A Dialogue On Poetic Morality

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Title:     A Dialogue On Poetic Morality
Author: Vernon Lee [More Titles by Lee]

God sent a poet to reform His earth.--A. MARY F. ROBINSON.

"And meanwhile, what have you written?" asked Baldwin, tickling the flies with his whip from off the horse's head, as they slowly ascended, in the autumn afternoon, the hill of Montetramito, which with its ilex and myrtle-grown black rocks, and its crumbling mounds, where the bright green spruce pine clings to the washed-away scarlet sand, separates the green and fertile plain of Lucca from the marshes of the Pisan sea-shore. The two friends had met only an hour or so before at the foot of the Apennine pass, and would part in not much more again. "And what have you written?" repeated Baldwin.

"Nothing," answered the younger man, drearily, leaning back languidly in the rickety little carriage. "Nothing, or rather too much; I don't know which. Is trash too much or too little? Anyhow, there's none of it remaining. I thrust all my manuscripts into my stove at Dresden, and the chimney took fire in consequence. That's the tragic history of all my poetical labours of the last two years." And Cyril, lying back in the carriage with his arms folded beneath his head, smiled half-sadly, half whimsically in the face of his friend.

But Baldwin did not laugh.

"Cyril," he answered, "do you remember on a birthday of yours--you were a tiny boy, brought up like a girl, with curls and beautiful hands--one of your sisters dared you to throw your presents into the garden well, and you did it, before a number of admiring little girls: you felt quite a hero or a little saint, didn't you? And then my little hero was suddenly collared by a big boy fresh from school, who was his friend Baldwin, and who pulled his ears soundly and told him to respect people's presents a little more. Do you remember that? Well; I now see that, with all your growing up, and writing, and philosophising, and talking about duty and self-sacrifice, you are just the self-same womanish and uncontrolled poseur, the same romantic braggadoccio that you were at seven. I have no patience with you!" And Baldwin whisked the whip angrily at the flies.

"Mere conceit: effeminate heroics again!" he went on. "Oh no, we must do the very best! Be Shakespeare at least! Anything short of that would be derogatory to our kingly nature! no idea of selecting the good (because in whatever you do there must be talent), and trying to develop it; no idea of doing the best with what gifts you have! For you are not going to tell me that two years of your work was mere rubbish--contained nothing of value. But, in point of fact, you don't care sufficiently for your art to be satisfied to be the most you can; 'tis mere vanity with you."

Cyril became very red, but did not interrupt.

"I am sorry you think so ill of me," he said sadly, "and I dare say I have given you good cause. I dare say I am all the things you say--vain, and womanish, and insolently dissatisfied with myself, and idiotically heroic. But not in this case, I assure you. I will explain why I thought it right to do that. You see I know myself very well now. I know my dangers; I am not like you--I am easily swayed. Had those poems remained in existence, had I taken them to England, I am sure I should not have resisted the temptation of showing them to my old encouragers, of publishing them probably; and then, after the success of my other book, and all their grand prophecies, the critics would have had to praise up this one too; and I should have been drifted back again into being a poet. Now, as I wrote you several times--only, of course, you thought it all humbug and affectation--such a poet as I could be I am determined I will not be. It was an act of self-defence--defence of whatever of good there may be in me."

Baldwin groaned. "Defence of fiddlesticks! Defence of your vanity!"

"I don't think so," replied Cyril, "and I don't think you understand me at all in this instance. There was no vanity in this matter. You know that since some time I have been asking myself what moral right a man has to consume his life writing verses, when there is so much evil to remove, and every drop of thought or feeling we have is needed to make the great river which is to wash out this Augean stable of a world. I tried to put the doubt behind me, and to believe in Art for Art's own sake, and such bosh. But the doubt pricked me. And when suddenly my uncle left me all he had, I felt I must decide. As long as I was a mere penniless creature I might write poetry, because there seemed nothing else for me to do. But now it is different. This money and the power it gives are mine only as long as I live; after my death they may go to some blackguard; so, while I have them, I must give all my energies to doing with them all the good that I possibly can."

"In that case better give them over to people who know best what to do with them--societies or hospitals, or that sort of thing--and write your verses as before. For I don't think your thoughts will add much to the value of your money, Cyril. You've not a bit of practical head. Of course you may, if you choose, look on idly while other people are using your money. But I don't think it is specially worth doing."

Cyril sighed, hesitated, and then burst out rapidly--

"But it is the only thing I can do--do you understand? I can't write poetry any more. Perhaps that may be the only thing for which I was ever fit, but I am fit for it no longer. I cannot do what I have got to despise and detest. For I do despise and detest the sort of poetry which I should write--mere ornamental uselessness, so much tapestry work or inlaid upholstery. You believe in Art for Art's own sake--Goethianism--that sort of thing, I know. It is all very well for you, who have an active practical life with your Maremma drainings and mine diggings, a life in which art, beauty, so forth, have only their due share, as repose and refreshment. It was all very well in former days also, when the people for whom artists worked had a deal of struggle and misery, and required some pure pleasure to make life endurable; but now-a-days, and with the people for whom I should write, things are different. What is wanted now-a-days is not art, but life. By whom do you think, would all the beautiful useful things I could write, all the fiddle-faddle about trees and streams and statues and love and aspiration (fine aspiration, which never takes a practical shape!) be read? By wretched overworked creatures, into whose life they might bring a moment of sweetness, like a spray of apple blossom or a bunch of sweet-peas into some black garret? Nothing of the kind. They would be read by a lot of intellectual Sybarites, shutting themselves out, with their abominable artistic religion, from all crude real life; they would be merely so much more hothouse scents or exotic music (con sordino), to make them snooze their lives away. Of course it is something to be a poet like those of former days; something to be Tasso, and be read by that poor devil of a fever-stricken watchmaker whom we met down in the plain of Lucca; but to be a poet for the cultured world of to-day--oh, I would rather be a French cook, and invent indigestible dishes for epicures without any appetite remaining to them."

So saying, Cyril jumped out of the gig, and ran up the steep last ascent of the hill. He had persuaded himself of his moral rightness and felt quite happy.

Suddenly the road made a sharp bend between the overhanging rocks, grown in all their fissures with dark ilex tufts and yellow broom and pale pink cyclamen; it turned, and widened into a flat grass-grown place, surrounded by cypresses on the top and ridge of the hill. Cyril ran to the edge and gave a cry of pleasure. Below was stretched a wide strip of Maremma swamp-land, mottled green and brown--green where the grass was under water, brown where it was burned into cinders by the sun; with here and there a patch of shining pond or canal; and at the extremity of this, distinguishable from the greyish amber sky only by its superior and intense luminousness, the sea--not blue nor green, but grey, silvery, steel-like, as a mirror in the full sunshine. Baldwin stopped the gig beneath the cypresses.

"Look there," he said, pointing with his whip to a dark greenish band, scarcely visible, which separated the land from the sea: "those are the pine woods of Viareggio. It was into their sand and weeds that the sea washed Shelley's body. Do you think we should be any the better off if he had taken to practical work which he could not do, and declared that poetry was a sort of French cookery?"

Baldwin tied the reins to the stem of a cypress, and threw himself down on the warm sere grass on the brow of the hill, overlooking the tangle of olive and vine and fig-trees of the slopes below.

