FullReads

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

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

“Yes,” answered Baldwin, “that’s the place. You will be picked up there if you choose.”

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

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

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

“Are you still too good for poetry?” asked Baldwin; “or–has poetry become too good for you?”

“I don’t know,” answered Cyril, in the tone of a man before whose mental eyes things are taking a new shape. “I don’t know–perhaps.”