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| Table of Contents | |
| Section | Page |
| Start of eBook | 1 |
| TAORMINA | 1 |
| I | 1 |
| II | 2 |
| III | 3 |
| IV | 6 |
| V | 8 |
| VI | 19 |
| VII | 24 |
| VIII | 25 |
| IX | 26 |
| A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY | 26 |
| DEMOCRACY | 79 |
| THE RIDE | 98 |
What should there be in the glimmering lights of a poor fishing-village to fascinate me? Far below, a mile perhaps, I behold them in the darkness and the storm like some phosphorescence of the beach; I see the pale tossing of the surf beside them; I hear the continuous roar borne up and softened about these heights; and this is night at Taormina. There is a weirdness in the scene—the feeling without the reality of mystery; and at evening, I know not why, I cannot sleep without stepping upon the terrace or peering through the panes to see those lights. At morning the charm has flown from the shore to the further heights above me. I glance at the vast banks of southward-lying cloud that envelop Etna, like deep fog upon the ocean; and then, inevitably, my eyes seek the double summit of the Taorminian mountain, rising nigh at hand a thousand feet, almost sheer, less than half a mile westward. The nearer height, precipice-faced, towers full in front with its crowning ruined citadel, and discloses, just below the peak, on an arm of rock toward its right, a hermitage church among the heavily hanging mists. The other horn of the massive hill, somewhat more remote, behind and to the old castle’s left, exposes on its slightly loftier crest the edge of a hamlet. It, too, is cloud-wreathed—the lonely crag of Mola. Over these hilltops, I know, mists will drift and touch all day; and often they darken threateningly, and creep softly down the slopes, and fill the next-lying valley, and roll, and lift again, and reveal the flank of Monte d’Oro northward on the far-reaching range. As I was walking the other day, with one of these floating showers gently blowing in my face down this defile, I noticed, where the mists hung in fragments from the cloud out over the gulf, how like air-shattered arches they groined the profound ravine; and thinking how much of the romantic charm which delights lovers of the mountains and the sea springs from such Gothic moods of nature, I felt for a moment something of the pleasure of recognition in meeting with this northern and familiar element in the Sicilian landscape.
One who has grown to be at home with nature cannot be quite a stranger anywhere on earth. In new lands I find the poet’s old domain. It is not only from the land-side that these intimations of old acquaintance come. When my eyes leave, as they will, the near girdle of rainy mountain tops, and range home at last upon the sea, something familiar is there too,—that which I have always known,—but marvellously transformed and heightened in beauty and power. Such sudden glints of sunshine in the offing through unseen rents of heaven, as brilliant as in mid-ocean, I have beheld a thousand times, but here they remind me rather of cloud-lights on far western plains; and where have I seen those still tracts of changeful colour, iridescent
The very rain is strange: it is charged with obscure personality; it is the habitation of a new presence, a storm-genius that I have never known; it in born of Etna, whence all things here have being and draw nourishment. It is not rain, but the rain-cloud, spread out over the valleys, the precipices, the sounding beaches, the ocean plain; it is not a storm, but a season. It does not rise with the moist Hyades, or ride with cloudy Orion in the Mediterranean night; it does not pass like Atlantic tempests on great world-currents: it remains. Its home is upon Etna; thence it comes and thither it returns; it gathers and disperses, lightens and darkens, blows and is silent, and though it suffer the clear north wind, or the west, to divide its veils with heaven, again it draws the folds together about its abode. It obeys only Etna, who sends it forth; then with clouds and thick darkness the mountain hides its face: it is the Sicilian winter.
But Etna does not withdraw continuously from its children even in this season. On the third day, at farthest, I was told it would bring back the sun; and I was not deceived. Two days it was closely wrapped in impenetrable gray; but the third morning, as I threw open my casement and stepped out upon the terrace, I saw it, like my native winter, expanding its broad flanks under the double radiance of dazzling clouds spreading from its extreme summit far out and upward, and of the snow-fields whose long fair drifts shone far down the sides. Villages and groves were visible, clothing all the lower zone, and between lay the plain. It seemed near in that air, but it is twelve miles away. From the sea-dipping base to the white cone the slope measures more than twenty miles, and as many more conduct the eye downward to the western fringe—a vast bulk; yet one does not think of its size as he gazes; so large a tract the eye takes in, but no more realizes than it does the distance of the stars. High up, forests
Would you see this land as I see it? Come then, since Etna gives a fair, pure morning, up over the shelving bank to the great eastern spur of Taormina, where stood the hollow theatre, now in ruins, and above it the small temple with which the Greeks surmounted the highest point. It is such a spot as they often chose for their temples; but none ever commanded a more noble prospect. The far-shining sea, four or five hundred feet below, washes the narrow, precipitous descent, and on each hand is disclosed the whole of that side of Sicily which faces the rising sun. To the left and northward are the level straits, with the Calabrian mountains opposite, thinly sown with light snow, as far as the Cape of Spartivento, distinctly seen, though forty miles away; in front expands the open sea; straight to the south runs the indented coast, bay and beach, point after point, to where, sixty miles distant, the great blue promontory of Syracuse makes far out. On the land-side Etna fills the south with its lifted snow-fields, now smoke-plumed at the languid cone; and thence, though lingeringly, the eye ranges nearer over the intervening plain to the well-wooded ridge of Castiglione, and, next, to the round solitary top of Monte Maestra, with its long shoreward descent, and comes to rest on the height of Taormina overhead, with its hermitage of Santa Maria della Rocca, its castle, and Mola. Yet further off, at the hand of the defile, looms the barren summit of Monte Venere, with Monte d’Oro and other hills in the foreground, and northward, peak after peak, travels the close Messina range.
A landscape of sky, sea, plain, and mountains, great masses majestically grouped, grand in contour! Yet to call it sublime does not render the impression it makes upon the soul. Sublime, indeed, it is at times, and dull were he whose heart from hour to hour awe does not visit here; but constantly the scene is beautiful, and yields that delight which dwells unwearied with the soul. One may be seldom touched to the exaltation which sublimity implies, but to take pleasure in loveliness is the habit of one who lives as heaven made him; and what characterizes this landscape and sets it apart is the permanence of its beauty, its perpetual and perfect charm through every change of light and weather, and in every quarter of its heaven and earth, felt equally whether the eye sweeps the great circuit with its vision, or pauses on the nearer features, for they, too, are wonderfully
The little city itself lies on its hill, between the bright shore and the gray old castle, on a crescent-like terrace whose two horns jut out into the air like capes. The northern one of these is my station, the site of the old temple and the amphitheatre; the southern one opposite shows the facade of the Dominican convent; and the town circles between, possibly a mile from spur to spur. Here and there long broken lines of the ancient wall, black with age, stride the hillside. A round Gothic tower, built as if for warfare, a square belfry, a ruined gateway, stand out among the humble roofs. Gardens of orange and lemon trees gleam like oblong parks, principally on the upper edge toward the great rock. If you will climb, as I have done, the craggy plateau close by, which overhangs the theatre and obstructs the view of the extreme end of the town at this point, you will see from its level face, rough with the plants of the prickly-pear, a cross on an eminence just below, and the gate toward Messina.
The face of the country is bare. Here beneath, where the main ravine of Taormina cuts into the earth between the two spurs of the city, are terraces of fruit trees and vegetables, and, wherever the naked rock permits, similar terraces are seen on the castle hill and every less steep slope, looking as if they would slide off. Almond and olive trees cling and climb all over the hillsides, but their boughs do not clothe the country. It is gray to look at, because of the masses of natural rock everywhere cropping out, and also from the substructure of the terraces, which, seen from below, present banks of the same gray stone. The only colour is given by the fan-like plants of the prickly-pear, whose
Three ways connect the town with the lower world. The modern carriage road runs from the Messina gate, and, quickly dropping behind the northern spur, winds in great serpentine loops between the Campo Santo below and old wayside tombs, Roman and Arabic, above, until it slowly opens on the southern outlook, and, after two miles of tortuous courses above the lovely coves, comes out on the main road along the coast. The second way starts from the other end of the town, the gate toward Etna, and goes down more precipitously along the outer flank of the southern spur, with Mola (here shifted to the other side of the castle hill) closing the deep ravine behind; and at last it empties into the torrent of Selina, in whose bed it goes on to Giardini. The third, or short way, leaps down the great hollow of the spurs, and yet keeps to a ridge between the folds of the ravine which it discloses on each side, with here and there a contadino cutting rock on the steep hillsides, or a sportsman wandering with his dog; or often at twilight, from some coign of vantage, you may see the goats trooping home across the distant sands by the sea. It debouches through great limestone quarries on the main road. There, seen from below, Taormina comes out—a cape, a town, and a hill. It is, in fact, a long, steep, broken ridge, shaped like a wedge; one end of the broad lace dips into the sea, the other, high on land, exposes swelling bluffs; its back bears the town, its point lifts the castle.
This is the Taorminian land. What a quietude hangs over it! How poor, how mean, how decayed the little town now looks amid all this silent beauty of enduring nature! It could not have been always so. This theatre at my feet, hewn in the living rock, flanked at each end by great piers of massive Roman masonry, and showing broken columns thick strewn in the midst of the broad orchestra, tells of ancient splendour and populousness. The narrow stage still stands, with nine columns in position in two groups; part are shattered half-way up, part are yet whole, and in the gap between the groups shines the lovely sea with the long southern coast, set in the beauty of these ruins as in a frame. Here Attic tragedies were once played, and Roman gladiators fought. The enclosure is large, much over a hundred yards in diameter. It held many thousands. Whence came the people to fill it? I noticed by the
I thought when I first saw the inaccessibility of this mountain-keep that I should have no walks except upon the carriage road; but I find there are paths innumerable. Leap the low walls where I will, I come on unsuspected ways broad enough for man and beast. They ran down the hillsides in all directions, and are ever dividing as they descend, like the branching streams of a waterfall. Some are rudely paved, and hemmed by low walls; others are mere footways on the natural rock and earth, often edging precipices, and opening short cross-cuts in the most unexpected places, not without a suggestion of peril, to make eye and foot alert, and to infuse a certain wild pleasure into the exercise. The multiplicity of these paths is a great boon to the lover of beauty, for here one charm of Italian landscape exists in perfection. Every few moments the scene rearranges itself in new combinations, as on the Riviera or at Amalfi, and makes an endless succession of lovely pictures. The infinite variety of these views is not to be imagined unless it has been witnessed; and besides the magic wrought by mere change of position, there is also a constant transformation of tone and colour from hour to hour, as the lights and shadows vary, and from day to day, with the unsettled weather.
Yet who could convey to black-and-white speech the sense of beauty which is the better part of my rambles? It is only to say that here I went up and down on the open hillsides, and there I followed the ridges or kept the cliff-line above the fair coves; that now I dropped down into the vales, under the shade of olive and lemon branches, and wound by the gushing streams through the orchards. In every excursion I make some discovery, and bring home some golden store for memory. Yesterday I found the olive slopes over Letojanni—beautiful old gnarled trees, such as I have never seen except where the
I have learned now that Taormina is famous for these marbles. Over thirty varieties were sent to the Vienna Exhibition, and they won the prize. I got this information from the keeper of the Communal Library, with whom I have made friends. He recalls to my memory the ship that Hieron of Syracuse gave to Ptolemy, wonderful for its size. It had twenty banks of rowers, three decks, and space to hold a library, a gymnasium, gardens with trees in them, stables, and baths, and towers for assault, and it was provided by Archimedes with many ingenious mechanical devices. The wood of sixty ordinary galleys was required for its construction. I describe it because its architect, Filea, was a Taorminian by birth, and esteemed in his day second only to Archimedes in his skill in mechanics; and in lining the baths of this huge galley he used these beautiful Taorminian marbles. My friend the librarian told me also, with his Sicilian burr, of the wine of Taormina, the Eugenaean, which was praised by Pliny, and used at the sacred feasts of Rome; but now, he said sadly, the grape had lost its flavour.
The sugar-cane, which nourished in later times, is also gone. But the mullet that is celebrated in Juvenal’s verse, and the lampreys that once went to better Alexandrian luxury, are still the spoil of the fishers, the shrimps are delicate to the palate, and the marbles will endure as long as this rock itself. The rock lasts, and the sea. The most ancient memory here is of them, for this is the shore of Charybdis. It is stated in Sallust and other Latin authors, as well as by writers throughout the Middle Ages, that all which was swallowed up in the whirlpool of the straits, after being carried beneath the sea for miles, was finally cast up on the beach beneath the hill of Taormina.
The rock and the sea were finely blended in one of my first discoveries in the land, and in consequence they have seemed, to my imagination, more closely united here than is common. On a stormy afternoon I had strolled down the main road, and was walking toward Letojanni. I came, after a little, to a great cliff that overhung the sea, with room for the road to pass beneath; and as I drew near I heard a strange sound, a low roaring, a deep-toned reverberation, that seemed not to come from the breaking waves, loud on the beach: it was a more solemn, a more piercing and continuous sound. It was from the rock itself. The grand music of the rolling sea beneath was taken up by the hollowed cliff, and reechoed with a mighty volume of sound from invisible sources. It seemed the voice of the rock, as if by long sympathy and neighbourhood in that lonely place the cliff were interpenetrated with the sea-music, and had become resonant of itself with those living harmonies heard only in the Psalmist’s song. It seemed a lyre for the centuries; and I thought over how many a conqueror, how many a race, that requiem had been lifted upon it as they passed to their death on this shore. I came back slowly in the twilight, and was roused from my reverie by the cold wind breathing on me as I reached the top of the hill, pure and keen and frosted like the bright December breezes of my own land. It was the kiss of Etna on my cheek.
Will you hear the legend of Taormina?—for in these days I dare not call it history. Noble and romantic it is, and age-long. I had not hoped to recover it; but my friend the librarian has brought me books in which patriotic Taorminians have written the story celebrating their dear city. I was touched by the simplicity with which he informed me that the town authorities had been unwilling to waste on a passing stranger these little paper-bound memorials of their city. “But,” he said, “I told them I had given you my word.” So I possess these books with a pleasant association of Sicilian honour, and I have read them with real interest. As I turned the pages I was reminded once more how impossible it is to know the past. The past survives in human institutions, in the temperament of races, and in the creations of ideal art; but only in the last is it immortal. Custom and law are for an age: race after race is pushed to the sea, and dies; only epic and saga and psalm have one date with man, one destiny with the breath of his lips, one silence at the last with them. Least of all does the past survive in the living memories of men. Here and there the earth cherishes a coin or a statue, the desert embalms some solitary city, a few leagues of rainless air preserve on rock and column the lost speech of Nile; so the mind of man holds in dark places, or lifts to living fame, no more than ruins and fragments of the life that was. I have been a diligent reader of books in my time; and here in an obscure corner of the Old-World I find a narrative studded with noble names, not undistinguished by stirring deeds, and, save for the great movements of history and a few shadowy figures, it is all fresh to my mind. I have looked on three thousand years of human life upon this hill; something of what they have yielded, if you will have patience with such a tract of time, I will set down.
My author is Monsignore Giovanni di Giovanni, a Taorminian, who flourished in the last century. He was a man of vast erudition, and there is in his pages the Old-World learning which delights me. He was born before the days of historic doubt. He tells a true story. To allege an authority is with him to prove a fact, and to cite all writers who repeat the original source is to render truth impregnable. Rarely does he show any symptom of the modern malady of incredulity. Scripta littera is reason enough, unless the fair fame of his city chances to be at stake. He was really learned, and I do wrong to seem to diminish his authority. He was a patient investigator of manuscripts, and did important service to Sicilian history. The simplicity I have alluded to affects mainly the ecclesiastical part of his narrative. A few statements also in regard to the prehistoric period might disturb the modern mind, but I own to finding in them the charm of lost things. In my mental provinces I welcome the cave-man, the flint-maker, the lake-dweller, and all their primitive tribes to the abode of science; but I feel them to be intruders in my antiquity. I was brought up on quite other chronologies, and I still like a history that begins with the flood. I will not, however, ask any one of more serious mind to go back with Monsignore and myself to the era of autochthonous Sicily, when the children of the Cyclops inhabited the land, and Demeter in her search for Proserpina wept on this hill, and Charybdis lay stretched out under these bluffs watching the sea. It is precise enough to say that Taormina began eighty years before the Trojan War. Very dimly, it must be acknowledged, the ancient Sicani are seen arriving and driven, like all doomed races, south and west out of the land, and in their place the Siculi flourish, and a Samnite colony voyages over the straits from Italy and joins them. Here for three centuries these sparse communities lived along these heights in fear of the sea pirates, and warred confusedly from their mainhold on Mount Taurus, or the Bull, so called because the two summits of the mountain from a distance resemble a bull’s horns; and they left no other memory of themselves.
Authentic history begins toward the end of the eighth century before our era. It is a bright burst; for then, down by yonder green-foaming rock, the young Greek mariners leaped on the strand. This was their first land-fall in Sicily; that rock, their Plymouth; and here, doubtless, the alarmed mountaineers stood in their fastness and watched the bearers of the world’s torch, and knew them not, bringing daybreak to the dark island for evermore, but fought, as barbarism will, against the light, and were at last made friends with it—a chance that does not always befall. Then quickly rose the lowland city of Naxos, and by the river sprang up the temple to Guiding Apollo, the earliest shrine of the Sicilian Greeks, where they came ever afterward
Other fortune awaited him a few years later when he came again, and our city (which, one knows not when, had been walled and fortified) stood its first historic siege. Dionysius arrived in the dead of winter. Snow and ice—I can hardly credit it—whitened and roughened these ravines, a new ally to the besieged; but the tyrant thought to betray them by a false security in such a season. On a bitter night, when clouds hooded the hilltop, and mists rolled low about its flanks, he climbed unobserved, with his forces, up these precipices, and gained two outer forts which gave footways to the walls; but the town roused at the sound of arms and the cries of the guards, and came down to the fray, and fought until six hundred of the foe fell dead, others with wounds surrendered, and the rest fled headlong, with Dionysius among them, hard pressed, and staining the snow with his blood as he went. This was the city’s first triumph.
Not only with brave deeds did Taormina begin, but, as a city should, with a great man. He was really great, this Andromachus. Do you not remember him out of Plutarch, and the noble words that have been his immortal memory among men? “This man was incomparably the best of all those that bore sway in Sicily at that time, governing his citizens according to law and justice, and openly professing an aversion and enmity to all tyrants.” Was the defeat of Dionysius the first of his youthful exploits, as some say? I cannot determine; but it is certain that he gathered the surviving exiles of Naxos, and gave them this plateau to dwell upon, and it was no longer called Mount Taurus, as had been
The day of Greece was gone; but those two clouds of war still hung on the horizon, north and south, with ever darker tempest. Instead of Syracuse and Messina, Carthage and the new name of Rome now sent them forth, and over this island they encountered. Our city, true to its ancient tradition, became Rome’s ever faithful ally, as you may read in the poem of Silius Italicus, and was dignified by treaty with the title of a confederate city; and of this fact Cicero reminded the judges when in that famous trial he thundered against Verres, the spoiler of our Sicilian province, and with the other cities defended this of ours, whose people had signalized their hatred of the Roman praetor by overthrowing his statue in the market-place and sparing the pedestal, as they said, to be an eternal memorial of his infamy. From the Roman age, however, I take but two episodes, for I find that to write this town’s history were to write the history of half the Mediterranean world. When the slaves rose in the Servile War, they intrenched themselves on this hill, and in their hands the city bore its siege by the Roman consul as hardily as was ever its custom. Cruel they were, no doubt, and vindictive. With horror Monsignore relates that they were so resolved not to yield that, starving, they ate their children, their wives, and one another; and he rejoices when they were at last betrayed and massacred, and this disgrace was wiped away. I hesitate. I cannot feel regret when those whom man has made brutal answer brutally to their oppressors. I have enough of the old Taorminian spirit to remember that the slaves, too, fought for liberty. I am sorry for those penned and dying men; their famine and slaughter in these walls were least horrible for their part in the catastrophe, if one looks through what they did to what they were, and remembers that the civilization they violated had stripped them of humanity. After the slave, I make room—for whom else than imperial Augustus? Off this shore he defeated Sextus Pompey, and he thought easily to subdue the town above when he summoned it. But Taormina was always a loyal little place, and it would not yield without a siege. Then Augustus, sitting down before it, prayed in our temple of Guiding Apollo
The Roman domination in its turn slowly moved to its fall; and where should the new age begin more fitly than in this city of beginnings? As of old the Greek torch first gleamed here, here first on Sicilian soil was the Cross planted. The gods of Olympus had many temples about the hill slopes, shrines of venerable antiquity even in those days; but if the monkish chronicles be credited, the new faith signalized its victory rather over three strange idolatries,—the worship of Falcone, of Lissone, and of Scamandro, a goddess. I refuse to believe that the citizens were accustomed to sacrifice three youths annually to Falcone; and as for the other two deities, little is known of them except that their destruction marked the advent of the young religion. Pancrazio was the name of him who was destined to be our patron saint through the coming centuries. He was born in Antioch, and when a child of three years, going with his father into Judea, he had seen the living Christ; now, grown into manhood, he was sent by St. Peter to spread the gospel in the isles of the sea. He disembarked on our beach, and forthwith threw Lissone’s image into the waves, and with it a holy dragon which was coiled about it like a garment and was fed with sacrifices; and he shattered with his cross the great idol Scamandro: and so Taormina became Christian, welcomed St. Peter on his way to Rome, and entered on the long new age. It was here, as elsewhere, the age of martyrs—Pancrazio first, and after him Geminiano, guided hither with his mother by an angel; and then San Nicone, who suffered with his one hundred and ninety-nine brother monks, and Sepero and Corneliano with their sixty; the age of monks—Luca, who fled from his bridal to live on Etna, with fasts, visions, and prophecies; and, later, simple-minded Daniele, the follower of St. Elia, of whom there is more to be recorded; the age of bishops, heard in Roman councils and the palace of Byzantium, of whom two only are of singular interest—Zaccaria, who was deprived, evidently the ablest in mind and policy of all the succession, once a great figure in the disputes of East and West; and Procopio, whom the Saracens slew, for the Crescent now followed the Cross.
