No More Learning

Perhaps I may go out with
something that I had not got before. I need not tell you that to me
reformations in morals are as meaningless and vulgar as Reformations in
theology. But while to propose to be a better man is a piece of
unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those
who have suffered. And such I think I have become.

If after I am free a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me
to it, I should not mind a bit. I can be perfectly happy by myself. With
freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?
Besides, feasts are not for me any more. I have given too many to care
about them. That side of life is over for me, very fortunately, I dare
say. But if after I am free a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to
allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the
doors of the house of mourning against me, I would come back again and
again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was
entitled to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him,
I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible
mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me. But that could not be.
I have a right to share in sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness
of the world and share its sorrow, and realise something of the wonder of
both, is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got as near to
God's secret as any one can get.
Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less than into my life, a
still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and directness of
impulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern art. We are
no longer in art concerned with the type. It is with the exception that
we have to do. I cannot put my sufferings into any form they took, I
need hardly say. Art only begins where Imitation ends, but something
must come into my work, of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer
cadences, of more curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of
some aesthetic quality at any rate.

When Marsyas was 'torn from the scabbard of his limbs'--_della vagina
della membre sue_, to use one of Dante's most terrible Tacitean
phrases--he had no more song, the Greek said. Apollo had been victor.
The lyre had vanquished the reed. But perhaps the Greeks were mistaken.
I hear in much modern Art the cry of Marsyas. It is bitter in
Baudelaire, sweet and plaintive in Lamartine, mystic in Verlaine. It is
in the deferred resolutions of Chopin's music. It is in the discontent
that haunts Burne-Jones's women. Even Matthew Arnold, whose song of
Callicles tells of 'the triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre,' and the
'famous final victory,' in such a clear note of lyrical beauty, has not a
little of it; in the troubled undertone of doubt and distress that haunts
his verses, neither Goethe nor Wordsworth could help him, though he
followed each in turn, and when he seeks to mourn for _Thyrsis_ or to
sing of the _Scholar Gipsy_, it is the reed that he has to take for the
rendering of his strain. But whether or not the Phrygian Faun was
silent, I cannot be.