"In Shelley's time," answered Cyril, leaning his head and shoulders against one of the cypresses, and looking up into its dark branches, compact in the centre, but delicate like feather and sparkling like jet where their extremities stood out against the pale blue sky--"in Shelley's time, things were rather different from what they are now. There was a religion of progress to preach and be stoned for; there was a cause of liberty to fight for--there were Bourbons and Lord Eldons, and there was Greece and Spain and Italy. There was Italy still when Mrs. Browning wrote: had she looked out of Casa Guidi windows now, on to the hum-drum, shoulder-shrugging, penny-haggling, professorial, municipal-councillorish Italy of to-day she could scarcely have felt in the vein. The heroic has been done--"

"There is Servia and Montenegro, and there are Nihilists and Democrats," answered Baldwin.

"I know--but we can't sing about barbarous ruffians, nor about half-besotten, half-knavish regicides; we can't be Democrats now-a-days--at least I can't. Would you have a man sing parliamentary debates, or High Church squabbles, or Disestablishment, or Woman's rights, or anti-communism? sing the superb conquests of man over nature, &c., like your Italian friends, your steam-engine and mammoth poet Zanella? The wonders of science!--six or seven thousand dogs and cats being flayed, roasted, baked, disembowelled, artificially ulcerated, galvanized on ripped-up nerves, at Government expense, in all the laboratories of Christendom, in order to discover the soul-secreting apparatus, and how to cure old maids of liver complaint! Thank you. My muse aspires not thereunto. What then? Progress? But it is assured. Why, man, we can't even sing of despair, like the good people of the year '20, since we all know that (bating a few myriads of sufferers and a few centuries of agony) all is going to come quite right, to be quite comfortable in this best of all possible worlds. What then remains, again? Look around you. There remains the poetry of beauty--oh yes, of pure beauty, to match the newest artistic chintzes; the poetry of artistic nirvana, of the blissful sleep of all manliness and energy, to the faint sound (heard through dreams) of paradisiac mysticism sung to golden lutes, or of imaginary amorous hysterics, or of symphonies in alliteration. And this when there is so much error, so much doubt, so much suffering, when all our forces are required to push away a corner of the load of evil still weighing on the world: this sort of thing I cannot take to." And Cyril fiercely plucked out a tuft of lilac-flowered thyme, and threw it into the precipice below, as if it had been the poetry of which he was speaking.

"Do you know, Baldwin," went on Cyril, "you have destroyed successively all my gods; you have shown me that my Holy Grails, in whose service, one after another I felt happy and peaceful to live, like another Parzival, or Galahaso, are not the sacred life-giving cup brought down by angels, but mere ordinary vessels of brittle earth or stinking pewter, mere more or less useful, but by no means holy things; ordinary pots and pans, barber's basins like Mambrino's helmet, or blue china teapots (worst degradation of all) like the Cimabue-Browns'. I believed in the religion of Nature, and you showed me that Nature was sometimes good and sometimes bad; that she produced the very foulness, physical and moral, which she herself chastised men for; you showed me whole races destined inevitably to moral perversion, and then punished for it. So I gave up Nature. Then I took up the fashionable religion of Science, and you showed me that it was the religion of a sort of Moloch, since it accustomed us to acquiesce in all the evil which is part and parcel of Nature, since it made us passive investigators into wrong when we ought to be judges. After the positive, I threw myself into the mystic--into the religion of all manner of mysterious connections and redemptions; you showed me that the connections did not exist, and that all attempted sanctification of things through mysticism was an abomination, since it could not alter evil, and taught us to think it might be good. O my poor Holy Grails! Then I took up the religion of love; and you proceeded to expound to me that if love was restricted to a few worthy individuals, it meant neglect of the world at large; and that if it meant love of the world at large, it meant love of a great many utterly unworthy and beastly people. You deprived me of humanitarianism, of positivism, of mysticism; and then you did not even let me rest peaceably in pessimism, telling me that to say that all was for the worst was as unjust as to say that all was for the best. With a few of your curt sentences you showed me that all these religions of mine were mere idolatries, and that to rest in them for the sake of peace was to be utterly base. You left me nothing but a vague religion of duty, of good; but you gave me no means of seeing where my duty lay, of distinguishing good from evil. You are a very useful rooter up of error, Baldwin; but you leave one's soul as dry and barren and useless as sea shingle. You have taken away all the falsehoods from my life, but you have not replaced them by truths."

Baldwin listened quietly.

"Would you like to have the falsehoods back, Cyril?" he asked. "Would you now like to be the holy knight, adoring and defending the pewter basin or blue china teapot of humanitarianism, or positivism, or mysticism, or aestheticism? And what becomes of the only religion which I told you was the true one--the religion of good, of right? Do you think it worthless now?"

"I think it is the religion of the Unknown God. Where shall I find Him?"

"In yourself, if you will look, Cyril."

Cyril was silent for a moment. "What is right?" he said. "In the abstract--(oh, and it is so easy to find out in the abstract, compared to the concrete!)--in the abstract, right is to improve things in the world, to make it better for man and beast; never to steal justice, and always to give mercy; to do all we can which can increase happiness, and refrain from doing all which can diminish it. That is the only definition I can see. But how vague!--and who is to tell me what I am to do? And when I see a faint glimmer of certainty, when I perceive what seems to me the right which I must do, who again interferes? My friend Baldwin, who, after preaching to me that the only true religion is the religion of diminishing evil and increasing good for the sake of so doing, coolly writes to me, in half-a-dozen letters, that the sole duty of the artist is to produce good art, and that good art is art which has no aim beyond its own perfection. Why, it is a return to my old aesthetic fetish worship, when I thought abstract ideas of beauty would set the world right, as Amphion's harp set the stones building themselves.... Am I justified in saying that you merely upset my beliefs, without helping me to build up any; yes, even when I am striving after that religion of right doing which you nominally call yours--?"

"You always rush to extremes, Cyril. If you would listen to, or read, my words without letting your mind whirl off while so doing--"

"I listen to you far too much, Baldwin," interrupted Cyril, who would not break the thread of his own ideas; "and first I want to read you a sonnet."

Baldwin burst out laughing. "A sonnet! one of those burnt at Dresden--or written in commemoration of your decision to write no more?"

"It is not by me at all, so there's an end to your amusement. I want you to hear it because it embodies, and very nobly, what I have felt. I have never even seen the author, and know nothing about her except that she is a woman."

"A woman!" and Baldwin's tone was disagreeably expressive.

"I know you don't believe in women poets or women artists."

"Not much, so far, excepting Sappho and Mrs. Browning, certainly. But, come, let's hear the sonnet. I do abominate women's verses, I confess; but there are such multitudes of poetesses that Nature may sometimes blunder in their production, and make one of them of the stuff intended for a poet."

"Well then, listen," and Cyril drew a notebook from his pocket, and read as follows:--

"God sent a poet to reform His earth
But when he came and found it cold and poor
Harsh and unlovely, where each prosperous boor
Held poets light for all their heavenly birth,
He thought--Myself can make one better worth
The living in than this--full of old lore,
Music and light and love, where saints adore
And angels, all within mine own soul's girth.
But when at last he came to die, his soul
Saw Earth (flying past to Heaven) with new love,
And all the unused passion in him cried:
'O God, your Heaven I know and weary of,
Give me this world to work in and make whole.'
God spoke: 'Therein, fool, thou hast lived and died.'"

Cyril paused for a moment. "Do you understand, Baldwin, how that expresses my state of feeling?" he then asked.

