Stopford A. Brooke

Page 6

A great part of society took up this position of science with avidity, and though they tired of it in the end if they lived for anything beyond the outward, yet it has only begun quite lately to weary us very much indeed.  The poets felt that weariness before we did.  Between 1860 and 1870, a certain number of men were bored to death by this dominance in society of the merely scientific ideas, and flashed into rebellion against it.  They did not care two straws whether man was descended from the ape or not.  It was nothing to them that all forces were interchangeable, and that the sum of energy was constant.  The discoveries of science were sometimes entertaining; matter for flying reading when they desired some relaxation from the press of the infinite things; sometimes irritating.   On the whole they were shadows in comparison with the substantial things of the soul.  The real world of these poets was elsewhere, far beyond the realm of science.   And when their ears were deafened with the conceited cries of science as it claimed to be the master-key of the universe, they determined (in the hope that a few might yet be able to see beauty and to love it) to image their own world, and to get rid as far as they could of the dry and dreadful noise of argument, the money-making inventions, the dreary quarrels of science and theology, the worry of criticism, the deathful world of the understanding.  "Glory and loveliness have passed away," they cried with Keats, only, as it was gross materialism of life which produced the cry of Keats, so now it was intellectual materialism which produced the cry of Rossetti and Morris.  I name these two and not Swinburne, whose position towards his time is much more difficult to define.  But these two, at a time analogous in many ways to the time of Keats, did the very thing which Keats did.  They left behind them, as if they did not exist, the worlds of theology and politics and business and science, all of them engaged in getting on; and fled back, as Keats fled, to find the beauty and romance and emotion they could not find in the present in the stories of the Greeks, and the Arthurian times, and the medieval romance, and the Norse sagas.  There they found what they loved and worshipped--beauty and heroism, simplicity and passion, and a lovely world, undefiled by invention, undisturbed by intellectual analysis, undissected by science.  "To love beauty, that is our religion."  It was the cry of Keats, it marks the exhaustion of the poetic impulse of 1832.  It marks the replacing of a poetry which once had vitally to do with the present by a poetry which despised and loathed the present; and as such, it was only a literary poetry, as was the poetry of Keats.

Well, I repeat, that, delightful as that poetry is when written by men like Morris, Rossetti, or Keats, and capable of giving a lasting pleasure to the human race, it does not create a school, it does not make creative emotion in a whole people.  It is a pleasant backwater, in the full stream of a nation's poetry.  Lovely islands, full of trees, fountains of flowers, are formed in it, where men may rest for a time and be happy.  But its waters circle round and round upon themselves.  They do not flow on, and become a river, or join the main river of song.  And in the end they dry up.  The religion of beauty, which seeks for its objects of worship only in the past and in a reversion to past loveliness, does not, when mingled with a contempt of the present, create a reproductive literature--a literature with children and grandchildren.  It records only a certain mood in a limited society.  When we are in that mood we read it with pleasure, but it is no foundation for life.  Morris called himself "the idle singer of an empty day."  It did not satisfy himself.  He felt the call of the present on him.   The injustice of things awoke his indignation, the sorrow of the world kindled his pity, and he began to live passionately in the present.  He became a warlike socialist.  But he did not lose his religious idea, "that in the devotion to beauty was the salvation of society."  But now he changed its place and time.   He did not bid us look back to find it.  He applied it to present life and bid us carry it with us into the future.  "I will develop," he thought, "the love of beauty in all things in men; and the proper means for that is to induce men to make things out of their own intelligence and for their own use, and out of their own desire for pleasurable emotion in what they do.  Therefore, mere machine work, which must necessarily be unintelligent, must be, except for preparatory purposes, put aside.  In their own handiwork men rejoice and love.  Therefore, also, men must cease to copy the fine work of the past, for all copying is done without love of the work or joy in it.  What we have to do to save the world is to lead men to express their own ideas, no matter how roughly, in handiwork; to get them to create, moved by the impulses of their own time and their own soul; to crate in any vehicle whatever.   This will so develop their imagination, their soul, and so fill their lives with the greatest joy in the world, the joy of making something out of their own being, that, in the end, they will begin, because they love and rejoice in their work, to add beauty to what they do, and finally to make nothing which will not be beautiful.  Then the base, ugly, mean elements of life will disappear.  Buildings, clothing, towns, books, all the doings and means of life, will give joy to the soul, minister to imagination, awaken aspiration, satisfy and charm the heart.  Humanity will feel itself content and divine.  Nature will give all her impulses to man, and man will love her better than before.  Her beauty will be cared for, and the care will react on the inner sense of beauty, and develop it further."

This it was which Morris conceived as the means of saving society, when he found out that to picture the lovely and heroic life of the past was not--as Keats also discovered-- enough to kindle society into a new life, or to supply the imagination with sufficient food on which to nourish a new literature.

This idea of his is a real contribution to the religion of humanity, to social religion.  It has no force as yet, nor is it possible as yet to realize it over any large surface of society.  Great changes will have to take place in the social state before what is really vital and useful in this idea can take form.  But some day it will be one of the master thoughts of a religion for life--not, as Morris seemed to think, the only master thought.  By itself, the love of beauty and the making of it cannot fulfil the religious wants of man, not even in the practical or possible form in which Morris finally put it.  But it will have to become a part of the religious idea and of religious practice.  We have too much forgotten that if God be love, He must also be beauty.  Indeed, if the capability of conceiving the infinite of righteousness in an infinite Being is that which plainly differentiates us from the brute, the capability of loving beauty, and the desire to make it, as plainly, perhaps even more plainly, differentiate us from the brute.  In all other points--in intellect, in conscience, in self-consciousness, in emotions, and the passions--we can find points of contact, similarities, with the lower animals, but in the matters which range themselves under the terms "Christianity" and "Art" there is no resemblance whatsoever, no descent.

The love of love and the love of beauty are one--two sides of the same shield--and the high form of the future religion for man to which we look forward will have to include the latter as well as the former.  We shall have to worship God, not only as the Father who loves us all, but as the King in his beauty.  Morris has started the conception which will lead us to that, though he did not connect it with a god at all; and when we mingle it up with the worship of God the Father as the source of beauty because He is the source of love, we shall complete the idea he left incomplete.  Incomplete, however, as he left it, it is becoming more and more a power in all fine literature.  It is not an idea which ends: it is a living idea which grows, and it will be interesting to watch its development in the new century as a means to a higher religion and a higher society.  At present it cannot find itself, and it rarely appears even in poetry.  Morris himself did not put it into poetry, only into romances.