Part 22

* * * * *

But I am not belittling loyalty. It is a great virtue so long as it understands itself to be making a virtue of necessity. Just so is it a great virtue to acquire equanimity in the face of death, in such wise that not being able to invent a way of getting around the thing one may accept it for the time being without disturbing oneself or one’s friends more than the episode calls for. Still, if I had some genius to spend, I should rather contribute it to the suppression of dying than to the cultivation of a cheerful manner in dying. So should I rather spend my time, if it were worth while, in wearing away the conditions that make loyalty necessary than in developing a spirit of loyalty. And so, or I mistake him, would Royce; for I can not get over the impression that for him, too, loyalty is but a half-way house on the road to something better--which something better is love.

It is with relief I find a definition of love can be effected which makes no very heavy demands upon one’s sentimental experience; in fact, requires no more in that way than a fair understanding of the theory of substitutions. For the peculiar quality Royce finds in the idea of love is that love individuates. This its quality is for him its virtue also and its excellence, so that the more love individuates the more is it love. We are far enough from the days when a Plato could hold the love to be higher that had detached itself from the individual and attached itself to the quality, had forgotten the beautiful being to think only of his beauty. For Royce, love is not love unless it has succeeded in making its object irreplaceable.

Now I do not know whether this constitutes a complete definition of love. There is something hopeful about the suggestion that it may do so; for if no one has been able to say anything very articulate about love, neither has anyone said much that is intelligible about individuation. But certain difficulties occur to one. Is love the only thing that individuates? If there is such a thing as Platonic hate, which I suppose would be the sort of hate that hates the sin and not the sinner, why should there not be such a thing as a romantic hate whose object would be just the sinner and not his fault? Or may not a process of individuation go on, cold and impassible, untouched by either hate or love?

* * * * *

One day Flaubert took his disciple by the hand and led him into the secret places of art. The talent of the artist, he said, is a long patience spent in learning how to portray so that your portrayal leaves the object it offers just as individual as the thing is found. “When you pass a grocer sitting at his door, or a concierge smoking his pipe, or a stand of cabs, show me this grocer and this concierge, their pose, their physical appearance, suggesting also by the skill of your image all their moral nature in such wise that I do not confuse them with any other grocer or with any other concierge. And make me see with a single stroke in what a certain cab horse is unlike fifty others following him or going before.”

Why, then, besides love and hate, art too claims to be that which individuates--and not because, if we may believe a certain philosophically minded critic, art has borrowed anything of love or hate. This disciple of Flaubert, this Maupassant, carried out his master’s teachings if ever an artist did, but there is that in his way of doing it which makes one feel that Anatole France’s account of him is not altogether wanting: “He is the great painter of the human grimace. He paints without hate and without love, without anger and without pity--hard-fisted peasants, drunken sailors, lost women, obscure clerks dried up in the air of the office, and all the humble folk whose humility is without beauty and without merit. All these grotesques and all these unfortunates he shows us so distinctly that we think we see them with our own eyes and find them more real than reality itself. He is a skillful artist who knows he has done all there is to do when he has given life to things. His indifference is as indifferent as nature.”

I am not so very confident that all these claimants to the right of individuating--love, hate, art--are equal claimants. As for hate, some poverty of experience may account for the fact that all I know of this romantically valued emotion has sometime been directed against persons unknown, whose manner of conducting themselves on the earth beneath and in the waters under the earth showed nothing more clearly than that they had forgotten the human being and were utterly lost in loyalty. A hate of such poor quality cannot well be said to individuate, and it is certainly not any experience of my own that would lead me to suppose romantic hate, as we have imagined it, to be real. Respecting the impassibility of the creative artist, I am no less skeptical, and so I think is France at bottom; for of this same artist whose indifference is as indifferent as nature, he says in another passage of the same appreciation that his hardened hero “is ashamed of nothing but his large native kindliness, careful to hide what is most exquisite in his soul.”

No, I am not convinced that love has any rivals in the art of individuating, and if not, then to call it that which individuates is to define it completely. But whether it is a deduction from this definition or whether it is an independent element in a fuller definition of love, it must be set down as an important fact about it that love wants the will and desire of the beloved to prevail. It wants the will of another to prevail, and as the easiest and most obvious way of bringing about this result is to yield its own will, it has generally been supposed that love was less the art of individuating than the art of yielding. But this is just the mistake that has prevented love from taking its place among the more seriously meant categories of philosophy and realities of life; for this yielding disposition that might be supposed to make for peace in a republic of lovers is the very matter introducing trouble and perplexity there. It is the very matter that has made traditional Christianity less effective than it might have been, failing where it fails, not because there is anything better to be conceived than its gospel of love, but because it has supposed a good heart and convinced will was enough to bring about its kingdom.

