Part 8

The nemesis of conduct then stalks about in the form of a natural law, not as the pseudo science of fancy, but as a mode of growth, modestly formulated by a great naturalist.

Take the matter up on its other side. You can only discover in the universe, try how you will, strain your eyes how you please, you can only see what you have lived. Out of our activity comes our character, and it is with this that we see beauty or ugliness, hope or despair. It is by this that we gauge the operation of economic law and of all other spiritual forces. It is with this that we interpret all things. What we see is only our own lives.

We are all more or less in contact with human life. We live in a pandemonium, a paradise of illustrations, and if we have only eyes to see, there is enough in any tenement house to-day to lay bare the heart and progress of Greek art.

But the worst is to come--the horror that makes intellect a plaything. By a double consequence the past fetters the future. Once take any course and our eyes begin to see it as right, our hearts to justify it. Only fighting can save us, and we see nothing to fight for. Thraldom enters and night like death where no voice reaches. The eternal struggle is for vision.

How idiotic are the compliments or the contempt of the inexperienced. Nothing but life teaches. Hallam thinks Juliet immodest, and he had read all the literatures of Europe. If you want to understand the Greek civilization you have got to be Sophocles. If you want to understand the New Testament you have got to be Christ. If you want to understand that most complex and difficult of all things, the present, you must be some or all of it, some of it any way. You must have it ground into you by a contact so wrenchingly close, by a struggle so severe, that you lose consciousness, and afterwards--next year--you will understand.

Here is the reaction familiar to all men since the dawn of history, which makes the man of action the hero of all times. It goes in courage, it comes out power.

This reaction, this transformation goes forward in the very stuff that we are made of, and if we come to look at it closely, we are obliged to speak of it in terms of consciousness. There are so many different kinds of consciousness, that the best we can do is to remind some one else of the kind we mean. The hand of the violinist is unconscious to the extent that it is functioning properly, and as his command over music develops, this unconsciousness creeps up his arm and possesses his brain and being, until he, as he plays, is completely unself-conscious and his music is the mere projection of an organism which is functioning freely.

But this condition of complete concentration makes us in a different sense of the word self-conscious in the highest degree, self-comprehending, self-controlled, self-expressing. And it is in this philosophical sense that the word self-conscious is used by the Germans, and may sometimes be conveniently used by us, if we can do so without foregoing the right to use the words conscious and unconscious in their popular sense at other times.

The discovery of Froebel was that this mastery over our own powers was to be obtained only through creative activity. The suggestion, it may be noted, is destined to reorganize every school of violin playing in Europe. For we have here the major canon of a rational criticism. We find that in the old vocabulary such words as genius, temperament, style, originality, etc., have always been fumblingly used to denote different degrees in which some man’s brain was working freely and with full self-consciousness. A deliverance of this kind has always been designated as ‘creative,’ no matter in what field it was found.

Approaching the matter more closely, we see that the whole of the man must have responded in real life to every particle of experience which he uses in his work. An imitation means something which does not represent an original unitary vibration.

Goethe puts in the mouth of the mad Gretchen a snatch of German song in imitation of Ophelia. The treatment does not fit the character. It has only been through that part of Goethe’s mind with which he read Shakespeare. As a sequel to this suggestion, the peasant of the early scenes has lavished upon her all the various reminiscences of the pathetic that Goethe could muster. It is moving, but it is inorganic. It is not true.

For note this, that while it takes the whole of a man to do anything true, no matter how small, anything that the whole of him does is right. Hence the inimitable grotesques of greatness, the puns in tragedy. These things belong to the very arcana of nature. By and by, when the reasons are understood, nature will be respected. No one will attempt to imitate genius, or to reproduce an artistic effect of any kind.

If we look at recent literature by the light of this canon, we find the reason for its inferiority. It is the work of half minds, of men upon whose intelligence the weight of a dogma is pressing.

The eclipse of philosophy was of course reflected in fiction. There is the same trouble with Herbert Spencer as with Zola. Each of them thinks to wrest the secrets of sociology from external observation. Their books lack objectivity and are ephemeral. Kant and Balzac did better because their method was truer.

