relations of its phenomena which constitute its laws, of the highest
importance of anything of human concern? In harmony with these laws, and
only thus, we ourselves, in whom this order is, become happy, righteous,
wise, and beautiful. In ideal literature this knowledge is found,
expressed, and handed down age after age--the knowledge of necessary and
permanent relations in these great spheres which, taken together,
exhaust the capacities of life. Man's moral sense is strong in
proportion as he apprehends necessity in the sequence of will and act;
his intellect is strong, his emotions, his sense of beauty, are strong
in the same way in proportion as he apprehends necessity in each several
field of experience. And conversely, the weakness of the intellect lies
in a greater or less failure to realise relations of fact in their
logic; and the other faculties, in proportion as they fail to realize
such relations in their own region, have a similar incapacity. Insanity,
in the broad sense, is involuntary error in a nature incapable of
effectual enlightenment, and hence abnormal or diseased; but the state
of error, whether more or less, whether voluntary or involuntary,
whether curable or incurable, in itself is the same. To take an example
from one sphere, in the moral world the criminal through ignorance of or
distrust in or revolt from the supreme divine law seeks to maintain
himself by his own power solitarily as if he might be a law unto
himself; he experiences, without the intervention of any human judge,
the condemnation which consigns him to enfeeblement and extinction
through the decay and death of his nature, as a moral being, stage by
stage; this is God's justice, visiting sin with death. Similarly, and to
most more obviously, in society itself, the criminal against society,
because he does not understand, or believe, or prefers not to accept
arbitrary social law as the means by which necessarily the general good,
including his own, is worked out, seeks to substitute for it his own
intelligence, his cunning, in his search for prosperity, as he conceives
it, by an adaptation of means to ends on his own account. This is why
the imperfection of human law is sometimes a just excuse for social
crime in those whom society does not benefit, its slaves and pariahs.
But whether in God's world or in man's, the mind of the criminal,
disengaging itself from reliance on the whole fabric for whatever
reason, pulverizes because he fails to realize the necessary relations
of the world in which he lives in their normal operation, and has no
effectual belief in them as unavoidably operant in his nature or over
his fortunes. This was the truth that lay in the Platonic doctrine that
all sin is ignorance; but Plato did not take account of any possible
depravity in the will. Nor is what has been illustrated above true of
the mind and the will only. In the region of emotion and of beauty,
there may be similar aberration, if these are not grasped in their vital
nature, in organic relation to the whole of life.
These several parts of our being are not independent of one another, but
are in the closest alliance. They act conjointly and with one result in
the single soul in which they find their unity as various energies of
one personal power. It cannot be that contradiction should arise among
them in their right operation, nor the error of one continue undetected
by the others; that the base should be joyful or the wicked beautiful in
reality, is impossible. In the narrow view the lust of the eye and the
pride of life may seem beautiful, but in the broad perspective of the
inward world they take on ugliness; in the moment they may seem
pleasurable, but in the backward reach of memory they take on pain; to
assert eternity against the moment, to see life in the whole, to live as
if all of life were concentrated in its instant, is the chief labour of
the mind, the eye, the heart, the enduring will, all together. To
represent a villain as attractive is an error of art, which thus
misrepresents the harmony of our nature. Satan, as conceived by Milton,
may seem to be a majestic figure, but he was not so to Milton's
imagination. "The Infernal Serpent" is the first name the poet gives
him; and though sublime imagery of gloom and terror is employed to
depict his diminished brightness and inflamed malice, Milton repeatedly
takes pains to degrade him to the eye, as when in Paradise he is
surprised at the ear of Eve "squat like a toad"; and when he springs up
in his own form there, as the "grisly king," he mourns most his beauty
lost; neither is his resolute courage long admirable. To me, at least,
so far from having any heroic quality, he seems always the malign fiend
sacrificing innocence to an impotent revenge. In all great creations of
art it is necessary that this consistency of beauty, virtue, reason, and
joy should he preserved.
