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Title: The Dance of Life

Author: Havelock Ellis

Release date: June 27, 2021 [eBook #65714]

Language: English

Credits: Tim Lindell, David King, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DANCE OF LIFE ***




                           THE DANCE OF LIFE




                           THE DANCE OF LIFE

                                   BY
                             HAVELOCK ELLIS

         AUTHOR OF “IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS,” “AFFIRMATIONS,”
                       “ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME,” ETC.

                          BOSTON AND NEW YORK
                        HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
                     The Riverside Press Cambridge




    COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY HAVELOCK ELLIS

    ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


    SECOND IMPRESSION, JUNE, 1923
    THIRD IMPRESSION, AUGUST, 1923
    FOURTH IMPRESSION, SEPTEMBER, 1923
    FIFTH IMPRESSION, OCTOBER, 1923
    SIXTH IMPRESSION, NOVEMBER, 1923
    SEVENTH IMPRESSION, DECEMBER, 1923
    EIGHTH IMPRESSION, FEBRUARY, 1924
    NINTH IMPRESSION, JULY, 1924
    TENTH IMPRESSION, SEPTEMBER, 1924
    ELEVENTH IMPRESSION, OCTOBER, 1924
    TWELFTH IMPRESSION, DECEMBER, 1924


    The Riverside Press
    CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
    PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.




                                PREFACE


THIS book was planned many years ago. As to the idea running through it,
I cannot say when that arose. My feeling is, it was born with me. On
reflection, indeed, it seems possible the seeds fell imperceptibly in
youth—from F. A. Lange, maybe, and other sources—to germinate unseen in
a congenial soil. However that may be, the idea underlies much that I
have written. Even the present book began to be written, and to be
published in a preliminary form, more than fifteen years ago. Perhaps I
may be allowed to seek consolation for my slowness, however vainly, in
the saying of Rodin that “slowness is beauty,” and certainly it is the
slowest dances that have been to me most beautiful to see, while, in the
dance of life, the achievement of a civilisation in beauty seems to be
inversely to the rapidity of its pace.

Moreover, the book remains incomplete, not merely in the sense that I
would desire still to be changing and adding to each chapter, but even
incomplete by the absence of many chapters for which I had gathered
material, and twenty years ago should have been surprised to find
missing. For there are many arts, not among those we conventionally call
“fine,” which seem to me fundamental for living. But now I put forth the
book as it stands, deliberately, without remorse, well content so to do.

Once that would not have been possible. A book must be completed as it
had been originally planned, finished, rounded, polished. As a man grows
older his ideals change. Thoroughness is often an admirable ideal. But
it is an ideal to be adopted with discrimination, having due reference
to the nature of the work in hand. An artist, it seems to me now, has
not always to finish his work in every detail; by not doing so he may
succeed in making the spectator his co-worker, and put into his hands
the tool to carry on the work which, as it lies before him, beneath its
veil of yet partly unworked material, still stretches into infinity.
Where there is most labour there is not always most life, and by doing
less, provided only he has known how to do well, the artist may achieve
more.

He will not, I hope, achieve complete consistency. In fact a part of the
method of such a book as this, written over a long period of years, is
to reveal a continual slight inconsistency. That is not an evil, but
rather the avoidance of an evil. We cannot remain consistent with the
world save by growing inconsistent with our own past selves. The man who
consistently—as he fondly supposes “logically”—clings to an unchanging
opinion is suspended from a hook which has ceased to exist. “I thought
it was she, and she thought it was me, and when we come near it weren’t
neither one of us”—that metaphysical statement holds, with a touch of
exaggeration, a truth we must always bear in mind concerning the
relation of subject and object. They can neither of them possess
consistency; they have both changed before they come up with one
another. Not that such inconsistency is a random flux or a shallow
opportunism. We change, and the world changes, in accordance with the
underlying organisation, and inconsistency, so conditioned by truth to
the whole, becomes the higher consistency of life. I am therefore able
to recognise and accept the fact that, again and again in this book, I
have come up against what, superficially regarded, seemed to be the same
fact, and each time have brought back a slightly different report, for
it had changed and I had changed. The world is various, of infinite
iridescent aspect, and until I attain to a correspondingly infinite
variety of statement I remain far from anything that could in any sense
be described as “truth.” We only see a great opal that never looks the
same this time as when we looked last time. “He never painted to-day
quite the same as he had painted yesterday,” Elie Faure says of Renoir,
and it seems to me natural and right that it should have been so. I have
never seen the same world twice. That, indeed, is but to repeat the
Heraclitean saying—an imperfect saying, for it is only the half of the
larger, more modern synthesis I have already quoted—that no man bathes
twice in the same stream. Yet—and this opposing fact is fully as
significant—we really have to accept a continuous stream as constituted
in our minds; it flows in the same direction; it coheres in what is more
or less the same shape. Much the same may be said of the ever-changing
bather whom the stream receives. So that, after all, there is not only
variety, but also unity. The diversity of the Many is balanced by the
stability of the One. That is why life must always be a dance, for that
is what a dance is: perpetual slightly varied movements which are yet
always held true to the shape of the whole.

We verge on philosophy. The whole of this book is on the threshold of
philosophy. I hasten to add that it remains there. No dogmas are here
set forth to claim any general validity. Not that even the technical
philosopher always cares to make that claim. Mr. F. H. Bradley, one of
the most influential of modern English philosophers, who wrote at the
outset of his career, “On all questions, if you push me far enough, at
present I end in doubts and perplexities,” still says, forty years
later, that if asked to define his principles rigidly, “I become
puzzled.” For even a cheese-mite, one imagines, could only with
difficulty attain an adequate metaphysical conception of a cheese, and
how much more difficult the task is for Man, whose everyday intelligence
seems to move on a plane so much like that of a cheese-mite and yet has
so vastly more complex a web of phenomena to synthetise.

It is clear how hesitant and tentative must be the attitude of one who,
having found his life-work elsewhere than in the field of technical
philosophy, may incidentally feel the need, even if only playfully, to
speculate concerning his function and place in the universe. Such
speculation is merely the instinctive impulse of the ordinary person to
seek the wider implications bound up with his own little activities. It
is philosophy only in the simple sense in which the Greeks understood
philosophy, merely a philosophy of life, of one’s own life, in the wide
world. The technical philosopher does something quite different when he
passes over the threshold and shuts himself up in his study—

                        “Veux-tu découvrir le monde,
                        Ferme tes yeux, Rosemonde”—

and emerges with great tomes that are hard to buy, hard to read, and,
let us be sure, hard to write. But of Socrates, as of the English
philosopher Falstaff, we are not told that he wrote anything.

So that if it may seem to some that this book reveals the expansive
influence of that great classico-mathematical Renaissance in which it is
our high privilege to live, and that they find here “relativity” applied
to life, I am not so sure. It sometimes seems to me that, in the first
place, we, the common herd, mould the great movements of our age, and
only in the second place do they mould us. I think it was so even in the
great earlier classico-mathematical Renaissance. We associate it with
Descartes. But Descartes could have effected nothing if an innumerable
crowd in many fields had not created the atmosphere by which he was
enabled to breathe the breath of life. We may here profitably bear in
mind all that Spengler has shown concerning the unity of spirit
underlying the most diverse elements in an age’s productivity. Roger
Bacon had in him the genius to create such a Renaissance three centuries
earlier; there was no atmosphere for him to live in and he was stifled.
But Malherbe, who worshipped Number and Measure as devoutly as
Descartes, was born half a century before him. That silent, colossal,
ferocious Norman—vividly brought before us by Tallement des Réaux, to
whom, rather than to Saint-Simon, we owe the real picture of
seventeenth-century France—was possessed by the genius of destruction,
for he had the natural instinct of the Viking, and he swept all the
lovely Romantic spirit of old France so completely away that it has
scarcely ever revived since until the days of Verlaine. But he had the
Norman classico-mathematical architectonic spirit—he might have said,
like Descartes, as truly as it ever can be said in literature, _Omnia
apud me mathematica fiunt_—and he introduced into the world a new rule
of Order. Given a Malherbe, a Descartes could hardly fail to follow, a
French Academy must come into existence almost at the same time as the
“Discours de la Méthode,” and Le Nôtre must already be drawing the
geometrical designs of the gardens of Versailles. Descartes, it should
be remembered, could not have worked without support; he was a man of
timid and yielding character, though he had once been a soldier, not of
the heroic temper of Roger Bacon. If Descartes could have been put back
into Roger Bacon’s place, he would have thought many of Bacon’s
thoughts. But we should never have known it. He nervously burnt one of
his works when he heard of Galileo’s condemnation, and it was fortunate
that the Church was slow to recognise how terrible a Bolshevist had
entered the spiritual world with this man, and never realised that his
books must be placed on the Index until he was already dead.

So it is to-day. We, too, witness a classico-mathematical Renaissance.
It is bringing us a new vision of the universe, but also a new vision of
human life. That is why it is necessary to insist upon life as a dance.
This is not a mere metaphor. The dance is the rule of number and of
rhythm and of measure and of order, of the controlling influence of
form, of the subordination of the parts to the whole. That is what a
dance is. And these same properties also make up the classic spirit, not
only in life, but, still more clearly and definitely, in the universe
itself. We are strictly correct when we regard not only life but the
universe as a dance. For the universe is made up of a certain number of
elements, less than a hundred, and the “periodic law” of these elements
is metrical. They are ranged, that is to say, not haphazard, not in
groups, but by number, and those of like quality appear at fixed and
regular intervals. Thus our world is, even fundamentally, a dance, a
single metrical stanza in a poem which will be for ever hidden from us,
except in so far as the philosophers, who are to-day even here applying
the methods of mathematics, may believe that they have imparted to it
the character of objective knowledge.

I call this movement of to-day, as that of the seventeenth century,
classico-mathematical. And I regard the dance (without prejudice to a
distinction made later in this volume) as essentially its symbol. This
is not to belittle the Romantic elements of the world, which are equally
of its essence. But the vast exuberant energies and immeasurable
possibilities of the first day may perhaps be best estimated when we
have reached their final outcome on the sixth day of creation.

However that may be, the analogy of the two historical periods in
question remains, and I believe that we may consider it holds good to
the extent that the strictly mathematical elements of the later period
are not the earliest to appear, but that we are in the presence of a
process that has been in subtle movement in many fields for half a
century. If it is significant that Descartes appeared a few years after
Malherbe, it is equally significant that Einstein was immediately
preceded by the Russian ballet. We gaze in admiration at the artist who
sits at the organ, but we have been blowing the bellows; and the great
performer’s music would have been inaudible had it not been for us.

This is the spirit in which I have written. We are all engaged—not
merely one or two prominent persons here and there—in creating the
spiritual world. I have never written but with the thought that the
reader, even though he may not know it, is already on my side. Only so
could I write with that sincerity and simplicity without which it would
not seem to me worth while to write at all. That may be seen in the
saying which I set on the forefront of my earliest book, “The New
Spirit”: he who carries farthest his most intimate feelings is simply
the first in file of a great number of other men, and one becomes
typical by being to the utmost degree one’s self. That saying I chose
with much deliberation and complete conviction because it went to the
root of my book. On the surface it obviously referred to the great
figures I was there concerned with, representing what I regarded—by no
means in the poor sense of mere modernity—as the New Spirit in life.
They had all gone to the depths of their own souls and thence brought to
the surface and expressed—audaciously or beautifully, pungently or
poignantly—intimate impulses and emotions which, shocking as they may
have seemed at the time, are now seen to be those of an innumerable
company of their fellow men and women. But it was also a book of
personal affirmations. Beneath the obvious meaning of that motto on the
title-page lay the more private meaning that I was myself setting forth
secret impulses which might some day be found to express the emotions
also of others. In the thirty-five years that have since passed, the
saying has often recurred to my mind, and if I have sought in vain to
make it mine I find no adequate justification for the work of my life.

And now, as I said at the outset, I am even prepared to think that that
is the function of all books that are real books. There are other
classes of so-called books: there is the class of history books and the
class of forensic books, that is to say, the books of facts and the
books of argument. No one would wish to belittle either kind. But when
we think of a book proper, in the sense that a Bible means a book, we
mean more than this. We mean, that is to say, a revelation of something
that had remained latent, unconscious, perhaps even more or less
intentionally repressed, within the writer’s own soul, which is,
ultimately, the soul of mankind. These books are apt to repel; nothing,
indeed, is so likely to shock us at first as the manifest revelation of
ourselves. Therefore, such books may have to knock again and again at
the closed door of our hearts. “Who is there?” we carelessly cry, and we
cannot open the door; we bid the importunate stranger, whatever he may
be, to go away; until, as in the apologue of the Persian mystic, at last
we seem to hear the voice outside saying: “It is thyself.”

H. E.




                                CONTENTS


I. INTRODUCTION 1

II. THE ART OF DANCING 36

III. THE ART OF THINKING 68

IV. THE ART OF WRITING 141

V. THE ART OF RELIGION 191

VI. THE ART OF MORALS 244

VII. CONCLUSION 285

INDEX 359




                               CHAPTER I
                              INTRODUCTION


                                   I


IT has always been difficult for Man to realise that his life is all an
art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For
that is always how he has more or less acted it. At the beginning,
indeed, the primitive philosopher whose business it was to account for
the origin of things usually came to the conclusion that the whole
universe was a work of art, created by some Supreme Artist, in the way
of artists, out of material that was practically nothing, even out of
his own excretions, a method which, as children sometimes instinctively
feel, is a kind of creative art. The most familiar to us of these
primitive philosophical statements—and really a statement that is as
typical as any—is that of the Hebrews in the first chapter of their Book
of Genesis. We read there how the whole cosmos was fashioned out of
nothing, in a measurable period of time by the art of one Jehovah, who
proceeded methodically by first forming it in the rough, and gradually
working in the details, the finest and most delicate last, just as a
sculptor might fashion a statue. We may find many statements of the like
kind even as far away as the Pacific.[1] And—also even at the same
distance—the artist and the craftsman, who resembled the divine creator
of the world by making the most beautiful and useful things for Mankind,
himself also partook of the same divine nature. Thus, in Samoa, as also
in Tonga, the carpenter, who built canoes, occupied a high and almost
sacred position, approaching that of the priest. Even among ourselves,
with our Roman traditions, the name Pontiff, or Bridge-Builder, remains
that of an imposing and hieratic personage.

But that is only the primitive view of the world. When Man developed,
when he became more scientific and more moralistic, however much his
practice remained essentially that of the artist, his conception became
much less so. He was learning to discover the mystery of measurement; he
was approaching the beginnings of geometry and mathematics; he was at
the same time becoming warlike. So he saw things in straight lines, more
rigidly; he formulated laws and commandments. It was, Einstein assures
us, the right way. But it was, at all events in the first place, most
unfavourable to the view of life as an art. It remains so even to-day.

Yet there are always some who, deliberately or by instinct, have
perceived the immense significance in life of the conception of art.
That is especially so as regards the finest thinkers of the two
countries which, so far as we may divine,—however difficult it may here
be to speak positively and by demonstration,—have had the finest
civilisations, China and Greece. The wisest and most recognisably
greatest practical philosophers of both these lands have believed that
the whole of life, even government, is an art of definitely like kind
with the other arts, such as that of music or the dance. We may, for
instance, recall to memory one of the most typical of Greeks. Of
Protagoras, calumniated by Plato,—though, it is interesting to observe
that Plato’s own transcendental doctrine of Ideas has been regarded as
an effort to escape from the solvent influence of Protagoras’ logic,—it
is possible for the modern historian of philosophy to say that “the
greatness of this man can scarcely be measured.” It was with measurement
that his most famous saying was concerned: “Man is the measure of all
things, of those which exist and of those which have no existence.” It
was by his insistence on Man as the active creator of life and
knowledge, the artist of the world, moulding it to his own measure, that
Protagoras is interesting to us to-day. He recognised that there are no
absolute criteria by which to judge actions. He was the father of
relativism and of phenomenalism, probably the initiator of the modern
doctrine that the definitions of geometry are only approximately true
abstractions from empirical experiences. We need not, and probably
should not, suppose that in undermining dogmatism he was setting up an
individual subjectivism. It was the function of Man in the world, rather
than of the individual, that he had in mind when he enunciated his great
principle, and it was with the reduction of human activity and conduct
to art that he was mainly concerned. His projects for the art of living
began with speech, and he was a pioneer in the arts of language, the
initiator of modern grammar. He wrote treatises on many special arts, as
well as the general treatise “On the Art” among the pseudo-Hippocratic
writings,—if we may with Gomperz attribute it to him,—which embodies the
spirit of modern positive science.[2]

Hippias, the philosopher of Elis, a contemporary of Protagoras, and like
him commonly classed among the “Sophists,” cultivated the largest ideal
of life as an art which embraced all arts, common to all mankind as a
fellowship of brothers, and at one with natural law which transcends the
convention of human laws. Plato made fun of him, and that was not hard
to do, for a philosopher who conceived the art of living as so large
could not possibly at every point adequately play at it. But at this
distance it is his ideal that mainly concerns us, and he really was
highly accomplished, even a pioneer, in many of the multifarious
activities he undertook. He was a remarkable mathematician; he was an
astronomer and geometer; he was a copious poet in the most diverse
modes, and, moreover, wrote on phonetics, rhythm, music, and mnemonics;
he discussed the theories of sculpture and painting; he was both
mythologist and ethnologist, as well as a student of chronology; he had
mastered many of the artistic crafts. On one occasion, it is said, he
appeared at the Olympic gathering in garments which, from the sandals on
his feet to the girdle round his waist and the rings on his fingers, had
been made by his own hands. Such a being of kaleidoscopic versatility,
Gomperz remarks, we call contemptuously a Jack-of-all-trades. We believe
in subordinating a man to his work. But other ages have judged
differently. The fellow citizens of Hippias thought him worthy to be
their ambassador to the Peloponnesus. In another age of immense human
activity, the Renaissance, the vast-ranging energies of Leo Alberti were
honoured, and in yet a later like age, Diderot—Pantophile as Voltaire
called him—displayed a like fiery energy of wide-ranging interests,
although it was no longer possible to attain the same level of
wide-ranging accomplishment. Of course the work of Hippias was of
unequal value, but some of it was of firm quality and he shrank from no
labour. He seems to have possessed a gracious modesty, quite unlike the
conceited pomposity Plato was pleased to attribute to him. He attached
more importance than was common among the Greeks to devotion to truth,
and he was cosmopolitan in spirit. He was famous for his distinction
between Convention and Nature, and Plato put into his mouth the words:
“All of you who are here present I reckon to be kinsmen and friends and
fellow citizens, and by nature, not by law; for by nature like is akin
to like, whereas law is the tyrant of mankind, and often compels us to
do many things that are against nature.” Hippias was in the line of
those whose supreme ideal is totality of existence. Ulysses, as Benn
remarks, was in Greek myth the representative of the ideal, and its
supreme representative in real life has in modern times been Goethe.[3]


                                   II


BUT, in actual fact, is life essentially an art? Let us look at the
matter more closely, and see what life is like, as people have lived it.
This is the more necessary to do since, to-day at all events, there are
simple-minded people—well-meaning honest people whom we should not
ignore—who pooh-pooh such an idea. They point to the eccentric
individuals in our Western civilisation who make a little idol they call
“Art,” and fall down and worship it, sing incomprehensible chants in its
honour, and spend most of their time in pouring contempt on the people
who refuse to recognise that this worship of “Art” is the one thing
needed for what they may or may not call the “moral uplift” of the age
they live in. We must avoid the error of the good simple-minded folk in
whose eyes these “Arty” people loom so large. They are not large, they
are merely the morbid symptoms of a social disease; they are the
fantastic reaction of a society which as a whole has ceased to move
along the true course of any real and living art. For that has nothing
to do with the eccentricities of a small religious sect worshipping in a
Little Bethel; it is the large movement of the common life of a
community, indeed simply the outward and visible form of that life.

Thus the whole conception of art has been so narrowed and so debased
among us that, on the one hand, the use of the word in its large and
natural sense seems either unintelligible or eccentric, while, on the
other hand, even if accepted, it still remains so unfamiliar that its
immense significance for our whole vision of life in the world is
scarcely at first seen. This is not altogether due to our natural
obtusity, or to the absence of a due elimination of subnormal stocks
among us, however much we may be pleased to attribute to that dysgenic
factor. It seems largely inevitable. That is to say that, so far as we
in our modern civilisation are concerned, it is the outcome of the
social process of two thousand years, the result of the breakup of the
classic tradition of thought into various parts which under post-classic
influences have been pursued separately.[4] Religion or the desire for
the salvation of our souls, “Art” or the desire for beautification,
Science or the search for the reasons of things—these conations of the
mind, which are really three aspects of the same profound impulse, have
been allowed to furrow each its own narrow separate channel, in
alienation from the others, and so they have all been impeded in their
greater function of fertilising life.

It is interesting to observe, I may note in passing, how totally new an
aspect a phenomenon may take on when transformed from some other channel
into that of art. We may take, for instance, that remarkable phenomenon
called Napoleon, as impressive an individualistic manifestation as we
could well find in human history during recent centuries, and consider
two contemporary, almost simultaneous, estimates of it. A distinguished
English writer, Mr. H. G. Wells, in a notable and even famous book, his
“Outline of History,” sets down a judgment of Napoleon throughout a
whole chapter. Now Mr. Wells moves in the ethico-religious channel. He
wakes up every morning, it is said, with a rule for the guidance of
life; some of his critics say that it is every morning a new rule, and
others that the rule is neither ethical nor religious; but we are here
concerned only with the channel and not with the direction of the
stream. In the “Outline” Mr. Wells pronounces his ethico-religious
anathema of Napoleon, “this dark little archaic personage, hard,
compact, capable, unscrupulous, imitative, and neatly vulgar.” The
“archaic”—the old-fashioned, outworn—element attributed to Napoleon, is
accentuated again later, for Mr. Wells has an extremely low opinion
(hardly justifiable, one may remark in passing) of primitive man.
Napoleon was “a reminder of ancient evils, a thing like the bacterium of
some pestilence”; “the figure he makes in history is one of almost
incredible self-conceit, of vanity, greed, and cunning, of callous
contempt and disregard of all who trusted him.” There is no figure, Mr.
Wells asserts, so completely antithetical to the figure of Jesus of
Nazareth. He was “a scoundrel, bright and complete.”

There is no occasion to question this condemnation when we place
ourselves in the channel along which Mr. Wells moves; it is probably
inevitable; we may even accept it heartily. Yet, however right along
that line, that is not the only line in which we may move. Moreover—and
this is the point which concerns us—it is possible to enter a sphere in
which no such merely negative, condemnatory, and dissatisfying a
conclusion need be reached. For obviously it is dissatisfying. It is not
finally acceptable that so supreme a protagonist of humanity, acclaimed
by millions, of whom many gladly died for him, and still occupying so
large and glorious a place in the human imagination, should be dismissed
in the end as merely an unmitigated scoundrel. For so to condemn him is
to condemn Man who made him what he was. He must have answered some
lyric cry in the human heart. That other sphere in which Napoleon wears
a different aspect is the sphere of art in the larger and fundamental
sense. Élie Faure, a French critic, an excellent historian of art in the
ordinary sense, is able also to grasp art in the larger sense because he
is not only a man of letters but of science, a man with medical training
and experience, who has lived in the open world, not, as the critic of
literature and art so often appears to be, a man living in a damp
cellar. Just after Wells issued his “Outline,” Élie Faure, who probably
knew nothing about it since he reads no English, published a book on
Napoleon which some may consider the most remarkable book on that
subject they have ever come across. For to Faure Napoleon is a great
lyric artist.

It is hard not to believe that Faure had Wells’s chapter on Napoleon
open before him, he speaks so much to the point. He entitled the first
chapter of his “Napoléon” “Jesus and He,” and at once pierces to what
Wells, too, had perceived to be the core of the matter in hand: “From
the point of view of morality he is not to be defended and is even
incomprehensible. In fact he violates law, he kills, he sows vengeance
and death. But also he dictates law, he tracks and crushes crime, he
establishes order everywhere. He is an assassin. He is also a judge. In
the ranks he would deserve the rope. At the summit he is pure,
distributing recompense and punishment with a firm hand. He is a monster
with two faces, like all of us perhaps, in any case like God, for those
who have praised Napoleon and those who have blamed him have alike not
understood that the Devil is the other face of God.” From the moral
point of view, Faure says (just as Wells had said), Napoleon is
Antichrist. But from this standpoint of art, all grows clear. He is a
poet of action, as Jesus was, and like him he stands apart. These two,
and these two alone among the world’s supremely great men of whom we
have any definite knowledge, “acted out their dream instead of dreaming
their action.” It is possible that Napoleon himself was able to estimate
the moral value of that acted dream. As he once stood before the grave
of Rousseau, he observed: “It would have been better for the repose of
France if that man and I had never existed.” Yet we cannot be sure. “Is
not repose the death of the world?” asks Faure. “Had not Rousseau and
Napoleon precisely the mission of troubling that repose? In another of
the profound and almost impersonal sayings that sometimes fell from his
lips, Napoleon observed with a still deeper intuition of his own
function in the world: “I love power. But it is as an artist that I love
it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out of it sounds
and chords and harmonies. I love it as an artist.” As an artist! These
words were the inspiration of this finely illuminating study of
Napoleon, which, while free from all desire to defend or admire, yet
seems to explain Napoleon, in the larger sense to justify his right to a
place in the human story, so imparting a final satisfaction which Wells,
we feel, could he have escaped from the bonds of the narrow conception
of life that bound him, had in him the spirit and the intelligence also
to bestow upon us.

But it is time to turn from this aside. It is always possible to dispute
about individuals, even when so happy an illustration chances to come
before us. We are not here concerned with exceptional persons, but with
the interpretation of general and normal human civilisations.


                                  III


I TAKE, almost at random, the example of a primitive people. There are
many others that would do as well or better. But this happens to come to
hand, and it has the advantage not only of being a primitive people, but
one living on an island, so possessing until lately its own
little-impaired indigenous culture, as far as possible remote in space
from our own; the record also has been made, as carefully and as
impartially as one can well expect, by a missionary’s wife who speaks
from a knowledge covering over twenty years.[5] It is almost needless to
add that she is as little concerned with any theory of the art of life
as the people she is describing.

The Loyalty Islands lie to the east of New Caledonia, and have belonged
to France for more than half a century. They are thus situated in much
the same latitude as Egypt is in the Northern hemisphere, but with a
climate tempered by the ocean. It is with the Island of Lifu that we are
mainly concerned. There are no streams or mountains in this island,
though a ridge of high rocks with large and beautiful caves contains
stalactites and stalagmites and deep pools of fresh water; these pools,
before the coming of the Christians, were the abode of the spirits of
the departed, and therefore greatly reverenced. A dying man would say to
his friends: “I will meet you all again in the caves where the
stalactites are.”

The Loyalty Islanders, who are of average European stature, are a
handsome race, except for their thick lips and dilated nostrils, which,
however, are much less pronounced than among African negroes. They have
soft large brown eyes, wavy black hair, white teeth, and rich brown skin
of varying depth. Each tribe has its own well-defined territory and its
own chief. Although possessing high moral qualities, they are a
laughter-loving people, and neither their climate nor their mode of life
demands prolonged hard labour, but they can work as well as the average
Briton, if need be, for several consecutive days, and, when the need is
over, lounge or ramble, sleep or talk. The basis of their culture—and
that is doubtless the significant fact for us—is artistic. Every one
learned music, dancing, and song. Therefore it is natural for them to
regard rhythm and grace in all the actions of life, and almost a matter
of instinct to cultivate beauty in all social relationships. Men and
boys spent much time in tattooing and polishing their brown skins, in
dyeing and dressing their long wavy hair (golden locks, as much admired
as they always have been in Europe, being obtained by the use of lime),
and in anointing their bodies. These occupations were, of course,
confined to the men, for man is naturally the ornamental sex and woman
the useful sex. The women gave no attention to their hair, except to
keep it short. It was the men also who used oils and perfumes, not the
women, who, however, wore bracelets above the elbow and beautiful long
strings of jade beads. No clothing is worn until the age of twenty-five
or thirty, and then all dress alike, except that chiefs fasten the
girdle differently and wear more elaborate ornaments. These people have
sweet and musical voices and they cultivate them. They are good at
learning languages and they are great orators. The Lifuan language is
soft and liquid, one word running into another pleasantly to the ear,
and it is so expressive that one may sometimes understand the meaning by
the sound. In one of these islands, Uvea, so great is the eloquence of
the people that they employ oratory to catch fish, whom indeed they
regard in their legends as half human, and it is believed that a shoal
of fish, when thus politely plied with compliments from a canoe, will
eventually, and quite spontaneously, beach themselves spellbound.

For a primitive people the art of life is necessarily of large part
concerned with eating. It is recognised that no one can go hungry when
his neighbour has food, so no one was called upon to make any great
demonstration of gratitude on receiving a gift. Help rendered to another
was help to one’s self, if it contributed to the common weal, and what I
do for you to-day you will do for me to-morrow. There was implicit
trust, and goods were left about without fear of theft, which was rare
and punishable by death. It was not theft, however, if, when the owner
was looking, one took an article one wanted. To tell a lie, also, with
intent to deceive, was a serious offence, though to tell a lie when one
was afraid to speak the truth was excusable. The Lifuans are fond of
food, but much etiquette is practised in eating. The food must be
conveyed to the mouth gracefully, daintily, leisurely. Every one helped
himself to the food immediately in front of him, without hurry, without
reaching out for dainty morsels (which were often offered to women), for
every one looked after his neighbour, and every one naturally felt that
he was his brother’s keeper. So it was usual to invite passers-by
cordially to share in the repast. “In the matter of food and eating,”
Mrs. Hadfield adds, “they might put many of our countrymen to shame.”
Not only must one never eat quickly, or notice dainties that are not
near one, but it would be indelicate to eat in the presence of people
who are not themselves eating. One must always share, however small
one’s portion, and one must do so pleasantly; one must accept also what
is offered, but slowly, reluctantly; having accepted it, you may, if you
like, openly pass it on to some one else. In old days the Lifuans were,
occasionally, cannibals, not, it would seem, either from necessity or
any ritual reason, but because, like some peoples elsewhere, they liked
it, having, indeed, at times, a kind of craving for animal food. If a
man had twenty or thirty wives and a large family, it would be quite
correct if, now and then, he cooked one of his own children, although
presumably he might prefer that some one else’s child was chosen. The
child would be cooked whole, wrapped in banana or coconut leaves. The
social inconveniences of this practice have now been recognised. But
they still feel the utmost respect and reverence for the dead and fail
to find anything offensive or repulsive in a corpse. “Why should there
be, seeing it was once our food?” Nor have they any fear of death. To
vermin they seem to have little objection, but otherwise they have a
strong love of cleanliness. The idea of using manure in agricultural
operations seems to them disgusting, and they never do use it. “The sea
was the public playground.” Mothers take their little ones for sea-baths
long before they can walk, and small children learn to swim as they
learn to walk, without teaching. With their reverence for death is
associated a reverence for old age. “Old age is a term of respect, and
every one is pleased to be taken for older than he is since old age is
honoured.” Still, regard for others was general—not confined to the
aged. In the church nowadays the lepers are seated on a separate bench,
and when the bench is occupied by a leper healthy women will sometimes
insist on sitting with him; they could not bear to see the old man
sitting alone as though he had no friends. There was much demonstration
on meeting friends after absence. A Lifuan always said “Olea” (“Thank
you”) for any good news, though not affecting him personally, as though
it were a gift, for he was glad to be able to rejoice with another.
Being divided into small tribes, each with its own autocratic chief, war
was sometimes inevitable. It was attended by much etiquette, which was
always strictly observed. The Lifuans were not acquainted with the
civilised custom of making rules for warfare and breaking them when war
actually broke out. Several days’ notice must be given before
hostilities were commenced. Women and children, in contrast to the
practice of civilised warfare, were never molested. As soon as half a
dozen fighters were put out of action on one side, the chief of that
side would give the command to cease fighting and the war was over. An
indemnity was then paid by the conquerors to the vanquished, and not, as
among civilised peoples, by the vanquished to the conquerors. It was
felt to be the conquered rather than the conqueror who needed
consolation, and it also seemed desirable to show that no feeling of
animosity was left behind. This was not only a delicate mark of
consideration to the vanquished, but also very good policy, as, by
neglecting it, some Europeans may have had cause to learn. This whole
Lifuan art of living has, however, been undermined by the arrival of
Christianity with its usual accompaniments. The Lifuans are substituting
European vices for their own virtues. Their simplicity and confidence
are passing away, though, even yet, Mrs. Hadfield says, they are
conspicuous for their honesty, truthfulness, good-humour, kindness, and
politeness, remaining a manly and intelligent people.


                                   IV


THE Lifuans furnish an illustration which seems decisive. But they are
savages, and on that account their example may be invalidated. It is
well to take another illustration from a people whose high and
long-continued civilisation is now undisputed.

The civilisation of China is ancient: that has long been a familiar
fact. But for more than a thousand years it was merely a legend to
Western Europeans; none had ever reached China, or, if they had, they
had never returned to tell the tale; there were too many fierce and
jealous barbarians between the East and the West. It was not until the
end of the thirteenth century, in the pages of Marco Polo, the Venetian
Columbus of the East,—for it was an Italian who discovered the Old World
as well as the New,—that China at last took definite shape alike as a
concrete fact and a marvellous dream. Later, Italian and Portuguese
travellers described it, and it is interesting to note what they had to
say. Thus Perera in the sixteenth century, in a narrative which Willes
translated for Hakluyt’s “Voyages,” presents a detailed picture of
Chinese life with an admiration all the more impressive since we cannot
help feeling how alien that civilisation was to the Catholic traveller
and how many troubles he had himself to encounter. He is astonished, not
only by the splendour of the lives of the Chinese on the material side,
alike in large things and in small, but by their fine manners in all the
ordinary course of life, the courtesy in which they seemed to him to
exceed all other nations, and in the fair dealing which far surpassed
that of all other Gentiles and Moors, while in the exercise of justice
he found them superior even to many Christians, for they do justice to
unknown strangers, which in Christendom is rare; moreover, there were
hospitals in every city and no beggars were ever to be seen. It was a
vision of splendour and delicacy and humanity, which he might have seen,
here and there, in the courts of princes in Europe, but nowhere in the
West on so vast a scale as in China.

The picture which Marco Polo, the first European to reach China (at all
events in what we may call modern times), presented in the thirteenth
century was yet more impressive, and that need not surprise us, for when
he saw China it was still in its great Augustan age of the Sung Dynasty.
He represents the city of Hang-Chau as the most beautiful and sumptuous
in the world, and we must remember that he himself belonged to Venice,
soon to be known as the most beautiful and sumptuous city of Europe, and
had acquired no small knowledge of the world. As he describes its life,
so exquisite and refined in its civilisation, so humane, so peaceful, so
joyous, so well ordered, so happily shared by the whole population, we
realise that here had been reached the highest point of urban
civilisation to which Man has ever attained. Marco Polo can think of no
word to apply to it—and that again and again—but Paradise.

The China of to-day seems less strange and astonishing to the Westerner.
It may even seem akin to him—partly through its decline, partly through
his own progress in civilisation—by virtue of its direct and practical
character. That is the conclusion of a sensitive and thoughtful
traveller in India and Japan and China, G. Lowes Dickinson. He is
impressed by the friendliness, the profound humanity, the gaiety, of the
Chinese, by the unequalled self-respect, independence, and courtesy of
the common people. “The fundamental attitude of the Chinese towards life
is, and has always been, that of the most modern West, nearer to us now
than to our mediæval ancestors, infinitely nearer to us than India.”[6]

So far it may seem scarcely as artists that these travellers regard the
Chinese. They insist on their cheerful, practical, social,
good-mannered, tolerant, peaceable, humane way of regarding life, on the
remarkably educable spirit in which they are willing, and easily able,
to change even ancient and deep-rooted habits when it seems convenient
and beneficial to do so; they are willing to take the world lightly, and
seem devoid of those obstinate conservative instincts by which we are
guided in Europe. The “Resident in Peking” says they are the least
romantic of peoples. He says it with a _nuance_ of dispraise, but Lowes
Dickinson says precisely the same thing about Chinese poetry, and with
no such _nuance_: “It is of all poetry I know the most human and the
least symbolic or romantic. It contemplates life just as it presents
itself, without any veil of ideas, any rhetoric or sentiment; it simply
clears away the obstruction which habit has built up between us and the
beauty of things and leaves that, showing in its own nature.” Every one
who has learnt to enjoy Chinese poetry will appreciate the delicate
precision of this comment. The quality of their poetry seems to fall
into line with the simple, direct, childlike quality which all observers
note in the Chinese themselves. The unsympathetic “Resident in Peking”
describes the well-known etiquette of politeness in China: “A Chinaman
will inquire of what noble country you are. You return the question, and
he will say his lowly province is so-and-so. He will invite you to do
him the honour of directing your jewelled feet to his degraded house.
You reply that you, a discredited worm, will crawl into his magnificent
palace.” Life becomes all play. Ceremony—the Chinese are unequalled for
ceremony, and a Government Department, the Board of Rites and
Ceremonies, exists to administer it—is nothing but more or less
crystallised play. Not only is ceremony here “almost an instinct,” but,
it has been said, “A Chinese thinks in theatrical terms.” We are coming
near to the sphere of art.

The quality of play in the Chinese character and Chinese civilisation
has impressed alike them who have seen China from afar and by actual
contact. It used to be said that the Chinese had invented gunpowder long
before Europeans and done nothing with it but make fireworks. That
seemed to the whole Western world a terrible blindness to the valuable
uses of gunpowder, and it is only of late years that a European
commentator has ventured to remark that “the proper use of gunpowder is
obviously to make fireworks, which may be very beautiful things, not to
kill men.” Certainly the Chinese, at all events, appreciate to the full
this proper use of gunpowder. “One of the most obvious characteristics
of the Chinese is their love of fireworks,” we are told. The gravest
people and the most intellectual occupy themselves with fireworks, and
if the works of Bergson, in which pyrotechnical allusions are so
frequent, are ever translated into Chinese, one can well believe that
China will produce enthusiastic Bergsonians. All toys are popular;
everybody, it is said, buys toys of one sort or another: paper
windmills, rattles, Chinese lanterns, and of course kites, which have an
almost sacred significance. They delight, also, in more complicated
games of skill, including an elaborate form of chess, far more difficult
than ours.[7] It is unnecessary to add that to philosophy, a higher and
more refined form of play, the Chinese are peculiarly addicted, and
philosophic discussion is naturally woven in with an “art of exquisite
enjoyment”—carried probably to greater perfection than anywhere else in
the world. Bertrand Russell, who makes this remark, in the suggestive
comments on his own visit to China, observes how this simple,
child-like, yet profound attitude towards life results in a liberation
of the impulses to play and enjoyment which “makes Chinese life
unbelievably restful and delightful after the solemn cruelties of the
West.” We are reminded of Gourmont’s remark that “pleasure is a human
creation, a delicate art, to which, as for music or painting, only a few
are apt.”

The social polity which brings together the people who thus view life is
at once singular and appropriate. I well remember how in youth a new
volume of the Sacred Books of the East Series, a part of the Confucian
Lî-kî, came into my hands and how delighted I was to learn that in China
life was regulated by music and ceremony. That was the beginning of an
interest in China that has not ceased to grow, though now, when it has
become a sort of fashion to exalt the spiritual qualities of the Chinese
above those of other peoples, one may well feel disinclined to admit any
interest in China. But the conception itself, since it seems to have had
its beginning at least a thousand years before Christ, may properly be
considered independently of our Western fashions. It is Propriety—the
whole ceremony of life—in which all harmonious intercourse subsists; it
is “the channel by which we apprehend the ways of Heaven,” in no
supernatural sense, for it is on the earth and not in the skies that the
Confucian Heaven lies concealed. But if human feelings, the
instincts—for in this matter the ancient Chinese were at one with our
modern psychologists,—are the field that has to be cultivated, and it is
ceremony that ploughs it, and the seeds of right action that are to be
planted on it, and discipline that is to weed it, and love that is to
gather in the fruits, it is in music, and the joy and peace that
accompany music, that it all ends. Indeed, it is also in music that it
all begins. For the sphere in which ceremonies act is Man’s external
life; his internal life is the sphere of music. It is music that moulds
the manners and customs that are comprised under ceremony, for Confucius
held that there can be music without sound where “virtue is deep and
silent”; and we are reminded of the “Crescendo of Silences” on the
Chinese pavilion in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s story, “Le Secret de
l’ancienne Musique.” It is music that regulates the heart and mind and
with that development brings joy, and joy brings repose. And so “Man
became Heaven.” “Let ceremonies and music have their course until the
earth is filled with them!”

It is sometimes said that among Chinese moralists and philosophers
Lao-tze, the deepest of them all, alone stands aside from the chorus in
praise of music and ceremony. When once Confucius came to consult
Lao-tze concerning the rules of propriety, and reverence for the
teaching of the sages of antiquity, we are told, Lao-tze replied: “The
men of whom you speak, sir, have, if you please, together with their
bones, mouldered.” Confucius went away, puzzled if not dissatisfied He
was willing to work not only from within outwards, but from without
inwards, because he allowed so large a place for social solidity, for
traditionalism, for paternalism, though he recognised that ceremony is
subordinate in the scheme of life, as colour is in a painting, the
picture being the real thing. Lao-tze was an individualist and a mystic.
He was little concerned with moralities in the ordinary sense. He
recognised no action but from within outwards. But though Confucius
could scarcely have altogether grasped his conception, he was quite able
to grasp that of Confucius, and his indifference to tradition, to rule
and propriety was simply an insistence on essential reality, on “music.”
“Ceremonies,” he said, “are the outward expression of inward feeling.”
He was no more opposed to the fundamental Chinese conception than George
Fox was opposed to Christianity in refusing to observe the mere forms
and ceremonies of the Church. A sound Confucianism is the outward
manifestation of Taoism (as Lao-tze himself taught it), just as a sound
socialism is the outward manifestation of a genuine individualism. It
has been well said that Chinese socialistic solidarity rests on an
individualistic basis, it is not a bureaucratic State socialism; it
works from within outward. (One of the first European visitors to China
remarked that there a street was like a home.) This is well shown by so
great and typical a Chinese philosopher as Meh-ti,[8] who lived shortly
after Confucius, in the fifth century B.C. He taught universal love,
with universal equality, and for him to love meant to act. He admitted
an element of self-interest as a motive for such an attitude. He desired
to universalise mutual self-help. Following Confucius, but yet several
centuries before Jesus, he declared that a man should love his
neighbour, his fellow man, as himself. “When he sees his fellow hungry,
he feeds him; when he sees him cold, he clothes him; ill, he nurses him;
dead, he buries him.” This, he said, was by no means opposed to filial
piety; for if one cares for the parents of others, they in turn will
care for his. But, it was brought against him, the power of egoism? The
Master agreed. Yet, he said, Man accepts more difficult things. He can
renounce joy, life itself, for even absurd and ridiculous ends. A single
generation, he added, such is the power of imitation, might suffice to
change a people’s customs. But Meh-ti remained placid. He remarked that
the great ones of the earth were against human solidarity and equality;
he left it at that. He took no refuge in mysticism. Practical social
action was the sole end he had in view, and we have to remember that his
ideals are largely embodied in Chinese institutions.[9]

We may understand now how it is that in China, and in China alone among
the great surviving civilisations, we find that art animates the whole
of life, even its morality. “This universal presence of art,” remarks an
acute yet discriminating observer, Émile Hovelaque, whom I have already
quoted,[10] “manifested in the smallest utensil, the humblest stalls,
the notices on the shops, the handwriting, the rhythm of movement,
always regular and measured, as though to the tune of unheard music,
announces a civilisation which is complete in itself, elaborated in the
smallest detail, penetrated by one spirit, which no interruption ever
breaks, a harmony which becomes at length a hallucinatory and
overwhelming obsession.” Or, as another writer has summed up the Chinese
attitude: “For them the art of life is one, as this world and the other
are one. Their aim is to make the Kingdom of Heaven here and now.”

It is obvious that a natural temperament in which the art-impulse is so
all-embracing, and the æsthetic sensibility so acute, might well have
been of a perilous instability. We could scarcely have been surprised
if, like that surpassing episode in Egyptian history of which Akhenaten
was the leader and Tell-el-Amarna the tomb, it had only endured for a
moment. Yet Chinese civilisation, which has throughout shown the
dominating power of this sensitive temperament, has lasted longer than
any other. The reason is that the very excesses of their temperament
forced the Chinese to fortify themselves against its perils. The Great
Wall, built more than two thousand years ago, and still to-day almost
the most impressive work of man on the earth, is typical of this
attitude of the Chinese. They have exercised a stupendous energy in
fortifying themselves against the natural enemies of their own
temperament. When one looks at it from this point of view, it is easy to
see that, alike in its large outlines and its small details, Chinese
life is always the art of balancing an æsthetic temperament and guarding
against its excesses. We see this in the whole of the ancient and still
prevailing system of Confucian morality with its insistence on formal
ceremony, even when, departing from the thought of its most influential
founder,—for ceremonialism in China would have existed even if Confucius
had not lived,—it tended to become merely an external formalism. We see
it in the massive solidarity of Chinese life, the systematic social
organisation by which individual responsibility, even though leaving
individuality itself intact, is merged in the responsibility of the
family and the still larger group. We see it in the whole drift of
Chinese philosophy, which is throughout sedative and contemplative. We
see it in the element of stoicism on the one hand and cruelty on the
other which in so genuinely good-natured a people would otherwise seem
puzzling. The Chinese love of flowers and gardens and landscape scenery
is in the same direction, and indeed one may say much the same of
Chinese painting and Chinese poetry.[11] That is why it is only to-day
that we in the West have reached the point of nervous susceptibility
which enables us in some degree to comprehend the æsthetic supremacy
which the Chinese reached more than a thousand years ago.

Thus, during its extremely long history—for the other great
civilisations with which it was once contemporary have passed away or
been disintegrated and transformed—Chinese civilisation has borne
witness to the great fact that all human life is art. It may be because
they have realised this so thoroughly that the Chinese have been able to
preserve their civilisation so long, through all the violent shocks to
which it has been subjected. There can be no doubt, however, that,
during the greater part of the last thousand years, there has been,
however slow and gradual, a decline in the vitality of Chinese
civilisation, largely due, it may well be, to the crushing pressure of
an excessive population. For, however remarkable the admiration which
China arouses even to-day, its finest flowering periods in the special
arts lie far in the past, while in the art of living itself the Chinese
have long grown languid. The different reports of ancient and modern
travellers regarding one definite social manifestation, the prevalence
of beggary, cannot fail to tell us something regarding the significant
form of their social life. Modern travellers complain of the plague
constituted by the prevalence of beggars in China; they are even a fixed
and permanent institution on a trades-union basis. But in the sixteenth
century Galeotto Perera noticed with surprise in China the absence of
beggars, as Marco Polo had before him, and Friar Gaspar de Cruz remarked
that the Chinese so abhorred idleness that they gave no alms to the poor
and mocked at the Portuguese for doing so: “Why give alms to a knave?
Let him go and earn it.” Their own priests, he adds, they sometimes
whipped as being knaves. (It should be noted at the same time that it
was considered reasonable only to give half the day to work, the other
half to joy and recreation.) But they built great asylums for the
helpless poor, and found employment for blind women, gorgeously dressed
and painted with ceruse and vermilion, as prostitutes, who were more
esteemed in early China than they have been since. That is a curious
instance of the unflinching practicality still shown by the Chinese in
endless ways. The undoubted lassitude in the later phases of this
long-lived Chinese culture has led to features in the art of life, such
as beggary and dirt among the poor, not manifested in the younger
offshoot of Chinese and Korean culture in Japan, though it is only fair
to point out that impartial English observers, like Parker, consider
this prevalence of vermin and dirt as simply due to the prevalence of
poverty, and not greater than we find among the poor in England and
elsewhere in the West. Marco Polo speaks of three hundred public baths
in one city alone in his time. We note also that in the more specialised
arts the transcendence of China belongs to the past, and even sometimes
a remote past. It is so in the art of philosophy, and the arts of poetry
and painting. It is so also in the art of pottery, in which Chinese
supremacy over the rest of the world has been longest recognised—has not
the word “china” for centuries been our name for the finest pottery?—and
is most beyond measure. Our knowledge of the pottery of various cultures
excels that of any other human products because of all it is the most
perdurable. We can better estimate their relative æsthetic worth now
than in the days when a general reverence for Greek antiquity led to a
popular belief in the beauty of Greek pottery, though scarcely a single
type of its many forms can fairly be so considered or even be compared
to the products of the Minoan predecessors of Greek culture, however
interesting they may still remain for us as the awkward and
inappropriate foundation for exquisite little pictures. The greatest age
of this universal human art was in China and was over many centuries
ago. But with what devotion, with what absolute concentration of the
spirit, the Chinese potters of the great period struggled with the
problem of art is finely illustrated by the well-known story which an
old Chinese historian tells of the sacrifice of the divine T’ung, the
spirit who protects potters. It happened that a complicated problem had
baffled the potters. T’ung laid down his life to serve them and to
achieve the solution of the problem. He plunged into the fire and the
bowl came out perfect. “The vessel’s perfect glaze is the god’s fat and
blood; the body material is the god’s body of flesh; the blue of the
decoration, with the brilliant lustre of gems, is the essence of the
god’s pure spirit.” That story embodies the Chinese symbol of the art of
living, just as we embody our symbol of that art in the Crucifixion of
Jesus. The form is diverse; the essence is the same.




                                   V


IT will be seen that when we analyse the experiences of life and look at
it simply, in the old-fashioned way, liberated from the artificial
complexities of a temporary and now, it may be, departing civilisation,
what we find is easy to sum up. We find, that is to say, that Man has
forced himself to move along this line, and that line, and the other
line. But it is the same water of life that runs in all these channels.
Until we have ascended to a height where this is clear, to see all our
little dogmatisms will but lead us astray.

We may illuminatingly change the analogy and turn to the field of
chemistry. All these various elements of life are but, as it were,
allotropic forms of the same element. The most fundamental among these
forms is that of art, for life in all its forms, even morality in the
narrowest sense, is, as Duprat has argued, a matter of technique, and
technique at once brings us to the elements of art. If we would
understand what we are dealing with, we may, therefore, best study these
forms under that of art.

There is, however, a deeper chemical analogy than this to be seen. It
may well be, indeed, that it is more than an analogy. In chemistry we
are dealing, not merely with the elements of life, but with the elements
of the world, even of what we call our universe. It is not unreasonable
to think that the same law holds good for both. We see that the forms of
life may all be found, and then better understood, in one form. Some
day, perhaps, we shall also see that that fact is only a corollary of
the larger fact—or, if any one prefers so to regard it, the smaller
fact—that the chemical elements of our world can be regarded as all only
transmutations of one element. From of old, men instinctively divined
that this might be so, though they were merely concerned to change the
elements into gold, the element which they most highly valued. In our
own times this transmutation is beginning to become, on a minute scale,
a demonstrable fact, though it would seem easier to transmute elements
into lead than into gold. Matter, we are thus coming to see, may not be
a confused variety of separate substances, but simply a different
quantitative arrangement of a single fundamental stuff, which might
possibly be identical with hydrogen or some other already known element.
Similarly we may now believe that the men of old who thought that all
human life was made of one stuff were not altogether wrong, and we may,
with greater assurance than they were able to claim, analyse the modes
of human action into different quantitative or other arrangements of
which the most fundamental may well be identical with art.

This may perhaps become clearer if we consider more in detail one of the
separate arts, selecting the most widely symbolic of all, the art that
is most clearly made of the stuff of life, and so able to translate most
truly and clearly into beautiful form the various modalities of life.

Footnote 1:

  See, for instance, Turner’s _Samoa_, chap. 1. Usually, however, in the
  Pacific, creation was accomplished, in a more genuinely evolutionary
  manner, by a long series of progressive generations.

Footnote 2:

  Gomperz, _Greek Thinkers_, vol. I, book III, chap. VI.

Footnote 3:

  I have here mainly followed Gomperz (_Greek Thinkers_, vol. I, pp.
  430-34); there is not now, however, much controversy over the position
  of Hippias, which there is now, indeed, rather a tendency to
  exaggerate, considering how small is the basis of knowledge we
  possess. Thus Dupréel (_La Légende Socratique_, p. 432), regarding him
  as the most misunderstood of the great Sophists, declares that Hippias
  is “the thinker who conceived the universality of science, just as
  Prodicus caught glimpses of the synthesis of the social sciences.
  Hippias is the philosopher of science, the Great Logician, just as
  Prodicus is the Great Moralist.” He compares him to Pico della
  Mirandola as a Humanist and to Leibnitz in power of wide synthesis.

Footnote 4:

  Strictly speaking, in the technical sense of that much-abused word,
  this is “decadence.” (I refer to the sense in which I defined
  “decadence” many years ago in _Affirmations_, pp. 175-87.) So that
  while the minor arts have sometimes been classic and sometimes
  decadent, the major art of living during the last two thousand years,
  although one can think of great men who have maintained the larger
  classic ideal, has mainly been decadent.

Footnote 5:

  Emma Hadfield, _Among the Natives of the Loyalty Group_. 1920. It
  would no doubt have been more satisfactory to select a people like the
  Fijians rather than the Lifuans, for they represented a more robust
  and accomplished form of a rather similar culture, but their culture
  has receded into the past,—and the same may be said of the Marquesans
  of whom Melville left, in _Typee_, a famous and delightful picture
  which other records confirm,—while that of the Lifuans is still
  recent.

Footnote 6:

  G. Lowes Dickinson, _An Essay on the Civilisations of India, China,
  and Japan_ (1914), p. 47. No doubt there are shades to be added to
  this picture. They may be found in a book, published two years
  earlier, _China as it Really Is_, by “a Resident in Peking” who claims
  to have been born in China. Chinese culture has receded, in part
  swamped by over-population, and concerning a land where to-day, it has
  lately been said, “magnificence, crudity, delicacy, fetidity, and
  fragrance are blended,” it is easy for Westerners to show violent
  difference of opinion.

Footnote 7:

  See, for instance, the chapter on games in Professor E. H. Parker’s
  _China: Past and Present_. Reference may be made to the same author’s
  important and impartial larger work, _China: Its History_, with a
  discriminating chapter on Chinese personal characteristics. Perhaps,
  the most penetrating study of Chinese psychology is, however, Arthur
  H. Smith’s _Chinese Characteristics_.

Footnote 8:

  His ideas have been studied by Madame Alexandra David, _Le Philosophe
  Meh-ti et l’Idée de Solidarité_. London, 1907.

Footnote 9:

  Eugène Simon, _La Cité Chinoise_.

Footnote 10:

  E. Hovelaque, _La Chine_ (Paris, 1920), p. 47.

Footnote 11:

  This point has not escaped the more acute students of Chinese
  civilisation. Thus Dr. John Steele, in his edition of the _I-Li_,
  remarks that “ceremonial was far from being a series of observances,
  empty and unprofitable, such as it degenerated into in later time. It
  was meant to inculcate that habit of self-control and ordered action
  which was the expression of a mind fully instructed in the inner
  meaning of things, and sensitive to every impression.” Still more
  clearly, Reginald Farrer wrote, in _On the Eaves of the World_, that
  “the philosophic calm that the Chinese deliberately cultivate is their
  necessary armour to protect the excessive susceptibility to emotion.
  The Chinese would be for ever the victims of their nerves had they not
  for four thousand years pursued reason and self-control with
  self-protective enthusiasm.”




                               CHAPTER II
                           THE ART OF DANCING


                                   I


DANCING and building are the two primary and essential arts. The art of
dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves
first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the
beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end
they unite. Music, acting, poetry proceed in the one mighty stream;
sculpture, painting, all the arts of design, in the other. There is no
primary art outside these two arts, for their origin is far earlier than
man himself; and dancing came first.[12]

That is one reason why dancing, however it may at times be scorned by
passing fashions, has a profound and eternal attraction even for those
one might suppose farthest from its influence. The joyous beat of the
feet of children, the cosmic play of philosophers’ thoughts rise and
fall according to the same laws of rhythm. If we are indifferent to the
art of dancing, we have failed to understand, not merely the supreme
manifestation of physical life, but also the supreme symbol of spiritual
life.

The significance of dancing, in the wide sense, thus lies in the fact
that it is simply an intimate concrete appeal of a general rhythm, that
general rhythm which marks, not life only, but the universe, if one may
still be allowed so to name the sum of the cosmic influences that reach
us. We need not, indeed, go so far as the planets or the stars and
outline their ethereal dances. We have but to stand on the seashore and
watch the waves that beat at our feet, to observe that at nearly regular
intervals this seemingly monotonous rhythm is accentuated for several
beats, so that the waves are really dancing the measure of a tune. It
need surprise us not at all that rhythm, ever tending to be moulded into
a tune, should mark all the physical and spiritual manifestations of
life. Dancing is the primitive expression alike of religion and of
love—of religion from the earliest human times we know of and of love
from a period long anterior to the coming of man. The art of dancing,
moreover, is intimately entwined with all human tradition of war, of
labour, of pleasure, of education, while some of the wisest philosophers
and the most ancient civilisations have regarded the dance as the
pattern in accordance with which the moral life of men must be woven. To
realise, therefore, what dancing means for mankind—the poignancy and the
many-sidedness of its appeal—we must survey the whole sweep of human
life, both at its highest and at its deepest moments.


                                   II


“WHAT do you dance?” When a man belonging to one branch of the great
Bantu division of mankind met a member of another, said Livingstone,
that was the question he asked. What a man danced, that was his tribe,
his social customs, his religion; for, as an anthropologist has put it,
“a savage does not preach his religion, he dances it.”

There are peoples in the world who have no secular dances, only
religious dances; and some investigators believe with Gerland that every
dance was of religious origin. That view may seem too extreme, even if
we admit that some even of our modern dances, like the waltz, may have
been originally religious. Even still (as Skene has shown among the
Arabs and Swahili of Africa) so various are dances and their functions
among some peoples that they cover the larger part of life. Yet we have
to remember that for primitive man there is no such thing as religion
apart from life, for religion covers everything. Dancing is a magical
operation for the attainment of real and important ends of every kind.
It was clearly of immense benefit to the individual and to society, by
imparting strength and adding organised harmony. It seemed reasonable to
suppose that it attained other beneficial ends, that were incalculable,
for calling down blessings or warding off misfortunes. We may conclude,
with Wundt, that the dance was, in the beginning, the expression of the
whole man, for the whole man was religious.[13]

Thus, among primitive peoples, religion being so large a part of life,
the dance inevitably becomes of supreme religious importance. To dance
was at once both to worship and to pray. Just as we still find in our
Prayer Books that there are divine services for all the great
fundamental acts of life,—for birth, for marriage, for death,—as well as
for the cosmic procession of the world as marked by ecclesiastical
festivals, and for the great catastrophes of nature, such as droughts,
so also it has ever been among primitive peoples. For all the solemn
occasions of life, for bridals and for funerals, for seed-time and for
harvest, for war and for peace, for all these things there were fitting
dances. To-day we find religious people who in church pray for rain or
for the restoration of their friends to health. Their forefathers also
desired these things, but, instead of praying for them, they danced for
them the fitting dance which tradition had handed down, and which the
chief or the medicine-man solemnly conducted. The gods themselves
danced, as the stars dance in the sky—so at least the Mexicans, and we
may be sure many other peoples, have held; and to dance is therefore to
imitate the gods, to work with them, perhaps to persuade them to work in
the direction of our own desires. “Work for us!” is the song-refrain,
expressed or implied, of every religious dance. In the worship of solar
deities in various countries, it was customary to dance round the altar,
as the stars dance round the sun. Even in Europe the popular belief that
the sun dances on Easter Sunday has perhaps scarcely yet died out. To
dance is to take part in the cosmic control of the world. Every sacred
Dionysian dance is an imitation of the divine dance.

All religions, and not merely those of primitive character, have been at
the outset, and sometimes throughout, in some measure saltatory. That
was recognised even in the ancient world by acute observers, like
Lucian, who remarks in his essay on dancing that “you cannot find a
single ancient mystery in which there is no dancing; in fact most people
say of the devotees of the Mysteries that ‘they dance them out.’” This
is so all over the world. It is not more pronounced in early
Christianity, and among the ancient Hebrews who danced before the ark,
than among the Australian aborigines whose great corroborees are
religious dances conducted by the medicine-men with their sacred staves
in their hands. Every American Indian tribe seems to have had its own
religious dances, varied and elaborate, often with a richness of meaning
which the patient study of modern investigators has but slowly revealed.
The Shamans in the remote steppes of Northern Siberia have their
ecstatic religious dances, and in modern Europe the Turkish
dervishes—perhaps of related stock—still dance in their cloisters
similar ecstatic dances, combined with song and prayer, as a regular
part of devotional service.

These religious dances, it may be observed, are sometimes ecstatic,
sometimes pantomimic. It is natural that this should be so. By each road
it is possible to penetrate towards the divine mystery of the world. The
auto-intoxication of rapturous movement brings the devotees, for a while
at least, into that self-forgetful union with the not-self which the
mystic ever seeks. The ecstatic Hindu dance in honour of the pre-Aryan
hill god, afterwards Siva, became in time a great symbol, “the clearest
image of the _activity_ of God,” it has been called, “which any art or
religion can boast of.”[14] Pantomimic dances, on the other hand, with
their effort to heighten natural expression and to imitate natural
process, bring the dancers into the divine sphere of creation and enable
them to assist vicariously in the energy of the gods. The dance thus
becomes the presentation of a divine drama, the vital reënactment of a
sacred history, in which the worshipper is enabled to play a real
part.[15] In this way ritual arises.

It is in this sphere—highly primitive as it is—of pantomimic dancing
crystallised in ritual, rather than in the sphere of ecstatic dancing,
that we may to-day in civilisation witness the survivals of the dance in
religion. The divine services of the American Indian, said Lewis Morgan,
took the form of “set dances, each with its own name, songs, steps, and
costume.” At this point the early Christian, worshipping the Divine
Body, was able to join in spiritual communion with the ancient Egyptian
or the later Japanese[16] or the modern American Indian. They are all
alike privileged to enter, each in his own way, a sacred mystery, and to
participate in the sacrifice of a heavenly Mass.

What by some is considered to be the earliest known Christian ritual—the
“Hymn of Jesus” assigned to the second century—is nothing but a sacred
dance. Eusebius in the third century stated that Philo’s description of
the worship of the Therapeuts agreed at all points with Christian
custom, and that meant the prominence of dancing, to which indeed
Eusebius often refers in connection with Christian worship. It has been
supposed by some that the Christian Church was originally a theatre, the
choir being the raised stage, even the word “choir,” it is argued,
meaning an enclosed space for dancing. It is certain that at the
Eucharist the faithful gesticulated with their hands, danced with their
feet, flung their bodies about. Chrysostom, who referred to this
behaviour round the Holy Table at Antioch, only objected to drunken
excesses in connection with it; the custom itself he evidently regarded
as traditional and right.

While the central function of Christian worship is a sacred drama, a
divine pantomime, the associations of Christianity and dancing are by no
means confined to the ritual of the Mass and its later more attenuated
transformations. The very idea of dancing had a sacred and mystic
meaning to the early Christians, who had meditated profoundly on the
text, “We have piped unto you and ye have not danced.” Origen prayed
that above all things there may be made operative in us the mystery “of
the stars dancing in Heaven for the salvation of the Universe.” So that
the monks of the Cistercian Order, who in a later age worked for the
world more especially by praying for it (“orare est laborare”), were
engaged in the same task on earth as the stars in Heaven; dancing and
praying are the same thing. St. Basil, who was so enamoured of natural
things, described the angels dancing in Heaven, and later the author of
the “Dieta Salutis” (said to have been St. Bonaventura), which is
supposed to have influenced Dante in assigning so large a place to
dancing in the “Paradiso,” described dancing as the occupation of the
inmates of Heaven, and Christ as the leader of the dance. Even in more
modern times an ancient Cornish carol sang of the life of Jesus as a
dance, and represented him as declaring that he died in order that man
“may come unto the general dance.”[17]

This attitude could not fail to be reflected in practice. Genuine
dancing, not merely formalised and unrecognisable dancing, such as the
traditionalised Mass, must have been frequently introduced into
Christian worship in early times. Until a few centuries ago it remained
not uncommon, and it even still persists in remote corners of the
Christian world. In English cathedrals dancing went on until the
fourteenth century. At Paris, Limoges, and elsewhere in France, the
priests danced in the choir at Easter up to the seventeenth century, in
Roussillon up to the eighteenth century. Roussillon is a Catalan
province with Spanish traditions, and it is in Spain, where dancing is a
deeper and more passionate impulse than elsewhere in Europe, that
religious dancing took firmest root and flourished longest. In the
cathedrals of Seville, Toledo, Valencia, and Jeres there was formerly
dancing, though it now only survives at a few special festivals in the
first.[18] At Alaro in Mallorca, also at the present day, a dancing
company called Els Cosiers, on the festival of St. Roch, the patron
saint of the place, dance in the church in fanciful costumes with
tambourines, up to the steps of the high altar, immediately after Mass,
and then dance out of the church. In another part of the Christian
world, in the Abyssinian Church—an offshoot of the Eastern
Church—dancing is also said still to form part of the worship.

Dancing, we may see throughout the world, has been so essential, so
fundamental, a part of all vital and undegenerate religion, that,
whenever a new religion appears, a religion of the spirit and not merely
an anæmic religion of the intellect, we should still have to ask of it
the question of the Bantu: “What do you dance?”


                                  III


Dancing is not only intimately associated with religion, it has an
equally intimate association with love. Here, indeed, the relationship
is even more primitive, for it is far older than man. Dancing, said
Lucian, is as old as love. Among insects and among birds it may be said
that dancing is often an essential part of love. In courtship the male
dances, sometimes in rivalry with other males, in order to charm the
female; then, after a short or long interval, the female is aroused to
share his ardour and join in the dance; the final climax of the dance is
the union of the lovers. Among the mammals most nearly related to man,
indeed, dancing is but little developed: their energies are more
variously diffused, though a close observer of the apes, Dr. Louis
Robinson, has pointed out that the “spasmodic jerking of the
chimpanzee’s feeble legs,” pounding the partition of his cage, is the
crude motion out of which “the heavenly alchemy of evolution has created
the divine movements of Pavlova”; but it must be remembered that the
anthropoid apes are offshoots only from the stock that produced Man, his
cousins and not his ancestors. It is the more primitive love-dance of
insects and birds that seems to reappear among human savages in various
parts of the world, notably in Africa, and in a conventionalised and
symbolised form it is still danced in civilisation to-day. Indeed, it is
in this aspect that dancing has so often aroused reprobation, from the
days of early Christianity until the present, among those for whom the
dance has merely been, in the words of a seventeenth-century writer, a
series of “immodest and dissolute movements by which the cupidity of the
flesh is aroused.”

But in nature and among primitive peoples it has its value precisely on
this account. It is a process of courtship and, even more than that, it
is a novitiate for love, and a novitiate which was found to be an
admirable training for love. Among some peoples, indeed, as the Omahas,
the same word meant both to dance and to love. By his beauty, his
energy, his skill, the male must win the female, so impressing the image
of himself on her imagination that finally her desire is aroused to
overcome her reticence. That is the task of the male throughout nature,
and in innumerable species besides Man it has been found that the school
in which the task may best be learnt is the dancing-school. Those who
have not the skill and the strength to learn are left behind, and, as
they are probably the least capable members of the race, it may be in
this way that a kind of sexual selection has been embodied in
unconscious eugenics, and aided the higher development of the race. The
moths and the butterflies, the African ostrich and the Sumatran argus
pheasant, with their fellows innumerable, have been the precursors of
man in the strenuous school of erotic dancing, fitting themselves for
selection by the females of their choice as the most splendid
progenitors of the future race.[19]

From this point of view, it is clear, the dance performed a double
function. On the one hand, the tendency to dance, arising under the
obscure stress of this impulse, brought out the best possibilities the
individual held the promise of; on the other hand, at the moment of
courtship, the display of the activities thus acquired developed on the
sensory side all the latent possibilities of beauty which at last became
conscious in man. That this came about we cannot easily escape
concluding. How it came about, how it happens that some of the least
intelligent of creatures thus developed a beauty and a grace that are
enchanting even to our human eyes, is a miracle, even if not affected by
the mystery of sex, which we cannot yet comprehend.