"I do," answered the other, "and I understand that both you and the author of the sonnet seem not to have understood in what manner God intended that poets should improve the earth. And here I return to my former remark, that when I said that the only true religion was the religion not of nature, nor of mankind, nor of science, nor of art, but the religion of good, and that the creation of perfect beauty is the highest aim of the artist, I was not contradicting myself, but merely stating two parts--a general and a particular--of the same proposition. I don't know what your definition of right living may be; mine, the more I think over the subject, has come to be this:--the destruction of the greatest possible amount of evil and the creation of the greatest possible amount of good in the world. And this is possible only by the greatest amount of the best and most complete activity, and the greatest amount of the best activity is possible only when everything is seen in its right light, in order that everything may be used in its right place. I have always preached to you that life must be activity; but activity defeats itself if misapplied; it becomes a mere Danaides' work of filling bottomless casks--pour and pour and pour in as much as you will, the cask will always be empty. Now, in this world there are two things to be done, and two distinct sets of people to do them: the one work is the destruction of evil, the other the creation of good. Mind, I say the creation of good, for I consider that to do good--that is to say, to act rightly--is not necessarily the same as to create good. Every one who does his allotted work is doing good; but the man who tends the sick, or defends the oppressed, or discovers new truths, is not creating good, but destroying evil--destroying evil in one of a hundred shapes, as sickness, or injustice, or falsehood. But he merely removes, he does not give; he leaves men as poor or as rich as they would have been, had not disease, or injustice, or error stolen away some of their life. The man who creates good is the one who not merely removes pain, but adds pleasure to our lives. Through him we are absolutely the richer. And this creator of good, as distinguished from destroyer of evil, is, above all other men, the artist. The scientific thinker may add pleasure to our lives, but in reality this truth of his is valuable, not for the pleasure it gives, but for the pain it removes. Science is warfare; we may consider it as a kind of sport, but in reality it is a hunting down of the most dangerous kind of wild animal--falsehood. A great many other things may give pleasure to our lives--all our healthy activities, upper or lower, must; but the lower ones are already fully exercised, and, if anything, require restraint; so that French cooks and erotic poets ought rather to be exterminated as productive of evil than encouraged as creative of good. And moral satisfaction and love give us the best pleasures of all; but these are pleasures which are not due to any special class created on purpose for their production. Oh, I don't say that any artist can give you the pleasure you have in knowing yourself to be acting rightly, or in sympathizing and receiving sympathy; but the artist is the instrument, the machine constructed to produce the only pleasures which can come near these. Every one of us can destroy evil and create pleasure, in a sort of incidental, amateurish way, within our own immediate circle; but as the men of thought and of action are the professional destroyers of evil, so the artists are the professional creators of good--they work not for those immediately around them, but for the world at large. So your artist is your typical professional creator of pleasure; he is fitted out, as other men are not, to do this work; he is made of infinitely finer stuff than other men, not as a whole man, but as an artist: he has much more delicate hearing, much keener sight, much defter fingers, much farther-reaching voice than other men; he is specially prepared to receive and transmit impressions which would be as wasted on other creatures, as the image in the camera on unprepared, ordinary paper. Now, what I maintain is simply this, that if, according to my definition, the object of destroying as much evil and creating as much good can be attained only by the greatest activity rightly applied, it is evident that a man endowed to be an artist--that is to say, a creator of good for the whole world--is simply failing in his duty by becoming a practical worker; that is to say, an amateur destroyer of evil. What shall we say of this artist? We shall say that, in order to indulge in the moral luxury, the moral amusement, of removing an imperceptible amount of pain, he has defrauded the world of the immense and long-lasting pleasure placed in his charge to give; we shall say that, in order to feel himself a little virtuous, this man has simply acted like a cheat and a thief."

Baldwin had spoken rapidly and earnestly, with a sort of uniform or only gradually rising warmth, very different from the hesitating, fluctuating sort of passion of his companion. There was a short silence; Cyril was still seated under the tall, straight cypress, whose fallen fruit, like carved balls of wood, strewed the sere grass, and whose compact hairy trunk gave out a resinous scent, more precious and strange than that of the fir: he felt that he was momentarily crushed, but had a vague sense that there lurked somewhere reasons, and very potent ones, which prevented his friend being completely victorious; and Baldwin was patiently waiting for him to muster his ideas into order before continuing the discussion. A slight breeze from the over-clouded sea sent a shiver across the olives into the ravine below, turning their feathery tops into a silver ripple, as of a breaking wave; the last belated cicalas, invisible in the thick plumy branches of the cypresses, sawed slowly and languidly in the languid late afternoon; and from the farms hidden in the olive yards of the slope came faint sounds of calling voices and barking dogs--just sound enough to make the stillness more complete. "All that is very true," said Cyril at last, "and yet--I don't know how to express it--I feel that there is still remaining to me all my reason for doubt and dissatisfaction. You say that artistic work is morally justifiable to the artist, since he is giving pleasure to others. From this point of view you are perfectly right. But what I feel is, that the pleasure which the artist thus gives is not morally valuable to those who enjoy it. Do you follow? I mean that the artist may be nobly and generously employed, and yet, by some fatal contradiction, the men and women who receive his gifts are merely selfishly gratified. He might not, perhaps, be better employed than in giving pleasure, but they might surely be better employed than in merely receiving it; and thus the selfishness of the enjoyment of the gift seems to diminish the moral value of giving it. When an artist gives to other men an hour of mere enjoyment, I don't know whether he ought to be quite proud or not."

Baldwin merely laughed. "It is droll to see what sort of hypermoral scruples some people indulge in now-a-days. So, your sense of the necessity of doing good is so keen that you actually feel wretched at the notion of your neighbours being simply happy, and no more, for an hour. You are not sure whether, by thus taking them away for a moment from the struggle with evil, letting them breathe and rest in the middle of the battle, you may not be making them sin and be sinning yourself! Why, my dear Cyril, if you condemn humanity to uninterrupted struggle with evil, you create evil instead of destroying it; if mankind could be persuaded to give up all of what you would call useless and selfish pleasure, it would very soon become so utterly worn out and disheartened as to be quite powerless to resist evil. If this is the system on which poets would reform the world, it is very fortunate that they don't think of it till they are flying to heaven."

"I can't make it out. You seem to be in the right, Baldwin, and yet I still seem to be justified in sticking to my ideas," said Cyril. "Do you see," he went on, "you have always preached to me that the highest aim of the artist is the perfection of his own work; you have always told me that art cannot be as much as it should if any extra-artistic purpose be given to it. And while listening to you I have felt persuaded that all this was most perfectly true. But then, an hour later, I have met the same idea--the eternal phrase of art for art's own sake--in the mouths and the books of men I completely despised; men who seemed to lose sight of all the earnestness and duty of life, who had even what seemed to me very base ideas about art itself, and at all events debased it by associating it with effeminate, selfish, sensual mysticism. So that the idea of art for art's own sake has come to have a disgusting meaning to me."

Baldwin had risen from the grass, and untied the horse from the trunk of the cypress.

"There is a storm gathering," he said, pointing to the grey masses of cloud, half-dissolved, which were gathering everywhere; "if we can get to one of the villages on the coast without being half-drowned while crossing the swamps, we shall be lucky. Get in, and we can discuss art for art's own sake, and anything else you please, on the way."

In a minute the gig was rattling down the hill, among the great blasted grey olives, and the vines with reddening foliage, and the farm-houses with their fig and orange trees, their great tawny pumpkins lying in heaps on the threshing-floor, and their autumn tapestry of strung-together maize hanging massy and golden from the eaves to the ground.

