sigh of regret to a certain Golden Age when there were no competitive
examinations, no wearisome educational systems, no missionaries, no penny
dinners for the people, no Established Churches, no Humanitarian
Societies, no dull lectures about one's duty to one's neighbour, and no
tedious sermons about any subject at all. In those ideal days, he tells
us, people loved each other without being conscious of charity, or
writing to the newspapers about it. They were upright, and yet they
never published books upon Altruism. As every man kept his knowledge to
himself, the world escaped the curse of scepticism; and as every man kept
his virtues to himself, nobody meddled in other people's business. They
lived simple and peaceful lives, and were contented with such food and
raiment as they could get. Neighbouring districts were in sight, and
'the cocks and dogs of one could be heard in the other,' yet the people
grew old and died without ever interchanging visits. There was no
chattering about clever men, and no laudation of good men. The
intolerable sense of obligation was unknown. The deeds of humanity left
no trace, and their affairs were not made a burden for posterity by
foolish historians.
In an evil moment the Philanthropist made his appearance, and brought
with him the mischievous idea of Government. 'There is such a thing,'
says Chuang Tzu, 'as leaving mankind alone: there has never been such a
thing as governing mankind.' All modes of government are wrong. They
are unscientific, because they seek to alter the natural environment of
man; they are immoral because, by interfering with the individual, they
produce the most aggressive forms of egotism; they are ignorant, because
they try to spread education; they are self-destructive, because they
engender anarchy. 'Of old,' he tells us, 'the Yellow Emperor first
caused charity and duty to one's neighbour to interfere with the natural
goodness of the heart of man. In consequence of this, Yao and Shun wore
the hair off their legs in endeavouring to feed their people. They
disturbed their internal economy in order to find room for artificial
virtues. They exhausted their energies in framing laws, and they were
failures.' Man's heart, our philosopher goes on to say, may be 'forced
down or stirred up,' and in either case the issue is fatal. Yao made the
people too happy, so they were not satisfied. Chieh made them too
wretched, so they grew discontented. Then every one began to argue about
the best way of tinkering up society. 'It is quite clear that something
must be done,' they said to each other, and there was a general rush for
knowledge. The results were so dreadful that the Government of the day
had to bring in Coercion, and as a consequence of this 'virtuous men
sought refuge in mountain caves, while rulers of state sat trembling in
ancestral halls.' Then, when everything was in a state of perfect chaos,
the Social Reformers got up on platforms, and preached salvation from the
ills that they and their system had caused. The poor Social Reformers!
'They know not shame, nor what it is to blush,' is the verdict of Chuang
Tzuu upon them.
The economic question, also, is discussed by this almond-eyed sage at
great length, and he writes about the curse of capital as eloquently as
Mr. Hyndman. The accumulation of wealth is to him the origin of evil. It
makes the strong violent, and the weak dishonest. It creates the petty
thief, and puts him in a bamboo cage. It creates the big thief, and sets
him on a throne of white jade. It is the father of competition, and
competition is the waste, as well as the destruction, of energy. The
order of nature is rest, repetition, and peace. Weariness and war are
the results of an artificial society based upon capital; and the richer
this society gets, the more thoroughly bankrupt it really is, for it has
neither sufficient rewards for the good nor sufficient punishments for
the wicked. There is also this to be remembered--that the prizes of the
world degrade a man as much as the world's punishments. The age is
rotten with its worship of success. As for education, true wisdom can
neither be learnt nor taught. It is a spiritual state, to which he who
lives in harmony with nature attains. Knowledge is shallow if we compare
it with the extent of the unknown, and only the unknowable is of value.
Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than
another. That is the only result of School Boards. Besides, of what
possible philosophic importance can education be, when it serves simply
to make each man differ from his neighbour? We arrive ultimately at a
chaos of opinions, doubt everything, and fall into the vulgar habit of
arguing; and it is only the intellectually lost who ever argue. Look at
Hui Tzu. 'He was a man of many ideas. His works would fill five carts.
