CONCLUSION
I
LIFE, we have seen, may be regarded as an art. But we cannot help
seeking to measure, quantitatively if not qualitatively, our mode of
life. We do so, for the most part, instinctively rather than
scientifically. It gratifies us to imagine that, as a race, we have
reached a point on the road of progress beyond that vouchsafed to our
benighted predecessors, and that, as individuals or as nations, it is
given to us, fortunately,—or, rather, through our superior merits,—to
enjoy a finer degree of civilisation than the individuals and the
nations around us. This feeling has been common to most or all branches
of the human race. In the classic world of antiquity they called
outsiders, indiscriminately, “barbarians”—a denomination which took on
an increasingly depreciative sense; and even the lowest savages
sometimes call their own tribe by a word which means “men,” thereby
implying that all other peoples are not worthy of the name.
But in recent centuries there has been an attempt to be more precise, to
give definite values to the feeling within us. All sorts of dogmatic
standards have been set up by which to measure the degree of a people’s
civilisation. The development of demography and social statistics in
civilised countries during the past century should, it has seemed,
render such comparison easy. Yet the more carefully we look into the
nature of these standards the more dubious they become. On the one hand,
civilisation is so complex that no one test furnishes an adequate
standard. On the other hand, the methods of statistics are so variable
and uncertain, so apt to be influenced by circumstance, that it is never
possible to be sure that one is operating with figures of equal weight.
Recently this has been well and elaborately shown by Professor Niceforo,
the Italian sociologist and statistician.[113] It is to be remembered
that Niceforo has himself been a daring pioneer in the measurement of
life. He has applied the statistical method not only to the natural and
social sciences, but even to art, especially literature. When,
therefore, he discusses the whole question of the validity of the
measurement of civilisation, his conclusions deserve respect. They are
the more worthy of consideration since his originality in the
statistical field is balanced by his learning, and it is not easy to
recall any scientific attempts in this field which he has failed to
mention somewhere in his book, if only in a footnote.
The difficulties begin at the outset, and might well serve to bar even
the entrance to discussion. We want to measure the height to which we
have been able to build our “civilisation” towards the skies; we want to
measure the progress we have made in our great dance of life towards the
unknown future goal, and we have no idea what either “civilisation” or
“progress” means.[114] This difficulty is so crucial, for it involves
the very essence of the matter, that it is better to place it aside and
simply go ahead, without deciding, for the present, precisely what the
ultimate significance of the measurements we can make may prove to be.
Quite sufficient other difficulties await us.
There is, first of all, the bewildering number of social phenomena we
can now attempt to measure. Two centuries ago there were no comparable
sets of figures whereby to measure one community against another
community, though at the end of the eighteenth century Boisguillebert
was already speaking of the possibility of constructing a “barometer of
prosperity.” Even the most elementary measurable fact of all, the
numbering of peoples, was carried out so casually and imperfectly and
indirectly, if at all, that its growth and extent could hardly be
compared with profit in any two nations. As the life of a community
increases in stability and orderliness and organisation, registration
incidentally grows elaborate, and thereby the possibility of the
by-product of statistics. This aspect of social life began to become
pronounced during the nineteenth century, and it was in the middle of
that century that Quetelet appeared, by no means as the first to use
social statistics, but the first great pioneer in the manipulation of
such figures in a scientific manner, with a large and philosophical
outlook on their real significance.[115] Since then the possible number
of such means of numerical comparison has much increased. The difficulty
now is to know which are the most truly indicative of real superiority.
But before we consider that, again even at the outset, there is another
difficulty. Our apparently comparable figures are often not really
comparable. Each country or province or town puts forth its own sets of
statistics and each set may be quite comparable within itself. But when
we begin critically to compare one set with another set, all sorts of
fallacies appear. We have to allow, not only for varying accuracy and
completeness, but for difference of method in collecting and registering
the facts, and for all sorts of qualifying circumstances which may exist
at one place or time, and not at other places or times with which we are
seeking comparison.
The word “civilisation” is of recent formation. It came from France, but
even in France in a Dictionary of 1727 it cannot be found, though the
verb _civiliser_ existed as far back as 1694, meaning to polish manners,
to render sociable, to become urbane, one might say, as a result of
becoming urban, of living as a citizen in cities. We have to recognise,
of course, that the idea of civilisation is relative; that any community
and any age has its own civilisation, and its own ideals of
civilisation. But, that assumed, we may provisionally assert—and we
shall be in general accordance with Niceforo—that, in its most
comprehensive sense, the art of civilisation includes the three groups
of _material_ facts, _intellectual_ facts, and _moral_ (with
_political_) facts, so covering all the essential facts in our life.
Material facts, which we are apt to consider the most easily measurable,
include quantity and distribution of population, production of wealth,
the consumption of food and luxuries, the standard of life. Intellectual
facts include both the diffusion and degree of instruction and creative
activity in genius. Moral facts include the prevalence of honesty,
justice, pity, and self-sacrifice, the position of women and the care of
children. They are the most important of all for the quality of a
civilisation. Voltaire pointed out that “pity and justice are the
foundations of society,” and, long previously, Pericles in Thucydides
described the degradation of the Peloponnesians among whom every one
thinks only of his own advantage, and every one believes that his own
negligence of other things will pass unperceived. Plato in his
“Republic” made justice the foundation of harmony in the outer life and
the inner life, while in modern times various philosophers, like
Shadworth Hodgson, have emphasised that doctrine of Plato’s. The whole
art of government comes under this head and the whole treatment of human
personality.
The comparative prevalence of criminality has long been the test most
complacently adopted by those who seek to measure civilisation on its
moral and most fundamental aspect. Crime is merely a name for the most
obvious, extreme, and directly dangerous forms of what we call
immorality—that is to say, departure from the norm in manners and
customs. Therefore the highest civilisation is that with the least
crime. But is it so? The more carefully we look into the matter, the
more difficult it becomes to apply this test. We find that even at the
outset. Every civilised community has its own way of dealing with
criminal statistics and the discrepancies thus introduced are so great
that this fact alone makes comparisons almost impossible. It is scarcely
necessary to point out that varying skill and thoroughness in the
detection of crime, and varying severity in the attitude towards it,
necessarily count for much. Of not less significance is the legislative
activity of the community; the greater the number of laws, the greater
the number of offences against them. If, for instance, Prohibition is
introduced into a country, the amount of delinquency in that country is
enormously increased, but it would be rash to assert that the country
has thereby been sensibly lowered in the scale of civilisation. To avoid
this difficulty, it has been proposed to take into consideration only
what are called “natural crimes”; that is, those everywhere regarded as
punishable. But, even then, there is a still more disconcerting
consideration. For, after all, the criminality of a country is a
by-product of its energy in business and in the whole conduct of
affairs. It is a poisonous excretion, but excretion is the measure of
vital metabolism. There are, moreover, the so-called evolutive social
crimes, which spring from motives not lower but higher than those ruling
the society in which they arise.[116] Therefore, we cannot be sure that
we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some
aspects possesses the highest civilisation.
Let us turn to the intellectual aspect of civilisation. Here we have at
least two highly important and quite fairly measurable facts to
consider: the production of creative genius and the degree and diffusion
of general instruction. If we consider the matter abstractly, it is
highly probable that we shall declare that no civilisation can be worth
while unless it is rich in creative genius and unless the population
generally exhibits a sufficiently cultured level of education out of
which such genius may arise freely and into which the seeds it produces
may fruitfully fall. Yet, what do we find? Alike, whether we go back to
the earliest civilisations we have definite information about or turn to
the latest stages of civilisation we know to-day, we fail to see any
correspondence between these two essential conditions of civilisation.
Among peoples in a low state of culture, among savages generally, such
instruction and education as exists really is generally diffused; every
member of the community is initiated into the tribal traditions; yet, no
observers of such peoples seem to note the emergence of individuals of
strikingly productive genius. That, so far as we know, began to appear,
and, indeed, in marvellous variety and excellence, in Greece, and the
civilisation of Greece (as later the more powerful but coarser
civilisation of Rome) was built up on a broad basis of slavery, which
nowadays—except, of course, when disguised as industry—we no longer
regard as compatible with high civilisation.
Ancient Greece, indeed, may suggest to us to ask whether the genius of a
country be not directly opposed to the temper of the population of that
country, and its “leaders” really be its outcasts. (Some believe that
many, if not all, countries of to-day might serve to suggest the same
question.) If we want to imagine the real spirit of Greece, we may have
to think of a figure with a touch of Ulysses, indeed, but with more of
Thersites.[117] The Greeks who interest us to-day were exceptional
people, usually imprisoned, exiled, or slain by the more truly
representative Greeks of their time. When Plato and the others set forth
so persistently an ideal of wise moderation they were really putting
up—and in vain—a supplication for mercy to a people who, as they had
good ground for realising, knew nothing of wisdom, and scoffed at
moderation, and were mainly inspired by ferocity and intrigue.
To turn to a more recent example, consider the splendid efflorescence of
genius in Russia during the central years of the last century, still a
vivifying influence on the literature and music of the world; yet the
population of Russia had only just been delivered, nominally at least,
from serfdom, and still remained at the intellectual and economic level
of serfs. To-day, education has become diffused in the Western world.
Yet no one would dream of asserting that genius is more prevalent.
Consider the United States, for instance, during the past half-century.
It would surely be hard to find any country, except Germany, where
education is more highly esteemed or better understood, and where
instruction is more widely diffused. Yet, so far as the production of
high original genius is concerned, an old Italian city, like Florence,
with a few thousand inhabitants, had far more to show than all the
United States put together. So that we are at a loss how to apply the
intellectual test to the measurement of civilisation. It would almost
seem that the two essential elements of this test are mutually
incompatible.
Let us fall back on the simple solid fundamental test furnished by the
material aspect of civilisation. Here we are among elementary facts and
the first that began to be measured. Yet our difficulties, instead of
diminishing, rather increase. It is here, too, that we chiefly meet with
what Niceforo has called “the paradoxical symptoms of superiority in
progress,” though I should prefer to call them ambivalent; that is to
say, that, while from one point of view they indicate superiority, from
another, even though some may call it a lower point of view, they appear
to indicate inferiority. This is well illustrated by the test of growth
of population, or the height of the birth-rate, better by the birth-rate
considered in relation to the death-rate, for they cannot be
intelligibly considered apart. The law of Nature is reproduction, and if
an intellectual rabbit were able to study human civilisation he would
undoubtedly regard rapidity of multiplication, in which he has himself
attained so high a degree of proficiency, as evidence of progress in
civilisation. In fact, as we know, there are even human beings who take
the same view, whence we have what has been termed “Rabbitism” in men.
Yet, if anything is clear in this obscure field, it is that the whole
tendency of evolution is towards a diminishing birth-rate.[118] The most
civilised countries everywhere, and the most civilised people in them,
are those with the lowest birth-rate. Therefore, we have here to measure
the height of civilisation by a test which, if carried to an extreme,
would mean the disappearance of civilisation. Another such ambivalent
test is the consumption of luxuries of which alcohol and tobacco are the
types. There is held to be no surer test of civilisation than the
increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcohol
and tobacco are recognisably poisons, so that their consumption has only
to be carried far enough to destroy civilisation altogether. Again, take
the prevalence of suicide. That, without doubt, is a test of height in
civilisation; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and
intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it
snaps. We should be justified in regarding as very questionable a high
civilisation which failed to show a high suicide-rate. Yet suicide is
the sign of failure, misery, and despair. How can we regard the
prevalence of failure, misery, and despair as the mark of high
civilisation?
Thus, whichever of the three groups of facts we attempt to measure, it
appears on examination almost hopelessly complex. We have to try to make
our methods correspondingly complex. Niceforo had invoked co-variation,
or simultaneous and sympathetic changes in various factors of
civilisation; he explains the index number, and he appeals to
mathematics for aid out of the difficulties. He also attempts to
combine, with the help of diagrams, a single picture out of these
awkward and contradictory tests. The example he gives is that of France
during the fifty years preceding the war. It is an interesting example
because there is reason to consider France as, in some respects, the
most highly civilised of countries. What are the chief significant
measurable marks of this superiority? Niceforo selects about a dozen,
and, avoiding the difficult attempt to compare France with other
countries, he confines himself to the more easily practicable task of
ascertaining whether, or in what respects, the general art of
civilisation in France, the movement of the collective life, has been
upward or downward. When the different categories are translated,
according to recognised methods, into index numbers, taking the original
figures from the official “Résumé” of French statistics, it is found
that each line of movement follows throughout the same direction, though
often in zigzag fashion, and never turns back on itself. In this way it
appears that the consumption of coal has been more than doubled, the
consumption of luxuries (sugar, coffee, alcohol) nearly doubled, the
consumption of food per head (as tested by cheese and potatoes) also
increasing. Suicide has increased fifty per cent; wealth has increased
slightly and irregularly; the upward movement of population has been
extremely slight and partly due to immigration; the death-rate has
fallen, though not so much as the birth-rate; the number of persons
convicted of offence by the courts has fallen; the proportion of
illiterate persons has diminished; divorces have greatly increased, and
also the number of syndicalist workers, but these two movements are of
comparative recent growth.
This example well shows what it is possible to do by the most easily
available and generally accepted tests by which to measure the progress
of a community in the art of civilisation. Every one of the tests
applied to France reveals an upward tendency of civilisation, though
some of them, such as the fall in the death-rate, are not strongly
pronounced and much smaller than may be found in many other countries.