When we survey the human world, the erotic dance of the animal world is
seen not to have lost, but rather to have gained, influence. It is no
longer the males alone who are thus competing for the love of the
females. It comes about by a modification in the earlier method of
selection that often not only the men dance for the women, but the women
for the men, each striving in a storm of rivalry to arouse and attract
the desire of the other. In innumerable parts of the world the season of
love is a time which the nubile of each sex devote to dancing in each
other’s presence, sometimes one sex, sometimes the other, sometimes
both, in the frantic effort to display all the force and energy, the
skill and endurance, the beauty and grace, which at this moment are
yearning within them to be poured into the stream of the race’s life.

From this point of view we may better understand the immense ardour with
which every part of the wonderful human body has been brought into the
play of the dance. The men and women of races spread all over the world
have shown a marvellous skill and patience in imparting rhythm and
measure to the most unlikely, the most rebellious regions of the body,
all wrought by desire into potent and dazzling images. To the vigorous
races of Northern Europe in their cold damp climate, dancing comes
naturally to be dancing of the legs, so naturally that the English poet,
as a matter of course, assumes that the dance of Salome was a “twinkling
of the feet.”[20] But on the opposite side of the world, in Japan and
notably in Java and Madagascar, dancing may be exclusively dancing of
the arms and hands, in some of the South Sea Islands of the hands and
fingers alone. Dancing may even be carried on in the seated posture, as
occurs at Fiji in a dance connected with the preparation of the sacred
drink, ava. In some districts of Southern Tunisia dancing, again, is
dancing of the hair, and all night long, till they perhaps fall
exhausted, the marriageable girls will move their heads to the rhythm of
a song, maintaining their hair in perpetual balance and sway. Elsewhere,
notably in Africa, but also sometimes in Polynesia, as well as in the
dances that had established themselves in ancient Rome, dancing is
dancing of the body, with vibratory or rotatory movements of breasts or
flanks. The complete dance along these lines is, however, that in which
the play of all the chief muscle-groups of the body is harmoniously
interwoven. When both sexes take part in such an exercise, developed
into an idealised yet passionate pantomime of love, we have the complete
erotic dance. In the beautiful ancient civilisation of the Pacific, it
is probable that this ideal was sometimes reached, and at Tahiti, in
1772, an old voyager crudely and summarily described the native dance as
“an endless variety of posturings and wagglings of the body, hands,
feet, eyes, lips, and tongue, in which they keep splendid time to the
measure.” In Spain the dance of this kind has sometimes attained its
noblest and most harmoniously beautiful expression. From the narratives
of travellers, it would appear that it was especially in the eighteenth
century that among all classes in Spain dancing of this kind was
popular. The Church tacitly encouraged it, an Aragonese Canon told
Baretti in 1770, in spite of its occasional indecorum, as a useful
safety-valve for the emotions. It was not less seductive to the foreign
spectator than to the people themselves. The grave traveller Peyron,
towards the end of the century, growing eloquent over the languorous and
flexible movements of the dance, the bewitching attitude, the voluptuous
curves of the arms, declares that, when one sees a beautiful Spanish
woman dance, one is inclined to fling all philosophy to the winds. And
even that highly respectable Anglican clergyman, the Reverend Joseph
Townsend, was constrained to state that he could “almost persuade
myself” that if the fandango were suddenly played in church the gravest
worshippers would start up to join in that “lascivious pantomime.” There
we have the rock against which the primitive dance of sexual selection
suffers shipwreck as civilisation advances. And that prejudice of
civilisation becomes so ingrained that it is brought to bear even on the
primitive dance. The pygmies of Africa are described by Sir H. H.
Johnston as a very decorous and highly moral people, but their dances,
he adds, are not so. Yet these dances, though to the eyes of Johnston,
blinded by European civilisation, “grossly indecent,” he honestly, and
inconsistently, adds, are “danced reverently.”


                                   IV


From the vital function of dancing in love, and its sacred function in
religion, to dancing as an art, a profession, an amusement, may seem, at
the first glance, a sudden leap. In reality the transition is gradual,
and it began to be made at a very early period in diverse parts of the
globe. All the matters that enter into courtship tend to fall under the
sway of art; their æsthetic pleasure is a secondary reflection of their
primary vital joy. Dancing could not fail to be first in manifesting
this tendency. But even religious dancing swiftly exhibited the same
transformation; dancing, like priesthood, became a profession, and
dancers, like priests, formed a caste. This, for instance, took place in
old Hawaii. The hula dance was a religious dance; it required a special
education and an arduous training; moreover, it involved the observance
of important taboos and the exercise of sacred rites; by the very fact
of its high specialisation it came to be carried out by paid performers,
a professional caste. In India, again, the Devadasis, or sacred dancing
girls, are at once both religious and professional dancers. They are
married to gods, they are taught dancing by the Brahmins, they figure in
religious ceremonies, and their dances represent the life of the god
they are married to as well as the emotions of love they experience for
him. Yet, at the same time, they also give professional performances in
the houses of rich private persons who pay for them. It thus comes about
that to the foreigner the Devadasis scarcely seem very unlike the
Ramedjenis, the dancers of the street, who are of very different origin,
and mimic in their performances the play of merely human passions. The
Portuguese conquerors of India called both kinds of dancers
indiscriminately Balheideras (or dancers) which we have corrupted in
Bayaderes.[21]

In our modern world professional dancing as an art has become altogether
divorced from religion, and even, in any biological sense, from love; it
is scarcely even possible, so far as Western civilisation is concerned,
to trace back the tradition to either source. If we survey the
development of dancing as an art in Europe, it seems to me that we have
to recognise two streams of tradition which have sometimes merged, but
yet remain in their ideals and their tendencies essentially distinct. I
would call these traditions the Classical, which is much the more
ancient and fundamental, and may be said to be of Egyptian origin, and
the Romantic, which is of Italian origin, chiefly known to us as the
ballet. The first is, in its pure form, solo dancing—though it may be
danced in couples and many together—and is based on the rhythmic beauty
and expressiveness of the simple human personality when its energy is
concentrated in measured yet passionate movement. The second is
concerted dancing, mimetic and picturesque, wherein the individual is
subordinated to the wider and variegated rhythm of the group. It may be
easy to devise another classification, but this is simple and
instructive enough for our purpose.

There can scarcely be a doubt that Egypt has been for many thousands of
years, as indeed it still remains, a great dancing centre, the most
influential dancing-school the world has ever seen, radiating its
influence to south and east and north. We may perhaps even agree with
the historian of the dance who terms it “the mother-country of all
civilised dancing.” We are not entirely dependent on the ancient
wall-pictures of Egypt for our knowledge of Egyptian skill in the art.
Sacred mysteries, it is known, were danced in the temples, and queens
and princesses took part in the orchestras that accompanied them. It is
significant that the musical instruments still peculiarly associated
with the dance were originated or developed in Egypt; the guitar is an
Egyptian instrument and its name was a hieroglyph already used when the
Pyramids were being built; the cymbal, the tambourine, triangles,
castanets, in one form or another, were all familiar to the ancient
Egyptians, and with the Egyptian art of dancing they must have spread
all round the shores of the Mediterranean, the great focus of our
civilisation, at a very early date.[22] Even beyond the Mediterranean,
at Cadiz, dancing that was essentially Egyptian in character was
established, and Cadiz became the dancing-school of Spain. The Nile and
Cadiz were thus the two great centres of ancient dancing, and Martial
mentions them both together, for each supplied its dancers to Rome. This
dancing, alike whether Egyptian or Gaditanian, was the expression of the
individual dancer’s body and art; the garments played but a small part
in it, they were frequently transparent, and sometimes discarded
altogether. It was, and it remains, simple, personal, passionate
dancing, classic, therefore, in the same sense as, on the side of
literature, the poetry of Catullus is classic.[23]

Ancient Greek dancing was essentially classic dancing, as here
understood. On the Greek vases, as reproduced in Emmanuel’s attractive
book on Greek dancing and elsewhere, we find the same play of the arms,
the same sideward turn, the same extreme backward extension of the body,
which had long before been represented in Egyptian monuments. Many
supposedly modern movements in dancing were certainly already common
both to Egyptian and Greek dancing, as well as the clapping of hands to
keep time which is still an accompaniment of Spanish dancing. It seems
clear, however, that, on this general classic and Mediterranean basis,
Greek dancing had a development so refined and so special—though in
technical elaboration of steps, it seems likely, inferior to modern
dancing—that it exercised no influence outside Greece. Dancing became,
indeed, the most characteristic and the most generally cultivated of
Greek arts. Pindar, in a splendid Oxyrhynchine fragment, described
Hellas, in what seemed to him supreme praise, as “the land of lovely
dancing,” and Athenæus pointed out that he calls Apollo the Dancer. It
may well be that the Greek drama arose out of dance and song, and that
the dance throughout was an essential and plastic element in it. Even if
we reject the statement of Aristotle that tragedy arose out of the
Dionysian dithyramb, the alternative suppositions (such as Ridgeway’s
theory of dancing round the tombs of the dead) equally involve the same
elements. It has often been pointed out that poetry in Greece demanded a
practical knowledge of all that could be included under “dancing.”
Æschylus is said to have developed the technique of dancing and
Sophocles danced in his own dramas. In these developments, no doubt,
Greek dancing tended to overpass the fundamental limits of classic
dancing and foreshadowed the ballet.[24]

The real germ of the ballet, however, is to be found in Rome, where the
pantomime with its concerted and picturesque method of expressive action
was developed, and Italy is the home of Romantic dancing. The same
impulse which produced the pantomime produced, more than a thousand
years later in the same Italian region, the modern ballet. In both
cases, one is inclined to think, we may trace the influence of the same
Etruscan and Tuscan race which so long has had its seat there, a race
with a genius for expressive, dramatic, picturesque art. We see it on
the walls of Etruscan tombs and again in pictures of Botticelli and his
fellow Tuscans. The modern ballet, it is generally believed, had its
origin in the spectacular pageants at the marriage of Galeazzo Visconti,
Duke of Milan, in 1489. The fashion for such performances spread to the
other Italian courts, including Florence, and Catherine de’ Medici, when
she became Queen of France, brought the Italian ballet to Paris. Here it
speedily became fashionable. Kings and queens were its admirers and even
took part in it; great statesmen were its patrons. Before long, and
especially in the great age of Louis XIV, it became an established
institution, still an adjunct of opera but with a vital life and growth
of its own, maintained by distinguished musicians, artists, and dancers.
Romantic dancing, to a much greater extent than what I have called
Classic dancing, which depends so largely on simple personal qualities,
tends to be vitalised by transplantation and the absorption of new
influences, provided that the essential basis of technique and tradition
is preserved in the new development. Lulli in the seventeenth century
brought women into the ballet; Camargo discarded the complicated
costumes and shortened the skirt, so rendering possible not only her own
lively and vigorous method, but all the freedom and airy grace of later
dancing. It was Noverre who by his ideas worked out at Stuttgart, and
soon brought to Paris by Gaetan Vestris, made the ballet a new and
complete art form; this Swiss-French genius not only elaborated plot
revealed by gesture and dance alone, but, just as another and greater
Swiss-French genius about the same time brought sentiment and emotion
into the novel, he brought it into the ballet. In the French ballet of
the eighteenth century a very high degree of perfection seems thus to
have been reached, while in Italy, where the ballet had originated, it
decayed, and Milan, which had been its source, became the nursery of a
tradition of devitalised technique carried to the finest point of
delicate perfection. The influence of the French school was maintained
as a living force into the nineteenth century,—when it was renovated
afresh by the new spirit of the age and Taglioni became the most
ethereal embodiment of the spirit of the Romantic movement in a form
that was genuinely classic,—overspreading the world by the genius of a
few individual dancers. When they had gone, the ballet slowly and
steadily declined. As it declined as an art, so also it declined in
credit and in popularity; it became scarcely respectable even to admire
dancing. Thirty or forty years ago, those of us who still appreciated
dancing as an art—and how few they were!—had to seek for it painfully
and sometimes in strange surroundings. A recent historian of dancing, in
a book published so lately as 1906, declared that “the ballet is now a
thing of the past, and, with the modern change of ideas, a thing that is
never likely to be resuscitated.” That historian never mentioned Russian
ballet, yet his book was scarcely published before the Russian ballet
arrived to scatter ridicule over his rash prophecy by raising the ballet
to a pitch of perfection it can rarely have surpassed, as an expressive,
emotional, even passionate form of living art.

The Russian ballet was an offshoot from the French ballet and
illustrates once more the vivifying effect of transplantation on the art
of Romantic dancing. The Empress Anna introduced it in 1735 and
appointed a French ballet-master and a Neapolitan composer to carry it
on; it reached a high degree of technical perfection during the
following hundred years, on the traditional lines, and the principal
dancers were all imported from Italy. It was not until recent years that
this firm discipline and these ancient traditions were vitalised into an
art form of exquisite and vivid beauty by the influence of the soil in
which they had slowly taken root. This contact, when at last it was
effected, mainly by the genius of Fokine and the enterprise of
Diaghilev, involved a kind of revolution, for its outcome, while genuine
ballet, has yet all the effect of delicious novelty. The tradition by
itself was in Russia an exotic without real life, and had nothing to
give to the world; on the other hand, a Russian ballet apart from that
tradition, if we can conceive such a thing, would have been formless,
extravagant, bizarre, not subdued to any fine æsthetic ends. What we see
here, in the Russian ballet as we know it to-day, is a splendid and
arduous technical tradition, brought at last—by the combined skill of
designers, composers, and dancers—into real fusion with an environment
from which during more than a century it had been held apart; Russian
genius for music, Russian feeling for rhythm, Russian skill in the use
of bright colour, and, not least, the Russian orgiastic temperament, the
Russian spirit of tender poetic melancholy, and the general Slav passion
for folk-dancing, shown in other branches of the race also, Polish,
Bohemian, Bulgarian, and Servian. At almost the same time what I have
termed Classic dancing was independently revived in America by Isadora
Duncan, bringing back what seemed to be the free naturalism of the Greek
dance, and Ruth St. Denis, seeking to discover and revitalise the
secrets of the old Indian and Egyptian traditions. Whenever now we find
any restored art of theatrical dancing, as in the Swedish ballet, it has
been inspired more or less, by an eclectic blending of these two revived
forms, the Romantic from Russia, the Classic from America. The result
has been that our age sees one of the most splendid movements in the
whole history of the ballet.


                                   V


Dancing as an art, we may be sure, cannot die out, but will always be
undergoing a rebirth. Not merely as an art, but also as a social custom,
it perpetually emerges afresh from the soul of the people. Less than a
century ago the polka thus arose, extemporised by the Bohemian servant
girl Anna Slezakova out of her own head for the joy of her own heart,
and only rendered a permanent form, apt for world-wide popularity, by
the accident that it was observed and noted down by an artist. Dancing
has for ever been in existence as a spontaneous custom, a social
discipline. Thus it is, finally, that dancing meets us, not only as
love, as religion, as art, but also as morals.

All human work, under natural conditions, is a kind of dance. In a large
and learned book, supported by an immense amount of evidence, Karl
Bücher has argued that work differs from the dance, not in kind, but
only in degree, since they are both essentially rhythmic. There is a
good reason why work should be rhythmic, for all great combined efforts,
the efforts by which alone great constructions such as those of
megalithic days could be carried out, must be harmonised. It has even
been argued that this necessity is the source of human speech, and we
have the so-called Yo-heave-ho theory of languages. In the memory of
those who have ever lived on a sailing ship—that loveliest of human
creations now disappearing from the world—there will always linger the
echo of the chanties which sailors sang as they hoisted the topsail yard
or wound the capstan or worked the pumps. That is the type of primitive
combined work, and it is indeed difficult to see how such work can be
effectively accomplished without such a device for regulating the
rhythmic energy of the muscles. The dance rhythm of work has thus acted
socialisingly in a parallel line with the dance rhythms of the arts, and
indeed in part as their inspirer. The Greeks, it has been too fancifully
suggested, by insight or by intuition understood this when they fabled
that Orpheus, whom they regarded as the earliest poet, was specially
concerned with moving stones and trees. Bücher has pointed out that even
poetic metre may be conceived as arising out of work; metre is the
rhythmic stamping of feet, as in the technique of verse it is still
metaphorically called; iambics and trochees, spondees and anapæsts and
dactyls, may still be heard among blacksmiths smiting the anvil or
navvies wielding their hammers in the streets. In so far as they arose
out of work, music and singing and dancing are naturally a single art. A
poet must always write to a tune, said Swinburne. Herein the ancient
ballad of Europe is a significant type. It is, as the name indicates, a
dance as much as a song, performed by a singer who sang the story and a
chorus who danced and shouted the apparently meaningless refrain; it is
absolutely the chanty of the sailors and is equally apt for the purposes
of concerted work.[25] Yet our most complicated musical forms are
evolved from similar dances. The symphony is but a development of a
dance suite, in the first place folk-dances, such as Bach and Handel
composed. Indeed a dance still lingers always at the heart of music and
even the heart of the composer. Mozart, who was himself an accomplished
dancer, used often to say, so his wife stated, that it was dancing, not
music, that he really cared for. Wagner believed that Beethoven’s
Seventh Symphony—to some of us the most fascinating of them and the most
purely musical—was an apotheosis of the dance, and, even if that belief
throws no light on the intention of Beethoven, it is at least a
revelation of Wagner’s own feeling for the dance.

It is, however, the dance itself, apart from the work and apart from the
other arts, which, in the opinion of many to-day, has had a decisive
influence in socialising, that is to say in moralising, the human
species. Work showed the necessity of harmonious rhythmic coöperation,
but the dance developed that rhythmic coöperation and imparted a
beneficent impetus to all human activities. It was Grosse, in his
“Beginnings of Art,” who first clearly set forth the high social
significance of the dance in the creation of human civilisation. The
participants in a dance, as all observers of savages have noted, exhibit
a wonderful unison; they are, as it were, fused into a single being
stirred by a single impulse. Social unification is thus accomplished.
Apart from war, this is the chief factor making for social solidarity in
primitive life; it was indeed the best training for war. It has been a
twofold influence; on the one hand, it aided unity of action and method
in evolution: on the other, it had the invaluable function—for man is
naturally a timid animal—of imparting courage; the universal drum, as
Louis Robinson remarks, has been an immense influence in human affairs.
Even among the Romans, with their highly developed military system,
dancing and war were definitely allied; the Salii constituted a college
of sacred military dancers; the dancing season was March, the war-god’s
month and the beginning of the war season, and all through that month
there were dances in triple measure before the temples and round the
altars, with songs so ancient that not even the priests could understand
them. We may trace a similar influence of dancing in all the coöperative
arts of life. All our most advanced civilisation, Grosse insisted, is
based on dancing. It is the dance that socialised man.

Thus, in the large sense, dancing has possessed peculiar value as a
method of national education. As civilisation grew self-conscious, this
was realised. “One may judge of a king,” according to ancient Chinese
maxim, “by the state of dancing during his reign.” So also among the
Greeks; it has been said that dancing and music lay at the foundation of
the whole political and military as well as religious organisation of
the Dorian states.

In the narrow sense, in individual education, the great importance of
dancing came to be realised, even at an early stage of human
development, and still more in the ancient civilisations. “A good
education,” Plato declared in the “Laws,” the final work of his old age,
“consists in knowing how to sing and dance well.” And in our own day one
of the keenest and most enlightened of educationists has lamented the
decay of dancing; the revival of dancing, Stanley Hall declares, is
imperatively needed to give poise to the nerves, schooling to the
emotions, strength to the will, and to harmonise the feelings and the
intellect with the body which supports them.

It can scarcely be said that these functions of dancing are yet
generally realised and embodied afresh in education. For, if it is true
that dancing engendered morality, it is also true that in the end, by
the irony of fate, morality, grown insolent, sought to crush its own
parent, and for a time succeeded only too well. Four centuries ago
dancing was attacked by that spirit, in England called Puritanism, which
was then spread over the greater part of Europe, just as active in
Bohemia as in England, and which has, indeed, been described as a
general onset of developing Urbanism against the old Ruralism. It made
no distinction between good and bad, nor paused to consider what would
come when dancing went. So it was that, as Remy de Gourmont remarks, the
drinking-shop conquered the dance, and alcohol replaced the violin.

But when we look at the function of dancing in life from a higher and
wider standpoint, this episode in its history ceases to occupy so large
a place. The conquest over dancing has never proved in the end a matter
for rejoicing, even to morality, while an art which has been so
intimately mixed with all the finest and deepest springs of life has
always asserted itself afresh. For dancing is the loftiest, the most
moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere
translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself. It is the only
art, as Rahel Varnhagen said, of which we ourselves are the stuff. Even
if we are not ourselves dancers, but merely the spectators of the dance,
we are still—according to that Lippsian doctrine of _Einfühlung_ or
“empathy” by Groos termed “the play of inner imitation”—which here, at
all events, we may accept as true—feeling ourselves in the dancer who is
manifesting and expressing the latent impulses of our own being.

It thus comes about that, beyond its manifold practical significance,
dancing has always been felt to possess also a symbolic significance.
Marcus Aurelius was accustomed to regard the art of life as like the
dancer’s art, though that Imperial Stoic could not resist adding that in
some respects it was more like the wrestler’s art. “I doubt not yet to
make a figure in the great Dance of Life that shall amuse the spectators
in the sky,” said, long after, Blake, in the same strenuous spirit. In
our own time, Nietzsche, from first to last, showed himself possessed by
the conception of the art of life as a dance, in which the dancer
achieves the rhythmic freedom and harmony of his soul beneath the shadow
of a hundred Damoclean swords. He said the same thing of his style, for
to him the style and the man were one: “My style,” he wrote to his
intimate friend Rohde, “is a dance.” “Every day I count wasted,” he said
again, “in which there has been no dancing.” The dance lies at the
beginning of art, and we find it also at the end. The first creators of
civilisation were making the dance, and the philosopher of a later age,
hovering over the dark abyss of insanity, with bleeding feet and muscles
strained to the breaking point, still seems to himself to be weaving the
maze of the dance.

Footnote 12:

  It is even possible that, in earlier than human times, dancing and
  architecture may have been the result of the same impulse. The nest of
  birds is the chief early form of building, and Edmund Selous has
  suggested (_Zoölogist_, December, 1901) that the nest may first have
  arisen as an accidental result of the ecstatic sexual dance of birds.

Footnote 13:

  “Not the epic song, but the dance,” Wundt says (_Völkerpsychologie_,
  3d ed. 1911, Bd. 1, Teil 1, p. 277), “accompanied by a monotonous and
  often meaningless song, constitutes everywhere the most primitive,
  and, in spite of that primitiveness, the most highly developed art.
  Whether as a ritual dance, or as a pure emotional expression of the
  joy in rhythmic bodily movement, it rules the life of primitive men to
  such a degree that all other forms of art are subordinate to it.”

Footnote 14:

  See an interesting essay in _The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian
  Essays_, by Ananda Coomaraswamy. New York, 1918.

Footnote 15:

  This view was clearly put forward, long ago, by W. W. Newell at the
  International Congress of Anthropology at Chicago in 1893. It has
  become almost a commonplace since.

Footnote 16:

  See a charming paper by Marcella Azra Hincks, “The Art of Dancing in
  Japan,” _Fortnightly Review_, July, 1906. Pantomimic dancing, which
  has played a highly important part in Japan, was introduced into
  religion from China, it is said, in the earliest time, and was not
  adapted to secular purposes until the sixteenth century.

Footnote 17:

  I owe some of these facts to an interesting article by G. R. Mead,
  “The Sacred Dance of Jesus,” _The Quest_, October, 1910.

Footnote 18:

  The dance of the Seises in Seville Cathedral is evidently of great
  antiquity, though it was so much a matter of course that we do not
  hear of it until 1690, when the Archbishop of the day, in opposition
  to the Chapter, wished to suppress it. A decree of the King was
  finally obtained permitting it, provided it was performed only by men,
  so that evidently, before that date, girls as well as boys took part
  in it. Rev. John Morris, “Dancing in Churches,” _The Month_, December,
  1892; also a valuable article on the Seises by J. B. Trend, in _Music
  and Letters_, January, 1921.

Footnote 19:

  See, for references, Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of
  Sex_, vol. III; _Analysis of the Sexual Impulse_, pp. 29, etc.; and
  Westermarck, _History of Human Marriage_, vol. I, chap. XIII, p. 470.

Footnote 20:

  At an earlier period, however, the dance of Salome was understood much
  more freely and often more accurately. As Enlart has pointed out, on a
  capital in the twelfth-century cloister of Moissac, Salome holds a
  kind of castanets in her raised hands as she dances; on one of the
  western portals of Rouen Cathedral, at the beginning of the sixteenth
  century, she is dancing on her hands; while at Hemelverdeghem she is
  really executing the _morisco_, the “_danse du ventre_.”

Footnote 21:

  For an excellent account of dancing in India, now being degraded by
  modern civilisation, see Otto Rothfeld, _Women of India_, chap. VII,
  “The Dancing Girl,” 1922.

Footnote 22:

  I may hazard the suggestion that the gypsies may possibly have
  acquired their rather unaccountable name of Egyptians, not so much
  because they had passed through Egypt, the reason which is generally
  suggested,—for they must have passed through many countries,—but
  because of their proficiency in dances of the recognised Egyptian
  type.

Footnote 23:

  It is interesting to observe that Egypt still retains, almost
  unchanged through fifty centuries, its traditions, technique, and
  skill in dancing, while, as in ancient Egyptian dancing, the garment
  forms an almost or quite negligible element in the art. Loret remarks
  that a charming Egyptian dancer of the Eighteenth Dynasty, whose
  picture in her transparent gauze he reproduces, is an exact portrait
  of a charming Almeh of to-day whom he has seen dancing in Thebes with
  the same figure, the same dressing of the hair, the same jewels. I
  hear from a physician, a gynæcologist now practising in Egypt, that a
  dancing-girl can lie on her back, and with a full glass of water
  standing on one side of her abdomen and an empty glass on the other,
  can by the contraction of the muscles on the side supporting the full
  glass, project the water from it, so as to fill the empty glass. This,
  of course, is not strictly dancing, but it is part of the technique
  which underlies classic dancing and it witnesses to the thoroughness
  with which the technical side of Egyptian dancing is still cultivated.

Footnote 24:

  “We must learn to regard the form of the Greek drama as a dance form,”
  says G. Warre Cornish in an interesting article on “Greek Drama and
  the Dance” (_Fortnightly Review_, February, 1913), “a musical
  symphonic dance-vision, through which the history of Greece and the
  soul of man are portrayed.”

Footnote 25:

  It should perhaps be remarked that in recent times it has been denied
  that the old ballads were built up on dance songs. Miss Pound, for
  instance, in a book on the subject, argues that they were of
  aristocratic and not communal origin, which may well be, though the
  absence of the dance element does not seem to follow.




                              CHAPTER III
                          THE ART OF THINKING


                                   I


HERBERT SPENCER pointed out, in his early essay on “The Genesis of
Science,” that science arose out of art, and that even yet the
distinction is “purely conventional,” for “it is impossible to say when
art ends and science begins.” Spencer was here using “art” in the
fundamental sense according to which all practice is of the nature of
art. Yet it is of interest to find a thinker now commonly regarded as so
prosaic asserting a view which to most prosaic people seems fanciful. To
the ordinary solid man, to any would-be apostle of common sense,
science—and by “science” he usually means applied science—seems the
exact opposite of the vagaries and virtuosities that the hard-headed
_homme moyen sensuel_ is accustomed to look upon as “art.”

Yet the distinction is modern. In classic times there was no such
distinction. The “sciences”—reasonably, as we may now see, and not
fancifully as was afterwards supposed—were “the arts of the mind.” In
the Middle Ages the same liberal studies—grammar, logic, geometry,
music, and the rest—could be spoken of either as “sciences” or as
“arts,” and for Roger Bacon, who in the thirteenth century was so
genuine a man of science, every branch of study or learning was a
“scientia.” I am inclined to think that it was the Mathematical
Renaissance of the seventeenth century which introduced the undue
emphasis on the distinction between “science” and “art.” “All the
sciences are so bound together,” wrote Descartes, the banner-bearer of
that Renaissance, in his “Règles pour la Direction de l’Esprit,” “that
it is much easier to learn them all at once than to learn one alone by
detaching it from the others.” He added that we could not say the same
of the arts. Yet we might perhaps say of arts and sciences that we can
only understand them all together, and we may certainly say, as
Descartes proceeded to say of the sciences alone, that they all emanate
from the same focus, however diversely coloured by the media they pass
through or the objects they encounter. At that moment, however, it was
no doubt practically useful, however theoretically unsound, to
overemphasise the distinction between “science,” with its new
instrumental precision, and “art.”[26] At the same time the tradition of
the old usage was not completely put aside, and a Master of “Arts”
remained a master of such sciences as the directors of education
succeeded in recognising until the middle of the nineteenth century. By
that time the development of the sciences, and especially of the
physical sciences, as “the discovery of truth,” led to a renewed
emphasis on them which resulted in the practical restriction of the term
“art” to what are ordinarily called the fine arts. More formally,
science became the study of what were supposed to be demonstrable and
systematically classifiable truths regarding the facts of the world; art
was separated off as the play of human impulses in making things. Sir
Sidney Colvin, in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” after discussing the
matter (which Mill had already discussed at length in his “Logic” and
decided that the difference is that Science is in the Indicative Mood
and Art in the Imperative Mood), concluded that science is “ordered
knowledge of natural phenomena and of the relations between them,” or
that “Science consists in knowing, Art consists in doing.” Men of
science, like Sir E. Ray Lankester, accepted this conclusion. That was
as far as it was possible to go in the nineteenth century.

But the years pass, and the progress of science itself, especially the
sciences of the mind, has upset this distinction. The analysis of
“knowing” showed that it was not such a merely passive and receptive
method of recognising “truth” as scientists had innocently supposed.
This is probably admitted now by the Realists among philosophers as well
as by the Idealists. Dr. Charles Singer, perhaps our most learned
historian of science, now defines science, no longer as a body of
organized knowledge, but as “the process which makes knowledge,” as
“knowledge in the making”; that is to say, “the growing edge between the
unknown and the known.”[27] As soon as we thus regard it, as a _making_
process, it becomes one with art. Even physical science is perpetually
laying aside the “facts” which it thought it knew, and learning to
replace them by other “facts” which it comes to know as more
satisfactory in presenting an intelligible view of the world. The
analysis of “knowing” shows that this is not only a legitimate but an
inevitable process. Such a process is active and creative. It clearly
partakes at least as much of the nature of “doing” as of “knowing.” It
involves qualities which on another plane, sometimes indeed on the same
plane, are essentially those involved in doing. The craftsman who moulds
conceptions with his mind cannot be put in a fundamentally different
class from the craftsman who moulds conceptions with his hand, any more
than the poet can be put in a totally different class from the painter.
It is no longer possible to deny that science is of the nature of art.

So it is that in the fundamental sense, and even, it will have to be
added, in a sense that comprehends the extravagancies of wild variations
from the norm, we have to recognise that the true man of science is an
artist. Like the lunatic, the lover, the poet (as a great physician, Sir
William Osler, has said), the student is “of imagination all compact.”
It was by his “wonderful imagination,” it has been well pointed out,
that Newton was constantly discovering new tracks and new processes in
the region of the unknown. The extraordinary various life-work of
Helmholtz, who initiated the valuation of beauty on a physiological
basis, scientifically precise as it was, had, as Einstein has remarked,
an æsthetic colouring. “There is no such thing as an unimaginative
scientific man,” a distinguished professor of mechanics and mathematics
declared some years ago, and if we are careful to remember that not
every man who believes that his life is devoted to science is really a
“scientific man,” that statement is literally true.[28] It is not only
true of the scientific man in the special sense; it is also true of the
philosopher. In every philosopher’s work, a philosophic writer has
remarked, “the construction of a complete system of conceptions is not
carried out simply in the interests of knowledge. Its underlying motive
is æsthetic. It is the work of a creative artist.”[29] The intellectual
lives of a Plato or a Dante, Professor Graham Wallas from a different
standpoint has remarked, “were largely guided and sustained by their
delight in the sheer beauty of the rhythmic relation between law and
instance, species and individual, or cause and effect.”[30]

That remark, with its reference to the laws and rhythm in the universe,
calls to mind the great initiator, so far as our knowledge extends back,
of scientific research in our European world. Pythagoras is a dim
figure, and there is no need here to insist unduly on his significance.
But there is not the slightest doubt about the nature of that
significance in its bearing on the point before us. Dim and legendary as
he now appears to us, Pythagoras was no doubt a real person, born in the
sixth century before Christ, at Samos, and by his association with that
great shipping centre doubtless enabled to voyage afar and glean the
wisdom of the ancient world. In antiquity he was regarded, Cicero
remarks, as the inventor of philosophy, and still to-day he is estimated
to be one of the most original figures, not only of Greece, but the
world. He is a figure full of interest from many points of view, however
veiled in mist, but he only concerns us here because he represents the
beginning of what we call “science”—that is to say, measurable knowledge
at its growing point—and because he definitely represents it as arising
out of what we all conventionally recognise as “art,” and as, indeed,
associated with the spirit of art, even its most fantastic forms, all
the way. Pythagoras was a passionate lover of music, and it was thus
that he came to make the enormously fruitful discovery that pitch of
sound depends upon the length of the vibrating chord. Therein it became
clear that law and spatial quantity ruled even in fields which had
seemed most independent of quantitative order. The beginning of the
great science of mechanics was firmly set up. The discovery was no
accident. Even his rather hostile contemporary Heraclitus said of
Pythagoras that he had “practised research and inquiry beyond all other
men.” He was certainly a brilliant mathematician; he was, also, not only
an astronomer, but the first, so far as we know, to recognise that the
earth is a sphere,—so setting up the ladder which was to reach at last
to the Copernican conception,—while his followers took the further step
of affirming that the earth was not the centre of our cosmic system, but
concentrically related. So that Pythagoras may not only be called the
Father of Philosophy, but, with better right the Father of Science in
the modern exact sense. Yet he remained fundamentally an artist even in
the conventional sense. His free play of imagination and emotion, his
delight in the ravishing charm of beauty and of harmony, however it may
sometimes have led him astray,—and introduced the reverence for Number
which so long entwined fancy too closely with science,—yet, as Gomperz
puts it, gave soaring wings to the power of his severe reason.[31]

One other great dim figure of early European antiquity shares with
Pythagoras the philosophic dominance over our world, and that is the
Platonic Socrates, or, as we might perhaps say, the Socratic Plato. And
here, too, we are in the presence of a philosopher, if not a scientist,
who was a supreme artist. Here again, also, we encounter a legendary
figure concealing a more or less real human person. But there is a
difference. While all are agreed that, in Pythagoras we have a great and
brilliant figure dimly seen, there are many who consider that in
Socrates we have a small and dim figure grown great and brilliant in the
Platonic medium through which alone he has been really influential in
our world, for without Plato the name of Socrates would have scarcely
been mentioned. The problem of the Pythagorean legend may be said to be
settled. But the problem of the Socratic legend is still under
discussion. We cannot, moreover, quite put it aside as merely of
academic interest, for its solution, if ever reached, would touch that
great vital problem of art in the actual world with which we are here
throughout concerned.

If one examines any large standard history of Greece, like Grote’s to
mention one of the oldest and best, one is fairly sure to find a long
chapter on the life of Socrates. Such a chapter is inserted, without
apology, without explanation, without compunction, as a matter of
course, in a so-called “history,” and nearly every one, even to-day,
still seems to take it as a matter of course. Few seem to possess the
critical and analytical mind necessary for the examination of the
documents on which the “history” rests. If they approached this chapter
in a questioning spirit, they might perhaps discover that it was not
until about half a century after the time of the real Socrates that any
“historical” evidence for the existence of our legendary Socrates begins
to appear.[32] Few people seem to realise that even of Plato himself we
know nothing certain that could not be held in a single sentence. The
“biographies” of Plato began to be written four hundred years after his
death. It should be easy to estimate their value.

There are three elements—one of them immeasurably more important than
the other two—of which the composite portrait of our modern Socrates is
made up: Xenophon, Plato, the dramatists. To the contribution furnished
by the first, not much weight is usually attached. Yet it should really
have been regarded as extremely illuminating. It suggests that the
subject of “Socrates” was a sort of school exercise, useful practice in
rhetoric or in dialectics. The very fact that Xenophon’s Socrates was so
reminiscent of his creator ought to have been instructive.[33] It has,
however, taken scholars some time to recognise this, and Karl Joël, who
spent fifteen of the best years of his life over the Xenophontic
Socrates, to discover that the figure was just as much a fiction as the
Platonic Socrates, has lately confessed that he thinks those years
rather wasted. It might have been clear earlier that what Plato had done
was really just the same thing so far as method was concerned, though a
totally different thing in result because done by the most richly
endowed of poet-philosophers, the most consummate of artists. For that
is probably how we ought to regard Plato, and not, like some, as merely
a great mystificator. It is true that Plato was the master of irony, and
that “irony,” in its fundamental meaning, is, as Gomperz points out,
“pleasure in mystifying.” But while Plato’s irony possesses a
significance which we must always keep before us, it is yet only one of
the elements of his vast and versatile mind.

It is to the third of these sources that some modern investigators are
now inclined to attach primary significance. It was on the stage—in the
branch of drama that kept more closely in touch with life than that
which had fallen into the hands of the prose dialecticians and
rhetoricians—that we seem to find the shadow of the real Socrates. But
he was not the Socrates of the dramatic dialogues of Plato or even of
Xenophon; he was a minor Sophist, an inferior Diogenes, yet a remarkable
figure, arresting and disturbing, whose idiosyncrasies were quite
perceptible to the crowd. It was an original figure, hardly the
embodiment of a turning-point in philosophy, but fruitful of great
possibilities, so that we could hardly be surprised if the master of
philosophic drama took it over from real life and the stage for his own
purposes.

To make clear to myself the possible way—I am far from asserting it was
the actual way—in which our legendary Socrates arose, I sometimes think
of Chidley. Chidley was an Australian Sophist and Cynic, in the good
sense of both these words, and without doubt, it seems to me, the most
original and remarkable figure that has ever appeared in Australia, of
which, however, he was not a native, though he spent nearly his whole
life there. He was always poor, and like most philosophers he was born
with a morbid nervous disposition, though he acquired a fine and robust
frame. He was liable not only to the shock of outward circumstances but
of inward impulses; these he had in the past often succumbed to, and
only slowly and painfully gained the complete mastery over as he gained
possession of his own philosophy. For all his falls, which he felt
acutely, as Augustine and Bunyan as well as Rousseau felt such lapses,
there was in him a real nobility, an even ascetic firmness and purity of
character. I never met him, but I knew him more intimately, perhaps,
than those who came in contact with him. For many years I was in touch
with him, and his last letter was written shortly before his death; he
always felt I ought to be persuaded of the truth he had to reveal and
never quite understood my sympathetic attitude of scepticism. He had
devoured all the philosophic literature he could lay hold of, but his
philosophy—in the Greek sense, as a way of life, and not in our modern
sense as a system of notions—was his own: a new vision of Nature’s
simplicity and wholeness, only new because it had struck on a new
sensibility and sometimes in excessive and fantastic ways, but he held
his faith with unbending devotion, and never ceased to believe that all
would accept the vision when once they beheld it. So he went about the
streets in Sydney, clad (as a concession to public feeling) in bathing
drawers, finding anywhere he could the Stoa which might serve for him,
to argue and discuss, among all who were willing, with eager faith, keen
mind, and pungent speech. A few were won, but most were disturbed and
shocked. The police persistently harassed him; they felt bound to
interfere with what seemed such an outrage on the prim decency of the
streets; and as he quietly persisted in following his own course, and it
was hard to bring any serious charge against him, they called in the aid
of the doctors, and henceforth he was in and out of the asylum instead
of the prison. No one need be blamed; it was nobody’s fault; if a man
transgresses the ordinary respectable notions of decency, he must be a
criminal, and if he is not a criminal, he must be a lunatic; the social
organisation takes no account of philosophers; the philosophic
Hipparchia and her husband must not nowadays consummate their marriage
in public, and our modern philosophers meekly agree that philosophy is
to have nothing to do with a life. Every one in the case seems to have
behaved with due conventional propriety, just as every one behaved
around the deathbed of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilitch. It was Chidley’s deathbed
they were preparing, and he knew it, but he unflinchingly grasped the
cup they held out to him and drank it to the dregs. He felt he could do
no other. There was no fabled hemlock in it, but it was just as deadly
as though it had been accompanied by all the dramatic symbolisation of a
formal condemnation to death, such as had really been recorded (Plato
well knew) in old Athenian annals. There was no Plato in Sydney. But if
there had been, it is hard to conceive any figure more fit for the ends
of his transforming art. Through that inspiring medium the plebeian
Sophist and Cynic, while yet retaining something of the asperity of his
original shape, would have taken on a new glory, his bizarreries would
have been spiritualised and his morbidities become the signs of mystic
possession, his fate would have appeared as consecrated in form as it
genuinely was in substance, he would have been the mouthpiece, not only
of the truths he really uttered, but of a divine eloquence on the verge
of which he had in real life only trembled, and, like Socrates in the
hands of Plato, he would have passed, as all the finest philosophy
passes at last, into music.[34] So in the end Chidley would have entered
modern history, just as Socrates entered ancient history, the Saint and
Martyr of Philosophy.[35]

If it should so be that, as we learn to see him truly, the figure of the
real Socrates must diminish in magnitude, then—and that is the point
which concerns us here—the glory of the artist who made him what he has
become for us is immensely enhanced. No longer the merely apt and
brilliant disciple of a great master, he becomes himself master and
lord, the radiant creator of the chief figure in European philosophy,
the most marvellous artist the world has ever known. So that when we
look back at the spiritual history of Europe, it may become possible to
say that its two supreme figures, the Martyr of Philosophy and the
Martyr of Religion, were both—however real the two human persons out of
which they were formed—the work of man’s imagination. For there, on the
one hand, we see the most accomplished of European thinkers, and on the
other a little band of barbarians, awkwardly using just the same Greek
language, working with an unconscious skill which even transcends all
that conscious skill could have achieved, yet both bearing immortal
witness to the truth that the human soul only lives truly in art and can
only be ruled through art. So it is that in art lies the solution of the
conflicts of philosophy. There we see Realism, or the discovery of
things, one with Idealism, or the creation of things. Art is the
embodied harmony of their conflict. That could not be more exquisitely
symbolised than by these two supreme figures in the spiritual life of
Europe, the Platonic Socrates and the Gospel Jesus, both alike presented
to us, it is so significant to observe, as masters of irony.

There has never again been so great an artist in philosophy, so supreme
a dramatist, as Plato. But in later times philosophers themselves have
often been willing to admit that even if they were not, like Plato,
dramatists, there was poetry and art in their vocation. “One does not
see why the sense for Philosophy should be more generally diffused than
that for poetry,” remarked Schelling, evidently regarding them as on the
same plane. F. A. Lange followed with his memorable “History of
Materialism,” in which the conception of philosophy as a poetic art was
clearly set forth. “Philosophy is pure art,” says in our own days a
distinguished thinker who is in especially close touch with the
religious philosophy of the East. “The thinker works with laws of
thought and scientific facts in just the same sense as the musical
composer with tones. He must find accords, he must think out sequences,
he must set the part in a necessary relation to the whole. But for that
he needs art.”[36] Bergson regards philosophy as an art, and Croce, the
more than rival of Bergson in popular esteem, and with interesting
points of contact with the French philosopher, though his standpoint is
so different, has repeatedly pointed out—as regards Nietzsche, for
instance, and even as regards a philosopher to whom he is so closely
related as Hegel—that we may read philosophy for its poetic rather than
its historic truth. Croce’s position in this matter is not, indeed, easy
to state quite simply. He includes æsthetics in philosophy, but he would
not regard philosophy as an art. For him art is the first and lowest
stratum in the mind, not in rank, but in order, and on it the other
strata are laid and combine with it. Or, as he elsewhere says, “art is
the root of our whole theoretic life. Without root there can be neither
flower nor fruit.”[37] But for Croce art is not itself flower or fruit.
The “Concept” and other abstractions have to be brought in before Croce
is satisfied that he has attained reality. It may, perhaps, indeed, be
permitted, even to an admirer of the skill with which Croce spreads out
such wide expanses of thought, to suggest that, in spite of his anxiety
to keep close to the concrete, he is not therein always successful, and
that he tends to move in verbal circles, as may perhaps happen to a
philosopher who would reduce the philosophy of art to the philosophy of
language. But, however that may be, it is a noteworthy fact that the
close relationship of art and philosophy is admitted by the two most
conspicuous philosophers of to-day, raised to popular eminence in spite
of themselves, the Philosopher of Other-worldliness and the Philosopher
of This-worldliness.

If we turn to England, we find that, in an age and a land wherein it was
not so easy to make the assertion as it has now more generally become,
Sir Leslie Stephen, in harmony, whether or not he knew it, with F. A.
Lange, wrote to Lord Morley (as he later became) in the last century: “I
think that a philosophy is really made more of poetry than of logic; and
the real value of both poetry and philosophy is not the pretended
reasoning, but the exposition in one form or other of a certain view of
life.” It is, we see, just what they have all been saying, and if it is
true of men of science and philosophers, who are the typical
representatives of human thinking, it is even true of every man on earth
who thinks, ever since the day when conscious thinking began. The world
is an unrelated mass of impressions, as it first strikes our infant
senses, falling at random on the sensory mechanism, and all appearing as
it were on the same plane. For an infant the moon is no farther away
than his mother’s breast, even though he possesses an inherited mental
apparatus fitted to coördinate and distinguish the two. It is only when
we begin to think, that we can arrange these unrelated impressions into
intelligible groups, and thinking is thus of the nature of art.[38]

All such art, moreover, may yet be said to be an invention of fictions.
That great and fundamental truth, which underlies so much modern
philosophy, has been expounded in the clearest and most detailed manner
by Hans Vaihinger in his “Philosophie des Als Ob.”


                                   II


HANS VAIHINGER is still little known in England;[39] and that is the
more remarkable as he has always been strongly attached to English
thought, of which his famous book reveals an intimate knowledge. In
early life he had mixed much with English people, for whom he has a deep
regard, and learnt to revere, not only Darwin, but Hume and J. S. Mill,
who exerted a decisive influence on his own philosophic development. At
the beginning of his career he projected a history of English
philosophy, but interest in that subject was then so small in Germany
that he had regretfully to abandon his scheme, and was drawn instead,
through no active effort on his part, to make the study of Kant the
by-product of his own more distinctive work, yet it was a fitting study,
for in Kant he saw the germs of the doctrine of the “as if,” that is to
say, the practical significance of fiction in human life, though that is
not the idea traditionally associated with Kant, who, indeed, was not
himself clear about it, while his insight was further darkened by his
reactionary tendencies; yet Vaihinger found that it really played a
large part in Kant’s work and might even be regarded as his special and
personal way of regarding things; he was not so much a metaphysician,
Vaihinger remarks, as a metaphorician. Yet even in his Kantian studies
the English influence was felt, for Vaihinger’s work has here been to
take up the Neo-Kantism of F. A. Lange and to develop it in an empirical
and positivistic direction.

There was evidently something in Vaihinger’s spirit that allied him to
the English spirit. We may see that in his portrait; it is not the face
of the philosophic dreamer, the scholarly man of the study, but the
eager, forceful head of the practical man of action, the daring
adventurer, the man who seems made to struggle with the concrete things
of the world, the kind of man, that is to say, whom we consider
peculiarly English. That, indeed, is the kind of man he would have been;
that is the kind of life, a social life full of activity and of sport,
that he desired to lead. But it was impossible. An extreme and lifelong
short-sightedness proved a handicap of which he has never ceased to be
conscious. So it came about that his practical energy was, as it were,
sublimated into a philosophy which yet retained the same forceful
dynamic quality.

For the rest, his origin, training, and vocation seem all to have been
sufficiently German. He came, like many other eminent men, out of a
Swabian parsonage, and was himself intended for theology, only branching
off into philosophy after his university career was well advanced. At
the age of sixteen he was deeply influenced, as so many others have
been, by Herder’s “Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit”; that not only
harmonised with his own tendency at the time towards a mixed theism and
pantheism, but it first planted within him the conception of evolution
in human history, proceeding from an animal origin, which became a
fundamental element of his mental constitution. When a year later he
came across Darwin’s doctrines he felt that he knew them beforehand.
These influences were balanced by that of Plato, through whose “Ideas”
he caught his first glimpse of an “As-If world.” A little later the
strenuous training of one of his teachers in the logical analysis of
Latin syntax, especially in the use of the conjunctions, furnished the
source from which subsequently he drew that now well-known phrase. It
was in these years that he reached the view, which he has since
definitely advocated, that philosophy should not be made a separate
study, but should become a natural part and corollary of every study,
since philosophy cannot be fruitfully regarded as a discipline by
itself. Without psychology, especially, he finds that philosophy is
merely “a methodic abstraction.” A weighty influence of these days was
constituted by the poems and essays of Schiller, a Swabian like himself,
and, indeed, associated with the history of his own family. Schiller was
not only an inspiring influence, but it was in Schiller’s saying, “Error
alone is life, and knowledge is death,” that he found (however
unjustifiably) the first expression of his own “fictionalism,” while
Schiller’s doctrine of the play impulse as the basis of artistic
creation and enjoyment seemed the prophecy of his own later doctrine,
for in play he saw later the “as if” as the kernel of æsthetic practice
and contemplation.

At the age of eighteen Vaihinger proceeded to the Swabian University of
Tübingen and here was free to let his wide-ranging, eager mind follow
its own impulses. He revealed a taste for the natural sciences and with
this the old Greek nature philosophers, especially Anaximander, for the
sake of their anticipations of modern evolutionary doctrines. Aristotle
also occupied him, later Spinoza, and, above all, Kant, though it was
chiefly the metaphysical antinomies and the practical reason which
fascinated him. As ever, it was what made for practice that seemed
mostly to concern him. Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, the
official German idealists, said nothing to him. He turned from them to
Schopenhauer, and thence he drew the pessimisms, the irrationalism, and
the voluntarism which became permanent features of his system of
thought. The irrationalism, as he himself points out, was completely
opposed to all early influences on him, but it lay in his own personal
circumstances. The contrast between his temperamental impulse to
energetic practical action in every direction, and the reserve,
passivity, and isolation which myopia enforced, seemed to him absolutely
irrational and sharpened his vision for all the irrationality of
existence. So that a philosophy which, like Schopenhauer’s, truthfully
recognised and allowed for the irrational element in existence came like
a revelation. As to Vaihinger’s pessimism, that, as we might expect, is
hardly of what would be generally considered a pessimistic character. It
is merely a recognition of the fact that most people are over-sanguine
and thereby come to grief, whereas a little touch of pessimism would
have preserved them from much misery. Long before the Great War,
Vaihinger felt that many Germans were over-sanguine regarding the
military power of their Empire, and of Germany’s place in the world, and
that such optimism might easily conduce to war and disaster. In 1911 he
even planned to publish anonymously in Switzerland a pamphlet entitled
“Finis Germaniæ,” with the motto “Quos Deus vult perdere, prius
dementat,” and was only prevented by a sudden development of the
eye-trouble. Vaihinger points out that an unjustified optimism had for a
long time past led in the politics of Germany—and also, he might have
said, of the countries later opposed to her—to lack of foresight,
over-haste, and arrogance; he might have added that a very slight touch
of pessimism would also have enabled these countries, on both sides, to
discover the not very remote truth that even the victors in such a
contest would suffer scarcely less than the conquered. In early life
Vaihinger had playfully defined Man as a “species of ape afflicted by
megalomania”; he admits that, whatever truth lies behind the definition,
the statement is somewhat exaggerated. Yet it is certainly strange to
observe, one may comment, how many people seem to feel vain of their own
ungratified optimism when the place where optimism most flourishes is
the lunatic asylum. They never seem to pause to reflect on the goal that
lies ahead of them, though there must be few who on looking back cannot
perceive what terrible accidents they might have foreseen and avoided by
the aid of a little pessimism. When the gods, to ruin a man, first make
him mad, they do it, almost invariably, by making him an optimist. One
might hazard the assertion that the chief philosophic distinction
between classic antiquity and modern civilisation is the prevalence in
the latter of a facile optimism; and the fact that of all ancient
writers the most popular in modern times has been the complacently
optimistic (or really hedonistic) Horace is hardly due to his technical
virtuosity. He who would walk sanely amid the opposing perils in the
path of life always needs a little optimism; he also needs a little
pessimism.

Reference has been made to Vaihinger’s devouring appetite for knowledge.
This, indeed, was extraordinary, and of almost universal range. There
seem to have been few fields with which he failed to come in touch,
either through books or by personal intercourse with experts. He found
his way into all the natural sciences, he was drawn to Greek archæology
and German philosophy; he began the study of Sanscrit with Roth. Then,
realising that he had completely neglected mathematics, he devoted
himself with ardour to analytic geometry and infinitesimals, a study
which later he found philosophically fruitful. Finally, in 1874, he may
be said to have rounded the circle of his self-development by reading
the just published enlarged and much improved edition of F. A. Lange’s
“History of Materialism.” Here he realised the presence of a spirit of
the noblest order, equipped with the widest culture and the finest
lucidity of vision, the keenest religious radicalism combined with
large-hearted tolerance and lofty moral equilibrium, all manifested in a
completed master-work. Moreover, the standpoint of F. A. Lange was
precisely that which Vaihinger had been independently struggling
towards, for it brought into view that doctrine of the place of fiction
in life which he had already seen ahead. It is not surprising that he
should generously and enthusiastically acclaim Lange as master and
leader, though his subsequent work is his own, and has carried ideas of
which Lange held only the seeds to new and fruitful development.[40]

It was in 1876-77 that Vaihinger wrote his book, a marvellous
achievement for so youthful a thinker, for he was then only about
twenty-five years of age. A final revision it never underwent, and there
remain various peculiarities about the form into which it is cast. The
serious failure in eyesight seems to have been the main reason for
delaying the publication of a work which the author felt to be too
revolutionary to put forth in an imperfect form. He preferred to leave
it for posthumous publication.

But the world was not standing still, and during the next thirty years
many things happened. Vaihinger found the new sect of Pragmatists coming
into fashion with ideas resembling his own, though in a cruder shape,
which seemed to render philosophy the “meretrix theologorum.” Many
distinguished thinkers were working towards an attitude more or less
like his own, especially Nietzsche, whom (like many others even to-day)
he had long regarded with prejudice and avoided, but now discovered to
be “a great liberator” with congenial veins of thought. Vaihinger
realised that his conception was being independently put forward from
various sides, often in forms that to him seemed imperfect or vicious.
It was no longer advisable to hold back his book. In 1911, therefore,
“Die Philosophie des Als Ob” appeared.

The problem which Vaihinger set out to solve was this: How comes it
about that with consciously false ideas we yet reach conclusions that
are in harmony with Nature and appeal to us as Truth? That we do so is
obvious, especially in the “exact” branches of science. In mathematics
it is notorious that we start from absurdities to reach a realm of law,
and our whole conception of the nature of the world is based on a
foundation which we believe to have no existence. For even the most
sober scientific investigator in science, the most thoroughgoing
Positivist, cannot dispense with fiction; he must at least make use of
categories, and they are already fictions, analogical fictions, or
labels, which give us the same pleasure as children receive when they
are told the “name” of a thing. Fiction is, indeed, an indispensable
supplement to logic, or even a part of it; whether we are working
inductively or deductively, both ways hang closely together with
fiction; and axioms, though they seek to be primary verities, are more
akin to fiction. If we had realised the nature of axioms, the doctrine
of Einstein, which sweeps away axioms so familiar to us that they seem
obvious truths, and substitutes others which seem absurd because they
are unfamiliar, might not have been so bewildering.

Physics, especially mathematical physics, Vaihinger explains in detail,
has been based, and fruitfully based, on fictions. The infinite,
infinitely little or infinitely great, while helpful in lightening our
mental operations, is a fiction. The Greeks disliked and avoided it, and
“the gradual formation of this conception is one of the most charming
and instructive themes in the history of science,” indeed, one of the
most noteworthy spectacles in the history of the human spirit; we see
the working of a logical impulse first feeling in the dark, gradually
constructing ideas fitted to yield precious service, yet full of
hopeless contradictions, without any relation to the real world. That
absolute space is a fiction, Vaihinger points out, is no new idea.
Hobbes had declared it was only a _phantasma_; Leibnitz, who agreed,
added that it was merely “the idolum of a few modern Englishmen,” and
called time, extension, and movement “_choses idéales_.” Berkeley, in
attacking the defective conceptions of the mathematicians, failed to see
that it was by means of, and not in spite of, these logically defective
conceptions that they attained logically valuable results. All the marks
of fiction were set up on the mathematician’s pure space; it was
impossible and unthinkable: yet it proved useful and fruitful.

The tautological fiction of “Force”—an empty reduplication of the fact
of a succession of relationships—is one that we constantly fall back on
with immense satisfaction and with the feeling of having achieved
something; it has been a highly convenient fiction which has aided
representation and experience. It is one of the most famous, and also,
it must be added, one of the most fatal of fantasies. For when we talk
of, for instance, a “life-force” and its _élan_, or whatever other
dainty term we like to apply to it, we are not only summarily mingling
together many separate phenomena, but we are running the risk that our
conception may be taken for something that really exists. There is
always temptation, when two processes tend to follow each other, to call
the property of the first to be followed by the other its “force,” and
to measure that force by the magnitude of the result. In reality we only
have succession and coexistence, and the “force” is something that we
imagine.

We must not, therefore, treat our imagination with contempt as was
formerly the fashion, but rather the reverse. The two great periods of
English Philosophy, Vaihinger remarks, ended with Ockham and with Hume,
who each took up, in effect, the fictional point of view, but both too
much on the merely negative side, without realising the positive and
constructive value of fictions. English law has above all realised it,
even, he adds, to the point of absurdity. Nothing is so precious as
fiction, provided only one chooses the right fiction. “Matter” is such a
fiction. There are still people who speak with lofty contempt of
“Materialism”; they mean well, but they are unhappy in their terms of
abuse. When Berkeley demonstrated the impossibility of “matter,” he
thought he could afford to throw away the conception as useless. He was
quite wrong; it is logically contradictory ideas that are the most
valuable. Matter is a fiction, just as the fundamental ideas with which
the sciences generally operate are mostly fictions, and the scientific
materialisation of the world has proved a necessary and useful fiction,
only harmful when we regard it as hypothesis and therefore possibly
true. The representative world is a system of fictions. It is a symbol
by the help of which we orient ourselves. The business of science is to
make the symbol ever more adequate, but it remains a symbol, a means of
action, for action is the last end of thinking.

The “atom,” to which matter is ultimately reduced, is regarded by
Vaihinger as equally a fiction, though it was at first viewed as an
hypothesis, and it may be added that since he wrote it seems to have
returned to the stage of hypothesis.[41] But when with Boscovich the
“atom” was regarded as simply the bearer of energy, it became “literally
a hypostatised nothing.” We have to realise at the same time that every
“thing” is a “summatory fiction,” for to say, as is often said, that a
“thing” has properties and yet has a real existence apart from its
properties is obviously only a convenient manner of speech, a “verbal
fiction.” The “force of attraction,” as Newton himself pointed out,
belongs to the same class of summatory fictions.

Vaihinger is throughout careful to distinguish fiction alike from
hypothesis and dogma. He regards the distinction as, methodologically,
highly important, though not always easy to make. The “dogma” is put
forward as an absolute and unquestionable truth; the “hypothesis” is a
possible or probable truth, such as Darwin’s doctrine of descent; the
“fiction” is impossible, but it enables us to reach what for us is
relatively truth, and, above all, while hypothesis simply contributes to
knowledge, fiction thus used becomes a guide to practical action and
indispensable to what we feel to be progress. Thus the mighty and
civilising structure of Roman law was built up by the aid of what the
Romans themselves recognised as fictions, while in the different and
more flexible system of English laws a constant inspiration to action
has been furnished by the supposed privileges gained by Magna Carta,
though we now recognise them as fictitious. Many of our ideas tend to go
through the three stages of Dogma, Hypothesis, and Fiction, sometimes in
that order and sometimes in the reverse order. Hypothesis especially
presents a state of labile stability which is unpleasant to the mind, so
it tends to become either dogma or fiction. The ideas of Christianity,
beginning as dogmas, have passed through all three stages in the minds
of thinkers during recent centuries: the myths of Plato, beginning as
fiction, not only passed through the three stages, but then passed back
again, being now again regarded as fiction. The scientifically valuable
fiction is a child of modern times, but we have already emerged from the
period when the use of fiction was confined to the exact sciences.

Thus we find fiction fruitfully flourishing in the biological and social
sciences and even in the highest spheres of human spiritual activity.
The Linnæan and similar classificatory systems are fictions, even though
put forward as hypotheses, having their value simply as pictures, as
forms of representation, but leading to contradictions and liable to be
replaced by other systems which present more helpful pictures. There are
still people who disdain Adam Smith’s “economic man,” as though
proceeding from a purely selfish view of life, although Buckle,
forestalling Vaihinger, long ago explained that Smith was deliberately
making use of a “valid artifice,” separating facts that he knew to be in
nature inseparable—he based his moral theory on a totally different kind
of man—because so he could reach results approximately true to the
observed phenomena. Bentham also adopted a fiction for his own system,
though believing it to be an hypothesis, and Mill criticised it as being
“geometrical”; the criticism is correct, comments Vaihinger, but the
method was not thereby invalidated, for in complicated fields no other
method can be fruitfully used.

The same law holds when we approach our highest and most sacred
conceptions. It was recognised by enlightened philosophers and
theologians before Vaihinger that the difference between body and soul
is not different from that between matter and force,—a provisional and
useful distinction,—that light and darkness, life and death, are
abstractions, necessary, indeed, but in their application to reality
always to be used with precaution. On the threshold of the moral world
we meet the idea of Freedom, “one of the weightiest conceptions man has
ever formed,” once a dogma, in course of time an hypothesis, now in the
eyes of many a fiction; yet we cannot do without it, even although we
may be firmly convinced that our acts are determined by laws that cannot
be broken. Many other great conceptions have tended to follow the same
course. God, the Soul, Immortality, the Moral World-Order. The critical
hearers understand what is meant when these great words are used, and if
the uncritical misunderstand, that, adds Vaihinger, may sometimes be
also useful. For these things are Ideals, and all Ideals are, logically
speaking, fictions. As Science leads to the Imaginary, so Life leads to
the Impossible; without them we cannot reach the heights we are born to
scale. “Taken literally, however, our most valuable conceptions are
worthless.”

When we review the vast field which Vaihinger summarises, we find that
thinking and existing must ever be on two different planes. The attempt
of Hegel and his followers to transform subjective processes into
objective world-processes, Vaihinger maintains, will not work out. The
Thing-in-Itself, the Absolute, remains a fiction, though the ultimate
and most necessary fiction, for without it representation would be
unintelligible. We can only regard reality as a Heraclitean flux of
happening—though Vaihinger fails to point out that this “reality” also
can only be an image or symbol—and our thinking would itself be fluid if
it were not that by fiction we obtain imaginary standpoints and
boundaries by which to gain control of the flow of reality. It is the
special art and object of thinking to attain existence by quite other
methods than that of existence itself. But the wish by so doing to
understand the world is both unrealisable and foolish, for we are only
trying to comprehend our own fictions. We can never solve the so-called
world-riddle because what seem riddles to us are merely the
contradictions we have ourselves created. Yet, though the way of
thinking cannot be the way of being, since they stand on such different
foundations, thinking always has a kind of parallelism with being, and
though we make our reckoning with a reality that we falsify, yet the
practical result tends to come out right. Just because thinking is
different from reality, its forms must also be different in order to
correspond with reality. Our conceptions, our conventional signs, have a
fictive function to perform; thinking in its lower grades is comparable
to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

Imagination is thus a constitutive part of all thinking. We may make
distinctions between practical scientific thinking and disinterested
æsthetic thinking. Yet all thinking is finally a comparison. Scientific
fictions are parallel with æsthetic fictions. The poet is the type of
all thinkers: there is no sharp boundary between the region of poetry
and the region of science. Both alike are not ends in themselves, but
means to higher ends.

Vaihinger’s doctrine of the “as if” is not immune from criticism on more
than one side, and it is fairly obvious that, however sound the general
principle, particular “fictions” may alter their status, and have even
done so since the book was written. Moreover, the doctrine is not always
quite congruous with itself. Nor can it be said that Vaihinger ever
really answered the question with which he set out. In philosophy,
however, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the
things that are met with by the way. And Vaihinger’s philosophy is not
only of interest because it presents so clearly and vigorously a
prevailing tendency in modern thought. Rightly understood, it supplies a
fortifying influence to those who may have seen their cherished
spiritual edifice, whatever it may be, fall around them and are tempted
to a mood of disillusionment. We make our own world; when we have made
it awry, we can remake it, approximately truer, though it cannot be
absolutely true, to the facts. It will never be finally made; we are
always stretching forth to larger and better fictions which answer more
truly to our growing knowledge and experience. Even when we walk, it is
only by a series of regulated errors, Vaihinger well points out, a
perpetual succession of falls to one side and the other side. Our whole
progress through life is of the same nature; all thinking is a regulated
error. For we cannot, as Vaihinger insists, choose our errors at random
or in accordance with what happens to please us; such fictions are only
too likely to turn into deadening dogmas: the old _vis dormitiva_ is the
type of them, mere husks that are of no vital use and help us not at
all. There are good fictions and bad fictions just as there are good
poets and bad poets. It is in the choice and regulation of our errors,
in our readiness to accept ever-closer approximations to the
unattainable reality, that we think rightly and live rightly. We triumph
in so far as we succeed in that regulation. “A lost battle,” Foch,
quoting De Maistre, lays down in his “Principes de Guerre,” “is a battle
one thinks one has lost”; the battle is won by the fiction that it is
won. It is so also in the battle of life, in the whole art of living.
Freud regards dreaming as fiction that helps us to sleep; thinking we
may regard as fiction that helps us to live. Man lives by imagination.


                                  III


YET what we consider our highest activities arise out of what we are
accustomed to regard as the lowest. That is, indeed, merely a necessary
result of evolution; bipeds like ourselves spring out of many-limbed
creatures whom we should now regard as little better than vermin, and
the adult human creature whose eyes, as he sometimes imagines, are fixed
on the stars, was a few years earlier merely a small animal crawling on
all fours. The impulse of the philosopher, of the man of science, of any
ordinary person who sometimes thinks about seemingly abstract or
disinterested questions—we must include the whole range of the play of
thought in response to the stimulus of curiosity—may seem at the first
glance to be a quite secondary and remote product of the great primary
instincts. Yet it is not difficult to bring this secondary impulse into
direct relation with the fundamental primary instincts, even, and
perhaps indeed chiefly, with the instinct of sex. On the mental
side—which is not, of course, its fundamental side—the sexual instinct
is mainly, perhaps solely, a reaction to the stimulus of curiosity.
Beneath that mental surface the really active force is a physiologically
based instinct urgent towards action, but the boy or girl who first
becomes conscious of the mental stimulus is unaware of the instinct it
springs from, and may even disregard as unimportant its specific
physiological manifestations. The child is only conscious of new
curiosities, and these it persistently seeks to satisfy at any available
or likely source of information, aided by the strenuous efforts of its
own restlessly active imagination. It is in exactly the same position as
the metaphysician, or the biologist, or any thinker who is faced by
complex and yet unsolved problems. And the child is at first baffled by
just the same kind of obstacles, due, not like those of the thinker, to
the silence of recalcitrant Nature, but to the silence of parents and
teachers, or to their deliberate efforts to lead him astray.