But his doctrines were paradoxical.' He said that there were feathers in
an egg, because there were feathers on a chicken; that a dog could be a
sheep, because all names were arbitrary; that there was a moment when a
swiftly-flying arrow was neither moving nor at rest; that if you took a
stick a foot long, and cut it in half every day, you would never come to
the end of it; and that a bay horse and a dun cow were three, because
taken separately they were two, and taken together they were one, and one
and two made up three. 'He was like a man running a race with his own
shadow, and making a noise in order to drown the echo. He was a clever
gadfly, that was all. What was the use of him?'
Morality is, of course, a different thing. It went out of fashion, says
Chuang Tzu, when people began to moralise. Men ceased then to be
spontaneous and to act on intuition. They became priggish and
artificial, and were so blind as to have a definite purpose in life. Then
came Governments and Philanthropists, those two pests of the age. The
former tried to coerce people into being good, and so destroyed the
natural goodness of man. The latter were a set of aggressive busybodies
who caused confusion wherever they went. They were stupid enough to have
principles, and unfortunate enough to act up to them. They all came to
bad ends, and showed that universal altruism is as bad in its results as
universal egotism. They 'tripped people up over charity, and fettered
them with duties to their neighbours.' They gushed over music, and
fussed over ceremonies. As a consequence of all this, the world lost its
equilibrium, and has been staggering ever since.
Who, then, according to Chuang Tzu, is the perfect man? And what is his
manner of life? The perfect man does nothing beyond gazing at the
universe. He adopts no absolute position. 'In motion, he is like water.
At rest, he is like a mirror. And, like Echo, he answers only when he is
called upon.' He lets externals take care of themselves. Nothing
material injures him; nothing spiritual punishes him. His mental
equilibrium gives him the empire of the world. He is never the slave of
objective existences. He knows that, 'just as the best language is that
which is never spoken, so the best action is that which is never done.'
He is passive, and accepts the laws of life. He rests in inactivity, and
sees the world become virtuous of itself. He does not try to 'bring
about his own good deeds.' He never wastes himself on effort. He is not
troubled about moral distinctions. He knows that things are what they
are, and that their consequences will be what they will be. His mind is
the 'speculum of creation,' and he is ever at peace.
All this is of course excessively dangerous, but we must remember that
Chuang Tzu lived more than two thousand years ago, and never had the
opportunity of seeing our unrivalled civilisation. And yet it is
possible that, were he to come back to earth and visit us, he might have
something to say to Mr. Balfour about his coercion and active
misgovernment in Ireland; he might smile at some of our philanthropic
ardours, and shake his head over many of our organised charities; the
School Board might not impress him, nor our race for wealth stir his
admiration; he might wonder at our ideals, and grow sad over what we have
realised. Perhaps it is well that Chuang Tzu cannot return.
Meanwhile, thanks to Mr. Giles and Mr. Quaritch, we have his book to
console us, and certainly it is a most fascinating and delightful volume.
Chuang Tzu is one of the Darwinians before Darwin. He traces man from
the germ, and sees his unity with nature. As an anthropologist he is
excessively interesting, and he describes our primitive arboreal ancestor
living in trees through his terror of animals stronger than himself, and
knowing only one parent, the mother, with all the accuracy of a lecturer
at the Royal Society. Like Plato, he adopts the dialogue as his mode of
expression, 'putting words into other people's mouths,' he tells us, 'in
order to gain breadth of view.' As a story-teller he is charming. The
account of the visit of the respectable Confucius to the great Robber Che
is most vivid and brilliant, and it is impossible not to laugh over the
ultimate discomfiture of the sage, the barrenness of whose moral
platitudes is ruthlessly exposed by the successful brigand. Even in his
metaphysics, Chuang Tzu is intensely humorous. He personifies his
abstractions, and makes them act plays before us. The Spirit of the
Clouds, when passing eastward through the expanse of air, happened to
fall in with the Vital Principle. The latter was slapping his ribs and
hopping about: whereupon the Spirit of the Clouds said, 'Who are you, old
man, and what are you doing?' 'Strolling!' replied the Vital Principle,
without stopping, for all activities are ceaseless. 'I want to _know_
something,' continued the Spirit of the Clouds. 'Ah!' cried the Vital
Principle, in a tone of disapprobation, and a marvellous conversation
follows, that is not unlike the dialogue between the Sphinx and the
Chimera in Flaubert's curious drama. Talking animals, also, have their
place in Chuang Tzu's parables and stories, and through myth and poetry
and fancy his strange philosophy finds musical utterance.