The ancient war-cloud had again gathered out of Africa. The Saracens were in the land, and every city had fallen except Syracuse and Taormina. For sixty years the former held out, and our city for yet another thirty, the sole refuge of the Christians. Signs of the impending destruction were first seen by that St. Elia already mentioned, who wandered hither, and was displeased by the manners and morals of the citizens. I am sorry to record that Monsignore believed his report, for only here is there mention of such a matter. “The citizens,” says my author, “lived in luxury and pleasure not becoming to a state of war. They saw on all sides the fields devastated, houses burnt, wealth plundered, cities given to the flames, friends and companions killed or reduced to slavery, yet was there no vice, no sin, that did not rule unpunished among them.” Therefore the saint preached the woe to come, and, turning to the governor, Constantine Patrizio, in his place in the cathedral, he appealed to him to restrain his people. “Let the philosophy of the Gentiles,” he exclaimed, “be your shame. Epaminondas, that illustrious condottiere, strictly restrained himself from intemperance, from every lust, every allurement of pleasure. So, also, Scipio, the Roman leader, was valorous through the same continence as Epaminondas; and therefore they brought back signal victory, one over the Spartans, the other over the Carthaginians, and both erected immortal trophies.” He promised them mercy with repentance, but ended threateningly: “So far as in me lies I have clearly foretold to you all that has been divinely revealed to me. If you believe my words, like the penitents of Nineveh, you shall find mercy; if you despise my admonitions, bound and captive you shall be reduced to the worst slavery.” He prophesied yet more in private. He went to the house of a noble citizen, Crisione, who esteemed him as a father, and, lying in bed, he said to him: “Do you see, Crisione, the bed in which I now lie? In this same bed shall Ibrahim sleep, hungry for human blood, and the walls of the rooms shall see many of the most distinguished persons of this city all together put to the edge of the sword.” Then he left the house and went to the square in the centre of the city, and, standing there, he lifted his garments above the knee. Whereupon simple Daniele, who always followed him about, marvelling asked, “What does this thing mean, father?” The old man had his answer ready, “Now I see rivers of blood running, and these proud and magnificent buildings which you see exalted shall be destroyed even to the foundations by the Saracens.” And the monk fled from the doomed city, like a true prophet, and went overseas.
The danger was near, but perhaps not more felt than it must always have been where the prayer for defence against the Saracens had gone up for a hundred years in the cathedral. The governor, however, had taken pains to add to the strength of the city by strong fortifications upon Mola. Ahulabras came under the walls, but gave over the ever unsuccessful attempt to take the place, and went on to ruin Reggio beyond the straits. When it was told to his father Ibrahim that Tabermina, as the Saracens called it, had again been passed by, he cried out upon his son, “He is degenerate, degenerate! He took his nature from his mother and not from his father; for, had he been born from me, surely his sword would not have spared the Christians!” Therefore he recalled him to the home government, and came himself and sat down before the city. The garrison was small and insufficient, but, says my author, following old chronicles, “youths, old men, and children, without distinction of age, sex, or condition, fearing outrage and all that slavery would expose them to, all spontaneously offered themselves to fight in this holy war even to death: with such courage did love of country and religious zeal inspire the citizens.” Ibrahim had other weapons than the sword. He first corrupted the captains of the Greek fleet, who were afterward condemned for the treason at Byzantium. Then, all being ready, he promised some Ethiopians of his army, who are described as of a ferocious nature and harsh aspect, that he would give them the city for booty, besides other gifts, if they would devote themselves to the bold undertaking. The catastrophe deserves to be told in Monsignore’s own words:
“This people, accustomed to rapine, allured by the riches of the Taorminians and the promises of the king, with the aid of the traitors entered unexpectedly into the city, and with bloody swords and mighty cries and clamour assailed the citizens. Meanwhile King Ibrahim, having entered with all his army by a secret gate under the fortress of Mola, thence called the gate of the Saracens, raged against the citizens with such unexpected and cruel slaughter that not only neither the weakness of sex, nor tender years, nor reverence for hoary age, but not even the abundance of blood that like torrents flowed down the ways, touched to pity that ferocious heart. The soldiers, masters of the beautiful and wealthy city, divided among them the riches and goods of the citizens according as to each one the lot fell; they levelled to the ground the magnificent buildings, public or private, sacred or profane, all that were proudest for amplitude, construction, and ornament; and that not even the ruins of ancient splendour should remain, all that had survived they gave to the flames.”
This city, which the Saracens destroyed, is the one the Taorminians cherish as the culmination of their past. In the Greek, the Roman, and the early Christian ages it had flourished, as both its ruins and its history attest, and much must have yet survived from those times; while its station as the only Christian stronghold in the island would naturally have attracted wealth hither for safety. In this first sack of the Saracens, the ancient city must have perished, but the destruction could hardly have been so thorough as is represented, since some of the churches themselves, in their present state, show Byzantine workmanship.
There remains one bloody and characteristic episode to Ibrahim’s victory. The king, says the Arab chronicler, was pious and naturally compassionate, but on this occasion he forgot his usual mildness. In the midst of fire and blood he ordered the soldiers to search the caverns of the hills, and they dragged forth many prisoners, among whom was the Bishop Procopio. The king spoke to him gently and nobly, “Because you are wise and old, O Bishop, I exhort you with soft words to obey my advice, and to have foresight for your own safety and that of your companions; otherwise you shall suffer what your fellow-citizens have suffered from me. If you will embrace my laws, and deny the Christian religion, you shall have the second place after me, and shall be more dear to me than all the Agarenes.” The prelate only smiled. Then, full of wrath, the king said: “Do you smile while you are my prisoner? Know you not in whose presence you are?” “I smile truly,” came the answer, “because I see you are inspired by a demon who puts these words into your mouth.” Furious, the king called to his attendants, “Quick, break open his breast, tear out his heart, that we may see and understand the secrets of his mind.” While the command was being executed, Procopio reproved the king and comforted his companions. “The tyrant, swollen with rage, and grinding his teeth,” says the narrative, “barbarously offered him the torn-out heart that he might eat it.” Then he bade them strike off the bishop’s head (who, we are told, was already half dead), and also the heads of his companions, and to burn the bodies all together. And as St. Pancrazio of old had thrown the holy dragon into the sea, so now were his own ashes scattered to the winds of heaven; and Ibrahim, having accomplished his work, departed.
Some of the citizens, however, had survived, and among them Crisione, the host of St. Elia. He went to bear the tidings to the saint; and being now assured of the gift of prophecy possessed by the holy man, asked him to foretell his future. He met the customary fate of the curious in such things. “I foresee,” said the discomfortable saint, “that within a few days you will die.” And to make an end of St. Elia with Crisione, let me record here the simple Daniele’s last act of piety to his master. It is little that in such company he fought with devils, or that after he had written with much labour a beautiful Psalter, the old monk bade him fling it and worldly pride together over the cliff into a lake. Such episodes belonged to the times; and, after all, by making a circuit of six miles he found the Psalter miraculously unwet, and only his worldly pride remained at the lake’s bottom. But it was a mind singularly inventive of penance that led the dying saint to charge poor Daniele to bear the corpse on his back a long way over the mountains, merely because, he said, it would be a difficult thing to do. Other survivors of the sack of Taormina, more fortunate than Crisione, watched
The Crescent ruled undisturbed for a hundred years, until the landing of Count Roger, the Norman, the great hero of mediaeval Sicily, who recovered the island to the Christian faith. Taormina, true to its tradition, was long in falling; but after eighteen years of desultory warfare Count Roger sat down before it with determination. He surrounded it with a circumvallation of twenty-two fortresses connected by ramparts and bridges, and cut off all access by land or sea. Each day he inspected the lines; and the enemy, having noticed this habit, laid an ambush for him in some young myrtles where the path he followed had a very narrow passage over the precipices. They rushed out on him, and, as he was unarmed and alone, would have killed him, had not their cries attracted one Evandro, a Breton, who, coming, and seeing his chief’s peril, threw himself between, and died in his place. Count Roger was not forgetful of this noble action. He recovered the body, held great funeral services, and gave gifts to the soldiers and the church. The story appealed so to the old chronicler Malaterra, that he told it in both prose and verse. After seven months the city surrendered, and the iron cross was again set up on the rocky eminence by the gate. It is a sign of the ruin which had befallen that the city now lost its bishopric and was ecclesiastically annexed to another see.
Taormina, compared with what it had been, was now a place of the desert; but not the less for that did the tide of war rage round it for five hundred years to come. It was like a rock of the sea over which conflicting billows break eternally. I will not narrate the feudal story of internecine violence, nor how amidst it all every religious order set up monasteries upon the beautiful hillsides, of whose life little is now left but the piles of books in old bindings over which my friend the librarian keeps guard, mourning the neglect in which they are left. Among both the nobles and the fathers were some examples
I shut my books; but to my eyes the rock is scriptured now. What a leaf it is from the world-history of man upon the planet! Every race has splashed it with blood; every faith has cried from it to heaven. It is only a hill-station in the realm of empire; but in the records of such a city, lying somewhat aside and out of common vision, the course of human fate may be more simply impressive than in the story of world-cities. Athens, Rome, Constantinople, London, Paris, are great centres of history; but in them the mind is confused by the multiplicity and awed by the majesty of events. Here on this bare rock there is no thronging of illustrious names, and little of that glory that conceals imperial crime, the massacre of armies, and the people’s woe. Again I use the figure: it is like a rock of the sea, set here in the midst of the Mediterranean world, washed by all the tides of history, beat on by every pitiless storm of the passion of man for blood. The torch of Greece, the light of the Cross, the streaming portent of the Crescent, have shone from it, each in its time; all governments, from Greek democracy to Bourbon tyranny, have ruled it in turn; Roman law and feudal custom had it in charge, each a long age: yet civilization in all its historic forms has never here done more, seemingly, than alleviate at moments the hard human lot. And what has been the end? Go down into the streets; go out into the villages; go into the country-side. The men will hardly look up from their burdens, the women will seldom stop to ask alms, but you will see a degradation of the
The rain-cloud is gone. The days are bright, warm, and clear, and every hour tempts me forth to wander about the hills. It is not spring, but the hesitancy that holds before the season changes; yet each day there are new flowers—not our delicate wood flowers, but larger and coarser of fibre, and it adds a charm to them that I do not know their names. The trees are budding, and here and there, like a wave breaking into foam on a windless sea, an almond has burst into blossom, white and solitary on the gray slopes, and over all the orchards there is the faint suggestion of pale pink, felt more than seen, so vague is it—but it is there. I go wandering by cliff or sea-shore, by rocky beds of running water, under dark-browed caverns, and on high crags; now on our cape, among the majestic rocks, I watch the swaying of the smooth deep-violet waters below, changing into indigo as they lap the rough clefts, or I loiter on the beach to see the fishers about their boats, weather-worn mariners, and youths in the fair strength of manly beauty, like athletes of the old world: and always I bring back something for memory, something unforeseen.
I have ever found this uncertainty a rare pleasure of travel. It is blessed not to know what the gods will give. I remember once in other days I left the beach of Amalfi to row away to the isles of the Sirens, farther down the coast. It was a beautiful, blowing, wave-wild morning, and I strained my sight, as every headland of the high cliff-coast was rounded, to catch the first glimpse of the low isles; and there came by a country boat-load of the peasants, and in the bows, as it neared and passed, I saw a dark, black-haired boy, bare breast, and dreaming eyes, motionless save for the dipping prow—a figure out of old Italian pictures, some young St. John, inexpressibly beautiful. I have forgotten how the isles of the Sirens looked, but that boy’s face I shall never forget. It is such moments that give the Italy of the imagination its charm. Here, too, I have similar experiences. A day or two ago, when the bright weather began, I was threading the rough edge of a broken path under the hill, and clinging to the rock with my hand. Suddenly a figure rose just before me, where the land made out a little farther on a point of the crag, so strange that I was startled; but straightway I knew the goatherd, the curling locks, the olive face, the garments of goatskin and leather on his limbs. It came on me like a flash—eccola the country of Theocritus!
I have never seen it set down among the advantages of travel that one learns to understand the poets better. To see courts and governments, manners and customs, works of architecture, statues and pictures and ruins—this, since modern travel began, is to make the grand tour; but though I have diligently sought such obvious and common aims, and had my reward, I think no gain so great as that I never thought of, the light which travel sheds upon the poets; unless, indeed, I should except that stronger hold on the reality of the ideal creations of the imagination which comes from familiar life with pictures, and statues, and kindred physical renderings of art. This latter advantage must necessarily be more narrowly availed of by men, since it implies a certain peculiar temperament; but poetry, in its less exalted forms, is open and common to all who are not immersed in the materialism of their own lives, and whatever helps to unlock the poetic treasures of other lands for our possession may be an important part of life. I think none can fully taste the sweetness, or behold the beauty, of English song even, until he has wandered in the lanes and fields of the mother-country; and in the case of foreign, and especially of the ancient, poets, so much of whose accepted and assumed world of fact has perished, the loss is very great. I had trodden many an Italian hillside before I noticed how subtly Dante’s landscape had become realized in my mind as a part of nature. I own to believing that Virgil’s storms never blew on the sea until once, near Salerno, as I rode back from Paestum, there came a storm over the wide gulf that held my eyes enchanted—such masses of ragged, full clouds, such darkness in their broad bosoms broken with rapid flame, and a change beneath so swift, such anger on the sea, such an indescribable and awful gleaming hue, not purple, nor green, nor red, but a commingling of all these—a revelation of the wrath of colour! The waves were wild with the fallen tempest; quick and heavy the surf came thundering on the sands; the light went out as if it were extinguished, and the dark rain came down; and I said, “’Tis one of Virgil’s storms.” Such a one you will find also in Theocritus, where he hymns the children of Leda, succourers of the ships that, “defying the stars that set and rise in heaven, have encountered the perilous breath of storms. The winds raise huge billows about their stern, yea, or from the prow, or even as each wind wills, and cast them into the hold of the ship, and shatter both bulwarks, while with the sail limits nil the gear confused and broken, and the wide sea rings, being lashed by the gusts and by showers of iron hail.”
I must leave these older memories, to tell, so far as it is possible in words, of that land of the idyl which of all enchanted retreats of the imagination is the hardest for him without the secret to enter. Yet here I find it all about me in the places where the poets first unveiled it. Once before I had a sight of it, as all over Italy it glimpses at times from the hills and the campagna. Descending under the high peak of Capri, I heard a flute, and turned and saw on the neighbouring slopes the shepherd-boy leading his flock, the music at his lips. Then the centuries rolled together like a scroll, and I heard the world’s morning notes. That was a single moment; but here, day-long is the idyl world. I read the old verses over, and in my walks the song keeps breaking in. The idyls are full of streams and fountains, just such as I meet with wherever I turn, and the water counts in the landscape as in the poems. It is always tumbling over rocks in cascades, brawling with rounded forms among the stones of the shallow brooks, bubbling in fountains, or dripping from the cliff, or shining like silver in the plain. The run that comes down from Mola, the torrent under the olive and lemon branches toward Letojanni, the more open course in the ravine of the mill down by Giardini, the cimeter of the far-seen Alcantara lying on the campagna in the meadows, and that further fiume freddo, the cold stream,—“chill water that for me deep-wooded Etna sends down from the white snow, a draught divine,”—each of these seems inhabited by a genius of its own, so that it does not resemble its neighbours. But all alike murmur of ancient song, and bring it near, and make it real.
On the beach one feels most keenly the actuality of much of the idyls, and finds the continuousness of the human life that enters into them. No idyl appeals so directly to modern feeling, I suspect, as does that of the two fishermen and the dream of the golden fish. Go down to the shore; you will find the old men still at their toil, the same implements, the same poverty, the same sentiment for the heart. Often as I look at them I recall the old words, while the goats hang their heads over the scant herbage, and the blue sea breaks lazily and heavily on the sands.
“Two fishers, on a time, two old men, together lay and slept; they had strewn the dry sea-moss for a bed in their wattled cabin, and there lay against the leafy wall. Beside them wore strewn the instruments of their toilsome bands, the fishing-creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the sails bedraggled with sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster-pots woven of rushes, the seines, two oars, and an old cobble upon props. Beneath their heads was a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailors’ caps. Here was all their toil, here all their wealth. The threshold had never a door nor a watch-dog. All things, all, to them seemed superfluity, for Poverty was their sentinel; they had no neighbour by them, but ever against their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea.”
This is what the eye beholds; and I dare not say that the idyl is touched more with the melancholy of human fate for us than for the poet. Poverty such as this, so absolute, I see everywhere at every hour. It is a terrible sight. It is the physical hunger of the soul in wan limbs and hand, and the fixed gaze of the unhoping eyes—despair made flesh. How long has it suffered here? and was it so when Theocritus saw his fishers and gave them a place in the country of his idyls? He spreads before us the hills and fountains, and fills the scene-with shepherds, and maidens, and laughing loves, and among the rest are these two poor old men. The shadow of the world’s poverty falls on this paradise now as then. With the rock and sea it, too, endures.
A few traces of the old myths also survive on the landscape. Not far from here, down the coast, the rocks that the Cyclops threw after the fleeing mariners are still to be seen near the shore above which he piped to Galatea. Some day I mean to take a boat and see them. But now I let the Cyclops idyls go, and with them Adonis of Egypt, and Ptolemy, and the prattling women, and the praises of Hiero, and the deeds of Herakles; these all belong to the cities of the pastoral, to its civilization and art in more conscious forms; but my heart stays in the campagna, where are the song-contests, the amorous praise of maidens, the boyish boasting, the young, sweet, graceful loves. Fain would I recover the breath of that springtime; but while from my foot “every stone upon the way spins singing,” make what speed I can, I come not to the harvest-feast. Bees go booming among the blossoms, and the flocks crop their pasture, and night falls with Hesperus; but fruitless on my lips, as at some shrine whence the god is gone, is Bion’s prayer: “Hesperus, golden lamp of the lovely daughter of the foam—dear Hesperus, sacred jewel of the deep blue night, dimmer as much than the moon as thou art among the stars preeminent, hail, friend!” Dead now is that ritual. Now more silent than ever is the country-side, missing Daphnis, the flower of all those who sing when the heart is young. Sweet was his flute’s first triumph over Menaleas: “Then was the boy glad, and leaped high, and clapped his hands over his victory, as a young fawn leaps about his mother”; but sweeter was the unwon victory when he strove with Damoetas: “Then Damoetas kissed Daphnis, as he ended his song, and he gave Daphnis a pipe, and Daphnis gave him a beautiful flute. Damoetas fluted, and Daphnis piped; the herdsmen, and anon the calves, were dancing in the soft green grass. Neither won the victory, but both were invincible.” And him, too, I miss who loved his friend, and wished that they twain might “become a song in the ears of all men unborn,” even for their love’s sake; and prayed, “Would, O Father Cronides, and would, ye ageless immortals, that this might be, and that when two generations have sped, one might bring these tidings to me by Acheron, the irremeable
And here I shut in my pages the one laurel leaf that Taormina bore. She, too, in her centuries has had her poet. Perhaps none who will see these words ever gave a thought to the name and fame of Cornelius Severus. Few of his works remain, and little is known of his life. He is said to have been the friend of Pollio, and to have been present in the Sicilian war between Augustus and Sextus Pompey. He wrote the first book of an epic poem on that subject, so excellent that it has been thought that, had the entire work been continued at the same level, he would have held the second place among the Latin epic poets. He wrote also heroic songs, of which fragments survive, one of which is an elegy upon Cicero, which Seneca quotes, saying of him, “No one out of so many talented men deplored the death of Cicero better than Cornelius Severus.” Some dialogues in verse also seem to have been written by him. These fragments may not he easily obtained. But take down your Virgil; and, if it be like this of mine which I brought from Rome, you will find at the very end, last of the shorter pieces ascribed to the poet, one of the length of a book of the “Georgics,” called “Etna.” This is the work of Cornelius Severus. An early death took from him the perfection of his genius and the hope of fame; but happy was the fortune of him who wrote so well that for centuries his lines were thought not unworthy of Virgil, whose name still shields this Taorminian verse from oblivion.
It is my last day at Taormina. I have seen the sunrise from my old station by the Greek temple, and watched the throng of cattle and men gathered on the distant beach of Letojanni and darkening the broad bed of the dry torrent that there makes down to the sea, and I wished I were among them, for it is their annual fair; and still I dwell on every feature of the landscape that familiarity has made more beautiful. The afternoon I have dedicated to a walk to Mola. It is a pleasant, easy climb, with the black ancient wall of the city on the left, where it goes up the face of the castle-rock, and on the right the deep ravine, closed by Monte Venere in the west. All is very quiet; a silent, silent country! There are few birds or none, and indeed I have heard no bird-song since I have been here. Opposite, on the other side of the wall of the ravine, are some cows hanging in strange fashion to the cliff, where it seems goats could hardly cling; but the unwieldy, awkward creatures move with sure feet, and seem wholly at home, pasturing on the bare precipice. I cannot hear the torrent, now a narrow stream, deep below me, but I see the women of Mola washing by the old fountain which is its source. There is no other sign of human life. The fresh spring flowers, large and coarse, but bright-coloured, are all I have of company, and the sky is blue and the air like crystal. So I go up, ever up, and at last am by the gate of Mola, and enter the stony-hearted town. A place more dreary, desolate to the eye, is seldom seen. There are only low, mean houses of gray stone, and the paved ways. If you can fancy a prison turned inside out like a glove, with all its interior stone exposed to the sunlight, which yet seems sunlight in a prison, and silence over all—that is Mola. The ruins of the fortress are near the gate on the highest point of the crag. Within is a barren spot—a cistern, old foundations, and some broken walls. Look over the battlement westward, and you will see a precipice that one thinks only birds could assail; and, observing how isolated is the crag on all sides, you will understand what an inaccessible fastness this was, and cannot be surprised at its record of defence.
