THE DANCE OF LIFE
THE DANCE OF LIFE
BY
HAVELOCK ELLIS
AUTHOR OF “IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS,” “AFFIRMATIONS,”
“ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME,” ETC.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY HAVELOCK ELLIS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
SECOND IMPRESSION, JUNE, 1923
THIRD IMPRESSION, AUGUST, 1923
FOURTH IMPRESSION, SEPTEMBER, 1923
FIFTH IMPRESSION, OCTOBER, 1923
SIXTH IMPRESSION, NOVEMBER, 1923
SEVENTH IMPRESSION, DECEMBER, 1923
EIGHTH IMPRESSION, FEBRUARY, 1924
NINTH IMPRESSION, JULY, 1924
TENTH IMPRESSION, SEPTEMBER, 1924
ELEVENTH IMPRESSION, OCTOBER, 1924
TWELFTH IMPRESSION, DECEMBER, 1924
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
PREFACE
THIS book was planned many years ago. As to the idea running through it,
I cannot say when that arose. My feeling is, it was born with me. On
reflection, indeed, it seems possible the seeds fell imperceptibly in
youth—from F. A. Lange, maybe, and other sources—to germinate unseen in
a congenial soil. However that may be, the idea underlies much that I
have written. Even the present book began to be written, and to be
published in a preliminary form, more than fifteen years ago. Perhaps I
may be allowed to seek consolation for my slowness, however vainly, in
the saying of Rodin that “slowness is beauty,” and certainly it is the
slowest dances that have been to me most beautiful to see, while, in the
dance of life, the achievement of a civilisation in beauty seems to be
inversely to the rapidity of its pace.
Moreover, the book remains incomplete, not merely in the sense that I
would desire still to be changing and adding to each chapter, but even
incomplete by the absence of many chapters for which I had gathered
material, and twenty years ago should have been surprised to find
missing. For there are many arts, not among those we conventionally call
“fine,” which seem to me fundamental for living. But now I put forth the
book as it stands, deliberately, without remorse, well content so to do.
Once that would not have been possible. A book must be completed as it
had been originally planned, finished, rounded, polished. As a man grows
older his ideals change. Thoroughness is often an admirable ideal. But
it is an ideal to be adopted with discrimination, having due reference
to the nature of the work in hand. An artist, it seems to me now, has
not always to finish his work in every detail; by not doing so he may
succeed in making the spectator his co-worker, and put into his hands
the tool to carry on the work which, as it lies before him, beneath its
veil of yet partly unworked material, still stretches into infinity.
Where there is most labour there is not always most life, and by doing
less, provided only he has known how to do well, the artist may achieve
more.
He will not, I hope, achieve complete consistency. In fact a part of the
method of such a book as this, written over a long period of years, is
to reveal a continual slight inconsistency. That is not an evil, but
rather the avoidance of an evil. We cannot remain consistent with the
world save by growing inconsistent with our own past selves. The man who
consistently—as he fondly supposes “logically”—clings to an unchanging
opinion is suspended from a hook which has ceased to exist. “I thought
it was she, and she thought it was me, and when we come near it weren’t
neither one of us”—that metaphysical statement holds, with a touch of
exaggeration, a truth we must always bear in mind concerning the
relation of subject and object. They can neither of them possess
consistency; they have both changed before they come up with one
another. Not that such inconsistency is a random flux or a shallow
opportunism. We change, and the world changes, in accordance with the
underlying organisation, and inconsistency, so conditioned by truth to
the whole, becomes the higher consistency of life. I am therefore able
to recognise and accept the fact that, again and again in this book, I
have come up against what, superficially regarded, seemed to be the same
fact, and each time have brought back a slightly different report, for
it had changed and I had changed. The world is various, of infinite
iridescent aspect, and until I attain to a correspondingly infinite
variety of statement I remain far from anything that could in any sense
be described as “truth.” We only see a great opal that never looks the
same this time as when we looked last time. “He never painted to-day
quite the same as he had painted yesterday,” Elie Faure says of Renoir,
and it seems to me natural and right that it should have been so. I have
never seen the same world twice. That, indeed, is but to repeat the
Heraclitean saying—an imperfect saying, for it is only the half of the
larger, more modern synthesis I have already quoted—that no man bathes
twice in the same stream. Yet—and this opposing fact is fully as
significant—we really have to accept a continuous stream as constituted
in our minds; it flows in the same direction; it coheres in what is more
or less the same shape. Much the same may be said of the ever-changing
bather whom the stream receives. So that, after all, there is not only
variety, but also unity. The diversity of the Many is balanced by the
stability of the One. That is why life must always be a dance, for that
is what a dance is: perpetual slightly varied movements which are yet
always held true to the shape of the whole.
We verge on philosophy. The whole of this book is on the threshold of
philosophy. I hasten to add that it remains there. No dogmas are here
set forth to claim any general validity. Not that even the technical
philosopher always cares to make that claim. Mr. F. H. Bradley, one of
the most influential of modern English philosophers, who wrote at the
outset of his career, “On all questions, if you push me far enough, at
present I end in doubts and perplexities,” still says, forty years
later, that if asked to define his principles rigidly, “I become
puzzled.” For even a cheese-mite, one imagines, could only with
difficulty attain an adequate metaphysical conception of a cheese, and
how much more difficult the task is for Man, whose everyday intelligence
seems to move on a plane so much like that of a cheese-mite and yet has
so vastly more complex a web of phenomena to synthetise.
It is clear how hesitant and tentative must be the attitude of one who,
having found his life-work elsewhere than in the field of technical
philosophy, may incidentally feel the need, even if only playfully, to
speculate concerning his function and place in the universe. Such
speculation is merely the instinctive impulse of the ordinary person to
seek the wider implications bound up with his own little activities. It
is philosophy only in the simple sense in which the Greeks understood
philosophy, merely a philosophy of life, of one’s own life, in the wide
world. The technical philosopher does something quite different when he
passes over the threshold and shuts himself up in his study—
“Veux-tu découvrir le monde,
Ferme tes yeux, Rosemonde”—
and emerges with great tomes that are hard to buy, hard to read, and,
let us be sure, hard to write. But of Socrates, as of the English
philosopher Falstaff, we are not told that he wrote anything.
So that if it may seem to some that this book reveals the expansive
influence of that great classico-mathematical Renaissance in which it is
our high privilege to live, and that they find here “relativity” applied
to life, I am not so sure. It sometimes seems to me that, in the first
place, we, the common herd, mould the great movements of our age, and
only in the second place do they mould us. I think it was so even in the
great earlier classico-mathematical Renaissance. We associate it with
Descartes. But Descartes could have effected nothing if an innumerable
crowd in many fields had not created the atmosphere by which he was
enabled to breathe the breath of life. We may here profitably bear in
mind all that Spengler has shown concerning the unity of spirit
underlying the most diverse elements in an age’s productivity. Roger
Bacon had in him the genius to create such a Renaissance three centuries
earlier; there was no atmosphere for him to live in and he was stifled.
