is wise and logical in its way. It confronts its antagonist with
terrific weapons; it seizes and sways him with a Titanic will force. It
knows where to attack, and how. It knows the spirit that would be death
to it, could that spirit prevail. It closes in the death grapple; the
arena is red with the blood of its victim, but from that blood immortal
springs a new world, a new society.
One word, in conclusion, about the Greek language. Valuable as
translations are, they can never, to the student, take the place of
originals. I have stumbled through these works with the lamest
knowledge of Greek, and with no one to help me. I have quoted from
admirable renderings of them into English. Yet, even in such delicate
handling as that of Frere, the racy quality of the Greek phrase
evaporates, like some subtle perfume; while the music of the grand
rhythm, which the ear seems able to get through the eye, is lost.
The Greek tongue belongs to the history of thought. The language that
gives us such distinctions as _nous_ and _logos_, as _gy_ and _kosmos_,
has been the great pedagogue of our race, has laid the foundations of
modern thought. Let us, by all means, help ourselves with Frere, with
Jowett, and a multitude of other literary benefactors. But let us all
get a little Greek on our own account, for the sake of our Socrates and
of our Christ. And as the great but intolerant Agassiz had it for his
motto that "species do not transmute," let this school have among its
mottoes this one: "True learning does not de-Hellenize."
The Halfness of Nature
THE great office of ethics and æsthetics is the reconciliation of God
and man; that is, of the divine and disinterested part of human nature
with its selfish and animal opposite.
This opposition exists, primarily, in the individual; secondarily, in
the society formed out of individuals. Human institutions typify the
two, with their mutual influence and contradictions. The church
represents the one; the market, the other. The battle-field and the
hospital, the school and the forum, are further terms of the same
antithesis. Nature does so much for the man, and the material she
furnishes is so indispensable to all the constructions which we found
upon it, that the last thing a teacher can afford to do is to undervalue
her gifts. When critical agencies go so far as to do this, revolution is
imminent: Nature reasserts herself.
Equally impotent is Nature where institutions do not supply the help of
Art. When this state of things perseveres, she dwindles instead of
growing. She becomes meagre, not grandiose. Men hunt, but do not
cultivate. Women drudge and bear offspring, but neither comfort nor
inspire.
Let us examine a little into what Nature gives, and into what she does
not give. In the domain of thought and religion, people dispute much on
this head, and are mostly ranged in two parties, of which one claims for
her everything, while the other allows her nothing.
In this controversy, we can begin with one point beyond dispute. Nature
gives the man, but she certainly does not give the clothes. Having
received his own body, he has to go far and work hard in order to cover
it.
Nature again scarcely gives human food. Roots, berries, wild fruit, and
raw flesh would not make a very luxurious diet for the king of creation.
Even this last staple Nature does not supply gratis, and the art of
killing is man's earliest discovery in the lesson of self-sustenance. So
Death becomes the succursal of life. The sense of this originates,
first, the art of hunting; secondly, the art of war.
Nature gives the religious impulse, originating in the further pole of
primal thought. The alternation of night and day may first suggest the
opposition of things seen and not seen. The world exists while the man
sleeps--exists independently of him. Sleep and its dreams are mysterious
to the waking man. His first theology is borrowed from this conjunction
of invisible might and irrational intellection.
But Nature does not afford the church. Art does this, laboring long and
finishing never,--coming to a platform of rest, but coming at the same
time to a higher view, inciting to higher effort. Temple after temple is
raised. Juggernaut, Jove, Jesus! India does not get beyond Juggernaut.
Rome could not get beyond Jove. Christendom is far behind Jesus. In all
religions, Art founds on Nature, and aspires to super-nature. In all,
Art asserts the superiority of thought over unthought, of measure over
excess, of conscience over confidence. The latest evangel alone supplies
a method of popularizing thought, of beautifying measure, of harmonizing
conscience, and is, therefore, the religion that uses most largely from
the race, and returns most largely to it.