It is true that the supremacy of law in this inward world, so
constituted, is less realized than in the physical world; but even in
the latter the wide conviction of its supremacy is a recent thing, and
in some parts of nature it is still lightly felt, especially in those
which touch the brain most nearly, while under the stress of exceptional
calamity or strong desire or traditional religious beliefs it often
breaks down. But if the order of the material universe seems now a more
settled thing than the spiritual law of the soul, once the case was
reversed; God was known and nature miraculous. It must be remembered,
too, in excuse of our feebleness of faith, that we are born bodily into
the physical world and are forced to live under its law; but life in the
spiritual world is more a matter of choice, at least in respect to its
degree; its phenomena are, in part, contingent upon our development and
growth, on our living habitually and intelligently in our higher nature,
the laws of which as communicated to us by other minds are in part
prophecies of experience not yet actual in ourselves. It is the
touchstone of experience, after all, that tries all things in both
worlds, and experience in the spiritual world may be long delayed; it is
power of mind that makes wide generalizations in both; and the
conception of spiritual law is the most refined as perhaps it is the
most daring of human thoughts.
The expansion of the conception of ideal literature so as to embrace
these other aspects, in addition to that of rational knowledge which has
thus far been exclusively dwelt upon, requires us to examine its nature
in the regions of beauty, joy, and conscience, in which, though
generalization remains its intellectual method, it does not make its
direct appeal to the mind. It is not enough to show that the creative
reason in its intellectual process employs that common method which is
the parent of all true knowledge, and by virtue of its high matter,
which is the divine order in the soul, holds the primacy among man's
faculties; the story were then left half told, and the better part yet
to come. To enlighten the mind is a great function; but in the mass of
mankind there are few who are accessible to ideas as such, especially on
the unworldly side of life, or interested in them. Idealism does not
confine its service to the narrow bounds of intellectuality. It has a
second and greater office, which is to charm the soul. So characteristic
of it is this power, so eminent and shining, that thence only springs
the sweet and almost sacred quality breathing from the word itself.
Idealism, indeed, by the garment of sense does not so much clothe wisdom
as reveal her beauty; so the Greek sculptor discloses the living form by
the plastic folds. Truth made virtue is her work of power, and she
imposes upon man no harder task than the mere beholding of that sight--
"Virtue in her shape how lovely,"
which since it first abashed the devil in Paradise makes wrong-doers
aware of their deformity, and yet has such subtle and penetrating might,
such fascination for all finer spirits, that they have ever believed
with their master, Plato, that should truth show her countenance
unveiled and dwell on earth, all men would worship and follow her.
The images of Plato--those images in which alone he could adequately
body forth his intuitions of eternity--present the twofold attitude of
our nature, in mind and heart, toward the ideal with vivid distinctness;
and they illustrate the more intimate power of beauty, the more
fundamental reach of emotion, and the richness of their mutual life in
the soul. Under the aspect of truth he likens our knowledge of the ideal
to that which the prisoners of the cave had of the shadows on the wall;
under the aspect of beauty he figures our love for it as that of the
passionate lover. As truth, again,--taking up in his earliest days what
seems the primitive impulse and first thought of man everywhere and at
all times,--under the image of the golden chain let down from the
throne of the god, he sets forth the heavenly origin of the ideal and
its descent on earth by divine inspiration possessing the poet as its
passive instrument; and later, bringing in now the cooperation of man in
the act, he again presents the ideal as known by reminiscence of the
soul's eternal life before birth, which is only a more defined and
rationalized conception of inspiration working normally instead of by
the special act and favour of God. As beauty, again, he shows forth the
enthusiasm evoked by the ideal in the image of the charioteer of the
white and black horses mastering them to the goal of love. In these
various ways the first idealist thought out these distinctions of truth
and beauty as having a real community, though a divided life in the mind
and heart; and, as he developed,--and this is the significant
matter,--the poet in him controlling his speech told ever more
eloquently of the charm with which beauty draws the soul unto itself,
for to the poet beauty is nearer than truth. It is the persuasion with
which he sets forth this charm, rather than his speculation, which has
fastened upon him the love of later ages. He was the first to discern in
truth and beauty equal powers of one divine being, and thus to effect
the most important reconciliation ever made in human nature.
