CHAPTER IX
THE ETHICAL SANCTION
Ethical philosophy centres on two main points—the ethical criterion and the ethical sanction. We have to ask ourselves, What kind of life ought I to live, and secondly, Why ought I to live it? The first of these questions we have answered simply thus: Life is self-justified; in merely living we fulfil the whole purpose of nature; and as life is a thing admitting of degrees it follows that that life is best in which there is most of life. But this does not mean apparent life for the individual at the present moment. It means most life for the Whole, so far as the individual acts upon the Whole. And he acts on it in two ways—first (one which is often overlooked) by living his own life which is equally a part of that Whole whether he lives on a desert island or in the heart of a city; and secondly by the influence he radiates on other lives with which his own is socially related.
This, it is clear, is quite the same thing as to say that the right life for any man is that in which for him there is most of life—the richest and the fullest life—if he were to go on living indefinitely. For whatever depresses or exalts life in the Whole must ultimately depress or exalt it in the individual also; the two interests are clearly identical in the long run. This ‘long run’ or universal point of view, which makes identical the interests of the Whole and the interests of the individual, gives to a natural ethics the criterion for all human action. It gives the contents, though not the cogency—with this we have to deal in the present chapter—of the word ‘ought.’
By the mere fact of his social relations with other men each individual is continually being trained to take this view, to harmonize together his egoistic and his altruistic instincts; and is continually amassing a store of social experiences out of which a universal moral code is gradually shaping itself. “Life,” it has been well said, “has saved up much wisdom.” Ethical wisdom, in this regard, will clearly involve such kind of action, of organization, as will afford to each individual the fullest opportunities for vital development in mind and body.
The life in which there is most of life! By holding fast to this clue we shall, I think, see our way through many of the obscurities in which, partly by the search for an extra-natural basis of morality, partly by the reactionary attempt to base morality simply on the striking of a balance between pleasures and pains, the philosophy of right and wrong has been involved. We get a natural basis for establishing a scale in human action, a distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower,’ without which a philosophic ethics is clearly impossible. I do not, of course, mean to say that it is possible to apply a mechanical rule and measure to moral action in the manner of Catholic casuistry, according to which it is a venial sin to steal 19s. 6d. but a mortal sin to steal £1.148 Still, the existence of a natural scale is evident at once when we consider the fact that man is constantly being placed in positions in which his action may either thwart and depress life, or simply maintain it, or markedly enrich and extend it. The ethical quality of his action appears to arise from the fact that it is possible for him, under the impulse of immediate personal gratification, to do things which if commonly done by men would destroy the beauty and order of human life. The interests of the whole and of the individual may be identical, as we have said, in the long run, but at the moment they are often in violent conflict. Allowing for the fact that it is never possible in nature to draw a sharp dividing line between different classes of being, and to say absolutely that things are thus on one side of it and thus on the other, we may repeat that this opposition between the long-run or universal and the momentary or personal interest is a characteristic of human life as opposed to that of the lower animals. It arises from the strong sense of individuality, of selfhood, which emerges in man and of which the animals know little or nothing. In itself it is a new and noble power of life, but it has its fatal and mischievous aspect. Without it we should know neither good nor evil. Personality is at once man’s pride and his fall.
With this sense of selfhood there have grown up in humanity the faculties of Conscience and of Will. Conscience I interpret as the sense of what is due to the Whole, to the nobler and more permanent self. Inasmuch as man is only gradually discovering what it really is that the Whole demands of us, it follows that the utterances of conscience may be misdirected, and that they need to be corrected and purified by intelligence and experience. We see here an example of that principle of the combination of evolution and involution which alone seems to make intelligible the development of life. Never, by organizing into a social system a multitude of individual appetencies, can one produce a moral sense, a conscience. But neither is conscience concerned to give the true laws of that organization. It adds its peculiar numen, its sanctity, to every effort to
and though the mark itself may, indeed must, shift and be transformed with the ripening insight of man, yet, as between it and the temptations of sense, conscience must always be obeyed. Now as nature is organically one, we should expect to find this truth not dependent merely on an intuitive perception but written in the experiences of life. And is not this exactly what we do find? The ethical ideals of Judaism, of Hinduism, and of Roman Catholicism, with their extreme reliance on external observance and ritual, are lower, no doubt, than those of Christianity as conceived, say, by St. Paul. Yet let a Jew or a Hindu turn Christian, or a Catholic turn Protestant or Freethinker, for the mere sake of material advantages or an easier way of living, and a general moral deterioration seems at once to set in.149 Whenever a man allows his sense of personal ease and gratification to overpower his sense of what is due to his fellow man, to his own higher self, to his God, he weakens his will and his capacity for living the nobler life. Ultimately he destroys the capacity altogether, and with it vanishes even that for which he sinned, the capacity for pleasure itself. The poison of self-indulgence will slacken and corrupt every fibre of his moral and physical being. To grasp at pleasure indiscriminately, recklessly, greedily is a way that makes not for life but death. On the other hand, the capacity for renunciation and self-control, the following of the law of love, the passion for justice and equality, not only grow strong by exercise but, far from injuring the other capacities which it may, on occasion, be right to suppress for their sake, they rather intensify these. As self-indulgence corrupts and fatigues the whole man, even on the self-indulgent side, so duty and righteousness vitalize and brace the whole man, both on their own side and the other. For Nature is one—sweet and mighty are the powers which conspire to create the harmony she loves in the spirits faithful to her world-wide revelation.
Now since the moral faculties bear this common stamp upon them, that they are those which oppose to the temptations of personal gratification the sense of duty to something outside ourselves, and since, when these two clash, the claim of the moral law is always to be obeyed, it is inevitable that men will sometimes take the denial of personal gratification for an end per se and attach to it a notion of peculiar holiness and purity. And this error will be intensified by the ancient and inveterate habit of regarding the Supreme Being as a malignant Power, to be propitiated by suffering. Thus we get the false sanction with its Ascetic ideal which has appeared so often in history. It is the other extreme to licence, and rests equally on disregard for the rational ideal of Sophrosyne or Temperance which lies between them. Yet it may truly be said that asceticism has its due place in the world. The ascetic life cannot indeed be the ideal life for any one who holds that plenitude of life is the true ideal. But it may be the best life for this or that individual. A nature maimed or scathed from birth, or by unhappy fortune, may best be able to realize itself in complete withdrawal from the interests of ordinary social life. Such withdrawal may also be necessary for the pioneer or leader of a cause, for a great reformer, for a teacher absorbed in his mission.
