built up, through personality in all its richness, by a perfected
imitation of life itself, and is set forth in universal unities of
relation, causal or formal, to the intellect in its inward, to the sense
of beauty in its outward, aspects; and thereby delighting the desire of
the mind for lucid and lovely order, it generates joy, and thence is
born the will to conform one's self to this order. If, then, this order
be conceived as known in its principles and in operation in living
souls, as existing in its completeness on the simplest scale in an
entire series of illustrative instances but without multiplicity,--if it
be conceived, that is, as the model of a world,--that would be to know
it as it exists to the mind of God; that would be to contemplate the
world of ideas as Plato conceived it seen by the soul before birth. That
is the beatific vision. If it be conceived in its mortal movement as a
developing world on earth, that would be to know "the plot of God," as
Poe called the universe. Art endeavours to bring that vision, that plot,
however fragmentary, upon earth. It is a world of order clothing itself
in beauty, with a charm to the soul, such is our nature,--operative upon
the will to live. It is preeminently a vision of beauty. It is true that
this beauty which thus wins and moves us seems something added by the
mind in its great creations rather than anything actual in life; for it
is, in fact, heightened and refined from the best that man has seen in
himself, and it partakes more of hope than of memory. Here is that woven
robe of illusion which is so hard a matter to those who live in horizons
of the eye and hand. Yet as idealism was found on its mental side
harmonious with reason in all knowledge, and on its emotional side
harmonious with the heart in its outgoings, so this perfecting
temperament that belongs to it and most characterizes it, falls in with
the natural faith of mankind. Idealism in this sense, too, existed in
life before it passed into literature. The youth idealizes the maiden he
loves, his hero, and the ends of his life; and in age the old man
idealizes his youth. Who does not remember some awakening moment when he
first saw virtue and knew her for what she is? Sweet was it then to
learn of some Jason of the golden fleece, some Lancelot of the tourney,
some dying Sydney of the stricken field. There was a poignancy in this
early knowledge that shall never be felt again; but who knows not that
such enthusiasm which earliest exercised the young heart in noble
feelings is the source of most of good that abides in us as years go on?
In such boyish dreaming the soul learns to do and dare, hardens and
supples itself, and puts on youthful beauty; for here is its palaestra.
Who would blot these from his memory? who choke these fountain-heads,
remembering how often along life's pathway he has thirsted for them?
Such moments, too, have something singular in their nature, and almost
immortal, that carries them echoing far on into life where they strike
upon us in manhood at chosen moments when least expected; some of them
are the real time in which we live. It was said of old that great men
were creative in their souls, and left their works to be their race;
these ideal heroes have immortal souls for their children, age after
age. Shall we in our youth, then, in generous emulation idealize the
great of old times, and honour them as our fair example of what we most
would be? Shall we, in our hearts, idealize those we love,--so natural
is it to believe in the perfection of those we love,--and even if the
time for forgiveness comes, and we show them the mercy that our own
frailty teaches us to exercise, shall we still idealize them, since love
continues only in the persuasion of perfection yet to come, and is the
tenderer because it comes with struggle? Whether in our acts or our
emotions shall we give idealism this range, and deny it to literature
which discloses the habits of our daily practice in more perfection and
with greater beauty? There we find the purest types to raise and sustain
us; to direct our choice, and reenforce us with that emotion, that
passion, which most supports the will in its effort. There history
itself is taken up, transformed, and made immortal, the whole past of
human emotion and action contained and shown forth with convincing
power. Nor is it only with the natural habit of mankind that idealism
falls in, but with divine command. Were we not bid be perfect as our
Father in heaven is perfect? And what is that image of the Christ, what
is that world-ideal, the height of human thought, but the work of the
creative reason,--not of genius, not of the great in mind and fortunate
in gifts, but of the race itself, in proud and humble, in saint and
sinner, in the happy and the wretched, in all the vast range of the
millions of the dead whose thoughts live embodied in that great
tradition,--the supreme and perfected pattern of mankind?
