Heart of Man by George Edward Woodberry
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George Edward Woodberry >> Heart of Man
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And how is it at the other pole of mystery, where life rises into a
heavenly vision of eternities of love to come? There is no place for
realism here, where observation ceases and our only human outlook is by
inference from principles and laws of the ideal world as known to us;
yet what problems are we aware of? Must,--to take the special problem of
art,--must the sensuous scheme of life persist, since of it warp and
woof are woven all our possibilities of communication, all our
capabilities of knowledge? it is our language and our memory alike. Must
God be still thought of in the image of man, since only in terms of our
humanity can we conceive even divine things, whether in forms of mortal
pleasure as the Greeks framed their deities, or in shapes of spiritual
bliss as Christians fashion saint, angel, and archangel? These are
rather philosophical problems. But in art, as at the realistic end of
the scale, we admit the portraiture, as a part of life, of the bestial,
the cruel, the unforgiven, and feel it debasing, so must we at the
idealistic end admit the representation of the celestial after human
models, and feel it, even in Milton and in Dante, minimizing. The
mysticism of the borderland at its supreme is a hope; at its nadir, it
is a fear. We do not know. But within the narrow range of the
intelligible and ordered world of art, which has been achieved by the
creative reason of civilized man in his brief centuries and along the
narrow path from Jerusalem and Athens to the western world, we do know
that for the normal man born into its circle of light the order of life
is within our reach, the order of death within reach of us. Shut within
these limits of the victory of our intellect and the upreaching of our
desires and the warfare of our will, we assert in art our faith that the
divine order is victorious, that the righteous man is not forsaken, that
the soul cannot suffer wrong either from others or from nature or from
God,--that the evil principle cannot prevail. It is faith, springing
from our experience of the working of that order in us; it transcends
knowledge, but it grows with knowledge; and ideal literature asserts
this faith against nature and against man in all their deformity, as the
centre about which life revolves so far as it has become subject to
rational knowledge, to beautiful embodiment, to joyful being, to the
will to live.
Can the faith of which idealism is the holder of the keys, the faith as
nigh to the intellect as to the heart, to the senses as to the spirit,
exceed even this limit, and affirm that if man were perfect in knowledge
and saw the universe as we believe God sees it, he would behold it as an
artistic whole even now? Would it be that beatific vision, revolving
like God's kaleidoscope, momentarily falling at each new arrangement
into the perfect unities of art? and is our world of art, our brief
model of such a world in single examples of its scheme, only a way of
limiting the field to the compass of human faculties that we may see
within our capacities as God sees, and hence have such faith? Is art
after all a lower creation than nature, a concession to our frail
powers? Has idealism such optimistic reach as that? Or must we see the
evil principle encamped here, confusing truth, deforming beauty,
depraving joy, deflecting the will, with wages of death for its victims,
and the hell of final destruction spreading beneath its sway? so that
the world as it now is cannot be thought of as the will of God exercised
in Omnipotence, but a human opportunity of union with or separation from
the ideal order in conflict with the order of death. I recall Newman's
picture: "To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various
history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their
mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits,
governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses,
their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of
long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending
design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or
truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not
toward final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his
far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his
futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success
of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of
sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless
irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly
described in the Apostle's words, 'having no hope and without God in the
world,'--all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the
mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human
solution." In the face of such a world, even when partially made
intelligible in ideal art, dare we assert that fatalistic optimism which
would have it that the universe is in God's eyes a perfect world? I can
find no warrant for it in ideal art, though thence the ineradicable
effort arises in us to win to that world in the conviction that it is
not indifferent in the sight of heaven whether we live in the order of
life or that of death, in the faith that victory in us is a triumph of
that order itself which increases and prevails in us, is a bringing of
Christ's kingdom upon earth. Art rather becomes in our mind a function
of the world's progress, and were its goal achieved would cease; for
life would then itself be one with art, one with the divine order. So
much of truth there is in Ruskin's statement that art made perfect
denies progress and is its ultimate. But perfection in life, as ideal
art presents it, it is a prophecy which enlists us as soldiers militant
in its fulfilment. Its optimism is that of the issue, and may be that of
the process; but it surely is not that of the state that now is in the
world.
