Part 6

It is good for some of earth's children that passion should be stayed before it makes ashes of the fancy; for if it does but touch for a moment only to be withdrawn for ever, it does not destroy, but by its meteoric passage kindles the imagination with the glow of an incorruptible flame. It is with them long enough to brand upon memory the image which, though never renewed before their bodily eyes, by its very severance from perception puts on an immortality of virginal grace. Love is understanding, said the poet of Heaven and Hell, and love ennobled through renunciant years shall at the last encompass the world. The sensuous glow that first quickened the heart of youth is transmuted into a purer fire akin to that which moves the spheres.

To know this truth is their compensation who are swiftly withdrawn from the warm radiance of earthly love. They are stricken, but before passion blinds them are rapt into a high solitude, whence, if they truly love, an infinite prospect is unrolled before them. They know desire; but as their passion was hopeless in this world, their steps were mercifully set upon a new path, whereby the bodily semblance of the beloved became the symbol of spiritual comeliness, alluring the beholder into the peace of a serene and unworldly mood. A thin and rarefied ideal, you say, a mirage which no wayfarer can approach: experience rejects these subtleties, and to these creations of a dream human affection was never given. True, to hearts established and content in happy unions, to minds preoccupied with the near cares and pleasures of a home, our distant visions may appear frail structures wrought in mist by homeless fancy. But for the exiled heart they are not such, but verities of abiding inspiration. For the ideal love did not die with Plato, but came again in mediaeval Italy, and who shall say that even our material age has banished it from the earth?

No indeed it is not dead, the ideal love, but indwells, a redeeming power, wherever there are desolate hearts and minds to be updrawn and united by its ministry; a power so lustral in its nature, that no abject and despairing thought creeps into its presence but is purified and exalted by its regard. This love brings hope and cheerful constancy; with a shining falchion it affrights into their natal darkness the monstrous forms of despair, and lends to all work a secret charm of chivalry. It sustains that high anticipatory mood to which life is but a preparation, and the bees buzzing round the honey-flowers seem poor things toiling for an inessential gain. Because it is mystic and transcendental it is the predestined guide of all whom fate holds removed from earthly love. This is the old device of the world's failures, you say, to trick themselves out in Plato's mantle or the schoolman's cowl, and conceal their spite beneath the pretensions of the mystic. But I answer that the causes which moved the Greek and the Florentine are still at work among mankind to-day; they have never ceased, however much obscured by the glare of triumphant luxury or the stress of miserable toil. Often when disillusion has laid bare a soul, this love which did but slumber awakes to contest with envy or despair the possession of a wounded heart. I aver that any exile from the happier earth whose heart is pure, if he invokes this love with ardent faith, may unbar his door and feel that it has passed his threshold. Let us never be persuaded that the ideal world is far from this earth of ours, or that the way to it may not be daily traversed by him who has submitted to the heavenly guide. Not even the close entanglement of common cares can avail to keep such an one from his love; but as Bishop Berkeley is said to have been able to pass in a moment from the consideration of trifling things to the throne of thrones and the seats of the Trinity, so this lover shall overpass with easy and habitual flight the barriers that hold most men life-long prisoners.

For to the Spirit that is chastened and endures there is given a power of flight and poise, by which, if it abandon itself to the celestial wind, it may instantly remove from the deeper planes of life, as a bird by the mere slanting of its wings is carried in proud quiescence into an upper region of the air. He shall know instant release from the leaguer of disillusion and vain solicitudes; in the light of one beautiful and compassionate countenance the unquiet memories of failure shall give up their exceeding bitterness.

