Part 8

The Pride of Modernity

G. R. ELLIOTT

In European literature from Homer down to Milton and Racine (not to speak of Oriental literature) pride, wrong pride, is represented as far and away the chief of human evils. Such is not the case with the comparatively brief stretch of literature that ensues. Of course there are sharp exceptions to the rule. But speaking by and large recent literature--if that of the past two hundred years may so be termed in view of the long eras behind it--has not held up pride as the towering villain of the human drama. That villain has become more and more shrunken and shadowy. The hubris of the Greeks, the proud presumption against the high gods that constituted for ancient writers the crown of human errors, seems now an old, unhappy, far-off thing, quite hopeless for literary purposes in the opening twentieth century. Even more hopeless seems the lineal successor to hubris, the Pride that led the seven deadly sins in mediæval pageantry, and doomed the heroes of humane tragedy in the Renaissance.

The surface reason for the fading of pride on our literary scene is obvious enough. Pride used to be considered not only the most immoral but also the most dramatic quality of human life. But recently life, or our imaginative way with life, has assumed a non-dramatic air. The interminable series of the falls of proud heroes and princes, historical or legendary, that runs through the bulk of the world’s literature--well, this series seems now to have terminated. Democracy’s interest in such personages is lackadaisical. I heard a bright American undergraduate refer to them as “those old guys that used to get bumped off quick.” And one must bear in mind that America, if still a bright undergraduate, is widely representative of modern civilisation. Yesterday a remote collection of insignificant states, she is now becoming an international state of mind and, more significantly, of imagination. In this state of imagination the old proud-falling potentate cuts a small figure. Recently, to be sure, many princes have fallen, in fact the majority of them; but they have fallen softly. The downfall of a business corporation is far more noisy and generally disturbing; but a corporation is impersonal and undramatic. As for pride, doubtless some American presidents have shown promising tragic signs of it, but of course these had to be nipped in the bud. A prince, even so powerful and autocratic a prince as the American president, cannot fall proudly and dramatically when he has to fall regularly every four years.

Pride is not popular with democracy either as a vice or as a virtue. Even a just pride in oneself is publicly regarded as not justifiable. Self-esteem must be submerged in party loyalty; and party loyalty, in turn, must whitewash its rising arrogance with humanitarian sentiment, with eloquent devotion to the welfare of men in general. To be sure, intelligent persons dislike the blatancy of this sentiment. Most of them nevertheless are actually in accord with the very heart of it. They wince and shrug at the slogan trumpet of “Service to Mankind,” but they quietly salute the flag. They bow in spirit to the reigning standard of “Social Value.” Tacitly accepting it as prime motive they deprecate their own self-esteem. They abet the general feeling that pride as the ruler of this world, good and evil pride alike, has modernly been deposed: it is a thing of the past.

This feeling, more than any other feature of modernity, constitutes our break with the past. It has inspired the general conviction that the modern age, so far from being merely one phase, even the most important phase, of human history, has brought about a permanent alteration in the basic conditions of human history. And here again the majority of the leaders of opinion, while disavowing the popular view in its blatant extreme, have been moulded in spirit by the accumulating pressure of it. At the same time our knowledge of the facts of the past has continued to increase. Popular biographies and surveys have circulated through a vast reading public. Hence has arisen what may be termed the modern historical paradox. The opening twentieth century has a wider speaking acquaintance with the past, and a fainter grip of its essential reality, than was ever the case before. The past is quite vivid to us, and quite unreal. Its main motif, its pride, is a dramatic ghost.

