But, on the other hand, this distinction may be just as real and vital

as any other in the world of experience. Nobody thinks that pleasure

and pain are indifferent because they are both necessary forms of

active life, or that beauty and ugliness are indifferent, or that

success and failure are indifferent. How we strain for success in a

game, for instance, although we are perfectly well aware that the game

is the real object, not the triumph! Yet without the possibilities of

triumph or defeat, there would be no game. The problem is really part

of the primal mystery of the origin of cosmic life. If we assume at

the beginning of things (so far as we can conceive a beginning) one

infinite, homogeneous, absolutely undifferentiated Existence, and then

conceive this Existence as impelled to act, and to become conscious of

itself, it is plain that to do so it must differentiate itself. There

must arise within it the relations of subject and object, simple and

complex, better and worse, and all that is involved in change, variety,

progression. And this applies as much to the moral life as to the

life of the senses. It has often been pointed out that if there were

no Wrong to strive with there would be no visible and active Right.

Were there no hate, love would be incapable of the noblest part of its

ministry. Were there no weakness, strength could never have been called

on for the strain by which it is developed. And if good should ever

overcome and absorb evil the stage thus attained will assuredly reveal

some new contrast of pursuit and avoidance perhaps as strange to us now

as moral distinctions would be to the lower animals.

The Monist will also urge that nature, as we behold it, is not a

fixed and rounded entity, but is something in process of completion.

We must therefore interpret nature not alone by its contents at any

given moment, but by its drift and tendency. This is precisely the

consideration which separates Pantheism as enlightened by science from

the Pantheism of a primitive nature-worship. In it, the Greek and the

Hebrew ideals are blended and reconciled.

But what, for ethical purposes, _is_ this drift and tendency? What

significance do I mean to attach to the terms moral good and moral

evil? It is hardly necessary to say that I do not propose in a couple

of chapters of one short book to elaborate an ethical system with all

its groundwork, and with details ramifying into every branch of ethical

action, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has essayed to do in his Data of Ethics.

All I can do here, or in any section of this book, is to indicate a

_way_ of looking at things—at nature, at human life, at art—in which

the meaning of the universe has seemed to become intelligible and

satisfying to my own thought. Having found the way, every one must use

it for himself or herself. I can, in the present work, go no further

into detail than is necessary to make my meaning clear; to set whatever

readers I may find at my point of view. If I can at all succeed in

doing this, let them use their own eyes: they will find a wonderful

landscape, vital, fresh and boundless, opening before them.

The conception of ethical law which I wish to put forward differs

from what is commonly understood as evolutionary or scientific ethics

at the present day. This system appears ultimately to rest on Jeremy

Bentham as its founder, but Bentham’s later disciples have modified

his doctrine at various points by a deeper appreciation of the

difficulties of the position. They have approximated more closely to

what I consider to be the truth, but they have never shaken off the

entanglement of the original false position of the modern founder

of the school. Bentham, who pursued “the greatest happiness of the

greatest number” through the medium of the most depressing system of

philosophy which the world has ever known, made Pleasure the ultimate

criterion of moral action and declared for the summary striking out

of the word ‘ought’ from the language of morals, as corresponding to

an idea which, so far as it rested on any reality, was merely a relic

of primitive superstition.[142] But J. S. Mill saw that the sentiment

of duty and moral obligation was based on something deeper and more

instinctive than a word misunderstood, and that it often survived in

persons singularly free from superstition. He sought its origin in the

psychology and physiology of man, and interpreted it, on the principle

of association of ideas, as a survival of the deep impression made by

punishments and rewards attached respectively to different classes

of actions in each man’s early life.[143] The position was a more

rational and scientific one than that of Bentham, but it still failed

to account for the _a priori_ character of the moral sense, the ready

responsiveness with which early training evokes in man the sentiment of

duty.

It seemed, as it were, to have been somehow _prepared beforehand_ and

to lie latent awaiting only the right touch to spring into action.

Finally, Herbert Spencer, who may be said to have brought all this

line of thinking to its climax, seized on the evolution doctrine as

explaining this intuitive and innate quality of ethical feeling. It

_was_ prepared beforehand, far back in the ancestry of the race. Not

the punishments and rewards applied to the modern individual in his own

person, but those which affected his near and remote progenitors, had,

in the course of countless generations, built up “moral perceptions”

resulting from “inherited modifications caused by accumulated

experiences.”[144] The moral sense, therefore, is _now_ really innate

because inherited, but was once acquired by the operation of pleasures

and pains arising from man’s intercourse with nature and with his

fellows. And the ultimate moral criterion in the present day remains

simply the striking of a balance between pleasure and pain.[145]

It is clear that if the Lamarckian doctrine of the inheritance of

acquired characteristics is a delusion, the bottom is at once knocked

out of the Spencerian system of ethics. But apart from this, that

system, on the historical side at least, is vitiated by the cardinal

defect in Mr. Spencer’s mind—his failure to appreciate the true nature

of the data with which he had to deal. The philosophic mind is not

a mere logic-machine. It must include the faculty of vision, the

vital perception of the objects of thought, as well as the faculty

of observing and of generalizing about their action and reaction on

each other, and from this point of view Mr. Spencer’s deficiency as a

philosopher is enormous. A vital perception of the object in this case

makes us at once aware that you cannot evolve a sense of Duty, “stern

daughter of the voice of God,” out of pleasures and pains. Pleasures

and pains _per se_ will yield nothing to the end of the chapter but the

sense or the recollection of pleasure and of pain. It is as impossible

in psychology as it is in mechanics to juggle more power out of the end

of a sequence of causes and effects than you put in at the beginning.

But what has a natural ethics to put in the place of pleasure as the

goal of right action? The question is answered when we ask, What does

Nature herself put? Nature is said to have no morals, yet a mother bird

will imperil and often lose its life for the sake of its young. Is it

seeking pleasure then? Certainly not—it is protecting and fostering

life, the life of the race. And here, as we have insisted so often,

is the master-impulse of nature. We are taking a false and contracted

view when we assume that a living thing can have no other goal of

action except pleasure. Far earlier than the appearance of man in

the world is the appearance of the social instinct which prompts the

individual to live, and if necessary to die, for the larger life of

the race. What really begins in man is the power to think of himself,

to choose, to analyze, the power to say, Why? To this question the

science of ethics must provide an answer if it can—that, in fact, is

its origin and function. But if it binds itself to provide an answer

in terms of pleasure, it is entering the lists with naked Egotism at

a fatal disadvantage. On that ground, it seems to me, Egotism must

always win. But it is not the only ground. Nature knows a whole world

of impulse and effort which has nothing to do with pleasure. _Nature

does not directly want pleasure at all, but is resolved, at the cost

of pleasure and everything else, to have life._ Now life is maintained

at its highest point by _harmony_—a harmony of the faculties with

each other and, as a whole, with the mighty life outside them. And,

as Santayana admirably says, “harmony when made to rule in life gives

reason a noble satisfaction which we call happiness. Happiness is

impossible and even inconceivable to a mind without scope and without

pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure, and fear.”[146] In this

sense we may say that happiness is organically connected with right

action.[147] But right action in itself is simply the action which best

subserves the central purpose of nature. If that purpose is summed up

in the one word Life, we must think of the moral sense, if we would

not go astray and be bewildered, in terms of living and not in terms

of enjoying. To take the greatest of exemplars, who can venture to

affirm that Christ had more pleasure living as he did and uttering to

the last syllable the message that was given him to deliver, than if

he had prudently restrained himself and led the life of a decent and

respectable artisan in his Syrian village? Indeed, even if we take very

long views, who can affirm that, on the whole, he has by his life and

death increased the sum of pleasure in the world? I doubt it very much.

No one can deny that it is most questionable. To think of the matter in

terms of pleasure seems to lead to nothing but perplexity and doubt.

But there can be no doubt whatever that he lived to the full the life

that it was in him to live, and that he immensely deepened and enriched

the spiritual life of man. When we fix our minds on life as the goal

and depth and fulness of life as the criterion, we come out at once

into the clear light where high inspirations are born and justified.

But it is not only the conception of life as existing for pleasure that

I think a true ethics will repudiate. We must clear our minds of the

idea that life has any goal outside itself—pleasure, moral discipline,

or what not. We must fully realize the conception of life as its own

goal, its own complete satisfaction and justification. Whoever has done

this will feel as if he had escaped from a jungle of contradiction

and gloom, where man can only live at all by clearing some little

space for his church and his homestead, and giving up the rest to the

powers of darkness. Yet a step brings him to a point of view from which

the physical, the animal and the human features of the world’s vast

landscape seem to flow into a happy and organic union, where every part

becomes luminous with meaning and charged with divine purpose.

Moral action then, I conceive, as a _certain kind_ of life-promoting

action. It is action which promotes life in the whole as opposed to the

part, which sacrifices the lower, narrower, more immediate life for the

fuller, nobler, more permanent life, whenever they are found to clash.

It does not differ in kind from other wholesome vital action, but it

differs in the heightening, the saliency, the intention conferred upon

it by the circumstances under which it is taken. And if we ask how it

was evolved in man, the answer is that it was there already in the

instincts of the lower animals, which are never, as man often so sadly

is, at odds with their true functions and duties. It is not morality

which has been evolved in man, but the capacity for immorality, due to

his personal self-consciousness.

The ultimate question, then, as regards the abstract morality of any

act or class of acts must be, Does it make for life? Does it tend to

help man towards the maximum development _of all his faculties and

capacities_? These faculties and capacities are what the universe

has now evolved at the highest level of which we have any knowledge.

None of them is evil, except in so far as it may thwart and stunt the

development of others. In the harmony of the whole range of man’s

powers of sense and spirit lies the golden ideal which none of us

may realize, but for which each of us may strive; or—for such is the

supreme and fatal prerogative of man—which he may set himself to

dishonour and deny.

CHAPTER IX

THE ETHICAL SANCTION

“Far, far, how far? from o’er the gates of Birth,

The faint horizons, all the bounds of earth.”

Tennyson.

Ethical philosophy centres on two main points—the ethical criterion

and the ethical sanction. We have to ask ourselves, What kind of life

ought I to live, and secondly, Why ought I to live it? The first of

these questions we have answered simply thus: Life is self-justified;

in merely living we fulfil the whole purpose of nature; and as life

is a thing admitting of degrees it follows that that life is best in

which there is most of life. But this does not mean apparent life for

the individual at the present moment. It means most life for the Whole,

so far as the individual acts upon the Whole. And he acts on it in two

ways—first (one which is often overlooked) by _living his own life_

which is equally a part of that Whole whether he lives on a desert

island or in the heart of a city; and secondly by the influence he

radiates on other lives with which his own is socially related.

This, it is clear, is quite the same thing as to say that the right

life for any man is that in which _for him_ there is most of life—the

richest and the fullest life—_if he were to go on living indefinitely_.

For whatever depresses or exalts life in the Whole must ultimately

depress or exalt it in the individual also; the two interests are

clearly identical _in the long run_. This ‘long run’ or universal

point of view, which makes identical the interests of the Whole

and the interests of the individual, gives to a natural ethics the

criterion for all human action. It gives the contents, though not the

cogency—with this we have to deal in the present chapter—of the word

‘ought.’

