by John Buchan
and so on with many tiresome details.
“Now for the little book —
“‘To-day the building of my summer Palace begins. The walls will rise level with the cliffs, and the portico will be open to the sea. For months ships have brought Parian marble and cedar logs to the little wharf below, and this morning the first hammer rang on the foundations. The great library is on the side facing the hills, so that I may have the open air even when the wind blows. There the hundred thousand volumes which Philotimus has gathered for me will be housed in cedar cabinets, and there I may find peace to wrestle with the problems of the state. It has been my order that the work should proceed by night and day, and the torch-lit dusk will be a sign to Theodora of my love, for it is for her sake alone that I burden my soul with trifles.’
“Which,” said Mrs Yorke, “brings us to Theodora. The Emperor John had a wide choice of princesses, but he imitated Justinian in falling in love with a slave-girl who was also a popular actress. He married her, and judging by the diary, she seems to have led him a pretty dance. She had other lovers, and there is a really horrid passage in the book where he describes the revenge he took on the man he found in the Empress’s boudoir. The two most piquant contrasts in the diaries concern the two women whom he thought he loved. On January 17th we read in the big diary —
“‘I have just returned from the churchyard where all that is mortal of my dear wife was this afternoon laid to rest. Even in my private diary I cannot write the thoughts which are now surging in on my mind. The sense of loss has crippled my power of reflection and drugged my memory. For forty years she was my comrade and friend, the sharer of every hope and every sorrow. Elizabeth was one of those rare women whose price is indeed above rubies. In her husband’s work and in the calm atmosphere of the home her sweet, pure domesticity found perfect content. No passion ever ruffled the calm surface of her soul. As I think of her, I realise how unstable a foundation for wedded happiness is the volcanic love which modern poets prate of. Mutual respect, a vivid interest in the personality of each other, a gentle and constant affection, are the only guarantees of that private tranquillity which enables a man to face the rough fortunes of the outer world. Passion! The word should be expunged from our language, for when it is not begotten of folly and weak emotion it is first cousin to morbidity and vice.’
Under the same date in the little book there is a rhapsody on Theodora’s beauty which is not unlike the Song of Solomon”, and “a passionate appeal to her” of which the style is “ — well, Byzantine”. These appear on the same date as the funeral of his wife in real life, celebrating their “gentle and constant affection”, and ending Passion! The word should be expunged from our language, for when it is not begotten of folly and weak emotion of folly and weak emotion it is first cousin to morbidity and vice.’ “ Under the same date in the little book there is a rhapsody on Theodora’s beauty which is not unlike the Song of Solomon. And there is a long passionate appeal to her to give him her heart as he had given her his. I will not read these passages, for the style of Byzantium was — well...
“‘These dogs of the Senate and the Church have again besought me to break with you. They say that the sacrosanctity of the throne will be gone if it is shared with a dancing-girl. Who are they to dictate the choice of an Emperor of Borne! High God that I will create for you a new earth. Cities and temples shall be ground into dust to make a path for these delicate feet. Your white hand shall fling open the door of a new Empire. Together we will sweep across the west, and when we have crushed the barbarians and shaken down the dotards of Italy, our palace shall be the Capitol, and you and I, little one, side by side, shall rule the world from the secular throne of Augustus.”
“‘And what happened in the end?” Marjory asked.
“Alas, the diary stops long before Rome was conquered. He had an illness some years before his death, and after that he never resumed it. But how I wish that I had known that all
the while, when he was talking platitudes at Henry, one-half of him was revelling in such a dream!”
“And the moral of that is?” asked the Duchess.
“Surely, Susan,” said Lord Appin, “that we are such very composite creatures that, as Marjory said, we should be very shy of dogmatising on each other’s natures. That, I suppose, is the worst platitude I have ever uttered, but then, all morals are platitudes, and you asked me for one.”
“Well, I think they were both very unpleasant characters — especially the Emperor John. Sir Charles was at least respectable.”
