The Altar Fire by Arthur Christopher Benson (golden son ebook txt) 📕

and though there were one or two old grandfathers, spent and dying, who remembered the day when he was lost, and the search made for him, yet now there was no room for the old man. The gap had filled up, life had flowed on. They had grieved for him, but they did not want him back. He disturbed their arrangements; he was another useless mouth to feed.

The pretty old story is full of parables, sad and sweet. But the kernel of the tale is a warning to all who, for any wilfulness or curiosity, however romantic or alluring the quest, forfeit their place for an instant in the world. You cannot return. Life accommodates itself to its losses, and however sincerely a man may be lamented, yet if he returns, if he tries to claim his place, he is in the way, de trop. No one has need of him.

An artist has most need of this warning, because he of all men is tempted to enter the dark place in the hill, to see wonderful things and to drink the oblivious wine. Let him rather keep his hold on the world, at whatever sacrifice. Because by the time that he has explored the home of the merry giants, and dreamed his dream, the world to which he tries to tell the vision will heed it not, but treat it as a fanciful tale.

All depends on the artist being in league with his day; if he is born too early or too late, he has no hold on the world, no message for it. Either he is a voice out of the past, an echo of old joys, piping a forgotten message, or he is fanciful, unreal, visionary, if he sees and tries to utter what shall be. By the time that events confirm his foresight, the vitality of his prophecy is gone, and he is only looked at with a curious admiration, as one that had a certain clearness of vision, but no more; he is called into court by the historian of tendency, but he has had no hold on living men.

One sees men of great artistic gifts who suffer from each of these disadvantages. One sees poets, born in a prosaic age, who would have won high fame if they had been born in an age of poets. And one sees, too, men who seem to struggle with big, unintelligible thoughts, thoughts which do not seem to fit on to anything existing. The happy artist is the man who touches the note which awakens a responsive echo in many hearts; the man who instinctively uses the medium of the time, and who neither regrets the old nor portends the new.

Karl Katz must content himself, if he can find a corner and a crust, with the memory of the day when the sun lay hot among the ruins, with the thought of the pleasant coolness of the vault, the leaping shower of corn, the thunder of the imprisoned feet, the heroic players, the heady wine. That must be enough for him. He has had a taste, let him remember, of marvels hidden from common eyes and ears. Let it be for him to muse in the sun, and to be grateful for the space of recollection given him. If he had lived the life of the world, he would but have had a treasure of simple memories, much that was sordid, much that was sad.

But now he has his own dreams, and he must pay the price in heaviness and dreariness!


December 14, 1888.