Time permits me only a partial review of this great system of gifts and
deficiencies. The secret of progress seems an infinitesimal seed,
dropped in some bosoms to bear harvest for all. Seed and soil together
give the product which is called genius. But genius is only half of the
great man. No one works so hard as he does to obtain the result
corresponding to his natural dimensions and obligations. The gift and
the capacity to employ it are simply boons of Nature. The resolution to
do so, the patience and perseverance, the long tasks bravely undertaken
and painfully carried through--these come of the individual action of
the moral man, and constitute his moral life. The wonderfully clever
people we all know, who fill the society toy-shop with what is needed in
the society workshop, are people who have not consummated this
resolution, who have not had this bravery, this perseverance. Death does
not waste more of immature life than Indolence wastes of immature
genius. The law of labor in ethics and æsthetics corresponds to the
energetic necessities of hygiene, and is the most precious and
indispensable gift of one generation to its successors.
In ethics, Nature supplies the first half, but Religion, or the law of
duty, supplies the other. Nature gives the enthusiasm of love, but not
the tender and persevering culture of friendship, which carries the
light of that tropical summer into the winter of age, the icy recesses
of death.
Art has no need to intervene in order to bring together those whom
passion inspires, whom inclination couples. But in crude Nature, passion
itself remains selfish, brutal, and short-lived.
The tender and grateful recollection of transient raptures, the culture
and growth of generous sympathies, resulting in noble co-operation--Art
brings these out of Nature by the second birth, of which Christ knew,
and at which Nicodemus marvelled.
Nature gives the love of offspring. Human parents share the passionate
attachment of other animals for their young. With the regulation of
this attachment Art has much to do. You love the child when it delights
you by day; you must also love it when it torments you at night. This
latter love is not against Nature, but Conscience has to apply the whip
and spur a little, or the mother will take such amusement as the child
can afford, and depute to others the fatigues which are its price.
A graver omission yet Nature makes. She does not teach children to
reverence and cherish their parents when the relation between them
reverses itself in the progress of time, and those who once had all to
give have all to ask. Moses was not obliged to say: "Parents, love your
children." But he was obliged to say: "Honor thy father and thy mother,"
in all the thunder of the Decalogue. The gentler and finer spirits value
the old for their useful council and inestimable experience.
You know to-day; but your father can show you yesterday, bright with
living traditions which history neglects and which posterity loses. We
do not profit as we might by this source of knowledge. Elders question
the young for their instruction. Young people, in turn, should question
elders on their own account, not allowing the personal values of
experience to go down to the grave unrealized. But Youth is cruel and
remorseless. The young, in their fulness of energy, in their desire for
scope and freedom, are often in unseemly haste to see the old depart.
Here Religion comes in with strong hands to moderate the tyrannous
impulse, the controversy of the green with the ripe fruit. All religions
agree in this intervention. The worship of ancestors in the Confucian
ethics shows this consciousness and intention. The aristocratic
traditions of rank and race are an invention to the same end. Vanity,
too, will often lead a man to glorify himself in the past and future, as
well as in the present.
Still, the instinct to get rid of elders is a feature in unreclaimed
nature. It shows the point at which the imperative suggestions of
personal feeling stop,--the spot where Nature leaves a desert in order
that Art may plant a garden. "Why don't you give me a carriage, now?"
said an elderly wife to an elderly husband. "When we married, you would
scarcely let me touch the ground with my feet. I need a conveyance now
far more than I did then." "That was the period of my young enthusiasm,"
replied the husband. The statement is one of unusual candor, but the
fact is one of not unusual occurrence.
I think that in the present study I have come upon the true and simple
sense of the parable of the talents. Of every human good, the initial
half is bestowed by Nature. But the value of this half is not realized
until Labor shall have acquired the other half. Talents are one thing:
the use of them is another. The first depend on natural conditions; the
second, on moral processes. The greatest native facilities are useless
to mankind without the discipline of Art. So in an undisciplined life,
the good that is born with a man dwindles and decays. The sketch of
childhood, never filled out, fades in the objectless vacancy of manhood;
and from the man is "taken away even that which he seemeth to have." Not
judicial vengeance this, but inevitable consequence.
