Chapter C: K. S. M (7)

Painting and sculpture are for the æsthetic theorist in many ways the most complex of the arts. As has been pointed out, neither music nor literature can be said to reproduce directly if they reproduce at all, because they employ a different medium, namely, sounds and words. But painting and sculpture apparently employ as a medium the very objects to be reproduced or expressed, viz., colours and lines. In literature the word refers to a reality that seemingly is not itself a word. In painting the picture and the reality can apparently be "matched" so that here literally the picture imitates reality. Outside and around us are already colours and forms, but there are no words, and only the crudest sounds. And so painting is easily regarded as _par excellence_ the imitative or reproductive art, and of all arts to have the easiest and most direct criterion: resemblance to external reality.

II

These are the premises with which the realists and the romanticists, cubists, futurists, etc., start. They all assume rather naïvely the existence of an immediately perceived natural reality of given colours and forms. Their divergence is in their views as to the activity of the artist in respect of this natural reality. The realist considers that the painter's function is to transcribe it, to copy it on to canvas. He may select certain aspects which appeal to him, in fact he paints a particular scene exactly because that scene gives him more pleasure than others. But his creativeness is limited to this selection of given scenes and to their skilful and accurate reproduction.

The opponents of this view (and they include the majority of persons who have any serious acquaintance with painting) maintain that the essential element in a picture is not its resemblance to something else, but its intrinsic interest, and, this being the case, so long as the painting contains and conveys an emotion that is inherent in its line and colour it does not matter if there is not a literal resemblance to real objects. In fact, it is thought that the very effort to express a subjective mood centring round an external situation, to project one's own imaginative life into that which itself has no life, inevitably results in a certain distortion of the natural reality, in a deliberate emphasising of certain features. The line vibrates with feeling, the colour is grouped and blended so as to conform to the emotion of the individual mood, irrespective of whether "out there" the artist can actually "see" such an arrangement. The photograph has tended strongly to confirm this theory. Back in the eighties J. A. Symonds wrote, "The artist cannot avoid modifying his imitation of the chosen object by the impression of his own subjective quality. Human art is unable to reproduce nature except upon such terms as these. It cannot draw as accurately as the sun does by means of the photographic camera. Art will never match the infinite variety and subtlety of nature; no drawing or painting will equal the primary beauties of the living model ... yet art has qualities derived from the intellectual selective imaginative faculties of man which more than justify its existence." Walter Pater went a step further and asserted that "Art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant aim of art to obliterate it."

The cubist and futurist art theories are a logical development of certain implications contained in arguments such as these: they are an attempt to make pictorial and plastic art identical with what music is supposed to be to get rid altogether of the irrelevant incubus of representation. They are quite distinct from the explanation often advanced for the primitive simplificatory character of Post-Impressionist art. The latter retains and is not a bit afraid of a representative content; it merely advocates a revolt from tradition and from the inclusion of facts which we know to be there in the objects depicted without actually seeing or perceiving them. Its purpose is not a musical elaboration of our vision, but a clarification and purging of it of all derivative and merely intellectual elements. Hence the stress laid on the art and vision of the child and the primitive. There is no doubt, however, that the explanations offered of the art of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne gradually led to the cubist theory. It was felt that not only were these artists breaking away from tradition in order to attain clearness and directness of vision, but that their vision was expressive rather than representative. "Primitive art, like the art of children, consists not so much in an attempt to represent what the eye perceives as to put a line round a mental conception of the object. Like the work of the primitive artist, the pictures children draw are often extraordinarily expressive."[15]

[15] Catalogue, Post-Impressionist Exhibition, Grafton
Galleries, 1910-11, pp. 11-12.

It should be noted that the early Post-Impressionists were artists first and theorists afterwards, and they did not themselves produce the theories which attempt to explain their art. The later men, on the other hand, appear to have consummated a remarkable marriage of philosophical reflection and artistic expression. Their art is the conscious execution of their argument. There is no _a priori_ objection to this luminous rationality. The only essential is that the argument should be correct. Therefore, while one cannot condemn the art of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne on the ground that the explanatory theories subsequently put forward are fallacious, a great many of the cubist experiments live or fall with their theory.

