Once on the heights, if you can reach them, you might see the world as it is.

 
 

Here's an extremely obscure early Chambers work published by F. Tennyson Neely.  I recently discovered it in primary sources and thought it was completely undocumented since his death, but it turns out the magnificent Miskatonic University Department of Literature got there before me.  

I won't keep you in suspense:  it's not a revelatory new weird novel.  It's just the introduction to Neely's 1895 edition of Tolstoy's Master and Man.  But still, it's an early undiscovered work that gives us a small window into the man in his early career, when he was still writing what he loved, before the obligation of the commercially successful stuff wore him down.  There may be a hint of rebuke to the critics who hated The King in Yellow mixed in there as well.  

Chambers' first book was In the Quarter in 1894, published by Neely.  In 1895 he had three published books:  TKiY and this introduction, both by Neely, and The Red Republic for Putnam.  

TKiY was published in March.  

The only primary sources I have for this introduction are The Fourth Estate (NYC), June 6, 1895; the News of Chicago, June 11, 1895; and the weekly Boston Ideas, June 15, 1895.  

The November 9, 1895 New York Times says the Putnam brothers "are about to publish" The Red Republic.  

So it looks like this is Chambers' third publication in book form, and possibly his last collaboration with Neely, whom he was glad to get away from.  

Again, it's only TKiY-adjacent, but it's a Chambers work almost nobody has read in probably over a century.  So here it is, for anybody interested:  

CLIMB the heights, stand face to face  with the master, learn to see--then, before the eyes have lost their focus, turn and look down on the world below. Ah! how small we all are--we busy little people swarming among the fields of art! We work hard and the fields are fertile; why should we wish to climb the heights where the soil, they say, is barren? Ask us and we answer: 

"Here we all are masters in our little fields; why should we seek the heights above the world? Nobody could see us up there."

"What matters that?" you say.  "Once on the heights, if you can reach them, you might see the world as it is."

"And neither be seen nor understood?  Oh, no, here the world sees us, and we are very happy, each in his little field."

The years pass and few leave the fields to seek the heights, and of those few how few arrive? Count them, the living with the dead: Bizet, Wagner, Tolstoi, Zola, Maeterlinck, Poe, Browning, Puvis de Chavannes, Regnault, Fortuny, Innis, et puis? [and then?]  Oh! there are more--some as yet invisible, some still climbing. The world will always stand gaping at the climbers.  Each worker in his little field will wag his head and stare; but when at last the climber rises above the cackle from the fields, it is only by that cackling that the world knows that the climber is above it. For the world can no longer see him nor comprehend his words, but the world will say it can, as long as the agitated colonies cackle among the fields.

If the masters from their heights can see and understand us, we also must rise before we can understand them. We must leave the highroads and well-trodden by-paths among the fields so often tilled; we must close our ears to the cackling, and the echoing bray of the world; we must toil upward to the side of the master, and then try to look out over the world from his heights and with his eyes.

"No! no!" cries a little worker in the fields, "the world doesn't look like that to me!"

But the little worker can only see as far as the wall which separates his acre from the acre of his little neighbor. If you tell him this, he may revile you, or he may stoop and look through a chink into his neighbor's yard. In the latter event he will cry triumphantly, "I was right! All the world is like my little acre!" forgetting that this neighbor also built a wall.

The world knows that Tolstoi is a master, but do you imagine the world would know it were it not for the cackling in the fields? Oh, the world is braying loudly and its ears are very long and keen! It is too heavy, however, to climb, but its weight can crush and mangle. Bizet died of a broken heart--but he died on the heights; and after he was dead, crushed by the heavy world, the tardy tumult from the fields set the world braying; but the few who understood Bizet are not very grateful to the world.

"Tout écrevain, [sic] dans quelque sphère que s'exerce son esprit, doit avoir pour objet principal d'être utile!" [Every writer, whatever the sphere in which his mind operates, must have as his principal aim to be useful!] thunders good old Hugo.

Has Tolstoi conformed to this? Confirmed! He learned it on the heights and he teaches it.  

Commerson has given us a creed: "Il faut être sans cesse aux barricades contre ses passions, et toujours au congrès de la paix avec sa conscience." [One must constantly man the barricades against his passions, and always make peace with his conscience.] Is it Commerson or Tolstoi who speaks? "Always at peace with one's conscience." That is Tolstoi: and as Gerfaut says: "La conscience? C'est tout simplement le bon sens de l'âme." [The conscience? It's simply common sense of the soul.]  That is Tolstoi's great and simple creed, and we understand and love him for it. And we love him for his truth and his pity and his goodness--and his splendid sincerity, his manliness--and because of all these, for his great art.  For these are the component parts of art, and art, without each one of them, is incomplete.  Dissect it as you dissect light! Hold up to it the prism of research, and as the colors of the spectrum are disclosed, so shall it be disclosed to you that truth, goodness, sincerity, manliness, and pity, which is charity, together form the eternal light of the world, true art. Yes, it is the eternal light, the "great white light " of our world, and if we will climb the heights we shall find the masters standing in the glare, almost alone. They and they only can teach our eyes to see the world, lighted by this "great white light," and when we have seen and understood, we love the men who teach us, and call them "masters."  Tolstoi can teach, and he will, for it is his creed. He is a master and therefore good. Good men are not rare, but, "en ce monde il faut être un peu trop bon pour l'être assez." [In this world, one must be a little too good to be good enough.]  

ROBERT W. CHAMBERS.