artists thought he was mad, besides knowing nothing of æsthetics. The
moral fanatics acclaimed him vociferously, mistaking him for a popular
preacher. Only a philosophico-artistic dilettante listened attentively,
and said, a little patronizingly, "He is wrong, but he is more right
than wrong."
138
_The Old Gods_
Perhaps there is too much made of anthropomorphism. Man's first gods
were not "human" gods; they were stars, animals, plants and the like.
It was not until he became an artist that he made gods after his own
form: anthropomorphism is just an artistic convention! For gods are in
their _content_ superhuman. There has never been a man like Jehovah
or Zeus or Odin. The essential thing in them is that they embody an
ideal, a fiction, adumbrating something _more_ than Man. Religion is
poetry in the grand style, and, as poetry, must have its conventions.
139
_The Old Poets_
In primitive times the poet was far more both of an inventor and a liar
than he is at present. For many centuries the lies of the poets have
been innocent lies, a convention merely, and to be recognized as such
before "æsthetic" enjoyment can begin. But the lies the old poets told
were believed literally--as they were meant to be! Yes, the poet at
the beginning was just a liar, a great liar. How else, if he had not
deceived Man, could he have peopled the heavens with Man's deities? And
as the father of whole families of gods, he has done more to decide the
fate of Humanity than all the philosophers, heroes and martyrs. These
are only his servants, who explain war or die for his fictions. And not
merely error, as Nietzsche held, but lying has from the earliest times
been the most potent factor of progress. But not all lying; only the
lies told out of great love have been creative and life-giving. Art,
imagination, prophecy, hallucination, ecstasy, vision--all these were
united in the first poets, the true creators.
140
_The Creator Redivivus_
The only modern who has dared to be a poet through and through,
that is, a liar in the noble and tragic sense, is the author of the
Superman. In Nietzsche, again, after centuries of divine toying, the
poet has appeared in his great _rôle_ of a creator of gods, a figure
beside whom the "poet" seems like nothing more than the page boy of the
Muse.
141
_Literature as Praise_
A. Would you erase from the book of literature all that is not
idealization and myth, you neo-moderns? Would you deprive us of all the
charming, serious, whimsical, and divinely frivolous works which are
human-all-too-human? B. If we could--a thousand times no! We would only
destroy what defames Life. All that praises Life, all that enchants to
Life, we would cherish as things holy. Idealization, it is true, is
the highest form of praise, because it arises out of Love; but there
are other forms. Modern Realism, however, is a calumny against Life.
_Écrasez l'infâme!_
142
_The Poet Speaks_
How unhappy must all those poor mortals be who are not poets! They
feel and cannot express. They are dumb when their soul would utter its
divinest thoughts. Cloddish and fragmentary, they are scarcely human,
these poor mortals! For one must be a poet to be altogether human. Yes!
in the ideal society of the future every one will be a poet, even the
average man!
143
_Myth_
The worst evil of our time is this, that there is nothing greater than
the current average existence to which man can look; Religion has dried
up, Art has decayed from an idealization of life into a reflection of
it. In short, Art has become a passive thing, where once it was the
"great stimulus to Life." The idealization and enchantment which the
moderns have so carefully eliminated from it was precisely its _raison
d'être._ And modern Art, which sets out to copy life, has forgotten Art
altogether, its origin, its meaning and its end.
Against this aimless Realism, we must oppose idealization, and
especially that which is its highest expression, Myth. And let no one
say that it is impossible at this stage in Man's history to resuscitate
Myth. The past has certainly lost its mystery for us, and it was in
the past, at the source of Humanity, that the old poets set their
sublime fictions. But the future is still ours, and there, at Man's
goal, our myths must be planted. And thither, indeed, has set the
great literature of the last hundred years. Faust, Mephistopheles,
Brand, Peer Gynt, Zarathustra--there were no greater figures in the
literature of the last century--were all myths, and all forecasts of
the future. The soil out of which literature grows, then, has not yet
been exhausted! If we but break away from Realism, if we make Art
symbolic, if we bring about a marriage between Art and Religion, Art
will rise again. That this is possible, we who have faith in the Future
_must_ believe.
