THE CLASSIC ARTIST

T HE most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us. This account of the activities of a French priest who was given a diocese in the south-west during the late forties, impresses one first of all by its amazing sensory achievements. She has within herself a sensitivity that constantly presents her with a body of material which would overwhelm most of us, so that we would give up all idea of transmitting it and would sink into a state of passivity; and she has also a quality of mountain-pony sturdiness that makes her push on unfatigued under her load and give an accurate account of every part of it. So it is that one is not quite sure whether it is one of the earlier pages in Death Comes for the Archbishop or a desert in central New Mexico, that is heaped up with small conical hills, red as brick-dust, a landscape of which the human aspect is thirst and confusion of the retina at seeing the earth itself veritably presenting such re-duplications of an image as one could conceive only as consequences of a visual disorder. When the young bishop on his mule finds this thirst smouldering up to flame in his throat and his confusion whirling faster and faster into vertigo, he blots out his own pain in meditating on the Passion of our Lord; he does not deny to consciousness that it is in a state of suffering, but leads it inward from the surface of being where it feebly feels itself contending with innumerable purposeless irritations to a place within the heart where suffering is held to have been proved of greater value than anything else in the world, the one coin sufficient to buy man’s salvation; this, perhaps the most delicate legerdemain man has ever practised on his senses, falls into our comprehension as lightly as a snowflake into the hand, because of her complete mastery of every phase of the process. But she becomes committed to no degree of complication as her special field. A page later she writes of the moment when the priest and his horses come on water, in language simple as if she were writing a book for boys, in language exquisitely appropriate for the expression of a joy that must have been intensest in the youth of races. Great is her accomplishment. That feat of making a composition out of the juxtaposition of different states of being, which Velasquez was so fond of practising, when he showed the tapestry-makers working in shadow, and some of their fellows working behind them in shadows honeycombed with golden motes, and others still further back working in the white wine of full sunlight, is a diversion of hers also. She can suggest how in this land of carnelian hills that become lavender in storm, of deserts striped with such strangeness as ochre-yellow waves of petrified sand, of mesas behind which stand cloud mesas as if here Nature had altered her accustomed order and the sky took reflections as the waters do elsewhere, of beauty on which a quality of prodigiousness is perpetually present like a powerful condiment, the Bishop and his boyhood friend would find refreshment in going back in memory to the cobbled streets of Clermont, where ivy that is cool to the touch and wet about the roots tumbles over garden walls and horse-chestnuts spread a wide shade which is scarcely needed, and simple families do explicable things and eat good food and love one another. Perfectly conveyed is the difference in palpability between things seen and things remembered; as perfectly as those other differences in palpability which became apparent to the senses of the Archbishop as death approached him. Then the countryside of Auvergne became a place too wet, too cultivated, too human; the air above it seemed to have something of the heaviness of sweat. The air that can only be breathed on land which has not yet been committed to human purposes, the light, dry air of the desert, is more suited to one who is now committed to them as little as it. He has now the excess of experience which comes to old age; since no more action is required from him. There is no particular reason why his attention should be focused on the present, so as he lies in his bed in the study in Santa Fé where he had begun his work forty years before, all the events of his life exist contemporaneously in his head: his childish days in Clermont and on the coast of the Mediterranean, his youth in the seminary at Rome, his travels among the deserts and the mesas, the Mexicans and the Indians. That is well enough but it could not go on. He longs, and one can feel the trouble in the old man’s head as he wishes it, for this free wind that has never been weighed down by the effluvia of human effort to blow away his soul out into its sphere of freedom.

