ON THE CULTURE OF ANTICIPATION

Evening Star, Issue 19788, 11 February 1928, Page 2

ON THE CULTURE OF ANTICIPATION

Since Matthew Arnold’s day the word culture has become one of the stock phrases of our language. He made it current coin. Its derivation is uncertain, as is also the exact connotation to be attached to the word. We speak of a man as cultured, but probably no two persons would mean thereby just the same thing;. Again, we speak of people cultivating a certain talent,' or art, or science, or method of living. We wish to put in a good word for the culture of anticipation. Wo may consider first the value ' of this culture and then the method of doing it. A * « * ' Before we set out to search for a thing we must first make up our mind whether or not it is worth while, and before we determine to culture anticipation the prior question is as to the value of anticipation itself. Is it worth culturing? It surely is. For what would life be without its forward look? The animals, as fur as wo can see, know no future except their feeding lime. Man does, and it is just as far as ho docs that he is ranked higher in the scale of being. The supreme value of anticipation is that it gives zest to life. It makes and keeps it worth living. There are three attitudes that life may take relative to the future. It may shut its eyes and firmly refuse in look at it or think of it. It may concern itself wholly with the present, living in it and for it. That method of living is obviously not tho highest. It is life on the plane of the animal, not on tho plane of tho human. Or life may look forward, may anticipate joy or sorrow, and prepare itself to meet them. It will not be forgetful of the present; it will lot the anticipated future mould and color and direct it. This is clearly the truer and better way. It is this because it gives zest to life. It helps us to feel that it is worth living. When this fooling withers or dies, nothing else matters much. Think of the educative value of a joy anticipated compared with one that comes suddenly. A sudden joy is apt to be feverish or exqited. Wo leap suddenly into happiness, and it seems as if it were an accident or a piece of good luck. Thus wc lose tho sense of law in what happens, and life tends to be read as a kind of gamble. But when we go steadily forward week by week to meet some joy that we see approaching us in tho future wc double its value in the expectation of it. Indeed, it is a debatable question if tho anticipation of a joy is not greater than the thing itself. The angler who looks ahead for weeks to the clay when ho will get off to the river is sustained in his daily duties by that far-off hope. And when he comes to look back on it all after the event be thinks that tho joy of anticipation exceeded that of the realisation, especially if tho basket on the return was more than half-empty. Or take an anticipated treat or sorrow. How much “better it is to see it in tho distance and prepare to meet it than have it sprung upon us suddenly. In the latter case it may make a wreck of the life; in the former it is likely to enrich tho character in the virtues of foresight and endurance. Or, compare again tho difference between a visitor's interest in a city and the man who has his home in it. Tho former will be constantly on the alert and on the move. Everything is new, and lie wants to see as much as lie can. The man who resides in the city knows all about it, and lias no great eagerness to see this or that, or to travel here or there tirelessly like the visitor. Hence it is that “tho child will make more character in a week than grown people will in months, because life, not having yet hardened itself into routine and certainties, is always vividly interesting to him, and is always enticing him on in anticipation of something.'’ So the supremo value of anticipation is that it gives zest to life. It prevents it from sinking down into routine and hardening into humdrum, disillusionment, and pessimism. It is thus one of the greatest assets ot life. Its culture, therefore, ought to he of tho highest concern to everybody. * * * * How can this be done? How best can we develop and enrich anticipation? By practice. That is how wo develop anything, from muscles to manhood. But to practise a thing we must first know something about it. Wo must he convinced of its value, or at least have evidence enough to induce us to make a trial of it. This we have already offered. Tho next step is to go to school to those who are masters of the art. Every school has school books and teachers. And so in tho school of anticipation we have books in abundance. We shall do well, therefore, to get acquainted with the literature that lifts horizons of anticipation before ns. This is the value of works of imagination—imagination which is what is like great beauty to a woman, “a crown of glory or a slaying sword.’’ And so poetry is first among the literature of anticipation, it, more than any other, keeps ' us from becoming humdrum, sinking down into an existence in which work is done either like a galley slave or dodged as a kind of intolerable nightmare. As Shelley says: “It redeems from decay tho visitings of the divinity in man.” It is a thousand pities that more attention is not given in our schools to tho study of poetry. We do not moan the study of it that consists in tearing it to pieces to find out its parsing wonders, or playing hide and go seek with its subjects and predicates and their extensions and what not. This is the sure way to disgust children with it. And so it comes about that it has no charms for them in later life It is merely a grammatical and analytical trap-door, through which pedantic teachers were ever contriving, to drop unwary pupils. And thus the finest field for the culture of anticipation is closed to multitudes of our youth; * * * * Amongst poets the best for the culture of anticipation are not the very modern ones. In most of these there is a certain flatness and limitation of view that narrow the horizon. Ruskin says that every great picture should open a door into the infinite. It is still more true of a great poem. It is this door that seems shut in so much of modern poetry. We need to go back to the despised .Victorian era for the great poets of anticipation—to Tennyson of the earlier days, not the days of ‘ Lockslcy Hall Sixty Years After,’ but the Tennyson of the ‘ldylls’- and of ‘ In Memoriam’; and, chiefest of all, Rrowning, whose “ Grow old along