It thus appears more and more that art is educative; it is the race's
foreknowledge of what may be, of the objects of effort and the methods
of their attainment under mortal conditions. The difficulty of men in
respect to it is the lax power they have to see in it the truth, as
contradistinguished from the fact, the continuous reality of the things
of the mind in opposition to the accidental and partial reality of the
things of actuality. They think of it as an imagined, instead of as the
real world, the model of that which is in the evolution of that which
ought to be. In history the climaxes of art have always outrun human
realization; its crests in Greece, Italy, and England are crests of the
never-attained; but they still make on in their mass to the yet rising
wave, which shall be of mankind universal, if, indeed, in the
cosmopolitan civilization which we hope for, the elements of the past,
yet surviving from the accomplishment of single famous cities and great
empires, shall be blended in a world-ideal, expressing the spiritual
uplifting to God of the reconciled and unified nations of the earth.
There remains but one last resort; for it will yet be urged that the
impossibility of any scientific knowledge of the spiritual order is
proved by the transience of the ideals of the past; one is displaced by
another, there is no permanence in them. It is true that the concrete
world, which must be employed by art, is one of sense, and necessarily
imports into the form of art its own mortality; it is, even in art, a
thing that passes away. It is also true that the world of knowledge,
which is the subject-matter of art, is in process of being known, and
necessarily imports into the contents of art its errors, its hypotheses,
its imperfections of every kind; it is a thing that grows more and more,
and in growing sheds its outworn shells, its past body. Let us consider
the form and the contents separately. The element of mortality in the
form is included in the transience of imagery. The poet uses the world
as he knows it, and reflects in successive ages of literature the
changing phases of civilization. The shepherd, the tiller of the soil,
the warrior, the trader yield to him their language of the earth, the
battle, and the sea; from the common altar he learns the speech of the
gods; the elemental aspects of nature, the pursuits of men, and what is
believed of the supernatural are the great storehouses of imagery. The
fact that it is at first a living act or habit that the poet deals with,
gives to his work that original vivacity, that direct sense of
actuality, of contemporaneousness, which characterizes early
literatures, as in Homer or the Song of Roland: even the marvellous has
in them the reality of being believed. This imagery, however, grows
remote with the course of time; it becomes capable of holding an inward
meaning without resistance from too high a feeling of actuality; it
becomes spiritualized. The process is the same already illustrated in
lyric form as an expression of personality; but here man universal
enters into the image and possesses it impersonally on the broad human
scale. The pastoral life, for example, then yields the forms of art
which hold either the simple innocence of happy earthly love, as in
Daphnis and Chloe, or the natural grief of elegy made beautiful, as in
Bion's dirge, or the shepherding of Christ in his church on earth, as in
many an English poet; the imagery has unclothed itself of actuality and
shows a purely spiritual body.
This growing inwardness of art is a main feature of literary history. It
is illustrated on the grand scale by the imagery of war. In the
beginning war for its own sake, mere fighting, is the subject; then war
for a cause, which ennobles it beyond the power of personal prowess and
justifies it as an element in national life; next, war for love, which
refines it and builds the paradox of the deeds of hate serving the will
of courtesy; last, war for the soul's salvation, which is unseen battle
within the breast. Achilles, Aeneas, Lancelot, the Red Cross Knight are
the terms in this series; they mark the transformation of the most
savage act of man into the symbol of his highest spiritual effort.
Nature herself is subject to this inwardness of art; at first merely
objective as a condition, and usually a hostile, or at least dangerous,
condition of human life, she becomes the witness to omnipotent power in
illimitable beauty and majesty, its infinite unknowableness, and its
tender care for all creatures, as in the Scriptures; and at last the
words of our Lord concentrate, in some simple flower, the profoundest of
moral truths,--that the beauty of the soul is the gift of God, out of
whose eternal law it blossoms and has therein its ever living roots, its
air and light, its inherent grace and sweetness: "Consider the lilies of
the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I
say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like
one of these. Shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?"
