Heart of Man by George Edward Woodberry

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The world of art, to reach its last limitation, through all this wide
range is in each creation passed through the mind of the artist and
presented necessarily under all the conditions of his personality. His
nature is a term in the process, and the question of imperfection or of
error, known as the personal equation, arises. Individual differences of
perceptive power in comprehending what is seen, and of narrative skill,
or in the plastic and pictorial arts of manual dexterity, import this
personal element into all artistic works, the more in proportion to the
originality of the maker and the fulness of his self-expression. In
rendering from the actual such error is unavoidable, and is practically
admitted by all who would rather see for themselves than take the
account of a witness, and prefer the original to any copy of it, though
they thereby only substitute their own error for that of the artist.
This personal error, however, is easily corrected by the consensus of
human nature.

The differences in personality go far deeper than this common liability
of humanity to mere mistakes in sight and in representation. The
isolating force that creates a solitude round every man lies in his
private experience, and results from his original faculties and the
special conditions of his environment, his acquired habits of attending
to some things rather than others open to him, the choices he has made
in the past by which his view of the world and his interest in it have
been determined. Memory, the mother of the Muses, is supreme here; a
man's memory, which is the treasury of his chosen delights in life,
characterizes him, and differentiates his work from that of others,
because he must draw on that store for his materials. Thus a man's
character, or, what is more profound, his temperament, acting in
conjunction with the memory it has built up for itself, is a controlling
force in artistic work, and modifies it in the sense that it presents
the universal truth only as it exists in his personality, in his
apprehension of it and its meaning.

Genius is this power of personality, and exists in proportion as the man
differs from the average in ways that find significant expression. This
difference may proceed along two lines. It may be aberration from normal
human nature, due to circumstances or to inherent defect or to a
thousand causes, but existing always in the form of an inward perversion
approaching disease of our nature; such types of genius are pathological
and may be neglected. It may, on the other hand, be development of
normal human nature in high power, and it then exists in the form of
inward energy, showing itself in great sensitiveness to outward things,
in mental power of comprehension, in creative force of recombination
and expression. Of genius of this last sort the leaders of the human
spirit are made. The basis of it is still, human faculty dealing with
the universe--the same faculty, the same universe, that are common to
mankind; but with an extraordinary power, such that it can reveal to men
at large what they of themselves might never have arrived at, can
advance knowledge and show forth goals of human hope, can in a word
guide the race. The isolation of such a nature is necessarily profound,
and intense loneliness has ever been a characteristic of genius. The
solvent of all personality, however, lies at last in this fact of a
common world and a common faculty for all, resulting in an experience
intelligible to all, even if unshared by them. The humanity of genius
constitutes its sanity, and is the ground of its usefulness; though it
lives in isolation, it does so only as an advanced outpost may; it
expects the advent of the race behind and below it, and shows there its
signal and sounds there its call. Its escape from personality lies in
its identifying itself with the common order in which all souls shall
finally be merged and be at one. The limitations of genius are
consequently not so much limitations as the abrogation of limits in the
ordinary sense; its originality of insight, interpretation, and
expression broadens the human horizons and enriches the fields within
them; it tells us what we may not have known or felt or guessed, but
what we shall at last understand. Thus, as the theory of art is most
fixed in the doctrine of order, so here it is most flexible in the
doctrine of personality, through which that order is most variously set
forth and illustrated. Imitation, so far from becoming a defective or
false method because of personality, is really made catholic by it, and
gains the variety and breadth that characterizes the artistic world as a
whole.

