Part 37

“But doesn’t the philosophic way help toward that good?” asked Henry.

“Yes,” I said, “though often it tries only impracticable schemes. The artistic way combines and transcends the two. For the artist must have knowledge of facts, must know science, and must love supreme good, as well. Facts according to the supreme good, life made beautiful to be like completeness, that is the artistic life. It includes both the scientific and the philosophic.”

“It is as it were the middle way?” asked Ruth.

“Yes,” I said, “because beauty includes all extremes.”

Henry remarked: “It may be the best way, but I wouldn’t guarantee to live according to it.”

I smiled. “You mean,” I said, “that you didn’t like the idea of asking the poor man in to dinner?” He assented. “But you misunderstood me. That was only a picture, a story, not a law. If we make large laws for life—such laws as those of art—we shall avoid petty moralizing, which I, for one, detest. We shall see that every circumstance alters the case.

“It’s just this petty moralizing that is unnecessary, when one has big laws and standards which he can use in life, each for himself.”

We did come very near having a discussion on truth-telling, but I stopped it at once. I was glad to discover, however, that Ruth is not a stickler for literal truth under all circumstances.

“I don’t like little laws laid down,” I said, “because they are never true and necessary in all cases. They make me feel rebellious.”

“Yes,” said Marian, “they make one feel contrary, and want to do just the opposite.”

I spoke of the undeniable fact that all great action, all history sprang from imaginative thought, that a deed had to be imagined before it could be done, that all history was inspired by the bards and prophets. I spoke of even such scientific theories as evolution springing from imaginative thought. They all seemed to have realized this before, and none dissented. I read to them O’Shawnessy’s Ode, “We are the Music-makers.”

Florence said: “We spoke of the thinker’s influence lately, at home. But I always thought of those great men, not as poets, but as philosophers.”

“Yes,” I answered, “they often were. But they were poets, too. The greatest artist—as I showed you—is a scientist and philosopher as well. Goethe to me seems the best example of such a complete man. His life was so many-sided, and yet so artistic, so definite in its aim; it might stand as an example of the artistic life.”

Now, what the children seemed to know of Goethe was that he had a great many love affairs, and did not behave well in any of them. Marian and Henry had a clearer idea, and knew this was not the whole or the chief part of his life, nor quite so faulty as represented. Henry said: “He could appreciate the good points in a woman without always falling in love with her.”

When Ruth said she didn’t know anything of Goethe but his lover’s weakness, Marian turned on her with: “Now, isn’t it a shame to know that of him, and nothing else!”

I told them again that as every work of art was a symbol of completeness, so every self, being a self, symbolized the complete self of understanding and unity; every man was a symbol of completeness, of the Divine Self.

Before we went on to enumerate for ourselves the laws of art, now that we all agreed they would be one with the laws of life, I wished to read aloud some slips from a Ruskin calendar, which Ruth had brought me two weeks before. The most fruitful of conversation were the following:

“All are to be men of genius in their degree—rivulets or rivers, it does not matter, so that the souls be clear and pure.”

This, they said, was exactly our idea of genius in all.

“Good work is never done for hatred, any more than for hire—but for love only.”

Surely, then, not for controversy, we said.

“Neither a great fact, nor a great man, nor a great poem, nor a great picture, nor any other great thing, can be fathomed to the bottom in a moment of time.”

“Every great man is always being helped by everybody, for his gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.”

This, I reminded them, was what we had said when we spoke of the good and bad, that we must use all things for good.

“The ennobling difference between one man and another—between one animal and another—is precisely in this, that one feels more than another.”

“Doesn’t it seem,” said Florence, “as if Ruskin had written those papers especially for us?”

“That last one,” I said, “expresses exactly our idea; here ‘feeling’ means the same as ‘sympathy,’ or ‘feeling with.’ So you find, all through the old books, the striving for this same truth, always vaguely expressed, never fully understood, as an ideal, as a religion of life.”

Ruth asked: “Don’t you think all great religions have always believed in that final unity?”