But Malherbe, who worshipped Number and Measure as devoutly as
Descartes, was born half a century before him. That silent, colossal,
ferocious Norman—vividly brought before us by Tallement des Réaux, to
whom, rather than to Saint-Simon, we owe the real picture of
seventeenth-century France—was possessed by the genius of destruction,
for he had the natural instinct of the Viking, and he swept all the
lovely Romantic spirit of old France so completely away that it has
scarcely ever revived since until the days of Verlaine. But he had the
Norman classico-mathematical architectonic spirit—he might have said,
like Descartes, as truly as it ever can be said in literature, _Omnia
apud me mathematica fiunt_—and he introduced into the world a new rule
of Order. Given a Malherbe, a Descartes could hardly fail to follow, a
French Academy must come into existence almost at the same time as the
“Discours de la Méthode,” and Le Nôtre must already be drawing the
geometrical designs of the gardens of Versailles. Descartes, it should
be remembered, could not have worked without support; he was a man of
timid and yielding character, though he had once been a soldier, not of
the heroic temper of Roger Bacon. If Descartes could have been put back
into Roger Bacon’s place, he would have thought many of Bacon’s
thoughts. But we should never have known it. He nervously burnt one of
his works when he heard of Galileo’s condemnation, and it was fortunate
that the Church was slow to recognise how terrible a Bolshevist had
entered the spiritual world with this man, and never realised that his
books must be placed on the Index until he was already dead.
So it is to-day. We, too, witness a classico-mathematical Renaissance.
It is bringing us a new vision of the universe, but also a new vision of
human life. That is why it is necessary to insist upon life as a dance.
This is not a mere metaphor. The dance is the rule of number and of
rhythm and of measure and of order, of the controlling influence of
form, of the subordination of the parts to the whole. That is what a
dance is. And these same properties also make up the classic spirit, not
only in life, but, still more clearly and definitely, in the universe
itself. We are strictly correct when we regard not only life but the
universe as a dance. For the universe is made up of a certain number of
elements, less than a hundred, and the “periodic law” of these elements
is metrical. They are ranged, that is to say, not haphazard, not in
groups, but by number, and those of like quality appear at fixed and
regular intervals. Thus our world is, even fundamentally, a dance, a
single metrical stanza in a poem which will be for ever hidden from us,
except in so far as the philosophers, who are to-day even here applying
the methods of mathematics, may believe that they have imparted to it
the character of objective knowledge.
I call this movement of to-day, as that of the seventeenth century,
classico-mathematical. And I regard the dance (without prejudice to a
distinction made later in this volume) as essentially its symbol. This
is not to belittle the Romantic elements of the world, which are equally
of its essence. But the vast exuberant energies and immeasurable
possibilities of the first day may perhaps be best estimated when we
have reached their final outcome on the sixth day of creation.
However that may be, the analogy of the two historical periods in
question remains, and I believe that we may consider it holds good to
the extent that the strictly mathematical elements of the later period
are not the earliest to appear, but that we are in the presence of a
process that has been in subtle movement in many fields for half a
century. If it is significant that Descartes appeared a few years after
Malherbe, it is equally significant that Einstein was immediately
preceded by the Russian ballet. We gaze in admiration at the artist who
sits at the organ, but we have been blowing the bellows; and the great
performer’s music would have been inaudible had it not been for us.
This is the spirit in which I have written. We are all engaged—not
merely one or two prominent persons here and there—in creating the
spiritual world. I have never written but with the thought that the
reader, even though he may not know it, is already on my side. Only so
could I write with that sincerity and simplicity without which it would
not seem to me worth while to write at all. That may be seen in the
saying which I set on the forefront of my earliest book, “The New
Spirit”: he who carries farthest his most intimate feelings is simply
the first in file of a great number of other men, and one becomes
typical by being to the utmost degree one’s self. That saying I chose
with much deliberation and complete conviction because it went to the
root of my book. On the surface it obviously referred to the great
figures I was there concerned with, representing what I regarded—by no
means in the poor sense of mere modernity—as the New Spirit in life.
They had all gone to the depths of their own souls and thence brought to
the surface and expressed—audaciously or beautifully, pungently or
poignantly—intimate impulses and emotions which, shocking as they may
have seemed at the time, are now seen to be those of an innumerable
company of their fellow men and women. But it was also a book of
personal affirmations. Beneath the obvious meaning of that motto on the
title-page lay the more private meaning that I was myself setting forth
secret impulses which might some day be found to express the emotions
also of others. In the thirty-five years that have since passed, the
saying has often recurred to my mind, and if I have sought in vain to
make it mine I find no adequate justification for the work of my life.
And now, as I said at the outset, I am even prepared to think that that
is the function of all books that are real books. There are other
classes of so-called books: there is the class of history books and the
class of forensic books, that is to say, the books of facts and the
books of argument. No one would wish to belittle either kind. But when
we think of a book proper, in the sense that a Bible means a book, we
mean more than this. We mean, that is to say, a revelation of something
that had remained latent, unconscious, perhaps even more or less
intentionally repressed, within the writer’s own soul, which is,
ultimately, the soul of mankind. These books are apt to repel; nothing,
indeed, is so likely to shock us at first as the manifest revelation of
ourselves. Therefore, such books may have to knock again and again at
the closed door of our hearts. “Who is there?” we carelessly cry, and we
cannot open the door; we bid the importunate stranger, whatever he may
be, to go away; until, as in the apologue of the Persian mystic, at last
we seem to hear the voice outside saying: “It is thyself.”
H. E.
CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION 1
II. THE ART OF DANCING 36
III. THE ART OF THINKING 68
IV. THE ART OF WRITING 141
V. THE ART OF RELIGION 191
VI. THE ART OF MORALS 244
VII. CONCLUSION 285
INDEX 359
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
I
IT has always been difficult for Man to realise that his life is all an
art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For
that is always how he has more or less acted it. At the beginning,
indeed, the primitive philosopher whose business it was to account for
the origin of things usually came to the conclusion that the whole
universe was a work of art, created by some Supreme Artist, in the way
of artists, out of material that was practically nothing, even out of
his own excretions, a method which, as children sometimes instinctively
feel, is a kind of creative art. The most familiar to us of these
primitive philosophical statements—and really a statement that is as
typical as any—is that of the Hebrews in the first chapter of their Book
of Genesis. We read there how the whole cosmos was fashioned out of
nothing, in a measurable period of time by the art of one Jehovah, who
proceeded methodically by first forming it in the rough, and gradually
working in the details, the finest and most delicate last, just as a
sculptor might fashion a statue. We may find many statements of the like
kind even as far away as the Pacific.[1] And—also even at the same
distance—the artist and the craftsman, who resembled the divine creator
of the world by making the most beautiful and useful things for Mankind,
himself also partook of the same divine nature. Thus, in Samoa, as also
in Tonga, the carpenter, who built canoes, occupied a high and almost
sacred position, approaching that of the priest. Even among ourselves,
with our Roman traditions, the name Pontiff, or Bridge-Builder, remains
that of an imposing and hieratic personage.