Perhaps here was the oldest dwelling-place of man upon the hill, and it was the securest retreat. Monsignore, indeed, believes that Ham, the son of Noah, who drove Japhet out of Sicily, was the first builder; but I do not doubt its antiquity was very great, and it seems likely that this was the original Siculian stronghold before the coming of the Greeks, and the building of the lower city of Taormina. The ruins that exist are part of the fortress made by that governor who lost the city to the Saracens, to defend it against them on this side; and here it stood for nigh a thousand years, like the citadel itself, an impregnable hold of war. It seldom yielded, and always by treachery or mutiny; for more than once, when Taormina was sacked, its citadel and Mola remained untaken and unconquerable on their extreme heights. I shall not tell its story; but one brave man once commanded here, and his name shall be its fame now, and my last tale of the Taorminian past.
He was Count Matteo, a nobleman of the days when the Messenians revolted against the chancellor of Queen Margaret. He was placed over this castle; and when a certain Count Riccardo was discovered in a conspiracy to murder the chancellor, and was taken captive, he was given into Matteo’s charge, and imprisoned here. The Messenians came and surprised the lower city of Taormina, but they could not gain Mola nor persuade Matteo to yield Riccardo up to them. So they thought to overcome his fidelity cruelly. They took his wife and children, who were at Messina, threw them into a dungeon, and condemned them to death. Then they sent Matteo’s brother-in-law to treat with him. But when the count knew the reason of the visit he said: “It seems to me that you little value the zeal of an honest man who, loyal to his office, does not wish, neither knows how, to break his sworn faith. My wife and children would look on me with scornful eyes should I be renegade; for shame is not the reward that sweetens life, but burdens it. If the Messenians stain themselves with innocent blood, I shall weep for the death of my wife and sons, but the heart of an honest citizen will have no remorse.” Then he was silent. But treachery could do what such threats failed to accomplish. One Gavaretto was found, who unlocked the prison, and Riccardo was already escaping when Matteo, roused at a slight noise, came, sword in hand, and would have slain him; but the traitor behind, “to save his wages,” struck Matteo in the body, and the faithful count fell dead in his blood. I thought of this story, standing there, and nothing else in the castle’s filled with bloom; then the infinite beauty, slowly fading, withdrew the scene, and sweetly it parted from my eyes.
Yet once more I step out upon the terrace into the night. I hear the long roar of the breakers; I see the flickering fishers’ lights, and Etna pale under the stars. The place is full of ghosts. In the darkness I seem to hear vaguely arising, half sense, half thought, the murmur of many tongues that have perished here, Sicanian and Siculian and the lost Oscan, Greek and Latin and the hoarse jargon of barbaric slaves, Byzantine and Arabic confused with strange African dialects, Norman and Sicilian, French and Spanish, mingling, blending, changing, the sharp battle-cry of a thousand assaults rising from the low ravines, the death-cry of twenty bloody massacres within these walls, ringing on the hard rock and falling to silence only to rise more full with fiercer pain—century after century of the battle-wrath and the battle-woe. My fancy shapes the air till I see over the darkly lifted, castle-rock the triple crossing swords of Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman in the age-long duel, and as these fade, the springing brands of Byzantine, Arab, and Norman, and yet again the heavy blades of France, Spain, and Sicily; and ever, like rain or snow, falls the bloody dew on this lone hill-wide.
The stars were paling over Etna, white and ghostly, as I came out to depart. In the dark street I met a woman with a young boy clinging to her side. Her black hair fell down over her shoulders, and her bosom was scantily clothed by the poor garment that fell to her ankles and her feet. She was still young, and from her dark, sad face her eyes met mine with that fixed look of the hopeless poor, now grown familiar; the child, half naked, gazed up at me as he held his mother’s hand. What brought her there at that hour, alone with her child? She seemed the epitome of the human life I was leaving behind, come forth to bid farewell; and she passed on under the shadows of the dawn. The last star faded as I went down the hollow between the spurs. Etna gleamed white and vast over the shoulder of the ravine, and, as I dipped down, was gone.
There was an old cry, Return to Nature! Let us rather return unto the soul. Nature is great, and her science marvellous; but it is man who knows it. In what he knows it is partial and subsidiary. Know thyself, was the first command of reason; and wisdom was an ancient thing when the sweet influences of the Pleiades and the path of Arcturus with his sons were young in human thought. These late conquests of the mind in the material infinities of the universe, its exploring of stellar space, its exhuming of secular time, its harnessing of invisible forces, this new mortal knowledge, its sudden burst, its brilliancy and amplitude of achievement, thought winnowing the world as with a fan; the vivid spectacle of vast and beneficent changes wrought by this means in human welfare, the sense of the increase of man’s power springing from unsuspected and illimitable resources,—all this has made us forgetful of truth that is the oldest heirloom of the race. In the balances of thought the soul of man outweighs the mass that gravitation measures. Man only is of prime interest to men; and man as a spirit, a creature but made in the likeness of something divine. The lapse of aeons touches
The defenders of the soul inherit an old cause that links them together in a long descent; but the battle is always to a present age. Continually something is becoming superfluous, inapplicable, or wanting in the work of the past. Victory itself makes arms useless, and consigns them to dark closets. New times, new weapons, is the history of all warfare. The doubt of the validity of the ideal, never absent from any intellectual period, is active on all sides, and in more than one quarter passes into denial. Literature and the other arts of expression suffer throughout the world. To that point is it come that those of the old stock who believe that the imagination
Di quibus imperium hoc steterat;
but no; for our opponents are worse off than those of whom it was said that though one rose from the dead they would not believe,—Plato, being dead, yet speaks, Shakspere treads our boards, and (why should I hesitate?) Tennyson yet breathes among us though already immortal. That which convinced the master minds of antiquity and many in later ages is still convincing, if it be attended to; the old tradition is yet unbroken; therefore, because I was bred in this faith, I will try to set forth anew in the phrases of our time the eternal ground of reason on which idealism rests.
The specific question concerns literature and its method, but its import is not mainly literary. Life is the matter of literature; and thence it comes that all leading inquiries to which literature gives rise probe for their premises to the roots of our being and expand in their issues to the unknown limits of human fate. It is an error to think of idealism as a thing remote, fantastic, and unsubstantial. It enters intimately into the lives of all men, however humble and unlearned, if they live at all except in their bodies. What is here proposed is neither speculative, technical, nor abstruse; it is practical in matter, universal in interest, and touches upon those things which men most should heed. I fear rather to incur the reproach of uttering truisms than paradoxes. But he does ill who is scornful of the trite. To be learned in commonplaces is no mean education. They make up the great body of the people’s knowledge. They are the living words upon the lips of men from generation to generation; the real winged words; the matter of the unceasing reiteration of families, schools, pulpits, libraries; the tradition of mankind. Proverb, text, homily,—happy the youth whose purse is stored with these broad pieces, current, in every country and for every good, like fairy gifts of which the occasion only when it arises shows the use. It is with truth as with beauty,—familiarity endears and makes it more precious. What is common is for that very reason in danger of neglect, and from it often flashes that divine surprise which most enkindles the soul. Why must Prometheus bring fire from heaven to savage man? Did it not sleep in the flint at his feet? How often, at the master stroke of life, has some text of Holy Scripture, which lay in the mind from childhood almost like the debris of memory, illuminated the remorseful darkness of the mind, or interpreted the sweetness of God’s
Can there be any surprise when I say that the method of idealism is that of all thought? that in its intellectual process the art of the poet, so far from being a sort of incantation, is the same as belongs to the logician, the chemist, the statesman? It is no more than to say that in creating literature the mind acts; the action of the mind is thought; and there are no more two ways of thinking than there are two kinds of gravitation. Experience is the matter of all knowledge. It is given to the mind as a complex of particular facts, a series, ever continuing, of impressions outward and inward. It is stored in the memory, and were memory the only mental faculty, no other knowledge than this of particular facts in their temporal sequence could be acquired; the sole method of obtaining knowledge would be by observation. All literature would then be merely annals of the contents of successive moments in their order. Reason, however, intervenes. Its process is well known. In every object of perception, as it exists in the physical world and is given by sensation to our consciousness, there is both in itself and in its relations a likeness to other objects and relations, and this likeness the mind takes notice of; it thus analyzes the complex of experience, discerns the common element, and by this means classifies particular facts, thereby condensing them into mental conceptions,— abstract ideas, formulas, laws. The mind arrives at these in the course of its normal operation. As soon as we think at all, we speak of white and black, of bird and beast, of distance and size,—of uniformities in the behaviour of nature, or laws; by such classification of qualities, objects, and various relations, not merely in the sensuous but in every sphere of our consciousness, the mind simplifies its experience, compacts its knowledge, and economizes its energies. To this work it brings, also, the method of experiment. It then interferes arbitrarily with the natural occurrence of facts, and brings that to pass which otherwise would not have been; and this method it uses to investigate, to illustrate what was previously known, and to confirm what was surmised. Its end, whether through observation or experiment, is to reach general truth as opposed to matter-of-fact, universals more or less embracing as opposed to particulars, the units of thought as opposed to the units of phenomena. The body of these constitutes rational knowledge.
Nature then becomes known, not as a series of impressions on the retina of sense merely, but as a system seized by the eye of reason; for the senses show man the aspect worn by the world as it is at the moment, but reason opens to him the order obtaining in the world as it must be at every moment; and the instrument by which man rises from the phenomenal plane of experience to the necessary sphere of truth is the generalizing faculty whose operation has just been described. The office of the reason in the exercise of this faculty is to find organic form in that experience which memory preserves in the mass,—to penetrate, that is, to that mould of necessity in the world which phenomena, when they arise, must put on. The species once perceived, the mind no longer cares for the individual; the law once known, the mind no longer cares for the facts; for in these universals all particular instances, past, present, and to come, are contained in their significance. All sciences are advanced in proportion as they have thus organized their appropriate matter in abstract conceptions and laws, and are backward in proportion as there remains much in their provinces not yet so coordinated and systematized; and in their hierarchy, from astronomical physics downward, each takes rank according to the nature of the universals it deals with, as these are more or less embracing.
The matter of literature—that part of total experience which it deals with—is life; and, to confine attention to imaginative literature where alone the question of idealism arises, the matter with which imaginative literature deals is the inward and spiritual order in man’s breast as distinguished from the outward and physical order with which science deals. The reason as here exercised organizes man’s experience in this great tract of emotion, will, and meditation, and so possesses man of true knowledge of himself, just as in the realm of science it possesses him of true knowledge of the physical world, or, in psychology and metaphysics, of the constitution and processes of the mind itself. Such knowledge is, without need of argument, of the highest consequence to mankind. It exceeds, indeed, in dignity and value all other knowledge; for to penetrate this inward or spiritual order, to grasp it with the mind and conform to it with the will, is not, as is the case with every other sort of knowledge, the special and partial effort of selected minds, but the daily business of all men in their lives. The method of the mind here is and must be the same with that by which it accomplishes its work elsewhere, its only method. Here, too, its concern is with the universal; its end is to know life—the life with which literature deals—not empirically in its facts, but scientifically in its necessary order, not phenomenally in the senses but rationally in the mind, not without relation in its mere procession but organically in its laws; and its instrument here, as through the whole gamut of the physical sciences and of philosophy itself, is the generalizing faculty.
One difference there is between scientific and imaginative truth,—a difference in the mode of statement. Science and also philosophy formulate truth and end in the formula; literature, as the saying is, clothes truth in a tale. Imagination is brought in, and by its aid the mind projects a world of its own, whose principle of being is that it reembodies general or abstract truth and presents it concretely to the eye of the mind, and in some arts gives it physical form. So, to draw an example from science itself, when Leverrier projected in imagination the planet Uranus, he incarnated in matter a whole group of universal qualities and relations, all that go to make up a world, and in so doing he created as the poet creates; there was as much of truth, too, in his imagined world before he found the actual planet as there was of reality in the planet itself after it swam into his ken. This creation of the concrete world of art is the joint act of the imagination and the reason working in unison; and hence the faculty to which this act is ascribed is sometimes called the creative reason, or shaping power of the mind, in distinction from the scientific intellect which merely knows. The term is intended to convey at once the double phase, under one aspect of which the reason controls imagination, and under the other aspect the imagination formulates the reason; it is meant to free the idea, on the one hand, from that suggestion of abstraction implied by the reason, and to disembarrass it, on the other, of any connection with the irrational fancy; for the world of art so conceived is necessarily both concrete, correspondent to the realities of experience, and truthful, subject to the laws of the universe; it cannot contain the impossible, it cannot amalgamate the actual with the unreal, it cannot in any way lie and retain its own nature. The use of this rational imagination is not confined to the world of art. It is only by its aid that we build up the horizons of our earthly life and fill them with objects and events beyond the reach of our senses. To it we are indebted for our knowledge of the greater part of others’ lives, for our idea of the earth’s surface and the doings of foreign nations, of all past history and its scene, and the events of primaeval nature which were even before man was. So far as we realize the world at all beyond the limit of our private experience of it, we do so by the power of the imagination acting on the lines of reason. It fills space and time for us through all their compass. Nor is it less operative in the practical pursuits of men. The scientist lights his way with it; the statesman forecasts reform by it, building in thought the state which he afterward realizes in fact; the entire future lives to us—and it is the most important part of life—only by its incantation. The poet acts no otherwise in employing it than the inventor and the speculator even, save that he uses it for the ends of reason instead of
Human life, as represented in literature, consists of two main branches, character and action. Of these, character, which is the realm of personality, is generalized by means of type, which is ideal character; action, which is the realm of experience, by plot, which is ideal action. It is convenient to examine the nature of these separately. A type, the example of a class, contains the characteristic qualities which make an individual one of that class; it does not differ in this elementary form from the bare idea of the species. The traits of a tree, for instance, exist in every actual tree, however stunted or imperfect; and in the type which condenses into itself what is common in all specimens of the class, these traits only exist; they constitute the type. Comic types, in literature, are often simple abstractions of some single human quality, and hence easily afford illustrations. The braggart, the miser, the hypocrite, contain that one trait which is common to the class; and in their portrayal this characteristic only is shown. In proportion as the traits are many in any character, the type becomes complex. In simple types attention is directed to some one vice, passion, or virtue, capable of absorbing a human life in to itself. This is the method of Jonson, and, in tragedy, of Marlowe. As human energy displays itself more variously in a life, in complex types, the mind contemplates human nature in a more catholic way, with a less exclusive identification of character with specific trait, a more free conception of personality as only partially exhibited; thus, in becoming complex, types gather breadth and depth, and share more in the mystery of humanity as something incompletely known to us at the best. Such are the characters of Shakspere.
The manner in which types are arrived at and made recognizable in other arts opens the subject more fully and throws light upon their nature. The sculptor observes in a group of athletes that certain physical habits result in certain moulds of the body; and taking such characteristics as are common to all of one class, and neglecting such as are peculiar to individuals, he carves a statue. So permanent are the physical facts he relies upon that, centuries
These several sorts of types make an ascending series from the predominantly physical to the predominantly spiritual; but, from the present point of view, the arts which embody their creations in a material form should not be opposed to literature which employs the least interrelation of sensation, as if the former had a physical and the last a spiritual content. All types have one common element, they express personality; they have for the mind a spiritual meaning, what they contain of human character; they differ here only in fulness of representation. The most purely physical types imply spiritual qualities, choice, will, command,—all the life which was a condition precedent to the bodily perfection that was its flower; and, though the eye rests on the beautiful form, it may discern through it the human soul of the athlete as in life; and, moreover, the figure may be represented in some significant act, or mood even, but this last is rare. The more plainly spiritual types, physically rendered, are most often shown in some such mood or act expressive in itself of the soul whose habit lives in the form it has moulded. It is not that the plastic and pictorial arts cannot spiritualize the stone and the canvas as well as humanize it bodily; equally with the poetic art they reveal character, but within narrower bounds. The limitation of these arts in embodying personality is one of scope, not of intention; and though it springs out of their use of material forms, it does so in a peculiar way. It is not the employment of a physical medium of communication that differentiates them, for a physical medium of some sort is the only means of exchange between mind and mind; neither is it the employment of a physical basis, for all art, being concrete, rests on a physical basis—the world of imagination is exhaled from things that are. The physical basis of a drama, for instance, is manifest when it is enacted on the stage; but it is substantially the same whether beheld in thought or ocularly.
The fact is that the limitation of sculpture and painting and their kindred arts results from their use of the physical basis of life only partially, and not as a whole as literature uses it. They set forth their works in the single element of space; they exclude the changes that take place in time. The types they show are arrested, each in its moment; or if a story is told by a series of representations, it is a succession of such moments of arrested life. The method is that of the camera; what is given is a fixed state. But literature renders life in movement; it revolves life through its moments as rapidly as on the retina of sense; its method is that of the kinetoscope. It holds under its command change, growth, the entire energy of life in action; it can chase mood with mood, link act to act. It alone can speak the word, which is the most powerful instrument of man. Hence the types it shows by presenting moods, words, and acts with the least obstruction of matter and the slightest obligation to the active senses, are the most complete. They have broken the bonds of the flesh, of moment and place. They exhibit themselves in actions; they speak, and in dialogue and soliloquy set forth their states of mind lying before, or accompanying, or following their actions, thus interpreting these more fully. Action by itself reveals character; speech illumines it, and casts upon the action also a forward and a backward light. The lapse of time, binding all together, adds the continuous life of the soul. This large compass, which is the greatest reached by any art, rests on the wider command and more flexible control which literature exercises over that physical basis which is the common foundation of all the arts. Hence it abounds in complex types, just as other arts present simple types with more frequency. All types, however, in so far as they appeal to the mind and interpret the inward world, under which aspect alone they are now considered, have their physical nature, materially or imaginatively, even though it be solely visible beauty, in order to express personality.
The type, in the usage of literature, must be further distinguished from the bare idea of the species as it has thus far been defined. It is more than this. It is not only an example; it is an example in a high state of development, if not perfect. The best possible tree, for instance, does not exist in nature, owing to a confused environment which does not permit its formation. In literature a type is made a high type either by intensity, if it be simple, or by richness of nature, if it be complex. Miserliness, braggadocio, hypocrisy, in their extremes, are the characters of comedy; a rich nature, such as Hamlet, showing variety of faculty and depth of experience, is the hero of more profound drama. This truth, the necessity of high development in the type, underlay the old canon that the characters of tragedy should be of lofty rank, great place, and
It is true that the type may seem defective in the point that it is at best but a fragment of humanity, an abstraction or a combination of abstracted qualities. There was never such an athlete as our Greek sculptor’s, never a pagan god nor Virgin Mother, nor a hero equal to Homer’s thought, so beautiful, brave, and courteous, so terrible to his foe, so loving to his friend. And yet is it not thus that life is known to us actually? does not this typical rendering of character fall in with the natural habit of life? What man, what friend, is known to us except by fragments of his spirit? Only one life, our own, is known to us as a continuous existence. Just as when we see an orange, we supply the further side and think of it as round, so with men we supply from ourselves the unseen side that makes the man completely and continuously human. Moreover, it is a matter of common experience that men, we ourselves, may live only in one part, and the best, of our nature at one moment, and yet for the moment be absorbed in that activity both in consciousness and energy; for that moment we are only living so; now, if a character were shown to us only in the moments in which he was living so, at his best and in his characteristic state as the soldier, the priest, the lover, then the ideal abstraction of literature
The type must make this human appeal under all circumstances. Its whole meaning and virtue lie in what it contains of our common humanity, in the clearness and brilliancy with which it interprets the man in us, in the force with which it identifies us with human nature. If it is separated from us by a too high royalty or a too base villany, it loses intelligibility, it forfeits sympathy, it becomes more and more an object of simple curiosity, and removes into the region of the unknown. Even if the type passes into the supernatural, into fairyland or the angelic or demoniac world, it must not leave humanity behind. These spheres are in fact fragments of humanity itself, projections of its sense of wonder, its goodness, and its evil, in extreme abstraction though concretely felt. Fairy, angel, and devil cease to be conceivable except as they are human in trait, however the conditions of their nature may be fancied; for we have no other materials to build with save those of our life on earth, though we may combine them in ways not justified by reason. In so far as these worlds are in the limits of rational imagination, they are derived from humanity, partial interpretations of some of its moods, portions of itself; and the beings who inhabit them are impaired for the purposes of art in the degree to which their abstract nature is felt as stripping them of complete humanity. For this reason in dealing with such simple types, being natures all of one strain, it has been found best in practice to import into them individually some quality widely common to men in addition to that limited quality they possess by their conception. Some touch of weakness in an angel, some touch of pity in a devil, some unmerited misfortune in an Ariel, bring them home to our bosoms; just as the frailty of the hero, however great he be, humanizes him at a stroke. Thus these abstract fragments also are reunited with humanity, with the whole of life in ourselves.
Types, then, whether simple or complex, whether apparently physical or purely spiritual, whether given fragmentary or as wholes of personality, express human character in its essential traits. They may be narrow or broad generalizations; but if to know ourselves be our aim, those types, which show man his common and enduring nature, are the most valuable, and rank first in importance; in proportion as they are specialized, they are less widely interpretative; in proportion
Action, the second great branch of life, is generalized by plot. It lies, as has been said, in the region of experience. Character, though it may be conceived as latent, can be presented only energetically as it finds outward expression. It cannot be shown in a vacuum. It embodies or reveals itself in an act; form and feature, as expressive of character, are the record of past acts. This act is the link that binds type to plot. By means of it character enters the external world, determining the course of events and being passively affected by them. Plot takes account of this interplay and sets forth its laws. It is, therefore, more deeply engaged with the environment, as type is more concerned with the man in himself. It is, initially, a thing of the outward as type is a thing of the inward world. How, then, does literature, through plot, reduce the environment in its human relations to organic form?