Yet, at the same time, while we have to admit that each of these lines
of movement indicates an upward tendency of civilisation, it by no means
follows that we can view them all with complete satisfaction. It may
even be said that some of them have only to be carried further in order
to indicate dissolution and decay. The consumption of luxuries, for
instance, as already noted, is the consumption of poisons. The increase
of wealth means little unless we take into account its distribution. The
increase of syndicalism, while it is a sign of increased independence,
intelligence, and social aspiration among the workers, is also a sign
that the social system is becoming regarded as unsound. So that, while
all these tests may be said to indicate a rising civilisation, they yet
do not invalidate the wise conclusion of Niceforo that a civilisation is
never an exclusive mass of benefits, but a mass of values, positive and
negative, and it may even be said that most often the conquest of a
benefit in one domain of a civilisation brings into another domain of
that civilisation inevitable evils. Long ago, Montesquieu had spoken of
the evils of civilisation and left the question of the value of
civilisation open, while Rousseau, more passionately, had decided
against civilisation.
We see the whole question from another point, yet not incongruously,
when we turn to Professor William McDougall’s Lowell Lectures, “Is
America Safe for Democracy?” since republished under the more general
title “National Welfare and National Decay,” for the author recognises
that the questions he deals with go to the root of all high
civilisation. As he truly observes, civilisation grows constantly more
complex and also less subject to the automatically balancing influence
of national selection, more dependent for its stability on our
constantly regulative and foreseeing control. Yet, while the
intellectual task placed upon us is ever growing heavier, our brains are
not growing correspondingly heavier to bear it. There is, as Remy de
Gourmont often pointed out, no good reason to suppose that we are in any
way innately superior to our savage ancestors, who had at least as good
physical constitutions and at least as large brains. The result is that
the small minority among us which alone can attempt to cope with our
complexly developing civilisation comes to the top by means of what
Arsène Dumont called social capillarity, and McDougall the social
ladder. The small upper stratum is of high quality, the large lower
stratum of poor quality, and with a tendency to feeble-mindedness. It is
to this large lower stratum that, with our democratic tendencies, we
assign the political and other guidance of the community, and it is this
lower stratum which has the higher birth-rate, since with all high
civilisation the normal birth-rate is low.[119] McDougall is not
concerned with the precise measurement of civilisation, and may not be
familiar with the attempts that have been made in that direction. It is
his object to point out the necessity in high civilisation for a
deliberate and purposive art of eugenics, if we would prevent the
eventual shipwreck of civilisation. But we see how his conclusions
emphasise those difficulties in the measurement of civilisation which
Niceforo has so clearly set forth.
McDougall is repeating what many, especially among eugenists, have
previously said. While not disputing the element of truth in the facts
and arguments brought forward from this side, it may be pointed out that
they are often overstated. This has been well argued by Carr-Saunders in
his valuable and almost monumental work, “The Population Problem,” and
his opinion is the more worthy of attention as he is himself a worker in
the cause of eugenics. He points out that the social ladder is, after
all, hard to climb, and that it only removes a few individuals from the
lower social stratum, while among those who thus climb, even though they
do not sink back, regression to the mean is ever in operation so that
they do not greatly enrich in the end the class they have climbed up to.
Moreover, as Carr-Saunders pertinently asks, are we so sure that the
qualities that mark successful climbers—self-assertion, acquisition,
emulation—are highly desirable? “It may even be,” he adds, “that we
might view a diminution in the average strength of some of the qualities
which mark the successful at least with equanimity.” Taken altogether,
it would seem that the differences between social classes may mainly be
explained by environmental influences. There is, however, ground to
recognise a slight intellectual superiority in the upper social class,
apart from environment, and so great is the significance for
civilisation of quality that even when the difference seems slight it
must not be regarded as negligible.[120]
More than half a century ago, indeed, George Sand pointed out that we
must distinguish between the civilisation of _quantity_ and the
civilisation of _quality_. As the great Morgagni had said much earlier,
it is not enough to count, we must evaluate; “observations are not to be
numbered, they are to be weighed.” It is not the biggest things that are
the most civilised things. The largest structures of Hindu or Egyptian
art are outweighed by the temples on the Acropolis of Athens, and
similarly, as Bryce, who had studied the matter so thoroughly, was wont
to insist, it is the smallest democracies which to-day stand highest in
the scale. We have seen that there is much in civilisation which we may
profitably measure, yet, when we seek to scale the last heights of
civilisation, the ladder of our “metrology” comes to grief. “The methods
of the mind are too weak,” as Comte said, “and the Universe is too
complex.” Life, even the life of the civilised community, is an art, and
the too much is as fatal as the too little. We may say of civilisation,
as Renan said of truth, that it lies in a _nuance_. Gumplowicz believed
that civilisation is the beginning of disease; Arsène Dumont thought
that it inevitably held within itself a toxic principle, a principle by
which it is itself in time poisoned. The more rapidly a civilisation
progresses, the sooner it dies for another to arise in its place. That
may not seem to every one a cheerful prospect. Yet, if our civilisation
has failed to enable us to look further than our own egoistic ends, what
has our civilisation been worth?
II
THE attempt to apply measurement to civilisation is, therefore, a
failure. That is, indeed, only another way of saying that civilisation,
the whole manifold web of life, is an art. We may dissect out a vast
number of separate threads and measure them. It is quite worth while to
do so. But the results of such anatomical investigation admit of the
most diverse interpretation, and, at the best, can furnish no adequate
criterion of the worth of a complex living civilisation.
Yet, although there is no precise measurement of the total value of any
large form of life, we can still make an estimate of its value. We can
approach it, that is to say, as a work of art. We can even reach a
certain approximation to agreement in the formation of such estimates.
When Protagoras said that “Man is the measure of all things,” he uttered
a dictum which has been variously interpreted, but from the standpoint
we have now reached, from which Man is seen to be preëminently an
artist, it is a monition to us that we cannot to the measurement of life
apply our instruments of precision, and cut life down to their graduated
marks. They have, indeed, their immensely valuable uses, but it is
strictly as instruments and not as ends of living or criteria of the
worth of life. It is in the failure to grasp this that the human tragedy
has often consisted, and for over two thousand years the dictum of
Protagoras has been held up for the pacification of that tragedy, for
the most part, in vain. Protagoras was one of those “Sophists” who have
been presented to our contempt in absurd traditional shapes ever since
Plato caricatured them—though it may well be that some, as, it has been
suggested, Gorgias, may have given colour to the caricature—and it is
only to-day that it is possible to declare that we must place the names
of Protagoras, of Prodicus, of Hippias, even of Gorgias, beside those of
Herodotus, Pindar, and Pericles.[121]
It is in the sphere of morals that the conflict has often been most
poignant. I have already tried to indicate how revolutionary is the
change which the thoughts of many have had to undergo. This struggle of
a living and flexible and growing morality against a morality that is
rigid and inflexible and dead has at some periods of human history been
almost dramatically presented. It was so in the seventeenth century
around the new moral discoveries of the Jesuits; and the Jesuits were
rewarded by becoming almost until to-day a by-word for all that is
morally poisonous and crooked and false—for all that is “Jesuitical.”
There was once a great quarrel between the Jesuits and the Jansenists—a
quarrel which is scarcely dead yet, for all Christendom took sides in
it—and the Jansenists had the supreme good fortune to entrap on their
side a great man of genius whose onslaught on the Jesuits, “Les
Provinciales,” is even still supposed by many people to have settled the
question. They are allowed so to suppose because no one now reads “Les
Provinciales.” But Remy de Gourmont, who was not only a student of
unread books but a powerfully live thinker, read “Les Provinciales,” and
found, as he set forth in “Le Chemin de Velours,” that it was the
Jesuits who were more nearly in the right, more truly on the road of
advance, than Pascal. As Gourmont showed by citation, there were Jesuit
doctrines put forth by Pascal with rhetorical irony as though the mere
statement sufficed to condemn them, which need only to be liberated from
their irony, and we might nowadays add to them. Thus spake Zarathustra.
Pascal was a geometrician who (though he, indeed, once wrote in his
“Pensées”: “There is no general rule”) desired to deal with the
variable, obscure, and unstable complexities of human action as though
they were problems in mathematics. But the Jesuits, while it is true
that they still accepted the existence of absolute rules, realised that
rules must be made adjustable to the varying needs of life. They thus
became the pioneers of many conceptions which are accepted in modern
practice.[122] Their doctrine of invincible ignorance was a discovery of
that kind, forecasting some of the opinions now held regarding
responsibility. But in that age, as Gourmont pointed out, “to proclaim
that there might be a sin or an offence without guilty parties was an
act of intellectual audacity, as well as scientific probity.” Nowadays
the Jesuits (together, it is interesting to note, with their baroque
architecture) are coming into credit, and casuistry again seems
reputable. To establish that there can be no single inflexible moral
code for all individuals has been, and indeed remains, a difficult and
delicate task, yet the more profoundly one considers it, the more
clearly it becomes visible that what once seemed a dead and rigid code
of morality must more and more become a living act of casuistry. The
Jesuits, because they had a glimmer of this truth, represented, as
Gourmont concluded, the honest and most acceptable part of Christianity,
responding to the necessities of life, and were rendering a service to
civilisation which we should never forget.
There are some who may not very cordially go to the Jesuits as an
example of the effort to liberate men from the burden of a subservience
to rigid little rules, towards the unification of life as an active
process, however influential they may be admitted to be among the
pioneers of that movement. Yet we may turn in what direction we will, we
shall perpetually find the same movement under other disguises. There
is, for instance, Mr. Bertrand Russell, who is, for many, the most
interesting and stimulating thinker to be found in England to-day. He
might scarcely desire to be associated with the Jesuits. Yet he also
seeks to unify life and even in an essentially religious spirit. His way
of putting this, in his “Principles of Social Reconstruction,” is to
state that man’s impulses may be divided into those that are creative
and those that are possessive, that is to say, concerned with
acquisition. The impulses of the second class are a source of inner and
outer disharmony and they involve conflict; “it is preoccupation with
possessions more than anything else that prevents men from living freely
and nobly”; it is the creative impulse in which real life consists, and
“the typical creative impulse is that of the artist.” Now this
conception (which was that Plato assigned to the “guardians” in his
communistic State) may be a little too narrowly religious for those
whose position in life renders a certain “preoccupation with
possessions” inevitable; it is useless to expect us all to become, at
present, fakirs and Franciscans, “counting nothing one’s own, save only
one’s harp.” But in regarding the creative impulses as the essential
part of life, and as typically manifested in the form of art, Bertrand
Russell is clearly in the great line of movement with which we have been
throughout concerned. We must only at the same time—as we shall see
later—remember that the distinction between the “creative” and the
“possessive” impulses, although convenient, is superficial. In creation
we have not really put aside the possessive instinct, we may even have
intensified it. For it has been reasonably argued that it is precisely
the deep urgency of the impulse to possess which stirs the creative
artist. He creates because that is the best way, or the only way, of
gratifying his passionate desire to possess. Two men desire to possess a
woman, and one seizes her, the other writes a “Vita Nuova” about her;
they have both gratified the instinct of possession, and the second, it
may be, most satisfyingly and most lastingly. So that—apart from the
impossibility, and even the undesirability, of dispensing with the
possessive instinct—it may be well to recognise that the real question
is one of values in possession. We must needs lay up treasure; but the
fine artist in living, so far as may be, lays up his treasure in Heaven.
In recent time some alert thinkers have been moved to attempt to measure
the art of civilisation by less impossibly exact methods than of old, by
the standard of art, and even of fine art. In a remarkable book on “The
Revelations of Civilisation”—published about three years before the
outbreak of that Great War which some have supposed to date a
revolutionary point in civilisation—Dr. W. M. Flinders Petrie, who has
expert knowledge of the Egyptian civilisation which was second to none
in its importance for mankind, has set forth a statement of the cycles
to which all civilisations are subject. Civilisation, he points out, is
essentially an intermittent phenomenon. We have to compare the various
periods of civilisation and observe what they have in common in order to
find the general type. “It should be examined like any other action of
Nature; its recurrences should be studied, and all the principles which
underlie its variations should be defined.” Sculpture, he believes, may
be taken as a criterion, not because it is the most important, but
because it is the most convenient and easily available, test. We may say
with the old Etruscans that every race has its Great Year—it sprouts,
flourishes, decays, and dies. The simile, Petrie adds, is the more
precise because there are always irregular fluctuations of the seasonal
weather. There have been eight periods of civilisation, he reckons, in
calculable human history. We are now near the end of the eighth, which
reached its climax about the year 1800; since then there have been
merely archaistic revivals, the value of which may be variously
interpreted. He scarcely thinks we can expect another period of
civilisation to arise for several centuries at least. The average length
of a period of civilisation is 1330 years. Ours Petrie dates from about
A.D. 450. It has always needed a fresh race to produce a new period of
civilisation. In Europe, between A.D. 300 and 600, some fifteen new
races broke in from north and east for slow mixture. “If,” he concluded,
“the source of every civilisation has lain in race mixture, it may be
that eugenics will, in some future civilisation, carefully segregate
fine races, and prohibit continual mixture, until they have a distinct
type, which will start a new civilisation when transplanted. The future
progress of Man may depend as much on isolation to establish a type as
on fusion of types when established.”
