can ever quite destroy.
There is, after all, a sort of spiritual second self, a sort of astral residuum left behind by a personality of this kind, which to certain natures becomes more sacred and suggestive than any of those tedious speculations or literary theories about which the historians may argue.
Most human beings--especially in these "centres of civilisation,"
which are more hideous than anything the sun has looked upon since it watched the mammoths tusking the frozen earth or the ichtheosauruses wallowing in the primeval mud--go through this life blindly, mechanically, unconsciously, fulfilling their duties, s.n.a.t.c.hing at their pleasures, and shuddering at the thought of the end.
Few men and women seem really conscious of what it is to be alive, to be alive and endowed with imagination and memory, upon this time-battered planet. It needs perhaps the anti-social instincts of a true "philosophic anarchist" to detach oneself from the absorbing present and to win the larger perspective.
Rousseau was of so fluid, so irresponsible a temperament that he never could be brought to take seriously, to take as anything but as suggestive subjects for eloquent diatribes, the practical and domestic relations between human beings in organised society.
He played lightly with these relations, he laughed over them and wept over them, he wrote impa.s.sioned and dithyrambic orations upon them. But they were not his real life. His real life was the life he lived with his music and his botany and his love affairs, the life of his dreamy wanderings from refuge to refuge among the woods and chateaux of France; the life of his delicate memories and wistful regrets; the life of his thrilling indescribable thoughts, half sensual and half spiritual, as he drifted along the lonely roads and under the silent stars, or sat staring at the fire-light in his Paris attic while the city roared about him.
No lonely introspective spirit, withdrawn from the crowd and hating the voices of the world, can afford to lose touch with the secret of Rousseau; with what his self-centred and impa.s.sioned existence really meant.
We need not tease ourselves with his pious speculations, with his philanthropic oratory or his educational proposals. These can be left to those who are interested in such things. What we find arresting and suggestive in him, after this lapse of years, is a certain quality of personal pa.s.sion, a certain vein of individual feeling, the touch of which still has a living power.
How interesting, for example, is that voluptuous desire of his to lay bare all his basest and meanest l.u.s.ts, all his little tricks and devices and vanities and envies and jealousies. This mania for self-exposure, this frantic pa.s.sion for self-laceration and self-humiliation is all of a piece with the manner in which he seemed to enjoy being ill-used and tyrannised over in his singular love-affairs.
More interesting still, and still more morbid, is that persecution mania which seized him in his later days--the mania that all the world loathed him and laughed at him and plotted to make a fool of him. Though betrayed into using the popular phrase, "persecution mania," I am myself inclined to resent, on Rousseau"s behalf and on behalf of those who temperamentally resemble him, this cool a.s.sumption by the normal world that those whom it instinctively detests are "mad" when they grow aware of such detestation.
There seems no doubt that certain human beings appear at intervals on the world stage, whose sentient organisation, attuned to an abnormal receptivity, renders them alien and antagonistic to the ma.s.ses of mankind.
They seem like creatures dropped upon the earth from some other planet, and, do what they may, they cannot grow "native and endued unto the element" of our terrestrial system. This difference in them is not only irritating to the normal herd; it is also provocative of bitter hostility in those among their contemporaries who are themselves possessed of genius.
These other wooers of posterity feel outraged and piqued to the limit of their endurance at having to contend in the same arena with an antagonist who seems to obey no human rules. "A conspiracy of silence" or of scandalous aspersions is almost instinctively set on foot.
Rousseau"s so-called mania of persecution can easily be explained.
There was morbidity; there was neurotic unwisdom, in the manner in which he dealt with all these people. But he was probably perfectly right in a.s.suming that they came to hate him.
In his Confessions he does his best to make posterity hate him; and in private life he must have been constantly, like one of those strange self-lacerating persons in Dostoievsky, bringing to the front, with shameless indecency, his vanities and jealousies, his weakness and his manias. When he couldn"t enjoy the society of some friendly lady--and his friends were nearly always uneasy under the infliction--he poured forth his childish petulances and his rare imaginations on the bosom, so to speak, of society in general; and society in general flung him back in wondering contempt.
His clever contemporaries would naturally, under the pressure of the moment, concentrate their critical attention upon the weakest part of his genius--that is to say upon his reforming theories and large world-shaking speculations--while the portion of him that interests us now would merely strike them as tiresome and irrelevant.
He grew more and more lonely as he neared his end. It might be said that he deserved this fate; he who refused to accept even the responsibility of paternity. But one cannot resist a certain satisfaction in noting how the high-placed society people who came to visit him as he sat in his attic, copying music for a livelihood, were driven from his door.
The great Sentimentalist must have had his exquisite memories, even then, as he sat brooding over his dull mechanical work, he whose burning eloquence about Liberty and Justice and Simplicity and Nature was already sowing the seed of the earthquake.
