“We may, then, consider it proved—though such a conclusion does not really need proof, since it is its own evidence—that the immortal in art and letters is always and for everyone identical with the religious. Insofar”—he wrote it thus—“as art, be it poetry, or fiction even, or painting, or sculpture, arouses religious feelings in the observer, that work is, as we have shown—and, indeed, as it shows itself—immortal in proportion to the depth and reality of the religious feeling it arouses.”
Canon Alington paused a moment, wondering whether, strictly speaking, a thing could be proportionately immortal. But since the whole phrase expressed what he meant, he let it stand.
“That is why we are right in agreeing that the Paradise Lost is indescribably nobler and finer than even the ‘mighty-mouthed music’ of Shakespeare; that is why we unhesitatingly can affirm that the glorious Sir Galahad and St. Agnes of the late Poet Laureate, why even the terrible ‘Rake’s Progress’ of Hogarth, since it rouses our religious sense by the horror with which we contemplate the result of sin, will continue to be fixed stars in the heaven of human achievement and aspiration for æons and æons after the corrupt sentimentality of Mr. Swinburne and the degraded ideals of Wagner’s Gotterdammerung——”
Canon Alington paused for a moment again, for he was not quite certain how this last very difficult word was spelled, being, though a scholar of dead languages, not so perfectly acquainted with the living. But a brief visit to the realms of gold, where he at once put his hand on a small German dictionary, relieved him from any anxiety on this score; there were two “m’s,” as he had thought. The fact that he had never seen the “Ring” did not prevent him from making this trenchant pronouncement on its ideals, for he had glanced not so long ago at a translation of it, which his brother-in-law, Hugh Grainger, had left in the house, which was more than enough to make him certain that he was not overstating the case, since, most unfortunately, he had opened it at that passage in the Valkyrie where Wotan, father of gods and men, enunciates such remarkable views on the subject of marriage.
But before returning to his table he took a pipe down from the Gothic window rack (it was by reason of its shape that he had chosen it from among twenty others), filled it, and lit it. Then he continued:
“have been consigned to the limbo of mere technical skill and mere jingle of metre and melody out of which they came.”
He inhaled a long breath of tobacco-smoke. Even if the sentence about Hogarth’s “Rake’s Progress” was a little “broad” for the Mannington “Literific,” this uncompromising condemnation of Wagner and Swinburne would show that, though he might be broad, he was also firm. The sentence was well-balanced too, the last hammer-taps were descending straight, and before proceeding he drew once or twice more at his pipe, for tobacco (he was afraid this was a weakness of the flesh, and meant to conquer it some day) always seemed to him to clarify his thought and aid his sense of literary composition. It was for this reason that, though he had tried giving up the use of it during last Lent, he had taken to it again after the third Sunday in that season, since he had thought, and his wife agreed with him, that his sermons suffered. This reason, though of the sort which the cynical tend to distrust, was indeed perfectly honest and genuine, and had not he thought that his sermons lost impressiveness, or had not Agnes shared his fear, he would have scorned to pamper the flesh in this manner; but since they did, it was a misdirected effort of asceticism to continue this particular form of abstinence. So instead he gave up for the remaining three weeks of Lent putting sugar in his tea, and in spite of the fact that he disliked this intensely—though, it is true, not quite so much as the abandonment of tobacco—he was quite firm about it, since nothing except a carnal appetite suffered.
Then, with the added inspiration of tobacco, he finished his peroration:
“Moreover, the sense of beauty is purely a function of the imagination, and it is therefore our duty so to train and vivify it that it perceives even through roughness and want of skill in the artist’s execution, nay, even through superficial plainness or ugliness that quality of high and true beauty which alone is worth our attention and reverent admiration, and is, as we have said, identical with religious feeling. So, just as in a plain face we ought to and can discern the beauty of the spirit within, so in literature and in all art it is in the moral significance of book or picture or statue that we must seek true beauty, which alone is the immortal element. Then to us the face of our fellow-men will be beautiful because we see there the love and faith of the spirit that animates them; a book will be beautiful because it tells us of Christian qualities and points Christian lessons, and with reverence and awe we shall close the volume or turn away from the picture, or even statue, that we have contemplated, feeling that dimly but surely we have caught a glimpse, a foreshadowing of the truly immortal, a ray from the dawn of the everlasting day.”
“Everlasting day,” said Canon Alington aloud, and repeated it again rather more sonorously. That was the last hammer-tap, and he drew a line across the paper, and dated it.