John Kelman

“ Margaret stands for all the great questions that are addressed to mankind. There are for every man two ways of doing work, of reading a book, of loving a woman. He who keeps his spiritual life pure and high finds that in all these things there is a noble path. He who yields to his lower self will prostitute and degrade them all, and the tragedy that leads on to the mad scene at the close, where the cries of Margaret have no parallel in literature except those of Lady Macbeth, is the inevitable result of choosing the pagan and refusing the ideal. ”

“ Then there is that small untoward class which knows the divine call of the spirit through the brain, and the secret whisper of the soul in the heart, and for ever perceives the veils of mystery and the rainbows of hope upon our human horizons: which hears and sees, and yet turns wisely, meanwhile, to the life of the green earth, of which we are part, to the common kindred of living things, with which we are at one—is content, in a word, to live, because of the dream that makes living so mysteriously sweet and poignant ”

“ The hunted one flees, as men so constantly flee from the Highest, and seeks refuge in every possible form of earthly experience—at least in every clean and noble form, for there is nothing suggestive of low covert or the mire. It is simply the second-best as a refuge from the best that is depicted here—the earth at its pagan finest, in whose charm or homeliness the soul would fain hide itself from the spiritual pursuit. And the Great Huntsman is remorseless in his determination to win the soul for the very best of all. The soul longs for beauty, for interest, for comfort ”

“ It is not enough that a man pass from the morbid and self-centered mood to an interest in the outward world that surrounds him. That might transform him simply into a curious but heartless dilettante, a mere tourist of the spirit, whose sole desire is to see and to take notes. But that could never satisfy Carlyle; for that is but self-indulgence in its more refined form of the lust of the eyes. It was not for this that the Everlasting No had set Teufelsdröckh wailing, nor for this that he had risen up in wrath and bidden defiance to fear. ”

“ But this story has to do also with Athene, on whose shield Medusa's head must rest at last. For it is not passion only, but knowledge, that may petrify the soul. Indeed, the story of passion can only do this when the dazzling glamour of temptation has passed, and in place of it has come the cold knowledge of remorse. Then the sight of one's own shame, and, on a wider scale, the sight of the pain and the tragedy of the world, present to the eyes of every generation the spectacle of victims standing petrified like those who had seen too much at the cave's mouth in the old legend. ”

“ Life is like that, and we cannot alter it. Quarrel with the seemingly arbitrary or unreasonable condition, and the whole fairy palace vanishes. "Life itself is as bright as the diamond, but as brittle as the window-pane."
From all this it is but a step to the consideration of dogma and the orthodox Christian creed. Mr. Chesterton is at war to the knife with vague modernism in all its forms. The eternal verities which produce great convictions are incomparably the most important things for human nature. No "inner light" will serve man's turn, but some outer light, and that only and always. ”

“ Even the hard-hearted monarch of hell is moved for Orpheus, who
"Drew iron tears down Pluto's cheek,
And made hell grant what love did seek."
But the rescue has one condition. He must restrain himself, must not look upon the face of his beloved though he bears her in his arms, until they have passed the region of the shadow of death, and may see one another in the sunlight of the bright earth again. The many versions of the tragic disobedience to this condition bear eloquent testimony, not certainly to any changing phase of the sky, but to the manifold aspects of human life. ”

“ The Erdgeist which comes to the saddened scholar is a noble spirit, vivifying and creative. It is the world in all its glorious fullness of meaning, quite as true an idealism as that which is expressed in the finest spirit of the Greeks. But for Faust it is too noble. His morbid gloom has enervated him, and the call of the splendid earth is beyond him. So there comes, instead of it, a figure as much poorer than that of Worldly Wiseman as the Erdgeist is richer. Wagner represents the poor commonplace world of the wholly unideal. ”

“ That something or some one is out after the souls of men, no man who has understood his inner life can question for a moment. But here the great doctrine is proclaimed, that the Huntsman of the soul is Love and not Hate, eternal Good and not Evil. No matter what cries may freeze the soul with horror in the night, what echoes of the deep-voiced dogs upon the trail of memory and of conscience, it is God and not the devil that is pursuing. ”

“ He who goes in with the rest of men in their sorrow and their rejoicing cannot but find the meaning of Easter morning for himself. It is a festival of earth and the spring, an earth idealised, whose spirit is incarnate in the risen Christ. Faust longs to share in that, and on Easter Eve tries in vain to read his Gospel and to feel its power. But the only cure for such morbid introspectiveness as his, is to cast oneself generously into the common life of man, and the refusal to do this invites the pagan devil. ”

“ But unless a man's style is absolutely offensive, which Pater's emphatically is not, it is a wise rule to accept it rather as a revelation of the man than as a chance for saying clever things. As one reads the work of some of our modern critics, one cannot but perceive and regret how much of pleasure and of profit their cleverness has cost them. Acknowledging his laboriousness and even his affectation, we still maintain that the style of Walter Pater is a very adequate expression of his mind. There is a calm suggestive atmosphere, a spirit half-childish and half-aged about his work. ”