Where do babies come from? That is perhaps for many children the
earliest scientific problem that is in this way rendered so difficult of
solution. No satisfying solution comes from the sources of information
to which the child is wont to appeal. He is left to such slight
imperfect observations as he can himself make; on such clues his
searching intellect works and with the aid of imagination weaves a
theory, more or less remote from the truth, which may possibly explain
the phenomena. It is a genuine scientific process—the play of intellect
and imagination around a few fragments of observed fact—and it is
undoubtedly a valuable discipline for the childish mind, though if it is
too prolonged it may impede or distort natural development, and if the
resulting theory is radically false it may lead, as the theories of
scientific adults sometimes lead, if not speedily corrected, to various
unfortunate results.

A little later, when he has ceased to be a child and puberty is
approaching, another question is apt to arise in the boy’s mind: What is
a woman like? There is also, less often and more carefully concealed,
the corresponding curiosity in the girl’s mind. Earlier this question
had seemed of no interest; it had never even occurred to ask it; there
was little realisation—sometimes none at all—of any sexual difference.
Now it sometimes becomes a question of singular urgency, in the solution
of which it is necessary for the boy to concentrate all the scientific
apparatus at his command. For there may be no ways of solving it
directly, least of all for a well-behaved, self-respecting boy or a shy,
modest girl. The youthful intellect is thus held in full tension, and
its developing energy directed into all sorts of new channels in order
to form an imaginative picture of the unknown reality, fascinating
because incompletely known. All the chief recognised mental processes of
dogma, hypothesis, and fiction, developed in the history of the race,
are to this end instinctively created afresh in the youthful individual
mind, endlessly formed and re-formed and tested in order to fill in the
picture. The young investigator becomes a diligent student of literature
and laboriously examines the relevant passages he finds in the Bible or
other ancient primitive naked books. He examines statues and pictures.
Perhaps he finds some old elementary manual of anatomy, but here the
long list of structures with Latin names proves far more baffling than
helpful to the youthful investigator who can in no possible way fit them
all into the smooth surface shown by the statues. Yet the creative and
critical habit of thought, the scientific mind generated by this search,
is destined to be of immense value, and long outlives the time when the
eagerly sought triangular spot, having fulfilled its intellectual
function, has become a familiar region, viewed with indifference, or at
most a homely tenderness.

That was but a brief and passing episode, however permanently beneficial
its results might prove. With the achievement of puberty, with the
coming of adolescence, a larger and higher passion fills the youth’s
soul. He forgets the woman’s body, his idealism seems to raise him above
the physical: it is the woman’s personality—most likely some particular
woman’s personality—that he desires to know and to grasp.

A twofold development tends to take place at this age—in those youths,
that is to say, who possess the latent attitude for psychic
development—and that in two diverse directions, both equally away from
definite physical desire, which at this age is sometimes, though not
always, at its least prominent place in consciousness. On the one hand
there is an attraction for an idealised person—perhaps a rather remote
person, for such most easily lend themselves to idealisation—of the
opposite (or occasionally the same) sex, it may sometimes for a time
even be the heroine of a novel. Such an ideal attraction acts as an
imaginative and emotional ferment. The imagination is stimulated to
construct for the first time, from such material as it has come across,
or can derive from within, the coherent picture of a desirable person.
The emotions are trained and disciplined to play around the figure thus
constructed with a new impersonal and unselfish, even self-sacrificing,
devotion. But this process is not enough to use up all the energies of
the developing mind, and the less so as such impulses are unlikely by
their very nature to receive any considerable degree of gratification,
for they are of a nature to which no adequate response is possible.

Thus it happens in adolescence that this new stream of psychic energy,
emotional and intellectual, generated from within, concurrently with its
primary personal function of moulding the object of love, streams over
into another larger and more impersonal channel. It is, indeed, lifted
on to a higher plane and transformed, to exercise a fresh function by
initiating new objects of ideal desire. The radiant images of religion
and of art as well as of science—however true it may be that they have
also other adjuvant sources—thus begin to emerge from the depths beneath
consciousness. They tend to absorb and to embody the new energy, while
its primary personal object may sink into the background, or at this age
even fail to be conscious at all.

This process—the process in which all abstract thinking is born as well
as all artistic creation—must to some slight extent take place in every
person whose mental activity is not entirely confined to the immediate
objects of sense. But in persons of more complex psychic organisation it
is a process of fundamental importance. In those of the highest complex
organisation, indeed, it becomes what we term genius. In the most
magnificent achievements of poetry and philosophy, of art and of
science, it is no longer forbidden to see the ultimate root in this
adolescent development.

To some a glimpse of this great truth has from time to time appeared.
Ferrero, who occupied himself with psychology before attaining eminence
as a brilliant historian, suggested thirty years ago that the art
impulse and its allied manifestations are transformed sexual instinct;
the sexual impulse is “the raw material, so to speak, from which art
springs”; he connected that transformation with a less development of
the sexual emotions in women; but that was much too hasty an assumption,
for apart from the fact that such transformation could never be
complete, and probably less so in women than in men, we have also to
consider the nature of the two organisms through which the transformed
emotions would operate, probably unlike in the sexes, for the work done
by two machines obviously does not depend entirely upon feeding them
with the same amount of fuel, but also on the construction of the two
engines. Möbius, a brilliant and original, if not erratic, German
psychologist, who was also concerned with the question of difference in
the amount of sexual energy, regarded the art impulse as a kind of
sexual secondary character. That is to say, no doubt,—if we develop the
suggestion,—that just as the external features of the male and his
external activities, in the ascending zoölogical series, have been
developed out of the impulse of repressed organic sexual desire striving
to manifest itself ever more urgently in the struggle to overcome the
coyness of the female, so on the psychic side there has been a parallel
impulse, if of later development, to carry on the same task in forms of
art which have afterwards acquired an independent activity and a yet
further growth dissociated from this primary biological function. We
think of the natural ornaments which adorn male animals from far down in
the scale even up to man, of the additions made thereto by tattooing and
decoration and garments and jewels, of the parades and dances and songs
and musical serenades found among lower animals as well as Man, together
with the love-lyrics of savages, furnishing the beginnings of the most
exquisite arts of civilisation.

It is to be noted, however, that these suggestions introduce an
assumption of male superiority, or male inferiority—according to our
scheme of values—which unnecessarily prejudices and confuses the issue.
We have to consider the question of the origin of art apart from any
supposed predominance of its manifestations in one sex or the other. In
my own conception—put forward a quarter of a century ago—of what I
called auto-erotic activities, it was on such a basis that I sought to
place it, since I regarded those auto-erotic phenomena as arising from
the impeded spontaneous sexual energy of the organism and extending from
simple physical processes to the highest psychic manifestations; “it is
impossible to say what finest elements in art, in morals, in
civilisation generally, may not really be rooted in an auto-erotic
impulse,” though I was careful to add that the transmutation of sexual
energy into other forms of force must not be regarded as itself
completely accounting for all the finest human aptitudes of sympathy and
art and religion.[42]

It is along this path, it may perhaps be claimed,—as dimly glimpsed by
Nietzsche, Hinton, and other earlier thinkers,—that the main explanation
of the dynamic process by which the arts, in the widest sense, have come
into being, is now chiefly being explored. One thinks of Freud and
especially of Dr. Otto Rank, perhaps the most brilliant and clairvoyant
of the younger investigators who still stand by the master’s side. In
1905 Rank wrote a little essay on the artist[43] in which this mechanism
is set forth and the artist placed, in what the psycho-analytic author
considers his due place, between the ordinary dreamer at one end and the
neurotic subject at the other, the lower forms of art, such as
myth-making, standing near to dreams, and the higher forms, such as the
drama, philosophy, and the founding of religions, near to
psycho-neurosis, but all possessing a sublimated life-force which has
its root in some modification of sexual energy.

It may often seem that, in these attempts to explain the artist, the man
of science is passed over or left in the background, and that is true.
But art and science, as we now know, have the same roots. The supreme
men of science are recognisably artists, and the earliest forms of art,
which are very early indeed,—Sir Arthur Evans has suggested that men may
have drawn before they talked,—were doubtless associated with magic,
which was primitive man’s science, or, at all events, his nearest
approximation to science. The connection of the scientific instinct with
the sexual instinct is not, indeed, a merely recent insight. Many years
ago it was clearly stated by a famous Dutch author. “Nature, who must
act wisely at the risk of annihilation,” wrote Multatuli at the
conclusion of his short story, “The Adventures of Little Walter,” “has
herein acted wisely by turning all her powers in one direction.
Moralists and psychologists have long since recognised, without
inquiring into the causes, that curiosity is one of the main elements of
love. Yet they were only thinking of sexual love, and by raising the two
related termini in corresponding wise on to a higher plane I believe
that the noble thirst for knowledge springs from the same soil in which
noble love grows. To press through, to reveal, to possess, to direct,
and to ennoble, that is the task and the longing, alike of the lover and
the natural discoverer. So that every Ross or Franklin is a Werther of
the Pole, and whoever is in love is a Mungo Park of the spirit.”


                                   IV


AS soon as we begin to think about the world around us in what we vainly
call a disinterested way—for disinterest is, as Leibnitz said, a
chimera, and there remains a superior interest—we become youths and
lovers and artists, and there is at the same time a significant strain
of sexual imagery in our thought.[44] Among ourselves this is not always
clear; we have been dulled by the routine of civilisation and the
artificial formalities of what is called education. It is clear in the
mythopœic creation of comparative primitive thought, but in civilisation
it is in the work of men of genius—poets, philosophers, painters, and,
as we have to recognise, men of science—that this trait is most
conspicuously manifested. To realise this it is sufficient to
contemplate the personality and activity of one of the earliest great
modern men of science, of Leonardo da Vinci. Until recent times it would
have seemed rather strange so to describe Leonardo da Vinci. He still
seemed, as he was in his own time, primarily a painter, an artist in the
conventionally narrow sense, and as such one of the greatest, fit to
paint, as Browning put it, one of the four walls of the New Jerusalem.
Yet even his contemporaries who so acclaimed him were a little worried
about Leonardo in this capacity. He accomplished so little, he worked so
slowly, he left so much unfinished, he seemed to them so volatile and
unstable. He was an enigma to which they never secured the key. They
failed to see, though it is clearly to be read even in his face, that no
man ever possessed a more piercing concentration of vision, a more fixed
power of attention, a more unshakable force of will. All that Leonardo
achieved in painting and in sculpture and in architecture, however novel
or grandiose, was, as Solmi, the highly competent Vincian scholar has
remarked, merely a concession to his age, in reality a violence done to
his own nature, and from youth to old age he had directed his whole
strength to one end: the knowledge and the mastery of Nature. In our own
time, a sensitive, alert, widely informed critic of art, Bernhard
Berenson, setting out with the conventional veneration for Leonardo as a
painter, slowly, as the years went by and his judgment grew more mature,
adopted a more critical attitude, bringing down his achievements in art
to moderate dimensions, yet without taking any interest in Leonardo as a
stupendous artist in science. We may well understand that vein of
contempt for the crowd, even as it almost seems the hatred for human
society, the spirit of Timon, which runs across Leonardo’s writings,
blended, no doubt inevitably blended, with his vein of human sweetness.
This stern devotee of knowledge declared, like the author of “The
Imitation of Christ,” that “Love conquers all things.” There is here no
discrepancy. The man who poured a contemptuous flood of irony and
denunciation over the most sacred social institutions and their most
respectable representatives was the same man—the Gospels tell us—who
brooded with the wings of a maternal tenderness over the pathos of human
things.

When, indeed, our imagination plays with the idea of a future Overman,
it is Leonardo who comes before us as his forerunner. Vasari, who had
never seen Leonardo, but has written so admirable an account of him, can
only describe him as “supernatural” and “divine.” In more recent times
Nietzsche remarked of Leonardo that “there is something super-European
and silent in him, the characteristic of one who has seen too wide a
circle of things good and evil.” There Nietzsche touches, even though
vaguely, more nearly than Vasari could, the distinguishing mark of this
endlessly baffling and enchanting figure. Every man of genius sees the
world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.
But it is usually a measurable angle. We cannot measure the angle at
which Leonardo stands; he strikes athwart the line of our conventional
human thought in ways that are sometimes a revelation and sometimes an
impenetrable mystery. We are reminded of the saying of Heraclitus: “Men
hold some things wrong and some right; God holds all things fair.” The
dispute as to whether he was above all an artist or a man of science is
a foolish and even unmeaning dispute. In the vast orbit in which
Leonardo moved the distinction had little or no existence. That was
inexplicable to his contemporaries whose opinions Vasari echoes. They
could not understand that he was not of the crowd of makers of pretty
things who filled the workshops of Florence. They saw a man of beautiful
aspect and fine proportions, with a long curled beard and wearing a
rose-coloured tunic, and they called him a craftsman, an artist, and
thought him rather fantastic. But the medium in which this artist worked
was Nature, the medium in which the scientist works; every problem in
painting was to Leonardo a problem in science, every problem in physics
he approached in the spirit of the artist. “Human ingenuity,” he said,
“can never devise anything more simple and more beautiful, or more to
the purpose, than Nature does.” For him, as later for Spinoza, reality
and perfection were the same thing. Both aspects of life he treats as
part of his task—the extension of the field of human knowledge, the
intension of the power of human skill; for art, or, as he called it,
practice, without science, he said, is a boat without a rudder.
Certainly he occupied himself much with painting, the common medium of
self-expression in his day, though he produced so few pictures; he even
wrote a treatise on painting; he possessed, indeed, a wider perception
of its possibilities than any artist who ever lived. “Here is the
creator of modern landscape!” exclaimed Corot before Leonardo’s
pictures, and a remarkable description he has left of the precise
effects of colour and light produced when a woman in white stands on
green grass in bright sunshine shows that Leonardo clearly apprehended
the _plein-airiste’s_ problem. Doubtless it will prove possible to show
that he foresaw still later methods. He rejected these methods because
it seemed to him that the artist could work most freely by moving midway
between light and darkness, and, indeed, he, first of painters,
succeeded in combining them—just as he said also that Pleasure and Pain
should be imaged as twins since they are ever together, yet back to back
because ever contrary—and devised the method of _chiaroscuro_, by which
light reveals the richness of shade and shade heightens the brightness
of light. No invention could be more characteristic of this man whose
grasp of the world ever involved the union of opposites, and the
opposites both apprehended more intensely than falls to the lot of other
men.

Yet it is noteworthy that Leonardo constantly speaks of the artist’s
function as searching into and imitating Nature, a view which the
orthodox artist anathematises. But Leonardo was not the orthodox artist,
not even, perhaps, as he is traditionally regarded, one of the world’s
supreme painters. For one may sympathise with Mr. Berenson’s engaging
attempt—unconvincing as it has seemed—to “expose” Leonardo. The drawings
Mr. Berenson, like every one else, admires whole-heartedly, but, save
for the unfinished “Adoration,” which he regards as a summit of art, he
finds the paintings mostly meaningless and repellent. He cannot rank
Leonardo as an artist higher than Botticelli, and concludes that he was
not so much a great painter as a great inventor in painting. With that
conclusion it is possible that Leonardo himself would have agreed.
Painting was to him, he said, a subtle invention whereby philosophical
speculation can be applied to all the qualities of forms. He seemed to
himself to be, here and always, a man standing at the mouth of the
gloomy cavern of Nature with arched back, one hand resting on his knee
and the other shading his eyes, as he peers intently into the darkness,
possessed by fear and desire, fear of the threatening gloom of that
cavern, desire to discover what miracle it might hold. We are far here
from the traditional attitude of the painter; we are nearer to the
attitude of that great seeker into the mysteries of Nature, one of the
very few born of women to whom we can ever even passingly compare
Leonardo, who felt in old age that he had only been a child gathering
shells and pebbles on the shore of the great ocean of truth.

It is almost as plausible to regard Leonardo as primarily an engineer as
primarily a painter. He offered his services as a military engineer and
architect to the Duke of Milan and set forth at length his manifold
claims which include, one may note, the ability to construct what we
should now, without hesitation, describe as “tanks.” At a later period
he actually was appointed architect and engineer-general to Cæsar
Borgia, and in this capacity was engaged on a variety of works. He has,
indeed, been described as the founder of professional engineering. He
was the seer of coming steam engines and of steam navigation and
transportation. He was, again, the inventor of innumerable varieties of
ballistic machines and ordnance, of steam guns and breech-loading arms
with screw breech-lock. His science always tended to become applied
science. Experience shows the road to practice, he said, science is the
guide to art. Thus he saw every problem in the world as in the wide
sense a problem in engineering. All nature was a dynamic process of
forces beautifully effecting work, and it is this as it were distinctive
vision of the world as a whole which seems to give Leonardo that
marvellous flair for detecting vital mechanism in every field. It is
impossible even to indicate summarily the vast extent of the region in
which he was creating a new world, from the statement, which he set down
in large letters, “The sun does not move,” the earth being, he said, a
star, “much like the moon,” down to such ingenious original devices as
the construction of a diving-bell, a swimming-belt, and a parachute of
adequate dimensions, while, as is now well known, Leonardo not only
meditated with concentrated attention on the problem of flight, but
realised scientifically the difficulties to be encountered, and made
ingenious attempts to overcome them in the designing of flying-machines.
It is enough—following expert scientific guidance—to enumerate a few
points: he studied botany in the biological spirit; he was a founder of
geology, discovering the significance of fossils and realising the
importance of river erosion; by his studies in the theories of mechanics
and their utilization in peace and war he made himself the prototype of
the modern man of science. He was in turn biologist in every field of
vital mechanism, and the inaugurator before Vesalius (who, however, knew
nothing of his predecessor’s work) of the minute study of anatomy by
direct investigation (after he had found that Galen could not be relied
on) and _post-mortem_ dissections; he nearly anticipated Harvey’s
conception of the circulation of the blood by studying the nature of the
heart as a pump. He was hydraulician, hydrographer, geometrician,
algebraist, mechanician, optician.[45] These are but a few of the fields
in which Leonardo’s marvellous insight into the nature of the forces
that make the world and his divining art of the methods of employing
them to human use have of late years been revealed. For centuries they
were concealed in notebooks scattered through Europe and with difficulty
decipherable. Yet they are not embodied in vague utterances or casual
intuitions, but display a laborious concentration on the precise details
of the difficulties to be overcome; nor was patient industry in him, as
often happens, the substitute for natural facility, for he was a person
of marvellous natural facility, and, like such persons, most eloquent
and persuasive in speech. At the same time his more general and
reflective conclusions are expressed in a style combining the maximum of
clarity with the maximum of concision,—far, indeed, removed from the
characteristic florid redundancy of Italian prose,—which makes Leonardo,
in addition to all else, a supreme master of language.[46]

Yet the man to whom we must credit these vast intellectual achievements
was no abstracted philosopher shut up in a laboratory. He was, even to
look upon, one of the most attractive and vivid figures that ever walked
the earth. As has sometimes happened with divine and mysterious persons,
he was the natural child of his mother, Caterina, of whom we are only
told that she was “of good blood,” belonging to Vinci like Ser Piero the
father, and that a few years after Leonardo’s birth she became the
reputable wife of a citizen of his native town. Ser Piero da Vinci was a
notary, of a race of notaries, but the busiest notary in Florence and
evidently a man of robust vigour; he married four times and his youngest
child was fifty years the junior of Leonardo. We hear of the
extraordinary physical strength of Leonardo himself, of his grace and
charm, of his accomplishments in youth, especially in singing and
playing on the flute, though he had but an elementary school education.
Except for what he learnt in the workshop of the many-sided but then
still youthful Verrocchio, he was his own schoolmaster, and was thus
enabled to attain that absolute emancipation from authority and
tradition which made him indifferent even to the Greeks, to whom he was
most akin. He was left-handed; his peculiar method of writing long
raised the suspicion that it was deliberately adopted for concealment,
but it is to-day recognised as simply the ordinary mirror-writing of a
left-handed child without training. This was not the only anomaly in
Leonardo’s strange nature. We now know that he was repeatedly charged as
a youth on suspicion of homosexual offences; the result remains obscure,
but there is some reason to think he knew the inside of a prison.
Throughout life he loved to surround himself with beautiful youths,
though no tradition of license or vice clings to his name. The precise
nature of his sexual temperament remains obscure. It mocks us, but
haunts us from out of his most famous pictures. There is, for instance,
the “John the Baptist” of the Louvre, which we may dismiss with the
distinguished art critic of to-day as an impudent blasphemy or brood
over long, without being clearly able to determine into what obscure
region of the Freudian Unconscious Leonardo had here adventured. Freud
himself has devoted one of his most fascinating essays to a
psychoanalytic interpretation of Leonardo’s enigmatic personality. He
admits it is a speculation; we may take it or leave it. But Freud has
rightly apprehended that in Leonardo sexual passion was largely
sublimated into intellectual passion, in accordance with his own saying,
“Nothing can be loved or hated unless first we have knowledge of it,”
or, as he elsewhere said, “True and great love springs out of great
knowledge, and where you know little you can love but little or not at
all.” So it was that Leonardo became a master of life. Vasari could
report of him—almost in the words it was reported of another supreme but
widely different figure, the Jesuit saint, Francis Xavier—that “with the
splendour of his most beautiful countenance he made serene every broken
spirit.” To possess by self-mastery the sources of love and hate is to
transcend good and evil and so to possess the Overman’s power of binding
up the hearts that are broken by good and evil.

Every person of genius is in some degree at once man, woman, and child.
Leonardo was all three in the extreme degree and yet without any
apparent conflict. The infantile strain is unquestioned, and, apart from
the problem of his sexual temperament, Leonardo was a child even in his
extraordinary delight in devising fantastic toys and contriving
disconcerting tricks. His more than feminine tenderness is equally
clear, alike in his pictures and in his life. Isabella d’Este, in asking
him to paint the boy Jesus in the Temple, justly referred to “the
gentleness and sweetness which mark your art.” His tenderness was shown
not only towards human beings, but to all living things, animals and
even plants, and it would appear that he was a vegetarian. Yet at the
same time he was emphatically masculine, altogether free from weakness
or softness. He delighted in ugliness as well as in beauty; he liked
visiting the hospitals to study the sick in his thirst for knowledge; he
pondered over battles and fighting; he showed no compunction in planning
devilish engines of military destruction. His mind was of a definitely
realistic and positive cast; though there seems no field of thought he
failed to enter, he never touched metaphysics, and though his worship of
Nature has the emotional tone of religion, even of ecstasy, he was
clearly disdainful of the established religions, and perpetually shocked
“the timid friends of God.” By precept and by practice he proclaimed the
lofty solitude of the individual soul, and he felt only contempt for the
herd. We see how this temper became impressed on his face in his own
drawing of himself in old age, with that intent and ruthless gaze
wrapped in intellectual contemplation of the outspread world.

Leonardo comes before us, indeed, in the end, as a figure for awe rather
than for love. Yet, as the noblest type of the Overman we faintly try to
conceive, Leonardo is the foe, not of man, but of the enemies of man.
The great secrets that with clear vision his stern grip tore from
Nature, the new instruments of power that his energy wrought, they were
all for the use and delight of mankind. So Leonardo is the everlasting
embodiment of that brooding human spirit whose task never dies. Still
to-day it stands at the mouth of the gloomy cavern of Nature, even of
Human Nature, with bent back and shaded eyes, seeking intently to
penetrate the gloom beyond, with the fear of that threatening darkness,
with the desire of what redeeming miracle it yet perchance may hold.


                                   V


THAT Leonardo da Vinci was not only supremely great in science, but the
incarnation of the spirit of science, the artist and lover of Nature, is
a fact it is well to bear in mind. Many mistakes would be avoided if it
were more clearly present to consciousness. We should no longer find the
artists in design absurdly chafing under what they considered the
bondage of the artists in thought. It would no longer be possible, as it
was some years ago, and may be still, for a narrow-minded pedagogue like
Brunetière, however useful in his own field, to be greeted as a prophet
when he fatuously proclaimed what he termed “the bankruptcy of science.”
Unfortunately so many of the people who masquerade under the name of
“men of science” have no sort of title to that name. They may be doing
good and honest work by accumulating in little cells the facts which
others, more truly inspired by the spirit of science, may one day work
on; they may be doing more or less necessary work by the application to
practical life of the discoveries which genuine men of science have
made. But they themselves have just as much, and no more, claim to use
the name of “science” as the men who make the pots and dishes piled up
in a crockery shop have to use the name of “art.”[47] They have not yet
even learnt that “science” is not the accumulation of knowledge in the
sense of piling up isolated facts, but the active organisation of
knowledge, the application to the world of the cutting edge of a
marvellously delicate instrument, and that this task is impossible
without the widest range of vision and the most restless fertility of
imagination.

Of such more genuine men of science—to name one whom by virtue of
several common interests I was sometimes privileged to come near—was
Francis Galton. He was not a professional man of science; he was even
willing that his love of science should be accounted simply a hobby.
From the standpoint of the ordinary professional scientific man he was
probably an amateur. He was not even, as some have been, a learned
amateur. I doubt whether he had really mastered the literature of any
subject, though I do not doubt that that mattered little. When he heard
of some famous worker in a field he was exploring, he would look up that
man’s work; so it was with Weismann in the field of heredity. And, as I
would note with a smile in reading his letters, Galton was not able to
spell Weismann’s name correctly.[48] His attitude in science might be
said to be pioneering much like that of the pioneers of museums in the
later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries, men like Tradescant
and Ashmole and Evelyn and Sloane: an insatiable curiosity in things
that were only just beginning, or had not yet begun, to arouse
curiosity. So it was that when I made some personal experiments with the
Mexican cactus, mescal (_Anhalonium Lewinii_), to explore its
vision-producing qualities, then quite unknown in England, Galton was
eagerly interested and wanted to experiment on himself, though
ultimately dissuaded on account of his advanced age. But, on this basis,
Galton’s curiosity was not the mere inquisitiveness of the child, it was
coördinated with an almost uniquely organised brain as keen as it was
well-balanced. So that on the one hand his curiosity was transformed
into methods that were endlessly ingenious and inventive, and on the
other it was guided and held in check by inflexible caution and good
sense. And he knew how to preserve that exquisite balance without any
solemnity or tension or self-assertion, but playfully and graciously,
with the most unfailing modesty. It was this rare combination of
qualities—one may see it all in his “Inquiries into Human Faculty”—which
made him the very type of the man of genius, operating, not by
profession or by deliberate training, but by natural function, throwing
light on the dark places of the world and creating science in
out-of-the-way fields of human experience which before had been left to
caprice or not even perceived at all. Throughout he was an artist and
if, as is reported, he spent the last year of his life chiefly in
writing a novel, that was of a piece with the whole of his marvellous
activity; he had never been doing anything else. Only his romances were
real.

Galton’s yet more famous cousin, Charles Darwin, presents in equal
purity the lover and the artist in the sphere of Nature and Science. No
doubt there were once many obtuse persons to whom these names seemed
scarcely to fit when applied to Darwin. There have been people to whom
Darwin scarcely seemed a man of genius, merely a dry laborious
pedestrian student of facts. He himself even—as many people find it
difficult to forget—once lamented his indifference to poetry and art.
But Darwin was one of those elect persons in whose subconscious, if not
in their conscious, nature is implanted the realisation that “science
_is_ poetry,” and in a field altogether remote from the poetry and art
of convention he was alike poet and artist. Only a man so endowed could
from a suggestion received on reading Malthus have conceived of natural
selection as a chief moulding creative force of an infinite succession
of living forms; so also of his fantastic theory of pangenesis. Even in
trifling matters of experiment, such as setting a musician to play the
bassoon in his greenhouse, to ascertain whether music affected plants,
he had all the inventive imagination of poet or of artist. He was poet
and artist—though I doubt if this has been pointed out—in his whole
attitude towards Nature. He worked hard, but to him work was a kind of
play, and it may well be that with his fragile health he could not have
carried on his work if it had not been play. Again and again in his
“Life and Letters” we find the description of his observations or
experiments introduced by some such phrase as: “I was infinitely
amused.” And he remarks of a biological problem that it was like a game
of chess. I doubt, indeed, whether any great man of science was more of
an artist than Darwin, more consciously aware that he was playing with
the world, more deliciously thrilled by the fun of life. That man may
well have found “poetry and art” dull who himself had created the theory
of sexual selection which made the whole becoming of life art and the
secret of it poetry.[49]

It is not alone among biologists, from whose standpoint it may be judged
easier to reach, since they are concerned with living Nature, that we
find the attitude of the lover and the artist. We find it just as well
marked when the man of genius plays in what some might think the arid
field of the physicist. Faraday worked in a laboratory, a simple one,
indeed, but the kind of place which might be supposed fatal to the true
spirit of science, and without his researches in magnetic electricity we
might have missed, with or without a pang, those most practical machines
of our modern life, the dynamo and the telephone. Yet Faraday had no
practical ends in view; it has been possible to say of him that he
investigated Nature as a poet investigates the emotions. That would not
have sufficed to make him the supreme man of science he was. His
biographer, Dr. Bence Jones, who knew him well, concludes that Faraday’s
first great characteristic was his trust in facts, and his second his
imagination. There we are brought to the roots of his nature. Only, it
is important to remember, these two characteristics were not separate
and distinct. In themselves they may be opposing traits; it was because
in Faraday they were held together in vital tension that he became so
potent an instrument of research into Nature’s secrets. Tyndall, who was
his friend and fellow worker, seems to have perceived this. “The force
of his imagination,” wrote Tyndall, “was enormous,”—he “rose from the
smallest beginnings to the greatest ends,” from “bubbles of oxygen and
nitrogen to the atmospheric envelope of the earth itself,”—but “he
bridled it like a mighty rider.” Faraday himself said to the same
effect: “Let the imagination go, guarding it by judgment and principles,
but holding it in and directing it by experiment.” Elsewhere he has
remarked that in youth he was, and he might have added that he still
remained, “a very lively imaginative person and could believe in the
‘Arabian Nights’ as easily as in the ‘Encyclopædia’.” But he soon
acquired almost an instinct for testing facts by experiment, for
distrusting such alleged facts as he had not so tested, and for
accepting all the conclusions that he had thus reached with a complete
indifference to commonly accepted beliefs. (It is true he was a faithful
and devout elder in the Sandemanian Church, and that is not the least
fascinating trait in this fascinating man.) Tyndall has insisted on both
of these aspects of Faraday’s mental activity. He had “wonderful
vivacity,” he was “a man of excitable and fiery nature,” and “underneath
his sweetness was the heat of a volcano.” He himself believed that there
was a Celtic strain in his heredity; there was a tradition that the
family came from Ireland; I cannot find that there are any Faradays, or
people of any name resembling Faraday, now in Ireland, but Tyndall,
being himself an Irishman, liked to believe that the tradition was
sound. It would only account for the emotionally vivacious side of this
nature. There was also the other side, on which Tyndall also insists:
the love of order, the extreme tenacity, the high self-discipline able
to convert the fire within into a clear concentrated glow. In the fusion
of these two qualities “he was a prophet,” says Tyndall, “and often
wrought by an inspiration to be understood by sympathy alone.” His
expansive emotional imagination became the servant of truth, and sprang
into life at its touch. In carrying out physical experiments he would
experience a childlike joy and his eyes sparkled. “Even to his latest
days he would almost dance for joy at being shown a new experiment.”
Silvanus Thompson, in his book on Faraday, insists (as Tyndall had) on
the association with this childlike joy in imaginative extravagance of
the perpetual impulse to test and to prove, “yet never hesitating to
push to their logical conclusions the ideas suggested by experiment,
however widely they might seem to lead from the accepted modes of
thought.” His method was the method of the “Arabian Nights,” transferred
to the region of facts.

Faraday was not a mathematician. But if we turn to Kepler, who moved in
the sphere of abstract calculation, we find precisely the same
combination of characteristics. It was to Kepler, rather than to
Copernicus, that we owe the establishment of the heliocentric theory of
our universe, and Kepler, more than any man, was the precursor of
Newton. It has been said that if Kepler had never lived it is difficult
to conceive who could have taken his place and achieved his special part
in the scientific creation of our universe. For that pioneering part was
required a singular blend of seemingly opposed qualities. Only a wildly
daring, original, and adventurous spirit could break away from the
age-long traditions and rigid preconceptions which had ruled astronomy
for thousands of years. Only an endlessly patient, careful, laborious,
precise investigator could set up the new revolutionary conceptions
needed to replace these traditions and preconceptions. Kepler supplied
this rare combination of faculties. He possessed the most absurdly
extravagant imagination; he developed a greater regard for accuracy in
calculation than the world had ever known. He was willing to believe
that the earth was a kind of animal, and would not have been surprised
to find that it possessed lungs or gills. At the same time so set was he
on securing the precise truth, so patiently laborious, that some of his
most elaborate calculations were repeated, and without the help of
logarithms, even seventy times. The two essential qualities that make
the supreme artist in science have never been so clearly made manifest
as in Kepler.

Kepler may well bring us to Einstein, the greatest pioneer in the
comprehension of the universe since his day, and, indeed, one who is
more than a pioneer, since he already seems to have won a place beside
Newton. It is a significant fact that Einstein, though he possesses an
extremely cautious, critical mind, and is regarded as conspicuous for
his common sense, has a profound admiration for Kepler, whom he
frequently quotes. For Einstein also is an imaginative artist.[50]

Einstein is obviously an artist, even in appearance, as has often been
noted by those who have met him; “he looks far more the musician than
the man of science,” one writes, while those who know him well say that
he is “essentially as much an artist as a discoverer.” As a matter of
fact he is an artist in one of the most commonly recognised arts, being
an accomplished musician, a good violinist, it is said, while
improvisation on the piano, he himself says, is “a necessity of his
life.” His face, we are told, is illumined when he listens to music; he
loves Bach and Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner much less, while
to Chopin, Schumann, and the so-called romantics in music, as we might
anticipate, he is indifferent. His love of music is inborn; it developed
when, as a child, he would think out little songs “in praise of God,”
and sing them by himself; music, Nature, and God began, even at that
early age, to become a kind of unity to him. “Music,” said Leibnitz, “is
the pleasure the human soul experiences from counting without being
aware that it is counting.” It is the most abstract, the most nearly
mathematical of the arts—we may recall how music and mathematics had
their scientific origin together in the discovery of Pythagoras—and it
is not surprising that it should be Einstein’s favorite art.[51] It is
even more natural that, next to music, he should be attracted to
architecture—the art which Goethe called “frozen music”—for here we are
actually plunged into mechanics, here statics and dynamics are
transformed into visible beauty. To painting he is indifferent, but he
is drawn to literature, although no great reader. In literature, indeed,
it would seem that it is not so much art that he seeks as emotion; in
this field it is no longer the austerely architectonic that draws him;
thus he is not attracted to Ibsen; he is greatly attracted to Cervantes
as well as Keller and Strindberg; he has a profound admiration for
Shakespeare, but is cooler towards Goethe, while it would seem that
there is no writer to whom he is more fervently attached than the most
highly emotional, the most profoundly disintegrated in nervous
organisation of all great writers, Dostoievsky, especially his
masterpiece, “The Brothers Karamazov.” “Dostoievsky gives me more than
any scientist, more than Gauss.” All literary analysis or æsthetic
subtlety, it seems to Einstein, fails to penetrate to the heart of a
work like “The Karamazovs,” it can only be grasped by the feelings. His
face lights up when he speaks of it and he can find no word but “ethical
satisfaction.” For ethics in the ordinary sense, as a system, means
little to Einstein; he would not even include it in the sciences; it is
the ethical joy embodied in art which satisfies him. Moreover, it is
said, the keynote of Einstein’s emotional existence is the cry of
Sophocles’ Antigone: “I am not here to hate with you, but to love with
you.” The best that life has to offer, he feels, is a face glowing with
happiness. He is an advanced democrat and pacifist rather than (as is
sometimes supposed) a socialist; he believes in the internationality of
all intellectual work and sees no reason why this should destroy
national characteristics.

Einstein is not—and this is the essential point to make clear—merely an
artist in his moments of leisure and play, as a great statesman may play
golf or a great soldier grow orchids. He retains the same attitude in
the whole of his work. He traces science to its roots in emotion, which
is exactly where art also is rooted. Of Max Planck, the physicist, for
whom he has great admiration, Einstein has said: “The emotional
condition which fits him for his task is akin to that of a devotee or a
lover.” We may say the same, it would seem, of Einstein himself. He is
not even to be included, as some might have supposed, in that rigid sect
which asserts that all real science is precise measurement; he
recognises that the biological sciences must be largely independent of
mathematics. If mathematics were the only path of science, he once
remarked, Nature would have been illegible for Goethe, who had a
non-mathematical, even anti-mathematical, mind, and yet possessed a
power of intuition greater than that of many an exact investigator.[52]
All great achievements in science, he holds, start from intuition. This
he constantly repeats, although he adds that the intuition must not
stand alone, for invention also is required. He is disposed to regard
many scientific discoveries commonly regarded the work of pure thought
as really works of art. He would have this view embodied in all
education, making education a free and living process, with no drilling
of the memory and no examinations, mainly a process of appeal to the
senses in order to draw out delicate reactions. With his end, and even
for the sake of acquiring ethical personality, he would have every child
learn a handicraft, joinery, bookbinding, or other, and, like Élie
Faure,[53] he has great faith in the educational value of the cinema. We
see that behind all Einstein’s activity lies the conception that the
physicist’s work is to attain a picture, “a world-picture,” as he calls
it. “I agree with Schopenhauer,” Einstein said at a celebration in
honour of Planck in 1918, “that one of the most powerful motives that
attract people to science and art is the longing to escape from everyday
life with its painful coarseness and desolating bareness, and to break
the fetters of their own ever-changing desires. It impels those of
keener sensibility out of their personal existences into the world of
objective perception and understanding. It is a motive force of like
kind to that which drives the dweller in noisy confused cities to
restful Alpine heights whence he seems to have an outlook on eternity.
Associated with this negative motive is the positive motive which impels
men to seek a simplified synoptic view of the world conformable to their
own nature, overcoming the world by replacing it with this picture. The
painter, the poet, the philosopher, the scientist, all do this, each in
his own way.” Spengler has elaborately argued that there is a perfect
identity of physics, mathematics, religion, and great art.[54] We might
fairly be allowed to point to Einstein as a lofty embodiment of that
identity.

Here, where we reach the sphere of mathematics, we are among processes
which seem to some the most inhuman of all human activities and the most
remote from poetry. Yet it is here that the artist has the fullest scope
for his imagination. “Mathematics,” says Bertrand Russell in his
“Mysticism and Logic,” “may be defined as the subject in which we never
know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.”
We are in the imaginative sphere of art, and the mathematician is
engaged in a work of creation which resembles music in its orderliness,
and is yet reproducing on another plane the order of the universe, and
so becoming as it were a music of the spheres. It is not surprising that
the greatest mathematicians have again and again appealed to the arts in
order to find some analogy to their own work. They have indeed found it
in the most various arts, in poetry, in painting, in sculpture, although
it would certainly seem that it is in music, the most abstract of the
arts, the art of number and of time, that we find the closest analogy.
“The mathematician’s best work is art,” said Mittag-Lefler, “a high and
perfect art, as daring as the most secret dreams of imagination, clear
and limpid. Mathematical genius and artistic genius touch each other.”
And Sylvester wrote in his “Theory of Reciprocants”: “Does it not seem
as if Algebra had attained to the dignity of a fine art, in which the
workman has a free hand to develop his conceptions, as in a musical
theme or a subject for painting? It has reached a point in which every
properly developed algebraical composition, like a skilful landscape, is
expected to suggest the notion of an infinite distance lying beyond the
limits of the canvas.” “Mathematics, rightly viewed,” says Bertrand
Russell again, “possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty
cold and austere, like that of sculpture.... The true spirit of delight,
the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the
touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as
surely as in poetry.”

The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human
thought. But it is the same ladder which we have all of us been always
ascending, alike from the infancy of the individual and the infancy of
the race. Molière’s Jourdain had been speaking prose for more than forty
years without knowing it. Mankind has been thinking poetry throughout
its long career and remained equally ignorant.

Footnote 26:

  It would not appear that the pioneers of the Mathematical Renaissance
  of the twentieth century are inclined to imitate Descartes in this
  matter. Einstein would certainly not, and many apostles of physical
  science to-day (see, e.g., Professor Smithells, _From a Modern
  University: Some Aims and Aspirations of Science_) insist on the
  æsthetic, imaginative, and other “art” qualities of science.

Footnote 27:

  C. Singer. “What is Science?” _British Medical Journal_, 25th June,
  1921. Singer refuses the name of “science” in the strict sense to
  fields of completely organised knowledge which have ceased growing,
  like human anatomy (though, of course, the anatomist still remains a
  man of science by working outwards into adjoining related fields),
  preferring to term any such field of completed knowledge a
  _discipline_. This seems convenient and I should like to regard it as
  sound. It is not, however, compatible with the old doctrine of Mill
  and Colvin and Ray Lankester, for it excludes from the field of
  science exactly what they regarded as most typically science, and some
  one might possibly ask whether in other departments, like Hellenic
  sculpture or Sung pottery, a completed art ceases to be art.

Footnote 28:

  It has often been pointed out that the imaginative application of
  science—artistic ideas like that of the steam locomotive, the
  flying-machine heavier than air, the telegraph, the telephone, and
  many others—were even at the moment of their being achieved,
  elaborately shown to be “impossible” by men who had been too hastily
  hoisted up to positions of “scientific” eminence.

Footnote 29:

  J. B. Baillie, _Studies in Human Nature_ (1921), p. 221. This point
  has become familiar ever since F. A. Lange published his almost
  epoch-marking work, _The History of Materialism_, which has made so
  deep an impress on many modern thinkers from Nietzsche to Vaihinger;
  it is indeed a book which can never be forgotten (I speak from
  experience) by any one who read it in youth.

Footnote 30:

  G. Wallas, _The Great Society_, p. 107.

Footnote 31:

  Gomperz, _Greek Thinkers_, vol. I, chap. III, where will be found an
  attractive account of Pythagoras’ career and position.

Footnote 32:

  Always, it may perhaps be noted in passing, it seems to have been
  difficult for the sober and solemn Northerner, especially of England,
  to enter into the Greek spirit, all the more since that spirit was
  only the spirit of a sprinkling of people amid a hostile mass about as
  unlike anything we conventionally call “Greek” as could well be
  imagined, so that, as Élie Faure, the historian of art, has lately
  remarked, Greek art is a biological “monstrosity.” (Yet, I would ask,
  might we not say the same of France or of England?) That is why it is
  usually so irritating to read books written about the Greeks by
  barbarians; they slur over or ignore what they do not like and, one
  suspects, they instinctively misinterpret what they think they do
  like. Better even the most imperfect knowledge of a few original
  texts, better even only a few days on the Acropolis, than the
  second-hand opinions of other people. And if we must have a book about
  the Greeks, there is always Athenæus, much nearer to them in time and
  in spirit, with all his gossip, than any Northern barbarian, and an
  everlasting delight.

Footnote 33:

  Along another line it should have been clear that the dialogues of the
  philosophers were drama and not history. It would appear (Croiset,
  _Littérature Grecque_, vol. III, pp. 448 _et seq._) that with
  Epicharmus of Cos, who was settled in Megara at the beginning of the
  fifth century, philosophic comedy flourished brilliantly at Syracuse,
  and indeed fragments of his formal philosophic dialogue survive. Thus
  it is suggested that Athenian comedy and sophistic prose dialogues may
  be regarded as two branches drawn from the ancient prototype of such
  Syracusan comedy, itself ultimately derived from Ionian philosophy. It
  is worth noting, I might add, that when we first hear of the Platonic
  dialogues they were being grouped in trilogies and tetralogies like
  the Greek dramas; that indicates, at all events, what their earliest
  editors thought about them. It is also interesting to note that the
  writer of, at the present moment, the latest handbook to Plato,
  Professor A. E. Taylor (_Plato_, 1922, pp. 32-33), regards the
  “Socrates” of Plato as no historical figure, not even a mask of Plato
  himself, but simply “the hero of the Platonic drama,” of which we have
  to approach in much the same way as the work of “a great dramatist or
  novelist.”

Footnote 34:

  He had often been bidden in dreams to make music, said the Platonic
  Socrates in _Phædo_, and he had imagined that that was meant to
  encourage him in the pursuit of philosophy, “which is the noblest and
  best of music.”

Footnote 35:

  In discussing Socrates I have made some use of Professor Dupréel’s
  remarkable book, _La Légende Socratique_ (1922). Dupréel himself, with
  a little touch of irony, recommends a careful perusal of the beautiful
  and monumental works erected by Zeller and Grote and Gomperz to the
  honour of Socrates.

Footnote 36:

  Count Hermann Keyserling, _Philosophie als Kunst_ (1920), p. 2. He
  associates this with the need for a philosophy to possess a subjective
  personal character, without which it can have no value, indeed no
  content at all.

Footnote 37:

  Croce, _Problemi d’ Estetica_, p. 15. I have to admit, for myself,
  that, while admiring the calm breadth of Croce’s wide outlook, it is
  sometimes my misfortune, in spite of myself, when I go to his works,
  to play the part of a Balaam _à rebours_. I go forth to bless: and,
  somehow, I curse.

Footnote 38:

  James Hinton, a pioneer in so many fields, clearly saw that thinking
  is really an art fifty years ago. “Thinking is no mere mechanical
  process,” he wrote (_Chapters on the Art of Thinking_, pp. 43 _et
  seq._), “it is a great Art, the chief of all the Arts.... Those only
  can be called thinkers who have a native gift, a special endowment for
  the work, and have been trained, besides, by assiduous culture. And
  though we continually assume that every one is capable of thinking, do
  we not all feel that there is somehow a fallacy in this assumption? Do
  we not feel that what people set up as their ‘reasons’ for
  disbelieving or believing are often nothing of the sort?... The Art
  faculty is Imagination, the power of seeing the unseen, the power also
  of putting ourselves out of the centre, of reducing ourselves to our
  true proportions, of truly using our own impressions. And is not this
  in reality the chief element in the work of the thinker?... Science
  _is_ poetry.”

Footnote 39:

  So far, indeed, as I am aware, I was responsible for the first English
  account of his work (outside philosophical journals); it appeared in
  the London _Nation and Athenæum_ a few years ago, and is partly
  embodied in the present chapter.

Footnote 40:

  I have based this sketch on an attractive and illuminating account of
  his own development written by Professor Vaihinger for Dr. Raymund
  Schmidt’s highly valuable series, _Die Deutsche Philosophie der
  Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen_ (1921), vol. II.

Footnote 41:

  “Most workers on the problem of atomic constitution,” remarks Sir
  Ernest Rutherford (_Nature_, 5th August, 1922), “take as a working
  hypothesis that the atoms of matter are purely electrical structures,
  and that ultimately it is hoped to explain all the properties of atoms
  as a result of certain combinations of the two fundamental units of
  positive and negative electricity, the proton and electron.”

Footnote 42:

  Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, vol. I.

Footnote 43:

  Otto Rank, _Der Künstler: Ansätze zu einer Sexual Psychologie_.

Footnote 44:

  The sexual strain in the symbolism of language is touched on in my
  _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, vol. V, and similar traits in
  primitive legends have been emphasised—many would say
  over-emphasised—by Freud and Jung.

Footnote 45:

  Einstein, in conversation with Moszkowski, expressed doubt as to the
  reality of Leonardo’s previsions of modern science. But it scarcely
  appeared that he had investigated the matter, while the definite
  testimony of the experts in many fields who have done so cannot be put
  aside.

Footnote 46:

  For the Italian reader of Leonardo the fat little volume of
  _Frammenti_, edited by Dr. Solmi and published by Barbèra, is a
  precious and inexhaustible pocket companion. For the English reader
  Mr. MacCurdy’s larger but much less extensive volume of extracts from
  the _Note-Books_, or the still further abridged _Thoughts_, must
  suffice. Herbert Horne’s annotated version of Vasari’s _Life_ is
  excellent for Leonardo’s personality and career.

Footnote 47:

  Morley Roberts, who might be regarded as a pupil in the school of
  Leonardo and trained like him in the field of art, has in various
  places of his suggestive book, _Warfare in the Human Body_, sprinkled
  irony over the examples he has come across of ignorant specialists
  claiming to be men of “science.”

Footnote 48:

  Needless to say, I do not mention this to belittle Galton. A careful
  attention to words, which in its extreme form becomes pedantry, is by
  no means necessarily associated with a careful attention to things.
  Until recent times English writers, even the greatest, were always
  negligent in spelling; it would be foolish to suppose they were
  therefore negligent in thinking.

Footnote 49:

  Darwin even overestimated the æsthetic element in his theory of sexual
  selection, and (I have had occasion elsewhere to point out)
  unnecessarily prejudiced that theory by sometimes unwarily assuming a
  conscious æsthetic element.

Footnote 50:

  It is probable that the reason why it is often difficult to trace the
  imaginative artist in great men of supposedly abstract science is the
  paucity of intimate information about them. Even their scientific
  friends have rarely had the patience, or even perhaps the
  intelligence, to observe them reverently and to record their
  observations. We know almost nothing that is intimately personal about
  Newton. As regards Einstein, we are fortunate in possessing the book
  of Moszkowski, _Einstein_ (translated into English under the title of
  _Einstein the Searcher_), which contains many instructive
  conversations and observations by a highly intelligent and
  appreciative admirer, who has set them down in a Boswellian spirit
  that faintly recalls Eckermann’s book on Goethe (which, indeed,
  Moszkowski had in mind), though falling far short of that supreme
  achievement. The statements in the text are mainly gleaned from
  Moszkowski.

Footnote 51:

  Spengler holds (_Der Untergang des Abendlandes_, vol. X, p. 329) that
  the development of music throughout its various stages in our European
  culture really has been closely related with the stages of the
  development of mathematics.

Footnote 52:

  I would here refer to a searching investigation, “Goethe und die
  mathematische Physik: Eine Erkenntnistheoretische Studie,” in Ernst
  Cassirer’s _Idee und Gestalt_ (1921). It is here shown that in some
  respects Goethe pointed the way along which mathematical physics, by
  following its own paths, has since travelled, and that even when most
  non-mathematical Goethe’s scientific attitude was justifiable.

Footnote 53:

  See the remarkable essay, “De la Cinéplastique,” in Élie Faure’s
  _L’Arbre d’Éden_ (1922). It is, however, a future and regenerated
  cinema for which Élie Faure looks, “to become the art of the crowd,
  the powerful centre of communion in which new symphonic forms will be
  born in the tumult of passions and utilized for fine and elevating
  æsthetic ends.”

Footnote 54:

  O. Spengler, _Der Untergang des Abendlandes_, vol. I, p. 576.




                               CHAPTER IV
                           THE ART OF WRITING


                                   I


FROM time to time we are solemnly warned that in the hands of modern
writers language has fallen into a morbid state. It has become
degenerate, if not, indeed, the victim of “senile ataxy” or “general
paralysis.” Certainly it is well that our monitors should seek to arouse
in us the wholesome spirit of self-criticism. Whether we write ill or
well, we can never be too seriously concerned with what it is that we
are attempting to do. We may always be grateful to those who stimulate
us to a more wakeful activity in pursuing a task which can never be
carried to perfection.

Yet these monitors seldom fail at the same time to arouse a deep revolt
in our minds. We are not only impressed by the critic’s own inability to
write any better than those he criticises. We are moved to question the
validity of nearly all the rules he lays down for our guidance. We are
inclined to dispute altogether the soundness of the premises from which
he starts. Of these three terms of our revolt, covering comprehensively
the whole ground, the first may be put aside—since the ancient retort is
always ineffective and it helps the patient not at all to bid the
physician heal himself—and we may take the last first.

Men are always apt to bow down before the superior might of their
ancestors. It has been so always and everywhere. Even the author of the
once well-known book of Genesis believed that “there were giants in the
earth in those days,” the mighty men which were of old, the men of
renown, and still to-day among ourselves no plaint is more common than
that concerning the physical degeneracy of modern men as compared with
our ancestors of a few centuries ago. Now and then, indeed, there comes
along a man of science, like Professor Parsons, who has measured the
bones from the remains of the ancestors we still see piled up in the
crypt at Hythe, and finds that—however fine the occasional
exceptions—the average height of those men and women was decidedly less
than that of their present-day descendants. Fortunately for the vitality
of tradition, we cherish a wholesome distrust of science. And so it is
with our average literary stature. The academic critic regards himself
as the special depository of the accepted tradition, and far be it from
him to condescend to any mere scientific inquiry into the actual facts.
He half awakens from slumber to murmur the expected denunciation of his
own time, and therewith returns to slumber. He usually seems unaware
that even three centuries ago, in the finest period of English prose,
Swift, certainly himself a supreme master, was already lamenting “the
corruption of our style.”

If it is asserted that the average writer of to-day has not equalled the
supreme writer of some earlier age,—there are but one or two in any
age,—we can only ejaculate: Strange if he had! Yet that is all that the
academic critic usually seems to mean. If he would take the trouble to
compare the average prose writer of to-day with the average writer of
even so great an age as the Elizabethan, he might easily convince
himself that the former, whatever his imperfections, need not fear the
comparison. Whether or not Progress in general may be described as “the
exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance,” it is certainly so with
the progress of style, and the imperfections of our average everyday
writing are balanced by the quite other imperfections of our
forefathers’ writing. What, for instance, need we envy in the literary
methods of that great and miscellaneous band of writers whom Hakluyt
brought together in those admirable volumes which are truly great and
really fascinating only for reasons that have nothing to do with style?
Raleigh himself here shows no distinction in his narrative of that
discreditable episode,—as he clearly and rightly felt it to be,—the loss
of the _Revenge_ by the wilful Grenville. Most of them are bald,
savourless, monotonous, stating the obvious facts in the obvious way,
but hopelessly failing to make clear, when rarely they attempt it,
anything that is not obvious. They have none of the little unconscious
tricks of manner which worry the critic to-day. But their whole manner
is one commonplace trick from which they never escape. They are only
relieved by its simplicity and by the novelty which comes through age.
We have to remember that all mediocrity is impersonal and that when we
encourage its manifestations on printed pages we merely make mediocrity
more conspicuous. Nor can that be remedied by teaching the mediocre to
cultivate tricks of fashion or of vanity. There is more personality in
Claude Bernard’s “Leçons de Physiologie Expérimentales,” a great critic
of life and letters has pointed out, Remy de Gourmont, than in Musset’s
“Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle.” For personality is not something
that can be sought; it is a radiance that is diffused spontaneously. It
may even be most manifest when most avoided, and no writer—the remark
has doubtless often been made before—can be more personal than Flaubert
who had made almost a gospel of Impersonality. But the absence of
research for personality, however meritorious, will not suffice to bring
personality out of mediocrity.

Moreover, the obvious fact seems often to be overlooked by the critic
that a vastly larger proportion of the population now write, and see
their writing printed. We live in what we call a democratic age in which
all are compulsorily taught how to make pothooks and hangers on paper.
So that every nincompoop—in the attenuated sense of the term—as soon as
he puts a pen in ink feels that he has become, like M. Jourdain, a
writer of prose. That feeling is justified only in a very limited sense,
and if we wish to compare the condition of things to-day with that in an
age when people wrote at the bidding of some urgent stimulus from
without or from within, we have at the outset to delete certainly over
ninety-five per cent of our modern so-called writers before we institute
any comparison. The writers thus struck out, it may be added, cannot
fail to include many persons of much note in the world. There are all
sorts of people to-day who write from all sorts of motives other than a
genuine aptitude for writing. To suppose that there can be any
comparison at this point of the present with the past and to dodder over
the decay of our language would seem a senile proceeding if we do not
happen to know that it occurs in all ages, and that, even at the time
when our prose speech was as near to perfection as it is ever likely to
be, its critics were bemoaning its corruption, lamenting, for instance,
the indolent new practice of increasing sibilation by changing
“arriveth” into “arrives” and pronouncing “walked” as “walkd,” sometimes
in their criticisms showing no more knowledge of the history and methods
of growth of English than our academic critics show to-day.

For we know what to-day they tell us; it is not hard to know, their
exhortations, though few, are repeated in so psittaceous a manner. One
thinks, for instance, of that solemn warning against the enormity of the
split infinitive which has done so much to aggravate the Pharisaism of
the bad writers who scrupulously avoid it. This superstition seems to
have had its origin in a false analogy with Latin in which the
infinitive is never split for the good reason that it is impossible to
split. In the greater freedom of English it is possible and has been
done for at least the last five hundred years by the greatest masters of
English; only the good writer never uses this form helplessly and
involuntarily, but with a definite object; and that is the only rule to
observe. An absolute prohibition in this matter is the mark of those who
are too ignorant, or else too unintelligent, to recognise a usage which
is of the essence of English speech.[55]

One may perhaps refer, again, to those who lay down that every sentence
must end on a significant word, never on a preposition, and who
reprobate what has been technically termed the post-habited prefix. They
are the same worthy and would-be old-fashioned people who think that a
piece of music must always end monotonously on a banging chord. Only
here they have not, any more than in music, even the virtue—if such it
be—of old fashion, for the final so-called preposition is in the genius
of the English language and associated with the Scandinavian—in the
wider ancient sense Danish—strain of English, one of the finest strains
it owns, imparting much of the plastic force which renders it flexible,
the element which helped to save it from the straitlaced tendency of
Anglo-Saxon and the awkward formality of Latin and French influence. The
foolish prejudice we are here concerned with seems to date from a period
when the example of French, in which the final preposition is
impossible, happened to be dominant. Its use in English is associated
with the informal grace and simplicity, the variety of tender cadence,
which our tongue admits.

In such matters as the “split infinitive” and the “post-habited
preposition,” there should never have been any doubt as to the complete
validity and authority of the questioned usages. But there are other
points at which some even good critics may be tempted to accept the
condemnation of the literary grammarians. It is sufficient to mention
one: the nominative use of the pronoun “me.” Yet, surely, any one who
considers social practice as well as psychological necessity should not
fail to see that we must recognise a double use of “me” in English. The
French, who in such matters seem to have possessed a finer social and
psychological tact, have realised that je cannot be the sole nominative
of the first person and have supplemented it by _moi_ (_mi_ from
_mihi_). The Frenchman, when asked who is there, does not reply “Je!”
But the would-be English purist is supposed to be reduced to replying
“I!” Royal Cleopatra asks the Messenger: “Is she as tall as me?” The
would-be purist no doubt transmutes this as he reads into: “Is she as
tall as I?” We need not envy him.

Such an example indicates how independent the free and wholesome life of
language is of grammatical rules. This is not to diminish the importance
of the grammarian’s task, but simply to define it, as the formulator,
and not the lawgiver, of usage. His rules are useful, not merely in
order to know how best to keep them, but in order to know how best to
break them. Without them freedom might become licence. Yet even licence,
we have to recognise, is the necessary offscouring of speech in its
supreme manifestations of vitality and force. English speech was never
more syntactically licentious than in the sixteenth century, but it was
never more alive, never more fitly the material for a great artist to
mould. So it is that in the sixteenth century we find Shakespeare. In
post-Dryden days (though Dryden was an excellent writer and engaged on
an admirable task) a supreme artist in English speech became impossible,
and if a Shakespeare had appeared all his strength would have been
wasted in a vain struggle with the grammarians. French speech has run a
similar and almost synchronous course with English. There was a
magnificently natural force and wealth in sixteenth-century French: in
Rabelais it had been even extravagantly exuberant; in Montaigne it is
still flexible and various—_ondoyant et divers_—and still full of
natural delight and freedom. But after Malherbe and his fellows French
speech acquired orderliness, precision, and formality; they were
excellent qualities, no doubt, but had to be paid for by some degree of
thinness and primness, even some stiffening of the joints. Rousseau came
and poured fresh blood from Switzerland into the language and a new
ineffable grace that was all his own; so that if we now hesitate to say,
with Landor, that he excels all the moderns for harmony, it is only
because they have learnt what he taught; and the later Romantics, under
the banner of Hugo, imparted colour and brilliance. Yet all the great
artists who have wrestled with French speech for a century have never
been able to restore the scent and the savour and the substance which
Villon and Montaigne without visible effort could once find within its
borders. In this as in other matters what we call Progress means the
discovery of new desirable qualities, and therewith the loss of other
qualities that were at least equally desirable.

Then there is yet another warning which, especially in recent times, is
issued at frequent intervals, and that is against the use of verbal
counters, of worn or even worn-out phrases, of what we commonly fall
back on modern French to call _clichés_. We mean thereby the use of old
stereotyped phrases—Goethe called them “stamped” or _gestempelt_—to save
the trouble of making a new living phrase to suit our meaning. The word
_cliché_ is thus typographic, though, it so happens, it is derived from
an old French word of phonetic meaning, _cliqueter_ or _cliquer_
(related to the German _klatschen_), which we already have in English as
to “click” or to “clack,” in a sense which well supplements its more
modern technical sense for this literary end. Yet the warning against
_clichés_ is vain. The good writer, by the very fact that he is alive
and craves speech that is vivid, as _clichés_ never are, instinctively
avoids their excessive use, while the nervous and bad writer, in his
tremulous anxiety to avoid these tabooed _clichés_, falls into the most
deplorable habits, like the late Mr. Robert Ross, who at one time was so
anxious to avoid _clichés_ that he acquired the habit of using them in
an inverted form and wrote a prose that made one feel like walking on
sharp flints; for, though a macadamized road may not be so good to walk
in as a flowered meadow, it is better than a macadamized road with each
stone turned upside down and the sharp edge uppermost. As a matter of
fact it is impossible to avoid the use of _clichés_ and counters in
speech, and if it were possible the results would be in the highest
degree tedious and painful. The word “_cliché_” itself, we have seen, is
a _cliché_, a worn counter of a word, with its original meaning all
effaced, and even its secondary meaning now only just visible. That, if
those folk who condemn _clichés_ only had the intelligence to perceive
it, is a significant fact. You cannot avoid using _clichés_, not even in
the very act of condemning them. They include, if we only look keenly
enough, nearly the whole of language, almost every separate word. If one
could avoid them one would be unintelligible. Even those common phrases
which it is peculiarly meet to call counters are not to be absolutely
condemned. They have become so common to use because so fit to use, as
Baudelaire understood when he spoke of “the immense depth of thought in
vulgar locutions.”[56] There is only one rule to follow here,—and it is
simply the rule in every part of art,—to know what one is doing, not to
go sheeplike with the flock, ignorantly, unthinkingly, heedlessly, but
to mould speech to expression the most truly one knows how. If, indeed,
we are seeking clarity and the precise expression of thought, there is
nothing we may not do if only we know how to do it—but that “if” might
well be in capitals. One who has spent the best part of his life in
trying to write things that had not been written before, and that were
very difficult to write, may perhaps be allowed to confess the hardness
of this task.

To write is thus an arduous intellectual task, a process which calls for
the highest tension of the muscles in the escalade of a heaven which the
strongest and bravest and alertest can never hope to take by violence.
He has to be true,—whether it is in the external world he is working or
in his own internal world,—and as truth can only be seen through his own
temperament, he is engaged in moulding the expression of a combination
which has never been seen in the world before.

It is sometimes said that the great writer seldom quotes, and that in
the main is true, for he finds it difficult to mix an alien music of
thought and speech with his own. Montaigne, it is also said, is an
exception, but that is scarcely true. What Montaigne quoted he often
translated and so moulded to the pattern of his own mind. The same may
be said of Robert Burton. If it had not been so these writers (almost
certainly Burton) could scarcely have attained to the rank of great
authors. The significant fact to note, however, is not that the great
writer rarely quotes, but that he knows how to quote. Schopenhauer was
here a master. He possessed a marvellous flair for fine sayings in
remote books, and these he would now and again let fall like jewels on
his page, with so happy a skill that they seem to be created for the
spot on which they fell. It is the little writer rather than the great
writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is really
never doing anything else.[57]

It is not in writing only, in all art, in all science, the task before
each is that defined by Bacon: _man added to Nature_. It is so also in
painting, as a great artist of modern time, Cézanne, recognised even in
those same words: “He who wishes to make art,” he once said to Vollard,
“must follow Bacon, who defined the artist as ‘Homo additus Naturæ.’” So
it is that the artist, if he has succeeded in being true to his
function, is necessarily one who makes all things new.[58] That
remarkable artist who wrote the Book of the Revelation has expressed
this in his allegorical, perhaps unconscious, Oriental way, for he
represents the artist as hearing the divine spirit from the throne
within him uttering the command: “Behold, I make all things new. Write!”
The command is similar whatever the art may be, though it is here the
privilege of the writer to find his own art set forth as the inspired
ensample of all art.

Thus it is that to write is a strenuous intellectual task not to be
achieved without the exercise of the best trained and most deliberate
rational faculties. That is the outcome of the whole argument up to this
point. There is so much bad writing in the world because writing has
been dominated by ignorance and habit and prudery, and not least by the
academic teachers and critics who have known nothing of what they claim
to teach and were often themselves singular examples of how not to
write. There has, on the other hand, been a little good writing here and
there in the world, through the ages, because a few possessed not only
courage and passion and patience, but knowledge and the concentrated
intellectual attention, and the resolution to seek truth, and the
conviction that, as they imagined, the genius they sought consisted in
taking pains.

Yet, if that were all, many people would become great writers who, as we
well know, will never become writers; if that were all, writing could
scarcely even be regarded as an art. For art, or one side of it,
transcends conscious knowledge; a poet, as Landor remarked, “is not
aware of all that he knows, and seems at last to know as little about it
as a silkworm knows about the fineness of her thread.” Yet the same
great writer has also said of good poetry, and with equal truth, that
“the ignorant and inexpert lose half its pleasures.” We always move on
two feet, as Élie Faure remarks in his “L’Arbre d’Éden,” the two poles
of knowledge and of desire, the one a matter of deliberate acquirement
and the other of profound instinct, and all our movements are a
perpetual leap from one to the other, seeking a centre of gravity we
never attain.[59] So the achievement of style in writing, as in all
human intercourse, is something more than an infinite capacity for
taking pains. It is also defined—and, sometimes I think, supremely well
defined—as “grace seasoned with salt.” Beyond all that can be achieved
by knowledge and effort, there must be the spontaneous grace that
springs up like a fountain from the depth of a beautifully harmonious
nature, and there must be also the quality which the Spaniards call
“sal,” and so rightly admire in the speech of the women of the people of
their own land, the salt quality which gives savour and point and
antiseptic virtue.[60]

The best literary prose speech is simply the idealisation in the heaven
of art of the finest common speech of earth, simply, yet never reached
for more than a moment in a nation’s long history. In Greece it was
immortally and radiantly achieved by Plato; in England it was attained
for a few years during the last years of the seventeenth and the first
years of the eighteenth centuries, lingering on, indeed, here and there
to the end of that century until crushed between the pedantry of Johnson
and the poetic licence of the Romantics. But for the rest only the most
happily endowed genius can even attain for a rare moment the perfection
of the Pauline ideal of “grace seasoned with salt.”