While Cubism and Futurism had a similar origin they very soon parted ways, and each followed the light of its own peculiar interpretation. The difference of opinion concerned not the departure from verisimilitude to persons and natural objects, about which both were in agreement, but the content and character of the expression. The futurists wanted, so to speak, programme music, the cubists pure music without any taint of worldly and literary associations. It is curious that these two movements which started so near together should diverge to either extreme, Cubism to enshrine itself in a pure inhuman emotion which possesses an absolutely divine "in itselfness," but is totally unrelated to the rest of life, and can, therefore, only be ejaculated about, and Futurism "to introduce brutally life into art, to combat the old ideal æsthetic, static, decorative, effeminate, precious, cynical that loathed action."[16] Cubism is fugitive, mystical, averse to science and the world of raw human passion. Futurism is explosive with mundane energy; it is not merely a theory of art, literature, music, it is a new orientation embracing the whole of life; "on every question, in Parliament, in communal councils, and in the market-places, men are divided into lovers of the past (_passatisti_) and futurists." Yet it is not so much the whole of life that the futurists wish to express as that part of it which is peculiarly modern, its movement, its flux, its dynamism. Any theory of a disruptive, hurly-burly aspect is grist to the mill of Futurism. With what acclamation will Professor Einstein's relativism be greeted: except that space should be angular rather than gracefully curved! And it is again curious how the extremes tend to meet. The Futurist's state, _nous aspirons à la création d'un type inhumain en qui seront aboli la douleur morale, la bonté, la tendresse et l'amour_.[17] Man must become metallic, mechanical, and dynamical. Mr. Clive Bell aspires (if only in art) after an inhuman emotion crystallised in abstract plastic form, in intricate relations of masses: a sort of divine mathematical matter.

[16] _Noi Futuristi!_ Milan, 1917.

[17] _Le Futurisme_, by Maxinetti and others. 1911.

Recently an interesting controversy has taken place in the _Burlington Magazine_ between Mr. Roger Fry and Mr. D. S. Maccoll on the question of representative and abstract or purely decorative form. Mr. Maccoll stands for the older school of J. A. Symonds; Mr. Roger Fry would assimilate pictorial art to music and deprive it altogether of a world outside itself. Both are in agreement as to art being non-photographic, and as to the existence parallel with or prior to visual emotional art of a photographic visual consciousness. Art, they both admit, is not reproductive; to reproduce is the function of photography and of the photographic side of our minds.

Art is temperamental, the expression in line and colour of emotion. But while Mr. Maccoll thinks that the emotion lies mainly in the rhythm of the objects represented, Mr. Fry considers that we are wrong in concerning ourselves either with the ideas and sentiments of the artist or with his interpretation of objects. We must appreciate and judge a drawing solely according to the degree of beauty the lines set up among themselves. Mr. Maccoll shrewdly points out that Mr. Fry and his school always lay great emphasis on "mass," "volume," "plasticity," etc., which are definitely characters of objects and, therefore, representative. It is possible, however, to go further: even a line and a colour are natural objects, and if we are able to find enjoyment in simple arrangements of lines and colours, why should we not find equal enjoyment in trees and clouds and hills and people? Stated thus these are generalities, but so are lines and colours: in a picture, however, or a decoration they are endowed with individual life, with a unique tone and significance.

In order to be absolutely logical, neither Mr. Roger Fry nor Mr. Clive Bell should attempt to describe or explain a picture at all. It is a world in a watertight compartment entirely severed and shut off from the ordinary world. It either throws us into an ecstasy or it does not, but these ecstasies are so many discrete units, and if they differ we cannot articulate the difference. We ought not, for instance, to describe early Italian art as ascetically religious, Botticelli as pagan and lyrical, Hogarth as satirical. For this would be ascribing to art a content extracted from life, it would be turning art into literature. Even literature, however, at its best is devoid of meaning. "In great poetry," writes Mr. Clive Bell, "it is the formal music that makes the miracle. The poet expresses in verbal form an emotion but distantly related to the words set down." And he quotes Shakespeare's poetry as an instance of this great meaningless word music. This surely is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the whole theory.

Mr. Clive Bell defines art as significant form. At first sight it would appear as though the delimitations set up by the reduction of art to abstract form were swept away by the admission of "significance" which might include in its range the whole world. But the significance is indescribable except in terms of form itself. Hence there is a certain justification in Mr. Maccoll's contention that Mr. Clive Bell really means "insignificant form." In his reply Mr. Bell falls back on the conception of emotion. The significance is emotional, it is not only incommunicable except by means of the actual work of art, but is also totally unrelated to life in general: it is an intelligible and self-contained department of its own, and does not require the liaison work of the critical guide and commentator.

The fact is that in their most legitimate preoccupation of ensuring that the work of art shall be a world in itself, a unity whose essential significance and content does not lie outside itself in a world of which it is merely a superfluous copy, but is firmly grasped and held in its imaginative synthesis so that the content is identical with the form. Messrs. Roger Fry, Clive Bell and Co. have gone absolutely to the other extreme and deprived the work of art of all content and significance; they have rendered it a discrete unit instead of an individual unit. Now, there is only one mental activity which deals with discrete units, and that is mathematics. Hence we can detect a gradual assimilation in their critical terminology to the language of mathematics and physics. The mysticism of art is becoming the mysticism of planes, angles, cubes, surfaces and relations of lines and masses.

