No More Learning

It is the world in which I have
been living. Sorrow, then, and all that it teaches one, is my new world.

I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and sorrow of
every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible:
to treat them, that is to say, as modes of imperfection. They were not
part of my scheme of life. They had no place in my philosophy. My
mother, who knew life as a whole, used often to quote to me Goethe's
lines--written by Carlyle in a book he had given her years ago, and
translated by him, I fancy, also:--

'Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the midnight hours
Weeping and waiting for the morrow,--
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers. '

They were the lines which that noble Queen of Prussia, whom Napoleon
treated with such coarse brutality, used to quote in her humiliation and
exile; they were the lines my mother often quoted in the troubles of her
later life. I absolutely declined to accept or admit the enormous truth
hidden in them. I could not understand it. I remember quite well how I
used to tell her that I did not want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to
pass any night weeping and watching for a more bitter dawn.

I had no idea that it was one of the special things that the Fates had in
store for me: that for a whole year of my life, indeed, I was to do
little else. But so has my portion been meted out to me; and during the
last few months I have, after terrible difficulties and struggles, been
able to comprehend some of the lessons hidden in the heart of pain.
Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of
suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things
one never discerned before. One approaches the whole of history from a
different standpoint. What one had felt dimly, through instinct, about
art, is intellectually and emotionally realised with perfect clearness of
vision and absolute intensity of apprehension.

I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable,
is at once the type and test of all great art. What the artist is always
looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and
indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which
form reveals. Of such modes of existence there are not a few: youth and
the arts preoccupied with youth may serve as a model for us at one
moment: at another we may like to think that, in its subtlety and
sensitiveness of impression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in
external things and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city
alike, and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours,
modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was realised in
such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is
absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex
example, and a flower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but
sorrow is the ultimate type both in life and art.

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and
callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike
pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between
the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the
resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to
the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than
it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the
moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing
with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made
incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no
truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to
be the only truth.