So, too, from the other great source of the race's wisdom, we are told
in the Scriptures that though we be fallen men, yet is it left to us to
lift our eyes to the beauty of holiness and be healed; for every ray of
that outward loveliness which strikes upon the eye penetrates to the
heart of man. Then are we moved, indeed, and incited to seek virtue with
true desire. Prophet and psalmist are here at one with the poet and the
philosopher in spiritual sensitiveness. At the height of Hebrew genius
in the personality of Christ, it is the sweet attractive grace, the
noble beauty of the present life incarnated in his acts and words, the
divine reality on earth and not, as Plato saw it, in a world removed,
that has drawn all eyes to the Judean hill. The years lived under the
Syrian blue were a rending of the veil of spiritual beauty which has
since shone in its purity on men's gaze. It is this loveliness which
needs only to be seen that wins mankind. The emotions are enlisted; and,
however we may slight them in practice, the habit of emotion more than
the habit of mind enters into and fixes inward character. More men are
saved by the heart than by the head; more youths are drawn to excellence
by noble feelings than are coldly reasoned into virtue on the ground of
gain. Some there are among men so colourless in blood that they embrace
the right on the mere calculation of advantage, but they seem to possess
only an earthly virtue; some, beholding the order of the world, desire
to put themselves in tune with nature and the soul's law, and these are
of a better sort; but most fortunate are they who, though well-nurtured,
find virtue not in profit, nor in the necessity of conforming to
implacable law, but in mere beauty, in the light of her face as it first
comes to them with ripening years in the sweet and noble nature of those
they grow to love and honour among the living and the dead. For this is
Achilles made brave, that he may stir us to bravery; and surely it were
little to see the story of Pelops' line if the emotions were not
awakened, not merely for a few moments of intense action of their own
play, but to form the soul. The emotional glow of the creative
imagination has been once mentioned in the point that it is often more
absorbed in the beauty and passion than in the intellectual
significance of its work; here, correspondingly, it is by the heart to
which it appeals rather than by the mind it illumines that it takes hold
of youth.
What, then, is the nature of this emotional appeal which surpasses so
much in intimacy, pleasure, and power the appeal to the intellect? It is
the keystone of the inward nature, that which binds all together in the
arch of life. Emotion has some ground, some incitement which calls it
forth; and it responds with most energy to beauty. In the strictest
sense beauty is a unity of relations of coexistence in coloured space
and appeals to the eye; it is in space what plot is in time. Like plot,
it is deeply engaged in the outward world; it exists in the sensuous
order, and it shadows forth the spiritual order in man only in so far as
a fair soul makes the body beautiful, as Spenser thought,--the mood, the
act, and the habit of heroism, love, and the like nobilities of man,
giving grace to form, feature, and attitude. It is primarily an outward
thing, as emotion, which is a phase of personality, is an inward thing;
what the necessary sequence of events, the chain of causation, is to
plot,--its cardinal idea,--that the necessary harmony of parts, the
chime of line and colour, is to beauty; thus beauty is as inevitable as
fate, as structurally planted in the form and colour of the universe as
fate is in its temporal movement. And as plot has its characteristic
unity in the impersonal order of God's will, shown in time's event, so
beauty has its characteristic unity in the same order shown in the
visible creation of space. It is true that all phenomena are perceived
by the mind, and are conditioned, as is said, by human modes of
perception; but within the limits of the relativity of all our
knowledge, beauty is initially a sensuous, not a spiritual, thing, and
though the structure of the human eye arranges the harmonies of line and
colour, it is no more than as the form of human thought arranges cause
and effect and other primary relations in things; beauty does not in
becoming humanly known cease to be known as a thing external,
independent of our will, and imposed on us from without. It is this
outward reality, the harmony of sense, that sculpture and painting add
in their types to the interpretation they otherwise give of personality,
and often in them this physical element is predominant; and in the
purely decorative arts it may be exclusive. In landscape, which is in
the realm of beauty, personality altogether disappears, unless, indeed,
nature be interpreted in the mood of the Psalmist as declaring its
Creator; for the reflection which the presence of man may cast upon
nature as his shadow is not expressive of any true personality there
abiding, but enters into the scene as the face of Narcissus into the
brook. The pleasure which the mind takes in beauty is only a part of its
general delight in order of any sort; and visible artistic form as
abstracted from the world of space is merely a species of organic form
and is included in it.