At the time when Flinders Petrie was publishing his suggestive book, Dr.
Oswald Spengler, apparently in complete ignorance of it, was engaged in
a far more elaborate work, not actually published till after the War, in
which an analogous conception of the growth and decay of civilisations
was put forward in a more philosophic way, perhaps more debatable on
account of the complex detail in which the conception was worked
out.[123] Petrie had considered the matter in a summary empiric manner
with close reference to the actual forces viewed broadly. Spengler’s
manner is narrower, more subjective, and more metaphysical. He
distinguishes—though he also recognises eight periods—between “culture”
and “civilisation.” It is the first that is really vital and profitable;
a “civilisation” is the decaying later stage of a “culture,” its
inevitable fate. Herein it reaches its climax. “Civilisations are the
most externalised and artistic conditions of which the higher embodiment
of Man is capable. They are a spiritual senility, an end which with
inner necessity is reached again and again.”[124] The transition from
“culture” to “civilisation” in ancient times took place, Spengler holds,
in the fourth century, and in the modern West in the nineteenth. But,
like Petrie, though more implicitly, he recognises the prominent place
of the art activities in the whole process, and he explicitly emphasises
the interesting way in which those activities which are generally
regarded as of the nature of art are interwoven with others not so
generally regarded.
III
HOWEVER we look at it, we see that Man, whether he works individually or
collectively, may conveniently be regarded, in the comprehensive sense,
as an artist, a bad artist, maybe, for the most part, but still an
artist. His civilisation—if that is the term we choose to apply to the
total sum of his group activities—is always an art, or a complex of
arts. It is an art that is to be measured, or left immeasurable. That
question, we have seen, we may best leave open. Another question that
might be put is easy to deal with more summarily: What is Art?
We may deal with it summarily because it is an ultimate question and
there can be no final answer to ultimate questions. As soon as we begin
to ask such questions, as soon as we begin to look at any phenomenon as
an end in itself, we are on the perilous slope of metaphysics, where no
agreement can, or should be, possible. The question of measurement was
plausible, and needed careful consideration. What is Art? is a question
which, if we are wise, we shall deal with as Pilate dealt with that like
question: What is Truth?
How futile the question is, we may realise when we examine the book
which Tolstoy in old age wrote to answer it. Here is a man who was
himself, in his own field, one of the world’s supreme artists. He could
not fail to say one or two true things, as when he points out that “all
human existence is full of art, from cradle songs and dances to the
offices of religion and public ceremonial—it is all equally art. Art, in
the large sense, impregnates our whole life.” But on the main point all
that Tolstoy can do is to bring together a large miscellaneous
collection of definitions—without seeing that as individual opinions
they all have their rightness—and then to add one of his own, not much
worse, nor much better, than any of the others. Thereto he appends some
of his own opinions on artists, whence it appears that Hugo, Dickens,
George Eliot, Dostoievsky, Maupassant, Millet, Bastien-Lepage, and Jules
Breton—and not always they—are the artists whom he considers great; it
is not a list to treat with contempt, but he goes on to pour contempt on
those who venerate Sophocles and Aristophanes and Dante and Shakespeare
and Milton and Michelangelo and Bach and Beethoven and Manet. “My own
artistic works,” he adds, “I rank among bad art, excepting a few short
stories.” It seems a reduction of the whole question, What is Art? to
absurdity, if one may be permitted to say so at a time when Tolstoy
would appear to be the pioneer of some of our most approved modern
critics.
Thus we see the reason why all the people who come forward to define
art—each with his own little measuring-rod quite different from
everybody else’s—inevitably make themselves ridiculous. It is true they
are all of them right. That is just why they are ridiculous: each has
mistaken the one drop of water he has measured for the whole ocean. Art
cannot be defined because it is infinite. It is no accident that poetry,
which has so often seemed the typical art, means a _making_. The artist
is a maker. Art is merely a name we are pleased to give to what can only
be the whole stream of action which—in order to impart to it selection
and an unconscious or even conscious aim—is poured through the nervous
circuit of a human animal or some other animal having a more or less
similar nervous organisation. For a cat is an artist as well as a man,
and some would say more than a man, while a bee is not only an obvious
artist, but perhaps even the typical natural and unconscious artist.
There is no defining art; there is only the attempt to distinguish
between good art and bad art.
Thus it is that I find no escape from the Aristotelian position of
Shakespeare that
“Nature is made better by no mean
But Nature makes that mean....
This is an art
Which does mend Nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is Nature.”
And that this conception is Aristotelian, even the essential Greek
conception, is no testimony to Shakespeare’s scholarship. It is merely
the proof that here we are in the presence of one of these great
ultimate facts of the world which cannot but be sensitively perceived by
the finest spirits, however far apart in time and space. Aristotle,
altogether in the same spirit as Shakespeare, insisted that the works of
man’s making, a State, for example, are natural, though Art partly
completes what Nature is herself sometimes unable to bring to
perfection, and even then that man is only exercising methods which,
after all, are those of Nature. Nature needs Man’s art in order to
achieve many natural things, and Man, in fulfilling that need, is only
following the guidance of Nature in seeming to make things which are all
the time growing by themselves.[125] Art is thus scarcely more than the
natural midwife of Nature.
There is, however, one distinguishing mark of Art which at this stage,
as we conclude our survey, must be clearly indicated. It has been
subsumed, as the acute reader will not have failed to note, throughout.
But it has, for the most part, been deliberately left implicit. It has
constantly been assumed, that is to say, that Art is the sum of all the
active energies of Mankind. We must in this matter of necessity follow
Aristotle, who in his “Politics” spoke, as a matter of course, of all
those who practice “medicine, gymnastics, and the arts in general” as
“artists.” Art is the moulding force of every culture that Man during
his long course has at any time or place produced. It is the reality of
what we imperfectly term “morality.” It is all human creation.
Yet creation, in the active visible constructive sense, is not the whole
of Man. It is not even the whole of what Man has been accustomed to call
God. When, by what is now termed a process of Narcissism, Man created
God in his own image, as we may instructively observe in the first
chapter of the Hebrew Book of Genesis, he assigned to him six parts of
active creational work, one part of passive contemplation of that work.
That one seventh part—and an immensely important part—has not come under
our consideration. In other words, we have been looking at Man the
artist, not at Man the æsthetician.
There was more than one reason why these two aspects of human faculty
were held clearly apart throughout our discussion. Not only is it even
less possible to agree about æsthetics, where the variety of individual
judgment is rightly larger, than about art (ancient and familiar is the
saying, _De gustibus_—), but to confuse art and æsthetics leads us into
lamentable confusion. We may note this in the pioneers of the modern
revival of what Sidgwick called “æsthetic Intuitionism” in the
eighteenth century, and especially in Hutcheson, though Hutcheson’s work
is independent of consistency, which he can scarcely even be said to
have sought. They never sufficiently emphasised the distinction between
art and æsthetics, between, that is to say, what we may possibly, if we
like, call the dynamic and the static aspects of human action. Herein is
the whole difference between work, for art is essentially work, and the
spectacular contemplation of work, which æsthetics essentially is. The
two things are ultimately one, but alike in the special arts and in that
art of life commonly spoken of as morals, where we are not usually
concerned with ultimates, the two must be clearly held apart. From the
point of view of art we are concerned with the internal impulse to guide
the activities in the lines of good work. It is only when we look at the
work of art from the outside, whether in the more specialised arts or in
the art of life, that we are concerned with æsthetic contemplation, that
activity of vision which creates beauty, however we may please to define
beauty, and even though we see it so widely as to be able to say with
Remy de Gourmont: “Wherever life is, there is beauty,”[126] provided,
one may add, that there is the æsthetic contemplation in which it must
be mirrored.
It is in relation with art, not with æsthetics, it may be noted in
passing, that we are concerned with morals. That was once a question of
seemingly such immense import that men were willing to spiritually slay
each other over it. But it is not a question at all from the standpoint
which has here from the outset been taken. Morals, for us to-day, is a
species of which art is the genus. It is an art, and like all arts it
necessarily has its own laws. We are concerned with the art of morals:
we cannot speak of art _and_ morals. To take “art” and “morals” and
“religion,” and stir them up, however vigorously, into an indigestible
plum-pudding, as Ruskin used to do, is no longer possible.[127] This is
a question which—like so many other furiously debated questions—only
came into existence because the disputants on both sides were ignorant
of the matter they were disputing about. It is no longer to be taken
seriously, though it has its interest because the dispute has so often
recurred, not only in recent days, but equally among the Greeks of
Plato’s days. The Greeks had a kind of æsthetic morality. It was
instinctive with them, and that is why it is so significant for us. But
they seldom seem to have succeeded in thinking æsthetic problems clearly
out. The attitude of their philosophers towards many of the special
arts, even the arts in which they were themselves supreme, to us seem
unreasonable. While they magnified the art, they often belittled the
artist, and felt an aristocratic horror for anything that assimilated a
man to a craftsman; for craftsman meant for them vulgarian. Plato
himself was all for goody-goody literature and in our days would be an
enthusiastic patron of Sunday-school stories. He would forbid any
novelist to represent a good man as ever miserable or a wicked man as
ever happy. The whole tendency of the discussion in the third book of
the “Republic” is towards the conclusion that literature must be
occupied exclusively with the representation of the virtuous man,
provided, of course, that he was not a slave or a craftsman, for to such
no virtue worthy of imitation should ever be attributed. Towards the end
of his long life, Plato remained of the same opinion; in the second book
of “The Laws” it is with the maxims of virtue that he will have the poet
solely concerned. The reason for this ultra-puritanical attitude, which
was by no means in practice that of the Greeks themselves, seems not
hard to divine. The very fact that their morality was temperamentally
æsthetic instinctively impelled them, when they were thinking
philosophically, to moralise art generally; they had not yet reached the
standpoint which would enable them to see that art might be consonant
with morality without being artificially pressed into a narrow moral
mould. Aristotle was conspicuously among those, if not the first, who
took a broader and saner view. In opposition to the common Greek view
that the object of art is to teach morals, Aristotle clearly expressed
the totally different view that poetry in the wide sense—the special art
which he and the Greeks generally were alone much concerned to
discuss—is an emotional delight, having pleasure as its direct end, and
only indirectly a moral end by virtue of its cathartic effects. Therein
he reached an æsthetic standpoint, yet it was so novel that he could not
securely retain it and was constantly falling back towards the old moral
conception of art.[128]
We may call it a step in advance. Yet it was not a complete statement of
the matter. Indeed, it established the unreal conflict between two
opposing conceptions, each unsound because incomplete, which loose
thinkers have carried on ever since. To assert that poetry exists for
morals is merely to assert that one art exists for the sake of another
art, which at the best is rather a futile statement, while, so far as it
is really accepted, it cannot fail to crush the art thus subordinated.
If we have the insight to see that an art has its own part of life, we
shall also see that it has its own intrinsic morality, which cannot be
the morality of morals or of any other art than itself. We may here
profitably bear in mind that antinomy between morals and morality on
which Jules de Gaultier has often insisted. The Puritan’s strait-jacket
shows the vigour of his external morals; it also bears witness to the
lack of internal morality which necessitates that control. Again, on the
other hand, it is argued that art gives pleasure. Very true. Even the
art of morals gives pleasure. But to assert that therein lies its sole
end and aim is an altogether feeble and inadequate conclusion, unless we
go further and proceed to inquire what “pleasure” means. If we fail to
take that further step, it remains a conclusion which may be said to
merge into the conclusion that art is aimless; that, rather, its aim is
to be aimless, and so to lift us out of the struggle and turmoil of
life. That was the elaborately developed argument of Schopenhauer:
art—whether in music, in philosophy, in painting, in poetry—is useless;
“to be useless is the mark of genius, its patent of nobility. All other
works of men are there for the preservation or alleviation of our
existence; but this alone not; it alone is there for its own sake; and
is in this sense to be regarded as the flower, or the pure essence, of
existence. That is why in its enjoyment our heart rises, for we are
thereby lifted above the heavy earthen atmosphere of necessity.”[129]
Life is a struggle of the will; but in art the will has become
objective, fit for pure contemplation, and genius consists in an eminent
aptitude for contemplation. The ordinary man, said Schopenhauer, plods
through the dark world with his lantern turned on the things he wants;
the man of genius sees the world by the light of the sun. In modern
times Bergson adopted that view of Schopenhauer’s, with a terminology of
his own, and all he said under this head may be regarded as a charming
fantasia on the Schopenhauerian theme: “Genius is the most complete
objectivity.” Most of us, it seems to Bergson, never see reality at all;
we only see the labels we have fixed on things to mark for us their
usefulness.[130] A veil is interposed between us and the reality of
things. The artist, the man of genius, raises this veil and reveals
Nature to us. He is naturally endowed with a detachment from life, and
so possesses as it were a virginal freshness in seeing, hearing, or
thinking. That is “intuition,” an instinct that has become
disinterested. “Art has no other object but to remove the practically
useful symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, so
as to bring us face to face with reality itself.”[131] Art would thus be
fulfilling its function the more completely the further it removed us
from ordinary life, or, more strictly, from any personal interest in
life. That was also Remy de Gourmont’s opinion, though I do not know how
far he directly derived it from Schopenhauer. “If we give to art a moral
aim,” he wrote, “it ceases to exist, for it ceases to be useless. Art is
incompatible with a moral or religious aim. It is unintelligible to the
crowd because the crowd is not disinterested and knows only the
principle of utility.” But the difficulty of making definite affirmation
in this field, the perpetual need to allow for _nuances_ which often on
the surface involve contradictions, is seen when we find that so great
an artist as Einstein—for so we may here fairly call him—and one so
little of a formal æsthetician, agrees with Schopenhauer. “I agree with
Schopenhauer,” he said to Moszkowski, “that one of the most powerful
motives that attract people to science and art is the longing to escape
from everyday life, with its painful coarseness and unconsoling
barrenness, and to break the fetters of their own ever-changing desires.