And though the style and instinct of modern life are hostile to such love, though in prosperity it is ignored and in adversity often overborne by a vain uproar of lamentation, yet even in a self-indulgent and furious world it still draws many to the severe exaltation of its service. We cannot approach the heights where a Plato and a Dante walked with ease, but far beneath upon the lower slopes we can draw a breath of new life as we fix our weaker eyes upon the glory which they saw so near. Although the men who have there ascended are a supreme company, we may yet presume to follow; for let it never be said that the gods have reserved for surpassing genius the consolation of which lesser men have so much deeper need. But he who would reach a serener air must press forward strenuously; for as a mountain may have one bare and northern slope, and another sunlit and clothed with verdure, and yet there may be a path on each side to the summit, so it is with the ascent to this felicity. One lingers amid pleasant groves and laughing waters; another, undistracted by the beauty of any lower zone, but fixing his eyes upon the far summit, crosses the chill rocky slopes, never feeling the warmth of the sun and only seeing his brightness reflected from the highest peak. Though the ways of the two travellers lie far apart until the end, their endurance may be crowned with the same reward; but he who knew no dalliance and plucked no fruit has from the beginning seen the goal clearly, and lived steadfastly in its distant promise. And do you tell me that this is not love or joy, you who saunter in the verdant southern valleys breathing a present happiness with the perfume of a thousand flowers? Your way may lead you upward after long vicissitudes, but endurance will more swiftly fail you for the last most arduous ascent. Very love is of the heights, and he whose thoughts have long been thither exalted will breathe with least pain the attenuate upper air.

To this pilgrimage the diffident are foreordained; it is their happiest hour when they take staff and scrip and set out in earnest for the shrine built among the mountains. The gardens of Armida are not for them, nor the warm breezes fragrant of fruit and flowers; but the vision of a far peak flushed at sundawn draws them onward, and strength and peace are increased upon them throughout the great ascent. He is still too rich for pity to whom renunciation brings these high and enviable hours.

But the heavens are not opened every day, and the adept of these mysteries must walk the dull round of common life like other men, not warmed as they are by the glow of constant friendship, yet cheered by intermittent flames of remembrance and of hope. The real life of the diffident is cunningly hidden from those around them, for whom, indeed, it is wont to have faint interest; but before you who have often sought me out through fair and foul weather, I may venture to undo the pack of small resources which brings variety and distraction into lonely days.

Firstly, I still dare to haunt the forecourts of philosophy. Into her inner courts I may not penetrate, lacking the leisure which her whole service demands; yet the loiterings which I may still enjoy are to me like voyages into a foreign country, and give my mind the healthful enjoyment of change; they are not long enough to bring that whole detachment from daily life which, in my case, might prove a perilous advantage. All that I need for common use is a simple rule based on a few fundamental thoughts to give me a course upon the wayward ocean, and though it be full of error as the Almagest, yet it shall surpass the thumb-rules of Philistia. It must be a doctrine which allows imagination her right and durable career, and therefore not be monist. For materialism is too wildly imaginative at the start: like a runner who at the outset overstrains his heart and thereafter runs no more, the follower of this creed, by his postulate of a blind impersonal Law, exhausts his power of speed and plods henceforth eyes downward over flattest plains of dulness. That my mind may remain curious and alert in isolation, I must conceive in the universal scheme a power that does not alone impel, but also draws me forward. For were it true that the sum of things blunders from change to change, swept by blind force into uncharted voids, I should abandon myself in despair to that hopeless course, and drift indifferent to the direction or the end.

Let me rather believe that if each several idea is compacted by my

## active intelligence out of some vast system of relations, then only a

supreme intelligence akin to man's can brace together the whole system or universal sum of things. For this earth, yes, and all the complex of the spheres, exist to me imperfectly as idea alone, nor can I conceive them any complete existence apart from a kindred but omniscient mind. Each advance in human knowledge should then be an infinitesimal approach towards the supreme comprehension; and the aspiring race of man is justified in that inchoation of long hope which is folly to the single life.

I would also believe that new relations between things may be detected not merely by the staid and ordered process of collating abstractions, which is science, but by swifter and more genial methods of intuition.

"Hurrah for positive science, Long live exact demonstration!"

cried Walt Whitman, exulting over the filed fetters of mankind; and let us all echo the cry, nor ever forget the razed Bastilles of superstition. But there glimmers a wealth of truth in the penumbra beyond our lanterns to which science will creep too slowly without the aid of imagination. Yet this truth may be seized by swift sallies into the darkness, and assured to us as it were by some dim apperception of the soul, when the whole personality is made tense, and subtly anticipates the cosmic argument. Life is too short to renounce this daring: the sense of kinship with the All-Consciousness sanctions if not commands the right adventure.

