is illustrated on the grand scale by the imagery of war. In the
beginning war for its own sake, mere fighting, is the subject; then war
for a cause, which ennobles it beyond the power of personal prowess and
justifies it as an element in national life; next, war for love, which
refines it and builds the paradox of the deeds of hate serving the will
of courtesy; last, war for the soul's salvation, which is unseen battle
within the breast. Achilles, Aeneas, Lancelot, the Red Cross Knight are
the terms in this series; they mark the transformation of the most
savage act of man into the symbol of his highest spiritual effort.
Nature herself is subject to this inwardness of art; at first merely
objective as a condition, and usually a hostile, or at least dangerous,
condition of human life, she becomes the witness to omnipotent power in
illimitable beauty and majesty, its infinite unknowableness, and its
tender care for all creatures, as in the Scriptures; and at last the
words of our Lord concentrate, in some simple flower, the profoundest of
moral truths,--that the beauty of the soul is the gift of God, out of
whose eternal law it blossoms and has therein its ever living roots, its
air and light, its inherent grace and sweetness: "Consider the lilies of
the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I
say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like
one of these. Shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?"
Such is the normal development of all imagery; its actuality limits it,
and in becoming remote it grows flexible. It is only by virtue of this
that man can retain the vast treasures of race-imagination, and continue
to use them, such as the worlds of mythology, of chivalry, and romance.
The imagery is, in truth, a background, whose foreground is the ideal
meaning. Thus even fairyland, and the worlds of heaven and hell, have
their place in art. The actuality of the imagery is in fact irrelevant,
just as history is in the idealization of human events. Its transience,
then, cannot matter, except in so far as it loses intelligibility
through changes of time, place, and custom, and becomes a dead language.
It follows that that imagery which keeps close to universal phases of
nature, to pursuits always necessary in human life, and to ineradicable
beliefs in respect to the supernatural, is most permanent as a language;
and here art in its most immortal creations returns again to its
omnipresent character as a thing of the common lot.
The transience of the contents of art may be of two kinds. There is a
passing away of error, as there is in all knowledge, but such a loss
need not detain attention. What is really in issue is the passing away
of the authority of precept and example fitted to one age but not to
another, as in the case of the substitution of the ideal of humility for
that of valour, owing to a changed emphasis in the scale of virtues. The
contents of art, its general ideals, reproduce the successive periods of
our earth-history as a race, by generalizing each in its own age. A
parallel exists in the subject-matter of the sciences; astronomy,
geology, paleontology are similar statements of past phases of the
evolution of the earth, its aspects in successive stages. Or, to take a
kindred example, just as the planets in their order set forth now the
history of our system from nascent life to complete death as earths, so
these ideals exhibit man's stages from savagery to such culture as has
been attained. They have more than a descriptive and historical
significance; they retain practical vitality because the unchangeable
element in the universe and in man's nature is in the main their
subject-matter. It is not merely that the child repeats in his
education, in some measure at least, the history of the race, and hence
must still learn the value of bravery and humility in their order; nor
that in the mass of men many remain ethically and emotionally in the
characteristic stages of past culture; but these various ideals of what
is admirable have themselves identical elements, and in those points in
which they differ respond to native varieties of human capacity and
temperament. The living principles of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and
Christian thought and feeling are at work in the world, still formative;
it is only by such vitality that their results in art truly survive.
There has been an expansion of the field, and some rearrangement within
it; but the evolution of human ideals has been, in our civilization, the
growth of one spirit out of its dead selves carrying on into each
reincarnation the true life that was in the form it leaves, and which is
immortal. The substance in each ideal, its embodiment of what is
cardinal in all humanity, remains integral. The alloy of mortality in a
work of art lies in so much of it as was limited in truth to time,
place, country, race, religion, its specific and contemporary part; so
great is this in detail that a strong power of historical imagination,
the power to rebuild past conditions, is a main necessity of culture,
like the study of a dead language; an interpretative faculty, the power
to translate into terms of our knowledge what was stated in terms of
different beliefs, must go with this; and also a corrective power, if
the work is to be truly useful and enter into our lives with effect.