The book, it may be seen, though clear as a dew-drop, is not superficial. The author is inspired to her best because she is working on a theme that is peculiarly sympathetic to her. When Father Vaillant goes to administer the sacraments to the faithful on the ranchero of Manuel Lujon he bustles into the kitchen and with scarcely less care than he bestows on preparations for the holy office he rescues the leg of mutton that is destined for his dinner and cooks it himself, so that when he carves it at table a ‘delicate stream of pink juice’ follows the knife. It is an incident which Miss Gather relates with a great deal of sisterly feeling; and it is, of course, a beautiful symbol of the effective synthesis which inspires the Roman Catholic Church to its highest activities. That Church has never doubted that sense is a synthesis of the senses; and it has never doubted that man must take the universe sensibly. The people, the suffering generations, deprived of material for the enjoyment of the senses, cry out for saints who shall sanctify their own fates by being holy and choosing it as the most suitable medium for their holiness, who court suffering, who deprive their senses of all material enjoyment. But behind them watches the Church to see that they avail themselves of this hungry sainthood only as one does of some powerful opiate, in small doses and not habitually. Not for long were the faithful to be allowed to abuse or miscall the body which has been given them as the instrument with which they must perform their task of living. Those who claimed supersensual ecstasies were—as one may read in the life of St. Teresa—exposed to the investigations of persons who comported themselves like Inspectors of Nuisances. While it is untrue to say that Protestantism invented or even specially stimulated Puritanism—the type of mind which tries to satisfy an innate sense of guilt by the coarser forms of expiation is naturally attracted to whatever the current religion may be and emerges equally under Catholicism or Paganism or Islam or any other formulated faith—it is true to say that Catholicism has always suppressed with extreme rigour such heresies as led to unwholesome abstinences becoming the general practice. The Cathari, for example, were persecuted because although their ascetic teachings might have led to individual sinlessness they would have wiped out the community, and there would have been so many happy villages the fewer. It would almost seem sometimes as if the Church burned heretics because it was afraid that if it did not man would burn his soup.

And soup, as the Roman Catholic Church knows, as Miss Cather knows, is a matter of the first importance. ‘When one comes to think of it,’ said the Bishop, sitting over a meal prepared by Father Vaillant on one of their early days at Santa Fé, when they were gloomily discussing the possibility of maintaining a French propriety of diet in a country so basely ignorant that it knew nothing of the lettuce, ‘soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup….’ Doubtless he would, if pressed, have admitted that while the introduction of good soup and lettuce was not the object of his labours in his diocese, they would at least afford a test of success. It was with no sense of trivial declension from his activities that, at the end of his life, he chose for the country estate of his retirement land on which he had seen an apricot-tree with ‘two trunks, each of them thicker than a man’s body,’ which was glorious with great golden fruit of superb flavour, and because of that indication of suitability planted orchards of pears and apples, cherries and apricots there from which he furnishes young trees for his priests to plant wherever they went, for their own eating and to encourage the Mexicans to add fruit to their starchy diet. In all his intermediate activities he has never really gone far from the earth that grows lettuces and apricots. There is a chapter relating to the rebellious Father Martinez, in which Miss Cather with a blacksmith’s muscle has lifted into a compendious form a prodigious deal of reading about the problem the Church has had to face in its efforts to secure priests lion-like enough to maintain the faith on the raw edges of civilization against the paganism of lawless men and yet lamblike enough to remain in loyal subjection to authority seated half the world away; it too is a demonstration of sense founded on a fusion of the senses. The Bishop, although fastidious to almost the point of squeamishness, tolerates this priest who rides at the head of a cavalcade of Mexicans and Indians like their robber chief, whose corridor walks are perpetually painted with a shadow-show of servant maids fleeing before young men whose origin seems to be indicated by the tart disputations at the supper-table concerning the celibacy of the clergy, whose past is stained with bloodshed arising out of lecherous desire for certain lands, as hot as the lands themselves. In spite of all this the Bishop does not deprive him of his parish. He looks around and marks the theatrical fervour of the landscape of ‘the flaming cactus and the gaudily decorated altars,’ of the gestures with which the women flung shawls on the pathway before him and the men snatched his hand to kiss the episcopal ring; and perceives as in complete keeping with that world this passionate and devout scoundrel who gives his virility to the chanting of the Mass as he gave it to murder, to the enrichment of his church with vestment and shining vessels as to the complication of his domesticity with amorousness. It is as if he tasted a chili con carne, judged it just as the Mexicans who were going to eat it would like it, and out of regard for the harmonies of life smoothed from his face all signs of what his French palate thought of the high seasoning. Though this may be an affair of importance, it is still an affair of the senses.