It is fortunate, no doubt, that an age of machinery is well content with
machine-made writing. It would be in bad taste—too physiological, too
sentimental, altogether too antiquated—to refer to the symbolical
significance of the highly relevant fact that the heart, while
undoubtedly a machine, is at the same time a sensitively pulsating organ
with fleshy strings stretched from ventricle to valves, a harp on which
the great artist may play until our hearts also throb in unison. Yet
there are some to whom it still seems that, beyond mechanical skill, the
cadences of the artist’s speech are the cadences of his heart, and the
footfalls of his rhythm the footfalls of his spirit, in a great
adventure across the universe.


                                   II


THUS we do not always realise that learning to write is partly a matter
of individual instinct. This is so even of that writing which, as
children, we learnt in copybooks with engraved maxims at the head of the
page. There are some, indeed, probably the majority, who quickly achieve
the ability to present a passable imitation of the irreproachable model
presented to them. There are some who cannot. I speak as one who knows,
for I recall how my first schoolmaster, a sarcastic little Frenchman,
irritated by my unchastenable hand, would sometimes demand if I wrote
with the kitchen poker, or again assert that I kept a tame spider to run
over the page, while a later teacher, who was an individualist and more
tolerant, yet sometimes felt called upon to murmur, in a tone of dubious
optimism: “You will have a hand of your own, my boy.” It is not lack of
docility that is in question, but an imperative demand of the nervous
system which the efforts of the will may indeed bend but cannot crush.

Yet the writers who cheerfully lay down the laws of style seldom realise
this complexity and mystery enwrapping even so simple a matter as
handwriting. No one can say how much atavistic recurrence from remote
ancestors, how much family nervous habit, how much wayward yet
deep-rooted personal idiosyncrasy deflect the child’s patient efforts to
imitate the copperplate model which is set before him. The son often
writes like the father, even though he may seldom or never see his
father’s handwriting; brothers may write singularly alike, though taught
by different teachers and even in different continents. It has been
noted of the ancient and distinguished family of the Tyrrells that their
handwriting in the parish books of Stowmarket remained the same
throughout many generations. I have noticed, in a relation of my own,
peculiarities of handwriting identical with those of an ancestor two
centuries ago whose writing he certainly never saw. The resemblance is
often not that of exact formation, but of general air or underlying
structure.[61] One is tempted to think that often, in this as in other
matters, the possibilities are limited, and that when the child is
formed in his mother’s womb Nature cast the same old dice and the same
old combinations inevitably tend to recur. But that notion scarcely fits
all the facts, and our growing knowledge of the infinite subtlety of
heredity, of its presence even in the most seemingly elusive psychic
characters, indicates that the dice may be loaded and fall in accord
with harmonies we fail to perceive. The development of Mendelian
analysis may in time help us to understand them.

The part in style which belongs to atavism, to heredity, to unconscious
instinct, is probably very large. It eludes us to an even greater extent
than the corresponding part in handwriting because the man of letters
may have none among his ancestors who sought expression in style, so
that only one Milton speaks for a mute inglorious family, and how far he
speaks truly remains a matter of doubt. We only divine the truth when we
know the character and deeds of the family. There could be no more
instructive revelation of family history in style than is furnished by
Carlyle. There had never been any writer in the Carlyle family, and if
there had, Carlyle at the time when his manner of writing was formed,
would scarcely have sought to imitate them. Yet we could not conceive
this stern, laborious, plebeian family of Lowland Scots—with its remote
Teutonic affinities, its coarseness, its narrowness, its assertive
inarticulative force—in any more fitting verbal translation than was
given it by this its last son, the pathetic little figure with the face
of a lost child, who wrote in a padded room and turned the rough
muscular and reproductive activity of his fathers into more than half a
century of eloquent chatter concerning Work and Silence, so writing his
name in letters of gold on the dome of the British Museum.[62]

When we consider the characteristics, not of the family, but of the
race, it is easier to find examples of the force of ancestry, even
remote ancestry, overcoming environment and dominating style.
Shakespeare and Bacon were both Elizabethans who both lived from youth
upwards in London, and even moved to some extent almost in the same
circles. Yet all the influences of tradition and environment, which
sometimes seem to us so strong, scarcely sufficed to spread even the
faintest veneer of similarity over their style, and we could seldom
mistake a sentence of one for a sentence of the other. We always know
that Shakespeare—with his gay extravagance and redundancy, his essential
idealism—came of a people that had been changed in character from the
surrounding stock by a Celtic infolding of the receding British to
Wales.[63] We never fail to realise that Bacon—with his instinctive
gravity and temperance, the suppressed ardour of his aspiring
intellectual passion, his temperamental naturalism—was rooted deep in
that East Anglian soil which he had never so much as visited. In
Shakespeare’s veins there dances the blood of the men who made the
“Mabinogion”; we recognise Bacon as a man of the same countryside which
produced the forefathers of Emerson. Or we may consider the mingled
Breton and Gascon ancestry of Renan, in whose brain, in the very contour
and melody of his style, the ancient bards of Brittany have joined hands
with the tribe of Montaigne and Brantôme and the rest. Or, to take one
more example, we can scarcely fail to recognise in the style of Sir
Thomas Browne—as later, may be, in that of Hawthorne—the glamour of
which the latent aptitude had been handed on by ancestors who dwelt on
the borders of Wales.

In these examples hereditary influence can be clearly distinguished from
merely external and traditional influences. Not that we need imply a
disparagement of tradition: it is the foundation of civilised progress.
Speech itself is a tradition, a naturally developed convention, and in
that indeed it has its universal applicability and use. It is the crude
amorphous material of art, of music and poetry. But on its formal side,
whatever its supreme significance as the instrument and medium of
expression, speech is a natural convention, an accumulated tradition.

Even tradition, however, is often simply the corporeal embodiment, as it
were, of heredity. Behind many a great writer’s personality there stands
tradition, and behind tradition the race. That is well illustrated in
the style of Addison. This style—with a resilient fibre underneath its
delicacy and yet a certain freedom as of conversational familiarity—has
as its most easily marked structural signature a tendency to a usage it
has already been necessary to mention: the tendency to allow the
preposition to lag to the end of the sentence rather than to come tautly
before the pronoun with which in Latin it is combined. In a century in
which the Latin-French elements of English were to become developed, as
in Gibbon and Johnson, to the utmost, the totally different physiognomy
of Addison’s prose remained conspicuous,—though really far from
novel,—and to the sciolists of a bygone age it seemed marked by
carelessness, if not licence, at the best by personal idiosyncrasy. Yet,
as a matter of fact, we know it was nothing of the kind. Addison, as his
name indicates, was of the stock of the Scandinavian English, and the
Cumberland district he belonged to is largely Scandinavian; the
adjoining peninsula of Furness, which swarms with similar patronymics,
is indeed one of the most purely Scandinavian spots in England. Now in
the Scandinavian languages, as we know, and in the English dialects
based upon them, the preposition comes usually at the end of the
sentence, and Scandinavian structural elements form an integral part of
English, even more than Latin-French, for it has been the part of the
latter rather to enrich the vocabulary than to mould the structure of
our tongue. So that, instead of introducing a personal idiosyncrasy or
perpetrating a questionable licence, Addison was continuing his own
ancestral traditions and at the same time asserting an organic
prerogative of English speech. It may be added that Addison reveals his
Scandinavian affinities not merely in the material structure, but in the
spiritual quality, of his work. This delicate sympathetic observation,
the vein of gentle melancholy, the quiet restrained humour, meet us
again in modern Norwegian authors like Jonas Lie.

When we put aside these ancestral and traditional influences, there is
still much in the writer’s art which, even if personal, we can only term
instinctive. This may be said of that music which at their finest
moments belongs to all the great writers of prose. Every writer has his
own music, though there are few in whom it becomes audible save at rare
and precious intervals. The prose of the writer who can deliberately
make his own personal cadences monotonously audible all the time grows
wearisome; it affects us as a tedious mannerism. This is a kind of
machine-made prose which indeed it requires a clever artisan to produce;
but, as Landor said, “he must be a bad writer to whom there are no
inequalities.” The great writers, though they are always themselves,
attain the perfect music of their style under the stress of a stimulus
adequate to arouse it. Their music is the audible translation of
emotion, and only arises when the waves of emotion are stirred. It is
not properly speaking a voluntary effect. We can but say that the winds
of the spirit are breathed upon the surface of style, and they lift it
into rhythmic movement. And for each writer these waves have their own
special rate of vibration, their peculiar shape and interval. The rich
deep slow tones of Bacon have nothing in common with the haunting,
long-drawn melody, faint and tremulous, of Newman; the high metallic
falsetto ring of De Quincey’s rhetoric is far away from the pensive
low-toned music of Pater.

Imitation, as psychologists have taught us to realise, is a part of
instinct. When we begin to learn to write, it rarely happens that we are
not imitators, and, for the most part, unconsciously. The verse of every
young poet, however original he may afterwards grow, usually has plainly
written across it the rhythmic signature of some great master whose work
chances to be abroad in the world; once it was usually Tennyson, then
Swinburne, now various later poets; the same thing happens with prose,
but the rhythm of the signature is less easy to hear.

As a writer slowly finds his own centre of gravity, the influence of the
rhythm of other writers ceases to be perceptible except in so far as it
coincides with his own natural movement and _tempo_. That is a familiar
fact. We less easily realise, perhaps, that not only the tunes but the
notes that they are formed of are, in every great writer, his own. In
other words, he creates even his vocabulary. That is so not only in the
more obvious sense that out of the mass of words that make up a language
every writer uses only a limited number and even among these has his
words of predilection.[64] It is in the meanings he gives to words, to
names, that a writer creates his vocabulary. All language, we know, is
imagery and metaphor; even the simplest names of the elementary things
are metaphors based on resemblances that suggested themselves to the
primitive men who made language. It is not otherwise with the aboriginal
man of genius who uses language to express his new vision of the world.
He sees things charged with energy, or brilliant with colour, or
breathing out perfume, that the writers who came before him had
overlooked, and to designate these things he must use names which convey
the qualities he has perceived. Guided by his own new personal
sensations and perceptions, he creates his metaphorical vocabulary. If
we examine the style of Montaigne, so fresh and personal and inventive,
we see that its originality lies largely in its vocabulary, which is
not, like that of Rabelais, manufactured afresh, but has its novelty in
its metaphorical values, such new values being tried and tempered at
every step, to the measure of the highly individual person behind them,
who thereby exerts his creative force. In later days Huysmans, who
indeed saw the world at a more eccentric angle than Montaigne, yet with
unflinching veracity and absolute devotion, set himself to the task of
creating his own vocabulary, and at first the unfamiliarity of its
beauty estranges us.

To think of Huysmans is to be led towards an aspect of style not to be
passed over. To say that the artist in words is expressing a new vision
of the world and seeking the designations for things as he sees them, is
a large part of the truth, and, I would say, perhaps the most important
part of it. For most of us, I suppose (as I know it has been for me),
our vision of Nature has been largely, though by no means entirely,
constituted by pictures we have seen, by poems we have read, that left
an abiding memory. That is to say that Nature comes to us through an
atmosphere which is the emanation of supreme artists who once thrilled
us. But we are here concerned with the process of the artist’s work and
not with his æsthetic influence. The artist finds that words have a rich
content of their own, they are alive and they flourish or decay. They
send out connecting threads in every direction, they throb with meaning
that ever changes and reverberates afar. The writer is not always, or
often, merely preparing a _catalogue raisonné_ of things, he is an
artist and his pigments are words. Often he merely takes his suggestions
from the things of the world and makes his own pictures without any real
resemblance to the scene it is supposed to depict. Dujardin tells us
that he once took Huysmans to a Wagner concert; he scarcely listened to
the music, but he was fascinated by the programme the attendant handed
to him; he went home to write a brilliant page on “Tannhäuser.”
Mallarmé, on the other hand, was soaked in music; to him music was the
voice of the world, and it was the aim of poetry to express the world by
itself becoming music; he stood on a height like a pioneer and looked
towards the Promised Land, trying to catch intimations of a new
sensibility and a future art, but a great master of language, like
Huysmans, he never was. Huysmans has written superb pages about Gustave
Moreau and Félicien Rops, thinking, no doubt, that he was revealing
supreme artists (though we need not follow too closely the fashion of
depreciating either of those artists), but he was really only attracted
to their programmes and therein experiencing a stimulus that chanced to
be peculiarly fitted for drawing out his own special art. Baudelaire
would have written less gorgeously, but he would have produced a more
final critical estimate.

Yet even the greatest writers are affected by the intoxication of mere
words in the artistry of language. Shakespeare is, constantly, and, not
content with “making the green one red,” he must needs at the same time
“the multitudinous seas incarnadine.” It is conspicuous in Keats (as
Leigh Hunt, perhaps his first sensitively acute critic, clearly
explained), and often, as in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” where he seemed to
be concerned with beautiful things, he was really concerned with
beautiful words. In that way he is sometimes rather misleading for the
too youthful reader; “porphyry” seemed to me a marvellous substance when
as a boy of twelve I read of it in Keats, and I imagine that Keats
himself would have been surprised, had he lived long enough to walk to
St. Thomas’s Hospital over the new London Bridge, when told that he was
treading a granite that was porphyritic. I recall how Verlaine would
sometimes repeat in varying tones some rather unfamiliar word, rolling
it round and round in his mouth, sucking it like a sweetmeat, licking
the sound into the shape that pleased him; some people may perhaps have
found a little bizarre the single words (“Green,” for example) which he
sometimes made the title of a song, but if they adopt the preliminary
Verlainian process they may understand how he had fitted such words to
music and meaning.

The most obviously beautiful things in the world of Nature are birds and
flowers and the stones we call precious. But the attitude of the poet in
the presence of Nature is precisely that of Huysmans in the presence of
art: it is the programme that interests him. Of birds the knowledge of
poets generally is of the most generalised and elementary kind; they are
the laughing-stock of the ornithologist; they are only a stage removed
from the standpoint of the painter who was introducing a tree into his
landscape and when asked what tree, replied, “Oh, just the ordinary
tree.” Even Goethe mistook the finches by the roadside for larks. The
poet, one may be sure, even to-day seldom carries in his pocket the
little “Führer durch unsere Vogelwelt” of Bernhard Hoffmann, and has
probably never so much as heard of it. Of flowers his knowledge seems to
be limited by the quality of the flower’s name. I have long cherished an
exquisite and quite common English wild-flower, but have never come
across a poem about it, for its unattractive name is the stitchwort, and
it is only lately that even in prose it has met (from Mr. Salt) with due
appreciation. As regards precious stones the same may be said, and in
the galleries of the Geological Museum it has hardly seemed to me that,
among the few visitors, there were poets (unless I chanced to bring one
myself) to brood over all that beauty. It is the word and its inner
reverberation with which the poet is really concerned, even sometimes
perhaps deliberately. When Milton misused the word “eglantine” one
realises the unconscious appeal to him of the name and one cannot feel
quite sure that it was altogether unconscious. Coleridge has been
solemnly reproved for speaking of the “loud” bassoon. But it was to the
timbre of the word, not of the instrument, that Coleridge was
responding, and had he been informed that the bassoon is not loud, I
doubt not he would have replied: “Well, if it is not loud it ought to
be.” On the plane on which Coleridge moved “the loud bassoon” was
absolutely right. We see that the artist in speech moves among words
rather than among things. Originally, it is true, words are closely
related to things, but in their far reverberation they have become
enriched by many associations, saturated with many colours; they have
acquired a life of their own, moving on another plane than that of
things, and it is on that plane that the artist in words is, as an
artist, concerned with them.

It thus comes about that the artist in words, like the artist in
pigments, is perpetually passing between two planes—the plane of new
vision and the plane of new creation. He is sometimes remoulding the
external world and sometimes the internal world; sometimes, by
predilection, lingering more on one plane than on the other plane. The
artist in words is not irresistibly drawn to the exact study of things
or moved by the strong love of Nature. The poets who describe Nature
most minutely and most faithfully are not usually the great poets. That
is intelligible because the poet—even the poet in the wide sense who
also uses prose—is primarily the instrument of human emotion and not of
scientific observation. Yet that poet possesses immense resources of
strength who in early life has stored within him the minute knowledge of
some field of the actual external world.[65] One may doubt, indeed,
whether there has been any supreme poet, from Homer on, who has not had
this inner reservoir of sensitive impressions to draw from. The youthful
Shakespeare who wrote the poems, with their minute descriptions, was not
a great poet, as the youthful Marlowe was, but he was storing up the
material which, when he had developed into a great poet, he could draw
on at need with a careless and assured hand. Without such reservoirs,
the novelists also would never attain to that touch of the poet which,
beyond their story-telling power, can stir our hearts. “À la Recherche
du Temps Perdu” is the name of a great modern book, but every novelist
during part of his time has been a Ulysses on a perilous voyage of
adventure for that far home. One thinks of George Eliot and her early
intimacy with the life of country people, of Hardy who had acquired so
acute a sensitivity to the sounds of Nature, of Conrad who had caught
the flashes of penetrating vision which came to the sailor on deck; and
in so far as they move away into scenes where they cannot draw from
those ancient reservoirs, the adventures of these artists, however
brilliant they may become, lose their power of intimate appeal. The most
extravagant example of this to-day is the Spanish novelist Blasco
Ibañez, who wrote of the Valencian _huerta_ that had saturated his youth
in novels that were penetrating and poignant, and then turned to writing
for the cosmopolitan crowd novels about anything, that were completely
negligible.

We grow familiar in time with the style of the great writers, and when
we read them we translate them easily and unconsciously, as we translate
a foreign language we are familiar with; we understand the vocabulary
because we have learnt to know the special seal of the creative person
who moulded the vocabulary. But at the outset the great writer may be
almost as unintelligible to us as though he were writing in a language
we had never learnt. In the now remote days when “Leaves of Grass” was a
new book in the world, few who looked into it for the first time,
however honestly, but were repelled and perhaps even violently repelled,
and it is hard to realise now that once those who fell on Swinburne’s
“Poems and Ballads” saw at first only picturesque hieroglyphics to which
they had no key. But even to-day how many there are who find Proust
unreadable and Joyce unintelligible. Until we find the door and the clue
the new writer remains obscure. Therein lies the truth of Landor’s
saying that the poet must himself create the beings who are to enjoy his
Paradise.

For most of those who deliberately seek to learn to write, words seem
generally to be felt as of less importance than the art of arranging
them. It is thus that the learner in writing tends to become the devoted
student of grammar and syntax whom we came across at the outset. That is
indeed a tendency which always increases. Civilisation develops with a
conscious adhesion to formal order, and the writer—writing by fashion or
by ambition and not by divine right of creative instinct—follows the
course of civilisation. It is an unfortunate tendency, for those whom it
affects conquer by their number. As we know, writing that is real is not
learnt that way. Just as the solar system was not made in accordance
with the astronomer’s laws, so writing is not made by the laws of
grammar. Astronomer and grammarian alike can only come in at the end, to
give a generalised description of what usually happens in the respective
fields it pleases them to explore. When a new comet, cosmic or literary,
enters their sky, it is their descriptions which have to be readjusted,
and not the comet. There seems to be no more pronounced mark of the
decadence of a people and its literature than a servile and rigid
subserviency to rule. It can only make for ossification, for anchylosis,
for petrification, all the milestones on the road of death. In every age
of democratic plebeianism, where each man thinks he is as good a writer
as the others, and takes his laws from the others, having no laws of his
own nature, it is down this steep path that men, in a flock, inevitably
run.

We may find an illustration of the plebeian anchylosis of advancing
civilisation in the minor matter of spelling. We cannot, it is true,
overlook the fact that writing is read and that its appearance cannot be
quite disregarded. Yet, ultimately, it appeals to the ear, and spelling
can have little to do with style. The laws of spelling, properly
speaking, are few or none, and in the great ages men have understood
this and boldly acted accordingly. They exercised a fine personal
discretion in the matter and permitted without question a wide range of
variation. Shakespeare, as we know, even spelt his own name in several
different ways, all equally correct. When that great old Elizabethan
mariner, Sir Martin Frobisher, entered on one of his rare and hazardous
adventures with the pen, he created spelling absolutely afresh, in the
spirit of simple heroism with which he was always ready to sail out into
strange seas. His epistolary adventures are, certainly, more interesting
than admirable, but we have no reason to suppose that the distinguished
persons to whom these letters were addressed viewed them with any
disdain. More anæmic ages cannot endure creative vitality even in
spelling, and so it comes about that in periods when everything
beautiful and handmade gives place to manufactured articles made
wholesale, uniform, and cheap, the same principles are applied to words,
and spelling becomes a mechanic trade. We must have our spelling
uniform, even if uniformly bad.[66] Just as the man who, having out of
sheer ignorance eaten the wrong end of his asparagus, was thenceforth
compelled to declare that he preferred that end, so it is with our race
in the matter of spelling; our ancestors, by chance or by ignorance,
tended to adopt certain forms of spelling and we, their children, are
forced to declare that we prefer those forms. Thus we have not only lost
all individuality in spelling, but we pride ourselves on our loss and
magnify our anchylosis. In England it has become almost impossible to
flex our stiffened mental joints sufficiently to press out a single
letter, in America it is almost impossible to extend them enough to
admit that letter. It is convenient, we say, to be rigid and formal in
these things, and therewith we are content; it matters little to us that
we have thereby killed the life of our words and only gained the
conveniency of death. It would be likewise convenient, no doubt, if men
and women could be turned into rigid geometrical diagrams,—as indeed our
legislators sometimes seem to think that they already are,—but we should
pay by yielding up all the infinite variations, the beautiful
sinuosities, that had once made up life.

There can be no doubt that in the much greater matter of style we have
paid heavily for the attainment of our slavish adherence to mechanical
rules, however convenient, however inevitable. The beautiful
incorrection, as we are now compelled to regard it, that so often marked
the great and even the small writers of the seventeenth century, has
been lost, for all can now write what any find it easy to read, what
none have any consuming desire to read. But when Sir Thomas Browne wrote
his “Religio Medici” it was with an art made up of obedience to personal
law and abandonment to free inspiration which still ravishes us. It is
extraordinary how far indifference or incorrection of style may be
carried and yet remain completely adequate even to complex and subtle
ends. Pepys wrote his “Diary,” at the outset of a life full of strenuous
work and not a little pleasure, with a rare devotion indeed, but with a
concision and carelessness, a single eye on the fact itself, and an
extraordinary absence of self-consciousness which rob it of all claim to
possess what we conventionally term style. Yet in this vehicle he has
perfectly conveyed not merely the most vividly realised and delightfully
detailed picture of a past age ever achieved in any language, but he
has, moreover, painted a psychological portrait of himself which for its
serenely impartial justice, its subtle gradations, its bold
juxtapositions of colours, has all the qualities of the finest
Velasquez. There is no style here, we say, merely the diarist, writing
with careless poignant vitality for his own eye, and yet no style that
we could conceive would be better fitted, or so well fitted, for the
miracle that has here been effected.

The personal freedom of Browne led up to splendour, and that of Pepys to
clarity. But while splendour is not the whole of writing, neither,
although one returns to it again and again, is clarity. Here we come
from another side on to a point we had already reached. Bergson, in
reply to the question: “Comment doivent écrire les Philosophes?” lets
fall some observations, which, as he himself remarks, concern other
writers beside philosophers. A technical word, he remarks, even a word
invented for the occasion or used in a special sense, is always in its
place provided the instructed reader—though the difficulty, as he fails
to point out, is to be sure of possessing this instructed reader—accepts
it so easily as not even to notice it, and he proceeds to say that in
philosophic prose, and in all prose, and indeed in all the arts, “the
perfect expression is that which has come so naturally, or rather so
necessarily, by virtue of so imperious a predestination, that we do not
pause before it, but go straight on to what it seeks to express, as
though it were blended with the idea; it became invisible by force of
being transparent.”[67] That is well said. Bergson also is on the side
of clarity. Yet I do not feel that that is all there is to say. Style is
not a sheet of glass in which the only thing that matters is the absence
of flaws. Bergson’s own style is not so diaphanous that one never pauses
to admire its quality, nor, as a hostile critic (Edouard Dujardin) has
shown, is it always so clear as to be transparent. The dancer in prose
as well as in verse—philosopher or whatever he may be—must reveal all
his limbs through the garment he wears; yet the garment must have its
own proper beauty, and there is a failure of art, a failure of
revelation, if it possesses no beauty. Style indeed is not really a mere
invisible transparent medium, it is not really a garment, but, as
Gourmont said, the very thought itself. It is the miraculous
transubstantiation of a spiritual body, given to us in the only form in
which we may receive and absorb that body, and unless its clarity is
balanced by its beauty it is not adequate to sustain that most high
function. No doubt, if we lean on one side more than the other, it is
clarity rather than beauty which we should choose, for on the other side
we may have, indeed, a Sir Thomas Browne, and there we are conscious not
so much of a transubstantiation as of a garment, with thick embroidery,
indeed, and glistening jewels, but we are not always sure that much is
hidden beneath. A step further and we reach D’Annunzio, a splendid mask
with nothing beneath, just as in the streets of Rome one may sometimes
meet a Franciscan friar with a head superb as a Roman Emperor’s and yet,
one divines, it means nothing. The Italian writer, it is significant to
note, chose so ostentatiously magnificent a name as Gabriele D’Annunzio
to conceal a real name which was nothing. The great angels of
annunciation create the beauty of their own real names. Who now finds
Shakespeare ridiculous? And how lovely a name is Keats!

As a part of the harmony of art, which is necessarily made out of
conflict, we have to view that perpetual seeming alternation between the
two planes—the plane of vision and the plane of creation, the form
within and the garment that clothes it—which may sometimes distract the
artist himself. The prophet Jeremiah once said (and modern prophets have
doubtless had occasion to recognise the truth of his remark) that he
seemed to the people round him only as “one that hath a pleasant voice
and can play well on an instrument.” But he failed to understand that it
was only through this quality of voice and instrument that his
lamentations had any vital force or even any being, and that if the poem
goes the message goes. Indeed, that is true of all his fellow prophets
of the Old Testament and the New who have fascinated mankind with the
sound of those harps that they had once hung by the waters of Babylon.
The whole Bible, we may be very sure, would have long ago been forgotten
by all but a few intelligent archæologists, if men had not heard in it,
again and again and again, “one that hath a pleasant voice and can play
well on an instrument.” Socrates said that philosophy was simply music.
But the same might be said of religion. The divine dance of satyrs and
nymphs to the sound of pipes—it is the symbol of life which in one form
or another has floated before human eyes from the days of the sculptors
of Greek bas-reliefs to the men of our own day who catch the glimpse of
new harmonies in the pages of “L’Esprit Nouveau.” We cannot but follow
the piper that knows how to play, even to our own destruction. There may
be much that is objectionable about Man. But he has that engaging trait.
And the world will end when he has lost it.

One asks one’s self how it was that the old way of writing, as a
personal art, gave place to the new way of writing, as a mere impersonal
pseudo-science, rigidly bound by formal and artificial rules. The
answer, no doubt, is to be found in the existence of a great new current
of thought which began mightily to stir in men’s minds towards the end
of the seventeenth century. It will be remembered that it was at that
time, both in England and France, that the new devitalised, though more
flexible, prose appeared, with its precision and accuracy, its conscious
orderliness, its deliberate method. But only a few years before, over
France and England alike, a great intellectual wave had swept, imparting
to the mathematical and geometrical sciences, to astronomy, physics, and
allied studies, an impetus that they had never received before on so
great a scale. Descartes in France and Newton in England stand out as
the typical representatives of the movement. If that movement had to
exert any influence on language—and we know how sensitively language
reacts to thought—it could have been manifested in no other way than by
the change which actually took place. And there was every opportunity
for that influence to be exerted.[68] This sudden expansion of the
mathematical and geometrical sciences was so great and novel that
interest in it was not confined to a small band of men of science: it
excited the man in the street, the woman in the drawing-room; it was
indeed a woman, a bright and gay woman of the world, who translated
Newton’s profound book into French. Thus it was that the new qualities
of style were invented, not merely to express new qualities of thought,
but because new scientific ideals were moving within the minds of men. A
similar reaction of thought on language took place at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, when an attempt was made to vitalise language
once more, and to break the rigid and formal moulds the previous century
had constructed. The attempt was immediately preceded by the awakening
of a new group of sciences, but this time the sciences of life, the
biological studies associated with Cuvier and Lamarck, with John Hunter
and Erasmus Darwin. With the twentieth century we see the temporary
exhaustion of the biological spirit with its historical form in science
and its romantic form in art, and we have a neo-classic spirit which has
involved a renaissance of the mathematical sciences and, even before
that, was beginning to affect speech.

To admire the old writers, because for them writing was an art to be
exercised freely and not a vain attempt to follow after the ideals of
the abstract sciences, thus by no means implies a contempt for that
decorum and orderliness without which all written speech must be
ineffective and obscure. The great writers in the great ages, standing
above classicism and above romanticism, have always observed this
decorum and orderliness. In their hands such observance was not a
servile and rigid adherence to external rules, but a beautiful
convention, an instinctive fine breeding, such as is naturally observed
in human intercourse when it is not broken down by intimacy or by any
great crisis of life or of death.

The freedom of art by no means involves the easiness of art. It may
rather, indeed, be said the difficulty increases with freedom, for to
make things in accordance with patterns is ever the easiest task. The
problem is equally arduous for those who, so far as their craft is
conscious, seek an impersonal and for those who seek a personal ideal of
style. Flaubert sought—in vain, it is true—to be the most objective of
artists and to mould speech with heroic energy in shapes of abstract
perfection. Nietzsche, one of the most personal artists in style, sought
likewise, in his own words, to work at a page of prose as a sculptor
works at a statue. Though the result is not perhaps fundamentally
different, whichever ideal it is that, consciously or instinctively, is
followed, the personal road of style is doubtless theoretically—though
not necessarily in practice—the sounder, usually also that which moves
most of us more profoundly. The great prose writers of the Second Empire
in France made an unparalleled effort to carve or paint impersonal
prose, but its final beauty and effectiveness seem scarcely equal to the
splendid energy it embodies. Jules de Goncourt, his brother thought,
literally died from the mental exhaustion of his unceasing struggle to
attain an objective style adequate to express the subtle texture of the
world as he saw it. But, while the Goncourts are great figures in
literary history, they have pioneered no new road, nor are they of the
writers whom men continuously love to read; for it is as a document that
the “Journal” remains of enduring value.

Yet the great writers of any school bear witness, each in his own way,
that, deeper than these conventions and decorums of style, there is a
law which no writer can escape from, a law which must needs be learnt,
but can never be taught. That is the law of the logic of thought. All
the conventional rules of the construction of speech may be put aside if
a writer is thereby enabled to follow more closely and lucidly the form
and process of his thought. It is the law of that logic that he must for
ever follow and in attaining it alone find rest. He may say of it as
devoutly as Dante: “In la sua voluntade è nostra pace.” All progress in
literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and
exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful
because alive and are now false because dead. The simple and naked
beauty of Swift’s style, sometimes so keen and poignant, rests
absolutely on this truth to the logic of his thought. The twin qualities
of flexibility and intimacy are of the essence of all progress in the
art of language, and in their progressive achievement lies the
attainment of great literature. If we compare Shakespeare with his
predecessors and contemporaries, we can scarcely say that in imaginative
force he is vastly superior to Marlowe, or in intellectual grip to
Jonson, but he immeasurably surpasses them in flexibility and in
intimacy. He was able with an incomparable art to weave a garment of
speech so flexible in its strength, so intimate in its transparence,
that it lent itself to every shade of emotion and the quickest turns of
thought. When we compare the heavy and formal letters of Bacon, even to
his closest friends, with the “Familiar Letters” of the vivacious
Welshman Howell, we can scarcely believe the two men were
contemporaries, so incomparably more expressive, so flexible and so
intimate, is the style of Howell. All the writers who influence those
who come after them have done so by the same method. They have thrown
aside the awkward and outworn garments of speech, they have woven a
simpler and more familiar speech, able to express subtleties or
audacities that before seemed inexpressible. That was once done in
English verse by Cowper and Wordsworth, in English prose by Addison and
Lamb. That has been done in French to-day by Proust and in English by
Joyce. When a great writer, like Carlyle or Browning, creates a speech
of his own which is too clumsy to be flexible and too heavy to be
intimate, he may arouse the admiration of his fellows, but he leaves no
traces on the speech of the men who come after him. It is not easy to
believe that such will be Joyce’s fate. His “Ulysses”—carrying to a much
further point qualities that began to appear in his earlier work—has
been hailed as epoch-making in English literature, though a
distinguished critic holds that it is this rather by closing than by
opening an epoch. It would still be preparing a new road, and as thus
operative we may accept it without necessarily judging it to be at the
same time a master-work, provided we understand what it is that has been
here attempted. This huge Odyssey is an ordinary day’s history in the
ordinary life of one ordinary man and the persons of his immediate
environment. It is here sought to reproduce as Art the whole of the
man’s physical and psychic activity during that period, omitting
nothing, not even the actions which the most naturalistic of novelists
had hitherto thought too trivial or too indelicate to mention. Not only
the thoughts and impulses that result in action, but also the thoughts
and emotions that drift aimlessly across the field of his consciousness,
are here; and, in the presentation of this combined inner and outer
life, Joyce has sometimes placed both on the same plane, achieving a new
simplicity of style, though we may at first sometimes find it hard to
divine what is outer and what inner. Moreover, he never hesitates, when
he pleases, to change the tone of his style and even to adopt without
notice, in a deliberately ironical and chameleon-like fashion, the
manner of other writers. In these ways Joyce has here achieved that new
intimacy of vision, that new flexibility of expression, which are of the
essence of all great literature at its vitally moving point of advance.
He has succeeded in realising and making manifest in art what others had
passed over or failed to see. If in that difficult and dangerous task he
has failed, as some of us may believe, to reach either complete clarity
or complete beauty, he has at all events made it possible for those who
come after to reach a new height which, without the help of the road he
had constructed, they might have missed, or even failed to conceive, and
that is enough for any writer’s fame.

When we turn to Proust we are in the presence of a writer about whom, no
doubt, there is no violent dispute. There may be much about his work
that is disturbing to many, but he was not concerned, like Joyce, to
affront so many prejudices, and in France it is not even necessary, for
the road has already been prepared by heroic pioneers of old during a
thousand years. But the writer who brings a new revelation is not
necessarily called upon to invite the execration of the herd. That is a
risk he must be called upon to face, it is not an inevitable fate. When
the mob yell: “Crucify him! Crucify him!” the artist, in whatever
medium, hears a voice from Heaven: “This is my beloved son.” Yet it is
conceivable that the more perfectly a new revelation is achieved the
less antagonism it arouses. Proust has undoubtedly been the master of a
new intimacy of vision, a new flexibility of expression, even though the
style through which the revelation has been made, perhaps necessarily on
account of the complexity involved, has remained a little difficult and
also, it must be said, a little negligent. But it has achieved a
considerable degree of clarity and a high degree of beauty. So there is
less difficulty in recognising a great masterpiece in “À la Recherche du
Temps Perdu” than if it were more conspicuously the work of a daring
pioneer. It is seen as the revelation of a new æsthetic sensibility
embodied in a new and fitting style. Marcel Proust has experienced
clearly what others have felt dimly or not at all. The significance of
his work is thus altogether apart from the power of its dramatic
incidents or its qualities as a novel. To the critic of defective
intelligence, craving for scenes of sensation, it has sometimes seemed
that “À l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleur” is the least important
section of Proust’s work. Yet it is on that quiet and uneventful tract
of his narrative that Proust has most surely set the stamp of his
genius, a genius, I should like to add, which is peculiarly congenial to
the English mind because it was in the English tradition, rather than in
the French tradition, that Proust was moving.[69]

No doubt it is possible for a writer to go far by the exercise of a
finely attentive docility. By a dutiful study of what other people have
said, by a refined cleverness in catching their tricks, and avoiding
their subtleties, their profundities, their audacities, by, in short, a
patient perseverance in writing out copperplate maxims in elegant
copybooks, he can become at last, like Stevenson, the idol of the crowd.
But the great writer can only learn out of himself. He learns to write
as a child learns to walk. For the laws of the logic of thought are not
other than those of physical movement. There is stumbling, awkwardness,
hesitation, experiment—before at last the learner attains the perfect
command of that divine rhythm and perilous poise in which he asserts his
supreme human privilege. But the process of his learning rests
ultimately on his own structure and function and not on others’ example.
“Style must be founded upon models”; it is the rule set up by the pedant
who knows nothing of what style means. For the style that is founded on
a model is the negation of style.

The ardour and heroism of great achievement in style never grow less as
the ages pass, but rather tend to grow more. That is so, not merely
because the hardest tasks are left for the last, but because of the ever
increasing impediments placed in the path of style by the piling up of
mechanical rules and rigid conventions. It is doubtful whether on the
whole the forces of life really gain on the surrounding inertia of
death. The greatest writers must spend the blood and sweat of their
souls, amid the execration and disdain of their contemporaries, in
breaking the old moulds of style and pouring their fresh life into new
moulds. From Dante to Carducci, from Rabelais to Proust, from Chaucer to
Whitman, the giants of letters have been engaged in this life-giving
task, and behind them the forces of death swiftly gather again. Here
there is always room for the hero. No man, indeed, can write anything
that matters who is not a hero at heart, even though to the people who
pass him in the street or know him in the house he may seem as gentle as
any dove. If all progress lies in an ever greater flexibility and
intimacy of speech, a finer adaptation to the heights and depths of the
mobile human soul, the task can never be finally completed. Every writer
is called afresh to reveal new strata of life. By digging in his own
soul he becomes the discoverer of the soul of his family, of his nation,
of the race, of the heart of humanity. For the great writer finds style
as the mystic find God, in his own soul. It is the final utterance of a
sigh, which none could utter before him, and which all can who follow.

In the end, it will be seen we return at last to the point from which we
start. We have completed the cycle of an art’s evolution,—and it might,
indeed, be any other art as much as writing,—reaching in the final sweep
of ever wider flights the fact from which we started, but seeing it
anew, with a fresh universal significance. Writing is an arduous
spiritual and intellectual task, only to be achieved by patient and
deliberate labour and much daring. Yet therewith we are only at the
beginning. Writing is also the expression of individual personality,
which springs up spontaneously, or is slowly drawn up from within, out
of a well of inner emotions which none may command. But even with these
two opposite factors we have not attained the complete synthesis. For
style in the full sense is more than the deliberate and designed
creation, more even than the unconscious and involuntary creation, of
the individual man who therein expresses himself. The self that he thus
expresses is a bundle of inherited tendencies that came the man himself
can never entirely know whence. It is by the instinctive stress of a
highly sensitive, or slightly abnormal constitution, that he is impelled
to instil these tendencies into the alien magic of words. The stylum
wherewith he strives to write himself on the yet blank pages of the
world may have the obstinate vigour of the metal rod or the wild and
quavering waywardness of an insect’s wing, but behind it lie forces that
extend into infinity. It moves us because it is itself moved by pulses
which in varying measure we also have inherited, and because its primary
source is in the heart of a cosmos from which we ourselves spring.

Footnote 55:

  It may be as well to point that it is the amateur literary grammarian
  and not the expert who is at fault in these matters. The attitude of
  the expert (as in C. T. Onions, _Advanced English Syntax_) is entirely
  reasonable.

Footnote 56:

  It is interesting to note that another aristocratic master of speech
  had also made just the same observation. Landor puts into the mouth of
  Horne Tooke the words: “No expression can become a vulgarism which has
  not a broad foundation. The language of the vulgar hath its source in
  physics: in known, comprehended, and operative things.” At the same
  time Landor was as stern a judge as Baudelaire of the random use of
  _clichés_.

Footnote 57:

  Speaking as a writer who has been much quoted,—it ought to be a
  satisfaction, but I have had my doubts,—I may say that I have observed
  that those who quote belong mostly to two classes, one consisting of
  good, or at all events indifferent, writers, and the other of bad
  writers. Those of the first class quote with fair precision and due
  acknowledgement, those of the second with no precision, and only the
  vaguest intimation, or none at all, that they are quoting. This would
  seem to indicate that the good writer is more honest than the bad
  writer, but that conclusion may be unjust to the bad writer. The fact
  is that, having little thought or knowledge of his own, he is not
  fully conscious of what he is doing. He is like a greedy child who,
  seeing food in front of him, snatches it at random, without being able
  to recognise whether or not it is his own. There is, however, a third
  class of those who cannot resist the temptation of deliberately
  putting forth the painfully achieved thought or knowledge of others as
  their own, sometimes, perhaps, seeking to gloss over the lapse with:
  “As every one knows—”

Footnote 58:

  Croce, who is no doubt the most instructive literary critic of our
  time, has, in his own way, insisted on this essential fact. As he
  would put it, there are no objective standards of judgment; we cannot
  approach a work of art with our laws and categories. We have to
  comprehend the artist’s own values, and only then are we fit to
  pronounce any judgment on his work. The task of the literary critic is
  thus immensely more difficult than it is vulgarly supposed to be. The
  same holds good, I would add, of criticism in the fields of art, not
  excluding the art of love and the arts of living in general.

Footnote 59:

  “This search is the art of all great thinkers, of all great artists,
  indeed of all those who, even without attaining expression, desire to
  live deeply. If the dance brings us so near to God, it is, I believe,
  because it symbolizes for us the movement of this gesture.” (Élie
  Faure, _L’Arbre d’Éden_, p. 318.)

Footnote 60:

  This is that “divine malice” which Nietzsche, in _Ecce Homo_, speaking
  of Heine (“one day Heine and I will be regarded as by far the greatest
  artists of the German language,” he says rather egotistically, but
  perhaps truly) considered essential to perfection. “I estimate the
  value of men and of races,” he added, “by their need to identify their
  God with a satyr,” a hard saying, no doubt, to the modern man, but it
  has its meaning.

Footnote 61:

  Since this was written I have found that Laycock, whose subtle
  observation pioneered so many later ideas, long ago noted (“Some
  Organic Laws of Memory,” _Journal of Mental Science_, July, 1875)
  reversion to ancestral modes of handwriting.

Footnote 62:

  This was written fifteen years ago, and as Carlyle has of late been
  unduly depreciated I would add that, while strictly to the present
  point, it is not put forward as an estimate of Carlyle’s genius. That
  I seem to have attempted twenty-five years earlier in a private letter
  (to my friend the late Reverend Angus Mackay) I may here perhaps be
  allowed to quote. It was in 1883, soon after the publication of
  Carlyle’s _Reminiscences_: “This is not Carlylese, but it is finer.
  The popular judgment is hopelessly wrong. We can never understand
  Carlyle till we get rid of the ‘great prophet’ notion. Carlyle is not
  (as we were once taught) a ‘great moral teacher,’ but, in the high
  sense, a great _comedian_. His books are wonderful comedies. He is the
  Scotch Aristophanes, as Rabelais is the French and Heine the German
  Aristophanes—of course, with the intense northern imagination, more
  clumsy, more imperfect, more profound than the Greek. But, at a long
  distance, there is a close resemblance to Aristophanes with the same
  mixture of audacity in method and conservatism in spirit. Carlyle’s
  account of Lamb seems in the true sense Aristophanic. His humour is,
  too, as broad as he dares (some curious resemblances there, too). In
  his lyrical outbursts, again, he follows Aristophanes, and again at a
  distance. Of course he cannot be compared as an artist. He has not,
  like Rabelais, created a world to play with, but, like Aristophanes
  generally, he sports with the things that are.” That youthful estimate
  was alien to popular opinion then because Carlyle was idolised; it is
  now, no doubt, equally alien for an opposite reason. It is only on
  extremes that the indolent popular mind can rest.

Footnote 63:

  J. Beddoe, _The Races of Britain_, p. 254.

Footnote 64:

  I once studied, as an example, colour-words in various writers,
  finding that every poet has his own colour formula. Variations in
  length of sentence and peculiarities of usage in metre have often been
  studied. Reference is made to some of these studies by A. Niceforo,
  “Metodo Statistico e Documenti Litterari,” _Revista d’Italia_, August,
  1917.

Footnote 65:

  “The Muses are the daughters of Memory,” Paul Morand tells us that
  Proust would say; “there is no art without recollection,” and
  certainly it is supremely true of Proust’s art. It is that element of
  art which imparts at once both atmosphere and poignant intimacy,
  external farness with internal nearness. The lyrics of Thomas Hardy
  owe their intimacy of appeal to the dominance in them of recollection
  (in _Late Lyrics and Earlier_ one might say it is never absent), and
  that is why they can scarcely be fully appreciated save by those who
  are no longer very young.

Footnote 66:

  The Oxford University Press publishes a little volume of _Rules for
  Compositors and Readers_ in which this uniform is set forth. It is a
  useful and interesting manual, but one wonders how many unnecessary
  and even undesirable usages—including that morbid desire to cling to
  the _ize_ termination (charming as an eccentricity but hideous as a
  rule) when _ise_ would suffice—are hereby fostered. Even when we leave
  out of consideration the great historical tradition of variety in this
  matter, it is doubtful, when we consider them comprehensively, whether
  the advantages of encouraging every one to spell like his fellows
  overbalances the advantages of encouraging every one to spell unlike
  his fellows. When I was a teacher in the Australian bush I derived far
  less enjoyment from the more or less “correctly” spelt exercises of my
  pupils than from the occasional notes I received from their parents
  who, never having been taught to spell, were able to spell in the
  grand manner. We are wilfully throwing away an endless source of
  delight.

Footnote 67:

  _Le Monde Nouveau_, 15th December, 1922.

Footnote 68:

  Ferris Greenslet (in his study of _Joseph Glanvill_, p. 183),
  referring to the Cartesian influence on English prose style, quotes
  from Sprat’s _History of the Royal Society_ that the Society “exacted
  from its members a close, naked, natural way of speaking, positive
  expressions, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the
  mathematic plainness as they can.” The Society passed a resolution to
  reject “all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style.”

Footnote 69:

  If it is asked why I take examples of a quality in art that is
  universal from literary personalities that to many are questionable,
  even morbid or perverse, rather than from some more normal and
  unquestioned figure, Thomas Hardy, for example, I would reply that I
  have always regarded it as more helpful and instructive to take
  examples that are still questionable rather than to fall back on the
  unquestionable that all will accept tamely without thought. Forty
  years ago, when Hardy’s genius was scarcely at all recognised, it
  seemed worth while to me to set forth the quality of his genius.
  To-day, when that quality is unquestioned, and Hardy receives general
  love and reverence, it would seem idle and unprofitable to do so.




                               CHAPTER V
                          THE ART OF RELIGION


                                   I


RELIGION is a large word, of good import and of evil import, and with
the general discussion of religion we are not in this place concerned.
Its quintessential core—which is the art of finding our emotional
relationship to the world conceived as a whole—is all that here matters,
and it is best termed “Mysticism.” No doubt it needs some courage to use
that word. It is the common label of abuse applied to every
pseudo-spiritual thing that is held up for contempt. Yet it would be
foolish to allow ourselves to be deflected from the right use of a word
by the accident of its abuse. “Mysticism,” however often misused, will
here be used, because it is the correct term for the relationship of the
Self to the Not-Self, of the individual to a Whole, when, going beyond
his own personal ends, he discovers his adjustment to larger ends, in
harmony or devotion or love.

It has become a commonplace among the unthinking, or those who think
badly, to assume an opposition of hostility between mysticism and
science.[70] If “science” is, as we have some reason to believe, an art,
if “mysticism” also is an art, the opposition can scarcely be radical
since they must both spring from the same root in natural human
activity.


                                   II


IF, indeed, by “science” we mean the organisation of an intellectual
relationship to the world we live in adequate to give us some degree of
power over that world, and if by “mysticism” we mean the joyful
organisation of an emotional relationship to the world conceived as a
whole,[71] the opposition which we usually assume to exist between them
is of comparatively modern origin.

Among savage peoples such an opposition can scarcely be said to have any
existence. The very fact that science, in the strict sense, seems often
to begin with the stars might itself have suggested that the basis of
science is mystical contemplation. Not only is there usually no
opposition between the “scientific” and the “mystical” attitude among
peoples we may fairly call primitive, but the two attitudes may be
combined in the same person. The “medicine-man” is not more an embryonic
man of science than he is an embryonic mystic; he is both equally. He
cultivates not only magic but holiness, he achieves the conquest of his
own soul, he enters into harmony with the universe; and in doing this,
and partly, indeed, through doing this, his knowledge is increased, his
sensations and power of observation are rendered acute, and he is
enabled so to gain organised knowledge of natural processes that he can
to some extent foresee or even control those processes. He is the
ancestor alike of the hermit following after sanctity and of the
inventor crystallising discoveries into profitable patents. Such is the
medicine-man wherever we may find him in his typical shape—which he
cannot always adequately achieve—all over the world, around Torres
Straits just as much as around Behring’s Straits. Yet we have failed to
grasp the significance of this fact.

It is the business of the _Shaman_, as on the mystical side we may
conveniently term the medicine-man, to place himself under the
conditions—and even in primitive life those conditions are varied and
subtle—which bring his will into harmony with the essence of the world,
so that he grows one with that essence, that its will becomes his will,
and, reversely, that, in a sense, his will becomes its. Herewith, in
this unity with the spirit of the world, the possibility of magic and
the power to control the operation of Nature are introduced into human
thought, with its core of reality and its endless trail of absurdity,
persisting even into advanced civilisation.

But this harmony with the essence of the universe, this control of
Nature through oneness with Nature, is not only at the heart of
religion; it is also at the heart of science. It is only by the
possession of an acquired or inborn temperament attuned to the
temperament of Nature that a Faraday or an Edison, that any scientific
discoverer or inventor, can achieve his results. And the primitive
medicine-man, who on the religious side has attained harmony of the self
with the Not-Self, and by obeying learnt to command, cannot fail on the
scientific side also, under the special conditions of his isolated life,
to acquire an insight into natural methods, a practical power over human
activities and over the treatment of disease, such as on the imaginative
and emotional side he already possesses. If we are able to see this
essential and double attitude of the _Shaman_—medicine-man—if we are
able to eliminate all the extraneous absurdities and the extravagancies
which conceal the real nature of his function in the primitive world,
the problem of science and mysticism, and their relationship to each
other, ceases to have difficulties for us.

It is as well to point out, before passing on, that the investigators of
primitive thought are not altogether in agreement with one another on
this question of the relation of science to magic, and have complicated
the question by drawing a distinction between magic (understood as man’s
claim to control Nature) and religion (understood as man’s submission to
Nature). The difficulties seem due to an attempt to introduce clear-cut
definitions at a stage of thought where none such existed. That
medicine-men and priests cultivated science, while wrapping it up in
occult and magical forms, seems indicated by the earliest historical
traditions of the Near East. Herbert Spencer long ago brought together
much of the evidence on this point. McDougall to-day in his “Social
Psychology” (Chapter XIII) accepts magic as the origin of science, and
Frazer in the early edition of his “Golden Bough” regarded magic as “the
savage equivalent of our natural science.” Marett[72] “profoundly
doubts” this, and declares that if we can use the word “science” at all
in such a context, magic is occult science and the very antithesis of
natural science. While all that Marett states is admirably true on the
basis of his own definitions, he scarcely seems to realise the virtue of
the word “equivalent,” while at the same time, it may be, his definition
of magic is too narrow. Silberer, from the psycho-analytic standpoint,
accepting the development of exact science from one branch of magic,
points out that science is, on the one hand, the recognition of
concealed natural laws and, on the other, the dynamisation of psychic
power,[73] and thus falls into two great classes, according as its
operation is external or internal. This seems a true and subtle
distinction which Marett has overlooked. In the latest edition of his
work,[74] Frazer has not insisted on the relation or analogy of science
to magic, but has been content to point out that Man has passed through
the three stages of magic, religion, and science. “In magic Man depends
on his own strength to meet the difficulties and dangers that beset him
on every side. He believes in a certain established order of Nature on
which he can surely count, and which he can manipulate for his own
ends.” Then he finds he has overestimated his own powers and he humbly
takes the road of religion, leaving the universe to the more or less
capricious will of a higher power. But he finds this view inadequate and
he proceeds to revert in a measure to the older standpoint of magic by
postulating explicitly what in magic had only been implicitly assumed,
“to wit, an inflexible regularity in the order of natural events which,
if carefully observed, enables us to foresee their course with
certainty, and to act accordingly.” So that science, in Frazer’s view,
is not so much directly derived from magic as itself in its original
shape one with magic, and Man has proceeded, not in a straight line, but
in a spiral.

The profound significance of this early personage is, however, surely
clear. If science and mysticism are alike based on fundamental natural
instincts, appearing spontaneously all over the world; if, moreover,
they naturally tend to be embodied in the same individual, in such a way
that each impulse would seem to be dependent on the other for its full
development; then there can be no ground for accepting any disharmony
between them. The course of human evolution involves a division of
labour, a specialisation of science and of mysticism along special lines
and in separate individuals.[75] But a fundamental antagonism of the
two, it becomes evident, is not to be thought of; it is unthinkable,
even absurd. If at some period in the course of civilisation we
seriously find that our science and our religion are antagonistic, then
there must be something wrong either with our science or with our
religion. Perhaps not seldom there may be something wrong with both. For
if the natural impulses which normally work best together are separated
and specialised in different persons, we may expect to find a
concomitant state of atrophy and hypertrophy, both alike morbid. The
scientific person will become atrophied on the mystical side, the
mystical person will become atrophied on the scientific side. Each will
become morbidly hypertrophied on his own side. But the assumption that,
because there is a lack of harmony between opposing pathological states,
there must also be a similar lack of harmony in the normal state, is
unreasonable. We must severely put out of count alike the hypertrophied
scientific people with atrophied religious instincts, and the
hypertrophied religious people with atrophied scientific instincts.
Neither group can help us here; they only introduce confusion. We have
to examine the matter critically, to go back to the beginning, to take
so wide a survey of the phenomena that their seemingly conflicting
elements fall into harmony.

The fact, in the first place, that the person with an overdeveloped
religious sense combined with an underdeveloped scientific sense
necessarily conflicts with a person in whom the reverse state of affairs
exists, cannot be doubted, nor is the reason of it obscure. It is
difficult to conceive a Darwin and a St. Theresa entering with full and
genuine sympathy into each other’s point of view. And that is so by no
means because the two attitudes, stripped of all but their essentials,
are irreconcilable. If we strip St. Theresa of her atrophied
pseudo-science, which in her case was mostly theological “science,”
there was nothing in her attitude which would not have seemed to
harmonise and to exalt that absolute adoration and service to natural
truth which inspired Darwin. If we strip Darwin of that atrophied sense
of poetry and the arts which he deplored, and that anæmic secular
conception of the universe as a whole which he seems to have accepted
without deploring, there was nothing in his attitude which would not
have served to fertilise and enrich the spiritual exaltation of Theresa
and even to have removed far from her that temptation to _acedia_ or
slothfulness which all the mystics who are mystics only have recognised
as their besetting sin, minimised as it was, in Theresa, by her
practical activities. Yet, being as they were persons of supreme genius
developed on opposite sides of their common human nature, an impassable
gulf lies between them. It lies equally between much more ordinary
people who yet show the same common character of being undergrown on one
side, overgrown on the other.

This difficulty is not diminished when the person who is thus
hypertrophied on one side and atrophied on the other suddenly wakes up
to his one-sided state and hastily attempts to remedy it. The very fact
that such a one-sided development has come about indicates that there
has probably been a congenital basis for it, an innate disharmony which
must require infinite patience and special personal experience to
overcome. But the heroic and ostentatious manner in which these
ill-balanced people hastily attempt the athletic feat of restoring their
spiritual balance has frequently aroused the interest, and too often the
amusement, of the spectator. Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most
quintessentially scientific persons the world has seen, a searcher who
made the most stupendous effort to picture the universe intelligently on
its purely intelligible side, seems to have realised in old age, when he
was, indeed, approaching senility, that the vast hypertrophy of his
faculties on that side had not been compensated by any development on
the religious side. He forthwith set himself to the interpretation of
the Book of Daniel and puzzled over the prophecies of the Book of
Revelation, with the same scientifically serious air as though he were
analysing the spectrum. In reality he had not reached the sphere of
religion at all; he had merely exchanged good science for bad science.
Such senile efforts to penetrate, ere yet life is quite over, the
mystery of religion recall, and, indeed, have a real analogy to, that
final effort of the emotionally starved to grasp at love which has been
called “old maid’s insanity”; and just as in this aberration the woman
who has all her life put love into the subconscious background of her
mind is overcome by an eruption of the suppressed emotions and driven to
create baseless legends of which she is herself the heroine, so the
scientific man who has put religion into the subconscious and scarcely
known that there is such a thing may become in the end the victim of an
imaginary religion. In our own time we may have witnessed attempts of
the scientific mind to become religious, which, without amounting to
mental aberration, are yet highly instructive. It would be a
double-edged compliment, in this connection, to compare Sir Oliver Lodge
to Sir Isaac Newton. But after devoting himself for many years to purely
physical research, Lodge also, as he has confessed, found that he had
overlooked the religious side of life, and therefore set himself with
characteristic energy to the task—the stages of which are described in a
long series of books—of developing this atrophied side of his nature.
Unlike Newton, who was worried about the future, Lodge became worried
about the past. Just as Newton found what he was contented to regard as
religious peace in speculating on the meaning of the Books of Daniel and
Revelation, so Lodge found a similar satisfaction in speculations
concerning the origin of the soul and in hunting out tags from the poets
to support his speculations. So fascinating was this occupation that it
seemed to him to constitute a great “message” to the world. “My message
is that there is some great truth in the idea of preëxistence, not an
obvious truth, nor one easy to formulate—a truth difficult to
express—not to be identified with the guesses of reincarnation and
transmigration, which may be fanciful. We may not have been individuals
before, but we are chips or fragments of a great mass of mind, of
spirit, and of life—drops, as it were, taken out of a germinal reservoir
of life, and incubated until incarnate in a material body.”[76] The
genuine mystic would smile if asked to accept as a divine message these
phraseological gropings in the darkness, with their culmination in the
gospel of “incubated drops.” They certainly represent an attempt to get
at a real fact. But the mystic is not troubled by speculations about the
origin of the individual, or theories of preëxistence, fantastic myths
which belong to the earlier Plato’s stage of thought. It is abundantly
evident that when the hypertrophied man of science seeks to cultivate
his atrophied religious instincts it is with the utmost difficulty that
he escapes from science. His conversion to religion merely means, for
the most part, that he has exchanged sound science for pseudo-science.

Similarly, when the man with hypertrophied religious instincts seeks to
cultivate his atrophied scientific instincts, the results are scarcely
satisfactory. Here, indeed, we are concerned with a phenomenon that is
rarer than the reverse process. The reason may not be far to seek. The
instinct of religion develops earlier in the history of a race than the
instinct of science. The man who has found the massive satisfaction of
his religious cravings is seldom at any stage conscious of scientific
cravings; he is apt to feel that he already possesses the supreme
knowledge. The religious doubters who vaguely feel that their faith is
at variance with science are merely the creatures of creeds, the product
of Churches; they are not the genuine mystics. The genuine mystics who
have exercised their scientific instincts have generally found scope for
such exercise within an enlarged theological scheme which they regarded
as part of their religion. So it was that St. Augustine found scope for
his full and vivid, if capricious, intellectual impulses; so also
Aquinas, in whom there was doubtless less of the mystic and more of the
scientist, found scope for the rational and orderly development of a
keen intelligence which has made him an authority and even a pioneer for
many who are absolutely indifferent to his theology.

Again we see that to understand the real relations of science and
mysticism, we must return to ages when, on neither side, had any
accumulated mass of dead traditions effected an artificial divorce
between two great natural instincts. It has already been pointed out
that if we go outside civilisation the divorce is not found; the savage
mystic is also the savage man of science, the priest and the doctor are
one.[77] It is so also for the most part in barbarism, among the ancient
Hebrews for instance, and not only among their priests, but even among
their prophets. It appears that the most usual Hebrew word for what we
term the “prophet” signified “one who bursts forth,” presumably into the
utterance of spiritual verities, and the less usual words signify
“seer.” That is to say, the prophet was primarily a man of religion,
secondarily a man of science. And that predictive element in the
prophet’s function, which to persons lacking in religious instinct seems
the whole of his function, has no relationship at all to religion; it is
a function of science. It is an insight into cause and effect, a
conception of sequences based on extended observation and enabling the
“prophet” to assert that certain lines of action will probably lead to
the degeneration of a stock, or to the decay of a nation. It is a sort
of applied history. “Prophecy” has no more to do with religion than have
the forecasts of the Meteorological Bureau, which also are a kind of
applied science in earlier stages associated with religion.

If, keeping within the sphere of civilisation, we go back as far as we
can, the conclusion we reach is not greatly different. The earliest of
the great mystics in historical times is Lao-tze. He lived six hundred
years earlier than Jesus, a hundred years earlier than Sakya-Muni, and
he was more quintessentially a mystic than either. He was, moreover,
incomparably nearer than either to the point of view of science. Even
his occupation in life was, in relation to his age and land, of a
scientific character; he was, if we may trust uncertain tradition,
keeper of the archives. In the substance of his work this harmony of
religion and science is throughout traceable, the very word “Tao,” which
to Lao-tze is the symbol of all that to which religion may mystically
unite us, is susceptible of being translated “Reason,” although that
word remains inadequate to its full meaning. There are no theological or
metaphysical speculations here concerning God (the very word only occurs
once and may be a later interpolation), the soul, or immortality. The
delicate and profound art of Lao-tze largely lies in the skill with
which he expresses spiritual verities in the form of natural truths. His
affirmations not only go to the core of religion, but they express the
essential methods of science. This man has the mystic’s heart, but he
has also the physicist’s touch and the biologist’s eye. He moves in a
sphere in which religion and science are one.

If we pass to more modern times and the little European corner of the
world, around the Mediterranean shores, which is the cradle of our
latter-day civilisation, again and again we find traces of this
fundamental unity of mysticism and science. It may well be that we never
again find it in quite so pure a form as in Lao-tze, quite so free from
all admixture alike of bad religion and bad science. The exuberant
unbalanced activity of our race, the restless acquisitiveness—already
manifested in the sphere of ideas and traditions before it led to the
production of millionaires—soon became an ever-growing impediment to
such unity of spiritual impulses. Among the supple and yet ferocious
Greeks, indeed, versatility and recklessness seem at a first glance
always to have stood in the way of approach to the essential terms of
this problem. It was only when the Greeks began to absorb Oriental
influences, we are inclined to say, that they became genuine mystics,
and as they approached mysticism they left science behind.

Yet there was a vein of mysticism in the Greeks from the first, not
alone due to seeds from the East flung to germinate fruitfully in Greek
soil, though perhaps to that Ionian element of the Near East which was
an essential part of the Greek spirit. All that Karl Joël of Basel has
sought to work out concerning the evolution of the Greek philosophic
spirit has a bearing on this point. We are wrong, he believes, to look
on the early Greek philosophers of Nature as mainly physicists, treating
the religious and poetic mystic elements in them as mere archaisms,
concessions, or contradictions. Hellas needed, and possessed, an early
Romantic spirit, if we understand the Romantic spirit, not merely
through its reactionary offshoots, but as a deep mystico-lyrical
expression; it was comparable in early Greece to the Romantic spirit of
the great creative men of the early Renaissance or the early nineteenth
century, and the Apollinian classic spirit was developed out of an
ordered discipline and formulation of the Dionysian spirit more
mystically near to Nature.[78] If we bear this in mind we are helped to
understand much in the religious life of Greece which seems not to
harmonise with what we conventionally call “classic.”

In the dim figure of Pythagoras we perhaps see not only a great leader
of physical science, but also a great initiator in spiritual mystery. It
is, at any rate, fairly clear that he established religious brotherhoods
of carefully selected candidates, women as well as men being eligible,
and living on so lofty and aristocratic a level that the populace of
Magna Grecia, who could not understand them, decided out of resentment
to burn them alive, and the whole order was annihilated about B.C. 500.
But exactly how far these early Pythagoreans, whose community has been
compared to the mediæval orders of chivalry, were mystics, we may
imagine as we list, in the light of the Pythagorean echoes we find here
and there in Plato. On the whole we scarcely go to the Greeks for a
clear exposition of what we now term “mysticism.” We see more of it in
Lucretius than we can divine in his master Epicurus. And we see it still
more clearly in the Stoics. We can, indeed, nowhere find a more pure and
concise statement than in Marcus Aurelius of the mystical core of
religion as the union in love and harmony and devotion of the self with
the Not-Self.

If Lucretius may be accounted the first of moderns in the identification
of mysticism and science, he has been followed by many, even though, one
sometimes thinks, with an ever-increasing difficulty, a drooping of the
wings of mystical aspiration, a limping of the feet of scientific
progress. Leonardo and Giordano Bruno and Spinoza and Goethe, each with
a little imperfection on one side or the other, if not on both sides,
have moved in a sphere in which the impulses of religion are felt to
spring from the same centre as the impulses of science. Einstein, whose
attitude in many ways is so interesting, closely associates the longing
for pure knowledge with religious feeling, and he has remarked that “in
every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence.”
He is inclined to attach significance to the fact that so many great men
of science—Newton, Descartes, Gauss, Helmholtz—have been in one way or
another religious. If we cannot altogether include such men as
Swedenborg and Faraday in the same group, it is because we cannot feel
that in them the two impulses, however highly developed, really spring
from the same centre or really make a true harmony. We suspect that
these men and their like kept their mysticism in a science-proof
compartment of their minds, and their science in a mysticism-proof
compartment; we tremble for the explosive result, should the wall of
partition ever be broken down.

The difficulty, we see again, has been that, on each hand, there has
been a growth of non-essential traditions around the pure and vital
impulse, and the obvious disharmony of these two sets of accretions
conceals the underlying harmony of the impulses themselves. The
possibility of reaching the natural harmony is thus not necessarily by
virtue of any rare degree of intellectual attainment, nor by any rare
gift of inborn spiritual temperament,—though either of these may in some
cases be operative,—but rather by the happy chance that the burden of
tradition on each side has fallen and that the mystical impulse is free
to play without a dead metaphysical theology, the scientific impulse
without a dead metaphysical formalism. It is a happy chance that may
befall the simple more easily than the wise and learned.


                                  III


THE foregoing considerations have perhaps cleared the way to a
realisation that when we look broadly at the matter, when we clear away
all the accumulated superstitions, the unreasoned prepossessions, on
either side, and so reach firm ground, not only is there no opposition
between science and mysticism, but in their essence, and at the outset,
they are closely related. The seeming divorce between them is due to a
false and unbalanced development on either side, if not on both sides.

Yet all such considerations cannot suffice to make present to us this
unity of apparent opposites. There is, indeed, it has often seemed to
me, a certain futility in all discussion of the relative claims of
science and religion. This is a matter which, in the last resort, lies
beyond the sphere of argument. It depends not only on a man’s entire
psychic equipment, brought with him at birth and never to be
fundamentally changed, but it is the outcome of his own intimate
experience during life. It cannot be profitably discussed because it is
experiential.

It seems to me, therefore, that, having gone so far, and stated what I
consider to be the relations of mysticism and science as revealed in
human history, I am bound to go further and to state my personal grounds
for believing that the harmonious satisfaction alike of the religious
impulse and the scientific impulse may be attained to-day by an
ordinarily balanced person in whom both impulses crave for satisfaction.
There is, indeed, a serious difficulty. To set forth a personal
religious experience for the first time requires considerable
resolution, and not least to one who is inclined to suspect that the
experiences usually so set forth can be of no profound or significant
nature; that if the underlying motives of a man’s life can be brought to
the surface and put into words their vital motive power is gone. Even
the fact that more than forty years have passed since the experience
took place scarcely suffices to make the confession of it easy. But I
recall to mind that the first original book I ever planned (and in fact
began to write) was a book, impersonal though suggested by personal
experience, on the foundations of religion.[79] I put it aside, saying
to myself I would complete it in old age, because it seemed to me that
the problem of religion will always be fresh, while there were other
problems more pressingly in need of speedy investigation. Now, it may
be, I begin to feel the time has come to carry that early project a
stage further.

