It is customary to judge religions and philosophies by their truth,
which is seldom their strong point; yet the application of that
unsympathetic criterion is not unjust, since they aspire to be true,
maintain that they are so, and forbid any opposed view, no matter
how obvious and inevitable, to be called true in their stead. But
when religions and philosophies are dead, or when we are so removed
from them by time or training that the question of their truth is
not a living question for us, they do not on that account lose all
their interest; then, in fact, for the first time they manifest their
virtues to the unbeliever. He sees that they are expressions of human
genius; that however false to their subject-matter they may be, like
the conventions of art they are true to the eye and to the spirit that
fashioned them. And as nothing in the world, not even the truth, is so
interesting as human genius, these incredible or obsolete religions and
philosophies become delightful to us. The sting is gone out of their
errors, which no longer threaten to delude us, and they have acquired
a beauty invisible to the eye of their authors, because [Pg 155] of
the very refraction which the truth suffered in that vital medium.
German philosophy is a work of genius. To be heathen is easy; to have
an absolute will and a belief in chaos--or rather a blind battle
with chance--is probably the lot of most animals; but to be
condemned to be learned, industrious, moral, and Christian, and yet,
through that veil of unavoidable phenomena and conventions, to pierce
to absolute will and freedom, and to set them forth persuasively as
the true reality, in spite of all the ordered appearances which do not
cease to confront and to occupy us--that is a work of genius. It
is a wonderful achievement, to have recovered atavistically the depths
of the primitive soul, in the midst of its later sophistication. In
this philosophy the ancestral ego, the soul perplexed and incredulous
at being born into this world, returns to haunt us in broad day-light
and to persuade us with its ghostly eloquence that not that ego but
this world is the ghost.
The egotism which in German philosophy is justified by a theory in
German genius is a form of experience. It turns everything it touches
into a part of its own life, personal, spontaneous, sincere, original.
It is young and self-sufficient; yet as a continual change of view is
incompatible with art and learning, we see in Germany, even more than
elsewhere, [Pg 156] a division of labour between genius and tradition;
nowhere are the types of the young rebel and the tireless pedant so
common and so extreme.
The notion that something that moves and lives, as genius does, can
at the same time be absolute has some interesting implications. Such
a genius and all its works must be unstable. As it has no external
sources and no external objects, as its own past can exercise no
control over it (for that would be the most lifeless of tyrannies), it
is a sort of shooting star, with no guarantees for the future. This,
for the complete egotist, has no terrors. A tragic end and a multitude
of enemies may seem good to the absolute hero and necessary to his
perfect heroism. In the same way, to be without a subject-matter or an
audience may seem good to the absolute poet, who sings to himself as he
goes, exclusively for the benefit of that glorious and fleeting moment.
Genius could not be purer than that: although perhaps it might be hard
to prove that it was genius.
A kindred implication, which perhaps might be less welcome to the
egotist himself, is that an absolute genius is formless, and that the
absolute freedom with which it thinks it takes on now this form and
now that, is not really freedom at all, but subjection to unknown and
perhaps ironical forces. Absolute Will, of which a perfectly free
genius is an expression, [Pg 157] cannot say specifically what it
craves, for essentially it should crave everything indiscriminately. In
practice, however, it must seem to aim at this or that precise result.
These specific aims are suggested to it by circumstances, foisted upon
it in its replete innocence; for it is all expectation, all vague
heartiness and zeal for it knows not what. The logic it proclaims at
any time and calls eternal is but the fashionable rhetoric of that
hour. Absolute Will is a great dupe on whom fortune forces card after
card. Like Faust it is helpless before the most vulgar temptations.
Why should it not fulfil itself now by the pursuit of magic, now by
the seduction of a young girl, now by an archæological pose, now by
a piratical or an engineering enterprise? True, there are limits to
its gullibility; there are suggestions from which it recoils. The
German ego, after swallowing Christianity whole, will in Luther stick
at Indulgences. Faust sometimes turns on Mephistopheles, as the worm
will turn: he says that he covets all experience, but in that he does
himself a great injustice; there are experiences he scorns. After all
this ego is not really absolute; it is specifically and pathetically
human and directed upon a few natural ends. That is what saves it; for
a mind can have no distinction and a soul no honour if its only maxim
is to live on. It may take up with enthusiasm [Pg 158] whatever it
takes up, but it will take up anything; and it may do mightily whatever
it does, but it will not do it long.