But that is only the primitive view of the world. When Man developed,
when he became more scientific and more moralistic, however much his
practice remained essentially that of the artist, his conception became
much less so. He was learning to discover the mystery of measurement; he
was approaching the beginnings of geometry and mathematics; he was at
the same time becoming warlike. So he saw things in straight lines, more
rigidly; he formulated laws and commandments. It was, Einstein assures
us, the right way. But it was, at all events in the first place, most
unfavourable to the view of life as an art. It remains so even to-day.
Yet there are always some who, deliberately or by instinct, have
perceived the immense significance in life of the conception of art.
That is especially so as regards the finest thinkers of the two
countries which, so far as we may divine,—however difficult it may here
be to speak positively and by demonstration,—have had the finest
civilisations, China and Greece. The wisest and most recognisably
greatest practical philosophers of both these lands have believed that
the whole of life, even government, is an art of definitely like kind
with the other arts, such as that of music or the dance. We may, for
instance, recall to memory one of the most typical of Greeks. Of
Protagoras, calumniated by Plato,—though, it is interesting to observe
that Plato’s own transcendental doctrine of Ideas has been regarded as
an effort to escape from the solvent influence of Protagoras’ logic,—it
is possible for the modern historian of philosophy to say that “the
greatness of this man can scarcely be measured.” It was with measurement
that his most famous saying was concerned: “Man is the measure of all
things, of those which exist and of those which have no existence.” It
was by his insistence on Man as the active creator of life and
knowledge, the artist of the world, moulding it to his own measure, that
Protagoras is interesting to us to-day. He recognised that there are no
absolute criteria by which to judge actions. He was the father of
relativism and of phenomenalism, probably the initiator of the modern
doctrine that the definitions of geometry are only approximately true
abstractions from empirical experiences. We need not, and probably
should not, suppose that in undermining dogmatism he was setting up an
individual subjectivism. It was the function of Man in the world, rather
than of the individual, that he had in mind when he enunciated his great
principle, and it was with the reduction of human activity and conduct
to art that he was mainly concerned. His projects for the art of living
began with speech, and he was a pioneer in the arts of language, the
initiator of modern grammar. He wrote treatises on many special arts, as
well as the general treatise “On the Art” among the pseudo-Hippocratic
writings,—if we may with Gomperz attribute it to him,—which embodies the
spirit of modern positive science.[2]
Hippias, the philosopher of Elis, a contemporary of Protagoras, and like
him commonly classed among the “Sophists,” cultivated the largest ideal
of life as an art which embraced all arts, common to all mankind as a
fellowship of brothers, and at one with natural law which transcends the
convention of human laws. Plato made fun of him, and that was not hard
to do, for a philosopher who conceived the art of living as so large
could not possibly at every point adequately play at it. But at this
distance it is his ideal that mainly concerns us, and he really was
highly accomplished, even a pioneer, in many of the multifarious
activities he undertook. He was a remarkable mathematician; he was an
astronomer and geometer; he was a copious poet in the most diverse
modes, and, moreover, wrote on phonetics, rhythm, music, and mnemonics;
he discussed the theories of sculpture and painting; he was both
mythologist and ethnologist, as well as a student of chronology; he had
mastered many of the artistic crafts. On one occasion, it is said, he
appeared at the Olympic gathering in garments which, from the sandals on
his feet to the girdle round his waist and the rings on his fingers, had
been made by his own hands. Such a being of kaleidoscopic versatility,
Gomperz remarks, we call contemptuously a Jack-of-all-trades. We believe
in subordinating a man to his work. But other ages have judged
differently. The fellow citizens of Hippias thought him worthy to be
their ambassador to the Peloponnesus. In another age of immense human
activity, the Renaissance, the vast-ranging energies of Leo Alberti were
honoured, and in yet a later like age, Diderot—Pantophile as Voltaire
called him—displayed a like fiery energy of wide-ranging interests,
although it was no longer possible to attain the same level of
wide-ranging accomplishment. Of course the work of Hippias was of
unequal value, but some of it was of firm quality and he shrank from no
labour. He seems to have possessed a gracious modesty, quite unlike the
conceited pomposity Plato was pleased to attribute to him. He attached
more importance than was common among the Greeks to devotion to truth,
and he was cosmopolitan in spirit. He was famous for his distinction
between Convention and Nature, and Plato put into his mouth the words:
“All of you who are here present I reckon to be kinsmen and friends and
fellow citizens, and by nature, not by law; for by nature like is akin
to like, whereas law is the tyrant of mankind, and often compels us to
do many things that are against nature.” Hippias was in the line of
those whose supreme ideal is totality of existence. Ulysses, as Benn
remarks, was in Greek myth the representative of the ideal, and its
supreme representative in real life has in modern times been Goethe.[3]
II
BUT, in actual fact, is life essentially an art? Let us look at the
matter more closely, and see what life is like, as people have lived it.
This is the more necessary to do since, to-day at all events, there are
simple-minded people—well-meaning honest people whom we should not
ignore—who pooh-pooh such an idea. They point to the eccentric
individuals in our Western civilisation who make a little idol they call
“Art,” and fall down and worship it, sing incomprehensible chants in its
honour, and spend most of their time in pouring contempt on the people
who refuse to recognise that this worship of “Art” is the one thing
needed for what they may or may not call the “moral uplift” of the age
they live in. We must avoid the error of the good simple-minded folk in
whose eyes these “Arty” people loom so large. They are not large, they
are merely the morbid symptoms of a social disease; they are the
fantastic reaction of a society which as a whole has ceased to move
along the true course of any real and living art. For that has nothing
to do with the eccentricities of a small religious sect worshipping in a
Little Bethel; it is the large movement of the common life of a
community, indeed simply the outward and visible form of that life.
Thus the whole conception of art has been so narrowed and so debased
among us that, on the one hand, the use of the word in its large and
natural sense seems either unintelligible or eccentric, while, on the
other hand, even if accepted, it still remains so unfamiliar that its
immense significance for our whole vision of life in the world is
scarcely at first seen. This is not altogether due to our natural
obtusity, or to the absence of a due elimination of subnormal stocks
among us, however much we may be pleased to attribute to that dysgenic
factor. It seems largely inevitable. That is to say that, so far as we
in our modern civilisation are concerned, it is the outcome of the
social process of two thousand years, the result of the breakup of the
classic tradition of thought into various parts which under post-classic
influences have been pursued separately.[4] Religion or the desire for
the salvation of our souls, “Art” or the desire for beautification,
Science or the search for the reasons of things—these conations of the
mind, which are really three aspects of the same profound impulse, have
been allowed to furrow each its own narrow separate channel, in
alienation from the others, and so they have all been impeded in their
greater function of fertilising life.
