_MYSTICISM AND THE UNKNOWABLE_
Of the good things contained in Nordau’s book which should secure for
it a place in the study of every educated man, his fourth chapter
entitled “Etiology” figures conspicuously. He deals here with the
causes—not the primary economic and sociological causes, but the
immediate causes—of the increasing bodily debilities and mental
derangements characteristic of our epoch. Such facts, or generally
assumed facts, as that the average term of human life is extending;
that the average stature of man has increased since the middle ages,
rendering the armour of mighty men of those days too small for
middle-sized men of our generation; that the average chest-measure
in the German army is expanding; that personal beauty of children,
women, and men is in the ascendant; that many men attain to a great
age without the slightest sign of diminished mental power;—all these
facts might appear so many contradictions to Nordau’s assertions in the
chapter alluded to.
But, though the consideration of them might induce him to modify
some of the minor points, they are not completely inconsistent with
his general reasoning. He warns us that the excessive consumption of
spirits and tobacco, the use of opiates and poisons in general, produce
debility and premature death. Bad food, bad air, bad dwellings, and a
great number of other disadvantages which town dwellers, especially
the poor, must endure, are no doubt at least as harmful to body and
mind as he proves. He rightly attributes a great number of nerve
diseases to the prostration and fatigue consequent upon over-exertion
and over-excitement, which seems inevitable in an epoch of railways,
telegraphs, and machinery.
The whole of his chapter “Etiology,” however, dealing as it does with
the degeneration of the masses, seems to contradict what he says in
his first chapter about the upper classes only being affected by _fin
de siècle_ degeneration, while the masses experience only a more or
less slight touch of it. It also seems to disprove his theory that
degenerate authors and artists are the chief cause of degeneration
among the upper classes, a view which leads him to overlook the
most palpable and most powerful causes for the production of those
psychological phenomena throughout civilized humanity which he notices
only among the upper classes.
In discussing degeneration it is of the utmost importance to know how
the affliction progresses—whether certain authors and artists were
degenerated, and then affected the upper classes—or whether the upper
classes were degenerated and thus produced the degenerated authors
and artists. Nordau seems to vacillate between the two opinions, or
he considers the pernicious influence to have been reciprocal. It
is however clear that he regards these authors and artists, as well
as those members of the upper classes who sympathize with them, as
dwellers on the border-land between sanity and madness. The stigmata,
or the signs of distorted minds, he divides—as they necessarily must be
divided—into bodily stigmata and mental stigmata. The bodily stigmata
are of course malformations of the head, and he lays particular stress
on the conformation of the ear, its more or less projecting position,
the shape of the lobe, or its clinging to the head. It would have
been charity and justice on his part to have explained that, while
these stigmata are frequently found on lunatics and idiots, there are
probably millions of people who bear them without being demented, or
even eccentric.
On the other hand, it cannot be denied that there are thousands of
lunatics who possess well-shaped heads and ears.
He relies however but little on the bodily stigmata, and finds them
only on a few of his subjects. He deals, of course, chiefly with the
mental stigmata, and among these he gives mysticism a prominent place.
He quotes from Legrain to the effect that “mystical thoughts are to
be laid to the account of insanity and degeneration,” but Legrain
adds at once that they are observable in two states—in epilepsy and
in hysterical delirium. According to his authority we consequently
know that those who suffer from epilepsy and delirium are apt to be
mystical. But Legrain would probably be the first to object to the
conclusion that all those who are mystically inclined suffer from
epilepsy and delirium.
In his definition of mysticism Nordau says that “the word describes a
state of mind in which the subject imagines that he sees or divines
unknown and inexplicable relations amongst phenomena, discerns in
things hints at mysteries, and regards them as symbols.” But he adds,
“by which dark powers seek to unveil, or, at least, to indicate all
sorts of marvels which he endeavours to guess, though generally in
vain.”
We have divided his definition into two parts, because placed in one
sentence it seems an incorrect and unfair definition, the former part
of which might be used as a proof of degeneration in a perfectly sound
mind, while the latter part is the essential of the whole definition.