Philosophy, in fact, has its saints and ascetics as well as any religion that rests on extra-natural sanctions. But in each case the ascetic ideal rests on quite a different basis.
Looking broadly at the part which religious Orders have played in the religious and intellectual history of Europe, it may well be doubted whether even the most gracious and human figure in the history of asceticism, Francis of Assisi, would not have better served his time and land by the natural development, in secular life and activity, of the beautiful if sometimes wildly ebullient character portrayed in the records of his youth, than by cutting away half his life in order to force the other half into a distorted rarity. In recognizing the beauty and sweetness of his nature let us not be misled into attributing it in any degree to the influence of that fatal miasma from a faith more ancient than any religion which has a name and place on earth to-day, the dim terror of the unseen which has embodied itself for ages in expiatory sacrifices and rites of blood and pain.
Had Francis not been a saint he would certainly have been one of his country’s greatest poets.150 Different minds will probably estimate differently the loss and gain. As a poet he produced the ‘Canticle of the Sun’; as an ascetic, the Franciscan Order. Now it is fair to point out that this, like other Orders of his church, must not be judged by what it is like in times when it is surrounded by watchful and by no means adorant eyes. A Catholic religious Order in a Catholic country naturally lives and moves in an atmosphere of veneration. To preserve this atmosphere pure from the sceptical thought which, from the monastic point of view, would vitiate it so dangerously, is naturally a prime object of every religious community; hence the bigotries, superstitions, and tyrannies of which these communities have so often been the sources or agents, from the days of Hypatia to the days of Dreyfus. Such communities, developing themselves under such circumstances, cannot attract many men of intellect and character to join them. They rapidly deteriorate, and European literature from Boccaccio and Chaucer to Erasmus shows us the repute in which they come to be held by the uncloistered intellect. A false ideal may stimulate, but it poisons. St. Francis, dreaming that he serves God by making himself blind to God’s world through a course of pitiless austerities,151 produces an Order whose licence in one generation after his death has become a scandal to Christendom.152
Let us turn now to the theory of asceticism as conceived by the humane and rational spirit of Stoic philosophy. Epictetus—to my mind the greatest ethical thinker of antiquity—has a valuable and carefully reasoned chapter on the subject in his Dissertations. In reading this after, let us say, The Little Flowers of St. Francis, one seems to pass from the drugged atmosphere of a mediæval church to the free air and sunlight of the world. The ascetic, or Cynic as he was called in Stoic phraseology, is painted for us as a man who adventures himself to the extreme limit of abnegation, not from any mystic sentiment of the holiness of pain and poverty, but simply to help himself and others to realize the soul’s independence of external things. It was a cardinal doctrine of Stoicism (as it was of the Christianity of Christ) that the things which a man wrought and thought, the things under the control of his will, were the only things that really mattered. What happened to a man from outside was, indeed, of great importance in regard to how he dealt with it; in itself it was of none; it was like a ball in a game which you have to do your best to catch, knowing well that you do so not for the sake of the ball but of the game. Such was the Stoic view of life, and the Cynic represented not the perfected Stoic, not an ideal towards which all should tend—for the ideal was that of citizenship and well-ordered social life—but simply the method of verification which consists in taking an extreme case and showing that one’s theory will fit in with it. And so Diogenes lived in a barrel instead of a house, and asked nothing of Alexander except to stand out of his light. It is not more pleasing to God, not better in any way, that a man should live in a barrel rather than in a house, that he should be single rather than married, poor rather than rich; yet in the chances and changes of this mortal life all these things may happen to a man, will he, nill he, and the point is to show that he may still be confident and cheerful, knowing that his true self is untouched by these calamities. And while St. Francis and the more devoted of his followers so tortured and wrecked the body which St. Paul had called the temple of the Holy Spirit that many of them perished or had to linger out their lives in the infirmary,153 with the Cynic the cultivation of the body and its faculties was a part of his discipline.
“For,” says Epictetus,154 “if he shall appear consumptive, meagre and pale, his witness hath not the same emphasis. Not only by showing forth the things of the spirit must he convince foolish men that it is possible, without the things that are admired of them, to be good and wise, but also in his body must he show that plain and simple and open-air living are not mischievous even to the body: ‘Behold, even of this I am a witness, I and my body.’ So Diogenes was wont to do, for he went about radiant with health, and with his very body he turned many to good. But a Cynic that men pity seems to be a beggar—all men turn away from him, all stumble at him. For he must not appear squalid; so that neither in this respect shall he scare men away; but his very austerity should be cleanly and pleasing.”
How sane and wholesome, how wisely adapted to the fundamental facts of life, is the Stoic ideal as compared with the monastic! In it we see that there is a place in a natural ethics for a rational asceticism. Of such there will always be need—we must admit, whatever we may think of the ‘spirituality’ of self-destruction, that there are, and are always likely to be, many more men and women who deteriorate in soul and body through petty acts of self-indulgence than who do so by an excess of austerity. And this makes it all the more necessary that the matter should be conceived rightly, reasonably, from the side of a reverence for life and its manifestations, not from that of disdain and repulsion; that we should take hold of it (to quote Epictetus again) by the handle by which it can be carried, not that by which theory and experience alike have shown that it never can. When Tennyson wrote “Move upward, working out the beast,” he was not so well inspired as in some of his other appreciations of modern science. The religious ascetic aims at working out the beast—not so Nature, who does not progress by substituting one form of living for another, but by growing from a central core and continually harmonizing the old radical elements of being with the new assimilations. One can, perhaps, work out the beast—what cannot the will achieve? But the beast surely avenges himself, and often in terrible fashion.
When, however, we have recognized the false sanction and the false ideal associated with it, we have still the more difficult problem of establishing the true. If Righteousness—to use that term for all kinds of action ethically right—is to be followed in the interests of life, how can it ever be required that much suffering, and even death itself may have to be faced for its sake? Man is a part of a Whole—in the effective realization of that conception all ethics is summed up—but he is also an individual. Why should the individual give way to the Whole if their interests seem to clash? In other words, though we have the contents, the static significance of the word ‘ought,’ we have still to find its dynamic significance, its cogency.