It was this feeling which led William Blake to exclaim in his impulsive way, that to generalize is to be an idiot, that direct perception is all, and the slow process of the inductive reason a devil's machination. This method of intuition is to the more sober method of science as the romantic to the classical spirit in literature, permitting to the individual mind a licence of noble vagrancy. But it must be a law for the ordinary intelligence to exercise the two apart, else it will fall into sick fancies of excitement, and by abuse of wild analogies lose the vital art of balance and sane comparison. Only the greatest minds, endowed as it were with some divine genius of extrication, may dare to practise the two together. So Leonardo da Vinci drove inference and intuition abreast without disaster, and gathered from purple distances of thought their wildest and most splendid flowers. To him, as has been well said, philosophy was something giving strange swiftness and double sight, clairvoyant of occult gifts in common or uncommon things. The doom of Phaeton awaits those who now would follow that marvellous course; but the poetic observation of resemblances in things remote, which lent so rich a colour to the science of the Renaissance, may yet be trained in all our minds; and the philosophy which trusts in the slow suffusion of the worlds with intellectual light will bless and encourage its reasonable growth.

Such a philosophy brings also a living sympathy with art. For the artist ever sees a perfection of truth beyond his rendering, yet always calling for expression; there is something eternally missed by his highest effort, and he can never know complacency. The philosophy which conceives the gradual growth of form through consciousness towards a perfection infinitely removed, yet in its remoteness drawing up our life as the moon sways the tides--this surely is the artist's wisdom. Idealism is like love, {apora porimos}, holding us as it were in touch with the intangible: it will have us conceive the Absolute without that helpless absorption in thought which changed Amiel's life from a fountain to a vapour: it would keep us near the surf and confluence of things. Its function is not to give any mysterious transcendental knowledge, but to serve culture "by suggesting questions which help to detect the passion, and strangeness and dramatic contrasts of life." And not only to bring suggestions, but repose, by granting to eyes wearied with minute concerns the contrasts of vast times and spaces, the majestic idea of the Whole; to change the focus and variously dispose the perspectives of familiar things.

An old watchmaker, whose window overlooked a wide meadow, used ever and again to lay down his instruments to gaze out upon the expanse of green, pasturing upon it a wandering vague regard, and absorbing from it an assuagement of his wearied senses which, he said, served him more effectually after these bright interludes. The province of Metaphysics should be to us as to this wise workman his field; not a place to dream our days away in, but for occasional resort; in which we may forget the infinitesimal in healing visions of broad space and colour. I counsel every lonely man to satisfy what has been described as the common metaphysical instinct, and according to his powers to become a metaphysician. There is no discipline which so well consists with solitude, none which so instantly enfranchises the mind from the tyranny of mean self-interest or vain and envious polemics. Men do not grow sour and quarrelsome about the Absolute: everything that is polemical is inspired, as Michelet once said, by some temporal and momentary interest. The man who has climbed to the Idalian spring comes down benevolent. He does not grudge this toiling ant his grain, that snarling dog his bone, but is content to live serene, in the certainty that his soul has great provision, and that though all human things are small, each is worth its while. Into his hand there is given a scale by which life is known in its fair proportions; a tranquil joy, disturbed neither by dirges nor Epinician odes, is poured into his heart and exalts him above distraction. He respects himself as akin to that great Self whose perfection shall one day be known; he understands the passion for the ideal through which men die young; he wonders at envy and in the happiness of enfranchisement would have all men free.

The pages of this Almagest are for the exceptional hour; but daily, as one bookish from the nursery, I read much in many directions. For if books are called the best friends of happy men, to the sad they are saviours also. And when I remember too clearly what I am, I turn perhaps most often to Lucretius. For of all those who have taken up the pen to assuage the miseries of men, it is he who sings most bravely of the great endurance. This austere enthusiast, whose soul was never fused in the fire of friendship; who went apart, as it were, amid thunders upon the lonely heights; who, without any lover, yet loved his kind so well that all the years of his maturity, how short and splendid a period, were poured forth in one song of human consolation,--this man for all the madness of his creed, was yet aflame with a wisdom to be called divine. That calm face, lit with one desire--to drive the furies from the way and soothe the frightened children of men, is ever among the nobler countenances which fancy summons about my bed. Over the anxious heart they flow, those slow cadences, so vibrant yet so magnificently passionless, until the nerves of pain cease to throb, and fear shrinks as a taint impossible to the patient of such a physician. It is not his to intimidate or denounce, to evoke visions of lurid hell, to linger over dire vaticinations, or apportion to each his grade of torment, but with cool fingers to smooth the hair back from the forehead, and in grave, tender accents to say: Sleep now, for it was a dream.