Is it nevertheless true that there is falsehood in all this? that men
were never such as the heart believes them, nor ideal characters able to
breathe mortal air? by indulging our emotions, do we deceive ourselves,
and end at last in cynicism or despair? Why, then, should we not boldly
affirm that the falsehood is rather in us, in the defects by which we
fail of perfection, in our ignorant error and voluntary wrong? that in
the ideal, free as it is from the accidental and the transitory,
inclusive as it is of the common truth, lies, as Plato thought, the only
reality, the truth which outlasts us all? But this may seem a subtle
evasion rather than a frank answer. Let us rather say that idealism is
one of the necessary modes of man's faith, brings in the future, and
assumes the reality of that which shall be actual; that the reality it
owns is that of the rose in the bud, the oak in the acorn, the planet in
its fiery mist. I believe that ideal character in its perfection is
potentially in every man who is born into the world. We forecast the
future in other parts of life; why should we not forecast ourselves?
Would he not be thought foolish who should refuse to embark in great
enterprises of trade, because he does not already hold the wealth to be
gained? The ideal is our infinite riches, more than any individual or
moment can hold. To refuse it is as if a man should neglect his estate
because he can take but a handful of it in his grasp. It is the law of
our being to grow, and it is a necessity that we should have examples
and patterns in advance of us, by which we can find our way. There is no
falsehood in such anticipation; there is only a faith in truth instead
of a possession of it. Will you limit us to one moment of time and
place? will you say to the patriot that his country is a geographical
term? and when he replies that rather is it the life of her sons, will
you point him to human nature as it seems at the period, to corruption,
folly, ignorance, strife, and crime, and tell him that is our actual
America? Will he not rather say that his America is a great past, a
future whose beneficence no man can sum? Is there any falsehood in this
ideal country that men have ever held precious? Did Pericles lie in his
great oration, and Virgil in his noble poem, and Dante in his fervid
Italian lines? And as there are ideals of country, so also of men, of
the soldier, the priest, the king, the lover, the citizen, and beside
each of us does there not go one who mourns over our fall and pities us,
gladdens in our virtue, and shall not leave us till we die; an ideal
self, who is our judgment? and if it be yet answered that this in truth
is so, and might be borne but for the errors of the idealizing
temperament, shall we not reply that the quack does not discredit the
art of medicine, nor the demagogue the art of politics, and no more does
the fool in all his motley the art of literature.
Must I, however, come back to my answer, and meet those who aver that
however stimulating idealism is to the soul, yet it must be remembered
that in the world at large there is nothing corresponding to ideal
order, to poetic ethics, and that to act these forth as the supremacy of
what ought to be is to misrepresent life, to raise expectations in youth
never to be realized, to pervert practical standards, and in brief to
make a false start that can be fruitful only in error, in subsequent
suffering of mind, and with material disadvantage? I must be frank: I
own that I can perceive in Nature no moral order, that in her world
there is no knowledge of us or of our ideals, and that in general her
order often breaks upon man's life with mere ruin, irrational and
pitiful; and I acknowledge, also, the prominence of evil in the social,
and its invasion in the individual, life of man. But, again, were we so
situated that there should be no external divine order apparent to our
minds, were justice an accident and mercy the illusion of wasted prayer,
there would still remain in us that order whose workings are known
within our own bosom, that law which compels us to be just and merciful
in order to lead the life that we recognize to be best, and the whole
imperative of our ideal, which, if we fail to ourselves, condemns us,
irrespective of what future attends us in the world. Ideal order as the
mind knows it, the mind must strive to realize, or stand dishonoured in
its own forum. Within us, at least, it exists in hope and somewhat in
reality, and following it in our effort, though we come merely to a
stoical idea of the just man on whom the heavens fall, we should yet be
nobler than the power that made us souls betrayed. But there is no such
difference between the world as it is and the world as ideal art
presents it.