“ Love is so great a thing that it obviously ought to have this power, and somehow we are all persuaded that it has it—that death is but a puppet king, and love the master of the universe after all. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is but a faltering expression of this great assurance, yet it does express it.
For it explains to all who have ears to hear, what are the real enemies of love which can weaken it in its conflict with death. The Thracian women, those drunken bacchanals that own no law but their desires, stand for the lawless claim and attack of the lower life upon the higher. ”

“ It is the transition from subjective to objective interests, from eating one's own heart out to a sense of the wide and living world by which one is surrounded. It is the same process which, just about this time, Robert Browning was describing in Paracelsus and Sordello. Once more Teufelsdröckh travels, but this time how differently! Instead of being absorbed by the haunting shadow of himself, he sees the world full of vital interests—cities of men, tilled fields, books, battlefields. The great questions of the world—the true meanings alike of peace and war—claim his interest. ”

“ He walks among the rowan trees of the Shadowy Glen, while the quiet light flames upon the grass, and the fierce people that lurk in shadow have eyes for the helplessness of the little lad who sees too far. Such tales are full of a strange light that seems to be, at one and the same time, the Celtic glamour and the Light of the World.
All the lovers of Mr. Yeats must have remembered many instances of the same kind in his work. "And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? ”

“ Eternity is in the heart of every man. The fashionable modern gospel of Pragmatism is telling us to-day that we should not vex ourselves about the ultimate truth of theories, but inquire only as to their value for life here and now, and the practical needs which they serve. But the most practical of all man's needs is his need of some contact with a higher world than that of sense. "To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man." ”

“ The heroes and great people of the early days are eternal figures, because each new generation gives them a resurrection in its own life and experience. They have eternal human meanings, beneath whatever pageantry of sun and stars the ancient heroes passed from birth to death. Soon everything of them is forgotten except the ideas about human life for which they stand. Then each of them becomes the expression of a thought common to humanity, and therefore secure of its immortality to the end of time ”

“ Sa'di also was a twelfth-century poet, although of a later time than Omar. He was a student of the College in Baghdad, and he lived as a hermit for sixty years in Shiraz, singing of love and war. His mind is full of mysticism, wisdom and beauty going hand in hand through a dim twilight land. Dominating all his thought is the primary conviction that the soul is essentially part of God, and will return to God again, and meanwhile is always revealing, in mysterious hints and half-conscious visions, its divine source and destiny. ”

“ The human and the divine love are rivals here; pagan versus ideal affection. The hunted heart is not allowed to find refuge or solace in human love. The man knows that it is Love that follows him: yet it is the warm, red, earthly passion that he craves for, and the divine pursuer seems cold, exacting, and austere.
Finding no refuge in human love from this "tremendous Lover," he seeks it next in a kind of imaginative materialism, half-scientific, half-fantastic. ”

“ It is simply the last result of a habit of luxurious self-indulgence; and the temptation to the self-indulgent, the present world in one form or another, comes upon everybody at times. [Pg 96] There are moods when all of us want to break away from the simple life, and feel the splendour of the dazzling lights and the intoxication of the strange scents of the world. To surrender to these has always been, and always will be, deadly. It is the old temptation to cease to strive, which we have already found to be the keynote of Goethe's Faust. ”

“ For six thousand years he has been pursuing the walk he struck out at the beginning, plying his self-selected function, dabbling devilishly in human nature, and abjuring all interest in the grander physics; and the consequence is, as he himself anticipated, that his nature, once great and magnificent, has become small, virulent, and shrunken. He, the scheming, enthusiastic Archangel, has been soured and civilised into the clever, cold-hearted Mephistopheles."
Marlowe's devil is of the solemn earlier kind, not yet degraded into the worldling whom Goethe has immortalised. ”

“ Here is obviously a man who would love the highest if he saw it, who would fain welcome and proclaim the ideals if he could only find them on the earth; but who has found instead the bitterness of darkness, the sarcasm and the sensationalism of an age that the gods have left. He is too honest to shout pour encourager les autres when his own heart has no hope in it; and his greater books express the wail and despair of our modern paganism. ”

“ But the chase of dogs was a common horror in the Middle Ages, and many of the mediæval fiends are dog-faced. In those days, when conscience had as yet received none of our modern soporifics, and men believed in hell, many a guilty sinner knew well the baying of the hell-hounds, masterless and bloody-fanged, that chased the souls of even good men up to the very gates of heaven. Conscience and remorse ran wild, and the Hound of Hell was a characteristic part of the machinery that made the tragedy of life so terrific in those old days. ”

“ Wells began to juggle with worlds. He has latterly introduced that delicate thing, the human soul and conscience, into the play, and you see it precariously fluttering among the immensities of leaping planets. He persuades himself that the common morality has not gripped people, and that they really don't believe in it at all. He aims at a way of thinking which will be so great as to be free from all commonplace and convention. ”