The course of events, taken as a whole, is in part a process of nature independent of man, in part the product of his will. It is a continuous stream of phenomena in great multiplicity, and proceeding in a temporal sequence. Science deals with that portion of the whole which is independent of man, and may be called natural events, and by discerning causal relations in them arrives at the conception of law as a principle of unchanging and necessary order in nature. Science seeks to reduce the multiplicity and heterogeneity of facts as they occur to these simple formulas of law. Science does not begin in reality until facts end; facts, ten or ten thousand, are indifferent to her after the law which contains them is found, and are a burden to her until it is found. Literature, in its turn, deals with human events; and, in the same way as science, by attending to causal relations, arrives at the conception of spiritual law as a similarly permanent principle in the order of the soul. This causal unity is the cardinal idea of plot which by definition is a series of events causally related and conceived as a unit, technically called the action. Plot is thus analogous to an illustrative experiment in science; it is a concrete example of law,—it is law operating.
The course of events again, so far as they stand in direct connection with human life, may be thought of as the expression of the individual’s own will, or of that of his environment. The will of the environment may be divided into three varieties, the will of nature, the will of other men, and the will of God. In each case it is will embodied in events. If these ideas be all merged in the conception of the world as a totality whose course is the unfolding of one Divine will operant throughout it and called Fate or Providence, then the individual will, through which, as through nature also, the Divine will works, is only its servant. Action so conceived, the march of events under some heavenly power working through the mass of human will which it overrules in conjunction with its own more comprehensive purposes, is epic action; in it characters are subordinate to the main progress of the action, they are only terms in the action; however free they may be apparently, considered by themselves, that freedom is within such limits as to allow entire certainty of result, its mutations are included in the calculation of the Divine will. The action of the Aeneid is of this nature: a grand series of destined events worked out through human agency to fulfil the plan of the ruler of all things in heaven and earth. On the other hand, if the course of events be more narrowly attended to within the limits of the individual’s own activity, as the expression primarily and significantly of his personal will, then the successive acts are subordinate to the character; they are terms of the character which is thereby exhibited; they externalize the soul. Action, so conceived, is dramatic action. If in the course of events there arises a conflict between the will of the individual and that of his environment, whether nature, man, or God, then the seed of tragedy, specifically, is present; this conflict is the essential idea of tragedy. In all these varieties of action, the scene is the external world; plot lies in that world, and sets forth the order, the causal principle, obtaining in it.
It is necessary, however, to refine upon this statement of the matter. The course of external events, in so far as it affects one person, whether as proceeding from or reacting upon him, reveals character, and has meaning as an interpretation of inward life. It is a series outward indeed, but parallel with the states of will, intellect, and emotion which make up the consciousness of the character; and it is interesting humanly only as a mirror of them. It is not the murderous blow, but the depraved will; not the pale victim, but the shocked conscience; not the muttered prayer, the frantic penance, the suicide, but remorse working itself out, that hold our attention. Plot here manifests the law of character outwardly; but the human reality lies within, and to be seen requires the illumination which only our own hearts can give. All fiction is such a shadowing forth of the soul. The constancy, the intimacy, the profundity with which Shakspere felt this, from the earliest syllables of his art, and the frequency with which he dwells upon it, mark a characteristic of genius. Says Richard II:—
“’Tis very true,
my grief lies all within;
And those external manners
of lament
Are merely shadows to the
unseen grief
That swells in silence in
the tortured soul;
There lies the substance.”
So Theseus, of the play of the rude artisans of Athens, excusing all art: “The best in this kind are but shadows.” So Hamlet; so Prospero.
Action is vital in us, and has a double order of phenomena; so far as these are physical, their law is one of the physical world, and interests us no more than other physical laws; so far as they belong in the inward world of self-consciousness, their law is spiritual, and has human interest as being operant in a soul like our own. The external fact is seized by the eye as a part of nature; the internal fact is of the unseen world, and is beheld only in the light which is within our own bosoms—it is spiritually discerned. On the stage plainly this is the case. So far as the actions are for the eye of sense alone they are merely spectacular; so far as they express desires and energies, they are dramatic, and these we do not see but feel according as our experience permits us so to comprehend them. We contemplate a world of emotion there in connection with the active energy of the will, a world of character in operation in man; we feed it from our life, interpret it therefrom, build it up in ourselves, suffering the illusion till absorbed in what is arising in our consciousness under the actor’s genius we become ourselves the character. The greatest actor is he who makes the spectator play the part. So far is the drama from the scene that it goes on in our own bosoms; there is the stage without any illusion whatsoever; the play in vital for the moment in ourselves.
And what is true of the stage is true of life. It is only through our own hearts that we look into the hearts of others. We interpret the external signs of sense in terms of personality and experience known only within us; the life of will, head, and heart that we ascribe to our nearest and dearest friends is something imagined, something never seen any more than our own personality. Thus our knowledge of them is not only fragmentary, as has been said; it is imaginative even within its limits. It is, in reality as well as in art, a shadow-world we live in, believing that within its sensuous films a spirit like unto ourselves abides,—the human soul, though never seen face to face. To enter this substantial world behind the phenomena of human life as sensibly shown in imagination, to know the invisible things of personality and experience, and to set them forth as a spiritual order, is the main end of ideal art. Though in plot the outward order is brought into the fullest prominence, and may seem to occupy the field, yet it is significantly only the shadow of that order within.
In thus presenting plot as the means by which the history of a single soul is externalized, one important element has been excluded from consideration. The causal chain of events, which constitutes plot, has a double unity, answering to the double order of phenomena in action as a state of mind and a state of external fact. Under one aspect, so much of the action as is included in any single life and is there a linked sequence of mental states, has its unity in the personality of that individual. Under the other aspect, the entire action which sets forth the relations of all the characters involved, of their several courses of experience as elements in the working out of the joint result, has its unity in the constitution of the universe,—the impersonal order, that structure of being itself, which is independent of man’s will, which is imposed upon him as a condition of existence, and which he must accept without appeal. This necessity, to give it the best name, to which man is exposed without and subjected within, is in its broadest conception the power that increases life, and all things are under its sway. Its sphere is above man’s will; he knows it as immutable law in himself as it is in nature; it is the highest object of his thoughts. Its workings are submitted to his observation and experiment as a part of the world of knowledge; he sees its operation in individuals, social groups, and nations, and sets it forth in the action of the lyric, the drama, and the epic as the law of life. In its sphere is the higher unity of plot by virtue of which it integrates many lives in one main action. Such, then, is the nature of plot as intermediary between man and his environment, but deeply engaged in the latter, and not to be freed from it even by a purely spiritualistic philosophy; for though we say that, as under one aspect plot shadows forth the unseen world of the soul’s life, so under the other it shadows forth the invisible will of God, we do not escape from the outward world. Sense is still the medium by which only man knows his brother man and God also as through a glass darkly,—
“The painted veil which those who live call life.”
It separates all spirits, the beautiful but dense element in which the pure soul is submerged.
It is necessary only to summarize the characteristics of plot which are merely parallel to those of type already illustrated. Plot may be simple or complex; it may be more or less involved in physical conditions in proportion as it lays stress on its machinery or its psychology; it must be important, as the type must be high, but important by virtue of its essential human meaning and not of its accidents; it is a fragment of destiny only, but in this falls in with the way life in others is known to us; if it passes into the superhuman world, it must retain human significance and be brought back to man’s life by devices similar to those used in the type for the same purpose; it rises in value in proportion to the universality it contains, and gains depth and permanence as it is interpretative of common human fate at all times and among all men; it may be purely imaginary or founded on actual incidents; and its exemplary interpretation of man’s life is its substance, and constitutes its ideality.
In the discussion of type and plot, the concrete nature of the world of art, which was originally stated to be the characteristic work of the creative reason, or imagination acting in conformity with truth, has been assumed; but no reason has been given for it, because it seemed best to develop first with some fulness the nature of that inward order which is thus projected in the forms of art. It belongs to the frailty of man that he seizes with difficulty and holds with feebleness the pure ideas of the intellect, the more in proportion as they are removed from sense; and he seeks to support himself against this weakness by framing sensible representations of the abstract in which the mind can rest. Thus in all lands and among savage tribes, as well as in the most civilized nations, symbols have been used immemorially. The flag of a nation has all its meaning because it is taken as a physical token of national honour, almost of national life itself. The Moslem crescent, the Christian cross, have only a similar significance, a bringing near to the eye of what exists in reality only for the mind and heart. A symbol, however, is an arbitrary fiction, and stands to the idea as a metaphor does to the thing itself. In literature the parable of the mustard seed to which the kingdom of heaven was likened, exemplifies symbolical or metaphorical method; but the tale of the court of Arthur’s knights, ideal method; between them, and sharing something of both, lies allegorical method. Idolatry is the religion of symbolism, for the image is not the god; Christianity is the religion of idealism, for Christ is God incarnate. Idealism presents the reality itself, the universal truth made manifest in the concrete type, and there present and embodied in its characteristics as they are, not merely arbitrarily by a fiction of thought, symbolically or allegorically.
The way in which type concretes truth is sufficiently plain; but it may be useful, with respect to plot, to draw out more in detail the analogy which has been said to exist between it and an illustrative scientific experiment. If scientific law is declared experimentally, the course of nature is modified by intent; certain conditions are secured, certain others eliminated; a selected train of phenomena is then set in motion to the end that the law may be illustrated, and nothing else. In a perfect experiment the law is in full operation. In plot there is a like selection of persons, situations, and incidents so arranged as to disclose the working of that order which obtains in man’s life. The law may be simple and shown by means of few persons and incidents in a brief way, as in ancient drama, or complex and exhibited with many characters in an abundance of action over a wide scene as in Shakspere; in either case equally there is a selection from the whole mass of man’s life of what shall illustrate the causal union in its order and show it in action. The process in the epic or prose narrative is the same. The common method of all is to present the universal law in a particular instance made for the purpose.
In thus clothing itself in concrete form, truth suffers no transformation; it remains what it was, general truth, the very essence of type and plot being, as has been said, to preserve this universality in the particular instance. There is a sense in which this general truth is more real, as Plato thought, than particulars; a sense in which the phenomenal world is less real than the system of nature, for phenomena come and go, but the law remains; a sense in which the order in man’s breast is more real than he is, in whom it is manifest, for the form of ideas, the mould of law, are permanent, but their expression in us transitory. It is this higher realism, as it was anciently called, that the mind strives for in idealism,—this organic form of life, the object of all rational knowledge. Types, under their concrete disguise, are thus only a part of the general notions of the mind found in every branch of knowledge and necessary to thought; plots, similarly, are only a part of the general laws of the ordered world; literature in using them, and specializing them in concrete form by which alone they differ in appearance from like notions and laws elsewhere, merely avails itself of that condensing faculty of the mind which most economizes mental effort and loads conceptions with knowledge. In the type it is not personal, but human character that interests the mind; in plot, it is not personal, but human fate.
While it is true that the object of ideal method is to reach universals, and reembody them in particular instances, this reasoning action is often obscurely felt by the imagination in its creative process. The very fact that its operation is through the concrete complicates the process. The mind of genius working out its will does not usually start with a logical attempt consciously; it does not arrive at truth in the abstract and then reduce it to concrete illustration in any systemic way; it does not select the law and then shape the plot. The poet is rather directly interested in certain characters and events that appeal to him; his sympathies are aroused, and he proceeds to show forth, to interpret, to create; and in proportion as the characters he sets in motion and the circumstances in which they are placed have moulding force, they will develop traits and express themselves in influences that he did not foresee. This is a matter of familiar knowledge to authors, who frequently discover in the trend of the imaginary tale a will of its own, which has its unforeseen way. The drama or story, once set in motion, tends to tell itself, just as life tends to develop in the world. The vitality of the clay it works in, is one of the curious experiences of genius, and occasions that mood of mystery in relation to their creatures frequently observed in great writers. In fact, this mode of working in the concrete, which is characteristic of the creative imagination, gives to its activity an inductive and experimental character, not to be confounded with the demonstrative act of the intellect which states truth after knowing it, and not in the moment of its discovery. In literature this moment of discovery is what makes that flash which is sometimes called intuition, and is one of the great charms of genius.
The concrete nature of ideal art, to touch conveniently here upon a related though minor topic, is also the reason that it expresses more than its creator is aware of. In imaging life he includes more reality than he attends to; but if his representation has been made with truth, others may perceive phases of reality that he neglected. It is the mark of genius, as has hitherto appeared, to grasp life, not fragmentarily, but in the whole. So, in a scientific experiment, intended to illustrate one particular form of energy, a spectator versed in another science may detect some truth belonging in his own field. This richer significance of great works is especially found where the union of the general and the particular is strong; where the fusion is complete, as in Hamlet. In a sense he is more real than living men, and we can analyze his nature, have doubts about his motives, judge differently of his character, and value his temperament more or less as one might with a friend. The more imaginative a character is, in the sense that his personality and experience are given in the whole so that one feels the bottom of reality there, the more significance it has. Thus in the world of art discoveries beyond the intention of the writer may be made as in the actual world; so much of reality does it contain.
Will it be said that, in making primary the universal contents and spiritual significance of type and plot, I have made literature didactic, as if the word should stop my mouth? If it is meant by this that I maintain that literature conveys truth, it may readily be admitted, since only thus can it interest the mind which has its whole life in the pursuit and its whole joy in the possession of truth. But if it be meant that abstract or moral instruction has been made the business of literature, the charge may be met with a disclaimer, as should be evident, first, from the emphasis placed on its concrete dealing with persons and actions. On the contrary, literature fails in art precisely in proportion as it becomes expressly such a teacher. Secondly, the life which literature organizes, the whole of human nature in its relation to the world, is many-sided; and imaginative genius, the creative reason, grasps it in its totality. The moral aspect is but one among many that life wears. If ethics are implicit in the mass of life, so also are beauty and passion, pathos, humour, and terror; and in literature any one of these may be the prominent phase at the moment, for literature gives out not only practical moral wisdom, but all the reality of life. Literature is didactic in the reproachful sense of the word only in proportion as type and plot are distinctly separated from the truth they embody, and ceases to be so in proportion as these are blended and unified. The fable is one of the most ancient forms of such didactic literature; in it a story is told to enforce a lesson, and animals are made the characters, in consequence of which it has the touch
If, then, to sum up the argument thus far, the subject-matter of literature is life in the forms of personality and experience, and the particular facts with respect to these are generalized by means of type and plot in concrete form, and so are set forth as phases of an ordered world for the intelligence, to the end that man may know himself in the same way as he knows nature in its living system—if this be so, what standing have those who would restrict literature to the actual in life? who would replace ideal types of manhood by the men of the time, and the ordered drama of the stage by the medley of life? They deny art, which is the instrument of the creative reason, to literature; for as soon as art, which is the process of creating a rational world, begins, the necessity for selection arises, and with it the whole question of values, facts being no longer equal among themselves on the score of actuality, nor in fitness for the work in hand. The trivial, the accidental, the unmeaning, are rejected, and there will be no stopping short of the end; for art, being the handmaid of truth, can employ no other than the method of all reason, wherefore idealism is to it what abstraction is to logic and induction to natural science,—the breath of its rational being. Those who hold to realism in its extreme form, as a representation of the actual only, behave as if one should say to the philosopher—leave this formulation of general notions and be content with sensible objects; or to the scientist—experiment no more,
I am aware that I have not proceeded so far without starting objections. To meet that which is most grave, what shall I say when it is alleged that there is no order such as I have assumed in life; or, if there be, that it is insufficiently known, too intangible and complex, too various in different races and ages, to be made the subject of such an exposition as obtains of natural order? Were this assertion true, yet there would be good reason to retain our illusion; for the mind delights in order, and will invent it. The mind is perplexed and disturbed until it finds this order; and in the progressive integration of its experience into an ordered world lies its work. Art gives pleasure to the intellect, because in its structure whatever is superfluous and extrinsic has been eliminated, so that the mind contemplates an artistic work as a unity of relations bound each to each which it fully comprehends. Such works, we say, have form, which is just this interdependence of parts wholly understood which appeals to the intellect, and satisfies it: they would please the mind, though the order they embody were purely imaginary, just as science would delight it, were the order of nature itself illusory. Creative art would thus still have a ground of being under a sceptical philosophy; man would delight to dream his dream. But it is not necessary to take this lower line of argument.
It does not appear to me to be open to question that there is in the soul of man a nature and an order obtaining in it as permanent and universal as in the material world. The soul of man has a common being in all. There could be no science of logic, psychology, or metaphysics on the hypothesis of any uncertainty as to the identity of mind in all, nor any science of ethics on the hypothesis of any variation as to the identity of the will in all, nor any ground of
So near is this order to us that it was known long before science came to any maturity. We have added, in truth, little to our knowledge of humanity since the Greeks; and if one wonders why ethics came before science, let him own at least that its priority shows that it is near and vital in life as science is not. We can do, it seems, without Kepler’s laws, but not without the Decalogue. The race acquires first what is most needful for life; and man’s heart was always with him, and his fate near. A second reason, it may be noted, for the later development of science is that our senses, as used by science, are more mental now, and the object itself is observable only by the intervention of the mind through the telescope or microscope or a hundred instruments into which, though physical, the mind enters. Our methods, too, as well as our instruments, are things of the mind. It behooves us to remember in an age which science is commonly thought to have materialized, that more and more the mind enters into all results, and fills an ever larger place in life; and this should serve to make materialism seem more
What, then, is this order? We do not merely contemplate it: we are immersed in it, it is vital in us, it is that wherein we live and move and have our being, ever more and more in proportion as the soul’s life outvalues the body in our experience. It is necessary to expand our conception of it. Hitherto it has been presented only as an order of truth appealing to the intellect: but the intellect is only one function of the soul, and thinkers are the merest fraction of mankind. We know this order not only as truth, but as righteousness; we know that certain choices end in enlarging and invigorating our faculties, and other choices in their enfeeblement and extinction; and the race adds, acting under the profound motive of self-preservation, that it is a duty to do the one thing and avoid the other, and stores up this doctrine in conscience. We know this order again under the aspect of joy, for joy attends some choices, and sorrow others; and again under the aspect of beauty, for certain choices result in beauty and others in deformity. What I maintain is that this order exists under four aspects, and may be learned in any of them—as an order of truth in the reason, as an order of virtue in the will, as an order of joy in the emotions, as an order of beauty in the senses. It is the same order, the same body of law, operating in each case; it is the vital force of our fourfold life,—it has one unity in the intellect, the will, the emotions, the senses,—is equal to the whole nature of man, and responds to him and sustains him on every side. A lover of beauty in whom conscience is feeble cannot wander if he follow beauty; nor a cold thinker err, though without a moral sense, if he accept truth; nor a just man, nor a seeker after pure joy merely, if they act according to knowledge each in his sphere. The course of action that increases life may be selected because it is reasonable, or joyful, or beautiful, or right; and therefore one may say fearlessly, choose the things that are beautiful, the things that are joyful, the things that are reasonable, the things that are right, and all else shall be added unto you. The binding force in this order is what literature, ideal literature, most brings out and emphasizes in its generalizations, that causal union which has hitherto been spoken of in the region of plot only; but it exists in every aspect of this order, and literature universalizes experience in all these realms, in the provinces of beauty and passion no less than in those of virtue and knowledge, and its method is the same in all.
Is not our knowledge of this fourfold order in its principles, in those relations of its phenomena which constitute its laws, of the highest importance of anything of human concern? In harmony with these laws, and only thus, we ourselves, in whom this order is, become happy, righteous, wise, and beautiful. In ideal literature this knowledge is found, expressed, and handed down age after age—the knowledge of necessary and permanent relations in these great spheres which, taken together, exhaust the capacities of life. Man’s moral sense is strong in proportion as he apprehends necessity in the sequence of will and act; his intellect is strong, his emotions, his sense of beauty, are strong in the same way in proportion as he apprehends necessity in each several field of experience. And conversely, the weakness of the intellect lies in a greater or less failure to realise relations of fact in their logic; and the other faculties, in proportion as they fail to realize such relations in their own region, have a similar incapacity. Insanity, in the broad sense, is involuntary error in a nature incapable of effectual enlightenment, and hence abnormal or diseased; but the state of error, whether more or less, whether voluntary or involuntary, whether curable or incurable, in itself is the same. To take an example from one sphere, in the moral world the criminal through ignorance of or distrust in or revolt from the supreme divine law seeks to maintain himself by his own power solitarily as if he might be a law unto himself; he experiences, without the intervention of any human judge, the condemnation which consigns him to enfeeblement and extinction through the decay and death of his nature, as a moral being, stage by stage; this is God’s justice, visiting sin with death. Similarly, and to most more obviously, in society itself, the criminal against society, because he does not understand, or believe, or prefers not to accept arbitrary social law as the means by which necessarily the general good, including his own, is worked out, seeks to substitute for it his own intelligence, his cunning, in his search for prosperity, as he conceives it, by an adaptation of means to ends on his own account. This is why the imperfection of human law is sometimes a just excuse for social crime in those whom society does not benefit, its slaves and pariahs. But whether in God’s world or in man’s, the mind of the criminal, disengaging itself from reliance on the whole fabric for whatever reason, pulverizes because he fails to realize the necessary relations of the world in which he lives in their normal operation, and has no effectual belief in them as unavoidably operant in his nature or over his fortunes. This was the truth that lay in the Platonic doctrine that all sin is ignorance; but Plato did not take account of any possible depravity in the will. Nor is what has been illustrated above true of the mind and the will only. In the region of emotion and of beauty, there may be similar aberration, if these are not grasped in their vital nature, in organic relation to the whole of life.
