life. Alas, as the days move on and the crisis
delays, as life brings the need of labour, the necessity
of earning money, as love and friendship lose their
rosy glow and settle down into comfortable relations,
the disillusionment spreads and widens. I do
not say that the nearer view of life is not more just,
more wholesome, more manly. It is but the working
of some strictly determined law. The dreams fade,
become unreal and unsubstantial; though not rarely,
in some glimpse of retrospect, the pilgrim turns,
ascends a hillock by the road, and sees the far-off
lines, the quiet folds, of the blue heights from which
he descended in the blithe air of the morning, and
knows that they were desirable. Perhaps the happiest
of all are those who, as the weary day advances, can
catch a sight of some no less beautiful hills ahead
of him, their hollows full of misty gold, where the
long journey may end; and then, however wearily the
sun falls on the dusty road and the hedged fields
to left and right, he knows that the secrets of the
earlier day are beautiful secrets still, and that
the fine wonder of youth has yet to be satisfied.
And yet the shadow does undoubtedly fall heavily on
the way for me and for such as me, whose one hope
is that before they die they may make some delicate
thing of beauty and delight which may remind those
that come after that the first beauty of opening light
and the song of the awakening bird is a real and true
thing, not a mere effect of air and sun and buoyant
spirit. Experience and fact and hard truth have
a beauty of their own, no doubt. Politics and
commerce, the growth of social liberty and law, civic
duty and responsibility—dull words for
noble things—have their place, their value,
their significance. But to the poet they seem
only the laborious organising of his dreams, the slow
and clumsy manufacture of what ought to be instinctive
and natural. If the world must grow upon these
lines, if men must toil in smoke-stained factories
or wrangle in heated Parliaments, then it is well
that the framework of life should be made as firm,
as compact, as just as it can. But not here does
his hope lie; he looks forward to a far different
regeneration than can be effected by law and police.
He looks forward to a time when the hearts of men
shall be so wise and tender and simple that they shall
smile at the thought that life needs all this organising
and arranging. For those who labour for social
good lose sight too often of the end in the means.
They think of education as a business of delightful
intricacy, and forget that it is but an elaborate
device for teaching men to love quiet labour and to
enjoy the delight of leisure. They lose themselves
in the dry delight of codifying law, and forget that
law is only necessary because men are born brutal
and selfish. Morality may be imposed from without,
or grace may grow from within; and the poet is on
the side of the inner grace, because he thinks that
if it can be achieved it will outrun the other lightly
and easily.