experience of their fellow men; their ideal must be to reveal meanings
that cannot be doubted by the normal soul, in the same way that
scientific formulations cannot be doubted by the normal mind. It is
here that we have a quarrel with old religion and old poetry, that
the vision which it brings us is not sufficiently purged of local
discolorations or intellectualistic taints. But it is not a quarrel
with religion and poetry as such; this age thirsts for a revelation
of the spiritual meanings of the wider world that has been opened to
us, and the complex and baffling anomalies that seem to confront us.
It is our imperative duty to reëmphasize the life of qualities and
ideals, to turn again our gaze to that aspect of the world from which
men have always drawn what gave life real worth and reinstate those
spiritual things whose strength advancing knowledge has seemed to sap.
There is room for a new idealism, but an idealism that sturdily keeps
its grip on the real, that grapples with the new knowledge and with the
irrevocable loss of much of the old poetry and many of the old values,
and wrests out finer qualities and a nobler spiritual life than the
world has yet seen. It is not betrayal of our integrity to believe that
the desires and interests of men, their hopes and fears and creative
imaginings, are as real as any atoms or formulas.
Now the place of religion in this new idealism will be the same place
that its essential spirit has always held in the spiritual life of
men. Religion is our sense of the quality of the universe itself, the
broadest, profoundest, and most constant of our intuitions. Men have
always felt that, outside of the qualities of concrete things, there
lay a sort of infinite quality that they could identify with the spirit
of the universe, and they have called it God. To this quality men have
always responded, and that response and appreciation is religion. To
appreciate this cosmic quality is to be religious, and to express that
appreciation is to worship. Religion is thus as much and eternally
a part of life as our senses themselves; the only justification for
making away with religion would be an event that would make away with
our senses. The scientist must always find it difficult to explain why,
if man’s mind, as all agree that it did, developed in adaptation to his
environment, it should somehow have become adapted so perfectly to a
spiritual world of qualities and poetic interpretation of phenomena,
and not to the world of atomic motion and mechanical law which
scientific philosophy assures us is the “real” world. Our minds somehow
adapted themselves, not to the hard world of fact, but to a world of
illusion, which had not the justification of being even practically
useful or empirically true. If the real world is mechanical, we should
have a right to expect the earliest thinking to be scientific, and
the spiritual life to come in only after centuries of refinement
of thought. But the first reactions of men were of course purely
qualitative, and it is only within the last few minutes of cosmic time
that we have known of the quantitative relations of things. Is it hard,
then, to believe that, since we and the world have grown up together,
there must be some subtle correlation between it and the values and
qualities that we feel, that our souls must reflect--not faithfully,
perhaps, because warped by a thousand alien compelling physical forces,
and yet somehow indomitably--a spiritual world that is perhaps even
more real, because more immediate and constant, than the physical? We
may partially create it, but we partially reflect it too.
That cosmic quality we feel as personality. Not artificial or illusive
is this deeply rooted anthropomorphic sense which has always been at
the bottom of man’s religious consciousness. We are alive, and we
have a right to interpret the world as living; we are persons, and we
have a right to interpret the world in terms of personality. In all
religions, through the encrustations of dogma and ritual, has been
felt that vital sense of the divine personality, keeping clean and
sweet the life of man. The definite appeal of the Church, in times
like these, when the external props fall away, is to the incarnation
of the divine personality, and the ideal of character deduced from it
as a pattern for life. This is the religion of ordinary people to-day;
it has been the heart of Christianity for nineteen hundred years. Our
feeling of this cosmic quality may be vague or definite, diffused or
crystallized, but to those of us who sense behind our pulsing life a
mystery which perplexes, sobers, and elevates us, that quality forms a
permanent scenic background for our life.
To feel this cosmic quality of a divine personality, in whom we live,
move, and have our being, is to know religion. The ordinary world we
live in is incurably dynamic; we are forced to think and act in terms
of energy and change and constant rearrangement and flux of factors and
elements. And we live only as we give ourselves up to that stream and
play of forces. Throughout all the change, however, there comes a sense
of this eternal quality. In the persistence of our own personality,
the humble fragment of a divine personality, we get the pattern of its
permanence. The Great Companion is ever with us, silently ratifying
our worthy deeds and tastes and responses. The satisfactions of our
spiritual life, of our judgments and appreciations of morality and art
and any kind of excellence, come largely from this subtle corroboration
that we feel from some unseen presence wider than ourselves. It
accompanies not a part but the whole of our spiritual life, silently
strengthening our responses to personality and beauty, our sense of
irony, the refinement of our taste, sharpening our moral judgment,
elevating our capacities for happiness, filling ever richer our sense
of the worth of life. And this cosmic influence in which we seem to be
immersed we can no more lose or doubt--after we have once felt the rush
of time past us, seen a friend die, or brooded on the bitter thought of
our personal death, felt the surge of forces of life and love, wondered
about consciousness, been melted before beauty--than we can lose or
doubt ourselves. The wonder of it is exhaustless,--the beneficence over
whose workings there yet breathes an inexorable sternness, the mystery
of time and death, the joy of beauty and creative art and sex, and
sheer consciousness.