Baldwin resumed the subject where they had left it: "My own experience is, that the men who go in for art for art's own sake, do so mainly from a morbid shrinking from all the practical and moral objects which other folk are apt to set up as the aim of art; in reality, they do not want art, nor the legitimate pleasures of art: they want the sterile pleasure of perceiving mere ingenuity and dexterity of handling; they hanker vaguely after imaginary sensuous stimulation, spiced with all manner of mystical rubbish, after some ineffable half-nauseous pleasure in strange mixtures of beauty and nastiness; they enjoy above all things dabbling and dipping alternately in virtue and vice, as in the steam and iced water of a Turkish bath.... In short, these creatures want art not for its own sake, but for the sake of excitement which the respectabilities of society do not permit their obtaining, except in imaginative form. As to art, real art, they treat it much worse than the most determined utilitarian: the utilitarians turn art into a drudge; these aesthetic folk make her into a pander and a prostitute. My reason for restricting art to artistic aims is simply my principle that if things are to be fully useful they must be restricted to their real use, according to the idea of Goethe's Duke of Ferrara:--

'Nicht alles dienet uns auf gleiche Weise;
Wer vieles brauchen will, gebrauche jedes
In seiner Art, so ist er wohl bedient.'

I want art in general not to meddle with the work of any of our other energies, for the same reason that I want each art in particular not to meddle with the work of any other art. Sculpture cannot do the same as painting, nor painting the same as music, nor music the same as poetry; and by attempting anything beyond its legitimate sphere each sacrifices what it, and no other, can do. So, also, art in general has a definite function in our lives; and if it attempts to perform the work of philosophy, or practical benevolence, or science, or moralizing, or anything not itself, it will merely fail in that, and neglect what it could do."

"Oh yes," continued Baldwin after a minute, as they passed into the twilight of a wood of old olives, grey, silvery, mysterious, rising tier above tier on either side of the road, a faint flicker of yellow light between their feathery branches. "Oh yes, I don't doubt that were I a writer, and were I to expound my life-and-art philosophy to the world, the world would tax me with great narrowness! Things are always too narrow for people when they are kept in their place--kept within duty and reason. Of course there is an infinite grandeur in chaos--in a general wandering among the Unknown, in an universal straining and hankering after the Impossible; it is grand to see the arts writhing and shivering to atoms, like caged vipers, in their impotence to do what they cannot. Only it would be simpler to let those do it who can; and my system is the only one which can work. Despair is fine, and Nirvana is fine; but successful and useful activity is a good deal finer. Wherefore I shall always say--'Each in his place and to his work;' and you, therefore, my dear Cyril, to yours, which is poetry."

"I think your philosophy is quite right, Baldwin, only--only, somehow, I can't get it to suit my moral condition," answered Cyril. "I do feel quite persuaded that sculptors must not try to be painters, nor musicians try to be poets, nor any of them try to be anything beyond what they are. It is all quite rational, and right, and moral, but still I am not satisfied about poetry. You see a poet is not quite in the same case as any other sort of artist. The musician, inasmuch as musician, knows only notes, has power only over sounds; and the painter similarly as to form and colours; if either be something more, it is inasmuch as he is a mere man, not an artist. But a poet, inasmuch as he is a poet, knows, sees, feels a great many things which have a practical and moral meaning: just because he is a poet, he knows that there is something beyond poetry; he knows that there are in the world such things as justice and injustice, good and evil, purity and foulness: he knows all this, which the mere musician, the mere painter, does not--and knowing it, perceiving, feeling, understanding it, with more intensity than other men, is he to sweep it all out of his sight? is he to say to justice and injustice, good and evil, purity and foulness, 'I know you, but my work lies not with you?' Is he to do this? Oh, Baldwin, if he be a man and an honest one, he surely cannot: he cannot set aside these ideas and devote himself to his art for its own sake."

Baldwin listened attentively to the passionate words of his companion, and twitching at a sprig of olive as a branch swept across their heads in their rapid movement through the wood, he answered quietly:

"He will not set aside the ideas of justice and injustice, of good and evil, of purity and impurity, Cyril. He will make use of them even as the musician uses his sounds, or the painter uses his colours. Such ideas are at least one-half of the poet's material, of the stuff out of which he creates--the half which belongs exclusively to him, which he does not share with any other artist; the half which gives poetry a character in many respects different from that of painting or music. I have always laughed at the Ruskinian idea of morality or immorality in architecture, or painting, or music, and said that their morality and immorality were beauty and ugliness. I have done so because moral ideas don't enter into the arts of line, or colour, or sound, but only into the subjects to which their visible and audible works are (usually arbitrarily) attached. But with poetry the case is different; and if the poet has got a keener perception (or ought to have) of right and wrong than other men, it is because a sense of moral right and wrong is required in his art, as a sense of colour is required in painting. I have said 'art for art's own sake,' but I should have been more precise in saying 'art for beauty's sake.' Now, in poetry, one half of beauty and ugliness is purely ethical, and if the poet who deals with this half, the half which comprises human emotion and action, has no sense of right and wrong, he will fail as signally as some very dexterous draughtsman, who should have no sense of physical beauty and ugliness, and spend his time making wonderful drawings of all manner of diseased growths. Of course, you may be a poet who does not deal with the human element, who writes only about trees and rivers, and in this case your notions of right and wrong are as unnecessary to you as an artist as they would be to a landscape painter. You use them in your life, but not in your art. But as soon as a poet deals with human beings, and their feelings and doings, he must have a correct sense of what, in such feelings and doings, is right and what is wrong. And if he have not this sense, he will not be in the same case as the painter or musician who is deficient in the sense of pictorial or musical right and wrong. The wise folk who have examined into our visual and acoustic nerves seem to think, what to me seems extremely probable, that the impression of aesthetic repulsion which we get from badly combined lines, or colours, or sounds, is a sort of admonition that such combinations are more or less destructive to our nerves of sight or of hearing; so, similarly, the quite abstract aversion which we feel to an immoral effect in literature, seems to me to be the admonition (while we are still Platonically viewing the matter, and have not yet come personally into contact with it) that our moral sense--what I may call our nerves of right and wrong--is being disintegrated by this purely intellectual contact with evil. And, moreover, our nerves of right and wrong are, somehow, much less well protected than our visual or acoustic nerves: they seem to be more on the surface of our nature, and they are much more easily injured: it takes a good deal of bad painting and bad music to deprave a man's eye or ear, and more than we can well conceive to make him blind or deaf; but it takes less than we think of base literature to injure a man's moral perception, to make him see and hear moral things completely wrong. You see the good, simple, physical senses look after themselves--are in a way isolated; but the moral sense is a very complex matter, and interfered with in every possible manner by the reason, the imagination, the bodily senses--so that injuring it through any of these is extremely easy. And the people whom bad painting or bad music had made half-blind or half-deaf would be less dangerous to themselves and to others than those who had been made half-immoral by poetry."

"But at that rate," said Cyril, "we should never be permitted to write except about moral action; if the morally right is the same for the poet as the pictorially right for the painter. Baldwin, I think, I fear, that all these are mere extemporized arguments for the purpose of making me satisfied with poetry, which I never shall be again, I feel persuaded."

"Not at all," answered Baldwin. "I mean that the moral right or wrong of poetry is not exactly what you mean. If we were bound never to write except about good people, there would be an end to half the literature of the world."

"That is exactly what I saw, and what showed me the hollowness of your theory, Baldwin."

"Because you mistook my theory. There could be no human action or interest if literature were to avoid all representation of evil: no more tragedy, at any rate, and no more novels. But you must remember that the impression given by a play or a poem is not the same as that given by a picture or statue. The picture or statue is all we see; if it be ugly, the impression is ugly. But in a work of literature we see not only the actors and their actions, but the manner in which they are regarded by the author; and in this manner of regarding them lies the morality or immorality. You may have as many villains as you please, and the impression may still be moral; and you may have as many saints as you please, and the impression may still be immoral."

