To treat fully the various ways in which structure may be made expressive of life would need a volume rather than a chapter. Enough has however been said to indicate the principle and to suggest a criterion by which good and bad structure may be judged. Let us turn to the question of ornament. In European art it is very common for ornament to be used as a kind of adjunct to structure; it follows the lines of structure and accentuates them. In Japanese art, however, the contours of an object often appear to determine the ornament applied to it as little as a window-frame determines the landscape we see through it. The apparent insouciance of Japanese ornament is, however, carefully calculated in relation to the field which is to be covered. In either case ornament as such—that is to say, apart from whatever charm of colour and rhythm its individual forms may have—is to be interpreted as an attempt to give life by introducing what is so characteristic of life—the element of change and variety. Popular language has hit the mark when it talks of a ‘dead’ wall, meaning thereby a wall whose surface is unbroken by openings or ornament. Ruskin has somewhere spoken of the magnificent work of Ghiberti on the bronze doors of the Baptistery in Florence as having been primarily designed to produce “a pleasant bossiness of surface.” The breaking up of the surface will not, however, be pleasant unless the forms of the decoration are in themselves good and instinct with life.
The beauty which so often arises from the effects of use and exposure may perhaps seem in some cases hard to reconcile with the principle which it is here sought to establish. If aptness for use, it may be asked, is an element in the beauty of an object of use, how are we to account for the strong appeal which the ruin of a noble building certainly makes to the sense of beauty? For my own part I am inclined to think that the taste for ruins is often a sign of a want of taste for art. A beautiful thing is better whole and sound than in decay. Yet the spectacle of the silent struggle of strength and grace with destructive forces has in it a sense of action, of drama, to which beauty cannot be denied. Apart from the question of actual decay, every one feels the æsthetic gain which has been made when a thing ceases to be blankly new. A natural adornment has then been added to it. A room that has been lived in, a piece of silver that has been rubbed and handled for a lifetime, the steps of an ancient building worn by thousands of passing feet, a wall whose angles are softened and whose surface is stained by having fronted the sun and rain for many years—all these have the natural and inimitable charm produced by the touch of life—they no longer stand in crude isolation, they are related to the goings-on of the world.
Of all the arts there is none which seems to evade analysis so much as Music; none whose power is at once so mighty and so mysterious. Saying nothing it seems to mean everything. We can think of nothing in the world so lofty, so sweet, so profound as to be the fit embodiment of what Music conveys to us. Closely analogous in its outward form to what in line and colour is called Pattern, we are yet evidently far short of expressing the whole character of Music when we say, what in itself is quite true, that it is beautiful pattern in sound. It has more of humanity about it than pattern can have. It neither gives us representations of objects of sense, nor even definite emotions, but it has a unique power over the moods of the soul. This power seems to arise first from its complete control over the resources of movement and rhythm, secondly from the fact that by virtue of certain acoustic laws it can excite the sense of fulfilment, of suspense, of unexpected sweetness, unexpected failure and depression, in a way open to no other art which appeals directly to the senses. But rhythm and movement are the main things in Music, and the nature of the power which it exercises by means of them must now be considered.
Rhythm and movement are closely related to each other, but they are not quite the same thing. The term rhythm is given to any kind of movement which is marked by the regular recurrence of stresses, undulations, beats. This is the essential character of the movement of life. Action and reaction, systole and diastole, the vibrations of the atom, the breaking of sea-waves, the changes of day and night, the alternations of the seasons—wherever we look, into things great or small, we find the same principle of rhythmic movement pervading all. Man has found out how to turn this principle to account in his mechanical contrivances, indeed in all ways in which he endeavours to exercise force on matter. Once get your force to work rhythmically, and it will do ten times the work it is capable of when evenly continuous. Our own bodies and nervous systems are attuned to the same law. Under the spell of rhythm the mind is capable of moods and emotions which without it could never have been evoked into consciousness. And that makes the difference between telling a thing in verse and in prose. Verse arouses the mood in which the subject has emotional value and significance. Even prose always becomes more or less rhythmic when impassioned.
Now Music has a control unrivalled among the arts over this element of rhythm. Other arts can suggest rhythm, Music actually is rhythm—it is the very pulse of life. It can produce rhythm, moreover, in a great variety of ways. The mere succession of sounds is rhythm, but music also has at command the varying stresses or accents of notes, alternations in volume of sound, alternations in pitch and quality of sound. And since a sequence of notes will cling to the memory, Music can put into rhythmical relations, not only single notes, but groups of notes, i.e. musical phrases, and chords, which are musical phrases played all at once. Music can therefore not only thunder upon the brain with mighty shocks of sound, but can enchant it with the most delicate complexities. The range of its power over rhythm is incomparably greater and subtler than that of the only two other arts in which rhythm works directly on the senses—dancing and metrical verse.