V
CREATIVE LOVE
144
_Creative Love_
To us who nourish hopes for the future of Man, the important
distinction to be drawn in Love is not that between the sacred and the
profane. We ask, rather, Is our Love creative or barren? That Love
should bring happiness, or union, or fulfilment, seems to us not such
a very great matter! The will to create something, out of oneself, not
oneself, whether it be in bodies, or in Art or Philosophy--that is the
thing for ever worthy of our reverence.
There is another Love; that whose end is enjoyment. It is the enemy
of creative Love. It is the Love which, in various forms, is known
as Liberalism, or Humanitarianism, or the greatest happiness of the
greatest number. Sympathy is its central dogma; and it is never tired
of exalting itself at the expense of the other Love, which it calls
cruel, senseless and unholy. But the same blasphemy is here repeated
that Socrates once was guilty of and afterwards so divinely atoned.
For it is not creative Love, but sympathetic Love, that is unholy.
This would spare the beloved the pangs of love, even if, in doing so,
it had to sacrifice the fruits of love. It springs from disbelief in
existence. Life is suffering, it cries, suffering must be alleviated,
and, therefore, Life must be abated, weakened and lamed! And this love
is barren. But creative Love does not bring enjoyment, but rapture
and pain. It is the will to suffer gladly; it finds relief from the
pains of existence, not in alleviation, but in creation. This Love
is, indeed, a Siren--we would not mitigate the awfulness of that
symbol--luring Man to peril, perhaps to shipwreck. Yet, by the holiest
law of his being, he listens, he follows. And, if his ears have been
sealed by reason he _unseals_ them again, he listens with his very
soul, yielding to that which is for him certainly danger, perhaps
Death, knowing that, even in Death, he will be affirming Life in the
highest. This Love, the earnest of future greatness, this terrible,
unconditional and innocent thing, we _cannot but_ reverence.
145
_Where Man is Innocent_
There is one region in Man where innocence and a good conscience
still reign--in the unconscious. Love and the joy in Love are of the
unconscious. The rapture which Love brings is neither, as Schopenhauer
said, merely a device to ensure the propagation of mankind, nor the
race rejoicing in and through the individual to its own perpetuation;
but the joy of unconscious Man, still innocent as before the Fall, with
a good conscience enjoying the anticipatory rapture of new life. The
instincts believe in Life entirely without questioning; doubt and guilt
are simply not present in their world: it is reflection that makes
sinners of us all.
The thoughts that come to us in the season of Love--we do not need to
search in metaphysical heavens for their source. They arise from the
very well spring, the very central ego of Man, out of the unconscious,
the innocent, the real. Poetry, in that which is incomprehensible and
mystical in it, arises from this also. So there is hope still for Man,
all ye who believe not in primal depravity! The real man is _even
now_ innocent: Original Sin is only mind deep, conscience deep. The
instincts still behave as if Life-defaming doctrines _were not_: they
have not yet begun to mourn at the Spring and exult at the Autumn.
And in the ecstasies of creative Love, whether it be of persons or of
things, they continue to celebrate, without misgiving, their jubilee.
146
_A Criterion_
To find out whether a thing is decadent or no, let us henceforth
put this question, Does it spring from creative Love? Is the Will
to suffering incarnate in it, or the will to alleviate suffering?
How much must by this standard be condemned! Humanitarianism and its
child, Reform, or the desire to alleviate others' pain; Æstheticism
and its step-brother, Realism, or the wish to alleviate one's own:
these spring from the same source--a dearth of Love. For creative Love
would enjoin, not sympathy with suffering, but the will to transcend
suffering; not reform, whose aim is happiness, but revolution, whose
aim is growth; not Art for Art's sake, an escape from Life into a
stationary æsthetic world, but the creation, out of Life, of ever new
Art; not Realism or the need to find men interesting; but idealization,
or the desire to _make_ men interesting. John Galsworthy and Oscar
Wilde alike are decadent for this reason, that they lack Love. The
real difference between them is that the one is a Collectivist, and
sympathizes with the people, and the other is an Individualist, and
sympathizes with himself. But both degrade Love to the level of
Hedonism; both rebel against the cruelty of Love, desiring a Love which
will not hurt, and, therefore, _must_ be barren.