Of course it is sad to be told that it is immoral to be consciously good,
and that doing anything is the worst form of idleness. Thousands of
excellent and really earnest philanthropists would be absolutely thrown
upon the rates if we adopted the view that nobody should be allowed to
meddle in what does not concern him. The doctrine of the uselessness of
all useful things would not merely endanger our commercial supremacy as a
nation, but might bring discredit upon many prosperous and serious-minded
members of the shop-keeping classes. What would become of our popular
preachers, our Exeter Hall orators, our drawing-room evangelists, if we
said to them, in the words of Chuang Tzu, 'Mosquitoes will keep a man
awake all night with their biting, and just in the same way this talk of
charity and duty to one's neighbour drives us nearly crazy. Sirs, strive
to keep the world to its own original simplicity, and, as the wind
bloweth where it listeth, so let Virtue establish itself. Wherefore this
undue energy?' And what would be the fate of governments and
professional politicians if we came to the conclusion that there is no
such thing as governing mankind at all? It is clear that Chuang Tzu is a
very dangerous writer, and the publication of his book in English, two
thousand years after his death, is obviously premature, and may cause a
great deal of pain to many thoroughly respectable and industrious
persons. It may be true that the ideal of self-culture and
self-development, which is the aim of his scheme of life, and the basis
of his scheme of philosophy, is an ideal somewhat needed by an age like
ours, in which most people are so anxious to educate their neighbours
that they have actually no time left in which to educate themselves. But
would it be wise to say so? It seems to me that if we once admitted the
force of any one of Chuang Tzu's destructive criticisms we should have to
put some check on our national habit of self-glorification; and the only
thing that ever consoles man for the stupid things he does is the praise
he always gives himself for doing them. There may, however, be a few who
have grown wearied of that strange modern tendency that sets enthusiasm
to do the work of the intellect. To these, and such as these, Chuang Tzu
will be welcome. But let them only read him. Let them not talk about
him. He would be disturbing at dinner-parties, and impossible at
afternoon teas, and his whole life was a protest against platform
speaking. 'The perfect man ignores self; the divine man ignores action;
the true sage ignores reputation.' These are the principles of Chuang
Tzu.
Chuang Tzu: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer. Translated from the
Chinese by Herbert A. Giles, H.B.M.'s Consul at Tamsui. (Bernard
Quaritch.)
MR. PATER'S LAST VOLUME
(Speaker, March 22, 1890.)
When I first had the privilege--and I count it a very high one--of
meeting Mr. Walter Pater, he said to me, smiling, 'Why do you always
write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more
difficult.'
It was during my undergraduate days at Oxford; days of lyrical ardour and
of studious sonnet-writing; days when one loved the exquisite intricacy
and musical repetitions of the ballade, and the villanelle with its
linked long-drawn echoes and its curious completeness; days when one
solemnly sought to discover the proper temper in which a triolet should
be written; delightful days, in which, I am glad to say, there was far
more rhyme than reason.
I may frankly confess now that at the time I did not quite comprehend
what Mr. Pater really meant; and it was not till I had carefully studied
his beautiful and suggestive essays on the Renaissance that I fully
realised what a wonderful self-conscious art the art of English prose-
writing really is, or may be made to be. Carlyle's stormy rhetoric,
Ruskin's winged and passionate eloquence, had seemed to me to spring from
enthusiasm rather than from art. I do not think I knew then that even
prophets correct their proofs. As for Jacobean prose, I thought it too
exuberant; and Queen Anne prose appeared to me terribly bald, and
irritatingly rational. But Mr. Pater's essays became to me 'the golden
book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty.' They are still this
to me. It is possible, of course, that I may exaggerate about them. I
certainly hope that I do; for where there is no exaggeration there is no
love, and where there is no love there is no understanding. It is only
about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really
unbiassed opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an unbiassed
opinion is always valueless.