Consider, in this respect, the pathetic history of the German people.
It conquered the Roman empire and it became Roman, or wished to become
so. It had had a mythology and a morality of its own (very like
in principle to those it has since rediscovered), yet it accepted
Christianity with the docility of a child. It began to feel, after some
centuries, how alien to its genius this religion was, but it could find
relief only in a fresh draught from the same foreign sources, or others
more remote. To cease to be Roman it tried to become Hebraic and Greek.
In studying these models, however, it came upon a new scent. What
passed for revelation or for classical perfection was of human national
growth, stratified like the rocks, and not divine or authoritative at
all. If you only made hypotheses enough, you could prove how it all
arose according to necessary laws, logical, psychological, historical,
economical, and æsthetical. Above all, you could prove how nobody had
understood anything properly before, and how the key to it all was in
your single hand.
Yet the triumphs of theory alone soon seemed unsatisfying. Wine,
science, and song once seemed to make Germany happy, but if a prince
imposed [Pg 159] military discipline, might not that be an even better
thing? For a time wistfulness, longing, and the feeling of Titanic
loneliness and of a world to be evoked and snuffed out like a dream,
seemed to fill the cup of intense living, and the greatest and happiest
of Germans could cry--
_Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt_ _weiss, was ich leide,_ _allein und
abgetrennt_ _von aller Freude_.
But presently true intensity of life appeared to lie rather in being a
victorious general, or an ironmaster, or a commercial traveller, or a
reveller in the Friedrich-strasse, or a spy and conspirator anywhere in
the world.
All these turbid and nondescript ambitions are in a sense artificial;
the Germans accept them now as a thousand years ago they accepted
Christianity, because such things are suddenly thrust upon them. By
nature they are simple, honest, kindly, easily pleased. There is no
latent irony or disbelief in their souls. The pleasures of sense, plain
and copious, they enjoy hugely, long labour does not exasperate them,
science fills them with satisfaction, music entrances them. There ought
to be no happier or more innocent nation in this world. Unfortunately
their very goodness and simplicity render them helpless; they are what
they are dragooned to be. There is no social or intellectual disease
to which, in spots, [Pg 160] they do not succumb, as to an epidemic:
their philosophy itself is an example of this. They have the defects
of the newly prosperous; they are far too proud of their possessions,
esteeming them for being theirs, without knowing whether they are
good of their kind. Culture is a thing seldom mentioned by those who
have it. The real strength of the Germans lies not in those external
achievements of which at this moment they make so much--for they
may outgrow this new materialism of theirs--it lies rather in what
they have always prized, their _Gemüth_ and their music.
Perhaps these two things have a common root. Emotion is inarticulate,
yet there is a mighty movement in it, and a great complexity of
transitions and shades. This intrinsic movement of the feelings is
ordinarily little noticed because people are too wide awake, or too
imaginative. Everything is a fact or a picture to them, and their
emotions seem to them little but obvious qualities of things. They
roundly call _things_ beautiful, painful, holy, or ridiculous; they do
not speak of their _Gemüth_, although, of course, it is by virtue of
their emotions that they pass such judgments. But when the occasions of
our emotions, the objects that call them forth, are not so instantly
focussed, when we know better what we feel than why we feel it, then
we seem to have a richer and more massive sensibility. Our feelings
[Pg 161] absorb our attention because they remain a thing apart: they
seem to us wonderfully deep because we do not ground them in things
external.
Now music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings without
attaching them to events or objects in the world. Music is articulate,
but articulate in a language which avoids, or at least veils the
articulation of the world we live in; it is, therefore, the chosen art
of a mind to whom the world is still foreign. If this seems in one way
an incapacity, it is also a privilege. Not to be at home in the world,
to prize it chiefly for echoes which it may have in the soul, to have a
soul that can give forth echoes, or that can generate internal dramas
of sound out of its own resources--may this not be a more enviable
endowment than that of a mind all surface, a sensitive plate only able
to photograph this not too beautiful earth? In any case, for better or
for worse, inward sensibility, unabsorbed in worldly affairs, exists
in some people; a life, as it were, still in the womb and not yet in
contact with the air. But let these inspired musicians, masters in
their own infinite realms, beware of the touch of matter. Let them not
compose a system of the universe out of their _Gemüth,_ as they might a
symphony. Let them not raise their baton in the face of the stars or of
the nations, and think to lead them like an orchestra.
[Pg 162] CHAPTER XVI