Liberation from One's Time.
The law of opposites under which men live is very strikingly brought
out in the endeavour to secure a sound and intelligent adjustment to
one's time,--a relation intimate and vital, and at the same time
deliberately and judicially assumed. To be detached in thought,
feeling, or action, from the age in which one lives, is to cut the
ties that bind the individual to society, and through which he is very
largely nourished and educated. To live deeply and really through
every form of expression and in every relationship is so essential to the
complete unfolding of the personality that he who falls below the full
measure of his capacity for experience and for expression falls below the
full measure of his possible growth. Life is not, as some men of detached
moods or purely critical temper have assumed, a spectacle of which the
secret can be mastered without sharing in the movement; it is rather a
drama, the splendour of whose expression and the depth of whose meaning
are revealed to those alone who share in the action. To stand aside from
the vital movement and study life in a purely critical spirit is to miss
the deeper education which is involved in the vital process, and to
lose the fundamental revelation which is slowly and painfully disclosed
to those whose minds and hearts are open to receive it. No one can
understand love who has not loved and been loved; no one can comprehend
sorrow who has not had the companionship of sorrow. The experiment has
been made in many forms, but no one has yet been nourished by the fruit
of the tree of knowledge who has eaten of that fruit alone. In the art
of living, as in all the arts which illustrate and enrich living, the
amateur and the dilettante have no real position; they never attain
to that mastery of knowledge or of execution which alone give reality
to a man's life or work. Mastery in any art comes to those only who
give themselves without reservation or stint to their task; mastery
in the supreme art of living is within reach of those only who live
completely in every faculty and relation.
To stand in the closest and most vital relation to one's time is,
therefore, the first condition of comprehending one's age and getting
from it what it has to give. But while a man must be in and with his
time in the most vital sense, he must not be wholly of it. To get the
vital enrichment which flows from identification with one's age, and
at the same time to get the detachment which enables one to see his
time in true relation to all time, is one of the problems which
requires the highest wisdom for its solution. It is easy to become
entirely absorbed in one's age, or it is easy to detach one's self
from it, and study it in a cold and critical temper; but to get its
warmth and vitality and escape its narrowing and limiting influence is
so difficult that comparatively few men succeed in striking the
balance between two divergent tendencies.
A man gets power and knowledge from his time in the degree in which he
suffers it to enlarge and vitalise him; he loses power and knowledge
in the degree in which he suffers it to limit his vision and confine
his interests. The Time Spirit is the greatest of our teachers so long
as it is the interpreter of the Eternal Spirit; it is the most
fallible and misleading of teachers when it attempts to speak for
itself. The visible and material things by which we are surrounded are
of immense helpfulness so long as they symbolise invisible and
spiritual things; they become stones of stumbling and rocks of offence
when they are detached from the spiritual order and set apart in an
order of their own. The age in which we live affords a concrete
illustration of the vital processes in society and means of contact
with that society, but it is comprehensible and educative in the exact
degree in which we understand its relation to other times. The
impression which the day makes upon us needs to be tested by the
impression which we receive from the year; the judgment of a decade
must be corrected by the judgment of the century. The present hour is
subtly illusive; it fills the whole stage, to the exclusion of the
past and the present; it appears to stand alone, detached from all
that went before or is to follow; it seems to be the historic moment,
the one reality amid fleeting shadows. As a matter of fact, it is a
logical product of the past, bound to it by ties so elusive that we
cannot trace them, and so numerous and tenacious that we cannot sever
them; it is but a fragment of a whole immeasurably greater than
itself; its character is so completely determined by the past that the
most radical changes we can make in it are essentially superficial;
for it is the future, not the present, which is in our hands. To get
even a glimpse of the character and meaning of our own time, we must,
therefore, see it in relation to all time; to master it in any sense
we must set it in its true historical relations. That which to the
uneducated mind seems portentous is lightly regarded by the mind which
sees the apparently isolated event in a true historic perspective;
while the occurrence or condition which is barely noticed by the
untrained, seen in the same perspective, becomes tragic in its
prophecy of change and suffering. History is full of corrections of
the mistaken judgments of the hour; and from the hate or adoration of
contemporaries, the wise man turns to the clear-sighted and inexorable
judgment of posterity. In the far-seeing vision of a trained
intelligence the hour is never detached from the day, nor the day from
the year; and the year is always held in its place in the century.
Now, the man of culture has pre-eminently the gift of living deeply in
his own age, and at the same time of seeing it in relation to all
ages. It has no illusion for him; it cannot deceive him with its
passionate acceptance or its equally passionate rejection. He sees the
crown shining above the cross; he hears the long thunders of applause
breaking in upon execrations which they will finally silence; he
foresees the harvest in the seed that lies barely covered on the
surface; and, afar off, his ear notes the final crash of that which at
the moment seems to carry with it the assurance of eternal duration.
Such a man secures the vitality of his time, but he escapes its
limitation of vision by seeing it clearly and seeing it whole; he
corrects the teaching of the time spirit by constant reference to the
teaching of the Eternal Spirit imparted in the long training and the
wide revelation of history. The day is beautiful and significant, or
ominous and tragic, to him as it discloses its relation to the good or
the evil of the years that are gone. And these vital associations,
these deep historic connections, are brought to light with peculiar
clearness in literature. Beyond all other means of enfranchisement,
the book liberates a man from imprisonment within the narrow limits of
his own time; it makes him free of all times. He lives in all periods,
under all forms of government, in all social conditions; the mind of
antiquity, of mediævalism, of the Renaissance, is as open to him as
the mind of his own day, and so he is able to look upon human life in
its entirety.