The element of beauty in a rhythmical phrase seems to depend mainly on the kind of mood it awakens. There are moods of meditation, moods of tenderness, moods of ardour, moods of yearning, moods of gaiety—all these and many more are under the control of rhythmic phrases. And there are common-place, self-assertive, bouncing rhythms which produce corresponding moods, and which may therefore be called ugly. The precise connexion of certain phrases with certain moods depending, as it does, on a world of dim associations stretching far beyond our personal, conscious life, is probably incapable of scientific statement. In the last result I think we should find that the characters of different rhythms are associated with bodily movements, attitudes, gestures, in short with dancing; but a host of other associations, branching out from this in many directions, have introduced a complexity of meaning which defies analysis.
To turn to the consideration of Movement in art, we find that the power of rendering this characteristic of life is shared by Music only with Dancing and with Literature. By movement in an art-work I mean movement whose sequences have proportion and design, progressing by stages linked to each other through natural and organic associations towards a significant conclusion. In nature, movement can be immensely varied in character. It can be slow or swift, rough and laboured or smooth and fluent, massive and voluminous or arrowy and intense; it can leap or undulate, march or dance, soar or swoop, and each of these kinds of movement means something to the spirit of man. All these Music controls, and can order and harmonize at will. It can represent that in the movement of nature which goes beyond and overmasters Rhythm; for Rhythm in itself does not involve Progression; in fact, a perfect rhythm would forbid it. If Action and Reaction were always precisely equal, we should have a universe as stationary as a spinning top—it might be in vehement action, but it would never develop into something new.183 Music by its complete command of the phases of movement can illustrate the progressive force, the life-impulse in nature, and this not merely by symbols and intellectual forms, but by playing directly on the nervous system as a harp-player on the strings of his instrument.
No art is more sensuous than Music, and none more abstract, more removed from what are called realities, in the substance of what it conveys. Its entire independence of objects of sense as given in experience, combined with its mastery of the inner law, the spiritual significance, of life has led to its being ranked by some as the highest of the arts. I doubt if such comparisons are profitable, but it is easy to recognize a sense in which Schopenhauer speaks truth when he says that the other arts deal with the shadows of life, Music, however, with its essence.184
Let us now consider the Representative Arts in the light of the principle which we are trying to establish. Since they depend on the portrayal of objects actually found in nature and not created by the artist, their relation to life is obvious. There are, however, some minor problems of great interest and intricacy connected with them, and these we must briefly touch on.
A great school of artists and art critics has in recent times maintained that Painting is concerned with nothing except harmonies of light and colour, and that subject is therefore completely indifferent to it save in so far as it affords opportunity for the rendering of surfaces variously illuminated and composed. The sun falling on a heap of refuse is on this theory as much to the artist as when it lights up the features of Cordelia under her tragic fate. A champion of this, as it is called, Impressionist school has explained its particular point of view by suggesting the manner in which two painters, one of the older type and one an Impressionist, would treat such a subject as the death of Agamemnon. The former would think of the magnitude of the event and the greatness of the characters of those concerned in it—the Impressionist would probably try to fix the attention of the spectator on some note of colour such as the red robe which a character in the scene might be wearing.185 Can we judge between these rival conceptions of the function of the representative arts?
Let us revert to our formula—Art is the expression of Life. In the Representative Arts it is the expression of visible life. If one wishes to paint the death of Agamemnon it will not do to rely for one’s effect upon the spectator’s knowledge of that bit of Greek history and to make one’s art impressive simply because its allusions are freely recognizable. So far undoubtedly the Impressionists are right. But on the other hand, the assassination of a great man is a bit of life and a very notable and memorable one. The visible world is, after all, not entirely summed up in the texture of surfaces under light. Character and spirit have also their visible manifestations, and the painter who can render them, as well as the aspects of physical life by which they are accompanied, is surely cutting a wider swathe of life than he who thinks only of the red robe of the actor in a tragic scene. Goethe satirized a whole false theory of art when he remarked in a well-known epigram that “pictures which work miracles are mostly very poor paintings.” Yet one is reminded of his own feeling before the painting of St. Agatha, by Raphael, which he saw on his first Italian journey at Bologna. “I have marked this figure well,” he writes. “I shall one day read my Iphigenia before her in spirit, and shall put no words in the mouth of my heroine which might not have been spoken by this saint.” Was there not something here for Goethe, for all of us, beyond painting for the sake of light and colour?