The element of self which thus enters into every artistic work has
different degrees of importance. In objective art, it is clear that it
enters valuably in proportion as the universe is seized by a mind of
right reason, of profound penetration, of truthful imagination; and if
the work be presented enveloped in a subjective mood, while it remains
objective in contents, as in Virgil the mood pervades the poem so deeply
as to be a main part of it, then the mood must be one of those felt or
capable of being felt universally,--the profound moods of the meditative
spirit in grand works, the common moods of simple joy and sorrow in less
serious works. In proportion as society develops, whether in historic
states singly or in the progress of mankind, the direct expression of
self for its own sake becomes more usual; literature becomes more
personal or purely subjective. If the poet's private story be one of
action, it is plain that it has interest only as if it were objectively
rendered, from its being illustrative of life in general; so, too, if
the felt emotion be given, this will have value from its being treated
as typical; and, in so far as the intimate nature of the poet is
variously given as a whole in his entire works, it has real importance,
has its justification in art, only in so far as he himself is a high
normal type of humanity. The truth of the matter is, in fact, only a
detail of the general proposition that in art history has no value of
its own as such; for the poet is a part of life that is, and his nature
and career, like that of any character or event in history, have no
artistic value beyond their universal significance. In such
self-portraiture there may be sometimes the depicting of a depraved
nature, such as Villon; but such a type takes its place with other
criminal types of the imagination, and belongs with them in another
sphere.

This element of self finds its intense expression in lyrical
love-poetry, one of the most enduring forms of literature because of its
elementariness and universality; but it is also found in other parts of
the emotional field. In seeking concrete material for lyrical use the
poet may take some autobiographical incident, but commonly the world of
inanimate nature yields the most plastic mould. It is a marvellous
victory of the spirit over matter when it takes the stars of heaven and
the flowers of earth and makes them utter forth its speech, less as it
seems in words of human language than in the pictured hieroglyph and
symphonic movement of natural things; for in such poetry it is not the
vision of nature, however beautiful, that holds attention; it is the
colour, form, and music of things externalizing, visualizing the inward
mood, emotion, or passion of the singer. Nature is emptied of her
contents to become the pure inhabitancy of one human soul. The poet's
method is that of life itself, which is first awakened by the beauty
without to thought and feeling; he expresses the state evoked by that
beauty and absorbing it. He identifies himself with the objects before
him through his joy in them, and entering there makes nature translucent
with his own spirit.

Shelley's Ode to the West Wind is the eminent example of such magical
power. The three vast elements, earth, air, and water, are first brought
into a union through their connection with the west wind; and, the wind
still being the controlling centre of imagination, the poet, drawing all
this limitless and majestic imagery with him, by gradual and spontaneous
approaches identifies himself at the climax of feeling with the object
of his invocation,--

"Be thou me, impetuous one!"

and thence the poem swiftly falls to its end in a lyric burst of
personality, in which, while the body of nature is retained, there is
only a spiritual meaning. So Burns in some songs, and Keats in some
odes, following the same method, make nature their own syllables, as of
some cosmic language. This is the highest reach of the artist's power
of conveying through the concrete image the soul in its pure emotional
life; and in such poetry one feels that the whole material world seems
lent to man to expand his nature and escape from the solitude in which
he is born to that divine union to which he is destined. The evolution
of this one moment of passion is lyric form, whose unity lies in
personality exclusively, however it may seem to involve the external
world which is its imagery,--its body lifted from the dust, woven of
light and air, but alive only while the spirit abides there. And here,
too, as elsewhere, to whatever height the poet may rise, it must be one
to which man can follow, to which, indeed, the poet lifts men. Nor is it
only nature which thus suffers spiritualization through the stress of
imagination interpreting life in definite and sensible forms of beauty,
but the imagery of action also may be similarly taken possession of,
though this is rare in merely lyrical expression.