Landor, in a fine passage, compared the merciful tolerance of the Roman poet with the pitiless ire of Dante, contrasting in respect of the quality of mercy these two poets, one in their austere perfection, but so different in their vision of death, and judgment, and ultimate reward. The seer of lost worlds has written his own defence, and was indeed but attacked to point the sharp antithesis; but Lucretius, though he owes it to a literary feint, is very finely praised. And to me it seems that his compassionate mood increased upon him just because he was not emulous of the world's gifts or earnest for its pleasures, but withdrew from the press, and lived out his few great years contemplating apart the vicissitudes of orbs and men. He did not wait in ante-chambers or sit at wedding feasts; but severing all entangling and intricate threads of observance, followed the voice which called him to solitary places of illimitable prospect. It was not through disillusion or injustice, or wounded pride, that he walked aloof; but loneliness was his birthright, and from the hills and headlands to which solitude allured his steps he saw the dust of mad encounters rise to heaven, and the rent sails of foundering galleys. He saw, and could not but be wrung with pity for man deafened to wise counsel by the noise of vanities, and fiercely conspiring to precipitate his doom. As he went by shore and upland, there gathered in his mind those resonant hexameters of warning or consolation, those similes from the life of husbandry and dumb things, which, set like diamonds in clay, lend to the most arid arguments their own incomparable splendour, or that homelier beauty which instantly pierces the defences of the heart. Not diffident as we, but of a nature so infinitely absent and reserved that in the legend his wife must concoct a philter to remind him of his love, he is of all the pagans the best companion for our angrier moods. An archaic and elemental serenity is upon his language and thought, rebuking our unprofitable petulance; if emotion gains him he finds utterance in those tremendous periods "where single words seem to gather out of the deep and to reverberate like thunder." As the reverberation dies away and the clouds are pierced by the sun, the world is seen in new lights through an air clear as upon rain-swept mountains.

As my reading is incessant, so also is my writing. For the happiness of man is in his fertility, and of barrenness comes the worst despair. To be happy is to have issue--children, or books written, or things beautifully wrought, or monuments of goodness to live after you, if only in the memory of some tiny hamlet of the folded hills. This is the law of life that Diotima knew, by which flower and tree, animal and man, fulfil the end of their creation; and man in nothing more surely proves his lordship than by his many-handed hold upon posterity. For the lower creation is procreant in one way, but man in many; who may have offspring not of body alone but of mind and heart, and be so redeemed from the grim dismay of childlessness. The greatest human happiness is to be fertile in every way, a thing granted rarely in the world we know; the next, perhaps, is that of the parent who gives all of himself to his family, not tilling any field beyond the charmed walls confining his desire. The author sure of his fame, the born artist, the benefactor of his kind, are also happy, seeing their offspring grow in years and in the power of making a brighter world.

But he is miserable who, aspiring to follow these, feels his force wane within him while he remains yet fatherless; or who has sons stillborn, or weakly, or dishonoured. I question whether sheer degradation into evil brings more pain to man than such sense of sterility or frustrate parentage. But it is no small part of human redemption that none need know the interminable misery. A man may have neither sons nor genius, but in the dark hour he can go out and give, if it be only a penny or a kind word, and on that foundation build a temple to receive his thanksgiving. To give of yourself is good. This is that grand agreement and oecumenical consent to which those words _quod ab omnibus quod ubique_ in deed and truth may be applied. For this reason meanness is of the deeps, and avarice groans in the lowest zone of hell. And if there are faces of blank and permanent despair upon your path, be sure that these are not masks of whole men, but of those who wilfully abstained from joy and have received the greater damnation. My children are mostly writings, poor weakly creatures dying inarticulate and unchristened, tenderly remembered by myself only, but at least no nuisance to the world. I loved them at their birth, I hold them in remembrance, though they were ever of a hectic and uncertain beauty.