Recently Lytton Strachey’s keen book on Queen Elizabeth and her Essex, and Francis Hackett’s glowing story of Henry Eighth and his wives, have made the pageant of the sixteenth century brilliantly alive for us. But in the end the pageant is more a pageant than ever; the past is more utterly past. The scene sparkles along before our eyes in sharp and multitudinous detail. Above all, the persons are amazingly human, as they loom toward us in vivid “close-ups.” Yet in the end they are human foreigners. They belong to a remote clime, and our attitude toward them is ironic and superior even when most sympathetic. In fact they seem to us amazingly human just because we are surprised that they can be human at all. For the central motive of their lives, their pride of spirit, is or seems to us entirely out of date. Their ordinary desires were the same as ours; we see that more fully every day. But the power of their pride, which swamped or swept before it all those common desires, like the gale that ruled their little sailing-ships on the Atlantic, is obsolete. It appears almost as strange and superstitious, when we pause to reflect upon it, as the spasmodic fits of humility that made those proud ghosts grovel at the feet of their kings and gods. We think we have changed all that.

But so deep-going an alteration in human nature, such a huge discrepancy between present and past, is disconcerting to the mind. It must needs be reduced and accounted for. Our emotional conviction of the obsolescence of pride, like every other strong and persistent feeling harboured by human beings, must needs be rationalised. And the rationalisation is now in progress. Pride has seemed to our imagination very unreal in the present; therefore our reason is demonstrating that it was also quite unreal in the past. Historical science aided by other sciences has undermined the pride of the past. It appears now that proud princes, as well as proud nations and empires, fell of old not by reason of pride but by reason of economics--or the lack of economics. Or else there were geographical, ethnological, biological, or psychological causes. The last-mentioned category is the most effective of all for eliminating moral factors from human history. For example, only an old-fashioned reader may still fancy that Henry the Second, by conquering the violence of his pride, could have refrained from causing the slaughter of Becket. That, to be sure, was the subsequent opinion of Henry himself. But, psychologically speaking, Henry and the old-fashioned reader are mistaken. Henry was subject to certain stimuli and certain complexes that completely determined, and completely explain, his extraordinary behaviour before and after the murder of the archbishop.

Emerson, looking back mildly from Concord upon the greedy and murderous pride of old days, found human history very tiresome because it was so very bad. To-day many disillusioned persons are finding it still more tiresome because it seems to them neither bad nor good. It is non-moral, and therefore non-dramatic. Never does it hang dramatically in the fearful balance of the free human will between a false pride and a right humility. It merely moves back and forth like the waves and currents of the sea. History, unhappily, just happens.

Perhaps, however, this ultra-modern view of history, in which pride seems so unreal, is itself the offspring of a very real pride. Modern pride is not of necessity less real than ancient pride just because, so far, its way is less conscious and dramatic. After all it takes time to dramatise ourselves to ourselves; and the modern age, so modernists say, is not yet in full swing. They say that the modern theatre has merely made a beginning and that in the future it will do great things. If so, I would claim that the greatest of those great things must be an adequate dramatisation of modern pride. But we cannot wait for that. If we did, it would never come. It cannot come until there is general recognition of the fact that pride is still the grand protagonist in the human drama; and that under its drab modern dress it has lost not a whit of its ancient sinew.

Pride is most virulent, indeed, when it wears plain clothes, when it hides itself from itself. Self-blindness, not dramatic display, is and always has been the very heart of it. Precisely when pride is most insidious is it least dramatic. Recognition of itself, which is the preliminary step toward cure, is also the preliminary step toward dramatic manifestation. Pride was very dramatic in old literature just because it was unearthed from its very undramatic lair in old human nature. Discovery is the essence of drama. Life is intensely dramatic as soon as its least discoverable motive is discovered, as soon as its “last infirmity,” its most hidden pride of spirit, is shown in action. Therefore if a superficial glance persuades us, as I said at the beginning, that pride has faded in modern literature because modern life is non-dramatic, a deeper search informs us that modern life seems non-dramatic because the meaning of pride has faded in our thought. We need to rediscover the truth of the truism that pride is the most insidious and blinding of all human qualities. Then we may discover the way of modern pride. We must see how utterly non-dramatic pride can be before our poets may show us how intensely dramatic modern life is. We cannot envisage the drama of modern life in its full reality, we cannot touch the very heart of its tragedy, until we realise the peculiar blindness of modern pride.