The ideal world, then, to present in full summary these views, is thus
built up, through personality in all its richness, by a perfected
imitation of life itself, and is set forth in universal unities of
relation, causal or formal, to the intellect in its inward, to the sense
of beauty in its outward, aspects; and thereby delighting the desire of
the mind for lucid and lovely order, it generates joy, and thence is
born the will to conform one's self to this order. If, then, this order
be conceived as known in its principles and in operation in living
souls, as existing in its completeness on the simplest scale in an
entire series of illustrative instances but without multiplicity,--if it
be conceived, that is, as the model of a world,--that would be to know
it as it exists to the mind of God; that would be to contemplate the
world of ideas as Plato conceived it seen by the soul before birth. That
is the beatific vision. If it be conceived in its mortal movement as a
developing world on earth, that would be to know "the plot of God," as
Poe called the universe. Art endeavours to bring that vision, that plot,
however fragmentary, upon earth. It is a world of order clothing itself
in beauty, with a charm to the soul, such is our nature,--operative upon
the will to live. It is preeminently a vision of beauty. It is true that
this beauty which thus wins and moves us seems something added by the
mind in its great creations rather than anything actual in life; for it
is, in fact, heightened and refined from the best that man has seen in
himself, and it partakes more of hope than of memory. Here is that woven
robe of illusion which is so hard a matter to those who live in horizons
of the eye and hand. Yet as idealism was found on its mental side
harmonious with reason in all knowledge, and on its emotional side
harmonious with the heart in its outgoings, so this perfecting
temperament that belongs to it and most characterizes it, falls in with
the natural faith of mankind. Idealism in this sense, too, existed in
life before it passed into literature. The youth idealizes the maiden he
loves, his hero, and the ends of his life; and in age the old man
idealizes his youth. Who does not remember some awakening moment when he
first saw virtue and knew her for what she is? Sweet was it then to
learn of some Jason of the golden fleece, some Lancelot of the tourney,
some dying Sydney of the stricken field. There was a poignancy in this
early knowledge that shall never be felt again; but who knows not that
such enthusiasm which earliest exercised the young heart in noble
feelings is the source of most of good that abides in us as years go on?
In such boyish dreaming the soul learns to do and dare, hardens and
supples itself, and puts on youthful beauty; for here is its palaestra.
Who would blot these from his memory? who choke these fountain-heads,
remembering how often along life's pathway he has thirsted for them?
Such moments, too, have something singular in their nature, and almost
immortal, that carries them echoing far on into life where they strike
upon us in manhood at chosen moments when least expected; some of them
are the real time in which we live. It was said of old that great men
were creative in their souls, and left their works to be their race;
these ideal heroes have immortal souls for their children, age after
age. Shall we in our youth, then, in generous emulation idealize the
great of old times, and honour them as our fair example of what we most
would be? Shall we, in our hearts, idealize those we love,--so natural
is it to believe in the perfection of those we love,--and even if the
time for forgiveness comes, and we show them the mercy that our own
frailty teaches us to exercise, shall we still idealize them, since love
continues only in the persuasion of perfection yet to come, and is the
tenderer because it comes with struggle? Whether in our acts or our
emotions shall we give idealism this range, and deny it to literature
which discloses the habits of our daily practice in more perfection and
with greater beauty? There we find the purest types to raise and sustain
us; to direct our choice, and reenforce us with that emotion, that
passion, which most supports the will in its effort. There history
itself is taken up, transformed, and made immortal, the whole past of
human emotion and action contained and shown forth with convincing
power. Nor is it only with the natural habit of mankind that idealism
falls in, but with divine command. Were we not bid be perfect as our
Father in heaven is perfect? And what is that image of the Christ, what
is that world-ideal, the height of human thought, but the work of the
creative reason,--not of genius, not of the great in mind and fortunate
in gifts, but of the race itself, in proud and humble, in saint and
sinner, in the happy and the wretched, in all the vast range of the
millions of the dead whose thoughts live embodied in that great
tradition,--the supreme and perfected pattern of mankind?