These several parts of our being are not independent of one another, but are in the closest alliance. They act conjointly and with one result in the single soul in which they find their unity as various energies of one personal power. It cannot be that contradiction should arise among them in their right operation, nor the error of one continue undetected by the others; that the base should be joyful or the wicked beautiful in reality, is impossible. In the narrow view the lust of the eye and the pride of life may seem beautiful, but in the broad perspective of the inward world they take on ugliness; in the moment they may seem pleasurable, but in the backward reach of memory they take on pain; to assert eternity against the moment, to see life in the whole, to live as if all of life were concentrated in its instant, is the chief labour of the mind, the eye, the heart, the enduring will, all together. To represent a villain as attractive is an error of art, which thus misrepresents the harmony of our nature. Satan, as conceived by Milton, may seem to be a majestic figure, but he was not so to Milton’s imagination. “The Infernal Serpent” is the first name the poet gives him; and though sublime imagery of gloom and terror is employed to depict his diminished brightness and inflamed malice, Milton repeatedly takes pains to degrade him to the eye, as when in Paradise he is surprised at the ear of Eve “squat like a toad”; and when he springs up in his own form there, as the “grisly king,” he mourns most his beauty lost; neither is his resolute courage long admirable. To me, at least, so far from having any heroic quality, he seems always the malign fiend sacrificing innocence to an impotent revenge. In all great creations of art it is necessary that this consistency of beauty, virtue, reason, and joy should he preserved.
It is true that the supremacy of law in this inward world, so constituted, is less realized than in the physical world; but even in the latter the wide conviction of its supremacy is a recent thing, and in some parts of nature it is still lightly felt, especially in those which touch the brain most nearly, while under the stress of exceptional calamity or strong desire or traditional religious beliefs it often breaks down. But if the order of the material universe seems now a more settled thing than the spiritual law of the soul, once the case was reversed; God was known and nature miraculous. It must be remembered, too, in excuse of our feebleness of faith, that we are born bodily into the physical world and are forced to live under its law; but life in the spiritual world is more a matter of choice, at least in respect to its degree; its phenomena are, in part, contingent upon our development and growth, on our living habitually and intelligently in our higher nature, the laws of which as communicated to us by other minds are in part prophecies of experience not yet actual in ourselves. It is the touchstone of experience, after all, that tries all things in both worlds, and experience in the spiritual world may be long delayed; it is power of mind that makes wide generalizations in both; and the conception of spiritual law is the most refined as perhaps it is the most daring of human thoughts.
The expansion of the conception of ideal literature so as to embrace these other aspects, in addition to that of rational knowledge which has thus far been exclusively dwelt upon, requires us to examine its nature in the regions of beauty, joy, and conscience, in which, though generalization remains its intellectual method, it does not make its direct appeal to the mind. It is not enough to show that the creative reason in its intellectual process employs that common method which is the parent of all true knowledge, and by virtue of its high matter, which is the divine order in the soul, holds the primacy among man’s faculties; the story were then left half told, and the better part yet to come. To enlighten the mind is a great function; but in the mass of mankind there are few who are accessible to ideas as such, especially on the unworldly side of life, or interested in them. Idealism does not confine its service to the narrow bounds of intellectuality. It has a second and greater office, which is to charm the soul. So characteristic of it is this power, so eminent and shining, that thence only springs the sweet and almost sacred quality breathing from the word itself. Idealism, indeed, by the garment of sense does not so much clothe wisdom as reveal her beauty; so the Greek sculptor discloses the living form by the plastic folds. Truth made virtue is her work of power, and she imposes upon man no harder task than the mere beholding of that sight—
“Virtue in her shape how lovely,”
which since it first abashed the devil in Paradise makes wrong-doers aware of their deformity, and yet has such subtle and penetrating might, such fascination for all finer spirits, that they have ever believed with their master, Plato, that should truth show her countenance unveiled and dwell on earth, all men would worship and follow her.
The images of Plato—those images in which alone he could adequately body forth his intuitions of eternity—present the twofold attitude of our nature, in mind and heart, toward the ideal with vivid distinctness; and they illustrate the more intimate power of beauty, the more fundamental reach of emotion, and the richness of their mutual life in the soul. Under the aspect of truth he likens our knowledge of the ideal to that which the prisoners of the cave had of the shadows on the wall; under the aspect of beauty he figures our love for it as that of the passionate lover. As truth, again,—taking up in his earliest days what seems the primitive impulse and first thought of man everywhere and at all times,—under the image of the golden chain let down from the throne of the god, he sets forth the heavenly origin of the ideal and its descent on earth by divine inspiration possessing the poet as its passive instrument; and later, bringing in now the cooperation of man in the act, he again presents the ideal as known by reminiscence of the soul’s eternal life before birth, which is only a more defined and rationalized conception
So, too, from the other great source of the race’s wisdom, we are told in the Scriptures that though we be fallen men, yet is it left to us to lift our eyes to the beauty of holiness and be healed; for every ray of that outward loveliness which strikes upon the eye penetrates to the heart of man. Then are we moved, indeed, and incited to seek virtue with true desire. Prophet and psalmist are here at one with the poet and the philosopher in spiritual sensitiveness. At the height of Hebrew genius in the personality of Christ, it is the sweet attractive grace, the noble beauty of the present life incarnated in his acts and words, the divine reality on earth and not, as Plato saw it, in a world removed, that has drawn all eyes to the Judean hill. The years lived under the Syrian blue were a rending of the veil of spiritual beauty which has since shone in its purity on men’s gaze. It is this loveliness which needs only to be seen that wins mankind. The emotions are enlisted; and, however we may slight them in practice, the habit of emotion more than the habit of mind enters into and fixes inward character. More men are saved by the heart than by the head; more youths are drawn to excellence by noble feelings than are coldly reasoned into virtue on the ground of gain. Some there are among men so colourless in blood that they embrace the right on the mere calculation of advantage, but they seem to possess only an earthly virtue; some, beholding the order of the world, desire to put themselves in tune with nature and the soul’s law, and these are of a better sort; but most fortunate are they who, though well-nurtured, find virtue not in profit, nor in the necessity of conforming to implacable law, but in mere beauty, in the light of her face as it first comes to them with ripening years in the sweet and noble nature of those they grow to love and honour among the living and the dead. For this is Achilles made brave, that he may stir us to bravery; and surely it were little to see the story of Pelops’ line if the emotions were not awakened, not merely for a few moments of intense action of their own play, but to form the soul. The emotional glow of the creative imagination has been once mentioned in the point that it is often more absorbed in the beauty and passion than in the intellectual significance of its work; here, correspondingly, it is by the heart to which it appeals rather than by the mind it illumines that it takes hold of youth.
What, then, is the nature of this emotional appeal which surpasses so much in intimacy, pleasure, and power the appeal to the intellect? It is the keystone of the inward nature, that which binds all together in the arch of life. Emotion has some ground, some incitement which calls it forth; and it responds with most energy to beauty. In the strictest sense beauty is a unity of relations of coexistence in coloured space and appeals to the eye; it is in space what plot is in time. Like plot, it is deeply engaged in the outward world; it exists in the sensuous order, and it shadows forth the spiritual order in man only in so far as a fair soul makes the body beautiful, as Spenser thought,—the mood, the act, and the habit of heroism, love, and the like nobilities of man, giving grace to form, feature, and attitude. It is primarily an outward thing, as emotion, which is a phase of personality, is an inward thing; what the necessary sequence of events, the chain of causation, is to plot,—its cardinal idea,—that the necessary harmony of parts, the chime of line and colour, is to beauty; thus beauty is as inevitable as fate, as structurally planted in the form and colour of the universe as fate is in its temporal movement. And as plot has its characteristic unity in the impersonal order of God’s will, shown in time’s event, so beauty has its characteristic unity in the same order shown in the visible creation of space. It is true that all phenomena are perceived by the mind, and are conditioned, as is said, by human modes of perception; but within the limits of the relativity of all our knowledge, beauty is initially a sensuous, not a spiritual, thing, and though the structure of the human eye arranges the harmonies of line and colour, it is no more than as the form of human thought arranges cause and effect and other primary relations in things; beauty does not in becoming humanly known cease to be known as a thing external, independent of our will, and imposed on us from without. It is this outward reality, the harmony of sense, that sculpture and painting add in their types to the interpretation they otherwise give of personality, and often in them this physical element is predominant; and in the purely decorative arts it may be exclusive. In landscape, which is in the realm of beauty, personality altogether disappears, unless, indeed, nature be interpreted in the mood of the Psalmist as declaring its Creator; for the reflection which the presence of man may cast upon nature as his shadow is not expressive of any true personality there abiding, but enters into the scene as the face of Narcissus into the brook. The pleasure which the mind takes in beauty is only a part of its general delight in order of any sort; and visible artistic form as abstracted from the world of space is merely a species of organic form and is included in it.
The eye, however, governs so large a part of the sensuous field, the idea of beauty as a unity of space-relations giving pleasure is so simple, and the experience is so usual, that the word has been carried over to the life of the more limited senses in which analogous phenomena arise, differing only in the fact that they exist in another sense. Thus in the dominion of the ear especially, we speak commonly of the beauty of music; but the life of the minor senses, touch, taste, and smell, is composed of too simple elements to allow of such combination as would constitute specific form in ordinary apprehension, though in the blind and deaf the possibility of high and intelligible complexity in these senses is proved. Similarly, the term is carried over to the invisible and inaudible world of the soul within itself, and we speak of the beauty of Sidney’s act, of Romeo’s nature, and, in the abstract, of the beauty of holiness, and, in a still more remote sphere, of the beauty of a demonstration or a hypothesis; by this usage we do not so much describe the thing as convey the charm of the thing. This charm is more intimate and piercing to those of sensuous nature who rejoice in visible loveliness or in heard melodies; but to the spiritually minded it may be as close and penetrating in the presence of what is to them dearer than life and light, and is beheld only by the inner eye. It is this charm, whether flowing from the outward semblance or shining from the unseen light, that wins the heart, stirs emotion, wakes the desire to be one with this order manifest in truth and beauty, in the spirit and the body of things, to go out toward it in love, to identify one’s being with it as the order of life, mortal and immortal; last the will quickens, and its effort to make this order prevail in us and possess us is virtue. The act through all its phases is, as has been said, one act of the soul, which first perceives, then loves, and finally wills. Emotion is the intermediary between the divine order and the human will; it responds to the beauty of the one and directs the choice of the other, and is felt in either function as love controlling life in the new births of the spirit.
The emotion, to return to the world of art, which is felt in the presence of imaginary things is actual in us; but the attempt is made to fix upon it a special character differentiating it from the emotion felt in the presence of reality. One principle of difference is sought in the point that in literature, or in sculpture and painting, emotion entails no action; it has no outlet, and is without practical consequences; the will is paralyzed by the fatuity of trying to influence an unreal series of events, and in the case of the object of beauty in statue or painting by the impossibility of possession. The world of art is thus thought of as one of pure contemplation, a place of escape from the difficulties, the pangs, and the incompleteness that beset all action. It is true that the imagined
The distinction between emotion depicted and that felt in response must be kept in mind to avoid confusion, for both sorts are present at the same time. In literature emotion may be set forth as a phase of the character or as a term in the plot; it may be a single moment of high feeling as in a lyric or a prolonged experience as in a drama; it may be shown in the pure type of some one passion as in Romeo, or in the various moods of a rich nature as in Hamlet; but, whether it be predominant or subordinate in any work, it is there treated in the same way and for the same purpose as other materials of life. What happens when literature gives us, for instance, examples of moral experience? It informs the mind of the normal course of certain lines of action, of the inevitable issues of life; it breeds habits of right thinking in respect to these; it is educative, and though we do not act at once upon this knowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to act. So, when literature presents examples of emotional experience, it informs us of the nature of emotion, its causes, occasions, and results, its value in character, its influence on action, the modes of its expression; it breeds habits of right thinking in respect to these, and is educative; and, just as in the preceding case, though we do not act at once upon this knowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to act. Concurrently with emotions thus objectively presented there arises in us a similar series of emotions in the beholding; by sympathy we ourselves feel what is before us, the emotions there are also in us in proportion as we identify ourselves with the character; or, in proportion as our own individuality asserts itself by revolt, a contrary series arises of hatred, indignation, or contempt, of pity for the character or of terror in the feeling that what has happened to one may happen to us in our humanity. We are taught in a more intimate and vital way than through ideas alone; the
Two particular phases of this educative power should be specifically mentioned. The objective presentation of emotion in literature, as has been often observed, corrects the perspective of our own lives, as does also the action which it envelops; and by showing to us emotion in intense energy, which by this intensity corresponds to high type and important plot, and in a compass far greater than is normal in ordinary life, the portrayal leads us better to bear and more justly to estimate the petty trials, the vexations, the insignificant experiences of our career; we see our lives in a truer relation to life in general, and avoid an overcharged feeling in regard to our private fortune. And, secondly, the subjective emotion in ourselves is educative in the point that by this outlet we go out of ourselves in sympathy, lose our egoism, and become one with man in general. This is an escape; but not such as has been previously spoken of, for it is not a retreat. There is no escape for us, except into the lives of others. In nature it is still our own face we see; and before the ideal creations of art we are still aware, for all our contemplation, of the ineffable yearning of the thwarted soul, of the tender melancholy, the sadness in all beauty, which is the measure of our separation therefrom, and is fundamental in the poetic temperament. This is that pain, which Plato speaks of—the pain of the growing of the wings of the spirit as they unfold. But in passing into the lives of other men, in sharing their joys, in taking on ourselves the burden of humanity, we escape from our self-prison,
Another special point arises from the fact that some emotions are painful, and the question is raised how in literature painful emotions become a pleasure. Aristotle’s doctrine in respect to certain of these emotions, tragic pity and terror, is well known, though variously interpreted. He regards such emotions as a discharge of energy, an exhaustion and a relief, in consequence of which their disturbing presence is less likely to recur in actual life; it is as if emotional energy accumulated, as vital force is stored up and requires to be loosed in bodily exercise; but this, except in the point that pity and terror, if they do accumulate in their particular forms latently, are specifically such as it is wise to be rid of, does not differentiate emotion from the rest of our powers in all of which there is a similar pleasure in exercising, an exhaustion and a relief, with less liability of immediate recurrence; this belongs to all expenditure of life. It is not credible to me that painful emotion, under the illusions of art, can become pleasurable in the common sense; what pleasure there is arises only in the climax and issue of the action, as in case of the drama when the restoration of the order that is joyful, beautiful, right, and wise occurs; in other words, in the presence of the final poetic justice or reconciliation of the disturbed elements of life. But here we come upon darker and mysterious aspects of our general subject, now to be slightly touched. Tragedy dealing with the discords of life must present painful spectacles; and is saved to art only by its just ending. Comedy,
This, then, being the nature of the ideal world in its whole range commensurate with our being, and these the methods of its intellectual and emotional appeal, it remains to examine the world of art in itself, and especially its genesis out of life. The method by which it is built up has long been recognized to be that of imitation of the actual, as has been assumed hitherto in the statement that all art is concrete. But the concrete which art creates is not a copy of the concrete of life; it is more than this. The mind takes the particulars of the world of sense into itself, generalizes them, and frames therefrom a new particular, which does not exist in nature; it is, in fact, nature made perfect in an imagined instance, and so presented to the mind’s eye, or to the eye of sense. The pleasure which imitation gives has been often and diversely analyzed; it may be that of recognition, or that of new knowledge satisfying our curiosity as if the original were present, or that of delight in the skill of the artist, or that of interest in seeing how his view differs from our own, or that of the illusion created for us; but all these modes of pleasure exist when the imitation is an exact copy of the original, and they do not characterize the artistic imitation in any way to differentiate its peculiar pleasure. It is that element which artistic imitation adds to actuality, the difference between its created concrete and the original out of which that was developed, which gives the special delight of art to the mind. It is the perfection of the type, the intensity of the emotion, the inevitability of the plot,—it is the pure and intelligible form disclosed in the phases and movement of life, disengaged and set apart for the contemplation of
It will be said at once that all these concrete representations necessarily fail to realize the artist’s thought, and are inadequate, inferior in exactness, to scientific and philosophic knowledge; in a measure this is true, and would be important if the method of art were demonstrative, instead of being, as has been said, experimental and inductive. So, too, all thinkers, using the actual world in their processes, are at a disadvantage. The figures of the geometer, the quantities of the chemist, the measurements of the astronomer, are inexact approximations to their equivalent in the mind. Art, as an embodiment in mortal images, is subject to the conditions of mortality. Hence arises its human history, the narrative of its rise, climax, and decline in successive ages. The course of art is known; it has been run many times; it is a simple matter. At first art is archaic, the sensible form being rudely controlled by the artist’s hand; it becomes, in the second stage, classical, the form being adequate to the thought, a transparent expression; last, it is decadent, the form being more than the thought, dwarfing it by usurping attention on its own account. The peculiar temptation of technique is always to elaboration of detail; technique is at first a hope, it becomes a power, it ends in being a caprice; and always as it goes on it loses sight of the general in its rendering, and dwells with a near eye on the specific. Nor is this attention to detail confined to the manner; the hand of the artist draws the mind after it, and it is no longer the great types of manhood, the important fates of life, the primary emotions in their normal course, that are in the foreground of thought, but the individual is more and more, the sensational in plot, the sentimental in feeling. This tendency to detail, which is the hallmark of realism, constitutes decline. It arises partly from the exhaustion of general ideas, from the search for novelty of subject and sensation, from the special phenomena of a decaying society; but, however manifold may be the causes, the fact of decline consists in the lessened scope of the matter and the increased importance of the form, both resulting in luxuriant detail. Ideas as they lose generality gain in intensity, but in the history of art this has not proved a compensation. In Greece the three stages are clearly marked both in matter and manner,
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
“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
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.
Such, then, as best I can state it in brief and rapid strokes, is the world of art, its methods, its appeals, its significance to mankind. Idealism, so presented, is in a sense a glorification of the commonplace. Its realm lies in the common lot of men; its distinction is to embrace truth for all, and truth in its universal forms of experience and personality, the primary, elementary, equally shared fates, passions, beliefs of the race. Shakspere, our great example, as
What, then, since I said that it is a question how to live as well as how to express life,—what, then, is the ideal life? It is to make one’s life a poem, as Milton dreamed of the true poet; for as art works through matter and takes on concrete and sensible shape with its mortal conditions, so the soul dips in life, is in material action, and, suffering a similar fate, sinks into limitations and externals of this world and this flesh, through which it must live. In such a life, mortal in all ways, to bring down to earth the vision that floats in the soul’s eyes, the ideal order as it is revealed to the poet’s gaze, incorporating it in deed and being, and to make it prevail, so far as our lives have power, in the world of our life, is the task set for us. To disengage reason from the confusion of things, and behold the eternal forms of the mind; to unveil beauty in the transitory sights of our eyes, and behold the eternal forms of sense; so to act that the will within us shall take on this form of reason and our manifest life wear this form of beauty; and, more closely, to live in the primary affections, the noble passions, the sweet emotions,—
“Founded in reason,
loyal, just, and pure,
Relations dear, and all the
charities
Of father, son, and brother,—”
and also in the general sorrows of mankind, thereby, in joy and grief, entering sympathetically into the hearts of common men; to keep in the highway of life, not turning aside to the eccentric, the sensational, the abnormal, the brutal, the base, but seeing them, if they must come within our vision, in their place only by the edges of true life; and, if, being men, we are caught in the tragic coil, to seek the restoration of broken order, learning also in such bitterness better to understand the dark conflict forever waging in the general heart, the terror of the heavy clouds hanging on the slopes of our battle, the pathos that
And Thou, O Youth, for whom these lines are written, fear not; idealize your friend, for it is better to love and be deceived than not to love at all; idealize your masters, and take Shelley and Sidney to your bosom, so shall they serve you more nobly and you love them more sweetly than if the touch and sight of their mortality had been yours indeed; idealize your country, remembering that Brutus in the dagger-stroke and Cato in his death-darkness knew not the greater Rome, the proclaimer of the unity of our race, the codifier of justice, the establisher of our church, and died not knowing,—but do you believe in the purpose of God, so shall you best serve the times to be; and in your own life, fear not to act as your ideal shall command, in the constant presence of that other self who goes with you, as I have said, so shall you blend with him at the end. Fear not either to believe that the soul is as eternal as the order that obtains in it, wherefore you shall forever pursue that divine beauty which has here so touched and inflamed you,—for this is the faith of man, your race, and those who were fairest in its records. And have recourse always to the fountains of this life in literature, which are the wells of truth. How to live is the one matter; the wisest man in his ripe age is yet to seek in it; but Thou, begin now and seek wisdom in the beauty of virtue and live in its light, rejoicing in it; so in this world shall you live in the foregleam of the world to come.
Democracy is a prophecy, and looks to the future; it is for this reason that it has its great career. Its faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen, whose realization will be the labour of a long age. The life of historic nations has been a pursuit toward a goal under the impulse of ideas often obscurely comprehended,—world-ideas as we call them,—which they have embodied in accomplished facts and in the institutions and beliefs of mankind, lasting through ages; and as each nation has slowly grown aware of the idea which animated it, it has become self-conscious and conscious of greatness. That men are born equal is still a doctrine openly derided; that they are born free is not accepted without much nullifying limitation; that they are born in brotherhood is less readily denied. These three, the revolutionary words, liberty, equality, fraternity, are the substance of democracy, if the matter be well considered, and all else is but consequence.