The eye, however, governs so large a part of the sensuous field, the
idea of beauty as a unity of space-relations giving pleasure is so
simple, and the experience is so usual, that the word has been carried
over to the life of the more limited senses in which analogous phenomena
arise, differing only in the fact that they exist in another sense. Thus
in the dominion of the ear especially, we speak commonly of the beauty
of music; but the life of the minor senses, touch, taste, and smell, is
composed of too simple elements to allow of such combination as would
constitute specific form in ordinary apprehension, though in the blind
and deaf the possibility of high and intelligible complexity in these
senses is proved. Similarly, the term is carried over to the invisible
and inaudible world of the soul within itself, and we speak of the
beauty of Sidney's act, of Romeo's nature, and, in the abstract, of the
beauty of holiness, and, in a still more remote sphere, of the beauty of
a demonstration or a hypothesis; by this usage we do not so much
describe the thing as convey the charm of the thing. This charm is more
intimate and piercing to those of sensuous nature who rejoice in visible
loveliness or in heard melodies; but to the spiritually minded it may be
as close and penetrating in the presence of what is to them dearer than
life and light, and is beheld only by the inner eye. It is this charm,
whether flowing from the outward semblance or shining from the unseen
light, that wins the heart, stirs emotion, wakes the desire to be one
with this order manifest in truth and beauty, in the spirit and the body
of things, to go out toward it in love, to identify one's being with it
as the order of life, mortal and immortal; last the will quickens, and
its effort to make this order prevail in us and possess us is virtue.
The act through all its phases is, as has been said, one act of the
soul, which first perceives, then loves, and finally wills. Emotion is
the intermediary between the divine order and the human will; it
responds to the beauty of the one and directs the choice of the other,
and is felt in either function as love controlling life in the new
births of the spirit.
The emotion, to return to the world of art, which is felt in the
presence of imaginary things is actual in us; but the attempt is made to
fix upon it a special character differentiating it from the emotion felt
in the presence of reality. One principle of difference is sought in the
point that in literature, or in sculpture and painting, emotion entails
no action; it has no outlet, and is without practical consequences; the
will is paralyzed by the fatuity of trying to influence an unreal series
of events, and in the case of the object of beauty in statue or painting
by the impossibility of possession. The world of art is thus thought of
as one of pure contemplation, a place of escape from the difficulties,
the pangs, and the incompleteness that beset all action. It is true that
the imagined world creates special conditions for emotion, and that the
will does not act in respect to that world; but does this imply any
radical difference in the emotion, or does it draw after it the
consequence that the will does not act at all? Checked emotion, emotion
dying in its own world, is common in life; and so, too, is contemplation
as a mode of approach to beauty, as in landscape, or even in human
figures where there is no thought of any other possession than the
presence of beauty before the eye and soul; escape, too, into a sphere
of impersonality, in the love of nature or the spectacle of life, is a
common refuge. Art does not give us new faculties, generate unknown
habits, or in any way change our nature; it presents to us a new world
only, toward which our mental behaviour is the same as in the rest of
life. Why, then, should emotion, the most powerful element in life, be
regarded as a fruitless thing in that ideal art which has thus far
appeared as a life in purer energy and higher intensity of being than
life itself?
The distinction between emotion depicted and that felt in response must
be kept in mind to avoid confusion, for both sorts are present at the
same time. In literature emotion may be set forth as a phase of the
character or as a term in the plot; it may be a single moment of high
feeling as in a lyric or a prolonged experience as in a drama; it may be
shown in the pure type of some one passion as in Romeo, or in the
various moods of a rich nature as in Hamlet; but, whether it be
predominant or subordinate in any work, it is there treated in the same
way and for the same purpose as other materials of life. What happens
when literature gives us, for instance, examples of moral experience? It
informs the mind of the normal course of certain lines of action, of the
inevitable issues of life; it breeds habits of right thinking in respect
to these; it is educative, and though we do not act at once upon this
knowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to act. So, when
literature presents examples of emotional experience, it informs us of
the nature of emotion, its causes, occasions, and results, its value in
character, its influence on action, the modes of its expression; it
breeds habits of right thinking in respect to these, and is educative;
and, just as in the preceding case, though we do not act at once upon
this knowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to act.
