And Mary saw my soul,
And laughed, and said, “Disquiet yourself not;
“ ’Tis nothing but a little downy owl.”
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
The flight in this case is to the world of animals. It is one of the most popular refuges. “I think,” says Walt Whitman.
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained.
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable and industrious over the whole earth,
So they show their relations to me, and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.
Much more cogent than any that Whitman has adduced, there is another reason why people take refuge among the beasts. Many more men and women leave the world for the kennel than for the cloister, and with good cause; in the kennel, even the feeblest and dullest of human beings can feel himself the master, the genius, positively the god. What a delightful, what an intoxicating change from a world where unsympathetic men exploit the weak and deride the stupid!
Disappointed humans discover among the fleas and the dog-dung, a kind of paradise of wish-fulfillment. They are grateful to their pets—hysterically so at times, almost insanely.
I call to mind in what state my soul once was, when I dwelt in my monastery; how then it was superior to all transitory matters and how it would soar above things corruptible.
GREGORY THE GREAT.
Behold him, priests, and though he stink of sweat,
Disdain him not; for shall I tell you what?
Such climb to heaven before the shaven crowns.
But how? Forsooth, with true humility.
Not that they hoard their grain when it is cheap,
Not that they kill the calf to have the milk,
Not that they set debate between their lords
By earing up the balks that part their bounds;
Not for because they can both crouch and creep
(The guilefull’st men that ever God yet made)
When as they mean most mischief and deceit;
Not that they can cry out on landlords loud,
And say they rack their rents an ace too high,
When they themselves do sell the landlord’s lamb
For greater price than ewe was wont be worth;
But for they feed with fruits of their great pains
Both king and knight and priests in cloister pent.
Therefore I say that sooner some of them
Shall scale the walls that lead us up to heaven
Than corn-fed beasts, whose belly is their God,
Although they preach of more perfection.
GEORGE GASCOIGNE.
There can be no higher living that is not based solidly upon an income. Gregory’s soul was able to soar, because the monastery provided his body with food and clothing, and because numerous peasants and artisans toiled in the welter of things corruptible in order to provide the monastery with the means to provide Gregory. These are facts which, however deep our devotion to the things of the spirit, we must never forget. Spirituality can so easily be made an excuse for the most shocking sins, both of omission and commission.
Realistic humanism has no more dangerous enemy than that speculative idealism, or “spiritualism,” which in place of the real individual man sets up the consciousness or mind.
KARL MARX.
“None can usurp this height,” returned that shade,
“But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.
All else who find a haven in the world,
Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,
If by a chance into this fane they come,
Rot on the pavement, where thou rotted’st half.”
“Are there not thousands in the world,” said I,
Encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade,
“Who love their fellows even unto the death,
Who feel the giant agony of the world,
And more, like slaves to poor humanity,
Labour to mortal good? I sure should see
Other men here, but I am here alone.”
“Those whom thou spak’st of are no visionaries,”
Rejoined that voice, “they are no dreamers weak,
They seek no wonder but the human face,
No music but a happy-noted voice—
They come not here, for thou art less than they.
What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,
To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing,
A fever of thyself; think of the earth;
What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee?
What haven? every creature hath its home,
Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,
Whether his labours be sublime or low—
The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct:
Only the dreamer venoms all his days,
Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.
Therefore, that happiness be somewhat shared,
Such things as thou art are admitted oft
Into like gardens thou didst pass erewhile,
And suffered in these temples: for that cause
Thou standest safe beneath the statue’s knees.”
JOHN KEATS.
These things, Ulysses,
The wise Bards also
Behold and sing.
But oh, what labour!
O Prince, what pain!
They too can see
Tiresias:—but the Gods
Who gave them vision,
Added this law:
That they should bear too
His groping blindness,
His dark foreboding,
His scorned white hairs;
Bear Hera’s anger
Through a life lengthened
To seven ages.
They see the Centaurs
On Pelion:—then they feel,
They too, the maddening wine
Swell their large veins to bursting: in wild pain
They feel the biting spears
Of the grim Lapithæ and Theseus drive,
Drive crashing through their bones; they feel
High on a jutting rock in the red stream
Alcmena’s dreadful son
Ply his bow:—such a price
The Gods exact for song;
To become what we sing.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
Artists are higher livers—dead, while they labour, to the world. Sometimes, however, some of them begin to question their right to be so happily defunct; they wonder if it isn’t somehow rather immoral to exist apart, as they do, in the heaven of the mind. It was a sense that they had no right to be posthumous spirits during their life-time, it was a twinge, so to say, of their physiological consciences, that drove Blake and D. H. Lawrence to preach a personal salvation through the body as well as the soul—a salvation that is, fundamentally and essentially, sexual salvation.
Faced by the same moral problem, Keats and Matthew Arnold developed a social conscience.
And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts.
They felt that it was their duty somehow to take their share in the sufferings and struggles of ordinary men and women living in the ordinary world of affairs. Arnold went so far in the direction of lower living as to become an inspector of schools. Keats, who had started his career in the medley and had hastily retired, felt it incumbent upon him to participate at least theoretically in its discomforts and its horrors. Both poets tried to set their consciences at rest by insisting that the artist who realizes imaginatively the pains of all the world suffers more than the common man who bears (but in the flesh) only his own particular pain. The poet’s greater capacity for suffering becomes, for such potential ascetics, his moral justification, the reason for his existence.
Some poets have participated less platonically in the activities of the lower life. Milton, for example, began above the medley; conscious of his powers, deliberately planning his poetical career, he cultivated his leisure in a next world of intellectual detachment. What seemed a higher duty beckoned from the world of the lower life. Milton went down unhesitatingly into the arena, and there, in the battle, unhesitatingly sacrificed his eyes.
What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, friend, to have lost them, overplied
In Liberty’s defence, my noble task,
Of which all Europe rings from side to side.
Blind and in his old age, Milton returned again to the other world of thought and imagination. Rimbaud, on the contrary, never returned. “Je ne pouvais pas continuer,” he said to his sister, “Je serais devenu fou et puis . . . c’était mal.” It is not right for a poet to penetrate so far into the other world as Rimbaud did. Rather Aden and Abyssinia than such a dangerous, such an immoral paradise. Rather death itself, with all the pain and bitterness of dying, than this too delicious death-surrogate.
Serenity
As when it happeneth that some lovely town
Unto a barbarous besieger falls,
Who there by sword and flame himself installs
And, cruel, it in tears and blood doth drown;
Her beauty spoiled, her citizens made thralls,
His spite yet so cannot her all throw down,
But that some statue, arch, fane of renown
Yet lurks unmaimed within her weeping walls:
So, after all the spoil, disgrace and wrack,
That time, the world and death could bring combined,
Amidst that mass of ruins they did make,
Safe and all scarless yet remains my mind.
From this so high transcending rapture springs
That I, all else defaced, not envy kings.
WILLIAM DRUMMOND.
Nîmes, Arles, Orange, Verona, Rome itself—where had Drummond seen one of those great ruins of grey or russet stone, towering up, symbolic, from out of the noisy squalor of the modern town?
“Safe and all scarless yet remains my mind.” The image of the aqueduct, the amphitheatre, the still unsubverted triumphal arch is beautifully apt. It is a pity that Drummond did not know how to do more with this lovely invention. His sonnet is only respectable. I quote it for the sake of what it might have been.
The poem of Matthew Arnold which follows is built round a similar and equally beautiful image.
Set where the upper streams of Simois flow
Was the Palladium, high ’mid rock and wood;
And Hector was in Ilium there below,
And fought, and saw it not, but there it stood.
It stood; and sun and moonshine rained their light
On the pure