Every beast does what it ‘ought’ without any question, and this constantly involves acts of co-operation or self-sacrifice for the interests of the race. In man, ethical action has a greater value for life, simply because, unlike the beast, he is able to question its grounds and to forgo it if he chooses. He observes, as we have said, that the ‘long run’ or universal point of view is often in conflict with the individual point of view. “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die” is the extreme expression of the individual point of view. It has been called a ‘pig-philosophy,’ and if the expression is just, it is not because the pig will die to-morrow, for it will probably live as long as anything else, but because no matter how long it lives it is, qua pig, incapable of any other form of life.
But a man is capable of other forms of life, and to realize these he must keep the pig-life in check, not despising or disowning it, but restraining it, lest it should throw him out of harmony. Unchecked, it will do that in the long run; but what if he is to have no long run? Where the lower life can yield an hour of delight, why deny it for the sake of a higher life, if in the next hour both must end together?
I confess that I see no escape from the implied conclusion if the premiss is true. But if the view of life outlined in these pages be true, then this premiss is palpably false. Neither the higher nor the lower life can ever have any end, though no doubt they may pass into forms outside the category of Time, in which the terms beginning and end have no longer any meaning. Life is not dependent on its visible and tangible forms. The question here involved is one on which the drift of certain modern speculations in physics obliges us to dwell for a little.
The question of the present inhabitability of Mars or other planets has been much debated of late, pro and con. Opinions differ on this point; but there is a very general agreement among physicists that the state of the moon, cold, dead, and barren as a burnt-out cinder, must, by the equalization of energy, be sooner or later the necessary fate of every planet and of every sun in the universe. Science has thus apparently come to justify by its solemn verdict that cry of the Latin poet, more charged with the pathos of eternal death than perhaps any other human utterance:—
The conditions under which life is possible will then no longer exist. One nothingness awaits the saint, the sage, the ox, the oak tree, and the fungus. “Life,” says Le Dantec, “has not always existed on the earth”; we are to regard it as merely “a surface accident in the history of the thermic evolution of the globe.”156
This remark, which is one that a thermometer might be expected to make if it could talk, is in Le Dantec’s mouth probably no more than a little rhetorical fling at orthodoxy, for it is really answered by his whole book. His main thesis is “the absence of all essential difference and all absolute discontinuity between living and not-living matter.” “A surface accident” can hardly be a reasonable description of a development thus prepared for in the essential nature of the substance of the world. But other physicists have lately cut deeper, and will not allow the suns of Catullus, even when cold, to set and rise again for ever. According to the very interesting and apparently well-supported speculations of Gustave Le Bon,157 all matter is at present engaged in that process of disintegration of which radium offers the most conspicuous example. The energy which produces life and response of all kinds is explained as simply the result of this long, disintegrating process, and may be compared to the action of a released spring, seeking its state of quiescence and immobility.158 When the process is complete, matter will be resolved into the primordial Something from which it somehow originated. And where will the saint and the sage, or anything that we can recognize as life, be then?
The answer to all this rises to the mind at once when we abandon the point of view of the thermometer and place ourselves at that of rational Man. This Matter, on whose states life is supposed to be dependent, is, after all, known to us only through the fact that we are living to observe it. If it disappeared, no doubt we should cease to see it, and if it were transformed we should see it otherwise, but to make the life which sees dependent on our seeing anything exactly as it appears now on this globe is surely the wildest of assumptions. We observe that life makes use of certain conditions of matter—a certain range of temperature, the presence of certain minerals and gases—in order to express itself. We regard these conditions as the product of a Power which desires life and has produced them to obtain it. But there may be many other conditions too. All we can tell is that beyond certain physical limits our senses cannot perceive life or get responses from it. M. Le Dantec would, no doubt, treat as an illusion the belief that man can communicate with and be responded to by a Power, a Life, transcending that of which the senses inform us. I am, with the multitude of men, profoundly convinced that we can. But leaving this entirely aside, is it not evident that, even as there are invisible rays in the spectrum which are now and then discovered by some unexpected chemical or electrical action, so there may be modes of living of which none of our present senses can give us the faintest conception? Whoever may deny this possibility, and on whatever grounds, it certainly cannot be denied on any grounds that physics or biology are aware of. And to those who believe that life is the central thing, and that matter exists only for it, the possibility is a certainty, for life must have been when as yet matter was not—life set it going. To convey the idea that everything that exists, however it may be transformed, is part of a divine Whole which cannot die because it is essential Life, we say that it is ‘immortal,’ and conceive ourselves as existing after death in a spiritual form just as the body exists after the bodily death in other bodily forms. Whether time and space, or even personality, will exist for us after death we dare not say; we are totally unable to imagine the conditions of such an existence. But we can perfectly grasp the broad fact that whatever we do and are, whatever we think, whatever transacts itself even in the unconscious sphere of our existence, must have eternal endurance and significance because it is knit with the eternal Whole.
“To the foot,” says Epictetus, “I shall say that it is
according to Nature that it be clean; but if you take it as
a foot, and not as a solitary thing, it shall beseem it to go
into the mud, and to tread on thorns, and perchance to be
cut off, for the sake of the whole; otherwise it is no longer
a foot.
“And some such thing we should suppose about ourselves
also. What art thou? A man. Look at thyself as
a solitary creature, and it is according to Nature for thee to
live to old age, to grow rich, and to keep good health. But
if thou look upon thyself as a man, and as a part of a certain
whole, for the sake of that whole it may become thee
now to have sickness, now to sail the seas, and run into
peril, now to suffer need, and perchance to die before thy
time.
“Why, then, dost thou bear it hard? Knowest thou not
that, as the foot, alone, is not a foot, so thou, alone, art not a
man.”159
The broad fact on which a system of natural ethics must be based, if it is to have any ethical quality at all, is that the individual life finds its goal in the cosmic life, not in pleasure, or any other term by which we may choose to express a sensation of personal enjoyment. The distinction between the bonum honestum and the bonum delectabile is really a valid one—it is no invention of moralists “suckled in a creed outworn,” but is revealed by a study of life and its manifestations to have been deeply rooted in nature from a period far anterior to the advent of man upon the earth. In man, the bonum honestum takes the form mainly of what Epictetus calls the sense of “natural fellowship” among men, and what Christ expressed in the word which gave to the ideas of Stoicism the penetrating power they had lacked, the great and divine word, Love. But we must never forget that even this word will not take us to our end and sum up a system of ethical thought unless we rightly conceive the ultimate object to which it is directed. This is not the visible community of men, nor even that of all nature, now existing or to exist in the future. It is the ideal, eternal community, of which every man remains equally an organic part, whether he has any means of physical communication with his fellows or not. It is that without which the visible community, with all its laws and inter-relations, would never have come into being. It is the “city of God,” builded without hands, the Universal Polity whose “troubled image,” as Plato says, we discern in the polity we know.