“Really, Aunt Susan,” said Lady Flora, “we have all got to the stage of talking like Alice in Wonderland. Don’t you think it is time to go to bed?”
CHAPTER XI.
THE evenings had grown milder, and after dinner it was possible to sit in one of the airier drawing-rooms which opened on the stoep. So soft was the weather that the great windows were left half open, and through them blew scented wafts from the gardens.
Mrs Deloraine’s beautiful head was silhouetted by a little lamp against an ebony screen. She arranged some papers on a table beside her and began to speak in her curiously gentle voice.
“I have been given my orders by Francis, and I can’t disobey them. But I hope you will be a very charitable audience. I am not a controversialist, and, though I have written a little it is very hasty and imperfect, and I shall have to supplement it as best I can. I want to speak about the bearing of our creed upon the aesthetic side of life, and my only claim to speak on the subject is that I was warned that I should be expected to deal with it, and I have been trying to think it over on our Ruwenzori trip. Mountains give one a hill-top prospect, but they do not help one to put ideas into a clear system. So if what I say is very full of loose ends, you must remember the mountains and forgive me.
“I know no pocket definition of Art. But as I understand it, it is the quest of beauty under certain conditions. All honest work, all right conduct, all true speech, have beauty in them, and the worker and the speaker are in one sense artists. But in its usual acceptation it means a conscious quest, where beauty is the goal sought for its own sake, and not the attendant of an alien ideal. And this beauty must be presented in terms of our common life. Poetry must be written in some tongue familiar to mankind; painting works through the homely medium of paint and canvas, and makes its appeal to eyes accustomed to the rough world; music is contained in notes within the range of the human ear. In a deeper sense, too, Art is rooted in life. For its material must not be sought in some rarefied world, or even in certain carefully defined provinces of that world which we know. Our poetry must not come from the stars or the Far Islands, but from the men and women we see daily, and the warm breathing life which we call ‘real’ because we cannot escape from it. To Art nothing can be unclean or common, provided it has the warrant of reality. If we limit ourselves by any of the many conventions which have stifled growth, and say that Art can deal only with the fortunes of gentlefolk, or, at the other extreme, of peasants; that Art belongs to civilisation and is urban at heart, or that it is natural and untamed and can be found only in the wilds; that it must deal with things fair and comely or only with the ugliness and tragedy of life, — then we sin against its catholicity and truth.
“But all this is only to define the material and to leave out the spirit. The realist is so absorbed in the variety and multiplicity of the world, that he imagines that in a dull chronicle of details he has fulfilled the purpose of the artist. But the essence of Art is that it is creative. It brings into the wilderness the shaping spirit of imagination, and by selection, by a deeper instinct, it shows us harmony in chaos, nobility in the squalid, and a fugitive poetry in the commonplace. The temporal, in the hand of Art, takes on the guise of the eternal. The ordinary man sees in a passing face comeliness, or want, or vice, or misery, but when fixed on the canvas of a master the original is forgotten, and the whole tale of mortal passion is enshrined in that face for the seeing eye. Art is the revolt against
the bondage of the superficial, the accidental, and the trite. It means always a spiritual adventure and the conquest of new worlds for the mind — worlds none the less new because they are the re-creation of the old. Every one has known what it is to visit a place many times and find it dreary and uninspiring, till one day comes an hour of illumination, and the common fields and woods are touched with a light that never leaves them. Art brings this fairyland gleam to life, and we realise that it is no importation from without but life itself laid bare in its profoundest meaning.
“I am one of those who hold the orthodox view about Art. Its purpose to my mind is not merely to inform, or merely to delight, but to illumine. I believe that there are fixed laws of beauty, canons for the artist which are as eternal as beauty itself. But we need not delay now to discuss these ultimate questions of aesthetics. The truth I wish to enforce is, that while the canons of Art may be limited and stationary the subject-matter to which they apply is endless and ever growing. Its boundaries are extended with each addition to the world’s knowledge. To my mind the worst crime against the laws of Art is the attempt to limit their sphere of application.