The road had suddenly emerged out of the olive woods covering the lowest hill ranges, and in a few minutes they were driving through a perfect desert. The road, a narrow white ribbon, stretched across a great flat tract of country: field after field of Indian corn, stripped of its leaves and looking like regiments of spindles, and of yellowish green grass, half under water; on either side a ditch full of water-lilies, widening into sedge-fringed canals, in which the hay of coarse long grass was stacked in boats for sheer want of dry soil, or expanding into shallow patches of water scarcely covering the grass, and reflecting, against the green of the meadow below, the boldly peaked marble mountains of Carrara, bare, intensely ribbed, veined, and the blue sky and rainy black clouds. Green brown fields, tufts of reed, hill and sky reflected in the inundated grass--nothing more, not a house, or shed, or tree for miles around--in front only the stormy horizon where it touched the sea.

"This is beautiful," cried Cyril. "I should like to come and live here. It is much lovelier and more peaceful than all the woods and valleys in creation."

Baldwin laughed. "It might be a good beginning for final Nirvana," he said. "These are the sea-swamps, the padule, where the serene Republic of Lucca sent its political offenders. You were locked up in a tower, the door bricked up, with food enough to last till your keeper came back once a fortnight; the malaria did the rest."

"It is like some of our modern literature," answered Cyril, with a shudder; "Maremma poetry--we have that sort of thing, too."

"By the way," went on Baldwin; "I don't think we quite came to the end of our discussion about what a poet ought to do with his moral instincts, if he has any."

"I know," answered Cyril, "and I have meanwhile returned to my previous conclusion that, now that all great singable strifes are at an end, poetry cannot satisfy the moral cravings of a man."

"You think so?" asked Baldwin, looking rather contemptuously at his companion. "You think so? Well, therein lies your mistake. I think, on the contrary, that poetry requires more moral sense and energy than most men can or will give to it. Do you know what a poet has to deal with, at least a poet who does not confine himself to mere description of inanimate things? He has to deal with the passions and actions of mankind--that is to say, with a hundred problems of right and wrong. Of course, men who have deliberately made up their mind on any question of right and wrong, are not shaken by anything in a book; nay, they probably scarcely remark it. But if you remember that in the inner life of every man there must be moments of doubt and hesitation, there must be problems vaguely knocking about, you will understand that for every man there is the danger that in such a moment of doubt his eyes may fall upon a sentence in a book--a sentence to other men trivial--which will settle that doubt for ever, rightly or wrongly. There are few of us so strong that the moment does not come when we would ask, as a good Catholic does of a confessor, what is right and what is wrong, and take the answer which is one of the two that have been struggling within himself, as definite; and to us, who do not go to confession, a book, any book casually taken up, may be this terribly powerful spiritual director. People used to exaggerate the influence of books, because they imagined that they could alter already settled opinions; now-a-days I deliberately think that they underrate this influence, because they forget how it may settle fluctuating opinion. The power of literature is in this way very great."

"It has been formerly--yes, I grant it," answered Cyril; "but it is no longer what it was; in our cut-and-dry days it is necessarily smaller."

"On the contrary, much greater now than perhaps almost at any other time. These are not cut-and-dry days, Cyril, but the very reverse; you must not let yourself be deceived by a certain superficial regularity, by railway journeys and newspapers, and a general civilization of hand-books and classes. In reality there is more room for indirect moral perversion or enervation in our days than there has been for a good while; for the upsetting of ideas, the infiltration of effete or foreign modes of thought and feeling, is much greater in this quiet nineteenth century than it was, for instance, in the Renaissance or the eighteenth century. With all their scepticism, the people of those days had a great fund of tradition about everything; they were floating about a good deal, I admit, but they were fully persuaded of the existence of certain very solid moral rocks, to which they might always tie their boat when it grew over-rough; rocks of religion or deistic mysticism, or of social convenances, which we have now discovered to be by no means granite, but some sort of sea deposit, of hardened sand, whose formation we understand and no longer rely upon. The most arrant sceptics of the past had always one great safety, that they were in a groove; they saw, understood, sympathized with only their own civilization. What they thought right they had never seen questioned--they never imagined any one could regard as wrong; hence the most liberal thinkers of former days always strike us, with their blindness to all but their own civilization, as such Philistines. Things have changed since then; they began to change already, as soon as men began to look at other civilizations; and the suggestive first-fruit of this early ethnographic eclecticism may be seen in Diderot's very beastly books: he found that the South Sea Islanders had not, on the subject of incest, the same views as Christian folk; whereupon it struck him that those views might be due to prejudice. It was not the development of the natural sciences, but rather of the historic and ethnographic, which upset people's ideas; it was the discovery of how our institutions, moral and social (hitherto regarded as come straight from heaven), had formed themselves, and how they were subject to variation. Speaking of poets, look at a pure man, I believe a very pure man, Shelley, if you want to understand the necessity of poets having a greater solidity of moral judgment than the mere Jones and Browns who stick to their shop, and are not troubled with theories. Add to the influence of scientific doubt, of the doubt created by books on the origin of ideas and institutions (showing of what moonshine they are often made), the utterly confusing effect of our modern literary eclecticism, our comprehension and sympathy with so many and hostile states of civilization, our jumbling together of antique and mediaeval, of barbarous and over-ripe and effete civilizations, our intellectual and moral absorption of incompatible past stages of thought and feeling, with the follies and vices inherent in each;--sum up all this, and you will see that, with our science and our culture, our self-swamping with other folk's ideas, we are infinitely less morally steady than the good sceptics of the days of Voltaire, who always believed in the supremacy of their own century, their own country, their own institutions, their own conventionalities; who were in danger only from their own follies and uncertainties, while we are in danger from the follies and uncertainties of every past century from which we have inherited. And you will see, if you look, that that sceptical eighteenth century, which was very much more credulous and conservative than ours, was very little divided and upset in its ideas; certain things were universally admitted, and certain other things universally rejected; in that day there was always the master of the ceremonies--Propriety. He knew exactly what could be permitted: in the dining-room, drunkards yelling filthy jests; in the drawing-room, polite gentlemen stalking or tripping through their minuets. It is different now-a-days."

Cyril nodded. "I understand what you mean," he said; "but I don't see the application yet."

"Well," answered Baldwin, "I will show you one instance of the application. Have you ever thought over the question of--how shall I call it?--the ethics of the indecent?"

Cyril stared. "No, it never struck me that there were any. I don't write indecent things, it doesn't amuse me. I feel not the smallest desire to do so; if anything, I feel rather sick at such things; that is all."

"That is all for you, but not all for other people. You don't feel attracted to write on some subjects; well, other people not only feel attracted, but imagine that it is their duty even if they are not."

"They are swine; I have nothing to do with them." And Cyril looked as if he had settled the matter.

"But they are not swine; at least, not all of them; or they are not entirely swine, by any means," insisted Baldwin. "You are not going to tell me that a man like Walt Whitman is a mere pig. Still there are things of his which to you are simply piggish. Either Whitman is a beast or you are a prude."

"That depends upon difference of nature," said Cyril quickly, vaguely desirous of putting an end to a discussion which brought forward an anomaly.

"That is merely repeating what I said," replied Baldwin. "But in reality I think it is not a difference of nature. I think it depends on a difference of reasoned opinion; in short, upon a sophistication of ideas on the part of Whitman. I think it depends in him and the really pure men who uphold his abominations upon a simple logical misconception; a confusion of the fact that certain phenomena have been inevitable, with the supposition that those same certain phenomena are therefore desirable--a confusion between what has been, and could not help being, and what may be and ought to be. It is the attempt to solve a moral problem by an historical test."