But Mr. Clive Bell has another and equally legitimate preoccupation. He has observed that he experiences the same kind of pleasure from a fine piece of architecture, a specimen of pottery, a decoration on a carpet, as from a painting inside a frame which ostensibly refers to people and objects existing independently outside the frame. And he concludes that all these works must admit of reduction to a common denomination, they all have that in common which induces us to call them works of art. Obviously as architecture is non-representative in the ordinary sense, we must excogitate a general definition which does not necessitate representation. And so by a simple classificatory abstracting process he arrives at the formula of "significant form."

Now this expressly refers only to pictorial art and does not pretend to be a definition of music, literature, dancing, etc. These, however, all come under the heading of art, and any formula for any single branch of art must contain something of the universal essence of art in general. This cannot lurk in the conception of form, because by form Mr. Bell means not the logical concept, but the spatial physical image. It must, therefore, inhere in the conception of significance. Pictorial art is something significant expressed in the medium of spatial form. But here we come up against the first preoccupation of eschewing all so-called literary content. The significance of Rembrandt's dramatic masterpiece, for instance, "Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery," must consist in the relation of the colours and lines to each other and not in its intensely dramatic human expression, which is an illegitimate literary association of ideas. The significance is wrapt up in the abstract spatial image and, therefore, so far from defining the essence of all art, including literature and music, it will not even cover dramatic representational painting. In his preoccupation of including decorative art in his definition Mr. Bell has excluded all other kinds of art, and has simply universalised the idiosyncrasy of decorative art.

He has not, however, really achieved that, because even decorative art has what Mr. Bell would call a literary significance. No one can seriously reflect upon Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic architecture without admitting how profoundly they are charged with historical meaning, and that it is precisely this meaning which differentiates them and gives them their individuality. They are the spirit of their respective ages, caught up and embodied in what by an abstractive process of thought we refer to as abstract form. Actually it is only abstract when thought of apart from a particular instance: in any given instance, _e.g._, the Cenotaph in Whitehall, it is as concrete and individual as an ordinary picture or statue: it is a manifestation and expression of the human mind in a particular set of circumstances.

The foregoing analysis brings out two facts. The new art of abstract significant form is not, strictly speaking, anything new: it is as old, if not older, than representational art, and it is equally pregnant with literary meaning. Until quite recently, however, it has never been condensed into the form of a picture and surrounded with a frame; it has almost without exception been connected with objects of utility. This does not detract from its value in the slightest; it may mean that abstract art will outlive the picture; it is simply a statement of historical fact. Nor can we draw the immediate inference that abstract art is inappropriate in a frame. Certainly the contrary would be inappropriate: that is to say, if we built a house in the form of an Assyrian lion or made a hearthrug after Rembrandt's picture of an old woman. But it is significant that the cubist and futurist art has so far exercised a far greater and more beneficial influence in the direction of curtains, upholstery, and dresses than of pictures. Moreover, one of the leading English apostles of futurist art, Mr. Wyndham Lewis, is beginning to realise the immense field which lies open to him in the sphere of architecture, and is growing impatient with the limitations and narrow confines of the picture frame.[18]

[18] _The Caliph's Design._ The Egoist Ltd. A brilliant
piece of destructive writing.

However this may be, the lovers both of representational art and of abstract art must live and let live, and the wrangle as to which is the most perfect, the purest kind of art, is as sterile and futile as the dispute over prose and poetry, opera and chamber music, tragedy and comedy.

III

The problem, however, of photographic reproduction and of imagination still awaits a satisfactory solution. We have seen that no objection whatsoever can be raised against the marvellous representative detail of, say, Jan Van Eyck's "Jan Arnolfini and His Wife." Nor can we explain the joy and love expressed in the picture by reference merely to the forms and colours in abstraction from the objects and persons. For that would be transforming the living and individual unity of artistic vision into the abstract schemata of scientific thought. And art is not science, although it might very well express the delights and struggles of the scientist. But, on the other hand, there are pictures which, at any rate, appear to represent objects with the same accuracy and detail as Jan Van Eyck, and yet definitely fail to rank as works of art. They may often give us pleasure, they are often informative, but a little introspection reveals that that pleasure is due to our being reminded of something that is not itself in the picture, and that the information is not about our emotion but about an historical or a scientific fact. Similarly with the photograph which has still greater precision of scientific (not artistic) observation, and for that very reason is artistically still more jejune and barren. But there is yet another visual product which is neither photographic nor artistic "reproduction," namely, imaginative representation. From internal as well as external evidence we can infer that certain pictures were painted by the artist "out of his head," and others from "the models," and we find that artists like Velasquez, who painted masterpieces from the model, often failed miserably in their attempts at imaginative work.[19] Of course, it is doubtful how far this distinction can be carried; for we have no direct proof that many of the most realistic pictures were not pure inventions, and that much of the apparently imaginative work, such as Blake's, was not simply composite memory. Imagination is just as dangerous and ambiguous a term as reproduction.