But I must not allow this brief notice of Mr. Pater's new volume to
degenerate into an autobiography. I remember being told in America that
whenever Margaret Fuller wrote an essay upon Emerson the printers had
always to send out to borrow some additional capital 'I's,' and I feel it
right to accept this transatlantic warning.
Appreciations, in the fine Latin sense of the word, is the title given by
Mr. Pater to his book, which is an exquisite collection of exquisite
essays, of delicately wrought works of art--some of them being almost
Greek in their purity of outline and perfection of form, others mediaeval
in their strangeness of colour and passionate suggestion, and all of them
absolutely modern, in the true meaning of the term modernity. For he to
whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the
age in which he lives. To realise the nineteenth century one must
realise every century that has preceded it, and that has contributed to
its making. To know anything about oneself, one must know all about
others. There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathise, no dead
mode of life that one cannot make alive. The legacies of heredity may
make us alter our views of moral responsibility, but they cannot but
intensify our sense of the value of Criticism; for the true critic is he
who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad
generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional
impulse obscure.
Perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the least successful, of the
essays contained in the present volume is that on Style. It is the most
interesting because it is the work of one who speaks with the high
authority that comes from the noble realisation of things nobly
conceived. It is the least successful, because the subject is too
abstract. A true artist like Mr. Pater is most felicitous when he deals
with the concrete, whose very limitations give him finer freedom, while
they necessitate more intense vision. And yet what a high ideal is
contained in these few pages! How good it is for us, in these days of
popular education and facile journalism, to be reminded of the real
scholarship that is essential to the perfect writer, who, 'being a true
lover of words for their own sake, a minute and constant observer of
their physiognomy,' will avoid what is mere rhetoric, or ostentatious
ornament, or negligent misuse of terms, or ineffective surplusage, and
will be known by his tact of omission, by his skilful economy of means,
by his selection and self-restraint, and perhaps above all by that
conscious artistic structure which is the expression of mind in style. I
think I have been wrong in saying that the subject is too abstract. In
Mr. Pater's hands it becomes very real to us indeed, and he shows us how,
behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's
soul.
As one passes to the rest of the volume, one finds essays on Wordsworth
and on Coleridge, on Charles Lamb and on Sir Thomas Browne, on some of
Shakespeare's plays and on the English kings that Shakespeare fashioned,
on Dante Rossetti, and on William Morris. As that on Wordsworth seems to
be Mr. Pater's last work, so that on the singer of the Defence of
Guenevere is certainly his earliest, or almost his earliest, and it is
interesting to mark the change that has taken place in his style. This
change is, perhaps, at first sight not very apparent. In 1868 we find
Mr. Pater writing with the same exquisite care for words, with the same
studied music, with the same temper, and something of the same mode of
treatment. But, as he goes on, the architecture of the style becomes
richer and more complex, the epithet more precise and intellectual.
Occasionally one may be inclined to think that there is, here and there,
a sentence which is somewhat long, and possibly, if one may venture to
say so, a little heavy and cumbersome in movement. But if this be so, it
comes from those side-issues suddenly suggested by the idea in its
progress, and really revealing the idea more perfectly; or from those
felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller completeness to the central
scheme, and yet convey something of the charm of chance; or from a desire
to suggest the secondary shades of meaning with all their accumulating
effect, and to avoid, it may be, the violence and harshness of too
definite and exclusive an opinion. For in matters of art, at any rate,
thought is inevitably coloured by emotion, and so is fluid rather than
fixed, and, recognising its dependence upon moods and upon the passion of
fine moments, will not accept the rigidity of a scientific formula or a
theological dogma. The critical pleasure, too, that we receive from
tracing, through what may seem the intricacies of a sentence, the working
of the constructive intelligence, must not be overlooked. As soon as we
have realised the design, everything appears clear and simple. After a
time, these long sentences of Mr. Pater's come to have the charm of an
elaborate piece of music, and the unity of such music also.