By the mere fact of his social relations with other men each individual

is continually being trained to take this view, to harmonize together

his egoistic and his altruistic instincts; and is continually amassing

a store of social experiences out of which a universal moral code is

gradually shaping itself. “Life,” it has been well said, “has saved up

much wisdom.” Ethical wisdom, in this regard, will clearly involve such

kind of action, of organization, as will afford to each individual the

fullest opportunities for vital development in mind and body.

The life in which there is most of life! By holding fast to this clue

we shall, I think, see our way through many of the obscurities in

which, partly by the search for an extra-natural basis of morality,

partly by the reactionary attempt to base morality simply on the

striking of a balance between pleasures and pains, the philosophy

of right and wrong has been involved. We get a natural basis for

establishing a scale in human action, a distinction between ‘higher’

and ‘lower,’ without which a philosophic ethics is clearly impossible.

I do not, of course, mean to say that it is possible to apply a

mechanical rule and measure to moral action in the manner of Catholic

casuistry, according to which it is a venial sin to steal 19s. 6d. but

a mortal sin to steal £1.[148] Still, the existence of a natural scale

is evident at once when we consider the fact that man is constantly

being placed in positions in which his action may either thwart and

depress life, or simply maintain it, or markedly enrich and extend

it. The ethical quality of his action appears to arise from the fact

that it is possible for him, under the impulse of immediate personal

gratification, to do things which if commonly done by men would destroy

the beauty and order of human life. The interests of the whole and of

the individual may be identical, as we have said, in the long run, but

at the moment they are often in violent conflict. Allowing for the

fact that it is never possible in nature to draw a sharp dividing

line between different classes of being, and to say absolutely that

things are _thus_ on one side of it and _thus_ on the other, we may

repeat that this opposition between the long-run or universal and the

momentary or personal interest is a characteristic of human life as

opposed to that of the lower animals. It arises from the strong sense

of individuality, of selfhood, which emerges in man and of which the

animals know little or nothing. In itself it is a new and noble power

of life, but it has its fatal and mischievous aspect. Without it we

should know neither good nor evil. Personality is at once man’s pride

and his fall.

With this sense of selfhood there have grown up in humanity the

faculties of Conscience and of Will. Conscience I interpret as the

sense of what is due to the Whole, to the nobler and more permanent

self. Inasmuch as man is only gradually discovering what it really

is that the Whole demands of us, it follows that the utterances of

conscience may be misdirected, and that they need to be corrected and

purified by intelligence and experience. We see here an example of

that principle of the combination of evolution and involution which

alone seems to make intelligible the development of life. Never, by

organizing into a social system a multitude of individual appetencies,

can one produce a moral sense, a conscience. But neither is conscience

concerned to give the true laws of that organization. It adds its

peculiar _numen_, its sanctity, to every effort to Set up a mark of

everlasting light Above the howling senses’ ebb and flow, and though

the mark itself may, indeed must, shift and be transformed with the

ripening insight of man, yet, as between it and the temptations of

sense, conscience must always be obeyed. Now as nature is organically

one, we should expect to find this truth not dependent merely on an

intuitive perception but written in the experiences of life. And is

not this exactly what we do find? The ethical ideals of Judaism, of

Hinduism, and of Roman Catholicism, with their extreme reliance on

external observance and ritual, are lower, no doubt, than those of

Christianity as conceived, say, by St. Paul. Yet let a Jew or a Hindu

turn Christian, or a Catholic turn Protestant or Freethinker, for the

mere sake of material advantages or an easier way of living, and a

general moral deterioration seems at once to set in.[149] Whenever a

man allows his sense of personal ease and gratification to overpower

his sense of what is due to his fellow man, to his own higher self,

to his God, he weakens his will and his capacity for living the nobler

life. Ultimately he destroys the capacity altogether, and with it

vanishes even that for which he sinned, the capacity for pleasure

itself. The poison of self-indulgence will slacken and corrupt

every fibre of his moral and physical being. To grasp at pleasure

indiscriminately, recklessly, greedily is a way that makes not for

life but death. On the other hand, the capacity for renunciation and

self-control, the following of the law of love, the passion for justice

and equality, not only grow strong by exercise but, far from injuring

the other capacities which it may, on occasion, be right to suppress

for their sake, they rather intensify these. As self-indulgence

corrupts and fatigues the whole man, even on the self-indulgent side,

so duty and righteousness vitalize and brace the whole man, both on

their own side and the other. For Nature is one—sweet and mighty are

the powers which conspire to create the harmony she loves in the

spirits faithful to her world-wide revelation.

Now since the moral faculties bear this common stamp upon them,

that they are those which oppose to the temptations of personal

gratification the sense of duty to something outside ourselves, and

since, when these two clash, the claim of the moral law is always to

be obeyed, it is inevitable that men will sometimes take the denial of

personal gratification for an end _per se_ and attach to it a notion

of peculiar holiness and purity. And this error will be intensified by

the ancient and inveterate habit of regarding the Supreme Being as a

malignant Power, to be propitiated by suffering. Thus we get the false

sanction with its Ascetic ideal which has appeared so often in history.

It is the other extreme to licence, and rests equally on disregard

for the rational ideal of Sophrosyne or Temperance which lies between

them. Yet it may truly be said that asceticism has its due place in

the world. The ascetic life cannot indeed be the ideal life for any

one who holds that plenitude of life is the true ideal. But it may be

the best life for this or that individual. A nature maimed or scathed

from birth, or by unhappy fortune, may best be able to realize itself

in complete withdrawal from the interests of ordinary social life. Such

withdrawal may also be necessary for the pioneer or leader of a cause,

for a great reformer, for a teacher absorbed in his mission.

Philosophy, in fact, has its saints and ascetics as well as any

religion that rests on extra-natural sanctions. But in each case the

ascetic ideal rests on quite a different basis.

Looking broadly at the part which religious Orders have played in the

religious and intellectual history of Europe, it may well be doubted

whether even the most gracious and human figure in the history of

asceticism, Francis of Assisi, would not have better served his time

and land by the natural development, in secular life and activity, of

the beautiful if sometimes wildly ebullient character portrayed in the

records of his youth, than by cutting away half his life in order to

force the other half into a distorted rarity. In recognizing the beauty

and sweetness of his nature let us not be misled into attributing it

in any degree to the influence of that fatal miasma from a faith more

ancient than any religion which has a name and place on earth to-day,

the dim terror of the unseen which has embodied itself for ages in

expiatory sacrifices and rites of blood and pain.

Had Francis not been a saint he would certainly have been one of his

country’s greatest poets.[150] Different minds will probably estimate

differently the loss and gain. As a poet he produced the ‘Canticle of

the Sun’; as an ascetic, the Franciscan Order. Now it is fair to point

out that this, like other Orders of his church, must not be judged

by what it is like in times when it is surrounded by watchful and

by no means adorant eyes. A Catholic religious Order in a Catholic

country naturally lives and moves in an atmosphere of veneration.

To preserve this atmosphere pure from the sceptical thought which,

from the monastic point of view, would vitiate it so dangerously,

is naturally a prime object of every religious community; hence the

bigotries, superstitions, and tyrannies of which these communities

have so often been the sources or agents, from the days of Hypatia to

the days of Dreyfus. Such communities, developing themselves under

such circumstances, cannot attract many men of intellect and character

to join them. They rapidly deteriorate, and European literature from

Boccaccio and Chaucer to Erasmus shows us the repute in which they

come to be held by the uncloistered intellect. A false ideal may

stimulate, but it poisons. St. Francis, dreaming that he serves God

by making himself blind to God’s world through a course of pitiless

austerities,[151] produces an Order whose licence in one generation

after his death has become a scandal to Christendom.[152]

Let us turn now to the theory of asceticism as conceived by the

humane and rational spirit of Stoic philosophy. Epictetus—to my mind

the greatest ethical thinker of antiquity—has a valuable and carefully

reasoned chapter on the subject in his Dissertations. In reading this

after, let us say, The Little Flowers of St. Francis, one seems to

pass from the drugged atmosphere of a mediæval church to the free air

and sunlight of the world. The ascetic, or Cynic as he was called in

Stoic phraseology, is painted for us as a man who adventures himself to

the extreme limit of abnegation, not from any mystic sentiment of the

holiness of pain and poverty, but simply to help himself and others to

realize the soul’s independence of external things. It was a cardinal

doctrine of Stoicism (as it was of the Christianity of Christ) that the

things which a man wrought and thought, the things under the control

of his will, were the only things that really mattered. What happened

to a man from outside was, indeed, of great importance in regard to

how he dealt with it; in itself it was of none; it was like a ball

in a game which you have to do your best to catch, knowing well that

you do so not for the sake of the ball but of the game. Such was the

Stoic view of life, and the Cynic represented not the perfected Stoic,

not an ideal towards which all should tend—for the ideal was that of

citizenship and well-ordered social life—but simply the method of

verification which consists in taking an extreme case and showing that

one’s theory will fit in with it. And so Diogenes lived in a barrel

instead of a house, and asked nothing of Alexander except to stand out

of his light. It is not more pleasing to God, not better in any way,

that a man should live in a barrel rather than in a house, that he

should be single rather than married, poor rather than rich; yet in the

chances and changes of this mortal life all these things may happen to

a man, will he, nill he, and the point is to show that he may still

be confident and cheerful, knowing that his true self is untouched by

these calamities. And while St. Francis and the more devoted of his

followers so tortured and wrecked the body which St. Paul had called

the temple of the Holy Spirit that many of them perished or had to

linger out their lives in the infirmary,[153] with the Cynic the

cultivation of the body and its faculties was a part of his discipline.

“For,” says Epictetus,[154] “if he shall appear consumptive, meagre

and pale, his witness hath not the same emphasis. Not only by

showing forth the things of the spirit must he convince foolish

men that it is possible, without the things that are admired of

them, to be good and wise, but also in his body must he show that

plain and simple and open-air living are not mischievous even to

the body: ‘Behold, even of this I am a witness, I and my body.’ So

Diogenes was wont to do, for he went about radiant with health, and

with his very body he turned many to good. But a Cynic that men

pity seems to be a beggar—all men turn away from him, all stumble

at him. For he must not appear squalid; so that neither in this

respect shall he scare men away; but his very austerity should be

cleanly and pleasing.”

How sane and wholesome, how wisely adapted to the fundamental facts of

life, is the Stoic ideal as compared with the monastic! In it we see

that there is a place in a natural ethics for a rational asceticism.

Of such there will always be need—we must admit, whatever we may think

of the ‘spirituality’ of self-destruction, that there are, and are

always likely to be, many more men and women who deteriorate in soul

and body through petty acts of self-indulgence than who do so by an

excess of austerity. And this makes it all the more necessary that the

matter should be conceived rightly, reasonably, from the side of a

reverence for life and its manifestations, not from that of disdain and

repulsion; that we should take hold of it (to quote Epictetus again)

by the handle by which it can be carried, not that by which theory and

experience alike have shown that it never can. When Tennyson wrote

“Move upward, working out the beast,” he was not so well inspired as

in some of his other appreciations of modern science. The religious

ascetic aims at working out the beast—not so Nature, who does not

progress by substituting one form of living for another, but by growing

from a central core and continually harmonizing the old radical

elements of being with the new assimilations. One _can_, perhaps,

work out the beast—what cannot the will achieve? But the beast surely

avenges himself, and often in terrible fashion.