For example. Some twelve years ago President Wilson announced on behalf of the United States, or was quoted as announcing, that we were “too proud to fight.” Soon afterwards we were fighting, not without martial pride, in the greatest war of all time. The irony of this sequence was too broad to escape notice. Yet the notice was comparatively slight. And the whole matter has faded with ominous speed from the imagination of a public debauched with the most adulterous mixture of pacific and pugnacious prides that the world has ever known. The Wilsonian remark was easily smiled into oblivion. The full dramatic irony of the situation, and the tragedy behind it, cannot appear until that proud utterance is recognised, not as the passing whimsy of a single person or party or nation, but as a vivid symbol of the modern spirit at large. It may fairly be regarded, indeed, as the verbal apex of the whole bad pyramid of modern pride--the pride of quick and direct solutions, the pride of immediacy.

The basis of that pyramid is religious. No doubt the superstructure owes much to our triumphantly swift results in science, industry, and humanitarian reform. But the pride of practical achievement, thoroughly wholesome in its proper locale, would not have formed a modern Babel unless assembled and underpinned by modern religion. And modern religion, while denouncing more and more the various arrogancies of our material civilisation, has not unearthed the deep foundation which it itself has provided for them. As religion is properly the founder and guardian of human humility, so religious pride is the prime evil. We see this very easily in the past. We know that the most blinding and hateful pride that grew among the ancient Greeks and Romans was not the pride of city-state, of empire, of symmetric culture. It was the arrogance of the religious philosophy of the Stoics, their assumption of a pseudo-divine impassivity of spirit. Likewise the mediæval glorification of chivalry, and even of ecclesiastic and theological edifice, is as nothing to modern eyes in comparison with the spiritual presumption that grew in mediæval asceticism. We see how vicious it was for the Stoic to be proud of his pride, and for the monk to be proud of his humility. We have not yet seen how vicious it is for the modern citizen to be proud of being neither proud nor humble.

He is spiritually proud of having escaped from spiritual pride. He believes he has left that historic vice far and forever behind. In his leisure hours he has learned all about it, he thinks, from interesting books, periodicals, preachers, lecturers, travels, historical moving-pictures, and maybe survey courses in college. He is amused and in better moments saddened at the tremendous dramatic display of religious pride in old times,--unaware that this evil never displayed itself to the hearts it mastered, nor does to-day. What, then, can he know of real humility? “Why,” I was recently asked by a sincerely puzzled undergraduate whose psychological interests had led him to scrutinise certain ancient documents, “why were the old Christians always jawing about humility?” The modern man is conscious, explicitly or implicitly, of possessing a new form of humility much superior to the old. He is proud of his freedom from the fearful self-abasement of his benighted ancestors. He is certain that his own brand of humility, his kindly modesty in relation to nature and to other men, is far more reasonable and real. Reality, indeed, is his keynote. He believes he sees the facts of human nature with a plain and full reality, or immediacy, that was impossible to men of old, distracted as their vision was by the extremes of pride and humility. He has done away with those two “mighty opposites.” His realism, his direct contact with life, has antiquated their histrionic conflict. He is superior to that primitive battle in the human breast. He has emerged from that cave warfare into the light of immediate reality. He is “too proud to fight.”

And this pride of immediacy, as I have called it, is at bottom religious. It was founded by the Protestant Reformation. More broadly speaking, it grows from that urgent religious revolution still going on which was publicly begun by the Protestant revolt of the sixteenth century. It goes on in Catholic and Protestant realms alike and has many modes, ranging all the way from the glittering wit of French Catholico-Modernism to the rash eloquence of the Protestant pulpits of New York. Revolution it is with a vengeance, not re-formation. And if it be true that the modern intelligence under the influence of science is coming to see the natural need of ordered evolution, instead of destructive revolution, in all human affairs, then we should see this need primarily in religion. Here the cost of revolution is heaviest. For the mischief of the revolutionary method--namely, that it externalises the issue--is greatest in that sphere which should be of all the most internal. The mental surfaces of religion are thrown into false prominence as the insignia of controversy. Sacred rites and dogmas, through the protective devotion of the loyalist and the pointed hostility of the rebel, are externalised. The imaginative flexibility properly belonging to them is congealed into a stiff surface that hides their inmost meaning, human and divine. Instead of vital human organisms, nourished in their growth and change by something of the divine circulation, they become fixed mechanisms; to be maintained in running order or else discarded altogether--windmills, pumping the living water direct to the household of faith, or suddenly assaulted into junk-heaps by quixotic insurgents. Loyalists and rebels, in reaction from each other, attribute to their own doctrines an impossible immediacy of truth. Thus both parties foster the pride of spiritual immediacy.

