Escape and Other Essays | Page 9

place.
Morris himself intended that art should supply the missing force; but
art is not a sociable thing; it is apt to be a lonely affair, and few artists
have either leisure or inclination to admire one another's work.
Still more dreary was the dream of the philosopher J. S. Mill, who was
asked upon one occasion what would be left for men to do when they
had been perfected on the lines which he desired. He replied, after a
long and painful hesitation, that they might find satisfaction in reading
the poems of Wordsworth. But Wordsworth's poems are useful in the
fact that they supply a refreshing contrast to the normal thought of the
world, and nothing but the fact that many took a different view of life
was potent enough to produce them.
So, for the present at all events, we must be content to feel that our
imagination provides us with a motive rather than with a goal; and
though it is very important that we should strive with all our might to
eliminate the baser elements of life, yet we must be brave and wise
enough to confess how much of our best happiness is born of the fact
that we have these elements to contend with.
Edward FitzGerald once said that a fault of modern writing was that it
tried to compress too many good things into a page, and aimed too
much at omitting the homelier interspaces. We must not try to make
our lives into a perpetual feast; at least we must try to do so, but it must
be by conquest rather than by inglorious flight; we must face the fact
that the stuff of life is both homely and indeed amiss, and realise, if we
can, that our happiness is bound up with energetically trying to escape
from conditions which we cannot avoid. When we are young and
fiery-hearted, we think that a tame counsel; but, like all great truths, it
dawns on us slowly. Not until we begin to ascend the hill do we grasp
how huge, how complicated, how intricate the plain, with all its fields,
woods, hamlets, and streams is; we are happy men and women if in
middle age we even faintly grasp that the actual truth about life is
vastly larger and finer than any impatient youthful fancies about it are,
though it is good to have indulged our splendid fancies in youth, if only

for the delight of learning how much more magnificent is the real
design.
In the Pilgrim's Progress, at the very outset of the journey, Evangelist
asks Christian why he is standing still. He replies:
"Because I know not whither to go."
Evangelist, with a certain grimness of humour, thereupon hands him a
parchment roll. One supposes that it will be a map or a paper of
directions, but all that it has written in it is, "Fly from the wrath to
come!"
Well, it is no longer that of which we are afraid, a rain of fire and
brimstone, storm and tempest! The Power behind the world has better
gifts than these; but we still have to fly, where we can and as fast as we
can; and when we have traversed the dim leagues, and have seen things
wonderful at every turn, and have passed through the bitter flood, we
shall find--at least this is my hope--no guarded city of God from which
we shall go no more out, but another road passing into wider fields and
dimmer uplands, and to things more and more wonderful and strange
and unknown.

II
LITERATURE AND LIFE

There is a tendency, not by any means among the greater writers, but
among what may be called the epigoni,--the satellites of literature, the
men who would be great if they knew how,--to speak of the business of
writing as if it were a sacred mystery, pontifically celebrated,
something remote and secret, which must be guarded from the vulgar
and the profane, and which requires an initiation to comprehend. I
always feel rather suspicious of this attitude; it seems to me something
of a pose, adopted in order to make other people envious and respectful.

It is the same sort of precaution as the "properties" of the wizard, his
gown and wand, the stuffed crocodile and the skeleton in the corner; for
if there is a great fuss made about locking and double-locking a box, it
creates a presumption of doubt as to whether there is anything
particular in it. In my nursery days one of my brothers was fond of
locking up his private treasures in a box, producing it in public,
unfastening it, glancing into it with a smile, and then softly closing it
and turning the key in a way calculated to provoke