“For mark what happens. We are left with a weary catalogue of things which Art may play with. And because a wall has been built round them, they are divorced from the rest of life, and become in themselves a phantasmal world. Their roots are no longer in reality, and therefore there can be no growth. The artist becomes a manipulator of mechanical toys, very subtle, exquisitely clever, and utterly futile — a purveyor of second-hand emotions and academic tragedies. The Muses become either genteel spinsters or stupid housemaids. For you cannot subdue the winds of the world to orderly breezes which never ruffle or chill, and when Art becomes domestic it dies.
“I seem to find in our Art to-day something of this vice, not so much in creed as in practice. We have not the wits to see that life is a violent, far-ranging thing, delighting in large contrasts and nobly tolerant. We are too fond of little prettinesses, too complex, too preoccupied with the small intricate things to have leisure for the great simple things which are the root of the matter. So we spend our time spinning cocoons, excellent as cocoons go, but, if I may borrow Lady Flora’s pet phrase about people, they ‘don’t matter.’ And the result is that Art misses that direct emotional appeal which is the final test of its truth. Great Art affects us with something of the emotion of life. The high rubs shoulders with the low, and the face of the laugher changes suddenly into the face of the seer and prophet. Cleopatra passes from banter with a peasant to the loftiest of human soliloquies. But in our dim half-world such heights are beyond us. We have too little of the real, for we are apt to limit arbitrarily the material of our art, and the ideal eludes us because it belongs to a nobler philosophy than ours. I am afraid we are in danger of decadence, and our only hope is in finding a new world.
“If I were a great poet I should write an epic on new worlds. A veil seems to lift when life is becoming dingy and narrow, and, behold! the gleam of dawn on untravelled seas. Men suddenly look up from their daily round and become aware of a great hope. It may be the revelation of a new Messiah or a new social creed, or in the literal sense a new world. Now, what we especially need is the last, for our Art wants above all things something of that spirit which you may call Ionian or Elizabethan or romantic, as you please. It is an enlarged basis of life that we require, rather than a new interpretation of our present routine. We must be shaken out of our content and our cynicism, and shown that the earth is full of wonderful and beautiful things, and that the wisdom of our grandfathers has not exhausted it. I believe in my heart that such a revelation awaits us. Mankind stands at the end of one long epoch, and has made itself master of the material globe. Science has opened her door half-way to us, we have circumnavigated and explored the whole earth, but still we are only at the beginning. For there still remains the task of taking possession — of reshaping all our creeds to correspond with our new heritage, and remodelling our heritage on an ideal plan. I am only concerned with the meaning of this illumination for Art, and two truths seem to be vital. The first is that we must absorb this enlarged material basis and make it part of our spiritual life. Otherwise it remains only a mysterious background, such as we find in the Roman decadence, while sill the time we go on living among our stale conventions. To us, as to the poets of the Silver Age, the outer empire will be only matter for a metaphor or a jest, unless we draw it within the circle of our lives. The second is that we must carry into our new sphere the inherited traditions of our culture, and not jettison them as useless ballast. Art, remember, looks towards the future, but her foundations are always in the past. Otherwise we shall become outlaws from her kingdom, and all the freshness of a new earth will not avail since we have lost the canons of interpretation. This, I think, is the weakness of so much colonial poetry. The novelty of the matter is believed to atone for the absence of the great tradition in the manner. But the rococo phrases of Fleet Street will never reproduce the mystery of the wilderness. What is lost, however, in Art which is colonial, and therefore provincial, may be recovered in Art which is imperial.”
“I think I understand what you mean,” said Lady Warcliff, “but I am far from certain that I agree with you. I should have thought that the essence of empire is the indefiniteness of its horizon and the unexplored chances of its future, whereas the essence of Art is that it works within clear limits. Surely, for ‘great verse’ we are taught to look to a ‘little clan.’ Material greatness is generally assumed to be hostile to spiritual perfection.”