Man seeks to form a simplified synoptical view of the world conformable
to his own nature, to overcome the world by replacing it with his
picture. The painter, the poet, the philosopher, the scientist, each
does this in his own way. He transfers the centre of his emotional life
to this picture, to find a surer haven of peace than the sphere of his
turbulent personal experience offers.” That is a sound statement of the
facts, yet it is absurd to call such an achievement “useless.”
Perhaps, however, what philosophers have really meant when they have
said that art (it is the so-called fine arts only that they have in
mind) is useless, is that _an art must not be consciously pursued for
any primary useful end outside itself_. That is true. It is even true of
morals, that is to say the art of living. To live in the conscious
primary pursuit of a “useful” end—such as one of the fine arts—outside
living itself is to live badly; to declare, like André Gide, that
“outside the doctrine of ‘Art for Art’ I know not where to find any
reason for living,” may well be the legitimate expression of a personal
feeling, but, unless understood in the sense here taken, it is not a
philosophical statement which can be brought under the species of
eternity, being, indeed, one of those confusions of substances which
are, metaphysically, damnable. So, again, in the art of science: the
most useful applications of science have sprung from discoveries that
were completely useless for purposes outside pure science, so far as the
aim of the discoverer went, or even so far as he ever knew. If he had
been bent on “useful” ends, he would probably have made no discovery at
all. But the bare statement that “art is useless” is so vague as to be
really meaningless, if not inaccurate and misleading.
Therefore, Nietzsche was perhaps making a profound statement when he
declared that art is the great stimulus to life; it produces joy as an
aid to life; it possesses a usefulness, that is to say, which transcends
its direct aim. The artist is one who sees life as beauty, and art is
thus fulfilling its function the more completely, the more deeply it
enables us to penetrate into life. It seems, however, that Nietzsche
insufficiently guarded his statement. Art for art’s sake, said
Nietzsche, is “a dangerous principle,” like truth for truth’s sake and
goodness for goodness’ sake. Art, knowledge, and morality are simply
means, he declared, and valuable for their “life-promoting tendency.”
(There is here a pioneering suggestion of the American doctrine of
Pragmatism, according to which how a thing “works” is the test of its
validity, but Nietzsche can by no means be counted a Pragmatist.) To
look thus at the matter was certainly, with Schopenhauer and with
Gourmont, to put aside the superficial moral function of art, and to
recognise in it a larger sociological function. It was on the
sociological function of art that Guyau, who was so penetrating and
sympathetic a thinker, insisted in his book, posthumously published in
1889, “L’Art au Point de Vue Sociologique.” He argued that art, while
remaining independent, is at the foundation one with morals and with
religion. He believed in a profound unity of all these terms: life,
morality, society, religion, art. “Art, in a word, is life.” So that, as
he pointed out, there is no conflict between the theory of art for art,
properly interpreted, and the theory that assigns to art a moral and
social function. It is clear that Guyau was on the right road, although
his statement was confusingly awkward in form. He deformed his
statement, moreover, through his perpetual tendency to insist on the
spontaneously socialising organisation of human groups—a tendency which
has endeared him to all who adopt an anarchist conception of
society—and, forgetting that he had placed morals only at the depth of
art and not on the surface, he commits himself to the supremely false
dictum: “Art is, above everything, a phenomenon of sociability,” and the
like statements, far too closely resembling the doctrinary
pronouncements of Tolstoy. For sociability is an indirect end of art: it
cannot be its direct aim. We are here not far from the ambiguous
doctrine that art is “expression,” for “expression” may be too easily
confused with “communication.”[132]
All these eminent philosophers—though they meant something which so far
as it went was true—have failed to produce a satisfying statement
because they have none of them understood how to ask the question which
they were trying to answer. They failed to understand that morals is
just as much an art as any other vital psychic function of man; they
failed to see that, though art must be free from the dominance of
morals, it by no means followed that it has no morality of its own, if
morality involves the organised integrity which all vital phenomena must
possess; they failed to realise that, since the arts are simply the sum
of the active functions which spring out of the single human organism,
we are not called upon to worry over any imaginary conflicts between
functions which are necessarily harmonious because they are all one at
the root. We cannot too often repeat the pregnant maxim of Bacon that
the right question is the half of knowledge. Here we might almost say
that it is the whole of knowledge. It seems, therefore, unnecessary to
pursue the subject further. He who cannot himself pursue it further had
best leave it alone.
But when we enter the æsthetic sphere we are no longer artists. That,
indeed, is inevitable if we regard the arts as the sum of all the active
functions of the organism. Rickert, with his methodical vision of the
world,—for he insists that we must have some sort of system,—has
presented what he regards as a reasonable scheme in a tabular form at
the end of the first volume of his “System.”[133] He divides Reality
into two great divisions: the monistic and asocial Contemplative and the
pluralistic and social Active. To the first belong the spheres of Logic,
Æsthetics, and Mysticism, with their values, truth, beauty, impersonal
holiness; to the second, Ethics, Erotics, the Philosophy of Religion,
with their values, morality, happiness, personal holiness. This view of
the matter is the more significant as Rickert stands aside from the
tradition represented by Nietzsche and returns to the Kantian current,
enriched, indeed, and perhaps not quite consistently, by Goethe. It
seems probable that all Rickert’s active attitudes towards reality may
fairly be called Art, and all the contemplative attitudes, Æsthetics.
There is in fact nothing novel in the distinction which underlies this
classification, and it has been recognised ever since the days of
Baumgarten, the commonly accepted founder of modern æsthetics, not to go
further back.[134] Art is the active practical exercise of a single
discipline: æsthetics is the philosophic appreciation of any or all the
arts. Art is concerned with the more or less unconscious creation of
beauty: æsthetics is concerned with its discovery and contemplation.
Æsthetics is the metaphysical side of all productive living.
IV
THIS complete unlikeness on the surface between art and æsthetics—for
ultimately and fundamentally they are at one—has to be emphasised, for
the failure to distinguish them has led to confusion and verbosity. The
practice of morals, we must ever remember, is not a matter of æsthetics;
it is a matter of art. It has not, nor has any other art, an immediate
and obvious relationship to the creation of beauty.[135] What the artist
in life, as in any other art, is directly concerned to express is not
primarily beauty; it is much more likely to seem to him to be truth (it
is interesting to note that Einstein, so much an artist in thought,
insists that he is simply concerned with truth), and what he produces
may seem at first to all the world, and even possibly to himself, to be
ugly. It is so in the sphere of morals. For morals is still concerned
with the possessive instinct, not with the creation of beauty, with the
needs and the satisfaction of the needs, with the industrial and
economic activities, with the military activities to which they fatally
tend. But the æsthetic attitude, as Gaultier expresses it, is the
radiant smile on the human face which in its primitive phases was
anatomically built up to subserve crude vital needs; as he elsewhere
more abstractly expresses it, “Beauty is an attitude of sensibility.” It
is the task of æsthetics, often a slow and painful task, to see
art—including the art of Nature, some would insist—as beauty. That, it
has to be added, is no mean task. It is, on the contrary, essential. It
is essential to sweep away in art all that is ultimately found to be
fundamentally ugly, whether by being, at the one end, distastefully
pretty, or, at the other, hopelessly crude. For ugliness produces nausea
of the stomach and sets the teeth on edge. It does so literally, not
metaphorically. Ugliness, since it interferes with digestion, since it
disturbs the nervous system, impairs the forces of life. For when we are
talking æsthetics (as the word itself indicates) we are ultimately
talking physiologically. Even our metaphysics—if it is to have any
meaning for us—must have a physical side. Unless we hold that fact in
mind, we shall talk astray and are likely to say little that is to the
point.
Art has to be seen as beauty and it is the function of æsthetics so to
see it. How slowly and painfully the function works every one must know
by observing the æsthetic judgments of other people, if not by recalling
his own experiences. I know in my own experience how hardly and
subconsciously this process works. In the matter of pictures, for
instance, I have found throughout life, from Rubens in adolescence to
Cézanne in recent years, that a revelation of the beauty of a painter’s
work which, on the surface, is alien or repulsive to one’s sensibility,
came only after years of contemplation, and then most often by a sudden
revelation, in a flash, by a direct intuition of the beauty of some
particular picture which henceforth became the clue to all the painter’s
work. It is a process comparable to that which is in religion termed
“conversion,” and, indeed, of like nature.[136] So also it is in
literature. And in life? We are accustomed to suppose that a moral
action is much easier to judge than a picture of Cézanne. We do not
dream of bringing the same patient and attentive, as it were æsthetic,
spirit to life as we bring to painting. Perhaps we are right,
considering what poor bungling artists most of us are in living. For
“art is easy, life is difficult,” as Liszt used to say. The reason, of
course, is that the art of living differs from the external arts in that
we cannot exclude the introduction of alien elements into its texture.
Our art of living, when we achieve it, is of so high and fine a quality
precisely because it so largely lies in harmoniously weaving into the
texture elements that we have not ourselves chosen, or that, having
chosen, we cannot throw aside. Yet it is the attitude of the spectators
that helps to perpetuate that bungling.
It is Plotinus whom we may fairly regard as the founder of Æsthetics in
the philosophic sense, and it was as formulated by Plotinus, though this
we sometimes fail to recognise, that the Greek attitude in these
matters, however sometimes modified, has come down to us.[137] We may be
forgiven for not always recognising it, because it is rather strange
that it should be so. It is strange, that is to say, that the æsthetic
attitude, which we regard as so emphatically Greek, should have been
left for formulation until the Greek world had passed away, that it
should not have been Plato, but an Alexandrian, living in Rome seven
centuries after him, who set forth what seems to us a distinctively
Platonic view of life.[138] The Greeks, indeed, seem to have recognised,
apart from the lower merely “ethical” virtues of habit and custom, the
higher “intellectual” virtues which were deliberately planned, and so of
the nature of art. But Plotinus definitely recognised the æsthetic
contemplation of Beauty, together with the One and the Good, as three
aspects of the Absolute.[139] He thus at once placed æsthetics on the
highest possible pedestal, beside religion and morals; he placed it
above art, or as comprehending art, for he insisted that Contemplation
is an active quality, so that all human creative energy may be regarded
as the by-play of contemplation. That was to carry rather far the
function of æsthetic contemplation. But it served to stamp for ever, on
the minds of all sensitive to that stamp who came after, the definite
realisation of the sublimest, the most nearly divine, of human
aptitudes. Every great spirit has furnished the measure of his greatness
by the more or less completeness in which at the ultimate outpost of his
vision over the world he has attained to that active contemplation of
life as a spectacle which Shakespeare finally embodied in the figure of
Prospero.
It may be interesting to note in passing that, psychologically
considered, all æsthetic enjoyment among the ordinary population,
neither artists in the narrow sense nor philosophers, still necessarily
partakes to some degree of genuine æsthetic contemplation, and that such
contemplation seems to fall roughly into two classes, to one or other of
which every one who experiences æsthetic enjoyment belongs. These have,
I believe, been defined by Müller-Freienfels as that of the “Zuschauer,”
who feels that he is looking on, and that of the “Mitspieler,” who feels
that he is joining in; on the one side, we may say, he who knows he is
looking on, the _spectator_, and on the other he who imaginatively joins
in, the _participator_. The people of the first group are those, it may
be, in whom the sensory nervous apparatus is highly developed and they
are able to adopt the most typical and complete æsthetic attitude; the
people of the other group would seem to be most developed on the motor
nervous side and they are those who themselves desire to be artists.
Groos, who has developed the æsthetic side of “miterleben,” is of this
temperament, and he had at first supposed that every one was like him in
this respect.[140] Plotinus, who held that contemplation embraced
activity, must surely have been of this temperament. Coleridge was
emphatically of the other temperament, _spectator haud particeps_, as he
himself said. But, at all events in northern countries, that is probably
not the more common temperament. The æsthetic attitude of the crowds who
go to watch football matches is probably much more that of the
imaginative participator than of the pure spectator.
There is no occasion here to trace the history of æsthetic
contemplation. Yet it may be worth while to note that it was clearly
present to the mind of the fine thinker and great moralist who brought
the old Greek idea back into the modern world. In the “Philosophical
Regimen” (as it has been named) brought to light a few years ago, in
which Shaftesbury set down his self-communings, we find him writing in
one place: “In the morning am I to see anew? Am I to be present yet
longer and content? I am not weary, nor ever can be, of such a
spectacle, such a theatre, such a presence, nor at acting whatever part
such a master assigns me. Be it ever so long, I stay and am willing to
see on whilst my sight continues sound; whilst I can be a spectator,
such as I ought to be; whilst I can see reverently, justly, with
understanding and applause. And when I see no more, I retire, not
disdainfully, but in reverence to the spectacle and master, giving
thanks.... Away, man! rise, wipe thy mouth, throw up thy napkin and have
done. A bellyful (they say) is as good as a feast.”