Such an alloy there is in nearly all great works even; much in Homer,
something in Virgil, a considerable part of Dante, and an increasing
portion in Milton have this mixture of death in them; but if by keeping
to the primary, the permanent, the universal, they have escaped the
natural body of their age, the substance of the work is still living;
they have achieved such immortality as art allows. They have done so,
not so much by the personal power of their authors as by their
representative character. These ideal works of the highest range, which
embody in themselves whole generations of effort and rise as the
successive incarnations of human imagination, are products of race and
state, of world experience and social personality; they differ, race
from race, civilization from civilization, Hebrew or Greek, Pagan or
Christian, just as on the individual scale persons differ; and they are
solved, as personality in its individual form is solved, in the element
of the common reason, the common nature in the world and man, which they
contain,--in man,
"Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless";
in the unity of the truth of his spirit they are freed from mortality,
they are mutually intelligible and interchangeable, they survive,--
racial and secular states and documents of a spiritual evolution yet
going on in all its stages in the human mass, still barbarous, still
pagan, still Christian, but an evolution which at its highest point
wastes nothing of the past, holds all its truth, its beauty, its vital
energy, in a forward reach.
The nature of the changes which time brings may best be illustrated from
the epic, and thus the opposition of the transient and permanent
elements in art be, perhaps, more clearly shown. Epic action has been
defined as the working out of the Divine will in society; hence it
requires a crisis of humanity as its subject, it involves the conflict
of a higher with a lower civilization, and it is conducted by means of a
double plot, one in heaven, the other on earth. These are the
characteristic epic traits. In dealing with ideas of such importance,
the poets in successive eras of civilization naturally found much
adaptation to new conditions necessary, and met with ever fresh
difficulties; the result is a many-sided epic development. The idea of
the Divine will, the theory of its operation, and the conception of
society itself were all subject to change. Epics at first are
historical; but, sharing with the tendency of all art toward inwardness
of meaning, they become purely spiritual. The one thing that remains
common to all is the notion of a struggle between a higher and a lower,
overruled by Providence. They have two subjects of interest, one the
cause, the other the hero through whom the cause works; and between
these two interests the epic hovers, seldom if ever identifying them and
yet preserving their dual reality.
The Iliad has all the traits that have been mentioned, but society is
still loose enough in its bonds to give the characters free play; it is,
in the main, a hero-epic. The Aeneid, on the contrary, exhibits the
enormous development of the social idea; its subject is Roman dominion,
which is the will of Zeus, localized in the struggle with Carthage and
with Turnus, but felt in the poem pervasively as the general destiny of
Rome in its victory over the world; and this interest is so overpowering
as to make Aeneas the slave of Jove and almost to extinguish the other
characters; it is a state-epic. So long as the Divine will was conceived
as finding its operation through deities similar to man, the double plot
presented little difficulty; but in the coming of Christian thought,
even with its hierarchies of angels and legions of devils, the
interpretation became arduous. In the Jerusalem Delivered the social
conflict between Crusader and infidel is clear, the historical crisis in
the wars of Palestine is rightly chosen, but the machinery of the
heavenly plot is weakened by the presence of magic, and is by itself
ineffectual in inspiring a true belief. So in the Lusiads, while the
conflict and the crisis, as shown in the national energy of colonization
in the East, are clear, the machinery of the heavenly plot frankly
reverts to mythologic and pagan forms and loses all credibility.