What, then, is the difference between art and nature? Art is nature
regenerate, made perfect, suffering the new birth into what ought to be;
an ordered and complete world. But this is the vision of art as the
ultimate of good. Idealism has also another world, of which glimpses
have already appeared in the course of this argument, though in the
background. In the intellectual sphere evil is as subject to general
statement as is good, and there is in the strict sense an idealization
of evil, a universal statement of it, as in Mephistopheles, or in more
partial ways in Iago, Macbeth, Richard III. In the emotional sphere also
there is the throb of evil, felt as diabolic energy and presented as the
element in which these characters have their being. Even in the sphere
of the will, who shall say that man does not knowingly choose evil as
his portion? So, too, as the method of idealism in the world of the good
tends to erect man above himself, the same generalizing method in the
world of the evil tends to degrade human nature below itself; the
extremes of the process are the divine and the devilish; both transcend
life, but are developed out of it. The difference between these two
poles of ideality is that the order of one is an order of life, that of
the other an order of death. Between these two is the special province
of the human will. What literature, what all art, presents is not the
ultimate of good or the ultimate of evil separately; it is, taking into
account the whole range, the mixed world becoming what it ought to be in
its evolution from what it is, and the laws of that progress. Hence
tragedy on the one hand and comedy, or more broadly humour, on the other
hand, have their great place in literature; for they are forms of the
intermediate world of conflict. I speak of the spiritual world of man's
will. We may conceive of the world optimistically as a place in which
all shall issue in good and nothing be lost; or as a place in which, by
alliance with or revolt from the forces of life, the will in its
voluntary and individual action may save or lose the soul at its choice.
We may think of God as conserving all, or as permitting hell, which is
death. We do not know. But as shown to us in imagination, idealism,
which is the race's dream of truth, hovers between these two worlds
known to us in tendency if not in conclusion,--the world of salvation on
the one hand, in proportion as the order of life is made vital in us,
the world of damnation on the other hand, in proportion as the order of
death prevails in our will; but the main effort of idealism is to show
us the war between the two, with an emphasis on the becoming of the
reality of beauty, joy, reason, and virtue in us. Not that prosperity
follows righteousness, not that poverty attends wickedness, in worldly
measure, but that life is the gift of a right will is her message; how
we, striving for eternal life, may best meet the chances and the bitter
fates of mortal existence, is her brooding care; ideal characters, or
those ideal in some trait or phase, in the midst of a hostile
environment, are her fixed study. So far is idealism from ignoring the
actual state of man that it most affirms its pity and evil by setting
them in contrast with what ought to be, by showing virtue militant not
only against external enemies but those inward weaknesses of our
mortality with its passion and ignorance, which are our most undermining
and intimate foes. Here is no false world, but just that world which is
our theatre of action, that confused struggle, represented in its
intelligible elements in art, that world of evil, implicit in us and the
universe, which must be overcome; and this is revealed to us in the ways
most profitable for our instruction, who are bound to seek to realize
the good through all the strokes of nature and the folly and sin of men.
Ideal literature in its broad compass, between its opposed poles of good
and evil, is just this: a world of order emerging from disorder, of
beauty and wisdom, of virtue and joy, emerging from the chaos of things
that are, in selected and typical examples.
It follows from this that what remains in the world of observation in
personality or experience, whether good or evil, whether particular or
general, not yet coordinated in rational knowledge as a whole, all for
which no solution is found, all that cannot be or has not been made
intelligible, must be the subject-matter of realism in the exact use of
that term. This must be recorded by literature, or admitted into it, as
matter-of-fact which is to the mind still a problem. Earthly mystery
therefore is the special sphere of realism. The borderland of the
unknown or the irreducible is its realm. This old residuum, this new
material, is not yet capable of art. Hence, too, realism in this sense
characterizes ages of expansion of knowledge such as ours. The new
information which is the fruit of our wide travel, of our research into
the past, has enlarged the problem of man's life by showing us both
primitive and historical humanity in its changeful phases of progress
working out the beast; and this new interest has been reenforced by the
attention paid, under influences of democracy and philanthropy, to the
lower and baser forms of life in the masses under civilization, which
has been a new revelation of persistent savagery in our midst. Here
realism illustrates its service as a gatherer of knowledge which may
hereafter be reduced to orderliness by idealistic processes, for
idealism is the organizer of all knowledge. But apart from this incoming
of facts, or of laws not yet harmonized in the whole body of law, for
which we may have fair hope that a synthesis will be found, there
remains forever that residuum of which I spoke, which has resisted the
intelligence of man, age after age, from the first throb of feeling,
the first ray of thought; that involuntary evil, that unmerited
suffering, that impotent pain,--the human debris of the social
process,--which is a challenge to the power of God, and a cry to the
heart of man that broods over it in vain, yet cannot choose but hear. In
this region the near affinity of realism to pessimism, to atheism, is
plain enough; its necessary dealing with the base, the brutal, the
unredeemed, the hopeless darkness of the infamies of heredity, criminal
education, and successful malignity, eating into the being as well as
controlling the fortune of their victims, is manifest; and what answer
has ever been found to the interrogation they make? It is not merely
that particular facts are here irreconcilable; but laws themselves are
discernible, types even not of narrow application, which have not been
brought into any relation with what I have named the divine order.