Education should clearly formulate this problem: Given half of a man or
woman, to make a whole one. This, I need not say, is to be done by
development, not by addition. Kant says that knowledge grows _per intus
susceptionem_, and not _per appositionem_. The knowledges that you
adjoin to memory do not fill out the man unless you reach, in his own
mind, the faculty that generates thought. A single reason perceived by
him either in numbers or in speech will outweigh in importance all the
rules which memory can be taught to supply. With little skill and much
perseverance, Education hammers upon the man until somewhere she strikes
a nerve, and the awakened interest leads him to think out something for
himself. Otherwise, she leaves the man a polite muddle, who makes his
best haste to forget facts in forms, and who cancels the enforced
production of his years of pedagogy by a lifelong non-production.
What Nature is able to give, she does give with a wealth and persistence
almost pathetic. The good gifts afloat in the world which never take
form under the appropriate influence, the good material which does not
build itself into the structures of society,--you and I grieve over
these sometimes. And here I come upon a doctrine which Fourier, I think,
does not state correctly. He maintains that inclinations which appear
vicious and destructive in society as at present constituted would
become highly useful in his ideal society. I should prefer to state the
matter thus: The given talent, not receiving its appropriate education,
becomes a negative instead of a positive, an evil instead of a good.
Here we might paraphrase the Scripture saying, and affirm that the stone
which is not built into the corner becomes a stumbling-block for the
wayfarer to fall over. So great mischief lies in those uneducated,
unconsecrated talents! This cordial companion becomes a sot. This
could-be knight remains a prize-fighter. This incipient mathematician
does not get beyond cards or billiards. This clever mechanic picks locks
and robs a bank, instead of endowing one.
Modern theories of education do certainly point toward the study, by the
party educating, of the party appointed to undergo education. But this
education of others is a very complex matter, not to be accomplished
unless the educator educates himself in the light afforded him by his
pupils. The boys or girls committed to you may study what you will: be
sure, first of all, that you study them to your best ability. Education
in this respect is forced to a continual rectification of her processes.
The greatest power and resource are needed to awaken and direct the
energies of the young. No speech in Congress is so important as are the
lessons in the primary school; no pulpit has so great a field of labor
as the Sunday school. The Turkish government showed a cruel wisdom of
instinct when it levied upon Greece the tribute of Christian children to
form its corps of Janissaries. It recognized alike the Greek superiority
of race, and the invaluable opportunity of training afforded by
childhood.
The work, then, of education demands an investigation of the elements
which Nature has granted to the individual, with the view of matching
that in which he is wanting with that which he has. I have heard of
lovers who, in plighting their faith, broke a coin in halves, whose
matching could only take place with their meeting. In true education as
in the love, these halves should correspond.
"What hast thou?" is, then, the first question of the educator. His
second is, "What hast thou not?" The third is, "How can I help thee to
this last?"
To my view, the man remains incomplete his whole life long. Most
incomplete is he, however, in the isolations of selfishness and of
solitude. Study is not necessarily solitude, but ideal society in the
highest grade in which human beings can enjoy it. It is, nevertheless,
dangerous to suffer the ideal to distance the real too largely.
Desk-dreamers end by being mental cripples. Divorce of this sort is not
wholesome, nor holy. Life is a perpetual marriage of real and ideal, of
endeavor and result. The solitary departure of physical death is
hateful, as putting asunder what God has joined together.
Must I go hence as lonely as I was born? My mother brought me into the
infinite society: I go into the absolute dissociation. I go many steps
further back than I came,--to the _ur_ mother, the common matrix which
bears plants, animals, and human creatures. Where, oh where, shall I
find that infinite companionship which my life should have earned for
me? My friendship has been hundred-handed. My love has consumed the
cities of the plain, and built the heavenly Jerusalem. And I go, without
lover or friend, in a box, into an earth vault, from which I cannot even
turn into violets and primroses in any recognizable and conscious way.