Mrs Deloraine was always embarrassed by Lady Wardiff’s precision. “I know that opinion,” she said a little nervously, “but I most profoundly disagree with it. Of course, Art works within limits and abhors loose outlines. This has been said a hundred times, as in Goethe’s famous line —
‘In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister.’
But these limits are the eternal laws of Art’s being and not the accidents of circumstance. Power and space will kill Art unless they are absorbed by the spirit of the artist. But that is not to say that when properly used they may not be Art’s best allies. Just as asceticism is only possible for those who have some inner core of grossness in their nature, so those who would make Art a nun are those who are also capable of making her a courtesan. It is a creed whose spirituality is not more but less than ours. If we limit Art to simple men and a little nation, we assume that her spiritual power is so slight that she will be overwhelmed and coarsened by a richer material environment. What warrant have we for so low a view of the fire in her heart? I grant you that in a great empire she walks in dangerous paths, but then the goal is more splendid, and it would be the part of cowardice to shirk the journey.
“I do not think that in this company at any rate I need linger on this point. My business is to try to show wherein the creed which we call Imperialism offers Art that new world which she needs. I remember that when I was a young girl the very name of Empire was a hateful thing to me. All the old orderly life which I loved seemed to be threatened by these barbarians who talked in a strange jargon, half mercantile, half Jingo. Their Palace of Art seemed to be constructed on the lines of a New York sky-scraper, and their music was the thumping of a brass band. And yet even then I seemed to hear behind the shouting a new note which haunted me in spite of my prejudice. As I grew older I came to live less in the past, and looked more to the realities of the world around me. Art came to be less a thing of dainty memories and delicate echoes, and more and more something solemn and tragic, and yet instinct with immortal humour, the voice of God speaking through the clamour of His creations. And then I felt the need of a wider horizon, a hope which should not be the perquisite of the few but the treasure of the humble. And suddenly I saw that I had been blind and deaf to a new world of which simple folk had long ago entered into possession.
“Imperialism brings into life, and therefore into Art, which is life’s interpretation, a vision of a wider world. It shows
us all the hard walled-in highroads which we had thought eternal, opening out on an upland which still retains the light of morning. That is the first of its gifts. Stale conventions, preciosity, all vapouring and trifling prettiness, must perish in that high air. Democracy, we agreed some time ago, cleared the way for superiority. So, too, this Imperialism of ours will clear the way for great Art by withering all that is petty and unreal There is a profound maxim of S. Augustine’s, ‘Ubi magnitudo, ibi veritas,’ — a maxim which, like all truths, is equally true in its converse. Greatness and truth in Art must walk hand in hand. And this vision brings with it a new hope, and without hope there is no enduring quality in any mortal work. Art demands in its creator an abounding optimism and vitality. He must see beyond all the tangles and deserts of the way to the ultimate city on its hill-top, - and he must go singing on his pilgrimage.
“This new world, again, is not only a world of cities but of wilds. We have grown deplorably urban in our civilisation. We still talk of nature, but it is a garden-nature, and its interest for us is only in its bearing upon our petty life. We are always on the watch for the ‘pathetic fallacy,’ and we read into the inanimate world some trivial human moral. But nature, equally with man, is the cipher of the Divine, and we shall never fathom it until we learn that it has a key of its own.
“I mean,” said Mrs Deloraine, looking up from her notes, “that we want a new poetry of nature, nature in its simplicity and vastness and savagery. Our modern civilisation, with its suburban country, gives us no scope for getting at the heart of the great forces which endure when we and all our work have perished. We take them as a pious opinion, something to make phrases about, but what chance does our normal life hold of any true communion? An ampler and newer earth will bring us back to the beginning of things. We shall feel the spray on our faces from antediluvian seas, and our lips will be salt with their brine. Our great poet when he arises will not be a Wordsworth, for he will be too bowed down with the wonder of it all to have any desire to read into it a system of philosophy. He will look on the world, I fancy, as Homer must have looked on that youthful world of his, rejoicing in its marvels, and seeing in them the working of some ageless plan, and yet facing it all with that frank human hope which tells him that neither space nor time can conquer the spirit.