Like many of the generation to which I belonged, I was brought up far
from the Sunday-school atmosphere of conventional religiosity. I
received little religious instruction outside the home, but there I was
made to feel, from my earliest years, that religion is a very vital and
personal matter with which the world and the fashion of it had nothing
to do. To that teaching, while still scarcely more than a child, I
responded in a wholehearted way. Necessarily the exercise of this early
impulse followed the paths prescribed for it by my environment. I
accepted the creed set before me; I privately studied the New Testament
for my own satisfaction; I honestly endeavoured, strictly in private, to
mould my actions and impulses on what seemed to be Christian lines.
There was no obtrusive outward evidence of this; outside the home,
moreover, I moved in a world which might be indifferent but was not
actively hostile to my inner aspirations, and, if the need for any
external affirmation had become inevitable, I should, I am certain, have
invoked other than religious grounds for my protest. Religion, as I
instinctively felt then and as I consciously believe now, is a private
matter, as love is. This was my mental state at the age of twelve.

Then came the period of emotional and intellectual expansion, when the
scientific and critical instincts began to germinate. These were
completely spontaneous and not stimulated by any influences of the
environment. To inquire, to question, to investigate the qualities of
the things around us and to search out their causes, is as native an
impulse as the religious impulse would be found to be if only we would
refrain from exciting it artificially. In the first place, this
scientific impulse was not greatly concerned with the traditional body
of beliefs which were then inextricably entwined in my mind with the
exercise of the religious instinct. In so far, indeed, as it touched
them it took up their defence. Thus I read Renan’s “Life of Jesus,” and
the facile sentiment of this book, the attitude of artistic
reconstruction, aroused a criticism which led me to overlook any
underlying sounder qualities. Yet all the time the inquiring and
critical impulse was a slowly permeating and invading influence, and its
application to religion was from time to time stimulated by books,
although such application was in no slightest degree favoured by the
social environment. When, too, at the age of fifteen, I came to read
Swinburne’s “Songs before Sunrise,”—although the book made no very
personal appeal to me,—I realised that it was possible to present in an
attractively modern emotional light religious beliefs which were
incompatible with Christianity, and even actively hostile to its creed.
The process of disintegration took place in slow stages that were not
perceived until the process was complete. Then at last I realised that I
no longer possessed any religious faith. All the Christian dogmas I had
been brought up to accept unquestioned had slipped away, and they had
dragged with them what I had experienced of religion, for I could not
then so far analyse all that is roughly lumped together as “religion” as
to disentangle the essential from the accidental. Such analysis, to be
effectively convincing, demanded personal experiences I was not
possessed of.

I was now seventeen years of age. The loss of religious faith had
produced no change in conduct, save that religious observances, which
had never been ostentatiously performed, were dropped, so far as they
might be without hurting the feelings of others. The revolution was so
gradual and so natural that even inwardly the shock was not great, while
various activities, the growth of mental aptitudes, sufficiently served
to occupy the mind. It was only during periods of depression that the
absence of faith as a satisfaction of the religious impulse became at
all acutely felt. Possibly it might have been felt less acutely if I
could have realised that there was even a real benefit in the cutting
down and clearing away of traditional and non-vital beliefs. Not only
was it a wholesome and strenuous effort to obey at all costs the call of
what was felt as “truth,” and therefore having in it a spirit of
religion even though directed against religion, but it was evidently
favourable to the training of intelligence. The man who has never
wrestled with his early faith, the faith that he was brought up with and
that yet is not truly his own,—for no faith is our own that we have not
arduously won,—has missed not only a moral but an intellectual
discipline. The absence of that discipline may mark a man for life and
render all his work in the world ineffective. He has missed a training
in criticism, in analysis, in open-mindedness, in the resolutely
impersonal treatment of personal problems, which no other training can
compensate. He is, for the most part, condemned to live in a mental
jungle where his arm will soon be too feeble to clear away the growths
that enclose him and his eyes too weak to find the light.

While, however, I had adopted, without knowing it, the best course to
steel the power of thinking and to render possible a patient, humble,
self-forgetful attitude towards Nature, there were times when I became
painfully, almost despairingly, conscious of the unsatisfied cravings of
the religious impulse. These moods were emphasised even by the books I
read which argued that religion, in the only sense in which I understood
religion, was unnecessary, and that science, whether or not formulated
into a creed, furnished all that we need to ask in this direction. I
well remember the painful feelings with which I read at this time D. F.
Strauss’s “The Old Faith and the New.” It is a scientific creed set down
in old age, with much comfortable complacency, by a man who found
considerable satisfaction in the evening of life in the enjoyment of
Haydn’s quartets and Munich brown beer. They are both excellent things,
as I am now willing to grant, but they are a sorry source of inspiration
when one is seventeen and consumed by a thirst for impossibly remote
ideals. Moreover, the philosophic horizon of this man was as limited and
as prosaic as the æsthetic atmosphere in which he lived. I had to
acknowledge to myself that the scientific principles of the universe as
Strauss laid them down presented, so far as I knew, the utmost scope in
which the human spirit could move. But what a poor scope! I knew nothing
of the way that Nietzsche, about that time, had demolished Strauss. But
I had the feeling that the universe was represented as a sort of factory
filled by an inextricable web of wheels and looms and flying shuttles,
in a deafening din. That, it seemed, was the world as the most competent
scientific authorities declared it to be made. It was a world I was
prepared to accept, and yet a world in which, I felt, I could only
wander restlessly, an ignorant and homeless child. Sometimes, no doubt,
there were other visions of the universe a little less disheartening,
such as that presented by Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles.” But the
dominant feeling always was that while the scientific outlook, by which
I mainly meant the outlook of Darwin and Huxley, commended itself to me
as presenting a sound view of the world, on the emotional side I was a
stranger to that world, if, indeed, I would not, with Omar, “shatter it
to bits.”

At the same time, it must be noted, there was no fault to find with the
general trend of my life and activities. I was fully occupied, with
daily duties as well as with the actively interested contemplation of an
ever-enlarging intellectual horizon. This was very notably the case at
the age of nineteen, three years after all vestiges of religious faith
had disappeared from the psychic surface.

I was still interested in religious and philosophic questions, and it so
chanced that at this time I read the “Life in Nature” of James Hinton,
who had already attracted my attention as a genuine man of science with
yet an original and personal grasp of religion. I had read the book six
months before and it had not greatly impressed me. Now, I no longer know
why, I read it again, and the effect was very different. Evidently by
this time my mind had reached a stage of saturated solution which needed
but the shock of the right contact to recrystallise in forms that were a
revelation to me. Here evidently the right contact was applied. Hinton
in this book showed himself a scientific biologist who carried the
mechanistic explanation of life even further than was then usual.[80]
But he was a man of highly passionate type of intellect, and what might
otherwise be formal and abstract was for him soaked in emotion. Thus,
while he saw the world as an orderly mechanism, he was not content, like
Strauss, to stop there and see in it nothing else. As he viewed it, the
mechanism was not the mechanism of a factory, it was vital, with all the
glow and warmth and beauty of life; it was, therefore, something which
not only the intellect might accept, but the heart might cling to. The
bearing of this conception on my state of mind is obvious. It acted with
the swiftness of an electric contact; the dull aching tension was
removed; the two opposing psychic tendencies were fused in delicious
harmony, and my whole attitude towards the universe was changed. It was
no longer an attitude of hostility and dread, but of confidence and
love. My self was one with the Not-Self, my will one with the universal
will. I seemed to walk in light; my feet scarcely touched the ground; I
had entered a new world.

The effect of that swift revolution was permanent. At first there was a
moment or two of wavering, and then the primary exaltation subsided into
an attitude of calm serenity towards all those questions that had once
seemed so torturing. In regard to all these matters I had become
permanently satisfied and at rest, yet absolutely unfettered and free. I
was not troubled about the origin of the “soul” or about its destiny; I
was entirely prepared to accept any analysis of the “soul” which might
commend itself as reasonable. Neither was I troubled about the existence
of any superior being or beings, and I was ready to see that all the
words and forms by which men try to picture spiritual realities are mere
metaphors and images of an inward experience. There was not a single
clause in my religious creed because I held no creed. I had found that
dogmas were—not, as I had once imagined, true, not, as I had afterwards
supposed, false,—but the mere empty shadows of intimate personal
experience. I had become indifferent to shadows, for I held the
substance. I had sacrificed what I held dearest at the call of what
seemed to be Truth, and now I was repaid a thousand-fold. Henceforth I
could face life with confidence and joy, for my heart was at one with
the world and whatever might prove to be in harmony with the world could
not be out of harmony with me.[81]

Thus, it might seem to many, nothing whatever had happened; I had not
gained one single definite belief that could be expressed in a
scientific formula or hardened into a religious creed. That, indeed, is
the essence of such a process. A “conversion” is not, as is often
assumed, a turning towards a belief. More strictly, it is a turning
round, a revolution; it has no primary reference to any external object.
As the greater mystics have often understood, “the Kingdom of Heaven is
within.” To put the matter a little more precisely, the change is
fundamentally a readjustment of psychic elements to each other, enabling
the whole machine to work harmoniously. There is no necessary
introduction of new ideas; there is much more likely to be a casting out
of dead ideas which have clogged the vital process. The psychic
organism—which in conventional religion is called the “soul”—had not
been in harmony with itself; now it is revolving truly on its own axis,
and in doing so it simultaneously finds its true orbit in the cosmic
system. In becoming one with itself, it becomes one with the
universe.[82]

The process, it will be seen, is thus really rather analogous to that
which on the physical plane takes place in a person whose jaw or arm is
dislocated, whether by some inordinate effort or some sudden shock with
the external world. The miserable man with a dislocated jaw is out of
harmony with himself and with the universe. All his efforts cannot
reduce the dislocation, nor can his friends help him; he may even come
to think there is no cure. But a surgeon comes along, and with a slight
pressure of his two thumbs, applied at the right spot, downwards and
backwards, the jaw springs into place, the man is restored to
harmony—and the universe is transformed. If he is ignorant enough, he
will be ready to fall on his knees before his deliverer as a divine
being. We are concerned with what is called a “spiritual” process,—for
it is an accepted and necessary convention to distinguish between the
“spiritual” and the “physical,”—but this crude and imperfect analogy may
help some minds to understand what is meant.

Thus may be explained what may seem to some the curious fact that I
never for a moment thought of accepting as a gospel the book which had
brought me a stimulus of such inestimable value. The person in whom
“conversion” takes place is too often told that the process is connected
in some magical manner with a supernatural influence of some kind, a
book, a creed, a church, or what not. I had read this book before and it
had left me unmoved; I knew that the book was merely the surgeon’s
touch, that the change had its source in me and not in the book. I never
looked into the book again; I cannot tell where or how my copy of it
disappeared; for all that I know, having accomplished its mission, it
was drawn up again to Heaven in a sheet. As regards James Hinton, I was
interested in him before the date of the episode here narrated; I am
interested in him still.[83]

It may further be noted that this process of “conversion” cannot be
regarded as the outcome of despair or as a protective regression towards
childhood. The unfortunate individual, we sometimes imagine, who is
bereft of religious faith sinks deeper and deeper into despondency,
until finally he unconsciously seeks the relief of his woes by plunging
into an abyss of emotions, thereby committing intellectual suicide. On
the contrary, the period in which this event occurred was not a period
of dejection either mental or physical. I was fully occupied; I lived a
healthy, open-air life, in a fine climate, amid beautiful scenery; I was
revelling in new studies and the growing consciousness of new powers.
Instead of being the ultimate stage in a process of descent, or a return
to childhood, such psychic revolution may much more fittingly be
regarded as the climax of an ascensional movement. It is the final
casting off of childish things, the initiation into complete manhood.

There is nothing ascetic in such a process. One is sometimes tempted to
think that to approve mysticism is to preach asceticism. Certainly many
mystics have been ascetic. But that has been the accident of their
philosophy, and not the essence of their religion. Asceticism has,
indeed, nothing to do with normal religion. It is, at the best, the
outcome of a set of philosophical dogmas concerning the relationship of
the body to the soul and the existence of a transcendental spiritual
world. That is philosophy, of a sort, not religion. Plotinus, who has
been so immensely influential in our Western world because he was the
main channel by which Greek spiritual tendencies reached us, to become
later embodied in Christianity, is usually regarded as a typical mystic,
though he was primarily a philosopher, and he was inclined to be
ascetic. Therein we may not consider him typically Greek, but the early
philosophical doctrine of Plato concerning the transcendental world of
“Ideas” easily lent itself to developments favourable to an ascetic
life. Plotinus, indeed, was not disposed to any extreme ascetic
position. The purification of the soul meant for him “to detach it from
the body, and to elevate it to a spiritual world.” But he would not have
sympathised with the harsh dualism of flesh and spirit which often
flourished among Christian ascetics. He lived celibate, but he was
willing to regard sex desire as beautiful, though a delusion.[84] When
we put aside the philosophic doctrines with which it may be associated,
it is seen that asceticism is merely an adjuvant discipline to what we
must regard as pathological forms of mysticism.

People who come in contact with the phenomenon of “conversion” are
obsessed by the notion that it must have something to do with morality.
They seem to fancy that it is something that happens to a person leading
a bad life whereby he suddenly leads a good life. That is a delusion.
Whatever virtue morality may possess, it is outside the mystic’s sphere.
No doubt a person who has been initiated into this mystery is likely to
be moral because he is henceforth in harmony with himself, and such a
man is usually, by a natural impulse, in harmony also with others. Like
Leonardo, who through the glow of his adoration of Nature was as truly a
mystic as St. Francis, even by contact with him “every broken heart is
made serene.” But a religious man is not necessarily a moral man. That
is to say that we must by no means expect to find that the religious
man, even when he is in harmony with his fellows, is necessarily in
harmony with the moral laws of his age. We fall into sad confusion if we
take for granted that a mystic is what we conventionally term a “moral”
man. Jesus, as we know, was almost as immoral from the standpoint of the
society in which he moved as he would be in our society. That, no doubt,
is an extreme example, yet the same holds good, in a minor degree, of
many other mystics, even in very recent times. The satyrs and the fauns
were minor divinities in antiquity, and in later times we have been apt
to misunderstand their holy functions and abuse their sacred names.

Not only is there no necessary moral change in such a process, still
less is there any necessary intellectual change. Religion need not
involve intellectual suicide. On the intellectual side there may be no
obvious change whatever. No new creed or dogma had been adopted.[85] It
might rather be said that, on the contrary, some prepossessions,
hitherto unconscious, had been realised and cast out. The operations of
reason, so far from being fettered, can be effected with greater freedom
and on a larger scale. Under favourable conditions the religious
process, indeed, throughout directly contributes to strengthen the
scientific attitude. The mere fact that one has been impelled by the
sincerity of one’s religious faith to question, to analyse, and finally
to destroy one’s religious creed, is itself an incomparable training for
the intelligence. In this task reason is submitted to the hardest tests;
it has every temptation to allow itself to be lulled into sleepy repose
or cajoled into specious reconciliations. If it is true to itself here
it is steeled for every other task in the world, for no other task can
ever demand so complete a self-sacrifice at the call of Truth. Indeed,
the final restoration of the religious impulse on a higher plane may
itself be said to reënforce the scientific impulse, for it removes that
sense of psychic disharmony which is a subconscious fetter on the
rational activity. The new inward harmony, proceeding from a psychic
centre that is at one alike with itself and with the Not-Self, imparts
confidence to every operation of the intellect. All the metaphysical
images of faith in the unseen—too familiar in the mystical experiences
of men of all religions to need specification—are now on the side of
science. For he who is thus held in his path can pursue that path with
serenity and trust, however daring its course may sometimes seem.

It appears to me, therefore, on the basis of personal experience, that
the process thus outlined is a natural process. The harmony of the
religious impulse and of the scientific impulse is not merely a
conclusion to be deduced from the history of the past. It is a living
fact to-day. However obscured it may sometimes be, the process lies in
human nature and is still open to all to experience.


                                   IV


IF the development of the religious instinct and the development of the
scientific instinct are alike natural, and if the possibility of the
harmony of the two instincts is a verifiable fact of experience, how is
it, one may ask, that there has ever been any dispute on the matter? Why
has not this natural experience been the experience of all?

Various considerations may help to make clear to us how it has happened
that a process which might reasonably be supposed to be intimate and
sacred should have become so obscured and so deformed that it has been
fiercely bandied about by opposing factions. At the outset, as we have
seen, among comparatively primitive peoples, it really is a simple and
natural process carried out harmoniously with no sense of conflict. A
man, it would seem, was not then overburdened by the still unwritten
traditions of the race. He was comparatively free to exercise his own
impulses unfettered by the chains forged out of the dead impulses of
those who had gone before him.

It is the same still among uncultivated persons of our own race in
civilisation. I well remember how once, during a long ride through the
Australian bush with a settler, a quiet, uncommunicative man with whom I
had long been acquainted, he suddenly told me how at times he would
ascend to the top of a hill and become lost to himself and to everything
as he stood in contemplation of the scene around him. Those moments of
ecstasy, of self-forgetful union with the divine beauty of Nature, were
entirely compatible with the rational outlook of a simple, hard-working
man who never went to church, for there was no church of any kind to go
to, but at such moments had in his own humble way, like Moses, met God
in a mountain. There can be no doubt that such an experience is not
uncommon among simple folk unencumbered by tradition, even when of
civilised race.

The burden of traditions, of conventions, of castes has too often proved
fatal alike to the manifestation of the religious impulse and the
scientific impulse. It is unnecessary to point out how easily this
happens in the case of the religious impulse. It is only too familiar a
fact how, when the impulse of religion first germinates in the young
soul, the ghouls of the Churches rush out of their caverns, seize on the
unhappy victim of the divine effluence and proceed to assure him that
his rapture is, not a natural manifestation, as free as the sunlight and
as gracious as the unfolding of a rose, but the manifest sign that he
has been branded by a supernatural force and fettered for ever to a dead
theological creed. Too often he is thus caught by the bait of his own
rapture; the hook is firmly fixed in his jaw and he is drawn whither his
blind guides will; his wings droop and fall away; so far as the finer
issues of life are concerned, he is done for and damned.[86]

But the process is not so very different on the scientific side, though
here it is more subtly concealed. The youth in whom the natural impulse
of science arises is sternly told that the spontaneous movement of his
intelligence towards Nature and truth is nothing, for the one thing
needful is that he shall be put to discipline, and trained in the
scientific traditions of the ages. The desirability of such training for
the effective questioning of Nature is so clear that both teacher and
pupil are apt to overlook the fact that it involves much that is not
science at all: all sorts of dead traditions, unrealised fragments of
ancient metaphysical systems, prepossessions and limitations, conscious
or unconscious, the obedience to arbitrary authorities. It is never made
clear to him that science also is an art. So that the actual outcome may
be that the finally accomplished man of science has as little of the
scientific impulse as the fully fledged religious man need have of the
religious impulse; he becomes the victim of another kind of
ecclesiastical sectarianism.

There is one special piece of ancient metaphysics which until recently
scientific and religious sects have alike combined to support: the
fiction of “matter,” which we passingly came upon when considering the
art of thinking. It is a fiction that has much to answer for in
distorting the scientific spirit and in creating an artificial
opposition between science and religion. All sorts of antique
metaphysical peculiarities, inherited from the decadence of Greek
philosophy, were attributed to “matter” and they were mostly of a bad
character; all the good qualities were attributed to “spirit”; “matter”
played the Devil’s part to this more divine “spirit.” Thus it was that
“materialistic” came to be a term signifying all that is most heavy,
opaque, depressing, soul-destroying, and diabolical in the universe. The
party of traditionalised religion fostered this fiction and the party of
traditionalised science frequently adopted it, cheerily proposing to
find infinite potentialities in this despised metaphysical substance. So
that “matter” which was on one side trodden underfoot was on the other
side brandished overhead as a glorious banner.

Yet “matter,” as psychologically minded philosophers at last began to
point out, is merely a substance we have ourselves invented to account
for our sensations. We see, we touch, we hear, we smell, and by a
brilliant synthetic effort of imagination we put together all those
sensations and picture to ourselves “matter” as being the source of
them. Science itself is now purging “matter” of its complicated
metaphysical properties. That “matter,” the nature of which Dr. Johnson,
as Boswell tells us, thought he had settled by “striking his foot with
mighty force against a large stone,” is coming to be regarded as merely
an electrical emanation. We now accept even that transmutation of the
elements of which the alchemists dreamed. It is true that we still think
of “matter” as having weight. But so cautious a physicist as Sir Joseph
Thomson long ago pointed out that weight is only an “apparently”
invariable property of matter. So that “matter” becomes almost as
“ethereal” as “spirit,” and, indeed, scarcely distinguishable from
“spirit.” The spontaneous affirmation of the mystic that he lives in the
spiritual world here and now will then be, in other words, merely the
same affirmation which the man of science has more laboriously reached.
The man, therefore, who is terrified by “materialism” has reached the
final outpost of absurdity. He is a simple-minded person who places his
own hand before his eyes and cries out in horror: The Universe has
disappeared!

We have not only to realise how our own prepossessions and the
metaphysical figments of our own creation have obscured the simple
realities of religion and science alike; we have also to see that our
timid dread lest religion should kill our science, or science kill our
religion, is equally fatal here. He who would gain his life must be
willing to lose it, and it is by being honest to one’s self and to the
facts by applying courageously the measuring rod of Truth, that in the
end salvation is found. Here, it is true, there are those who smilingly
assure us that by adopting such a method we shall merely put ourselves
in the wrong and endure much unnecessary suffering. There is no such
thing as “Truth,” they declare, regarded as an objective impersonal
reality; we do not “discover” truth, we invent it. Therefore your
business is to invent a truth which shall harmoniously satisfy the needs
of your nature and aid your efficiency in practical life. That we are
justified in being dishonest towards truth has even been argued from the
doctrine of relativity by some who failed to realise that that doctrine
is here hardly relative. Certainly the philosophers of recent times,
from Nietzsche to Croce, have loved to analyse the idea of “truth” and
to show that it by no means signifies what we used to suppose it
signified. But to show that truth is fluid, or even the creation of the
individual mind, is by no means to show that we can at will play fast
and loose with it to suit our own momentary convenience. If we do we
merely find ourselves, at the end, in a pool where we must tramp round
and round in intellectual slush out of which there is no issue. One may
well doubt whether any Pragmatist has ever really invented his truth
that way. Practically, just as the best result is attained by the man
who acts as though free-will were a reality and who exerts it, so in
this matter, also, practically, in the end the best result is attained
by assuming that truth is an objective reality which we must patiently
seek, and in accordance with which we must discipline our own wayward
impulses. There is no transcendent objective truth, each one of us is an
artist creating his own truth from the phenomena presented to him, but
if in that creation he allows any alien emotional or practical
considerations to influence him he is a bad artist and his work is
wrought for destruction. From the pragmatic point of view, it may thus
be said that if the use of the measuring-rod of truth as an objective
standard produces the best practical results, that use is pragmatically
justified. But if so, we are exactly in the same position as we were
before the pragmatist arrived; we can get on as well without him, if not
better, for we run the risk that he may confuse the issues for us. It is
really on the theoretic rather than the practical side that he is
helpful.

It is not only the Pragmatist whose well-meant efforts to find an easy
reconciliation of belief and practice, and indirectly the concord of
religion and science, come to grief because he has not realised that the
walls of the spiritual world can only be scaled with much expenditure of
treasure, not without blood and sweat, that we cannot glide luxuriously
to Heaven in his motor-car. We are also met by the old-fashioned
Intuitionist.[87] It is no accident that the Intuitionist so often walks
hand in hand with the Pragmatist; they are engaged in the same tasks.
There is, we have seen, the impulse of science which must work through
intelligence; there is, also, the impulse of religion in the
satisfaction of which intelligence can only take a very humble place at
the antechamber of the sanctuary. To admit, therefore, that reason
cannot extend into the religious sphere is absolutely sound so long as
we realise that reason has a coordinate right to lay down the rules in
its own sphere of intelligence. But in men of a certain mental type the
two tendencies are alike so deeply implanted that they cannot escape
them: they are not only impelled to go beyond intelligence, but they are
also impelled to carry intelligence with them outside its sphere. The
sphere of intelligence is limited, they say, and rightly; the soul has
other impulses besides that of intelligence and life needs more than
knowledge for its complete satisfaction. But in the hands of these
people the faculty of “intuition,” which is to supplant that of
intelligence, itself results in a product which by them is called
“knowledge,” and so spuriously bears the hall-mark which belongs to the
product of intelligence.

But the result is disastrous. Not only is an illegitimate confusion
introduced, but, by attributing to the impulse of religion a character
which it is neither entitled to nor in need of, we merely discredit it
in the eyes of intelligence. The philosopher of intuition, even in
denying intelligence, is apt to remain so predominantly intelligent
that, even in entering what is for him the sphere of religion, he still
moves in an atmosphere of rarefied intelligence. He is farther from the
Kingdom of Heaven than the simple man who is quite incapable of
understanding the philosopher’s theory, but yet may be able to follow
his own religious impulse without foisting into it an intellectual
content. For even the simple man may be one with the great mystics who
all declare that the unspeakable quality they have acquired, as Eckhart
puts it, “hath no image.” It is not in the sphere of intellection, it
brings no knowledge; it is the outcome of the natural instinct of the
individual soul.

No doubt there really are people in whom the instincts of religion and
of science alike are developed in so rudimentary a degree, if developed
at all, that they never become conscious. The religious instinct is not
an essential instinct. Even the instinct of sex, which is much more
fundamental than either of these, is not absolutely essential. A very
little bundle of instincts and impulses is indispensable to a man on his
way down the path of life to a peaceful and humble grave. A man’s
equipment of tendencies, on the lowest plane, needs to be more complex
and diverse than an oyster’s, yet not so very much more. The equipment
of the higher animals, moreover, is needed less for the good of the
individual than for the good of the race. We cannot, therefore, be
surprised if the persons in whom the superfluous instincts are
rudimentary fail to understand them, confusing them and overlaying them
with each other and with much that is outside both. The wonder would be
if it were otherwise.

When all deduction has been made of the mental and emotional confusions
which have obscured men’s vision, we cannot fail to conclude, it seems
to me, that Science and Mysticism are nearer to each other than some
would have us believe. At the beginning of human cultures, far from
being opposed, they may even be said to be identical. From time to time,
in later ages, brilliant examples have appeared of men who have
possessed both instincts in a high degree and have even fused the two
together, while among the humble in spirit and the lowly in intellect it
is probable that in all ages innumerable men have by instinct harmonised
their religion with their intelligence. But as the accumulated
experiences of civilisation have been preserved and handed on from
generation to generation, this free and vital play of the instincts has
been largely paralysed. On each side fossilised traditions have
accumulated so thickly, the garments of dead metaphysics have been
wrapped so closely around every manifestation alike of the religious
instinct and the scientific instinct—for even what we call “common
sense” is really a hardened mass of dead metaphysics—that not many
persons can succeed in revealing one of these instincts in its naked
beauty, and very few can succeed in so revealing both instincts. Hence a
perpetual antagonism. It may be, however, we are beginning to realise
that there are no metaphysical formulas to suit all men, but that every
man must be the artist of his own philosophy. As we realise that, it
becomes easier than it was before to liberate ourselves from a dead
metaphysics, and so to give free play alike to the religious instinct
and the scientific instinct. A man must not swallow more beliefs than he
can digest; no man can absorb all the traditions of the past; what he
fills himself with will only be a poison to work to his own
auto-intoxication.

Along all these lines we see more clearly than before the real harmony
between Mysticism and Science. We see, also, that all arguments are
meaningless until we gain personal experience. One must win one’s own
place in the spiritual world painfully and alone. There is no other way
of salvation. The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a
wilderness.


                                   V


IT may seem that we have been harping overmuch on a single string of
what is really a very rich instrument, when the whole exalted art of
religion is brought down to the argument of its relationship to science.
The core of religion is mysticism, it is admitted. And yet where are all
the great mystics? Why nothing of the Neo-Platonists in whom the whole
movement of modern mysticism began, of their glorious pupils in the
Moslem world, of Ramon Lull and Francis of Assisi and François Xavier
and John of the Cross and George Fox and the “De Imitatione Christi” and
“Towards Democracy”? There is no end to that list of glorious names, and
they are all passed by.

To write of the mystics, whether Pagan or Christian or Islamic, is a
most delightful task. It has been done, and often very well done. The
mystics are not only themselves an incarnation of beauty, but they
reflect beauty on all who with understanding approach them.

Moreover, in the phenomena of religious mysticism we have a key—if we
only knew it—to many of the most precious human things which on the
surface may seem to have nothing in them of religion. For this is an art
which instinctively reveals to us the secrets of other arts. It presents
to us in the most naked and essential way the inward experience which
has inspired men to find modes of expression which are transmutations of
the art of religion and yet have on the surface nothing to indicate that
this is so. It has often been seen in poetry and in music and in
painting. One might say that it is scarcely possible to understand
completely the poetry of Shelley or the music of César Franck or the
pictures of Van Gogh unless there is somewhere within an intimation of
the secret of mysticism. This is so not because of any imperfection in
the achieved work of such men in poetry and in music and in
painting,—for work that fails to contain its own justification is always
bad work,—but because we shall not be in possession of the clue to
explain the existence of that work. We may even go beyond the sphere of
the recognised arts altogether, and say that the whole love of Nature
and landscape, which in modern times has been so greatly developed,
largely through Rousseau, the chief creator of our modern spiritual
world, is not intelligible if we are altogether ignorant of what
religion means.

But we are not so much concerned here with the rich and variegated
garments the impulse of religion puts on, or with its possible
transmutations, as with the simple and naked shape of those impulses
when bared of all garments. It was peculiarly important to present the
impulse of mysticism naked because, of all the fundamental human
impulses, that is the one most often so richly wrapped round with
gorgeous and fantastic garments that, alike to the eye of the ordinary
man and the acute philosopher, there has seemed to be no living thing
inside at all. It was necessary to strip off all these garments, to
appeal to simple personal direct experience for the actual core of fact,
and to show that that core, so far from being soluble by analysis into
what science counts as nothing, is itself, like every other natural
organic function, a fact of science.

It is enough here, where we are concerned only with the primary stuff of
art, the bare simple technique of the human dance, to have brought into
as clear a light as may be the altogether natural mechanism which lies
behind all the most magnificent fantasies of the mystic impulse, and
would still subsist and operate even though they were all cast into the
flames. That is why it has seemed necessary to dwell all the time on the
deep-lying harmony of the mystic’s attitude with the scientific man’s
attitude. It is a harmony which rests on the faith that they are
eternally separate, however close, however intimately coöperative. When
the mystic professes that, as such, he has knowledge of the same order
as the man of science, or when the scientist claims that, as such, he
has emotion which is like that of the man of religion, each of them
deceives himself. He has introduced a confusion where no confusion need
be; perhaps, indeed, he has even committed that sin against the Holy
Ghost of his own spiritual integrity for which there is no forgiveness.
The function of intellectual thought—which is that of the art of
science—may, certainly, be invaluable for religion; it makes possible
the purgation of all that pseudo-science, all that philosophy, good or
bad, which has poisoned and encrusted the simple spontaneous impulse of
mysticism in the open air of Nature and in the face of the sun. The man
of science may be a mystic, but cannot be a true mystic unless he is so
relentless a man of science that he can tolerate no alien science in his
mysticism. The mystic may be a man of science, but he will not be a good
man of science unless he understands that science must be kept for ever
bright and pure from all admixture of mystical emotion; the fountain of
his emotion must never rust the keenness of his analytic scalpel. It is
useless to pretend that any such rustiness can ever convert the scalpel
into a mystical implement, though it can be an admirable aid in cutting
towards the mystical core of things, and perhaps if there were more
relentless scientific men there would be more men of pure mystic vision.
Science by itself, good or bad, can never be religion, any more than
religion by itself can ever be science, or even philosophy.

It is by looking back into the past that we see the facts in an
essential simplicity less easy to reach in more sophisticated ages. We
need not again go so far back as the medicine-men of Africa and Siberia.
Mysticism in pagan antiquity, however less intimate to us and less
seductive than that of later times, is perhaps better fitted to reveal
to us its true nature. The Greeks believed in the spiritual value of
“conversion” as devoutly as our Christian sects and they went beyond
most such sects in their elaborately systematic methods for obtaining
it, no doubt for the most part as superficially as has been common among
Christians. It is supposed that almost the whole population of Athens
must have experienced the Eleusinian initiation. These methods, as we
know, were embodied in the Mysteries associated with Dionysus and
Demeter and Orpheus and the rest, the most famous and typical being
those of Attic Eleusis.[88] We too often see those ancient Greek
Mysteries through a concealing mist, partly because it was rightly felt
that matters of spiritual experience were not things to talk about, so
that precise information is lacking, partly because the early
Christians, having their own very similar Mysteries to uphold, were
careful to speak evil of Pagan Mysteries, and partly because the Pagan
Mysteries no doubt really tended to degenerate with the general decay of
classic culture. But in their large simple essential outlines they seem
to be fairly clear. For just as there was nothing “orgiastic” in our
sense in the Greek “orgies,” which were simply ritual acts, so there was
nothing, in our sense, “mysterious” in the Mysteries. We are not to
suppose, as is sometimes supposed, that their essence was a secret
doctrine, or even that the exhibition of a secret rite was the sole
object, although it came in as part of the method. A mystery meant a
spiritual process of initiation, which was, indeed, necessarily a secret
to those who had not yet experienced it, but had nothing in itself
“mysterious” beyond what inheres to-day to the process in any Christian
“revival,” which is the nearest analogue to the Greek Mystery. It is
only “mysterious” in the sense that it cannot be expressed, any more
than the sexual embrace can be expressed, in words, but can only be
known by experience. A preliminary process of purification, the
influence of suggestion, a certain religious faith, a solemn and
dramatic ritual carried out under the most impressive circumstances,
having a real analogy to the Catholic’s Mass, which also is a function,
at once dramatic and sacred, which culminates in a spiritual communion
with the Divine—all this may contribute to the end which was, as it
always must be in religion, simply a change of inner attitude, a sudden
exalting realisation of a new relationship to eternal things. The
philosophers understood this; Aristotle was careful to point out, in an
extant fragment, that what was gained in the Mysteries was not
instruction but impressions and emotions, and Plato had not hesitated to
regard the illumination which came to the initiate in philosophy as of
the nature of that acquired in the Mysteries. So it was natural that
when Christianity took the place of Paganism the same process went on
with only a change in external circumstances. Baptism in the early
Church—before it sank to the mere magical sort of rite it later
became—was of the nature of initiation into a Mystery, preceded by
careful preparation, and the baptised initiate was sometimes crowned
with a garland as the initiated were at Eleusis.

When we go out of Athens along the beautiful road that leads to the
wretched village of Eleusis and linger among the vast and complicated
ruins of the chief shrine of mysticism in our Western world, rich in
associations that seem to stretch back to the Neolithic Age and suggest
a time when the mystery of the blossoming of the soul was one with the
mystery of the upspringing of the corn, it may be that our thoughts by
no unnatural transition pass from the myth of Demeter and Kore to the
remembrance of what we may have heard or know of the manifestations of
the spirit among barbarian northerners of other faiths or of no faith in
far Britain and America and even of their meetings of so-called
“revival.” For it is always the same thing that Man is doing, however
various and fantastic the disguises he adopts. And sometimes the
revelation of the new life, springing up from within, comes amid the
crowd in the feverish atmosphere of artificial shrines, maybe soon to
shrivel up, and sometimes the blossoming forth takes place, perhaps more
favourably, in the open air and under the light of the sun and amid the
flowers, as it were to a happy faun among the hills. But when all
disguises have been stripped away, it is always and everywhere the same
simple process, a spiritual function which is almost a physiological
function, an art which Nature makes. That is all.

Footnote 70:

  It is scarcely necessary to remark that if we choose to give to
  “mysticism” a definition incompatible with “science,” the opposition
  cannot be removed. This is, for example, done by Croce, who yet
  recognises as highly important a process of “conversion” which is
  nothing else but mysticism as here understood. (See, e.g., Piccoli,
  _Benedetto Croce_, p. 184.) Only he has left himself no name to apply
  to it.

Footnote 71:

  “The endeavour of the human mind to enjoy the blessedness of actual
  communion with the highest,” which is Pringle Pattison’s widely
  accepted definition of mysticism, I prefer not to use because it is
  ambiguous. The “endeavour,” while it indicates that we are concerned
  with an art, also suggests its strained pathological forms, while
  “actual communion” lends itself to ontological interpretations.

Footnote 72:

  _The Threshold of Religion_ (1914), p. 48.

Footnote 73:

  _Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_ (1911), p. 272.

Footnote 74:

  _Golden Bough_, “Balder the Beautiful,” vol. II, pp. 304-05.

Footnote 75:

  Farnell even asserts (in his _Greek Hero Cults_) that “it is
  impossible to quote a single example of any one of the higher
  world-religions working in harmony with the development of physical
  science.” He finds a “special and unique” exception in the cult of
  Asclepios at Cos and Epidauros and Pergamon, where, after the fourth
  century B.C., were physicians, practising a rational medical science,
  who were also official priests of the Asclepios temples.

Footnote 76:

  Sir Oliver Lodge, _Reason and Belief_, p. 19.

Footnote 77:

  It is scarcely necessary to point out that a differentiation of
  function has to be made sooner or later, and sometimes it is made
  soon. This was so among the Todas of India. “Certain Todas,” says Dr.
  Rivers (_The Todas_, 1906, p. 249), “have the power of divination,
  others are sorcerers, and others again have the power of curing
  diseases by means of spells and rites, while all three functions are
  quite separate from those of the priest or sharman. The Todas have
  advanced some way towards civilisation of function in this respect,
  and have as separate members of the community their prophets, their
  magicians, and their medicine-men in addition to their priests.”

Footnote 78:

  Joël, _Ursprung der Naturphilosophie aus dem Geiste der Romantik_
  (1903); _Nietzsche und die Romantik_ (1905). But I am here quoting
  from Professor Joël’s account of his own philosophical development in
  _Die Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart_, vol. I (1921).

Footnote 79:

  In connection with this scheme, it may be interesting to note, I
  prepared, in 1879, a _questionnaire_ on “conversion,” on the lines of
  the investigations which some years later began to be so fruitfully
  carried out by the psychologists of religion in America.

Footnote 80:

  It must be remembered that for science the mechanistic assumption
  always remains; it is, as Vaihinger would say, a necessary fiction. To
  abandon it is to abandon science. Driesch, the most prominent vitalist
  of our time, has realised this, and in his account of his own mental
  development (_Die Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart_, vol. I, 1921)
  he shows how, beginning as a pupil of Haeckel and working at zoölogy
  for many years, after adopting the theory of vitalism he abandoned all
  zoölogical work and became a professor of philosophy. When the
  religious spectator, or the æsthetic spectator (as is well illustrated
  in the French review _L’Esprit Nouveau_), sees the “machinery” as
  something else than machinery he is legitimately going outside the
  sphere of science, but he is not thereby destroying the basic
  assumption of science.

Footnote 81:

  Long ago Edith Simcox (in a passage of her _Natural Law_ which chanced
  to strike my attention very soon after the episode above narrated)
  well described “conversion” as a “spiritual revolution,” not based on
  any single rational consideration, but due to the “cumulative evidence
  of cognate impressions” resulting, at a particular moment, not in a
  change of belief, but in a total rearrangement and recolouring of
  beliefs and impressions, with the supreme result that the order of the
  universe is apprehended no longer as hostile, but as friendly. This is
  the fundamental fact of “conversion,” which is the gate of mysticism.

Footnote 82:

  How we are to analyse the conception of “universe”—apart from its
  personal emotional tone, which is what mainly concerns us—is, of
  course, a matter that must be left altogether open and free. Sir James
  Frazer at the end of his _Golden Bough_ (“Balder the Beautiful,” vol.
  II, p. 306) finds that the “universe” is an “ever-shifting
  phantasmagoria of thought,” or, he adds, suddenly shifting to a less
  idealistic and more realistic standpoint, “shadows on the screen.”
  That is a literary artist’s metaphysical way of describing the matter
  and could not occur to any one who was not familiar with the magic
  lantern which has now developed into the cinema, beloved of
  philosophers for its symbolic significance. Mr. Bertrand Russell, a
  more abstract artist, who would reject any such “imaginative
  admixture” as he would find in Frazer’s view, once severely refused to
  recognise any such thing as a “universe,” but has since less austerely
  admitted that there is, after all, a “set of appearances,” which may
  fairly be labelled “reality,” so long as we do not assume “a
  mysterious Thing-in-Itself behind the appearances.” (_Nation_, 6th
  January, 1923.) But there are always some people who think that an
  “appearance” must be an appearance of _Something_, and that when a
  “shadow” is cast on the screen of our sensory apparatus it must be
  cast by _Something_. So every one defines the “universe” in his own
  way, and no two people—not even the same person long—can define it in
  the same way. We have to recognise that even the humblest of us is
  entitled to his own “universe.”

Footnote 83:

  The simple and essential outlines of “conversion” have been obscured
  because chiefly studied in the Churches among people whose
  prepossessions and superstitions have rendered it a highly complex
  process, and mixed up with questions of right and wrong living which,
  important as they are, properly form no part of religion. The man who
  waits to lead a decent life until he has “saved his soul” is not
  likely to possess a soul that is worth saving. How much ignorance
  prevails in regard to “conversion,” even among the leaders of
  religious opinion, and what violent contrasts of opinion—in which
  sometimes both the opposing parties are mistaken—was well illustrated
  by a discussion on the subject at the Church Congress at Sheffield in
  1922. A distinguished Churchman well defined “conversion” as a
  unification of character, involving the whole man,—will, intellect,
  and emotion,—by which a “new self” was achieved; but he also thought
  that this great revolutionary process consisted usually in giving up
  some “definite bad habit,” very much doubted whether sudden conversion
  was a normal phenomenon at all, and made no attempt to distinguish
  between that kind of “conversion” which is merely the result of
  suggestion and auto-suggestion, after a kind of hysterical attack
  produced by feverish emotional appeals, and that which is spontaneous
  and of lifelong effect. Another speaker went to the opposite extreme
  by asserting that “conversion” is an absolutely necessary process, and
  an Archbishop finally swept away “conversion” altogether by declaring
  that the whole of the religious life (and the whole of the irreligious
  life?) is a process of conversion. (_The Times_, 12th October, 1922.)
  It may be a satisfaction to some to realise that this is a matter on
  which it is vain to go to the Churches for light.

Footnote 84:

  Dean Inge (_Philosophy of Plotinus_, vol. II, p. 165) has some remarks
  on Plotinus in relation to asceticism.

Footnote 85:

  Jules de Gaultier (_La Philosophie officielle et la Philosophie_, p.
  150) refers to those Buddhist monks the symbol of whose faith was
  contained in one syllable: _Om_. But those monks, he adds, belonged to
  “the only philosophic race that ever existed” and by the aid of their
  pure faith, placed on a foundation which no argumentation can upset,
  all the religious philosophies of the Judeo-Helleno-Christian
  tradition are but as fairy-tales told to children.

Footnote 86:

  We must always remember that “Church” and “religion,” though often
  confused, are far from being interchangeable terms. “Religion” is a
  natural impulse, “Church” is a social institution. The confusion is
  unfortunate. Thus Freud (_Group Psychology_, p. 51) speaks of the
  probability of religion disappearing and Socialism taking its place.
  He means not “religion,” but a “Church.” We cannot speak of a natural
  impulse disappearing, an institution easily may.

Footnote 87:

  It must be remembered that “intuition” is a word with all sorts of
  philosophical meanings, in addition to its psychological meanings
  (which were studied some years ago by Dearborn in the _Psychological
  Review_). For the ancient philosophic writers, from the Neo-Platonists
  on, it was usually a sort of special organ for coming in contact with
  supernatural realities; for Bergson it is at once a method superior to
  the intellect for obtaining knowledge and a method of æsthetic
  contemplation; for Croce it is solely æsthetic, and art is at once
  “intuition” and “expression” (by which he means the formation of
  internal images). For Croce, when the mind “intuits” by “expressing,”
  the result is art. There is no “religion” for Croce except philosophy.

Footnote 88:

  The modern literature of the Mysteries, especially of Eleusis, is very
  extensive and elaborate in many languages. I will only mention here a
  small and not very recent book, Cheetham’s Hulsean Lectures on _The
  Mysteries Pagan and Christian_ (1897) as for ordinary readers
  sufficiently indicating the general significance of the Mysteries.
  There is, yet briefer, a more modern discussion of the matter in the
  Chapter on “Religion” by Dr. W. R. Inge in R. W. Livingstone’s useful
  collection of essays, _The Legacy of Greece_ (1921).




                               CHAPTER VI
                           THE ART OF MORALS


                                   I


NO man has ever counted the books that have been written about morals.
No subject seems so fascinating to the human mind. It may well be,
indeed, that nothing imports us so much as to know how to live. Yet it
can scarcely be that on any subject are the books that have been written
more unprofitable, one might even say unnecessary.

For when we look at the matter objectively it is, after all, fairly
simple. If we turn our attention to any collective community, at any
time and place, in its moral aspect, we may regard it as an army on the
march along a road of life more or less encompassed by danger. That,
indeed, is scarcely a metaphor; that is what life, viewed in its moral
aspect, may really be considered. When thus considered, we see that it
consists of an extremely small advance guard in front, formed of persons
with a limited freedom of moral action and able to act as patrols in
various directions, of a larger body in the rear, in ancient military
language called the blackguard and not without its uses, and in the main
of a great compact majority with which we must always be chiefly
concerned since they really are the army; they are the community. What
we call “morals” is simply blind obedience to words of command—whether
or not issued by leaders the army believes it has itself chosen—of which
the significance is hidden, and beyond this the duty of keeping in step
with the others, or of trying to keep in step, or of pretending to do
so.[89] It is an automatic, almost unconscious process and only becomes
acutely conscious when the individual is hopelessly out of step; then he
may be relegated to the rear blackguard. But that happens seldom. So
there is little need to be concerned about it. Even if it happened very
often, nothing overwhelming would have taken place; it would merely be
that what we called the blackguard had now become the main army, though
with a different discipline. We are, indeed, simply concerned with a
discipline or routine which in this field is properly described as
_custom_, and the word _morals_ essentially means _custom_. That is what
morals must always be for the mass, and, indeed, to some extent for all,
a discipline, and, as we have already seen, a discipline cannot properly
be regarded as a science or an art. The innumerable books on morals,
since they have usually confused and befogged this simple and central
fact, cannot fail to be rather unprofitable. That, it would seem, is
what the writers thought—at all events about those the others had
written—or else they would not have considered it necessary for
themselves to add to the number. It was not only an unprofitable task,
it was also—except in so far as an objectively scientific attitude has
been assumed—aimless. For, although the morals of a community at one
time and place is never the same as that of another or even the same
community at another time and place, it is a complex web of conditions
that produces the difference, and it must have been evident that to
attempt to affect it was idle.[90] There is no occasion for any one who
is told that he has written a “moral” book to be unduly elated, or when
he is told that his book is “immoral” to be unduly cast down. The
significance of these adjectives is strictly limited. Neither the one
book nor the other can have more than the faintest effect on the march
of the great compact majority of the social army.

Yet, while all this is so, there is still some interest in the question
of morals. For, after all, there is the small body of individuals ahead,
alertly eager to find the road, with a sensitive flair for all the
possibilities the future may hold. When the compact majority, blind and
automatic and unconscious, follows after, to tramp along the road these
pioneers have discovered, it may seem but a dull road. But before they
reached it that road was interesting, even passionately interesting.

The reason is that, for those who, in any age, are thus situated, life
is not merely a discipline. It is, or it may become, really an art.


                                   II


THAT living is or may be an art, and the moralist the critic of that
art, is a very ancient belief. It was especially widespread among the
Greeks. To the Greeks, indeed, this belief was so ingrained and
instinctive that it became an implicitly assumed attitude rather than a
definitely expressed faith. It was natural to them to speak of a
virtuous person as we should speak of a beautiful person. The “good” was
the “beautiful”; the sphere of ethics for the Greeks was not
distinguished from the sphere of æsthetics. In Sophocles, above all
poets, we gather the idea of a natural agreement between duty and
inclination which is at once both beauty and moral order. But it is the
beautiful that seems to be most fundamental in τὸ καλὸν, which was the
noble, the honourable, but fundamentally the beautiful. “Beauty is the
first of all things,” said Isocrates, the famous orator; “nothing that
is devoid of beauty is prized.... The admiration for virtue comes to
this, that of all manifestation of life, virtue is the most beautiful.”
The supremely beautiful was, for the finer sort of Greeks, instinctively
if not always consciously, the supremely divine, and the Argive Hera, it
has been said, “has more divinity in her countenance than any Madonna of
them all.” That is how it came to pass that we have no word in our
speech to apply to the Greek conception; æsthetics for us is apart from
all the serious business of life, and the attempt to introduce it there
seems merely comic. But the Greeks spoke of life itself as a craft or a
fine art. Protagoras, who appears to-day as a pioneer of modern science,
was yet mainly concerned to regard living as an art, or as the sum of
many crafts, and the Platonic Socrates, his opponent, still always
assumed that the moralist’s position is that of a critic of a craft. So
influential a moralist as Aristotle remarks in a matter-of-fact way, in
his “Poetics,” that if we wish to ascertain whether an act is, or is
not, morally right we must consider not merely the intrinsic quality of
the act, but the person who does it, the person to whom it is done, the
time, the means, the motive. Such an attitude towards life puts out of
court any appeal to rigid moral laws; it meant that an act must befit
its particular relationships at a particular moment, and that its moral
value could, therefore, only be judged by the standard of the
spectator’s instinctive feeling for proportion and harmony. That is the
attitude we adopt towards a work of art.

It may well appear strange to those who cherish the modern idea of
“æstheticism” that the most complete statement of the Greek attitude has
come down to us in the writings of a philosopher, an Alexandrian Greek
who lived and taught in Rome in the third century of our Christian Era,
when the Greek world had vanished, a religious mystic, moreover, whose
life and teaching were penetrated by an austere ascetic severity which
some would count mediæval rather than Greek.[91] It is in Plotinus, a
thinker whose inspiring influence still lives to-day, that we probably
find the Greek attitude, in its loftiest aspect, best mirrored, and it
was probably through channels that came from Plotinus—though their
source was usually unrecognised—that the Greek moral spirit has chiefly
reached modern times. Many great thinkers and moralists of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it has been claimed, were
ultimately indebted to Plotinus, who represented the only genuinely
creative effort of the Greek spirit in the third century.[92]

Plotinus seems to have had little interest in art, as commonly
understood, and he was an impatient, rapid, and disorderly writer, not
even troubling to spell correctly. All his art was in the spiritual
sphere. It is impossible to separate æsthetics, as he understood it,
from ethics and religion. In the beautiful discourse on Beauty, which
forms one of the chapters of his first “Ennead,” it is mainly with
spiritual beauty that he is concerned. But he insists that it _is_
beauty, beauty of the same quality as that of the physical world, which
inheres in goodness, “nor may those tell of the splendour of Virtue who
have never known the face of Justice and of Wisdom beautiful beyond the
beauty of Evening and of Dawn.” It is a beauty, he further
states,—though here he seems to be passing out of the purely æsthetic
sphere,—that arouses emotions of love. “This is the spirit that Beauty
must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love,
and a trembling that is also delight. For the unseen all this may be
felt as for the seen, and this souls feel for it, every soul in some
degree, but those the more deeply who are the more truly apt to this
higher love—just as all take delight in the beauty of the body, but all
are not strung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are
known as Lovers.” Goodness and Truth were on the same plane for Plotinus
as Beauty. It may even be said that Beauty was the most fundamental of
all, to be identified ultimately as the Absolute, as Reality itself. So
it was natural that in the sphere of morals he should speak
indifferently either of “extirpating evil and implanting goodness” or of
“introducing order and beauty to replace goodness”—in either case “we
talk of real things.” “Virtue is a natural concordance among the
phenomena of the soul, vice a discord.” But Plotinus definitely rejects
the notion that beauty is only symmetry, and so he avoids the narrow
conception of some more modern æsthetic moralists, notably Hutcheson.
How, then, he asks, could the sun be beautiful, or gold, or light, or
night, or the stars? “Beauty is something more than symmetry, and
symmetry owes its beauty to a remoter principle”—its affinity, in the
opinion of Plotinus, with the “Ideal Form,” immediately recognised and
confirmed by the soul.

It may seem to some that Plotinus reduces to absurdity the conception of
morality as æsthetics, and it may well be that the Greeks of the great
period were wiser when they left the nature of morals less explicit. Yet
Plotinus had in him the root of the matter. He had risen to the
conception that the moral life of the soul is a dance; “Consider the
performers in a choral dance: they sing together, though each one has
his own particular part, and sometimes one voice is heard while the
others are silent; and each brings to the chorus something of his own;
it is not enough that all lift their voices together; each must sing,
choicely, his own part in the music set for him. So it is with the
Soul.”[93] The Hellenic extension of the æsthetic emotion, as Benn
pointed out, involved no weakening of the moral fibre. That is so, we
see, and even emphatically so, when it becomes definitely explicit as in
Plotinus, and revolutionarily hostile to all those ideals of the moral
life which most people have been accustomed to consider modern.

As usually among the Greeks, it is only implicitly, also, that we detect
this attitude among the Romans, the pupils of the Greeks. For the most
part, the Romans, whose impulses of art were very limited, whose
practical mind craved precision and definition, proved rebellious to the
idea that living is an art; yet it may well be that they still retained
that idea at the core of their morality. It is interesting to note that
St. Augustine, who stood on the threshold between the old Roman and new
Christian worlds was able to write: “The art of living well and rightly
is the definition that the ancients give of ‘virtue.’” For the Latins
believed that _ars_ was derived from the Greek word for virtue,
ἀρετή.[94] Yet there really remained a difference between the Greek and
the Roman views of morals. The Greek view, it is universally admitted,
was æsthetic, in the most definite sense; the Roman was not, and when
Cicero wishes to translate a Greek reference to a “beautiful” action it
becomes an “honourable” action. The Greek was concerned with what he
himself felt about his actions; the Roman was concerned with what they
would look like to other people, and the credit, or discredit, that
would be reflected back on himself.

The Hebrews never even dreamed of such an art. Their attitude is
sufficiently embodied in the story of Moses and that visit to Sinai
which resulted in the production of the table of Ten Commandments which
we may still see inscribed in old churches. For even our modern feeling
about morals is largely Jewish, in some measure Roman, and scarcely
Greek at all. We still accept, in theory at all events, the Mosaic
conception of morality as a code of rigid and inflexible rules,
arbitrarily ordained, and to be blindly obeyed.

The conception of morality as an art, which Christendom once disdained,
seems now again to be finding favour in men’s eyes. The path has been
made smooth for it by great thinkers of various complexion, who,
differing in many fundamental points, all alike assert the relativity of
truth and the inaptitude of rigid maxims to serve as guiding forces in
life. They also assert, for a large part, implicitly or explicitly, the
authority of art.

The nineteenth century was usually inspired by the maxims of Kant, and
lifted its hat reverently when it heard Kant declaiming his famous
sayings concerning the supremacy of an inflexible moral law. Kant had,
indeed, felt the stream of influence which flowed from Shaftesbury, and
he sought to mix up æsthetics with his system. But he had nothing of the
genuine artist’s spirit. The art of morals was to him a set of maxims,
cold, rigid, precise. A sympathetic biographer has said of him that the
maxims were the man. They are sometimes fine maxims. But as guides, as
motives to practical action in the world? The maxims of the
valetudinarian professor at Königsberg scarcely seem that to us to-day.
Still less can we harmonise maxims with art. Nor do we any longer
suppose that we are impertinent in referring to the philosopher’s
personality. In the investigation of the solar spectrum personality may
count for little; in the investigation of moral laws it counts for much.
For personality is the very stuff of morals. The moral maxims of an
elderly professor in a provincial university town have their interest.
But so have those of a Casanova. And the moral maxims of a Goethe may
possibly have more interest than either. There is the rigid categorical
imperative of Kant; and there is also that other dictum, less rigid but
more reminiscent of Greece, which some well-inspired person has put into
the mouth of Walt Whitman: “Whatever tastes sweet to the most perfect
person, that is finally right.”


                                  III


FUNDAMENTALLY considered, there are two roads by which we may travel
towards the moral ends of life: the road of Tradition, which is
ultimately that of Instinct, pursued by the many, and the road of what
seems to be Reason—sought out by the few. And in the end these two roads
are but the same road, for reason also is an instinct. It is true that
the ingenuity of analytic investigators like Henry Sidgwick has
succeeded in enumerating various “methods of ethics.” But, roughly
speaking, there can only be these two main roads of life, and only one
has proved supremely important. It has been by following the path of
tradition moulded by instinct that man reached the threshold of
civilisation: whatever may have been the benefits he derived from the
guidance of reason he never consciously allowed reason to control his
moral life. Tables of commandments have ever been “given by God”; they
represented, that is to say, obscure impulses of the organism striving
to respond to practical needs. No one dreamed of commending them by
declaring that they were reasonable.

It is clear how Instinct and Tradition, thus working together, act
vitally and beneficently in moulding the moral life of primitive
peoples. The “divine command” was always a command conditioned by the
special circumstance under which the tribe lived. That is so even when
the moral law is to our civilised eyes “unnatural.” The infanticide of
Polynesian islanders, where the means of subsistence and the
possibilities of expansion were limited, was obviously a necessary
measure, beneficent and humane in its effects. The killing of the aged
among the migrant Eskimos was equally a necessary and kindly measure,
recognised as such by the victims themselves, when it was essential that
every member of the community should be able to help himself. Primitive
rules of moral action, greatly as they differ among themselves, are all
more or less advantageous and helpful on the road of primitive life. It
is true that they allow very little, if any, scope for divergent
individual moral action, but that, too, was advantageous.

But that, also, is the rock on which an instinctive traditional morality
must strike as civilisation is approached. The tribe has no longer the
same unity. Social differentiation has tended to make the family a unit,
and psychic differentiation to make even the separate individuals units.
The community of interests of the whole tribe has been broken up, and
therewith traditional morality has lost alike its value and its power.

The development of abstract intelligence, which coincides with
civilisation, works in the same direction. Reason is, indeed, on one
side an integrating force, for it shows that the assumption of
traditional morality—the identity of the individual’s interests with the
interests of the community—is soundly based. But it is also a
disintegrating force. For if it reveals a general unity in the ends of
living, it devises infinitely various and perplexingly distracting
excuses for living. Before the active invasion of reason living had been
an art, or at all events a discipline, highly conventionalised and even
ritualistic, but the motive forces of living lay in life itself and had
all the binding sanction of instincts; the penalty of every failure in
living, it was felt, would be swiftly and automatically experienced. To
apply reason here was to introduce a powerful solvent into morals.
Objectively it made morality clearer but subjectively it destroyed the
existing motives for morality; it deprived man, to use the fashionable
phraseology of the present day, of a vital illusion.

Thus we have morality in the fundamental sense, the actual practices of
the main army of the population, while in front a variegated procession
of prancing philosophers gaily flaunt their moral theories before the
world. Kant, whose personal moral problems were concerned with eating
sweetmeats,[95] and other philosophers of varyingly inferior calibre,
were regarded as the lawgivers of morality, though they carried little
enough weight with the world at large.

Thus it comes about that abstract moral speculations, culminating in
rigid maxims, are necessarily sterile and vain. They move in the sphere
of reason, and that is the sphere of comprehension, but not of vital
action. In this way there arises a moral dualism in civilised man.
Objectively he has become like the gods and able to distinguish the ends
of life; he has eaten of the fruit of the tree and has knowledge of good
and evil. Subjectively he is still not far removed from the savage,
oftenest stirred to action by a confused web of emotional motives, among
which the interwoven strands of civilised reason are as likely to
produce discord or paralysis as to furnish efficient guides, a state of
mind first, and perhaps best, set forth in its extreme form by
Shakespeare in Hamlet. On the one hand he cannot return to the primitive
state in which all the motives for living flowed harmoniously in the
same channel; he cannot divest himself of his illuminating reason; he
cannot recede from his hardly acquired personal individuality. On the
other hand he can never expect, he can never even reasonably hope, that
reason will ever hold in leash the emotions. It is clear that along
neither path separately can the civilised man pursue his way in
harmonious balance with himself. We begin to realise that what we need
is not a code of beautifully cut-and-dried maxims—whether emanating from
sacred mountains or from philosophers’ studies—but a happy combination
of two different ways of living. We need, that is, a traditional and
instinctive way of living, based on real motor instincts, which will
blend with reason and the manifold needs of personality, instead of
being destroyed by their solvent actions, as rigid rules inevitably are.
Our only valid rule is a creative impulse that is one with the
illuminative power of intelligence.


                                   IV


AT the beginning of the eighteenth century, the seed-time of our modern
ideas, as it has so often seemed to be, the English people, having in
art at length brought their language to a fine degree of clarity and
precision, and having just passed through a highly stimulating period of
dominant Puritanism in life, became much interested in philosophy,
psychology, and ethics. Their interest was, indeed, often superficial
and amateurish, though they were soon to produce some of the most
notable figures in the whole history of thought. The third Earl of
Shaftesbury, one of the earliest of the group, himself illustrated this
unsystematic method of thinking. He was an amateur, an aristocratic
amateur, careless of consistency, and not by any means concerned to
erect a philosophic system. Not that he was a worse thinker on that
account. The world’s greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for
high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for
that a professorial chair offers no special opportunities. Shaftesbury
was, moreover, a man of fragile physical constitution, as Kant was; but,
unlike Kant, he was not a childish hypochondriac in seclusion, but a man
in the world, heroically seeking to live a complete and harmonious life.
By temperament he was a Stoic, and he wrote a characteristic book of
“Exercises,” as he proposed to call what his modern editor calls the
“Philosophical Regimen,” in which he consciously seeks to discipline
himself in fine thinking and right living, plainly acknowledging that he
is the disciple of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But Shaftesbury was
also a man of genius, and as such it was his good fortune to throw
afresh into the stream of thought a fruitful conception, in part
absorbed, indeed, from Greece, and long implicit in men’s minds, but
never before made clearly recognisable as a moral theory and an ethical
temper, susceptible of being labelled by the philosophic historian, as
it since has been under the name, passable no doubt as any other, of
“Æsthetic Intuitionism.”

Greek morality, it has been well said, is not a conflict of light and
darkness, of good and evil, the clear choice between the broad road that
leads to destruction and the narrow path of salvation: it is “an
artistic balance of light and shade.” Gizycki, remarking that
Shaftesbury has more affinity to the Greeks than perhaps any other
modern moralist, says that “the key lay not only in his head, but in his
heart, for like can only be recognised by like.”[96] We have to remember
at the same time that Shaftesbury was really something of a classical
scholar, even from childhood. Born in 1671, the grandson of the foremost
English statesman of his time, the first Earl, Anthony Cooper, he had
the advantage of the wise oversight of his grandfather, who placed with
him as a companion in childhood a lady who knew both Greek and Latin so
well that she could converse fluently in both languages. So it was that
by the age of eleven he was familiar with the two classic tongues and
literatures. That doubtless was also a key to his intimate feeling for
the classic spirit, though it would not have sufficed without a native
affinity. He became the pupil of Locke, and at fifteen he went to Italy,
to spend a considerable time there. He knew France also, and the French
tongue, so well that he was often taken for a native. He lived for some
time in Holland, and there formed a friendship with Bayle, which began
before the latter was aware of his friend’s rank and lasted till Bayle’s
death. In Holland he may have been slightly influenced by Grotius.[97]
Shaftesbury was not of robust constitution; he suffered from asthma, and
his health was further affected by his zeal in public affairs as well as
his enthusiasm in study, for his morality was not that of a recluse, but
of a man who played an active part in life, not only in social
benevolence, like his descendant the enlightened philanthropic Earl of
the nineteenth century, but in the establishment of civil freedom and
toleration. Locke wrote of his pupil (who was not, however, in agreement
with his tutor’s philosophic standpoint,[98] though he always treated
him with consideration) that “the sword was too sharp for the scabbard.”

“He seems,” wrote of Shaftesbury his unfriendly contemporary Mandeville,
“to require and expect goodness in his species as we do a sweet taste in
grapes and China oranges, of which, if any of them are sour, we boldly
pronounce that they are not come to that perfection their nature is
capable of.” In a certain sense this was correct. Shaftesbury, it has
been said, was the father of that new ethics which recognises that
Nature is not a mere impulse of self-preservation, as Hobbes thought,
but also a racial impulse, having regard to others; there are social
inclinations in the individual, he realised, that go beyond individual
ends. (Referring to the famous dictum of Hobbes, _Homo homini lupus_, he
observes: “To say in disparagement of Man ‘that he is to Man a wolf’
appears somewhat absurd when one considers that wolves are to wolves
very kind and loving creatures.”) Therewith “goodness” was seen,
virtually for the first time in the modern period, to be as “natural” as
the sweetness of ripe fruit.

There was another reason, a fundamental physiological and psychological
reason, why “goodness” of actions and the “sweetness” of fruits are
equally natural, a reason that would, no doubt, have been found strange
both by Mandeville and Shaftesbury. Morality, Shaftesbury describes as
“the taste of beauty and the relish of what is decent,” and the “sense
of beauty” is ultimately the same as the “moral sense.” “My first
endeavour,” wrote Shaftesbury, “must be to distinguish the true taste of
fruits, refine my palate, and establish a just relish in the kind.” He
thought, evidently, that he was merely using a metaphor. But he was
speaking essentially in the direct, straightforward way of natural and
primitive Man. At the foundation, “sweetness” and “goodness” are the
same thing. That can still be detected in the very structure of
language, not only of primitive languages, but those of the most
civilised peoples. That morality is, in the strict sense, a matter of
taste, of æsthetics, of what the Greeks called αἴσθησις, is conclusively
shown by the fact that in the most widely separated tongues—possibly
wherever the matter has been carefully investigated—moral goodness is,
at the outset, expressed in terms of _taste_. What is _good_ is what is
_sweet_, and sometimes, also, _salt_.[99] Primitive peoples have highly
developed the sensory side of their mental life, and their vocabularies
bear witness to the intimate connection of sensations of taste and touch
with emotional tone. There is, indeed, no occasion to go beyond our own
European traditions to see that the expression of moral qualities is
based on fundamental sensory qualities of taste. In Latin _suavis_ is
_sweet_, but even in Latin it became a moral quality, and its English
derivatives have been entirely deflected from physical to moral
qualities, while _bitter_ is at once a physical quality and a poignantly
moral quality. In Sanskrit and Persian and Arabic _salt_ is not only a
physical taste but the name for lustre and grace and beauty.[100] It
seems well in passing to point out that the deeper we penetrate the more
fundamentally we find the æsthetic conception of morals grounded in
Nature. But not every one cares to penetrate any deeper and there is no
need to insist.