In considering the plastic arts in relation to subject, the large question of their function as illustration comes into view. An immense range of art, from that which deals with religion and history down to the drawings in our comic journals, evidently presupposes in the spectator’s mind a background of information with which the work of art itself does not and cannot furnish him. A work of this kind must certainly be said to rely for part of its interest upon something which is not in the picture. It is therefore not a pure art product; it is a complex of artistic with historical or religious or critical interest; but so long as we do not confuse the different elements it would be absurd to say that they may not be legitimately united. Still, the subject of a picture, as a picture, remains always something which is in the picture. It would therefore be a contradiction in terms to speak of a poor picture on a great subject. If the painting be poor, the subject is poor—the painter’s intention may have been great, but he has not expressed it. A reference to portraiture may help to make the matter clear. An indifferent portrait of a person held in special love or veneration by me would, if it were not so bad as to belie him, have an interest and value for me which it would entirely lack in the case of one who knew or cared nothing for the person represented. This superadded interest, the interest which travels through the painting to some concrete person or thing behind it, must be thought away before a work of art can be judged as a work of art. The application to religious or historical art is obvious. Here is a painting in which an uninformed observer sees a woman and an angel. What is he to make of it? The painter is evidently representing a moment of great exaltation and significance. The woman is receiving a message; and the painter can tell us, within the limits of his art, not what the message is, but of what kind it is—sad, or solemn, or joyful, or tragic. He can make all the accessories of the theme, the lighting, colour, etc., reinforce his conception, and the observer can discern, if he has intelligence in such things, that the painter is putting before us his conception of the way in which a soul conceives a mighty destiny. That is the subject; the universal idea, although the label on the frame be ‘The Annunciation.’
I hope it will not be thought that I am in any degree seeking to disparage the beautiful art of the Impressionists in maintaining that the highest art is that in which there is most of life. Life is so abundant and rich that one can find it almost anywhere in sufficient measure to delight and to enchant. Moreover, the great laws by which life acts and endures, the laws of rhythm, contrast, harmony, can be amply suggested in the plastic arts even when dealing with the most familiar things of earth, and these exalt and glorify any theme.
I remember to have heard once of a visitor to an exhibition of paintings by—I need not name him—a certain well-known purveyor of sensuous religiosities, a kind of nineteenth-century Carlo Dolci. On entering he met two ladies passing out through the ante-room, which happened to be hung with landscapes by an artist whom I need not hesitate to name, Mr. Mark Fisher. One of them wished to pause over these. The other, who walked with wet eyes and flushed cheek, cried, “Trees, trees! Do you want me to look at trees after having had my soul uplifted?” This little anecdote will bear some thinking over. Can we call an art bad which has power to uplift the soul? But we have to ask, Was it really the art which did so, or the allusions in the art? And again, as in the case of Tolstoy and his canon of infectiousness, we must ask, What soul? It is difficult to imagine that the soul capable of being uplifted by the art of the painter in question would be very quick to recognize the signs of nobility and heroic passion in real life. To recognize that the trees of Mr. Mark Fisher might be worth many Martyrdoms would be at least a sound beginning of an artistic education.
Dancing, so far as it is an art, must be classed under the Representative Arts. Unlike most of these it can render movement; and its art is to display movements in a progressive and a rhythmic sequence. It is sculpture in motion. Unless when combined with Music, however, its range of artistic expression is not great, beautiful effects are not under strict control, and in their rapid change the eye cannot properly take them in. The impression left by a succession of attitudes seems more confused and more transitory than that of a musical phrase.
The question of the place of Literature in the scheme is one of some difficulty. Unlike all the other arts, its subject matter is not brought directly before the senses, but evoked by conventional symbols which have in themselves no æsthetic value whatever. Thus in one sense it may be called the only strictly national art in existence. The most beautiful poem in the world, though it were graven in Egyptian basalt, would be a collection of meaningless scratches if the language in which it was written were lost. If, however, the language be known, Literature has not only the power of evoking the conceptions desired by the maker, but also that of working directly on the senses by means of the rhythmic qualities of speech. Still the range of rhythmic expression in language is so limited that in itself (i.e. as we might feel it if spoken in an unknown tongue) it may be regarded as quite subordinate to the matter conveyed. Strictly, therefore, we ought perhaps to call Literature neither a Presentative nor a Representative, but an Evocative art. Within its own circle, however, it falls naturally into classes corresponding to those of the other arts, for narrative literature and drama, which deal with actions and images taken from external life, are clearly Representative in character, while lyrical and meditative poetry, which place the maker’s mind, mood, or passion directly before us, are Presentative.
