So it is that we live for ever on hostility. Our friends may be the undoing of us; in the end it is our enemies who save us. The views we hate become ridiculous because they adopt them. Their very thoroughness leads to an overwhelming reaction on whose waves we ride to victory. Even their skill calls out our greater skill and our finer achievement. At their best, at their worst, alike they help us. They are the very life-blood in our veins.
It is a strange world in which, as Paulhan says (and I chance to alight on his concordant words even as I write this note), "things are not employed according to their essence, but, as a rule, for ends which are directly opposed to that essence." We are more unsuccessful than we know. And if we could all realise more keenly that we are fighting not so much in our own cause as in the cause of our enemies, how greatly it would make for the Visible Harmony of the World.
April 12.—All literary art lies in the arrangement of life. The literature most adequate to the needs of life is that most capable of transforming the facts of life into expressive and beautiful words. French literary art has always had that power. English literary art had it once and has lost it now. When I read, for instance, Goncourt's Journal—one of the few permanently interesting memoirs the nineteenth century has left us—my heart sinks at the comparison of its adequacy to life with the inadequacy of all contemporary English literature which seeks to grapple with life. It is all pathetically mirrored in the typical English comic paper, Punch, this inability to go below the surface of life, or even to touch life at all, save in narrowly prescribed regions. But Goncourt is always able to say what there is to say, simply and vividly; whatever aspect of life presents itself, of that he is able to speak. I can understand, surprising as at first it may be, how Verlaine, who seems at every point so remote from Goncourt, yet counted him as the first prose-writer of his time; Verlaine had penetrated to the simplicité cachée (to use Poincaré's phrase) behind the seemingly tortured expressions of Goncourt's art. Goncourt makes us feel that whatever is fit to occur in the world is fit to be spoken of by him who knows how to speak of it. If we wish to face the manifold interest of the world, in its poignancy and its beauty, as well as in its triviality, there is no other way.
English literary art was strong and brave and expressive for several centuries, even, one may say, on the whole, up to the end of the eighteenth century, though I suppose that Dr. Johnson had helped to crush the life out of it. When Queen Victoria came to the throne the finishing stroke seems to have been dealt at it. One might fancy that the whole literary world had become conscious of the youthful and innocent monarch's eye on every book issued from the press, and that every writer feared he might write a word to bring a blush on her virginal countenance. When young Queen Elizabeth came to the throne, they seem to have felt, it was another matter. There was a monarch who feared nothing and nobody, who once spat at a courtier whose costume misliked her, who as a girl had experienced no resentment when the Lord High Admiral, who was courting her, sent a messenger to "ax hir whether hir great buttocks were grown any less or no," a monarch who was not afraid of any word in the English language, and loved the most expressive words best. Under such a monarch, the Victorian writers felt they would no longer have modestly refrained from becoming Shakespeares.
But the excuses for feebleness are apt to be more ingenious than convincing. There is no connection between coarseness and art. Goncourt was a refined aristocrat who associated with the most highly civilised men and women of his day, and possessed the rarest secrets of aesthetic beauty. Indeed we may say that it is precisely the consciousness of coarseness which leads to a cowardly flight from the brave expression of life. Most of these excuses are impotent. Most impotent of all is the excuse that their books reach the Nursery and the Young Ladies' School. Do they suppose by any chance that their books grapple with the real life of Nurseries and Young Ladies' Schools? If they grappled with that they might grapple with anything. It is a subterfuge, a sham, and with fatty degeneration eating away the muscular fibre of their hearts, they snatch at it.
The road is long, and a high discipline is needed, and a great courage, if our English literature is to regain its old power and exert once more its proper influence in the world.
April 16.—I have often noticed—and I find that others also have noticed—that when an artist in design, whether line or colour or clay, takes up a pen and writes, he generally writes well, sometimes even superbly well. Again and again it has happened that a man who has spent his life with a brush in his hand has beaten the best penmen at their own weapon.
Leonardo, who was indeed great in everything, is among the few great writers of Italian prose. Blake was first and above all an artist in design, but at the best he had so magnificent a mastery of words that besides it all but the rare best of his work in design looks thin and artificial. Rossetti was drawing and painting all his life, and yet, as has now become clear, it is only in language, verse and prose alike, that he is a supreme master. Fromentin was a painter for his contemporaries, yet his paintings are now quite uninteresting, while the few books he wrote belong to great literature, to linger over with perpetual delight. Poetry seemed to play but a small part in the life of Michelangelo, yet his sonnets stand to-day by the side of his drawings and his marbles. Rodin has all his life been passionately immersed in plastic art; he has never written and seldom talks; yet whenever his more intimate disciples, a Judith Cladel or a Paul Gsell, have set down the things he utters, they are found to be among the most vital, fascinating, and profound sayings in the world. Even a bad artist with the brush may be on the road to become a good artist with the pen. Euripides was not only a soldier, he had tried to be a painter before he became a supreme tragic dramatist, and, to come down to modern times, Hazlitt and Thackeray, both fine artists with the pen, had first been poor artists with the brush. It is hard, indeed, to think of any artist in design who has been a bad writer. The painter may never write, he may never feel an impulse to write, but when he writes, it would almost seem without an effort, he writes well. The list of good artists and bad artists who have been masters of words, from Vasari and earlier onwards, is long. One sets down at random the names of Reynolds, Northcote, Delacroix, Woolner, Carrière, Leighton, Gauguin, Beardsley, Du Maurier, Besnard, to which doubtless it might be easy to add a host of others. And then, for contrast, think of that other art, which yet seems to be so much nearer to words; think of musicians!
The clue seems to be, not only in the nature of the arts of design, but also in the nature of writing. For, unlike all the arts, writing is not necessarily an art at all. It is just anything. It fails to carry inevitably within it the discipline of art. And if the writer is not an artist, if the discipline of art has left no acquired skill in his muscles and no instinctive habit in his nerves, he may never so much as discover that he is not an artist. The facility of writing is its fate.
Gourmont has well said that whatever is deeply thought is well written. And one might add that whatever is deeply observed is well said. The artist in design is by the very nature of his work compelled to observe deeply, precisely, beautifully. He is never able to revolve in a vacuum, or flounder in a morass, or run after a mirage. When there is nothing there he is still. He is held by his art to Nature. So, when he takes up his pen, by training, by acquired instinct, he still follows with the new instrument, deeply, precisely, beautifully, the same mystery of Nature.