I
The art of defining is so indispensable that one needs to define the
limits of definition itself. A very eminent humanist, Erasmus, showed
his awareness of these limits when he complained of the attempts of the
theologians of the Reformation to formulate deity that every definition
was a disaster. Though the humanist does not seek to define God and is
in general chary of ultimates, he is wont in more mundane matters to
put the utmost emphasis on definition. This Socratic emphasis would
seem especially needed at a time like the present which has probably
surpassed all previous epochs in its loose and irresponsible use of
general terms. Unless this tendency is corrected, the day may come
when, outside of words that stand for the measurements of science or
the objects of sense, communication between men will be well-nigh
impossible. The exchange of ideas regarding those aspects of life
that fall outside the merely quantitative and material may become
as difficult as economic exchanges would be with coins that have no
definite value.
This growing debasement of the intellectual coinage may be illustrated
from the word humanism itself. The boundaries of a genuine humanism
are broad and flexible. It is plain, however, that the word is being
appropriated for points of view that cannot be brought within these
boundaries, however generously extended. As a preliminary to pointing
out some of the more serious of the resulting confusions it would
seem desirable to build up the historical background. For what a word
actually has meant should surely throw light on what it ought to mean.
As is well known, the word humanist was applied, first in the Italy of
the fifteenth century, and later in other European countries, to the
type of scholar who was not only proficient in Greek and Latin, but who
at the same time inclined to prefer the humanity of the great classical
writers to what seemed to him the excess of divinity in the mediævals.
This contrast between humanity and divinity was often conceived very
superficially. However, the best of the humanists were not content with
opposing a somewhat external imitation of the Ciceronian or Virgilian
elegance to the scholastic carelessness of form. They actually caught
a glimpse of the fine proportionateness of the ancients at their best.
They were thus encouraged to aim at a harmonious development of their
faculties in this world rather than at an other-worldly felicity.
Each faculty, they held, should be cultivated in due measure without
one-sidedness or over-emphasis, whether that of the ascetic or that of
the specialist. “Nothing too much” is indeed the central maxim of all
genuine humanists, ancient and modern.
In a world of ever-shifting circumstance, this maxim is not always of
easy application. Whoever has succeeded in bridging the gap between
the general precept and some particular emergency has to that extent
achieved the fitting and the decorous. Decorum is simply the law of
measure in its more concrete aspects. For every type of humanist
decorum is, in Milton’s phrase, the “grand masterpiece to observe.”
Actually this observation may rest on deep insight, as it did in the
case of Milton himself, or it may degenerate into empty formalism.
The adjustment of which I have spoken between the variable and the
permanent elements in human experience requires spiritual effort and
most men are spiritually indolent. For genuine adjustment they tend
to substitute outer conformity so that decorum itself finally comes
to seem a mere veneer, something that has no deep root in the nature
of things. Moreover the notions of decent behaviour to which men have
conformed at any particular period have always been more or less
local and relative. It is easy to take the next step and assume that
they have been _only_ local and relative, an assumption subversive
not merely of decorum but of humanism itself. Humanism, one of our
modernists has argued, may have done very well for other times and
places, but under existing circumstances, it is at best likely to prove
only a “noble anachronism.” A similar objection to humanism is that
it has its source in a psychology of “escape,” that it is an attempt
to take flight from the present into a past that has for the modern
man become impossible. But humanism is not to be identified with this
or that body of traditional precepts. The law of measure on which it
depends becomes meaningless unless it can be shown to be one of the
“laws unwritten in the heavens” of which Antigone had the immediate
perception, laws that are “not of to-day or yesterday,” that transcend
in short the temporal process. The final appeal of the humanist is not
to any historical convention but to intuition.
It does not follow that the humanist is ready to abandon history to
the relativist. The main conventions that have prevailed in the past
reveal important identities as well as differences. These identities
cannot be explained as due to their common derivation from some
previous convention. The Chinese made an independent discovery of
the law of measure.[2] An important task, indeed, that awaits some
properly qualified scholar, preferably a Chinese, is a comparison of
Confucian humanism with occidental humanism as it appears, for example,
in the _Ethics_ of Aristotle. The announcement was made recently in
the press that a Harvard astronomer had discovered the “centre of the
universe” (more strictly the centre of our galactic system). In the
meanwhile the far more important question is being neglected whether
human nature itself has any centre. One’s faith in the existence of
such a centre increases when one finds the best commentary on Pascal’s
dictum that the great man is he who combines in himself opposite
virtues and occupies all the space between them, in a Confucian book
the very title of which, literally rendered, means the “universal norm”
or “centre.”[3] Here and elsewhere the Confucian books reveal a deep
and direct insight into the law of measure. Legge’s translation of the
Chinese word for decorum (_li_) as “the rules of propriety” has been
rightly censured as unduly prim and formalistic; though it must be
admitted that a formalistic element is very marked at times even in the
older Confucian writings.
Practically the assertion of a “universal centre” means the setting
up of some pattern or model for imitation. The idea of imitation goes
even deeper than that of decorum, but is an idea that humanism shares
with religion. Humanism, however, differs from religion in putting
at the basis of the pattern it sets up, not man’s divinity, but the
something in his nature that sets him apart simply as man from other
animals and that Cicero defines as a “sense of order and decorum and
measure in deeds and words.”[4] It dwells on the danger of any attempt
to pass too abruptly to the religious level; it holds, if I may be
pardoned for quoting myself, that the world would have been a better
place if more persons had made sure they were human before setting
out to be superhuman. The virtue that results from a right cultivation
of one’s humanity, in other words from moderate and decorous living,
is poise. Perfect poise is no doubt impossible: not even Sophocles
succeeded in seeing life steadily and seeing it whole. The difference
is none the less marked between the man who is moving towards poise and
the man who is moving away from it. Since the break with the somewhat
artificial decorum of the eighteenth century most men have been moving
away from it. It would not be easy to argue with any plausibility that
the typical modernist is greatly concerned with the law of measure;
his interest, as a glance at our newspapers should suffice to show,
is rather in the doing of stunts and the breaking of records, in
“prodigies, feats of strength and crime,”[5] the very topics that,
according to the traditional report, Confucius banished from his
conversation. “Let us confess it,” says Nietzsche, speaking not merely
for the rank and file but for the leaders, “proportionateness is
foreign to us.” It is foreign to us because we no longer refer our
experience to any centre. With the growth of the naturalistic temper,
the normal has come to have less appeal than the novel. The pursuit
of poise has tended to give way to that of uniqueness, spontaneity,
and above all intensity. “The last remnant of God on earth,” says
Nietzsche himself, “are the men of great longing, of great loathing, of
great satiety.” Once grant that there is no constant element in life
and one might agree with Walter Pater that a man’s highest ambition
should be “to burn with a hard gem-like flame,” to get “as many
pulsations as possible into the given time.”[6] Æsthetic perceptiveness
is an excellent thing, but thus to set it up as an end in itself is
almost at the opposite pole from humanism. Yet Pater has been called
a humanist. One might so regard him if one accepted his view that
the distinctive humanistic trait is an all-embracing curiosity.[7]
Humanism appears primarily, not in the enlargement of comprehension
and sympathy, desirable though this enlargement may be, but in the act
of selection, in the final imposition on mere multiplicity of a scale
of values. Matthew Arnold, with his striving for centrality, has far
better claims to be regarded as a humanist than Pater--and that in
spite of his inadequacy on the side of religion. The model that Arnold
sets up for imitation in the name of culture is a constant corrective
of everything that is one-sided and out of proportion. “I hate,” he
says, speaking not only for himself but for all true humanists, “all
over-preponderance of single elements.”