When Socrates, after his sentence, lay in prison awaiting the summons to die, his friends gathered round him entreating him to make his escape, and explaining to him the safe and easy means they had provided for that end. Freely and cheerfully as was his wont, delighting in the play of dialectical fence, he debated the matter with them. Then he laid dialectics aside, and spoke to them from the heights of vision. Rightly or wrongly, he declared, the laws of his mother-city, to which he owed all he had and all he was, had bidden him die. Whatever happened now, there could be no escape in the end. Some day he must face death, and stand before the Laws of the Underworld. What answer should he make to Them when they demanded how he had dealt in life by their brethren in the world above?
This grand impersonation of the eternal Laws in their kinship with the laws of the visible world illumines a whole region of thought, extending far beyond the limits of the particular moral question which evoked it. It strikes the note of all high thinking on man’s duty to man. The laws, written or unwritten, that govern societies of men can claim no reverence from the individual who does not feel that they are the shadows or copies of laws belonging to the sphere of the eternal.
It is one thing to admit that the social relations of mankind give the start to ethical feeling, provide it with a wide and varied field of action, and with a criterion as to what is right and what is not. It is quite another to argue that this ethical feeling is merely a product of these relations, and has, apart from them, no meaning or purpose. This is another case of the principle which I have described before160 in speaking of Evolution and Involution. Without both of these I cannot see how any movement from one state of being to another is to be accounted for. People, or even animals, living in communities find that mutual aid is useful to them, and they practise it. The utilitarian school think, when they have demonstrated this, that the whole ethical question is solved. But in reality they have not even approached it. Mutual aid is useful? Well, then, it is useful. How are we going to get any further? How are we going to account for love, duty, fidelity, self-sacrifice? Because certain things appear in the world under certain conditions we have, many of us, got into a slipshod way of saying that they are the product of these conditions, but a strict examination of the terms will frequently show that they are nothing of the kind. There is no valid reason why social life and mutual aid should not go on for ever without producing anything higher than the sense of mutual advantage. The nobler passions do indeed come into life when the proper stage of social evolution has been reached, but their source is not within the bounds of the visible order, nor do I see how they can ever justify themselves with reference to it alone. Neither, on the other hand, can they be realized without it. The divine air which we breathe on the mountain height is not made by the mountain, but we must climb the mountain to breathe it. Every step we take upwards in the visible order is, as it were, the discovery of something in that invisible order which is its spiritual counterpart and gives it its spiritual significance.
I have said that ethics is for life; but to the individual it must sometimes appear to be rather for death than for life, unless he knows that there is a life beyond the visible life. In this faith only—in whatever varied forms the intellect of man has embodied and expressed it—are martyrdoms possible. And martyrdoms have been so often the great turning-points and inspirations of human history that an ethics which cannot justify them would seem to be an ethics at odds with nature. Consider from our point of view the significance of the two martyrdoms of history which have most deeply impressed and influenced the minds of men.
Socrates had no gospel, no new truth to proclaim. He dissociated himself from the ‘rationalistic’ theories of his time, not indeed because he was particularly attached to ancient ideas in religion, but because theorizing on these subjects had no interest for him.161 On his trial he expressly disclaimed heretical views on religion. It is clear that these were only charged against him because the real offence was no crime in Athenian or any other law. The real offence was that Socrates was a relentless critic, within reach of whose tongue no patriotic rhetorician could feel himself confident and comfortable. It was a time of rhetorical patriotism in Athens. From the bitter humiliation of the Peloponnesian War had arisen an impulse towards national regeneration, a genuine and worthy impulse in itself, but one which unfortunately took shape not in a manly facing of facts, a courageous march forward to the future, but rather in a panic-stricken retreat to old conservative formulas and bigotries, to the abandonment of which by cultivated Athenians was ascribed all the evil that had fallen on the city. Socrates, however, delighted in taking popular convictions and reducing them by a series of ingenious interrogations to their verifiable residuum of truth, if there happened to be any. They commonly emerged from the ordeal in a dilapidated condition. At a time when the whole city was high strung with patriotic fervour while inwardly very uncertain about its principles of action, the presence of a thinker like Socrates, with his pitiless arraignment of every gaudy fallacy before the bar of Reason, was a continual scandal and offence, and was easily interpreted as a public danger. Had he consented to keep silent, and affected to fall in with the general trend of public sentiment, he would, as he well knew, have been safe. But he refused all compliance and compromise, and declared with absolute truth that Athens would do better to reward him for stinging it into a perception of realities than to punish him for the wholesome pain of the process. So he went with clear-sighted deliberation to his death, and that death, so wonderfully recorded for us by the greatest prose writer of all time, has ennobled all criticism, all sceptical thought, thenceforward. None can think lightly of what Socrates thought it worth his while to die for.
Turn to the death of Christ, and into how different an atmosphere we seem to pass! No philosopher has here recorded for us the death of a philosopher. Myth and legend have clustered round the great event—the Jewish conception of an expiatory sacrifice—the truer and profounder myth of a slain and re-arisen God—and these have wrapped the Crucifixion in such a cloud of mystical light and colour that the outlines of the historical fact are lost to view. When this cloud is pierced, however, an intelligible human transaction remains. In Christ the luminous purity of Greek reason was so blended with the religious fervour of the Eastern mind that he may justly be called the ideal man, the Son of Man and of God, the incarnation of the divine thought. Unlike Socrates, he was distinctly a heretic in his place and time. He appeared among a people deeply religious but one in whom religion had taken the form of an immense fabric of ceremonial and observance, guarded and administered by a special caste who conceived themselves as the appointed vehicle of the will of God for the untaught multitude. To this multitude Christ went direct. He led them straight to the ancient founts of light and life, disregarding the narrow channels hewn by Pharisaic formalism. He bade them open their eyes and see for themselves; he taught them that the truth was for all men; beside the conceptions of the authorized religion he set new conceptions which made the old seem barren or ludicrous. The people heard him gladly, and the great fabric of Pharisaism was manifestly tottering. The fury of a monopolist caste was aroused. There is no more merciless anger than the anger of the religious monopolist who sees his monopoly threatened, and to this anger Christ fell a victim. As Socrates died for the right to disbelieve, so Christ died for the right to believe, and whatever the churches have made of him he has inspired every revolt against priestcraft and authority ever since. No creed is worth living for which is not worth dying for. Christ’s death and spiritual resurrection162 set the seal on this truth and gave the world the most signal instance in history of triumph arising out of defeat and death.