As we have already pointed out, science and all researches have utterly
failed to furnish replies to all questions regarding the origin,
aim, plan, and final destiny of the universe and of humanity. Under
such circumstances, the world around us, that which has preceded
it, that which will follow it, as well as ourselves, necessarily
remain mysteries. Can then any one who perceives or divines unknown,
and to us now inexplicable, relations between phenomena and who
discerns mysteries be regarded as a degenerate? All the scientific
facts of which we are now in possession were mysteries before they
were discovered, and the scientists who, guided by slight hints and
sometimes by guesses, have unravelled the marvels of nature, could not
surely be put down as lunatics. It is therefore evident that the phrase
“dark power” is a most essential part in Nordau’s definition, and
that a man can behold mysteries, dwell on them, study them, sometimes
unravel them, and remain a perfectly sane man, and that he only who is
mystical and deals with mysteries in an irrational way is a degenerate.
Nordau says as much in his illustration of the peasant who is a
mystic in his religion and in his belief in the weather-witch, but a
matter-of-fact man in his farming and in his business. But he is not so
lenient to the exponents of the mystic school in art and literature.
With regard to these, he is rather prone to determine the state of
their mind according to that part of a quotation from Morel which he
has italicised in his book, “_a morbid deviation from an original
type_.” The word morbid alone would have sufficed, but he seems to
attach more importance to the other part of the sentence and to regard
all who deviate from an original type as degenerate. He does not allow
for extenuating circumstances in the authors and artists as he does in
the case of the peasant. If he did, he could not class any of these, or
their admirers, among the degenerates, unless he could also prove that
they were irrational in their daily life and their business relations.
He acknowledges that the emotional nature of man has played a more
important part in the world than his intellect, and yet he seems
to have before his eyes an original type consisting exclusively
of intellect and devoid of emotions. If man’s destiny, his moral
condition, his education, his happiness, and his usefulness in the
world, were to be determined chiefly by his intellectual power, the
progress of the race would have been infinitely more slow than it has
been, and the bulk of individuals now alive would be far less removed
from the animal than they are.
It might be contended that, if not all, at least a large number of
religions have brought with them many evils, but, taking a broad view
of the work accomplished by them in comparison, not with what they
would have done had they been more perfect, but with that state which
would have prevailed had they never existed, no unprejudiced historian
will deny that civilization and the progress of our race have been
considerably accelerated through the influence of religions.
No religion is based on logic, and hardly ever were religious precepts
and dogmas accepted exclusively on intellectual grounds. Faith and
reasoning, considerably modified by emotion, have always formed the
basis of religious beliefs.
Not only in connection with religious matters, but in every event and
every development in human affairs, emotion has played an active and
prominent part. Such feelings as love, friendship, ambition, lust,
gratitude, hatred, revengefulness, patriotism, loyalty, chivalry, etc.,
are the great motive powers in the human drama, and when the intellect
steps in it is as their counsellor and their servant.
It is therefore legitimate and reasonable for those who wish to sway
human beings, who wish to educate them, elevate them, to address
themselves to their emotional nature. In the position in which man
is placed—living on a cosmic grain of sand, moving in space by an
inexplicable power at an inconceivable speed, without knowing who he is
and why he is—the mystical must perforce have a great attraction for
him. To be easily impressed by the mystical is therefore one of his
natural conditions, be it good, bad, or indifferent. When the emotional
nature of human beings is appealed to it is as rational for artists and
poets to address themselves to the love of the mystical as to the love
of the beautiful, and therefore there should be a legitimate place for
mysticism in art and poetry.
