speculation is vain, for the antique had influenced it, had been goading
it on ever since the earliest times; it had been present at its birth,
it had affected Giotto through Niccoto Pisano, and Masaccio through
Ghiberti; the antique influence cannot be conceived as absent in the
history of Italian painting. So far, as a study of the impossible, the
speculation respecting the fate of Renaissance art had it not been
influenced by the antique would be childishly useless. But lest we
forget that this antique influence did exist, lest, grown ungrateful and
blind, we refuse it its immense share in producing Michel Angelo,
Raphael, and Titian, we may do well to turn to an art born and bred like
Italian art, in the Middle Ages; like it, full of strength and power of
self-development, but which, unlike Italian art, was not influenced by
the antique. This art is the great German art of the early sixteenth
century; the art of Martin Schongauer, of Aldegrever, of Graf, of
Wohlgemuth, of Pencz, of Zatzinger, of Kranach, and of the great
Albrecht Dürer, whom they resemble as Pinturricchio, and Lo Spagna
resemble Perugino, as Palma and Pario Bordone resemble Titian. This is
an art born in a civilization less perfect indeed than that of Italy,
narrower, as Nürnberg is narrower than Florence, but resembling it in
habits, dress, religion, above all the main characteristic of being
mediæval; and its masters, as great as their Italian contemporaries in
all the technicalities of the art, and in absolute honesty of endeavour,
may show what the Italian art of the sixteenth century might have been
without the antique. Let us therefore open a portfolio of those
wonderful minute yet grand engravings of the old Germans. They are for
the most part Scriptural scenes or allegories, quite analogous to those
of the Italians, but purely realistic, conscious of no world beyond that
of an Imperial City of the year 1500. Here we have the whole turn-out,
male and female, of a German free town, in the shape of scenes from the
lives of the Virgin and saints; here are short fat burghers, with
enormous blotchy, bloated faces and little eyes set in fat, their huge
stomachs protruding from under their jackets; here are blear-eyed
ladies, tall, thin, wrinkled though not old, with figures like hungry
harpies, stalking about in high headgears and stiff gowns, or sitting by
the side of lean and stunted pages, singing (with dolorous voice) to
lutes; or promenading under trees with long-shanked, high-shouldered
gentlemen, with vacant sickly face and long scraggy hairs and beard,
their bony elbows sticking out of their slashed doublets. These courtly
figures culminate in Dürer's magnificent plate of the wild man of the
woods kissing the hideous, leering Jezebel in her brocade and jewels.
These aristocratic women are terrible; prudish, malicious, licentious,
never modest because they are always ugly. Even the poor Madonnas,
seated in front of village hovels or windmills, smile the smile of
starved, sickly sempstresses. It is a stunted, poverty-stricken,
plague-sick society, this mediæval society of burghers and burghers'
wives; the air seems bad and heavy, and the light wanting physically and
morally, in these old free towns; there is intellectual sickness as well
as bodily in those musty gabled houses; the mediæval spirit blights what
revival of healthiness may exist in these commonwealths. And feudalism
is outside the gates. There are the brutal, leering men-at-arms, in
slashed, puffed doublets and heavy armour, face and dress as unhuman as
possible, standing grimacing at the blood spurting from John the
Baptist's decapitated trunk, as in Kranach's horrible print, while
gaping spectators fill the castle yard; there are the castles high on
rocks amidst woods, with miserable villages below, where the Prodigal
Son wallows among the swine and the tattered boors tumble about in
drunkenness, or rest wearied on their spades. There are the Middle Ages
in full force. But had these Germans of the days of Luther really no
thought beyond their own times and their own country? Had they really
no knowledge of the antique? Not so; they had heard from their learned
men, from Willibald Pirkheimer and Ulrich von Hutten, that the world had
once been peopled with naked gods and goddesses; nay, the very year
perhaps that Raphael handed to the engraver, Marc Antonio, his
magnificent drawing of the Judgment of Paris, Lukas Kranach bethought
him to represent the story of the good Knight Paris giving the apple to
the Lady Venus. So Kranach took up his steady pencil and sharp chisel,
and in strong, clear, minute lines of black and white showed us the
scene. There, on Mount Ida, with a castellated rock in the distance, the
charger of Paris browses beneath some stunted larches; the Trojan
knight's helmet, with its monstrous beak and plume, lies on the ground;
and near it reclines Paris himself, lazy, in complete armour, with
frizzled fashionable beard. To him, all wrinkled and grinning with
brutal lust, comes another bearded knight, with wings to his vizored
helmet, Sir Mercury, leading the three goddesses, short, fat-cheeked
German wenches, housemaids stripped of their clothes, stupid, brazen,
indifferent. And Paris is evidently prepared with his choice: he awards
the apple to the fattest, for among a half-starved, plague-stricken
people like this, the chosen of gods and men must needs be the fattest.
