Diana of the Crossways | Page 8

veraciously historical, honestly transcriptive. Rose-pink and dirty drab
will alike have passed away. Philosophy is the foe of both, and their
silly cancelling contest, perpetually renewed in a shuffle of extremes,
as it always is where a phantasm falseness reigns, will no longer baffle
the contemplation of natural flesh, smother no longer the soul issuing
out of our incessant strife. Philosophy bids us to see that we are not so
pretty as rose-pink, not so repulsive as dirty drab; and that instead of
everlastingly shifting those barren aspects, the sight of ourselves is
wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a delight. Do but perceive that
we are coming to philosophy, the stride toward it will be a giant's --a
century a day. And imagine the celestial refreshment of having a pure
decency in the place of sham; real flesh; a soul born active, wind-
beaten, but ascending. Honourable will fiction then appear; honourable,
a fount of life, an aid to life, quick with our blood. Why, when you
behold it you love it--and you will not encourage it?--or only when
presented by dead hands? Worse than that alternative dirty drab, your
recurring rose-pink is rebuked by hideous revelations of the filthy foul;
for nature will force her way, and if you try to stifle her by drowning,
she comes up, not the fairest part of her uppermost! Peruse your
Realists--really your castigators for not having yet embraced
Philosophy. As she grows in the flesh when discreetly tended, nature is
unimpeachable, flower-eke, yet not too decoratively a flower; you must
have her with the stem, the thorns, the roots, and the fat bedding of
roses. In this fashion she grew, says historical fiction; thus does she
flourish now, would say the modern transcript, reading the inner as
well as exhibiting the outer.
And how may you know that you have reached to Philosophy? You
touch her skirts when you share her hatred of the sham decent, her
derision of sentimentalism. You are one with her when--but I would not
have you a thousand years older! Get to her, if in no other way, by the
sentimental route:--that very winding path, which again and again
brings you round to the point of original impetus, where you have to be
unwound for another whirl; your point of original impetus being the
grossly material, not at all the spiritual. It is most true that
sentimentalism springs from the former, merely and badly aping the

latter,--fine flower, or pinnacle flame-spire, of sensualism that it is,
could it do other? and accompanying the former it traverses tracts of
desert here and there couching in a garden, catching with one hand at
fruits, with another at colours; imagining a secret ahead, and goaded by
an appetite, sustained by sheer gratifications. Fiddle in harmonics as it
may, it will have these gratifications at all costs. Should none be
discoverable, at once you are at the Cave of Despair, beneath the
funereal orb of Glaucoma, in the thick midst of poniarded, slit-throat,
rope-dependant figures, placarded across the bosom Disillusioned,
Infidel, Agnostic, Miserrimus. That is the sentimental route to
advancement. Spirituality does not light it; evanescent dreams: are its
oil-lamps, often with wick askant in the socket.
A thousand years! You may count full many a thousand by this route
before you are one with divine Philosophy. Whereas a single flight of
brains will reach and embrace her; give you the savour of Truth, the
right use of the senses, Reality's infinite sweetness; for these things are
in philosophy; and the fiction which is the summary of actual Life, the
within and without of us, is, prose or verse, plodding or soaring,
philosophy's elect handmaiden. To such an end let us bend our aim to
work, knowing that every form of labour, even this flimsiest, as you
esteem it, should minister to growth. If in any branch of us we fail in
growth, there is, you are aware, an unfailing aboriginal democratic old
monster that waits to pull us down; certainly the branch, possibly the
tree; and for the welfare of Life we fall. You are acutely conscious of
yonder old monster when he is mouthing at you in politics. Be wary of
him in the heart; especially be wary of the disrelish of brainstuff. You
must feed on something. Matter that is not nourishing to brains can
help to constitute nothing but the bodies which are pitched on rubbish
heaps. Brainstuff is not lean stuff;--the brainstuff of fiction is internal
history, and to suppose it dull is the profoundest of errors; how deep,
you will understand when I tell you that it is the very football of the
holiday-afternoon imps below. They kick it for pastime; they are
intelligences perverted. The comic of it, the adventurous, the tragic,
they make devilish, to