accepts the wind’s whispering that “there never was a yesterday, and never will be a to-morrow.” It finds “always hope in the hills.” “All the grasses of the meadow were my pets,” wrote Jefferies of his childhood’s days. “I loved them all.” Of poppies, “there is genius in them,” he proclaims, “the genius of colour, and they are saved.” With Thoreau he will abandon all for which most men labour to hear one cricket sing. “I found from the dandelion,” he cries, “that there were no books.” “The sunlight puts out the words of the printed books as it puts out the fire; the very grass blades confound the wise.” To that sunlight he brings as a testing instrument all clamorous and appealing things: the hopes and dreams and perplexing ways of men. He is a worshipper of the sun, falling in the afternoon in Trafalgar Square, on the crowded Brighton promenade, in the woods of high June, or under a cold November day. He applauds it stored in the gold of the wheat or woven into the petals of the rose. “More sunshine; more flowers” is a perpetual hope for the future of mankind. For this sunshine is life—riotous, confident, unashamed; life congruous to and illuminating all the physical beauty of the human body, of the world of out of doors; the life which made him almost intoxicated with the marbles in the British Museum, which drew him, resisting, to the unknown city multitudes; which left him in childhood on the downs, “utterly alone with the sun and the earth,” lost in an ecstasy, an inflatus at “the inexpressible beauty of it all.”
And as “Life Worship” approves, it also condemns; all energies directed towards blind alleys, burrowings underground; all that is unable to encounter with exultation the test of that strong stimulus and fever. It rebels always against the mechanic pacing to and fro; the set grey life; the apathetic end. Its vision of modern England is of the man with the muckrake, ever being offered the golden crown, ever assiduously and with downcast eyes raking together the sticks and small stones and the dust of the floor. “The pageantry of power,” says Jefferies, “the still more foolish pageantry of wealth; the senseless precedence of place; words fail me to express my utter contempt for such pleasure or such ambitions.” He is dissatisfied that life for the general is “so little and so mean.” “Back to the sun” he is always preaching, from “house life”—“house life” which he denounces as the creed of the half-alive. “Remain; be content; go round and round in one barren path, a little money, a little food and sleep, some ancient fables, old age, and death.” As a mystic he belongs to the class of those who aspire, rather than of those who acquiesce. These are never in danger of becoming quietists. Rejoicing in the moment, they are never content with the moment, demanding always that which the moment, with all its rich benefits, can never bestow. They ask “for a larger frame, a longer day, more sunshine, a longer sleep.” They rise from the banquet of life never satisfied, encouraging illimitable desires. Longing—an invalid—for “the unwearied strength of Ninus to hunt unceasingly in the fierce sun,” “still I should desire greater strength and a stouter bow,” cries Jefferies; “wilder creatures to combat.” “The intense life of the senses,” he asserts, “there is never enough of them.” “I should like to be loved by every beautiful woman on earth.” Meat and bread he finds pleasant and wine refreshing, but “these are the least of all.” He has never had enough of the vehemence of exertion, the vehemence of sunlight and life, the insatiate desire of love, divine and beautiful, the uncontrollable desire of beauty. “Give me these in greater abundance,” he prays, “than was ever known to man or woman.” It is the prayer of a cripple, in poverty and pain, stricken down ere the journey has well-nigh begun; so soon to pass to where all journeys end.[25]
And what they desire for themselves they come to desire also for all companions, as they march singing down the great roads of the universe. It is a life which will transfer no affections to some problematical future, but here and now will riot and rejoice in the glory of the sum of things. Jefferies was perplexed and saddened by the confusion that man has made of his world. “In twelve thousand written years the world has not yet built itself a House, nor filled a Granary, nor organised itself for its own comfort. It is so marvellous I cannot express the wonder with which it fills me.” Yet he believes that there would be enough for all, if only all were willing to share it. He brushes aside the ordinary ambitions which inflame mankind: “money, furniture, affected show, and the pageantry of wealth.” He longs for the coming of a day when the ambition of the multitude will be fixed on the idea of form and beauty. “I would submit to a severe discipline,” he declares, “and to go without many things cheerfully, for the good and happiness of the human race in the future.” “The labour of our predecessors in this country, in all other countries of the earth, is entirely wasted. We live—that is, we snatch an existence—and our works become nothing. The piling up of fortunes, the building of cities, the establishment of immense commerce, end in a cipher. These objects are so outside my idea that I cannot understand them, and look upon the struggle in amazement. Not even the pressure of poverty can force upon me an understanding of, and sympathy with, these things.” But he does not despair of the future. “Earth,” he asserts in The Pageant of Summer, “holds secrets enough to give them the life of the favoured immortals.” His heart was fixed firm and stable in the belief that “ultimately the sunshine and the summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were, interwoven into man’s existence.” “There is so much for us yet to come,” he believes, “so much to be gathered and enjoyed.”