But there is more to life than this. St. Teresa was greater than her investigators. The community that chose to die might know more in the moment when it went out to death than the neighbouring unperverted community might know when it came into supper. It is inconceivable that man was born of woman to suffer more forms of agony than there are kinds of flowers simply in order that he should make good soup. That complaint might be made against Miss Cather herself, for her own absorption in sense and the senses. She arranges with mastery such phenomena of life as the human organism can easily collect through the most ancient and most perfected mechanisms of body and mind. But must not such an art, admirable as it is, be counted as inferior to an art which accepts no such limitations, which deals with the phenomena of life collected by the human organism with such difficulty that to the overstrained consciousness they appear only as vague intimations, and the effort of obtaining them develops new mechanisms? Ought not art that tries to make humanity superhuman be esteemed above art that leaves humanity exactly as it is? One is reminded constantly of that issue while one is reading Death Comes for the Archbishop by its similarity in material to some of the recent work of Mr. D. H. Lawrence. Both come face to face with the Indian and find there is no face there but an unclimbable cliff, giving no foothold, like the side of a mesa; but each takes it so differently. ‘The Bishop,’ says Miss Cather, of a certain conversation by a camp fire, ‘seldom questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or beliefs. He didn’t think it polite, and he believed it to be useless. There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him. A chill came with the darkness …’ and so on. There is no attempt to fit the key into the lock. That door will not open. But Mr. Lawrence cries out in his last book of essays, ‘The consciousness of one branch of humanity is the annihilation of the consciousness of another branch…. We can understand the consciousness of the Indian only in terms of the death of our consciousness.’ There is nothing here to say he will not try it. Indeed, the querulousness of it suggests a tired, brave man becoming aware of an imperative call to further adventures. There may be necessary a re-entrance to the darkness of the womb, another fretful birth. He will do it!

The difference in their daring is powerfully suggested by a certain chapter of this book named ‘Stone Lips.’ The Bishop and his Indian guide are on the desert when a snowstorm breaks and covers the land with a white blindness. The Indian makes the Bishop leave the mules and clamber over rocks and fallen trees to a cliff in which there is a cave that has an opening sinister enough in itself, with rounded edges like lips. It is large, shows signs or being used for ceremonial purposes, and is clean and swept; but it is icy-cold and full of a slight but loathsome odour. There is a hole in the wall about the size of a watermelon. This the Indian guide fills up with a mixture of stones, wood, earth and snow. Then he builds a fire, and the odour disappears. There is, however, a humming as of bees, which puzzles the Bishop till the guide takes him to a part of the cave where there is a crack in the floor through which sounds the roaring of an underground river. The Bishop drops off to sleep, but wakes up and finds the boy mounting guard over the hole in the wall, listening as though to hear if anything were stirring behind the patch of plaster. The episode owes its accent, of course, to the proximity of the cave to the pueblo of Pecos, which was reputed to keep a giant serpent out in the mountains for use in its religious festivals. Miss Cather passes through this experience responding sensitively and powerfully to its splendid portentousness, but she stays with the Bishop the whole time. Mr. Lawrence, on the other hand, would have been through the hole in the wall after the snake. He would have been through the crack in the floor after the river. Irritably and with partial failure, but also with greater success than any previous aspirant, he would have tried to become the whole caboodle. Does not such transcendental courage, does not such ambition to extend consciousness beyond its present limits and elevate man above himself, entitle his art to be ranked as more important than that of Miss Gather?