It is almost inconceivable that an educated, well-balanced mind
should never dwell on those immensities still unexplored, and the
innumerable enigmas still unsolved or insoluble, and content itself
with lingering over those comparatively insignificant truths which
science so far has revealed. To what an extent a man remains satisfied
with quasi-explanations of scientific research depends on the strength
of his imagination. It is pardonable if alienists should look upon
imagination as a doubtful blessing; but though it may appear a
dangerous gift in their patients, there can be little doubt that it is
an indispensable attribute to a well-equipped mind. It is the mental
faculty which most distinguishes man from the animals—the one on which
he could with the greatest appearance of legitimacy base his claim to
divine origin. Dogs may dream and horses may see ghosts, but their
hallucinations are vastly different from the imagination of man, which
allows him to receive and retain almost any number of presentations,
to elaborate them into new combinations, thus reconstructing pictures
of the past and daring conceptions of the future, capable of easy
realization. A powerful imagination is essential not only to the
poet and the artist, but to the engineer, the mechanician, the
statesman,—in fact, to all who set themselves a practical task or a
distinct ideal.
It is the imaginative strength of the scientist which renders him
a pioneer and a discoverer, and without it he is to his science
what the performer of music who cannot compose is to music. From
everyday experience we are justified in believing that the cramming
of the memory, much reading for examinations or other purposes,
and a developed habit of relying on authorities tend to weaken the
imagination in a man. This seems to be confirmed by the theory of
psychologists: that desuetude of a faculty tends to its decay; and
might well be the explanation of the often-confirmed fact that great
discoverers and inventors have seldom emerged from the ranks of the
omnivorous readers of the universities.
In the same manner we may explain what we have before called the
scientific superstition discernible in so many scientists. The more
they are satisfied with their systems, the more they take nomenclature
and classification for adequate explanation, the less they are
attracted by the spheres into which science has not penetrated or
cannot penetrate. There is this similarity between the scientifically
superstitious and the theologically superstitious—that they both
believe that they have explained all, and they thereby place themselves
beyond the possibility of being right; for the mass of unexpected
facts revealed by science, eclipsing as they do the wildest flight of
the imagination, renders it possible for any man to be right in his
speculations on the secrets of the universe save those men who say that
they know all.
It is therefore not surprising that a scientist by erudition, and
especially an alienist, who, by dint of studying the mechanism which
connects what some call the soul, and others designate as the trinity
of the consciousness, the judgment, and the will, with the body, has
persuaded himself that there is nothing beyond nerves, cells and the
gray matter, should look with contempt on imagination, and yet more
so on the love of the mystical, and that his ideal man, his “original
type,” should possess so little imagination as to remain unaffected by
the mystical.
Lack of information and of observation has caused the multitude to
regard a great number of men—distinguished in the eyes of the world
exclusively by their intellectual powers—as non-mystics to such a
degree as to class them as atheists. The majority of such men, though
distinctly at variance with the dogmas and views of established sects,
have been and are, in their inner consciousness, both mystics and
religionists. When in public they have seemingly attacked religion
and mysticism, they have in reality only attacked churches and
superstition. In the judgment of a great many intelligent men the
controversy between Professor Huxley and Dr. Martineau goes far to
confirm this view. When humanity, including scientists, learns to
distinguish between religion and churches, it will be understood that
almost all men in the past and present who have deservedly been called
great, have been religionists, and therefore mystics.
Let us instance Faraday. He belonged all his life to a sect which must
be classed among the mystics, and he died a believer in its creed.
Are we then to class this keen observer, accurate investigator, and
brilliant logician, this daring pioneer of science, this ingenious
unraveller of nature’s secrets, among the degenerates? If we do, where
should we class average scientists, including Nordau? Or should we
place ourselves in the position of the common-sense German Philistine,
and declare that mysticism is not mysticism when it takes the shape of
the belief of a sect tolerated by the police?
But is not Faraday’s mysticism perfectly compatible with a sound mind?
He was one of those scientists with unclouded reasoning powers, whose
knowledge—gained by investigation, not from authorities—had taught him
how little he knew of the great mysteries of creation. He recognised
that our emotional cravings cannot be satisfied by science in its
present stage, but only by emotional realization. Hence his religious
attitude towards the great mysterious power of which he knew nothing,
but whose work became more and more manifest as his investigation
proceeded. What wiser course could a man adopt, who was so capable
of distinguishing essence from form, than to give that form to his
religion which had gratified his emotional nature as a child?