So these writers can look towards the future with hope. Their visions and Utopias do not end in a sense of dust and ashes—an infinite weariness. The cities ever growing higher of M. Anatole France, in the heart of which men pile up wealth on a diet of sour milk and digestive tablets, the fat, settled comfort of Mr. Bellamy, the roofed-in labyrinthine airless ant-heaps of Mr. Wells’s nightmare all leave an impression of emptiness and fatigue. But here is the sense of an inspiration and splendour which could become part of the common life of humanity. Nor does this splendour require, as in former appeals in literature, assumptions which the modern world is finding impossible. Wordsworth offered an escape from the tyrannies of a mechanical civilisation, in an exaltation of the appeal of Nature and of the life of the poor. But he demanded for his acceptance assumptions concerning both Nature and the Poor which men to-day are by no means prepared to give. He found the one charged with a spiritual presence, the other transformed by unusual tranquillity and piety. Not through such assumptions will society, in the immediate years to come, find the satisfaction which is the goal of all its wandering. There is more hope in the way of the Life Worshippers like Jefferies than of the Nature Worshippers like Wordsworth. Wordsworth assumes a Nature benignant and responsive, a spirit whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and in the mind of man. The result is a kind of refined and sometimes too rarefied Pantheism, which is compelled often to shut its eyes to the Nature which is “red in tooth and claw,” and equally bestows increase and destruction. Jefferies wove from his dawns and sunsets no roseate scheme of natural religion. He acknowledged the “blunt cruelty” of natural things. He always confessed no intelligence in human affairs: outside, a Nature not so much hostile as utterly indifferent to all the ardours of mankind. “The sea, the earth, the sun, the trees, the hills, care nothing for human life.” He had no specific “humanitarian” teaching, and in early days delighted in the work of devastation and of slaughter. He was bored by the claims of science, and thought nothing of the jargon of “Evolution.” The strength of his position rests in his association of these realities with the overmastering “passion of life.” To him it was an adventure always, into a region of fairyland, occupied as to another modern mystic with “dust like the wreck of temples and thistle-down like the ruin of stars.” His strength was in himself. It was from that hidden, mysterious source of vitality that the colours appeared which he sought in field and flower, that rain of fairy gold which flung itself over the common things until every bush was burning with fire. He did not find a Presence which disturbed with the joy of elevating thoughts. He found a Glamour—inimitable, inexplicable—which excited to passionate emotion. Others have demanded Order, Understanding, evidence of Purpose or Compassion. He asked only for Beauty. And that Beauty is not denied to the supplicant. The Seasons pass in their procession; Birth and Death weave their webs of being; men are seeking, and in vain, for sympathy and pity behind the veil of visible things. Enough for him that here the sunlight flickering on the stems of old trees, the sap creeping up through a million tiny stems, the changes of expanding petals and of withered autumn leaves, can reveal a magic and a mystery which time shall never dim nor age destroy.
