VII.

The unrestrained historical sense, pushed to its logical extreme,

uproots the future, because it destroys illusions and robs existing

things of the only atmosphere in which they can live. Historical

justice, even if practised conscientiously, with a pure heart, is

therefore a dreadful virtue, because it always undermines and ruins

the living thing: its judgment always means annihilation. If there be

no constructive impulse behind the historical one, if the clearance

of rubbish be not merely to leave the ground free for the hopeful

living future to build its house, if justice alone be supreme, the

creative instinct is sapped and discouraged. A religion, for example,

that has to be turned into a matter of historical knowledge by the

power of pure justice, and to be scientifically studied throughout,

is destroyed at the end of it all. For the historical audit brings so

much to light which is false and absurd, violent and inhuman, that

the condition of pious illusion falls to pieces. And a thing can only

live through a pious illusion. For man is creative only through love

and in the shadow of love's illusions, only through the unconditional

belief in perfection and righteousness. Everything that forces a man

to be no longer unconditioned in his love, cuts at the root of his

strength: he must wither, and be dishonoured. Art has the opposite

effect to history: and only perhaps if history suffer transformation

into a pure work of art, can it preserve instincts or arouse them.

Such history would be quite against the analytical and inartistic

tendencies of our time, and even be considered false. But the history

that merely destroys without any impulse to construct, will in the

long-run make its instruments tired of life; for such men destroy

illusions, and "he who destroys illusions in himself and others is

punished by the ultimate tyrant, Nature." For a time a man can take

up history like any other study, and it will be perfectly harmless.

Recent theology seems to have entered quite innocently into

partnership with history, and scarcely sees even now that it has

unwittingly bound itself to the Voltairean _écrasez_! No one need

expect from that any new and powerful constructive impulse: they

might as well have let the so-called Protestant Union serve as the

cradle of a new religion, and the jurist Holtzendorf, the editor of

the far more dubiously named Protestant Bible, be its John the

Baptist. This state of innocence may be continued for some time by

the Hegelian philosophy,--still seething in some of the older

heads,--by which men can distinguish the "idea of Christianity" from

its various imperfect "manifestations"; and persuade themselves that

it is the "self-movement of the Idea" that is ever particularising

itself in purer and purer forms, and at last becomes the purest, most

transparent, in fact scarcely visible form in the brain of the

present _theologus liberalis vulgaris_. But to listen to this pure

Christianity speaking its mind about the earlier impure Christianity,

the uninitiated hearer would often get the impression that the talk

was not of Christianity at all but of ...--what are we to think? if

we find Christianity described by the "greatest theologians of the

century" as the religion that claims to "find itself in all real

religions and some other barely possible religions," and if the "true

church" is to be a thing "which may become a liquid mass with no

fixed outline, with no fixed place for its different parts, but

everything to be peacefully welded together"--what, I ask again, are

we to think?

Christianity has been denaturalised by historical treatment--which in

its most complete form means "just" treatment--until it has been

resolved into pure knowledge and destroyed in the process. This can

be studied in everything that has life. For it ceases to have life if

it be perfectly dissected, and lives in pain and anguish as soon as

the historical dissection begins. There are some who believe in the

saving power of German music to revolutionise the German nature. They

angrily exclaim against the special injustice done to our culture,

when such men as Mozart and Beethoven are beginning to be spattered

with the learned mud of the biographers and forced to answer a

thousand searching questions on the rack of historical criticism. Is

it not premature death, or at least mutilation, for anything whose

living influence is not yet exhausted, when men turn their curious

eyes to the little minutiæ of life and art, and look for problems of

knowledge where one ought to learn to live, and forget problems? Set

a couple of these modern biographers to consider the origins of

Christianity or the Lutheran reformation: their sober, practical

investigations would be quite sufficient to make all spiritual

"action at a distance" impossible: just as the smallest animal can

prevent the growth of the mightiest oak by simply eating up the

acorn. All living things need an atmosphere, a mysterious mist,

around them. If that veil be taken away and a religion, an art, or a

genius condemned to revolve like a star without an atmosphere, we

must not be surprised if it becomes hard and unfruitful, and soon

withers. It is so with all great things "that never prosper without

some illusion," as Hans Sachs says in the Meistersinger.