Everything good that has been done in the last fifty years has been done in the teeth of current science. The whole raft of English scientists are children playing with Raphael’s brushes the moment they leave some specialty. There never lived a set of men more blinded by dogma, blinded to the meaning of the past, to the trend of the future, by the belief that they had found new truth. Not one of them can lift the stone and show what lies under Darwin’s demonstration. They run about with little pamphlets and proclaim a New Universe like Frenchmen. They bundle up all beliefs into a great Dogma of Unbelief, and throw away the kernel of life with the shell. This was inevitable. A generation or two was well sacrificed, in this last fusillade of the Dogma of Science--the old guard dogma that dies but never surrenders. Hereafter it will be plain that the whole matter is a matter of symbols on the one hand, knowledge of human nature on the other.

Herbert Spencer has been a useful church-warden to science, but his knowledge of life was so trifling, his own personal development so one-sided, that his sociology is a farce.

This canon of criticism explains in a very simple manner the art ages, times when apparently every one could paint, or speak, or compose. The art which is lost is really the art of courageous action. Neither war nor dogma nor revolution is necessary, for feeling can no more be lost than force, and the power to express it depends upon an interest in life. The past has enriched us with conventions, and whenever a man or a group of men arises who uses them and is not subdued to them, we have art. The thing is easy. To the doers it is a mere knack of the attention.

We had almost thought that art was finished, and we find we are standing at the beginning of all things. Froebel has found a formula which fits every human activity.

Let us take the supreme case, the apogee of human development, and what will it be?

The sum of all possible human knowledge is, as we have seen, an expansion of our understanding of human nature, and this is got by intercourse, by dealing with men, by getting them to do something. In order to make them do it, in order to govern, you must understand, and the rulers of mankind are the wisest of the species. They summarize society. Solomon, Cæsar, Hildebrand, Lincoln, Bismarck, these men knew their world.

But if a virtuous ruler be the prototype of all possible human fulfilment, there is no other art or province of employment to which the same views do not apply. When any man reaps some of the power which his toil has sown, and throws it out as a note or a book or a statue, it has an organic relation to the human soul and is valuable forever. There is only one rule of art. Let a man work at a thing till it looks right to him. Let him adjust and refine it till, as he looks at it, it passes straight into him, and he grows for a moment unconscious again, that the forces which produced it may be satisfied. As it stands then, it is the best he can do. In so far as we completely develop this power we become completely happy and completely useful, for our acts, our statements, our notes, our books, our statues become universally significant.

Once feel this truth, and you begin to lose the sense of your identity, to know that your destiny, your self, is an organic part of all men. It is they that speak. It is themselves that have been found and expressed. It was this toward which we tended, this that we cared for--action, art, intellect, unselfishness, are they not one thing?

The complete development of every individual is necessary to our complete happiness. And there is no reason why any one who has ever been to a dull dinner party should doubt this. Nay, history gives proof that solitude is dangerous. Man cannot sing, nor write, nor paint, nor reform, nor build, nor do anything except die, alone. The reasons for this are showered upon us by the idea of Froebel, no matter which side of it is turned toward us.

This philosophy which seemed so dry till we began to see what it meant, begins now to circumscribe God and include everything. For Christ himself was one whose thoughts were laws and whose deeds are universal truth. Shakespeare’s plays are universal truth. They are the projection of a completely developed and completely unconscious human intellect. They educated Germany, and it is to the study of them that Hegel’s view of life is due. The great educational forces in the world are proportioned in power to the development of the individual man in the epochs they date from. Here and there, out of a hotbed, arises a personal influence which directs thought for a thousand years and qualifies time forever.

The division of the old ethics into egoism and altruism receives the sanction of science. The turning of the attention upon selfish ends, no matter how remote nor how momentary, hurts the organism, contracts the intellect, dries up the emotions, and is felt as unhappiness. The turning of the attention toward public aims benefits the organism, enlarges the intellect, and is felt as happiness. There is no complexity possible, for any mixed motive is a selfish motive.

All the virtues are different names for the injunction of self-mastery, by which the internal struggle is made more severe, and the force cooped in and controlled until it is released in the functioning of the whole man.

In any sincere struggle for right, then, no matter how petty, we are fighting for mankind, and this is just what everybody has always known, always believed.

It is thrown at us as a great paradox, that somebody must pay the bills; that if you live upon charity and can succeed in getting yourself crucified, you are still a mere product of thrift and selfishness somewhere. But the paradox is the same if put the other way, for selfishness would never support you.