Millions of men in thousands of years are included in this holocaust of
past time,--eras of savagery, Assyrian civilizations, Christian
butcheries, the Czar yet supreme, the Turk yet alive.
And how is it at the other pole of mystery, where life rises into a
heavenly vision of eternities of love to come? There is no place for
realism here, where observation ceases and our only human outlook is by
inference from principles and laws of the ideal world as known to us;
yet what problems are we aware of? Must,--to take the special problem of
art,--must the sensuous scheme of life persist, since of it warp and
woof are woven all our possibilities of communication, all our
capabilities of knowledge? it is our language and our memory alike. Must
God be still thought of in the image of man, since only in terms of our
humanity can we conceive even divine things, whether in forms of mortal
pleasure as the Greeks framed their deities, or in shapes of spiritual
bliss as Christians fashion saint, angel, and archangel? These are
rather philosophical problems. But in art, as at the realistic end of
the scale, we admit the portraiture, as a part of life, of the bestial,
the cruel, the unforgiven, and feel it debasing, so must we at the
idealistic end admit the representation of the celestial after human
models, and feel it, even in Milton and in Dante, minimizing. The
mysticism of the borderland at its supreme is a hope; at its nadir, it
is a fear. We do not know. But within the narrow range of the
intelligible and ordered world of art, which has been achieved by the
creative reason of civilized man in his brief centuries and along the
narrow path from Jerusalem and Athens to the western world, we do know
that for the normal man born into its circle of light the order of life
is within our reach, the order of death within reach of us. Shut within
these limits of the victory of our intellect and the upreaching of our
desires and the warfare of our will, we assert in art our faith that the
divine order is victorious, that the righteous man is not forsaken, that
the soul cannot suffer wrong either from others or from nature or from
God,--that the evil principle cannot prevail. It is faith, springing
from our experience of the working of that order in us; it transcends
knowledge, but it grows with knowledge; and ideal literature asserts
this faith against nature and against man in all their deformity, as the
centre about which life revolves so far as it has become subject to
rational knowledge, to beautiful embodiment, to joyful being, to the
will to live.