That may seem but a simple and homely way of stating the matter, though
a few years later, in 1727, a yet greater spirit than Shaftesbury,
Swift, combining the conception of life as æsthetic contemplation with
that of life as art, wrote in a letter, “Life is a tragedy, wherein we
sit as spectators awhile, and then act our own part in it.” If we desire
a more systematically philosophical statement we may turn to the
distinguished thinker of to-day who in many volumes has most powerfully
presented the same essential conception, with all its implications, of
life as a spectacle. “Tirez le rideau; la farce est jouée.” That
Shakespearian utterance, which used to be attributed to Rabelais on his
death-bed, and Swift’s comment on life, and Shaftesbury’s intimate
meditation, would seem to be—on the philosophic and apart from the moral
side of life—entirely in the spirit that Jules de Gaultier has so
elaborately developed. The world is a spectacle, and all the men and
women the actors on its stage. Enjoy the spectacle while you will,
whether comedy or tragedy, enter into the spirit of its manifold
richness and beauty, yet take it not too seriously, even when you leave
it and the curtains are drawn that conceal it for ever from your eyes,
grown weary at last.
Such a conception, indeed, was already to be seen in a deliberately
philosophical form in Schopenhauer (who, no doubt, influenced Gaultier)
and, later, Nietzsche, especially the early Nietzsche, although he never
entirely abandoned it; his break with Wagner, however, whom he had
regarded as the typical artist, led him to become suddenly rather
critical of art and artists, as we see in “Human-all-too-Human,” which
immediately followed “Wagner in Bayreuth,” and he became inclined to
look on the artist, in the narrow sense, as only “a splendid relic of
the past,” not, indeed, altogether losing his earlier conception, but
disposed to believe that “the scientific man is the finest development
of the artistic man.” In his essay on Wagner he had presented art as the
essentially metaphysical activity of Man, here following Schopenhauer.
“Every genius,” well said Schopenhauer, “is a great child; he gazes out
at the world as something strange, a spectacle, and therefore with
purely objective interest.” That is to say that the highest attitude
attainable by man towards life is that of æsthetic contemplation. But it
took on a different character in Nietzsche. In 1878 Nietzsche wrote of
his early essay on Wagner: “At that time I believed that the world was
created from the æsthetic standpoint, as a play, and that as a moral
phenomenon it was a deception: on that account I came to the conclusion
that the world was only to be justified as an æsthetic phenomenon.”[141]
At the end of his active career Nietzsche was once more reproducing this
proposition in many ways. Jules de Gaultier has much interested himself
in Nietzsche, but he had already reached, no doubt through Schopenhauer,
a rather similar conception before he came in contact with Nietzsche’s
work, and in the present day he is certainly the thinker who has most
systematically and philosophically elaborated the conception.[142]
Gaultier is most generally known by that perhaps not quite happily
chosen term of “Bovarism,” embodied in the title of his earliest book
and abstracted from Flaubert’s heroine, which stands for one of his most
characteristic conceptions, and, indeed, in a large sense, for the
central idea of his philosophy. In its primary psychological sense
Bovarism is the tendency—the unconscious tendency of Emma Bovary and,
more or less, all of us—to conceive of ourselves as other than we are.
Our picture of the world, for good or for evil, is an idealised picture,
a fiction, a waking dream, an _als ob_, as Vaihinger would say. But when
we idealise the world we begin by first idealising ourselves. We imagine
ourselves other than we are, and in so imagining, as Gaultier clearly
realises, we tend to mould ourselves, so that reality becomes a
prolongation of fiction. As Meister Eckhart long since finely said: “A
man is what he loves.” A similar thought was in Plato’s mind. In modern
times a variation of this same idea has been worked out, not as by
Gaultier from the philosophic side, but from the medical and more
especially the psycho-analytic side, by Dr. Alfred Adler of Vienna.[143]
Adler has suggestively shown how often a man’s or a woman’s character is
constituted by a process of fiction,—that is by making an ideal of what
it is, or what it ought to be,—and then so far as possible moulding it
into the shape of that fiction, a process which is often interwoven with
morbid elements, especially with an original basis of organic defect,
the reaction being an effort, sometimes successful, to overcome that
defect, and even to transform it into a conspicuous quality, as when
Demosthenes, who was a stutterer, made himself a great orator. Even
thinkers may not wholly escape this tendency, and I think it would be
easily possible to show that, for instance, Nietzsche was moved by what
Adler calls the “masculine protest”; one remembers how shrinkingly
delicate Nietzsche was towards women and how emphatically he declared
they should never be approached without a whip. Adler owed nothing to
Gaultier, of whom he seems to be ignorant; he found his first
inspiration in Vaihinger’s doctrine of the “as if”; Gaultier, however,
owes nothing to Vaihinger, and, indeed, began to publish earlier, though
not before Vaihinger’s book was written. Gaultier’s philosophic descent
is mainly from Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.
There is another deeper and wider sense, a more abstract esoteric sense,
in which Jules de Gaultier understands Bovarism. It is not only the
human being and human groups who are psychologically Bovaristic, the
Universe itself, the Eternal Being (to adopt an accepted fiction),
metaphysically partakes of Bovarism. The Universe, it seems to Gaultier,
necessarily conceives itself as other than it is. Single, it conceives
itself multiple, as subject and object. Thus is furnished the
fundamental convention which we must grant to the Dramatist who presents
the cosmic tragi-comedy.[144]
It may seem to some that the vision of the world which Man pursues on
his course across the Universe becomes ever more impalpable and
visionary. And so perhaps it may be. But even if that were an
undesirable result, it would still be useless to fight against God. We
are, after all, merely moulding the conceptions which a little later
will become commonplaced and truisms. For really—while we must hold
physics and metaphysics apart, for they cannot be blended—a metaphysics
which is out of harmony with physics is negligible; it is nothing in the
world. And it is our physical world that is becoming more impalpable and
visionary. It is “matter,” the very structure of the “atom,” that is
melting into a dream, and if it may seem that on the spiritual side life
tends to be moulding itself to the conception of Calderon as a dream, it
is because the physical atom is pursuing that course. Unless we hold in
mind the analysis of the world towards which the physicist is bringing
us, we shall not understand the synthesis of the world towards which the
philosopher is bringing us. Gaultier’s philosophy may not be based upon
physics, but it seems to be in harmony with physics.
This is the metaphysical scaffolding—we may if we like choose to
dispense with it—by aid of which Jules de Gaultier erects his
spectacular conception of the world. He is by no means concerned to deny
the necessity of morality. On the contrary, morality is the necessary
restraint on the necessary biological instinct of possession, on the
desire, that is, by the acquisition of certain objects, to satisfy
passions which are most often only the exaggeration of natural needs,
but which—through the power of imagination such exaggeration inaugurates
in the world—lead to the development of civilisation. Limited and
definite so long as confined to their biological ends, needs are
indefinitely elastic, exhibiting, indeed, an almost hysterical character
which becomes insatiable. They mark a hypertrophy of the possessive
instinct which experience shows to be a menace to social life. Thus the
Great War of recent times may be regarded as the final tragic result of
the excessive development through half a century of an economic fever,
the activity of needs beyond their due biological ends producing
suddenly the inevitable result.[145] So that the possessive instinct,
while it is the cause of the formation of an economic civilised society,
when pushed too far becomes the cause of the ruin of that society. Man,
who begins by acquiring just enough force to compel Nature to supply his
bare needs, himself becomes, according to the tragic Greek saying, the
greatest force of Nature. Yet the fact that a civilisation may persist
for centuries shows that men in societies have found methods of
combating the exaggerated development of the possessive instinct, of
retaining it within bounds which have enabled societies to enjoy a
fairly long life. These methods become embodied in religions and
moralities and laws. They react in concert to restrain the greediness
engendered by the possessive instinct. They make virtues of Temperance
and Sobriety and Abnegation. They invent Great Images which arouse human
hopes and human fears. They prescribe imperatives, with sanctions, in
part imposed by the Great Images and in part by the actual executive
force of social law. So societies are enabled to immunise themselves
against the ravaging auto-intoxication of an excessive instinct of
possession, and the services rendered by religions and moralities cannot
be too highly estimated. They are the spontaneous physiological
processes which counteract disease before medical science comes into
play.
But are they of any use in those periods of advanced civilisation which
they have themselves contributed to form? When Man has replaced flint
knives and clubs and slings by the elaborate weapons we know, can he be
content with methods of social preservation which date from the time of
flint knives and clubs and slings? The efficacy of those restraints
depends on a sensibility which could only exist when men scarcely
distinguished imaginations from perceptions. Thence arose the credulity
on which religions and moralities flourished. But now the Images have
grown pale in human sensibility, just as they have in words, which are
but effaced images. We need a deeper reality to take the place of these
early beliefs which the growth of intelligence necessarily shows to be
illusory. We must seek in the human ego an instinct in which is
manifested a truly autonomous play of the power of imagination, an
instinct which by virtue of its own proper development may restrain the
excesses of the possessive instinct and dissipate the perils which
threaten civilisation. The æsthetic instinct alone answers to that
double demand.
At this point we may pause to refer to the interesting analogy between
this argument of Jules de Gaultier and another recently proposed
solution of the problems of civilisation presented by Bertrand Russell,
to which there has already been occasion to refer. The two views were
clearly suggested by the same events, though apparently in complete
independence, and it is interesting to observe the considerable degree
of harmony which unites two such distinguished thinkers in different
lands, and with unlike philosophic standpoints as regards ultimate
realities.[146] Man’s impulses, as we know, Bertrand Russell holds to be
of two kinds: those that are possessive and those that are creative; the
typical possessive impulse being that of property and the typical
creative impulse that of the artist. It is in following the creative
impulse, he believes, that man’s path of salvation lies, for the
possessive impulses necessarily lead to conflict while the creative
impulses are essentially harmonious. Bertrand Russell seeks the
unification of life. But consistency of action should, he holds, spring
from consistency of impulse rather than from the control of impulse by
will. Like Gaultier, he believes in what has been called, perhaps not
happily, “the law of irony”; that is to say, that the mark we hit is
never the mark we aimed at, so that, in all supreme success in life, as
Goethe said of Wilhelm Meister, we are like Saul, the son of Kish, who
went forth to seek his father’s asses and found a kingdom. “Those who
best promote life,” Russell prefers to put it, “do not have life for
their purpose. They aim rather at what seems like a gradual incarnation,
a bringing into our human existence of something eternal.” And, again
like Gaultier, he invokes Spinoza and what in his phraseology he called
“the intellectual love of God.” “Take no thought, saying, What shall we
eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?
Whosoever has known a strong creative impulse has known the value of
this precept in its exact and literal sense; it is preoccupation with
possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living
freely and nobly.”[147]
This view of the matter seems substantially the same, it may be in an
unduly simplified form, as the conception which Jules de Gaultier has
worked out more subtly and complexly, seeking to weave in a large number
of the essential factors, realising that the harmony of life must yet be
based on an underlying conflict.[148] The main difference would seem to
be that Bertrand Russell’s creative impulse seems to be fairly identical
with the productive impulse of art in the large sense in which I have
throughout understood it, while Jules de Gaultier is essentially
concerned with the philosophic or religious side of the art impulse;
that is to say, the attitude of æsthetic contemplation which in
appearance forms the absolute antithesis to the possessive instinct. It
is probable, however, that there is no real discrepancy here, for as we
may regard æsthetic contemplation as the passive aspect of art, so art
may be regarded as the active aspect of æsthetic contemplation, and
Bertrand Russell, we may certainly believe, would include the one under
art as Jules de Gaultier would include the other under æsthetics.
The æsthetic instinct, as Jules de Gaultier understands it, answers the
double demand of our needs to-day, not, like religions and moralities,
by evoking images as menaces or as promises, only effective if they can
be realised in the world of sensation, and so merely constituting
another attempt to gratify the possessive instinct, by enslaving the
power of imagination to that alien master. Through the æsthetic instinct
Man is enabled to procure joy, not from the things themselves and the
sensations due to the possession of things, but from the very images of
things. Beyond the sense of utility bound up with the possession of
objects, he acquires the privilege, bound up with the sole contemplation
of them, of enjoying the beauty of things. By the æsthetic instinct the
power of imagination realises its own proper tendency and attains its
own proper end.
Such a process cannot fail to have its reaction on the social
environment. It must counteract the exaggeration of the possessive
instinct. To that impulse, when it transgresses the legitimate bounds of
biological needs and threatens to grow like a destructive cancer, the
æsthetic instinct proposes another end, a more human end, that of
æsthetic joy. Therewith the exuberance of insatiable and ruinous
cupidity is caught in the forms of art, the beauty of the universe is
manifested to all eyes, and the happiness which had been sought in the
paradoxical enterprise of glutting that insatiable desire finds its
perpetual satisfaction in the absolute and complete realisation of
beauty.