Shaftesbury held that human actions should have a beauty of symmetry and
proportion and harmony, which appeal to us, not because they accord with
any rule or maxim (although they may conceivably be susceptible of
measurement), but because they satisfy our instinctive feelings, evoking
an approval which is strictly an æsthetic judgment of moral action. This
instinctive judgment was not, as Shaftesbury understood it, a guide to
action. He held, rightly enough, that the impulse to action is
fundamental and primary, that fine action is the outcome of finely
tempered natures. It is a feeling for the just time and measure of human
passion, and maxims are useless to him whose nature is ill-balanced.
“Virtue is no other than the love of order and beauty in society.”
Æsthetic appreciation of the act, and even an ecstatic pleasure in it,
are part of our æsthetic delight in Nature generally, which includes
Man. Nature, it is clear, plays a large part in this conception of the
moral life. To lack balance on any plane of moral conduct is to be
unnatural; “Nature is not mocked,” said Shaftesbury. She is a miracle,
for miracles are not things that are performed, but things that are
perceived, and to fail here is to fail in perception of the divinity of
Nature, to do violence to her, and to court moral destruction. A return
to Nature is not a return to ignorance or savagery, but to the first
instinctive feeling for the beauty of well-proportioned affections. “The
most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth,” he
asserts, and he recurs again and again to “the beauty of honesty.”
“_Dulce et decorum est_ was his sole reason,” he says of the classical
pagan, adding: “And this is still a good reason.” In learning how to
act, he thought, we are “learning to become artists.” It seems natural
to him to refer to the magistrate as an artist; “the magistrate, if he
be an artist,” he incidentally says. We must not make morality depend on
authority. The true artist, in any art, will never act below his
character. “Let who will make it for you as you fancy,” the artist
declares; “I know it to be wrong. Whatever I have made hitherto has been
true work. And neither for your sake or anybody’s else shall I put my
hand to any other.” “This is virtue!” exclaims Shaftesbury. “This
disposition transferred to the whole of life perfects a character. For
there is a workmanship and a truth in actions.”

Shaftesbury, it may be repeated, was an amateur, not only in philosophy,
but even in the arts. He regarded literature as one of the schoolmasters
for fine living, yet he has not been generally regarded as a fine artist
in writing, though, directly or indirectly, he helped to inspire not
only Pope, but Thomson and Cowper and Wordsworth. He was inevitably
interested in painting, but his tastes were merely those of the ordinary
connoisseur of his time. This gives a certain superficiality to his
general æsthetic vision, though it was far from true, as the theologians
supposed, that he was lacking in seriousness. His chief immediate
followers, like Hutcheson, came out of Calvinistic Puritanism. He was
himself an austere Stoic who adapted himself to the tone of the
well-bred world he lived in. But if an amateur, he was an amateur of
genius. He threw a vast and fruitful conception—caught from the
“Poetics” of Aristotle, “the Great Master of Arts,” and developed with
fine insight—into our modern world. Most of the great European thinkers
of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were in some measure
inspired, influenced, or anticipated by Shaftesbury. Even Kant, though
he was unsympathetic and niggardly of appreciation, helped to develop
the conception Shaftesbury first formulated. To-day we see it on every
hand. It is slowly and subtly moulding the whole of our modern morality.

“The greatest Greek of modern times”—so he appears to those who study
his work to-day. It is through Shaftesbury, and Shaftesbury alone that
Greek morals, in their finest essence, have been a vivifying influence
in our modern world. Georg von Gizycki, who has perhaps most clearly
apprehended Shaftesbury’s place in morals, indicates that place with
precision and justice when he states that “he furnished the _elements_
of a moral philosophy which fits into the frame of a truly scientific
conception of the world.”[101] That was a service to the modern world so
great and so daring that it could scarcely meet with approval from his
fellow countrymen. The more keenly philosophical Scotch, indeed,
recognised him, first of all Hume, and he was accepted and embodied as a
kind of founder by the so-called Scottish School, though so toned down
and adulterated and adapted to popular tastes and needs, that in the end
he was thereby discredited. But the English never even adulterated him;
they clung to the antiquated and eschatological Paley, bringing forth
edition after edition of his works whereon to discipline their youthful
minds. That led naturally on to the English Utilitarians in morality,
who would disdain to look at anything that could be called Greek. Sir
Leslie Stephen, who was the vigorous and capable interpreter to the
general public of Utilitarianism, could see nothing good whatever in
Shaftesbury; he viewed him with contemptuous pity and could only murmur:
“Poor Shaftesbury!”

Meanwhile Shaftesbury’s fame had from the first been pursuing a very
different course in France and Germany, for it is the people outside a
man’s own country who anticipate the verdict of posterity. Leibnitz,
whose vast genius was on some sides akin (Shaftesbury has, indeed, been
termed “the Leibnitz of morals”), admired the English thinker, and the
universal Voltaire recognised him. Montesquieu placed him on a
four-square summit with Plato and Montaigne and Malebranche. The
enthusiastic Diderot, seeing in Shaftesbury the exponent of the
naturalistic ethics of his own temperament, translated a large part of
his chief book in 1745. Herder, who inspired so many of the chief
thinkers of the nineteenth century and even of to-day, was himself
largely inspired by Shaftesbury, whom he once called “the virtuoso of
humanity,” regarding his writings as, even in form, well-nigh worthy of
Greek antiquity, and long proposed to make a comparative study of the
ethical conceptions of Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Shaftesbury, but
unfortunately never carried out that happy idea. Rousseau, not only by
contact of ideas, but the spontaneous effort of his own nature towards
autonomous harmony, was in touch with Shaftesbury, and so helped to
bring his ideals into the general stream of modern life. Shaftesbury,
directly or indirectly, inspired the early influential French Socialists
and Communists. On the other hand he has equally inspired the moralists
of individualism. Even the Spanish-American Rodó, one of the most
delicately aristocratic of modern moralists in recent time, puts forth
conceptions, which, consciously or unconsciously, are precisely those of
Shaftesbury. Rodó believes that all moral evil is a dissonance in the
æsthetic of conduct and that the moral task in character is that of the
sculptor in marble: “Virtue is a kind of art, a divine art.” Even Croce,
who began by making a deep division between art and life, holds that
there can be no great critic of art who is not also a great critic of
life, for æsthetic criticism is really itself a criticism of life, and
his whole philosophy may be regarded as representing a stage of
transition between the old traditional view of the world and that
conception towards which in the modern world our gaze is turned.[102]

As Shaftesbury had stated the matter, however, it was left on the whole
vague and large. He made no very clear distinction between the creative
artistic impulse in life and critical æsthetic appreciation. In the
sphere of morals we must often be content to wait until our activity is
completed to appreciate its beauty or its ugliness.[103] On the
background of general æsthetic judgment we have to concentrate on the
forces of creative artistic activity, whose work it is painfully to
mould the clay of moral action, and forge its iron, long before the
æsthetic criterion can be applied to the final product. The artist’s
work in life is full of struggle and toil; it is only the spectator of
morals who can assume the calm æsthetic attitude. Shaftesbury, indeed,
evidently recognised this, but it was not enough to say, as he said,
that we may prepare ourselves for moral action by study in literature.
One may be willing to regard living as an art, and yet be of opinion
that it is as unsatisfactory to learn the art of living in literature as
to learn, let us say, the art of music in architecture.

Yet we must not allow these considerations to lead us away from the
great fact that Shaftesbury clearly realised—what modern psychology
emphasises—that desires can only be countered by desires, that reason
cannot affect appetite. “That which is of original and pure nature,” he
declared, “nothing besides contrary habit and custom (a second nature)
is able to displace. There is no speculative opinion, persuasion, or
belief, which is capable immediately or directly to exclude or destroy
it.” Where he went beyond some modern psychologists is in his Hellenic
perception that in this sphere of instinct we are amid the play of art
to which æsthetic criteria alone can be applied.

It was necessary to concentrate and apply these large general ideas. To
some extent this was done by Shaftesbury’s immediate successors and
followers, such as Hutcheson and Arbuckle, who taught that man is,
ethically, an artist whose work is his own life. They concentrated
attention on the really creative aspects of the artist in life, æsthetic
appreciation of the finished product being regarded as secondary. For
all art is, primarily, not a contemplation, but a doing, a creative
action, and morality is so preëminently.

Shaftesbury, with his followers Arbuckle and Hutcheson, may be regarded
as the founders of æsthetics; it was Hutcheson, though he happened to be
the least genuinely æsthetic in temperament of the three, who wrote the
first modern treatise on æsthetics. Together, also, they may be said to
have been the revivalists of Hellenism, that is to say, of the Hellenic
spirit, or rather of the classic spirit, for it often came through Roman
channels. Shaftesbury was, as Eucken has well said, the Greek spirit
among English thinkers. He represented an inevitable reaction against
Puritanism, a reaction which is still going on—indeed, here and there
only just beginning. As Puritanism had achieved so notable a victory in
England, it was natural that in England the first great champion of
Hellenism should appear. It is to Oliver Cromwell and Praise-God
Barebones that we owe Shaftesbury.

After Shaftesbury it is Arbuckle who first deserves attention, though he
wrote so little that he never attained the prominence he deserved.[104]
He was a Dublin physician of Scottish ancestry, the friend of Swift, by
whom he was highly esteemed, and he was a cripple from boyhood. He was a
man of genuine artistic temperament, though the art he was attracted to
was not, as with Shaftesbury, the sculptor’s or the painter’s, but the
poet’s. It was not so much intuition on which he insisted, but
imagination as formative of a character; moral approval seemed to him
thoroughly æsthetic, part of an imaginative act which framed the ideal
of a beautiful personality, externalising itself in action. When Robert
Bridges, the poet of our own time, suggests (in his “Necessity of
Poetry”) that “morals is that part of Poetry which deals with conduct,”
he is speaking in the spirit of Arbuckle. An earlier and greater poet
was still nearer to Arbuckle. “A man to be greatly good,” said Shelley
in his “Defence of Poetry,” “must imagine intensely and
comprehensively.... The great instrument of moral good is the
imagination.” If, indeed, with Adam Smith and Schopenhauer, we choose to
base morals on sympathy we really are thereby making the poet’s
imagination the great moral instrument. Morals was for Arbuckle a
disinterested æsthetic harmony, and he had caught much of the genuine
Greek spirit.

Hutcheson was in this respect less successful. Though he had occupied
himself with æsthetics he had little true æsthetic feeling; and though
he accomplished much for the revival of Greek studies his own sympathies
were really with the Roman Stoics, with Cicero, with Marcus Aurelius,
and in this way he was led towards Christianity, to which Shaftesbury
was really alien. He democratised if not vulgarised, and diluted if not
debased, Shaftesbury’s loftier conception. In his too widely sympathetic
and receptive mind the Shaftesburian ideal was not only Romanised, not
only Christianised; it was plunged into a miscellaneously eclectic mass
that often became inconsistent and incoherent. In the long run, in spite
of his great immediate success, he injured in these ways the cause he
advocated. He overemphasised the passively æsthetic side of morals; he
dwelt on the term “moral sense,” by Shaftesbury only occasionally used,
as it had long previously been by Aristotle (and then only in the sense
of “natural temper” by analogy with the physical senses), and this term
was long a stumbling-block in the eyes of innocent philosophic critics,
too easily befooled by words, who failed to see that, as Libby has
pointed out, the underlying idea simply is, as held by Shaftesbury, that
æsthetic notions of proportion and symmetry depend upon the native
structure of the mind and only so constitute a “moral sense.”[105] What
Hutcheson, as distinct from Shaftesbury, meant by a “moral sense”—really
a conative instinct—is sufficiently indicated by the fact that he was
inclined to consider the conjugal and parental affections as a “sense”
because natural. He desired to shut out reason, and cognitive elements,
and that again brought him to the conception of morality as instinctive.
Hutcheson’s conception of “sense” was defective as being too liable to
be regarded as passive rather than as conative, though conation was
implied. The fact that the “moral sense” was really instinct, and had
nothing whatever to do with “innate ideas,” as many have ignorantly
supposed, was clearly seen by Hutcheson’s opponents. The chief objection
brought forward by the Reverend John Balguy in 1728, in the first part
of his “Foundation of Moral Goodness,” was precisely that Hutcheson
based morality on instinct and so had allowed “some degree of morality
to animals.”[106] It was Hutcheson’s fine and impressive personality,
his high character, his eloquence, his influential position, which
enabled him to keep alive the conception of morals he preached, and even
to give it an effective force, throughout the European world, it might
not otherwise easily have exerted. Philosophy was to Hutcheson the art
of living—as it was to the old Greek philosophers—rather than a question
of metaphysics, and he was careless of consistency in thinking, an
open-minded eclectic who insisted that life itself is the great matter.
That, no doubt, was the reason why he had so immense an influence. It
was mainly through Hutcheson that the more aristocratic spirit of
Shaftesbury was poured into the circulatory channels of the world’s
life. Hume and Adam Smith and Reid were either the pupils of Hutcheson
or directly influenced by him. He was a great personality rather than a
great thinker, and it was as such that he exerted so much force in
philosophy.[107]

With Schiller, whose attitude was not, however, based directly on
Shaftesbury, the æsthetic conception of morals, which in its definitely
conscious form had up till then been especially English, may be said to
have entered the main stream of culture. Schiller regarded the identity
of Duty and Inclination as the ideal goal of human development, and
looked on the Genius of Beauty as the chief guide of life. Wilhelm von
Humboldt, one of the greatest spirits of that age, was moved by the same
ideas, throughout his life, much as in many respects he changed, and
even shortly before his death wrote in deprecation of the notion that
conformity to duty is the final aim of morality. Goethe, who was the
intimate friend of both Schiller and Humboldt, largely shared the same
attitude, and through him it has had a subtle and boundless influence.
Kant, who, it has been said, mistook Duty for a Prussian drill-sergeant,
still ruled the academic moral world. But a new vivifying and moulding
force had entered the larger moral world, and to-day we may detect its
presence on every side.


                                   V


It has often been brought against the conception of morality as an art
that it lacks seriousness. It seems to many people to involve an easy,
self-indulgent, dilettante way of looking at life. Certainly it is not
the way of the Old Testament. Except in imaginative literature—it was,
indeed, an enormous and fateful exception—the Hebrews were no “æsthetic
intuitionists.” They hated art, for the rest, and in face of the
problems of living they were not in the habit of considering the lilies
how they grow. It was not the beauty of holiness, but the stern rod of a
jealous Jehovah, which they craved for their encouragement along the
path of Duty. And it is the Hebrew mode of feeling which has been, more
or less violently and imperfectly, grafted into our Christianity.[108]

It is a complete mistake, however, to suppose that those for whom life
is an art have entered on an easy path, with nothing but enjoyment and
self-indulgence before them. The reverse is nearer to the truth. It is
probably the hedonist who had better choose rules if he only cares to
make life pleasant.[109] For the artist life is always a discipline, and
no discipline can be without pain. That is so even of dancing, which of
all the arts is most associated in the popular mind with pleasure. To
learn to dance is the most austere of disciplines, and even for those
who have attained to the summit of its art often remains a discipline
not to be exercised without heroism. The dancer seems a thing of joy,
but we are told that this famous dancer’s slippers are filled with blood
when the dance is over, and that one falls down pulseless and deathlike
on leaving the stage, and the other must spend the day in darkness and
silence. “It is no small advantage,” said Nietzsche, “to have a hundred
Damoclean swords suspended above one’s head; that is how one learns to
dance, that is how one attains ‘freedom of movement.’”[110]

For as pain is entwined in an essential element in the perfect
achievement of that which seems naturally the most pleasurable of the
arts, so it is with the whole art of living, of which dancing is the
supreme symbol. There is no separating Pain and Pleasure without making
the first meaningless for all vital ends and the second turn to ashes.
To exalt pleasure is to exalt pain; and we cannot understand the meaning
of pain unless we understand the place of pleasure in the art of life.
In England, James Hinton sought to make that clear, equally against
those who failed to see that pain is as necessary morally as it
undoubtedly is biologically, and against those who would puritanically
refuse to accept the morality of pleasure.[111] It is no doubt important
to resist pain, but it is also important that it should be there to
resist. Even when we look at the matter no longer subjectively but
objectively, we must accept pain in any sound æsthetic or metaphysical
picture of the world.[112]

We must not be surprised, therefore, that this way of looking at life as
an art has spontaneously commended itself to men of the gravest and
deepest character, in all other respects widely unlike. Shaftesbury was
temperamentally a Stoic whose fragile constitution involved a perpetual
endeavour to mould life to the form of his ideal. And if we go back to
Marcus Aurelius we find an austere and heroic man whose whole life, as
we trace it in his “Meditations,” was a splendid struggle, a man
who—even, it seems, unconsciously—had adopted the æsthetic criterion of
moral goodness and the artistic conception of moral action. Dancing and
wrestling express to his eyes the activity of the man who is striving to
live, and the goodness of moral actions instinctively appears to him as
the beauty of natural objects; it is to Marcus Aurelius that we owe that
immortal utterance of æsthetic intuitionism: “As though the emerald
should say: ‘Whatever happens I must be emerald.’” There could be no man
more unlike the Roman Emperor, or in any more remote field of action,
than the French saint and philanthropist Vincent de Paul. At once a
genuine Christian mystic and a very wise and marvellously effective man
of action, Vincent de Paul adopts precisely the same simile of the moral
attitude that had long before been put forth by Plotinus and in the next
century was again to be taken up by Shaftesbury: “My daughters,” he
wrote to the Sisters of Charity, “we are each like a block of stone
which is to be transferred into a statue. What must the sculptor do to
carry out his design? First of all he must take the hammer and chip off
all that he does not need. For this purpose he strikes the stone so
violently that if you were watching him you would say he intended to
break it to pieces. Then, when he has got rid of the rougher parts, he
takes a smaller hammer, and afterwards a chisel, to begin the face with
all the features. When that has taken form, he uses other and finer
tools to bring it to that perfection he has intended for his statue.” If
we desire to find a spiritual artist as unlike as possible to Vincent de
Paul we may take Nietzsche. Alien as any man could ever be to a cheap or
superficial vision of the moral life, and far too intellectually keen to
confuse moral problems with purely æsthetic problems, Nietzsche, when
faced by the problem of living, sets himself—almost as instinctively as
Marcus Aurelius or Vincent de Paul—at the standpoint of art. “Alles
Leben ist Streit um Geschmack und Schmecken.” It is a crucial passage in
“Zarathustra”: “All life is a dispute about taste and tasting! Taste:
that is weight and at the same time scales and weigher; and woe to all
living things that would live without dispute about weight and scales
and weigher!” For this gospel of taste is no easy gospel. A man must
make himself a work of art, Nietzsche again and again declares, moulded
into beauty by suffering, for such art is the highest morality, the
morality of the Creator.

There is a certain indefiniteness about the conception of morality as an
artistic impulse, to be judged by an æsthetic criterion, which is
profoundly repugnant to at least two classes of minds fully entitled to
make their antipathy felt. In the first place, it makes no appeal to the
abstract reasoner, indifferent to the manifoldly concrete problems of
living. For the man whose brain is hypertrophied and his practical life
shrivelled to an insignificant routine—the man of whom Kant is the
supreme type—it is always a temptation to rationalise morality. Such a
pure intellectualist, overlooking the fact that human beings are not
mathematical figures, may even desire to transform ethics into a species
of geometry. That we may see in Spinoza, a nobler and more inspiring
figure, no doubt, but of the same temperament as Kant. The impulses and
desires of ordinary men and women are manifold, inconstant, often
conflicting, and sometimes overwhelming. “Morality is a fact of
sensibility,” remarks Jules de Gaultier; “it has no need to have
recourse to reason for its affirmations.” But to men of the
intellectualist type this consideration is almost negligible; all the
passions and affections of humanity seem to them meek as sheep which
they may shepherd, and pen within the flimsiest hurdles. William Blake,
who could cut down to that central core of the world where all things
are fused together, knew better when he said that the only golden rule
of life is “the great and golden rule of art.” James Hinton was for ever
expatiating on the close resemblance between the methods of art, as
shown especially in painting, and the methods of moral action. Thoreau,
who also belonged to this tribe, declared, in the same spirit as Blake,
that there is no golden rule in morals, for rules are only current
silver; “it is golden not to have any rule at all.”

There is another quite different type of person who shares this
antipathy to the indefiniteness of æsthetic morality: the ambitious
moral reformer. The man of this class is usually by no means devoid of
strong passions; but for the most part he possesses no great
intellectual calibre and so is unable to estimate the force and
complexity of human impulses. The moral reformer, eager to introduce the
millennium here and now by the aid of the newest mechanical devices, is
righteously indignant with anything so vague as an æsthetic morality. He
must have definite rules and regulations, clear-cut laws and by-laws,
with an arbitrary list of penalties attached, to be duly inflicted in
this world or the next. The popular conception of Moses, descending from
the sacred mount with a brand-new table of commandments, which he
declares have been delivered to him by God, though he is ready to smash
them to pieces on the slightest provocation, furnishes a delightful
image of the typical moral reformer of every age. It is, however, only
in savage and barbarous stages of society, or among the uncultivated
classes of civilisation, that the men of this type can find their
faithful followers.

Yet there is more to be said. That very indefiniteness of the criterion
of moral action, falsely supposed to be a disadvantage, is really the
prime condition for effective moral action. The academic philosophers of
ethics, had they possessed virility enough to enter the field of real
life, would have realised—as we cannot expect the moral reformers
blinded by the smoke of their own fanaticism to realise—that the slavery
to rigid formulas which they preached was the death of all high moral
responsibility. Life must always be a great adventure, with risks on
every hand; a clear-sighted eye, a many-sided sympathy, a fine daring,
an endless patience, are for ever necessary to all good living. With
such qualities alone may the artist in life reach success; without them
even the most devoted slave to formulas can only meet disaster. No
reasonable moral being may draw breath in the world without an open-eyed
freedom of choice, and if the moral world is to be governed by laws,
better to people it with automatic machines than with living men and
women.

In our human world the precision of mechanism is for ever impossible.
The indefiniteness of morality is a part of its necessary imperfection.
There is not only room in morality for the high aspiration, the
courageous decision, the tonic thrill of the muscles of the soul, but we
have to admit also sacrifice and pain. The lesser good, our own or that
of others, is merged in a larger good, and that cannot be without some
rending of the heart. So all moral action, however in the end it may be
justified by its harmony and balance, is in the making cruel and in a
sense even immoral. Therein lies the final justification of the æsthetic
conception of morality. It opens a wider perspective and reveals loftier
standpoints; it shows how the seeming loss is part of an ultimate gain,
so restoring that harmony and beauty which the unintelligent partisans
of a hard and barren duty so often destroy for ever. “Art,” as Paulhan
declares, “is often more moral than morality itself.” Or, as Jules de
Gaultier holds, “Art is in a certain sense the only morality which life
admits.” In so far as we can infuse it with the spirit and method of
art, we have transformed morality into something beyond morality; it has
become the complete embodiment of the Dance of Life.

Footnote 89:

  What we call crime is, at the beginning, usually an effort to get, or
  to pretend to get, into step, but, being a violent or miscalculated
  effort, it is liable to fail, and the criminal falls to the rear of
  the social army. “I believe that most murders are really committed by
  Mrs. Grundy,” a woman writes to me, and, with the due qualification,
  the saying is worthy of meditation. That is why justice is impotent to
  prevent or even to punish murder, for Mrs. Grundy is within all of us,
  being a part of the social discipline, and cannot be hanged.

Footnote 90:

  Herbert Spencer, writing to a correspondent, once well expressed the
  harmlessness—if we choose so to regard it—of moral teaching: “After
  nearly two thousand years’ preaching of the religion of amity, the
  religion of enmity remains predominant, and Europe is peopled by two
  hundred million pagans, masquerading as Christians, who revile those
  who wish them to act on the principles they profess.”

Footnote 91:

  But later asceticism was strictly the outcome of a Greek tendency, to
  be traced in Plato, developed through Antisthenes, through Zeno,
  through Epictetus, who all desired to liberate the soul from the bonds
  of matter. The Neo-Platonists carried this tendency further, for in
  their time, the prevailing anarchy and confusion rendered the world
  and society less than ever a fitting haven for the soul. It was not
  Christianity that made the world ascetic (and there were elements of
  hedonism in the teaching of Jesus), but the world that made
  Christianity ascetic, and it was easy for a Christian to become a
  Neo-Platonist, for they were both being moulded by the same forces.

Footnote 92:

  Maurice Croiset devotes a few luminous critical pages to Plotinus in
  the Croisets’ _Histoire de la Littérature Grecque_, vol. V, pp.
  820-31. As an extended account of Plotinus, from a more
  enthusiastically sympathetic standpoint, there are Dr. Inge’s
  well-known Gifford Lectures, _The Philosophy of Plotinus_ (1918); I
  may also mention a careful scholastic study, _L’Esthétique de Plotin_
  (1913), by Cochez, of Louvain, who regards Plotinus as the climax of
  the objective æsthetics of antiquity and the beginning of the road to
  modern subjective æsthetics.

Footnote 93:

  _Ennead_, bk. III, chap. VI. I have mostly followed the translation of
  Stephen McKenna.

Footnote 94:

  St. Augustine, _De Civitate Dei_, bk. IV, chap. XXI.

Footnote 95:

  Kant was habitually cold and calm. But he was very fond of dried
  fruits and used to have them specially imported for him by his friend
  Motherby. “At one time he was eagerly expecting a vessel with French
  fruits which he had ordered, and he had already invited some friends
  to a dinner at which they were to be served. The vessel was, however,
  delayed a number of days by a storm. When it arrived, Kant was
  informed that the provisions had become short on account of the delay,
  and that the crew had eaten his fruit. Kant was so angry that he
  declared they ought rather to have starved than to have touched it.
  Surprised at this irritation, Motherby said, ‘Professor, you cannot be
  in earnest.’ Kant answered, ‘I am really in earnest,’ and went away.
  Afterwards he was sorry.” (Quoted by Stuckenberg, _The Life of Kant_,
  p. 138.) But still it was quite in accordance with Kantian morality
  that the sailors should have starved.

Footnote 96:

  Georg von Gizycki, _Die Ethik David Hume’s_, p. 11.

Footnote 97:

  F. C. Sharp, _Mind_ (1912), p. 388.

Footnote 98:

  Shaftesbury held that Locke swept away too much and failed to allow
  for inborn instincts (or “senses,” as he sometimes called them)
  developing naturally. We now see that he was right.

Footnote 99:

  There is no need to refer to the value of salt, and therefore the
  appreciation of the flavour of salt, to primitive people. Still
  to-day, in Spain, _sal_ (salt) is popularly used for a more or less
  intellectual and moral quality which is highly admired.

Footnote 100:

  Dr. C. S. Myers has touched on this point in _Reports of the Cambridge
  Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. II, part II, chap.
  IV; also “The Taste-Names of Primitive Peoples,” _British Journal of
  Psychology_, June, 1904.

Footnote 101:

  Dr. Georg von Gizycki, _Die Philosophie Shaftesbury’s_ (1876); and the
  same author’s _Die Ethik David Hume’s_ (1878).

Footnote 102:

  It should be added that Croce is himself moving in this direction, and
  in, for instance, _Il Carattere di Totalità della Espressione
  Artistica_ (1917), he recognises the universality of art.

Footnote 103:

  Stanley Hall remarks in criticising Kant’s moral æsthetics: “The
  beauty of virtue is only seen in contemplating it and the act of doing
  it has no beauty to the doer at the moment.” (G. Stanley Hall, “Why
  Kant is Passing,” _American Journal of Psychology_, July, 1912.)

Footnote 104:

  See article on Arbuckle by W. R. Scott in _Mind_, April, 1899.

Footnote 105:

  See a helpful paper by M. F. Libby, “Influence of the Idea of Æsthetic
  Proportion on the Ethics of Shaftesbury,” _American Journal of
  Psychology_, May-October, 1901.

Footnote 106:

  We find fallacious criticism of the “moral sense” down to almost
  recent times, in, for instance, McDougall’s _Social Psychology_, even
  though McDougall, by his insistence on the instinctive basis of
  morality, was himself carrying on the tradition of Shaftesbury and
  Hutcheson. But McDougall also dragged in “some prescribed code of
  conduct,” though he neglected to mention who is to “prescribe” it.

Footnote 107:

  See W. R. Scott, _Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teaching and Position
  in the History of Philosophy_. (1900.)

Footnote 108:

  It is noteworthy, however, that the æsthetic view of morals has had
  advocates, not only among the more latitudinarian Protestants, but in
  Catholicism. A few years ago the Reverend Dr. Kolbe published a book
  on _The Art of Life_, designed to show that just as the sculptor works
  with hammer and chisel to shape a block of marble into a form of
  beauty, so Man, by the power of grace, the illumination of faith, and
  the instrument of prayer, works to transform his soul. But this simile
  of the sculptor, which has appealed so strongly alike to Christian and
  anti-Christian moralists, proceeds, whether or not they knew it, from
  Plotinus, who, in his famous chapter on Beauty, bids us note the
  sculptor. “He cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line
  lighter, this other purer, until a living face has grown upon his
  work. So do you also cut away all that is excessive, straighten all
  that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, make all one
  glow of beauty, and never cease chiselling your statue until the
  godlike splendour shines on you from it, and the perfect goodness
  stands, surely, in the stainless shrine.”

Footnote 109:

  “They who pitched the goal of their aspiration so high knew that the
  paths leading up to it were rough and steep and long,” remarks A. W.
  Benn (_The Greek Philosophers_, 1914, p. 57); “they said ‘the
  beautiful is hard’—hard to judge, hard to win, hard to keep.”

Footnote 110:

  _Der Wille zur Macht_, p. 358.

Footnote 111:

  Mrs. Havelock Ellis, _James Hinton_, 1918.

Footnote 112:

  This has been well seen by Jules de Gaultier: “The joys and the
  sorrows which fill life are, the one and the other,” he says (_La
  Dépendance de la Morale et l’Indépendance des Mœurs_, p. 340),
  “elements of spectacular interest, and without the mixture of both
  that interest would be abolished. To make of the representative worth
  of phenomena their justification in view of a spectacular end alone,
  avoids the objection by which the moral thesis is faced, the fact of
  pain. Pain becomes, on the contrary, the correlative of pleasure, an
  indispensable means for its realization. Such a thesis is in agreement
  with the nature of things, instead of being wounded by their
  existence.”




                              CHAPTER VII
                               CONCLUSION


                                   I


LIFE, we have seen, may be regarded as an art. But we cannot help
seeking to measure, quantitatively if not qualitatively, our mode of
life. We do so, for the most part, instinctively rather than
scientifically. It gratifies us to imagine that, as a race, we have
reached a point on the road of progress beyond that vouchsafed to our
benighted predecessors, and that, as individuals or as nations, it is
given to us, fortunately,—or, rather, through our superior merits,—to
enjoy a finer degree of civilisation than the individuals and the
nations around us. This feeling has been common to most or all branches
of the human race. In the classic world of antiquity they called
outsiders, indiscriminately, “barbarians”—a denomination which took on
an increasingly depreciative sense; and even the lowest savages
sometimes call their own tribe by a word which means “men,” thereby
implying that all other peoples are not worthy of the name.

But in recent centuries there has been an attempt to be more precise, to
give definite values to the feeling within us. All sorts of dogmatic
standards have been set up by which to measure the degree of a people’s
civilisation. The development of demography and social statistics in
civilised countries during the past century should, it has seemed,
render such comparison easy. Yet the more carefully we look into the
nature of these standards the more dubious they become. On the one hand,
civilisation is so complex that no one test furnishes an adequate
standard. On the other hand, the methods of statistics are so variable
and uncertain, so apt to be influenced by circumstance, that it is never
possible to be sure that one is operating with figures of equal weight.

Recently this has been well and elaborately shown by Professor Niceforo,
the Italian sociologist and statistician.[113] It is to be remembered
that Niceforo has himself been a daring pioneer in the measurement of
life. He has applied the statistical method not only to the natural and
social sciences, but even to art, especially literature. When,
therefore, he discusses the whole question of the validity of the
measurement of civilisation, his conclusions deserve respect. They are
the more worthy of consideration since his originality in the
statistical field is balanced by his learning, and it is not easy to
recall any scientific attempts in this field which he has failed to
mention somewhere in his book, if only in a footnote.

The difficulties begin at the outset, and might well serve to bar even
the entrance to discussion. We want to measure the height to which we
have been able to build our “civilisation” towards the skies; we want to
measure the progress we have made in our great dance of life towards the
unknown future goal, and we have no idea what either “civilisation” or
“progress” means.[114] This difficulty is so crucial, for it involves
the very essence of the matter, that it is better to place it aside and
simply go ahead, without deciding, for the present, precisely what the
ultimate significance of the measurements we can make may prove to be.
Quite sufficient other difficulties await us.

There is, first of all, the bewildering number of social phenomena we
can now attempt to measure. Two centuries ago there were no comparable
sets of figures whereby to measure one community against another
community, though at the end of the eighteenth century Boisguillebert
was already speaking of the possibility of constructing a “barometer of
prosperity.” Even the most elementary measurable fact of all, the
numbering of peoples, was carried out so casually and imperfectly and
indirectly, if at all, that its growth and extent could hardly be
compared with profit in any two nations. As the life of a community
increases in stability and orderliness and organisation, registration
incidentally grows elaborate, and thereby the possibility of the
by-product of statistics. This aspect of social life began to become
pronounced during the nineteenth century, and it was in the middle of
that century that Quetelet appeared, by no means as the first to use
social statistics, but the first great pioneer in the manipulation of
such figures in a scientific manner, with a large and philosophical
outlook on their real significance.[115] Since then the possible number
of such means of numerical comparison has much increased. The difficulty
now is to know which are the most truly indicative of real superiority.

But before we consider that, again even at the outset, there is another
difficulty. Our apparently comparable figures are often not really
comparable. Each country or province or town puts forth its own sets of
statistics and each set may be quite comparable within itself. But when
we begin critically to compare one set with another set, all sorts of
fallacies appear. We have to allow, not only for varying accuracy and
completeness, but for difference of method in collecting and registering
the facts, and for all sorts of qualifying circumstances which may exist
at one place or time, and not at other places or times with which we are
seeking comparison.

The word “civilisation” is of recent formation. It came from France, but
even in France in a Dictionary of 1727 it cannot be found, though the
verb _civiliser_ existed as far back as 1694, meaning to polish manners,
to render sociable, to become urbane, one might say, as a result of
becoming urban, of living as a citizen in cities. We have to recognise,
of course, that the idea of civilisation is relative; that any community
and any age has its own civilisation, and its own ideals of
civilisation. But, that assumed, we may provisionally assert—and we
shall be in general accordance with Niceforo—that, in its most
comprehensive sense, the art of civilisation includes the three groups
of _material_ facts, _intellectual_ facts, and _moral_ (with
_political_) facts, so covering all the essential facts in our life.

Material facts, which we are apt to consider the most easily measurable,
include quantity and distribution of population, production of wealth,
the consumption of food and luxuries, the standard of life. Intellectual
facts include both the diffusion and degree of instruction and creative
activity in genius. Moral facts include the prevalence of honesty,
justice, pity, and self-sacrifice, the position of women and the care of
children. They are the most important of all for the quality of a
civilisation. Voltaire pointed out that “pity and justice are the
foundations of society,” and, long previously, Pericles in Thucydides
described the degradation of the Peloponnesians among whom every one
thinks only of his own advantage, and every one believes that his own
negligence of other things will pass unperceived. Plato in his
“Republic” made justice the foundation of harmony in the outer life and
the inner life, while in modern times various philosophers, like
Shadworth Hodgson, have emphasised that doctrine of Plato’s. The whole
art of government comes under this head and the whole treatment of human
personality.

The comparative prevalence of criminality has long been the test most
complacently adopted by those who seek to measure civilisation on its
moral and most fundamental aspect. Crime is merely a name for the most
obvious, extreme, and directly dangerous forms of what we call
immorality—that is to say, departure from the norm in manners and
customs. Therefore the highest civilisation is that with the least
crime. But is it so? The more carefully we look into the matter, the
more difficult it becomes to apply this test. We find that even at the
outset. Every civilised community has its own way of dealing with
criminal statistics and the discrepancies thus introduced are so great
that this fact alone makes comparisons almost impossible. It is scarcely
necessary to point out that varying skill and thoroughness in the
detection of crime, and varying severity in the attitude towards it,
necessarily count for much. Of not less significance is the legislative
activity of the community; the greater the number of laws, the greater
the number of offences against them. If, for instance, Prohibition is
introduced into a country, the amount of delinquency in that country is
enormously increased, but it would be rash to assert that the country
has thereby been sensibly lowered in the scale of civilisation. To avoid
this difficulty, it has been proposed to take into consideration only
what are called “natural crimes”; that is, those everywhere regarded as
punishable. But, even then, there is a still more disconcerting
consideration. For, after all, the criminality of a country is a
by-product of its energy in business and in the whole conduct of
affairs. It is a poisonous excretion, but excretion is the measure of
vital metabolism. There are, moreover, the so-called evolutive social
crimes, which spring from motives not lower but higher than those ruling
the society in which they arise.[116] Therefore, we cannot be sure that
we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some
aspects possesses the highest civilisation.

Let us turn to the intellectual aspect of civilisation. Here we have at
least two highly important and quite fairly measurable facts to
consider: the production of creative genius and the degree and diffusion
of general instruction. If we consider the matter abstractly, it is
highly probable that we shall declare that no civilisation can be worth
while unless it is rich in creative genius and unless the population
generally exhibits a sufficiently cultured level of education out of
which such genius may arise freely and into which the seeds it produces
may fruitfully fall. Yet, what do we find? Alike, whether we go back to
the earliest civilisations we have definite information about or turn to
the latest stages of civilisation we know to-day, we fail to see any
correspondence between these two essential conditions of civilisation.
Among peoples in a low state of culture, among savages generally, such
instruction and education as exists really is generally diffused; every
member of the community is initiated into the tribal traditions; yet, no
observers of such peoples seem to note the emergence of individuals of
strikingly productive genius. That, so far as we know, began to appear,
and, indeed, in marvellous variety and excellence, in Greece, and the
civilisation of Greece (as later the more powerful but coarser
civilisation of Rome) was built up on a broad basis of slavery, which
nowadays—except, of course, when disguised as industry—we no longer
regard as compatible with high civilisation.

Ancient Greece, indeed, may suggest to us to ask whether the genius of a
country be not directly opposed to the temper of the population of that
country, and its “leaders” really be its outcasts. (Some believe that
many, if not all, countries of to-day might serve to suggest the same
question.) If we want to imagine the real spirit of Greece, we may have
to think of a figure with a touch of Ulysses, indeed, but with more of
Thersites.[117] The Greeks who interest us to-day were exceptional
people, usually imprisoned, exiled, or slain by the more truly
representative Greeks of their time. When Plato and the others set forth
so persistently an ideal of wise moderation they were really putting
up—and in vain—a supplication for mercy to a people who, as they had
good ground for realising, knew nothing of wisdom, and scoffed at
moderation, and were mainly inspired by ferocity and intrigue.

To turn to a more recent example, consider the splendid efflorescence of
genius in Russia during the central years of the last century, still a
vivifying influence on the literature and music of the world; yet the
population of Russia had only just been delivered, nominally at least,
from serfdom, and still remained at the intellectual and economic level
of serfs. To-day, education has become diffused in the Western world.
Yet no one would dream of asserting that genius is more prevalent.
Consider the United States, for instance, during the past half-century.
It would surely be hard to find any country, except Germany, where
education is more highly esteemed or better understood, and where
instruction is more widely diffused. Yet, so far as the production of
high original genius is concerned, an old Italian city, like Florence,
with a few thousand inhabitants, had far more to show than all the
United States put together. So that we are at a loss how to apply the
intellectual test to the measurement of civilisation. It would almost
seem that the two essential elements of this test are mutually
incompatible.

Let us fall back on the simple solid fundamental test furnished by the
material aspect of civilisation. Here we are among elementary facts and
the first that began to be measured. Yet our difficulties, instead of
diminishing, rather increase. It is here, too, that we chiefly meet with
what Niceforo has called “the paradoxical symptoms of superiority in
progress,” though I should prefer to call them ambivalent; that is to
say, that, while from one point of view they indicate superiority, from
another, even though some may call it a lower point of view, they appear
to indicate inferiority. This is well illustrated by the test of growth
of population, or the height of the birth-rate, better by the birth-rate
considered in relation to the death-rate, for they cannot be
intelligibly considered apart. The law of Nature is reproduction, and if
an intellectual rabbit were able to study human civilisation he would
undoubtedly regard rapidity of multiplication, in which he has himself
attained so high a degree of proficiency, as evidence of progress in
civilisation. In fact, as we know, there are even human beings who take
the same view, whence we have what has been termed “Rabbitism” in men.
Yet, if anything is clear in this obscure field, it is that the whole
tendency of evolution is towards a diminishing birth-rate.[118] The most
civilised countries everywhere, and the most civilised people in them,
are those with the lowest birth-rate. Therefore, we have here to measure
the height of civilisation by a test which, if carried to an extreme,
would mean the disappearance of civilisation. Another such ambivalent
test is the consumption of luxuries of which alcohol and tobacco are the
types. There is held to be no surer test of civilisation than the
increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcohol
and tobacco are recognisably poisons, so that their consumption has only
to be carried far enough to destroy civilisation altogether. Again, take
the prevalence of suicide. That, without doubt, is a test of height in
civilisation; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and
intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it
snaps. We should be justified in regarding as very questionable a high
civilisation which failed to show a high suicide-rate. Yet suicide is
the sign of failure, misery, and despair. How can we regard the
prevalence of failure, misery, and despair as the mark of high
civilisation?

Thus, whichever of the three groups of facts we attempt to measure, it
appears on examination almost hopelessly complex. We have to try to make
our methods correspondingly complex. Niceforo had invoked co-variation,
or simultaneous and sympathetic changes in various factors of
civilisation; he explains the index number, and he appeals to
mathematics for aid out of the difficulties. He also attempts to
combine, with the help of diagrams, a single picture out of these
awkward and contradictory tests. The example he gives is that of France
during the fifty years preceding the war. It is an interesting example
because there is reason to consider France as, in some respects, the
most highly civilised of countries. What are the chief significant
measurable marks of this superiority? Niceforo selects about a dozen,
and, avoiding the difficult attempt to compare France with other
countries, he confines himself to the more easily practicable task of
ascertaining whether, or in what respects, the general art of
civilisation in France, the movement of the collective life, has been
upward or downward. When the different categories are translated,
according to recognised methods, into index numbers, taking the original
figures from the official “Résumé” of French statistics, it is found
that each line of movement follows throughout the same direction, though
often in zigzag fashion, and never turns back on itself. In this way it
appears that the consumption of coal has been more than doubled, the
consumption of luxuries (sugar, coffee, alcohol) nearly doubled, the
consumption of food per head (as tested by cheese and potatoes) also
increasing. Suicide has increased fifty per cent; wealth has increased
slightly and irregularly; the upward movement of population has been
extremely slight and partly due to immigration; the death-rate has
fallen, though not so much as the birth-rate; the number of persons
convicted of offence by the courts has fallen; the proportion of
illiterate persons has diminished; divorces have greatly increased, and
also the number of syndicalist workers, but these two movements are of
comparative recent growth.

This example well shows what it is possible to do by the most easily
available and generally accepted tests by which to measure the progress
of a community in the art of civilisation. Every one of the tests
applied to France reveals an upward tendency of civilisation, though
some of them, such as the fall in the death-rate, are not strongly
pronounced and much smaller than may be found in many other countries.
Yet, at the same time, while we have to admit that each of these lines
of movement indicates an upward tendency of civilisation, it by no means
follows that we can view them all with complete satisfaction. It may
even be said that some of them have only to be carried further in order
to indicate dissolution and decay. The consumption of luxuries, for
instance, as already noted, is the consumption of poisons. The increase
of wealth means little unless we take into account its distribution. The
increase of syndicalism, while it is a sign of increased independence,
intelligence, and social aspiration among the workers, is also a sign
that the social system is becoming regarded as unsound. So that, while
all these tests may be said to indicate a rising civilisation, they yet
do not invalidate the wise conclusion of Niceforo that a civilisation is
never an exclusive mass of benefits, but a mass of values, positive and
negative, and it may even be said that most often the conquest of a
benefit in one domain of a civilisation brings into another domain of
that civilisation inevitable evils. Long ago, Montesquieu had spoken of
the evils of civilisation and left the question of the value of
civilisation open, while Rousseau, more passionately, had decided
against civilisation.

We see the whole question from another point, yet not incongruously,
when we turn to Professor William McDougall’s Lowell Lectures, “Is
America Safe for Democracy?” since republished under the more general
title “National Welfare and National Decay,” for the author recognises
that the questions he deals with go to the root of all high
civilisation. As he truly observes, civilisation grows constantly more
complex and also less subject to the automatically balancing influence
of national selection, more dependent for its stability on our
constantly regulative and foreseeing control. Yet, while the
intellectual task placed upon us is ever growing heavier, our brains are
not growing correspondingly heavier to bear it. There is, as Remy de
Gourmont often pointed out, no good reason to suppose that we are in any
way innately superior to our savage ancestors, who had at least as good
physical constitutions and at least as large brains. The result is that
the small minority among us which alone can attempt to cope with our
complexly developing civilisation comes to the top by means of what
Arsène Dumont called social capillarity, and McDougall the social
ladder. The small upper stratum is of high quality, the large lower
stratum of poor quality, and with a tendency to feeble-mindedness. It is
to this large lower stratum that, with our democratic tendencies, we
assign the political and other guidance of the community, and it is this
lower stratum which has the higher birth-rate, since with all high
civilisation the normal birth-rate is low.[119] McDougall is not
concerned with the precise measurement of civilisation, and may not be
familiar with the attempts that have been made in that direction. It is
his object to point out the necessity in high civilisation for a
deliberate and purposive art of eugenics, if we would prevent the
eventual shipwreck of civilisation. But we see how his conclusions
emphasise those difficulties in the measurement of civilisation which
Niceforo has so clearly set forth.

McDougall is repeating what many, especially among eugenists, have
previously said. While not disputing the element of truth in the facts
and arguments brought forward from this side, it may be pointed out that
they are often overstated. This has been well argued by Carr-Saunders in
his valuable and almost monumental work, “The Population Problem,” and
his opinion is the more worthy of attention as he is himself a worker in
the cause of eugenics. He points out that the social ladder is, after
all, hard to climb, and that it only removes a few individuals from the
lower social stratum, while among those who thus climb, even though they
do not sink back, regression to the mean is ever in operation so that
they do not greatly enrich in the end the class they have climbed up to.
Moreover, as Carr-Saunders pertinently asks, are we so sure that the
qualities that mark successful climbers—self-assertion, acquisition,
emulation—are highly desirable? “It may even be,” he adds, “that we
might view a diminution in the average strength of some of the qualities
which mark the successful at least with equanimity.” Taken altogether,
it would seem that the differences between social classes may mainly be
explained by environmental influences. There is, however, ground to
recognise a slight intellectual superiority in the upper social class,
apart from environment, and so great is the significance for
civilisation of quality that even when the difference seems slight it
must not be regarded as negligible.[120]

More than half a century ago, indeed, George Sand pointed out that we
must distinguish between the civilisation of _quantity_ and the
civilisation of _quality_. As the great Morgagni had said much earlier,
it is not enough to count, we must evaluate; “observations are not to be
numbered, they are to be weighed.” It is not the biggest things that are
the most civilised things. The largest structures of Hindu or Egyptian
art are outweighed by the temples on the Acropolis of Athens, and
similarly, as Bryce, who had studied the matter so thoroughly, was wont
to insist, it is the smallest democracies which to-day stand highest in
the scale. We have seen that there is much in civilisation which we may
profitably measure, yet, when we seek to scale the last heights of
civilisation, the ladder of our “metrology” comes to grief. “The methods
of the mind are too weak,” as Comte said, “and the Universe is too
complex.” Life, even the life of the civilised community, is an art, and
the too much is as fatal as the too little. We may say of civilisation,
as Renan said of truth, that it lies in a _nuance_. Gumplowicz believed
that civilisation is the beginning of disease; Arsène Dumont thought
that it inevitably held within itself a toxic principle, a principle by
which it is itself in time poisoned. The more rapidly a civilisation
progresses, the sooner it dies for another to arise in its place. That
may not seem to every one a cheerful prospect. Yet, if our civilisation
has failed to enable us to look further than our own egoistic ends, what
has our civilisation been worth?


                                   II


THE attempt to apply measurement to civilisation is, therefore, a
failure. That is, indeed, only another way of saying that civilisation,
the whole manifold web of life, is an art. We may dissect out a vast
number of separate threads and measure them. It is quite worth while to
do so. But the results of such anatomical investigation admit of the
most diverse interpretation, and, at the best, can furnish no adequate
criterion of the worth of a complex living civilisation.

Yet, although there is no precise measurement of the total value of any
large form of life, we can still make an estimate of its value. We can
approach it, that is to say, as a work of art. We can even reach a
certain approximation to agreement in the formation of such estimates.

When Protagoras said that “Man is the measure of all things,” he uttered
a dictum which has been variously interpreted, but from the standpoint
we have now reached, from which Man is seen to be preëminently an
artist, it is a monition to us that we cannot to the measurement of life
apply our instruments of precision, and cut life down to their graduated
marks. They have, indeed, their immensely valuable uses, but it is
strictly as instruments and not as ends of living or criteria of the
worth of life. It is in the failure to grasp this that the human tragedy
has often consisted, and for over two thousand years the dictum of
Protagoras has been held up for the pacification of that tragedy, for
the most part, in vain. Protagoras was one of those “Sophists” who have
been presented to our contempt in absurd traditional shapes ever since
Plato caricatured them—though it may well be that some, as, it has been
suggested, Gorgias, may have given colour to the caricature—and it is
only to-day that it is possible to declare that we must place the names
of Protagoras, of Prodicus, of Hippias, even of Gorgias, beside those of
Herodotus, Pindar, and Pericles.[121]

It is in the sphere of morals that the conflict has often been most
poignant. I have already tried to indicate how revolutionary is the
change which the thoughts of many have had to undergo. This struggle of
a living and flexible and growing morality against a morality that is
rigid and inflexible and dead has at some periods of human history been
almost dramatically presented. It was so in the seventeenth century
around the new moral discoveries of the Jesuits; and the Jesuits were
rewarded by becoming almost until to-day a by-word for all that is
morally poisonous and crooked and false—for all that is “Jesuitical.”
There was once a great quarrel between the Jesuits and the Jansenists—a
quarrel which is scarcely dead yet, for all Christendom took sides in
it—and the Jansenists had the supreme good fortune to entrap on their
side a great man of genius whose onslaught on the Jesuits, “Les
Provinciales,” is even still supposed by many people to have settled the
question. They are allowed so to suppose because no one now reads “Les
Provinciales.” But Remy de Gourmont, who was not only a student of
unread books but a powerfully live thinker, read “Les Provinciales,” and
found, as he set forth in “Le Chemin de Velours,” that it was the
Jesuits who were more nearly in the right, more truly on the road of
advance, than Pascal. As Gourmont showed by citation, there were Jesuit
doctrines put forth by Pascal with rhetorical irony as though the mere
statement sufficed to condemn them, which need only to be liberated from
their irony, and we might nowadays add to them. Thus spake Zarathustra.
Pascal was a geometrician who (though he, indeed, once wrote in his
“Pensées”: “There is no general rule”) desired to deal with the
variable, obscure, and unstable complexities of human action as though
they were problems in mathematics. But the Jesuits, while it is true
that they still accepted the existence of absolute rules, realised that
rules must be made adjustable to the varying needs of life. They thus
became the pioneers of many conceptions which are accepted in modern
practice.[122] Their doctrine of invincible ignorance was a discovery of
that kind, forecasting some of the opinions now held regarding
responsibility. But in that age, as Gourmont pointed out, “to proclaim
that there might be a sin or an offence without guilty parties was an
act of intellectual audacity, as well as scientific probity.” Nowadays
the Jesuits (together, it is interesting to note, with their baroque
architecture) are coming into credit, and casuistry again seems
reputable. To establish that there can be no single inflexible moral
code for all individuals has been, and indeed remains, a difficult and
delicate task, yet the more profoundly one considers it, the more
clearly it becomes visible that what once seemed a dead and rigid code
of morality must more and more become a living act of casuistry. The
Jesuits, because they had a glimmer of this truth, represented, as
Gourmont concluded, the honest and most acceptable part of Christianity,
responding to the necessities of life, and were rendering a service to
civilisation which we should never forget.

There are some who may not very cordially go to the Jesuits as an
example of the effort to liberate men from the burden of a subservience
to rigid little rules, towards the unification of life as an active
process, however influential they may be admitted to be among the
pioneers of that movement. Yet we may turn in what direction we will, we
shall perpetually find the same movement under other disguises. There
is, for instance, Mr. Bertrand Russell, who is, for many, the most
interesting and stimulating thinker to be found in England to-day. He
might scarcely desire to be associated with the Jesuits. Yet he also
seeks to unify life and even in an essentially religious spirit. His way
of putting this, in his “Principles of Social Reconstruction,” is to
state that man’s impulses may be divided into those that are creative
and those that are possessive, that is to say, concerned with
acquisition. The impulses of the second class are a source of inner and
outer disharmony and they involve conflict; “it is preoccupation with
possessions more than anything else that prevents men from living freely
and nobly”; it is the creative impulse in which real life consists, and
“the typical creative impulse is that of the artist.” Now this
conception (which was that Plato assigned to the “guardians” in his
communistic State) may be a little too narrowly religious for those
whose position in life renders a certain “preoccupation with
possessions” inevitable; it is useless to expect us all to become, at
present, fakirs and Franciscans, “counting nothing one’s own, save only
one’s harp.” But in regarding the creative impulses as the essential
part of life, and as typically manifested in the form of art, Bertrand
Russell is clearly in the great line of movement with which we have been
throughout concerned. We must only at the same time—as we shall see
later—remember that the distinction between the “creative” and the
“possessive” impulses, although convenient, is superficial. In creation
we have not really put aside the possessive instinct, we may even have
intensified it. For it has been reasonably argued that it is precisely
the deep urgency of the impulse to possess which stirs the creative
artist. He creates because that is the best way, or the only way, of
gratifying his passionate desire to possess. Two men desire to possess a
woman, and one seizes her, the other writes a “Vita Nuova” about her;
they have both gratified the instinct of possession, and the second, it
may be, most satisfyingly and most lastingly. So that—apart from the
impossibility, and even the undesirability, of dispensing with the
possessive instinct—it may be well to recognise that the real question
is one of values in possession. We must needs lay up treasure; but the
fine artist in living, so far as may be, lays up his treasure in Heaven.

In recent time some alert thinkers have been moved to attempt to measure
the art of civilisation by less impossibly exact methods than of old, by
the standard of art, and even of fine art. In a remarkable book on “The
Revelations of Civilisation”—published about three years before the
outbreak of that Great War which some have supposed to date a
revolutionary point in civilisation—Dr. W. M. Flinders Petrie, who has
expert knowledge of the Egyptian civilisation which was second to none
in its importance for mankind, has set forth a statement of the cycles
to which all civilisations are subject. Civilisation, he points out, is
essentially an intermittent phenomenon. We have to compare the various
periods of civilisation and observe what they have in common in order to
find the general type. “It should be examined like any other action of
Nature; its recurrences should be studied, and all the principles which
underlie its variations should be defined.” Sculpture, he believes, may
be taken as a criterion, not because it is the most important, but
because it is the most convenient and easily available, test. We may say
with the old Etruscans that every race has its Great Year—it sprouts,
flourishes, decays, and dies. The simile, Petrie adds, is the more
precise because there are always irregular fluctuations of the seasonal
weather. There have been eight periods of civilisation, he reckons, in
calculable human history. We are now near the end of the eighth, which
reached its climax about the year 1800; since then there have been
merely archaistic revivals, the value of which may be variously
interpreted. He scarcely thinks we can expect another period of
civilisation to arise for several centuries at least. The average length
of a period of civilisation is 1330 years. Ours Petrie dates from about
A.D. 450. It has always needed a fresh race to produce a new period of
civilisation. In Europe, between A.D. 300 and 600, some fifteen new
races broke in from north and east for slow mixture. “If,” he concluded,
“the source of every civilisation has lain in race mixture, it may be
that eugenics will, in some future civilisation, carefully segregate
fine races, and prohibit continual mixture, until they have a distinct
type, which will start a new civilisation when transplanted. The future
progress of Man may depend as much on isolation to establish a type as
on fusion of types when established.”

At the time when Flinders Petrie was publishing his suggestive book, Dr.
Oswald Spengler, apparently in complete ignorance of it, was engaged in
a far more elaborate work, not actually published till after the War, in
which an analogous conception of the growth and decay of civilisations
was put forward in a more philosophic way, perhaps more debatable on
account of the complex detail in which the conception was worked
out.[123] Petrie had considered the matter in a summary empiric manner
with close reference to the actual forces viewed broadly. Spengler’s
manner is narrower, more subjective, and more metaphysical. He
distinguishes—though he also recognises eight periods—between “culture”
and “civilisation.” It is the first that is really vital and profitable;
a “civilisation” is the decaying later stage of a “culture,” its
inevitable fate. Herein it reaches its climax. “Civilisations are the
most externalised and artistic conditions of which the higher embodiment
of Man is capable. They are a spiritual senility, an end which with
inner necessity is reached again and again.”[124] The transition from
“culture” to “civilisation” in ancient times took place, Spengler holds,
in the fourth century, and in the modern West in the nineteenth. But,
like Petrie, though more implicitly, he recognises the prominent place
of the art activities in the whole process, and he explicitly emphasises
the interesting way in which those activities which are generally
regarded as of the nature of art are interwoven with others not so
generally regarded.


                                  III


HOWEVER we look at it, we see that Man, whether he works individually or
collectively, may conveniently be regarded, in the comprehensive sense,
as an artist, a bad artist, maybe, for the most part, but still an
artist. His civilisation—if that is the term we choose to apply to the
total sum of his group activities—is always an art, or a complex of
arts. It is an art that is to be measured, or left immeasurable. That
question, we have seen, we may best leave open. Another question that
might be put is easy to deal with more summarily: What is Art?

We may deal with it summarily because it is an ultimate question and
there can be no final answer to ultimate questions. As soon as we begin
to ask such questions, as soon as we begin to look at any phenomenon as
an end in itself, we are on the perilous slope of metaphysics, where no
agreement can, or should be, possible. The question of measurement was
plausible, and needed careful consideration. What is Art? is a question
which, if we are wise, we shall deal with as Pilate dealt with that like
question: What is Truth?

How futile the question is, we may realise when we examine the book
which Tolstoy in old age wrote to answer it. Here is a man who was
himself, in his own field, one of the world’s supreme artists. He could
not fail to say one or two true things, as when he points out that “all
human existence is full of art, from cradle songs and dances to the
offices of religion and public ceremonial—it is all equally art. Art, in
the large sense, impregnates our whole life.” But on the main point all
that Tolstoy can do is to bring together a large miscellaneous
collection of definitions—without seeing that as individual opinions
they all have their rightness—and then to add one of his own, not much
worse, nor much better, than any of the others. Thereto he appends some
of his own opinions on artists, whence it appears that Hugo, Dickens,
George Eliot, Dostoievsky, Maupassant, Millet, Bastien-Lepage, and Jules
Breton—and not always they—are the artists whom he considers great; it
is not a list to treat with contempt, but he goes on to pour contempt on
those who venerate Sophocles and Aristophanes and Dante and Shakespeare
and Milton and Michelangelo and Bach and Beethoven and Manet. “My own
artistic works,” he adds, “I rank among bad art, excepting a few short
stories.” It seems a reduction of the whole question, What is Art? to
absurdity, if one may be permitted to say so at a time when Tolstoy
would appear to be the pioneer of some of our most approved modern
critics.

Thus we see the reason why all the people who come forward to define
art—each with his own little measuring-rod quite different from
everybody else’s—inevitably make themselves ridiculous. It is true they
are all of them right. That is just why they are ridiculous: each has
mistaken the one drop of water he has measured for the whole ocean. Art
cannot be defined because it is infinite. It is no accident that poetry,
which has so often seemed the typical art, means a _making_. The artist
is a maker. Art is merely a name we are pleased to give to what can only
be the whole stream of action which—in order to impart to it selection
and an unconscious or even conscious aim—is poured through the nervous
circuit of a human animal or some other animal having a more or less
similar nervous organisation. For a cat is an artist as well as a man,
and some would say more than a man, while a bee is not only an obvious
artist, but perhaps even the typical natural and unconscious artist.
There is no defining art; there is only the attempt to distinguish
between good art and bad art.

Thus it is that I find no escape from the Aristotelian position of
Shakespeare that

               “Nature is made better by no mean
               But Nature makes that mean....
                               This is an art
               Which does mend Nature, change it rather, but
               The art itself is Nature.”

And that this conception is Aristotelian, even the essential Greek
conception, is no testimony to Shakespeare’s scholarship. It is merely
the proof that here we are in the presence of one of these great
ultimate facts of the world which cannot but be sensitively perceived by
the finest spirits, however far apart in time and space. Aristotle,
altogether in the same spirit as Shakespeare, insisted that the works of
man’s making, a State, for example, are natural, though Art partly
completes what Nature is herself sometimes unable to bring to
perfection, and even then that man is only exercising methods which,
after all, are those of Nature. Nature needs Man’s art in order to
achieve many natural things, and Man, in fulfilling that need, is only
following the guidance of Nature in seeming to make things which are all
the time growing by themselves.[125] Art is thus scarcely more than the
natural midwife of Nature.

There is, however, one distinguishing mark of Art which at this stage,
as we conclude our survey, must be clearly indicated. It has been
subsumed, as the acute reader will not have failed to note, throughout.
But it has, for the most part, been deliberately left implicit. It has
constantly been assumed, that is to say, that Art is the sum of all the
active energies of Mankind. We must in this matter of necessity follow
Aristotle, who in his “Politics” spoke, as a matter of course, of all
those who practice “medicine, gymnastics, and the arts in general” as
“artists.” Art is the moulding force of every culture that Man during
his long course has at any time or place produced. It is the reality of
what we imperfectly term “morality.” It is all human creation.

Yet creation, in the active visible constructive sense, is not the whole
of Man. It is not even the whole of what Man has been accustomed to call
God. When, by what is now termed a process of Narcissism, Man created
God in his own image, as we may instructively observe in the first
chapter of the Hebrew Book of Genesis, he assigned to him six parts of
active creational work, one part of passive contemplation of that work.
That one seventh part—and an immensely important part—has not come under
our consideration. In other words, we have been looking at Man the
artist, not at Man the æsthetician.

There was more than one reason why these two aspects of human faculty
were held clearly apart throughout our discussion. Not only is it even
less possible to agree about æsthetics, where the variety of individual
judgment is rightly larger, than about art (ancient and familiar is the
saying, _De gustibus_—), but to confuse art and æsthetics leads us into
lamentable confusion. We may note this in the pioneers of the modern
revival of what Sidgwick called “æsthetic Intuitionism” in the
eighteenth century, and especially in Hutcheson, though Hutcheson’s work
is independent of consistency, which he can scarcely even be said to
have sought. They never sufficiently emphasised the distinction between
art and æsthetics, between, that is to say, what we may possibly, if we
like, call the dynamic and the static aspects of human action. Herein is
the whole difference between work, for art is essentially work, and the
spectacular contemplation of work, which æsthetics essentially is. The
two things are ultimately one, but alike in the special arts and in that
art of life commonly spoken of as morals, where we are not usually
concerned with ultimates, the two must be clearly held apart. From the
point of view of art we are concerned with the internal impulse to guide
the activities in the lines of good work. It is only when we look at the
work of art from the outside, whether in the more specialised arts or in
the art of life, that we are concerned with æsthetic contemplation, that
activity of vision which creates beauty, however we may please to define
beauty, and even though we see it so widely as to be able to say with
Remy de Gourmont: “Wherever life is, there is beauty,”[126] provided,
one may add, that there is the æsthetic contemplation in which it must
be mirrored.

It is in relation with art, not with æsthetics, it may be noted in
passing, that we are concerned with morals. That was once a question of
seemingly such immense import that men were willing to spiritually slay
each other over it. But it is not a question at all from the standpoint
which has here from the outset been taken. Morals, for us to-day, is a
species of which art is the genus. It is an art, and like all arts it
necessarily has its own laws. We are concerned with the art of morals:
we cannot speak of art _and_ morals. To take “art” and “morals” and
“religion,” and stir them up, however vigorously, into an indigestible
plum-pudding, as Ruskin used to do, is no longer possible.[127] This is
a question which—like so many other furiously debated questions—only
came into existence because the disputants on both sides were ignorant
of the matter they were disputing about. It is no longer to be taken
seriously, though it has its interest because the dispute has so often
recurred, not only in recent days, but equally among the Greeks of
Plato’s days. The Greeks had a kind of æsthetic morality. It was
instinctive with them, and that is why it is so significant for us. But
they seldom seem to have succeeded in thinking æsthetic problems clearly
out. The attitude of their philosophers towards many of the special
arts, even the arts in which they were themselves supreme, to us seem
unreasonable. While they magnified the art, they often belittled the
artist, and felt an aristocratic horror for anything that assimilated a
man to a craftsman; for craftsman meant for them vulgarian. Plato
himself was all for goody-goody literature and in our days would be an
enthusiastic patron of Sunday-school stories. He would forbid any
novelist to represent a good man as ever miserable or a wicked man as
ever happy. The whole tendency of the discussion in the third book of
the “Republic” is towards the conclusion that literature must be
occupied exclusively with the representation of the virtuous man,
provided, of course, that he was not a slave or a craftsman, for to such
no virtue worthy of imitation should ever be attributed. Towards the end
of his long life, Plato remained of the same opinion; in the second book
of “The Laws” it is with the maxims of virtue that he will have the poet
solely concerned. The reason for this ultra-puritanical attitude, which
was by no means in practice that of the Greeks themselves, seems not
hard to divine. The very fact that their morality was temperamentally
æsthetic instinctively impelled them, when they were thinking
philosophically, to moralise art generally; they had not yet reached the
standpoint which would enable them to see that art might be consonant
with morality without being artificially pressed into a narrow moral
mould. Aristotle was conspicuously among those, if not the first, who
took a broader and saner view. In opposition to the common Greek view
that the object of art is to teach morals, Aristotle clearly expressed
the totally different view that poetry in the wide sense—the special art
which he and the Greeks generally were alone much concerned to
discuss—is an emotional delight, having pleasure as its direct end, and
only indirectly a moral end by virtue of its cathartic effects. Therein
he reached an æsthetic standpoint, yet it was so novel that he could not
securely retain it and was constantly falling back towards the old moral
conception of art.[128]

We may call it a step in advance. Yet it was not a complete statement of
the matter. Indeed, it established the unreal conflict between two
opposing conceptions, each unsound because incomplete, which loose
thinkers have carried on ever since. To assert that poetry exists for
morals is merely to assert that one art exists for the sake of another
art, which at the best is rather a futile statement, while, so far as it
is really accepted, it cannot fail to crush the art thus subordinated.
If we have the insight to see that an art has its own part of life, we
shall also see that it has its own intrinsic morality, which cannot be
the morality of morals or of any other art than itself. We may here
profitably bear in mind that antinomy between morals and morality on
which Jules de Gaultier has often insisted. The Puritan’s strait-jacket
shows the vigour of his external morals; it also bears witness to the
lack of internal morality which necessitates that control. Again, on the
other hand, it is argued that art gives pleasure. Very true. Even the
art of morals gives pleasure. But to assert that therein lies its sole
end and aim is an altogether feeble and inadequate conclusion, unless we
go further and proceed to inquire what “pleasure” means. If we fail to
take that further step, it remains a conclusion which may be said to
merge into the conclusion that art is aimless; that, rather, its aim is
to be aimless, and so to lift us out of the struggle and turmoil of
life. That was the elaborately developed argument of Schopenhauer:
art—whether in music, in philosophy, in painting, in poetry—is useless;
“to be useless is the mark of genius, its patent of nobility. All other
works of men are there for the preservation or alleviation of our
existence; but this alone not; it alone is there for its own sake; and
is in this sense to be regarded as the flower, or the pure essence, of
existence. That is why in its enjoyment our heart rises, for we are
thereby lifted above the heavy earthen atmosphere of necessity.”[129]
Life is a struggle of the will; but in art the will has become
objective, fit for pure contemplation, and genius consists in an eminent
aptitude for contemplation. The ordinary man, said Schopenhauer, plods
through the dark world with his lantern turned on the things he wants;
the man of genius sees the world by the light of the sun. In modern
times Bergson adopted that view of Schopenhauer’s, with a terminology of
his own, and all he said under this head may be regarded as a charming
fantasia on the Schopenhauerian theme: “Genius is the most complete
objectivity.” Most of us, it seems to Bergson, never see reality at all;
we only see the labels we have fixed on things to mark for us their
usefulness.[130] A veil is interposed between us and the reality of
things. The artist, the man of genius, raises this veil and reveals
Nature to us. He is naturally endowed with a detachment from life, and
so possesses as it were a virginal freshness in seeing, hearing, or
thinking. That is “intuition,” an instinct that has become
disinterested. “Art has no other object but to remove the practically
useful symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, so
as to bring us face to face with reality itself.”[131] Art would thus be
fulfilling its function the more completely the further it removed us
from ordinary life, or, more strictly, from any personal interest in
life. That was also Remy de Gourmont’s opinion, though I do not know how
far he directly derived it from Schopenhauer. “If we give to art a moral
aim,” he wrote, “it ceases to exist, for it ceases to be useless. Art is
incompatible with a moral or religious aim. It is unintelligible to the
crowd because the crowd is not disinterested and knows only the
principle of utility.” But the difficulty of making definite affirmation
in this field, the perpetual need to allow for _nuances_ which often on
the surface involve contradictions, is seen when we find that so great
an artist as Einstein—for so we may here fairly call him—and one so
little of a formal æsthetician, agrees with Schopenhauer. “I agree with
Schopenhauer,” he said to Moszkowski, “that one of the most powerful
motives that attract people to science and art is the longing to escape
from everyday life, with its painful coarseness and unconsoling
barrenness, and to break the fetters of their own ever-changing desires.
Man seeks to form a simplified synoptical view of the world conformable
to his own nature, to overcome the world by replacing it with his
picture. The painter, the poet, the philosopher, the scientist, each
does this in his own way. He transfers the centre of his emotional life
to this picture, to find a surer haven of peace than the sphere of his
turbulent personal experience offers.” That is a sound statement of the
facts, yet it is absurd to call such an achievement “useless.”