But wherever peoples, faiths or arts decay, the decay of Love--this
strong, energetic Love--has come first. The current frivolousness about
intellectual matters, the philandering of the literary coquettes,
springs simply from a lack of Love. For the great problems demand
passion for their comprehension, and our intellectuals dislike
passion. In politics and in religion it is the same: creative Love has
everywhere disappeared to be replaced by barren Sympathy. But is it
possible by preaching to increase Love? Can it be willed into power?
Well, praise may call it forth.
147
_Love at the Renaissance_
How may a great creative age like the Renaissance be interpreted on the
hypothesis of Love? Shall it yet be found that the mainspring of the
Renaissance was a newly discovered love of Life and, therefore, of Man?
In the Middle Ages that part of Life, then called God, had become
isolated and abstract, and was worshipped to the detriment of all other
Life; while Man was neglected where he was not belittled. Thus, a
strong current of Man's love was diverted away from Man altogether, and
the earth became dark and sterile. How was the earth to recapture its
love again, and drink back into itself its rapture and creativeness? By
a marriage in which God and the Universe were made one flesh; by the
incorporation of God into Life, and, therefore, into Man. Hence arose
the Pantheism of the Renaissance. To love Life with a good conscience,
to love Life unconditionally, it was necessary to call Life God. Out of
this Love sprang not only the art but the science of the Renaissance.
For Man once more became interested in himself, and, from himself, in
Life; ultimately discoveries were made and more than one New World was
brought to light.
Perhaps it is the defect of all theistic, objective theologies that
they become, sooner or later, barren. Only by being translated into the
subjective do they regain their creative power: Pantheism is the remedy
for Theism. Yet to Theism we owe this, that it lent intensity and
elevation to Love. The Love of the Pantheists of the Renaissance was
not ordinary human Love; it united in a unique emotion the love that
had formerly been given to Man along with that which had formerly been
given to God. It loved Man as God should be loved--a dangerous thing.
But out of this love of God in Man it created, nevertheless, something
great, somewhat less than the one, somewhat more than the other--the
demi-god. The Renaissance was the age of the demi-gods.
148
_Sympathy_
Sympathy is Love bereft of his bow and arrows--but still blind.
149
A Self-Evident Proposition
This is certain, that God is Love. How, else, could He have created the
Universe?
150
_"God is Love"_
When Jesus said, "God is Love," He denned a religion of Becoming. Was
it not necessarily so? For Love is not something which may _choose_ to
create; it _must_ create, it is fundamentally the will and the power
to create. And Eternal Love, or God, is, therefore, eternal creation,
eternal change, eternal Becoming. Consequently, there is no ultimate
goal, no Perfection, except that which is realized at every moment in
the self-expression of Love. A vision? A nightmare? Well, it depends
whether one is in favour of Life, or of Death; whether one lives, or is
lived. And, therefore, whether religion is subjective, or objective?
Whether God is within us, or outside us? For so long as God is within
us, we must create. That should be our Becoming!
151
_Love and Mr. Galsworthy_
The art of Mr. Galsworthy is such an ambiguous thing--half impersonal
portrayal, half personal plea, the _Art pour l'Art_ of a social
reformer--and the subjects he chooses are so controversial--the
abuses of society--that it is hard to place him as an artist. When
"The Dark Flower" appeared, however, we thought we had him. Here was
a great subject to his hand, an artist's question at last, Love.
Alas! even in writing about it, he could not altogether exclude the
reformer. Well, that itself, perhaps, told us something! However
that may be, we do get here Mr. Galsworthy's conception of Love. It
is an inadequate conception, a realist's conception: Love, with the
meaning left out. The ardours, the longing, the disappointment and
anguish--all the _symptoms_--of Love are given; but not a hint that
Love has any significance beyond the emotions it brings: that which
redeems Love, creation, is ignored altogether! Mr. Galsworthy has
seen that Love is cruel, but he has not seen beyond the cruelty: it
is the ultimate thing to him. Well, that is perhaps the most that
could be expected of a humanitarian trying to comprehend Love! In this
book are all the symptoms of Humanitarianism--pity for every one,
reform of institutions, suffering always considered the sufficient
reason for abolishing or palliating things: a creed thrice inadequate,
thrice shallow, thrice blind. Love would find relief from suffering in
creation. But one feels that Mr. Galsworthy would abolish Life if he
could. Humanitarianism unconsciously seeks the annihilation of Life,
for in Life suffering is integral.