When, however, we have recognized the false sanction and the false

ideal associated with it, we have still the more difficult problem of

establishing the true. If Righteousness—to use that term for all kinds

of action ethically right—is to be followed in the interests of life,

how can it ever be required that much suffering, and even death itself

may have to be faced for its sake? Man is a part of a Whole—in the

effective realization of that conception all ethics is summed up—but he

is also an individual. Why should the individual give way to the Whole

if their interests seem to clash? In other words, though we have the

contents, the static significance of the word ‘ought,’ we have still to

find its dynamic significance, its cogency.

Every beast does what it ‘ought’ without any question, and this

constantly involves acts of co-operation or self-sacrifice for the

interests of the race. In man, ethical action has a greater value for

life, simply because, unlike the beast, he is able to question its

grounds and to forgo it if he chooses. He observes, as we have said,

that the ‘long run’ or universal point of view is often in conflict

with the individual point of view. “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow

we die” is the extreme expression of the individual point of view. It

has been called a ‘pig-philosophy,’ and if the expression is just, it

is not because the pig will die to-morrow, for it will probably live as

long as anything else, but because no matter how long it lives it is,

_qua_ pig, incapable of any other form of life.

But a man is capable of other forms of life, and to realize these he

must keep the pig-life in check, not despising or disowning it, but

restraining it, lest it should throw him out of harmony. Unchecked, it

will do that in the long run; but what if he is to have no long run?

Where the lower life can yield an hour of delight, why deny it for the

sake of a higher life, if in the next hour both must end together?

I confess that I see no escape from the implied conclusion if the

premiss is true. But if the view of life outlined in these pages be

true, then this premiss is palpably false. Neither the higher nor the

lower life can ever have any end, though no doubt they may pass into

forms outside the category of Time, in which the terms beginning and

end have no longer any meaning. Life is not dependent on its visible

and tangible forms. The question here involved is one on which the

drift of certain modern speculations in physics obliges us to dwell for

a little.

The question of the present inhabitability of Mars or other planets has

been much debated of late, pro and con. Opinions differ on this point;

but there is a very general agreement among physicists that the state

of the moon, cold, dead, and barren as a burnt-out cinder, must, by the

equalization of energy, be sooner or later the necessary fate of every

planet and of every sun in the universe. Science has thus apparently

come to justify by its solemn verdict that cry of the Latin poet, more

charged with the pathos of eternal death than perhaps any other human

utterance:—

“Soles occidere et redire possunt:

Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,

Nox est perpetua una dormienda.”[155]

The conditions under which life is possible will then no longer exist.

One nothingness awaits the saint, the sage, the ox, the oak tree, and

the fungus. “Life,” says Le Dantec, “has not always existed on the

earth”; we are to regard it as merely “a surface accident in the

history of the thermic evolution of the globe.”[156]

This remark, which is one that a thermometer might be expected to make

if it could talk, is in Le Dantec’s mouth probably no more than a

little rhetorical fling at orthodoxy, for it is really answered by his

whole book. His main thesis is “the absence of all essential difference

and all absolute discontinuity between living and not-living matter.”

“A surface accident” can hardly be a reasonable description of a

development thus prepared for in the essential nature of the substance

of the world. But other physicists have lately cut deeper, and will not

allow the suns of Catullus, even when cold, to set and rise again for

ever. According to the very interesting and apparently well-supported

speculations of Gustave Le Bon,[157] all matter is at present engaged

in that process of disintegration of which radium offers the most

conspicuous example. The energy which produces life and response of all

kinds is explained as simply the result of this long, disintegrating

process, and may be compared to the action of a released spring,

seeking its state of quiescence and immobility.[158] When the process

is complete, matter will be resolved into the primordial Something

from which it somehow originated. And where will the saint and the

sage, or anything that we can recognize as life, be then?

The answer to all this rises to the mind at once when we abandon

the point of view of the thermometer and place ourselves at that of

rational Man. This Matter, on whose states life is supposed to be

dependent, is, after all, known to us only through the fact that we

are living to observe it. If it disappeared, no doubt we should cease

to see it, and if it were transformed we should see it otherwise, but

to make the life which sees dependent on our seeing anything exactly

as it appears now on this globe is surely the wildest of assumptions.

We observe that life makes use of certain conditions of matter—a

certain range of temperature, the presence of certain minerals and

gases—in order to express itself. We regard these conditions as the

product of a Power which desires life and has produced them to obtain

it. But there may be many other conditions too. All we can tell is

that beyond certain physical limits our senses cannot perceive life

or get responses from it. M. Le Dantec would, no doubt, treat as an

illusion the belief that man can communicate with and be responded to

by a Power, a Life, transcending that of which the senses inform us. I

am, with the multitude of men, profoundly convinced that we can. But

leaving this entirely aside, is it not evident that, even as there are

invisible rays in the spectrum which are now and then discovered by

some unexpected chemical or electrical action, so there may be modes

of living of which none of our present senses can give us the faintest

conception? Whoever may deny this possibility, and on whatever grounds,

it certainly cannot be denied on any grounds that physics or biology

are aware of. And to those who believe that life is the central thing,

and that matter exists only for it, the possibility is a certainty,

for life must have been when as yet matter was not—life set it going.

To convey the idea that everything that exists, however it may be

transformed, is part of a divine Whole which cannot die because it is

essential Life, we say that it is ‘immortal,’ and conceive ourselves

as existing after death in a spiritual form just as the body exists

after the bodily death in other bodily forms. Whether time and space,

or even personality, will exist for us after death we dare not say;

we are totally unable to imagine the conditions of such an existence.

But we can perfectly grasp the broad fact that whatever we do and are,

whatever we think, whatever transacts itself even in the unconscious

sphere of our existence, must have eternal endurance and significance

because it is knit with the eternal Whole.

“To the foot,” says Epictetus, “I shall say that it is according to

Nature that it be clean; but if you take it as a foot, and not as a

solitary thing, it shall beseem it to go into the mud, and to tread

on thorns, and perchance to be cut off, for the sake of the whole;

otherwise it is no longer a foot.

“And some such thing we should suppose about ourselves also. What

art thou? A man. Look at thyself as a solitary creature, and it is

according to Nature for thee to live to old age, to grow rich, and

to keep good health. But if thou look upon thyself as a man, and as

a part of a certain whole, for the sake of that whole it may become

thee now to have sickness, now to sail the seas, and run into

peril, now to suffer need, and perchance to die before thy time.

“Why, then, dost thou bear it hard? Knowest thou not that, as the

foot, alone, is not a foot, _so thou, alone, art not a man_.”[159]

The broad fact on which a system of natural ethics must be based, if

it is to have any ethical quality at all, is that _the individual

life finds its goal in the cosmic life_, not in pleasure, or any

other term by which we may choose to express a sensation of personal

enjoyment. The distinction between the _bonum honestum_ and the _bonum

delectabile_ is really a valid one—it is no invention of moralists

“suckled in a creed outworn,” but is revealed by a study of life and

its manifestations to have been deeply rooted in nature from a period

far anterior to the advent of man upon the earth. In man, the _bonum

honestum_ takes the form mainly of what Epictetus calls the sense of

“natural fellowship” among men, and what Christ expressed in the

word which gave to the ideas of Stoicism the penetrating power they

had lacked, the great and divine word, Love. But we must never forget

that even this word will not take us to our end and sum up a system of

ethical thought unless we rightly conceive the ultimate object to which

it is directed. This is not the visible community of men, nor even that

of all nature, now existing or to exist in the future. It is the ideal,

eternal community, of which every man remains equally an organic part,

whether he has any means of physical communication with his fellows or

not. It is that without which the visible community, with all its laws

and inter-relations, would never have come into being. It is the “city

of God,” builded without hands, the Universal Polity whose “troubled

image,” as Plato says, we discern in the polity we know.

When Socrates, after his sentence, lay in prison awaiting the summons

to die, his friends gathered round him entreating him to make his

escape, and explaining to him the safe and easy means they had provided

for that end. Freely and cheerfully as was his wont, delighting in the

play of dialectical fence, he debated the matter with them. Then he

laid dialectics aside, and spoke to them from the heights of vision.

Rightly or wrongly, he declared, the laws of his mother-city, to

which he owed all he had and all he was, had bidden him die. Whatever

happened now, there could be no escape in the end. Some day he must

face death, and stand before the Laws of the Underworld. What answer

should he make to Them when they demanded how he had dealt in life by

their brethren in the world above?

This grand impersonation of the eternal Laws in their kinship with

the laws of the visible world illumines a whole region of thought,

extending far beyond the limits of the particular moral question which

evoked it. It strikes the note of all high thinking on man’s duty to

man. The laws, written or unwritten, that govern societies of men can

claim no reverence from the individual who does not feel that they are

the shadows or copies of laws belonging to the sphere of the eternal.

It is one thing to admit that the social relations of mankind give the

start to ethical feeling, provide it with a wide and varied field of

action, and with a criterion as to what is right and what is not. It is

quite another to argue that this ethical feeling is merely a product of

these relations, and has, apart from them, no meaning or purpose. This

is another case of the principle which I have described before[160] in

speaking of Evolution and Involution. Without both of these I cannot

see how any movement from one state of being to another is to be

accounted for. People, or even animals, living in communities find that

mutual aid is useful to them, and they practise it. The utilitarian

school think, when they have demonstrated this, that the whole ethical

question is solved. But in reality they have not even approached it.

Mutual aid is useful? Well, then, it is useful. How are we going to

get any further? How are we going to account for love, duty, fidelity,

self-sacrifice? Because certain things appear in the world under

certain conditions we have, many of us, got into a slipshod way of

saying that they are the product of these conditions, but a strict

examination of the terms will frequently show that they are nothing

of the kind. There is no valid reason why social life and mutual aid

should not go on for ever without producing anything higher than the

sense of mutual advantage. The nobler passions do indeed come into life

when the proper stage of social evolution has been reached, but their

source is not within the bounds of the visible order, nor do I see how

they can ever justify themselves with reference to it alone. Neither,

on the other hand, can they be realized without it. The divine air

which we breathe on the mountain height is not made by the mountain,

but we must climb the mountain to breathe it. Every step we take

upwards in the visible order is, as it were, the discovery of something

in that invisible order which is its spiritual counterpart and gives it

its spiritual significance.

I have said that ethics is for life; but to the individual it must

sometimes appear to be rather for death than for life, unless he knows

that there is a life beyond the visible life. In this faith only—in

whatever varied forms the intellect of man has embodied and expressed

it—are martyrdoms possible. And martyrdoms have been so often the great

turning-points and inspirations of human history that an ethics which

cannot justify them would seem to be an ethics at odds with nature.

Consider from our point of view the significance of the two martyrdoms

of history which have most deeply impressed and influenced the minds of

men.

Socrates had no gospel, no new truth to proclaim. He dissociated

himself from the ‘rationalistic’ theories of his time, not indeed

because he was particularly attached to ancient ideas in religion, but

because theorizing on these subjects had no interest for him.[161] On

his trial he expressly disclaimed heretical views on religion. It is

clear that these were only charged against him because the real offence

was no crime in Athenian or any other law. The real offence was that

Socrates was a relentless critic, within reach of whose tongue no

patriotic rhetorician could feel himself confident and comfortable.