[19] Cf. "La Couronnement de la Vierge." A voluminous mass
of pompous clothing floating on some well-fed babies'
heads.

These, then, are the "facts" to be explained. On the one hand, we have undeniably a reality of perception and photography which is not that of art but often extraordinarily akin to it; on the other hand, we have a visual art which divides itself into three groups, each of which _qua_ art is of equal value: realistic, imaginative, and, thirdly, formal, decorative, or abstract art. What is desired is some synthetic conception which will make intelligible the similarities and differences and contradictions dwelling in these, at any rate, superficially different kinds of vision.

Behind the conception of thinkers like J. A. Symonds there always lay the photographic reality which was the common reality of everyone, and supplied all the materials for the artist's reality: the framework of forms and colours, of objects and persons. It was regarded from the æsthetic point of view as rather a nightmare, for it was so unemotional, so much the same all through, so unpliable. And the explanation of art was that it consisted of this same reality, but as seen through the temperament of the artist and, therefore, somehow, by some mysterious wizardy, coloured with emotion, electrified into all kinds of subjective illuminations, a fascinating mirage. Or instead of the word temperament one substituted the phrase creative imagination. This means substantially the same thing, but it leads us away a bit further from photographic reality, widening the gulf between the two. We cannot create the outer world, but we can create an inner world of imagination, and actually bring into our life something intimately new, shedding a light of its own that never was on sea or land. Drive this argument a little further and we arrive at Cubism and Futurism.

This is the philosophical view which dominates most art criticism of to-day, and probably quite rightly so. It is fairly safe, and it "corresponds to the facts" with tolerable accuracy. It is sufficiently eclectic not to offend either an ardent philosophical realism or an ardent idealism. And it does not fall into the error of condemning one kind of art and exalting another, although our æsthetic taste when unprejudiced by theory proclaims both kinds equally delightful. This, however, is no reason why we should not attempt to deepen the theory with a view to giving it a closer organic unity and explaining facts which it does not seem at present to take into account. Needless to say, we may get entangled and strike out on a wrong track. For thinking, like everything else, is experimental.

IV

1. The very first observation to be made is that ordinary vision is not photographic: it is shot through and through with emotional elements which are part and parcel of every concrete colour and form that is seen. The photographic reality is obtained by a process of thinning down, so that only the skeleton of similarities remains. It consists of a consciousness of general facts--this is a tree, it has leaves with clearly delineated edges, underneath it is a brown and white cow.

2. Nevertheless, even if the normal man in the street were to depict precisely the semi-emotional reality which he sees, it would not necessarily be a work of art. The Royal Academy is a convincing proof of this fact. But this is not because the normal man's vision is essentially different from that of the artist; the reason is just the opposite: his seeing is borrowed from the artist, it is second-hand property. Considered in connection with the co-ordinated arrangement of the ordinary man's life this borrowed vision is absolutely correct and in its place, just as is his borrowed knowledge of science, mathematics, history. But if he tries to isolate it and put it apart in a frame, claiming for it an original independent value, it immediately becomes false, pretentious, sentimental. It still, however, is not photographic: it is an emotion out of place. There is, of course, also in Academy pictures a great deal of photography, that is to say of general statement.

3. The artistic disvalue of such statements lies not in the fact that they are reproductive and "true to nature," but in the deliberate stripping of all emotional content. So far from giving a completer and truer account of reality, the photograph gives a thoroughly impoverished account.[20] It must not, however, be inferred that art should assist or take the place of, say, geological drawings, because these drawings are intentionally confined to similarities and general facts.

[20] The cinematograph drama might become genuine art,
because one can look through the generality of the
photograph into the human imaginative synthesis. It
is on a par with a photograph of a picture or of a
building.

4. The conception of the "creative imagination" is liable to lapse into a false kind of mysticism. Imagination is always about reality. Rembrandt possessed a marvellous imagination, yet for that very reason he has considerably increased and enhanced the human consciousness of reality. In the same way the interior of a beautiful church evokes and deepens our consciousness of religious emotion, and, therefore, of the profound significance of life. And it is not the life of some abstract mysticism, but of man in the travail of history. All art is imaginative, but it is equally real and objective, it adds to our consciousness of the world in which we live. We need not even object to the metaphor about holding the mirror up to nature, for we cannot see ourselves except in a mirror.

