Given faith that conscious Will is at the helm of human affairs, then a definite attitude must result before the spectacle of humanity; but if the mind be built to accept only unconscious Law as controller, the outlook differs and a resolute trust may develop in man, as ultimate arbiter of his own destiny. Neither assumption can be proved, or disproved; but the relation of a controlling, guiding Spirit to the Universe lies open to doubt; its subjection to Law does not; and building upon this latter certainty, I discovered, in the evolution of the moral principle, full cause for trust and for hope.
Observation has convinced me that moral evolution is upward, despite massive, contemporary evidence to the contrary. For the War and the peace alike I recognise as a transient paralysis of human reason, not its negation. The War was an attack of familiar maladies for which man's own errors of ignorance were to be condemned, not the laws of his being; but it was an unutterable infamy and disgrace to him, for this reason, that it proves him to be lagging behind the time-table of moral evolution. Ere now he should have outgrown his present stature, and the causes of his tardy progress, his centuries of loitering in the desert, are as plain as pitiful. An impartial ethics can point to where his faith took the wrong turn; but progress in righteousness is only delayed; I have seen dawn upon the mountain tops too often not to trust that it will presently descend into the shadowed homes and sleeping hearts of men.
Fortified by this opinion—the only opinion I ever clung to—my instinct turned from the way of least resistance on easy and level lands and strove to climb, to sacrifice without regret the highest, best, most hopeful, as life itself actually does. Thus only is the vitality of the creator proved in his creation and tragedy achieved, which, according to the measure of an artist's endowment, is clean, cathartic, inspiring and obedient to the laws and realities of things as they are. Irrationalism chokes under this atmosphere: only the humanist can breathe it.
But the world grows braver, for we have seen great artists open its eyes and blow the breath of honesty and truth into its lungs; we have seen the sentimental vapours of the past dispelled in the freedom that art now attains; we have seen the artist pitiless, that his audience may learn the meaning of pity; ugly, that others may find wherein true beauty lies.
By the kindness of Messrs. Heinemann and The Macmillan Company full titles of my Dartmoor cycle are recorded on another page; and it is a source of deepest gratification to know that in the future, when conditions of production admit it, they design for me a definitive edition. His publishers can pay no author a greater compliment than that, and I take this opportunity to thank them for the highest distinction my work has ever brought.
As a man's footsteps in the dew of the morning are the labours of the minor artist; but if he challenge surer feet and greater strength to pursue his quest before the dews are dried and his passing forgotten, then he also has played a part. The masters flash lightning through our clouds of human passion, ignorance and error, or hang rainbows of promise upon their gloom; but for us of the rank and file, it is enough that we make happy such as have only heard of happiness and waken the dayspring of courage in fearful hearts; it is enough if we kindle one valley mist with a gleam of beauty, or pour some few, pure drops of hope into the thirsty and percipient soul.
E. P.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER