The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
The vaporous exultation not to be confined!'
And not only happiness and love, but knowledge also: the Earth calls to
the Sky: 'Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.'
Soberer spirits shared this poet's ecstasy. Wordsworth sang
'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.'
And that heaven was exactly this foretaste of the Spirit of Man entering
undisturbed into his full inheritance at last: Science welcomed as a
dear and honoured guest, Poetry known as 'the breath and finer spirit
that is in the countenance of all knowledge'.
It is scarcely necessary even to mention the high hopes of the French
themselves, the confident anticipation of an Age of Reason when all men
should be brothers and the earth bring forth all her treasures, but it
is well worth noting the attitude of Goethe, an attitude the more
significant because, in a sense, Goethe always stood outside the French
Revolution. But he, like the best of its votaries--and this is less
known than it should be--desired the development of all men every whit
as much as he desired the high culture of a few. It was for the double
goal that he worked. 'Only through all men,' he writes in a notable
passage, 'only through all men, can mankind be made.'[72] All good lies
in Man, he tells us again, and must be developed, 'only not in one man,
but in many'. Goethe, the so-called aristocrat, has given us here as
true a formula for the democratic faith as could well be found. And to
him, as to Shelley and to Wordsworth, Poetry and Science were not
enemies but friends dearer than sisters. Those three, Shelley,
Wordsworth, and Goethe, foreshadowed a new poetry of science that has
never yet been achieved, though fine work has been done by Tennyson,
Whitman, Sully Prudhomme, and Meredith.
Goethe, moreover, again like Shelley and the French, broke with all
ideals of mere self-abnegation. In his poem, 'General Confession', he
makes his disciples repent of ever having missed an opportunity for
enjoyment and resolve never so to offend again. Here, as often, Goethe
comes into the closest touch with our modern feeling. We, too, can never
return to the Franciscan ideal of poverty, celibacy, and obedience as
the highest life for man on earth. We have done with self-denial except
as the means to a human end. We are still in the tide of what I would
call the Modern Renascence; we claim the whole garden of the world for
our own, the tree with the knowledge of good and evil included, reacting
even from Christian ideals if they can make no room for that. But, after
all, the characteristic of the belief dominant a century ago was exactly
that such room could be made, that Hellenism could be combined with
Christianity, and self-development with self-denial.
And this belief is, I think, reflected in the music of the time.
Schubert, that sweetest soul of tears and laughter, understands every
shade of wistfulness, and yet again and again in his music it seems as
though the universe had become, to quote a lover of his, one immense and
glorious blackbird. Mozart, in 'The Magic Flute', as Goethe seems to
have recognized, sings the very song of union between the unreflecting
joy of the natural man and the strenuous self-devotion of the awakened
spirit. Beethoven, greatest of them all, plumbs the lowest depths of
suffering and then astounds and comforts us by ineffable vistas of
happiness. After years of personal misery he crowns the glorious series
of his symphonies by the one that ends in a hymn of joy, freedom, and
faith, embracing the whole world--'Diese Kuss der ganzen Welt'--that
majestic open melody, clear as the morning, fresh as though it came from
far oversea, greater even than any of the great harmonies that have gone
before, larger than the tortured human heart, steadier than the sudden
ecstasy of the spirits set free, stronger than the swansong of the
dying, a melody content with earth because it is conscious of heaven. I
offer no apology for weaving my own fairy-tales round such music: I see
no harm in the practice, but only good, so long as we understand what we
are about. Music, it is true, is something other than, in a sense more
than, either thought or feeling or even poetry, and cannot be reduced to
any of them (nor any of them to it). The universe would be poor indeed
if it could be so. But none the less the truth may be, as Spinoza
thought, that the universe is at once a unity and a unity with many
facets, so that any one facet, while for ever unique, can bring to our
minds all the mysteries of the rest.
In any case, the high confidence that breathes in the music of a hundred
years ago meets us again in the philosophers.
Hegel, born in the same year as Beethoven and Wordsworth (1770), is sure
that nothing can resist the onslaught of man's spirit. 'Stronger than
the gates of Hell are the gates of Thought.' Fichte is convinced that
there waits in man, only to be developed, a power that will unite him
with all other men and at the same time develop his own personality to
the full. In a sense, the deepest, each man _is_ his fellow-men, and
they are he.
How much this conception has affected modern thought can be seen in a
recent and very remarkable book, _The New State_,[73] where the very
basis of democracy is shown to be the faith in this essential unity, a
unity to be worked out, not yet realized, but capable of realization, a
faith stirring all through the modern world, in ways expected and
unexpected, from Syndicalism to the League of Nations.
Later than Hegel and Fichte, the great Positivist conception of life
preached by Comte is instinct with this belief that man united with his
fellows, and only as so united, can attain heights undreamt-of and
unlimited.
The flood-tide of this faith flowed far into the nineteenth century. The
Italian Mazzini, leader of revolt in 1848, was filled with it. Prophet
of the most generous political gospel ever preached, he lived on the
hope that, if freedom were given to the nations and duty set before
them, they would prove worthy of their double mission, and peace would
come to pass between all peoples.
But even Mazzini had his moments of agonizing doubt. And others beside
him, men of lesser intellect as well as greater, were soon to raise, or
had already raised, voices, stern or fretful, of protest and criticism.
It became clear at last that this joyous confidence rested on a very
definite view of life and one that might easily be challenged, the view,
namely, that at bottom the universe meant well to man, that his greatest
aspirations were compatible with each other and nowise beyond
attainment. Almost from the first there were men of the modern world who
did challenge this. Byron and Schopenhauer are significant figures, both
born in the same year, only eighteen years later than the great Three of
1770, Wordsworth, Hegel, and Beethoven. Byron is full of moody
questionings, Schopenhauer of much more than questionings. Against the
dauntless optimism of Hegel, he flatly denies that the universe is good,
or happiness possible for man. On the contrary, at the heart of it and
of him there lies an infinite unrest, never to be quieted until man
himself gives up the Will to Live and sinks back into the Unconscious
from which he came.
Now after Schopenhauer came Nietzsche, and though Nietzsche's influence
may have been exaggerated, yet undeniably it has been of immense
importance both for Germany and Europe. He is typical of the change that
begins to appear about the middle of the century. Reacting from the
optimism of the idealists (which seemed to him both smug and false),
Nietzsche welcomed Schopenhauer's more Spartan view with a kind of
fierce delight. But his criticism of Schopenhauer was fierce too, and he
gave a strangely different turn to such parts of the doctrine as he did
accept. To Schopenhauer, since it was folly to hope for real happiness
in this life or any other, the wise course would be to kill outright, so
far as possible, the Will to Live itself. To Nietzsche the wise course
was to assert life, to claim it more and more abundantly, to face this
tragic show with a courage so high that it could be gay, a courage that
could do without happiness, and yet that turned aside from none of
life's joys simply because they were fleeting, that was more than
content to 'live dangerously', picking flowers, as it were, clear-eyed,
on the edge of the precipice. And this not merely in the temper of 'Let
us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' For him the motto would have
run, 'Let us be up and doing, for to-morrow we die', sustained by the
belief that the heroic struggle now would lead inevitably to the
production of a nobler type of man, a man who would be something more
than man--the Super-man, to give him the name that every reader knows,
if he knows nothing else about Nietzsche.