If sound minds may be mystically inclined, if our emotional nature can
be reached by mysticism in poetry and art, and if our emotions are
acknowledged to be receptive to elevating and pleasing impressions,
the pre-Raphaelites could not all have been as degenerate as Nordau
would have us believe. They were, no doubt, emotionalists, mystics,
and even symbolists, and they frankly claimed the right to be regarded
as such. They considered themselves as having a mission, and the fact
that a man throws himself heart and soul into his mission is no sign of
degeneration.
Now, there are walks in life, callings, missions, which involve no risk
to those who undertake them; there are others that involve great risks.
Some callings expose a man to bodily harm, others to mental harm.
Nothing could be more uncharitable and cruel than to revile a man,
to attack his reputation, to wound his feelings, and to lower his
self-esteem, because he returns maimed and invalided after having
fought the good fight.
A shopkeeper, a shoemaker, an author of sensational books, runs but
little risk of damaging either his body or his mind. The sailor, the
miner, the leader of a revolution, exposes himself to great bodily
danger. The man who acquires a vast erudition may dull his imagination
and his judgment; the man who strains his brain to the utmost, who,
perhaps, overstrains it, in the solution of difficult problems, the
man whose mission lies in the domain of the emotions, exposes his mind
to injury. If there be truth in this, mysticism in poetry and art may
cause degeneration in the poet’s or the artist’s mind, especially if it
be a weak one; but to conclude from this that mysticism in art springs
from diseased minds is to confound cause with effect.
If we accept Nordau’s Philistine definition of art and his views as
to its mission, mysticism would have no place in art or in poetry.
He would certainly exclude it, but in doing so he would contradict
himself glaringly. We have already complained that he does not explain
his standards, and that he does not give his ideals. But from his work
before us, it is evident that the standard by which he would measure
poetry is the work of Goethe and Shakespeare, especially the former.
Goethe owes his fame largely to his _Faust_—a mystical work if ever
there was one. The prologue is religious mysticism, the first part is
diabolism, the second part is arch-mysticism, which so far has resisted
all attempts at interpretation. In the same manner _Hamlet_, _Macbeth_,
and other plays of Shakespeare derive their great charm and their
artistic value largely from mysticism.
All this however does not prove that either irrational or dishonest
mysticism is acceptable, and much that Nordau says regarding
pre-Raphaelitism should be taken to heart by the camp-followers of
the movement. In this term we include, of course, those painters
who, unable to draw and paint, try to force their pictures upon the
market by sheer bounce; and empty-headed critics who insolently
assume a mental, or, as they would call it, a spiritual, superiority
by writing obscure, unintelligible rigmaroles in praise of pictures
which attract attention by means of nought but their eccentricity.
This class of people cannot be considered as representing the
pre-Raphaelite movement, nor can they be called degenerate in the
sense Nordau means, for there is a method in their degeneracy which
yields pounds, shillings, and pence. We also include in this category
a class of people whose conceit may border on degeneracy, and who
believe that any one who cannot draw and paint is qualified for a
pre-Raphaelite painter, and who sincerely assume and enjoy the position
as misunderstood geniuses.
As to the crowds in the exhibitions that gather before an
incomprehensible eccentricity made conspicuous by the log-rolling
process, they surely do not all deserve the epithet of degenerates.
Many are drawn there by sheer curiosity; others damn with faint praise,
in order to escape the wrath of the fanatic. There are also, of
course, many who, for the purpose of giving themselves airs, admire
traits of beauty which they really fail to see. The behaviour of these
hypocritical æsthetes is, of course, deplorable, but they yield to a
weakness not confined to the end of our century. Andersen’s story of
the king’s clothes, inspired by a very old German tale, is one of many
evidences of the antiquity of such folly.
The sincere pre-Raphaelites deserve the sympathy of every thinking man,
though they may be guilty of many imperfections. According to Nordau,
the mission of the painter is to serve as a vehicle of beautiful
impressions to the public. A man who fulfilled this mission might
indeed be called an artist, and his painting might be the limits of
painting as such. But this does not prevent a picture from containing
a story, a moral, or the expression of an emotion, if the painter be a
good story-teller, a true poet, and a sound teacher. If a work of art
can thus fulfil two high purposes instead of one, everybody is a gainer
by it, and the fact that it is the embodiment of two arts instead of
one cannot reasonably be made an objection. The artist who succeeds in
thus blending two arts should surely not be called a degenerate.