with mo, the best is yet to be,” is the keynote of all his singing. Hardly inferior to these is Francis Thompson. A competent critic has testified recently that he “ was the man of genius who first gave body and a language to a feeling of my own which I had been shy to confess, that the great joy is not in a thing itself, but in the anticipation of it; that with the actual tasting and experience there is always a slight fail in the temperature of our spirit.” That is one of the perils that beset the culture of anticipation, Jfc so often falls short of the reality as they'conceived it that they arc tempted to shut down on the whole thing. They are tempted to say, when asked to be interested or enthusiastic about this or that coming event: “Excuse me, I have seen the show before.” That is the sort of attitude one finds in so much of our modern literature, especially imaginative literature, novels, and poetry. Life and the world are presented as if they were like Boh Sawyer’s drawers: “Half of them arc dummies, my dear boy, and the other half don’t open.” Dante has drawn a picture for us of this class of people and their punishment in the Fifth Circle of Hell. They are the gloomy and the unhoping. They lived in an exhausted world; nothing worth their attention happened in it; they dropped the habit of expectancy, ami were incapable of hope. “Oh, my Lord Arthur!” they said (for they are of no particular century or language)— Oh, my Lord Arthur! whither shall .1 go? , Where shall i hide my lorehead and my eyes ? For now ! know the true old times are dead, When every morning brought a noble chance, And every chance brought out a noble knight. Books and people of that sort, and they arc as common as clay in these days, ought to be avoided if we are to retain and enrich our asset of anticipation.

But the greatest of all literature for the culture of anticipation is the Bible, and specially the New Testament. There have been many reasons urged for Bible reading; but it is not often advocated on this ground. There is certainly no other hook that so insists on anticipation, and supplies a basis and inspiration for it. When wo open its doors it is like the bracing breath of a spring .morning after tho stifling atmosphere that pervades so much of our modern poetry and romance. Indeed, it may bo argued, not without show oi reason, that this is tho cause of it. Tho faith and hope and expectancy that tilled the souls of tho Biblical writers are no longer with us in anything like the same degree. They had their times of despondency. Their conditions were such as to produce these. But they could not put them down, any more

Than loud south-westerns, rolling ridge on ridge, 'The buoy that rides at sea and dips and springs

For ever. A critic has said of John Masefield, one of tho most robust of modern singers, that Ids poetry carries no cargoes of wonder. Whether or not this bo true of him, it certainly is true ot most of our modern poets and novelists. But when wo open the pages of the Now Testament wo find ourselves in presence ot wonders without end—high as the heavens, deep as tho bottomless pit.- ■ One supreme anticipation covered the whole horizon of tho early Christians. It held them spellbound with awe and expectation. It was not realised as they hoped. It died out in apparent disillusion. But every now and again, all down the ages, tho same anticipation has kept the church watchful and on the alert. “Maranatha: the Lord will come.”. Thus the early Christians used to salute each other, and though they died not having received the promises, that same faith, in one form or another, must be the muster light of all our seeing. For what docs it mean? What is the ultimate ground of this faith? It is the conviction that in onr world we have not to do with an absentee God. Every morning brings not only a noble chance, but the divine follow-worker of those who reverently expect Him. Though it tarries it will come. To abandon that faith is to bereave the world of hope, and to infect men with the sullen gloom that finds its level in the Stygian slime.