Even this short statement shows how Nietzsche shared the admiration for
life and power characteristic of what I have called the Modern
Renascence, and how deeply he was influenced by the doctrine of
Evolution, and that in a not unhopeful form, the hope for an advance in
the race at least, if not in the individuals now living. And it shows
too how mistaken those are who see in him nothing but a preacher of
brutal egotism. If he had been only that, he would never have won the
influence he possessed and possesses. Yet there is important truth in
the cursory popular judgement. If his teaching has its heroic side, a
side that has enabled him to give succour to many when other and sweeter
gospels are spurned as flattering unctions, he has also a most ruthless
element. And this partly because of his very sincerity. Accept the
doctrine that men and women perish like candles blown out in the night,
accept it really and fully, with intellect, imagination, and feeling,
and then see how much light-heartedness can be got out of life, if we
still allow ourselves to pity men. Nietzsche had intellect, imagination,
and feeling, and he saw plainly enough that, while even in such a
universe there could be a grim happiness for the lives of heroes, there
could be nothing but infinite sadness for the countless failures who
have never been either happy or heroic. There was no immortality; these
wretched beings would never have another chance. If joy was to be kept
(and Nietzsche was avid for joy), if the universe was to be accepted
(and Nietzsche desired above all to say Yes! to the universe), then he
must root out pity from his heart as an unmanly weakness. In this way
was sharpened the ruthlessness and savage arrogance latent in the man, a
ruthlessness and an arrogance that have done so much harm both to his
country and the world.
In fairness, we must add that Nietzsche could not succeed in his own
attempt; the struggle tore him to pieces and he died in madness.
But it is above all instructive to contrast him here with several of
his contemporaries and successors. Browning in England, Walt Whitman in
America, facing the same problems of joy and struggle, of life and
death, of the few great and the many commonplace, of Man himself and the
Nature that seems at once his mother and his enemy, refused to give up
the hope of a solution, nay, they were sure they had found a solution,
and for them it was bound up with the hope of immortality. They go even
beyond the earlier men in their insistence on the double ideal of
Paganism and Christianity, but they have an insistence of their own on
the belief in unending life as alone giving man elbow-room, so to speak,
for working out his destiny. Browning claims eternity as the due of
every man, however mean; and if Whitman feels his foothold 'tenon'd and
mortised in granite', it is because he can 'laugh at dissolution' and
knows 'the amplitude of time'.
But in such insistence and such conviction they have not been followed,
speaking broadly, by our leading writers since. On the other hand, they
have been so followed, again speaking broadly, in their loyalty to the
twofold ideal. Here and there, no doubt, as I have said, writers like
Nietzsche, on the one hand, have tried to be satisfied with the splendid
development of a Few, or, on the other hand, like Tolstoy, have flung
back in a kind of despair to the old ideal of abnegation, of sheer
brotherly love and nothing else, turning their backs on all splendours
of art, knowledge, or delight, that do not directly minister to the one
thing they hold needful. But the earlier and wider ideal, the ideal of
our Renascence, once envisaged by man, that has not been lost, and I
believe never can be lost. Its own greatness will keep the foremost men
true to it. Meredith is one of the men I mean. He is full of pity, but
he does not only pity men and women--he wants them to grow, and to grow
for themselves. His whole attitude towards Woman shows this: for the
women's movement is nothing more and nothing less, as Ibsen also felt,
than one big stream of the general movement towards liberty and
self-determination. So far Meredith marches with Browning and Whitman.
But he will never commit himself about immortality. It seems enough for
him to take part in the struggle for a finer life, at once heroic and
tender, not caring overmuch whether we reach it or no. 'Spirit raves not
for a goal' is one of his hard and characteristic sayings, and here he
seems to me typical both of modern thought in general and especially of
English thought, and that both for good and ill. We see in him the want
of precision, the lack of logical coherence, that have prevented us from
ever producing a philosopher of the first rank. At the same time there
is something true and profound in his instinct that the moment has not
yet come in which to formulate our faith. We all feel that we are on the
brink of tremendous, perhaps terrifying, discoveries; we resent any
cut-and-dried solution, however pleasant, perhaps all the more if it is
pleasant, and we resent it because we feel that at bottom our hopes
would be travestied by any conception we, with our little intellect and
minute knowledge, could at present frame. It was once said to me by a
far-seeing friend[74] that the modern dislike of church-going, the
modern incapacity to write a long coherent poem, the modern passion for
music and for realism, even for sordid realism, all sprang from the same
roots, from the thirst for an infinite harmony, the belief that
everything was somehow involved in that harmony, and the conviction that
all systems, as yet made or makeable, were entirely inadequate.
