Books: Imaginations and Reveries
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(A.E.) George William Russell >> Imaginations and Reveries
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The Hill of Vision is a very unequal book. There are many verses
full of power, which move with the free easy motion of the literary
athlete. Others betray awkwardness, and stumble as if the writer
had stepped too suddenly into the sunlight of his power, and was
dazed and bewildered. There is some diffusion of his faculties
in what I feel are byways of his mind, but the main current of
his energies will, I am convinced, urge him on to his inevitable
portrayal of humanity. With writers like Synge and Stephens the
Celtic imagination is leaving its Timanoges, its Ildathachs, its
Many Colored Lands and impersonal moods, and is coming down to
earth intent on vigorous life and individual humanity. I can see
that there are great tales to be told and great songs to be sung,
and I watch the doings of the new-comers with sympathy, all the
while feeling I am somewhat remote from their world, for I belong
to an earlier day, and listen to these robust songs somewhat as a
ghost who hears the cock crow, and knows his hours are over, and
he and his tribe must disappear into tradition.
1912
A NOTE ON SEUMAS O'SULLIVAN
As I grow older I get more songless. I am now exiled irrevocably
from the Country of the Young, but I hope I can listen without
jealousy and even with delight to those who still make music in
the enchanted land. I often searched in the "Poet's Corner" of
the country papers with a wild surmise that there, amid reports of
Boards of Guardians and Rural Councils, some poetic young kinsman
may be taking council with the stars, watching more closely the
Plough in the furrows of the heavens than the county instructor at
his task of making farmers drive the plough straight in the fields.
I found many years ago in a country paper a local poet making
genuine music. I remember a line:
And hidden rivers were murmuring in the dark.
I went on in the strength of this poem through the desert
of country journalism for many years, hoping to find more hidden
rivers of song murmuring in the darkness. It was a patient life
of unrequited toil, and I have returned to civilization to search
publishers' lists for more easily procurable pleasure. A few years
ago I mined out of the still darker region of manuscripts some
poetic crystals which I thought were valuable, and edited New Songs.
Nearly all my young singers have since then taken flight on their
own account. Some have volumes in the booksellers and some in the
hands of the printers. But there is one shy singer of the group
of writers in New Songs who might easily get overlooked because
his verse takes little or no thought of the past or present or
future of his country: yet the slim book in which is collected
Seumas O'Sullivan's verses reveals a true poet, and if he is too
shy to claim his country in his verses there is no reason why his
country should not claim him, for he is in his way as Irish as any
of our singers. He is, as Mr. W. B. Yeats was in his earlier days,
the literary successor of those old Gaelic poets who were fastidious
in their verse, who loved little in this world but some chance
light in it which reminded them of fairyland, or who, if they were
in love, loved their mistress less for her own sake than because
some turn of her head, or "a foam-pale breast," carried their
impetuous imaginations past her beauty into memories of Helen of
Troy, Deirdre, or some other symbol of that remote and perfect
beauty which, however man desires, he shall embrace only at the
end of time. I think the wives or mistresses of these old poets
must have been very unhappy, for women wish to be loved for what
they know about themselves, and for the tenderness which is in
their hearts, and not because some colored twilight invests them
with a shadowy beauty not their own, and which they know they can
never carry into the light of day. These poets of the transient
look and the evanescent light do not help us to live our daily life,
but they do something which is as necessary. They educate and
refine the spirit so that it shall not come altogether without any
understanding of delicate loveliness into the Kingdom of Heaven,
or gaze on Timanoge with the crude blank misunderstanding of Cockney
tourists staring up at the stupendous dreams pictured on the roof
of the Sistine Chapel. These fastidious scorners of every day and
its interests are always looking through nature for "the herbs
before they were in the field and every flower before it grew,"
and through women for the Eve who was in the imagination of the
Lord before she was embodied, and we all need this refining vision
more than we know. It may be asked of us hereafter when we would
mount up into the towers of vision, "How can you desire the beauty
you have not seen, who have not sought or loved its shadow in the
world?" and the Gates of Ivory may not swing open at our knock.
This will never be said to Seumas O'Sullivan, who is always waiting
on the transient look and the evanescent light to build up out of
their remembered beauty the Kingdom of his Heaven:
Round you light tresses, delicate,
Wind blown, wander and climb
Immortal, transitory.