Ruskin did not, as Nordau confesses, advocate any neglect in the art
of painting as such, but he warned artists not to waste their time on
unworthy subjects. He is a philanthropist as well as a writer on art,
and feels aggrieved when the artist neglects so good an opportunity of
teaching as a well-executed painting offers, and yet more when he sees
art abased in order to gratify sensuality or morbid cravings for the
horrible.
That Ruskin did not so absolutely disregard beautiful pictures which
have no story to tell and no teaching to impart becomes incontestable
when we remember his panegyrics of Turner.
Victor Hugo in his _Notre Dame de Paris_ makes Claude Frollo say,
when he has a book in his hand and the old cathedral before him, that
the one will kill the other, meaning, of course, that books were
predestined to supersede symbolism in buildings and other arts. Nordau
takes for granted that this has already been done. He sees no good
in works of art giving expression to ideas and emotions which could
so much better be described and more clearly defined in books. But
is there not a great inconsistency in first admitting that art keeps
within its rational limit when it presents the beauties of nature to
the public in such a manner as to make them more evident, which is
equal to teaching that nature is beautiful, and then to say that art
oversteps its limits when it teaches, or attempts to teach, anything
else?
If we survey all the means available to humanity for the conveyance
of thoughts and emotions, they present a scale which begins by speech
and ends with music. Though it must be acknowledged that speech only
with difficulty lends itself to the expression of one or a considerable
number of interdependent and intertangent complex ideas perfectly
clear in a sound mind, it is however the best means we possess for
lucid expression. Written prose has the same merit as speech, and may
be used to express the driest mathematical facts, as well as the most
poetical imaginings. Verse, we think it will be generally allowed,
is better calculated to convey poetical ideas and expressions, as it
admits of greater liberty, more stirring language, bolder metaphors,
and because rhythm and rhyme, in virtue of their musical qualities,
appeal to the imagination and stir the emotions.
When to poetry melody is added, it becomes song, a mode of expression
which appeals fully as much to our emotional nature as to our
intellect. When instrumental music is added to song, to evoke emotion
becomes the cardinal object, and intellect receives hardly any
impression. Music without words is the mode of conveying emotions—and
possibly ideas, too subtle, so to say, too spiritual to be analysed by
the intellect—in so distinct a way that the emotions of the composer,
and may be of the performer, are faithfully reproduced in the hearers.
A mutual understanding is thus established between them as clearly as
any understanding arrived at through exhaustive verbal explanation.
Scientists have endeavoured to explain on materialist lines the charm
exercised by music over us, but their explanations obviously never
touch more than the mechanical motion of the sound-waves and the
receptive mechanism of the ear and the brain. Their dogmatizing is
moreover so dry, halting, and one-sided as to convince musical people
that their attempt at explanation is hopeless. Music belongs to the
sphere of emotions, which lie beyond the ken of science, and will be as
long as scientific progression is hampered by the materialist bias.
And yet the most unimaginative scientist will not deny that all the
methods of conveying ideas and emotions enumerated in the above scale,
including instrumental music, are legitimate arts. Why then should
there not be the same latitude allowed to the arts appealing to us
through the sight as to those appealing to us through the hearing? If
the architect, sculptor, or painter, or two of them, or even three of
them, combined in collaboration, wishing to convey an impression, or
to evoke an emotion, why should they not be allowed to do so by any
of the means which fall within their sphere? If they should wish to
evoke emotions similar to those evoked by music, and they can do so by
choosing a certain subject, by introducing certain symbols, or even by
recalling sentiments of the past—the time of our first love, our youth,
or even our childhood,—why should they not be free to do so?