And to the list we may add, I think, the modern passion for history and
for science. We study history not merely to be warned by failures or
inspired by shining examples: at bottom we have a belief that somehow
the lives and struggles of those men in the distant past are still quite
as important as our own. We follow the discoveries of science not only
for their commercial value or because we share the excitement of the
chase, but because, deeper than all, we suspect that the universe is a
glorious thing.
And there is another matter, perhaps the most important of all, on which
I would dwell as I draw to a close, where Meredith leads directly to the
dominant thought of the present day. I mean his feeling that, if the
universe is to be proved acceptable to man's conscience, it will be
through the effort of man himself struggling towards his own ideal. It
is as though the world itself had to be redeemed by man. This hope is
the real hope of our time. So far as the modern world believes the
doctrine of the Incarnation, it is in this sense that it believes.
And this belief we find everywhere in all hopeful writers, great or
small. It gives dignity to the latest writings of H.G. Wells, this faith
in a spirit moving in man greater than man himself, worthy to fight and
fit to overcome all that is wrong in the universe. Bernard Shaw's creed
is just the same, sometimes thinly disguised under respect for 'the
Life-Force', sometimes coming boldly forward in audacious, profound
assertions that God needs Man to accomplish His own will and is helpless
without him. 'There is something I want to do,' Shaw imagines his God as
saying, 'and I don't know what it is; I must make a brain, the human
brain, to find it out.' Rodin modelled a mighty hand, the Hand of God,
holding within it Man and Woman. Shaw, it is reported, asked the
sculptor: 'I suppose you meant your own hand after all?' 'Yes,' said
Rodin, 'as the tool.'
The same idea is at the base of what is most stimulating in Bergson,
the idea of what he calls Creative Evolution, an undefined splendour not
yet fully existing, but, as it were, crying out to be born, and only to
be born through the struggle of man's spirit with matter. This is one
function of matter, perhaps the supreme function, to be the material
through which alone man's vague ideal can become definite and actual,
just as an artist can only get close to his own conception through the
effort to embody it in visible form or audible sound.
From this point of view, the world is conceived as anything but
ready-made, rather it is in the process of making, and we ourselves are
among the makers. Or, to take a metaphor that perhaps appeals more to
the modern world, it is a fight, and an unfinished fight. To quote
William James, 'It _feels_ like a real fight--as if there were something
really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and
faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own
hearts from atheisms and fears.' He goes on to confess that he himself
does not know, and certainly cannot prove scientifically, that the
redemption will surely be accomplished. Such proof, he admits, 'may not
be clear before the day of judgement (or some stage of being which that
expression may serve to symbolize)'. 'But the faithful fighters of this
hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may turn to
the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those with
which Henry IV greeted the tardy Crillon after a great battle had been
gained:
"Hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques,
and you were not there!"'[75]
Thus, if the idea of the splendour and perfection of the universe has
sunk into the background, if the sense of worship and the feeling of
ecstasy have been dimmed (and I think they have), at least the reverence
for heroism and for tenderness has not been impaired, and there after
all lies the root of human majesty. There is deep pathos in the change,
but maybe, paradoxical as it sounds, deep hope as well. The world may
grow the stronger for having to live now by what Carlyle called
'desperate hope' as distinct from 'hoping hope'. The triumphant harmony
that seemed attained a century ago by certain poets and thinkers may
have been, after all, too cheap and easy, if not for their own large
spirits, at least for us, their lesser readers. Mystics have spoken of
'The Dark Night of the Soul' as the stage inevitable before the crowning
glory, and to-day some of those who call to us out of great darkness are
among our greatest leaders.