Literature has one great superiority over the plastic arts. Like Music, it can render the movement of life. In the dramatic form this movement can be brought to bear directly upon the senses. It resembles Painting and Sculpture in being able to deal with concrete objects of sense, though, as we have seen, its method of dealing with them is not strictly representative. It stands absolutely alone in the fact that it can render thoughts186 as well as passions or moods. I should, then, be inclined to reckon Drama as the greatest of all the arts in its range of expression, while at the same time it cannot be claimed for it that it approaches Music in the control of moods or in the intensity of effect which audible rhythm alone seems to command. The conclusion drawn by Wagner, that the supreme art must be sought in a combination of Music and Drama, is a tempting one, but I doubt its validity. The question arises whether in this combination one or other of the united arts does not surrender much of its own special power. So at least one great poet seems to have felt. “C’est defendu,” announced Victor Hugo about his dramas, “de mettre des notes de musique le long de ces vers.” The poetic use of language has its own conventions and laws, and these, when used by a master, are so subtle and so powerful that to set his words to music is often to produce an effect of distortion. What is most truly poetic in the language is turned into an empty mask by withdrawing the underlying substance to place it under the control of another convention, another law. One can, no doubt, as in the case of a Greek chorus, set great poetry to the measure of a simple chant, or one can unite rhythmic diction of a broad and simple character with great music, but the highest poetry and the highest music do not seem to combine to good purpose.
In this rapid survey of the arts there are, of course, large and attractive fields of exploration which have not been even glanced at. It has been sought on the present occasion merely to give the clue by which the arts may be related to the main thesis of this book. Ethics and Art constitute the two great fields of what we may call the disinterested activity of man. They engage his highest powers, they set him on fire with ardour and sympathy, yet they do nothing, directly at least, towards satisfying the primary and personal needs of his nature. Our problem has been to relate them to life, and to give them a place in a scheme of organic unity. Both have been seen to have that place only by reference to something which in one sense is immanent in nature, and clearly perceptible there, but which in another aspect is outside “the realm of clock-time and measuring rod,” the transcendent Whole. All spiritual ethics, all art which is not of the nature of a mere record, must in the last resort rely on this wholeness of things for their justification. But in the earlier parts of this study we have tried to show that even the physical organization of nature must rely on it too; for the driving force of evolution, as well as the framework of law in which it works, have been both interpreted as a manifestation of the Will to live, to act; of the impulse towards the richest and fullest development of the material, animal, and spiritual life. It is in this life-impulse that God reveals Himself in the world of time and space. This is the visible aspect of His all-embracing unity; this is His essential relation to earthly things; and this is the clue to their rational interpretation as parts of a divine cosmic Order. To learn to apprehend the vast Purpose with conscious intelligence, to further it with conscious will and with deliberate faith, is the sweet and wholesome gospel which Nature preaches to all who have ears to hear.
APPENDIX A
SUM ERGO COGITO
NOT to encumber the text with too much abstruse metaphysics, I place here what seem to me some important corollaries of the position stated at the close of Chapter I.
If the Universe is not a mere aggregate but a coherent Whole, then it follows of necessity that the units which compose it will have relations not only with each other but also with the Whole. When any of these units reaches the stage of consciousness it may be expected that it will become conscious of these relations, and that this consciousness will, like other things, develop in time to greater and greater fulness.
But here, from the analytic side of the Kantian philosophy, comes the warning which tells us that all we can really know is the stream of sensation which passes through our mind and which derives the order and coherence it seems to possess from the laws of that mind. How can we transcend this apprehension of fleeting appearances, and attain knowledge of the One, the Real, and of our relations with It?
To answer this question we must look a little deeper into the basis of this doctrine of the subjectivity of human knowledge.
This subjectivity, when we examine it closely, does not (as it is often, I think, supposed) appear to be a special and inexplicable condition imposed in some external way on human consciousness. It is a condition absolutely bound up with the state of existence implied in being a Person, an ‘I.’ The moment the mind is able to turn inward upon itself and to separate the thing known or felt from that which knows and feels, in that moment the Thing stands a whole infinity away from the ‘I’; they are separated by the analytic faculty of the Ego and they can never by that faculty be reunited. The state of being an ‘I’ is essentially a state of analytic consciousness. The intuitions of space and time are simply the instruments by which the analytic faculty works, for it is only by their relations in space and time that things in the world can be divided and distinguished by the intellect. This analytic faculty has, it must be noted, an unbounded power of disintegration. It does not spare even the Ego itself, which it reduces to a mere flux of sensations. There is no answer to its destructive logic except the sufficient one, that this boundless power of analysis in both directions, inward and outward, is simply a function inevitably bound up with being an ‘I’ at all—it is because of that function that I am an ‘I.’ Every being possessing ‘I’-hood must, eo ipso, be capable of reducing all external things to its own sensations, and of externalizing its own self. One cannot be an ‘I’ on any other terms.
Now let us suppose that this analytic faculty did not exist, and that consciousness went on, as perhaps it does in beasts, by acts of pure intuition, without ever turning inward to regard itself, without ever making distinctions between external objects, save as a matter of unreasoned sense-responsiveness; what would the consequences be then?
Clearly in that case object and subject would be one, and knowledge, so far as it went, would be absolute knowledge. But it would neither be true nor false, since without analysis and comparison there could be no criterion of truth and falsity. Nor, similarly, could the actions springing from this state of what may be called Impersonal Consciousness be either ethically good or bad in relation to the creature which performed them. In this state, things in space and time would be seen simply as they really are—as moments in the life of the Spirit.
Our relations with the Whole, then, must be sought in this region of pure impersonal consciousness, which implies entire forgetfulness of Self, entire surrender to the life-movement of the universe. We can understand now why man has always had yearnings for this state, and has so often sought to attain it by false means, by the trance or ecstasy produced through self-hypnotism, drugs, etc.; means ultimately and necessarily destructive of their object since a self-regarding motive lies at the root of them.
If there are illegitimate ways of attaining this state what, it may be asked, are the legitimate ones? The difficulty of this question lies in the fact that the state of impersonal consciousness disappears the moment we begin to think about it. We live in it, in fact, a great deal more than, in our states of analytic self-consciousness, we have any idea of. But as a rule we only live in it with a part of our nature—the instinctive, animal part. To enter it with our whole nature, to live in it as Man, two ways have been found and these we call the way of Religion and the way of Art; or, if we describe them by the faculties respectively dominant in each, as the way of Love and the way of Beauty. Through these essentially harmonizing and synthesizing powers Man can for a while merge himself in the vast ocean of Being, and return from it, renewed and purified, to the narrow confines of his selfhood.
But return he must; for selfhood is not an accident or a deformity, not a thing to be despised and shuffled off the moment we can get rid of it. It, also, is a power of life, and through it we are enabled to harvest an immense store of experiences. Through the Ego, no doubt, with its rapacious egotisms, come sin and wrong into the world; but, as Heracleitus finely says, “Men would not have known the name of Justice if these things had not been.” Moreover, man has to act as well as to be and to feel. For all complex action, regarding distant ends and involving choice and discrimination, the faculty of analysis, with which selfhood is bound up, is absolutely essential. Man is not to be raised in the scale of being by cutting away any part of his nature, but by developing the whole harmoniously; and the analytic self-consciousness is harmonized with the impersonal consciousness when the one is used to translate into its own sphere the experiences of the other—to fashion in the visible and material life some counterpart of the realities known in the spirit.
APPENDIX B
CO-OPERATION AND COMPETITION
IN Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, it seems to me (for all that it finds little favour with some men of science) that real light has been thrown on certain principles of cardinal importance which had been obscured in the too exclusive contemplation of the Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for life. Ample proof is given by Kropotkin of the truth of the following passage:—
“As soon as we study animals—not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains—we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially among various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species, or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Of course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance of both these series of facts. But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: ‘Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?’ we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization. If the numberless facts which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into account, we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance, inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits and characters as ensure the maintenance and further development of the species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste of energy” (pp. 5, 6. 1903).
From the mass of facts which Kropotkin has adduced in support of the above-quoted view, I cannot forbear quoting one, an observation of his own, relating to a creature of by no means high organization:—
“As to the big Molucca crab (Limulus), I was struck (in 1882, at the Brighton Aquarium) with the extent of mutual assistance which these clumsy animals are capable of bestowing upon a comrade in case of need. One of them had fallen upon its back in a corner of the tank, and its heavy, saucepan-like carapace prevented it from returning to its natural position, the more so as there was in the corner an iron bar which rendered the task still more difficult. Its comrades came to the rescue, and for one hour’s time I watched how they endeavoured to help their fellow-prisoner. They came two at once, pushed their friend from beneath, and after strenuous efforts succeeded in lifting it upright; but then the iron bar would prevent them from achieving the work of rescue, and the crab would again fall heavily upon its back. After many attempts, one of the helpers would go in the depth of the tank and bring two other crabs, which would begin with fresh forces the same pushing and lifting of their helpless comrade. We stayed in the Aquarium for more than two hours, and, when leaving, we again came to cast a glance upon the tank: the work of rescue still continued! Since I saw that, I cannot refuse credit to the observation quoted by Dr. Erasmus Darwin, namely, that ‘the common crab during the moulting season stations as sentinel an unmoulted or hard-shelled individual to prevent marine enemies from injuring moulted individuals in their unprotected state’” (pp. 10, 12).
APPENDIX C
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?
THIS grave question is, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, one which must be “definitely raised and answered before entering on any ethical discussion” (Data of Ethics, § 9). He goes on to restate it in the form: Does life yield “a surplus of pleasurable feeling over painful feeling?” and he argues that “goodness or badness can be ascribed to acts which subserve life or hinder life only on this supposition” (§ 10). But can one really strike a balance between pleasures and pains in human life? Mr. Spencer himself admits, later on, that pleasures and pains, “unlike in their kinds, intensities and times of occurrence, are incommensurable” (§ 57). Moreover, the maintenance of life in the present day means passing it on for countless generations ahead, and how can we feel satisfied that the conditions then existing will make more for pleasure than for pain, even assuming that they do so now? The question, then, whether it is good to maintain life does not seem capable of philosophic decision on this ground.
Mr. Spencer’s sense of logic, however, seems to me to be here at fault as well as his fundamental conception of ethics. The question which he begins by asking is not the question which he ends by answering. In the original question, Is life worth living? a comparison is set up between living and not-living. But we find this merging, in Mr. Spencer’s mind, into the quite different comparison of one kind of living with another kind of living—the pleasurable and the painful. Let us translate the original question into the language of Mr. Spencer’s ethical system. In that system “the good is universally the pleasurable” (§ 10). The word ‘worth,’ then, connotes pleasure, and the question resolves itself simply into this, Is it more pleasurable to live than not to live? Seeing that in not-living there is no pleasure at all, the only possible answer is an affirmative—the question answers itself. And in fact this must always be the case whatever connotation we attach to the word ‘worth,’ for life has at any rate possibilities, whereas not-living has none. The question, then, “of late so much agitated,” is really a nonsense question, and the reason why it is necessarily devoid of meaning will appear at once when we analyze the terms. For ‘worth,’ ‘goodness,’ ‘blessedness,’ ‘pleasure,’ and so forth, are simply terms of life and have no significance whatever apart from it. So the question, Is it better to live than not to live? is merely the same thing as to ask, Is there more life in living than in not living? Instead, therefore, of the unverifiable assumption on which Spencer bases his system of ethics, that life yields on the whole a surplus of pleasure over pain, we merely affirm the indubitable proposition that it yields a surplus of life.
From another side than that of the Spencerian ethics, however, it may be argued, against the conception which we are trying to substitute for it, that, if Life is something more than the physical phenomena attending it on earth, if, in fact, it is what we call ‘immortal,’ we need be at no pains to preserve it for ourselves or others in the form in which we find it going on here, since death can merely have the effect of translating it into another form.
True; but suppose us to hold as lightly by that form as we are urged to do by this—suppose us to show no persistence in any of the forms of being into which our life may pass, what kind of life would be realizable under such conditions of eternal volatility? Could life ever have risen above the stage of the Amœba if the Amœba had not the instinct to maintain itself on earth? Can Man ever hope to rise to anything higher without a strong element of continuity, of fixity, of ‘fighting it out on these lines’ in his feeling about the form of life in which he actually finds himself? It is through the thousand ties of duty and service, love and joy, which we form with the visible world around us that we realize the highest life of which we are at present capable. A light-minded readiness to snap those ties would imply an incapacity for forming them. Here, as always, we find that Nature tells us nothing to any good purpose unless we look at her as an organic whole. One cannot live by any isolated principle or factor, however great and true.
APPENDIX D
ST. FRANCIS THE POET
NO one can read St. Francis’s one poem, the Canticle of the Sun, without feeling that had poetry claimed and won him in time, his might have been one of the greatest and sweetest of Italian voices. The story of its composition has a touching beauty. Towards the end of his life, when in the deepest dejection over the failure of his Order to live the life of joyful humility, unworldliness, and poverty to which he had pledged it, he came, blind and ill, to S. Clare’s Convent at St. Damien, on his way to Rieti, where his malady was to be treated. In this darkest hour of his life the untroubled faith and loving sympathy of his old friend brought consolation and peace to his torn spirit. She made him, it is said, a cell of reeds in the convent garden, where he could be free to come and go as he wished. “Little by little,” writes Paul Sabatier in his Vie de S. François, “the man of ancient days revived in him, and at times the Sisters heard the echo of strange chants, which mingled with the murmuring of the pines and olives, and which seemed to come from the cell of reeds.” One day, after a long conversation with Clare, he had sat down at the monastery table for refection. Scarcely had he begun to eat when he fell into a kind of trance. “Praise be to God!” he cried, on coming to himself. He had completed the Canticle of the Sun.
It is said that for a week afterwards he forgot his breviary, and passed his days in repeating to himself the strophes of his wonderful poem—a work in which, for all its religious ardour, the note of asceticism is little apparent; unless one sees it in his usual quaint adoption of the things of creation into a religious community! I append a literal translation, omitting two later verses composed for special occasions and not belonging to the first pure inspiration. It is written in unrhymed irregular stanzas:—
CANTICLE OF THE SUN
APPENDIX E
ISABELLA AND CLAUDIO
THE ethics of sex-relations has always formed a crucial question in ethical systems. Let me recall a remarkable debate upon it which took place recently between a champion of the Spencerian system, Dr. Saleeby, and Mr. W. S. Lilly, who represented, of course, the view of Catholic orthodoxy.
Mr. Lilly, in an article on Shakespere’s Religion contributed to the Fortnightly Review for June, 1904, was led to dwell on “the strikingly Catholic ethos of the play Measure for Measure, informed as it is by the idea, quite alien from the Protestant mind, of the surpassing excellence and sacrosanct character of virginal chastity.” Hazlitt, whom Mr. Lilly takes to represent the typical Protestant view, had declared himself “not greatly enamoured” of Isabella’s inflexible purity, and had expressed his want of “confidence in the virtue that is sublimely good at another’s expense.” Mr. Lilly added that Spencer’s teaching would have countenanced Hazlitt’s judgment and enjoined upon Isabella compliance with Angelo’s desire. Dr. Saleeby having denounced this as an “outrageous” perversion of Spencer’s meaning, Mr. Lilly vindicates himself in a letter to the Fortnightly as follows:—
“I pointed, in a letter appearing in your July number, to Mr. Spencer’s express declaration, in the Data of Ethics, that the elements out of which the conceptions of right and wrong are framed are pleasures and pains, and that ‘conduct is considered by us as good or bad, according as its aggregate results to self or others, or both, are pleasurable or painful.’ I concluded, therefore, that if we are to go by Mr. Spencer’s ‘scientific ethics,’ Isabella ought to have been willing to make the sacrifice of her virginity in order to prevent the disagreeable feeling which would be caused to herself through the loss of a beloved brother, to Claudio through the process of decapitation, and to Angelo through disappointed desire, and thus to have procured, as ‘aggregate results,’ a great balance of pleasure over pain to all concerned” (Fortnightly Review, September, 1906).
Dr. Saleeby’s answer to this is the obvious one that the Spencerian ethics do not contemplate immediate personal pleasures and pains, but rather ultimate utility to the race at large, and that “Isabella’s virtue, if merely by example alone, would make for the strengthening of the society in which she found herself.” Mr. Lilly then practically surrenders his first position—he admits that Spencer’s “scientific ethics” are intended to have little or no concern with the immediate sensations of Isabella, Claudio, and Angelo, but he turns to confront Dr. Saleeby and Spencer from a new and much stronger position. What claim, he asks, have “scientific ethics” on the individual? Ultimate utility for the race might (if one could estimate it correctly) be taken as giving us the what of moral action, but can it ever give us the why? Isabella was not thinking of “ultimate utility” in her refusal, but of the laws that Sophocles wrote of so memorably, “unwritten and invincible laws which ever live, and no man knows their birthplace.” She was not thinking of the effect of her example—her action would have been, and ought to have been, just the same though she had had the most complete assurance that none but Angelo and herself would ever know the reason for Claudio’s pardon. The motive which constrained her was derived from the system of ethics which Spencer’s was constructed to replace. This new system has never succeeded in supplying an answer to the demand of the individual man or woman, ‘What is the advantage of the race to me that I should sacrifice the least of my inclinations for its sake?’ But till that piercing question is answered, all hedonistic systems, however elaborate and perfect their fabric, are building on “wood, hay, stubble.” Touch their foundations with the pitiless edge of that question, and in a moment they are in the dust. So far, in effect, Mr. Lilly.
Before we go on to deal with these conflicting views of the ethical problem in Measure for Measure, let us take a parallel presentation in literature of the same problem, in which the implied judgment of the dramatist appears entirely different. Maeterlinck, in his Monna Vanna, shows us a beautiful and high-souled woman, the loving and faithful wife of the commandant of the city of Pisa. The city is beleaguered by foes, its power of defence is at an end, an assault is imminent, and the inhabitants will be exposed to all the havoc and outrage which attended warfare in the days when the conceptions so much prized by Mr. Lilly held undisputed sway. The captain of the besieging Florentine forces, a great soldier of fortune named Prinzivalle, had been an ancient playmate of Monna Vanna, and, unknown to her, had been her ardent lover. Being entreated for mercy, he sends an ultimatum. Let Monna Vanna spend a night in his tent, and he will provision the city and withdraw his army next day. Amid the indignation and distraction which the cruel dilemma causes in the household of the prince, Monna Vanna’s resolve shapes and hardens itself. She decides to sacrifice herself for the city. But Prinzivalle finds her a woman of marble. Her soul is so high-strung with heroic devotion that she regards her body as little as a cast-off rag—she is become as incapable of fear or shrinking as she is of base desire. His passion is chilled by the icy completeness of her self-surrender, while all that is noble in him responds to her nobility, and the city is saved without the terrible sacrifice which she was ready to perform.
Such is the tale of Monna Vanna, so far as it concerns our present discussion. In reading it, it is impossible not to feel that she was right, just as in reading Measure for Measure it is impossible not to feel that Isabella was right. What has a system of natural ethics, a system based on the conception of life and nature put forward in this book, to say upon the searching ethical question involved in these two great dramas? It is not an easy nor a pleasant question to subject to philosophic analysis, but it is a very important and critical one.
In the first place neither science nor sense will, I think, agree with Mr. Lilly’s estimate of “the surpassing excellence and sacrosanct character of virginal chastity.” Virginity, in itself and apart from all qualifying circumstances, is the reverse of excellent and admirable. It means death, not life; it violates nature. What is really sound doctrine in this connexion is not the sanctity and excellence of virginity, but the deep degradation of making sexual relations a subject of barter. Wherever this prevails, whatever the church and the law may or may not have had to do with the transaction, the beauty and romance of life is blighted and destroyed. There is no conquest of culture which should be guarded more devotedly than the dignity and sweetness which are brought into the relations of man and woman by love, as the great poets have understood that word, love moving in its guarded circle of mutual trust and intimacy. A life is well lost in defence of this most sacred treasure of the spirit.
Isabella and Monna Vanna both felt this truth in the depths of their nature as all good women do. Yet absolute laws of action can rarely, if ever, be laid down to cover every individual case. One can conceive either of them deciding as Monna Vanna actually did. But in the realm of high tragedy which we are now dealing with, where principles and actions have a simplicity and integrity rarely found in common life, it must be felt that neither of them could have taken up life again as if nothing had happened. Had they recognized that there were higher reasons stringent enough to compel them to tread the way to that sacrifice, they would, I think, like the Roman Lucretia, have solemnly marked it with their life-blood as an expiation, and as a warning, were it only to Prinzivalle or Angelo, that such a thing must not be done save at the most terrible cost that man can pay. For Isabella, then, the problem would practically resolve itself into the question whether she should surrender her own life for that of a single worthless relative. There was no moral obligation on her to do that. Had she loved him so intensely as to go willingly to her doom for his sake, no one could have blamed her; no one could blame her if she refused, and bade him summon up his manhood to die for his own sin.
But in Monna Vanna’s case it was not a single life that was at stake, but the life and honour of a multitude of men and women with whose protection, moreover, she was, in part, charged by the high position she held in their midst. If right and wrong are to be interpreted as Mr. Lilly would interpret them, solely with regard to the arbitrary commands of a supernatural Power, then the extent to which a given action may influence life can hardly be a matter of any moment. On the other hand, in Spencer’s scheme, with its criterion of the greatest ultimate pleasure of the greatest number, hardly anything else can matter except precisely this question of the extent or area affected by our action. In the scheme of natural ethics which I am trying to commend, and which, if I am right, grows logically out of the conception of a living universe, the element of extent has its due place in determining action, but none in fixing the character of the action. And this, it may be observed, is just what the good sense of humanity has practically arrived at in its daily judgments and doings. No ordinary man would be required by any ethical law to lay down his life as a substitute for another who had no claim on him. But for a community, or a man such as a sovran, who for the time represents a community and embodies its interests, it would be thought base not to die if occasion demanded it. And so Monna Vanna might rightly feel herself constrained to do for her city what Isabella was in no way required to do for a brother, but the quality of the action would remain in each case the same, and the tragedy could have ended nobly only in the one stern way.
On the general question of the ordering of sex-relations, it needs no argument to show that the conditions fixed by nature forbid them, in the interests of life, to be casual and fleeting. On the other hand to require that, when these relations have once been entered into, no vices, no cruelty, no variance of any kind on either side would justify the dissolution of the connexion and the formation of a new one, is surely a superstitious exaggeration of a principle in itself right and sound. Probably the law and practice in England at the present day are as good a rough approximation to a sound marriage system as man has yet devised; with, however, this large qualification, that cases of divorce when they come before the law should be heard in camera. The Anglo-Saxon has not yet got rid of all his superstitions, and his belief in salvation by publicity is distinctly one of them.