Culture through Action.
It is an interesting fact that the four men who have been accepted as
the greatest writers who have yet appeared, used either the epic or
the dramatic form. It can hardly have been accidental that Homer and
Dante gave their greatest work the epic form, and that Shakespeare and
Goethe were in their most fortunate moments dramatists. There must
have been some reason in the nature of things for this choice of two
literary forms which, differing widely in other respects, have this in
common, that they represent life in action. They are very largely
objective; they portray events, conditions, and deeds which have
passed beyond the stage of thought and have involved the thinker in
the actual historical world of vital relationships and dramatic
sequence. The lyric poet may sing, if it pleases him, like a bird in
the recesses of a garden, far from the noise and dust of the highway
and the clamour of men in the competitions of trade and work; but the
epic or dramatic poet must find his theme and his inspiration in the
stir and movement of men in social relations. He deals, not with the
subjective, but with the objective man; with the man whose dreams are
no longer visions of the imagination, but are becoming incorporate in
some external order; whose passions are no longer seething within him,
but are working themselves out in vital consequences; whose thought is
no longer purely speculative, but has begun to give form and shape to
laws, habits, or institutions. It is the revelation of the human
spirit in action which we find in the epic and the drama; the inward
life working itself out in material and social relations; the soul of
the man becoming, so to speak, externalised.
The epic, as illustrated in the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," deals with a
main or central movement in Greek tradition; a series of events which,
by reason of their nature and prominence, imbedded themselves in the
memory of the Greek race. These events are described in narrative
form, with episodes, incidents, and dialogues, which break the long
story and relax the strain of attention from time to time, without
interrupting the progress of the narrative. There are heroes whose
figures stand out in the long story with great distinctness, but we
are interested much more in what they do than in what they are; for in
the epic, character is subordinate to action. In the dramas of
Shakespeare, on the other hand, while action is more constantly
employed and is thrown into bolder relief, our deepest interest
centres in the actors; the action is no longer the matter of first
importance; it is significant mainly because it involves men and women
not only in the chain of external consequences, but also in the order
of spiritual sequences. We are deeply stirred by our perception of the
intimate connection between the possibilities which lie sleeping in
the individual life, and the tragic events which are set in motion
when those possibilities are realised in action. In both epic and
drama men are seen, not in their subjective moods, but in their
objective struggles; not in the detachment of the life of speculation
and imagination, but in vital association and relation with society in
its order and institutions. With many differences, both of spirit and
form, the epic and the drama are at one in portraying men in that
ultimate and decisive stage which determines individual character and
gives history its direction and significance.
And it is from men in action that much of the deepest truth concerning
life and character has come; indeed, it is not until we pass out of
the region of the speculative, the merely potential, that the word
"character" takes on that tremendous meaning with which thousands of
years of actual happenings have invested it. A purely ideal world--a
world fashioned wholly apart from the realities which convey definite,
concrete revelations of what is in us and in our world--would
necessarily be an unmoral world. The relationships which bind men
together and give human intercourse such depth and richness spring
into being only when they are actually entered upon; they could never
be understood or foreseen in a world of pure thought; nor would it be
possible, in such a world, to realise that reaction of the deed upon
the doer which creates character, nor that far-reaching influence of
the deed upon society, and the sequence of events which so often
issues in tragedy and from which history derives its immense interest
and meaning. A world which stopped short of realisation in action
would not only lose the fathomless dramatic interest which inheres in
human life, but it would part with all those moral implications of the
integrity and persistence of the individual soul, its moral quality
and its moral responsibility, which make man something different from
the dust which whirls about him on the highway, or the stone over
which he stumbles. This is precisely the character of those
speculative systems which deny the reality of action and substitute
the idea for the deed; such a world does more than suffocate the
individual soul; it destroys the very meaning of life by robbing it of
moral order and meaning. The end of such a conception of the universe
is necessarily annihilation, and its mood is necessarily despair.
"How can a man come to know himself?" asked Goethe. "Never by
thinking, but by doing." Now, this knowledge of self in the large
sense is precisely the knowledge which ripens and clarifies us, which
gives us sanity, repose, and power. To know what is in humanity and
what life means to humanity, we must study humanity in its active, not
in its passive, moods; in the hours when it is doing, not thinking.
Sooner or later all its thinking which has any reality in it passes on
into action. The emotion, passion, thought, impulse, which never gets
beyond the subjective stage, dies before birth; and all those
philosophies which urge abstinence from action would cut the plant of
life at the root; they are, in the last analysis, pleas for suicide.
Men really live only as they freely express themselves through
thought, emotion, and action. They get at the deepest truth and enter
into the deepest relationships only as they act. Inaction involves
something more than the disease and decay of certain faculties; it
involves the deformity of arrested development, and failure to enter
into that larger world of truth which is open to those races alone
which live a whole life. It is for this reason that the drama must
always hold the first place among those forms which the art of
literature has perfected; it is for this reason that Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare, and Goethe, consciously or unconsciously, chose those
forms of expression which are specially adapted to represent and
illustrate life in action; it is for this reason, among others, that
these writers must always play so great a part in the work of
educating the race. Culture is, above all things, real and vital;
knowledge may deal with abstractions and unrelated bits of fact, but
culture must always fasten upon those things which are significant in
a spiritual order. It has to do with the knowledge which may become
incorporate in a man's nature, and with that knowledge especially
which has come to humanity through action. It is this deeper knowledge
which holds a lighted torch aloft in the deepest recesses of the soul,
or over those abysses of possible experience which open on all sides
about every man, which is to be found in the pages of Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare, and Goethe, and of all those great artists who have seen
men in those decisive and significant moments when they strike into
the movement of history, or, through their deeds and sufferings, the
order of life suddenly shines forth.