It is interesting to observe, I may note in passing, how totally new an
aspect a phenomenon may take on when transformed from some other channel
into that of art. We may take, for instance, that remarkable phenomenon
called Napoleon, as impressive an individualistic manifestation as we
could well find in human history during recent centuries, and consider
two contemporary, almost simultaneous, estimates of it. A distinguished
English writer, Mr. H. G. Wells, in a notable and even famous book, his
“Outline of History,” sets down a judgment of Napoleon throughout a
whole chapter. Now Mr. Wells moves in the ethico-religious channel. He
wakes up every morning, it is said, with a rule for the guidance of
life; some of his critics say that it is every morning a new rule, and
others that the rule is neither ethical nor religious; but we are here
concerned only with the channel and not with the direction of the
stream. In the “Outline” Mr. Wells pronounces his ethico-religious
anathema of Napoleon, “this dark little archaic personage, hard,
compact, capable, unscrupulous, imitative, and neatly vulgar.” The
“archaic”—the old-fashioned, outworn—element attributed to Napoleon, is
accentuated again later, for Mr. Wells has an extremely low opinion
(hardly justifiable, one may remark in passing) of primitive man.
Napoleon was “a reminder of ancient evils, a thing like the bacterium of
some pestilence”; “the figure he makes in history is one of almost
incredible self-conceit, of vanity, greed, and cunning, of callous
contempt and disregard of all who trusted him.” There is no figure, Mr.
Wells asserts, so completely antithetical to the figure of Jesus of
Nazareth. He was “a scoundrel, bright and complete.”
There is no occasion to question this condemnation when we place
ourselves in the channel along which Mr. Wells moves; it is probably
inevitable; we may even accept it heartily. Yet, however right along
that line, that is not the only line in which we may move. Moreover—and
this is the point which concerns us—it is possible to enter a sphere in
which no such merely negative, condemnatory, and dissatisfying a
conclusion need be reached. For obviously it is dissatisfying. It is not
finally acceptable that so supreme a protagonist of humanity, acclaimed
by millions, of whom many gladly died for him, and still occupying so
large and glorious a place in the human imagination, should be dismissed
in the end as merely an unmitigated scoundrel. For so to condemn him is
to condemn Man who made him what he was. He must have answered some
lyric cry in the human heart. That other sphere in which Napoleon wears
a different aspect is the sphere of art in the larger and fundamental
sense. Élie Faure, a French critic, an excellent historian of art in the
ordinary sense, is able also to grasp art in the larger sense because he
is not only a man of letters but of science, a man with medical training
and experience, who has lived in the open world, not, as the critic of
literature and art so often appears to be, a man living in a damp
cellar. Just after Wells issued his “Outline,” Élie Faure, who probably
knew nothing about it since he reads no English, published a book on
Napoleon which some may consider the most remarkable book on that
subject they have ever come across. For to Faure Napoleon is a great
lyric artist.
It is hard not to believe that Faure had Wells’s chapter on Napoleon
open before him, he speaks so much to the point. He entitled the first
chapter of his “Napoléon” “Jesus and He,” and at once pierces to what
Wells, too, had perceived to be the core of the matter in hand: “From
the point of view of morality he is not to be defended and is even
incomprehensible. In fact he violates law, he kills, he sows vengeance
and death. But also he dictates law, he tracks and crushes crime, he
establishes order everywhere. He is an assassin. He is also a judge. In
the ranks he would deserve the rope. At the summit he is pure,
distributing recompense and punishment with a firm hand. He is a monster
with two faces, like all of us perhaps, in any case like God, for those
who have praised Napoleon and those who have blamed him have alike not
understood that the Devil is the other face of God.” From the moral
point of view, Faure says (just as Wells had said), Napoleon is
Antichrist. But from this standpoint of art, all grows clear. He is a
poet of action, as Jesus was, and like him he stands apart. These two,
and these two alone among the world’s supremely great men of whom we
have any definite knowledge, “acted out their dream instead of dreaming
their action.” It is possible that Napoleon himself was able to estimate
the moral value of that acted dream. As he once stood before the grave
of Rousseau, he observed: “It would have been better for the repose of
France if that man and I had never existed.” Yet we cannot be sure. “Is
not repose the death of the world?” asks Faure. “Had not Rousseau and
Napoleon precisely the mission of troubling that repose? In another of
the profound and almost impersonal sayings that sometimes fell from his
lips, Napoleon observed with a still deeper intuition of his own
function in the world: “I love power. But it is as an artist that I love
it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out of it sounds
and chords and harmonies. I love it as an artist.” As an artist! These
words were the inspiration of this finely illuminating study of
Napoleon, which, while free from all desire to defend or admire, yet
seems to explain Napoleon, in the larger sense to justify his right to a
place in the human story, so imparting a final satisfaction which Wells,
we feel, could he have escaped from the bonds of the narrow conception
of life that bound him, had in him the spirit and the intelligence also
to bestow upon us.
But it is time to turn from this aside. It is always possible to dispute
about individuals, even when so happy an illustration chances to come
before us. We are not here concerned with exceptional persons, but with
the interpretation of general and normal human civilisations.
III
I TAKE, almost at random, the example of a primitive people. There are
many others that would do as well or better. But this happens to come to
hand, and it has the advantage not only of being a primitive people, but
one living on an island, so possessing until lately its own
little-impaired indigenous culture, as far as possible remote in space
from our own; the record also has been made, as carefully and as
impartially as one can well expect, by a missionary’s wife who speaks
from a knowledge covering over twenty years.[5] It is almost needless to
add that she is as little concerned with any theory of the art of life
as the people she is describing.
The Loyalty Islands lie to the east of New Caledonia, and have belonged
to France for more than half a century. They are thus situated in much
the same latitude as Egypt is in the Northern hemisphere, but with a
climate tempered by the ocean. It is with the Island of Lifu that we are
mainly concerned. There are no streams or mountains in this island,
though a ridge of high rocks with large and beautiful caves contains
stalactites and stalagmites and deep pools of fresh water; these pools,
before the coming of the Christians, were the abode of the spirits of
the departed, and therefore greatly reverenced. A dying man would say to
his friends: “I will meet you all again in the caves where the
stalactites are.”
The Loyalty Islanders, who are of average European stature, are a
handsome race, except for their thick lips and dilated nostrils, which,
however, are much less pronounced than among African negroes. They have
soft large brown eyes, wavy black hair, white teeth, and rich brown skin
of varying depth. Each tribe has its own well-defined territory and its
own chief. Although possessing high moral qualities, they are a
laughter-loving people, and neither their climate nor their mode of life
demands prolonged hard labour, but they can work as well as the average
Briton, if need be, for several consecutive days, and, when the need is
over, lounge or ramble, sleep or talk. The basis of their culture—and
that is doubtless the significant fact for us—is artistic. Every one
learned music, dancing, and song. Therefore it is natural for them to
regard rhythm and grace in all the actions of life, and almost a matter
of instinct to cultivate beauty in all social relationships. Men and
boys spent much time in tattooing and polishing their brown skins, in
dyeing and dressing their long wavy hair (golden locks, as much admired
as they always have been in Europe, being obtained by the use of lime),
and in anointing their bodies. These occupations were, of course,
confined to the men, for man is naturally the ornamental sex and woman
the useful sex. The women gave no attention to their hair, except to
keep it short. It was the men also who used oils and perfumes, not the
women, who, however, wore bracelets above the elbow and beautiful long
strings of jade beads. No clothing is worn until the age of twenty-five
or thirty, and then all dress alike, except that chiefs fasten the
girdle differently and wear more elaborate ornaments. These people have
sweet and musical voices and they cultivate them. They are good at
learning languages and they are great orators. The Lifuan language is
soft and liquid, one word running into another pleasantly to the ear,
and it is so expressive that one may sometimes understand the meaning by
the sound. In one of these islands, Uvea, so great is the eloquence of
the people that they employ oratory to catch fish, whom indeed they
regard in their legends as half human, and it is believed that a shoal
of fish, when thus politely plied with compliments from a canoe, will
eventually, and quite spontaneously, beach themselves spellbound.