It was a time of rhetorical patriotism in Athens. From the bitter

humiliation of the Peloponnesian War had arisen an impulse towards

national regeneration, a genuine and worthy impulse in itself, but

one which unfortunately took shape not in a manly facing of facts, a

courageous march forward to the future, but rather in a panic-stricken

retreat to old conservative formulas and bigotries, to the abandonment

of which by cultivated Athenians was ascribed all the evil that had

fallen on the city. Socrates, however, delighted in taking popular

convictions and reducing them by a series of ingenious interrogations

to their verifiable residuum of truth, if there happened to be any.

They commonly emerged from the ordeal in a dilapidated condition. At a

time when the whole city was high strung with patriotic fervour while

inwardly very uncertain about its principles of action, the presence of

a thinker like Socrates, with his pitiless arraignment of every gaudy

fallacy before the bar of Reason, was a continual scandal and offence,

and was easily interpreted as a public danger. Had he consented to

keep silent, and affected to fall in with the general trend of public

sentiment, he would, as he well knew, have been safe. But he refused

all compliance and compromise, and declared with absolute truth that

Athens would do better to reward him for stinging it into a perception

of realities than to punish him for the wholesome pain of the process.

So he went with clear-sighted deliberation to his death, and that

death, so wonderfully recorded for us by the greatest prose writer

of all time, has ennobled all criticism, all sceptical thought,

thenceforward. None can think lightly of what Socrates thought it worth

his while to die for.

Turn to the death of Christ, and into how different an atmosphere

we seem to pass! No philosopher has here recorded for us the death

of a philosopher. Myth and legend have clustered round the great

event—the Jewish conception of an expiatory sacrifice—the truer and

profounder myth of a slain and re-arisen God—and these have wrapped

the Crucifixion in such a cloud of mystical light and colour that the

outlines of the historical fact are lost to view. When this cloud is

pierced, however, an intelligible human transaction remains. In Christ

the luminous purity of Greek reason was so blended with the religious

fervour of the Eastern mind that he may justly be called the ideal

man, the Son of Man and of God, the incarnation of the divine thought.

Unlike Socrates, he was distinctly a heretic in his place and time.

He appeared among a people deeply religious but one in whom religion

had taken the form of an immense fabric of ceremonial and observance,

guarded and administered by a special caste who conceived themselves as

the appointed vehicle of the will of God for the untaught multitude.

To this multitude Christ went direct. He led them straight to the

ancient founts of light and life, disregarding the narrow channels

hewn by Pharisaic formalism. He bade them open their eyes and see for

themselves; he taught them that the truth was for all men; beside the

conceptions of the authorized religion he set new conceptions which

made the old seem barren or ludicrous. The people heard him gladly,

and the great fabric of Pharisaism was manifestly tottering. The fury

of a monopolist caste was aroused. There is no more merciless anger

than the anger of the religious monopolist who sees his monopoly

threatened, and to this anger Christ fell a victim. As Socrates died

for the right to disbelieve, so Christ died for the right to believe,

and whatever the churches have made of him he has inspired every

revolt against priestcraft and authority ever since. No creed is worth

living for which is not worth dying for. Christ’s death and spiritual

resurrection[162] set the seal on this truth and gave the world the

most signal instance in history of triumph arising out of defeat and

death.

Volumes of argument and analysis could not confute an ethical system so

effectually and so severely as the bare fact that it looked paltry or

incongruous beside such lives and deaths as these.

The conclusions we have reached in this discussion of the basis of a

natural ethics may now be summed up. We have interpreted the object of

phenomenal Being as Life.

The ethical quality of life lies in its conscious and active harmony

with the Whole.

The motive for ethical action lies in the fact that we are a part of

that Whole. The sense of this relation is as deep a part of man’s

nature as the sense of his selfhood, or deeper.

To live for Others, then, is no more the true epitome of a natural

ethics than is, to live for Self. The true epitome is, Live for the

Whole—the Whole which includes both others and yourself, which is

greater than all humanity, yet is capable of being faithfully served in

the silence of one human breast.

We have now before us, therefore, a clear conception of the criterion

and the sanction of ethical action. The criterion is applied when we

ask of anything done by man, “Does it further life in the Whole?” The

sanction is found in the fact that each of us is an organic part of

that Whole. The richest and fullest life is evidently to be won by the

most complete development of all our faculties which is allowed us by

our opportunities. Ethics, therefore, exists for life, not life for

ethics. This simple proposition arises inevitably from the scientific

conception of the world. The greatest of fallacies is to conceive life

as existing for any other object whatsoever, or to define its aim as

something more or less remote from our present existence. Our ‘eternal

life’ is not something to come—we are living it here and now. This is

not a pilgrimage or a place of preparation; it leads us to no heaven,

no hell, no distant judgment seat. We are before that judgment seat

every hour; the heaven and the hell which it dispenses are the daily

experiences through which we move; and the saints and prophets of this

faith are those who have felt most deeply and revealed most profoundly

the great realities of existence, hidden from us not so much by the

darkness of the grave as by the impalpable veils of use and wont. The

grave has mystery indeed but no terror of gloom for those who realize

that the universe is but an eddy on the stream of life. By that eddy we

see the stream, we feel its power and movement; and we know that the

substance of which it is made is the stuff of life itself.

PART III: ART

CHAPTER X

ART AND LIFE

“Like a living thing, one and whole.”—Aristotle.[163]

The third chapter of Tolstoy’s book, What is Art? contains a summary

of the opinions of some sixty modern writers (taken chiefly from

Schasler’s Kritische Geschichte der Aesthetik) on the essential meaning

of the terms Art and Beauty. All these opinions, after having been

duly paraded across the stage, are dismissed by Tolstoy as a mass of

“enchanted confusion and contradictoriness,” and he then proceeds to

build up his own theory of art. As the latest critical treatment of

the subject on a large scale by a thinker and an artist who has made a

deep impression on the minds of men, his conclusions deserve careful

attention on the part of any later writer who desires to deal with the

perennially attractive but very obscure problems of æsthetics. Let me

begin by quoting the passage with which Tolstoy closes the fourth

chapter of his work:—

“To the question What is this Art, to which is offered up the

labour of millions, the very lives of men, and even morality

itself? we have extracted replies from the existing æsthetics

which amount to this—that the aim of art is beauty, that beauty is

recognized by the enjoyment it gives, and that artistic enjoyment

is a good and important thing because it _is_ enjoyment. In a

word, that enjoyment is good because it is enjoyment. Thus, what

is considered the definition of art is no definition at all, but

only a shuffle to justify existing art. Therefore, however strange

it may seem to say so, in spite of the mountains of books written

about art, no exact definition of art has been constructed. And the

reason of this is that the conception of art has been based on the

conception of beauty.”[164]

Now in one point at least, that which is embodied in the last sentence,

these words of Tolstoy’s appear to me to go straight to the mark.

Art can no more be founded on beauty than morality can be founded on

pleasure. A greater than Tolstoy has spoken the same truth in a couple

of his mighty lines. The great masters, says Whitman,

... do not seek beauty, they are sought,

Forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty,

longing, fain, love-sick.

But let us see what Tolstoy would set up in place of what he throws

down. Art, he tells us, is “one of the means of intercourse between

man and man.” “By words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by

means of art he transmits his feelings.” But the transmission must, if

it is art, be intentional, premeditated. “Art begins when one person

with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the

same feeling expresses that feeling by certain external indications.”

The “indications” may, of course, be a certain kind of language, or

gesture, or plastic representation, or sound. If, by such means, a man

has succeeded in making his own feeling _infectious_, and affecting

others by it, he has, to that extent achieved art. Art is therefore “a

means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings,

and is indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of

individuals and of humanity.”[165]

Certainly one cannot but admire the strong clear-headedness and common

sense with which Tolstoy blows away the mists into which he had plunged

us in his third chapter, and brings us into a region of daylight

realities, with firm earth under our feet. Undoubtedly if man does

want to get into real contact with his fellow-men he must not merely

tell them what he feels, he must make them feel the same thing. And

art, produced with “individuality, clearness and sincerity” has this

property, to use Tolstoy’s own term, of infectiousness. Moreover it

is of enormous antiquity and has exceedingly primitive forms. There

may have been art before there was speech—there was certainly art

before there was writing, before there was anything remotely resembling

intellectual culture or religion. The metaphysical definitions of

Hegel, “The Idea shining through Matter,” or of Knight, “The union of

object and subject, the drawing forth from nature of that which is

cognate to man,” and of the rest of the sixty and odd philosophers,

do, I think, look a little irrelevant when we think of the cave-man

scratching his bit of mammoth ivory. But Tolstoy’s account of the

matter glows with reality. The cave-artist was struck with something in

nature—the reindeer drinking at a pool, the mammoth swinging through

the jungle—he longed to express it, to make others see. It can hardly

be doubted that this was the origin of art _as art_.[166] I think it

is its fundamental quality even now, though we must include among the

objects rendered things not in external nature but in the artist’s own

imagination.

The questions then arise, What is it that the artist is trying to

infect other people with? Is art quite indifferent to the nature of the

feeling communicated? Is there any common feeling expressed by things

apparently so diverse as a strain of music, a piece of pottery, a

cathedral, a lyric, a statue, and a landscape painting?

Tolstoy does not overlook these questions; he has, in fact, a great

deal to say about them. But here, in his analysis of the æsthetic

faculty, the obsession with the exclusively ethical view of things

which has so much impaired his own art seems to have led him on a false

track. Having decided that infectiousness is the common quality of all

art, he is struck with the fact that this quality varies very much in

different works, and he uses it to obtain a scale of merit:—

“Not only,” he writes, “is infection a sure sign of art, but the

degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence

in art. The stronger the infection the better is the art, as art,

speaking now apart from its subject matter, _i.e._ not considering

the quality of the feelings it transmits.”[167]

This statement is obviously meaningless unless you define the nature

of the person who is to be infected. Infection is as much a matter of

the mind infected as of the agent which infects. “The stronger the

infection for such and such an audience ...” is what we shall have to

read. The audience must be a constant element if the definition is to

convey any distinct meaning. Perceiving this, as so acute a mind could

not fail to do, Tolstoy falls back on exactly the same criterion as

that of Bishop Butler when he endeavoured to get a universal standard

of right and wrong. Butler set up as final judge in these matters the

“plain honest man.”[168] You were to appeal to the unsophisticated

conscience of this ideal being, and that ended the matter. So, with

Tolstoy, you are to get the “unperverted” man who, like an animal,

“unerringly finds what he needs.”[169] Most people in our society,

says Tolstoy, “are quite unable to distinguish a work of art from the

grossest counterfeit.” They like, or pretend to like, Beethoven better

than a peasant folk-song! But the peasant’s, _i.e._ the untaught,

appreciation, which is merely bewildered by Beethoven, is right.[170]

This, we ultimately find, simply means that the “plain honest man,” as

conceived by Tolstoy, is one who appreciates the _moral_ contents of a

work of art, provided that it has any, and that it has infection enough

to get them into his mind. And Tolstoy (the art-critic) does not care

about anything except these moral contents.