To ask that question is our disposition to-day. It is the core of contemporary resentment against the classics. But one must suspect it. It leads to such odd preferences on the part of the young: for example, to the exaltation of James Joyce over Marcel Proust, although A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is like a beautiful hand with long fingers reaching out to pluck a perfect fruit, without error, for the accurate eye knows well it is growing just there on the branch, while Ulysses is the fumbling of a horned hand in darkness after a doubted jewel. Such a judgment leaves out of account that though a jewel is more precious than a fruit, grace also is one of the ultimate values, a chief accelerator of our journey towards the stars. It should, like all occasions when we find ourselves rejecting non-toxic pleasantness, make us examine ourselves carefully to see if we are not the latest victims to the endemic disease of Puritanism, to this compulsion to satisfy an innate sense of guilt by the coarser forms of expiation. There is, after all, no real reason to suppose that there is less Puritan impulse in humanity than there ever was, since the origin and control of such infantile fantasies as the sense of guilt has hardly yet begun to be worked upon; and it would be peculiarly apt at this moment to express itself in the sphere of art. The Church no longer takes care of it among the literate, for during the last century they either ceased to go to church at all or have transferred it to some faith which does not pander to those lownesses; but they found a new and disguised channel for the old impulse in reformist politics. That again has been denied them, for the war has damped political enthusiasms just as the biological advances of the nineteenth century damped religious fervour. The weaker spirits are scared by the evidence that social change may involve serious hardship and have scuttled back to Toryism; the stronger spirits who can bear to envisage hardship are just as paralysed by their doubt whether there is any economic system yet invented which is certain to justify by success the inconveniences of change. There has happened therefore a curious reversal of the position in regard to the gratification of the Puritan and counter-Puritan impulses in the last century. The young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne. Nowadays the corresponding young men gratify their voluptuousness by an almost complete acquiescence in the political and economic status quo, an unremorseful acceptance of whatever benefits it may bring them personally; and they placate their Puritanism by demanding of literature that never shall it sit down to weave beauty out of the material which humanity has already been able to collect with its limited powers, that perpetually it must be up and marching on through the briars towards some extension of human knowledge and power.

It is characteristically Puritan, this demand that the present should be annihilated. The church-goers of the breed insisted that we should have no pleasures in this world but should devote ourselves to preparation for the next. The political sphere made the same demand in many veiled forms, which one may perceive, in the phrase constantly used in propagandist literature that it is the duty of each generation to sacrifice itself for the sake of future generations. That is, of course, pernicious. It makes man try to live according to another rhythm than that of the heart within him, which has its systole and its diastole. It deftly extracts all meaning out of life, which, if it were but an eternal climbing of steep steps, sanity would refuse to live. And æsthetically it is the very deuce, for in rejecting classical art it rejects the real sanction of the revolutionary art it pretends to defend. When Willa Cather describes in terms acceptable to a Catholic Missionary Society the two young priests stealing away secretly from Clermont to avoid saying good-bye to their devoted families, who would have been too greatly distressed by the loss of their sons, she is not as explicit as Mr. Lawrence would be in his statement that in this separation a creature as little Christian as a snake was trying to slough its skin, that a force as hidden from the sun as an underground river was trying to separate itself from its source. But by proving exhaustively what joy a man can have and what beauty he can make by using such materials and such mechanism he already has, she proves Mr. Lawrence’s efforts to add to their number worth while. Since man can work thus with his discoveries, how good it is that there should be discoveries! There is nothing here which denotes rejection of any statement of life fuller than her own. Her work has not that air of claiming to cover all the ground which gives the later novels of Henry James the feeling of pretentiousness and futility which amazingly coexists with the extremes of subtlety and beauty and which is perhaps due to his attempt to account for all the actions and thoughts of his characters by motives established well in the forefront of consciousness. She is indeed deeply sympathetic to what the order of artist who is different from herself is trying to do, as can be seen in her occasional presentation of incidents that would be beautifully grist to their mill: as in the enchanting story of the El Greco painting of a St. Francis in meditation, which was begged from a Valencian nobleman by a hairy Franciscan priest from New Mexico for his mission church, who forced the gift by his cry, ‘You refuse me this picture because it is a good picture. It is too good for God, but it is not too good for you’; and was at the pillaging of the mission church either burned or taken to some pueblo. How we can imagine that part of the spirit of El Greco which was in that picture, crying out while flames made it the bright heart of an opening flower of massacre, or while the smoke of the adobe dwelling discolours and stripes it like a flagellation, ’It is just as I thought!’ And how like the anguished accents of Mr. Lawrence’s work sounds that imagined cry. Willa Cather is not unaware of these fissures in the solid ground of life, but to be aware of them is not her task. Hers is it to move on the sunlit face of the earth, with the gracious amplitude of Ceres, bidding the soil yield richly, that the other kind of artist, who is like Persephone and must spend half of his days in the world under the world, may be refreshed on emergence.