It might be possible, therefore, to overcome the apparent distinction between "painting from the model" and "out of one's head," and to show that they are both the same kind of activity. There is no doubt that imaginative work has its roots in ordinary perception; even the creator of pure designs is using lines and colours which are visible, and he gets his suggestions from the external world. And even though in the process of creating the artist seems to move away from external reality into his inner being, the created product is definitely about external reality. The Cenotaph in Whitehall _is_ our mourning over the dead: Goya's etchings _The Disasters of War are_ part of our concrete consciousness of war. Blake, too, where he is not lost in impossible symbolism, is always referring back to life.

On the other side, every piece of ordinary perception is shot through with imagination, as with emotion. The mind is not a _tabula rasa_, but a most marvellous and intricate activity. And there is another explanation possible of the difference between the art, say, of Velasquez and of Fra Angelico than that the one was reproductive, the other the work of fantasy. At the time of Velasquez the whole interest and value of life centred round man and pre-eminently round the life of kings and nobles. On these people was focussed the emotional imagination of the age. To Fra Angelico the world was altogether different; its quintessential value lay outside it in our experience after death: this life was but a preparation for the next, and art was as it were the imaginative anticipation of the loveliness of heaven. Nevertheless, this anticipation spoke in terms of the most refined delights of this world, and the pæan to heaven was but a pæan to the beauty of life. Or if one may diverge from the artist to an appreciator of art, it is clear from Mr. Clive Bell's book, _Art_, that at the back of his mind there is a mystical metaphysics, a sort of conviction that the objects and events of this muddled material world are contemptible, and that we must seek for the reality of realities in some aloof inhuman state of consciousness. This is his third and in many ways most interesting preoccupation.

5. Each of the three definitions of art referred to at the beginning of this essay, those of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, sets up claims which must be satisfied if we do not want to be continually dogged by their importunate ghosts. One of the strongest objections to Plato's premise that the artist imitates is that it does not allow any element of novelty. It is true that in the physical act of painting the artist reproduces his vision, and that this act requires considerable technical accomplishment. But throughout the principal, all-powerful, radiating influence is the vision. This cannot correctly be called reproductive; it is just the unmediated consciousness of something, and of that something for the first time. For instance, the artist apparently works with a limited number of colours just as the musician with notes; but out of these he produces entirely new colours in combination (colours are never really out of combination), just as the musician produces literally new sounds. And this production is not a mere abstract physical fact, it is emotional and can contain the whole significance of a given period of history. The seeing of the colours and the emotional impulse coincide: it is an act of creation. Nor do the colours belong, so to speak, merely to the artist's palette and canvas, they are seen out there "in nature." It is a new vision of nature. It is, however, futile for the man in the street, when he sees the picture for the first time, to refer back to his own past experience, because this is a new experience, a new vision. At the same time, although the picture is hung up indoors in a room or gallery, the vision pierces, as it were, right through the canvas and walls and comes to a halt out there in the mysterious and infinite world. We have seen that this process of consciousness is undoubtedly imaginative, even if the completed product is almost historically real. It is not a mere statement of fact, but it always includes facts, surrounding them with concrete living individuality. Further, it always contains an element of the ideal, of aspiration, not of an abstract schematised Utopia or stereotyped moralising, but of a pulsating individual love and hate. In all art, even in the most realistic, this is transparent. It is, in a sense, the goodwill bending over the present and dreaming of the future.

Briefly, pictorial and plastic art is the creation of the visual feeling or emotional consciousness of the human mind. As such it is inseparably bound up in real objects, actions, and events. Remove it (speculatively in thought) and you get the bare though magnificent framework of science and the stark matters-of-fact of history.

PROSE AND MORTALITY

By J. C. SQUIRE

In recent years several editors have put together anthologies of English prose passages, among them Mr. S. L. Edwards (_An Anthology of English Prose_; Dent), Messrs. Broadus and Gordon (_English Prose_; Milford), Mr. Treble (_English Prose_; Milford), and Professor Cowl (_An Anthology of Imaginative Prose_; Simpkin). Only the last of these books has much in common with the "treasury"[21] now presented by Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith. There are many kinds of good prose, of which Samuel Butler's is one, Jane Austen's another, Cowley's another: but the last two of these authors do not appear, and the first is only here by favour. A few exceptions are made, presumably owing to personal predilections or a feeling that such and such a great prose name should not be omitted. Swift is an instance. His prose, the faithful reflection of his mind, has many qualities, but it is out of place here. Generally speaking, to satisfy Mr. Pearsall Smith, in his present capacity, it is not enough--in fact, it is not anything--that prose should be adequate to its purpose, neat, easy, vivacious, well-knit. It must be prose on what by common consent is the highest level of prose, prose impeccably written, and prose with a dignity, a richness, a sonority or a sweetness of flow that rival the attributes of great poetry. Almost all his examples come into this category: he has no room here for the most vigorous pages of Scott or the most amusing chapters of Dickens. His extracts are to be detachable jewels, gorgeous or exquisite. On his fly-leaf he quotes Keats:

[21] _A Treasury of English Prose. Edited by Logan Pearsall
Smith. Constable. 6s. net._

"I had an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this
manner--let him on a certain day read a certain page of full Poesy
or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it,
and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it,
and dream upon it: until it becomes stale--But when will it do so?
Never--When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect
any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post
towards all the two-and-thirty Palaces. How happy is such a voyage of
conception, what delicious diligent indolence!"