As Jules de Gaultier understands it, we see that the æsthetic instinct
is linked on to the possessive instinct. Bertrand Russell would
sometimes seem to leave the possessive instinct in the void without
making any provision for its satisfaction. In Gaultier’s view, we may
probably say it is taken in charge by the æsthetic instinct as soon as
it has fulfilled its legitimate biological ends, and its excessive
developments, what might otherwise be destructive, are sublimated. The
æsthetic instinct, Gaultier insists, like the other instincts, even the
possessive instinct, has imperative claims; it is an appetite of the
_ego_, developed at the same hearth of intimate activity, drawing its
strength from the same superabundance from which they draw strength.
Therefore, in the measure in which it absorbs force they must lose
force, and civilisation gains.
The development of the æsthetic sense is, indeed, indispensable if
civilisation—which we may, perhaps, from the present point of view,
regard with Gaultier as the embroidery worked by imagination on the
stuff of our elementary needs—is to pass safely through its critical
period and attain any degree of persistence. The appearance of the
æsthetic sense is then an event of the first order in the rank of
natural miracles, strictly comparable to the evolution in the organic
sphere of the optic nerves, which made it possible to know things
clearly apart from the sensations of actual contact. There is no mere
simile here, Gaultier believes: the faculty of drawing joy from the
images of things, apart from the possession of them, is based on
physiological conditions which growing knowledge of the nervous system
may some day make clearer.[149]
It is this specific quality, the power of enjoying things without being
reduced to the need of possessing them, which differentiates the
æsthetic instinct from other instincts and confers on it the character
of morality. Based, like the other instincts on egoism, it, yet, unlike
the other instincts, leads to no destructive struggles. Its powers of
giving satisfaction are not dissipated by the number of those who secure
that satisfaction. Æsthetic contemplation engenders neither hatred nor
envy. Unlike the things that appeal to the possessive instinct, it
brings men together and increases sympathy. Unlike those moralities
which are compelled to institute prohibitions, the æsthetic sense, even
in the egoistic pursuit of its own ends, becomes blended with morality,
and so serves in the task of maintaining society.
Thus it is that, by aiming at a different end, the æsthetic sense yet
attains the end aimed at by morality. That is the aspect of the matter
which Gaultier would emphasise. There is implied in it the judgment that
when the æsthetic sense deviates from its proper ends to burden itself
with moral intentions—when, that is, it ceases to be itself—it ceases to
realise morality. “Art for art’s sake!” the artists of old cried. We
laugh at that cry now. Gaultier, indeed, considers that the idea of pure
art has in every age been a red rag in the eyes of the human bull. Yet,
if we had possessed the necessary intelligence, we might have seen that
it held a great moral truth. “The poet, retired in his Tower of Ivory,
isolated, according to his desire, from the world of man, resembles,
whether he so wishes or not, another solitary figure, the watcher
enclosed for months at a time in a lighthouse at the head of a cliff.
Far from the towns peopled by human crowds, far from the earth, of which
he scarcely distinguishes the outlines through the mist, this man in his
wild solitude, forced to live only with himself, almost forgets the
common language of men, but he knows admirably well how to formulate
through the darkness another language infinitely useful to men and
visible afar to seamen in distress.”[150] The artist for art’s sake—and
the same is constantly found true of the scientist for science’s
sake[151]—in turning aside from the common utilitarian aims of men is
really engaged in a task none other can perform, of immense utility to
men. The Cistercians of old hid their cloisters in forests and
wildernesses afar from society, mixing not with men nor performing for
them so-called useful tasks; yet they spent their days and nights in
chant and prayer, working for the salvation of the world, and they stand
as the symbol of all higher types of artists, not the less so because
they, too, illustrate that faith transcending sight, without which no
art is possible.
The artist, as Gaultier would probably put it, has to effect a necessary
Bovarism. If he seeks to mix himself up with the passions of the crowd,
if his work shows the desire to prove anything, he thereby neglects the
creation of beauty. Necessarily so, for he excites a state of
combativity, he sets up moral, political, and social values, all having
relation to biological needs and the possessive instinct, the most
violent of ferments. He is entering on the struggle over Truth—though
his opinion is here worth no more than any other man’s—which, on account
of the presumption of its universality, is brandished about in the most
ferociously opposed camps.
The mother who seeks to soothe her crying child preaches him no sermon.
She holds up some bright object and it fixes his attention. So it is the
artist acts: he makes us see. He brings the world before us, not on the
plane of covetousness and fears and commandments, but on the plane of
representation; the world becomes a spectacle. Instead of imitating
those philosophers who with analyses and syntheses worry over the goal
of life, and the justification of the world, and the meaning of the
strange and painful phenomenon called Existence, the artist takes up
some fragment of that existence, transfigures it, shows it: There! And
therewith the spectator is filled with enthusiastic joy, and the
transcendent Adventure of Existence is justified. Every great artist, a
Dante or a Shakespeare, a Dostoievsky or a Proust, thus furnishes the
metaphysical justification of existence by the beauty of the vision he
presents of the cruelty and the horror of existence. All the pain and
the madness, even the ugliness and the commonplace of the world, he
converts into shining jewels. By revealing the spectacular character of
reality he restores the serenity of its innocence.[152] We see the face
of the world as of a lovely woman smiling through her tears.
How are we to expect this morality—if so we may still term it—to
prevail? Jules de Gaultier, as we have seen, realising that the old
moralities have melted away, seems to think that the morality of art, by
virtue of its life, will take the place of that which is dead. But he is
not specially concerned to discuss in detail the mechanism of this
replacement, though he looks to the social action of artists in
initiation and stimulation. That was the view of Guyau, and it fitted in
with his sociological conception of art as being one with life; great
poets, great artists, Guyau believed, will become the leaders of the
crowd, the priests of a social religion without dogmas.[153] But
Gaultier’s conception goes beyond this. He cannot feel that the direct
action of poets and artists is sufficient. They only reveal the more
conspicuous aspects of the æsthetic sense. Gaultier considers that the
æsthetic sense, in humbler forms, is mixed up with the most primitive
manifestations of human life, wherein it plays a part of unsuspected
importance.[154] The more thorough investigation of these primitive
forms, he believes, will make it possible for the lawmaker to aid the
mechanism of this transformation of morality.
Having therewith brought us to the threshold of the æsthetic revolution,
Jules de Gaultier departs. It remains necessary to point out that it is
only the threshold. However intimately the elements of the æsthetic
sense may be blended with primitive human existence, we know too well
that, as the conditions of human existence are modified, art seems to
contract and degenerate, so we can hardly expect the æsthetic sense to
develop in the reverse direction. At present, in the existing state of
civilisation, with the decay of the controlling power of the old
morality, the æsthetic sense often seems to be also decreasing, rather
than increasing, in the masses of the population.[155] One need not be
troubled to find examples. They occur on every hand and whenever we take
up a newspaper. One notes, for instance, in England, that the most
widespread spectacularly attractive things outside cities may be said to
be the private parks and the churches. (Cities lie outside the present
argument, for their inhabitants are carefully watched whenever they
approach anything that appeals to the possessive instinct.) Formerly the
parks and churches were freely open all day long for those who desired
to enjoy the spectacle of their beauty and not to possess it. The owners
of parks and the guardians of churches have found it increasingly
necessary to close them because of the alarmingly destructive or
predatory impulses of a section of the public. So the many have to
suffer for the sins of what may only be the few. It is common to speak
of this as a recent tendency of our so-called civilisation. But the
excesses of the possessive instinct cannot have been entirely latent
even in remote times, though they seem to have been less in evidence.
The Platonic Timæus attributed to the spectacle of the sun and the moon
and the stars the existence of philosophy. He failed to note that the
sun and the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago—as even
their infinitely more numerous analogues on the earth beneath are likely
to disappear—had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human
hands. But the warps and strains of civilised life, with its excessive
industrialism and militarism, seem to disturb the wholesome balance of
even the humblest elements of the possessive and æsthetic instincts.
This means, in the first and most important place, that the liberty of
the whole community in its finest manifestations is abridged by a
handful of imbeciles. There are infinite freedoms which it would be a
joy for them to take, and a help to their work, and a benefit to the
world, but they cannot be allowed to take them because there are some
who can only take them and perish, damning others with themselves.
Besides this supreme injury to life, there are perpetual minor injuries
that the same incapable section of people are responsible for in every
direction, while the actual cost of them in money, to the community they
exert so pernicious an influence on, is so great and so increasing that
it constitutes a social and individual burden which from time to time
leads to outbursts of anxious expostulation never steady enough to be
embodied in any well-sustained and coherent policy.
It is not, indeed, to be desired that the eugenic action of society
should be directly aimed at any narrowly æsthetic or moral end. That has
never been the ideal of any of those whose conceptions of social life
deserve to be taken seriously, least of all Galton, who is commonly
regarded as the founder of the modern scientific art of eugenics.
“Society would be very dull,” he remarked, “if every man resembled
Marcus Aurelius or Adam Bede.” He even asserted that “we must leave
morality as far as possible out of the discussion,” since moral goodness
and badness are shifting phases of a civilisation; what is held morally
good in one age is held bad in another. That would hold true of any
æsthetic revolution. But we cannot afford to do without the sane and
wholesome persons who are so well balanced that they can adjust
themselves to the conditions of every civilisation as it arises and
carry it on to its finest issues. We should not, indeed, seek to breed
them directly, and we need not, since under natural conditions Nature
will see to their breeding. But it is all the more incumbent upon us to
eliminate those ill-balanced and poisonous stocks produced by the
unnatural conditions which society in the past had established.[156]
That we have to do alike in the interests of the offspring of these
diseased stocks and in the interests of society. No power in Heaven or
Earth can ever confer upon us the right to create the unfit in order to
hang them like millstones around the necks of the fit. The genius of
Galton enabled him to see this clearly afresh and to indicate the
reasonable path of human progress. It was a truth that had long been
forgotten by the strenuous humanitarians who ruled the nineteenth
century, so anxious to perpetuate and multiply all the worst spawn of
their humanity. Yet it was an ancient truth, carried into practice,
however unconsciously and instinctively, by Man throughout his upward
course, probably even from Palæolithic times, and when it ceased Man’s
upward course also ceased. As Carr-Saunders has shown, in a learned and
comprehensive work which is of primary importance for the understanding
of the history of Man, almost every people on the face of the earth has
adopted one or more practices—notably infanticide, abortion, or severe
restriction of sexual intercourse—adapted to maintain due selection of
the best stocks and to limit the excess of fertility. They largely
ceased to work because Man had acquired the humanity which was repelled
by such methods and lost the intelligence to see that they must be
replaced by better methods. For the process of human evolution is
nothing more than a process of sifting, and where that sifting ceases
evolution ceases, becomes, indeed, devolution.[157]
When we survey the history of Man we are constantly reminded of the
profound truth which often lay beneath the parables of Jesus, and they
might well form the motto for any treatise on eugenics. Jesus was
constantly seeking to suggest the necessity of that process of sifting
in which all human evolution consists; he was ever quick to point out
how few could be, as it was then phrased, “saved,” how extremely narrow
is the path to the Kingdom of Heaven, or, as many might now call it, the
Kingdom of Man. He proclaimed symbolically a doctrine of heredity which
is only to-day beginning to be directly formulated: “Every tree that
bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire.”
There was no compunction at all in his promulgation of this radical yet
necessary doctrine for the destruction of unfit stocks. Even the best
stocks Jesus was in favour of destroying ruthlessly as soon as they had
ceased to be the best: “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt
have lost his savour, ... it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be
cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.” Jesus has been
reproached by Nietzsche for founding a religion for slaves and
plebeians, and so in the result it may have become. But we see that, in
the words of the Teacher as they have been handed down, the religion of
Jesus was the most aristocratic of religions. Its doctrine embodied not
even the permission to live for those human stocks which fall short of
its aristocratic ideal. It need not surprise us to find that Jesus had
already said two thousand years ago what Galton, in a more modern
and—some would add—more humane way, was saying yesterday. If there had
not been a core of vital truth beneath the surface of the first
Christian’s teaching, it could hardly have survived so long. We are told
that it is now dead, but should it ever be revived we may well believe
that this is the aspect by which it will be commended. It is a
significant fact that at the two spiritual sources of our world, Jesus
and Plato, we find the assertion of the principle of eugenics, in one
implicitly, in the other explicitly.
Jules de Gaultier was not concerned to put forward an aristocratic
conception of his æsthetic doctrine, and, as we have seen, he remained
on the threshold of eugenics. He was content to suggest, though with no
positive assurance, a more democratic conception. He had, indeed, one
may divine, a predilection for that middle class which has furnished so
vast a number of the supreme figures in art and thought; by producing a
class of people dispensed from tasks of utility, he had pointed out, “a
society creates for itself an organ fitted for the higher life and bears
witness that it has passed beyond the merely biological stage to reach
the human stage.” But the middle class is not indispensable, and if it
is doomed Gaultier saw ways of replacing it.[158] Especially we may seek
to ensure that, in every social group, the individual task of
utilitarian work shall be so limited that the worker is enabled to gain
a leisure sufficiently ample to devote, if he has the aptitude, to works
of intellect or art. He would agree with Otto Braun, the inspired youth
who was slain in the Great War, that if we desire the enablement of the
people “the eight-hours day becomes nothing less than the most
imperative demand of culture.” It is in this direction, it may well be,
that social evolution is moving, however its complete realisation may,
by temporary causes, from time to time be impeded. The insistent demand
for increased wages and diminished hours of work has not been inspired
by the desire to raise the level of culture in the social environment,
or to inaugurate any æsthetic revolution, yet, by “the law of irony”
which so often controls the realisation of things, that is the result
which may be achieved. The new leisure conferred on the worker may be
transformed into spiritual activity, and the liberated utilitarian
energy into æsthetic energy. The road would thus be opened for a new
human adventure, of anxious interest, which the future alone can reveal.