This is clear when he comes to deal with the element which he mentions

above as having been omitted from his consideration of the comparative

value of art-work, namely the quality of the feeling transmitted by

the medium of art. Here he lays it down that the object of all art is

to unite mankind, and to make them feel at one with God and with each

other.[171] This may pass very well if by uniting is meant enabling

us to enter with sympathy into the life of man, and even of things

that are not man. Even so a drawing by Nettleship can make us feel

at one with a python or a tigress. But Tolstoy does not mean that.

His uniting is a moral and practical idea based on the doctrine that

combat, and everything that could lead to combat, is wrong. Ancient

religious perceptions, he argues, confined the sense of unity to the

tribe or nation, and art had to glorify solely the might or greatness

of the people who produced it. Modern religion, on the contrary, takes

account of all humanity without exception. “And therefore the feelings

transmitted by the art of our time not only cannot coincide with the

feelings transmitted by former art, but must run counter to them.”[172]

Only two kinds of art, according to Tolstoy, “can be considered good

art in our time.” These are first, “art transmitting feelings flowing

from a religious perception of man’s position in the world in relation

to God and to his neighbours,” and secondly, “art transmitting the

simplest feelings of common life, but such, always, as are accessible

to all men in the whole world—the art of common life—the art of a

people—universal art.”[173] As instances of these types of good modern

art, Tolstoy gives his amazing list—Schiller’s Robbers, Les Misérables,

Dickens’s and Dostoievsky’s novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Adam Bede.

In painting we are to take as types of excellence “the drawing by

Kramskoy (worth many of his finished pictures), showing a drawing-room

with a balcony past which troops are marching in triumph on their

return from the war. On the balcony stands a wet-nurse holding a baby

and a boy. They are admiring the procession of the troops, but the

mother, covering her face with a handkerchief, has fallen back on the

sofa, sobbing.” Or one may turn to “a picture by the French artist,

Morlon, depicting a lifeboat hastening in a heavy storm to the relief

of a steamer that is being wrecked.”[174]

It is easy to make fun of this headlong descent to the level of the

parish magazine, but it is not so easy to challenge the position from

which Tolstoy deduces his criticisms of individual works, or to deny

that he has again and again struck home with incomparable force against

the factitious art so current in the present day. His book is a piece

of genuine thinking, and in this it has few rivals among contemporary

works of æsthetic criticism, especially in English. Most of these works

are either pæans of praise for what the critic finds attractive and

stimulating to his own temperament, or attacks conducted with every

resource of satire and ridicule on what he does not understand or care

for. But a serious attempt like that of Tolstoy to discover and to

apply a true principle of art criticism is very much to seek; and I

venture to think that many critics who are horrified at the notion of

putting Uncle Tom’s Cabin above King Lear would find it by no means so

easy as they suppose to give a rational account of the faith that is in

them. Tolstoy’s conclusions, like those of Plato in The Republic (which

they very much resemble), are wrong-headed, but his manner of thinking

is that of a massive and nobly ordered intellect, and is well worthy of

respectful imitation at whatever distance lesser powers can contrive to

follow it.

I know nothing whatever (I regret to say) about the art of Kramskoy or

of Morlon, but one imagines, from Tolstoy’s way of talking about the

works referred to, that they are attempts to capture admiration for a

work of art by the aid of something which is not art, but sentiment.

At any rate, that is just what Tolstoy desires them to do. Is art,

then, entirely indifferent to subject, as some of the philosophers of

the Impressionist school contend? Not at all—so long as the subject

is something _in the picture_, and capable of being expressed in the

medium of that branch of art. A crew of men pulling a boat through a

heavy sea may be a good subject for a painting, but to the artist it

does not matter a pin’s point whether they are going to rescue life or

to board an enemy or to catch lobsters. Under the circumstances they

will all look just the same. The wreck in the offing has its value

in the design of the picture, no more and no less. And those who are

always on the look out for false values, sentimental values, will never

learn what art really has to teach them, what art alone can teach. What

is this?

The master key with which we have tried to open certain doors in

biology and in ethics will, I hope, serve us also in discovering the

principles of art. I accept fully Tolstoy’s postulate of infectiousness

as a primary quality of art. There can be no art which does not

communicate to others the feeling of the artist. This implies that the

artist must have a distinct and sincere feeling to communicate. But

it does not at all imply that the finest art is that which is most

widely or powerfully communicable at its first appearance or at any

given period in history. To say that infectiousness is an essential

characteristic of art is not the same thing as to say that the more

it infects, either extensively or intensively, the better art it is.

One might as well say that if, as has been done, you define man as ‘a

political animal,’ it would follow that the more strenuously political

he was the more he fulfilled the purpose of his being as a man. But

politics and art are both of them simply ways in which man endeavours

to remould his universe “nearer to the heart’s desire.” How does he

make use of political methods _for his true purpose_? How does he make

use of art and its infectiousness _for his true purpose_? These are the

real, the decisive questions.

What is the essential thing communicated in art? The question is

answered at once if we reflect that as life can have no ulterior

object beyond life, and is satisfied when the maximum of living is

attained,[175] so life must be the ultimate object of art also. It is

the _quality_ of art to communicate feeling; it is the _object_ of

art to communicate a feeling for life. _Art is man’s expression of

life_; and he delights in art precisely because and in so far as he

delights in life. But if this be all, it may be objected, why, with

life in full glow and activity all around him, should man turn to this

reflection or rendering of it which he calls art? What place does the

reality leave for the enjoyment of the shadow? This was substantially

Plato’s indictment of art in the last book of The Republic. All things

exist, according to his well-known doctrine of ideas, in an ideal

or archetypal form, a “pattern laid up in heaven.” There is such a

pattern, let us say, of a Bed, and this is the real, the archetypal

Bed. Copying some reflection of this in his own mind, the carpenter

makes a material, individual bed.

Then comes in the painter, who copies the bed of the carpenter, and who

is thus at two removes from Reality; art, in Plato’s view, being simply

imitation, and therefore somewhat despicable.[176]

There are some minor, yet by no means trivial, reasons which might be

given in answer to this objection; as, for instance, that art enables

one to assemble together in small compass the expressions of a great

variety of life not to be directly enjoyed, save at wide intervals of

time and place. But the primary and fundamental reasons are our main

concern here.

In the first place, the material world around us, or such portion of

it as we are able to perceive, is not, as it stands, a pure expression

of life. Holding as we do with Cleanthes in his majestic Hymn to Zeus

that all things redundant have their place in the Whole, and that in

it all things ugly have their beauty and all things hateful their share

of love,[177] it is still true that the world as we see it presents

us with a pell-mell of varied forms—some mature and beautiful, some

in process of transition, some in decay, some stationary, unchanging,

dead. The inner harmony which holds them together is rarely perceptible

in any one fragment of actual life. But the artist adds this harmony,

this completeness; his work, within its own limits, is a whole. He

gives us something which nature cannot give. Taking some aspect of

life which he wishes to convey by means of line, colour, or tone, he

suppresses, alters, composes, emphasizes, till he has expressed his

feeling in its purity, with everything immaterial left out and with

the things essential to his conception lifted clearly into view. His

work is therefore greater and more vital than nature, that is to say

than any fragment of nature, for he is looking at the part he renders

_sub specie aeternitatis_, in the light of the Whole. And living in the

conception of a great work of art, we live in the Whole; the individual

has sunk from view.

Zola has finely said, “Art is a bit of Nature seen through the medium

of a temperament.” This temperament means the artist’s personal way of

seeing life; it means all that makes his art different from a mere

record. And the audience who see or hear his work become acquainted

with this temperament—there is no other way in which the artist can

express it so well. The artist, then, is giving us himself along with

his subject, and this is the greatest thing he can give. Whether the

wars of Troy ever happened is of very little consequence compared with

Homer’s way of imagining them. And when we have learned Homer’s way we

can and do apply it for ourselves, for has he not ‘infected’ us with

it? The artist opens our eyes, and leaves us in a world infinitely

more significant and beautiful than without his aid we should ever

have known it to be. His function is thus the liberation within us of

faculties, of powers of living, which otherwise might never have risen

into consciousness. We commonly call this ‘idealizing the facts of

life.’ It would be nearer the mark to say that it makes them real. Art

turns our formal, sensible, external perceptions of things into real

and vital perceptions, and thus enormously increases the range and

volume of life of which those who apprehend it are capable. The glory

of light, the music of winds and waters, the dignity of man’s common

occupations, the wonder and sweetness of the love of men and women, all

these have been revealed to us by the artist, “a man speaking to men

... pleased with his own passions and volitions, who rejoices more than

other men in the spirit of life that is within him.”[178]

The essential purpose of any art-work, then, is to be _expressive of

life_—more expressive than the raw facts of life ever can be. The

practical problem for every artist in every kind of material is how

to make his work expressive; only thus can it be what Tolstoy calls

“infectious.” To do this, besides the acquirement of technique, he

must clearly have something to express. Let us not imagine, however,

as the “plain honest man” is apt to do, that this must necessarily be

something capable of being put into terms of the intellect—a fact,

a story, a “criticism of life.” Art is rather an exploration than a

criticism of life.[179] And life is very great and manifold. Primarily

the painter is a man who likes to apprehend life in colour, the

sculptor one who apprehends it in the form of masses, the musician in

sound, the poet in actions, emotions, ideas. Each may, and probably

must, have some of the gifts and faculties of the others, but as

painter, musician, or whatever he may be, he thinks and feels in the

material of his own art, and he uses that material to express its own

virtues, not to imitate those of another.

The question of the relation of art to beauty, and the meaning of

beauty itself, may now be considered. What is this mysterious element

about the nature of which such a torrent of opinion has been poured out

since man first began to reflect on his own states of mind? Between

the view which holds it to be an absolute and ultimate principle,

recognized in, rather than arising from, experience, and that which

denies it any right to be called a principle at all, referring it

simply to the effect of habit, and refusing to see any essential

difference between the Hottentot conception of beauty and the Greek,

we can find, I think, a position in strict accordance both with the

historical facts of the evolution of the conception and with the claims

of the Idealists.

Let us look back a moment to the analysis of moral action which we

made in the preceding chapters. We found then that while all healthy

action tends to maintain and promote life, there are circumstances

under which this life-promoting quality comes more saliently into view

than is usual. This happens in general when mere personal desires are

subjected to the larger life of the Whole, or when a lower form of

living is subjected to a higher. This heightening and intensification

of life-promoting action we called moral action. And we drew no sharp

and distinct line between it and ordinary healthy action, for nature

knows no such distinctions, and the philosophy which tries to establish

them is stamped with unreality.

In regard to Beauty we have only to take up the same point of view as

we did in regard to Ethics, and the mystery lies clear before us at

once. All nature is in some sense expressive of life, even when it

seems most desolate or most degraded; for life as we know it means

change, variety, contrast, and, under the conditions of space and time,

one can no more have life without death and decay than one can have

height without depth. But all nature does not equally express life,

and much of it, as we have seen, does not express it at all to our

perceptions. Beauty arises, then, when we find a certain heightening,

a saliency, an intensity in the expression or vitality, whether by

external nature or, in art, by man. Thus Life, not Beauty, is the mark

of art, but beauty is the signal that the mark has been hit.