Volumes of argument and analysis could not confute an ethical system so effectually and so severely as the bare fact that it looked paltry or incongruous beside such lives and deaths as these.
The conclusions we have reached in this discussion of the basis of a natural ethics may now be summed up. We have interpreted the object of phenomenal Being as Life.
The ethical quality of life lies in its conscious and active harmony with the Whole.
The motive for ethical action lies in the fact that we are a part of that Whole. The sense of this relation is as deep a part of man’s nature as the sense of his selfhood, or deeper.
To live for Others, then, is no more the true epitome of a natural ethics than is, to live for Self. The true epitome is, Live for the Whole—the Whole which includes both others and yourself, which is greater than all humanity, yet is capable of being faithfully served in the silence of one human breast.
We have now before us, therefore, a clear conception of the criterion and the sanction of ethical action. The criterion is applied when we ask of anything done by man, “Does it further life in the Whole?” The sanction is found in the fact that each of us is an organic part of that Whole. The richest and fullest life is evidently to be won by the most complete development of all our faculties which is allowed us by our opportunities. Ethics, therefore, exists for life, not life for ethics. This simple proposition arises inevitably from the scientific conception of the world. The greatest of fallacies is to conceive life as existing for any other object whatsoever, or to define its aim as something more or less remote from our present existence. Our ‘eternal life’ is not something to come—we are living it here and now. This is not a pilgrimage or a place of preparation; it leads us to no heaven, no hell, no distant judgment seat. We are before that judgment seat every hour; the heaven and the hell which it dispenses are the daily experiences through which we move; and the saints and prophets of this faith are those who have felt most deeply and revealed most profoundly the great realities of existence, hidden from us not so much by the darkness of the grave as by the impalpable veils of use and wont. The grave has mystery indeed but no terror of gloom for those who realize that the universe is but an eddy on the stream of life. By that eddy we see the stream, we feel its power and movement; and we know that the substance of which it is made is the stuff of life itself.
PART III: ART
CHAPTER X
ART AND LIFE
“Like a living thing, one and whole.”—Aristotle.163
THE third chapter of Tolstoy’s book, What is Art? contains a summary of the opinions of some sixty modern writers (taken chiefly from Schasler’s Kritische Geschichte der Aesthetik) on the essential meaning of the terms Art and Beauty. All these opinions, after having been duly paraded across the stage, are dismissed by Tolstoy as a mass of “enchanted confusion and contradictoriness,” and he then proceeds to build up his own theory of art. As the latest critical treatment of the subject on a large scale by a thinker and an artist who has made a deep impression on the minds of men, his conclusions deserve careful attention on the part of any later writer who desires to deal with the perennially attractive but very obscure problems of æsthetics. Let me begin by quoting the passage with which Tolstoy closes the fourth chapter of his work:—
“To the question What is this Art, to which is offered up the labour of millions, the very lives of men, and even morality itself? we have extracted replies from the existing æsthetics which amount to this—that the aim of art is beauty, that beauty is recognized by the enjoyment it gives, and that artistic enjoyment is a good and important thing because it is enjoyment. In a word, that enjoyment is good because it is enjoyment. Thus, what is considered the definition of art is no definition at all, but only a shuffle to justify existing art. Therefore, however strange it may seem to say so, in spite of the mountains of books written about art, no exact definition of art has been constructed. And the reason of this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.”164
Now in one point at least, that which is embodied in the last sentence, these words of Tolstoy’s appear to me to go straight to the mark. Art can no more be founded on beauty than morality can be founded on pleasure. A greater than Tolstoy has spoken the same truth in a couple of his mighty lines. The great masters, says Whitman,
But let us see what Tolstoy would set up in place of what he throws down. Art, he tells us, is “one of the means of intercourse between man and man.” “By words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he transmits his feelings.” But the transmission must, if it is art, be intentional, premeditated. “Art begins when one person with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the same feeling expresses that feeling by certain external indications.” The “indications” may, of course, be a certain kind of language, or gesture, or plastic representation, or sound. If, by such means, a man has succeeded in making his own feeling infectious, and affecting others by it, he has, to that extent achieved art. Art is therefore “a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and is indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.”165
Certainly one cannot but admire the strong clear-headedness and common sense with which Tolstoy blows away the mists into which he had plunged us in his third chapter, and brings us into a region of daylight realities, with firm earth under our feet. Undoubtedly if man does want to get into real contact with his fellow-men he must not merely tell them what he feels, he must make them feel the same thing. And art, produced with “individuality, clearness and sincerity” has this property, to use Tolstoy’s own term, of infectiousness. Moreover it is of enormous antiquity and has exceedingly primitive forms. There may have been art before there was speech—there was certainly art before there was writing, before there was anything remotely resembling intellectual culture or religion. The metaphysical definitions of Hegel, “The Idea shining through Matter,” or of Knight, “The union of object and subject, the drawing forth from nature of that which is cognate to man,” and of the rest of the sixty and odd philosophers, do, I think, look a little irrelevant when we think of the cave-man scratching his bit of mammoth ivory. But Tolstoy’s account of the matter glows with reality. The cave-artist was struck with something in nature—the reindeer drinking at a pool, the mammoth swinging through the jungle—he longed to express it, to make others see. It can hardly be doubted that this was the origin of art as art.166 I think it is its fundamental quality even now, though we must include among the objects rendered things not in external nature but in the artist’s own imagination.
The questions then arise, What is it that the artist is trying to infect other people with? Is art quite indifferent to the nature of the feeling communicated? Is there any common feeling expressed by things apparently so diverse as a strain of music, a piece of pottery, a cathedral, a lyric, a statue, and a landscape painting?