Our two great experiments at loving--the love of man and woman and the love of one’s neighbor--have been too much alike in this, that they both supposed love to be the sort of thing one could fall into and be done with. But it is clear this is not at all the way of the matter, and in our poor imaginings about the lovers’ republic we have been too much guided by our imperfect experience of what our loves have been to think our way into what the love that individuates ought to be. Oh, yes, our love has yielded; its great vice has been its contentment in yielding rather than suffer the labor and unrest of that thinking which alone could have saved its kingdom. In this dear illogical passion for yielding, we have been content with a division of the spoils; one is allowed to give this, the other that; one now, the other then; and so we have patched up our lovers’ quarrel as best we could without logic. But logic, which is supposed to have nothing to do with love and has had little enough to do with the old loves of this world, has everything to do with the love that individuates. For, the moment love begins to be a mutual affair, neither lover has the right to usurp the privilege of giving; else what is left for the other lover to do? Without logic our lovers are doomed to stand bowing to each other before the door of promise till time grows gray.

However, besides logic there is such a thing as bad logic, which is perhaps nothing more than a well-meant half-thoughtfulness in presence of puzzling experience. As a result of this half-thoughtfulness there has sometimes crept a half-reasonableness into the matter we are considering, which would begin by suggesting that the various and contradictory desires of lovers, though equally strong, cannot, save by improbable chance, be equally high and worth while; that, therefore, the logical thing to do would be to let the lower ideal recognize the higher and bow to it, while the higher might somehow forget its longing to give and content its poor heart with being given to.

There are many difficulties in the way of making such an account of the affair persuasive, but there are more serious troubles ahead of anyone who would try to make it meaningful. Chief of these is the hopelessness of defining high and low in the matter of purposes and ideals. Here, once more, Royce is quick to analyze the difficulty and remove it; for, if I read him aright, he sees no way, and no more do I, by which the value of ultimate objects of desire may be compared. It is easy to calculate the better means, but how is one to know the better end? Only this may we do--we may discover that purposes which seem contradictory are not really so, and that neither need sacrifice itself to the other if thought be allowed to work its perfect work. No doubt happiness lies in getting what we want; but this is not the same as getting what we think we want, as capturing what we go after; for our wants are none the less hard to make out because they are our own.

This, then, is thought’s infinitely difficult task in the service of love, to analyze apparent desires until it has found the real want at the core of appearance, while the postulate on which alone the advent of the kingdom becomes possible is that thought may find our real wants not contradictory. The times are not without sign that Christianity as an ethics is coming to realize how very intellectual is the task it has set itself in trying to bring the kingdom of Christ’s vision to be on earth. What Christianity most needs, writes Tennant, is a philosophy.

* * * * *

The brief time we allow ourselves for our utterances ought yet to prove ample for a person of industry and thrift to make himself thoroughly misunderstood; and I hope I have used it to no less purpose on this than on former occasions; but among the misunderstandings I would prevent, if I could, is that which would sum up the matter of my discourse as a defense of individualism against collectivism. Such an issue could only be meaningful for one to whom the collectivity was denied some sort of individuality which the “individual” enjoys. But I have tried to show that I could conceive no such difference between the mind of the part and the mind of the group. The group mind may be loved with the human love that individuates, as well as can the soul of a fellow-man; and no doubt one may love one’s country as a mistress. But the difference between the love of equals and the love of constituents is plain. The latter sort of love can last only so long as its object endures, and as long as it lasts its sacrifices are incurable; for in a world that has conquered strife there would no longer be that contradiction between the will of a group and the will of its parts, which alone makes the group entity meaningful. Groups bound in mutual respect of each other and studying to preserve their parts irreplaceable have no minds; the entity born of struggle and calling for sacrifice has simply disappeared; where we had a group mind, we have now but an aggregate of minds, “a fluid complex of relations among individuals.” But the love of equals can push on toward the ideal without destroying the very object of its devotion; it can go on searching the core of concord in the stupid appearance of discord until love has found a way to make loyalty a lost virtue and a group mind a thing that is no more.

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT

When I had gathered together the pages in which for a time I had been living with these men whose thought had been so real a thing to me, who one by one had said their word and left it to live or die according as men’s hearts received it, I was as though suddenly and newly aware of the great modern city without pressing on my window-panes. Little by little its vast insistent presence seemed to push my whilom companions out of the room of being back to their places among the many silent dead. For indeed, I reflected, how few, how vanishingly small a number of those who are out there will be better, worse or different for anything these lives had spent themselves to gain and to give.