This unquestioning love of the Earth and the children of it is perhaps the most hopeful element for future progress. In a century of doubts and scepticisms it may serve to bridge the gulf between the old and the new. Whilst men are still confused concerning the purposes of Nature, and still doubtful concerning any definite or intelligent progress towards a final end, it is much that inspiration and contentment can be found in its present beauty and appeal. The “glory of the sum of things” may thus come to be interpreted in some particular sense-given experience, untroubled—in that present—by inquiry concerning a past that is dead or a future that is not yet born. Forgetful of the cold of a vanished winter, and of the inevitable fading of the flowers, man can accept the summer day, from dawn to sunset, as an “Eternal moment,” something that is good in itself apart from remembrance of what has been or anticipation of what shall be. And if this acquiescence and enjoyment be supplemented by the recreation of a creative energy, in that special happiness which comes from the fashioning by human handiwork of things of delight, the possibilities of an inspiration can be discerned which even for a time, putting aside occupation in ultimate mysteries, may “bring satisfaction to the ways of men.”
The demand for more and fuller life, which attempts in empty effort, in acceleration, in sense-given pleasure, in the mere blind and laborious effort at the attainment of wealth, may be here pictured as realising itself in no material or brutal fashion, through an experience which itself is its own justification. In such a life as that of William Morris there is the suggestion of a possibility of progress, more satisfying and at the same time more hopeful than Mill’s refuge in transcendental poetry. It is an advance on Jefferies because more determined and alive: more positive in its proclamation of life’s good things. It is the artist as craftsman on the one hand, as lover of the earth on the other, who appears typical of the best that can be expected in a world which has abandoned adventure beyond the sense-given universe. His Socialism indeed led him amongst strange companions and into mean unlovely regions of the Newer England. But this Socialism was just the emotional revolt against all the multitudinous ugliness and captivity and starved limited life of those whose life could have been a thing so different. The very thing that seemed to be intolerable, in a society which called itself a civilisation, was that the variable, fascinating aspects of a changing year should proclaim its appeal on wall and garden, and mankind pass by, with blind uncomprehending gaze, in a pursuit after irrelevant things; and that in the industry of a whole race of men engaged in extravagant toil, there should be absent from that toil the delight in inventiveness and original handwork which alone can convert labour into a joy. His first allies had been absorbed in the effort at escape: through Rossetti’s exotic twilight, or Burne Jones’s radiant visions of a world beyond the world. He also had sought the consolation which comes from far-off places, in a medieval England seen under a light which never was on sea or land. He drew from this passion of the past the best that the past could give; a sharp sense of the good things which are still offered to a world of children living always in fairyland: untroubled by present doubts and future fears. “With him,” says his biographer, “the love of things had all the romance and passion that is generally associated with the love of persons only.” “It has come to be to me,” he wrote in 1882, of the Manor House at Kelmscott, “the type of the pleasant places of the earth, and of the homes of harmless, simple people, not overburdened with the intricacies of life. And as others love the race of men through their lovers, so I love the earth through that small space of it.”
“Children we twain are,” he could write of himself and his book, “late made wise in love, but in all else most childish still.” Loving the earth and the joy of it, seeking still the pleasure of the eyes, exulting in its visible beauty, the waters gliding through the Hollow Land where the hills are blue, a walled garden in the happy poplar land, with old grey stones over which red apples shone “at the right time of the year” he could always cherish the hope that “our small corner of the world may once again become beautiful and dramatic withal”: because the red apples and grey stones and blue hills were possessions which required for their acceptance no impossible extension of present human achievement. In his vision of satisfaction “now it is a picture of some great room full of merriment,” says a critic, “now of the winepress, now of the golden threshing-floor, now of an old mill among apple trees, now of cool water after heat of the sun, now of some well-sheltered, well-tilled place among woods or mountains, where men and women live happily, knowing of nothing that is too far off or too great for the affections.” The one cloud in the landscape comes from the knowledge that it will change and vanish: that, behind, are always the hurrying of the inexorable hours and the beating of the great wings of Death. But if the transitoriness of love and beauty causes some pang of sadness, the intensity of it is deepened by this conviction of its passing. The shadow creeping slowly over the dial, the vision of bare November with its ruined choirs in the splendour of the August afternoon, can excite a longing wild with all regret. But they can excite also an ever-deepening exultation in Beauty all the more desirable because it is “Beauty that must die”; and a passion for the love and labour of the day because so soon “the night cometh,” when all love and labour are done.