It might seem singular that man should ever have found out this creed, as that physical life could invent the brain, since the struggle for existence in primitive and early times was so adverse to it, and rested on a selfish and aggrandizing principle, in states as well as between races. In most parts of the world the first true governments were tyrannies, patriarchal or despotic; and where liberty was indigenous, it was confined to the race-blood. Aristotle speaks of slavery without repugnance save in Greeks, and serfdom was incorporated in the northern tribes as soon as they began to be socially organized. Some have alleged that religious equality was an Oriental idea, and borrowed from the relation of subjects to an Asiatic despot, which paved the way for it; some attribute civil equality to the Roman law; some find the germ of both in Stoical morals. But so great an idea as the equality of man reaches down into the past by a thousand roots. The state of nature of the savage in the woods, which our fathers once thought a pattern, bore some outward resemblance to a freeman’s life; but such a condition is rather one of private independence than of the grounded social right that democracy contemplates. How the ideas involved came into historical existence is a minor matter. Democracy has its great career, for the first time, in our national being, and exhibits here most purely its formative powers, and unfolds destiny on the grand scale. Nothing is more incumbent on us than to study it, to turn it this way and that, to handle it as often and in as many phases as possible with lively curiosity, and not to betray ourselves by an easy assumption that so elementary a thing is comprehended because it seems simple. Fundamental ideas are precisely those with which we should be most familiar.
Democracy is not merely a political experiment; and its governmental theory, though so characteristic of it as not to be dissociated from it, is a result of underlying principles. There is always an ideality of the human spirit in all its works, if one will search them, which is the main thing. The State, as a social aggregate with a joint life which constitutes it a nation, is dynamically an embodiment of human conviction, desire, and tendency, with a common basis of wisdom and energy of action, seeking to realize life in accordance with its ideal, whether traditional or novel, of what life should be; and government is no more than the mode of administration under which it achieves its results both in national life and in the lives of its citizens. All society is a means of escape from personality, and its limitations of power and wisdom, into this larger communal life; the individual, in so far, loses his particularity, and at the same time intensifies and strengthens that portion of his life which is thus made one with the general life of men,—that universal and typical life which they have in common and which moulds them with similar characteristics. It is by this
The life of society, however, includes various affairs, and man deals with them by different means; thus property is a mode of dealing with things. Democracy is a mode of dealing with souls. Men commonly speak as if the soul were something they expect to possess in another world; men are souls, and this is a fundamental conception of democracy. This spiritual element is the substance of democracy, in the large sense; and the special governmental theory which it has developed and organized, and in which its ideas are partially included, is, like other such systems, a mode of administration under which it seeks to realize its ideal of what life ought to be, with most speed and certainty, and on the largest scale. What characterizes that ideal is that it takes the soul into account in a way hitherto unknown; not that other governments have not had regard to the soul, but, in democracy, it is spirituality that gives the law and rules the issue. Hence, a great preparation was needed before democracy could come into effective control of society. Christianity mainly afforded this, in respect to the ideas of equality and fraternity, which were clarified and illustrated in the life of the Church for ages, before they entered practically into politics and the general secular arrangements of state organization; the nations of progress, of which freedom is a condition, developed more definitely the idea of liberty, and made it familiar to the thoughts of men. Democracy belongs to a comparatively late age of the world, and to advanced nations, because such ideas could come into action only after the crude material necessities of human progress—illustrated in the warfare of nations, in military organizations for the extension of a common rule and culture among mankind, and in despotic impositions of order, justice, and the general ideas of civilization—had relaxed, and a free course, by comparison at least, was opened for the higher nature of man in both private and public action. A conception of the soul and its destiny, not previously applicable in society, underlies democracy; this is why it is the most spiritual government known to man, and therefore the highest reach of man’s evolution; it is, in fact, the spiritual element in society expressing itself now in politics with an unsuspected and incalculable force.
Democracy is contained in the triple statement that men are born free, equal, and in brotherhood; and in this formula it is the middle term that is cardinal, and the root of all. Yet it is the doctrine of the equality of man, by virtue of the human nature with which he is clothed entire at birth, that is most attacked, as an obvious absurdity, and provocative more of laughter than of argument. What, then, is this equality which democracy affirms as the true state of all men among themselves? It is our common human nature, that identity of the soul in all men, which was first inculcated by the preaching of Christ’s death for all equally, whence it followed that every human soul was of equal value in the eyes of God, its Creator, and had the same title to the rites of the Christian Church, and the same blessedness of an infinite immortality in the world to come; thence we derived it from the very fountain of our faith, and the first true democracy was that which levelled king and peasant, barbarian and Roman, in the communion of our Lord. Yet nature laughs at us, and ordains such inequalities at birth itself as make our peremptory charter of the value of men’s souls seem a play of fancy. There are men of almost divine intelligence, men of almost devilish instincts, men of more or less clouded mind; and they are such at birth, so deeply has nature stamped into them heredity, circumstance, and the physical conditions of sanity, morality and wholesomeness, in the body which is her work. Such differences do exist, and conditions vary the world over, whence nature, which accumulates inequalities in the struggle for life, “with ravin shrieks against our creed.” But we have not now to learn for the first time that nature, though not the enemy of the human spirit, is indifferent to all the soul has erected in man’s own realm, peculiar to humanity. What has nature contributed to the doctrine of freedom or of fraternity? Man’s life to her is all one, tyrant or slave, friend or foe, wise or foolish, virtuous or vicious, holy or profane, so long as her imperative physical conditions of life, the mortal thing, are conformed to; society itself is not her care, nor civilization, nor anything that belongs to man above the brute. Her word, consequently, need not disturb us; she is not our oracle. It rather belongs to us to win further victory over her, if it may be, by our intelligence, and control her vital, as we are now coming to control her material, powers and their operation.
This equality which democracy affirms—the identity of the soul, the sameness of its capacities of energy, knowledge, and enjoyment—draws after it as a consequence the soul’s right to opportunity for self-development by virtue of which it may possess itself of what shall be its own fulness of life. In the inscrutable mystery of this world, the soul at birth enters on an unequal struggle, made such both by inherent conditions and by external limitations, in individuals, classes, and races; but the determination
The great hold that the doctrine of equality has upon the masses is not merely because it furnishes the justification of the whole scheme, which is a logic they may be dimly conscious of, but that it establishes their title to such good in human life as they can obtain, on the broadest scale and in the fullest measure. What other claim, so rational and noble in itself, can they put forth in the face of what they find established in the world they are born into? The results of past civilization are still monopolized by small minorities of mankind, who receive by inheritance, under natural and civil law, the greater individual share of material comfort, of large intelligence, of fortunate careers. It does not matter that the things which belong to life as such, the greater blessings essential to human existence, cannot be monopolized; all that man can take and appropriate they find preoccupied so far as human discovery and energy have been able to reach, understand, and utilize it; and what proposition can they assert as against this sequestering of social results and material and intellectual opportunity, except to say, “we, too, are men,” and with the word to claim a share in such parts of social good as are not irretrievably pledged to men better born, better educated, better supplied with the means of subsistence and the accumulated hoard of the past, which has come into their hands by an award of fortune? It is not a fanciful idea. It is founded in the
It is in this portion of the field that democracy relies most upon its prophetic power. Within the limits of nature and mortal life the hope of any equal development of the soul seems folly; yet, so far as my judgment extends, in men of the same race and community it appears to me that the sameness in essentials is so great as to leave the differences inessential, so far as power to take hold of life and possess it in thought, will, or feeling is in question. I do not see, if I may continue to speak personally, that in the great affairs of life, in duty, love, self-control, the willingness to serve, the sense of joy, the power to endure, there is any great difference among those of the same community; and this is reasonable, for the permanent relations of life, in families, in social ties, in public service, and in all that the belief in heaven and the attachments to home bring into men’s lives, are the same; and though, in the choicer parts of fortunate lives, aesthetic and intellectual goods may be more important than among the common people, these are less penetrating and go not to the core, which remains life as all know it—a thing of affection, of resolve, of service, of use to those to whom it may be of human use. Is it not reasonable, then, on the ground of what makes up the substance of life within our observation, to accept this principle of equality, fortified as it is by any conception of heaven’s justice to its creatures? and to assume, if the word must be used, the principle primary in democracy, that all men are equally endowed with destiny? and thus to allow its prophetic claim, till disproved, that equal opportunity, linked with the service of the higher to the lower, will justify its hope? At all events, in this lies the possibility of greater achievement than would otherwise be attained within our national limits; and what is found to be true of us may be extended to less developed communities and races in their degree.
The doctrine of the equality of mankind by virtue of their birth as men, with its consequent right to equality of opportunity for self-development as a part of social justice, establishes a common basis of conviction, in respect to man, and a definite end as one main object of the State; and these elements are primary in the democratic scheme. Liberty is the next step, and is the means by which that end is secured. It is so cardinal in democracy as to seem hardly secondary to equality in importance. Every State, every social organization whatever, implies a principle of authority commanding obedience; it may be of the absolute type of military and ecclesiastical use, or limited, as in constitutional monarchies; but some obedience and some authority are necessary in order that the will of the State may be realized. The problem of democracy is to find that principle of authority which is most consistent with the liberty it would establish, and which acts with the greatest furtherance and the least interference in the accomplishment of the chief end in view. It composes authority, therefore, of personal liberty itself, and derives it from the consent of the governed, and not merely from their consent but from their active decree. The social will is impersonal, generic, the will of man, not of men; particular wills enter into it, and make it, so constituted, themselves in a larger and external form. The citizen has parted with no portion of his freedom of will; the will of the State is still his own will, projected in unison with other wills, all jointly making up one sum,—the authority of the nation. This is social self-government,—not the anarchy of individuals each having his own way for himself, but government through a delegated self, if one may use the phrase, organically combined with others in the single power of control belonging to a State. This fusion is accomplished in the secondary stage, for the continuous action of the State, by representation, technically; but, in its primary stage and original validity, by universal suffrage; for the characteristic trait of democracy is that in constituting this authority, which is social as opposed to personal freedom,—personal freedom existing in its social form,—it includes every unit of will, and gives to each equivalence. Democracy thus establishes the will of society in its most universal form, lying between the opposite extremes of particularism in despotism and anarchy; it owns the most catholic organ of authority, and enters into it with the entire original force of the community.
This universal will of democracy is distinguished from the more limited forms of states partially embodying democratic principles by the fact that nothing enters into it except man as such. The rival powers which seek to encroach upon this scheme, and are foreign elements in a pure democracy, are education, property, and ancestry, which last has its claim as the custodian of education and property and the advantages flowing
Universal suffrage is the centre of the discussion, and the argument against it is twofold. It is said that, though much in the theory of democracy may be granted and its methods partially adopted, men at large lack the wisdom to govern themselves for good in society, and also that they control by their votes much more than is rightfully their own. The operation of the social will is in large concerns of men requiring knowledge and skill, and it has no limits. In state affairs education should have authority reserved to it, and certain established interests, especially the rights of property, should be exempted from popular control; and the effectual means of securing these ends is to magnify the representatives of education and property to such a degree that they will retain deciding power. But is this so? or if there be some truth in the premises, may it not be contained in the democratic scheme and reconciled with it? And, to begin with, is education, in the special sense, so important in the fundamental decisions which the suffrage makes? I speak, of course, of literary education. It may well be the case that the judgment of men at large is sufficiently informed and sound to be safe, and is the safest, for the reason that the good of society is for all in common, and being, from the political point of view, in the main, a material good, comes home to their business and bosoms in the most direct and universal way, in their comfort or deprivation, in prosperity and hard times, in war and famine, and those wide-extended results of national policies which are the evidence and the facts. Politics is very largely, and one might almost say normally, a conflict of material interests; ideas dissociated from action are not its sphere; the way in which policies are found immediately to affect
Common experience furnishes a basis of political fact, well known to the people in their state of life, and also a test of any general policy once put into operation. The capacity of the people to judge the event in the long run must be allowed. But does broad human experience, however close and pressing, contain that forecast of the future, that right choice of the means of betterment, or even knowledge of the remedy itself, which belong in the proper sphere of enlightened intelligence? I am not well assured that it is not so. The masses have been long in existence, and what affects them is seldom novel; they are of the breed that through
“old experience do attain
To something like prophetic
strain.”
The sense of the people, learning from their fathers and their mothers, sums up a vast amount of wisdom in common life, and more surely than in others the half-conscious tendencies of the times; for in them these are vital rather than reflective, and go on by the force of universal conditions, hopes, and energies. In them, too, intelligence works in precisely the same way as in other men, and in politics precisely as in other parts of life. They listen to those
If this process—and it is to be observed that as the scale of power rises the more limited elements of social influence enter into the result with more determining force—be apparently crude in its early stages, and imperfect at the best, is it different from the process of social expansion in other parts of life? Wherever masses of men are entering upon a rising and larger life, do not the same phenomena occur? in religion, for example, was there not a similar popular crudity, as it is termed by some, a vulgarity as others name it, in the Methodist movement, in the Presbyterian movement, in the Protestant movement, world-wide? Was English Puritanism free from the same sort of characteristics, the things that are unrefined as belong to democratic politics in another sphere? The method, the phenomena, are those that belong to life universal, if life be free and efficient in moving masses of men upward into more noble ranges. Men of the people lead, because the people are the stake. On the other hand, educated leaders, however well-intentioned, may be handicapped if they are not rooted deeply in the popular soil. Literary education, it must never be forgotten, is not specially a preparation for political good judgment. It is predominantly concerned, in its high branches, with matters not of immediate political consequence—with books generally, science, history, language, technical processes
It must be acknowledged, too, that in the past, the educated class as a whole has commonly been found to entertain a narrow view; it has been on the side of the past, not of the future; previous to the revolutionary era the class was not—though it is now coming to be—a germinating element in reform, except in isolated cases of high genius which foresees the times to come and develops principles by which they come; it has been, even during our era, normally in alliance with property and ancestry, to which it is commonly an appurtenance, and like them is deeply engaged in the established order, under which it is comfortable, enjoying the places there made for its functions, and is conservative of the past, doubtful of the changing order, a hindrance, a brake, often a note of despair. I do not forget the great exceptions; but revolutions have come from below, from the masses and their native leaders, however they may occasionally find some preparation in thinkers, and some welcome in aristocrats. The power of intellectual education as an element in life is always overvalued; and, within its sphere, which is less than is represented, it is subject to error, prejudice, and arrogance of its own; and, being without any necessary connection with love or conscience, it has often been a reactionary, disturbing, or selfish force in politics and events, even when well acquainted with the field of politics, as ever were any of the forms of demagogy in the popular life. Intelligence, in the form of high education, can make no authoritative claim, as such, either by its nature, its history, or, as a rule, its successful examples in character. The suffrage, except as by natural modes it embodies the people’s practical and general intelligence, in direct decisions and in the representatives of themselves whom it elects to serve the State, need not look to high education as it has been in the privileged past, for light and leading in matters of fundamental concern; education remains useful, as expert knowledge is always useful in matters presently to be acted on; but in so far as it is separable from the business of the State, and stands by itself in a class not servants of the State and mainly critical and traditionary, it is deserving of no special political trust because
What suffrage records, in opposition it may be to educated opinion, as such, is the mental state of the people, and their choices of the men they trust with the accomplishment of what is to be done. If the suffrage is exposed to defect in wisdom by reason of its dulness and ignorance, which I by no means admit, the remedy lies not in a guardianship of the people by the educated class, but in popular education itself, in lower forms, and the diffusion of that general information which, in conjunction with sound morals, is all that is required for the comprehension of the great questions decided by suffrage, and the choice of fit leaders who shall carry the decisions into effect. The vast increase of this kind of intelligence, bred of such schools and such means for the spread of political information as have grown up here, has been a measureless gain to man in many other than political ways. No force has been so great, except the discussion of religious dogma and practice under the Reformation in northern nations, in establishing a mental habit throughout the community. The suffrage also has this invaluable advantage, that it brings about a substitution of the principle of persuasion for that of force, as the normal mode of dealing with important differences of view in State affairs; it is, in this respect, the corollary of free speech and the preservative of that great element of liberty, and progress under liberty, which is not otherwise well safe-guarded. It is also a continuous thing, and deals with necessities and disagreements as they arise and by gradual means, and thus, by preventing too great an accumulation of discontent, it avoids revolution, containing in itself the right of revolution in a peaceable form under law. It is, moreover, a school into which the citizen is slowly received; and it is capable of receiving great masses of men and accustoming them to political thought, free and efficient action in political affairs, and a civic life in the State, breeding in them responsibility for their own condition and that of the State. It is the voice of the people always speaking; nor is it to be forgotten, especially by those who fear it, that the questions which come before the suffrage
Fraternity, the third constituent of democracy, enforces the idea of equality through its doctrine of brotherhood, and enlarges the idea of liberty, which thus becomes more than an instrument for obtaining private ends, is inspired with a social spirit and has bounds set to its exercise. Fraternity leads us, in general, to share our good, and to provide others with the means of sharing in it. This good is inexhaustible and makes up welfare in the State, the common weal. It is in the sphere of fraternity, in particular, that humanitarian ideas, and those expressions of the social conscience which we call moral issues, generally arise, and enter more or less completely into political life. In defining politics as, in the main, a selfish struggle of material interests, this was reserved, that, from time to time, questions of a higher order do arise, such as that of slavery in our history, which have in them a finer element; and, though it be true that government has in charge a race which is yet so near to the soil that it is never far from want, and therefore government must concern itself directly and continuously with arrangements for our material welfare, yet the higher life has so far developed that matters which concern it more intimately are within the sphere of political action, and among these we reckon all those causes which appeal immediately to great principles, to liberty, justice, and manhood, as things apart from material gain or loss, and in our consciousness truly spiritual; and such a cause, preeminently, was the war for the Union, heavy as it was with the fate of mankind under democracy. In such crises, which seldom arise, material good is subordinated for the time being, and life and property, our great permanent interests, are held cheap in the balance with that which is their great charter of value, as we conceive our country.
Yet even here material interests are not far distant. Such issues are commonly found to be involved with material interests in conflict, or are alloyed with them in the working out; and these interests are a constituent, though, it may be, not the controlling matter. It is commonly felt, indeed, that some warrant of material necessity is required in any great political act, for politics, as has been said, is an affair of life, not of free ideas; and without such a plain authorization reform is regarded as an invasion
But fraternity finds, perhaps, its great seal of sovereignty in that principle of persuasion which has been spoken of already, and in that substitution of it for force, in the conduct of human affairs, which democracy has made, as truly as it has replaced tyranny with the authority of a delegated and representative liberty. Persuasion, in its moral form, outside of politics,—which is so largely resorted to in a community that does not naturally regard the imposition of virtue, even, with favour, but believes virtue should be voluntary in the man and decreed by him out of his own soul,—need not be enlarged upon here; but in its intellectual form, as a persuasion of the mind and will necessarily precedent to political action, it may be glanced at, since law thus becomes the embodied persuasion of the community, and is itself no longer force in the objectionable sense; even minorities, to which it is adversely applied, and on which it thus operates like tyranny, recognize the different character it bears to arbitrary power as that has historically been. But outside of this refinement of thought in the analysis, the fact that the normal attitude of any cause in a democracy is that men must be persuaded of its justice and expediency, before it can impose itself as the will of the State on its citizens, marks a regard for men as a brotherhood of equals and freemen, of the highest consequence in State affairs, and with a broad overflow of moral habit upon the rest of life.
That portion of the community which is not reached by persuasion, and remains in opposition, must obey the law, and submit, such is the nature of society; but minorities have acknowledged rights, which are best preserved, perhaps, by the knowledge that they may be useful to all in turn. Those rights are more respected under democracy than in any other form of government. The important question here, however, is not the conduct of the State toward an opposition in general, which is at one time composed of one element and at another time of a different element, and is
Fraternity, following lines whose general sense has been sufficiently indicated, has, in particular, established out of the common fund public education as a means of diffusing intellectual gain, which is the great element of growth even in efficient toil, and also of extending into all parts of the body politic a comprehension of the governmental scheme and the organized life of the community, fusing its separate interests in a mutual understanding and regard. It has established, too, protection in the law, for the weak as against the strong, the poor as against the rich, the citizen as against those who would trustee the State for their own benefit; and, on the broad scale, it provides for the preservation of the public health, relief of the unfortunate, the care of all children, and in a thousand humane ways permeates the law with its salutary justice. It has, again, in another great field, established toleration, not in religion merely, but of opinion and practice in general; and thereby largely has built up a mutual and pervading faith in the community as a body in all its parts and interests intending democratic results under human conditions; it has thus bred a habit of reserve at moments of hardship or grave difficulty,—a respect that awaits social justice giving time for it to be brought about,—which as a constituent of national character cannot be too highly prized.
The object of all government, and of every social system is, in its end and summary, to secure justice among mankind. Justice is the most sacred word of men; but it is a thing hard to find. Law, which is its social instrument, deals with external act, general conditions, and mankind in the mass. It is not, like conscience, a searcher of men’s bosoms; its knowledge extends no farther than to what shall illuminate the nature of the event it examines; it makes no true ethical award. It is in the main a method of procedure, largely inherited and wholly practical in intent, applied to recurring states of fact; it is a reasonable arrangement for the peaceful facilitation of human business of all social kinds; and to a considerable degree it is a convention, an agreement upon what shall be done in certain sets of circumstances, as an approximation, it may be, to justice, but, at all events, as an advantageous solution of difficulties. This is as true of its criminal as of its civil branches. Its concern is with society rather than the individual, and it sacrifices the individual to society without compunction, applying one rule to all alike, with a view to social, not individual, results, on the broad scale. Those matters which make individual justice impossible,—especially the element of personal responsibility in wrong-doing, how the man came to be what he is and his susceptibility to motives, to reason and to passion, in their varieties, and all such considerations,—law ignores in the main question, however it may admit them in the imperfect form in which only they can be known,
If such be the case within the law, what indifference to justice does the course of events exhibit in the world at large which comes under the law’s inquisition so imperfectly! How continuous and inevitable, how terrible and pitiful is this aspect of life, is shown in successive ages by the unending story of ideal tragedy, in poem, drama, and tale, in which the noble nature through some frailty, that was but a part, and by the impulse of some moment of brief time, comes to its wreck; and, in connection with this disaster to the best, lies the action of the villain everywhere overflowing in suffering and injury upon his victims and all that is theirs. What is here represented as the general lot of mankind, in ideal works, exists, multiplied world-wide in the lives and fortunes of mankind, an inestimable amount of injustice always present. The sacrifice of innocence is in no way lessened by aught of vengeance that may overtake the wrong-doer; and it is constant. The murdered man, the wronged woman, can find no reparation. What shall one say of the sufferings of children and of the old, and of the great curse that lies in heredity and the circumstances of early life under depraved, ignorant, or malicious conditions? These brutalities, like the primeval struggle in the rise of life, seem in a world that never heard the name of justice. The main seat of individual justice and its operation is, after all, in the moral sense of men, governing their own conduct and modifying so far as possible the mass of injustice continually arising in the process of life, by such relief as they can give by personal influence and action both on persons and in the realm of moral opinion.