Earth has no steady beauty as the calm-eyed immortals have, but
their image glimmers on the waves of time, and out of what instantly
vanishes we can build up something within us which may yet grow
into a calm-eyed immortality of loveliness, we becoming gradually
what we dream of. I have heard people complain of the frailty of
these verses of Seumas O'Sullivan. They want war songs, plough songs,
to nerve the soul to fight or the hand to do its work. I will never
make that complaint. I will only complain if the strife or the
work ever blunt my senses so that I will pass by with an impatient
disdain these delicate snatchings at a beauty which is ever fleeting.
But I would ask him to remember that life never allures us twice
with exactly the same enchantment. Never again will that tress
drift like a woven wind made visible out of Paradise; never again
will that lifted hand, foam-pale, seem like the springing up of
beauty in the world; never a second time will that white brow
remind him of the wonderful white towers of the city of the gods.
To seek a second inspiration is to receive only a second-rate
inspiration, and our poet is a little too fond of lingering in his
verse round a few things, a face, the swaying poplars, or sighing
reeds which had once piped an alluring music in his ears, and which
he longs to hear again. He lives not in too frail a world, but in
too narrow a world, and he should adventure out into new worlds
in the old quest. He, has become a master of delicate and musical
rhythms. I remember reading Seumas O'Sulivan's first manuscripts
with mingled pleasure and horror, for his lines often ran anyhow,
and scansion seemed to him an unknown art, but I feel humbly now
that he can get a subtle quality into his music which I could not
hope to acquire. I would like him to catch some new and rare birds
with that subtle net of his, and to begin to invent more beauty of
his own and to seek for it less. I believe he has got it in him
to do well, to do better than he has done if he will now try to use
his invention more. The poems with a slight narrative in them,
like "The Portent" or the "Saint Anthony," seem to me the most
perfect, and it is in this direction, I think, he will succeed best.
He wants a story to keep him from beating musical and ineffective
wings in the void. I have not said half what I want to say about
Seumas O'Sullivan's verses, but I know the world will not listen
long to the musings of one verse-writer on another. I only hope
this note may send some readers to their bookseller for Seumas
O'Sullivan's poems, and that it may help them to study with more
understanding a mind that I love.
1909
ART AND LITERATURE
A LECTURE ON THE ART OF G. F. WATTS
After the publication of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies the writer
who ventures to speak of art and literature in the same breath needs
some courage. Since the death of Whistler, his opinions about the
independence of art from the moral ideas with which literature is
preoccupied have been generally accepted in the studios. The artist
who is praised by a literary man would hardly be human if he was
not pleased; but he listens with impatience to any criticism or
suggestion about the substance of his art or the form it should take.
I had a friend, an artist of genius, and when we were both young
we argued together about art on equal terms. It had not then
occurred to him that any intelligence I might have displayed in
writing verse did not entitle me to an opinion about modeling; but
one day I found him reading Mr. Whistler's Ten O'clock. The revolt
of art against literature had reached Ireland. After that, while
we were still good friends, he made me feel that I was an outsider,
and when I ventured to plead for a national character in sculpture,
his righteous anger--I might say his ferocity--forced me to talk
of something else.
I was not convinced he was right, but years after I began to use
the brush a little, and I remember painting a twilight from love
of some strange colors and harmonious lines, and when one of my
literary friends found that its interest depended on color and form,
and that the idea in it could not readily be translated into words,
and that it left him wishing that I would illustrate my poems or
something that had a meaning, I veered round at once and understood
Whistler, and how foolish I was to argue with John Hughes. I joined
in the general insurrection of art against the domination of literature.
But being a writer and much concerned with abstract ideas, I have never
had the comfort and happiness of those who embrace this opinion with
their whole being, and when I was asked to lecture, I thought that
as I had no Irish Whistler to fear, I might speak of art in relation
to these universal ideas which artists hold are for literature and
not subject matter for art at all.