No, such pagan scenes are mere burlesques, coarse mummeries, such as may
have amused Nürnberg and Augsburg during Shrovetide, when drunken louts
figured as Bacchus and sang drinking songs by Hans Sachs. There is no
reality in all this; there is no belief in pagan gods. If we would see
the haunting divinity of the German Renaissance, we shall find him
prying and prowling in nearly every scene of real life; him, the ever
present, the king of the Middle Ages, whose triumph we have seen on the
cloister wall at Pisa, the lord "Death." His fleshless face peers from
behind a bush at Zatzinger's stunted, fever-stricken lady and imbecile
gentleman; he sits grinning on a tree in Orso Graf's allegory, while the
cynical knights, with haggard, sensual faces, crack dirty jokes with the
fat, brutish woman squatted below; he puts his hand into the basket of
Dürer's tattered pedlar; he leers hideously at the stirrup of Dürer's
armed and stalwart knight. No gods of youth and Nature; no Hercules, no
Hermes, no Venus, have invaded his German territories, as they invaded
even his own palace, the burial-ground at Pisa; the antique has not
perverted Dürer and his fellows, as it perverted Masaccio, and
Signorelli, and Mantegna, from the mediæval worship of Death.
The Italians had seen the antique and had let themselves be seduced by
it, despite their civilization and their religion. Let us only rejoice
thereat. There are indeed some, and among them the great English critic,
who is irrefutable when he is a poet and irrational when he becomes a
philosopher;--there are some who tell us that in its union with antique
art, the art of the followers of Giotto embraced death, and rotted away
ever after; there are others, more moderate but less logical, who would
teach us that in uniting with the antique, the mediæval art of the
fifteenth century purified and sanctified the beautiful but evil child
of Paganism, that the goddess of Scopas and the athlete of Polyclete
were raised to a higher sphere when Raphael changed the one into a
Madonna, and Michel Angelo metamorphosed the other into a prophet. But
both schools of criticism are wrong. Every civilization has its inherent
evil; antiquity had its' inherent evils, as the Middle Ages had theirs;
antiquity may have bequeathed to the Renaissance the bad with the good,
as the Middle Ages had bequeathed to the Renaissance the good with the
bad. But the art of antiquity was not the evil, it was the good of
antiquity; it was born of its strength and its purity only and it was
the incarnation of its noblest qualities. It could not be purified,
because it was spotless; it could not be sanctified because it was holy.
It could gain nothing from the art of the Middle Ages, alternately
strong in brutal reality, and languid in mystic inanity; the men of the
Renaissance could, if they influenced it at all, influence the antique
only for evil; they belonged to an inferior artistic civilization, and
if we conscientiously seek for the spiritual improvements brought by
them into antique types, we shall see that they consist in spoiling
their perfect proportions, in making necks longer and muscles more
prominent, in rendering more or less flaccid, or meagre, or coarse, the
grand and delicate forms of antique art. And when we have examined into
this purified art of the Renaissance, when we have compared coolly and
equitably, we may perhaps confess that, while the Renaissance added
immense wealth of beauty in colour, perspective, and grouping, it took
away something of the perfection of simple lines and modest light and
shade of the antique; we may admit to ourselves that the grandest saint
by Raphael is meagre and stunted, and the noblest Virgin by Titian is
overblown and sensual by the side of the demi-gods and amazons of
antique sculpture.
The antique perfected the art of the Renaissance, it did not corrupt it.