Obviously, however, it is not the conservative but the protestant or modernist pride of immediacy that, for the time being at least, has won the day. Indeed it has flourished like a weed in the very midst of our best achievements. The great achievement of modern times is the general realisation that life is of necessity experimental, that change is a constant law for us, and that the human spirit is more important than human customs and institutions however sacrosanct. Hence our pride of freedom, freedom from the past. And this pride is proper and sound in so far as it is a proud gratitude for the general dissemination of a truth that the great saints and sages, under all dispensations, knew--the experimentality of life. But our pride is rank and noxious when we imagine we know this truth as well as the saints and sages knew it, if not better. To be sure, we know it more widely in a certain sense than they did, having discovered with the aid of science many exterior illustrations of it which were unknown to them. We know it with a wide and superficial immediacy. But they knew it with a profound immediacy.

They knew the basal experimentality of life because they knew it was basifixed. They knew the depth and height of change because they knew the permanency below and above it. They knew the Permanency that does the experimenting, the Changeless that enables us to know change. Of this we have lost hold. And the main source of our modern spiritual catastrophe, the cancerous growth that disguises itself and induces the thronging diagnosticians to limit their attention to secondary symptoms and remedies, is the ancient evil in modern form, blind spiritual pride. The modern imagination has more and more lost hold of the changing Permanency as the modern mind has more and more developed its arrogance of change, its pride of immediacy. This very pride keeps us from seeing the permanence of the law of pride and humility in human nature. We patronise the wise men of old--confident writers on “personal religion” in American magazines patronise them--assuming that when they signalised spiritual pride as the permanent root of human ills, they were speaking only for an age and not for all time, at any rate not for our time.

This pride means a false emphasis on “personal religion” over against institutional religion. “Personal religion” now comprises a vast variety of creeds. Many of these are asserted by their proponents, sometimes angrily asserted, to be not religious at all, but they really are religious in the broadest or lowest extension of this term. A few years ago newspaper reporters discovered in a western state a not insane man who claimed that the earth was flat. As to the long story of geodesy, he said it meant little to him, for he had “a science of my own.” Nowadays many a person has in the same way “a religion of my own.” But this phenomenon, unlike the other, is too popular just at present to have any comic news-value. It would start a public laugh only in the thirteenth or, who knows, in the thirtieth century. To-day many persons who religiously swallow the authority of science, who religiously believe that Einsteinism is true and wish they could understand what it means, reject all authority in religion.

They say that Jesus himself rejected it, and patronise Him as the first of the moderns. They isolate Him from the religious organism to which he was deeply attached; which shaped his principles no less than his images; and through which indeed, during the long preceding centuries of Hebrew history, his sublime nature itself had been (if this may be said without irreverence) gradually “evolved.” Thus they affix to Him a singularity no less miraculous, no less disruptive of the laws of human nature and history, than that attributed to him by popular orthodoxy; but far better calculated to debauch with blind pride the souls of his worshippers or, as the case may be, his modern rivals or superseders. They have learned from Him, not wisely but too well, that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. They hug the false inference which he so sternly and constantly rejected, namely, that man was made to disuse instead of to use the Sabbath, to win spiritual maturity by discarding institutional religion. Jesus discarded revolution. He continued and reformed a great religious tradition. He made it capable of feeding itself--and us--upon the best of Greek as well as Hebrew thought. He made it nobly catholic in the very process of nourishing his individual soul upon it. He was crucified because he was more deeply true to it than the modernists, as well as the loyalists, of his day. Our modernists, however, deem that his hand was raised and pierced to direct us to bite the hand that fed us.