The pre-Raphaelites claim the freedom to thus expand the scope of
pictorial art, to sanctify it, and to make it appeal to the inmost
recesses of our emotional nature; and as the movement was started at
a time when art was in decadence and tended to become subservient,
abroad to pruriency, and at home, to abominable Philistinism, the
pre-Raphaelites deserve a better treatment than they have received at
the hands of Nordau.
That they should commit mistakes was inevitable. It is probable that
they had not realized completely to themselves the exact results to be
aimed at. Like the composer of music, they wished to convey to others
such of their own emotions as they deemed legitimate, beautiful, and
ennobling, and had to grope in the dark, or to trust to momentary
inspiration, for the means. Being, and wishing to be emotional, they
may have neglected their intellectual powers, forgetting that even
when emotion reigns supreme it can express itself truly only by the
aid of intelligence. Vivid emotions and powerful imaginations are not
in themselves stigmata of degeneration, but rather the signs of a rich
mind, so long as they remain under the control of the intellect. It is
only when they run riot, unheeding the criticism of intellect, that the
balance of the mind is imperilled.
In their desire to emphasize the spiritual meaning and the emotional
nature of their works, the pre-Raphaelites may have committed the
mistake of neglecting execution, truthfulness to nature, and the laws
of optics. Finding pictures appreciated by the public in virtue of the
subject and the conception, despite faulty treatment, many of them no
doubt have been induced to realize their ideas and emotions on canvas
before they had sufficiently trained their eye and their hand.
Every educated Englishman will understand that Nordau somewhat distorts
facts and conveys wrong impressions in the account he gives of the
movement. Though the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was dissolved, the
movement has not been so devoid of results as he insinuates. Though the
first exhibition of the Brotherhood was also the last one, pictures
by the same artist have been constantly exhibited, and some of them
have fetched fabulous prices. He says that Millais, amongst others,
has retained that characteristic of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
consisting of minuteness in details, draperies, and backgrounds. Any
one who has seen Millais’ striking portraits, his “Cherry Ripe,”
“Bubbles,” “Caller Herrings,” and other pictures could not possibly
make such an assertion. We must, of course, allow for the circumstance
that Nordau’s knowledge of the pictures he criticises is second-hand.
It is evident that he has not seen Millais’ latest pictures. Had he
done so, he would not have jeopardized his whole system of reasoning
by holding Millais up as an example of degeneration. Here, as in many
other cases, Nordau, while exhibiting an enormous erudition, reveals a
remarkable want of logic. To call Millais degenerate is a desperate way
out of a dilemma in which he has landed himself by asserting, on the
one hand, that those who paint pictures such as Millais painted years
ago are people with degenerate brains, and, on the other, that people
who produce pictures such as Millais paints now are people of sound
mind. If degeneration is the first step towards a high, normal, and
sound development, Nordau has been guilty of much ado about nothing.
Had he ever beheld Holman Hunt’s “Shadow of the Cross” even in an
engraving, he could not in his description of it have committed the
mistakes he has unless his mind is impervious to pictorial impressions.
He says that “the shadow of his (Christ’s) body falling on the ground
shows the form of a cross.” This is not true. The shadow of Christ’s
body falls on the wall, where a tool shelf and suspended tools simulate
a cross. Nordau’s erroneous description will certainly prejudice those
who have not seen the picture against Holman Hunt.
It is natural that the materialist, the pseudo-scientifically
superstitious, and the Philistine tendencies of our age, so eminently
embodied in the mind of Nordau, and against which the pre-Raphaelite
school is a protest, should militate against a fair appreciation of the
tentative departure of these innovators.
The essence of their mysticism and their symbolism is their belief
in what, for lack of a better term, has been called their spiritual
life—the belief that the mind is not a condition of matter, but
that our thinking _Ego_ might have existed before it was incarnated,
and that it will live after our body has decayed. Could our earthly
existence be proved finite with certainty, could any future existence
be proved a vain dream, incompatible with reason, then indeed would
pre-Raphaelitism be the beginning of folly, as, in fact, would most of
the things which now tend to lighten and beautify our lives. We shall
not here endeavour to determine the five-thousand-year-old discussion
regarding eternal life. We shall simply point out that the proofs on
which the so-called materialists base their conclusions are not so
absolutely convincing as to stigmatize their opponents as lunatics.