I have suggested that the essay on Wordsworth is probably the most recent
bit of work contained in this volume. If one might choose between so
much that is good, I should be inclined to say it is the finest also. The
essay on Lamb is curiously suggestive; suggestive, indeed, of a somewhat
more tragic, more sombre figure, than men have been wont to think of in
connection with the author of the Essays of Elia. It is an interesting
aspect under which to regard Lamb, but perhaps he himself would have had
some difficulty in recognising the portrait given of him. He had,
undoubtedly, great sorrows, or motives for sorrow, but he could console
himself at a moment's notice for the real tragedies of life by reading
any one of the Elizabethan tragedies, provided it was in a folio edition.
The essay on Sir Thomas Browne is delightful, and has the strange,
personal, fanciful charm of the author of the Religio Medici, Mr. Pater
often catching the colour and accent and tone of whatever artist, or work
of art, he deals with. That on Coleridge, with its insistence on the
necessity of the cultivation of the relative, as opposed to the absolute
spirit in philosophy and in ethics, and its high appreciation of the
poet's true position in our literature, is in style and substance a very
blameless work. Grace of expression and delicate subtlety of thought and
phrase, characterise the essays on Shakespeare. But the essay on
Wordsworth has a spiritual beauty of its own. It appeals, not to the
ordinary Wordsworthian with his uncritical temper, and his gross
confusion of ethical and aesthetical problems, but rather to those who
desire to separate the gold from the dross, and to reach at the true
Wordsworth through the mass of tedious and prosaic work that bears his
name, and that serves often to conceal him from us. The presence of an
alien element in Wordsworth's art is, of course, recognised by Mr. Pater,
but he touches on it merely from the psychological point of view,
pointing out how this quality of higher and lower moods gives the effect
in his poetry 'of a power not altogether his own, or under his control';
a power which comes and goes when it wills, 'so that the old fancy which
made the poet's art an enthusiasm, a form of divine possession, seems
almost true of him.' Mr. Pater's earlier essays had their purpurei
panni, so eminently suitable for quotation, such as the famous passage on
Mona Lisa, and that other in which Botticelli's strange conception of the
Virgin is so strangely set forth. From the present volume it is
difficult to select any one passage in preference to another as specially
characteristic of Mr. Pater's treatment. This, however, is worth quoting
at length. It contains a truth eminently suitable for our age:
That the end of life is not action but contemplation--_being_ as
distinct from _doing_--a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some
shape or other, the principle of all the higher morality. In poetry,
in art, if you enter into their true spirit at all, you touch this
principle in a measure; these, by their sterility, are a type of
beholding for the mere joy of beholding. To treat life in the spirit
of art is to make life a thing in which means and ends are identified:
to encourage such treatment, the true moral significance of art and
poetry. Wordsworth, and other poets who have been like him in ancient
or more recent times, are the masters, the experts, in this art of
impassioned contemplation. Their work is not to teach lessons, or
enforce rules, or even to stimulate us to noble ends, but to withdraw
the thoughts for a while from the mere machinery of life, to fix them,
with appropriate emotions, on the spectacle of those great facts in
man's existence which no machinery affects, 'on the great and
universal passions of men, the most general and interesting of their
occupations, and the entire world of nature'--on 'the operations of
the elements and the appearances of the visible universe, on storm and
sunshine, on the revolutions of the seasons, on cold and heat, on loss
of friends and kindred, on injuries and resentments, on gratitude and
hope, on fear and sorrow.' To witness this spectacle with appropriate
emotions is the aim of all culture; and of these emotions poetry like
Wordsworth's is a great nourisher and stimulant. He sees nature full
of sentiment and excitement; he sees men and women as parts of nature,
passionate, excited, in strange grouping and connection with the
grandeur and beauty of the natural world:--images, in his own words,
'of men suffering, amid awful forms and powers.'
Certainly the real secret of Wordsworth has never been better expressed.
After having read and reread Mr. Pater's essay--for it requires
re-reading--one returns to the poet's work with a new sense of joy and
wonder, and with something of eager and impassioned expectation. And
perhaps this might be roughly taken as the test or touchstone of the
finest criticism.