Concurrently with emotions thus objectively presented there arises in us
a similar series of emotions in the beholding; by sympathy we ourselves
feel what is before us, the emotions there are also in us in proportion
as we identify ourselves with the character; or, in proportion as our
own individuality asserts itself by revolt, a contrary series arises of
hatred, indignation, or contempt, of pity for the character or of terror
in the feeling that what has happened to one may happen to us in our
humanity. We are taught in a more intimate and vital way than through
ideas alone; the lesson has entered into our bosoms; we have lived the
life. Literature is thus far more powerfully educative emotionally than
intellectually; and if the poet has worked with wisdom, he has bred in
us habits of right feeling in respect to life, he has familiarized our
hearts with love and anger, with compassion and fear, with courage, with
resolve, has exercised us in them upon their proper occasions and in
their noble expression, has opened to us the world of emotion as it
ought to be in showing us that world as it is in men with all its
possibilities of baseness, ugliness, and destruction. This is the
service which literature performs in this field. Imagination shows us a
scheme of emotion attending the scheme of events and presents it in its
general connection with life, in simple, powerful, and complete
expression, on the lines of inevitable law in its sphere. We go out from
the sway of this imagined world, more sensitive to life, more accessible
to emotion, more likely and more capable, when the occasion arises, to
feel rightly, and to carry that feeling out into an act. In all
literature the knowledge gained objectively, whether of action or
emotion, is a preparation for life; but this intimate experience of
emotion in connection with an imagined world is a more vital
preparation, and enters more directly, easily, and effectually into
men's bosoms.
Two particular phases of this educative power should be specifically
mentioned. The objective presentation of emotion in literature, as has
been often observed, corrects the perspective of our own lives, as does
also the action which it envelops; and by showing to us emotion in
intense energy, which by this intensity corresponds to high type and
important plot, and in a compass far greater than is normal in ordinary
life, the portrayal leads us better to bear and more justly to estimate
the petty trials, the vexations, the insignificant experiences of our
career; we see our lives in a truer relation to life in general, and
avoid an overcharged feeling in regard to our private fortune. And,
secondly, the subjective emotion in ourselves is educative in the point
that by this outlet we go out of ourselves in sympathy, lose our egoism,
and become one with man in general. This is an escape; but not such as
has been previously spoken of, for it is not a retreat. There is no
escape for us, except into the lives of others. In nature it is still
our own face we see; and before the ideal creations of art we are still
aware, for all our contemplation, of the ineffable yearning of the
thwarted soul, of the tender melancholy, the sadness in all beauty,
which is the measure of our separation therefrom, and is fundamental in
the poetic temperament. This is that pain, which Plato speaks of--the
pain of the growing of the wings of the spirit as they unfold. But in
passing into the lives of other men, in sharing their joys, in taking on
ourselves the burden of humanity, we escape from our self-prison, we
leave individuality behind, we unite with man in common; so we die to
ourselves in order to live in lives not ours. In literature, sympathy
and that imagination by which we enter into and comprehend other lives
are most trained and developed, made habitual, instinctive, and quick.
It begins to appear, I trust, that ideal art is not only one with our
nature intellectually, but in all ways; it is the path of the spirit in
all things. Moreover, emotion is in itself simple; it does not need
generalization, it is the same in all. It is rather a means of
universalizing the refinements of the intellect, the substantive
idealities of imagination, by enveloping them in an elementary,
primitive feeling which they call forth. Poetry, therefore, especially
deals, as Wordsworth pointed out, in the primary affections, the
elementary passions of mankind; and, whatever be its intellectual
contents of nature or human events, calls these emotions forth as the
master-spirit of all our seeing. Emotion is more fundamental in us than
knowledge; it is more powerful in its working; it underlies more
deliberate and conscious life in the mind, and in most of us it rules,
as it influences in all. It is natural, therefore, to find that its
operation in art is of graver importance than that of the intellectual
faculty so far as the broad power of art over men is concerned.