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PROEM
Of all, simple peoples in
history, as to the young in every age, the seasons have meant much: not
only marking out the paths of action and filling the cup of sense, but
giving varying colour to thought and fancy. And even among us to-day, so
slenderly related as we are apt to be to the primary Nature of Things,
it would yet seem that the most harmonious lives—seen in glimpses now
and then— are those whose times of effort and of rest, of growing and of
ripening, are in tune with the seasonal rhythm of the earth. That is the
ultimate system in which we live; and we needs must respond to it,
however reluctantly, as the finger; acknowledges the heart-throbs and
the fjord the tides. So, at this time, the voice of Spring echoes
through us all, and is felt as a tidal message in the landlocked places
of our being. The evergreen feels it, even. For though its branches are
never bare, it now shares in the fulness of sap that is given to all
things living.
The sun has swept through Aries, the west wind blows, the showers soften
the earth—and behold! the world is young again and visionary. The
Sleeping Beauty has awaked in fragrance; Proserpina, escaped from Hades,
goes joyously about the fields, hearing the sprouting of the corn, the
rising of the sap, the tiny clamour of buds new breaking into life. Some
of the Wanderers who went last Autumn have returned with the sunshine,
and the little hills shout for joy. It is a time of Renascence. And not
only do we rejoice because what has been is again, but we feel that
every Spring is the epochal dawn of a new age. This time of birth is
also the time of variations, when new forms and new habits flow from the
well-head of change.
And so it will be not amiss if we try in the present foreword to give
some hint of what our particular variation may be, what is our
conception of that present from which we start and the future towards
which we tend—unanimously, if in broken order. For though we are one, we
are also many; and the words and lines which form our book will show how
variously each, according to his or her listening, interprets the
seasonal melody—the true song of the spheres—which we all bow to.
And first we would say that we do not ignore the Decadence around us, so
much spoken of. If we wished, we could not. For while at one social
level, all the land over, it fills the gaze with a vision of slums and
the hearing with outcries of coarseness and cretinous insanity—at
another it is trumpeted as a boast and worn as a badge and studied as
the ultimate syllable of this world’s wisdom. So many clever writers
emulously working in a rotten vineyard, so many healthy young men eager
for the distinction of decay I And yet, out of each other’s sight as
those two worlds lie, there is but a step between and their kinship is
unmistakable. A literature of distinguished style and moral vulgarity is
indeed a misproduct of the same process that gives us in our meaner
streets a degeneration of human type worse than what follows famine. We
see also the restless craving, high and low, for undignified excitement,
the triumphant system of education which is the nationalised blasting of
buds, our science metamorphosed into the man with the muck-rake, our
religion become the symbol of a drifting ship. All these things we see,
if we are for the most part silent regarding them. It may be that they
are a p^rt of us; for even from the evergreen the leaves fall singly at
this time of greatest hopefulness. By reaction, at least, and by
counter-influence, we would gladly have our relation to them made
certain and a remembered thing. Nay, already we seem to see, against the
background of Decadence, the vaguely growing lines of a picture of
New-Birth.
And as the evil began in the social and economic sphere, it is there
that we first mark the remedial beginnings of a better order. A
generation or two ago, in an age committed to arid industrialism and the
keenest practice, men happened on a half-thought which had strayed from
science into the marketplace. That thought was the conception of the
Struggle for Existence as Nature’s sole method of progress. It was, to
be sure, a libel projected upon Nature, but it had enough truth in it to
be mischievous for a while. For now the pitiful creed of individualism—'
Each for himself!’—seemed to have gained unexpected sanction, as a
cosmic process. Egoism and recklessness, provided they be on a large
scale and out-of-doors, were evolutionary forces as fair as the
sunlight, making ultimately for the welfare of the race. We need not
wonder, then, that the individualist waxed arrogant, that his work
prospered, that he built cities which are a degradation unto this day.
But all error is a deciduous growth: truths and evergreens only are
perpetual. Science, working honestly within its own region, has
perceived in good time how false to natural fact the theory was, and has
lately vindicated for Nature a more logical method and a nobler
character. It has shown how primordial, how organically imperative the
social virtues are; how love, not egoism, is the motive which the final
history of every species justifies; how fostering, not ravening, is the
pioneer process in the ascent of life. The practical inference has been
quickly made: that a rule of conduct—' Each for himself 1 ’— which is
not half good enough for the beasts, has but little relevance to human
intercourse and social action.
And thus the good sense and sympathies of the best men and women are no
longer at heresy with the accredited teaching of their time. A communal
quickening of the conscience is one of the most marked notes of recent
history: that, and a growing faith in the value of all good precedents,
an increasing confidence that one man’s gain need not for ever be
another man’s loss. Experiments in co-operation have been an effective
object-lesson in citizenship; the union of workers is rapidly passing
beyond its earlier character as a mere article of war. And this had need
to be so. For the social organism must integrate, or perish of its own
energies: and our hope can never be in any banding together which shall
merely make bread and butter cheaper, still less in any massing of
similar interests which shall enable a legion to triumph over a phalanx,
or a city to prosper at the expense of a shire. Least of all with the
desperadoes of chimerical reform can we have anything to do. Our trust
is rather in following a subtler indication which Nature gives to those
who study her domestic economy: by trying to bring the most diverse
interests under the dominance of a common civic ideal, in what to
naturalists is known as a Symbiosis—in which the strength of one shall
call forth, instead of cancelling, the strength of the other, in which
each shall have his place, and even his privileges ungrudged, but shall
feel that he has them through and for all. A second way of escape we are
reminded of now, when we throw our windows open to the morning air. The
time of the singing of birds has come, and in the city precincts a
thousand voices are gossiping of green fields beyond, calling upon us to
go out into the country. The decadent of idleness is putting his yacht
in trim, the decadent of another order now buys to himself a singing
bird—a pathetic act, surely, to make the angels weep! Both are witnesses
to one truth, and it is an old one: that Nature, whether you drive her
out with a pitchfork or with material progress, never ceases trying to
come back. We can never quite lose a kindly feeling towards the old
memories and the old menage of the race, unless ourselves be lost
altogether. The desire of them is an organic inheritance of the heart,
and the need of them haunts our spirit in every generation. We are wont
enough to look for health in the rural ways of living to which all our
pedigrees so quickly revert; but we do not consider that our ways of
thinking, also, would be saner and more wholesome if we listened to the
counsel of the birds, or drew an inference from the trees in the city
square:—
‘Can such delights be in
the street
And open fields, and we not see’t?