Is it nevertheless true that there is falsehood in all this? that men
were never such as the heart believes them, nor ideal characters able to
breathe mortal air? by indulging our emotions, do we deceive ourselves,
and end at last in cynicism or despair? Why, then, should we not boldly
affirm that the falsehood is rather in us, in the defects by which we
fail of perfection, in our ignorant error and voluntary wrong? that in
the ideal, free as it is from the accidental and the transitory,
inclusive as it is of the common truth, lies, as Plato thought, the only
reality, the truth which outlasts us all? But this may seem a subtle
evasion rather than a frank answer. Let us rather say that idealism is
one of the necessary modes of man's faith, brings in the future, and
assumes the reality of that which shall be actual; that the reality it
owns is that of the rose in the bud, the oak in the acorn, the planet in
its fiery mist. I believe that ideal character in its perfection is
potentially in every man who is born into the world. We forecast the
future in other parts of life; why should we not forecast ourselves?
Would he not be thought foolish who should refuse to embark in great
enterprises of trade, because he does not already hold the wealth to be
gained? The ideal is our infinite riches, more than any individual or
moment can hold. To refuse it is as if a man should neglect his estate
because he can take but a handful of it in his grasp. It is the law of
our being to grow, and it is a necessity that we should have examples
and patterns in advance of us, by which we can find our way. There is no
falsehood in such anticipation; there is only a faith in truth instead
of a possession of it. Will you limit us to one moment of time and
place? will you say to the patriot that his country is a geographical
term? and when he replies that rather is it the life of her sons, will
you point him to human nature as it seems at the period, to corruption,
folly, ignorance, strife, and crime, and tell him that is our actual
America? Will he not rather say that his America is a great past, a
future whose beneficence no man can sum? Is there any falsehood in this
ideal country that men have ever held precious? Did Pericles lie in his
great oration, and Virgil in his noble poem, and Dante in his fervid
Italian lines? And as there are ideals of country, so also of men, of
the soldier, the priest, the king, the lover, the citizen, and beside
each of us does there not go one who mourns over our fall and pities us,
gladdens in our virtue, and shall not leave us till we die; an ideal
self, who is our judgment? and if it be yet answered that this in truth
is so, and might be borne but for the errors of the idealizing
temperament, shall we not reply that the quack does not discredit the
art of medicine, nor the demagogue the art of politics, and no more does
the fool in all his motley the art of literature.

Must I, however, come back to my answer, and meet those who aver that
however stimulating idealism is to the soul, yet it must be remembered
that in the world at large there is nothing corresponding to ideal
order, to poetic ethics, and that to act these forth as the supremacy of
what ought to be is to misrepresent life, to raise expectations in youth
never to be realized, to pervert practical standards, and in brief to
make a false start that can be fruitful only in error, in subsequent
suffering of mind, and with material disadvantage? I must be frank: I
own that I can perceive in Nature no moral order, that in her world
there is no knowledge of us or of our ideals, and that in general her
order often breaks upon man's life with mere ruin, irrational and
pitiful; and I acknowledge, also, the prominence of evil in the social,
and its invasion in the individual, life of man. But, again, were we so
situated that there should be no external divine order apparent to our
minds, were justice an accident and mercy the illusion of wasted prayer,
there would still remain in us that order whose workings are known
within our own bosom, that law which compels us to be just and merciful
in order to lead the life that we recognize to be best, and the whole
imperative of our ideal, which, if we fail to ourselves, condemns us,
irrespective of what future attends us in the world. Ideal order as the
mind knows it, the mind must strive to realize, or stand dishonoured in
its own forum. Within us, at least, it exists in hope and somewhat in
reality, and following it in our effort, though we come merely to a
stoical idea of the just man on whom the heavens fall, we should yet be
nobler than the power that made us souls betrayed. But there is no such
difference between the world as it is and the world as ideal art
presents it.