Such is the normal development of all imagery; its actuality limits it,
and in becoming remote it grows flexible. It is only by virtue of this
that man can retain the vast treasures of race-imagination, and continue
to use them, such as the worlds of mythology, of chivalry, and romance.
The imagery is, in truth, a background, whose foreground is the ideal
meaning. Thus even fairyland, and the worlds of heaven and hell, have
their place in art. The actuality of the imagery is in fact irrelevant,
just as history is in the idealization of human events. Its transience,
then, cannot matter, except in so far as it loses intelligibility
through changes of time, place, and custom, and becomes a dead language.
It follows that that imagery which keeps close to universal phases of
nature, to pursuits always necessary in human life, and to ineradicable
beliefs in respect to the supernatural, is most permanent as a language;
and here art in its most immortal creations returns again to its
omnipresent character as a thing of the common lot.
The transience of the contents of art may be of two kinds. There is a
passing away of error, as there is in all knowledge, but such a loss
need not detain attention. What is really in issue is the passing away
of the authority of precept and example fitted to one age but not to
another, as in the case of the substitution of the ideal of humility for
that of valour, owing to a changed emphasis in the scale of virtues. The
contents of art, its general ideals, reproduce the successive periods of
our earth-history as a race, by generalizing each in its own age. A
parallel exists in the subject-matter of the sciences; astronomy,
geology, paleontology are similar statements of past phases of the
evolution of the earth, its aspects in successive stages. Or, to take a
kindred example, just as the planets in their order set forth now the
history of our system from nascent life to complete death as earths, so
these ideals exhibit man's stages from savagery to such culture as has
been attained. They have more than a descriptive and historical
significance; they retain practical vitality because the unchangeable
element in the universe and in man's nature is in the main their
subject-matter. It is not merely that the child repeats in his
education, in some measure at least, the history of the race, and hence
must still learn the value of bravery and humility in their order; nor
that in the mass of men many remain ethically and emotionally in the
characteristic stages of past culture; but these various ideals of what
is admirable have themselves identical elements, and in those points in
which they differ respond to native varieties of human capacity and
temperament. The living principles of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and
Christian thought and feeling are at work in the world, still formative;
it is only by such vitality that their results in art truly survive.
There has been an expansion of the field, and some rearrangement within
it; but the evolution of human ideals has been, in our civilization, the
growth of one spirit out of its dead selves carrying on into each
reincarnation the true life that was in the form it leaves, and which is
immortal. The substance in each ideal, its embodiment of what is
cardinal in all humanity, remains integral. The alloy of mortality in a
work of art lies in so much of it as was limited in truth to time,
place, country, race, religion, its specific and contemporary part; so
great is this in detail that a strong power of historical imagination,
the power to rebuild past conditions, is a main necessity of culture,
like the study of a dead language; an interpretative faculty, the power
to translate into terms of our knowledge what was stated in terms of
different beliefs, must go with this; and also a corrective power, if
the work is to be truly useful and enter into our lives with effect.
Such an alloy there is in nearly all great works even; much in Homer,
something in Virgil, a considerable part of Dante, and an increasing
portion in Milton have this mixture of death in them; but if by keeping
to the primary, the permanent, the universal, they have escaped the
natural body of their age, the substance of the work is still living;
they have achieved such immortality as art allows. They have done so,
not so much by the personal power of their authors as by their
representative character. These ideal works of the highest range, which
embody in themselves whole generations of effort and rise as the
successive incarnations of human imagination, are products of race and
state, of world experience and social personality; they differ, race
from race, civilization from civilization, Hebrew or Greek, Pagan or
Christian, just as on the individual scale persons differ; and they are
solved, as personality in its individual form is solved, in the element
of the common reason, the common nature in the world and man, which they
contain,--in man,
"Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless";
in the unity of the truth of his spirit they are freed from mortality,
they are mutually intelligible and interchangeable, they survive,--
racial and secular states and documents of a spiritual evolution yet
going on in all its stages in the human mass, still barbarous, still
pagan, still Christian, but an evolution which at its highest point
wastes nothing of the past, holds all its truth, its beauty, its vital
energy, in a forward reach.