We cannot be sure that this transformation will take place. We cannot be
sure, indeed, that it is possible for it to take place unless the
general quality of the population in whom so fine a process must be
effected is raised by a more rigid eugenic process than there is yet any
real determination among us to exert. Men still bow down before the
fetish of mere quantity in population, and that worship may be their
undoing. Giant social organisms, like the giant animal species of early
times, may be destined to disappear suddenly when they have attained
their extreme expansion.
Even if that should be so, even if there should be a solution of
continuity in the course of civilisation, even then, as again Jules de
Gaultier also held, we need not despair, for life is a fountain of
everlasting exhilaration. No creature on the earth has so tortured
himself as Man, and none has raised a more exultant Alleluia. It would
still be possible to erect places of refuge, cloisters wherein life
would yet be full of joy for men and women determined by their vocation
to care only for beauty and knowledge, and so to hand on to a future
race the living torch of civilisation. When we read Palladius, when we
read Rabelais, we realise how vast a field lies open for human activity
between the Thebaid on one side and Thelema on the other. Out of such
ashes a new world might well arise. Sunset is the promise of dawn.
THE END
Footnote 113:
Alfred Niceforo, _Les Indices Numériques de la Civilisation et du
Progrès_. Paris, 1921.
Footnote 114:
Professor Bury, in his admirable history of the idea of progress (J.
B. Bury, _The Idea of Progress_, 1920), never defines the meaning of
“progress.” As regards the meaning of “civilisation” see essay on
“Civilisation,” Havelock Ellis, _The Philosophy of Conflict_ (1919),
pp. 14-22.
Footnote 115:
Quetelet, _Physique Sociale_. (1869.)
Footnote 116:
See e.g., Maurice Parmelee’s _Criminology_, the sanest and most
comprehensive manual on the subject we have in English.
Footnote 117:
Élie Faure, with his usual incisive insight, has set out the real
characters of the “Greek Spirit” (“Reflexions sur le Génie Grec,”
_Monde Nouveau_, December, 1922).
Footnote 118:
This tendency, on which Herbert Spencer long ago insisted, is in its
larger aspects quite clear. E. C. Pell (_The Law of Births and
Deaths_, 1921) has argued that it holds good of civilised man to-day,
and that our decreasing birth rate with civilisation is quite
independent of any effort on Man’s part to attain that evolutionary
end.
Footnote 119:
Professor McDougall refers to the high birth-rate of the lower stratum
as more “normal.” If that were so, civilisation would certainly be
doomed. All high evolution _normally_ involves a low birth-rate.
Strange how difficult it is even for those most concerned with these
questions to see the facts simply and clearly!
Footnote 120:
A. M. Carr-Saunders, _The Population Problem: A Study in Human
Evolution_ (1922), pp. 457, 472.
Footnote 121:
Dupréel, _La Légende Socratique_ (1922), p. 428. Dupréel considers (p.
431) that the Protagorean spirit was marked by the idea of explaining
the things of thought, and life in general, by the meeting,
opposition, and harmony of individual activities, leading up to the
sociological notion of _convention_, and behind it, of relativity.
Nietzsche was a pioneer in restoring the Sophists to their rightful
place in Greek thought. The Greek culture of the Sophists grew out of
all the Greek instincts, he says (_The Will to Power_, section 428):
“And it has ultimately shown itself to be right. Our modern attitude
of mind is, to a great extent, Heraclitean, Democritean, and
Protagorean. To say that it is Protagorean is even sufficient, because
Protagoras was himself a synthesis of Heraclitus and Democritus.” The
Sophists, by realizing that many supposed objective ideas were really
subjective, have often been viewed with suspicion as content with a
mere egotistically individualistic conception of life. The same has
happened to Nietzsche. It was probably an error as regards the
greatest Sophists, and is certainly an error, though even still
commonly committed, as regards Nietzsche; see the convincing
discussion of Nietzsche’s moral aim in Salter, _Nietzsche the
Thinker_, chap. XXIV.
Footnote 122:
I may here, perhaps, remark that in the General Preface to my _Studies
in the Psychology of Sex_ I suggested that we now have to lay the
foundation of a new casuistry, no longer theological and Christian,
but naturalistic and scientific.
Footnote 123:
Oswald Spengler, _Der Untergang des Abendlandes_, vol. I (1918); vol.
II (1922).
Footnote 124:
In an interesting pamphlet, _Pessimismus?_ Spengler has since pointed
out that he does not regard his argument as pessimistic. The end of a
civilisation is its fulfilment, and there is still much to be achieved
(though not, he thinks, along the line of art) before our own
civilisation is fulfilled. With Spengler’s conception of that
fulfilment we may, however, fail to sympathise.
Footnote 125:
See, for instance, W. L. Newman, _The Politics of Aristotle_, vol. 1,
p. 201, and S. H. Butcher, _Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine
Art_, p. 119.
Footnote 126:
Beauty is a dangerous conception to deal with, and the remembrance of
this great saying may, perhaps, help to save us from the degrading
notion that beauty merely inheres in objects, or has anything to do
with the prim and smooth conventions which make prettiness. Even in
the fine art of painting it is more reasonable to regard prettiness as
the negation of beauty. It is possible to find beauty in Degas and
Cézanne, but not in Bouguereau or Cabanel. The path of beauty is not
soft and smooth, but full of harshness and asperity. It is a rose that
grows only on a bush covered with thorns. As of goodness and of truth,
men talk too lightly of Beauty. Only to the bravest and skilfullest is
it given to break through the briers of her palace and kiss at last
her enchanted lips.
Footnote 127:
Ruskin was what Spinoza has been called, a God-intoxicated man; he had
a gift of divine rhapsody, which reached at times to inspiration. But
it is not enough to be God-intoxicated, for into him whose mind is
disorderly and ignorant and ill-disciplined the Gods pour their wine
in vain. Spinoza’s mind was not of that kind, Ruskin’s too often was,
so that Ruskin can never be, like Spinoza, a permanent force in the
world of thought. His interest is outside that field, mainly perhaps
psychological in the precise notation of a particular kind of æsthetic
sensibility. The admiration of Ruskin cherished by Proust, himself a
supreme master in this field, is significant.
Footnote 128:
Butcher, _Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_, chap. V, “Art
and Morals.” Aristotle could have accepted the almost Freudian view of
Croce that art is the deliverer, the process through which we overcome
the stress of inner experiences by objectifying them (_Æsthetics as
Science of Expression_, p. 35). But Plato could not accept Croce,
still less Freud.
Footnote 129:
Schopenhauer, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_ (1859), vol. II, p.
442. For a careful and detailed study of Schopenhauer’s conception of
art, see A. Fauconnet, _L’Esthétique de Schopenhauer_ (1913).
Footnote 130:
I find that I have here negligently ascribed to Bergson a metaphor
which belongs to Croce, who at this point says the same thing as
Bergson, though he gives it a different name. In _Æsthetics as Science
of Expression_ (English translation, p. 66) we read: “The world of
which as a rule we have intuition [Bergson could not have used that
word here] is a small thing.... ‘Here is a man, here is a horse, this
is heavy, this is hard, this pleases me,’ etc. It is a medley of light
and colour, which could not pictorially attain to any more sincere
expression than a haphazard splash of colour, from among which would
with difficulty stand out a few special distinctive traits. This and
nothing else is what we possess in our ordinary life; this is the
basis of our ordinary action. It is the index of a book. The labels
tied to things take the place of things themselves.”
Footnote 131:
H. Bergson, _Le Rire_. For a clear, concise, and sympathetic
exposition of Bergson’s standpoint, though without special reference
to art, see Karin Stephen, _The Misuse of Mind_.
Footnote 132:
This may seem to cast a critical reflection on Croce. Let me,
therefore, hasten to add that it is merely the personal impression
that Croce, for all his virtuous aspirations after the concrete, tends
to fall into verbal abstraction. He so often reminds one of that old
lady who used to find (for she died during the Great War) such
spiritual consolation in “that blessed word Mesopotamia.” This refers,
however, to the earlier more than to the later Croce.
Footnote 133:
H. Rickert, _System der Philosophie_, vol. I (1921).
Footnote 134:
Before Baumgarten this distinction seems to have been recognised,
though too vaguely and inconsistently, by Hutcheson, who is so often
regarded as the real founder of modern æsthetics. W. R. Scott
(_Francis Hutcheson_, p. 216) points out these two principles in
Hutcheson’s work, “the Internal Senses, as derived from Reflection,
representing the attitude of the ‘Spectator’ or observer in a picture
gallery while, on the other hand, as deduced from εὐέργεια find a
parallel in the artist’s own consciousness of success in his work,
thus the former might be called static and the latter dynamic
consciousness, or, in the special case of Morality, the first applies
primarily to approval of the acts of others, the second to each
individual’s approval of his own conduct.”
Footnote 135:
This would probably be recognised even by those moralists who, like
Hutcheson, in their anxiety to make clear an important relationship,
have spoken ambiguously. “Probably Hutcheson’s real thought,” remarks
F. C. Sharp (_Mind_, 1921, p. 42), “is that the moral emotion, while
possessing many important affinities with the æsthetic, is in the last
resort different in content.”
Footnote 136:
Schopenhauer long ago pointed out that a picture should be looked at
as a royal personage is approached, in silence, until the moment it
pleases to speak to you, for, if you speak first (and how many critics
one knows who “speak first”!), you expose yourself to hear nothing but
the sound of your own voice. In other words, it is a spontaneous and
“mystical” experience.
Footnote 137:
It is through Plotinus, also, that we realise how æsthetics is on the
same plane, if not one, with mysticism. For by his insistence on
Contemplation, which is æsthetics, we learn to understand what is
meant when it is said, as it often is, that mysticism is
Contemplation. (On this point, and on the early evolutions of
Christian Mysticism, see Dom Cuthbert Butler, _Western Mysticism_
(1922).)
Footnote 138:
Really, however, Plotinus was here a Neo-Aristotelian rather than a
Neo-Platonist, for Aristotle (_Ethics_, book X, chap. 6) had put the
claim of the Contemplative life higher even than Plato and almost
forestalled Plotinus. But as Aristotle was himself here a Platonist
that does not much matter.
Footnote 139:
See Inge, _Philosophy of Plotinus_, p. 179. In a fine passage (quoted
by Bridges in his _Spirit of Man_) Plotinus represents contemplation
as the great function of Nature herself, content, in a sort of
self-consciousness, to do nothing more than perfect that fair and
bright vision. This “metaphysical Narcissism,” as Palante might call
it, accords with the conception of various later thinkers, like
Schopenhauer, and like Gaultier, who however, seldom refers to
Plotinus.
Footnote 140:
R. Schmidt, _Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart in
Selbstdarstellungen_ (1921), vol. II.
Footnote 141:
E. Förster-Nietzsche, _Das Leben Nietzsches_, vol. II, p. 99.
Footnote 142:
W. M. Salter in his _Nietzsche the Thinker_—probably the best and most
exact study of Nietzsche’s thought we possess—summarises Nietzsche’s
“æsthetic metaphysics,” as he terms it (pp. 46-48), in words which
apply almost exactly to Gaultier.
Footnote 143:
See especially his book _Über den Nervösen Charakter_ (1912). It has
been translated into English.
Footnote 144:
Jules de Gaultier, _Le Bovarysme_, and various other of his works.
Georges Palante has lucidly and concisely expounded the idea of
Bovarism in a small volume, _La Philosophie du Bovarysme_ (_Mercure de
France_).
Footnote 145:
Gaultier has luminously discussed the relations of War, Civilisation,
and Art in the _Monde Nouveau_, August, 1920, and February, 1921.
Footnote 146:
These are problems concerning which innocent people might imagine that
the wise refrained from speculating, but, as a matter of fact, the
various groups of philosophic devotees may be divided into those
termed “Idealists” and those termed “Realists,” each assured of the
superiority of his own way of viewing thought. Roughly speaking, for
the idealist thought means the creation of the world, for the realist
its discovery. But here (as in many differences between Tweedledum and
Tweedledee for which men have slain one another these thousands of
years) there seem to be superiorities on both sides. Each looks at
thought in a different aspect. But the idealist could hardly create
the world with nothing there to make it from, nor the realist discover
it save through creating it afresh. We cannot, so to put it, express
in a single formula of three dimensions what only exists as a unity in
four dimensions.
Footnote 147:
Bertrand Russell, _Principles of Social Reconstruction_ (1916), p.
235.
Footnote 148:
I may here be allowed to refer to another discussion of this point,
Havelock Ellis, _The Philosophy of Conflict, and Other Essays_, pp.
57-68.
Footnote 149:
I may remark that Plato had long before attributed the same
observation to the Pythagorean Timæus in the sublime and amusing
dialogue that goes under that name: “Sight in my opinion is the source
of the greatest benefit to us, for had we never seen the stars, and
the sun, and the heavens, none of the words which we have spoken about
the universe would ever have been uttered. But now the sight of day
and night, and the months and the revolution of the years, have
created Number, and have given us a conception of Time, and the powers
of inquiring about the Nature of the Universe, and from this source we
have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or will
be given by the gods to mortal man.”