Queer memories he must have had of his early tramp life through the roads and villages of France; of his conversations with the sceptical Hume among the hills of Derbyshire; of his sweet romantic sojournings in old historic houses, and his strange pa.s.sions and fatal loves. But the rarest of his memories must have been of those hours and days when, in the pastoral seclusion of some cherished hiding-place, he let the world go by and sank, among patient leaves and flowers that could not mock him, into his own soul and the soul of nature.
He has been hugely vituperated by evolutionary philosophers for his mania for the "age of gold" and his disbelief in progress.
One of his favourite themes that civilisation is a curse and not a blessing excited the derision of his best friends. Others said that he stole the idea. But we may be sure that as he copied his daily portion of music with the civilisation of the Salons clamouring unheeded around him, his mind reverted rather to those exquisite moments when he had been happy alone, than to all the triumphs of his genius.
He was just the type that the world would naturally persecute.
Devoid of any sparkling wit, devoid of any charm of manner, singularly devoid of the least sense of proportion, he lent himself to every sort of social rancour. He was one of those persons who take themselves seriously, and that, in his world as in the world of our own time, was an unpardonable fault.
He loved humanity better than men and women. He loved nature better than humanity.
He was a man with little sense of humour and with little interest in other men. He lived for his memories and his dreams, his glimpses and his visions.
Turning away from all dogmatic creeds, he yet sought G.o.d and prayed to him for his mercy.
Born into a world whose cleverness he dreaded, whose inst.i.tutions he loathed, whose angers he provoked, whose authorities he scandalised, whose crowds he hated, he went aside "botanizing" and "copying music"; every now and then hurling forth from his interludes of sentimental journeying a rhythmical torrent of eloquent prophecy in which he himself only half believed and of which, quite often, "the idea was stolen."
In his abnormal receptivity, he was used as a reed for the invisible powers to blow their wild tunes through and to trouble the earth. He produced one great Revolution, and he may, through the medium of souls like his own, produce another; but all the time his real happiness was in his wanderings by field and hedge and road and lane, by ca.n.a.l side and by river bank, thinking the vague delicious thoughts of sensuous solitude and dreaming over the dumb quiescence of that mute inanimate background of our days into which, with his exasperated human nerves, he longed to sink and be at rest.
BALZAC
The real value of the creations of men of genius is to make richer and more complicated what might be called the imaginative margin of our normal life.
We all, as Goethe says, have to bear the burden of humanity--we have to plunge into the bitter waters of reality, so full of sharp rocks and blinding spray. We have to fight for our own hand. We have to forget that we so much as possess a soul as we tug and strain at the resistant elements out of which we live and help others to live.
It is nonsense to pretend that the insight of philosophers and the energy of artists help us very greatly in this bleak wrestling. They are there, these men of genius, securely lodged in the Elysian fields of large and free thoughts--and we are here, sweating and toiling in the dust of brutal facts.
The hollow idealism that pretends that the achievements of literature and thought enter profoundly into the diurnal necessity which prods us forward is a plausible and specious lie. We do not learn how to deal craftily and prosperously with the world from the Machiavels and Talleyrands. We do not learn how to love the world and savour it with exquisite joy from the Whitmans and Emersons. What we do is to struggle on, as best we may; living by custom, by prejudice, by hope, by fear, by envy and jealousy, by ambition, by vanity, by love.
They call it our "environment," this patched up and piecemeal panorama of mad chaotic blunderings, which pushes us. .h.i.ther and thither; and they call it our "heredity," this confused and twisted amalgam of greeds and l.u.s.ts and conscience-stricken reactions, which drives us backward and forward from within. But there is more in the lives of the most wretched of us than this blind struggle.
There are those invaluable, unutterable moments, which we have _to ourselves,_ free of the weight of the world. There are the moments--the door of our bedroom, of our attic, of our ship"s cabin, of our monastic cell, of our tenement-flat, shut against the intruder--when we can enter the company of the great shadows and largely and freely converse with them to the forgetting of all vexation.
At such times, it is to the novelists, to the inventors of stories, that we most willingly turn for the poppied draught that we crave. The poets hurt us with the pang of too dear beauty. They remind us too pitifully of what we have missed. There is too much Rosemary which is "for remembrance" about their songs; too many dead violets between their leaves!
But on the large full tide of a great human romance, we can forget all our troubles. We can live in the lives of people who resemble ourselves and yet are not ourselves. We can put our own misguided life into the sweet distance, and see it--it also--as an invented story; a story that may yet have a fortunate ending!