Come, we ’ll abroad: and let’s obey
The proclamation made for May!’
From urban to rural, from
fever to fresh air—that may fitly be the second rallying-word of
Renascence.
And let no one too promptly construe our saying, or accuse us of
ignoring the forces which bind men to their fate. Cities there are and
must be, and it is in cities that much of to-day’s work and breadwinning
must needs be done. But a more open route from town to country is surely
not beyond achieving, nor is it necessary that all the travelling should
tend for ever one way. People might at least be kept from forgetting
that the fields are still under the open sky, that the occupations of
Adam still go on, that the nature of things and man’s relation to the
earth have a creation freshness still, some ten miles from town. Of the
moral value of even such knowledge as that, and of the present-day need
for it, many things might be said. But here we shall rather say that the
means of salvation lie not in any unhoped migration to the solitary
places of the land, but in a transformation of the populous centres.
While the town grows year by year in our heart’s despite, we can
determine in some degree the aspects it shall take. Spaces may be left
for the sunlight to fill, trees may redeem the dismal street, fit
architecture call forth the pride of citizenship. Some sylvan graces may
brave the vicinage of the factory, and the cultivation of flowers become
a school of manners. So we may draw a little nearer to the City
Beautiful —the rural town—in which joy inhabits, and righteousness has a
chance of increase.
And we have many cities that are called to a splendid future, if men
were only wise. Before all others there is our own, unique in the world:
‘A city that is set upon an hill.’ Its houses are in mourning, and its
streets have been washed with tears; but it has kept well its brave
outlook over sea and land, its own gifts of sanity and eagerness. Paved
with history, echoing with romance, rich in an unbroken intellectual
tradition—what might not this city become! Meanwhile it sends forth its
sons, there being little for them here to do, and they are of service in
carrying on the wasting business of that metropolitan life which
resembles so much the proliferation of a cancer. Yet the stirrings of
better things are visible here also; there are those who do not hesitate
to discuss already the tendencies of the local Renascence as a thing
assured. Howsoever that be, there are many places in the land which seem
marked just now for hope to alight upon. In a vision of fair
cities—Houses Beautiful or about to be—we cannot miss the grey town in
the east, splashed with sea-foam, cinctured by green fields and the
paradise of golfers; nor the city of industry in the west, mistress of
many ships, trafficking with all peoples; nor the granite city of the
north, cold and clear, defined into dignity, softened into music. Upon
them all is the flying shadow of a regret, the breaking light of a
promise. We see them—with Durham, York and Liverpool, Manchester,
Bristol, Dundee and Perth—all with a struggling sublimity, all
dishevelled and disgraced, all alive and full of hope!
One thought more. Now is the season of young things, of buds and
seedlings, of lambs and other children. Round the earth has gone a cry
of resurrection, and Life renews itself from point to point. It was in
vain, seemingly, that Autumn withered and Winter laid waste—for behold!
the muster of young lives, the splendour of fresh energies. The hawthorn
which the hedger stripped, leaving it a gaunt skeleton, is clothed again
with green leaves, and among the leaves is the shining of blossoms. And
looking at the blossoms we are 14 minded of the Children. Through them
also reparation is unceasingly being made. The dust of life dries up the
heart of a generation, character is fretted out in mean practice,
thought itself is frittered down to cheap expedients and broken views
(for which reason, notice, every vicious age and circle is addicted to
epigram as a means of masking its emotional impotence, its bankruptcy of
generous human qualities). With all this cheapening, we are driven to
think, the moral wealth of mankind must be dwindling, the common fund
will soon be dissipated, the human average tends steadily downward. But
such fears are fanciful; against those evil issues there is an eternal
safeguard. For while the love of man and maid is a daily discovery for
some one in town and village, and while the greater love it leads to
supplies the powerfullest motive in life and the most pervading, human
nature can never permanently forfeit either its dignity or its strength.
The higher truths are in the keeping of every household, while the women
educate and the children lead the Race. Through them in every generation
Nature conserves her good, and returns always to the standard of
normality for a fresh outfaring. We have reason therefore, when, looking
at the Children, we feel that the blossom is of more purchase than the
tree. Another line of the Renascence must surely be in the right
unfolding of these, in care for the new that is in them, in perfecting
their powers, in teaching them to love, in helping them to learn by
living.
This, then, in the Springtime, would be our particular variation, if
only we might achieve it perfectly: to think and to dream, to rhyme and
to picture, in unison with the music of the Renascence. Of that music we
hear as yet only broken snatches. But in these snatches four chords are
sounded, which we would fain carry in our hearts—That faith may be had
still in the friendliness of fellows; that the love of country is not a
lost cause; that the love of women is the way of life; and that in the
eternal newness of every Child is an undying promise for the Race.
W. M.
J. A. T
Spring |
Summer |
Autumn |
Winter |