The art of the Renaissance fell indeed into shameful degradation soon
after the period of its triumphant union with the antique; and Raphael's
grand gods and goddesses, his exquisite Eros and radiant Psyche of the
Farnesina, are indeed succeeded but too soon by the Olympus of Giulio
Romano, an Olympus of harlots and acrobats, who smirk and mouth and
wriggle and sprawl ignobly on the walls and ceilings of the dismantled
palace which crumbles away among the stunted willows, the stagnant
pools, and rank grass of the marshes of Mantua. But this is no more the
fault of antiquity than it is the fault of the Middle Ages; it is the
fault of that great principle of life and of change which makes all
things organic, be they physical or intellectual, germinate, grow,
attain maturity, and then fade, wither, and rot. The dead art of
antiquity could never have brought the art of the Renaissance to an
untimely end; the art of the Renaissance decayed because it was mature,
and died because it had lived.
VERNON LEE.
THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION OF COMTE.
IV.
In my last article I considered the subjective synthesis of Comte, or in
other words, his attempt to systematize human knowledge in relation to
the moral life of man. For it is his view, as we have seen, that science
can never yield its highest fruit to man unless it be
systematized--_i.e._, unless its different parts be connected together
and put in their true place as parts of one whole. Scattered lights give
no illumination; it is the _esprit d'ensemble_, the general idea in
which our knowledge begins and ends, that ultimately determines the
scientific value of each special branch of knowledge. But while
synthesis is necessary, it is not necessary, according to Comte, that
the synthesis should be objective. The error of mankind in the past has
been that they supposed themselves able to ascertain the real or
objective principle, which gives unity to the world, and able,
therefore, to make their system of knowledge an ideal repetition of the
system of things without them. Such a system, however, is entirely
beyond our reach. The conditions of our lot, and the weakness of our
intelligence, make it impossible for us to tell what is the real
principle of unity in the world, or even whether such a principle
exists. The attempts to discover it, made by Theology and Metaphysics,
have been nothing more than elaborate anthropomorphisms, in which men
gave to the unknown and unknowable reality, a form which was borrowed
from their own. They saw in the clouds about them an exaggerated and
distorted reflection of themselves, and regarded this Brocken spectre as
the controlling power whose activity was the source and explanation of
everything. Positivism, on the other hand, arises whenever men learn to
recognize the nature of this illusion, and to confine their ambition
within that which is really the limit of their intelligence. All that we
can know is the resemblances and successions of phenomena, and not the
things in themselves that are their causes; and if we seek to find a
principle of unity for these phenomena, we must find it within and not
without. We must organize knowledge with reference to our own wants,
rather than with reference to the nature of things. We must regard
everything as a means to an end, which is determined by some inner
principle in ourselves--not as if we supposed that the world and all
that is in it were made for us, or found its centre in us--but simply
because this is the only point of view from which we can systematize
knowledge, as it is indeed the only point of view from which we need
care to systematize it.
It may be asked why system is necessary at all, why we should not be
content with a fragmentary consciousness of the world, without
attempting to gather the dispersed lights of science to one central
principle. To critics like J. S. Mill, Comte's effort after system seems
to be the result of an "original mental twist very common in French
thinkers," of "an inordinate desire of unity." "That all perfection
consists in unity, Comte apparently considers to be a maxim which no
sane man thinks of questioning: it never seems to enter into his
conceptions that any one could object _ad initio_, and ask, Why this
universal systematizing, systematizing, systematizing? Why is it
necessary that all human life should point but to one object, and be
cultivated into a system of means to a single end?"[26] To this Mr.
Bridges answers that unity in Comte's sense is "the first and most
obvious condition which all moral and religious renovators, of whatever
time or country, have by the very nature of their office set themselves
to fulfil."[27] In other words, all moral and spiritual life depends
upon the harmony of the individual with himself and with the world. A
divided life is a life of weakness and misery, nor can life be divided
intellectually, without being, or ultimately becoming, divided morally.
Such unity, indeed, does not exclude--and in a being like man who is in
course of development cannot altogether exclude--difference and even
conflict. In the most steadily growing intellectual life there are
pauses of difficulty and doubt; in the most continuous moral progress
there are conflicts with self and others. But such doubts and
difficulties will not greatly weaken or disturb us, so long as they are
partial, so long as they do not affect the central principles of thought
and action, so long as there is still some fixed faith which reaches
beyond the disturbance, some certitude which is untouched by the doubt.