In the Paradise Lost arises the spiritual epic, but still historically
conceived; the crisis chosen, which is the fall of man in Adam, is the
most important conceivable by man; the powers engaged are the superior
beings of heaven and hell in direct antagonism; but here, too, the
machinery of the heavenly plot is handled with much strain, and, however
strongly supported by the Scriptures, has little convincing power. The
truth is that the Divine will was coming to be conceived as implicit in
society, being Providence there, and operating in secret but normal ways
in the guidance of events, not by special and interfering acts; and also
as equally implicit in the individual soul, the influence of the Spirit,
and working in the ways of spiritual law. One change, too, of vast
importance was announced by the words "The Kingdom of Heaven is within
you." This transferred the very scene of conflict, the theatre of
spiritual warfare, from an external to an internal world, and the social
significance of such individual battle lay in its being typical of all
men's lives. The Faerie Queene, the most spiritual poem in all ways in
English, is an epic in essence, though its action is developed by a
revolution of the phases of the soul in succession to the eye, and not
by the progress of one main course of events. The conflict of the higher
and the lower under Divine guidance in the implicit sense is there
shown; the significance is for mankind, though not for a society in its
worldly fortunes; but there is little attempt to externalize the
heavenly power in specific action in superhuman forms, though in mortal
ways the good knights, and especially Arthur, shadow it forth. The
celestial plot is humanized, and the poem becomes a hero-epic in almost
an exclusive way; though the knight's achievement is also an achievement
of God's will, the interest lies in the Divine power conceived as man's
moral victory. In the Idyls of the King there are several traits of the
epic. There is the central idea of the conflict between the higher and
lower, both on the social and the individual side; the victory of the
Round Table would have meant not only pure knights but a regenerate
state. Here, however, the externalization of the Divine will in the Holy
Grail, and, as in the Christian epic generally, its confusion on the
marvellous side with a world of enchantment passing here into the
sensuous sphere of Merlin, are felt to be inadequate. The war of "soul
with sense" was the subject-matter, as was Spenser's; the method of
revolution of its phases was also Spenser's; but the two poems differ in
the point that Spenser's knight wins, but Tennyson's king loses, so far
as earth is concerned; nor can it be fairly pleaded that as in Milton
Adam loses, yet the final triumph of the cause is known and felt as a
divine issue of the action though outside the poem, so Arthur is saved
to the ideal by virtue of the faith he announces in the New Order coming
on, for it is not so felt. The touch of pessimism invades the poem in
many details, but here at its heart; for Arthur alone of all the heroes
of epic in his own defeat drags down his cause. He is the hero of a lost
cause, whose lance will never be raised again in mortal conflict to
bring the kingdom of Christ on earth, nor its victory be declared except
as the echo of a hope of some miraculous and merciful retrieval from
beyond the barriers of the world to come. But in showing the different
conditions of the modern epic, its spirituality, its difficulties of
interpreting in sensuous imagery the working of the Divine will, its
relaxed hold on the social movement for which it substitutes man's
universal nature, and the mist that settles round it in its latest
example, sufficient illustration has been given of the changes of time
to which idealism is subject, and also of the essential truth surviving
in the works of the past, which in the epics is the vision of how the
ends of God have been accomplished in the world and in the soul by the
union of divine grace with heroic will,--the interpretation and
glorification, of history and of man's single conflict in himself ago
after age, asserting through all their range the supremacy of the ideal
order over its foes in the entire race-life of man.
Out of these changes of time, in response to the varying moods of men in
respect to the world they inhabit, arise those phases of art which are
described as classical and romantic, words of much confusion. It has
been attempted to distinguish the latter as having an element of
remoteness, of surprise, of curiosity; but to me, at least, classical
art has the same remoteness, the same surprise, and answers the same
curiosity as romantic art. If I were to endeavour to oppose them I
should say that classical art is clear, it is perfectly grasped in form,
it satisfies the intellect, it awakes an emotion absorbed by itself, it
definitely guides the will; romantic art is touched with mystery, it has
richness and intricacy of form not fully comprehended, it suggests more
than it satisfies, it stirs an unconfined and wandering emotion, it
invigorates an adventurous will; classicism is whole in itself and lives
in the central region, the white light, of that star of ideality which
is the light of our knowledge; romanticism borders on something
else,--the rosy corona round about our star, carrying on its dawning
power into those unknown infinities which embosom the spark of life. The
two have always existed in conjunction, the romantic element in ancient
literature being large. But owing to the disclosure of the world to us
in later times, to the deeper sense of its mysteries which are our
bounding horizons round about, and especially to the impulse given to
emotion by the opening of the doors of immortality by Christianity to
thought, revery, and dream, to hope and effort, the romantic element has
been more marked in modern art, has in fact characterized it, being fed
moreover by the ever increasing inwardness of human life, the greater
value and opportunity of personality in a free and high civilization,
and by the uncertainty, confusion, and complexity of such masses of
human experience as our observation now controls. The romantic temper is
inevitable in men whose lives are themselves thought of as, in form, but
fragments of the life to come, which shall find their completion an
eternal task. It is the natural ally of faith which it alone can render
with an infinite outlook; and it is the complement of that mystery which
is required to supplement it, and which is an abiding presence in the
habit of the sensitive and serious mind. Yet in classical art the
definite may still be rendered, the known, the conquered. Idealism has
its finished world therein; in romanticism it has rather its prophetic
work.