Against this scenic background, along this deep undercurrent of
feeling, our outward, cheerful, settled, and orderly life plays its
part. That life is no less essential; we must be willing to see life in
two aspects, the world as deathless yet ever-creative, evolution yet
timeless eternity. To be religious is to turn our gaze away from the
dynamic to the static and the permanent, away from the stage to the
scenic background of our lives. Religion cannot, therefore, be said
to have much of a place in our activity of life, except as it fixes
the general emotional tone. We have no right to demand that it operate
practically, nor can we call altruistic activity, and enthusiasm for a
noble cause, religion. Moral action is really more a matter of social
psychology than of religion. All religions have been ethical only as a
secondary consideration. Religion in and for itself is something else;
we can enjoy it only by taking, as it were, the moral holiday into its
regions when we are weary of the world of thinking and doing. It is a
land to retreat into when we are battered and degraded by the dynamic
world about us, and require rest and recuperation. It is constantly
there behind us, but to live in it always is to take a perpetual
holiday.
At all times we may have its beauty with us, however, as we may have
prospects of far mountains and valleys. As we go in the morning to
work in the fields, religion is this enchanting view of the mountains,
inspiring us and lifting our hearts with renewed vigor. Through all the
long day’s work we feel their presence with us, and have only to turn
around to see them shining splendidly afar with hope and kindliness.
Even the austerest summits are warm in the afternoon sun. Yet if we
gaze at them all day long, we shall accomplish no work. Nor shall we
finish our allotted task if we succumb to their lure and leave our
fields to travel towards them. As we return home weary at night, the
mountains are still there to refresh and cheer us with their soft
colors and outline blended in the purple light. When our task is
entirely done, it has been our eternal hope to journey to those far
mountains and valleys; if this is not to be, at least their glorious
view will be the last to fall upon us as we close our eyes. But we know
that, whatever happens, if we have done our work well, have performed
faithfully our daily tasks of learning to control and manage and
make creative the tough soil of this material world in which we find
ourselves, if we have neither allowed its toughness to distract us from
the beauty of the eternal background, nor let those far visions slow
down the wheels of life, distract us from our work, or blur our thought
and pale by their light the other qualities and beauties around us--we
shall attain what is right for us when we lay down our tools. In a
living world, death can be no more than an apparition.
VIII
THE MYSTIC TURNED RADICAL
The mystical temperament is little enough popular in this workaday
modern world of ours. The mystic, we feel, comes to us discounted
from the start; he should in all decency make constant apologies for
his existence. In a practical age of machinery he is an anomaly, an
anachronism. He must meet the direct challenge of the scientist, who
guards every approach to the doors of truth and holds the keys of its
citadel. Any thinker who gets into the fold by another way is a thief
and a robber.
The mystic must answer that most heinous of all charges,--of being
unscientific. By tradition he is even hostile to science. For his main
interest is in wonder, and science by explaining things attacks the
very principle of his life. It not only diminishes his opportunities
for wonder, but threatens to make him superfluous by ultimately
explaining everything.
The scientist may say that there is no necessary antithesis between
explanation and that beautiful romance of thought we call wonder. The
savage, who can explain nothing, is the very creature who has no wonder
at all. Everything is equally natural to him. Only a mind that has
acquaintance with laws of behavior can be surprised at events.
The wonder of the scientist, however, although it be of a more robust,
tough-minded variety, is none the less wonder. A growing acquaintance
with the world, an increasing at-homeness in it, is not necessarily
incompatible with an ever-increasing marvel both at the beautiful
fitness of things and the limitless field of ignorance and mystery
beyond. So the modern mystic must break with his own tradition if he
is to make an appeal to this generation, and must recognize that the
antithesis between mystic and scientific is not an eternally valid one.
