LVII
FROM PHILIP’S DIARY
There are two paths of consolation and we have strayed from both. There is the way of the Imitation trod by those who have perceived the illusion of this life and the reality of the spirit,—the way over whose entrance stand written the words: “The more nearly a man approacheth unto God, the further doth he recede from all earthly solace.” And truly he who hath boldly entered on this path shall be free in heart, neither shall shadows trample him down—tenebrœ non conculcabunt te. There is also that other way pointed out by Pindar to the Greek world in his Hymns of Victory,—the way of honour and glory, of seeking the sweet things of the day without grasping after the impossible, of joys temperate withal yet gilded with the golden light of song; the way of the strong will and clear judgment and purged imagination, with reverence for the destiny that is hereafter to be; of the man who is proudly sufficient unto himself yet modest before the gods; the way summed up by a rival of Pindar’s in the phrase: “Doing righteousness, make glad your heart!” There is not much room for pity here or in the Imitation, for compassion after all is a perilous guest, and only too often drags down a man to the level of that which he pities.
And now instead of these twin paths of responsibility to God and to a man’s own self, we have sought out another way—the way of all-levelling human sympathy, the way celebrated by Edwin Markham! Oh, if it were possible to cry out on the street corners where all men might hear and know that there is no salvation for literature and art, no hope for the harvest of the higher life, no joy or meaning in our civilisation, until we learn to distinguish between the manly sentiment of such work as Millet’s painting and the mawkishness of such a poem as The Man with the Hoe! The one is the vigorous creation of a craftsman who builded his art with noble restraint on the great achievements of the past, and who respected himself and the material he worked in; the other is the disturbing cry of one who is intellectually an hysterical parvenu.
LVIII
FROM PHILIP’S DIARY
The new volumes of Letters have carried me back to Carlyle, who has always rather repelled me by his noisy voluminousness. But one message at least he had to proclaim to the world,—the ancient imperishable truth that man lives, not by surrender of himself to his kind, but by following the stern call of duty to his own soul. Do thy work and be at peace. Make thyself right and the world will take care of itself. There lies the everlasting verity we are rapidly forgetting. And he saw, too, as no one to-day seems to perceive, the intimate connection between the preaching of false reform and the gripe of a sordid plutocracy. He saw that most reformers, by presenting materialism to the world in the disguise of a sham ideal, were really playing into the hands of those who find in the accumulation of riches the only aim of life, that they are in fact one of the chief obstacles in the path of any genuine reformation. The humanitarianism that attains its utterance in Mr. Markham’s rhapsodic verse loses sight of judgment in its cry for justice. It ceases to judge in accordance with the virtue and efficiency of character, and seeks to relieve mankind by a false sympathy. Such pity merely degrades by obscuring the sense of personal responsibility. From it can grow only weakness and in the end certain decay.
LIX
FROM PHILIP’S DIARY