For a primitive people the art of life is necessarily of large part
concerned with eating. It is recognised that no one can go hungry when
his neighbour has food, so no one was called upon to make any great
demonstration of gratitude on receiving a gift. Help rendered to another
was help to one’s self, if it contributed to the common weal, and what I
do for you to-day you will do for me to-morrow. There was implicit
trust, and goods were left about without fear of theft, which was rare
and punishable by death. It was not theft, however, if, when the owner
was looking, one took an article one wanted. To tell a lie, also, with
intent to deceive, was a serious offence, though to tell a lie when one
was afraid to speak the truth was excusable. The Lifuans are fond of
food, but much etiquette is practised in eating. The food must be
conveyed to the mouth gracefully, daintily, leisurely. Every one helped
himself to the food immediately in front of him, without hurry, without
reaching out for dainty morsels (which were often offered to women), for
every one looked after his neighbour, and every one naturally felt that
he was his brother’s keeper. So it was usual to invite passers-by
cordially to share in the repast. “In the matter of food and eating,”
Mrs. Hadfield adds, “they might put many of our countrymen to shame.”
Not only must one never eat quickly, or notice dainties that are not
near one, but it would be indelicate to eat in the presence of people
who are not themselves eating. One must always share, however small
one’s portion, and one must do so pleasantly; one must accept also what
is offered, but slowly, reluctantly; having accepted it, you may, if you
like, openly pass it on to some one else. In old days the Lifuans were,
occasionally, cannibals, not, it would seem, either from necessity or
any ritual reason, but because, like some peoples elsewhere, they liked
it, having, indeed, at times, a kind of craving for animal food. If a
man had twenty or thirty wives and a large family, it would be quite
correct if, now and then, he cooked one of his own children, although
presumably he might prefer that some one else’s child was chosen. The
child would be cooked whole, wrapped in banana or coconut leaves. The
social inconveniences of this practice have now been recognised. But
they still feel the utmost respect and reverence for the dead and fail
to find anything offensive or repulsive in a corpse. “Why should there
be, seeing it was once our food?” Nor have they any fear of death. To
vermin they seem to have little objection, but otherwise they have a
strong love of cleanliness. The idea of using manure in agricultural
operations seems to them disgusting, and they never do use it. “The sea
was the public playground.” Mothers take their little ones for sea-baths
long before they can walk, and small children learn to swim as they
learn to walk, without teaching. With their reverence for death is
associated a reverence for old age. “Old age is a term of respect, and
every one is pleased to be taken for older than he is since old age is
honoured.” Still, regard for others was general—not confined to the
aged. In the church nowadays the lepers are seated on a separate bench,
and when the bench is occupied by a leper healthy women will sometimes
insist on sitting with him; they could not bear to see the old man
sitting alone as though he had no friends. There was much demonstration
on meeting friends after absence. A Lifuan always said “Olea” (“Thank
you”) for any good news, though not affecting him personally, as though
it were a gift, for he was glad to be able to rejoice with another.
Being divided into small tribes, each with its own autocratic chief, war
was sometimes inevitable. It was attended by much etiquette, which was
always strictly observed. The Lifuans were not acquainted with the
civilised custom of making rules for warfare and breaking them when war
actually broke out. Several days’ notice must be given before
hostilities were commenced. Women and children, in contrast to the
practice of civilised warfare, were never molested. As soon as half a
dozen fighters were put out of action on one side, the chief of that
side would give the command to cease fighting and the war was over. An
indemnity was then paid by the conquerors to the vanquished, and not, as
among civilised peoples, by the vanquished to the conquerors. It was
felt to be the conquered rather than the conqueror who needed
consolation, and it also seemed desirable to show that no feeling of
animosity was left behind. This was not only a delicate mark of
consideration to the vanquished, but also very good policy, as, by
neglecting it, some Europeans may have had cause to learn. This whole
Lifuan art of living has, however, been undermined by the arrival of
Christianity with its usual accompaniments. The Lifuans are substituting
European vices for their own virtues. Their simplicity and confidence
are passing away, though, even yet, Mrs. Hadfield says, they are
conspicuous for their honesty, truthfulness, good-humour, kindness, and
politeness, remaining a manly and intelligent people.
IV
THE Lifuans furnish an illustration which seems decisive. But they are
savages, and on that account their example may be invalidated. It is
well to take another illustration from a people whose high and
long-continued civilisation is now undisputed.
The civilisation of China is ancient: that has long been a familiar
fact. But for more than a thousand years it was merely a legend to
Western Europeans; none had ever reached China, or, if they had, they
had never returned to tell the tale; there were too many fierce and
jealous barbarians between the East and the West. It was not until the
end of the thirteenth century, in the pages of Marco Polo, the Venetian
Columbus of the East,—for it was an Italian who discovered the Old World
as well as the New,—that China at last took definite shape alike as a
concrete fact and a marvellous dream. Later, Italian and Portuguese
travellers described it, and it is interesting to note what they had to
say. Thus Perera in the sixteenth century, in a narrative which Willes
translated for Hakluyt’s “Voyages,” presents a detailed picture of
Chinese life with an admiration all the more impressive since we cannot
help feeling how alien that civilisation was to the Catholic traveller
and how many troubles he had himself to encounter. He is astonished, not
only by the splendour of the lives of the Chinese on the material side,
alike in large things and in small, but by their fine manners in all the
ordinary course of life, the courtesy in which they seemed to him to
exceed all other nations, and in the fair dealing which far surpassed
that of all other Gentiles and Moors, while in the exercise of justice
he found them superior even to many Christians, for they do justice to
unknown strangers, which in Christendom is rare; moreover, there were
hospitals in every city and no beggars were ever to be seen. It was a
vision of splendour and delicacy and humanity, which he might have seen,
here and there, in the courts of princes in Europe, but nowhere in the
West on so vast a scale as in China.
The picture which Marco Polo, the first European to reach China (at all
events in what we may call modern times), presented in the thirteenth
century was yet more impressive, and that need not surprise us, for when
he saw China it was still in its great Augustan age of the Sung Dynasty.
He represents the city of Hang-Chau as the most beautiful and sumptuous
in the world, and we must remember that he himself belonged to Venice,
soon to be known as the most beautiful and sumptuous city of Europe, and
had acquired no small knowledge of the world. As he describes its life,
so exquisite and refined in its civilisation, so humane, so peaceful, so
joyous, so well ordered, so happily shared by the whole population, we
realise that here had been reached the highest point of urban
civilisation to which Man has ever attained. Marco Polo can think of no
word to apply to it—and that again and again—but Paradise.
