Nature, like a theatre, offers a double object to the mind. There is
in the first place the play presented, the overt spectacle, which is
something specious and ideal; and then there is something material
and profound lying behind and only symbolically revealed, namely, the
stage, the actors, and the author. The playful spectacular sort of
reality we can pretty well dominate and exhaust, if we are attentive;
indeed the prospect, in its sensuous and poetic essence, is plastic
to attention, and alters its character according to the spectator's
station and faculty; a poetic theme develops as interest in it is
aroused, and offers different beauties and different morals to every
new critic. The instrumentalities, on the contrary, which bring
this spectacle before us, whether they be material or personal, are
unfathomable. They are events, not ideas. Even putting together all
that carpenters and chemists, biographers and psychologists, might
learn about these events, we could never probe them to the bottom.
In the beginning, as for a child at his first pantomime, the play's
the thing; and a human audience can never quite outgrow this initial
illusion, since this world is a theatre nobody can visit twice. If we
could become habitués, old theatre-goers amongst the worlds, we might
grow more discriminating; on the whole we might enjoy the performances
just as much or even more, perhaps; yet less breathlessly. We should
see more and believe less. The pleasure of seeing is one, and the
pleasure of believing is quite another; the first liberates our senses
and fills the present with light; the second directs our conduct
and relieves our anxiety or doubts about the past and future. When
the spectator bethinks himself of destiny as well as of beauty, his
sensibility becomes tragic, it becomes intelligence. Every picture is
then regarded as a sign for the whole situation which has generated it
or which it forebodes. The given image, for intelligence, expresses
a problematic fact; and intelligence invents various grammatical
forms and logical categories by which to describe its hidden enemy
or fascinating prey. So spontaneous and dogmatic is the intellect in
this interpretation of the scene that the conceived object (however
abstractly sketched) is unhesitatingly judged to be, as we say, the
real thing: it alone works and acts, whilst the given image is either
disregarded altogether or despised as a mere word or phantasm of
sense, such as only fools would stop to gaze at. And it is very true,
whatever desperate efforts empiricism may make to deny it, that every
figure crossing the stage of apprehension is a symbol, or may become
a symbol; they all have some occasion and arise out of some deeper
commotion in the material world. The womb of nature is full of crowding
events, to us invisible; the ballet has machinery behind its vistas and
its music; the dancers possess a character and fate in the daylight
quite foreign to these fays and shepherds before the footlights; what
to us is a pirouette to them is a twitch or a shilling. Shame to the
impious egotism that would deny it, and, in order to spare itself the
tension of faith and the labour of understanding, would pretend to find
in experience nothing but a shadowy tapestry, a landscape without a
substance. To its invisible substance the spectacle owes not only its
existence but its meaning, since our interest in the scene is rooted
in a hidden life within us, quite as much as the shifts and colours of
the scenery are rooted in tricks of the stage. Nevertheless the roots
of things are properly and decently hidden under ground, and it is as
childish to be always pulling them up, to make sure that they exist, as
it is to deny their existence. The flowers are what chiefly interests
a man of taste; the spectacle is what liberal-minded people have come
to see. Every image has its specific aspect and aesthetic essence, more
or less charming in itself; the sensualist, the poet, the chronicler of
his passing visions must take them at their face value, and be content
with that. Fair masks, like flowers, like sunsets, like melodies wrung
out of troubled brains and strung wire, cover for us appropriately the
anatomical face of nature; and words and dogmas are other masks, behind
which we, too, can venture upon the stage; for it is life to give
expression to life, transmuting diffused movements into dear images.
How blind is the zeal of the iconoclasts, and how profoundly hostile
to religious impulse! They pour scorn upon eyes that see not and a
mouth that cannot speak; they despise a work of art or of thought for
being finished and motionless; as if the images of the retina were less
idols than those of the sculptor, and as if words, of all things, were
not conventional signs, grotesque counterfeits, dead messengers, like
fallen leaves, from the dumb soul. Why should one art be contemptuous
of the figurative language of another? Jehovah, who would suffer no
statues, was himself a metaphor.
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