"Distilled Prose," "grand and spiritual passage": the editor gives no other explanation than this second-hand one, but that is enough.

We must grant Mr. Pearsall Smith his ground, but on that ground every reader is sure--as an anthologist's readers always will be--occasionally to quarrel with him. His earlier selections, from the Bible, Donne, and Jeremy Taylor, could not, I think, have been better. He was bound to fill a good deal of his space with the seventeenth-century religious writers. He does not overlook South; and he gives a numerous and glittering selection from Milton, one of the few English writers who have contrived to keep their singing-robes about them, with whatever effort, when writing about every sort of mundane subject. He has found almost everything that he could have wanted in the writers of the eighteenth century, and he gives many perfect passages from Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Landor. But to some of the Victorian writers, and to some of our contemporaries (though he has quarried some exquisite things from unlikely places) he does, if he will allow me to say so, less than justice. We could have spared some of the eleven pages of Emerson for the sake of some of the best paragraphs of Ruskin, who is given only two pages. The single extract from Cardinal Newman (whose _Idea of a University_ should have been searched) does not represent him, and no single extract could. There are two--there might well have been more--extracts from Mr. Doughty's _Wanderings in Arabia_. The passage from Samuel Butler is more sustained than Butler's wont, but scarcely worthy of inclusion, though the reader would appreciate in any surroundings his last sentence, "I am not very fond of Milton, but I admit that he does at times put me in mind of Fleet Street." Mr. Shaw appears and Henry James; there are good extracts from Mr. Santayana and Mr. Lowes Dickinson. But Mr. Conrad's works--both his Reminiscences and his novels--should have yielded many more than two pieces, and some admirable modern writers of coloured, musical, and affecting prose are omitted altogether. Mr. Hardy is a curious omission. Mr. Chesterton, as a rule, troubles too little to be a good subject for this anthologist; the journalist and the tumbler are always breaking in; the poet appears arm-in-arm with the politician, an exasperating contiguity. But I think that exploration would have been rewarded even had our collector gone no farther than the splendid last pages of _The Short History of England_. From Mr. Hudson's books, especially from _A Crystal Age_ and _Far Away and Long Ago_, passages, I think, could have been taken which would have competed respectably with many that are here; Mrs. Meynell's essays and Mr. Bertrand Russell's last book should be drawn on; and where is Mr. Belloc? Rupert Brooke said that Mr. Belloc had a better prose style than any man alive. I should not dispute that: it is a clear, a precise, an economical style that serves admirably all the diverse uses to which its owner puts it. And it often rises, always quietly, where some poignant thing is clearly seen, into sentences of noble beauty. These are liable to occur almost anywhere; for instance, in a digression during an article on strategy. Possibly because he began his career with public facetiousness about "purple patches" he often seems to allow a promising passage to break its back because he will not seem artificial or affected. He fetters his consciously-exercised powers and he can seldom let himself go, as it were, unconsciously. In his books it would therefore be far more easy to find short passages than long ones of the kind included in this anthology; for any other sort of prose anthology his work should be thoroughly ransacked. Nevertheless there are long ones. My memory is that there are certainly several in _The Four Men_ and in the books of essays. To hunt for examples which one will have no room to quote would be tiresome; there is a long passage in _The Absence of the Past_ which begins:

There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready
for laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the
noblest of replies. Many loved her; all admired. She passed (I will
suppose) by this street or by that; she sat at table in such and such
a house; Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there were
men who had the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter with
their own. And the house where she moved is there, and the street in
which she walked, and the very furniture she used and touched with
her hands you may touch with your hands. You shall come into the
rooms she inhabited, and there you shall see her portrait, all light
and movement and grace and beatitude.

But it is a stupid thing to spend much time talking about the omissions from a good book; only less so than it would be to complain that it is one sort of book and not another sort. Mr. Pearsall Smith set out to collect prose passages of a certain, the most poetical and resounding, kind; and he has made an admirable and a learned choice. A perusal of his specimens confirms in me an opinion previously formed as to the nature of this kind of prose in English. It is that we have a canonical style for such prose, and that such prose most frequently arises from meditation on a definable kind of subject.