Such, then, as best I can state it in brief and rapid strokes, is the
world of art, its methods, its appeals, its significance to mankind.
Idealism, so presented, is in a sense a glorification of the
commonplace. Its realm lies in the common lot of men; its distinction is
to embrace truth for all, and truth in its universal forms of experience
and personality, the primary, elementary, equally shared fates,
passions, beliefs of the race. Shakspere, our great example, as
Coleridge wisely said, "kept in the highway of life." That is the royal
road of genius, the path of immortality, the way ever trodden by the
great who lead. I have ventured to speak at times of religious truth.
What is the secret of Christ's undying power? Is it not that he stated
universal truth in concrete forms of common experience so that it comes
home to all men's bosoms? Genius is supreme in proportion as it does
that, and becomes the interpreter of every man who is born into the
world, makes him know his brotherhood with all, and the incorporation of
his fate in the scheme of law, and ideal achievement under it, which is
the common ground of humanity. Ideal literature is the treasury of such
genius in the past; here, as I said in the beginning, the wisdom of the
soul is stored; and art, in all its forms, is immortal only in so far as
it has done its share in this same labour of illumination, persuasion,
and command, forecasting the spirit to be, companioning the spirit that
is, sustaining us all in the effort to make ideal order actual in
ourselves.
What, then, since I said that it is a question how to live as well as
how to express life,--what, then, is the ideal life? It is to make
one's life a poem, as Milton dreamed of the true poet; for as art works
through matter and takes on concrete and sensible shape with its mortal
conditions, so the soul dips in life, is in material action, and,
suffering a similar fate, sinks into limitations and externals of this
world and this flesh, through which it must live. In such a life, mortal
in all ways, to bring down to earth the vision that floats in the soul's
eyes, the ideal order as it is revealed to the poet's gaze,
incorporating it in deed and being, and to make it prevail, so far as
our lives have power, in the world of our life, is the task set for us.
To disengage reason from the confusion of things, and behold the eternal
forms of the mind; to unveil beauty in the transitory sights of our
eyes, and behold the eternal forms of sense; so to act that the will
within us shall take on this form of reason and our manifest life wear
this form of beauty; and, more closely, to live in the primary
affections, the noble passions, the sweet emotions,--
"Founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure,
Relations dear, and all the charities
Of father, son, and brother,--"
and also in the general sorrows of mankind, thereby, in joy and grief,
entering sympathetically into the hearts of common men; to keep in the
highway of life, not turning aside to the eccentric, the sensational,
the abnormal, the brutal, the base, but seeing them, if they must come
within our vision, in their place only by the edges of true life; and,
if, being men, we are caught in the tragic coil, to seek the restoration
of broken order, learning also in such bitterness better to understand
the dark conflict forever waging in the general heart, the terror of the
heavy clouds hanging on the slopes of our battle, the pathos that looks
down even from blue skies that have kept watch o'er man's
mortality,--so, even through failure, to draw nearer to our race; this,
as I conceive it, is to lead the ideal life. It is a message blended of
many voices of the poets whom Shelley called, whatever might be their
calamity on earth, the most fortunate of men; it rises from all lands,
all ages, all religions; it is the battle-cry of that one great idea
whose slow and hesitating growth is the unfolding of our long
civilization, seeking to realize in democracy the earthly, and in
Christianity the heavenly, hope of man,--the idea of the community of
the soul, the sameness of it in all men. To lead this life is to be one
with man through love, one with the universe through knowledge, one with
God through the will; that is its goal, toward that we strive, in that
we believe.