Any one who has glanced at the development of science from old times
up to the present is well aware of that weakness in the mind of
scientists—especially the non-pioneer scientists—which induces them
to believe that the conclusions they have arrived at, generally in
opposition to predecessors, are the whole truth and nothing but the
truth. For thousands of years it has been the same. For each step
that science has climbed upwards, its votaries, with a few brilliant
exceptions, have believed themselves to be at the top, and have with
scorn rejected, as sheer folly, any suggestion that the step on which
they stand is rotten and that there are sounder steps higher up. The
scientists of other days in their turn looked upon Columbus, Galileo,
and Tycho Brahe as fools. A hundred years ago the scientists would have
laughed to scorn any one who had told them that their senses deceived
them with regard to light, darkness, colours, silence and sound,
and that all these presentations received by our senses were simply
movement or manifestations of energy. The theory which regarded atoms
as minute subdivisions of matter is quite a modern dogma, and yet it is
already tottering to its fall. More rational scientists already speak
of atoms as centres of force, an expression which twenty years ago was
regarded as rank heresy. If the theory that atoms are centres of force
is accepted, with all its consequences, science is on the threshold of
a new departure which may cause the materialists to look small indeed;
for if what to our senses appears as matter is a condition of force,
instead of force being a condition of matter, a vista entirely opposite
to that of the materialists is open to science—a vista disclosing
possibilities before which we might well stand in awe.
Though it is incontestable that invention and discovery have been
enormously accelerated by often apparently wild suggestions by the
imagination, by emotion, and by instinct, it is especially such
suggestions which are visited by the most furious onslaughts on the
part of the superstitious scientists. When these reject as utter folly
imaginings prompted by faith or any other emotions, it is because such
suggestions are not only entirely out of harmony with the scientific
ideas of the moment, but because they appear so extraordinary, so
utterly destructive to the views familiar to them. They would be
less positive in face of suggestions and speculations justified by
emotion, if they did not constantly forget that every scientific
discovery reveals facts which are not only diametrically opposed to
opinions previously held, but also so marvellous as to baffle human
understanding. Bearing recent scientific discovery in mind, no one
will deny the folly of the man who a hundred years ago would have
prophetically declared: “What we now have proved true and reasonable
will in a hundred years be proved error and folly, and what to us now
appears as sheer madness and rank impossibility will then be scientific
truth.”
Any contemporary scientist, unaffected by scientific superstition,
would unhesitatingly acknowledge the probability of present scientific
dogmas being declared errors, and that what would now appear as the
hallucinations of an overheated imagination may become scientific truth
a century hence.
Though the narrow-minded scientist who takes up his stand on the so
far explored speck of the universe has no right to blame the artist or
poet who, guided by emotion and faith, plunges his imagination into
the surrounding abyss of the mystical, which no well-balanced mind
can ignore, it would be both unjust and absurd to blame the prosaic
and plodding scientist who concentrates his whole mind on scientific
details, and, to use a happy metaphor of Nordau himself, is building a
bridge, arch by arch, out into the unknown. It is good that the Alpine
climber should concentrate his attention on the steps he hews in the
ice and the safe resting-point he can find for his feet, and not allow
his mind to wander in the dark precipice below him or among the lofty
peaks he hopes to reach. Man being two personalities, one emotional,
the other intellectual, stands in need of the services of both the
logical scientist and the emotional artist and poet.
Once it has been recognised that the emotions may be conveyed by
pictorial art, we cannot quarrel with the _raison d’être_ of the
pre-Raphaelites, though we might disagree with them as to the means
they are using. They can however justly demand that those who criticise
their means of expression should show the possibility of better ones.