Tolstoy does not overlook these questions; he has, in fact, a great deal to say about them. But here, in his analysis of the æsthetic faculty, the obsession with the exclusively ethical view of things which has so much impaired his own art seems to have led him on a false track. Having decided that infectiousness is the common quality of all art, he is struck with the fact that this quality varies very much in different works, and he uses it to obtain a scale of merit:—
“Not only,” he writes, “is infection a sure sign of art, but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art. The stronger the infection the better is the art, as art, speaking now apart from its subject matter, i.e. not considering the quality of the feelings it transmits.”167
This statement is obviously meaningless unless you define the nature of the person who is to be infected. Infection is as much a matter of the mind infected as of the agent which infects. “The stronger the infection for such and such an audience ...” is what we shall have to read. The audience must be a constant element if the definition is to convey any distinct meaning. Perceiving this, as so acute a mind could not fail to do, Tolstoy falls back on exactly the same criterion as that of Bishop Butler when he endeavoured to get a universal standard of right and wrong. Butler set up as final judge in these matters the “plain honest man.”168 You were to appeal to the unsophisticated conscience of this ideal being, and that ended the matter. So, with Tolstoy, you are to get the “unperverted” man who, like an animal, “unerringly finds what he needs.”169 Most people in our society, says Tolstoy, “are quite unable to distinguish a work of art from the grossest counterfeit.” They like, or pretend to like, Beethoven better than a peasant folk-song! But the peasant’s, i.e. the untaught, appreciation, which is merely bewildered by Beethoven, is right.170 This, we ultimately find, simply means that the “plain honest man,” as conceived by Tolstoy, is one who appreciates the moral contents of a work of art, provided that it has any, and that it has infection enough to get them into his mind. And Tolstoy (the art-critic) does not care about anything except these moral contents.
This is clear when he comes to deal with the element which he mentions above as having been omitted from his consideration of the comparative value of art-work, namely the quality of the feeling transmitted by the medium of art. Here he lays it down that the object of all art is to unite mankind, and to make them feel at one with God and with each other.171 This may pass very well if by uniting is meant enabling us to enter with sympathy into the life of man, and even of things that are not man. Even so a drawing by Nettleship can make us feel at one with a python or a tigress. But Tolstoy does not mean that. His uniting is a moral and practical idea based on the doctrine that combat, and everything that could lead to combat, is wrong. Ancient religious perceptions, he argues, confined the sense of unity to the tribe or nation, and art had to glorify solely the might or greatness of the people who produced it. Modern religion, on the contrary, takes account of all humanity without exception. “And therefore the feelings transmitted by the art of our time not only cannot coincide with the feelings transmitted by former art, but must run counter to them.”172 Only two kinds of art, according to Tolstoy, “can be considered good art in our time.” These are first, “art transmitting feelings flowing from a religious perception of man’s position in the world in relation to God and to his neighbours,” and secondly, “art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life, but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the whole world—the art of common life—the art of a people—universal art.”173 As instances of these types of good modern art, Tolstoy gives his amazing list—Schiller’s Robbers, Les Misérables, Dickens’s and Dostoievsky’s novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Adam Bede. In painting we are to take as types of excellence “the drawing by Kramskoy (worth many of his finished pictures), showing a drawing-room with a balcony past which troops are marching in triumph on their return from the war. On the balcony stands a wet-nurse holding a baby and a boy. They are admiring the procession of the troops, but the mother, covering her face with a handkerchief, has fallen back on the sofa, sobbing.” Or one may turn to “a picture by the French artist, Morlon, depicting a lifeboat hastening in a heavy storm to the relief of a steamer that is being wrecked.”174
It is easy to make fun of this headlong descent to the level of the parish magazine, but it is not so easy to challenge the position from which Tolstoy deduces his criticisms of individual works, or to deny that he has again and again struck home with incomparable force against the factitious art so current in the present day. His book is a piece of genuine thinking, and in this it has few rivals among contemporary works of æsthetic criticism, especially in English. Most of these works are either pæans of praise for what the critic finds attractive and stimulating to his own temperament, or attacks conducted with every resource of satire and ridicule on what he does not understand or care for. But a serious attempt like that of Tolstoy to discover and to apply a true principle of art criticism is very much to seek; and I venture to think that many critics who are horrified at the notion of putting Uncle Tom’s Cabin above King Lear would find it by no means so easy as they suppose to give a rational account of the faith that is in them. Tolstoy’s conclusions, like those of Plato in The Republic (which they very much resemble), are wrong-headed, but his manner of thinking is that of a massive and nobly ordered intellect, and is well worthy of respectful imitation at whatever distance lesser powers can contrive to follow it.
I know nothing whatever (I regret to say) about the art of Kramskoy or of Morlon, but one imagines, from Tolstoy’s way of talking about the works referred to, that they are attempts to capture admiration for a work of art by the aid of something which is not art, but sentiment. At any rate, that is just what Tolstoy desires them to do. Is art, then, entirely indifferent to subject, as some of the philosophers of the Impressionist school contend? Not at all—so long as the subject is something in the picture, and capable of being expressed in the medium of that branch of art. A crew of men pulling a boat through a heavy sea may be a good subject for a painting, but to the artist it does not matter a pin’s point whether they are going to rescue life or to board an enemy or to catch lobsters. Under the circumstances they will all look just the same. The wreck in the offing has its value in the design of the picture, no more and no less. And those who are always on the look out for false values, sentimental values, will never learn what art really has to teach them, what art alone can teach. What is this?
The master key with which we have tried to open certain doors in biology and in ethics will, I hope, serve us also in discovering the principles of art. I accept fully Tolstoy’s postulate of infectiousness as a primary quality of art. There can be no art which does not communicate to others the feeling of the artist. This implies that the artist must have a distinct and sincere feeling to communicate. But it does not at all imply that the finest art is that which is most widely or powerfully communicable at its first appearance or at any given period in history. To say that infectiousness is an essential characteristic of art is not the same thing as to say that the more it infects, either extensively or intensively, the better art it is. One might as well say that if, as has been done, you define man as ‘a political animal,’ it would follow that the more strenuously political he was the more he fulfilled the purpose of his being as a man. But politics and art are both of them simply ways in which man endeavours to remould his universe “nearer to the heart’s desire.” How does he make use of political methods for his true purpose? How does he make use of art and its infectiousness for his true purpose? These are the real, the decisive questions.