And Thou, O Youth, for whom these lines are written, fear not; idealize
your friend, for it is better to love and be deceived than not to love
at all; idealize your masters, and take Shelley and Sidney to your
bosom, so shall they serve you more nobly and you love them more sweetly
than if the touch and sight of their mortality had been yours indeed;
idealize your country, remembering that Brutus in the dagger-stroke and
Cato in his death-darkness knew not the greater Rome, the proclaimer of
the unity of our race, the codifier of justice, the establisher of our
church, and died not knowing,--but do you believe in the purpose of God,
so shall you best serve the times to be; and in your own life, fear not
to act as your ideal shall command, in the constant presence of that
other self who goes with you, as I have said, so shall you blend with
him at the end. Fear not either to believe that the soul is as eternal
as the order that obtains in it, wherefore you shall forever pursue that
divine beauty which has here so touched and inflamed you,--for this is
the faith of man, your race, and those who were fairest in its records.
And have recourse always to the fountains of this life in literature,
which are the wells of truth. How to live is the one matter; the wisest
man in his ripe age is yet to seek in it; but Thou, begin now and seek
wisdom in the beauty of virtue and live in its light, rejoicing in it;
so in this world shall you live in the foregleam of the world to come.
DEMOCRACY
Democracy is a prophecy, and looks to the future; it is for this reason
that it has its great career. Its faith is the substance of things hoped
for and the evidence of things unseen, whose realization will be the
labour of a long age. The life of historic nations has been a pursuit
toward a goal under the impulse of ideas often obscurely
comprehended,--world-ideas as we call them,--which they have embodied in
accomplished facts and in the institutions and beliefs of mankind,
lasting through ages; and as each nation has slowly grown aware of the
idea which animated it, it has become self-conscious and conscious of
greatness. That men are born equal is still a doctrine openly derided;
that they are born free is not accepted without much nullifying
limitation; that they are born in brotherhood is less readily denied.
These three, the revolutionary words, liberty, equality, fraternity, are
the substance of democracy, if the matter be well considered, and all
else is but consequence.
It might seem singular that man should ever have found out this creed,
as that physical life could invent the brain, since the struggle for
existence in primitive and early times was so adverse to it, and rested
on a selfish and aggrandizing principle, in states as well as between
races. In most parts of the world the first true governments were
tyrannies, patriarchal or despotic; and where liberty was indigenous, it
was confined to the race-blood. Aristotle speaks of slavery without
repugnance save in Greeks, and serfdom was incorporated in the northern
tribes as soon as they began to be socially organized. Some have alleged
that religious equality was an Oriental idea, and borrowed from the
relation of subjects to an Asiatic despot, which paved the way for it;
some attribute civil equality to the Roman law; some find the germ of
both in Stoical morals. But so great an idea as the equality of man
reaches down into the past by a thousand roots. The state of nature of
the savage in the woods, which our fathers once thought a pattern, bore
some outward resemblance to a freeman's life; but such a condition is
rather one of private independence than of the grounded social right
that democracy contemplates. How the ideas involved came into historical
existence is a minor matter. Democracy has its great career, for the
first time, in our national being, and exhibits here most purely its
formative powers, and unfolds destiny on the grand scale. Nothing is
more incumbent on us than to study it, to turn it this way and that, to
handle it as often and in as many phases as possible with lively
curiosity, and not to betray ourselves by an easy assumption that so
elementary a thing is comprehended because it seems simple. Fundamental
ideas are precisely those with which we should be most familiar.