I must first say it was not my wish to speak. With a world of
noble and immortal forms all about us, it seemed to me as unfitting
that words without art or long labor in their making should be
advertised as an attraction; that any one should be expected to
sit here for an hour to listen to me or another upon a genius which
speaks for itself. I was overruled by Mr. Lane. But it is all wrong,
this desire to hear and hold opinions about art rather than to be
moved by the art itself. I know twenty charlatans who will talk
about art, but never lift their eyes to look at the pictures on
the wall. I remember an Irish poet speaking about art a whole
evening in a room hung round with pictures by Constable, Monet,
and others, and he came into that room and went out of it without
looking at those pictures. His interest in art was in the holding
of opinions about it, and in hearing other opinions, which he could
again talk about. I hope I have made some of you feel uncomfortable.
This may, perhaps, seem malicious, but it is necessary to release
artists from the dogmas of critics who are not artists.
I would not venture to speak here tonight if I thought that anything
I said could be laid hold of and be turned into a formula, and used
afterwards to torment some unfortunate artist. An artist will take
with readiness advice or criticism from a fellow-artist, so far as
his natural vanity permits; but he writhes under opinions derived
from Ruskin or Tolstoi, the great theorists. You may ask indignantly,
Can no one, then, speak about paintings or statues except painters
or modelers? No; no one would condemn you to such painful silence
and self-suppression. Artists would wish you to talk unceasingly
about the emotions their pain of making pictures arouse in you;
but, under lifelong enemies, do not suggest to artists the theories
under which they should paint. That is hitting below the belt. The
poor artist is as God made him; and no one, not even a Tolstoi,
is competent to undertake his re-creation. His fellow-artists
will pass on to him the tradition of using the brush. He may use
it well or ill; but when you ask him to use his art to illustrate
literary ideas, or ethical ideas, you are asking him to become a
literary man or a preacher. The other arts have their obvious
limitations. The literary man does not dare to demand of the
musician that he shall be scientific or moral. The latter is safe
in uttering every kind of profanity in sound so long as it is music.
Musicians have their art to themselves. But the artist is tormented,
and asked to reflect the thought of his time. Beauty is primarily
what he is concerned with; and the only moral ideas which he can
impart in a satisfactory way are the moral ideas naturally associated
with beauty in its higher or lower forms. But I think, some of you
are confuting me in your own minds at this moment. You say to
yourselves: "But we have all about us the works of great artists
whose inspiration not one will deny. He used his art to express
great ethical ideas. He spoke again and again about these ideas.
He was proud that his art was dedicated to their expression." I am
sorry to say that he did say many things which would have endeared
him to Tolstoi and Ruskin, and for which I respect him as a man,
and which as an artist I deplore. I deplore his speaking of ethical
ideas as the inspiration of his art, because I think they were only
the inspiration of his life; and where he is weakest in his appeal
as an artist is where he summons consciously to his aid ethical
ideas which find their proper expression in religion or literature
or life.
Watts wished to ennoble art by summoning to its aid the highest
conceptions of literature; but in doing so he seems to me to imply
that art needed such conceptions for its justification, that the
pure artist mind, careless of these ideas, and only careful to make
for itself a beautiful vision of things, was in a lower plane, and
had a less spiritual message. Now that I deny. I deny absolutely
that art needs to call to its aid, in order to justify or ennoble
it, any abstract ideas about love or justice or mercy.
It may express none of these ideas, and yet express truths of its
own as high and as essential to the being of man; and it is in
spite of himself, in spite of his theories, that the work of Watts
will have an enduring place in the history of art. You will ask
then, "Can art express no moral ideas? Is it unmoral?" In the
definite and restricted sense in which the words "ethical" and
"moral" are generally used, art is, and must by its nature be unmoral.