"I don't understand in the least, Baldwin."

"Why, thus: our modern familiarity with the intellectual work of all times and races has made people perceive that in past days indecency was always part and parcel of literature, and that to try to weed it out is to completely alter the character of at least a good half of the literature of the past. Hence, some of us moderns, shaken as we are in all our conventional ideas, have argued that this so-called indecency is a legitimate portion of all literature, and that the sooner it is re-introduced into that of the present the better, if our literature is to be really vital and honest. Now, these people do not perceive that the literature of the past contained indecencies, merely because, being infinitely less self-conscious, less responsible than now, the literature of those days contained fragments of every portion of the civilization which produced it. For besides what I might call absolute indecency, in the sense of pruriency, the literature of the past is full of filth pure and simple, like some Eastern town; a sure proof this, that if certain subjects which we taboo were not tabooed then, it was not from any conscious notion of their legitimacy, but from a general habit of making literature, like the street of some Oriental or mediaeval town, the scene of every sort of human action, important or trifling, noble or vile; regarding it as the place for which the finest works were painted or carved, and into which all the slops were emptied. Hence, in our wanderings through the literature of the past, our feet are for ever stumbling into pools of filth, while our eyes are seeking for the splendid traceries, the gorgeous colours above; our stomachs are turned by stenches even while we are peeping in at some wonderful rose garden or fruit orchard. I think you might almost count on your fingers the books up to the year 1650, in which you are sure of encountering no beastliness--choice gardens or bowers of the soul, or sacred chapels kept carefully tidy and pure--viz., Milton, Spenser, the Vita Nuova, Petrarch, Tasso--things, you see, mainly sacred or spiritualistic--sort of churches where only devotion of some sort goes on; but if we go out to where there is real life, life complete and thoughtless--Shakspeare, Rabelais, Moliere, Ariosto, Cervantes, Aristophanes, Horace--the evil odours meet us again at every step. Well, now-a-days this has all been misunderstood. People have imagined that an inevitable nuisance of the past ought also to be a deliberately chosen nuisance of the present: a line of argument which appears to me to be similar to that of a man, who, because the people of Lisbon used, in the days of my grandfather, to practise a very primitive system of sewerage, should recommend that the inhabitants of modern London should habitually empty their slops on to the heads of passers-by. I am crude? Well, it is by calling nasty things by beautiful names that we are able to endure their existence. I think that people who should attempt such literary revivals ought to be fined, as the more practical revivers of old traditions certainly would be."

Cyril paused a moment. "I think that these sort of offenders, like Whitman, are not evil-doers, but merely snobs: they offend not good morals, but good taste."

"That's just such an artistic and well-bred distinction as I should expect from you," answered Baldwin, rather contemptuously. "I wonder what that word 'good taste' signifies to your mind? Everything and nothing. They are offenders against good taste, you say. Well, let us see how. If I hang a bright green curtain close to a bright blue wall-paper, you will say it is bad taste; if I set Gray's 'Elegy' to one of Strauss's waltzes, that is bad taste also; and if I display all my grand furniture and plate (supposing I had it) to my poor neighbour, whose chintz chair is all torn, and who breakfasts out of a cup without a handle, that also is bad taste. Each for a good reason, and a different one; in each case I am inflicting an injury, too slight and inadvertent to be sin, against something: the green curtain and blue paper combination pains your eye; the Gray's 'Elegy' and Strauss's waltz combination annoys your common sense; the contrast between my riches and your poverty inflicts a wound on your feelings; you see that all sins against taste are merely a hurting of something in somebody. So that, if writing indecent poems is an offence against good taste, it means that it also inflicts some such injury. That injury is simply, as the world has vaguely felt all along, an injury to your neighbour's morals."

"But," put in Cyril, "such a man as Whitman has no immoral intention, nor is he immoral in the sense that Ariosto and Byron are sometimes immoral. The man is not a libertine, but a realist. He wishes people to live clean lives; all he says is, that everything which is legitimate, innocent, necessary in life, is also legitimate and innocent in literature. And although I should rather select other subjects to write about, and would rather he did so likewise, I cannot deny that there is logic in saying that there can be no harm in speaking of that which there is no harm in doing."

"Yes," said Baldwin, "that is just the argument of such men. And the answer is simply that there are things which are intended to be done and not to be spoken about. What you call logic is no logic at all, but a mere appeal to ignorance. It so happens that the case is exactly reversed--that there are a great many things which there is not the smallest immorality in speaking about, and which it would be the most glaring immorality to do. No one shrinks from talking about murder or treachery; nay, even in the very domain of sexual relations there need not be the smallest immorality, nothing at all perverting, in a play which, like the whole Orestes trilogy, or Othello, or Faust, turns upon adultery or seduction; no one also has the slightest instinct of immorality in talking about the most fearful wholesale massacres. Yet the world at large, ever since it has had any ideas of good and evil, has had an instinct of immorality in talking of that without which not one of us would exist, that which society sanctions and the church blesses. And this exactly because it is as natural as murder--of which we speak freely--is the contrary. For, exactly because certain instincts are so essential and indispensable, Nature has made them so powerful and excitable; there is no fear of their being too dormant, but there is fear of their being too active, and the consequences of their excess are so hideously dangerous to Nature itself, so destructive of all the higher powers, of all the institutions of humanity; the over-activity of the impulses to which we owe our birth is so ruinous of all that for which we are born, social, domestic, and intellectual good, nay, to physical existence itself, that Nature even has found it necessary to restrain them by a counter-instinct--purity, chastity--such as has not been given us to counteract the other physical instincts, as that of eating, which can at most injure an individual glutton, but not affect the general social order. Hence, the slightest artificial stimulus is a danger to mankind, and the giving thereof a crime; for the experience of all times tells us what modern psychology is beginning to explain--viz., the strange connection between the imagination and the senses, the hitherto mysterious power of awakening physical desires, of almost reproducing sensation, possessed by the mind, even as the mention of dainty food is said to make the mouth water, and the description of a surgical operation to make the nerves wince. So that the old intuition, now called conventionalism, which connects indecency with immorality, is entirely justified. Crime may be spoken of just because it is crime, and our nature recoils therefrom; indeed, I think that now-a-days, when our destructive instinct (except in small boys and professors of physiology) is becoming effete, there has ceased to be any very demoralizing influence in talking even of horrors. But the immorality of indecency is quite unlike the immorality of--how shall I distinguish?--of ordinary immorality. In the case of the latter the mischief lies in the sophistication of the reason or the perversion of the sympathies; as, for instance, in Machiavel's 'Prince,' or any of a hundred French novels. In the former case, that of indecency, the immorality lies in the risk of inducing a mood which may lead to excess--that is, to evil. And, as a rule, I think this inducing of a mood is the commonest source of moral danger, whether the mood be a sensual or a destructive one."

"I don't see how you make that out; although I now understand what at first seemed to me mere inexplicable instincts--founded on nothing."