The gnawing pride of religious individualism cloaks itself in the assumption that the individual has transferred his reverence entire from the traditional deity to “the present; God” as Emerson called Him, or to the present Reality as successors of Emerson often prefer to call It. But actually that transfer is never accomplished. The reverence never arrives entire. Always some of it, often most of it, leaks away unnoticed during the transshipment. Therefore this exchange is never attempted by the greatest men of religion, nor advocated by the truest realists or humanists. Jesus and Socrates both found the “Father’s business” in the Temple, in the moral and imaginative organism of orthodox religion, and never more so than when they were doing their best to cleanse it of thieves. They were wrongly accused of an intention for which some of our modern spiritual leaders have been wrongly praised, the intention of destroying the Temple in order to rebuild it on their own insights, as it were in three days. No doubt all men of deepest insight are strongly tempted, in their first maturity, by this pseudo-divine impatience with tradition. They yearn to show immediately that the Power within them is more reliable than the “pinnacle of the Temple.” But they perceive the spiritual pride of this yearning, its tempting of God, and they forthwith school themselves to the divine patience. They recognise that the Temple is essential for their own fullest development. They do not patronise it diplomatically for the public welfare while deprecating it for themselves. They see that the fullest type of spiritual life is attainable only through the unbroken “tension,” the constant critical interaction, between personal and institutional religion, between individual inspiration and a rich tradition. They know that their own humility, like that of the multitudes whom they influence, must grow and bear fruit in the kind of temple that George Herbert saw, the temple which is at once, and mysteriously, within and without. In short, the greatest leaders of the spirit faced the pride of spiritual immediacy and subdued it.

But Emerson did not. He only partly faced it, and he very considerably succumbed to it. He fell, and modern spirituality fell with him. The greatness of this default in so great a man is admitted very reluctantly by those of us who have loved him from youth. When they were beginning life, he told them what a happy day it was for the youth when he discovered that “the above” was the same as “the within.” He did not tell them that “the within,” on the same happy day, begins to leak down through an unseen pride to “the below.” He told them that “I the imperfect adore my own Perfect.” He was not careful to explain to them how very imperfect is this Perfect--or else, how scantily It is my own.

Emerson’s effect on young men is most significant, I think, in the case of Matthew Arnold. In Arnold’s Oxford days, Newman impressed him with a sense of the laborious difficulty of spiritual truth. But that sense was considerably soothed and weakened, I think, by the cheery, confident voice that came to him from across the Atlantic; throwing into contrast the melancholy beauty of Newman’s voice and relegating its religious message to a past which, however alluring in its beautiful melancholy, seemed now so utterly past. Arnold lost Newman for religion while continuing to patronise him for beauty and culture. He did not discern how greatly Newman, on account of his fresh and profound humility, joined with a mind unsurpassed in the modern age for analytic penetration, was needed by this age as a “friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit.” Therefore Arnold left the way open for T. H. Huxley to persuade the oncoming generation, in the blundering pride of his naturalistic sophistry, that Newman’s way with truth was in the main sophistic. I am very far from wishing to disparage Arnold, as I am accused of having done in previous papers. It is just because he was so great and influential a critic, such a fine stronghold of humanism in the midst of the nineteenth century, that his deficiency in this matter is costly to-day. His tendency to a certain superior ease, not free from presumption, in his treatment of religious truth was doubtless due in good measure to the influence of Emerson. Hence when Arnold came to America in the eighteen-eighties he could tell us how matchless Emerson was as a modern “friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit” without telling us how deficient this friend was in the pertinent and prime requisite of spiritual humility.