In great writers and small, in those whose prose marches always with majesty and in those with whom eloquence is infrequent, in the graceful and the ungainly, in the magisterial and the familiar, this thing is to be discerned: that their prose is least personal when at its highest flights. The observation is common that we have in England no standard and accepted prose style, but a medley of manners which are continually increasing in number. This is true. But it has not been generally noticed that amongst those passages of English prose, drawn from authors of all our literary ages, which are received as being the most sublime and the most musical--passages which have been, and must be, the first resort of all anthologists of our prose who are in search of those attributes of power and beauty--there is a strong likeness of form and feature. There is more: the resemblance is often so close that the differences, normally marked, between the styles of writers divided by a great gulf of time are in such sentences not to be distinguished. Styles so various on the lower plane meet, as it were, on the higher: there is an established, an inevitable, manner into which an Englishman will rise when his ideas and images lift into grandeur. It is the style of the Authorised Version, a style in process of formation long before the date of that Parthenon of our prose, but reaching in that its perfection, and by means of that made an element of the air we breathe, and many generations before us have breathed, in childhood. Even in writers who never entirely lose the marks of their eccentricity the most eloquent "purple patches" are always reminiscent. Emotion deepens suddenly, or reaches an expected climax; the results of reflection are summarised; by whatever route, the author comes to a place at which his expression assumes a sublimity of imagery and a perfection of rhythm; and with the emotion he communicates is always mingled the throe of recognition. The note has been struck and a hundred neighbouring strings respond. The writer has stepped off the common road and into that chapel where there is one ritual and one mode of incantation. "Man that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay." It is the Prayer-Book of 1549. "Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, _Hic jacit_." It is Sir Walter Raleigh. "These wait upon the shore of death, and waft unto him to draw near, wishing above all others to see his star that they might be led to his place; wooing the remorseless Sisters to wind down the watch of their life, and to break them off before the hour." It is Bacon. "A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer." It is John Donne. "Methusalem, with all his hundreds of years, was but a mushroom of a night's growth to this day; and all the four Monarchies, with all their thousands of years, and all the powerful Kings, and all the beautiful Queens of this world, were but as a bed of flowers, some gathered at six, some at seven, some at eight--all in one morning in respect of this day." That too is Donne, and his subject Eternity. "Since the brother of Death daily haunts us with dying Mementoes, and Time that grows old itself bids us hope no long duration, diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation." That is Sir Thomas Browne. "They that three thousand years agone died unwillingly, and stopped death two days, or stayed it a week, what is their gain? Where is that week?" That is Jeremy Taylor. "When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet, till it falls asleep, and then the care is over." That is Sir William Temple. "The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more; and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful." That is Gibbon. "The stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest and their native country and their natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival." The argument to the _Ancient Mariner_ needs no specification. "Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter, went before. It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to sit up late; better, than to cling pertinaciously to what we feel crumbling under us, and to protract an inevitable fall." That is from a dialogue of Landor's. "And it would not taste of death, by reason of its adoption into immortal palaces; but it was to know weakness, and reliance, and the shadow of human imbecility; and it went with a lame gait; but in its goings it exceeded all mortal children in grace and swiftness." That is Charles Lamb. "In her sight there was Elysium; her smile was heaven; her voice was enchantment; the air of love waved round her, breathing balm into my heart: for a little while I had sat with the gods at their golden tables, I had tasted of all earth's bliss." They have quoted that passage from Hazlitt's _Liber Amoris_ a thousand times. "Like God, whose servants they are, they utter their pleasure not by sounds that perish, or by words that go astray, but by signs in heaven, by changes on earth, by pulses in secret rivers, heraldries painted on darkness, and hieroglyphics written on the tablets of the brain." That is de Quincey. "And again the sun blinks out, and the poor sower is casting his grain into the furrow, hopeful he that the Zodiacs and far Heavenly Horologes have not faltered; that there will be yet another summer added for us and another harvest." That is Carlyle. "To what port are we bound? Who knows? There is no one to tell us but such poor weather tossed mariners as ourselves, whom we speak as we pass, or who have hoisted some signal, or floated to us some letter in a bottle from far." It is from Emerson. "Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening." That, if modern in conception, altogether traditional in cadence and in the phrasing of its close, is from Pater's _Renaissance_. "We can therefore be happy in our sorrows, happy even in the death of our beloved who fall in the fight; for they die nobly, as heroes and saints die, with hearts and hands unstained by hatred and wrong." A peroration: the peroration from the Poet Laureate's _Spirit of Man_. "And in the autumn before the snows come they have all gone--of all that incalculable abundance of life, of all that hope and adventure, excitement and deliciousness there is scarcely more to be found than a soiled twig, a dirty seed, a dead leaf, black mould or a rotting feather." Mr. H. G. Wells, never a careful artist or fully aware of what language can be, permits himself some looseness in the phraseology of the passage from which that sentence comes, but he too falls, as it were unwittingly, into the old music. And here, from another living author is a piece of declamation which contains, indeed, sentiments and words which would have been foreign to the seventeenth century, but is a true child of its loins:

We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears,
of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence,
of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a
period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed
compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the
energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be
dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate
the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will
go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy
consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space
broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter
will know itself no longer. "Imperishable monuments" and "immortal
deeds," death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though
they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or be worse
for all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have
striven through countless generations to effect.