What is the essential thing communicated in art? The question is answered at once if we reflect that as life can have no ulterior object beyond life, and is satisfied when the maximum of living is attained,175 so life must be the ultimate object of art also. It is the quality of art to communicate feeling; it is the object of art to communicate a feeling for life. Art is man’s expression of life; and he delights in art precisely because and in so far as he delights in life. But if this be all, it may be objected, why, with life in full glow and activity all around him, should man turn to this reflection or rendering of it which he calls art? What place does the reality leave for the enjoyment of the shadow? This was substantially Plato’s indictment of art in the last book of The Republic. All things exist, according to his well-known doctrine of ideas, in an ideal or archetypal form, a “pattern laid up in heaven.” There is such a pattern, let us say, of a Bed, and this is the real, the archetypal Bed. Copying some reflection of this in his own mind, the carpenter makes a material, individual bed.
Then comes in the painter, who copies the bed of the carpenter, and who is thus at two removes from Reality; art, in Plato’s view, being simply imitation, and therefore somewhat despicable.176
There are some minor, yet by no means trivial, reasons which might be given in answer to this objection; as, for instance, that art enables one to assemble together in small compass the expressions of a great variety of life not to be directly enjoyed, save at wide intervals of time and place. But the primary and fundamental reasons are our main concern here.
In the first place, the material world around us, or such portion of it as we are able to perceive, is not, as it stands, a pure expression of life. Holding as we do with Cleanthes in his majestic Hymn to Zeus that all things redundant have their place in the Whole, and that in it all things ugly have their beauty and all things hateful their share of love,177 it is still true that the world as we see it presents us with a pell-mell of varied forms—some mature and beautiful, some in process of transition, some in decay, some stationary, unchanging, dead. The inner harmony which holds them together is rarely perceptible in any one fragment of actual life. But the artist adds this harmony, this completeness; his work, within its own limits, is a whole. He gives us something which nature cannot give. Taking some aspect of life which he wishes to convey by means of line, colour, or tone, he suppresses, alters, composes, emphasizes, till he has expressed his feeling in its purity, with everything immaterial left out and with the things essential to his conception lifted clearly into view. His work is therefore greater and more vital than nature, that is to say than any fragment of nature, for he is looking at the part he renders sub specie aeternitatis, in the light of the Whole. And living in the conception of a great work of art, we live in the Whole; the individual has sunk from view.
Zola has finely said, “Art is a bit of Nature seen through the medium of a temperament.” This temperament means the artist’s personal way of seeing life; it means all that makes his art different from a mere record. And the audience who see or hear his work become acquainted with this temperament—there is no other way in which the artist can express it so well. The artist, then, is giving us himself along with his subject, and this is the greatest thing he can give. Whether the wars of Troy ever happened is of very little consequence compared with Homer’s way of imagining them. And when we have learned Homer’s way we can and do apply it for ourselves, for has he not ‘infected’ us with it? The artist opens our eyes, and leaves us in a world infinitely more significant and beautiful than without his aid we should ever have known it to be. His function is thus the liberation within us of faculties, of powers of living, which otherwise might never have risen into consciousness. We commonly call this ‘idealizing the facts of life.’ It would be nearer the mark to say that it makes them real. Art turns our formal, sensible, external perceptions of things into real and vital perceptions, and thus enormously increases the range and volume of life of which those who apprehend it are capable. The glory of light, the music of winds and waters, the dignity of man’s common occupations, the wonder and sweetness of the love of men and women, all these have been revealed to us by the artist, “a man speaking to men ... pleased with his own passions and volitions, who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is within him.”178
The essential purpose of any art-work, then, is to be expressive of life—more expressive than the raw facts of life ever can be. The practical problem for every artist in every kind of material is how to make his work expressive; only thus can it be what Tolstoy calls “infectious.” To do this, besides the acquirement of technique, he must clearly have something to express. Let us not imagine, however, as the “plain honest man” is apt to do, that this must necessarily be something capable of being put into terms of the intellect—a fact, a story, a “criticism of life.” Art is rather an exploration than a criticism of life.179 And life is very great and manifold. Primarily the painter is a man who likes to apprehend life in colour, the sculptor one who apprehends it in the form of masses, the musician in sound, the poet in actions, emotions, ideas. Each may, and probably must, have some of the gifts and faculties of the others, but as painter, musician, or whatever he may be, he thinks and feels in the material of his own art, and he uses that material to express its own virtues, not to imitate those of another.
The question of the relation of art to beauty, and the meaning of beauty itself, may now be considered. What is this mysterious element about the nature of which such a torrent of opinion has been poured out since man first began to reflect on his own states of mind? Between the view which holds it to be an absolute and ultimate principle, recognized in, rather than arising from, experience, and that which denies it any right to be called a principle at all, referring it simply to the effect of habit, and refusing to see any essential difference between the Hottentot conception of beauty and the Greek, we can find, I think, a position in strict accordance both with the historical facts of the evolution of the conception and with the claims of the Idealists.
Let us look back a moment to the analysis of moral action which we made in the preceding chapters. We found then that while all healthy action tends to maintain and promote life, there are circumstances under which this life-promoting quality comes more saliently into view than is usual. This happens in general when mere personal desires are subjected to the larger life of the Whole, or when a lower form of living is subjected to a higher. This heightening and intensification of life-promoting action we called moral action. And we drew no sharp and distinct line between it and ordinary healthy action, for nature knows no such distinctions, and the philosophy which tries to establish them is stamped with unreality.
In regard to Beauty we have only to take up the same point of view as we did in regard to Ethics, and the mystery lies clear before us at once. All nature is in some sense expressive of life, even when it seems most desolate or most degraded; for life as we know it means change, variety, contrast, and, under the conditions of space and time, one can no more have life without death and decay than one can have height without depth. But all nature does not equally express life, and much of it, as we have seen, does not express it at all to our perceptions. Beauty arises, then, when we find a certain heightening, a saliency, an intensity in the expression or vitality, whether by external nature or, in art, by man. Thus Life, not Beauty, is the mark of art, but beauty is the signal that the mark has been hit.