Perhaps, however, what philosophers have really meant when they have
said that art (it is the so-called fine arts only that they have in
mind) is useless, is that _an art must not be consciously pursued for
any primary useful end outside itself_. That is true. It is even true of
morals, that is to say the art of living. To live in the conscious
primary pursuit of a “useful” end—such as one of the fine arts—outside
living itself is to live badly; to declare, like André Gide, that
“outside the doctrine of ‘Art for Art’ I know not where to find any
reason for living,” may well be the legitimate expression of a personal
feeling, but, unless understood in the sense here taken, it is not a
philosophical statement which can be brought under the species of
eternity, being, indeed, one of those confusions of substances which
are, metaphysically, damnable. So, again, in the art of science: the
most useful applications of science have sprung from discoveries that
were completely useless for purposes outside pure science, so far as the
aim of the discoverer went, or even so far as he ever knew. If he had
been bent on “useful” ends, he would probably have made no discovery at
all. But the bare statement that “art is useless” is so vague as to be
really meaningless, if not inaccurate and misleading.

Therefore, Nietzsche was perhaps making a profound statement when he
declared that art is the great stimulus to life; it produces joy as an
aid to life; it possesses a usefulness, that is to say, which transcends
its direct aim. The artist is one who sees life as beauty, and art is
thus fulfilling its function the more completely, the more deeply it
enables us to penetrate into life. It seems, however, that Nietzsche
insufficiently guarded his statement. Art for art’s sake, said
Nietzsche, is “a dangerous principle,” like truth for truth’s sake and
goodness for goodness’ sake. Art, knowledge, and morality are simply
means, he declared, and valuable for their “life-promoting tendency.”
(There is here a pioneering suggestion of the American doctrine of
Pragmatism, according to which how a thing “works” is the test of its
validity, but Nietzsche can by no means be counted a Pragmatist.) To
look thus at the matter was certainly, with Schopenhauer and with
Gourmont, to put aside the superficial moral function of art, and to
recognise in it a larger sociological function. It was on the
sociological function of art that Guyau, who was so penetrating and
sympathetic a thinker, insisted in his book, posthumously published in
1889, “L’Art au Point de Vue Sociologique.” He argued that art, while
remaining independent, is at the foundation one with morals and with
religion. He believed in a profound unity of all these terms: life,
morality, society, religion, art. “Art, in a word, is life.” So that, as
he pointed out, there is no conflict between the theory of art for art,
properly interpreted, and the theory that assigns to art a moral and
social function. It is clear that Guyau was on the right road, although
his statement was confusingly awkward in form. He deformed his
statement, moreover, through his perpetual tendency to insist on the
spontaneously socialising organisation of human groups—a tendency which
has endeared him to all who adopt an anarchist conception of
society—and, forgetting that he had placed morals only at the depth of
art and not on the surface, he commits himself to the supremely false
dictum: “Art is, above everything, a phenomenon of sociability,” and the
like statements, far too closely resembling the doctrinary
pronouncements of Tolstoy. For sociability is an indirect end of art: it
cannot be its direct aim. We are here not far from the ambiguous
doctrine that art is “expression,” for “expression” may be too easily
confused with “communication.”[132]

All these eminent philosophers—though they meant something which so far
as it went was true—have failed to produce a satisfying statement
because they have none of them understood how to ask the question which
they were trying to answer. They failed to understand that morals is
just as much an art as any other vital psychic function of man; they
failed to see that, though art must be free from the dominance of
morals, it by no means followed that it has no morality of its own, if
morality involves the organised integrity which all vital phenomena must
possess; they failed to realise that, since the arts are simply the sum
of the active functions which spring out of the single human organism,
we are not called upon to worry over any imaginary conflicts between
functions which are necessarily harmonious because they are all one at
the root. We cannot too often repeat the pregnant maxim of Bacon that
the right question is the half of knowledge. Here we might almost say
that it is the whole of knowledge. It seems, therefore, unnecessary to
pursue the subject further. He who cannot himself pursue it further had
best leave it alone.

But when we enter the æsthetic sphere we are no longer artists. That,
indeed, is inevitable if we regard the arts as the sum of all the active
functions of the organism. Rickert, with his methodical vision of the
world,—for he insists that we must have some sort of system,—has
presented what he regards as a reasonable scheme in a tabular form at
the end of the first volume of his “System.”[133] He divides Reality
into two great divisions: the monistic and asocial Contemplative and the
pluralistic and social Active. To the first belong the spheres of Logic,
Æsthetics, and Mysticism, with their values, truth, beauty, impersonal
holiness; to the second, Ethics, Erotics, the Philosophy of Religion,
with their values, morality, happiness, personal holiness. This view of
the matter is the more significant as Rickert stands aside from the
tradition represented by Nietzsche and returns to the Kantian current,
enriched, indeed, and perhaps not quite consistently, by Goethe. It
seems probable that all Rickert’s active attitudes towards reality may
fairly be called Art, and all the contemplative attitudes, Æsthetics.

There is in fact nothing novel in the distinction which underlies this
classification, and it has been recognised ever since the days of
Baumgarten, the commonly accepted founder of modern æsthetics, not to go
further back.[134] Art is the active practical exercise of a single
discipline: æsthetics is the philosophic appreciation of any or all the
arts. Art is concerned with the more or less unconscious creation of
beauty: æsthetics is concerned with its discovery and contemplation.
Æsthetics is the metaphysical side of all productive living.


                                   IV


THIS complete unlikeness on the surface between art and æsthetics—for
ultimately and fundamentally they are at one—has to be emphasised, for
the failure to distinguish them has led to confusion and verbosity. The
practice of morals, we must ever remember, is not a matter of æsthetics;
it is a matter of art. It has not, nor has any other art, an immediate
and obvious relationship to the creation of beauty.[135] What the artist
in life, as in any other art, is directly concerned to express is not
primarily beauty; it is much more likely to seem to him to be truth (it
is interesting to note that Einstein, so much an artist in thought,
insists that he is simply concerned with truth), and what he produces
may seem at first to all the world, and even possibly to himself, to be
ugly. It is so in the sphere of morals. For morals is still concerned
with the possessive instinct, not with the creation of beauty, with the
needs and the satisfaction of the needs, with the industrial and
economic activities, with the military activities to which they fatally
tend. But the æsthetic attitude, as Gaultier expresses it, is the
radiant smile on the human face which in its primitive phases was
anatomically built up to subserve crude vital needs; as he elsewhere
more abstractly expresses it, “Beauty is an attitude of sensibility.” It
is the task of æsthetics, often a slow and painful task, to see
art—including the art of Nature, some would insist—as beauty. That, it
has to be added, is no mean task. It is, on the contrary, essential. It
is essential to sweep away in art all that is ultimately found to be
fundamentally ugly, whether by being, at the one end, distastefully
pretty, or, at the other, hopelessly crude. For ugliness produces nausea
of the stomach and sets the teeth on edge. It does so literally, not
metaphorically. Ugliness, since it interferes with digestion, since it
disturbs the nervous system, impairs the forces of life. For when we are
talking æsthetics (as the word itself indicates) we are ultimately
talking physiologically. Even our metaphysics—if it is to have any
meaning for us—must have a physical side. Unless we hold that fact in
mind, we shall talk astray and are likely to say little that is to the
point.

Art has to be seen as beauty and it is the function of æsthetics so to
see it. How slowly and painfully the function works every one must know
by observing the æsthetic judgments of other people, if not by recalling
his own experiences. I know in my own experience how hardly and
subconsciously this process works. In the matter of pictures, for
instance, I have found throughout life, from Rubens in adolescence to
Cézanne in recent years, that a revelation of the beauty of a painter’s
work which, on the surface, is alien or repulsive to one’s sensibility,
came only after years of contemplation, and then most often by a sudden
revelation, in a flash, by a direct intuition of the beauty of some
particular picture which henceforth became the clue to all the painter’s
work. It is a process comparable to that which is in religion termed
“conversion,” and, indeed, of like nature.[136] So also it is in
literature. And in life? We are accustomed to suppose that a moral
action is much easier to judge than a picture of Cézanne. We do not
dream of bringing the same patient and attentive, as it were æsthetic,
spirit to life as we bring to painting. Perhaps we are right,
considering what poor bungling artists most of us are in living. For
“art is easy, life is difficult,” as Liszt used to say. The reason, of
course, is that the art of living differs from the external arts in that
we cannot exclude the introduction of alien elements into its texture.
Our art of living, when we achieve it, is of so high and fine a quality
precisely because it so largely lies in harmoniously weaving into the
texture elements that we have not ourselves chosen, or that, having
chosen, we cannot throw aside. Yet it is the attitude of the spectators
that helps to perpetuate that bungling.

It is Plotinus whom we may fairly regard as the founder of Æsthetics in
the philosophic sense, and it was as formulated by Plotinus, though this
we sometimes fail to recognise, that the Greek attitude in these
matters, however sometimes modified, has come down to us.[137] We may be
forgiven for not always recognising it, because it is rather strange
that it should be so. It is strange, that is to say, that the æsthetic
attitude, which we regard as so emphatically Greek, should have been
left for formulation until the Greek world had passed away, that it
should not have been Plato, but an Alexandrian, living in Rome seven
centuries after him, who set forth what seems to us a distinctively
Platonic view of life.[138] The Greeks, indeed, seem to have recognised,
apart from the lower merely “ethical” virtues of habit and custom, the
higher “intellectual” virtues which were deliberately planned, and so of
the nature of art. But Plotinus definitely recognised the æsthetic
contemplation of Beauty, together with the One and the Good, as three
aspects of the Absolute.[139] He thus at once placed æsthetics on the
highest possible pedestal, beside religion and morals; he placed it
above art, or as comprehending art, for he insisted that Contemplation
is an active quality, so that all human creative energy may be regarded
as the by-play of contemplation. That was to carry rather far the
function of æsthetic contemplation. But it served to stamp for ever, on
the minds of all sensitive to that stamp who came after, the definite
realisation of the sublimest, the most nearly divine, of human
aptitudes. Every great spirit has furnished the measure of his greatness
by the more or less completeness in which at the ultimate outpost of his
vision over the world he has attained to that active contemplation of
life as a spectacle which Shakespeare finally embodied in the figure of
Prospero.

It may be interesting to note in passing that, psychologically
considered, all æsthetic enjoyment among the ordinary population,
neither artists in the narrow sense nor philosophers, still necessarily
partakes to some degree of genuine æsthetic contemplation, and that such
contemplation seems to fall roughly into two classes, to one or other of
which every one who experiences æsthetic enjoyment belongs. These have,
I believe, been defined by Müller-Freienfels as that of the “Zuschauer,”
who feels that he is looking on, and that of the “Mitspieler,” who feels
that he is joining in; on the one side, we may say, he who knows he is
looking on, the _spectator_, and on the other he who imaginatively joins
in, the _participator_. The people of the first group are those, it may
be, in whom the sensory nervous apparatus is highly developed and they
are able to adopt the most typical and complete æsthetic attitude; the
people of the other group would seem to be most developed on the motor
nervous side and they are those who themselves desire to be artists.
Groos, who has developed the æsthetic side of “miterleben,” is of this
temperament, and he had at first supposed that every one was like him in
this respect.[140] Plotinus, who held that contemplation embraced
activity, must surely have been of this temperament. Coleridge was
emphatically of the other temperament, _spectator haud particeps_, as he
himself said. But, at all events in northern countries, that is probably
not the more common temperament. The æsthetic attitude of the crowds who
go to watch football matches is probably much more that of the
imaginative participator than of the pure spectator.

There is no occasion here to trace the history of æsthetic
contemplation. Yet it may be worth while to note that it was clearly
present to the mind of the fine thinker and great moralist who brought
the old Greek idea back into the modern world. In the “Philosophical
Regimen” (as it has been named) brought to light a few years ago, in
which Shaftesbury set down his self-communings, we find him writing in
one place: “In the morning am I to see anew? Am I to be present yet
longer and content? I am not weary, nor ever can be, of such a
spectacle, such a theatre, such a presence, nor at acting whatever part
such a master assigns me. Be it ever so long, I stay and am willing to
see on whilst my sight continues sound; whilst I can be a spectator,
such as I ought to be; whilst I can see reverently, justly, with
understanding and applause. And when I see no more, I retire, not
disdainfully, but in reverence to the spectacle and master, giving
thanks.... Away, man! rise, wipe thy mouth, throw up thy napkin and have
done. A bellyful (they say) is as good as a feast.”

That may seem but a simple and homely way of stating the matter, though
a few years later, in 1727, a yet greater spirit than Shaftesbury,
Swift, combining the conception of life as æsthetic contemplation with
that of life as art, wrote in a letter, “Life is a tragedy, wherein we
sit as spectators awhile, and then act our own part in it.” If we desire
a more systematically philosophical statement we may turn to the
distinguished thinker of to-day who in many volumes has most powerfully
presented the same essential conception, with all its implications, of
life as a spectacle. “Tirez le rideau; la farce est jouée.” That
Shakespearian utterance, which used to be attributed to Rabelais on his
death-bed, and Swift’s comment on life, and Shaftesbury’s intimate
meditation, would seem to be—on the philosophic and apart from the moral
side of life—entirely in the spirit that Jules de Gaultier has so
elaborately developed. The world is a spectacle, and all the men and
women the actors on its stage. Enjoy the spectacle while you will,
whether comedy or tragedy, enter into the spirit of its manifold
richness and beauty, yet take it not too seriously, even when you leave
it and the curtains are drawn that conceal it for ever from your eyes,
grown weary at last.

Such a conception, indeed, was already to be seen in a deliberately
philosophical form in Schopenhauer (who, no doubt, influenced Gaultier)
and, later, Nietzsche, especially the early Nietzsche, although he never
entirely abandoned it; his break with Wagner, however, whom he had
regarded as the typical artist, led him to become suddenly rather
critical of art and artists, as we see in “Human-all-too-Human,” which
immediately followed “Wagner in Bayreuth,” and he became inclined to
look on the artist, in the narrow sense, as only “a splendid relic of
the past,” not, indeed, altogether losing his earlier conception, but
disposed to believe that “the scientific man is the finest development
of the artistic man.” In his essay on Wagner he had presented art as the
essentially metaphysical activity of Man, here following Schopenhauer.
“Every genius,” well said Schopenhauer, “is a great child; he gazes out
at the world as something strange, a spectacle, and therefore with
purely objective interest.” That is to say that the highest attitude
attainable by man towards life is that of æsthetic contemplation. But it
took on a different character in Nietzsche. In 1878 Nietzsche wrote of
his early essay on Wagner: “At that time I believed that the world was
created from the æsthetic standpoint, as a play, and that as a moral
phenomenon it was a deception: on that account I came to the conclusion
that the world was only to be justified as an æsthetic phenomenon.”[141]
At the end of his active career Nietzsche was once more reproducing this
proposition in many ways. Jules de Gaultier has much interested himself
in Nietzsche, but he had already reached, no doubt through Schopenhauer,
a rather similar conception before he came in contact with Nietzsche’s
work, and in the present day he is certainly the thinker who has most
systematically and philosophically elaborated the conception.[142]

Gaultier is most generally known by that perhaps not quite happily
chosen term of “Bovarism,” embodied in the title of his earliest book
and abstracted from Flaubert’s heroine, which stands for one of his most
characteristic conceptions, and, indeed, in a large sense, for the
central idea of his philosophy. In its primary psychological sense
Bovarism is the tendency—the unconscious tendency of Emma Bovary and,
more or less, all of us—to conceive of ourselves as other than we are.
Our picture of the world, for good or for evil, is an idealised picture,
a fiction, a waking dream, an _als ob_, as Vaihinger would say. But when
we idealise the world we begin by first idealising ourselves. We imagine
ourselves other than we are, and in so imagining, as Gaultier clearly
realises, we tend to mould ourselves, so that reality becomes a
prolongation of fiction. As Meister Eckhart long since finely said: “A
man is what he loves.” A similar thought was in Plato’s mind. In modern
times a variation of this same idea has been worked out, not as by
Gaultier from the philosophic side, but from the medical and more
especially the psycho-analytic side, by Dr. Alfred Adler of Vienna.[143]
Adler has suggestively shown how often a man’s or a woman’s character is
constituted by a process of fiction,—that is by making an ideal of what
it is, or what it ought to be,—and then so far as possible moulding it
into the shape of that fiction, a process which is often interwoven with
morbid elements, especially with an original basis of organic defect,
the reaction being an effort, sometimes successful, to overcome that
defect, and even to transform it into a conspicuous quality, as when
Demosthenes, who was a stutterer, made himself a great orator. Even
thinkers may not wholly escape this tendency, and I think it would be
easily possible to show that, for instance, Nietzsche was moved by what
Adler calls the “masculine protest”; one remembers how shrinkingly
delicate Nietzsche was towards women and how emphatically he declared
they should never be approached without a whip. Adler owed nothing to
Gaultier, of whom he seems to be ignorant; he found his first
inspiration in Vaihinger’s doctrine of the “as if”; Gaultier, however,
owes nothing to Vaihinger, and, indeed, began to publish earlier, though
not before Vaihinger’s book was written. Gaultier’s philosophic descent
is mainly from Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.

There is another deeper and wider sense, a more abstract esoteric sense,
in which Jules de Gaultier understands Bovarism. It is not only the
human being and human groups who are psychologically Bovaristic, the
Universe itself, the Eternal Being (to adopt an accepted fiction),
metaphysically partakes of Bovarism. The Universe, it seems to Gaultier,
necessarily conceives itself as other than it is. Single, it conceives
itself multiple, as subject and object. Thus is furnished the
fundamental convention which we must grant to the Dramatist who presents
the cosmic tragi-comedy.[144]

It may seem to some that the vision of the world which Man pursues on
his course across the Universe becomes ever more impalpable and
visionary. And so perhaps it may be. But even if that were an
undesirable result, it would still be useless to fight against God. We
are, after all, merely moulding the conceptions which a little later
will become commonplaced and truisms. For really—while we must hold
physics and metaphysics apart, for they cannot be blended—a metaphysics
which is out of harmony with physics is negligible; it is nothing in the
world. And it is our physical world that is becoming more impalpable and
visionary. It is “matter,” the very structure of the “atom,” that is
melting into a dream, and if it may seem that on the spiritual side life
tends to be moulding itself to the conception of Calderon as a dream, it
is because the physical atom is pursuing that course. Unless we hold in
mind the analysis of the world towards which the physicist is bringing
us, we shall not understand the synthesis of the world towards which the
philosopher is bringing us. Gaultier’s philosophy may not be based upon
physics, but it seems to be in harmony with physics.

This is the metaphysical scaffolding—we may if we like choose to
dispense with it—by aid of which Jules de Gaultier erects his
spectacular conception of the world. He is by no means concerned to deny
the necessity of morality. On the contrary, morality is the necessary
restraint on the necessary biological instinct of possession, on the
desire, that is, by the acquisition of certain objects, to satisfy
passions which are most often only the exaggeration of natural needs,
but which—through the power of imagination such exaggeration inaugurates
in the world—lead to the development of civilisation. Limited and
definite so long as confined to their biological ends, needs are
indefinitely elastic, exhibiting, indeed, an almost hysterical character
which becomes insatiable. They mark a hypertrophy of the possessive
instinct which experience shows to be a menace to social life. Thus the
Great War of recent times may be regarded as the final tragic result of
the excessive development through half a century of an economic fever,
the activity of needs beyond their due biological ends producing
suddenly the inevitable result.[145] So that the possessive instinct,
while it is the cause of the formation of an economic civilised society,
when pushed too far becomes the cause of the ruin of that society. Man,
who begins by acquiring just enough force to compel Nature to supply his
bare needs, himself becomes, according to the tragic Greek saying, the
greatest force of Nature. Yet the fact that a civilisation may persist
for centuries shows that men in societies have found methods of
combating the exaggerated development of the possessive instinct, of
retaining it within bounds which have enabled societies to enjoy a
fairly long life. These methods become embodied in religions and
moralities and laws. They react in concert to restrain the greediness
engendered by the possessive instinct. They make virtues of Temperance
and Sobriety and Abnegation. They invent Great Images which arouse human
hopes and human fears. They prescribe imperatives, with sanctions, in
part imposed by the Great Images and in part by the actual executive
force of social law. So societies are enabled to immunise themselves
against the ravaging auto-intoxication of an excessive instinct of
possession, and the services rendered by religions and moralities cannot
be too highly estimated. They are the spontaneous physiological
processes which counteract disease before medical science comes into
play.

But are they of any use in those periods of advanced civilisation which
they have themselves contributed to form? When Man has replaced flint
knives and clubs and slings by the elaborate weapons we know, can he be
content with methods of social preservation which date from the time of
flint knives and clubs and slings? The efficacy of those restraints
depends on a sensibility which could only exist when men scarcely
distinguished imaginations from perceptions. Thence arose the credulity
on which religions and moralities flourished. But now the Images have
grown pale in human sensibility, just as they have in words, which are
but effaced images. We need a deeper reality to take the place of these
early beliefs which the growth of intelligence necessarily shows to be
illusory. We must seek in the human ego an instinct in which is
manifested a truly autonomous play of the power of imagination, an
instinct which by virtue of its own proper development may restrain the
excesses of the possessive instinct and dissipate the perils which
threaten civilisation. The æsthetic instinct alone answers to that
double demand.

At this point we may pause to refer to the interesting analogy between
this argument of Jules de Gaultier and another recently proposed
solution of the problems of civilisation presented by Bertrand Russell,
to which there has already been occasion to refer. The two views were
clearly suggested by the same events, though apparently in complete
independence, and it is interesting to observe the considerable degree
of harmony which unites two such distinguished thinkers in different
lands, and with unlike philosophic standpoints as regards ultimate
realities.[146] Man’s impulses, as we know, Bertrand Russell holds to be
of two kinds: those that are possessive and those that are creative; the
typical possessive impulse being that of property and the typical
creative impulse that of the artist. It is in following the creative
impulse, he believes, that man’s path of salvation lies, for the
possessive impulses necessarily lead to conflict while the creative
impulses are essentially harmonious. Bertrand Russell seeks the
unification of life. But consistency of action should, he holds, spring
from consistency of impulse rather than from the control of impulse by
will. Like Gaultier, he believes in what has been called, perhaps not
happily, “the law of irony”; that is to say, that the mark we hit is
never the mark we aimed at, so that, in all supreme success in life, as
Goethe said of Wilhelm Meister, we are like Saul, the son of Kish, who
went forth to seek his father’s asses and found a kingdom. “Those who
best promote life,” Russell prefers to put it, “do not have life for
their purpose. They aim rather at what seems like a gradual incarnation,
a bringing into our human existence of something eternal.” And, again
like Gaultier, he invokes Spinoza and what in his phraseology he called
“the intellectual love of God.” “Take no thought, saying, What shall we
eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?
Whosoever has known a strong creative impulse has known the value of
this precept in its exact and literal sense; it is preoccupation with
possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living
freely and nobly.”[147]

This view of the matter seems substantially the same, it may be in an
unduly simplified form, as the conception which Jules de Gaultier has
worked out more subtly and complexly, seeking to weave in a large number
of the essential factors, realising that the harmony of life must yet be
based on an underlying conflict.[148] The main difference would seem to
be that Bertrand Russell’s creative impulse seems to be fairly identical
with the productive impulse of art in the large sense in which I have
throughout understood it, while Jules de Gaultier is essentially
concerned with the philosophic or religious side of the art impulse;
that is to say, the attitude of æsthetic contemplation which in
appearance forms the absolute antithesis to the possessive instinct. It
is probable, however, that there is no real discrepancy here, for as we
may regard æsthetic contemplation as the passive aspect of art, so art
may be regarded as the active aspect of æsthetic contemplation, and
Bertrand Russell, we may certainly believe, would include the one under
art as Jules de Gaultier would include the other under æsthetics.

The æsthetic instinct, as Jules de Gaultier understands it, answers the
double demand of our needs to-day, not, like religions and moralities,
by evoking images as menaces or as promises, only effective if they can
be realised in the world of sensation, and so merely constituting
another attempt to gratify the possessive instinct, by enslaving the
power of imagination to that alien master. Through the æsthetic instinct
Man is enabled to procure joy, not from the things themselves and the
sensations due to the possession of things, but from the very images of
things. Beyond the sense of utility bound up with the possession of
objects, he acquires the privilege, bound up with the sole contemplation
of them, of enjoying the beauty of things. By the æsthetic instinct the
power of imagination realises its own proper tendency and attains its
own proper end.

Such a process cannot fail to have its reaction on the social
environment. It must counteract the exaggeration of the possessive
instinct. To that impulse, when it transgresses the legitimate bounds of
biological needs and threatens to grow like a destructive cancer, the
æsthetic instinct proposes another end, a more human end, that of
æsthetic joy. Therewith the exuberance of insatiable and ruinous
cupidity is caught in the forms of art, the beauty of the universe is
manifested to all eyes, and the happiness which had been sought in the
paradoxical enterprise of glutting that insatiable desire finds its
perpetual satisfaction in the absolute and complete realisation of
beauty.

As Jules de Gaultier understands it, we see that the æsthetic instinct
is linked on to the possessive instinct. Bertrand Russell would
sometimes seem to leave the possessive instinct in the void without
making any provision for its satisfaction. In Gaultier’s view, we may
probably say it is taken in charge by the æsthetic instinct as soon as
it has fulfilled its legitimate biological ends, and its excessive
developments, what might otherwise be destructive, are sublimated. The
æsthetic instinct, Gaultier insists, like the other instincts, even the
possessive instinct, has imperative claims; it is an appetite of the
_ego_, developed at the same hearth of intimate activity, drawing its
strength from the same superabundance from which they draw strength.
Therefore, in the measure in which it absorbs force they must lose
force, and civilisation gains.

The development of the æsthetic sense is, indeed, indispensable if
civilisation—which we may, perhaps, from the present point of view,
regard with Gaultier as the embroidery worked by imagination on the
stuff of our elementary needs—is to pass safely through its critical
period and attain any degree of persistence. The appearance of the
æsthetic sense is then an event of the first order in the rank of
natural miracles, strictly comparable to the evolution in the organic
sphere of the optic nerves, which made it possible to know things
clearly apart from the sensations of actual contact. There is no mere
simile here, Gaultier believes: the faculty of drawing joy from the
images of things, apart from the possession of them, is based on
physiological conditions which growing knowledge of the nervous system
may some day make clearer.[149]

It is this specific quality, the power of enjoying things without being
reduced to the need of possessing them, which differentiates the
æsthetic instinct from other instincts and confers on it the character
of morality. Based, like the other instincts on egoism, it, yet, unlike
the other instincts, leads to no destructive struggles. Its powers of
giving satisfaction are not dissipated by the number of those who secure
that satisfaction. Æsthetic contemplation engenders neither hatred nor
envy. Unlike the things that appeal to the possessive instinct, it
brings men together and increases sympathy. Unlike those moralities
which are compelled to institute prohibitions, the æsthetic sense, even
in the egoistic pursuit of its own ends, becomes blended with morality,
and so serves in the task of maintaining society.

Thus it is that, by aiming at a different end, the æsthetic sense yet
attains the end aimed at by morality. That is the aspect of the matter
which Gaultier would emphasise. There is implied in it the judgment that
when the æsthetic sense deviates from its proper ends to burden itself
with moral intentions—when, that is, it ceases to be itself—it ceases to
realise morality. “Art for art’s sake!” the artists of old cried. We
laugh at that cry now. Gaultier, indeed, considers that the idea of pure
art has in every age been a red rag in the eyes of the human bull. Yet,
if we had possessed the necessary intelligence, we might have seen that
it held a great moral truth. “The poet, retired in his Tower of Ivory,
isolated, according to his desire, from the world of man, resembles,
whether he so wishes or not, another solitary figure, the watcher
enclosed for months at a time in a lighthouse at the head of a cliff.
Far from the towns peopled by human crowds, far from the earth, of which
he scarcely distinguishes the outlines through the mist, this man in his
wild solitude, forced to live only with himself, almost forgets the
common language of men, but he knows admirably well how to formulate
through the darkness another language infinitely useful to men and
visible afar to seamen in distress.”[150] The artist for art’s sake—and
the same is constantly found true of the scientist for science’s
sake[151]—in turning aside from the common utilitarian aims of men is
really engaged in a task none other can perform, of immense utility to
men. The Cistercians of old hid their cloisters in forests and
wildernesses afar from society, mixing not with men nor performing for
them so-called useful tasks; yet they spent their days and nights in
chant and prayer, working for the salvation of the world, and they stand
as the symbol of all higher types of artists, not the less so because
they, too, illustrate that faith transcending sight, without which no
art is possible.

The artist, as Gaultier would probably put it, has to effect a necessary
Bovarism. If he seeks to mix himself up with the passions of the crowd,
if his work shows the desire to prove anything, he thereby neglects the
creation of beauty. Necessarily so, for he excites a state of
combativity, he sets up moral, political, and social values, all having
relation to biological needs and the possessive instinct, the most
violent of ferments. He is entering on the struggle over Truth—though
his opinion is here worth no more than any other man’s—which, on account
of the presumption of its universality, is brandished about in the most
ferociously opposed camps.

The mother who seeks to soothe her crying child preaches him no sermon.
She holds up some bright object and it fixes his attention. So it is the
artist acts: he makes us see. He brings the world before us, not on the
plane of covetousness and fears and commandments, but on the plane of
representation; the world becomes a spectacle. Instead of imitating
those philosophers who with analyses and syntheses worry over the goal
of life, and the justification of the world, and the meaning of the
strange and painful phenomenon called Existence, the artist takes up
some fragment of that existence, transfigures it, shows it: There! And
therewith the spectator is filled with enthusiastic joy, and the
transcendent Adventure of Existence is justified. Every great artist, a
Dante or a Shakespeare, a Dostoievsky or a Proust, thus furnishes the
metaphysical justification of existence by the beauty of the vision he
presents of the cruelty and the horror of existence. All the pain and
the madness, even the ugliness and the commonplace of the world, he
converts into shining jewels. By revealing the spectacular character of
reality he restores the serenity of its innocence.[152] We see the face
of the world as of a lovely woman smiling through her tears.

How are we to expect this morality—if so we may still term it—to
prevail? Jules de Gaultier, as we have seen, realising that the old
moralities have melted away, seems to think that the morality of art, by
virtue of its life, will take the place of that which is dead. But he is
not specially concerned to discuss in detail the mechanism of this
replacement, though he looks to the social action of artists in
initiation and stimulation. That was the view of Guyau, and it fitted in
with his sociological conception of art as being one with life; great
poets, great artists, Guyau believed, will become the leaders of the
crowd, the priests of a social religion without dogmas.[153] But
Gaultier’s conception goes beyond this. He cannot feel that the direct
action of poets and artists is sufficient. They only reveal the more
conspicuous aspects of the æsthetic sense. Gaultier considers that the
æsthetic sense, in humbler forms, is mixed up with the most primitive
manifestations of human life, wherein it plays a part of unsuspected
importance.[154] The more thorough investigation of these primitive
forms, he believes, will make it possible for the lawmaker to aid the
mechanism of this transformation of morality.

Having therewith brought us to the threshold of the æsthetic revolution,
Jules de Gaultier departs. It remains necessary to point out that it is
only the threshold. However intimately the elements of the æsthetic
sense may be blended with primitive human existence, we know too well
that, as the conditions of human existence are modified, art seems to
contract and degenerate, so we can hardly expect the æsthetic sense to
develop in the reverse direction. At present, in the existing state of
civilisation, with the decay of the controlling power of the old
morality, the æsthetic sense often seems to be also decreasing, rather
than increasing, in the masses of the population.[155] One need not be
troubled to find examples. They occur on every hand and whenever we take
up a newspaper. One notes, for instance, in England, that the most
widespread spectacularly attractive things outside cities may be said to
be the private parks and the churches. (Cities lie outside the present
argument, for their inhabitants are carefully watched whenever they
approach anything that appeals to the possessive instinct.) Formerly the
parks and churches were freely open all day long for those who desired
to enjoy the spectacle of their beauty and not to possess it. The owners
of parks and the guardians of churches have found it increasingly
necessary to close them because of the alarmingly destructive or
predatory impulses of a section of the public. So the many have to
suffer for the sins of what may only be the few. It is common to speak
of this as a recent tendency of our so-called civilisation. But the
excesses of the possessive instinct cannot have been entirely latent
even in remote times, though they seem to have been less in evidence.
The Platonic Timæus attributed to the spectacle of the sun and the moon
and the stars the existence of philosophy. He failed to note that the
sun and the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago—as even
their infinitely more numerous analogues on the earth beneath are likely
to disappear—had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human
hands. But the warps and strains of civilised life, with its excessive
industrialism and militarism, seem to disturb the wholesome balance of
even the humblest elements of the possessive and æsthetic instincts.
This means, in the first and most important place, that the liberty of
the whole community in its finest manifestations is abridged by a
handful of imbeciles. There are infinite freedoms which it would be a
joy for them to take, and a help to their work, and a benefit to the
world, but they cannot be allowed to take them because there are some
who can only take them and perish, damning others with themselves.
Besides this supreme injury to life, there are perpetual minor injuries
that the same incapable section of people are responsible for in every
direction, while the actual cost of them in money, to the community they
exert so pernicious an influence on, is so great and so increasing that
it constitutes a social and individual burden which from time to time
leads to outbursts of anxious expostulation never steady enough to be
embodied in any well-sustained and coherent policy.

It is not, indeed, to be desired that the eugenic action of society
should be directly aimed at any narrowly æsthetic or moral end. That has
never been the ideal of any of those whose conceptions of social life
deserve to be taken seriously, least of all Galton, who is commonly
regarded as the founder of the modern scientific art of eugenics.
“Society would be very dull,” he remarked, “if every man resembled
Marcus Aurelius or Adam Bede.” He even asserted that “we must leave
morality as far as possible out of the discussion,” since moral goodness
and badness are shifting phases of a civilisation; what is held morally
good in one age is held bad in another. That would hold true of any
æsthetic revolution. But we cannot afford to do without the sane and
wholesome persons who are so well balanced that they can adjust
themselves to the conditions of every civilisation as it arises and
carry it on to its finest issues. We should not, indeed, seek to breed
them directly, and we need not, since under natural conditions Nature
will see to their breeding. But it is all the more incumbent upon us to
eliminate those ill-balanced and poisonous stocks produced by the
unnatural conditions which society in the past had established.[156]
That we have to do alike in the interests of the offspring of these
diseased stocks and in the interests of society. No power in Heaven or
Earth can ever confer upon us the right to create the unfit in order to
hang them like millstones around the necks of the fit. The genius of
Galton enabled him to see this clearly afresh and to indicate the
reasonable path of human progress. It was a truth that had long been
forgotten by the strenuous humanitarians who ruled the nineteenth
century, so anxious to perpetuate and multiply all the worst spawn of
their humanity. Yet it was an ancient truth, carried into practice,
however unconsciously and instinctively, by Man throughout his upward
course, probably even from Palæolithic times, and when it ceased Man’s
upward course also ceased. As Carr-Saunders has shown, in a learned and
comprehensive work which is of primary importance for the understanding
of the history of Man, almost every people on the face of the earth has
adopted one or more practices—notably infanticide, abortion, or severe
restriction of sexual intercourse—adapted to maintain due selection of
the best stocks and to limit the excess of fertility. They largely
ceased to work because Man had acquired the humanity which was repelled
by such methods and lost the intelligence to see that they must be
replaced by better methods. For the process of human evolution is
nothing more than a process of sifting, and where that sifting ceases
evolution ceases, becomes, indeed, devolution.[157]

When we survey the history of Man we are constantly reminded of the
profound truth which often lay beneath the parables of Jesus, and they
might well form the motto for any treatise on eugenics. Jesus was
constantly seeking to suggest the necessity of that process of sifting
in which all human evolution consists; he was ever quick to point out
how few could be, as it was then phrased, “saved,” how extremely narrow
is the path to the Kingdom of Heaven, or, as many might now call it, the
Kingdom of Man. He proclaimed symbolically a doctrine of heredity which
is only to-day beginning to be directly formulated: “Every tree that
bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire.”
There was no compunction at all in his promulgation of this radical yet
necessary doctrine for the destruction of unfit stocks. Even the best
stocks Jesus was in favour of destroying ruthlessly as soon as they had
ceased to be the best: “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt
have lost his savour, ... it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be
cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.” Jesus has been
reproached by Nietzsche for founding a religion for slaves and
plebeians, and so in the result it may have become. But we see that, in
the words of the Teacher as they have been handed down, the religion of
Jesus was the most aristocratic of religions. Its doctrine embodied not
even the permission to live for those human stocks which fall short of
its aristocratic ideal. It need not surprise us to find that Jesus had
already said two thousand years ago what Galton, in a more modern
and—some would add—more humane way, was saying yesterday. If there had
not been a core of vital truth beneath the surface of the first
Christian’s teaching, it could hardly have survived so long. We are told
that it is now dead, but should it ever be revived we may well believe
that this is the aspect by which it will be commended. It is a
significant fact that at the two spiritual sources of our world, Jesus
and Plato, we find the assertion of the principle of eugenics, in one
implicitly, in the other explicitly.

Jules de Gaultier was not concerned to put forward an aristocratic
conception of his æsthetic doctrine, and, as we have seen, he remained
on the threshold of eugenics. He was content to suggest, though with no
positive assurance, a more democratic conception. He had, indeed, one
may divine, a predilection for that middle class which has furnished so
vast a number of the supreme figures in art and thought; by producing a
class of people dispensed from tasks of utility, he had pointed out, “a
society creates for itself an organ fitted for the higher life and bears
witness that it has passed beyond the merely biological stage to reach
the human stage.” But the middle class is not indispensable, and if it
is doomed Gaultier saw ways of replacing it.[158] Especially we may seek
to ensure that, in every social group, the individual task of
utilitarian work shall be so limited that the worker is enabled to gain
a leisure sufficiently ample to devote, if he has the aptitude, to works
of intellect or art. He would agree with Otto Braun, the inspired youth
who was slain in the Great War, that if we desire the enablement of the
people “the eight-hours day becomes nothing less than the most
imperative demand of culture.” It is in this direction, it may well be,
that social evolution is moving, however its complete realisation may,
by temporary causes, from time to time be impeded. The insistent demand
for increased wages and diminished hours of work has not been inspired
by the desire to raise the level of culture in the social environment,
or to inaugurate any æsthetic revolution, yet, by “the law of irony”
which so often controls the realisation of things, that is the result
which may be achieved. The new leisure conferred on the worker may be
transformed into spiritual activity, and the liberated utilitarian
energy into æsthetic energy. The road would thus be opened for a new
human adventure, of anxious interest, which the future alone can reveal.

We cannot be sure that this transformation will take place. We cannot be
sure, indeed, that it is possible for it to take place unless the
general quality of the population in whom so fine a process must be
effected is raised by a more rigid eugenic process than there is yet any
real determination among us to exert. Men still bow down before the
fetish of mere quantity in population, and that worship may be their
undoing. Giant social organisms, like the giant animal species of early
times, may be destined to disappear suddenly when they have attained
their extreme expansion.

Even if that should be so, even if there should be a solution of
continuity in the course of civilisation, even then, as again Jules de
Gaultier also held, we need not despair, for life is a fountain of
everlasting exhilaration. No creature on the earth has so tortured
himself as Man, and none has raised a more exultant Alleluia. It would
still be possible to erect places of refuge, cloisters wherein life
would yet be full of joy for men and women determined by their vocation
to care only for beauty and knowledge, and so to hand on to a future
race the living torch of civilisation. When we read Palladius, when we
read Rabelais, we realise how vast a field lies open for human activity
between the Thebaid on one side and Thelema on the other. Out of such
ashes a new world might well arise. Sunset is the promise of dawn.


THE END

Footnote 113:

  Alfred Niceforo, _Les Indices Numériques de la Civilisation et du
  Progrès_. Paris, 1921.

Footnote 114:

  Professor Bury, in his admirable history of the idea of progress (J.
  B. Bury, _The Idea of Progress_, 1920), never defines the meaning of
  “progress.” As regards the meaning of “civilisation” see essay on
  “Civilisation,” Havelock Ellis, _The Philosophy of Conflict_ (1919),
  pp. 14-22.

Footnote 115:

  Quetelet, _Physique Sociale_. (1869.)

Footnote 116:

  See e.g., Maurice Parmelee’s _Criminology_, the sanest and most
  comprehensive manual on the subject we have in English.

Footnote 117:

  Élie Faure, with his usual incisive insight, has set out the real
  characters of the “Greek Spirit” (“Reflexions sur le Génie Grec,”
  _Monde Nouveau_, December, 1922).

Footnote 118:

  This tendency, on which Herbert Spencer long ago insisted, is in its
  larger aspects quite clear. E. C. Pell (_The Law of Births and
  Deaths_, 1921) has argued that it holds good of civilised man to-day,
  and that our decreasing birth rate with civilisation is quite
  independent of any effort on Man’s part to attain that evolutionary
  end.

Footnote 119:

  Professor McDougall refers to the high birth-rate of the lower stratum
  as more “normal.” If that were so, civilisation would certainly be
  doomed. All high evolution _normally_ involves a low birth-rate.
  Strange how difficult it is even for those most concerned with these
  questions to see the facts simply and clearly!

Footnote 120:

  A. M. Carr-Saunders, _The Population Problem: A Study in Human
  Evolution_ (1922), pp. 457, 472.

Footnote 121:

  Dupréel, _La Légende Socratique_ (1922), p. 428. Dupréel considers (p.
  431) that the Protagorean spirit was marked by the idea of explaining
  the things of thought, and life in general, by the meeting,
  opposition, and harmony of individual activities, leading up to the
  sociological notion of _convention_, and behind it, of relativity.
  Nietzsche was a pioneer in restoring the Sophists to their rightful
  place in Greek thought. The Greek culture of the Sophists grew out of
  all the Greek instincts, he says (_The Will to Power_, section 428):
  “And it has ultimately shown itself to be right. Our modern attitude
  of mind is, to a great extent, Heraclitean, Democritean, and
  Protagorean. To say that it is Protagorean is even sufficient, because
  Protagoras was himself a synthesis of Heraclitus and Democritus.” The
  Sophists, by realizing that many supposed objective ideas were really
  subjective, have often been viewed with suspicion as content with a
  mere egotistically individualistic conception of life. The same has
  happened to Nietzsche. It was probably an error as regards the
  greatest Sophists, and is certainly an error, though even still
  commonly committed, as regards Nietzsche; see the convincing
  discussion of Nietzsche’s moral aim in Salter, _Nietzsche the
  Thinker_, chap. XXIV.

Footnote 122:

  I may here, perhaps, remark that in the General Preface to my _Studies
  in the Psychology of Sex_ I suggested that we now have to lay the
  foundation of a new casuistry, no longer theological and Christian,
  but naturalistic and scientific.

Footnote 123:

  Oswald Spengler, _Der Untergang des Abendlandes_, vol. I (1918); vol.
  II (1922).

Footnote 124:

  In an interesting pamphlet, _Pessimismus?_ Spengler has since pointed
  out that he does not regard his argument as pessimistic. The end of a
  civilisation is its fulfilment, and there is still much to be achieved
  (though not, he thinks, along the line of art) before our own
  civilisation is fulfilled. With Spengler’s conception of that
  fulfilment we may, however, fail to sympathise.

Footnote 125:

  See, for instance, W. L. Newman, _The Politics of Aristotle_, vol. 1,
  p. 201, and S. H. Butcher, _Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine
  Art_, p. 119.

Footnote 126:

  Beauty is a dangerous conception to deal with, and the remembrance of
  this great saying may, perhaps, help to save us from the degrading
  notion that beauty merely inheres in objects, or has anything to do
  with the prim and smooth conventions which make prettiness. Even in
  the fine art of painting it is more reasonable to regard prettiness as
  the negation of beauty. It is possible to find beauty in Degas and
  Cézanne, but not in Bouguereau or Cabanel. The path of beauty is not
  soft and smooth, but full of harshness and asperity. It is a rose that
  grows only on a bush covered with thorns. As of goodness and of truth,
  men talk too lightly of Beauty. Only to the bravest and skilfullest is
  it given to break through the briers of her palace and kiss at last
  her enchanted lips.

Footnote 127:

  Ruskin was what Spinoza has been called, a God-intoxicated man; he had
  a gift of divine rhapsody, which reached at times to inspiration. But
  it is not enough to be God-intoxicated, for into him whose mind is
  disorderly and ignorant and ill-disciplined the Gods pour their wine
  in vain. Spinoza’s mind was not of that kind, Ruskin’s too often was,
  so that Ruskin can never be, like Spinoza, a permanent force in the
  world of thought. His interest is outside that field, mainly perhaps
  psychological in the precise notation of a particular kind of æsthetic
  sensibility. The admiration of Ruskin cherished by Proust, himself a
  supreme master in this field, is significant.

Footnote 128:

  Butcher, _Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_, chap. V, “Art
  and Morals.” Aristotle could have accepted the almost Freudian view of
  Croce that art is the deliverer, the process through which we overcome
  the stress of inner experiences by objectifying them (_Æsthetics as
  Science of Expression_, p. 35). But Plato could not accept Croce,
  still less Freud.

Footnote 129:

  Schopenhauer, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_ (1859), vol. II, p.
  442. For a careful and detailed study of Schopenhauer’s conception of
  art, see A. Fauconnet, _L’Esthétique de Schopenhauer_ (1913).

Footnote 130:

  I find that I have here negligently ascribed to Bergson a metaphor
  which belongs to Croce, who at this point says the same thing as
  Bergson, though he gives it a different name. In _Æsthetics as Science
  of Expression_ (English translation, p. 66) we read: “The world of
  which as a rule we have intuition [Bergson could not have used that
  word here] is a small thing.... ‘Here is a man, here is a horse, this
  is heavy, this is hard, this pleases me,’ etc. It is a medley of light
  and colour, which could not pictorially attain to any more sincere
  expression than a haphazard splash of colour, from among which would
  with difficulty stand out a few special distinctive traits. This and
  nothing else is what we possess in our ordinary life; this is the
  basis of our ordinary action. It is the index of a book. The labels
  tied to things take the place of things themselves.”

Footnote 131:

  H. Bergson, _Le Rire_. For a clear, concise, and sympathetic
  exposition of Bergson’s standpoint, though without special reference
  to art, see Karin Stephen, _The Misuse of Mind_.

Footnote 132:

  This may seem to cast a critical reflection on Croce. Let me,
  therefore, hasten to add that it is merely the personal impression
  that Croce, for all his virtuous aspirations after the concrete, tends
  to fall into verbal abstraction. He so often reminds one of that old
  lady who used to find (for she died during the Great War) such
  spiritual consolation in “that blessed word Mesopotamia.” This refers,
  however, to the earlier more than to the later Croce.

Footnote 133:

  H. Rickert, _System der Philosophie_, vol. I (1921).

Footnote 134:

  Before Baumgarten this distinction seems to have been recognised,
  though too vaguely and inconsistently, by Hutcheson, who is so often
  regarded as the real founder of modern æsthetics. W. R. Scott
  (_Francis Hutcheson_, p. 216) points out these two principles in
  Hutcheson’s work, “the Internal Senses, as derived from Reflection,
  representing the attitude of the ‘Spectator’ or observer in a picture
  gallery while, on the other hand, as deduced from εὐέργεια find a
  parallel in the artist’s own consciousness of success in his work,
  thus the former might be called static and the latter dynamic
  consciousness, or, in the special case of Morality, the first applies
  primarily to approval of the acts of others, the second to each
  individual’s approval of his own conduct.”

Footnote 135:

  This would probably be recognised even by those moralists who, like
  Hutcheson, in their anxiety to make clear an important relationship,
  have spoken ambiguously. “Probably Hutcheson’s real thought,” remarks
  F. C. Sharp (_Mind_, 1921, p. 42), “is that the moral emotion, while
  possessing many important affinities with the æsthetic, is in the last
  resort different in content.”

Footnote 136:

  Schopenhauer long ago pointed out that a picture should be looked at
  as a royal personage is approached, in silence, until the moment it
  pleases to speak to you, for, if you speak first (and how many critics
  one knows who “speak first”!), you expose yourself to hear nothing but
  the sound of your own voice. In other words, it is a spontaneous and
  “mystical” experience.

Footnote 137:

  It is through Plotinus, also, that we realise how æsthetics is on the
  same plane, if not one, with mysticism. For by his insistence on
  Contemplation, which is æsthetics, we learn to understand what is
  meant when it is said, as it often is, that mysticism is
  Contemplation. (On this point, and on the early evolutions of
  Christian Mysticism, see Dom Cuthbert Butler, _Western Mysticism_
  (1922).)

Footnote 138:

  Really, however, Plotinus was here a Neo-Aristotelian rather than a
  Neo-Platonist, for Aristotle (_Ethics_, book X, chap. 6) had put the
  claim of the Contemplative life higher even than Plato and almost
  forestalled Plotinus. But as Aristotle was himself here a Platonist
  that does not much matter.

Footnote 139:

  See Inge, _Philosophy of Plotinus_, p. 179. In a fine passage (quoted
  by Bridges in his _Spirit of Man_) Plotinus represents contemplation
  as the great function of Nature herself, content, in a sort of
  self-consciousness, to do nothing more than perfect that fair and
  bright vision. This “metaphysical Narcissism,” as Palante might call
  it, accords with the conception of various later thinkers, like
  Schopenhauer, and like Gaultier, who however, seldom refers to
  Plotinus.

Footnote 140:

  R. Schmidt, _Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart in
  Selbstdarstellungen_ (1921), vol. II.

Footnote 141:

  E. Förster-Nietzsche, _Das Leben Nietzsches_, vol. II, p. 99.

Footnote 142:

  W. M. Salter in his _Nietzsche the Thinker_—probably the best and most
  exact study of Nietzsche’s thought we possess—summarises Nietzsche’s
  “æsthetic metaphysics,” as he terms it (pp. 46-48), in words which
  apply almost exactly to Gaultier.

Footnote 143:

  See especially his book _Über den Nervösen Charakter_ (1912). It has
  been translated into English.

Footnote 144:

  Jules de Gaultier, _Le Bovarysme_, and various other of his works.
  Georges Palante has lucidly and concisely expounded the idea of
  Bovarism in a small volume, _La Philosophie du Bovarysme_ (_Mercure de
  France_).

Footnote 145:

  Gaultier has luminously discussed the relations of War, Civilisation,
  and Art in the _Monde Nouveau_, August, 1920, and February, 1921.

Footnote 146:

  These are problems concerning which innocent people might imagine that
  the wise refrained from speculating, but, as a matter of fact, the
  various groups of philosophic devotees may be divided into those
  termed “Idealists” and those termed “Realists,” each assured of the
  superiority of his own way of viewing thought. Roughly speaking, for
  the idealist thought means the creation of the world, for the realist
  its discovery. But here (as in many differences between Tweedledum and
  Tweedledee for which men have slain one another these thousands of
  years) there seem to be superiorities on both sides. Each looks at
  thought in a different aspect. But the idealist could hardly create
  the world with nothing there to make it from, nor the realist discover
  it save through creating it afresh. We cannot, so to put it, express
  in a single formula of three dimensions what only exists as a unity in
  four dimensions.

Footnote 147:

  Bertrand Russell, _Principles of Social Reconstruction_ (1916), p.
  235.

Footnote 148:

  I may here be allowed to refer to another discussion of this point,
  Havelock Ellis, _The Philosophy of Conflict, and Other Essays_, pp.
  57-68.

Footnote 149:

  I may remark that Plato had long before attributed the same
  observation to the Pythagorean Timæus in the sublime and amusing
  dialogue that goes under that name: “Sight in my opinion is the source
  of the greatest benefit to us, for had we never seen the stars, and
  the sun, and the heavens, none of the words which we have spoken about
  the universe would ever have been uttered. But now the sight of day
  and night, and the months and the revolution of the years, have
  created Number, and have given us a conception of Time, and the powers
  of inquiring about the Nature of the Universe, and from this source we
  have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or will
  be given by the gods to mortal man.”

Footnote 150:

  Jules de Gaultier, “La Guerre et les Destinées de l’Art,” _Monde
  Nouveau_, August, 1920.

Footnote 151:

  Thus Einstein, like every true man of science, holds that cultural
  developments are not to be measured in terms of utilitarian technical
  advances, much as he has himself been concerned with such advances,
  but that, like the devotee of “Art for Art’s sake,” the man of science
  must proclaim the maxim, “Science for Science’s sake.”

Footnote 152:

  In the foregoing paragraphs I have, in my own way, reproduced the
  thought, occasionally the words, of Jules de Gaultier, more especially
  in “La Moralité Esthétique” (_Mercure de France_, 15th December,
  1921), probably the finest short statement of this distinguished
  thinker’s reflections on the matter in question.

Footnote 153:

  Guyau, _L’Art au Point de Vue Sociologique_, p. 163.

Footnote 154:

  This diffused æsthetic sense is correlated with a diffused artistic
  instinct, based on craftsmanship, which the Greeks were afraid to
  recognise because they looked down with contempt on the handicrafts as
  vulgar. William Morris was a pioneer in asserting this association. As
  a distinguished English writer, Mr. Charles Marriott, the novelist and
  critic, clearly puts the modern doctrine: “The first step is to
  absorb, or re-absorb, the ‘Artist’ into the craftsman.... Once agree
  that the same æsthetic considerations which apply to painting a
  picture apply, though in a different degree, to painting a door, and
  you have emancipated labour without any prejudice to the highest
  meaning of art.... A good surface of paint on a door is as truly an
  emotional or æsthetic consideration as ‘significant form,’ indeed it
  _is_ ‘significant form.’” (_Nation and Athenæum_, 1st July, 1922.)
  Professor Santayana has spoken in the same sense: “In a thoroughly
  humanised society everything—clothes, speech, manners, government—is a
  work of art.” (_The Dial_, June, 1922, p. 563.) It is, indeed, the
  general tendency to-day and is traceable in Croce’s later writings.

Footnote 155:

  Thus it has often been pointed out that the Papuans are artists in
  design of the first rank, with a finer taste in some matters than the
  most highly civilised races of Europe. Professor R. Semon, who has
  some remarks to this effect (_Correspondenzblatt_ of the German
  Anthropological Society, March, 1902), adds that their unfailing
  artistic sense is spread throughout the whole population and shown in
  every object of daily use.

Footnote 156:

  The presence of a small minority of abnormal or perverse persons—there
  will be such, we may be sure, in every possible society—affords no
  excuse for restricting the liberty of the many to the standard of the
  few. The general prevalence of an æsthetic morality in classic times
  failed to prevent occasional outbursts of morbid sexual impulse in the
  presence of objects of art, even in temples. We find records of
  Pygmalionism and allied perversities in Lucian, Athenæus, Pliny,
  Valerius Maximus. Yet supposing that the Greeks had listened to the
  proposals of some strayed Puritan visitor, from Britain or New
  England, to abolish nude statues, or suppose that Plato, who wished to
  do away with imaginative literature as liable to demoralise, had
  possessed the influence he desired, how infinite the loss to all
  mankind! In modern Europe we not only propose such legal abolition; we
  actually, however in vain, carry it out. We seek to reduce all human
  existence to absurdity. It is, at the best, unnecessary, for we may be
  sure that, in spite of our efforts, a certain amount of absurdity will
  always remain.

Footnote 157:

  A. M. Carr-Saunders, _The Population Problem: A Study in Human
  Evolution_ (Oxford Press, 1922).

Footnote 158:

  J. de Gaultier, “Art et Civilisation,” _Monde Nouveau_, February,
  1921.




                                 INDEX

 Abortion, once practised, 354.

 Absolute, the, a fiction, 101.

 Abyssian Church, dancing in worship of, 45.

 Acting, music, and poetry, proceed in one stream, 36.

 Adam, Villiers de l’Isle, his story _Le Secret de l’ancienne Musique_,
    25.

 Addison, Joseph, his style, 161-63, 184.

 Adler, Dr. Alfred, of Vienna, 336, 337.

 Adolescence, idealisation in, 107, 108.

 Æschylus, developed technique of dancing, 56.


 Æsthetic contemplation, 314, 315, 325, 326;
   recognised by the Greeks, 330, 331;
   two kinds of, that of spectator and that of participator, 331, 332;
   the Shaftesbury attitude toward, 332, 333;
   the Swift attitude toward, 333;
   involves life as a spectacle, 333, 334;
   and the systems of Gaultier and Russell, 343;
   engenders neither hatred nor envy, 346.


 Æsthetic instinct, to replace moralities, religions, and laws, 340,
    341, 343-45;
   differentiated from other instincts, 346;
   has the character of morality, 346.

 Æsthetic intuitionism, 260, 276, 279, 314.

 Æsthetic sense, development of, indispensable for civilisation, 345;
   realises morality when unburdened with moral intentions, 346;
   mixed with primitive manifestations of life, 350;
   correlated with diffused artistic instinct, 350 _n._;
   seems to be decreasing, 350-52.

 Æsthetics, and ethics, among the Greeks, 247;
   with us, 348;
   in the Greek sense, 263;
   the founders of, 271, 329;
   and art, the unlikeness of, 325-28;
   on same plane with mysticism, 330 _n._

 Africa, love-dance in, 46, 49, 50.

 Akhenaten, 28.

 Alaro, in Mallorca, dancing in church at, 44, 45.

 Alberti, Leo, vast-ranging ideas of, 5.

 Alcohol, consumption of, as test of civilisation, 295, 296.

 Anatomy, studied by Leonardo da Vinci, 120.

 Anaximander, 89.

 Ancestry, the force of, in handwriting, 157, 158;
   in style, 158-61, 190.

 Anna, Empress, 59.

 Antisthenes, 249 _n._

 “Appearance,” 219 _n._

 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 202.

 Arabs, dancing among, 38.

 Arbuckle, one of the founders of æsthetics, 271;
   insisted on imagination as formative of character, 272.

 Architecture. _See_ Building.

 Aristophanes, 311.

 Aristotle, 89;
   on tragedy, 56;
   on the Mysteries, 242;
   on the moral quality of an act, 248;
   his use of the term “moral sense,” 273;
   on Art and Nature in the making of the State, 313;
   his use of the term “artists,” 313;
   his view of poetry, 318;
   and the contemplative life, 330 _n._

 Art, life as, more difficult to realise than to act, 1, 2;
   universe conceived as work of, by the primitive philosopher, 1;
   life as, views of finest thinkers of China and Greece on, 2-6,
      247-52;
   whole conception of, has been narrowed and debased, 6, 7;
   in its proper sense, 7, 8;
   as the desire for beautification, 8;
   of living, has been decadent during the last two thousand years, 8
      _n._;
   Napoleon in the sphere of, 10;
   of living, the Lifuan, 13-18;
   of living, the Chinese, 27;
   Chinese civilisation shows that human life is, 30;
   of living, T’ung’s story the embodiment of the Chinese symbol of, 33;
   life identical with, 33-35;
   of dancing, 36, 51-67, _see_ Dancing;
   of life, a dance, 66, 67;
   science and, no distinction between, in classic times, 68;
   science and, distinction between, in modern times, 68-70;
   science is of the nature of, 71;
   represented by Pythagoras as source of science, 74;
   Greek, 76 _n._;
   of thinking, 68-140, _see_ Thinking;
   the solution of the conflicts of philosophy in, 82, 83;
   philosophy and, close relationship of, 83-85;
   impulse of, transformed sexual instinct, 108-12;
   and mathematics, 138-40;
   of writing, 141-190, _see_ Writing;
   Man added to Nature, is the task in, 153;
   the freedom and the easiness of, do not necessarily go together, 182;
   of religion, 191-243, _see_ Religion;
   of morals, 244-84, _see_ Morals;
   the critic of, a critic of life, 269;
   civilisation is an, 301, 310;
   consideration of the question of the definition of, 310-12;
   Nature and, 312, 313;
   the sum of the active energies of mankind, 313;
   and æsthetics, the unlikeness of, 314, 315, 325-28;
   a genus, of which morals is a species, 316;
   each, has its own morality, 318;
   to assert that it gives pleasure a feeble conclusion, 319;
   on the uselessness of, according to Schopenhauer and others, 319-21;
   meaninglessness of the statement that it is useless, 322;
   sociological function of, 323, 324;
   philosophers have failed to see that it has a morality of its own,
      324, 325;
   for art’s sake, 346, 347.

 Artist, partakes of divine nature of creator of the world, 2;
   Napoleon as an, 10-12;
   the true scientist as, 72, 73, 112;
   the philosopher as, 72, 73, 85;
   explanation of, 108-12;
   Bacon’s definition of, Man added to Nature, 153;
   makes all things new, 153;
   in words, passes between the plane of new vision and the plane of new
      creation, 170, 178;
   life always a discipline for, 277;
   lays up his treasure in Heaven, 307;
   Man as, 310;
   is a maker, 312;
   Aristotle’s use of the term, 313;
   reveals Nature, 320;
   has to effect a necessary Bovarism, 348, 349.

 Artistic creation, the process of its birth, 108, 109.

 Arts, sometimes classic and sometimes decadent, 8 _n._;
   and sciences, 68-70;
   Master of, 69.

 “Arty” people, 6, 7.

 “As if,” germs of doctrine of, in Kant, 87;
   world of, and Plato’s “Ideas,” 88;
   source of the phrase, 88, 89;
   seen in play, 89;
   the doctrine of, not immune from criticism, 102;
   fortifying influence of the doctrine, 102, 103.
   _See_ Fiction, Vaihinger.

 Asceticism, has nothing to do with normal religion, 222, 223;
   among the Greeks, traced, 249 _n._;
   and Christianity, 249 _n._

 Asclepios, the cult of, 197 _n._

 Atavism, in handwriting, 157, 158;
   in style, 158-61, 190.

 Athenæus, 55, 353 _n._;
   his book about the Greeks, 76 _n._

 Atom, a fiction or an hypothesis, 97, 338;
   the structure of, 97 _n._

 Attraction, force of, a fiction, 98.

 Aurelius, Marcus, regarded art of life as like the dancer’s art, 66;
   his statement of the mystical core of religion, 207;
   adopted æsthetic criterion of moral action, 279.

 Australians, religious dances among, 40.

 Auto-erotic activities, 110, 111.

 Axioms, akin to fiction, 94, 95.


 Babies, 105.

 Bach, Sebastian, 62, 311.

 Bacon, Francis, his definition of the artist, Man added to Nature, 153;
   his style compared with that of Shakespeare, 160;
   the music of his style, 163;
   heavy and formal letters of, 184;
   his axiom, the right question is half the knowledge, 325.

 Bacon, Roger, on the sciences, 68.

 Balguy, Rev. John, 274.

 Ballad, a dance as well as song, 62.

 Ballet, the, chief form of Romantic dancing, 53;
   the germ of, to be found in ancient Rome, 56;
   origin of the modern, 56;
   the Italian and the French, 56-58;
   decline of, 58;
   the Russian, 58-60;
   the Swedish, 60.

 Bantu, the question of the, 38, 45.

 Baptism, 242.

 “Barbarians,” the classic use of the term, 285.

 Barebones, Praise-God, 272.

 Baretti, G. M., 50.

 Bastien-Lepage, Jules, 311.

 Baudelaire, Charles, on vulgar locutions, 151.

 Baumgarten, A. G., the commonly accepted founder of æsthetics, 326.

 Bayaderes, 52.

 Bayle, G. L., 261.

 “Beautiful,” the, among Greeks and Romans, 247, 252.

 Beauty, developed by dancing, 47;
   as an element of literary style, 176-78;
   and the good, among the Greeks, 247;
   Plotinus’s doctrine of, 250, 251;
   of virtue, 270 _n._;
   æsthetic contemplation creates, 315, 327, 328;
   and prettiness, 315 _n._;
   revelation of, sometimes comes as by a process of “conversion,” 328,
      329.

 Bee, the, an artist, 312.

 Beethoven, 311;
   his Seventh Symphony, 62, 63.

 Beggary in China, 31.

 Benn, A. W., his _The Greek Philosophers_, 6, 252, 277 _n._

 Bentham, Jeremy, adopted a fiction for his system, 99.

 Berenson, Bernhard, critic of art, 114;
   his attitude toward Leonardo da Vinci, 114, 117.

 Bergson, Henri Louis, pyrotechnical allusions frequent in, 23;
   regards philosophy as an art, 83, 84;
   on clarity in style, 176, 177;
   his idea of intuition, 232 _n._;
   on reality, 320.

 Berkeley, George, 95.

 Bernard, Claude, personality in his _Leçons de Physiologie
    Expérimentales_, 144.


 Bible, the, the source of its long life, 179.
   _See_ Old Testament, Revelation.

 Birds, dancing of, 36 _n._, 45;
   the attitude of the poet toward, 168.

 Birth-rate, as test of civilisation, 294, 296, 299 _n._

 “Bitter,” a moral quality, 264.

 Blackguard, the, 244, 245.

 Blake, William, on the Dance of Life, 66;
   on the golden rule of life, 281.

 Blasco Ibañez, 171.

 Blood, Harvey’s conception of circulation of, nearly anticipated by
    Leonardo da Vinci, 120.

 Boisguillebert, Pierre Le Pesant, sieur de, his “barometer of
    prosperity,” 287.