Can the faith of which idealism is the holder of the keys, the faith as
nigh to the intellect as to the heart, to the senses as to the spirit,
exceed even this limit, and affirm that if man were perfect in knowledge
and saw the universe as we believe God sees it, he would behold it as an
artistic whole even now? Would it be that beatific vision, revolving
like God's kaleidoscope, momentarily falling at each new arrangement
into the perfect unities of art? and is our world of art, our brief
model of such a world in single examples of its scheme, only a way of
limiting the field to the compass of human faculties that we may see
within our capacities as God sees, and hence have such faith? Is art
after all a lower creation than nature, a concession to our frail
powers? Has idealism such optimistic reach as that? Or must we see the
evil principle encamped here, confusing truth, deforming beauty,
depraving joy, deflecting the will, with wages of death for its victims,
and the hell of final destruction spreading beneath its sway? so that
the world as it now is cannot be thought of as the will of God exercised
in Omnipotence, but a human opportunity of union with or separation from
the ideal order in conflict with the order of death. I recall Newman's
picture: "To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various
history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their
mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits,
governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses,
their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of
long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending
design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or
truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not
toward final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his
far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his
futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success
of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of
sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless
irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly
described in the Apostle's words, 'having no hope and without God in the
world,'--all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the
mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human
solution." In the face of such a world, even when partially made
intelligible in ideal art, dare we assert that fatalistic optimism which
would have it that the universe is in God's eyes a perfect world? I can
find no warrant for it in ideal art, though thence the ineradicable
effort arises in us to win to that world in the conviction that it is
not indifferent in the sight of heaven whether we live in the order of
life or that of death, in the faith that victory in us is a triumph of
that order itself which increases and prevails in us, is a bringing of
Christ's kingdom upon earth. Art rather becomes in our mind a function
of the world's progress, and were its goal achieved would cease; for
life would then itself be one with art, one with the divine order. So
much of truth there is in Ruskin's statement that art made perfect
denies progress and is its ultimate. But perfection in life, as ideal
art presents it, it is a prophecy which enlists us as soldiers militant
in its fulfilment. Its optimism is that of the issue, and may be that of
the process; but it surely is not that of the state that now is in the
world.
It thus appears more and more that art is educative; it is the race's
foreknowledge of what may be, of the objects of effort and the methods
of their attainment under mortal conditions. The difficulty of men in
respect to it is the lax power they have to see in it the truth, as
contradistinguished from the fact, the continuous reality of the things
of the mind in opposition to the accidental and partial reality of the
things of actuality. They think of it as an imagined, instead of as the
real world, the model of that which is in the evolution of that which
ought to be. In history the climaxes of art have always outrun human
realization; its crests in Greece, Italy, and England are crests of the
never-attained; but they still make on in their mass to the yet rising
wave, which shall be of mankind universal, if, indeed, in the
cosmopolitan civilization which we hope for, the elements of the past,
yet surviving from the accomplishment of single famous cities and great
empires, shall be blended in a world-ideal, expressing the spiritual
uplifting to God of the reconciled and unified nations of the earth.
There remains but one last resort; for it will yet be urged that the
impossibility of any scientific knowledge of the spiritual order is
proved by the transience of the ideals of the past; one is displaced by
another, there is no permanence in them. It is true that the concrete
world, which must be employed by art, is one of sense, and necessarily
imports into the form of art its own mortality; it is, even in art, a
thing that passes away. It is also true that the world of knowledge,
which is the subject-matter of art, is in process of being known, and
necessarily imports into the contents of art its errors, its hypotheses,
its imperfections of every kind; it is a thing that grows more and more,
and in growing sheds its outworn shells, its past body. Let us consider
the form and the contents separately. The element of mortality in the
form is included in the transience of imagery. The poet uses the world
as he knows it, and reflects in successive ages of literature the
changing phases of civilization. The shepherd, the tiller of the soil,
the warrior, the trader yield to him their language of the earth, the
battle, and the sea; from the common altar he learns the speech of the
gods; the elemental aspects of nature, the pursuits of men, and what is
believed of the supernatural are the great storehouses of imagery. The
fact that it is at first a living act or habit that the poet deals with,
gives to his work that original vivacity, that direct sense of
actuality, of contemporaneousness, which characterizes early
literatures, as in Homer or the Song of Roland: even the marvellous has
in them the reality of being believed. This imagery, however, grows
remote with the course of time; it becomes capable of holding an inward
meaning without resistance from too high a feeling of actuality; it
becomes spiritualized. The process is the same already illustrated in
lyric form as an expression of personality; but here man universal
enters into the image and possesses it impersonally on the broad human
scale. The pastoral life, for example, then yields the forms of art
which hold either the simple innocence of happy earthly love, as in
Daphnis and Chloe, or the natural grief of elegy made beautiful, as in
Bion's dirge, or the shepherding of Christ in his church on earth, as in
many an English poet; the imagery has unclothed itself of actuality and
shows a purely spiritual body.