The China of to-day seems less strange and astonishing to the Westerner.
It may even seem akin to him—partly through its decline, partly through
his own progress in civilisation—by virtue of its direct and practical
character. That is the conclusion of a sensitive and thoughtful
traveller in India and Japan and China, G. Lowes Dickinson. He is
impressed by the friendliness, the profound humanity, the gaiety, of the
Chinese, by the unequalled self-respect, independence, and courtesy of
the common people. “The fundamental attitude of the Chinese towards life
is, and has always been, that of the most modern West, nearer to us now
than to our mediæval ancestors, infinitely nearer to us than India.”[6]
So far it may seem scarcely as artists that these travellers regard the
Chinese. They insist on their cheerful, practical, social,
good-mannered, tolerant, peaceable, humane way of regarding life, on the
remarkably educable spirit in which they are willing, and easily able,
to change even ancient and deep-rooted habits when it seems convenient
and beneficial to do so; they are willing to take the world lightly, and
seem devoid of those obstinate conservative instincts by which we are
guided in Europe. The “Resident in Peking” says they are the least
romantic of peoples. He says it with a _nuance_ of dispraise, but Lowes
Dickinson says precisely the same thing about Chinese poetry, and with
no such _nuance_: “It is of all poetry I know the most human and the
least symbolic or romantic. It contemplates life just as it presents
itself, without any veil of ideas, any rhetoric or sentiment; it simply
clears away the obstruction which habit has built up between us and the
beauty of things and leaves that, showing in its own nature.” Every one
who has learnt to enjoy Chinese poetry will appreciate the delicate
precision of this comment. The quality of their poetry seems to fall
into line with the simple, direct, childlike quality which all observers
note in the Chinese themselves. The unsympathetic “Resident in Peking”
describes the well-known etiquette of politeness in China: “A Chinaman
will inquire of what noble country you are. You return the question, and
he will say his lowly province is so-and-so. He will invite you to do
him the honour of directing your jewelled feet to his degraded house.
You reply that you, a discredited worm, will crawl into his magnificent
palace.” Life becomes all play. Ceremony—the Chinese are unequalled for
ceremony, and a Government Department, the Board of Rites and
Ceremonies, exists to administer it—is nothing but more or less
crystallised play. Not only is ceremony here “almost an instinct,” but,
it has been said, “A Chinese thinks in theatrical terms.” We are coming
near to the sphere of art.
The quality of play in the Chinese character and Chinese civilisation
has impressed alike them who have seen China from afar and by actual
contact. It used to be said that the Chinese had invented gunpowder long
before Europeans and done nothing with it but make fireworks. That
seemed to the whole Western world a terrible blindness to the valuable
uses of gunpowder, and it is only of late years that a European
commentator has ventured to remark that “the proper use of gunpowder is
obviously to make fireworks, which may be very beautiful things, not to
kill men.” Certainly the Chinese, at all events, appreciate to the full
this proper use of gunpowder. “One of the most obvious characteristics
of the Chinese is their love of fireworks,” we are told. The gravest
people and the most intellectual occupy themselves with fireworks, and
if the works of Bergson, in which pyrotechnical allusions are so
frequent, are ever translated into Chinese, one can well believe that
China will produce enthusiastic Bergsonians. All toys are popular;
everybody, it is said, buys toys of one sort or another: paper
windmills, rattles, Chinese lanterns, and of course kites, which have an
almost sacred significance. They delight, also, in more complicated
games of skill, including an elaborate form of chess, far more difficult
than ours.[7] It is unnecessary to add that to philosophy, a higher and
more refined form of play, the Chinese are peculiarly addicted, and
philosophic discussion is naturally woven in with an “art of exquisite
enjoyment”—carried probably to greater perfection than anywhere else in
the world. Bertrand Russell, who makes this remark, in the suggestive
comments on his own visit to China, observes how this simple,
child-like, yet profound attitude towards life results in a liberation
of the impulses to play and enjoyment which “makes Chinese life
unbelievably restful and delightful after the solemn cruelties of the
West.” We are reminded of Gourmont’s remark that “pleasure is a human
creation, a delicate art, to which, as for music or painting, only a few
are apt.”
The social polity which brings together the people who thus view life is
at once singular and appropriate. I well remember how in youth a new
volume of the Sacred Books of the East Series, a part of the Confucian
Lî-kî, came into my hands and how delighted I was to learn that in China
life was regulated by music and ceremony. That was the beginning of an
interest in China that has not ceased to grow, though now, when it has
become a sort of fashion to exalt the spiritual qualities of the Chinese
above those of other peoples, one may well feel disinclined to admit any
interest in China. But the conception itself, since it seems to have had
its beginning at least a thousand years before Christ, may properly be
considered independently of our Western fashions. It is Propriety—the
whole ceremony of life—in which all harmonious intercourse subsists; it
is “the channel by which we apprehend the ways of Heaven,” in no
supernatural sense, for it is on the earth and not in the skies that the
Confucian Heaven lies concealed. But if human feelings, the
instincts—for in this matter the ancient Chinese were at one with our
modern psychologists,—are the field that has to be cultivated, and it is
ceremony that ploughs it, and the seeds of right action that are to be
planted on it, and discipline that is to weed it, and love that is to
gather in the fruits, it is in music, and the joy and peace that
accompany music, that it all ends. Indeed, it is also in music that it
all begins. For the sphere in which ceremonies act is Man’s external
life; his internal life is the sphere of music. It is music that moulds
the manners and customs that are comprised under ceremony, for Confucius
held that there can be music without sound where “virtue is deep and
silent”; and we are reminded of the “Crescendo of Silences” on the
Chinese pavilion in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s story, “Le Secret de
l’ancienne Musique.” It is music that regulates the heart and mind and
with that development brings joy, and joy brings repose. And so “Man
became Heaven.” “Let ceremonies and music have their course until the
earth is filled with them!”
It is sometimes said that among Chinese moralists and philosophers
Lao-tze, the deepest of them all, alone stands aside from the chorus in
praise of music and ceremony. When once Confucius came to consult
Lao-tze concerning the rules of propriety, and reverence for the
teaching of the sages of antiquity, we are told, Lao-tze replied: “The
men of whom you speak, sir, have, if you please, together with their
bones, mouldered.” Confucius went away, puzzled if not dissatisfied He
was willing to work not only from within outwards, but from without
inwards, because he allowed so large a place for social solidity, for
traditionalism, for paternalism, though he recognised that ceremony is
subordinate in the scheme of life, as colour is in a painting, the
picture being the real thing. Lao-tze was an individualist and a mystic.
He was little concerned with moralities in the ordinary sense. He
recognised no action but from within outwards. But though Confucius
could scarcely have altogether grasped his conception, he was quite able
to grasp that of Confucius, and his indifference to tradition, to rule
and propriety was simply an insistence on essential reality, on “music.”
“Ceremonies,” he said, “are the outward expression of inward feeling.”