Just here, perhaps, some readers are priding themselves on never having cared for Emerson, in other words on never having been young. But maybe they have absorbed some jots and tittles of his toxin by way of Arnold and the college professors, or of Huxley and the scientific metaphysicians, or of Whitman and the current poets. By de-personalising his individualism in a rare and not unspecious fashion, Emerson could send it seeping through an extraordinary variety of individuals. To-day wherever two or three, or two or three hundred, are gathered together in the name of God (modern)--in the name of the Over-Soul or the Under-Soul, of Reality, Nature, Humanity, Hinduism, Good Will, Progress, World Peace, World Religion, Individual Freedom, yes and even Enlightened Disillusion--there is Emerson in the midst of them. To be sure it is but a shade, a distorted shade, of the master. Yet it reminds us what a crooked, widening shadow is thrown forward through the years by a hidden grain of pride in a master mind. Emerson’s spiritual pride was veiled by his personal modesty, which was the tolerant deference and flexibility of the modern spirit at its brightest. His luminous nobility of nature and the underlying soundness of his humanism enabled him to give unexampled force and radiance to the proud errors he inherited from the eighteenth-century naturists and the great Romantic poets. It was he, above all, who made naturism seem deeply natural and Romantic irresponsibility nigh divine.

He disclaimed responsibility for his words, yet spoke as one having authority. He claimed the moody freedom of a Romantic poet together with the plain weight of a prose prophet of common sense. He consummated the noxious amalgam that his predecessors in prose and verse had prepared: he solidly confused poetic immediacy of experience with the immediate presence of Truth. Admirers, half perceiving his confusion, have wholly excused it on the ground of his unique constitution--just as he did! If gold rust, what will iron do? If Emerson could be vitally yet complacently muddled, what of the Emersonians? If the modern outlook is now confused and unhappy, one reason is that the chief modern sage was confused and at the same time spiritually proud.

The balefulness of his confusion was concealed from him by the subtle mingling of his pride into his modesty. He was too modest to believe that his individual outlook could become a public tragedy, and too proud to doubt that his individual inspirations were universally valid. He attributed these too much to deity and not at all to Rousseau. He disavowed all predecessors and all disciples. In his study or along the woodpath he deemed he was alone with the Soul; never realising how much the thoughts that arose in him were determined by the souls who had influenced his soul and by the souls whom his soul wanted to influence. His solitude of the Soul was thronged with unacknowledged souls. He dislimned them all into deity. His religious predecessors had loudly demolished one religious form after another to leave no barrier, so they thought, between the soul and God. He, the last great Protestant, serenely set fire to the limits of the soul itself. With suave and awful presumption, he melted all souls into God. The outcome is a new barrier between them and Him, a cool, unobtrusive glaze of pride.

The modern pride that Emerson helped so much to crystallise, wears a lucent, modest air. It looks like a lens turned directly upon Reality. But it has the opaqueness of a mirror and is turned upon ourselves--if only by the grace of God we could see our reflections in it. Its surface seems plain, undramatic, when compared with the ancient modes of hubris,--until one perceives therein the swarming shapes and conflicts of the modern tragedy.

Dramatic enough is the way this pride, during the past two hundred years, has worked out cogently from its religious centre to its secular circumference, in recent years with catastrophic speed. In religion it has meant more and more a blind emphasis upon the immediacy of spiritual values--as though their close presence to Everyman were the same, or almost the same, as his real possession of them. Modern religionists have debased the great doctrine of the Immanence of God and, therewith, the doctrines of divine love, the brotherhood of man, the goodness of the human heart, and the “positiveness” of morality. The results for Everyman are now glaring.

Deity, from Everyman’s modern viewpoint, is fast disappearing into human nature; or into that mystic conglomerate of man and the universe which is either called Nature or, as Mark Twain might say, is “the same gentleman under another name.” New names are being invented for It daily by pseudo-science. Advanced Protestant theology lies at the proud foot of this conqueror. Forgetting that modern religion at the first did help to wound herself, the more conservative type of theist blames science for harming religion. The up-to-date theist blames religion for not equalling the flight of science, unaware how terribly religion has maimed her wing with pride. A common type of minister deprecates the spread of atheism while confidently advocating the very doctrine that fosters it. If he is shrewd enough to glimpse his dilemma, he can justify himself with Emersonian blandness by pointing out that the abuse of an excellent idea is not a good ground for the disuse of it--the excellent idea being a conceited, facile, and slippery sentiment of divine immanence.