The completeness of our severance or deficiency may be, after all, the
determining circumstance of our achievement. What I would have is cut so
clean off from what I have as to leave no sense of wholeness in my
continuing as I am. Something of mine is mislaid or lost. It is more
mine than anything that I have, but where to find it? Who has it? I
reach for it under this bundle and under that. After my life's trial, I
find that I have pursued, but not possessed it. What I have gained of it
in the pursuit, others must realize. I bequeath, and cannot take it with
me. Did Dante regard the parchments of his "Divina Commedia" with a
sigh, foreseeing the long future of commentators and booksellers, he
himself absolving them beforehand by the quitclaim of death? You and I
may also grieve to part from certain unsold volumes, from certain
manuscripts of doubtful fate and eventuality. Oh! out of this pang of
death has come the scheme and achievement of immortality. "_Non omnis
moriar_." "I am the resurrection and the life." "It is sown a natural
body; it is raised a spiritual body."
This tremendous leap and feat of the human soul across the bridge of
dark negativity would never have been made without the sharp spur and
bitter pang of death. "My life food for worms? No; never. I will build
and bestow it in arts and charities, spin it in roads and replicate it
in systems; but to be lopped from the great body of humanity, and decay
like a black, amputated limb? My manhood refuses. The infinite hope
within me generates another life, realizable in every moment of my
natural existence, whose moments are not in time, whose perfect joys are
not measured by variable duration. Thus every day can be to me full of
immortality, and the matter of my corporeal decease full of
indifference, as sure to be unconscious."
I think this attainment the first, fundamental to all the others. We
console the child with a simple word about heaven. He is satisfied, and
feels its truth. How to attain this deathlessness is the next problem
whose solution he will ask of us. We point him to the plane on which he
will roll; for our life is a series of revolutions,--no straight-forward
sledding, but an acceleration by ideal weight and propulsion, through
which our line becomes a circle, and our circle itself a living wheel of
action, creating out of its mobile necessity a past and a future.
The halfness of the individual is literally shown in the division of
sex. The Platonic fancy runs into an anterior process, by which what was
originally one has been made two. We will say that the two halves were
never historically, though always ideally, one. Here Art comes to the
assistance of Nature. The mere contrast of sex does not lift society out
of what is animal and slavish. The integrity of sex relation is not to
be found in a succession or simultaneity of mates, easily taken and as
easily discarded. This great value of a perfected life is to be had only
through an abiding and complete investment,--the relations of sex
lifted up to the communion of the divine, unified by the good faith of a
lifetime, enriched by a true sharing of all experience. This august
partnership is Marriage, one of the most difficult and delicate
achievements of society. Too sadly does its mockery afflict us in these
and other days. Either party, striving to dwarf the other, dwarfs
itself. This mystic selfhood, inexpressible in literal phrases, is at
once the supreme of Nature and the sublime of institutions. The ideal
human being is man and woman united on the ideal plane. The church long
presented and represented this plane. The state is hereafter to second
and carry out its suggestions. The ideal assembly, which we figure by
the communion of the saints, is a coming together of men and women in
the highest aims and views to which Humanity can be a party.
Passing from immediate to projected consciousness, I can imagine
expression itself to spring from want. The sense of the incompleteness
of life in itself and in each of its acts calls for this effort to show,
at least, what life should be,--to vindicate the shortcoming of action
out of the fulness of speech. This that eats and sleeps is so little of
the man! These processes are so little what he understands by life!
Listen; let him tell you what life means to him.
And so sound is differentiated into speech, and hammered into grammar,
and built up into literature--all of whose creations are acoustic
palaces of imagination. For the eye in reading is only the secondary
sense: the written images the spoken word.