He was no more opposed to the fundamental Chinese conception than George
Fox was opposed to Christianity in refusing to observe the mere forms
and ceremonies of the Church. A sound Confucianism is the outward
manifestation of Taoism (as Lao-tze himself taught it), just as a sound
socialism is the outward manifestation of a genuine individualism. It
has been well said that Chinese socialistic solidarity rests on an
individualistic basis, it is not a bureaucratic State socialism; it
works from within outward. (One of the first European visitors to China
remarked that there a street was like a home.) This is well shown by so
great and typical a Chinese philosopher as Meh-ti,[8] who lived shortly
after Confucius, in the fifth century B.C. He taught universal love,
with universal equality, and for him to love meant to act. He admitted
an element of self-interest as a motive for such an attitude. He desired
to universalise mutual self-help. Following Confucius, but yet several
centuries before Jesus, he declared that a man should love his
neighbour, his fellow man, as himself. “When he sees his fellow hungry,
he feeds him; when he sees him cold, he clothes him; ill, he nurses him;
dead, he buries him.” This, he said, was by no means opposed to filial
piety; for if one cares for the parents of others, they in turn will
care for his. But, it was brought against him, the power of egoism? The
Master agreed. Yet, he said, Man accepts more difficult things. He can
renounce joy, life itself, for even absurd and ridiculous ends. A single
generation, he added, such is the power of imitation, might suffice to
change a people’s customs. But Meh-ti remained placid. He remarked that
the great ones of the earth were against human solidarity and equality;
he left it at that. He took no refuge in mysticism. Practical social
action was the sole end he had in view, and we have to remember that his
ideals are largely embodied in Chinese institutions.[9]
We may understand now how it is that in China, and in China alone among
the great surviving civilisations, we find that art animates the whole
of life, even its morality. “This universal presence of art,” remarks an
acute yet discriminating observer, Émile Hovelaque, whom I have already
quoted,[10] “manifested in the smallest utensil, the humblest stalls,
the notices on the shops, the handwriting, the rhythm of movement,
always regular and measured, as though to the tune of unheard music,
announces a civilisation which is complete in itself, elaborated in the
smallest detail, penetrated by one spirit, which no interruption ever
breaks, a harmony which becomes at length a hallucinatory and
overwhelming obsession.” Or, as another writer has summed up the Chinese
attitude: “For them the art of life is one, as this world and the other
are one. Their aim is to make the Kingdom of Heaven here and now.”
It is obvious that a natural temperament in which the art-impulse is so
all-embracing, and the æsthetic sensibility so acute, might well have
been of a perilous instability. We could scarcely have been surprised
if, like that surpassing episode in Egyptian history of which Akhenaten
was the leader and Tell-el-Amarna the tomb, it had only endured for a
moment. Yet Chinese civilisation, which has throughout shown the
dominating power of this sensitive temperament, has lasted longer than
any other. The reason is that the very excesses of their temperament
forced the Chinese to fortify themselves against its perils. The Great
Wall, built more than two thousand years ago, and still to-day almost
the most impressive work of man on the earth, is typical of this
attitude of the Chinese. They have exercised a stupendous energy in
fortifying themselves against the natural enemies of their own
temperament. When one looks at it from this point of view, it is easy to
see that, alike in its large outlines and its small details, Chinese
life is always the art of balancing an æsthetic temperament and guarding
against its excesses. We see this in the whole of the ancient and still
prevailing system of Confucian morality with its insistence on formal
ceremony, even when, departing from the thought of its most influential
founder,—for ceremonialism in China would have existed even if Confucius
had not lived,—it tended to become merely an external formalism. We see
it in the massive solidarity of Chinese life, the systematic social
organisation by which individual responsibility, even though leaving
individuality itself intact, is merged in the responsibility of the
family and the still larger group. We see it in the whole drift of
Chinese philosophy, which is throughout sedative and contemplative. We
see it in the element of stoicism on the one hand and cruelty on the
other which in so genuinely good-natured a people would otherwise seem
puzzling. The Chinese love of flowers and gardens and landscape scenery
is in the same direction, and indeed one may say much the same of
Chinese painting and Chinese poetry.[11] That is why it is only to-day
that we in the West have reached the point of nervous susceptibility
which enables us in some degree to comprehend the æsthetic supremacy
which the Chinese reached more than a thousand years ago.
Thus, during its extremely long history—for the other great
civilisations with which it was once contemporary have passed away or
been disintegrated and transformed—Chinese civilisation has borne
witness to the great fact that all human life is art. It may be because
they have realised this so thoroughly that the Chinese have been able to
preserve their civilisation so long, through all the violent shocks to
which it has been subjected. There can be no doubt, however, that,
during the greater part of the last thousand years, there has been,
however slow and gradual, a decline in the vitality of Chinese
civilisation, largely due, it may well be, to the crushing pressure of
an excessive population. For, however remarkable the admiration which
China arouses even to-day, its finest flowering periods in the special
arts lie far in the past, while in the art of living itself the Chinese
have long grown languid. The different reports of ancient and modern
travellers regarding one definite social manifestation, the prevalence
of beggary, cannot fail to tell us something regarding the significant
form of their social life. Modern travellers complain of the plague
constituted by the prevalence of beggars in China; they are even a fixed
and permanent institution on a trades-union basis. But in the sixteenth
century Galeotto Perera noticed with surprise in China the absence of
beggars, as Marco Polo had before him, and Friar Gaspar de Cruz remarked
that the Chinese so abhorred idleness that they gave no alms to the poor
and mocked at the Portuguese for doing so: “Why give alms to a knave?
Let him go and earn it.” Their own priests, he adds, they sometimes
whipped as being knaves. (It should be noted at the same time that it
was considered reasonable only to give half the day to work, the other
half to joy and recreation.) But they built great asylums for the
helpless poor, and found employment for blind women, gorgeously dressed
and painted with ceruse and vermilion, as prostitutes, who were more
esteemed in early China than they have been since. That is a curious
instance of the unflinching practicality still shown by the Chinese in
endless ways. The undoubted lassitude in the later phases of this
long-lived Chinese culture has led to features in the art of life, such
as beggary and dirt among the poor, not manifested in the younger
offshoot of Chinese and Korean culture in Japan, though it is only fair
to point out that impartial English observers, like Parker, consider
this prevalence of vermin and dirt as simply due to the prevalence of
poverty, and not greater than we find among the poor in England and
elsewhere in the West. Marco Polo speaks of three hundred public baths
in one city alone in his time. We note also that in the more specialised
arts the transcendence of China belongs to the past, and even sometimes
a remote past. It is so in the art of philosophy, and the arts of poetry
and painting. It is so also in the art of pottery, in which Chinese
supremacy over the rest of the world has been longest recognised—has not
the word “china” for centuries been our name for the finest pottery?—and
is most beyond measure. Our knowledge of the pottery of various cultures
excels that of any other human products because of all it is the most
perdurable. We can better estimate their relative æsthetic worth now
than in the days when a general reverence for Greek antiquity led to a
popular belief in the beauty of Greek pottery, though scarcely a single
type of its many forms can fairly be so considered or even be compared
to the products of the Minoan predecessors of Greek culture, however
interesting they may still remain for us as the awkward and
inappropriate foundation for exquisite little pictures. The greatest age
of this universal human art was in China and was over many centuries
ago. But with what devotion, with what absolute concentration of the
spirit, the Chinese potters of the great period struggled with the
problem of art is finely illustrated by the well-known story which an
old Chinese historian tells of the sacrifice of the divine T’ung, the
spirit who protects potters. It happened that a complicated problem had
baffled the potters. T’ung laid down his life to serve them and to
achieve the solution of the problem. He plunged into the fire and the
bowl came out perfect. “The vessel’s perfect glaze is the god’s fat and
blood; the body material is the god’s body of flesh; the blue of the
decoration, with the brilliant lustre of gems, is the essence of the
god’s pure spirit.” That story embodies the Chinese symbol of the art of
living, just as we embody our symbol of that art in the Crucifixion of
Jesus. The form is diverse; the essence is the same.