Every people, every man even, who would become ripe, needs such a

veil of illusion, such a protecting cloud. But now men hate to become

ripe, for they honour history above life. They cry in triumph that

"science is now beginning to rule life." Possibly it might; but a

life thus ruled is not of much value. It is not such true _life_, and

promises much less for the future than the life that used to be

guided not by science, but by instincts and powerful illusions. But

this is not to be the age of ripe, alert and harmonious

personalities, but of work that may be of most use to the

commonwealth. Men are to be fashioned to the needs of the time, that

they may soon take their place in the machine. They must work in the

factory of the "common good" before they are ripe, or rather to

prevent them becoming ripe; for this would be a luxury that would

draw away a deal of power from the "labour market." Some birds are

blinded that they may sing better; I do not think men sing to-day

better than their grandfathers, though I am sure they are blinded

early. But light, too clear, too sudden and dazzling, is the infamous

means used to blind them. The young man is kicked through all the

centuries: boys who know nothing of war, diplomacy, or commerce are

considered fit to be introduced to political history. We moderns also

run through art galleries and hear concerts in the same way as the

young man runs through history. We can feel that one thing sounds

differently from another, and pronounce on the different "effects."

And the power of gradually losing all feelings of strangeness or

astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the

historical sense, or historical culture. The crowd of influences

streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and

violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed

stupidity is his only refuge. Where there is a subtler and stronger

self-consciousness we find another emotion too--disgust. The young

man has become homeless: he doubts all ideas, all moralities. He

knows "it was different in every age, and what you are does not

matter." In a heavy apathy he lets opinion on opinion pass by him,

and understands the meaning of Hölderlin's words when he read the

work of Diogenes Laertius on the lives and doctrines of the Greek

philosophers: "I have seen here too what has often occurred to me,

that the change and waste in men's thoughts and systems is far more

tragic than the fates that overtake what men are accustomed to call

the only realities." No, such study of history bewilders and

overwhelms. It is not necessary for youth, as the ancients show, but

even in the highest degree dangerous, as the moderns show. Consider

the historical student, the heir of ennui, that appears even in his

boyhood. He has the "methods" for original work, the "correct ideas"

and the airs of the master at his fingers' ends. A little isolated

period of the past is marked out for sacrifice. He cleverly applies

his method, and produces something, or rather, in prouder phrase,

"creates" something. He becomes a "servant of truth" and a ruler in

the great domain of history. If he was what they call ripe as a boy,

he is now over-ripe. You only need shake him and wisdom will rattle

down into your lap; but the wisdom is rotten, and every apple has its

worm. Believe me, if men work in the factory of science and have to

make themselves useful before they are really ripe, science is ruined

as much as the slaves who have been employed too soon. I am sorry to

use the common jargon about slave-owners and taskmasters in respect

of such conditions, that might be thought free from any economic

taint: but the words "factory, labour-market, auction-sale, practical

use," and all the auxiliaries of egoism, come involuntarily to the

lips in describing the younger generation of savants. Successful

mediocrity tends to become still more mediocre, science still more

"useful." Our modern savants are only wise on one subject, in all the

rest they are, to say the least, different from those of the old

stamp. In spite of that they demand honour and profit for themselves,

as if the state and public opinion were bound to take the new coinage

for the same value as the old. The carters have made a trade-compact

among themselves, and settled that genius is superfluous, for every

carrier is being re-stamped as one. And probably a later age will see

that their edifices are only carted together and not built. To those

who have ever on their lips the modern cry of battle and

sacrifice--"Division of labour! fall into line!" we may say roundly:

"If you try to further the progress of science as quickly as

possible, you will end by destroying it as quickly as possible; just

as the hen is worn out which you force to lay too many eggs." The

progress of science has been amazingly rapid in the last decade; but

consider the savants, those exhausted hens. They are certainly not

"harmonious" natures: they can merely cackle more than before,

because they lay eggs oftener: but the eggs are always smaller,

though their books are bigger. The natural result of it all is the

favourite "popularising" of science (or rather its feminising and

infantising), the villainous habit of cutting the cloth of science to

fit the figure of the "general public." Goethe saw the abuse in this,

and demanded that science should only influence the outer world by

way of _a nobler ideal of action_. The older generation of savants

had good reason for thinking this abuse an oppressive burden: the

modern savants have an equally good reason for welcoming it, because,

leaving their little corner of knowledge out of account, they are

part of the "general public" themselves, and its needs are theirs.

They only require to take themselves less seriously to be able to

open their little kingdom successfully to popular curiosity. This

easy-going behaviour is called "the modest condescension of the

savant to the people"; whereas in reality he has only "descended" to

himself, so far as he is not a savant but a plebeian. Rise to the

conception of a people, you learned men; you can never have one noble

or high enough. If you thought much of the people, you would have

compassion towards them, and shrink from offering your historical

aquafortis as a refreshing drink. But you really think very little of

them, for you dare not take any reasonable pains for their future;

and you act like practical pessimists, men who feel the coming

catastrophe and become indifferent and careless of their own and

others' existence. "If only the earth last for us: and if it do not

last, it is no matter." Thus they come to live an _ironical_

existence.