If such thoughts came to me, as to any one they might, must they not have come often and often to those of whom I have been telling? and must not these men have been seized at times with a wistful sense of the humor of their situation? If so, what gave them courage to keep on and to endure until the end? Was it that by some fatality they were bond-slaves to the remote, from whose dominance they could not, even if they would, have freed themselves? For one may suppose that all men, even philosophers, are human enough sometimes to crave the response of their fellows to the effort of their lives; the recognition not merely of some few initiated ones, but of the many or of those who represent the many by the simplicity of their thought. Must not many a one whose labor was with the stars have stopped on his way to envy some singer at the street-corner whose trivial melody had caught the ear and held the steps of passers-by? What reasoning then, or what destiny carried our star-gazer on to his lonely vigil?

You may say, the psychology of the man who thinks of cosmic things is simple and that his steadfastness is due to his inability to realize or his ability to forget the homely intimate things of life that to the rest of us are, if not important, yet all the more indispensable. To this I answer: ’tis unlikely! But whether true or not of any of those whose thoughts must seem (if I have not entirely failed to render them) so much our own, let it not be true of us!

I mean, that no one can think of himself as likely to enrich the world so greatly by his thought and labor that he may count himself to be or encourage himself to become a soul solitary to its toil. Which, being so of our lives as a whole, we frequently feel and wholesomely feel that it is not very well for us to indulge even moments of these lives in studies and reflections so detached from all the give and take of our other time as to leave no trace of influence there.

Perhaps indeed it cannot be said of any of our momentary flights away from familiar things that we come back from them with no star-dust on our wings, and so these spirit holidays may be excused as may any other holiday on the ground of their quickening and refreshment. But little as I would quarrel with holidays of any kind, and satisfied as I should be had any one found these pages opening to him a door to some fourth dimension where momentary exhilaration or passing forgetfulness might be found, yet I have the feeling that holidays are but a poor imperfect device for making other days more livable.

In these last reflections, I am sensible that I have been clumsily feeling my way to the asking of a question. It is this: May we not bring the experience of the most thoughtful men of the centuries that have gone before so to bear in our daily living that it will no longer be noble, because no longer necessary, to scorn delights and live laborious days (save holidays)? May not these men have been the prophets of that mediation which will make labor and delight one thing? May it not be possible for us after their leading so to live and strive in the moment that more and more of the whole toward which it tends may be felt in it? And this whole, the while, will it not come so to be conceived that its real presence in the crumb of bread and drop of wine may make of our daily partaking a sacrament as bright as it is enduring?

If so, and, as it seems to me, only if so, will these thinkers about the whole have found that for which they seemed to waste their being--the response of the man living the moment, which is everyman. Then will we the studious have brought back from our wanderings with these “souls of men outworn” something more than ineffable things and memories of dreams dreamt with them. To men bound for the most part to live the moment, that moment would not have lost its throbbing intimacy because it had lost its solitude.

Now of all desirable things, one may feel and in a poor fashion of words try to tell how desirable they are, without having much hope of securing them for himself or of being able to offer them to others. But it cannot be a bad way to begin winning something for oneself at least by enriching one’s reflection with all the stored experience of history. And as history is not always easy to gather, it is at least a generous impulse to tell of what is to be found there a little more simply and compendiously than others have cared to tell it. Which done--and the doing of it has that peculiar quality of giving to the labor of the moment its sense of participation--it is time to look about one with one’s own eyes.

What under such circumstances the private eye, turning from the past and peering into the future, thinks it sees there, might well be kept private for all the authority it can have and for all the interest it may have for another. Each will have his own vision of the horizon. But it has never been found that the truth is in the end better made out by each holding his own counsel as to what he timidly thinks he descries there. No, out of the confusion of many witnesses comes what little we have guessed or can hope to guess of truth, and no less of that truth which, because it deals with the tie that binds the least with the greatest of things, I venture to call religious.

* * * * *

In these pages, little or no mention has been made of those great historic religions in whose name temples and cathedrals have been built, and throngs have been moved to worship and to war. This neglect has not been due to indifference: it will perhaps have been felt that these matters were present to the writer as the background against which the thought of the philosophers had to be portrayed if we were to gain insight into their motives and meanings. But our study was to be of those who had given reasons for the faith that was in them, or it might be for their lack of faith. This, the great swaying mass of humanity cannot be expected to do, and if the learned and thoughtful of its various communions have constantly tried to do it for their fellows, these studious devout minds are led by the very diligence of their reflection to interpret the formulas of the throng in a way the throng could not understand. Thus they too become philosophers, and for the depth and learning of their thought are as interesting as any of those here presented. It would be hard to find in history a clearer and more judicious mind than Thomas Aquinas.

But because these theologians are in modern times the exponents of religious views that are widely spread in some manifest form or other, we may assume that they are familiar figures in the thoughts of men of our day and civilization. Wherefore it is of others, churchless and alone, with nothing but their personal writings to make their views known, yet religious in the object of their inquiry and in the conduct of their thought, that I have chosen to speak.