What, then, is the difference between art and nature? Art is nature
regenerate, made perfect, suffering the new birth into what ought to be;
an ordered and complete world. But this is the vision of art as the
ultimate of good. Idealism has also another world, of which glimpses
have already appeared in the course of this argument, though in the
background. In the intellectual sphere evil is as subject to general
statement as is good, and there is in the strict sense an idealization
of evil, a universal statement of it, as in Mephistopheles, or in more
partial ways in Iago, Macbeth, Richard III. In the emotional sphere also
there is the throb of evil, felt as diabolic energy and presented as the
element in which these characters have their being. Even in the sphere
of the will, who shall say that man does not knowingly choose evil as
his portion? So, too, as the method of idealism in the world of the good
tends to erect man above himself, the same generalizing method in the
world of the evil tends to degrade human nature below itself; the
extremes of the process are the divine and the devilish; both transcend
life, but are developed out of it. The difference between these two
poles of ideality is that the order of one is an order of life, that of
the other an order of death. Between these two is the special province
of the human will. What literature, what all art, presents is not the
ultimate of good or the ultimate of evil separately; it is, taking into
account the whole range, the mixed world becoming what it ought to be in
its evolution from what it is, and the laws of that progress. Hence
tragedy on the one hand and comedy, or more broadly humour, on the other
hand, have their great place in literature; for they are forms of the
intermediate world of conflict. I speak of the spiritual world of man's
will. We may conceive of the world optimistically as a place in which
all shall issue in good and nothing be lost; or as a place in which, by
alliance with or revolt from the forces of life, the will in its
voluntary and individual action may save or lose the soul at its choice.
We may think of God as conserving all, or as permitting hell, which is
death. We do not know. But as shown to us in imagination, idealism,
which is the race's dream of truth, hovers between these two worlds
known to us in tendency if not in conclusion,--the world of salvation on
the one hand, in proportion as the order of life is made vital in us,
the world of damnation on the other hand, in proportion as the order of
death prevails in our will; but the main effort of idealism is to show
us the war between the two, with an emphasis on the becoming of the
reality of beauty, joy, reason, and virtue in us. Not that prosperity
follows righteousness, not that poverty attends wickedness, in worldly
measure, but that life is the gift of a right will is her message; how
we, striving for eternal life, may best meet the chances and the bitter
fates of mortal existence, is her brooding care; ideal characters, or
those ideal in some trait or phase, in the midst of a hostile
environment, are her fixed study. So far is idealism from ignoring the
actual state of man that it most affirms its pity and evil by setting
them in contrast with what ought to be, by showing virtue militant not
only against external enemies but those inward weaknesses of our
mortality with its passion and ignorance, which are our most undermining
and intimate foes. Here is no false world, but just that world which is
our theatre of action, that confused struggle, represented in its
intelligible elements in art, that world of evil, implicit in us and the
universe, which must be overcome; and this is revealed to us in the ways
most profitable for our instruction, who are bound to seek to realize
the good through all the strokes of nature and the folly and sin of men.
Ideal literature in its broad compass, between its opposed poles of good
and evil, is just this: a world of order emerging from disorder, of
beauty and wisdom, of virtue and joy, emerging from the chaos of things
that are, in selected and typical examples.

It follows from this that what remains in the world of observation in
personality or experience, whether good or evil, whether particular or
general, not yet coordinated in rational knowledge as a whole, all for
which no solution is found, all that cannot be or has not been made
intelligible, must be the subject-matter of realism in the exact use of
that term. This must be recorded by literature, or admitted into it, as
matter-of-fact which is to the mind still a problem. Earthly mystery
therefore is the special sphere of realism. The borderland of the
unknown or the irreducible is its realm. This old residuum, this new
material, is not yet capable of art. Hence, too, realism in this sense
characterizes ages of expansion of knowledge such as ours. The new
information which is the fruit of our wide travel, of our research into
the past, has enlarged the problem of man's life by showing us both
primitive and historical humanity in its changeful phases of progress
working out the beast; and this new interest has been reenforced by the
attention paid, under influences of democracy and philanthropy, to the
lower and baser forms of life in the masses under civilization, which
has been a new revelation of persistent savagery in our midst. Here
realism illustrates its service as a gatherer of knowledge which may
hereafter be reduced to orderliness by idealistic processes, for
idealism is the organizer of all knowledge. But apart from this incoming
of facts, or of laws not yet harmonized in the whole body of law, for
which we may have fair hope that a synthesis will be found, there
remains forever that residuum of which I spoke, which has resisted the
intelligence of man, age after age, from the first throb of feeling,
the first ray of thought; that involuntary evil, that unmerited
suffering, that impotent pain,--the human debris of the social
process,--which is a challenge to the power of God, and a cry to the
heart of man that broods over it in vain, yet cannot choose but hear. In
this region the near affinity of realism to pessimism, to atheism, is
plain enough; its necessary dealing with the base, the brutal, the
unredeemed, the hopeless darkness of the infamies of heredity, criminal
education, and successful malignity, eating into the being as well as
controlling the fortune of their victims, is manifest; and what answer
has ever been found to the interrogation they make? It is not merely
that particular facts are here irreconcilable; but laws themselves are
discernible, types even not of narrow application, which have not been
brought into any relation with what I have named the divine order.
Millions of men in thousands of years are included in this holocaust of
past time,--eras of savagery, Assyrian civilizations, Christian
butcheries, the Czar yet supreme, the Turk yet alive.

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