It is just through realization of this fact that Maeterlinck, the best
of modern mystics, makes his extraordinary appeal. For, as he tells us,
the valid mystery does not begin at the threshold of knowledge but only
after we have exhausted our resources of knowing. His frank and genuine
acceptance of science thus works out a _modus vivendi_ between the seen
and the unseen. It allows many of us who have given our allegiance
to science to hail him gladly as a prophet who supplements the work
of the wise men of scientific research, without doing violence to our
own consciences. For the world is, in spite of its scientific clamor,
still far from ready really to surrender itself to prosaicness. It is
still haunted with the dreams of the ages--dreams of short roads to
truth, visions of finding the Northwest passage to the treasures of the
Unseen. Only we must go as far as possible along the traveled routes of
science.
Maeterlinck is thus not anti-scientific or pseudo-scientific, but
rather sub-scientific. He speaks of delicately felt and subtle
influences and aspects of reality that lie beneath the surface of our
lives, of forces and shadows that cannot be measured quantitatively
or turned into philosophical categories. Or we may say that he
is ultra-scientific. As science plods along, opening up the dark
wilderness, he goes with the exploring party, throwing a search-light
before them; flickering enough and exasperatingly uncertain at times,
but sufficiently constant to light up the way, point out a path, and
give us confidence that the terrors before us are not so formidable
as we have feared. His influence on our time is so great because we
believe that he is a seer, a man with knowledge of things hidden from
our eyes. We go to him as to a spiritual clairvoyant,--to have him tell
us where to find the things our souls have lost.
But the modern mystic must not only recognize the scientific aspect
of the age,--he must feel the social ideal that directs the spiritual
energies of the time. It is the glory of Maeterlinck’s mysticism that
it has not lingered in the depths of the soul, but has passed out to
illuminate our thinking in regard to the social life about us. The
growth of this duality of vision has been with him a long evolution.
His early world was a shadowy, intangible thing. As we read the early
essays, we seem to be constantly hovering on the verge of an idea, just
as when we read the plays we seem to be hovering on the verge of a
passion. This long brooding away from the world, however, was fruitful
and momentous. The intense gaze inward trained the eye, so that when
the mists cleared away and revealed the palpitating social world about
him, his insight into its meaning was as much more keen and true than
our own as had been his sense of the meaning of the individual soul.
The light he turns outward to reveal the meaning of social progress is
all the whiter for having burned so long within.
In the essay on “Our Social Duty,” the clearest and the consummate
expression of this new outward look, there are no contaminating fringes
of vague thought; all is clear white light. With the instinct of the
true radical, the poet has gone to the root of the social attitude. Our
duty as members of society is to be radical, he tells us. And not only
that, but an excess of radicalism is essential to the equilibrium of
life. Society so habitually thinks on a plane lower than is reasonable
that it behooves us to think and to hope on an even higher plane than
seems to be reasonable. This is the overpoweringly urgent philosophy of
radicalism. It is the beautiful courage of such words that makes them
so vital an inspiration.
It is the sin of the age that nobody dares to be anything to too great
a degree. We may admire extremists in principle, but we take the best
of care not to imitate them ourselves. Who in America would even be
likely to express himself as does Maeterlinck in this essay? Who of us
would dare follow the counsel? Of course we can plead extenuation. In
Europe the best minds are thinking in terms of revolution still, while
in America our radicalism is still simply amateurish and incompetent.
To many of us, then, this call of Maeterlinck’s to the highest of
radicalisms will seem irrelevant; this new social note which appears
so strongly in all his later work will seem a deterioration from
the nobler mysticism of his earlier days. But rather should it be
viewed as the fruit of matured insight. There has been no decay,
no surrender. It is the same mysticism, but with the direction of
the vision altered. This essay is the expression of the clearest
vision that has yet penetrated our social confusion, the sanest and
highest ideal that has been set before progressive minds. It may be
that its utter fearlessness, its almost ascetic detachment from the
matter-of-fact things of political life, its clear cold light of
conviction and penetration, may repel some whose hearts have been
warmed by Maeterlinck’s subtle revelations of the spiritual life. They
may reproach him because it has no direct bearings on the immediate
practical social life; it furnishes no weapon of reform, no tool with
which to rush out and overthrow some vested abuse. But to the traveler
lost in the wood the one thing needful is a pole-star to show him
his direction. The star is unapproachable, serene, cold, and lofty.
But although he cannot touch it, or utilize it directly to extend
his comfort and progress, it is the most useful of all things to
him. It fills his heart with a great hope; it coördinates his aimless
wanderings and gropings, and gives meaning and purpose to his course.
So a generation lost in a chaos of social change can find in these
later words of Maeterlinck a pole-star and a guide. They do for the
social life of man what the earlier essays did for the individual. They
endow it with values and significances that will give steadfastness
and resource to his vision as he looks out on the great world of human
progress, and purpose and meaning to his activity as he looks ahead
into the dim world of the future.