I do not mean "immoral," and let no one represent me as saying art
must be immoral by its very nature. There are dear newspaper men
to whom it would be a delight to attribute to me such a saying;
and never to let me forget that I said it. When I say that art is
essentially unmoral, I mean that the first impulse to paint comes
from something seen, either beauty of color or form or tone. It
may be light which attracts the artist, or it may be some dimming
of natural forms, until they seem to have more of the loveliness
of mind than of nature. But it is the aesthetic, not the moral
or ethical, nature which is stirred. The picture may afterwards
be called "Charity," or "Faith," or "Hope"--and any of these words
may make an apt title. But what looms up before the vision of the
artist first of all is an image, and that is accepted on account
of its fitness for a picture; and an image which was not pictorial
would be rejected at once by any true artist, whether it was an
illustration of the noblest moral conception or not. Whether a
picture is moral or immoral will depend upon the character of the
artist, and not upon the subject. A man will communicate his
character in everything he touches. He cannot escape communicating
it. He must be content with that silent witness, and not try to
let the virtues shout out from his pictures. The fact is, art is
essentially a spiritual thing, and its vision is perpetually turned
to Ultimates. It is indefinable as spirit is. It perceives in
life and nature those indefinable relations of one thing to another
which to the religious thinker suggest a master mind in nature--a
magician of the beautiful at work from hour to hour, from moment
to moment, in a never-ceasing and solemn chariot motion in the
heavens, in the perpetual and marvelous breathing forth of winds,
in the motion of waters, and in the unending evolution of gay and
delicate forms of leaf and wing.
The artist may be no philosopher, no mystic; he may be with or
without a moral sense, he may not believe in more than his eye can
see; but in so far as he can shape clay into beautiful and moving
forms he is imitating Deity; when his eye has caught with delight
some subtle relation between color and color there is mysticism
in his vision. I am not concerned here to prove that there is a
spirit in nature or humanity; but for those who ask from art a
serious message, here, I say, is a way of receiving from art an
inspiration the most profound that man can receive. When you ask
from the artist that he should teach you, be careful that you are
not asking him to be obvious, to utter platitudes--that you are
not asking him to debase his art to make things easy for you, who
are too indolent to climb to the mountain, but want it brought to
your feet. There are people who pass by a nocturne by Whistler,
a misty twilight by Corot, and who whisper solemnly before a Noel
Paton as if they were in a Cathedral. Is God, then, only present
when His Name is uttered? When we call a figure Time or Death,
does it add dignity to it? What is the real inspiration we derive
from that noble design by Mr. Watts? Not the comprehension of Time,
not the nature of Death, but a revelation human form can express
of the heroic dignity. Is it not more to us to know that man or
woman can look half-divine, that they can wear an aspect such as
we imagine belongs to the immortals, and to feel that if man is
made in the image of his Creator, his Creator is the archetype of
no ignoble thing? There were immortal powers in Watts' mind when
those figures surged up in it; but they were neither Time nor Death.
He was rather near to his own archetype, and in that mood in which
Emerson was when he said, "I the imperfect adore my own perfect."
Touch by touch, as the picture was built up, he was becoming
conscious of some interior majesty in his own nature, and it was
for himself more than for us he worked. "The oration is to the
orator," says Whitman, "and comes most back to him." The artist,
too, as he creates a beautiful form outside himself, creates
within himself, or admits to his being a nobler beauty than his
eyes have seen. His inspiration is spiritual in its origin, and
there is always in it some strange story of the glory of the King.
With man and his work we must take either a spiritual or a material
point of view. All half-way beliefs are temporary and illogical.
I prefer the spiritual with its admission of incalculable mystery
and romance in nature, where we find the infinite folded in the atom,
and feel how in the unconscious result and labor of man's hand the
Eternal is working Its will. You may say that this belongs more to
psychology than to art criticism, but I am trying to make clear to
you and to myself the relation which the mind which is in literature
may rightly bear to the vision which is art. Are literature and
ethics to dictate to Art its subjects? Is it right to demand that
the artist's work shall have an obviously intelligible message or
meaning, which the intellect can abstract from it and relate to
the conduct of life? My belief is that the most literature can do
is to help to interpret art, and that art offers to it, as nature
does, a vision of beauty, but of undefined significance.
No one asks or expects the clouds to shape themselves into ethical
forms, or the sun to shine only on the just and not on the unjust
also. It is vain to expect it, but there is something written
about the heavens declaring the beauty of the Creator and the
firmament showing His handiwork. If the artist can bring whatever
of that vision has touched him into his work we should ask no more,
and must not expect him to be more righteously minded than his
Creator, or to add a finishing tag of moral to justify it all, to
show that Deity is solemnly minded and no mere idle trifler with
beauty like Whistler.