But, such questions apart, and within the reach of the rude power of the law over men in the mass, where individuality may be neglected, there remains that portion of the field in which the cause of justice may be advanced, as it was in the extinction of slavery, the confiscation of the French lands, the abolition of the poor debtor laws, and in similar great measures of class legislation, if you will. I confess I am one of those who hold that society is largely responsible even for crime and pauperism, and especially other less clearly defined conditions in the community by which there exists an inveterate injustice ingrained in the structure of society itself. The process of freeing man from the fetters of the past is still incomplete, and democracy is a faith still early in its manifestation; social justice is the cry under which this progress is made, and, being grounded in material conditions and hot with men’s passions under wrong, it is a dangerous cry, and unheeded it becomes revolutionary; but in what has democracy been so beneficent to society as in the ways without number that it has opened for the doing of justice to men in masses, for the moulding of safe and orderly methods of change, and for the formation as a part of human character of a habit of philanthropy to those especially whose misfortunes may be partly laid to the door of society itself? Charity, great as it is, can but alleviate, it cannot upon any scale cure poverty and its attendant ills; nor can mercy, however humanely and wisely exerted, do more than mollify the misfortune that abides in the criminal. Social justice asks neither charity nor mercy, but such conditions, embodied in institutions and laws, as shall diminish, so far as under nature and human nature is possible, the differences of men at birth, and in their education, and in their opportunity through life, to the end that all citizens shall be equal in the power to begin and conduct their lives in morals, industry, and the hope of happiness. Social justice, so defined, under temporal conditions, democracy seeks as the sum and substance of its effort in governmental ways; some advance has been made; but it requires no wide survey, nor long examination, to see that what has been accomplished is a beginning, with the end so far in the future as to seem a dream, such as the poets have sung almost from the dawn of hope. What matters it? It is not only poets who dream; justice is the statesman’s dream.
Such in bold outline are the principles of democracy. They have been working now for a century in a great nation, not wholly unfettered and on a complete scale even with us, but with wider acceptance and broader application than elsewhere in the world, and with most prosperity in those parts of the country where they are most mastering; and the nation has grown great in their charge. What, in brief, are the results, so clear, so grand, so vast, that they stand out like mountain ranges, the configuration of a national life?
It will be plain to those who have read what has elsewhere been said of the ideal life, that democracy is for the nation a true embodiment of that life, and wears its characteristics upon its sleeve. In it the individual mingles with the mass, and becomes one with mankind, and mankind itself sums the totality of individual good in a well-nigh perfect way. In it there is the slow embodiment of a future nobly conceived and brought into existence on an ideal basis of the best that is, from age to age, in man’s power. It includes the universal wisdom, the reach of thought and aspiration, by virtue of which men climb, and here manhood climbs. It knows no limit; it rejects no man who wears the form Christ wore; it receives all into its benediction. Through democracy, more readily and more plainly than through any other system of government or conception of man’s nature and destiny, the best of men may blend with his race, and store in their common life the energies of his own soul, looking for as much aid as he may give. Democracy, as elsewhere has been said, is the earthly hope of men; and they who stand apart, in fancied superiority to mankind, which is by creation equal in destiny, and in fact equal in the larger part of human nature, however obstructed by time and circumstance, are foolish withdrawers from the ways of life. On the battle-field or in the senate, or in the humblest cabin of the West, to lead an American life is to join heart and soul in this cause.
Mystery is the natural habitat of the soul. It is the child’s element, though he sees it not; for, year by year, acquiring the solid and palpable, the visible and audible, the things of mortal life, he lives in horizons of the senses, and though grown a youth he still looks intellectually for things definite and clear. Education in general through its whole period induces the contempt of all else, impressing almost universally the positive element in life, whose realm in early years at least is sensual. So it was with me: the mind’s eye saw all that was or might be in an atmosphere of scepticism, as my bodily eye beheld the world washed in colour. Yet the habitual sense of mystery in man’s life is a measure of wisdom in the man; and, at last, if the mind be open and turn upon the poles of truth, whether in the sage’s knowledge or the poet’s emotion or such common experience of the world as all have, mystery visibly envelops us, equally in the globed sky or the unlighted spirit,
I well remember the very moment when a poetical experience precipitated this conviction out of moods long familiar, but obscurely felt and deeply distrusted. I was born and bred by the sea; its mystery had passed into my being unawares, and was there unconscious, or, at least, not to be separated from the moods of my own spirit. But on my first Italian voyage, day by day we rolled upon the tremendous billows of a stormy
“A poet’s mood”—I know what once I should have said. But mystery I then accepted as the only complement, the encompassment, of what we know of our life. In many ways I had drawn near to this belief before, and I have since many times confirmed it. One occasion, however, stands out in my memory even more intensely than those I have made bold to mention,—one experience that brought me near to my mother earth, as that out of which I was formed and to which I shall return, and made these things seem as natural as to draw my breath from the sister element of air. I had returned to the West; and while there, wandering in various places, I went to a small town, hardly more than a hamlet, some few hundred miles beyond the Missouri, where the mighty railroad, putting out a long feeler for the future, had halted its great steel branch—sinking like a thunderbolt into the ground for no imaginable reason, and affecting me vaguely with a sense of utmost limits. There a younger friend, five years my junior, in his lonely struggle with life bore to live, in such a camp of pioneer civilization as made my heart fail at first sight, though not unused to the meagreness, crudity, and hardness of such a place; but there I had come to take the warm welcome of his hands and look once more into his face before time should part us. He flung his arms about me, with a look of the South in his eyes, full of happy dancing lights, and the barren scene was like Italy made real for one instant of golden time.
But if we had wandered momentarily, as if out of some quiet sunlit gallery of Monte Beni, I soon found it was into the frontier of our western border. A herd of Texas ponies were to be immediately on sale, and I went to see them—wild animals, beautiful in their wildness, who had never known bit or spur; they were lariated and thrown down, as the buyers picked them out, and then led and pulled away to man’s life. It was a typical scene: the pen, the hundred ponies bunched together and startled with the new surroundings, the cowboys whose resolute habit sat on them like cotillion grace—athletes in the grain—with the gray, close garb for use, the cigarette like a slow spark under the broad sombrero, the belted revolver, the lasso hung loose-coiled in the hand, quiet, careless, confident, with the ease of the master in his craft, now pulling down a pony without a struggle, and now showing strength and dexterity against frightened resistance; but the hour sped on, and our spoil was two of these creatures, so attractive to me at least that every moment my friend’s eye was on me, and he kept saying, “They’re wild, mind!” The next morning in the dark dawn we had them in harness, and drove out, when the stars were scarce gone from the sky, due north to the Bad Lands, to give me a new experience of the vast American land that bore us both, and made us, despite the thousands of miles that stretched between ocean and prairie, brothers in blood and brain,—brothers and friends.
Yet how to tell that ride, now grown a shining leaf of my book of memory! for my eyes were fascinated with the land, in the high blowing August wind, full of coolness and upland strength, like new breath in my nostrils; and forward over the broken country, fenceless, illimitable, ran the brown road, like a ploughed ribbon of soil, into the distance, where pioneer and explorer and prospector had gone before, and now the farmer was thinly settling,—the new America growing up before my eyes! and him only by me to make me not a stranger there, with talk of absent friends and old times, though scarce the long age of a college course had gone by,—talk lapsing as of old on such rides into serious strains, problems such as the young talk of together and keep their secret, learning life,—the troubles of the heart of youth. And if now I recur to some of the themes we touched on, and set down these memoranda, fragments of life, thinking they may be of use to other youths as they were then to us, I trust they will lose no privacy; for, as I write, I see them in that place, with that noble prospect, that high sky, and him beside me whose young listening yet seems to woo them from my breast.
We mounted the five-mile ridge,—and, “Poor Robin,” he said, “what of him?” “Poor Robin sleeps in the Muses’ graveyard,” I laughed, “in the soft gray ashes of my blazing hearth. One must live the life before he tells the tale.” “I loved his ‘awakening,’” he replied, “and I have often thought of it by myself. And will nothing come of him now?” “Who can tell?” I said, looking hard off over the prairie. “The Muses must care for their own. That ‘awakening,’” I went on, after a moment of wondering why the distant stream of the valley was called “the Looking-glass,” and learning only that such was its name, “was when after the bookish torpor of his mind—you remember he called books his opiates—he felt the beauty of the spring and the marvel of human service come back on him like a flood. It was the growing consciousness of how little of life is our own. Youth takes life for granted; the hand that smoothed his pillow the long happy years, the springs that brought new blossoms to his cheeks, the common words that martyr and patriot have died to form on childish lips, and make them native there with life’s first breath, are natural to him as Christmas gifts, and bring no obligation. Our life from babyhood is only one long lesson in indebtedness; and we best learn what we have received by what we give. This was dawning on my hero then. I recall how he ran the new passion. That outburst you used to like, amid the green bloom of the prairies, like the misted birches at home, under the heaven-wide warmth of April breathing with universal mildness through the softened air—why, you can remember the very day,” I said. “It was one—” “Yes, I can remember more than that,” he interrupted; “I know the words, or some of them; what you just said was the old voice—tang and colour—Poor Robin’s voice;” and he began, and I listened to the words, which had once been mine, and now were his.
“By heaven, I never believed it. ’Clotho spins, Lachesis weaves, and Atropos cuts,’ I said, ’and the poor illusion vanishes; the loud laughter, the fierce wailing, die on pale lips; the foolish and the wise, the merciful and the pitiless, the workers in the vineyard and the idlers in the market-place, are huddled into one grave, and the heart of Mary Mother and of Mary Magdalen are one dust.’ Duly in those years the sun rose to cheer me; the breath of the free winds was in my nostrils; the grass made my pathways soft to my feet. Spring with its blossomed fruit trees, and the ungarnered summer, gladdened me; the flame of autumn was my torch of memory, and winter lighted my lamp of solitude. Men tilled the fields to feed me, and worked the loom to clothe me, and so far as in them was power and in me was need, brought to my doors sustenance for the body and whatsoever of divine truth was theirs for my soul. Women ministered to me in blessed charities; and some among my fellows gave me their souls in keeping. How true is that which my friend said to the poor boy-murderer condemned to die,—’I
* * * * *
“Eccola!” I said, “was it like that? But a heady rhetoric is not inconsistent with sobriety of thought, as many a Victorian page we have read together testifies. The style tames with the spirit; and wild blood is not the worst of faults in poets or boys. But I will change old coin for the new mintage with you, if you like, and it is not so very different. There is a good stretch ahead, and the ponies never seem to misbehave both at once.” In fact, these ponies, who seemed to enjoy the broad, open world with us, had yet to learn the first lesson of civilization, and unite their private wills in rebellion; for, while one or the other of them would from time to time fling back his heels and prepare to resist, the other dragged him into the course with the steady pace, and, under hand and voice, they kept going in a much less adventurous way than I had anticipated. And so I read a page or two from the small blank-book in which I used to write, saying only, by way of preface, that the April morning my friend so well remembered marked the time when I began that direct appeal to life of which these notes were the first-fruits.
The waters of the Looking-glass had been lost behind its bluffs to the west as we turned inland, though we still rose with the slope of the valley; and now on higher land we saw the open country in a broad sweep, but with bolder configuration than was familiar to me in prairie regions, the rolling of the country being in great swells; and this slight touch of strangeness, this accentuation of the motionless lines of height and hollow, and the general lift of the land, perhaps, was what first gave that life to the soil, that sense of a presence in the earth itself, which was felt at a later time. Then I saw only the outspread region, with here and there a gleam of grain on side-hills and far-curved embrasures of the folded slopes, or
“The gift of life at birth is only a little breath on a baby’s lips; the air asks no consent to fill the lungs, the heart beats, the senses awaken, the mind begins, and the first handwriting of life is a child’s smile; but as boyhood gathers fuller strength, and youth hives a more intimate sweetness, and manhood expands in richer values, life is not less entirely a gift. As well say a self-born as a self-made man. Nature does not intrust to us her bodily processes and functions, and the fountains of feeling within well up, and the forms of thought define, without obligation to man’s wisdom; body and soul alike are above his will—our garment of sense comes from no human loom, nor were the bones of the spirit fashioned by any mortal hands; in our progress and growth, too, bloom of health and charm of soul owe their loveliness to that law of grace that went forth with the creative word. Slow as men are to realize the fact and the magnitude of this great grant, and the supreme value of it as life itself in all its abundance of blessings, there comes a time to every generous and open heart when the youth is made aware of the stream of beneficence flowing in upon him from the forms and forces of nature with benedictions of beauty and vigour; he knows, too, the cherishing of human service all about him in familiar love and the large brothering of man’s general toil; he begins to see, shaping itself in him, the vast tradition of the past,—its mighty sheltering of mankind in institution and doctrine and accepted hopes, its fostering agencies, its driving energies. What a breaking out there is then in him of the emotions that are fountain-heads of permanent life,—filial love, patriotic duty, man’s passion for humanity! It is then that he becomes a man. Strange would it be, if, at such tidal moments, the youth should not, in pure thankfulness, find out the Giver of all good!
“As soon as man thus knows himself a creature, he has established a direct relation with the Creator, did he but realize it,—not in mere thought of some temporal creation, some antecedent fact of a beginning, but in immediate experience of that continuing act which keeps the universe in being,
’Which wields the world
with never wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath and
kindles it above,’—
felt and known now in the life which, moment to moment, is his own. The extreme sense of this may take on the expression of the pantheistic mood, as here in Shelley’s words, without any logical irreverence: for pantheism is that great mood of the human spirit which it is, permanent, recurring in every age and race, as natural to Wordsworth as to Shelley, because of the fundamental character of these facts and the inevitability of the knowledge of them. The most arrogant thought of man, since it identifies him with deity, it springs from that same sense of insignificance which makes humility the characteristic of religious life in all its forms. A mind deeply penetrated with the feeling that all we take and all we are, our joys and the might and grace of life in us, are the mere lendings of mortality like Lear’s rags, may come to think man the passive receptacle of power, and the instrument scarce distinguishable from the hand that uses it; the thought is as nigh to St. Paul as to Plato. This intimate and infinite sense of obligation finds its highest expression, on the secular side, and takes on the touch of mystery, in those great men of action who have believed themselves in a special manner servants of God, and in great poets who found some consecration in their calling. They, more than other men, know how small is any personal part in our labours and our wages alike. But in all men life comes to be felt to be, in itself and its instruments, this gift, this debt; to continue to live is to contract a greater debt in proportion to the greatness of the life; it is greatest in the greatest.
“This spontaneous gratitude is a vital thing. He who is most sensitive to beauty and prizes it, who is most quick to love, who is most ardent in the world’s service, feels most constantly this power which enfolds him in its hidden infinity; he is overwhelmed by it: and how should gratitude for such varied and constant and exhaustless good fail to become a part of the daily life of his spirit, deepening with every hour in which the value, the power and sweetness of life, is made more plain? Yet at the same instant another and almost contrary mood is twin-born with this thankfulness,—the feeling of helplessness. Though the secret and inscrutable power, sustaining and feeding life, be truly felt,—
’Closer is He than breathing
and nearer than
hands and feet,’—
though in moments of life’s triumphs it evokes this natural burst of happy gratitude, yet who can free himself from mortal fear, or dispense with human hope, however firm and irremovable may be his confidence in the beneficent order of God? And especially in the more strenuous trials of later ages for Christian perfection in a world not Christian, and under the mysterious dispensation of nature, even the youth has lived little, and that shallowly, who does not crave companionship, guidance, protection. Dependent as he feels himself to be for all he is and all he
“There is a third mood of direct experience by which one approaches the religious life. Surely no man in our civilization can grow far in years without finding out that, in the effort to live a life obeying his desires and worthy of his hopes, his will is made one with Christ’s commands; and he knows that the promises of Christ, so far as they relate to the life that now is, are fulfilled in himself day by day; he can escape neither the ideal that Christ was, nor the wisdom of Christ in respect to the working of that ideal on others and within himself. He perceives the evil of the world, and desires to share in its redemption; its sufferings, and would remove them; its injustice, and would abolish it. He is, by the mere force of his own heart in view of mankind, a humanitarian. But he is more than this in such a life. If he be sincere, he has not lived long before he knows in himself such default of duty that he recognizes it as the soul’s betrayal; its times and occasions, its degrees of responsibility, its character whether of mere frailty or of an evil will, its greater or less offence, are indifferent matters; for, as it is the man of perfect honour who feels a stain as a wound, and a shadow as a stain, so poignancy of repentance is keenest in the purest souls. It is death that is dull, it is life that is quick. It may well be, in the world’s history in our time, that the suffering caused in the good by slight defections from virtue far overbalances the general remorse felt for definite and habitual crime. Thus none—those least who are most hearts of conscience—escapes this emotion,
“Yet it seems to me a profound error in life to concentrate attention upon the moral experience here described; it is but initial; and, though repeated, it remains only a beginning; as the vast force of nature is put forth through health, and its curative power is an incident and subordinate, so the spiritual energy of life is made manifest, in the main, in the joy of the soul in so far as it has been made whole. A narrow insistence on the fact of sin distorts life, and saddens it both in one’s own conscience and in his love for others. Sin is but a part of life, and it is far better to fix our eyes on the measureless good achieved in those lines of human effort which have either never been deflected from right aims, or have been brought back to the paths of advance, which I believe to be the greater part, both in individual lives of noble intention, and in the Christian nations. Sin loses half its dismaying power, and evil is stripped of its terrors, if one recognizes how far ideal motives enter with controlling influence into personal life, and to what a degree ideal destinies are already incarnate in the spirit of great nations.
“However this may be, I find on examination of man’s common experience these three things, which establish, it seems to me, a direct relation between him and God: this spontaneous gratitude, this trustful dependence, this noble practice, which is, historically, the Christian life, and is characterized by its distinctive experiences. They are simple elements: a faith in God’s being which has not cared further to define the modes of that being; a hope which has not grown to specify even a Resurrection;
“The spiritual life here defined, elementary as it is, appears inevitable, part and parcel of our natural being. Why should this be surprising? Surely if there be a revelation of the divine at all, it must be one independent of external things; one that comes to all by virtue of their human nature; one that is direct, and not mediately given through others. Faith that is vital is not the fruit of things told of, but of things experienced. It follows that religion may be essentially free from any admixture of the past in its communication to the soul. It cannot depend on events of a long-past time now disputable, or on books of a far-off and now alien age. These things are the tradition and history of the spiritual life, but not the life. To the mass of men religion derived from such sources would be a belief in other men’s experience, and for most of them would rest on proofs they cannot scrutinize. It would be a religion of authority, not of personal and intimate conviction. Just as creation may be felt, not as some far-off event, but a continuing act, revelation itself is a present reality. Do not the heavens still declare the glory of God as when they spoke to the Psalmist? and has the light that lighteth every man who is born into the world ceased to burn in the spirit since the first candle was lit on a Christian altar? If the revelation of glory and mercy be an everlasting thing, and inextinguishable save in the life itself, then only is that direct relation of man with God, this vital certainty in living truth,—living in us,—this personal religion, possible.
“What has reform in religion ever been other than the demolition of the interfering barriers, the deposit of the past, between man and God? The theory of the office of the Holy Spirit in the Church expresses man’s need of direct contact with the divine; the doctrine of transubstantiation symbolizes it; and what is Puritanism in all ages, affirming the pure spirit, denying all forms, but the heart of man in his loneliness, seeking God face to face? what is its iconoclasm of image and altar, of prayer-book and ritual, of the Councils and the Fathers, but the assertion of the noble dignity in each individual soul by virtue of which it demands a freeman’s right of audience, a son’s right of presence with his father, and believes that such is God’s way with his own? This immediacy of the religious life, being once accepted as the substance of vitality in it, relieves man at once of the greater mass of that burden in which scepticism thrives and labours. The theories of the past respecting God’s government, no longer possible in a humaner and Christianized age, the impaired genuineness of the Scriptures and all questions of their text and accuracy, even the great doctrine of miracles, cease to be of vital consequence. A man may approach divine truth without them. Simple and bare as the spiritual life here presented is, it is not open to such sceptical attack, being the fundamental revelation of God bound up in the very nature of man which has been recognized at so many critical times, in so many places and ages, as the inward light. We may safely leave dogma and historical criticism and scientific discovery on one side; it is not in them that man finds this inward wisdom, but in the religious emotions as they naturally arise under the influence of life.