This passage, summarising the conclusions that natural science unaided has been able to reach, is detached from a longer one: it occurs in Mr. Balfour's _The Foundations of Belief_.

* * * * *

There is one music and one speech in all these extracts. It is not the result of deliberation, but it is not an accident, that they have so much else in common, that their very subjects are analogous. Chosen, however genuinely, at random and without afterthought, if they are chosen from the best, they will be variations on but a few related themes and half of them will be inspired by the direct contemplation of death. There are innumerable subjects which engage the attention, and they may be seen in countless aspects; but that large utterance comes chiefly to English lips when things, of whatever nature they may be, are regarded _sub specie æternitatis_. Whatever a man's philosophy and whatever his mood, when he speaks with this music, he speaks with the voice of mankind, awed and saddened by its inscrutable destiny. Time, Death, Eternity, Mutability: those words, the most awful that we know, insistently recur. It is they, unuttered yet present, which give their grandeur to pronouncements of many kinds which do not relate directly to the general operations of Time or of Death: to Burke's passage on Marie Antoinette, to Johnson's Preface to his Dictionary, to Gibbon's moonlight reverie on the conclusion of his History. Those names, those figures with their skirts of thunder and doom, trail through all our literature with a majesty that no others possess. Apostrophising those our shadowy tyrants, celebrating them, rebelling against them, we may clothe our conceptions in many images, though even here, for the most part, we must observe a tendency, natural and spontaneous, to choose as tokens and ornaments a few, in the earthly sense, universal and perennial things. But those shapes tower over our whole world. Anything we look at in the sunlight, a wave, a weed, a travelling insect, may be like a window opening out to them; and at night, under the dark sky, so actual and so symbolical, the reflective man is always aware of them. We have our activities and our distractions. We must satisfy our carnal cravings, eat, drink, and sleep; between birth and death, under that immense and unresponsive heaven, we build and dig, hunt and dance, carve and paint, intrigue, copulate and kill. But whenever the moment comes that we turn round from our toys it is one spectacle that we see: life proceeding from darkness to darkness, change, dissolution, and death. And the greatest utterance of our tongue is a chronicle, again and again resumed and repeated, of the wonder and dread, the certain regret and the wavering hope which that spectacle arouses in hearts which have immortal longings but have loved transient things: a chronicle of grass that withers, leaves that fall, of girls like flowers who fade like flowers, of conquerors who are dust, blown about, of tough oaks that decay, of stone temples and pyramids that as surely, after a few more years, fall into dust, of the world's past, and the past of the individual which cannot be recovered, the innocence and the illusions of childhood, the loss of which typifies all loss and their beauty that Eden to which, with the shadow approaching, we pitifully aspire: all framed by the most abiding things that our senses know, the sea and the wind and the hills, the seasons which come for all generations in their order, the stars, constant, silent, vigilant over all: those also transitory after their own kind, arching to their fall in epochs beyond our computation or guessing, but in relation to us steadfast and immutable.

They say (though I do not believe it) that an age, even if it be still far distant, is coming in which the present preoccupations of man, both physical and mental, will have vanished and new passions and new hopes will have taken their place. Our contact with each other is as yet imperfect; psychological discovery is only beginning; the gates between mind and mind will all be broken down; it will not be a question of universal candour but of automatic communication and sympathy. The individual will be identified with the race, will live only in the life of the race, will not merely not fear but will not even think about any death which does not involve the death of the race. The race will be one animal; its members, sloughed and replaced, will want no more immortality than that qualified perpetuation which the race can give; no two persons will be more to each other than any other two; Man will really be Man and will cease to be men. Should that time come (which, speaking diffidently, it will not) the voice of Man may change. His most eloquent words may be other than they are now, and even though, in his corporate form, he is still most deeply stirred by frustrations that we cannot conjecture, the range of his imagery will have altered, he will have new symbols for his regrets, and new comparisons for his ideas. Pending that change there is no reason to suppose that the essential, or to a large extent the incidental, material of our poetry, or of such of our prose as aspires to the condition of poetry, will substantially alter. We speak most sublimely of what moves us most deeply.