V
IT will be seen that when we analyse the experiences of life and look at
it simply, in the old-fashioned way, liberated from the artificial
complexities of a temporary and now, it may be, departing civilisation,
what we find is easy to sum up. We find, that is to say, that Man has
forced himself to move along this line, and that line, and the other
line. But it is the same water of life that runs in all these channels.
Until we have ascended to a height where this is clear, to see all our
little dogmatisms will but lead us astray.
We may illuminatingly change the analogy and turn to the field of
chemistry. All these various elements of life are but, as it were,
allotropic forms of the same element. The most fundamental among these
forms is that of art, for life in all its forms, even morality in the
narrowest sense, is, as Duprat has argued, a matter of technique, and
technique at once brings us to the elements of art. If we would
understand what we are dealing with, we may, therefore, best study these
forms under that of art.
There is, however, a deeper chemical analogy than this to be seen. It
may well be, indeed, that it is more than an analogy. In chemistry we
are dealing, not merely with the elements of life, but with the elements
of the world, even of what we call our universe. It is not unreasonable
to think that the same law holds good for both. We see that the forms of
life may all be found, and then better understood, in one form. Some
day, perhaps, we shall also see that that fact is only a corollary of
the larger fact—or, if any one prefers so to regard it, the smaller
fact—that the chemical elements of our world can be regarded as all only
transmutations of one element. From of old, men instinctively divined
that this might be so, though they were merely concerned to change the
elements into gold, the element which they most highly valued. In our
own times this transmutation is beginning to become, on a minute scale,
a demonstrable fact, though it would seem easier to transmute elements
into lead than into gold. Matter, we are thus coming to see, may not be
a confused variety of separate substances, but simply a different
quantitative arrangement of a single fundamental stuff, which might
possibly be identical with hydrogen or some other already known element.
Similarly we may now believe that the men of old who thought that all
human life was made of one stuff were not altogether wrong, and we may,
with greater assurance than they were able to claim, analyse the modes
of human action into different quantitative or other arrangements of
which the most fundamental may well be identical with art.
This may perhaps become clearer if we consider more in detail one of the
separate arts, selecting the most widely symbolic of all, the art that
is most clearly made of the stuff of life, and so able to translate most
truly and clearly into beautiful form the various modalities of life.
Footnote 1:
See, for instance, Turner’s _Samoa_, chap. 1. Usually, however, in the
Pacific, creation was accomplished, in a more genuinely evolutionary
manner, by a long series of progressive generations.
Footnote 2:
Gomperz, _Greek Thinkers_, vol. I, book III, chap. VI.
Footnote 3:
I have here mainly followed Gomperz (_Greek Thinkers_, vol. I, pp.
430-34); there is not now, however, much controversy over the position
of Hippias, which there is now, indeed, rather a tendency to
exaggerate, considering how small is the basis of knowledge we
possess. Thus Dupréel (_La Légende Socratique_, p. 432), regarding him
as the most misunderstood of the great Sophists, declares that Hippias
is “the thinker who conceived the universality of science, just as
Prodicus caught glimpses of the synthesis of the social sciences.
Hippias is the philosopher of science, the Great Logician, just as
Prodicus is the Great Moralist.” He compares him to Pico della
Mirandola as a Humanist and to Leibnitz in power of wide synthesis.
Footnote 4:
Strictly speaking, in the technical sense of that much-abused word,
this is “decadence.” (I refer to the sense in which I defined
“decadence” many years ago in _Affirmations_, pp. 175-87.) So that
while the minor arts have sometimes been classic and sometimes
decadent, the major art of living during the last two thousand years,
although one can think of great men who have maintained the larger
classic ideal, has mainly been decadent.
Footnote 5:
Emma Hadfield, _Among the Natives of the Loyalty Group_. 1920. It
would no doubt have been more satisfactory to select a people like the
Fijians rather than the Lifuans, for they represented a more robust
and accomplished form of a rather similar culture, but their culture
has receded into the past,—and the same may be said of the Marquesans
of whom Melville left, in _Typee_, a famous and delightful picture
which other records confirm,—while that of the Lifuans is still
recent.
Footnote 6:
G. Lowes Dickinson, _An Essay on the Civilisations of India, China,
and Japan_ (1914), p. 47. No doubt there are shades to be added to
this picture. They may be found in a book, published two years
earlier, _China as it Really Is_, by “a Resident in Peking” who claims
to have been born in China. Chinese culture has receded, in part
swamped by over-population, and concerning a land where to-day, it has
lately been said, “magnificence, crudity, delicacy, fetidity, and
fragrance are blended,” it is easy for Westerners to show violent
difference of opinion.
Footnote 7:
See, for instance, the chapter on games in Professor E. H. Parker’s
_China: Past and Present_. Reference may be made to the same author’s
important and impartial larger work, _China: Its History_, with a
discriminating chapter on Chinese personal characteristics. Perhaps,
the most penetrating study of Chinese psychology is, however, Arthur
H. Smith’s _Chinese Characteristics_.
Footnote 8:
His ideas have been studied by Madame Alexandra David, _Le Philosophe
Meh-ti et l’Idée de Solidarité_. London, 1907.
Footnote 9:
Eugène Simon, _La Cité Chinoise_.
Footnote 10:
E. Hovelaque, _La Chine_ (Paris, 1920), p. 47.
Footnote 11:
This point has not escaped the more acute students of Chinese
civilisation. Thus Dr. John Steele, in his edition of the _I-Li_,
remarks that “ceremonial was far from being a series of observances,
empty and unprofitable, such as it degenerated into in later time. It
was meant to inculcate that habit of self-control and ordered action
which was the expression of a mind fully instructed in the inner
meaning of things, and sensitive to every impression.” Still more
clearly, Reginald Farrer wrote, in _On the Eaves of the World_, that
“the philosophic calm that the Chinese deliberately cultivate is their
necessary armour to protect the excessive susceptibility to emotion.
The Chinese would be for ever the victims of their nerves had they not
for four thousand years pursued reason and self-control with
self-protective enthusiasm.”