The nature of the changes which time brings may best be illustrated from
the epic, and thus the opposition of the transient and permanent
elements in art be, perhaps, more clearly shown. Epic action has been
defined as the working out of the Divine will in society; hence it
requires a crisis of humanity as its subject, it involves the conflict
of a higher with a lower civilization, and it is conducted by means of a
double plot, one in heaven, the other on earth. These are the
characteristic epic traits. In dealing with ideas of such importance,
the poets in successive eras of civilization naturally found much
adaptation to new conditions necessary, and met with ever fresh
difficulties; the result is a many-sided epic development. The idea of
the Divine will, the theory of its operation, and the conception of
society itself were all subject to change. Epics at first are
historical; but, sharing with the tendency of all art toward inwardness
of meaning, they become purely spiritual. The one thing that remains
common to all is the notion of a struggle between a higher and a lower,
overruled by Providence. They have two subjects of interest, one the
cause, the other the hero through whom the cause works; and between
these two interests the epic hovers, seldom if ever identifying them and
yet preserving their dual reality.
The Iliad has all the traits that have been mentioned, but society is
still loose enough in its bonds to give the characters free play; it is,
in the main, a hero-epic. The Aeneid, on the contrary, exhibits the
enormous development of the social idea; its subject is Roman dominion,
which is the will of Zeus, localized in the struggle with Carthage and
with Turnus, but felt in the poem pervasively as the general destiny of
Rome in its victory over the world; and this interest is so overpowering
as to make Aeneas the slave of Jove and almost to extinguish the other
characters; it is a state-epic. So long as the Divine will was conceived
as finding its operation through deities similar to man, the double plot
presented little difficulty; but in the coming of Christian thought,
even with its hierarchies of angels and legions of devils, the
interpretation became arduous. In the Jerusalem Delivered the social
conflict between Crusader and infidel is clear, the historical crisis in
the wars of Palestine is rightly chosen, but the machinery of the
heavenly plot is weakened by the presence of magic, and is by itself
ineffectual in inspiring a true belief. So in the Lusiads, while the
conflict and the crisis, as shown in the national energy of colonization
in the East, are clear, the machinery of the heavenly plot frankly
reverts to mythologic and pagan forms and loses all credibility.
In the Paradise Lost arises the spiritual epic, but still historically
conceived; the crisis chosen, which is the fall of man in Adam, is the
most important conceivable by man; the powers engaged are the superior
beings of heaven and hell in direct antagonism; but here, too, the
machinery of the heavenly plot is handled with much strain, and, however
strongly supported by the Scriptures, has little convincing power. The
truth is that the Divine will was coming to be conceived as implicit in
society, being Providence there, and operating in secret but normal ways
in the guidance of events, not by special and interfering acts; and also
as equally implicit in the individual soul, the influence of the Spirit,
and working in the ways of spiritual law. One change, too, of vast
importance was announced by the words "The Kingdom of Heaven is within
you." This transferred the very scene of conflict, the theatre of
spiritual warfare, from an external to an internal world, and the social
significance of such individual battle lay in its being typical of all
men's lives. The Faerie Queene, the most spiritual poem in all ways in
English, is an epic in essence, though its action is developed by a
revolution of the phases of the soul in succession to the eye, and not
by the progress of one main course of events. The conflict of the higher
and the lower under Divine guidance in the implicit sense is there
shown; the significance is for mankind, though not for a society in its
worldly fortunes; but there is little attempt to externalize the
heavenly power in specific action in superhuman forms, though in mortal
ways the good knights, and especially Arthur, shadow it forth. The
celestial plot is humanized, and the poem becomes a hero-epic in almost
an exclusive way; though the knight's achievement is also an achievement
of God's will, the interest lies in the Divine power conceived as man's
moral victory. In the Idyls of the King there are several traits of the
epic. There is the central idea of the conflict between the higher and