As with the moral, so with the æsthetic sense—we find it in all stages

of development. A man or a race whose range of life is contracted

to a few physical enjoyments and pains will set the idea of beauty

in whatever expresses or is associated with these enjoyments.

A wider, loftier, subtler conception of life will bring forth a

nobler beauty. We are not, on this theory, abandoned to a mere

subjective and arbitrary preference, according as we are trained and

accustomed to this type or to that. There is a perfectly valid and

objective criterion in the question, Which represents the fullest and

strongest life? The Greek ideal surpasses the Hottentot—to take two

extremes—because the Greek is capable of all that the Hottentot can

do or feel—he takes it all up into his larger life; but the Hottentot

can only live in a small sector of the sphere occupied by the Greek.

Instead, therefore, of the two opposing battlecries of ‘Art for Morals’

and ‘Art for Art,’ let us set that of ‘Art for Life.’ For Life is

greater than either art or morals; it includes and justifies them both.

The characteristics of Beauty will be further discussed in connexion

with some of the individual arts, which we have now to range under our

general principle.

The more deeply life is studied and felt, the more strongly do two

great and cardinal principles of it come into view. These are opposed

to each other, but complementary; and thus life in general appears to

exhibit that singular quality of polarity which seems so intimately

to pervade all its separate manifestations; everything which lives

and moves appearing to do so by virtue of the action of two opposing

forces. These two poles of the axis of life are, on the one hand, what

we call Order, Continuity, Rhythm; and on the other, Change, Variety,

Contrast. If Order were not, Change would become chaos. If Change

were not, Order would become death. In neither case would growth and

development be possible.

An art, therefore, however abstract, like Music or like the decorative

pattern in a Celtic MS., which expressed the union of these two

principles might be profoundly expressive of life. It need not set

before us any definite living thing provided it expresses the cardinal

principles of all life. It will do this the better the more intimately

these principles are blended, as in nature, into a vital unity.

On the other hand, art does, of course, frequently represent individual

objects, and probably had its first distinguishable beginnings in so

doing.[180] We may, then, get a broad classification of the arts by

placing on one side those which deal with objects of sense, and on

the other those which convey life under forms devised by the artist

himself, and not found in the external world. One is tempted to call

these respectively Imitative and Creative. But, after all, what is

essentially artistic in the first category is just the fact that it is

_not_ purely imitative, for, as Mr.

Whistler observed, to suppose that you can get art by copying nature is

equivalent to thinking that you can get music by sitting on the piano.

On the other hand, it does not seem fitting to use so exalted a word

as creation with reference to the pattern which a Zuñi Indian draws on

a piece of pottery, while denying it to a painting by Titian. Instead,

therefore, of using the words Creative and Imitative—now that we know

what we mean by them—we shall contrast those arts which are directly

Presentative with those which are Representative. In the one case the

artist presents us with the whole artistic product, form and substance,

as devised by himself. In the other, he represents to us forms already

presented by nature, but re-composed, re-presented, and harmonized by

him for an æsthetic purpose.

The Presentative arts fall into two classes. In one of these Music

stands alone. Here the artistic purpose is not only dominant but (I

speak, of course, of music in its highest and most characteristic

development) there is no other purpose whatever. The forms elaborated

by combinations and sequences of sound have no object except that of

art and mean nothing apart from that. Hence Music has been called ‘pure

style.’ We shall recur to this subject when we have dealt with the

other class, that of the Decorative arts, the essence of which it is

to add an expression of rhythm, of world-harmony, to objects whose

primary purpose is something different—a building, a vase, a piece of

furniture, or a hanging. This class, again, can be subdivided into arts

which attain this effect by the structure of the object, and those

which do so by the application of ornament to its surface; both being,

of course, often combined in the same object.

In structure the expression of life is gained by so arranging the

lines and masses as to give an impression that power is at work—that

something is being done—done triumphantly yet not without strain and

effort. Every object of utility does something—art shows it to us in

the act. An example may help to make clear what I mean, and may show

how the principle can be applied to any kind of object which may be the

subject of artistic treatment.

A Greek temple in its simplest external aspect consists of a

quadrilateral group of columns surrounding a walled shrine and

supporting a low-pitched roof. Nothing could well be simpler than the

structural conditions thus expressed. But the artistic expression of

them is not so simple. This depends in the main upon the proportion

observed between the pillars and the weight, or apparent weight, above

them. If the pillars are too massive or too numerous there will be no

sense of strain, and if they are too slender or too few there will be

no sense of security. In either case the expression of vital energy in

the structure will be imperfect, and beauty, which waits on the golden

moment of the perfect adaptation of means to ends, will not dwell in

that structure. There is nothing more inartistic than superfluity;

and there is no lesson more emphatically taught by nature than this.

The avoidance of insufficiency is generally enforced in practice on

utilitarian grounds, but its artistic justification is equally evident.

The golden mean is what we call Just Proportion.

The kind of vitality expressed in Greek architecture is quite different

from that expressed in Gothic, but the æsthetic basis of both styles is

the same; the principle we have in view will justify any art in which

there is the spirit of life. A Greek temple shows us power, braced and

conscious, but in repose. There is nothing daring or sensational in its

construction. Stress and thrust answer each other directly, simply,

massively. The stately calm of such a structure might easily become

dull and monotonous were it not for the delicate sense of proportion

governing the relations of the parts, for the introduction of slight

deviations from strict rectangularity and symmetry,[181] and for the

beautiful decoration in form and colour on frieze, pediment, and

capital.

The principle of the arch was known in very early times to Pelasgians

in Greece and to Etruscans in Italy, both of whom, no doubt, derived

it from the East. But it was valued more for its utility in certain

constructions than for its artistic quality, and Greek classical

architecture knows nothing of it. It was freely used in Rome, and here

its extraordinary effect of vital energy as a supporter of weight first

began to be perceived. When Romanesque and Gothic architecture seized

on this principle, the strength of stonework, heretofore essentially

placid, leapt into vehement life and action. A Gothic cathedral is the

expression of a war of mighty forces held in equilibrium by their own

antagonism. Every part seems to threaten destruction to some other.

There is, of course, a war of forces in a Greek temple also, but there

the weight and thrust answer each other, as we have said, directly; a

vertical column supports a horizontal architrave, and _must_ support

it, for nothing can give way without crumbling to pieces. In Gothic

building the counter-stresses meet indirectly, a dead weight or a

thrust is met by the springing curve of an arch; the whole structure

would fall to ruin were it not for something in the stone which is not

mere solidity, which arises from something vital and energetic in the

scheme of the structure. The expression of conflict, therefore, as

compared with Greek architecture, is greatly intensified; the serenity

of power has given place to the play of forces rushing into eager and

often tempestuous action, and saved from being mutually destructive by

the control of a far-seeing design.[182]

To treat fully the various ways in which structure may be made

expressive of life would need a volume rather than a chapter. Enough

has however been said to indicate the principle and to suggest a

criterion by which good and bad structure may be judged. Let us turn

to the question of ornament. In European art it is very common for

ornament to be used as a kind of adjunct to structure; it follows the

lines of structure and accentuates them. In Japanese art, however,

the contours of an object often appear to determine the ornament

applied to it as little as a window-frame determines the landscape

we see through it. The apparent insouciance of Japanese ornament is,

however, carefully calculated in relation to the field which is to be

covered. In either case ornament as such—that is to say, apart from

whatever charm of colour and rhythm its individual forms may have—is

to be interpreted as an attempt to give life by introducing what is

so characteristic of life—the element of change and variety. Popular

language has hit the mark when it talks of a ‘dead’ wall, meaning

thereby a wall whose surface is unbroken by openings or ornament.

Ruskin has somewhere spoken of the magnificent work of Ghiberti on the

bronze doors of the Baptistery in Florence as having been primarily

designed to produce “a pleasant bossiness of surface.” The breaking up

of the surface will not, however, be pleasant unless the forms of the

decoration are in themselves good and instinct with life.

The beauty which so often arises from the effects of use and exposure

may perhaps seem in some cases hard to reconcile with the principle

which it is here sought to establish. If aptness for use, it may be

asked, is an element in the beauty of an object of use, how are we

to account for the strong appeal which the ruin of a noble building

certainly makes to the sense of beauty? For my own part I am inclined

to think that the taste for ruins is often a sign of a want of taste

for art. A beautiful thing is better whole and sound than in decay.

Yet the spectacle of the silent struggle of strength and grace with

destructive forces has in it a sense of action, of drama, to which

beauty cannot be denied. Apart from the question of actual decay, every

one feels the æsthetic gain which has been made when a thing ceases

to be blankly new. A natural adornment has then been added to it. A

room that has been lived in, a piece of silver that has been rubbed

and handled for a lifetime, the steps of an ancient building worn

by thousands of passing feet, a wall whose angles are softened and

whose surface is stained by having fronted the sun and rain for many

years—all these have the natural and inimitable charm produced by the

touch of life—they no longer stand in crude isolation, they are related

to the goings-on of the world.

Of all the arts there is none which seems to evade analysis so much

as Music; none whose power is at once so mighty and so mysterious.

Saying nothing it seems to mean everything. We can think of nothing in

the world so lofty, so sweet, so profound as to be the fit embodiment

of what Music conveys to us. Closely analogous in its outward form to

what in line and colour is called Pattern, we are yet evidently far

short of expressing the whole character of Music when we say, what in

itself is quite true, that it is beautiful pattern in sound. It has

more of humanity about it than pattern can have. It neither gives us

representations of objects of sense, nor even definite emotions, but

it has a unique power over the moods of the soul. This power seems to

arise first from its complete control over the resources of movement

and rhythm, secondly from the fact that by virtue of certain acoustic

laws it can excite the sense of fulfilment, of suspense, of unexpected

sweetness, unexpected failure and depression, in a way open to no

other art which appeals directly to the senses. But rhythm and movement

are the main things in Music, and the nature of the power which it

exercises by means of them must now be considered.

Rhythm and movement are closely related to each other, but they are not

quite the same thing. The term rhythm is given to any kind of movement

which is marked by the regular recurrence of stresses, undulations,

beats. This is the essential character of the movement of life. Action

and reaction, systole and diastole, the vibrations of the atom, the

breaking of sea-waves, the changes of day and night, the alternations

of the seasons—wherever we look, into things great or small, we

find the same principle of rhythmic movement pervading all. Man has

found out how to turn this principle to account in his mechanical

contrivances, indeed in all ways in which he endeavours to exercise

force on matter. Once get your force to work rhythmically, and it will

do ten times the work it is capable of when evenly continuous. Our own

bodies and nervous systems are attuned to the same law. Under the spell

of rhythm the mind is capable of moods and emotions which without it

could never have been evoked into consciousness. And that makes the

difference between telling a thing in verse and in prose. Verse arouses

the mood in which the subject has emotional value and significance.

Even prose always becomes more or less rhythmic when impassioned.

Now Music has a control unrivalled among the arts over this element of

rhythm. Other arts can suggest rhythm, Music actually _is_ rhythm—it

is the very pulse of life. It can produce rhythm, moreover, in a

great variety of ways. The mere succession of sounds is rhythm, but

music also has at command the varying stresses or accents of notes,

alternations in volume of sound, alternations in pitch and quality of

sound. And since a sequence of notes will cling to the memory, Music

can put into rhythmical relations, not only single notes, but groups of

notes, _i.e._ musical phrases, and chords, which are musical phrases

played all at once. Music can therefore not only thunder upon the brain

with mighty shocks of sound, but can enchant it with the most delicate

complexities. The range of its power over rhythm is incomparably

greater and subtler than that of the only two other arts in which

rhythm works directly on the senses—dancing and metrical verse.