I have stated my belief that art is spiritual, that its genuine
inspirations come from a higher plane of our being than the ethical
or intellectual; and I think wherever literature or ethics have
so dominated the mind of the artist that they change the form of
his inspiration, his art loses its own peculiar power and gains
nothing. We have here a picture of "Love steering the bark of
Humanity." I may put it rather crudely when I say that pictures
like this are supposed to exert a power on the man who, for example,
would beat his wife, so that love will be his after inspiration.
Anyhow, ethical pictures are painted with some such intention belief.
Now, art has great influence, but I do not believe this or any other
picture would stop a man beating his wife if he wanted to. Art does
not call sinners to repentance; that is not one of its powers. It
fulfils rather another saying: "Unto them that have much shall be
given," bringing delight to those that are already sensitive to
beauty. My own conviction is that ethical pictures are, if anything,
immoral in their influence, as everything must be that forsakes
the law of its own being, and that pictures like this only add to
the vanity of people so righteously minded as to be aware of their
own virtue. We will always have these concessions to passing phases
of thought. We have had requests for the scientific painter--the
man who will paint nature with geological accuracy, and man in
accordance with evolutionary dogmas. He will find his eloquent
literary defenders enchanted to find so much learning to point to
in his work, but it will all pass. The true artist will still be
instinctively spiritual.
Now I have used the word "spiritual" so often in connection with
art that you may reasonably ask for some definition of my meaning.
I am afraid it is easier to define spirituality in literature than
in art. But a literary definition may help. Spirituality is the
power certain minds have of apprehending formless spiritual essences,
of seeing the eternal in the transitory, of relating the particular
to the universal, the type to the archetype.
While I give this definition, I hope no artist will ever be insane
enough to make it the guiding principle of his art. I shudder to
think of any conscious attempt in a picture to relate the type to
the archetype. It is a philosophical definition, solely intended
for the spectator. I wish the artist only to paint his vision,
and whether he paints this, or another world he imagines, if it is
art it will be spiritual. I have given a definition of spirituality
in literature, but how now relate it to art? How illustrate its
presence? When Pater wrote his famous description of the Mona Lisa,
that intense and enigmatic face had evoked a spiritual mood. When
he saw in it the summed-up experience of many generations of humanity,
he felt in the picture that relation of the particular to the universal
I have spoken of. When we find human forms suggesting a superhuman
dignity, as in Watts' figures of Time and Death, or in the Phidian
marbles, the type is there melting into the archetype. When Millet
paints a peasant figure of today with some gesture we imagine the
first Sower must have used, it is the eternal in it which makes
the transitory impressive. But these are obvious instances, you
will say, chosen from artists whose pictures lend themselves to
this kind of exposition. What about the art of the landscape painter?
Undeniably a form of art, where is the spirituality?
I am afraid my intellect is not equal to talking up every picture
that might be suggested and using it to illustrate my meaning,
though I do not think I would despair of finally discovering the
spiritual element in any picture I felt was art. However, I will
go further. We have all felt some element of art lacking in the
painter who goes to Killarney, Italy, or Switzerland, and brings
us back a faithful representation of undeniably beautiful places.
It is all there--the lofty mountains, the lakes, the local color;
but what enchanted us in nature does not touch us in the picture.
What we want is the spirit of the place evoked in us rather than
the place itself. Art is neither pictured botany or geology. A
great landscape is the expression of a mood of the human mind as
definitely as music or poetry is. The artist is communicating his
own emotions. There is some mystic significance in the color he
employs; and then the doorways are opened, and we pass from sense
into soul. We are looking into a soul when we are looking at a
Turner, a Carot, or a Whistler, as surely as when in dream we find
ourselves moving in strange countries which are yet within us,
contained for all their seeming infinitudes in the little hollow
of the brain. All this, I think, is undeniable; but perhaps not
many of you will follow me, though you may understand me, if I go
further and say, that in this, art is unconsciously also reaching
out to archetypes, is lifting itself up to walk in that garden of
the divine mind where, as the first Scripture says, it created
"flowers before they were in the field and every herb before it
grew." A man may sit in an armchair and travel farther than ever
Columbus traveled; and no one can say how far Turner, in his search
after light, had not journeyed into the lost Eden, and he himself
may have been there most surely at the last when his pictures had
become a blaze of incoherent light.
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