Holman Hunt has aimed at evoking by his pictures a feeling of respect
and admiration for religion, and in many cases has succeeded; and
the means he has employed are a reverential treatment, a style of
old associated with religious representations and suggestions of the
supernatural. Burne Jones, whose object seems to be to emphasize the
higher significance of our spiritual being over our bodily, does so
by giving us pictures of maidens whose beauty is of a kind devoid of
all those attractions which coquetry, roguishness, animal spirits,
and exuberance of health may confer. Their vacant and inward look
suggests a contemplative mood and a yearning to see the invisible. As
if to still further quicken the sluggish imagination of the masses, he
cloaks his figures in draperies and surrounds them by objects which of
old have been used in representing holy people. He comes as near as
possible to the representation of wingless angels, without presenting
anything that could not be seen in reality.
Such pictures may not appeal to everybody, but we have overwhelming
evidence that they do appeal to a great number; and if the belief
in a superiority over animals, in a spiritual personality, in a
responsibility for our development, and in a future life contributes
to our happiness and exercises an ennobling influence on our race, the
pictures of Burne Jones cannot be the work of a degenerate aiming at
the degeneration of others.
What by many is considered Rossetti’s masterpiece, “Dante’s Dream,”
would by a painter, in his capacity of craftsman, be found to contain
many defects, and only one great merit—exquisite colouring. The
conception is eccentric, the surroundings are symbolic and mystical,
and the anatomy is incorrect. There are faults of perspective, some
of them glaring. For instance, the left shoulder of the angel of
love who stands on the left hand of Beatrice, facing her and bending
over her, is partly hidden by Beatrice’s right shoulder, which could
not be possible in reality unless the two figures had only two
dimensions—height and breadth, with no thickness. And yet this picture
has been bought by the Corporation of Liverpool for a large sum, and is
considered as a thing of joy and beauty by a mass of people among whom
Nordau could detect but a few with malformations of the heads and the
ears, and who in the whole of their life have given abundant proof of
practical rationalism far greater even than that of the superstitious
peasant he instances as having a sound mind.
The charm of the picture does not lie in the execution, but in the
conception. It is probable that it evokes exactly the same emotion felt
by Rossetti while painting it. The subject being a dream, the many
symbols tend to throw the spectator into the mood in which the picture
should be contemplated. There is an atmosphere of Sabbath—presentiment
of bliss—which is produced by the introduction of such presentations
which in our youth or childhood have been associated with that day.
The artist has succeeded in intensifying the belief in the sacredness
of love and the consolations which, amid the troubles of life, may be
drawn from the faith in a spiritual existence.
The conceiving and representing of pictures like this, the outcome of
intense emotion, might well endanger the balance of the painter’s mind,
but the soothing influence they exercise on the spectator would surely
assuage rather than excite any restless mind which, deprived of a
profound philosophy and a far-reaching scientific knowledge, must needs
cling to faith.
The painter who produces on the canvas a beautiful scene from nature,
beautiful flowers, or other beautiful objects, pleases and elevates
the beholders of the picture. Nordau admits as much. But he does not
analyse the methods by which this result is accomplished. He would
probably not deny that one of the feelings which such a picture calls
forth is a sympathy with nature and the Creator, and that this sympathy
favours the conception of the distinct idea that the great power of the
universe suggested by natural beauties—as the painter is suggested by
the picture—loves the beautiful, and consequently the good.
The signification of the pre-Raphaelites in the progress of art is
that they strive to teach, in the production of groups and figures,
similar emotions and thoughts to those produced by the representation
of natural beauties. They have therefore contributed considerably
to the elevation of art so far as aims and subjects go. If they
believe that a purpose can be attained only by the imitation of the
unskilled pre-Raphaelite painters, by violating nature, by eliminating
perspective, and by apotheosizing ugliness, they do not further that
regeneration which we believe they are striving for. But there is every
reason to hope that modern art will come out ennobled from the crisis
into which it has been plunged, and that rising painters will see their
way to paint reverently and realize their noblest aims and highest
ideals, represented in naturally beautiful forms, painted with the
greatest skill of a painter proud of his craft.
Whether this hope be realized or not, it seems to us that a
regeneration of art would be impossible without the attempts at new
departure which Nordau has mistaken for degeneration.