If, however, we once lose the consciousness that there is any such
principle, or if we try to rest on a principle which we at the same time
feel to be inadequate, our spiritual life, in losing its unity or
harmony with itself, must at the same time lose its purity and energy.
It must become fitful and uncertain, the sport of accidental influences
and tendencies; it must lower its moral and intellectual aims. This, in
Comte's view, is what we have seen in the past. The decay of the old
faiths, and of the objective synthesis based upon them, has emancipated
us from many illusions, but it has, as it were, taken the inspiration
out of our lives. It has made knowledge a thing for specialists who have
lost the sense of totality, the sense of the value of their particular
studies in relation to the whole; and it has made action feeble and
wayward by depriving men of the conviction that there is any great
central aim to be achieved by it. And these results would have been
still more obvious, were it not that men are so slow in realizing what
is involved in the change of their beliefs were it not that the habits
and sympathies developed by a creed continue to exist long after the
creed itself has disappeared. In the long run, however, the change of
man's intellectual attitude to the world must bring with it a change of
his whole life. As the creed which reconciled him to the world and bound
him to his fellows ceases to affect him, he must be thrown back upon his
own mere individuality, unless he can find another creed of equal or
greater power to inspire and direct his life. And mere individualism is
nothing, but anarchy. That this is so, was not indeed manifest to those
who first expressed the individualistic principle: on the contrary, they
seemed to themselves to have, in the assertion of individual right, not
only an instrument for destroying the old faith and the old social
order, but also the principle of a better faith, and the means of
reconstructing a better order. But to us who have outlived the period
when it could be supposed that the destruction of old, involves in
itself the construction of new, forms of life and thought, it cannot but
be obvious that the principles of private judgment and individual
liberty are nothing more than negations. For as the real problem of our
intellectual life is how to rise to a judgment which is more than
private judgment, so the real problem of our practical life is how to
realize a liberty that is more than individual license. It is in this
sense that Comte says that the last three centuries have been a period
of the insurrection of the intellect against the heart, a phrase by
which he means to indicate at once the gain and the loss of the
revolutionary movement; its gain, in so far as it emancipated the
intelligence from superstitious illusions, and its loss, in so far as it
destroyed the faith which was the bond of social union, without
substituting any other faith in its room. At the same time, the
expression points to a peculiarity of Comte's Psychology, which affects
his whole view of the history, and especially of the religious history,
of man; and it is therefore necessary to subject it to a careful
examination.
Is it possible for the intellect to be in insurrection against the
heart? In a sense already indicated this is possible. It is possible, in
short, that the moral and intellectual spirit of a belief may still
control the life of one who, so far as his explicit consciousness is
concerned, has renounced it. Rooted as the individual is in a wider life
than his own, it is often but a small part of himself that he can bring
to distinct consciousness. Further, so little are most men accustomed to
self-analysis; that they are seldom aware what it is that constitutes
the inspiring power of their beliefs. Generally, at least in the first
instance, they take their creed in gross, without distinguishing between
essential and unessential elements. They confuse, in one general
consecration of reverence, its primary principles, and the local and
temporary accidents of the form in which it was first presented to them,
and they are as ready to accept battle _à l'outrance_ for some useless
outwork as for the citadel itself. And, for the same reason, they are
ready to think that the citadel is lost when the outwork is taken; to
suppose, _e.g._, that the spiritual nature of man is a fiction if he was
not directly made by God out of the dust of the earth, or that the
Christian view of life has ceased to be true if a doubt can be thrown on
the possibility of proving miracles. Yet however little the individual
may be able to separate the particulars which are assailed from the
universal with which they are accidentally connected, his whole nature
must rebel against the sacrifice which logical consistency seems in such
a case to demand from him. It is a painful experience when the first
break is made in the implicit unity of early faith, and it is painful
just in proportion to the depth of the spiritual consciousness which
that faith has produced in the individual. Unable to separate that which
he is obliged to doubt from that in which lies the principle of his
moral, and, even of his intellectual, life, he is "in a strait betwixt
two;" and no course seems to be open to him which does not involve the
