FullReads

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

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

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

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

“A woman!” and Baldwin’s tone was disagreeably expressive.

“I know you don’t believe in women poets or women artists.”

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

“Well then, listen,” and Cyril drew a notebook from his pocket, and read as follows:–

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

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

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