 Botany, studied by Leonardo da Vinci, 119.

 Botticelli, Sandro, 56.

 Bouguereau, G. A., 315 _n._

 Bovarism, explanation of, 335;
   applied to the Universe, 337;
   a necessary, effected by the artist, 348, 349.

 Brantôme, Pierre de B., his style, 161.

 Braun, Otto, 357.

 Breton, Jules, 311.

 Bridges, Robert, 272.

 Browne, Sir Thomas, his style, 161, 175, 176, 178.

 Browning, Robert, 113;
   too clumsy to influence others, 184.

 Brunetière, Ferdinand, a narrow-minded pedagogue, 125.

 Bruno, Giordano, 207.

 Bruno, Leonardo, 207.

 Bryce, James, on democracies, 300.

 Bücher, Karl, on work and dance, 61, 62.

 Buckle, H. T., 99.

 Buddhist monks, 224 _n._


 Building, and dancing, the two primary arts, 36;
   birds’ nests, the chief early form of, 36 _n._

 Bunyan, John, 79.

 Burton, Robert, as regards his quotations, 152.

 Bury, J. B., 287 _n._


 Cabanel, 315 _n._

 Cadiz, the dancing-school of Spain, 54.

 Camargo, innovations of, in the ballet, 57.

 Carlyle, Thomas, revelation of family history in his style, 158, 159;
   compared to Aristophanes, 159 _n._;
   too clumsy to ninfluence others, 184.

 Carpenter, the, sacred position of, in some countries, 2.

 Carr-Saunders, A. M., on the social ladder and the successful climbers,
    299, 300;
   on selecting the best stock of humanity, 354.

 Cassirer, Ernest, on Goethe, 137 _n._

 Castanets, 54.

 Casuistry, 304 _n._, 305.

 Categories, are fictions, 94.

 Cathedrals, dancing in, 44, 45.

 Ceremony, Chinese, 22, 29;
   and music, Chinese life regulated by, 24-26.

 Cézanne, artist, 153, 315 _n._

 Chanties, of sailors, 61, 62.

 Cheetham, Samuel, on the Pagan Mysteries, 241 _n._

 Chemistry, analogy of, to life, 33-35.

 Chess, the Chinese game of, 23.

 _Chiaroscuro_, method of, devised by Leonardo da Vinci, 117.

 Chidley, Australian philosopher, 79-82.

 China, finest thinkers of, perceived significance in life of conception
    of art, 3;
   art animates the whole of life in, 27, 28;
   beggary in, 31.

 Chinese, the, the accounts of, 18-21;
   their poetry, 21, 22, 29, 32;
   their etiquette of politeness, 22;
   the quality of play in their character, 22-24;
   their life regulated by music and ceremony, 24-26, 29;
   their civilisation shows that life is art, 27, 28, 30;
   the æsthetic supremacy of, 28-30;
   endurance of their civilisation, 28, 30;
   their philosophic calm, 29 _n._;
   decline in civilisation of, in last thousand years, 30;
   their pottery, 32, 33;
   embodiment of their symbol of the art of living, 33.

 Chinese life, the art of balancing æsthetic temperament and guarding
    against its excesses, 29.

 _Choir_, the word, 42.

 Christian Church, supposed to have been originally a theatre, 42.

 Christian ritual, the earliest known, a sacred dance, 42.

 Christian worship, dancing in, 42-45;
   central function of, a sacred drama, 43.

 Christianity, Lifuan art of living undermined by arrival of, 18;
   dancing in, 40-45;
   the ideas of, as dogmas, hypotheses, and fictions, 99;
   and the Pagan Mysteries, 242;
   and asceticism, 249 _n._;
   the Hebrew mode of feeling grafted into, 276.

 Chrysostom, on dancing at the Eucharist, 43.

 Church, and religion, not the same, 228 _n._

 Church Congress, at Sheffield in 1922, ideas of conversion expressed
    at, 220 _n._

 Churches, 351.

 Cicero, 73, 252.

 Cinema, educational value of, 138.

 Cistercian monks, 43.

 Cistercians, the, 347.

 Civilisation, develops with conscious adhesion to formal order, 172;
   standards for measurement of, 285;
   Niceforo’s measurement of, 286;
   on meaning of, 287;
   the word, 288;
   the art of, includes three kinds of facts, 289;
   criminality as a measure of, 290, 291;
   creative genius and general instruction in connection with, 291-93;
   birth-rate as test of, 294;
   consumption of luxuries as test of, 294, 295;
   suicide rate as test of, 295;
   tests of, applied to France by Niceforo, 295-97;
   not an exclusive mass of benefits, but a mass of values, 297;
   becoming more complex, 298;
   small minority at the top of, 298;
   guidance of, assigned to lower stratum, 298, 299;
   art of eugenics necessary to save, 299, 300;
   of quantity and of quality, 300;
   not to be precisely measured, 301;
   the more rapidly it progresses, the sooner it dies, 301;
   an art, 301, 310;
   an estimate of its value possible, 302;
   meaning of Protagoras’s dictum with relation to, 302;
   measured by standard of fine art (sculpture), 307, 308;
   eight periods of, 307, 308;
   a fresh race needed to produce new period of, 308;
   and culture, 309;
   æsthetic sense indispensable for, 345;
   possible break-up of, 358.

 Clarity, as an element of style, 176-78.

 _Clichés_, 149-51.

 Cloisters, for artists, 358.

 Cochez, of Louvain, on Plotinus, 249 _n._

 Coleridge, S. T., his “loud bassoon,” 169;
   of the spectator type of the contemplative temperament, 332.

 Colour-words, 164 _n._

 Colvin, Sir Sidney, on science and art, 70.

 Commandments, tables of, 253, 255.

 Communists, French, inspired by Shaftesbury, 269.

 Community, the, 244.

 Comte, J. A., 301.

 Confucian morality, the, 29.

 Confucianism, outward manifestation of Taoism, 26.

 Confucius, consults Lao-tze, 25, 26.

 Conrad, Joseph, his knowledge of the sea, 171.

 Contemplation. _See_ Æsthetic contemplation.

 Convention, and Nature, Hippias makes distinction between, 5.

 Conventions. _See_ Traditions.

 Conversion, a _questionnaire_ on, 210 _n._;
   the process of, 218;
   the fundamental fact of, 218, 218 _n._;
   essential outlines of, have been obscured, 220 _n._;
   Churchmen’s ideas of, 220 _n._;
   not the outcome of despair or a retrogression, 221, 222;
   nothing ascetic about it, 222;
   among the Greeks, 240;
   revelation of beauty sometimes comes by a process of, 328, 329.

 Cooper, Anthony, 261.

 Cornish, G. Warre, his article on “Greek Drama and the Dance,” 56.

 Cosmos. _See_ Universe.

 Courtship, dancing a process of, 46.

 Cowper, William, 184;
   influence of Shaftesbury on, 266.

 Craftsman, the, partakes of divine nature of creator of the world, 2.

 Creation, not the whole of Man, 314.

 Creative impulses. _See_ Impulses.

 Crime, an effort to get into step, 245 _n._;
   defined, 290;
   natural, 290;
   evolutive social, 291.

 Criminality, as a measure of civilisation, 290, 291.

 Critics, of language, 141-51;
   difficulty of their task, 153 _n._

 Croce, Benedetto, his idea of art, 84;
   tends to move in verbal circles, 84;
   on judging a work of art, 153 _n._;
   on mysticism and science, 191 _n._;
   tends to fall into verbal abstraction, 324 _n._;
   his idea of intuition, 232 _n._, 320 _n._;
   on the critic of art as a critic of life, 269;
   on art the deliverer, 318 _n._;
   union of æsthetic sense with artistic instinct, 350 _n._

 Croiset, Maurice, on Plotinus, 249 _n._

 Cromwell, Oliver, 272.

 Cruz, Friar Gaspar de, on the Chinese, 31.

 Culture, and civilisation, 309.

 Curiosity, the sexual instinct a reaction, to the stimulus of, 104,
    112.

 Custom, 245.

 Cuvier, Georges, 181.

 Cymbal, the, 53.



 Dance, love, among insects, birds, and mammals, 45, 46;
   among savages, 46;
   has gained influence in the human world, 48;
   various forms of, 48, 49;
   the complete, 49, 50;
   the seductiveness of, 50;
   prejudice against, 50, 51;
   choral, Plotinus compares the moral life of the soul to, 251, 252.

 Dance of Life, the, 66, 67.


 Dancing, and building, the two primary acts, 36;
   possibly accounts for origin of birds’ nests, 36 _n._;
   supreme manifestation of physical life and supreme symbol of
      spiritual life, 36;
   the significance of, 37;
   the primitive expression of religion and of love, 37, 38, 45;
   entwined with human tradition of war, labour, pleasure, and
      education, 37;
   the expression of the whole man, 38, 39;
   rules the life of primitive men, 39 _n._;
   religious importance of, among primitive men, 39, 40;
   connected with all religions, 40;
   ecstatic and pantomimic, 41, 42;
   survivals of, in religion, 42;
   in Christian worship, 42-45;
   in cathedrals, 44, 45;
   among birds and insects, 45;
   among mammals, 45, 46;
   a process of courtship and novitiate for love, 46, 47;
   double function of, 47;
   different forms of, 48-51;
   becomes an art, 51;
   professional, 52;
   Classic and Romantic, 52-60;
   the ballet, 53, 56-60;
   solo, 53;
   Egyptian and Gaditanian, 53, 54;
   Greek, 55, 56, 60;
   as morals, 60, 61, 63;
   all human work a kind of, 61, 62;
   and music, 61-63;
   social significance of, 60, 61, 63, 64;
   and war, allied, 63, 64;
   importance of, in education, 64, 65;
   Puritan attack on, 65;
   is life itself, 65;
   always felt to possess symbolic significance, 66;
   the learning of, a severe discipline, 277.

 Dancing-school, the function of, process of courtship, 47.

 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 178.

 _Danse du ventre_, the, 49 _n._

 Dante, 311, 349;
   dancing in his “Paradiso,” 43;
   intellectual life of, largely guided by delight in beauty of rhythmic
      relation between law and instance, 73.

 Darwin, Charles, 88;
   poet and artist, 128, 129;
   and St. Theresa, 198.

 Darwin, Erasmus, 181.

 David, Alexandra, his book, _Le Philosophe Meh-ti et l’Idée de
    Solidarité_, 26 _n._

 Decadence, of art of living, 8 _n._;
   rigid subservience to rule a mark of, 173.

 Degas, 315 _n._

 Democracies, the smallest, are highest, 300.

 Demography, 285.

 Demosthenes, 336.

 De Quincey, Thomas, the music of his style, 164.

 Descartes, René, on arts and sciences, 69;
   represents in France new impetus to sciences, 180;
   religious, though man of science, 208.

 Design, the arts of, 36.

 Devadasis, the, sacred dancing girls, 51, 52.

 Diaghilev, 59.

 Dickens, Charles, 311.

 Dickinson, G. Lowes, his account of the Chinese, 20, 21;
   his account of Chinese poetry, 21, 22.

 Diderot, Denis, wide-ranging interests of, 5;
   translated Shaftesbury, 268.

 “Dieta Salutis,” the, 43.

 Discipline, definition of a, 71 _n._

 “Divine command,” the, 255.

 “Divine malice,” of Nietzsche, 155 _n._

 Diving-bell, constructed by Leonardo da Vinci, 119.

 Divorces, as test of civilisation, 296.

 Doctor, and priest, originally one, 197 _n._, 203.

 Dogma, hypothesis, and fiction, 98, 99.

 Dogmas, shadows of personal experience, 217.

 Dostoievsky, F. M., 311, 349;
   his masterpiece, “_The Brothers Karamazov_,” 135, 136.

 Drama, Greek, origin of, 55, 56;
   the real Socrates possibly to be seen in, 78.

 Driesch, Hans, on his own mental development, 216 _n._

 Drum, the influence of the, 63.

 Dryden, John, 148.

 Dujardin, Edouard, his story of Huysmans, 166;
   on Bergson’s style, 177.

 Dumont, Arsène, on civilisation, 298, 301.

 Duncan, Isadora, 60.

 Duprat, G. L., on morality, 34.

 Dupréel, Professor, on Hippias, 6 _n._;
   his _La Légende Socratique_, 82 _n._;
   on the Protagorean spirit, 302 _n._

 Duty, 275, 276.


 Easter, dancing of priests at, 44.

 Eckhart, Meister, 234, 336.

 Education, importance of dancing in, 64, 65;
   Einstein’s views on, 137;
   and genius, as tests of civilisation, 291-93.

 Egypt, ancient, dancing in, 42;
   Classical dancing originated in, 52;
   the most influential dancing-school of all time, 53;
   musical instruments associated with dancing, originated or developed
      in, 53;
   modern, dancing in, 54 _n._;
   importance of its civilisation, 307.

 Eight-hours day, the, 357.

 Einstein, Albert, 2, 69 _n._, 72;
   substitutes new axioms for old, 95;
   casts doubts on Leonardo da Vinci’s previsions of modern science, 120
      _n._;
   seems to have won a place beside Newton, 133;
   an imaginative artist, 134;
   his fondness for music, 134, 135;
   his other artistic likings and dislikings, 135, 136;
   an artist also in his work, 136;
   his views on science, 137;
   his views on education, 137, 138;
   on the motives that attract people to science and art, 138, 321;
   feels harmony of religion and science, 207;
   concerned with truth, 327;
   and “science for science’s sake,” 347 _n._

 Eleusinian Mysteries, the, 240-43.

 Eliot, George, her knowledge of the life of country people, 171;
   Tolstoy’s opinion of, 311.

 Ellis, Havelock, childhood of, 210, 211;
   his period of emotional and intellectual expansion, 211;
   loses faith, 212;
   influence of Hinton’s “_Life in Nature_” on, 215-18.

 Els Cosiers, dancing company, 45.

 Emerson, R. W., his style and that of Bacon, 161.

 Emmanuel, his book on Greek dancing, 55.

 Empathy, 66.

 Engineering, professional, Leonardo da Vinci called the founder of,
    118, 119.

 English laws, 98.

 English prose style, Cartesian influence on, 180 _n._

 English speech, licentiousness of, in the sixteenth century, 148;
   the best literary prose, 155, 156.

 Enjoyment, without possession, 343-46.

 Epictetus, 249 _n._

 Epicurus, 207.

 Erosian, river, importance of, realised by Leonardo da Vinci, 120.

 Eskimos, 255.

 Este, Isabella d’, 123.

 Ethics, and æsthetics, among the Greeks, 247.


 Etruscans, the, 56, 308.

 Eucharist, dancing at the, 43.

 Eucken, Rudolf, on Shaftesbury, 271.

 Eugenics, art of, necessary for preservation of civilisation, 299;
   Galton the founder of the modern scientific art of, 353;
   assertion of principle of, by Jesus, 355, 356;
   question of raising quality of population by process of, 358.

 Eusebius, on the worship of the Therapeuts, 42.

 Evans, Sir Arthur, 112.

 Evolution, theory of, 88, 104;
   a process of sifting, 355;
   and devolution, 355;
   social, 357, 358.

 Existence, totality of, Hippias’s supreme ideal, 6.

 Existing, and thinking, on two different planes, 101.

 “Expression,” 324.


 Facts, in the art of civilisation, material, intellectual, and moral
    (with political), 289.

 Fandango, the, 50.

 Faraday, Michael, characteristics of, trust in facts and imagination,
    130-32;
   his science and his mysticism, 208.

 Farnell, L. R., on religion and science, 197 _n._

 Farrer, Reginald, on the philosophic calm of the Chinese, 29 _n._

 Faure, Elie, his conception of Napoleon, 10;
   on Greek art, 76 _n._;
   has faith in educational value of cinema, 137;
   on knowledge and desire, 154;
   on the Greek spirit, 292 _n._

 Ferrero, Guglielmo, on the art impulse and the sexual instinct, 109.


 Fiction, germs of doctrine of, in Kant, 87;
   first expression of doctrine of, found in Schiller, 89;
   doctrine of, in F. A. Lange’s _History of Materialism_, 93;
   Vaihinger’s doctrine of, 94-103;
   hypothesis, and dogma, 98, 99;
   of Bovarism, 335, 336;
   character constituted by process of, 336.

 Fictions, the variety of, 94-100;
   the value of, 96, 97;
   summatory, 98;
   scientific and æsthetic, 102;
   may always be changed, 103;
   good and bad, 103.

 Fiji, dancing at, 49.

 Fijians, the, 13 _n._

 Fine arts, the, 70;
   civilisation measured by standard of, 307;
   not to be pursued for useful end outside themselves, 322.

 Fireworks, 22, 23.

 Flaubert, Gustave, is personal, 144;
   sought to be most objective of artists, 182.

 Flowers, the attitude of the poet toward, 168, 169.

 Flying-machines, 72 _n._;
   designed by Leonardo da Vinci, 119.

 Foch, Ferdinand, quoted, 103.

 Fokine, 59.

 Folk-dances, 62.

 Force, a fiction, 96.

 Fossils, significance of, discovered by Leonardo da Vinci, 120.

 Fox, George, 237.

 France, tests of civilization applied to, by Niceforo, 295-97.

 Francis of Assisi, 237.

 Franck, César, mysticism in music of, 237.

 Frazer, J. G., on magic and science, 195, 196.

 Freedom, a fiction, 100.

 French ballet, the, 57, 58.

 French speech, its course, 148, 149.

 Freud, Sigmund, 111, 318 _n._;
   regards dreaming as fiction, 103;
   on the probability of the disappearance of religion, 228 _n._

 Frobisher, Sir Martin, his spelling, 173, 174.


 Galen, 120.

 Galton, Francis, a man of science and an artist, 126-28;
   founder of the modern scientific art of eugenics, 353;
   and Jesus’s assertion of the principle of eugenics, 356.

 Games, the liking of the Chinese for, 23.

 Gaultier, Jules de, 330 _n._;
   on Buddhist monks, 224 _n._;
   on pain and pleasure in life, 278 _n._;
   on morality and reason, 281;
   on morality and art, 284;
   on the antinomy between morals and morality, 319;
   on beauty, 327;
   on life as a spectacle, 333;
   the Bovarism of, 335-37;
   his philosophic descent, 337;
   applies Bovarism to the Universe, 337;
   his philosophy seems to be in harmony with physics, 338;
   the place of morality, religion, and law in his system, 338-40;
   place of the æsthetic instinct in his system, 341, 343-45;
   system of, compared with Russell’s, 342, 343;
   importance of development of æsthetic sense to, 345;
   and the idea of pure art, 346, 347;
   considers æsthetic sense mixed in manifestations of life, 349, 350;
   had predilection for middle class, 356, 357;
   sees no cause for despair in break-up of civilisation, 358.

 Gauss, C. F., religious, though man of science, 208.


 Genesis, Book of, the fashioning of the cosmos in, 1, 314.

 Genius, the birth of, 109;
   and education, as tests, of civilisation, 291-93;
   of country, and temper of the population, 292, 293.

 Geology, founded by Leonardo da Vinci, 120.

 Geometry, Protagoras’s studies in, 3;
   a science or art, 68.

 Gibbon, Edward, 162.

 Gide, André, 322.

 Gizycki, Georg von, on Shaftesbury, 260, 267.

 God, a fiction, 100, 337.

 Goethe, J. W., 342;
   representative of ideal of totality of existence, 6;
   called architecture “frozen music,” 135;
   his power of intuition, 137;
   his studies in mathematical physics, 137 _n._;
   use of word “stamped” of certain phrases, 149;
   mistook birds, 168;
   felt harmony of religion and science, 207;
   and Schiller and Humboldt, 275.

 Gomperz, Theodor, his _Greek Thinkers_, 4, 5, 6 _n._; 75, 78.

 Goncourt, Jules de, his style, 182, 183.

 Goncourts, the, 183.

 Good, the, and beauty, among the Greeks, 247.

 Goodness, and sweetness, in Shaftesbury’s philosophy, 262;
   and sweetness, originally the same, 263;
   moral, originally expressed in terms of taste, 263.

 Gorgias, 302.

 Gourmont, Remy de, 65;
   his remark about pleasure, 24;
   on personality, 144;
   on style, 177;
   on civilisation, 298;
   on the Jesuits, 304, 305;
   on beauty, 315;
   on art and morality, 321;
   on sociological function of art, 323.

 Government, as art, 3.

 Grace, an element of style in writing, 155, 156.

 Grammar, Protagoras the initiator of modern, 4;
   a science or art, 68;
   writing not made by the laws of, 172, 173.

 Grammarian, the, the formulator, not the lawgiver, of usage, 148.

 Great Wall of China, the, 28.

 Great War, the, 339.

 Greece, ancient, genius built upon basis of slavery in, 292;
   the spirit of, 292.

 Greek art, 76 _n._

 Greek dancing, 55, 56, 60.

 Greek drama, 55, 56, 78.

 Greek morality, an artistic balance of light and shade, 260.

 Greek speech, the best literary prose, 155.

 Greek spirit, the, 76 _n._

 Greeks, attitude of thinkers of, on life as art, 3, 247-53;
   the pottery of, 32;
   importance of dancing and music in organisation of some states of,
      64;
   books on, written by barbarians, 76 _n._;
   mysticism of, 205-07, 240-43;
   spheres of ethics and æsthetics not distinguished among, 247;
   had a kind of æsthetic morality, 316-18;
   recognised destruction of ethical and intellectual virtues, 330;
   a small minority of abnormal persons among, 353 _n._

 Greenslet, Ferris, on the Cartesian influence on English prose style,
    180 _n._

 Groos, Karl, his “the play of inner imitation,” 66;
   has developed æsthetic side of _miterleben_, 332.

 Grosse, on the social significance of dancing, 63, 64.

 Grote, George, his chapter on Socrates, 76.

 Grotius, Hugo, 261.

 Guitar, the, an Egyptian instrument, 53.

 Gumplowicz, Ludwig, on civilisation, 301.

 Gunpowder, use made of, by Chinese, 22, 23.

 Guyau, insisted on sociological function of art, 323, 324;
   believes that poets and artists will be priests of social religion
      without dogmas, 349, 350.

 Gypsies, possible origin of the name “Egyptians” as applied to them, 54
    _n._


 Hadfield, Emma, her account of the life of the natives of the Loyalty
    Islands, 13-18.

 Hakluyt, Richard, 143;
   his picture of Chinese life, 19.

 Hall, Stanley, on importance of dancing, 64, 65;
   on the beauty of virtue, 270 _n._

 Handel, G. F., 62.


 Handwriting, partly a matter of individual instinct, 156, 157;
   the complexity and mystery enwrapping, 157;
   resemblances in, among members of the same family, 157, 158;
   atavism in, 157, 158.

 Hang-Chau, 20.

 Hardy, Thomas, his lyrics, 170 _n._;
   his sensitivity to the sounds of Nature, 171;
   his genius unquestioned, 187 _n._

 Hawaii, dancing in, 51.

 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, his style, 161.

 Hebrews, their conception of the fashioning of the universe, 1;
   ancient, their priests and their prophets, 203;
   never conceived of the art of morals, 253;
   were no æsthetic intuitionists, 276.

 Hegel, G. W. F., 90;
   poetic quality of his philosophy, 84;
   his attempt to transform subjective processes into objective
      world-processes, 101.

 Heine, Heinrich, 155 _n._

 Hellenism, the revivalists of, 271.

 Helmholtz, H. L. F., science and art in, 72.

 Hemelverdeghem, Salome on Cathedral at, 49 _n._

 Heraclitus, 74.

 Herder, J. G. von, his _Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit_, 88;
   inspired by Shaftesbury, 268.

 Heredity, in handwriting, 157, 158;
   in style, 158-61, 190;
   tradition the corporeal embodiment of, 161.

 Hincks, Marcella Azra, on the art of dancing in Japan, 42 _n._

 Hindu dance, 41.

 Hinton, James, on thinking as an art, 86 _n._;
   on the arts, 111;
   the universe according to, 215, 216;
   Ellis’s copy of his book, 220;
   on pleasure and pain in the art of life, 278;
   on methods of arts and moral action, 281, 282.

 Hippias, 302;
   significance of his ideas, in conception of life as an art, 4-6;
   his ideal, 4, 6;
   the Great Logician, 6 _n._

 Hobbes, Thomas, on space, 95;
   his dictum _Homo homini lupus_, 262.

 Hodgson, Shadworth, 289.

 Hoffman, Bernhard, his _Guide to the Bird-World_, 168.

 Horace, the popularity of, in modern times, 92.

 Hovelaque, Émile, on the Chinese, 27, 28.

 Howell, James, his “Familiar Letters,” 184.

 Hugo, Victor, 149, 311.

 Hula dance, the, 51.

 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 275.

 Hume, David, took up fictional point of view, 96;
   recognised Shaftesbury, 267;
   influenced by Hutcheson, 275.

 Hunt, Leigh, sensitively acute critic of Keats, 167.

 Hunter, John, 181.

 Hutcheson, Francis, æsthetic moralist, 251;
   came out of Calvinistic Puritanism, 266;
   one of the founders of æsthetics, 271, 326 _n._;
   wrote the first modern treatise on æsthetics, 271;
   represented reaction against Puritanism, 271;
   Shaftesbury’s ideas as developed by, 273;
   his use of the term “moral sense,” 273, 274;
   his impressive personality, 274;
   philosophy was art of living to, 274, 275;
   inconsistent, 314;
   on distinction between art and æsthetics, 326 _n._;
   his idea of the æsthetic and the moral emotion, 327 _n._

 Huysmans, J. K., his vocabulary, 165;
   at Wagner concert, 166;
   fascinated by concert programmes, 166, 167.

 “Hymn of Jesus,” the, 42.

 Hypothesis, dogma, and fiction, 98, 99.


 _I_ and _me_, 147.

 Idealisation, in adolescence, 107, 108.

 Idealism, 83.

 Idealists, 70, 341 _n._

 Ideals, are fictions, 100.

 Imagination, a constitutive part of thinking, 102;
   man lives by, 102;
   guarded by judgment and principles, 130-32;
   part performed by, in morals, 272;
   and the æsthetic instinct, 344.

 Imbeciles, 352-55.

 Imitation, in the productions of young writers, 164.

 _Immoral_, significance of the word, 246.

 Immortality, a fiction, 100.


 Impulses, creative and possessive, 306, 307, 341-43.

 Inclination, 275.

 India, dancing in, 51, 52;
   the Todas of, 203 _n._

 Indians, American, religious dances among, 40, 42.

 Infanticide, 255, 354.

 Infinite, the, a fiction, 95.

 Infinitive, the split, 145-47.

 Inge, Dean, on Plotinus, 223 _n._, 249 _n._;
   on Pagan Mysteries, 241 _n._

 Innate ideas, 274.

 Insects, dancing among, 45.

 Instinct, the part it plays in style, 163;
   imitation a part of, 164;
   and tradition, mould morals, 254-59;
   the possessive, 338-40, 344, 345, 351, _see_ Possessive instinct;
   the æsthetic, 341, 343-46, 350, _see_ Æsthetic instinct.

 Instincts, 234, 235.

 Intelligence, the sphere of, 233, 234.

 Intuition, the starting point of science, 137;
   meaning of, 232 _n._;
   of the man of genius, 320.

 Intuitionism, æsthetic, 260, 276, 279, 314.

 Intuitionists, the, 232-34.

 Invention, necessary in science, 137.

 Invincible ignorance, doctrine of, 304.

 Irony, Socratic, 78, 83.

 Irrationalism, of Vaihinger, 90.

 Isocrates, on beauty and virtue, 247.

 Italy, Romantic dancing originated in, 53, 56;
   the ballet in, 56-58.


 Jansenists, the, 303.

 Japan, dancing in, 42, 49.

 Java, dancing in, 49.

 Jehovah, in the Book of Genesis, 1.

 Jeremiah, the prophet, his voice and instrument, 178, 179.

 Jeres, cathedral of, dancing in, 44.

 Jesuits, the, 303-05.

 Jesus, and Napoleon, 10, 11;
   and the Platonic Socrates, 82, 83;
   asserts principle of eugenics, 353, 356;
   and Plato, 356.

 Joël, Karl, on the Xenophontic Socrates, 78;
   on the evolution of the Greek philosophic spirit, 206.

 John of the Cross, 237.

 Johnson, Samuel, the pedantry of, 156;
   Latin-French element in, 162;
   his idea of “matter,” 230.

 Johnston, Sir H. H., on the dancing of the Pygmies, 51.

 Jones, Dr. Bence, biographer of Faraday, 130.

 Jonson, Ben, 184.

 Joyce, James, 172, 184;
   his _Ulysses_, 185, 186.


 Kant, Immanuel, 89;
   germs of the doctrine of the “as if” in, 87;
   his idea of the art of morals, 253, 254;
   influenced by Shaftesbury, 253, 254, 266;
   anecdote about, 257 _n._, 276;
   rationalises morality, 281.

 Keats, John, concerned with beautiful words in “The Eve of St. Agnes,”
    167.

 Kepler, Johann, his imagination and his accuracy in calculation, 132,
    133.

 Keyserling, Count Hermann, his _Philosophie als Kunst_, 83 _n._

 “Knowing,” analysis of, 70, 71.

 Kolbe, Rev. Dr., illustrates æsthetic view of morals, 276 _n._


 Lamb, Charles, 184.

 Landor, W. S., 149;
   on vulgarisms in language, 151 _n._;
   on the poet and poetry, 154, 172;
   on style, 163.

 Lange, F. A., his _The History of Materialism_, 73 _n._, 83;
   sets forth conception of philosophy as poetic art, 83;
   the Neo-Kantism of, 87;
   his influence on Vaihinger, 92, 93.

 Language, critics of present-day, 141-51;
   of our forefathers and of to-day, 143;
   things we are told to avoid in, 145-51;
   is imagery and metaphor, 165;
   reaction of thought on, 179-81;
   progress in, due to flexibility and intimacy, 183.

 Languages, the Yo-heave-ho theory of, 61.

 Lankester, Sir E. Ray, 70.

 Lao-tze, and Confucius, 25, 26;
   the earliest of the great mystics, 204;
   harmony of religion and science in his work, 204, 205.

 Law, a restraint placed upon the possessive instinct, 339, 340;
   to be replaced by æsthetic instinct, 340, 341.

 Laycock, on handwriting, 158 _n._

 Leibnitz, Baron S. W. von, 6 _n._;
   on space, 95;
   on music, 135;
   admired Shaftesbury, 268.

 “L’Esprit Nouveau,” 179.

 Libby, M. F., on Shaftesbury, 273.

 Lie, Jonas, 163.

 Life, more difficult to realise it as an art than to act it so, 1, 2;
   as art, view of highest thinkers of China and Greece on, 2-6, 247-52;
   ideal of totality of, 6;
   art of, has been decadent during last two thousand years, 8 _n._;
   of the Loyalty Islanders, 13-18;
   the Lifuan art of, 13-18;
   the Chinese art of, 27, 28;
   Chinese civilization proves that it is art, 30;
   embodiment of the Chinese symbol of the art of, 33;
   identical with art, 33-35;
   the art of, a dance, 66, 67;
   mechanistic explanation of, 216;
   viewed in its moral aspect, 244;
   the moralist the critic of the art of, 247;
   as art, attitude of Romans toward, 252;
   as art, attitude of Hebrews toward, 253;
   the art of, both pain and pleasure in, 277, 278;
   as art, a conception approved by men of high character, 278, 279;
   not to be precisely measured by statistics, 302;
   as a spectacle, 333, 334.

 Lifu. _See_ Loyalty Islands.


 Lifuans, the, the art of living of, 13-18.

 Limoges, 44.

 Linnæan system, the, a fiction, 99.

 Liszt, Franz, 329.

 Livingstone, David, 38.

 Locke, John, and Shaftesbury, 261, 262.

 Locomotive, the, 72 _n._

 Lodge, Sir Oliver, his attempt to study religion, 201.

 Logic, a science or art, 68;
   and fiction, 94;
   of thought, inescapable, 183.

 Loret, on dancing, 54 _n._

 Love, dancing the primitive expression of, 37, 45;
   curiosity one of the main elements of, 112.

 Love-dance, 45-51.
   _See_ Dance, Dancing.


 Loyalty Islands, the, customs of the natives of, 13-18.

 Lucian, 353 _n._;
   on dancing, 40, 45.

 Lucretius, 207.

 Lull, Ramon, 237.

 Lulli, J. B., brought women into the ballet, 57.

 Luxuries, consumption of, as test of civilisation, 294-97.


 Machinery of life, 216.

 Madagascar, dancing in, 49.

 Magic, relation of, to science and religion, 193-96.

 Magna Carta, 98.

 Malherbe, François de, 148.

 Mallarmé, Stéphane, music the voice of the world to, 166.

 Mallorca, dancing in church in, 44, 45.

 Mammals, dancing among, 45, 46.

 Man, has found it more difficult to conceive life as an art than to act
    it so, 1;
   his conception less that of an artist, as time went on, 2;
   in Protagoras’s philosophy, 3, 4, 302;
   ceremony and music, his external and internal life, 25;
   added to Nature, 153;
   has passed through stages of magic, religion, and science, 196;
   an artist of his own life, 271;
   is an artist, 310;
   as artist and as æsthetician, 314;
   becomes the greatest force in Nature, 339;
   practices adopted by, to maintain selection of best stock, 354.

 Mandeville, Sir John, on Shaftesbury, 262.

 Manet, 311.

 Marco Polo, his picture of Chinese life, 19, 20;
   noticed absence of beggars in China, 31;
   on public baths in China, 32.

 Marett, on magic and science, 195.

 Marlowe, Christopher, 170, 184.

 Marquesans, the, 13 _n._

 Marriott, Charles, on the union of æsthetic sense with artistic
    instinct, 350 _n._

 Martial, 54.

 Mass, dancing in ritual of, 43-45;
   analogy of Pagan Mysteries to, 242.

 Master of Arts, 69.

 Materialism, 97, 230.

 Materialistic, the term, 229.

 Mathematical Renaissance, the, 69.

 Mathematics, false ideas in, 94, 95;
 and art, 138-40.

 Matter, a fiction, 97, 229, 338;
   and spirit, 229, 230.

 Maupassant, Guy de, 311.

 McDougall, William, accepts magic as origin of science, 195;
   his criticism of the “moral sense,” 274 _n._;
   his study of civilisation, 298;
   on birth-rate, 298 _n._

 _Me_ and _I_, 147.

 Mead, G. R., his article _The Sacred Dance of Jesus_, 44.

 Measurement, Protagoras’s saying concerning, 3, 302.

 Mechanics, beginning of science of, 74;
   theories of, studied by Leonardo da Vinci, 120.

 Medici, Catherine de’, brought Italian ballet to Paris, 57.

 Medicine, and religion, 197 _n._, 203.

 Medicine-man, the, 192-95.

 Meh-ti, Chinese philosopher, 26, 27.

 Men, of to-day and of former days, their comparative height, 142.

 “Men of science,” 125, 126.
   _See_ Scientist.

 Meteorological Bureau, the, 203.

 Metre, poetic, arising out of work, 62.

 Michelangelo, 311.

 Milan, the ballet in, 58.

 Mill, J. S., on science and art, 70;
   criticism of Bentham, 99.

 Millet, J. F., 311.

 Milton, John, his misuse of the word “eglantine,” 169;
   Tolstoy’s opinion of, 311.

 Mirandola, Pico della, 6 _n._

 Mittag-Lefler, Gustav, on mathematics, 139.

 Möbius, Paul Julius, German psychologist, 109.

 Moissac, Salome capital in, 49 _n._

 Montaigne, M. E. de, his style flexible and various, 148;
   his quotations moulded to the pattern of his own mind, 152;
   his style and that of Renan, 161;
   the originality of his style found in vocabulary, 165.

 Montesquieu, Baron de, his admiration for Shaftesbury, 268;
   on the evils of civilisation, 297.

 _Moral_, significance of the term, 246.

 Moral maxims, 254, 258.

 Moral reformer, the, 282.

 “Moral sense,” the term as used by Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, 273, 274;
   in McDougall’s _Social Psychology_, 274 _n._

 Moral teaching, 246 _n._

 Moral World-Order, the, a fiction, 100.

 Morand, Paul, 170 _n._

 Moreau, Gustave, 167.

 Morgagni, G. B., 300.

 Morris, William, 350 _n._

 Moses, 253, 282.

 Moszkowski, Alexander, his book on Einstein, 134 _n._

 Moralist, the critic of the art of life, 247.

 Morality, Greek, an artistic balance of light and shade, 260;
   a matter of taste, 263;
   the æsthetic quality of, evidenced by language, 263, 264;
   Shaftesbury’s views on, 264-66;
   the influence of Shaftesbury on our modern, 266, 267;
   imagination in, 272;
   instinctive, according to Hutcheson, 274;
   conception of, as an art, does not lack seriousness, 276;
   the æsthetic view of, advocated by Catholics, 276 _n._;
   the æsthetic view of, repugnant to two classes of minds, 280-82;
   indefiniteness of criterion of, an advantage, 282, 283;
   justification of æsthetic conception of, 283, 284;
   flexible and inflexible, illustrated by Jesuits and Pascal, 303-05;
   art the reality of, 314;
   æsthetic, of the Greeks, 316-18;
   the antinomy between morals and, 319;
   a restraint placed upon the possessive instinct, 338-40;
   to be replaced by æsthetic instinct, 340, 341;
   æsthetic instinct has the character of, 346.


 Morals, dancing as, 61, 63, 66;
   books on, 244;
   defined, 245;
   means _custom_, 245;
   Plotinus’s conception of, 250-52;
   as art, views of the Greeks and the Romans on, differ, 252;
   Hebrews never conceived of the art of, 253;
   as art, modern conception of, 253;
   the modern feeling about, is Jewish and Roman, 253;
   Kant’s idea of the art of, 253, 254;
   formed by instinct, tradition and reason, 254-59;
   Greek, have come to modern world through Shaftesbury, 267;
   the æsthetic attitude possible for spectator of, 270;
   art and æsthetics to be kept apart in, 314, 315, 325-28;
   a species of the genus art, 316;
   the antinomy between morality and, 319;
   philosophers have failed to see that it is an art, 324.

 _Morisco_, the, 49 _n._

 Mozart, Wolfgang, his interest in dancing, 62.

 Müller-Freienfels, Richard, two kinds of æsthetic contemplation defined
    by, 331.

 Multatuli, quoted on the source of curiosity, 112.

 Music, and ceremony, 24-26;
   and acting, and poetry, 36;
   and singing, and dancing, their relation, 62;
   a science or art, 68;
   discovery of Pythagoras in, 74;
   philosophy the noblest and best, 81 _n._;
   the most abstract, the most nearly mathematical of the arts, 135;
   of style, 163, 164;
   of philosophy and religion, 179.

 Musical forms, evolved from similar dances, 62.

 Musical instruments, 53, 54.

 Musset, Alfred de, his _Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle_, 144.

 Mysteries, the Eleusinian, 240-43.

 Mystic, the genuine, 202;
   Lao-tze, the earliest great, 204.

 Mystics, the great, 236, 237.


 Mysticism, the right use and the abuse of the word, 191;
   and science, supposed difference between, 191-203;
   what is meant by, 192;
   and science, the harmony of, as revealed in human history, 203-08;
   of the Greeks, 205-07, 240-43;
   and science, the harmony of, as supported by personal experience of
      Havelock Ellis, 209-18;
   and science, how they came to be considered out of harmony, 226-35;
   and science, harmony of, summary of considerations confirming, 235,
      236;
   the key to much that is precious in art and Nature in, 237, 238;
   is not science, 238-40;
   æsthetics on same plane as, 330 _n._
   _See_ Religion.


 Napoleon, described as unmitigated scoundrel by H. G. Wells, 8-10;
   described as lyric artist by Élie Faure, 10.

 Nature, and convention, Hippias made distinction between, 5;
   comes through an atmosphere which is the emanation of supreme
      artists, 166;
   the attitude of the poet in the face of, 168, 169;
   the object of Leonardo da Vinci’s searchings, 114, 117, 125;
   Man added to, 153;
   communion with, 227;
   in Shaftesbury’s system, 265;
   and art, 312, 313.

 Neo-Platonists, the, 237;
   asceticism in, 249 _n._

 Nests, birds’, and dancing, 36 _n._

 Newell, W. W., 41 _n._

 Newman, Cardinal J. H., the music of his style, 164.

 Newton, Sir Isaac, his wonderful imagination, 72;
   his force of attraction a summatory fiction, 98;
   represents in England new impetus to sciences, 180;
   his attempt to study religion, 199-201;
   religious, though a man of science, 208.

 Niceforo, Alfred, his measurement of civilisation, 286, 293, 297;
   tests of civilisation applied to France by, 295-97.

 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 111;
   conceived the art of life as a dance, 66, 67;
   poetic quality of his philosophy, 84;
   Vaihinger’s opinion of, 94;
   on Leonardo da Vinci, 115;
   the “divine malice” of, 155 _n._;
   laboured at his prose, 182;
   demolished D. F. Strauss’s ideas, 215;
   on learning to dance, 277;
   his gospel of taste, 280;
   on the Sophists, 302 _n._;
   on art as the great stimulus of life, 322, 323;
   on the world as a spectacle, 334, 335;
   moved by the “masculine protest,” 336;
   Jesus reproached by, 355.

 Novelists, their reservoirs of knowledge, 171.

 Noverre, and the ballet, 57.


 Ockham, William of, 96.


 Old Testament, the, and the conception of morality as an art, 276.
   _See_ Bible, Genesis.

 Omahas, the, 46.

 Onions, C. T., 146 _n._

 Optimism, and pessimism, 90-92.

 Origen, on the dancing of the stars, 43.

 Orpheus, fable of, 61.

 Osler, Sir William, 72.


 Pacific, the, creation as conceived in, 2;
   dancing in, 49.
   _See_ Lifuans.

 Pain, and pleasure, united, 278.

 Painting, Chinese, 29, 32;
   and sculpture, and the arts of design, 36;
   of Leonardo da Vinci, 113, 114, 117, 118.

 Palante, Georges, 337 _n._

 Paley, William, 267.

 Palladius, 358.

 Pantomime, and pantomimic dancing, 41, 42, 49, 56.

 Papuans, the, are artistic, 351 _n._

 Parachute, constructed by Leonardo da Vinci, 119.

 Paris, dancing in choir in, 44;
   the ballet at, 57.

 Parker, Professor E. H., his book _China: Past and Present_, 23 _n._;
   his view of Chinese vermin and dirt, 31, 32.

 Parks, 351.

 Parmelee, Maurice, his _Criminology_, 291 _n._

 Parsons, Professor, 142.

 Pascal, Blaise, and the Jesuits, 303, 304.

 Pater, W. H., the music of his style, 164.

 Pattison, Pringle, his definition of mysticism, 192 _n._

 Paul, Vincent de, his moral attitude, 279, 280.

 Paulhan, on morality, 284.

 Pell, E. C., on decreasing birth-rate, 294 _n._

 Pepys, Samuel, the accomplishment of his “Diary,” 176.

 Perera, Galeotto, his picture of Chinese life, 19;
   noticed absence of beggars in China, 31.

 Pericles, 289.

 Personality, 144.

 Pessimism, and optimism, 90-92.

 Petrie, Dr. W. M. Flinders, his attempt to measure civilisation by
    standard of sculpture, 307, 308.

 Peyron, traveller, 50.

 Phenomenalism, Protagoras the father of, 3.

 Philosopher, the primitive, usually concluded that the universe was a
    work of art, 1;
   a creative artist, 72, 73, 85;
   curiosity the stimulus of, 104, 105.

 Philosophy, of the Chinese, 32;
   solution of the conflicts of, in art, 82, 83;
   and art, close relationship of, 83-85;
   and poetry, 83, 85;
   is music, 179.

 Physics, and fiction, 95.

 Pictures, revelation of beauty in, 328, 329;
   should be looked at in silence, 329 _n._

 Pindar, calls Hellas “the land of lovely dancing,” 55.

 Planck, Max, physicist, 136.

 Plato, Protagoras calumniated by, 3;
   made fun of Hippias, 4;
   his description of a good education, 64;
   a creative artist, 73;
   his picture of Socrates, 75, 78;
   the biographies of, 76, 77;
   his irony, 78, 83;
   a marvellous artist, 82;
   a supreme artist in philosophy, 83;
   a supreme dramatist, 83;
   his “Ideas” and the “As-If world,” 88;
   the myths, as fictions, hypotheses, and dogmas, 99;
   represents the acme of literary prose speech, 155;
   and Plotinus, 222;
   on the Mysteries, 242;
   asceticism, traced in, 249 _n._;
   on justice, 289;
   his ideal of wise moderation addressed to an immoderate people, 292;
   Sophists caricatured by, 302;
   his “guardians,” 306;
   the ultrapuritanical attitude of, 317, 318 _n._;
   and Bovarism, 336;
   on the value of sight, 345 _n._;
   wished to do away with imaginative literature, 353 _n._;
   and Jesus, 356.

 Pleasure, a human creation, 24;
   and pain, united, 278.

 Pliny, 353 _n._

 Plotinus, 222;
   Greek moral spirit reflected in, 249;
   his doctrine of Beauty, 250, 251;
   his idea that the moral life of the soul is a dance, 251, 252;
   his simile of the sculptor, 276 _n._;
   founder of æsthetics in the philosophic sense, 329;
   recognised three aspects of the Absolute, 330;
   insisted on contemplation, 330 _n._, 331;
   of the participating contemplative temperament, 332.

 Poet, the type of all thinkers, 102;
   Landor on, 154;
   his attitude in the presence of Nature, 168, 169;
   the great, does not describe Nature minutely, but uses his knowledge
      of, 170, 171.

 Poetry, Chinese, 21, 22, 29, 32;
   and music, and acting, 36;
   and dancing, 56;
   and philosophy, 83, 85;
   and science, no sharp boundary between, 102, 128, 129;
   Landor on, 154;
   a _making_, 312;
   Aristotle’s view of, 318;
   does not exist for morals, 318.

 Polka, origin of the, 60.

 Polynesia, dancing in, 49.

 Polynesian islanders, 255.

 Pontiff, the Bridge-Builder, 2.

 Pope, Alexander, influence of Shaftesbury on, 266.

 Porphyry, 167.

 Possessive impulses, 306, 307, 341-43.


 Possessive instinct, restraints placed upon, 338-40;
   in Gaultier and Russell, 344;
   excesses of, 351.

 Pottery, of the Chinese, 32, 33;
   of the Greeks and the Minoan predecessors of the Greeks, 32.

 Pound, Miss, on the origin of the ballad, 62 _n._

 Pragmatism, 323.

 Pragmatists, the, 93, 231, 232.

 Precious stones, attitude of the poet toward, 169.

 Preposition, the post-habited, 146, 147, 162.

 Prettiness, and beauty, 315 _n._

 Priest, cultivated science in form of magic, 195;
   and doctor, originally one, 197 _n._, 203.

 Prodicus, 302;
   the Great Moralist, 6 _n._

 Progress, 143, 149;
   on meaning of, 287.

 Prophecy, 204.

 _Prophet_, meaning of the word, 203, 204.

 Propriety, 24-26.

 Protagoras, significance of his ideas, in conception of life as an art,
    3, 4;
   his interest for us to-day, 3;
   his dictum “Man is the measure of all things,” 3, 302;
   concerned to regard living as an art, 248.

 Proust, Marcel, 172, 184;
   his art, 170 _n._, 186, 187;
   his _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_, 171, 187;
   admiration of, for Ruskin, 316 _n._

 Puberty, questions arising at time of, 105-07.

 Puritanism, reaction against, represented by Hutcheson, 271.

 Pygmalionism, 353 _n._

 Pygmies, the dancing of the, 51.

 Pythagoras, represents the beginning of science, 73, 74;
   fundamentally an artist, 74, 75;
   founded religious brotherhoods, 206, 207.


 Quatelet, on social questions, 288.

 Quoting, by writers, 152.


 Rabbitism, 294.

 Rabelais, François, 148, 165, 358.

 Race mixture, 308.

 Raleigh, Sir Walter, his literary style, 143.

 Ramedjenis, the, street dancers, 52.

 Rank, Dr. Otto, his essay on the artist, 111.

 Realism, 83.

 Realists, 70, 341 _n._

 Reality, a flux of happening, 101.

 Reason, helps to mould morals, 255-59.

 Reid, Thomas, influenced by Hutcheson, 275.

 Relativism, Protagoras the father of, 3.


 Religion, as the desire for the salvation of the soul, 8;
   origin of dance in, 38;
   connection of dance with, among primitive men, 39;
   in music, 179;
   and science, supposed difference between, 191-203;
   its quintessential core, 191;
   control of Nature through oneness with Nature, at the heart of, 194;
   relation of, to science and magic, 194-96;
   the man of, studying science, 202;
   and science, the harmony of, as revealed in human history, 203-08;
   and science, the harmony of, as supported by personal experience of
      Havelock Ellis, 209-18;
   asceticism has nothing to do with normal, 222;
   and science, how they came to be considered out of harmony, 226-35;
   the burden of the traditions of, 227;
   and church, not the same, 228 _n._;
   the instinct of, 234;
   and science, harmony of, summary of considerations confirming, 235,
      236;
   is not science, 238-40;
   an act, 243;
   a restraint placed upon the possessive instinct, 339, 340;
   to be replaced by æsthetic instinct, 340, 341.
   _See_ Mysticism.

 Religions, in every case originally saltatory, 40.

 Religious dances, ecstatic and pantomimic, 41;
   survivals of, 42;
   in Christianity, 42-45.

 Renan, J. E., his style, 161;
   his _Life of Jesus_, 212;
   on truth, 301.

 “Resident in Peking, A,” author of _China as it Really Is_, 21, 22.


 Revelation, Book of, 153.

 Revival, the, 241, 243.

 Rhythm, marks all the physical and spiritual manifestations of life,
    37;
   in work, 61.

 Rickert, H., his twofold division of Reality, 325, 326.

 Ridgeway, William, his theory of origin of tragedy, 56.

 Roberts, Morley, ironical over certain “men of science,” 126 _n._

 Robinson, Dr. Louis, on apes and dancing, 46;
   on the influence of the drum, 63.

 Rodó, his conceptions those of Shaftesbury, 269.

 Roman law, 98.

 Romans, the ancient, dancing and war allied among, 63, 64;
   did not believe that living is an art, 252.

 Romantic spirit, the, 206.

 Romantics, the, 149, 156.

 Rome, ancient, dancing in, 49;
   genius built upon basis of slavery in, 292.

 Rops, Félicien, 167.

 Ross, Robert, 150.

 Rouen Cathedral, Salome on portal of, 49 _n._

 Rousseau, J. J., Napoleon before grave of, 11;
   felt his lapses, 79;
   grace of, 149;
   love of Nature developed through, 238;
   and Shaftesbury, 268, 269;
   decided against civilisation, 298.

 Roussillon, 44.

 Rule, rigid subserviency to, mark of decadence, 173;
   much lost by rigid adherence to, in style, 175.

 _Rules for Compositors and Readers_, on spelling, Oxford University
    Press, 174 _n._

 Ruskin, John, 316;
   a God-intoxicated man, 316 _n._

 Russell, Bertrand, on the Chinese, 23;
   on mathematics, 139, 140;
   on the creative and the possessive impulses, 305-07, 341, 342;
   system of, compared with Gaultier’s, 342, 343.

 Russia, the genius of, compared with the temper of the population, 293.

 Russian ballet, the, 58-60.

 Rutherford, Sir Ernest, on the atomic constitution, 97 _n._


 St. Augustine, 79, 202;
   on the art of living well, 252.

 St. Basil, on the dancing of the angels, 43.

 St. Bonaventura, said to have been author of “Diet a Salutis,” 43.

 St. Denis, Ruth, 60.

 St. Theresa, and Darwin, 198, 199.

 Salome, the dance of, 49.

 _Salt_, intellectual and moral suggestion of the word, 263, 263 _n._,
    264.

 Salt, Mr., 169.

 Salter, W. M., his _Nietzsche the Thinker_, 335 _n._

 Samoa, sacred position of carpenter in, 2.

 Sand, George, on civilisation, 300.

 Santayana, Professor George, on union of æsthetic sense with artistic
    instinct, 350 _n._

 Schelling, F. W. J. von, 90;
   on philosophy and poetry, 83.

 Schiller, Friedrich von, influence on Vaihinger, 89;
   and the æsthetic conception of morals, 275.

 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 90.

 Schmidt, Dr. Raymund, 93 _n._

 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 330 _n._;
   his influence on Vaihinger, 90;
   as regards his quotations, 152;
   morals based on sympathy, according to, 272;
   on the uselessness of art, 319;
   on the man of genius, 320;
   on sociological function of art, 323;
   on the proper way of looking at pictures, 329 _n._;
   on the world as a spectacle, 334.

 Science, spirit of modern, in Protagoras, 4;
   as the search for the reason of things, 8;
   and poetry, no sharp boundary between, 102, 128, 129;
   impulse to, and the sexual instinct, 112;
   intuition and invention needed by, 137;
   and mysticism, supposed difference between, 191-203;
   what is meant by, 192;
   and art, no distinction between, in classic times, 68;
   and art, distinction between, in modern times, 68-70;
   definitions of, 70, 71;
   is of the nature of art, 71;
   the imaginative application of, 72;
   Pythagoras represents the beginning of, 74;
   control of Nature through oneness with Nature, at the heart of, 194;
   relation of, to magic and religion, 194-96;
   and pseudo-science, 199-202;
   and mysticism, the harmony of, as revealed in human history, 203-08;
   and mysticism, the harmony of, as supported by personal experience of
      Havelock Ellis, 209-18;
   and mysticism, how they came to be considered out of harmony, 226-35;
   traditions of, 228;
   the instinct of, 234;
   and mysticism, harmony of, summary of considerations confirming, 235,
      236;
   is not religion, 238-40;
   not pursued for useful ends, 322;
   for science’s sake, 347.

 Sciences, and arts, 68-70;
   biological and social, fiction in, 99;
   mathematical impetus given to, toward end of seventeenth century,
      180;
   biological, awakening of, 181;
   mathematical, renaissance of, 181.


 Scientist, the true, an artist, 72, 73, 112, 126;
   curiosity the stimulus of, 104, 105;
   the false, 125, 126;
   who turns to religion, 199-201.

 Scott, W. R., on art and æsthetics, 326 _n._

 Scottish School, the, 267.

 Sculpture, painting, and the arts of design, 36;
   civilisation measured by standard of, 308.

 Seises, the, the dance of, 44 _n._

 Selous, Edmund, 36 _n._

 Semon, Professor, R., 351 _n._

 “Sense,” Hutcheson’s conception of, 274.

 Seville, cathedral of, dancing in, 44.

 Sex, instinct of, a reaction to the stimulus of curiosity, 104;
   early questions concerning, 105-07;
   source of art impulse, 108-12;
   and the scientific interest, 112;
   not absolutely essential, 234.

 Sexual imagery, strain of, in thought, 113.

 “Shadow,” 219 _n._

 Shaftesbury, Earl of, influence on Kant, 254;
   illustrated unsystematic method of thinking, 259;
   his book, 260;
   his theory of Æsthetic Intuitionism, 260;
   his affinity to the Greeks, 260;
   his early life, 261;
   his idea of goodness, 262;
   his principles expounded, 264-66;
   his influence on later writers and thinkers, 266;
   his influence on our modern morality, 266, 267;
   the greatest Greek of modern times, 267, 271;
   his service to the modern world, 267;
   measure of his recognition in Scotland and England, 267;
   recognition of, abroad, 268, 269;
   made no clear distinction between creative artistic impulse and
      critical æsthetic appreciation, 270;
   realised that reason cannot affect appetite, 270;
   one of the founders of æsthetics, 271;
   his use of the term “moral sense,” 273, 274;
   temperamentally a Stoic, 279;
   of the æsthetic contemplative temperament, 332, 333.

 Shakespeare, William, 148;
   his style compared with that of Bacon, 160;
   affected by the intoxication of words, 167;
   stored up material to be used freely later, 170, 171;
   the spelling of his name by himself, 173;
   surpasses contemporaries in flexibility and intimacy, 184;
   Tolstoy’s opinion of, 311;
   on Nature and art, 312, 313;
   his figure of Prospero, 331.

 Shamans, the, religious dances among, 40, 41;
   their wills brought into harmony with the essence of the world, 193;
   double attitude of, 194.

 Sharp, F. C., on Hutcheson, 327 _n._

 Shelley, P. B., mysticism in poetry of, 237;
   on imagination and morality, 238.

 Sidgwick, Henry, 255, 314.

 Singer, Dr. Charles, his definition of science, 70, 71.

 Singing, relation to music and dancing, 62.

 Silberer, Herbert, on magic and science, 195.

 Simcox, Edith, her description of conversion, 218 _n._

 Skene, on dances among African tribes, 38.

 Slezakova, Anna, the polka extemporised by, 60.

 Smith, Adam, his “economic man,” 99;
   morals based on sympathy, according to, 272;
   influenced by Hutcheson, 275.

 Smith, Arthur H., his book _Chinese Characteristics_, 23 _n._

 Social capillarity, 298.

 Social ladder, 298, 299.

 Social statistics, 286-88.

 Socialists, French, inspired by Shaftesbury, 269.

 Socrates, the Platonic, 75, 78;
   Grote’s chapter on, 76;
   the real and the legendary, 76, 79, 82;
   three elements in our composite portrait of, 77-79;
   the Platonic, and the Gospel Jesus, 82, 83;
   on philosophy and music, 179;
   his view of the moralist, 248.

 Solidarity, socialistic, among the Chinese, 26, 27.

 Solmi, Vincian scholar, 114.

 Sophists, the, 4, 302, 302 _n._

 Sophocles, danced in his own dramas, 56;
   beauty and moral order in, 247;
   Tolstoy’s opinion of, 311.

 Soul, a fiction, 100;
   in harmony with itself, 219;
   the moral life of, as a dance, 251, 252.

 South Sea Islands, dancing in, 49.

 Space, absolute, a fiction, 95.

 Spain, dancing in, 44, 50, 54.

 Speech, the best literary prose, 155;
   in Greece, 155;
   in England, 155, 156;
   the artist’s, 156;
   a tradition, 161.

 Spelling, and thinking, 127 _n._;
   has little to do with style, 173;
   now uniform and uniformly bad, 174, 175.

 Spencer, Herbert, on science and art, 68;
   on use of science in form of magic, 195;
   the universe according to, 215;
   on the harmlessness of moral teaching, 246 _n._;
   on diminishing birth-rate, 294 _n._

 Spengler, Dr. Oswald, on the development of music, 135 _n._;
   argues on the identity of physics, mathematics, religion, and great
      art, 138;
   his theory of culture and civilisation, 309, 310.

 Spinoza, Baruch, 89;
   has moved in sphere where impulses of religion and science spring
      from same source, 207;
   transforms ethics into geometry, 281;
   has been called a God-intoxicated man, 316 _n._;
   his “intellectual love of God,” 342.

 Spirit, and matter, 229, 230.

 Statistics, uncertainty of, 286;
   for measurement of civilisation, 286-88;
   applied to France to test civilisation, 295-97.

 Steele, Dr. John, on the Chinese ceremonial, 29 _n._

 Stephen, Sir Leslie, on poetry and philosophy, 85;
   could see no good in Shaftesbury, 268.

 Stevenson, R. L., 188.

 Stocks, eradication of unfit, by Man, 354;
   recommended by Jesus, 355, 356.

 Stoics, the, 207.

 Strauss, D. F., his _The Old Faith and the New_, 214.


 Style, literary, of to-day and of our fore-fathers’ time, 143;
   the achievement of, 155;
   grace seasoned with salt, 155;
   atavism in, in members of the same family, 158, 190;
   atavism in, in the race, 160, 190;
   much that is instinctive in, 163;
   the music of, 163, 164;
   vocabulary in, 164, 165;
   the effect of mere words on, 165-67;
   familiarity with author’s, necessary to understanding, 171, 172;
   spelling has little to do with, 173;
   much lost by slavish adherence to rules in, 175;
   must have clarity and beauty, 176-78;
   English prose, Cartesian influence on, 180 _n._;
   personal and impersonal, 182, 183;
   progress in, lies in casting aside accretions and exuberances, 183;
   founded on a model, the negation of style, 188;
   the task of breaking the old moulds of, 188, 189;
   summary of elements of, 190.
   _See_ Writing.

 Suicide, rate of, as test of civilisation, 295, 296.

 Swahili, dancing among, 38.

 Swedenborg, Emanuel, his science and his mysticism, 208.

 Swedish ballet, the, 60.

 _Sweet_ (_suavis_), referring to moral qualities, 264.

 Sweetness, and goodness, in Shaftesbury’s philosophy, 262;
   originally the same, 263.

 Swift, Jonathan, laments “the corruption of our style,” 142;
   beauty of his style, rests on truth to logic of his thought, 183;
   utterance of, combining two conceptions of life, 333.

 Swimming-belt, constructed by Leonardo da Vinci, 119.

 Swinburne, C. A., on writing poetry to a tune, 62;
   his _Poems and Ballads_, 172;
   his _Songs before Sunrise_, 212.

 Sylvester, J. J., on mathematics, 139.

 Symphony, the development of a dance suite, 62.

 Syndicalism, as test of civilisation, 296, 297.


 Taglioni, Maria, 58.

 Tahiti, dancing at, 50.

 Tambourine, the, 53.

 _Tao_, the word, 204.

 Taste, the gospel of, 280.

 Telegraph, the, 72 _n._

 Telephone, the, 72 _n._

 Tell-el-Amarna, 28.

 Theology, 227.

 Therapeuts, the worship of, 42.

 Thing-in-Itself, the, a fiction, 101.

 Things, are fictions, 98.


 Thinking, of the nature of art, 85, 86;
   and existing, on two different planes, 101;
   the special art and object of, 101;
   is a comparison, 102;
   is a regulated error, 103;
   abstract, the process of its birth, 108, 109.

 Thompson, Silvanus, on Faraday, 132.

 Thomson, James, influence of Shaftesbury on, 266.

 Thomson, Sir Joseph, on matter and weight, 230.

 Thoreau, H. D., on morals, 282.

 Thought, logic of, inescapable, 183.

 Tobacco, consumption of, as test of civilisation, 295.

 Todas, the, of India, 203 _n._

 Toledo, cathedral of, dancing in, 44.

 Tolstoy, Count Leo, his opinions on art, 311.

 Tonga, sacred position of carpenter in, 2.

 Tooke, Horne, 151 _n._

 Townsend, Rev. Joseph, on the fandango, 50.

 Tradition, the corporeal embodiment of heredity, 161;
   and instinct, mould morals, 254-59.


 Traditions, religious, 227;
   scientific, 228.

 Triangles, 53.

 Truth, the measuring-rod of, 230-32.

 Tunisia, Southern, dancing in, 49.

 T’ung, the story of, 33.

 Turkish dervishes, dances of, 41.

 Tuscans, the, 56.
   _See_ Etruscans.

 Tyndall, John, on Faraday, 130-32.

 Tyrrells, the, the handwriting of, 157.


 Ugliness, 328.

 Ulysses, representative of ideal of totality of existence, 6.

 United States, the genius of, compared with the temper of the
    population, 293.


 Universe, conceived as work of art by primitive philosopher, 1;
   according to D. F. Strauss, 214;
   according to Spencer, 215;
   according to Hinton, 216;
   according to Sir James Frazer, 219 _n._;
   according to Bertrand Russell, 219 _n._;
   conception of, a personal matter, 219 _n._;
   the so-called materialistic, 229, 230;
   Bovarism of, 337.

 Utilitarians, the, 267, 268.

 Uvea, 15.
   _See_ Loyalty Islands.



 Vaihinger, Hans, his _Philosophie des Als Ob_, 86;
   English influence upon, 86, 87;
   allied to English spirit, 87, 88;
   his origin, 88;
   his training, and vocation, 88-93;
   influence of Schiller on, 89;
   philosophers who influenced, 89, 90;
   his pessimisms, irrationalism, and voluntarism, 90;
   his view of military power of Germany, 90, 91;
   his devouring appetite for knowledge, 92;
   reads F. A. Lange’s _History of Materialism_, 92, 93;
   writes his book at about twenty-five years of age, 93;
   his book published, 94;
   the problem he set out to prove, 94;
   his doctrine of fiction, 94-102;
   his doctrine not immune from criticism, 102;
   the fortifying influence of his philosophy, 102, 103;
   influenced Adler, 337.

 Valencia, cathedral of, dancing in, 44.

 Valerius, Maximus, 353 _n._

 Van Gogh, mysticism in pictures of, 237.

 Varnhagen, Rahel, 66.

 Verbal counters, 149, 150.

 Verlaine, Paul, the significance of words to, 168.

 Vesalius, 120.

 Vasari, Giorgio, his account of Leonardo da Vinci, 115, 123.

 Vestris, Gaetan, and the ballet, 57.

 Vinci, Leonardo da, man of science, 113, 125;
   as a painter, 113, 114, 117, 118;
   his one aim, the knowledge and mastery of Nature, 114, 117, 125;
   an Overman, 115;
   science and art joined in, 115-17;
   as the founder of professional engineering, 118, 119;
   the extent of his studies and inventions, 119, 120;
   a supreme master of language, 121;
   his appearance, 121;
   his parentage, 121;
   his youthful accomplishments, 122;
   his sexual temperament, 122, 123;
   the man, woman, and child in, 123, 124;
   a figure for awe rather than love, 124.

 Vinci, Ser Piero da, father of Leonardo da Vinci, 121.

 Virtue, and beauty, among the Greeks, 247;
   the art of living well, 252;
   in Shaftesbury’s system, 265, 266;
   beauty of, 270 _n._

 Virtues, ethical and intellectual, 330.

 Visconti, Galeazzo, spectacular pageants at marriage of, 57.

 Vocabulary, each writer creates his own, 164, 165.

 Voltaire, F. M. A. de, recognised Shaftesbury, 268;
   on the foundations of society, 289.


 Wagner, Richard, on Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, 62, 63.

 Wallas, Professor Graham, on Plato and Dante, 73.

 War, and dancing, allied, 63, 64.

 Wealth, as test of civilisation, 296, 297.

 Weight, its nature, 230.

 Weismann, and the study of heredity, 127.

 Wells, H. G., his description of Napoleon, 8-10, 12.

 Whitman, Walt, his _Leaves of Grass_, 172;
   words attributed to him on what is right, 254.

 Woman, the question, what she is like, 106.

 Words, have a rich content of their own, 166;
   the intoxication of, 167-69;
   their arrangement chiefly studied by young writer, 172.

 Wordsworth, William, 184;
   influence of Shaftesbury on, 266.

 Work, a kind of dance, 61, 62.

 World, becoming impalpable and visionary, 337, 338.
   _See_ Universe.

 Writers, the great, have observed decorum instinctively, 181, 182;
   the great, learn out of themselves, 188, 189;
   the great, are heroes at heart, 189.


 Writing, personality in, 144, 190;
   a common accomplishment to-day, 144, 145;
   an arduous intellectual task, 151, 153, 190;
   good and bad, 154;
   the achievement of style in, 155;
   machine-made, 156;
   not made by the laws of grammar, 172, 173;
   how the old method gave place to the new, 179-81;
   summary of elements of, 190.
   _See_ Handwriting, Style.

 Wundt, Wilhelm, on the dance, 38, 39 _n._


 Xavier, Francis, 123, 237.

 Xenophon, his portrait of Socrates, 77.


 Zeno, 249 _n._




 ● Transcriber’s Notes:
    ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
      Text that was in bold face is enclosed by equals signs (=bold=).
    ○ Footnotes have been moved to follow the chapters in which they are
      referenced.



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