What one comes more and more to feel is that everything which belongs to poetry and art belongs to the individual, to the individual nation and the individual person. The great modern democracies, with their cult of the average man and their suspicion of the exceptional man, are naturally only too ready to hail as ideal and wonderful any doctrine about literature which flatters their pride.
One of the most plausible forms of rhetorical cant is the cant about the soul of average humanity expressing itself in art, in an art which has sloughed off like an outworn skin all ancient race-instincts and all individual egoism.
There has never been such art in the history of the world as this average man"s art, free from tradition and free from personal colour.
There will never be such art, unless it be the great, idealistic, humanitarian, cosmopolitan art of the Moving Picture Show.
But the idea sounds well in popular oratory, and it has a most soothing ointment for the souls of such artists as have neither reverence nor imagination.
It is quite possible that for the general comfort of the race at large --even if not for its happiness--it would be a good thing if philosophers and moralists between them could get rid of the imagination of races as well as the imagination of individuals.
The common crowd are naturally suspicious of imagination of any kind, as they are suspicious of genius of any kind; and this new doctrine of a literature largely and purely "human," wherein the general soul of humanity may find its expression, free from the colour of race-feeling and free from the waywardness of individual men of genius, is just the sort of thing to flatter the unthinking mob.
Why not have art and literature harnessed once and for all to the great rolling chariot of popular public opinion? Why not abolish all individualism at one stroke as a thing dangerous to the public welfare--a thing uncomfortable, undesirable, upsetting?
The same desperate, irrational, immoral imagination which inspires races with a strange madness, inspires individuals too with a strange madness.
Art and Literature are, after all, and there is little use denying it, the last refuge and sanctuary, in a world ruled by machinery and sentiment, of the free, wild, reckless, irresponsible, anarchical imagination of such as refuse to sacrifice their own dreams for the dreams--not less illusive--of the general herd.
We have to face the fact--bitter and melancholy though it may be--that in our great bourgeois-dominated democracies the majority of people would like to trample out the flame of genius altogether; trample it out as something inimical to their peace.
Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, were all completely aware of this instinctive hatred with which the mob of men regard what is exceptional and rare. The Hamlet-spirit of the author of Coriola.n.u.s must chuckle bitterly in that grave in Stratford-on-Avon when he learns that the new ideal is the ideal of cosmopolitan literature expressing the soul of the average man.
The clash is bound to come sooner or later between public opinion, concerned to preserve the comfort of its illusions, and the art of the individual artist playing, in n.o.ble irresponsibility, with all illusions.
It was his consciousness of this--of the natural antagonism of the mob and its leaders to all great literature--that made Goethe draw back so coldly and proudly from the popular tendencies of his time, and seek refuge among the great individualistic spirits of the cla.s.sic civilisations. And what Goethe--the good European--did in his hour, the more cla.s.sical among European writers of our own day do still.
The great style--the style which is like gold and bronze in an age of clay and rubble--remains as the only sure refuge we have from the howling vulgarities of our generation. If books were taken from us--the high, calm, beautiful, ironical books of cla.s.sic tradition--how, in this age, could the more sensitive among us endure to live at all?
With brutality and insanity and ruffianism, with complacency and stupidity and sentimentalism, jostling us and hustling us on all sides, how could we live, if it were not for the great, calm, scornful anarchists of the soul, whose high inviolable imaginations perpetually refresh and re-create the world?
And we who find this refuge, we who have to win our liberty every day anew by bathing in these cla.s.sic streams, we too will do well to remember that the most precious things in life are the things that the world can neither give nor take away.
We too--encouraged by these great individualists--have a right to fall back upon whatever individuality may have been left to us; and, resting upon that, sinking into the soul of that, to defy all that public opinion and the voice of the majority may be able to do.
And we shall be wise also if we recognise, before it is too late, that what is most intrinsic and inalienable in ourselves is just that very portion of us which has nothing to do with our work in life, nothing to do with our duty to the community.
We shall be wise if we recognise, before it is too late, that the thing most sacred in us is that strange margin of unoccupied receptivity, upon which settle, in their flight over land and sea, the beautiful wild birds of unsolicited dreams.
We shall be wise if, before we die, we learn a little of the art of suspending our judgment--the art of "waiting upon the spirit."
For it is only when we have suspended our judgment; it is only when we have suspended our convictions, our principles, our ideals, our moralities, that "the still small voice" of the music of the universe, sad and sweet and terrible and tender, drifts in upon us, over the face of the waters of the soul.
The essence of us, the hidden reality of us, is too rare and delicate a thing to bear the crude weight of these st.u.r.dy opinions, these vigorous convictions, these social ardours, without growing dulled and hardened.
We all have to bear the burden of humanity; and the artists among us may be thankful that the predatory curse resting upon the rich is very seldom ours: but the burden of humanity must not be allowed to press all joy, all originality, all waywardness, all interest, all imagination out of our lives.
It is not for long, at best or worst, that we know what it is to be conscious of being living children of the human race upon this strange planet.
The days pa.s.s quickly, and the seasons and the years. From the graves of the darlings of our souls there comes a voice and a cry. A voice bidding us sink into our own true selves before we too are numbered with the dead; a cry bidding us sacrifice everything before we sacrifice the prerogative of our inmost ident.i.ty, the right to feel and think and dream as persons born into a high inheritance, the inheritance of the mind that has the right to question all things and to hold fast what pleases it in defiance of opinion and logic and probability and argument.
For it is only when we suspend our judgments and leave arguing and criticising, that the quiet G.o.ds of the moonlit sh.o.r.es of the world murmur their secrets in our ears.
They come without our seeking for them, these rare intimations; without our seeking for them, and, sometimes, without our desiring them; but when they come they come as revelations of something deeper in us than any mere soul of humanity. They come from a region that is as far beyond humanity as it is beyond nature. They come from the fairy-land of that mysterious country wherein dwell the dreams and the fancies of those lonely ones among the sons of men who have been possessed by imagination. They come from the unknown land where those inhabit who are, as the Psalmist says, "free among the dead." They come from the land which we left when we were born, and to which we return when we die. And whether this is a land of nothingness and oblivion none knoweth; for none hath returned to tell us. Meanwhile we can imagine what we will; and we can suspend our last judgment until we ourselves are judged.