The element of beauty in a rhythmical phrase seems to depend mainly

on the kind of mood it awakens. There are moods of meditation,

moods of tenderness, moods of ardour, moods of yearning, moods of

gaiety—all these and many more are under the control of rhythmic

phrases. And there are common-place, self-assertive, bouncing rhythms

which produce corresponding moods, and which may therefore be called

ugly. The precise connexion of certain phrases with certain moods

depending, as it does, on a world of dim associations stretching

far beyond our personal, conscious life, is probably incapable of

scientific statement. In the last result I think we should find

that the characters of different rhythms are associated with bodily

movements, attitudes, gestures, in short with dancing; but a host of

other associations, branching out from this in many directions, have

introduced a complexity of meaning which defies analysis.

To turn to the consideration of Movement in art, we find that the

power of rendering this characteristic of life is shared by Music only

with Dancing and with Literature. By movement in an art-work I mean

movement whose sequences have proportion and design, progressing by

stages linked to each other through natural and organic associations

towards a significant conclusion. In nature, movement can be immensely

varied in character. It can be slow or swift, rough and laboured or

smooth and fluent, massive and voluminous or arrowy and intense; it

can leap or undulate, march or dance, soar or swoop, and each of these

kinds of movement means something to the spirit of man. All these Music

controls, and can order and harmonize at will. It can represent that

in the movement of nature which goes beyond and overmasters Rhythm;

for Rhythm in itself does not involve Progression; in fact, a perfect

rhythm would forbid it. If Action and Reaction were always precisely

equal, we should have a universe as stationary as a spinning top—it

might be in vehement action, but it would never develop into something

new.[183] Music by its complete command of the phases of movement can

illustrate the progressive force, the life-impulse in nature, and this

not merely by symbols and intellectual forms, but by playing directly

on the nervous system as a harp-player on the strings of his instrument.

No art is more sensuous than Music, and none more abstract, more

removed from what are called realities, in the substance of what it

conveys. Its entire independence of objects of sense as given in

experience, combined with its mastery of the inner law, the spiritual

significance, of life has led to its being ranked by some as the

highest of the arts. I doubt if such comparisons are profitable, but it

is easy to recognize a sense in which Schopenhauer speaks truth when he

says that the other arts deal with the shadows of life, Music, however,

with its essence.[184]

Let us now consider the Representative Arts in the light of the

principle which we are trying to establish. Since they depend on the

portrayal of objects actually found in nature and not created by the

artist, their relation to life is obvious. There are, however, some

minor problems of great interest and intricacy connected with them, and

these we must briefly touch on.

A great school of artists and art critics has in recent times

maintained that Painting is concerned with nothing except harmonies of

light and colour, and that subject is therefore completely indifferent

to it save in so far as it affords opportunity for the rendering of

surfaces variously illuminated and composed. The sun falling on a heap

of refuse is on this theory as much to the artist as when it lights up

the features of Cordelia under her tragic fate. A champion of this,

as it is called, Impressionist school has explained its particular

point of view by suggesting the manner in which two painters, one of

the older type and one an Impressionist, would treat such a subject

as the death of Agamemnon. The former would think of the magnitude of

the event and the greatness of the characters of those concerned in

it—the Impressionist would probably try to fix the attention of the

spectator on some note of colour such as the red robe which a character

in the scene might be wearing.[185] Can we judge between these rival

conceptions of the function of the representative arts?

Let us revert to our formula—Art is the expression of Life. In the

Representative Arts it is the expression of visible life. If one wishes

to paint the death of Agamemnon it will not do to rely for one’s

effect upon the spectator’s knowledge of that bit of Greek history and

to make one’s art impressive simply because its allusions are freely

recognizable. So far undoubtedly the Impressionists are right. But on

the other hand, the assassination of a great man is a bit of life and

a very notable and memorable one. The visible world is, after all, not

entirely summed up in the texture of surfaces under light. Character

and spirit have also their visible manifestations, and the painter who

can render them, as well as the aspects of physical life by which they

are accompanied, is surely cutting a wider swathe of life than he who

thinks only of the red robe of the actor in a tragic scene. Goethe

satirized a whole false theory of art when he remarked in a well-known

epigram that “pictures which work miracles are mostly very poor

paintings.” Yet one is reminded of his own feeling before the painting

of St. Agatha, by Raphael, which he saw on his first Italian journey

at Bologna. “I have marked this figure well,” he writes. “I shall one

day read my Iphigenia before her in spirit, and shall put no words

in the mouth of my heroine which might not have been spoken by this

saint.” Was there not something here for Goethe, for all of us, beyond

painting for the sake of light and colour?

In considering the plastic arts in relation to subject, the large

question of their function as illustration comes into view. An immense

range of art, from that which deals with religion and history down

to the drawings in our comic journals, evidently presupposes in the

spectator’s mind a background of information with which the work of

art itself does not and cannot furnish him. A work of this kind must

certainly be said to rely for part of its interest upon something

which is not in the picture. It is therefore not a pure art product;

it is a complex of artistic with historical or religious or critical

interest; but so long as we do not confuse the different elements it

would be absurd to say that they may not be legitimately united. Still,

the subject of a picture, as a picture, remains always something which

is in the picture. It would therefore be a contradiction in terms to

speak of a poor picture on a great subject. If the painting be poor,

the subject is poor—the painter’s intention may have been great, but

he has not expressed it. A reference to portraiture may help to make

the matter clear. An indifferent portrait of a person held in special

love or veneration by me would, if it were not so bad as to belie him,

have an interest and value for me which it would entirely lack in the

case of one who knew or cared nothing for the person represented. This

superadded interest, the interest which travels through the painting

to some concrete person or thing behind it, must be thought away before

a work of art can be judged as a work of art. The application to

religious or historical art is obvious. Here is a painting in which an

uninformed observer sees a woman and an angel. What is he to make of

it? The painter is evidently representing a moment of great exaltation

and significance. The woman is receiving a message; and the painter can

tell us, within the limits of his art, not what the message is, but of

what kind it is—sad, or solemn, or joyful, or tragic. He can make all

the accessories of the theme, the lighting, colour, etc., reinforce

his conception, and the observer can discern, if he has intelligence

in such things, that the painter is putting before us his conception

of the way in which a soul conceives a mighty destiny. _That is the

subject_; the universal idea, although the label on the frame be ‘The

Annunciation.’

I hope it will not be thought that I am in any degree seeking to

disparage the beautiful art of the Impressionists in maintaining that

the highest art is that in which there is most of life. Life is so

abundant and rich that one can find it almost anywhere in sufficient

measure to delight and to enchant. Moreover, the great laws by which

life acts and endures, the laws of rhythm, contrast, harmony, can be

amply suggested in the plastic arts even when dealing with the most

familiar things of earth, and these exalt and glorify any theme.

I remember to have heard once of a visitor to an exhibition of

paintings by—I need not name him—a certain well-known purveyor of

sensuous religiosities, a kind of nineteenth-century Carlo Dolci. On

entering he met two ladies passing out through the ante-room, which

happened to be hung with landscapes by an artist whom I need not

hesitate to name, Mr. Mark Fisher. One of them wished to pause over

these. The other, who walked with wet eyes and flushed cheek, cried,

“Trees, trees! Do you want me to look at trees after having had my soul

uplifted?” This little anecdote will bear some thinking over. Can we

call an art bad which has power to uplift the soul? But we have to ask,

Was it really the art which did so, or the allusions in the art? And

again, as in the case of Tolstoy and his canon of infectiousness, we

must ask, What soul? It is difficult to imagine that the soul capable

of being uplifted by the art of the painter in question would be very

quick to recognize the signs of nobility and heroic passion in real

life. To recognize that the trees of Mr. Mark Fisher might be worth

many Martyrdoms would be at least a sound beginning of an artistic

education.

Dancing, so far as it is an art, must be classed under the

Representative Arts. Unlike most of these it can render movement;

and its art is to display movements in a progressive and a rhythmic

sequence. It is sculpture in motion. Unless when combined with Music,

however, its range of artistic expression is not great, beautiful

effects are not under strict control, and in their rapid change the

eye cannot properly take them in. The impression left by a succession

of attitudes seems more confused and more transitory than that of a

musical phrase.

The question of the place of Literature in the scheme is one of some

difficulty. Unlike all the other arts, its subject matter is not

brought directly before the senses, but evoked by conventional symbols

which have in themselves no æsthetic value whatever. Thus in one sense

it may be called the only strictly national art in existence. The most

beautiful poem in the world, though it were graven in Egyptian basalt,

would be a collection of meaningless scratches if the language in

which it was written were lost. If, however, the language be known,

Literature has not only the power of evoking the conceptions desired

by the maker, but also that of working directly on the senses by means

of the rhythmic qualities of speech. Still the range of rhythmic

expression in language is so limited that in itself (_i.e._ as we might

feel it if spoken in an unknown tongue) it may be regarded as quite

subordinate to the matter conveyed. Strictly, therefore, we ought

perhaps to call Literature neither a Presentative nor a Representative,

but an Evocative art. Within its own circle, however, it falls

naturally into classes corresponding to those of the other arts, for

narrative literature and drama, which deal with actions and images

taken from external life, are clearly Representative in character,

while lyrical and meditative poetry, which place the maker’s mind,

mood, or passion directly before us, are Presentative.

Literature has one great superiority over the plastic arts. Like

Music, it can render the movement of life. In the dramatic form this

movement can be brought to bear directly upon the senses. It resembles

Painting and Sculpture in being able to deal with concrete objects of

sense, though, as we have seen, its method of dealing with them is not

strictly representative. It stands absolutely alone in the fact that it

can render thoughts[186] as well as passions or moods. I should, then,

be inclined to reckon Drama as the greatest of all the arts in its

range of expression, while at the same time it cannot be claimed for it

that it approaches Music in the control of moods or in the intensity

of effect which audible rhythm alone seems to command. The conclusion

drawn by Wagner, that the supreme art must be sought in a combination

of Music and Drama, is a tempting one, but I doubt its validity. The

question arises whether in this combination one or other of the united

arts does not surrender much of its own special power. So at least

one great poet seems to have felt. “C’est defendu,” announced Victor

Hugo about his dramas, “de mettre des notes de musique le long de ces

vers.” The poetic use of language has its own conventions and laws,

and these, when used by a master, are so subtle and so powerful that

to set his words to music is often to produce an effect of distortion.

What is most truly poetic in the language is turned into an empty mask

by withdrawing the underlying substance to place it under the control

of another convention, another law. One can, no doubt, as in the case

of a Greek chorus, set great poetry to the measure of a simple chant,

or one can unite rhythmic diction of a broad and simple character with

great music, but the highest poetry and the highest music do not seem

to combine to good purpose.

In this rapid survey of the arts there are, of course, large and

attractive fields of exploration which have not been even glanced at.

It has been sought on the present occasion merely to give the clue

by which the arts may be related to the main thesis of this book.