surrender, either of his intellectual honesty, or of that higher
consciousness which alone "makes life worth living," Such a crisis is
commonly described as a division between the heart and the head, for in
it the articulate or conscious logic is on the side of disbelief, and
the resisting conviction generally takes the form of a feeling, an
impulse, an intuition, which the individual has for himself, but which
he is unable to communicate in the same force to another. And, as such
feelings and intuitions of the individual are necessarily subject to
continual variation of intensity and clearness, so the struggle between
doubt and faith may be long and difficult, the objections, which at one
time seem as nothing, at another time appearing to be almost
irresistible. Not seldom the result is a broken life, in which youth is
given to revolt, and the rest of existence to a faith which vainly
strives to be implicit. There is, indeed, no final and satisfactory
issue from such an endless internal debate and conflict, until the
"heart" has learned to speak the language of the "head,"--_i.e._, until
the permanent principles which underlay and gave strength to faith have
been brought into the light of distinct consciousness, and until it has
been discovered how to separate them from the accidents, with which at
first they were necessarily identified. The hard labour of
distinguishing, in the traditions of the past, between the germinative
principles, out of which the future must spring, and those external
forms and adjuncts, which every day is making more incredible, must be
undertaken by any one who would restore the broken unity of man's life.
We begin our existence under the shadow and influence of a faith which
is given to us, as it were; in our sleep; but in no age, and in this
age less than any other, can man possess a spiritual life as a gift from
the past without reconquering it for himself.
In this sense, then, we can understand how Comte might speak of an
insurrection of the intelligence against the heart, which must be
quelled ere the normal state of humanity could be restored; for this
would be only another way of saying that, in the modern conflict of
faith and reason, the substantial truth, or at least the most important
truth, had, up to Comte's own time, been on the side of the former. In
this view, the deep unwillingness of those nourished in the Christian or
Catholic faith to yield to the logical battery of the Encyclopædists was
not merely the result of an obscurantist hatred of light; it was also in
great part due to a more or less definite sense of the moral, if not the
intellectual, weakness of the principles which the Encyclopædists
maintained. For, while the insurrection was justified in so far as it
asserted the claims of the special sciences, it was to be condemned in
so far as it involved the denial of all synthesis whatever, and also in
so far as it was blind to the elements of truth in the imperfect
synthesis of the past. It thus tended to destroy the spirit of totality
and the sense of duty (_l'esprit d'ensemble et le sentiment du
devoir_).[28] It practically denied the existence of any universal
principle which could connect the different parts of knowledge with each
other, of any general aim which could give unity to the life of man. Its
analytic spirit was fatal, not only to the fictions of theology, but
also to that growing consciousness of the solidarity of men of which
theology had been the accidental embodiment. The reluctance of religious
men to admit the claims of what appeared to be, and, indeed, to a
certain extent was, light, was thus due to a more or less distinct
perception that their own creed, amid all its partial errors, contained
a central truth more important than all the partial truths of science.
In clinging to the past they were preserving the germ of the future, and
the final victory of science could not come until this germ had been
disengaged from the husk of superstition under which it was hidden. Till
that was done, the logic of the heart in clinging to its superstitions
was better than the logic of the head in rebelling against them. In
other words, the implicit reason of faith was wiser than the explicit
reason of science.
But this is not all that Comte means. For him the appeal to the heart is
not merely the appeal to feelings and intuitions, which are the result
of the past development of human intelligence, and especially of the
long discipline by which the Christian Church has moulded the modern
spirit; it is an appeal to the altruistic affections as original or
"innate" tendencies in man which are altogether independent of his
intelligence. It is not that the reason of man often speaks through his
feelings, but that feeling and reason have in themselves different, and
even it may be opposite, voices. In this sense, the attempt has often
been made in modern times to stop the invasions of critical reflection
by setting up the heart as an independent authority. From the Lutheran
theologian who said, "_Pectus theologum facit_," down to Mr. Tennyson
who declares that whenever he heard "the voice--Believe no more,"
"A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason's colder part,
And like a man in wrath, the heart
Stood up and answered, 'I have felt:'"