“This view is supported rather than weakened by such records of the spiritual life in man as we possess. Man’s nature is one; and, just as it is interpreted and illuminated by the poets from whom we derive direction in our general conduct, it is set forth and illustrated by saintly men and holy women in the special sphere of the soul’s life with God. Our nature is one with theirs; but as there are differences in the aptitudes, sensibilities, and fates of all men, so is it with spiritual faculties and their growth; and, from time to time, men have arisen of such intense nature, so sensitive to religious emotions, so developed in religious experience, through instinct, circumstance, and power, that they can aid us by the example and precept of their lives. To them belongs a respect similar to that paid to poets and thinkers. Yet it is because they tell us what they have seen and touched, not what they have heard,—what they have lived and shown forth in acts that bear testimony to their words, that they have this power. Such were St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas a Kempis, and many a humbler name whose life’s story has come into our hands; such were the Apostles, and, preeminently,
* * * * *
The sun was high in the heavens when we ceased talking of these matters and saw in a lowland before us a farmhouse, where we stopped. It was a humble dwelling—almost the humblest—partly built of sod, with a barn near by, and nothing to distinguish it except the sign, “Post Office,” which showed it was the centre of this neighborhood, if “the blank miles round about” could be so called. We were made welcome, and, the ponies being fed and cared for, we sat down with the farmer and his wife and the small brood of young children, sharing their noonday meal. It was a rude table and a lowly roof; but, when I arose, I was glad to have been at such a board, taking a stranger’s portion, but not like a stranger. It was to be near the common lot, and the sense of it was as primitive as the smell of the upturned earth in spring; it had the wholesomeness of life in it. Going out, I lay down on the ground and talked with the little boy, some ten years old, to whom our coming was evidently an event of importance; and I remember asking him if he ever saw a city. He had been once, he said, to—the hamlet, as I thought it, which we had just left—with his father in the farm-wagon. That was his idea of the magnificence of cities. I could not but look at him curiously. Here was the creature, just like other boys, who knew less of the look of man’s world than any one I had ever encountered. To him this overstretching silent sky, this vacant rolling reach of earth, and home, were all of life. What a waif of existence!—but the ponies being ready, we said our good-byes and drove on along fainter tracks, still northward. We talked for a while in that spacious atmosphere—the cheerful talk, half personal, half literary, lightly humorous, too, which we always had together; but tiring of it at last, and the boy still staying in my mind as a kind of accidental symbol of that isolated being whom my notes had described, and knowing that I had told but half my story and that my friend would like the rest, I turned the talk again on the serious things, saying—and there was nothing surprising in such a change with us—“After all, you know, we can’t live to ourselves alone or by ourselves. How to enter life and be one with other men, how to be the child of society, and a peer
* * * * *
“Respect for age is the natural religion of childhood; it becomes in men a sentiment of the soul. An obscure melancholy, the pathos of human fate, mingles with this instinctive feeling. The fascination of the sea, the sublimity of mountains, are indebted to it, as well as the beautiful and solemn stars, which, like them, the mind does not distinguish from eternal things, and has ever invested with sacred awe. It is the sense of our mortality that thus exalts nature. Yet before her antiquity merely, veneration is seldom full and perfect; her periods are too impalpable, and, in contemplating their vastness, amazement dissipates our faculties. Rather some sign of human occupancy, turning the desert into a neglected garden, is necessary to give emotional colour and the substance of thought; some touch of man’s hand that knows a writing beyond nature’s can add what centuries could not give, and makes a rock a monument. The Mediterranean islet is older for the pirate tower that caps it, and for us the ivied church, with its shadowed graves, makes England ancestral soil. Nor is it only such landmarks of time that bring this obscure awe; occupations, especially, awake it, and customary ceremonies, and all that enters into the external tradition of life, handed down from generation to generation. On the Western prairies I have felt rather the permanence of human toil than the newness of the land.
“The sense of age in man’s life, relieved, as it is, on the seeming agelessness of nature, is a meditation on death, deep-set far below thought. We behold the sensible conquests of death, and the sight is so habitual, and remains so mysterious, that it leaves its imprint less in the conscious and reflective mind than in temperament, sentiment, imagination, and their hidden stir; the pyramids then seem fossils of mankind; Stonehenge, Indian mounds, and desolate cities are like broken anchors caught in the sunken reef and dull ooze of time’s ocean, lost relics of their human charge long vanished away. Startling it is, when the finger of time has touched what we thought living, and we find in some solitary place the face of stone. I learned this lesson on the low marshes of Ravenna, where, among the rice-fields and the thousands of white pond lilies, stands a lonely cathedral, from whose ruined sides Christianity, in the face and figure it wore before it put on the form
“The Mother-Church?—is then this personal religious life only a state of orphanage? Because true life necessarily begins in the independent self, must it continue without the sheltering of the traditional past, the instructed guidance of older wisdom, and man’s joint life in common which by association so enlarges and fortifies the individual good? Why should one not behave with respect to religion as he does in other parts of life? It is our habit elsewhere in all quarters to recognize beyond ourselves an ampler knowledge, a maturer judgment, a more efficient will enacting our own choice. To obey by force is a childish or a slavish act, but intelligently and willingly to accept authority within just limits is the reasonable and practical act of a free man in society; the recognition of this by a youth marks his attainment of intellectual majority. Authority, in all its modes, is the bond of the commonwealth; until the youth comprehends it he is a ward; thereafter he is either a rebel or a citizen, as he lists. For us, born to the largest measure of freedom society has ever known, there is little fear lest the principle of authority should prove a dangerous element. The right of private judgment, which is, I believe, the vital principle of the intellectual life, is the first to be exercised by our young men who lead that life; and quite in the spirit of that education which would repeat in the child the history of the race, we are scarce out of the swaddling bands of the primer and catechism before we would remove all questions to the court of our own jurisdiction. The mind is not a tabula rasa at birth, we learn, but, so soon as may be, we will remedy that, and erase all records copied there. The treasure doors of our fathers’ inheritance are thrown open to us; but we will weigh each gold piece with balance and scale. All that libraries contain, all that institutions embody, all the practice of life which, in its innocence, mankind has adopted as things of use and wont, shall be certified by our scrutiny. So in youth we say, and what results? What do the best become? Incapables, detached from the sap of life, forced to escape to the intellectual limbo of a suspension of judgment, extending till it fills heaven and earth. We no longer discuss opinions even; the most we can attain to is an attitude of mind. In view of the vast variety of phases in which even man’s great ideas have been held, a sense of indifference among them, a vacuity in all, grows up. Pilate’s question, ’What is truth?’ ends all.
“This is the extreme penalty of the heroic sceptical resolve in strong and constant minds; commonly those who would measure man’s large scope by the gauge of their own ability and experience fall into such idiosyncrasy as is the fruitful mother of sects, abortive social schemes, and all the various brood of dwarfed life; but, for most men, the pressure of life itself, which compels them, like Descartes, doubting the world, to live as if it were real, corrects their original method of independence. They find that to use authority is the better part of wisdom, much as to employ men belongs to practical statecraft; and they learn the reasonable share of the principle of authority in life. They accept, for example, the testimony of others in matters of fact, and their mental results in those subjects with which such men are conversant, on the ground of a just faith in average human capacity in its own sphere; and, in particular, they accept provisional opinions, especially such as are alleged to be verifiable in action, and they put them to the test. This is our habit in all parts of secular life—in scholarship and in practical affairs. ’If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God,’ is only a special instance of this law of temporary acceptance and experiment in all life. It is a reasonable command. The confusion of human opinion largely arises from the fact that the greater part of it is unverifiable, owing to the deficient culture or opportunity of those who hold it; and the persistency with which such opinion is argued, clung to, and cherished, is the cause of many of the permanent differences that array men in opposition. The event would dispense with the argument; but in common life, which knows far more of the world than it has in its own laboratory, much lies beyond the reach of such real solution. It is the distinction of vital religious truth that it is not so withdrawn from true proof, but is near at hand in the daily life open to all.
“Such authority, then, as is commonly granted in science, politics, or commerce to the past results and expectations of men bringing human life in these provinces down to our time and delivering it, not as a new, but as an incomplete thing, into the hands of our generation, we may yield also in religion. The lives of the saints and all those who in history have illustrated the methods and results of piety, their convictions, speculations, and hopes, their warning and encouragement, compose a great volume of instruction, illustration, and education of the religious life. It is folly to ignore this, as it would be to ignore the alphabet of letters, the Arabic numerals, or the Constitution; for, as these are the monuments of past achievement and an advantage we have at our start over savage man, so in religion there are as well established results of life already lived. Though the religious life be personal, it is not more so than all life of thought and emotion;
“The question of authority in the religious life, however, is more specific than this, and is not to be met by an admission of the general respect due to the human past and its choicer spirits, and our dependence thereon for the fostering of instinctive impulses, direction, and the confirmation of our experience. It is organized religion that here makes its claim to fealty, as organized liberty, organized justice do, in man’s communal life. There is a joint and general consent in the masses of men with similar experience united into the Church, with respect to the religious way of life, similar to that of such masses united into a government with respect to secular things. The history of the Church with its embodied dogmas—the past of Christendom—contains that consent; and the Church founds its claim to veneration on this broad accumulation of experience, so gathered from all ages and all conditions of men as to have lost all traces of individuality and become the conviction of mankind to a degree that no free constitution and no legal code can claim. To substitute the simple faith of the young heart, however immediate, in the place of this hoary and commanding tradition is a daring thing, and may seem both arrogance and folly; to stand apart from it, though willing to be taught within the free exercise of our own faculties, abashes us; and it is necessary, for our own self-respect, to adopt some attitude toward the Church definitely, not as a part of the common mass of race-tradition in a diffused state like philosophy, but as an institution like the Throne or the Parliament.
“But may it not be pleaded that, however slight by comparison personal life may seem, yet if it be true, the Church must include this in its own mighty sum; and that what the Church adds to define, expand, and elevate, to guide and support, belongs to growth in spiritual things, not to those beginnings which only are here spoken of? And in defence of a private view and hesitancy, such as is also felt in the organized social life elsewhere, may it not be suggested that the past of Christendom, great as it is in mental force, moral ardour, and spiritual insight, and illustrious with triumphs over evil in man and in society, and shining always with the leading of a great light, is yet a human past, an imperfect stage of progress at every era? Is its historic life, with all its accumulation of creed and custom, not
“If, however, a claim be advanced which forbids such a use of reason as we make in regard to all other human institutions, viewing them historically with reference to their constant service to mankind and their particular adaptation to a changing social state; if, as was the case with the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, the Church proclaims a commission not subject to human control, by virtue of which it would impose creed and ritual, and assumes those great offices, reserved in Puritan thought to God only,—then does it not usurp the function of the soul itself, suppress the personal revelation of the divine by taking from the soul the seals of original sovereignty, remove God to the first year of our era, relying on his mediate revelation in time, and thus take from common man the evidence of religion and therewith its certainty, and in general substitute faith in things for the vital faith? If the voice of the Church is to find only its own echo in the inner voice of life, if its evidences of religion involve more than is near and present to every soul by virtue of its birth, if its rites have any other reality than that of the heart which expresses itself in them and so gives them life and significance, then its authority
“Within these limits, then, imposed by the earlier argument, what, under such reserves of the great principles of liberty, democracy, and justice in which we are bred and which are forms of the cardinal fact of the value of the personal soul in all men,—what to us is the office of the Church? In theology it defines a philosophy which, though an interpretation of divine truth, takes its place in the intellectual scheme of theory like other human philosophies, and has a similar value, differing only in the gravity of its subject-matter, which is the most mysterious known to thought. In its specific rites it dignifies the great moments of life—birth, marriage, and death—with its solemn sanctions; and in its general ceremonies it affords appropriate forms in which religious emotion finds noble and tender expression; especially it enables masses of men to unite in one great act of the heart with the impressiveness that belongs to the act of a community, and to make that act, though emotional in a multitude of hearts, single and whole in manifestation; and it does this habitually in the life of its least groups by Sabbath observances, and in the life of nations by public thanksgivings, and in the life of entire Christendom by its general feasts of Christmas and Easter, and, though within narrower limits, by its seasons of fasting and prayer. In its administration it facilitates its daily work among men. The Church is thus a mighty organizer of thought in theology, of the forms of emotion in its ritual, and of practical action in its executive. Its doctrines, however conflicting in various divisions of the whole vast body, are the result of profound, conscientious, and long-continued thought among its successive synods, which are the custodians of creeds as senates are of constitutions, and whose affirmations and interpretations have a like weight in their own speculative sphere as these possess in the province of political thought age after age. Its counsels are ripe with a many-centuried knowledge of human nature. Its joys and consolations are the most precious inheritance of the heart of man. Its saints open our pathways, and go before,
“It is true that in uniting with such a Church, under the specific conditions natural to both temperament and residence, a man yields something of private right, and sacrifices in a greater or less degree his personality; but this is the common condition of all social cooperation, whether in party action or any union to a common end. The compromise, involved in any platform of principles, tolerates essential differences in important matters, but matters not then important in view of what is to be gained in the main. The advantages of an organized religious life are too plain to be ignored; it is reasonable to go to the very verge in order to avail of them, both for a man’s self and for his efficiency in society, just as it is to unite with a general party in the state, and serve it in local primaries, for the ends of citizenship; such means of help and opportunities of accomplishment are not to be lightly neglected. Happy is he who, christened at the font, naturally accepts the duties devolved upon him, and stands in his parents’ place; and fortunate I count the youth who, without stress and trouble, undertakes in his turn his father’s part. But some there are, born of that resolute manliness of the fathers, which is finer than tempered steel, and of the conscience of the mothers which is more sensitive than the bare nerve,—the very flower of the Puritan tradition, and my heart goes out to them. And if there be a youth in our days who feels hesitancy in such an early surrender into the bosom of a Church, however broadly inclusive of firm consciences, strong heads, and free hearts; if primitive Puritanism is bred in his bone and blood and is there the large reserve of liberty natural to the American heart; if the spirit is so living in him that he dispenses with the form, which to those of less strenuous strain is rather a support; if truth is so precious to him that he will not subscribe to
* * * * *
There was no doubt about it; we were lost. The faint tracks in the soil had long ago disappeared, and we followed, as was natural, the draws between the slopes; and now, for the last quarter-hour, the grass had deepened till it was above the wheels and to the shoulders of the ponies. They did not mind; they were born to it. What solitude there was in it, as we pulled up and came to a stand! What wildness was there! Only the great blue sky, with a westward dropping sun of lonely splendour, and green horizons, broken and nigh, of the waving prairie, whispering with the high wind,—and no life but ours shut in among the group of low, close hills all about, in that grassy gulf! The earth seemed near, waiting for us; in such places, just like this, men lost had died and none knew it; half-unconsciously I found myself thinking of Childe Roland’s Tower,—
“those
two hills on the right
Couched,”—
and the reality of crossing the prairie in old days came back on me. That halt in the cup of the hills was our limit; it was a moment of life, an arrival, an end.
The sun was too low for further adventuring. We struck due west on as straight a course as the rugged country permitted, thinking to reach the Looking-glass creek, along which lay the beaten road of travel back to mankind. An hour or two passed, and we saw a house in the distance to which we drove,—a humble house, sod-built, like that we had made our nooning in. We drove to the door, and called; it was long before any answer came; but at last a
We drove on, with some word of this; and, eating what we had with us in case of famine, made our supper from biscuit and flask; and, before darkness fell, we struck the creek road, and turned southward,—a splendour of late sunset gleaming over the untravelled western bank, and dying out in red bloom and the purple of slow star-dawning overhead; and on we drove, with a hard road under us, having far to go. At the first farmhouse we watered the willing ponies, who had long succumbed to our control, and who went as if they could not tire, steadily and evenly, under the same strong hand and kindly voice they had felt day-long. It was then I took the reins for an easy stretch, giving my friend a change, and felt what so unobservably he had been doing all day with wrist and eye, while he listened. So we drove down, and knew the moon was up by the changed heavens, though yet unseen behind the bluffs of the creek upon our left; and far away southward, in the evening light, lay the long valley like a larger river. We still felt the upland, however, as a loftier air; and always as, when night comes, nature exercises some mysterious magic of the dark hour in strange places, there, as all day long, we seemed to draw closer to earth—not earth as it is in landscape, a thing of beauty and colour and human kinship, but earth, the soil, the element, the globe.
This was in both our minds, and I had thought of it before he spoke after a long pause over the briar pipes that had comraded our talk since morning. “I can’t talk of it now,” he said; “it’s gone into me in an hour that you have been years in thinking; but that is what you are to us.” I say the things he said, for I cannot otherwise give his way, and that trust of love in which these thoughts were born on my lips; all those years, in many a distant place, I had thought for him almost as much as for myself. “You knighted us,” he said, “and we fight your cause,”—not knowing that kingship, however great or humble, is but the lowly knights
But without repeating the wandering talk of reality with its changeful tones,—and however serious the matter might be it was never far from a touch of lightness shuttling in and out like sunshine,—I told him, as we drove down the dark valley, my hand resting now on his shoulder near me, how nature is antipodal to the soul; or, if not the antipodes, is apart from us, and cares not for the virtues we have erected, for authority and mercy, for justice, chastity, and sacrifice, for nothing that is man’s except the life of the body itself, the race-life, as if man were a chemical element or a wave-motion of ether that are parts of physics. “I convinced myself,” I said, “that the soul is not a term in the life of nature, but that nature is in it as a physical vigour and to it an outward spectacle, whereby the soul acquires a preparation for immortality, whether immortality come or not. And I have sometimes thought,” I continued, “that on the spiritual side an explanation of the inequalities of human conditions, both past and present, may be contained in the idea that for all alike, lowly and lofty, wretched and fortunate, simple and learned, life remains in all its conditions an opportunity to know God and exercise the soul in virtue, and is an education of the soul in all its essential knowledge and faculties, at least within Christian times, broadly speaking, and in more than one pagan civilization. Material success, fame, wealth, and power—birth even, with all it involves of opportunity and fate—are insignificant, if the soul’s life is thus secured. I do not mean that such a thought clears the mystery of the different lots of mankind; but it suggests another view of the apparent injustice of the world in its most rigid forms. This, however, is a wandering thought. The great reversal of the law of nature in the soul lies in the fact that whereas she proceeds by the selfish will of the strongest trampling out the weak, spiritual law requires the best to sacrifice itself for the least. Scientific ethics, which would chloroform the feeble, can never succeed until the race makes bold to amend what it now receives as the mysterious ways of heaven, and identifies a degenerate body with a dead soul. Such a code is at issue with true democracy, which requires that every soul, being equal in value in view of its unknown future, shall receive the benefit of every doubt in earthly life, and be left as a being in the hands of the secret power that ordained its
So I spoke, as the words came to me, while we were still driving down the dark valley, in deeper shadows, under higher bluffs, looking out on a levelled world westward, stretching off with low, white, wreathing mists and moonlit distances of plains beyond the further bunk. We turned a great shoulder of the hills, and the moon shone out bright and clear, riding in heaven; and the southward reach unlocked, and gave itself for miles to our eyes. At the instant, while the ponies came back upon their haunches at the drop of the long descent ahead, we both cried out, “the Looking-glass!” There it was, about a mile away before and below us, as plain as a pikestaff,—a silvery reach, like a long narrow lake, smooth as the floor of cloud seen from above among mountains, silent, motionless,—for all the world like an immense, spectral looking-glass, set there in the half-darkened waste. It was evidently what gave the name to the creek, and I have since noticed the same name elsewhere in the Western country, and I suppose the phenomenon is not uncommon. For an hour or more it remained; we never seemed to get nearer to it; it was an eerie thing—the earth-light of the moon on that side,—I saw it all the time.
“The difference you spoke of,” I began, with my eyes upon that spectral pool, “is only that change which belongs to life, dissolving like illusion, but not itself illusion. I am not aware of any break; it is the old life in a higher form with clearer selfhood. Life, in the soul especially, seems less a state of being than a thing of transformation, whose successive shapes we wear; and so far as that
We spoke of some illustrations of this, the scene before us lending atmosphere and suggestion to the talk, and enforcing it like nature’s comment. “But,” I continued, “what I had in mind to say was concerning our dead selves. The old phrase, life is a continual dying, is true, and, once gone life is death; and sometimes so much of it has been gathered to the past, such definite portions of it are laid away, that we can look, if we will, in the lake of memory on the faces of the dead selves which once we were.” Instinctively we looked on the mystic glamour in the low valley, as on that Lake of the Dead Souls I spoke of. I went on after the natural pause,—I could not help it,—“’I was a different man, then,’ we say, with a touch of sadness, perhaps, but often with better thoughts, and always with a feeling of mystery. How old is the youth before he is aware of the fading away of vitality out of early beliefs? and then he feels the quick passing of the enthusiasms of opening life, as one cause after another, one hero, one poet, disclosing the great interests of life, in turn engages his heart. As time goes on, and life comes out in its true perspective,
The sheen of the river had died out, and the creek was only a common stream lit with the high moon, and bordered far off to the west with the low indistinguishable country. We drove in silence down the valley along that shelf of road under the land. The broken bluffs on the left rose into immense slopes of rolling prairie, and magnified by the night atmosphere into majesty, heavy with deep darkness in their folds, stood massive and vast in the dusk moonlight, like a sea. Then fell on me and grew with strange insistence the sense of this everlasting mounded power of the earth, like the rise and subsidence of ocean in an element of slower and more awful might. The solid waste began to loom and lift, almost with the blind internal
O brave and tender heart, now long lapped under the green fold of that far prairie in his niche of earth! How often I see him as in our first days,—the boy of seventeen summers, lying on his elbows over his Thackeray, reading by the pictures, and laughing to himself hour after hour; and many a prairie adventure, many happy days and fortunate moments come back, with the strength and bloom of youth, as I recall the manly figure, the sensitive and eager face, and all his resolute ways. Who of us knows what he is to another? He could not know how much his life entered into mine, and still enters. But he is dead; and I have set down these weak and stammering words of the life we began together, not for the strong and sure, but for those who, though true hearts, find it hard to lay hold of truth, and doubt themselves, in the hope that some younger comrade of life, though unknown, may make them of avail and find in them the dark leading of a hand.