Footnote 150:
Jules de Gaultier, “La Guerre et les Destinées de l’Art,” _Monde
Nouveau_, August, 1920.
Footnote 151:
Thus Einstein, like every true man of science, holds that cultural
developments are not to be measured in terms of utilitarian technical
advances, much as he has himself been concerned with such advances,
but that, like the devotee of “Art for Art’s sake,” the man of science
must proclaim the maxim, “Science for Science’s sake.”
Footnote 152:
In the foregoing paragraphs I have, in my own way, reproduced the
thought, occasionally the words, of Jules de Gaultier, more especially
in “La Moralité Esthétique” (_Mercure de France_, 15th December,
1921), probably the finest short statement of this distinguished
thinker’s reflections on the matter in question.
Footnote 153:
Guyau, _L’Art au Point de Vue Sociologique_, p. 163.
Footnote 154:
This diffused æsthetic sense is correlated with a diffused artistic
instinct, based on craftsmanship, which the Greeks were afraid to
recognise because they looked down with contempt on the handicrafts as
vulgar. William Morris was a pioneer in asserting this association. As
a distinguished English writer, Mr. Charles Marriott, the novelist and
critic, clearly puts the modern doctrine: “The first step is to
absorb, or re-absorb, the ‘Artist’ into the craftsman.... Once agree
that the same æsthetic considerations which apply to painting a
picture apply, though in a different degree, to painting a door, and
you have emancipated labour without any prejudice to the highest
meaning of art.... A good surface of paint on a door is as truly an
emotional or æsthetic consideration as ‘significant form,’ indeed it
_is_ ‘significant form.’” (_Nation and Athenæum_, 1st July, 1922.)
Professor Santayana has spoken in the same sense: “In a thoroughly
humanised society everything—clothes, speech, manners, government—is a
work of art.” (_The Dial_, June, 1922, p. 563.) It is, indeed, the
general tendency to-day and is traceable in Croce’s later writings.
Footnote 155:
Thus it has often been pointed out that the Papuans are artists in
design of the first rank, with a finer taste in some matters than the
most highly civilised races of Europe. Professor R. Semon, who has
some remarks to this effect (_Correspondenzblatt_ of the German
Anthropological Society, March, 1902), adds that their unfailing
artistic sense is spread throughout the whole population and shown in
every object of daily use.
Footnote 156:
The presence of a small minority of abnormal or perverse persons—there
will be such, we may be sure, in every possible society—affords no
excuse for restricting the liberty of the many to the standard of the
few. The general prevalence of an æsthetic morality in classic times
failed to prevent occasional outbursts of morbid sexual impulse in the
presence of objects of art, even in temples. We find records of
Pygmalionism and allied perversities in Lucian, Athenæus, Pliny,
Valerius Maximus. Yet supposing that the Greeks had listened to the
proposals of some strayed Puritan visitor, from Britain or New
England, to abolish nude statues, or suppose that Plato, who wished to
do away with imaginative literature as liable to demoralise, had
possessed the influence he desired, how infinite the loss to all
mankind! In modern Europe we not only propose such legal abolition; we
actually, however in vain, carry it out. We seek to reduce all human
existence to absurdity. It is, at the best, unnecessary, for we may be
sure that, in spite of our efforts, a certain amount of absurdity will
always remain.
Footnote 157:
A. M. Carr-Saunders, _The Population Problem: A Study in Human
Evolution_ (Oxford Press, 1922).
Footnote 158:
J. de Gaultier, “Art et Civilisation,” _Monde Nouveau_, February,
1921.
INDEX
Abortion, once practised, 354.
Absolute, the, a fiction, 101.
Abyssian Church, dancing in worship of, 45.
Acting, music, and poetry, proceed in one stream, 36.
Adam, Villiers de l’Isle, his story _Le Secret de l’ancienne Musique_,
25.
Addison, Joseph, his style, 161-63, 184.
Adler, Dr. Alfred, of Vienna, 336, 337.
Adolescence, idealisation in, 107, 108.
Æschylus, developed technique of dancing, 56.
Æsthetic contemplation, 314, 315, 325, 326;
recognised by the Greeks, 330, 331;
two kinds of, that of spectator and that of participator, 331, 332;
the Shaftesbury attitude toward, 332, 333;
the Swift attitude toward, 333;
involves life as a spectacle, 333, 334;
and the systems of Gaultier and Russell, 343;
engenders neither hatred nor envy, 346.
Æsthetic instinct, to replace moralities, religions, and laws, 340,
341, 343-45;
differentiated from other instincts, 346;
has the character of morality, 346.
Æsthetic intuitionism, 260, 276, 279, 314.
Æsthetic sense, development of, indispensable for civilisation, 345;
realises morality when unburdened with moral intentions, 346;
mixed with primitive manifestations of life, 350;
correlated with diffused artistic instinct, 350 _n._;
seems to be decreasing, 350-52.
Æsthetics, and ethics, among the Greeks, 247;
with us, 348;
in the Greek sense, 263;
the founders of, 271, 329;
and art, the unlikeness of, 325-28;
on same plane with mysticism, 330 _n._
Africa, love-dance in, 46, 49, 50.
Akhenaten, 28.
Alaro, in Mallorca, dancing in church at, 44, 45.
Alberti, Leo, vast-ranging ideas of, 5.
Alcohol, consumption of, as test of civilisation, 295, 296.
Anatomy, studied by Leonardo da Vinci, 120.
Anaximander, 89.
Ancestry, the force of, in handwriting, 157, 158;
in style, 158-61, 190.
Anna, Empress, 59.
Antisthenes, 249 _n._
“Appearance,” 219 _n._
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 202.
Arabs, dancing among, 38.
Arbuckle, one of the founders of æsthetics, 271;
insisted on imagination as formative of character, 272.
Architecture. _See_ Building.
Aristophanes, 311.
Aristotle, 89;
on tragedy, 56;
on the Mysteries, 242;
on the moral quality of an act, 248;
his use of the term “moral sense,” 273;
on Art and Nature in the making of the State, 313;
his use of the term “artists,” 313;
his view of poetry, 318;
and the contemplative life, 330 _n._
Art, life as, more difficult to realise than to act, 1, 2;
universe conceived as work of, by the primitive philosopher, 1;
life as, views of finest thinkers of China and Greece on, 2-6,
247-52;
whole conception of, has been narrowed and debased, 6, 7;
in its proper sense, 7, 8;
as the desire for beautification, 8;
of living, has been decadent during the last two thousand years, 8
_n._;
Napoleon in the sphere of, 10;
of living, the Lifuan, 13-18;
of living, the Chinese, 27;
Chinese civilisation shows that human life is, 30;
of living, T’ung’s story the embodiment of the Chinese symbol of, 33;
life identical with, 33-35;
of dancing, 36, 51-67, _see_ Dancing;
of life, a dance, 66, 67;
science and, no distinction between, in classic times, 68;
science and, distinction between, in modern times, 68-70;
science is of the nature of, 71;
represented by Pythagoras as source of science, 74;
Greek, 76 _n._;
of thinking, 68-140, _see_ Thinking;
the solution of the conflicts of philosophy in, 82, 83;
philosophy and, close relationship of, 83-85;
impulse of, transformed sexual instinct, 108-12;
and mathematics, 138-40;
of writing, 141-190, _see_ Writing;
Man added to Nature, is the task in, 153;
the freedom and the easiness of, do not necessarily go together, 182;
of religion, 191-243, _see_ Religion;
of morals, 244-84, _see_ Morals;
the critic of, a critic of life, 269;
civilisation is an, 301, 310;
consideration of the question of the definition of, 310-12;
Nature and, 312, 313;
the sum of the active energies of mankind, 313;
and æsthetics, the unlikeness of, 314, 315, 325-28;
a genus, of which morals is a species, 316;
each, has its own morality, 318;
to assert that it gives pleasure a feeble conclusion, 319;
on the uselessness of, according to Schopenhauer and others, 319-21;
meaninglessness of the statement that it is useless, 322;
sociological function of, 323, 324;
philosophers have failed to see that it has a morality of its own,
324, 325;
for art’s sake, 346, 347.
Artist, partakes of divine nature of creator of the world, 2;
Napoleon as an, 10-12;
the true scientist as, 72, 73, 112;
the philosopher as, 72, 73, 85;
explanation of, 108-12;
Bacon’s definition of, Man added to Nature, 153;
makes all things new, 153;
in words, passes between the plane of new vision and the plane of new
creation, 170, 178;
life always a discipline for, 277;
lays up his treasure in Heaven, 307;
Man as, 310;
is a maker, 312;
Aristotle’s use of the term, 313;
reveals Nature, 320;
has to effect a necessary Bovarism, 348, 349.
Artistic creation, the process of its birth, 108, 109.
Arts, sometimes classic and sometimes decadent, 8 _n._;
and sciences, 68-70;
Master of, 69.
“Arty” people, 6, 7.
“As if,” germs of doctrine of, in Kant, 87;
world of, and Plato’s “Ideas,” 88;
source of the phrase, 88, 89;
seen in play, 89;
the doctrine of, not immune from criticism, 102;
fortifying influence of the doctrine, 102, 103.
_See_ Fiction, Vaihinger.
Asceticism, has nothing to do with normal religion, 222, 223;
among the Greeks, traced, 249 _n._;
and Christianity, 249 _n._
Asclepios, the cult of, 197 _n._
Atavism, in handwriting, 157, 158;
in style, 158-61, 190.
Athenæus, 55, 353 _n._;
his book about the Greeks, 76 _n._
Atom, a fiction or an hypothesis, 97, 338;
the structure of, 97 _n._
Attraction, force of, a fiction, 98.
Aurelius, Marcus, regarded art of life as like the dancer’s art, 66;
his statement of the mystical core of religion, 207;
adopted æsthetic criterion of moral action, 279.
Australians, religious dances among, 40.
Auto-erotic activities, 110, 111.
Axioms, akin to fiction, 94, 95.
Babies, 105.
Bach, Sebastian, 62, 311.
Bacon, Francis, his definition of the artist, Man added to Nature, 153;
his style compared with that of Shakespeare, 160;
the music of his style, 163;
heavy and formal letters of, 184;
his axiom, the right question is half the knowledge, 325.
Bacon, Roger, on the sciences, 68.
Balguy, Rev. John, 274.
Ballad, a dance as well as song, 62.
Ballet, the, chief form of Romantic dancing, 53;
the germ of, to be found in ancient Rome, 56;
origin of the modern, 56;
the Italian and the French, 56-58;
decline of, 58;
the Russian, 58-60;
the Swedish, 60.
Bantu, the question of the, 38, 45.
Baptism, 242.
“Barbarians,” the classic use of the term, 285.
Barebones, Praise-God, 272.
Baretti, G. M., 50.
Bastien-Lepage, Jules, 311.
Baudelaire, Charles, on vulgar locutions, 151.
Baumgarten, A. G., the commonly accepted founder of æsthetics, 326.
Bayaderes, 52.
Bayle, G. L., 261.
“Beautiful,” the, among Greeks and Romans, 247, 252.
Beauty, developed by dancing, 47;
as an element of literary style, 176-78;
and the good, among the Greeks, 247;
Plotinus’s doctrine of, 250, 251;
of virtue, 270 _n._;
æsthetic contemplation creates, 315, 327, 328;
and prettiness, 315 _n._;
revelation of, sometimes comes as by a process of “conversion,” 328,
329.
Bee, the, an artist, 312.
Beethoven, 311;
his Seventh Symphony, 62, 63.
Beggary in China, 31.
Benn, A. W., his _The Greek Philosophers_, 6, 252, 277 _n._
Bentham, Jeremy, adopted a fiction for his system, 99.
Berenson, Bernhard, critic of art, 114;
his attitude toward Leonardo da Vinci, 114, 117.
Bergson, Henri Louis, pyrotechnical allusions frequent in, 23;
regards philosophy as an art, 83, 84;
on clarity in style, 176, 177;
his idea of intuition, 232 _n._;
on reality, 320.
Berkeley, George, 95.
Bernard, Claude, personality in his _Leçons de Physiologie
Expérimentales_, 144.
Bible, the, the source of its long life, 179.
_See_ Old Testament, Revelation.
Birds, dancing of, 36 _n._, 45;
the attitude of the poet toward, 168.
Birth-rate, as test of civilisation, 294, 296, 299 _n._
“Bitter,” a moral quality, 264.
Blackguard, the, 244, 245.
Blake, William, on the Dance of Life, 66;
on the golden rule of life, 281.
Blasco Ibañez, 171.
Blood, Harvey’s conception of circulation of, nearly anticipated by
Leonardo da Vinci, 120.
Boisguillebert, Pierre Le Pesant, sieur de, his “barometer of
prosperity,” 287.
Botany, studied by Leonardo da Vinci, 119.
Botticelli, Sandro, 56.
Bouguereau, G. A., 315 _n._
Bovarism, explanation of, 335;
applied to the Universe, 337;
a necessary, effected by the artist, 348, 349.
Brantôme, Pierre de B., his style, 161.
Braun, Otto, 357.
Breton, Jules, 311.
Bridges, Robert, 272.
Browne, Sir Thomas, his style, 161, 175, 176, 178.