Of such certainly is a living writer, now beginning to be acclaimed as
he deserves, the writer Conrad. In some ways this noble novelist might
stand as the special representative of modern feeling. A Pole by birth
and more than half an Englishman by sympathy, his view of life is as
wide as it is profound and grave. It has all the sternness of temper of
which I have spoken, the determination to look facts in the face
whatever the consequences. Conrad would echo Sartor's noble cry for
Truth--'Truth! though the Heavens crush me for following her;--no
Falsehood! though a whole celestial Lubberland were the price of
Apostasy!' This determination is fierce enough to be taken for cynicism,
but Conrad is far too tender ever to be a cynic. So also does his
pitifulness prevent him from ever falling into the errors of a
Nietzsche, but none the less he has all Nietzsche's ardour for heroism.
That to him is the core of life:--'to face it.' 'Keep on facing it,' so
the old skipper tells the young mate in _Typhoon_. And facing the
mysterious universe, peering into the Darkness with steady alert eyes,
Conrad has at once an endless wistfulness and, or so it seems to me, a
secret unquenchable hope. Doubt certainly he has in plenty. The sea of
which he is always dreaming is terrible and cruel in his eyes as well as
august and ennobling.
But he is sure of one thing: it is through the struggle with it and such
as it that man alone can become Man. It is through facing the horrors of
a dead calm, with a sick crew on board and no medicine, that the young
master of the sailing-vessel in the Pacific crosses successfully the
Shadow Line that divides youth from manhood. And it is through facing
the unleashed fury of the tornado that the old captain of the
'full-powered steam-ship' in _Typhoon_ shows what he has in him,
compassion and kindness as well as shrewd knowledge of men, expert
seamanship, and indomitable heroism. The whole thing is driven home with
a power, an incisiveness, and a delicate irradiating humour which I
should despair of conveying by mere criticism. The book must be read for
itself, and read again and again. It is told, in one way, simply as a
sailor's yarn, but it awakes in us the feeling that the struggle is a
symbol of man's life.
Threatened by the advancing cyclone, Captain MacWhirr, 'the stupid man'
of no imagination, decides, almost instinctively, that the only thing to
be done is to keep up steam and face the wind. By sheer force of
personality he holds the crew together and carries the ship through. And
in the desperate struggle, every nerve on the strain for hours that seem
unending, MacWhirr finds time to care for the miserable pack of
terrified coolies on board, who have given way to panic and are fighting
madly in the hold. MacWhirr stops this, brings about order and a chance
for the Chinese, when the rest of his men, fine men as most of them
are, can think of nothing but the safety of the ship. 'Had to do what's
fair for all,' he mumbles stolidly to his clever grumbling mate, Jukes,
during a dead lull in the storm--'they are only Chinamen. Give them the
same chance with ourselves' ... 'Couldn't let that go on in my ship, if
I knew she hadn't five minutes to live. Couldn't bear it, Mr. Jukes.' He
does not know whether the ship will be lost or not--(and we do not know
whether mankind will be lost or not)--what he does know is how he must
act. But also he never loses hope. 'She may come out of it yet': that is
the kind of answer the taciturn man gives when driven to speech. The
chief mate, locked in his captain's arms to brace himself against the
hurricane, scarcely able to make the other hear in the terrific gale
though he shouts close to his head, gets back such answers, and with
them the power to endure. He tells him the boats are gone: the captain
yells back sensibly, 'Can't be helped.'
And so noble is the power with which Conrad uses our tongue, the tongue
he has made his own by adoption and genius, that I must let him speak
for himself, and can find no better close for my own lame words. Jukes
has been shouting to his captain again:
'And again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but
with a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of
noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the
black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man's voice--the frail
and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of
thought, resolution, and purpose, that shall be pronouncing
confident words on the last day, when heavens fall and justice is
done--again he heard it, and it was crying to him, as if from
very, very far--"All right."'
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 72: _Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre_, Bk. 8, c. 5.]
[Footnote 73: By M.P. Follett (Longmans).]
[Footnote 74: Professor A.C. Bradley, to whom also is due the passage
about Schubert and the parallel drawn between Beethoven, Hegel, and
Wordsworth.]
[Footnote 75: From _The Will to Believe_, quoted in Bridges' _The Spirit
of Man_, No. 425.]
End of Project Gutenberg's Recent Developments in European Thought, by Various