The philosophers and even the poets are too anxious to convert us to their visions and their fancies. There is the fatal odour of the prophet in their perilous rhetoric, and they would fain lay their most n.o.ble fingers upon our personal matters. They want to make us moral or immoral. They want to thrust their mysticism, their materialism, their free love, or their imprisoned thoughts, down our reluctant throats.
But the great novelists are up to no such mischief; they are dreaming of no such outrage. They are telling their stories of the old eternal dilemmas; stories of love and hate and fear and wonder and madness; stories of life and death and strength and weakness and perversion; stories of loyalty and treachery, of angels and devils, of things seen and things unseen. The greatest novelists are not the ones that deal in sociological or ethical problems. They are the ones that make us forget sociological and ethical problems. They are the ones that deal with the beautiful, mad, capricious, reckless, tyrannous pa.s.sions, which will outlast all social systems and are beyond the categories of all ethical theorising.
First of all the arts of the world was, they say, the art of dancing.
The aboriginal cave-men, we are to believe, footed it in their long twilights to tunes played on the bones of mammoths. But I like to fancy, I who have no great love for this throwing abroad of legs and arms, that there were a few quiet souls, even in those days, who preferred to sit on their haunches and listen to some h.o.a.ry greybeard tell stories, stories I suppose of what it was like in still earlier days, when those lumbering Diplodocuses were still snorting in the remoter marshes.
It was not, as a matter of fact, in any attic or ship"s cabin that I read the larger number of Balzac"s novels. I am not at all disinclined to explain exactly and precisely where it was, because I cannot help feeling that the way we poor slaves of work manage to s.n.a.t.c.h an hour"s pleasure, and the little happy accidents of place and circ.u.mstance accompanying such pleasure, are a noteworthy part of the interest of our experience. It was, as it happens, in a cheerful bow-window in the Oxford High Street that I read most of Balzac; read him in the dreamy half-light of late summer afternoons while the coming on of evening seemed delayed by something golden in the drowsy air which was more than the mere sinking of the sun behind the historic roofs.
Oxford is not my Alma Mater. The less courtly atmosphere which rises above the willows and poplars of the Cam nourished my youthful dreams; and I shall probably to my dying day never quite attain the high nonchalant aloofness from the common herd proper to a true scholar.
It was in the humbler capacity of a summer visitor that I found myself in those exclusive purlieus, and it amuses me now to recall how I a.s.sociated, as one does in reading a great romance, the personages of the Human Comedy with what surrounded me then.
It is a far cry from the city of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater to the city of Vautrin and Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre and Gobsec and Pere Goriot and Diane de Maufrigneuse; and the great Balzacian world has the power of making every other milieu seem a little faded and pallid. But one got a delicious sense of contrast reading him just there in those golden evenings, and across the margin of one"s mind floated rich and thrilling suggestions of the vast vistas of human life. One had the dreamy pleasure that some sequestered seminarist might have, who, on a sunny bench, under high monastic walls, reads of the gallantries and adventures of the great unG.o.dly world outside.
Certainly the heavy avalanches of scoriac pa.s.sion which rend their way through the pages of the Human Comedy make even the graceful blasphemies of the Oscar Wilde group, in those fastidious enclosures, seem a babyish pretence of naughtiness.
I remember how I used to return after long rambles through those fields and village lanes which one reads about in "Thyrsis," and linger in one of the cavernous book-shops which lie--like little Bodleians of liberal welcome--anywhere between New College and Balliol, hunting for Balzac in the original French. Since then I have not been able to endure to read him in any edition except in that very cheapest one, in dusty green paper, with the pages always so resistently uncut and tinted with a peculiar brownish tint such as I have not seemed to find in any other volumes. What an enormous number of that particular issue there must be in Paris, if one can find so many of them still, sun-bleached and weather-stained, in the old book-shops of Oxford!
Translations of Balzac, especially in those "editions de luxe" with dreadful interpretative prefaces by English professors, are odious to me. They seem the sort of thing one expects to find under gla.s.s-cases in the houses of cultured financiers. They are admirably adapted for wedding presents. And they have ill.u.s.trations! That is really too much. A person who can endure to read Balzac, or any other great imaginative writer, in an edition with ill.u.s.trations, is a person utterly outside the pale. It must be for barbarians of this sort that the custom has arisen of having handsome young women, representing feminine prettiness in general, put upon the covers of books in the way they put them upon chocolate boxes. I have seen even "Tess of the d"Urbervilles" prost.i.tuted in this manner. It is all on a par with every other aspect of modern life. Indeed it may be said that what chiefly distinguishes our age from previous ages is its habit of leaving nothing to the imagination.
On the whole, Balzac must still be regarded as the greatest novelist that ever lived. Not to love Balzac is not to love the art of fiction, not to love the huge restorative pleasure of wandering at large through a vast region of imaginary characters set in localities and scenes which may be verified and authenticated by contact with original places.