"Some things are inexplicable, perhaps, but be sure instincts are not founded on nothing. Misconceptions are mere false conceptions; but a good half of what people call social convention is based upon a perfectly correct conception, only mankind has forgotten what that conception was. Well, I should place the various sorts of demoralization of which literature is capable in this order: No. 1, and least dangerous, sophistication of judgment; No. 2, and more dangerous, perversion of sympathy; No. 3, and most dangerous, inducement of questionable frame of mind. And I place them thus because it seems to me that this is the order of facility, and, consequently, universality; I mean that fewest people can be found who depend sufficiently on their deliberate ideas, and most effort is required to sophisticate them; whereas, least effort is required, and most effect produced, in the matter of inducing a mood; the perversion of sympathy is half-way. Of course, if we could imagine (as once or twice has actually been the case) that the moral ideas of a whole people were sophisticated, that would be the worst, because the least remediable; but, in the first place, people act but little from ideas, or few persons do, and it is difficult to alter people's ideas; and, in the second place, the sophistication of conscience of single individuals is kept in check by the steadfastness of the mass of mankind, and, consequently, as in such men as Diderot, reduced to mere talk, without corresponding action. But a mood is easily induced without the reason even perceiving it, and the more necessary the mood is to nature, the more easily it will be aroused--the more unnatural an evil, the less danger of it; the more an evil is the mere excess of the necessary, the more danger there is of it."

"It is curious how you marshal ideas into their right places," said Cyril. "There remains one thing to be said about the ethics of impropriety. The people who go in for writing upon subjects which thirty years ago would have distinctly been forbidden, do not all of them write as Whitman does: they are not all what I should call openly beastly. They do their best, on the contrary, to spiritualize the merely animal."

"That is just the most mischievous thing they could possibly do," interrupted Baldwin. "I know the sort of poets you mean. They are the folk who say that things are pure or impure, holy or foul, according as we view them. They are not the brutal, straightforward, naturalistic school; they are the mystico-sensual. Of the two, they are infinitely the worse. For the straightforward naturalistic hogs generally turn your stomach before they have had a chance of doing you any harm; but these persuade themselves and you that, while you are just gloating over sensual images, you are improving your soul. They call brute desire passion, and love lust, and prostitution marriage, and the body the soul. Oh! I know them; they are the worst pests we have in literature."

"But I don't think they are intentionally immoral, Baldwin."

"Do you think any writer ever was intentionally immoral, Cyril?"

"Well, I mean that these men really intend doing good. They think that if only some subjects be treated seriously, without any sniggering or grimacing, there ceases to be any harm in them. They say that they wish to rescue from out of the mire where prudery has thrown it, that which is clean in itself; they wish to show that the whole of Nature is holy; they wish to purify by sanctifying."

Baldwin listened with a smile of contempt. "Of course such words seem very fine," he said; "but a thing is either holy or is not holy: all the incense of poetry and all the hocus-pocus words of mysticism cannot alter its nature by a title. And woe betide us if we once think that any such ceremony of sanctification can take place; woe betide us if we disguise the foul as the innocent, or the merely indifferent as the holy! There is in Nature a great deal which is foul: in that which men are pleased to call unnatural, because Nature herself chastises it after having produced it: there is in Nature an infinite amount of abominable necessity and abominable possibility, which we have reason and conscience to separate from that which within Nature itself is innocent or holy. Mind, I say innocent or holy; for innocence and holiness are very different things. All our appetites, within due limits, are innocent, but they are not therefore holy; and that is just what mystico-sensual poetry fails to perceive, and in giving innocence the rank of holiness it makes it sinful. Do you know what is the really holy? It is that of which the world possesses too little, and can never possess too much: it is justice, charity, heroism, self-command, truthfulness, lovingness, beauty, genius--these things are holy. Place them, if you will, on a poetic altar, that all men may see them, and know them, and love them, and seek after them life-long without ever wearying. But do not enshrine in poetic splendours the merely innocent; that which bestows no merit on its possessor, that which we share with every scoundrel and every animal, that which is so universal that it must for ever be kept in check, and which, unless thus checked by that in ourselves which is truly holy, will degrade us lower than beasts. For in so doing--in thus attempting to glorify that in which there is nothing glorious--you make men think that self-indulgence is sanctity, you let them consume their lives in mere acquiescence with their lusts and laziness, while all around is raging the great battle between good and evil. Worst of all, in giving them this worship of a mystic Ashtaroth or Belial, you hide from them the knowledge of the true God, of the really and exclusively holy, of good, truth, beauty, to know and receive which into our soul we must struggle lifelong with the world and with ourselves; yes, struggle for the sake of the really holy with that mere innocence which is for ever threatening to become guilt."

Baldwin paused; then resumed after a moment: "I believe that mankind as it exists, with whatever noble qualities it possesses, has been gradually evolved out of a very inferior sort of mankind or brutekind, and will, I hope, be evolved into a very superior sort of mankind. And I believe, as science teaches us, that this has been so far effected, and will be further effected henceforward, by an increased activity of those nobler portions of us which have been developed as it were by their own activity; I believe, in short, that we can improve only by becoming more and more different from the original brutes that we were. I have said this to explain to you my feelings towards a young poet of my acquaintance, who is very sincerely smitten with the desire to improve mankind; and has deliberately determined to devote a very fine talent to the glorification of what he calls pure passion, pure in the sense that it can be studied in its greatest purity from the cats on the house tops."

Cyril made a grimace of disgust.

"No, indeed," continued Baldwin, "that poet is not one of the aesthetic-sensual lot you seem to think. He is pure, conscientious, philanthropic; but he is eminently unreasoning. He is painfully impressed by the want of seriousness and holiness with which mankind regards marriage, and his ambition is to set mankind right on this subject, even as another young poet-philanthropist tried to improve family relations in his 'Laon and Cythna.' Now, if you were required to use your poetical talents in order to raise the general view of marriage, in order to show the sanctity of the love of a man and a woman, how would you proceed?"

"I have often thought about that," answered Cyril; "but it has been done over and over again, and I think with most deliberate solemnity and beauty by Schiller and Goethe in the 'Song of the Bell' and in 'Hermann and Dorothea.' Well, I think that poetry can do good work in this line only if the poet see where the real holiness of such love lies; in the love not of the male and the female, but of the man and the woman. For there is nowhere, I think, greater room for moral beauty and dignity than in the choosing by a man of the one creature from whom only death can separate him; of the one friend, not of a phase of his life, but of his whole life; of the one soul which will grow and mature always by the side of his, and having blossomed and borne fruit of good, will gently fade and droop together with his. But this is not the most holy part of the choice, for he is choosing also the mother of his children, the woman who is to give half their nature, half their training, to what children must mean to every honest man: the one chance he possesses of living as he would have wished to have lived, of being what he should wish to have been, his one chance of redeeming his errors, of fulfilling his hopes, of realizing in a measure his own ideals. And to me such a choice, and love in the sense of such a choice, become not merely coldly deliberate, but passionately instinctive, are holy with the holiness that, as you say, is the only real one; holy in all it implies of recognized beauty and goodness, of trust and hope, of all the excellence of which it is at least the supposed forerunner; and its holiness is that upon which all other holiness, all the truthfulness and justice and beauty and goodness of mankind, depends. This is how I view the sanctity of the love between man and woman; how all the greatest poets, from Homer to Schiller, and from Schiller to Mrs. Browning, have viewed it; and it is the only possible view that I can conceive."