152
_Mr. Thomas Hardy_
In Mr. Hardy's conception of Love, unlike Mr. Galsworthy's, the
contingency of creation is never absent; but to him creation is not
a justification of the pangs of Love. It is an intensification of
them; it is Love's last and worst indignity. But even when Love does
not bestow this ultimate insult of creation, it cannot resist the
satisfaction of torturing its victims; it is wanton and irrelevant
in its distribution of pain. Mr. Hardy's books are filled with the
torments of Love. Was it not fitting that he should aim his main
indictment of Life against it, seeing that it is the trick whereby
the blunder of Life is perpetuated? And so Mr. Hardy is certainly a
decadent; but he is a great decadent--one of those who by the power of
their denial of Life seem to make Life more profound and tragic, and
inspire the healthy artists to an even greater love and reverence for
it.
He is great, however, not by his theories, but by his art. The contrast
between the sordidness of his thought and the splendidness of his art
fills us sometimes with amazement. He sets out in his books to prove
that Life is a mean blunder; and, in spite of himself, the tragedy of
this blunder becomes in his hands splendid and impressive, so that
Life is enriched even while it is defamed. Art, which is _necessarily_
idealization and glorification, triumphs in him over even his most
deeply founded conscious ideas. In all his greater books, it refutes
his pessimism and turns his curses into involuntary blessings. So
divine is Art!
153
_Mr. George Moore_
In writing about Love, Mr. Moore falls into the same realistic error
as Mr. Galsworthy: he writes about its manifestations without knowledge
of that which gives them meaning and connection. Love to him is just
certain sensations--and not only Love, but everything else. Art is
a sensation; religion, a sensation; the soul, a sensation. Take out
of his books sensation, and there will be little of account left. He
knows the religious feeling, but not religion: he always confounds
spirituality with refined sensualism. So he knows the sensation of
Love, but not Love.
But Mr. Moore is learned in the senses: he knows them in everything
but their purity. Yes, even sensuality is in his books corrupted. How
true this is we realize when in "Evelyn Innes" he compares one of his
characters to a faun. We are almost distressed at this, for we feel
that the word is not only coarsened, but used with a wrong meaning
altogether: we feel that Mr. Moore is incapable of understanding what a
faun is! These sophisticated, scented and somewhat damaged voluptuaries
of his, in whose conversation there is always an atmosphere of
expensive feminine lingerie, and who "know" women so intimately; how
perverted must be the taste which can compare them with the hardy,
nimble, unconscious creatures of ancient Greece! But Mr. Moore is much
nearer in temper to Oscar Wilde than to the realists. He is an æsthete
essentially, and a realist only in the second place, and only because
he is an æsthete. The province of selected exquisite beauty had been
exhausted by Wilde and his school; so Mr. Moore turned to the squalid,
the commonplace and the diseased in Life, there to find his "æsthetic
emotion." This explains the curious effect at once of colour and of
drabness in his books. He is a perverted Wilde; doubly a decadent.
154
_Mr. Bernard Shaw_
Both the strength and the weakness of Mr. Shaw spring from a
defect--his lack of Love. Freedom from illusion is his strength. He
possesses common sense minus common sentiment; that, and probably
nothing more; and that gives to his thought an appearance of subtlety,
though it is not really subtle. Thus, his common sense tells him that
Love is essentially creation. He sees through the illusions which Love
spins round its purpose, because he does not see these illusions at
all. Love, indeed, is known to him in all but its illusions; but who
knows Love that knows not Love's illusions? Still, it is to his honour
that he has conceived Love as creation. His weakness consists in that
his attitude to Love is purely intellectual. He lacks Love more than
any other man of his time. In grappling with the great problems of
existence, it is not Love but the very absence of Love that has been
his most useful weapon; and so he has seen much, but grasped nothing,
created nothing. And because he has never loved, he can never be called
an artist. For how can one who has not loved idealize? And how can one
who has not idealized be an artist? In Mr. Shaw, Nature has gone out of
her way to create the very antithesis of the artist.
