Art is a great thing. But it is not the greatest. The most important
of all perceptions is the continual perception of cause and effect--in
other words, the perception of the continuous development of the
universe--in still other words, the perception of the course of
evolution. When one has thoroughly got imbued into one's head the
leading truth that nothing happens without a cause, one grows not only
large-minded, but large-hearted.
It is hard to have one's watch stolen, but one reflects that the thief
of the watch became a thief from causes of heredity and environment
which are as interesting as they are scientifically comprehensible; and
one buys another watch, if not with joy, at any rate with a philosophy
that makes bitterness impossible. One loses, in the study of cause and
effect, that absurd air which so many people have of being always
shocked and pained by the curiousness of life. Such people live amid
human nature as if human nature were a foreign country full of awful
foreign customs. But, having reached maturity, one ought surely to be
ashamed of being a stranger in a strange land!
The study of cause and effect, while it lessens the painfulness of
life, adds to life's picturesqueness. The man to whom evolution is but
a name looks at the sea as a grandiose, monotonous spectacle, which he
can witness in August for three shillings third-class return. The man
who is imbued with the idea of development, of continuous cause and
effect, perceives in the sea an element which in the
day-before-yesterday of geology was vapour, which yesterday was
boiling, and which to-morrow will inevitably be ice.
He perceives that a liquid is merely something on its way to be solid,
and he is penetrated by a sense of the tremendous, changeful
picturesqueness of life. Nothing will afford a more durable
satisfaction than the constantly cultivated appreciation of this. It is
the end of all science.
Cause and effect are to be found everywhere. Rents went up in
Shepherd's Bush. It was painful and shocking that rents should go up
in Shepherd's Bush. But to a certain point we are all scientific
students of cause and effect, and there was not a clerk lunching at a
Lyons Restaurant who did not scientifically put two and two together
and see in the (once) Two-penny Tube the cause of an excessive demand
for wigwams in Shepherd's Bush, and in the excessive demand for wigwams
the cause of the increase in the price of wigwams.
"Simple!" you say, disdainfully. Everything--the whole complex
movement of the universe--is as simple as that--when you can
sufficiently put two and two together. And, my dear sir, perhaps you
happen to be an estate agent's clerk, and you hate the arts, and you
want to foster your immortal soul, and you can't be interested in your
business because it's so humdrum.
Nothing is humdrum.
The tremendous, changeful picturesqueness of life is marvellously shown
in an estate agent's office. What! There was a block of traffic in
Oxford Street; to avoid the block people actually began to travel under
the cellars and drains, and the result was a rise of rents in
Shepherd's Bush! And you say that isn't picturesque! Suppose you were
to study, in this spirit, the property question in London for an hour
and a half every other evening. Would it not give zest to your
business, and transform your whole life?
You would arrive at more difficult problems. And you would be able to
tell us why, as the natural result of cause and effect, the longest
straight street in London is about a yard and a half in length, while
the longest absolutely straight street in Paris extends for miles. I
think you will admit that in an estate agent's clerk I have not chosen
an example that specially favours my theories.
You are a bank clerk, and you have not read that breathless romance
(disguised as a scientific study), Walter Bagehot's "Lombard Street"?
Ah, my dear sir, if you had begun with that, and followed it up for
ninety minutes every other evening, how enthralling your business would
be to you, and how much more clearly you would understand human nature.
You are "penned in town," but you love excursions to the country and
the observation of wild life--certainly a heart-enlarging diversion.
Why don't you walk out of your house door, in your slippers, to the
nearest gas lamp of a night with a butterfly net, and observe the wild
life of common and rare moths that is beating about it, and co-ordinate
the knowledge thus obtained and build a superstructure on it, and at
last get to know something about something?
You need not be devoted to the arts, not to literature, in order to
live fully.
The whole field of daily habit and scene is waiting to satisfy that
curiosity which means life, and the satisfaction of which means an
understanding heart.
I promised to deal with your case, O man who hates art and literature,
and I have dealt with it. I now come to the case of the person,
happily very common, who does "like reading."