Baldwin nodded. "This is how I also see the question. But my young poet is not satisfied with this: he wishes to make men believe in the holiness of that which is no more holy, and far oftener tends to be unholy, than eating or drinking; and in order to make mankind adore, he lavishes all his artistic powers on the construction of an aesthetical temple wherein to enshrine, on the preparation of poetic incense with which to surround, this species of holiness, carefully separated from any extraneous holiness, such as family affection, intellectual appreciation, moral sympathy; left in its complete unmixed simplicity of brute appetite and physical longing and physical rapture; and the temple which he constructs out of all that is beautiful in the world is a harlot's chamber; and the incense which he cunningly distils out of all the sights and sounds of Nature are filthy narcotics, which leave the moral eyes dim, and the moral nerves tremulous, and the moral muscle unstrung. In his desire to moralize he demoralizes; in his desire to sanctify one item of life, he casts aside, he overlooks, forgets, all that which in life is already possessed of holiness. Thus my young poet, in wishing to improve mankind, to raise it, undoes for the time being that weary work of the hundreds of centuries which have slowly changed lust into love, the male and female into a man and a woman, the life of the body into the life of the soul; poetry, one of the highest human products, has, as it were, undone the work of evolution; poetry, which is essentially a thing of the self-conscient intellect, has taken us back to the time when creatures with two legs and no tail could not speak, but only whine and yell and sob--a mode of converse, by the way, more than sufficient for the intercourse of what he is pleased to call the typical Bride and Bridegroom."

They had got out of the strange expanse of brown and green swamp, and after traversing a strip of meagre redeemed land, with stunted trees and yellowish vines, had reached the long narrow line of pine woods which met the beach. They passed slowly through the midst of the woods, brushing the rain-drops off the short, bright, green pines, their wheels creaking over the slippery fallen needles embedded in the sand; while the setting sun fell in hazy yellow beams through the brushwood, making the crisp tree-tufts sparkle like green spun-glass, and their scaly trunks flush rosy; and the stormy sea roared on the sands close by.

"I think your young poet ought to be birched," remarked Cyril; "and if anything could add to my aversion, not for poetry, but for the poetic profession, this would which you have just told me. You see how right I was in saying that I would have more moral satisfaction in being a French cook than in being a poet."

"By no means," answered Baldwin. "In the first place, my young poet ought not to be birched; he ought to be made to reflect, to ask himself seriously and simply, in plain prose, what ideal of life he has been setting before his readers. He ought to be shown that a poet, inasmuch as he is the artist whose material is human feeling and action, is not as free an artist as the mere painter, or sculptor, or composer; he ought to be made to understand that now-a-days, when the old rules of conduct, religious and social, are for ever being questioned, every man who writes of human conduct is required, is bound, to have sound ideas on the subject: that, because now-a-days, for better or for worse, poetry is no longer the irresponsible, uncontrolled, helter-skelter performance of former times, but a very self-conscious, wide-awake, deliberate matter, it can do both much more harm and much more good than it could do before."

They were slowly driving along the beach, among the stunted pine shoots and the rough grass and the yellow bindweed half buried in the sand, and the heaps of sea-blackened branches, and bits of wood and uncouth floating rubbish which the waves had deposited, with a sort of ironical regularity, in a neat band upon the shore; down here on the coast the storm had already broken, and the last thin rain was still falling, dimpling the grey sand. The sun was just going to emerge from amidst the thick blue-black storm-clouds and descend into a clear space, like molten amber, above the black, white-crested, roaring sea; it descended slowly, an immense pale luminous globe, gilding the borders of the piled-up clouds above it, gilding the sheen of the waves and the wet sand of the shore; and as it descended, the clouds gathered above it into a vast canopy, a tawny orange diadem or reef of peaked vapours encircling the liquid topaz in which the sun moved; tawnier became this garland, larger the free sky, redder the black storm masses above; till at last the reddening rays of the sun enlarged and divided into immense beams of rosy light, cutting away the dark and leaving uncovered a rent of purest blue. At last the yellow globe touched the black line of the horizon, gilding the waters; then sank behind it and disappeared. The wreath of vapours glowed golden, the pall of heaped-up storm-clouds flushed purple, and bright yellow veinings, like filaments of gold, streaked the pale amber where the sun had disappeared. The amber grew orange, the tawny purple, the purple a lurid red, as of masses of flame-lit smoke; all around, the sky blackened, until at last there remained only one pile of livid purple clouds hanging over a streak of yellow sky, and gradually dying away into black, with but here and there a death-like rosy patch, mirrored deadlier red in the wet sand of the beach. The two friends remained silent, like men listening to the last bars, rolling out in broad succession of massy, gradually resolving chords, of some great requiem mass--silent even for a while after all was over. Then Cyril asked, pointing to a row of houses glimmering white along the dark lines of coast, below the great marble crags of Carrara, rising dim in the twilight--

"Is that the place where my friends will pick me up?"

"Yes," answered Baldwin, "that's the place. You will be picked up there if you choose."

"I must, you know." And Cyril looked astonished, as if for the first time it struck him that there might be no must in the matter. "I must--at least, I suppose I ought to--go back to England with them."

"You know that best," replied Baldwin, shortly. "But before we get there I want to finish what we were saying about the moral value of poetry, if you don't mind. I gave you the instance of Whitman and the mystico-sensual school merely because it is one of the most evident; but it is only one of many I could give you of the truth of what I said, that if a poet, inasmuch as he is a poet, has--what the painter, or sculptor, or musician, inasmuch as they are such, have not--a keener sense of moral right and wrong than other men, it is because his art requires it. Consider what it is deliberately to treat of human character and emotion and action; consider what a strange chaos, an often inextricable confusion of clean and foul, of healthy and pestilent, you get among, in penetrating into the life of the human soul; consider that the poet must pick his way through all this, amidst very loathsome dangers which he often cannot foresee; and not alone, but carrying in his moral arms the soul of his reader--of each of his thousands of readers--a soul which, if he see not clearly his way, if he miss his footing, or tread in the soft, sinking soil (soft with filthy bogs), may be bespattered and soiled, perhaps for ever--may be sucked into the swamp pool or poisoned by the swamp air; and that he must thus carry, not one soul, but thousands of souls, unknown to him--souls in many cases weak, sometimes already predisposed to some loathsome moral malady, and which, by a certain amount of contact with what to the poet himself might be innocuous, may be condemned to life-long disease. I do not think that the poet's object is to moralize mankind; but I think that the materials with which he must work are such that, while practising his art, he may unconsciously do more mischief than all the professed moralists in Christendom can consciously do good. The poet is the artist, remember, who deliberately chooses as material for his art the feelings and actions of man; he is the artist who plays his melodies, not on catgut strings or metal stops, but upon human passions; and whose playing touches not a mere mechanism of fibres and membranes like the ear, but the human soul, which in its turn feels and acts; he is the artist who, if he blunders, does not merely fatigue a nerve, or paralyze for a moment a physical sense, but injures the whole texture of our sympathies and deafens our conscience. And I ask you, does such an artist, playing on such an instrument, not require moral feeling far stronger and keener than that of any other man, who, if he mistake evil for good, injures only himself and the few around him? You have been doubting, Cyril, whether poetry is sufficient work for a man who feels the difference between good and evil; you might more worthily doubt whether any man knows good from evil with instinct sure enough to suffice him as a poet. You thought poetry morally below you: are you certain that you are morally up to its level?"

Cyril looked vaguely about him: at the black sea breaking on the twilight sands, at the dark outline of pine-wood against the pale sky, at the distant village lights--vaguely, and as if he saw nothing of it all. The damp sea breeze blew in their faces, the waves moaned sullenly, the pines creaked in the wind; the moon, hidden behind clouds, slowly silvered into light their looser, outer folds, then emerged, spreading a broad white sheen on the sands and the water.

"Are you still too good for poetry?" asked Baldwin; "or--has poetry become too good for you?"

"I don't know," answered Cyril, in the tone of a man before whose mental eyes things are taking a new shape. "I don't know--perhaps."

[The end]
Vernon Lee's essay: Dialogue On Poetic Morality

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