As with the moral, so with the æsthetic sense—we find it in all stages of development. A man or a race whose range of life is contracted to a few physical enjoyments and pains will set the idea of beauty in whatever expresses or is associated with these enjoyments. A wider, loftier, subtler conception of life will bring forth a nobler beauty. We are not, on this theory, abandoned to a mere subjective and arbitrary preference, according as we are trained and accustomed to this type or to that. There is a perfectly valid and objective criterion in the question, Which represents the fullest and strongest life? The Greek ideal surpasses the Hottentot—to take two extremes—because the Greek is capable of all that the Hottentot can do or feel—he takes it all up into his larger life; but the Hottentot can only live in a small sector of the sphere occupied by the Greek. Instead, therefore, of the two opposing battlecries of ‘Art for Morals’ and ‘Art for Art,’ let us set that of ‘Art for Life.’ For Life is greater than either art or morals; it includes and justifies them both.
The characteristics of Beauty will be further discussed in connexion with some of the individual arts, which we have now to range under our general principle.
The more deeply life is studied and felt, the more strongly do two great and cardinal principles of it come into view. These are opposed to each other, but complementary; and thus life in general appears to exhibit that singular quality of polarity which seems so intimately to pervade all its separate manifestations; everything which lives and moves appearing to do so by virtue of the action of two opposing forces. These two poles of the axis of life are, on the one hand, what we call Order, Continuity, Rhythm; and on the other, Change, Variety, Contrast. If Order were not, Change would become chaos. If Change were not, Order would become death. In neither case would growth and development be possible.
An art, therefore, however abstract, like Music or like the decorative pattern in a Celtic MS., which expressed the union of these two principles might be profoundly expressive of life. It need not set before us any definite living thing provided it expresses the cardinal principles of all life. It will do this the better the more intimately these principles are blended, as in nature, into a vital unity.
On the other hand, art does, of course, frequently represent individual objects, and probably had its first distinguishable beginnings in so doing.180 We may, then, get a broad classification of the arts by placing on one side those which deal with objects of sense, and on the other those which convey life under forms devised by the artist himself, and not found in the external world. One is tempted to call these respectively Imitative and Creative. But, after all, what is essentially artistic in the first category is just the fact that it is not purely imitative, for, as Mr.
Whistler observed, to suppose that you can get art by copying nature is equivalent to thinking that you can get music by sitting on the piano. On the other hand, it does not seem fitting to use so exalted a word as creation with reference to the pattern which a Zuñi Indian draws on a piece of pottery, while denying it to a painting by Titian. Instead, therefore, of using the words Creative and Imitative—now that we know what we mean by them—we shall contrast those arts which are directly Presentative with those which are Representative. In the one case the artist presents us with the whole artistic product, form and substance, as devised by himself. In the other, he represents to us forms already presented by nature, but re-composed, re-presented, and harmonized by him for an æsthetic purpose.
The Presentative arts fall into two classes. In one of these Music stands alone. Here the artistic purpose is not only dominant but (I speak, of course, of music in its highest and most characteristic development) there is no other purpose whatever. The forms elaborated by combinations and sequences of sound have no object except that of art and mean nothing apart from that. Hence Music has been called ‘pure style.’ We shall recur to this subject when we have dealt with the other class, that of the Decorative arts, the essence of which it is to add an expression of rhythm, of world-harmony, to objects whose primary purpose is something different—a building, a vase, a piece of furniture, or a hanging. This class, again, can be subdivided into arts which attain this effect by the structure of the object, and those which do so by the application of ornament to its surface; both being, of course, often combined in the same object.
In structure the expression of life is gained by so arranging the lines and masses as to give an impression that power is at work—that something is being done—done triumphantly yet not without strain and effort. Every object of utility does something—art shows it to us in the act. An example may help to make clear what I mean, and may show how the principle can be applied to any kind of object which may be the subject of artistic treatment.
A Greek temple in its simplest external aspect consists of a quadrilateral group of columns surrounding a walled shrine and supporting a low-pitched roof. Nothing could well be simpler than the structural conditions thus expressed. But the artistic expression of them is not so simple. This depends in the main upon the proportion observed between the pillars and the weight, or apparent weight, above them. If the pillars are too massive or too numerous there will be no sense of strain, and if they are too slender or too few there will be no sense of security. In either case the expression of vital energy in the structure will be imperfect, and beauty, which waits on the golden moment of the perfect adaptation of means to ends, will not dwell in that structure. There is nothing more inartistic than superfluity; and there is no lesson more emphatically taught by nature than this. The avoidance of insufficiency is generally enforced in practice on utilitarian grounds, but its artistic justification is equally evident. The golden mean is what we call Just Proportion.
The kind of vitality expressed in Greek architecture is quite different from that expressed in Gothic, but the æsthetic basis of both styles is the same; the principle we have in view will justify any art in which there is the spirit of life. A Greek temple shows us power, braced and conscious, but in repose. There is nothing daring or sensational in its construction. Stress and thrust answer each other directly, simply, massively. The stately calm of such a structure might easily become dull and monotonous were it not for the delicate sense of proportion governing the relations of the parts, for the introduction of slight deviations from strict rectangularity and symmetry,181 and for the beautiful decoration in form and colour on frieze, pediment, and capital.
The principle of the arch was known in very early times to Pelasgians in Greece and to Etruscans in Italy, both of whom, no doubt, derived it from the East. But it was valued more for its utility in certain constructions than for its artistic quality, and Greek classical architecture knows nothing of it. It was freely used in Rome, and here its extraordinary effect of vital energy as a supporter of weight first began to be perceived. When Romanesque and Gothic architecture seized on this principle, the strength of stonework, heretofore essentially placid, leapt into vehement life and action. A Gothic cathedral is the expression of a war of mighty forces held in equilibrium by their own antagonism. Every part seems to threaten destruction to some other. There is, of course, a war of forces in a Greek temple also, but there the weight and thrust answer each other, as we have said, directly; a vertical column supports a horizontal architrave, and must support it, for nothing can give way without crumbling to pieces. In Gothic building the counter-stresses meet indirectly, a dead weight or a thrust is met by the springing curve of an arch; the whole structure would fall to ruin were it not for something in the stone which is not mere solidity, which arises from something vital and energetic in the scheme of the structure. The expression of conflict, therefore, as compared with Greek architecture, is greatly intensified; the serenity of power has given place to the play of forces rushing into eager and often tempestuous action, and saved from being mutually destructive by the control of a far-seeing design.182