The danger of art as an occupation is that one uses life, looks at life, as so much material for one's art. Life becomes a province of art, instead of art being a province of life. That is all a sad mistake, perhaps an irreparable mistake! I walked to-day on the crisp frozen snow, down the valley, by field-paths, among leafless copses and wood-ends. The stream ran dark and cold, between its brambly banks; the snow lay pure and smooth on the high-sloping fields. It made a heart of whiteness in the covert, the trees all delicately outlined, the hazels weaving an intricate pattern. All perfectly and exquisitely beautiful. Sight after sight of subtle and mysterious beauty, vignette after vignette, picture after picture. If I could but sing it, or say it, depict or record it, I thought to myself! Yet I could not analyse what the desire was. I do not think I wished to interpret the sight to others, or even to capture it for myself. No matter at what season of the year I pass through the valley, it is always filled from end to end with beauty, ever changing, perishing, ever renewing itself. In spring the copse is full of tender points of green, uncrumpling and uncurling. The hyacinths make a carpet of steely blue, the anemones weave their starred tapestry. In the summer, the grove hides its secret, dense with leaf, the heavy-seeded grass rises in the field, the tall flowering plants make airy mounds of colour; in autumn, the woods blaze with orange and gold, the air is heavy with the scent of the dying leaf. In winter, the eye dwells with delight upon the spare low tints; and when the snow falls and lies, as it does to-day, the whole scene has a still and mournful beauty, a pure economy of contrasted light and gloom. Yet the trained perception of the artist does not dwell upon the thought of the place as upon a perpetual feast of beauty and delight. Rather, it shames me to reflect, one dwells upon it as a quarry of effects, where one can find and detach the note of background, the sweet symbol that will lend point and significance to the scene that one is labouring at. Instead of being content to gaze, to listen, to drink in, one thinks only what one can carry away and make one's own. If one's art were purely altruistic, if one's aim were to emphasise some sweet aspect of nature which the careless might otherwise overlook or despise; or even if the sight haunted one like a passion, and fed the heart with hope and love, it would be well. But does one in reality feel either of these purposes? Speaking candidly, I do not. I care very little for my message to the world. It is true that I have a deep and tender love for the gracious things of earth; but I cannot be content with that. One thinks of Wordsworth, rapt in contemplation, sitting silent for a whole morning, his eyes fixed upon the pool of the moorland stream, or the precipice with the climbing ashes. It was like a religion to him, a communion with something holy and august which in that moment drew near to his soul. But with me it is different. To me the passion is to express it, to embalm it, in phrase or word, not for my pride in my art, not for any desire to give the treasure to others, but simply, so it seems, in obedience to a tyrannous instinct to lend the thought, the sight, another shape. I despair of defining the feeling. It is partly a desire to arrest the fleeting moment, to give it permanence in the ruinous lapse of things, the same feeling that made old Herrick say to the daffodils, "We weep to see you haste away so soon." Partly the joy of the craftsman in making something that shall please the eye and ear. It is not the desire to create, as some say, but to record. For when one writes an impassioned scene, it seems no more an act of creation than one feels about one's dreams. The wonder of dreams is that one does not make them; they come upon one with all the pleasure of surprise and experience. They are there; and so, when one indulges imagination, one does not make, one merely tells the dream. It is this that makes art so strange and sad an occupation, that one lives in a beautiful world, which does not seem to be of one's own designing, but from which one is awakened, in terror and disgust, by bodily pain, discomfort, anxiety, loss. Yet it seems useless to say that life is real and imagination unreal. They are both there, both real. The danger is to use life to feed the imagination, not to use imagination to feed life. In these sad weeks I have been like a sleeper awakened. The world of imagination, in which I have lived and moved, has crumbled into pieces over my head; the wind and rain beat through the flimsy dwelling, and I must arise and go. I have sported with life as though it were a pretty plaything; and I find it turn upon me like a wild beast, gaunt, hungry, angry. I am terrified by its evil motions, I sicken at its odour. That is the deep mystery and horror of life, that one yields unerringly to blind and imperious instincts, not knowing which may lead us into green and fertile pastures of hope and happy labour, and which may draw us into thorny wildernesses. The old fables are true, that one must not trust the smiling presences, the beguiling words. Yet how is one to know which of the forms that beckon us we may trust. Must we learn the lesson by sad betrayals, by dark catastrophes? I have wandered, it seems, along a flowery path--and yet I have not gathered the poisonous herbs of sin; I have loved innocence and goodness; but for all that I have followed a phantom, and now that it is too late to retrace my steps, I find that I have been betrayed. I feel


"As some bold seer in a trance
Seeing all his own mischance."


Well, at least one may still be bold!


December 22, 1888.


Perhaps my trial comes to me that it may test my faith in art; perhaps to show me that the artist's creed is a false and shallow one after all. What is it that we artists do? In a happy hour I should have said glibly that we discern and interpret beauty. But now it seems to me that no man can ever live upon beauty. I think I have gone wrong in busying myself so ardently in trying to discern the quality of beauty in all things. I seem to have submitted everything--virtue, honour, life itself--to that test. I appear to myself like an artist who has devoted himself entirely to the appreciation of colour, who is suddenly struck colour-blind; he sees the forms of things as clearly as ever, but they are dreary and meaningless. I seem to have tried everything, even conduct, by an artistic standard, and the quality which I have devoted myself to discerning has passed suddenly out of life. And my mistake has been all the more grievous, because I have always believed that it was life of which I was in search. There are three great writers--two of them artists as well--whose personality has always interested me profoundly--Ruskin, Carlyle, Rossetti. But I have never been able wholly to admire the formal and deliberate products of their minds. Ruskin as an art-critic--how profoundly unfair, prejudiced, unjust he is! He has made up his mind about the merit of an artist; he will lay down a principle about accuracy in art, and to what extent imagination may improve upon vision; and then he will abuse Claude for modifying a scene, in the same breath, and for the same reasons, with which he will praise Turner for exaggerating one. He will use the same stick that he throws for one dog to