IX
SEEING, WE SEE NOT
It is a mere superstition, Maeterlinck tells us in one of his beautiful
essays, that there is anything irrevocable about the past. On the
contrary, we are constantly rearranging it, revising it, remaking it.
For it is only in our memory that it exists, and our conception of it
changes as the loose fringes of past events are gathered up into a
new meaning, or when a sudden fortune lights up a whole series in our
lives, and shows us, stretching back in orderly array and beautiful
significance, what we had supposed in our blindness to be a sad and
chaotic welter. It is no less a superstition to suppose that we have
a hand in making the present. The present, like the past, is always
still to be made; indeed, must wait its turn, so to speak, to be seen
in its full meaning until after the past itself has been remoulded and
reconstituted. It is depressing to think that we do not know our own
time, that the events we look upon have a permanent value far different
from the petty one that we endow them with, that they fit into a
larger whole of which we see only a dim fraction--and that the least
important because the seed of something that shall come much later
into full fruition. Must our short life pass away without knowledge
or vision of the majestic processes which are unfolding themselves
under our very eyes, while we have wasted our admiration and distorted
our purpose by striving to interpret the ephemeral, that is gone as
soon as we? Even the wisest among us can see with but a dim eye into
the future, and make rather a lucky guess at its potentialities than
a true prophecy based on a realization of the real tendencies of the
time. It is only the Past that we really make. And this may account
for our love of it. This fragile thing of tradition that we have
so carefully constructed and so lovingly beautified, this artistic
creation of a whole people or race, becomes most naturally the object
of our tenderest solicitude. Any attack upon it that suggests a marring
of its golden beauty, any new proposal that threatens to render it
superfluous, elicits the outraged cry of anger, the passionate defense,
of the mother protecting her child. For the Past is really the child
of the Present. We are the authors of its being, and upon it we lavish
all our thoughts, our interest and our delight. And even our hopes
are centred in the Past, for the most enthusiastic among us can do no
more than hope that something worth while will come out of the Past
to nourish us in the approaching Present. Concern for the Future is
so new a thing in human history that we are hardly yet at home with
the feeling. Perhaps, if we thought more about what was before us, we
should come to know more about it. Meanwhile our only consolation is
that if _we_ cannot see, neither did the generations that were before
us. And we have the advantage of _knowing_ that we do not see, while
they did not care about their ignorance at all.
We have constantly to check ourselves in reading history with the
remembrance that, to the actors in the drama, events appeared very
differently from the way they appear to us. We know what they were
doing far better than they knew themselves. We are in the position of
the novel reader who looks, before he begins to read, to see how the
plot turns out. This orderly and dramatic chronicle of history that
thrills us as we read has only been orderly and dramatic to readers of
the present time, who can see the _dénouement_ of the story. History is
peculiarly the creation of the present. Even the great men of the past
are largely the agglomerations of centuries of hero-worship. Genius is
as much a slow accretion of the ages as an endowment of man. Few great
poets were seen in the full glory of their superhuman capacity by their
fellows. Contemporary opinion of the great has been complimentary but
seldom excessively laudatory, and there are sad instances of the decay
and deflation of a supernatural personality through the smooth, gentle,
imperceptibly creeping oblivion of the centuries.
We rarely see what is distinctive in our own time. The city builders
of the West are quite unconscious of the fact that they are leaving
behind them imperishable and mighty memorials of themselves. Few of the
things that we admire now will be considered by posterity as noteworthy
and distinctive of our age. All depends on the vitality of our customs
and social habits, and some show as high a mortality as others do
a stubborn tenacity of life. What we are witnessing is a gigantic
struggle of customs and ideas to survive and propagate their kind.
The means of subsistence is limited; it is impossible that all should
be able to live. The fascinating problem for the social philosopher
is which of these beliefs and tendencies will prove strong enough to
overcome their rivals and make their stock a permanent type. How many
of the fads and brilliant theories and new habits of thought and taste
will be able to maintain their place in the world? If we could discern
them, we should know the distinction of our age. Definite epochs of
the past we distinguish and celebrate because they contained the germs
of ideas or the roots of institutions that still survive among us,
or customs and habits of thought that flourished in them with great
brilliancy but have now utterly passed away. Now these beginnings are
quite too subtle for us to see in our contemporary life, and there
are so many brilliancies that it is impossible to pick out with any
definiteness the things which have power to project themselves into
the future, and cast a broad trail of light back to our age. Most of
those very things that seem to us imperishable will be the ones to
fade,--fade, indeed, so gradually that they will not even be missed. It
is this gradual disappearance that gives the most thorough oblivion.
History remembers only the brilliant failures and the brilliant
successes.