How the rhythm of the blood comes to be embodied in verse is more
difficult to trace. But the justification of Poetry is obvious. When you
have told the thing in prose, you have made it false by making it
literal. Poesy lies a little to complete the truth which Honesty lacks
skill to embody. Her artifices are subtle and wonderful. You glance
sideways at the image, and you see it. You look it full in the face, and
it disappears.
The plastic arts, too. This beautiful face commands me to paint from it
a picture twice as beautiful. Its charm of Nature I cannot attain. My
painting must not try for the edge of its flesh and blood forms, the
evanescence of its color, the light and shadow of its play of feature.
But something which the beautiful face could not know of itself the
artist knows of it. That deep interpretation of its ideal significance
marks the true master, who is never a Chinese copyist. Some of the
portraits that look down upon you from the walls of Rome and of Florence
calmly explain to you a whole eternity. Their eyes seem to have seized
it all, and to hold it beyond decay. This is what Art gives in the
picture,--not simply what appears and disappears, but that which, being
interpreted, abides with us.
Who shall say by what responsive depths the heights of architecture
measure themselves? The uplifted arches mirror the introspective soul.
So profoundly did I think, and plot, and contrive! So loftily must my
stone climax balance my cogitations! To such an amount of prayer allow
so many aisles and altars. The pillars of cloisters image the
brotherhood who walked in the narrow passages; straight, slender, paired
in steadfastness and beauty, there they stand, fair records of amity.
Columns of retrospect, let us hope that the souls they image did not
look back with longing upon the scenes which they were called upon to
forsake.
Critical belief asks roomy enclosures and windows unmasked by artificial
impediments. It comes also to desire limits within which the voice of
the speaker can reach all present. Men must look each other in the face,
and construct prayer or sermon with the human alphabet. We are glad to
see the noble structures of older times maintained and renewed; but we
regret to see them imitated in our later day. (St. Peter's is, in all
save dimension, a church of Protestant architecture--so is St. Paul's,
of London.) The present has its own trials and agonies, its martyrdoms
and deliverances. With it, the old litanies must sink to sleep; the more
Christian of to-day efface the most Christian of yesterday. The very
attitude of saintship is changed. The practical piety of our time looks
neither up nor down, but straight before it, at the men and women to be
relieved, at the work to be done. Religion to-day is not "height nor
depth nor any other creature," but God with us.
There is a mystic birth and Providence in the succession of the Arts;
yet are they designed to dwell together, each needing the aid of all.
People often speak of sculpture as of an art purely and distinctively
Grecian. But the Greeks possessed all the Arts, and more, too,--the
substratum of democracy and the sublime of philosophy. No natural
jealousy prevails in this happy household. The Arts are not wives, of
whom one must die before another has proper place. They are sisters,
whose close communion heightens the charm of all by the excellence of
each. The Christian unanimity is as favorable to Art as to human
society.
We may say that the Greeks attained a great perfection in sculpture, and
have continued in this art to offer the models of the world.
When the great period of Italian art attained its full splendor, it
seemed as if the frozen crystals of Greek sculpture had melted before
the fire of Christian inspiration. But this transformation, like the
transfiguration of Hindoo deities, did not destroy the anterior in its
issue.
The soul of sculpture ripened into painting, but Sculpture, the
beautiful mother, still lived and smiled upon her glowing daughter. See
Michael Angelo studying the torso! See the silent galleries of the
Vatican, where Form holds you in one room, Color presently detaining you
in another! And what are our Raphaels, Angelos, making to-day? Be sure
they are in the world, for the divine spirit of Art never leaves itself
without a witness. But what is their noble task? They are moulding
character, embodying the divine in human culture and in human
institutions. The Greek sculptures indicate and continue a fitting
reverence for the dignity and beauty of the human form; but the
reverence for the human soul which fills the world to-day is a holier
and happier basis of Art. From it must come records in comparison with
which obelisk and pyramid, triumphal arch and ghostly cathedral, shall
seem the toys and school appliances of the childhood of the race.
To return to our original problem,--how shall we attain the proper human
stature, how add the wanting half to the half which is given?