lower, both on the social and the individual side; the victory of the
Round Table would have meant not only pure knights but a regenerate
state. Here, however, the externalization of the Divine will in the Holy
Grail, and, as in the Christian epic generally, its confusion on the
marvellous side with a world of enchantment passing here into the
sensuous sphere of Merlin, are felt to be inadequate. The war of "soul
with sense" was the subject-matter, as was Spenser's; the method of
revolution of its phases was also Spenser's; but the two poems differ in
the point that Spenser's knight wins, but Tennyson's king loses, so far
as earth is concerned; nor can it be fairly pleaded that as in Milton
Adam loses, yet the final triumph of the cause is known and felt as a
divine issue of the action though outside the poem, so Arthur is saved
to the ideal by virtue of the faith he announces in the New Order coming
on, for it is not so felt. The touch of pessimism invades the poem in
many details, but here at its heart; for Arthur alone of all the heroes
of epic in his own defeat drags down his cause. He is the hero of a lost
cause, whose lance will never be raised again in mortal conflict to
bring the kingdom of Christ on earth, nor its victory be declared except
as the echo of a hope of some miraculous and merciful retrieval from
beyond the barriers of the world to come. But in showing the different
conditions of the modern epic, its spirituality, its difficulties of
interpreting in sensuous imagery the working of the Divine will, its
relaxed hold on the social movement for which it substitutes man's
universal nature, and the mist that settles round it in its latest
example, sufficient illustration has been given of the changes of time
to which idealism is subject, and also of the essential truth surviving
in the works of the past, which in the epics is the vision of how the
ends of God have been accomplished in the world and in the soul by the
union of divine grace with heroic will,--the interpretation and
glorification, of history and of man's single conflict in himself ago
after age, asserting through all their range the supremacy of the ideal
order over its foes in the entire race-life of man.
Out of these changes of time, in response to the varying moods of men in
respect to the world they inhabit, arise those phases of art which are
described as classical and romantic, words of much confusion. It has
been attempted to distinguish the latter as having an element of
remoteness, of surprise, of curiosity; but to me, at least, classical
art has the same remoteness, the same surprise, and answers the same
curiosity as romantic art. If I were to endeavour to oppose them I
should say that classical art is clear, it is perfectly grasped in form,
it satisfies the intellect, it awakes an emotion absorbed by itself, it
definitely guides the will; romantic art is touched with mystery, it has
richness and intricacy of form not fully comprehended, it suggests more
than it satisfies, it stirs an unconfined and wandering emotion, it
invigorates an adventurous will; classicism is whole in itself and lives
in the central region, the white light, of that star of ideality which
is the light of our knowledge; romanticism borders on something
else,--the rosy corona round about our star, carrying on its dawning
power into those unknown infinities which embosom the spark of life. The
two have always existed in conjunction, the romantic element in ancient
literature being large. But owing to the disclosure of the world to us
in later times, to the deeper sense of its mysteries which are our
bounding horizons round about, and especially to the impulse given to
emotion by the opening of the doors of immortality by Christianity to
thought, revery, and dream, to hope and effort, the romantic element has
been more marked in modern art, has in fact characterized it, being fed
moreover by the ever increasing inwardness of human life, the greater
value and opportunity of personality in a free and high civilization,
and by the uncertainty, confusion, and complexity of such masses of
human experience as our observation now controls. The romantic temper is
inevitable in men whose lives are themselves thought of as, in form, but
fragments of the life to come, which shall find their completion an
eternal task. It is the natural ally of faith which it alone can render
with an infinite outlook; and it is the complement of that mystery which
is required to supplement it, and which is an abiding presence in the
habit of the sensitive and serious mind. Yet in classical art the
definite may still be rendered, the known, the conquered. Idealism has
its finished world therein; in romanticism it has rather its prophetic
work.
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