Ethics and Art constitute the two great fields of what we may call the

disinterested activity of man. They engage his highest powers, they set

him on fire with ardour and sympathy, yet they do nothing, directly

at least, towards satisfying the primary and personal needs of his

nature. Our problem has been to relate them to life, and to give them

a place in a scheme of organic unity. Both have been seen to have that

place only by reference to something which in one sense is immanent in

nature, and clearly perceptible there, but which in another aspect is

outside “the realm of clock-time and measuring rod,” the transcendent

Whole. All spiritual ethics, all art which is not of the nature of a

mere record, must in the last resort rely on this wholeness of things

for their justification. But in the earlier parts of this study we have

tried to show that even the physical organization of nature must rely

on it too; for the driving force of evolution, as well as the framework

of law in which it works, have been both interpreted as a manifestation

of the Will to live, to act; of the impulse towards the richest and

fullest development of the material, animal, and spiritual life. It is

in this life-impulse that God reveals Himself in the world of time and

space. This is the visible aspect of His all-embracing unity; this is

His essential relation to earthly things; and this is the clue to their

rational interpretation as parts of a divine cosmic Order. To learn

to apprehend the vast Purpose with conscious intelligence, to further

it with conscious will and with deliberate faith, is the sweet and

wholesome gospel which Nature preaches to all who have ears to hear.

APPENDIX A

SUM ERGO COGITO

Not to encumber the text with too much abstruse metaphysics, I place

here what seem to me some important corollaries of the position stated

at the close of Chapter I.

If the Universe is not a mere aggregate but a coherent Whole, then

it follows of necessity that the units which compose it will have

relations not only with each other but also with the Whole. When any

of these units reaches the stage of consciousness it may be expected

that it will become conscious of these relations, and that this

consciousness will, like other things, develop in time to greater and

greater fulness.

But here, from the analytic side of the Kantian philosophy, comes the

warning which tells us that all we can really know is the stream of

sensation which passes through our mind and which derives the order

and coherence it seems to possess from the laws of that mind. How can

we transcend this apprehension of fleeting appearances, and attain

knowledge of the One, the Real, and of our relations with It?

To answer this question we must look a little deeper into the basis of

this doctrine of the subjectivity of human knowledge.

This subjectivity, when we examine it closely, does not (as it is

often, I think, supposed) appear to be a special and inexplicable

condition imposed in some external way on human consciousness. It is

a condition absolutely bound up with the state of existence implied

in being a Person, an ‘I.’ The moment the mind is able to turn inward

upon itself and to separate the thing known or felt from that which

knows and feels, in that moment the Thing stands a whole infinity away

from the ‘I’; they are separated by the analytic faculty of the Ego and

they can never _by that faculty_ be reunited. The state of being an

‘I’ is essentially a state of analytic consciousness. The intuitions

of space and time are simply the instruments by which the analytic

faculty works, for it is only by their relations in space and time that

things in the world can be divided and distinguished by the intellect.

This analytic faculty has, it must be noted, an unbounded power of

disintegration. It does not spare even the Ego itself, which it reduces

to a mere flux of sensations. There is no answer to its destructive

logic except the sufficient one, that this boundless power of analysis

in both directions, inward and outward, is simply a function inevitably

bound up with being an ‘I’ at all—it is because of that function that

I am an ‘I.’ Every being possessing ‘I’-hood must, _eo ipso_, be

capable of reducing all external things to its own sensations, and of

externalizing its own self. One cannot be an ‘I’ on any other terms.

Now let us suppose that this analytic faculty did not exist, and that

consciousness went on, as perhaps it does in beasts, by acts of pure

intuition, without ever turning inward to regard itself, without ever

making distinctions between external objects, save as a matter of

unreasoned sense-responsiveness; what would the consequences be then?

Clearly in that case object and subject would be one, and knowledge,

_so far as it went_, would be absolute knowledge. But it would neither

be true nor false, since without analysis and comparison there could

be no criterion of truth and falsity. Nor, similarly, could the

actions springing from this state of what may be called Impersonal

Consciousness be either ethically good or bad in relation to the

creature which performed them. In this state, things in space and time

would be seen simply as they really are—as moments in the life of the

Spirit.

Our relations with the Whole, then, must be sought in this region of

pure impersonal consciousness, which implies entire forgetfulness of

Self, entire surrender to the life-movement of the universe. We can

understand now why man has always had yearnings for this state, and has

so often sought to attain it by false means, by the trance or ecstasy

produced through self-hypnotism, drugs, etc.; means ultimately and

necessarily destructive of their object since a self-regarding motive

lies at the root of them.

If there are illegitimate ways of attaining this state what, it may be

asked, are the legitimate ones? The difficulty of this question lies

in the fact that the state of impersonal consciousness disappears the

moment we begin to think about it. We live in it, in fact, a great deal

more than, in our states of analytic self-consciousness, we have any

idea of. But as a rule we only live in it with a part of our nature—the

instinctive, animal part. To enter it with our whole nature, to live

in it as Man, two ways have been found and these we call the way of

Religion and the way of Art; or, if we describe them by the faculties

respectively dominant in each, as the way of Love and the way of

Beauty. Through these essentially harmonizing and synthesizing powers

Man can for a while merge himself in the vast ocean of Being, and

return from it, renewed and purified, to the narrow confines of his

selfhood.

But return he must; for selfhood is not an accident or a deformity,

not a thing to be despised and shuffled off the moment we can get rid

of it. It, also, is a power of life, and through it we are enabled to

harvest an immense store of experiences. Through the Ego, no doubt,

with its rapacious egotisms, come sin and wrong into the world; but,

as Heracleitus finely says, “Men would not have known the name of

Justice if these things had not been.” Moreover, man has to act as

well as to be and to feel. For all complex action, regarding distant

ends and involving choice and discrimination, the faculty of analysis,

with which selfhood is bound up, is absolutely essential. Man is not

to be raised in the scale of being by cutting away any part of his

nature, but by developing the whole harmoniously; and the analytic

self-consciousness is harmonized with the impersonal consciousness when

the one is used to translate into its own sphere the experiences of the

other—to fashion in the visible and material life some counterpart of

the realities known in the spirit.

APPENDIX B

CO-OPERATION AND COMPETITION

In Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, it seems to me (for

all that it finds little favour with some men of science) that real

light has been thrown on certain principles of cardinal importance

which had been obscured in the too exclusive contemplation of the

Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for

life. Ample proof is given by Kropotkin of the truth of the following

passage:—

“As soon as we study animals—not in laboratories and museums

only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the

mountains—we at once perceive that though there is an immense

amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various

species, and especially among various classes of animals, there is,

at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support,

mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same

species, or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much

a law of nature as mutual struggle. Of course it would be extremely

difficult to estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical

importance of both these series of facts. But if we resort to an

indirect test, and ask Nature: ‘Who are the fittest: those who

are continually at war with each other, or those who support one

another?’ we at once see that those animals which acquire habits

of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances

to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the

highest development of intelligence and bodily organization. If

the numberless facts which can be brought forward to support this

view are taken into account, we may safely say that mutual aid is

as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but that, as a

factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance,

inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits and

characters as ensure the maintenance and further development of the

species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment

of life for the individual, with the least waste of energy” (pp. 5,

6. 1903).

From the mass of facts which Kropotkin has adduced in support of the

above-quoted view, I cannot forbear quoting one, an observation of his

own, relating to a creature of by no means high organization:—

“As to the big Molucca crab (_Limulus_), I was struck (in 1882, at

the Brighton Aquarium) with the extent of mutual assistance which

these clumsy animals are capable of bestowing upon a comrade in

case of need. One of them had fallen upon its back in a corner of

the tank, and its heavy, saucepan-like carapace prevented it from

returning to its natural position, the more so as there was in the

corner an iron bar which rendered the task still more difficult.

Its comrades came to the rescue, and for one hour’s time I watched

how they endeavoured to help their fellow-prisoner. They came two

at once, pushed their friend from beneath, and after strenuous

efforts succeeded in lifting it upright; but then the iron bar

would prevent them from achieving the work of rescue, and the crab

would again fall heavily upon its back. After many attempts, one

of the helpers would go in the depth of the tank and bring two

other crabs, which would begin with fresh forces the same pushing

and lifting of their helpless comrade. We stayed in the Aquarium

for more than two hours, and, when leaving, we again came to cast a

glance upon the tank: the work of rescue still continued! Since I

saw that, I cannot refuse credit to the observation quoted by Dr.

Erasmus Darwin, namely, that ‘the common crab during the moulting

season stations as sentinel an unmoulted or hard-shelled individual

to prevent marine enemies from injuring moulted individuals in

their unprotected state’” (pp. 10, 12). #/

APPENDIX C

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

This grave question is, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, one which

must be “definitely raised and answered before entering on any ethical

discussion” (Data of Ethics, § 9). He goes on to restate it in the

form: Does life yield “a surplus of pleasurable feeling over painful

feeling?” and he argues that “goodness or badness can be ascribed to

acts which subserve life or hinder life only on this supposition” (§

10). But can one really strike a balance between pleasures and pains in

human life? Mr. Spencer himself admits, later on, that pleasures and

pains, “unlike in their kinds, intensities and times of occurrence,

are incommensurable” (§ 57). Moreover, the maintenance of life in the

present day means passing it on for countless generations ahead, and

how can we feel satisfied that the conditions then existing will make

more for pleasure than for pain, even assuming that they do so now?

The question, then, whether it is good to maintain life does not seem

capable of philosophic decision on this ground.

Mr. Spencer’s sense of logic, however, seems to me to be here at fault

as well as his fundamental conception of ethics. The question which

he begins by asking is not the question which he ends by answering.

In the original question, Is life worth living? a comparison is set

up between living and not-living. But we find this merging, in Mr.

Spencer’s mind, into the quite different comparison of one _kind_ of

living with another kind of living—the pleasurable and the painful.

Let us translate the original question into the language of Mr.

Spencer’s ethical system. In that system “the good is universally the

pleasurable” (§ 10). The word ‘worth,’ then, connotes pleasure, and the

question resolves itself simply into this, Is it more pleasurable to

live than not to live? Seeing that in not-living there is no pleasure

at all, the only possible answer is an affirmative—the question answers

itself. And in fact this must always be the case whatever connotation

we attach to the word ‘worth,’ for life has at any rate possibilities,

whereas not-living has none. The question, then, “of late so much

agitated,” is really a nonsense question, and the reason why it is

necessarily devoid of meaning will appear at once when we analyze the

terms. For ‘worth,’ ‘goodness,’ ‘blessedness,’ ‘pleasure,’ and so

forth, are simply _terms of life_ and have no significance whatever

apart from it. So the question, Is it better to live than not to live?

is merely the same thing as to ask, Is there more life in living than

in not living? Instead, therefore, of the unverifiable assumption on

which Spencer bases his system of ethics, that life yields on the whole

a surplus of pleasure over pain, we merely affirm the indubitable

proposition that it yields a surplus of life.

From another side than that of the Spencerian ethics, however, it may

be argued, against the conception which we are trying to substitute

for it, that, if Life is something more than the physical phenomena

attending it on earth, if, in fact, it is what we call ‘immortal,’ we

need be at no pains to preserve it for ourselves or others in the form

in which we find it going on here, since death can merely have the

effect of translating it into another form.