No More Learning

1902.




THE AUTUMN OF THE BODY


OUR thoughts and emotions are often but spray flung up from hidden
tides that follow a moon no eye can see. I remember that when I first
began to write I desired to describe outward things as vividly as
possible, and took pleasure, in which there was, perhaps, a little
discontent, in picturesque and declamatory books. And then quite
suddenly I lost the desire of describing outward things, and found
that I took little pleasure in a book unless it was spiritual and
unemphatic. I did not then understand that the change was from beyond
my own mind, but I understand now that writers are struggling all over
Europe, though not often with a philosophic understanding of their
struggle, against that picturesque and declamatory way of writing,
against that 'externality' which a time of scientific and political
thought has brought into literature. This struggle has been going on
for some years, but it has only just become strong enough to draw
within itself the little inner world which alone seeks more than
amusement in the arts. In France, where movements are more marked,
because the people are pre-eminently logical, _The Temptation of S.
Anthony_, the last great dramatic invention of the old romanticism,
contrasts very plainly with _Axel_, the first great dramatic invention
of the new; and Maeterlinck has followed Count Villiers de L'Isle
Adam. Flaubert wrote unforgettable descriptions of grotesque, bizarre,
and beautiful scenes and persons, as they show to the ear and to the
eye, and crowded them with historic and ethnographical details; but
Count Villiers de L'Isle Adam swept together, by what seemed a sudden
energy, words behind which glimmered a spiritual and passionate mood,
as the flame glimmers behind the dusky blue and red glass in an Eastern
lamp; and created persons from whom has fallen all even of personal
characteristic except a thirst for that hour when all things shall pass
away like a cloud, and a pride like that of the Magi following their
star over many mountains; while Maeterlinck has plucked away even this
thirst and this pride and set before us faint souls, naked and pathetic
shadows already half vapour and sighing to one another upon the border
of the last abyss. There has been, as I think, a like change in French
painting, for one sees everywhere, instead of the dramatic stories and
picturesque moments of an older school, frail and tremulous bodies
unfitted for the labour of life, and landscape where subtle rhythms of
colour and of form have overcome the clear outline of things as we see
them in the labour of life.

There has been a like change in England, but it has come more gradually
and is more mixed with lesser changes than in France. The poetry which
found its expression in the poems of writers like Browning and of
Tennyson, and even of writers, who are seldom classed with them, like
Swinburne, and like Shelley in his earlier years, pushed its limits
as far as possible, and tried to absorb into itself the science and
politics, the philosophy and morality of its time; but a new poetry,
which is always contracting its limits, has grown up under the shadow
of the old. Rossetti began it, but was too much of a painter in his
poetry to follow it with a perfect devotion; and it became a movement
when Mr. Lang and Mr. Gosse and Mr.
Dobson devoted themselves to
the most condensed of lyric poems, and when Mr. Bridges, a more
considerable poet, elaborated a rhythm too delicate for any but an
almost bodiless emotion, and repeated over and over the most ancient
notes of poetry, and none but these. The poets who followed have
either, like Mr. Kipling, turned from serious poetry altogether, and
so passed out of the processional order, or speak out of some personal
or spiritual passion in words and types and metaphors that draw one's
imagination as far as possible from the complexities of modern life and
thought. The change has been more marked in English painting, which,
when intense enough to belong to the procession order, began to cast
out things, as they are seen by minds plunged in the labour of life, so
much before French painting that ideal art is sometimes called English
art upon the Continent.

I see, indeed, in the arts of every country those faint lights and
faint colours and faint outlines and faint energies which many call
'the decadence,' and which I, because I believe that the arts lie
dreaming of things to come, prefer to call the autumn of the body.
An Irish poet whose rhythms are like the cry of a sea-bird in autumn
twilight has told its meaning in the line, 'The very sunlight's weary,
and it's time to quit the plough. ' Its importance is the greater
because it comes to us at the moment when we are beginning to be
interested in many things which positive science, the interpreter
of exterior law, has always denied: communion of mind with mind in
thought and without words, foreknowledge in dreams and in visions, and
the coming among us of the dead, and of much else. We are, it may be,
at a crowning crisis of the world, at the moment when man is about
to ascend, with the wealth, he has been so long gathering, upon his
shoulders, the stairway he has been descending from the first days.
The first poets, if one may find their images in the _Kalevala_, had
not Homer's preoccupation with things, and he was not so full of their
excitement as Virgil. Dante added to poetry a dialectic which, although
he made it serve his laborious ecstasy, was the invention of minds
trained by the labour of life, by a traffic among many things, and
not a spontaneous expression of an interior life; while Shakespeare
shattered the symmetry of verse and of drama that he might fill them
with things and their accidental relations to one another.

Each of these writers had come further down the stairway than those
who had lived before him, but it was only with the modern poets, with
Goethe and Wordsworth and Browning, that poetry gave up the right to
consider all things in the world as a dictionary of types and symbols
and began to call itself a critic of life and an interpreter of things
as they are. Painting, music, science, politics, and even religion,
because they have felt a growing belief that we know nothing but the
fading and flowering of the world, have changed in numberless elaborate
ways. Man has wooed and won the world, and has fallen weary, and not,
I think, for a time, but with a weariness that will not end until the
last autumn, when the stars shall be blown away like withered leaves.
He grew weary when he said, 'These things that I touch and see and hear
are alone real,' for he saw them without illusion at last, and found
them but air and dust and moisture. And now he must be philosophical
above everything, even about the arts, for he can only return the way
he came, and so escape from weariness, by philosophy.