What Nietzsche said about Socrates is true of Mr. Shaw even in a
higher degree; that his reason is stronger than his instincts, and
has usurped the place of his instincts. Without Love, he yet affirms
creation. What can be his reason for doing so? Why should he wish
Life to persist if he does not love Life? Is it in order that people
might still converse wittily, and the epigram might not die? Or so
that exceptional men might experience forever the joy of intellectual
conflict, the satisfaction found in the ruthless exposure of fallacy
and weakness, and the proud feeling of mental power? We know that Mr.
Shaw regards the brain as an end--the purpose of Life being to perfect
a finer and finer brain--and we know, too, that to Mr. Shaw the highest
joy the brain can experience is not that of knowing, but of fighting.
Knowledge to him is a weapon with which to wage war. Does he desire
Life to continue so that controversy might continue? Well, let us look,
then, for some other reason for his praise of Love. He himself lacks
Love:--Can it be that he praises it for the same reason for which
the Christian praises what he is not but would fain be? And his love
of Love is then something pathetic, founded on "unselfishness"? And
himself, a Romantic?
155
_Mr. H. G. Wells_
How much has Mr. Wells's scientific training had to do with his
conception of Love? As a student of biology, it was natural he should
see Love as sex. In all his theories, indeed, there is more of the
scientist than of the artist. Scientific certainly, is his simple
acceptance of sex as a fact, and his unhesitating association of it
with generation, and of both with Love. The innocence of the scientist
and not of the artist is his, an innocence Darwinian, not Goethean. And
so, although his purpose is fine--to restore in his books an innocent
conception of sexual Love--in doing so, his biology always runs away
with his art. For he would render sex significant by reading it into
all creation, as the meaning of creation; thus making the instrument
more than the agent, the very meaning of the agent! But this robs both
creation and sex of their significance. The way to restore an innocent
conception of sexual Love is by reading creation into it, by seeing it
as part of the universal Becoming, by carrying it away on the great
purifying stream of Becoming. In spite of his genius, and still more
of his cleverness, Mr. Wells here began at the wrong end. But it is
doubtful whether any one in this generation has sufficient artistic
power and elevation to express in art this conception of Love. Within
the limits of Realism, especially of "physiological Realism," it
certainly cannot be expressed. Nothing less than the symbolic may serve
for it.
156
_The Idealism of Love_
The writer who discovered that love idealizes the object might have
pushed his discovery a little further; for it is no less true that love
idealizes the subject. None knows better than the poets how to take
advantage of this self-idealization: one has only to read their love
poems to find out how much more is said about the poet's beautiful
feelings than about the object which presumably evoked them. Heine,
particularly, was a shameless offender in this way. A woman was to
him simply an excuse for seeing himself in imagination in a romantic
attitude. But even with the others who appear less obtrusive and more
disinterested the implication is the same. How elevated and even divine
we must be, they seem to say, when we can feel in this manner; and how
happy, when we are privileged to love an object of such loveliness!
Yes! love has such power that it idealizes everything--even the
subject!
157
_Love and Becoming_
The great Heraclitus propounded the doctrine of Becoming. Everything
changes, is built up and dissolved; "stability" is only a little
sluggishness in the flux of things. Zeus, the great child, the divine
artist, constructs and destroys at his pleasure and for his amusement:
all the worlds are his playthings. This conception of the Universe is
innocent and beautiful, an artist's conception; but it is at the same
time terrifying. And that because all meaning is left out of it; for
all things without meaning, no matter how beautiful they may be, are in
the end terrifying.
Nietzsche, the modern counterpart of Heraclitus, re-affirmed this
doctrine; but he coupled with it the idea of creative Love: that is his
chief distinction. Certainly, those who do not comprehend Nietzsche's
Love do not comprehend Nietzsche. It is the key to his religion of
Becoming. Becoming without Love is meaningless; Love without Becoming
is meaningless. But, united, each gives its meaning to the other, each
redeems the other. But have things a meaning in themselves? Is it not
Man that forever interprets and interprets? Very well. But is not a
thing incomplete without its interpretation? Is not its interpretation
a part of it?
158
_Static Values_