Chapter 10

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

And how is it at the other pole of mystery, where life rises into a heavenly vision of eternities of love to come? There is no place for realism here, where observation ceases and our only human outlook is by inference from principles and laws of the ideal world as known to us; yet what problems are we aware of? Must,--to take the special problem of art,--must the sensuous scheme of life persist, since of it warp and woof are woven all our possibilities of communication, all our capabilities of knowledge? it is our language and our memory alike. Must God be still thought of in the image of man, since only in terms of our humanity can we conceive even divine things, whether in forms of mortal pleasure as the Greeks framed their deities, or in shapes of spiritual bliss as Christians fashion saint, angel, and archangel? These are rather philosophical problems. But in art, as at the realistic end of the scale, we admit the portraiture, as a part of life, of the bestial, the cruel, the unforgiven, and feel it debasing, so must we at the idealistic end admit the representation of the celestial after human models, and feel it, even in Milton and in Dante, minimizing. The mysticism of the borderland at its supreme is a hope; at its nadir, it is a fear. We do not know. But within the narrow range of the intelligible and ordered world of art, which has been achieved by the creative reason of civilized man in his brief centuries and along the narrow path from Jerusalem and Athens to the western world, we do know that for the normal man born into its circle of light the order of life is within our reach, the order of death within reach of us. Shut within these limits of the victory of our intellect and the upreaching of our desires and the warfare of our will, we assert in art our faith that the divine order is victorious, that the righteous man is not forsaken, that the soul cannot suffer wrong either from others or from nature or from God,--that the evil principle cannot prevail. It is faith, springing from our experience of the working of that order in us; it transcends knowledge, but it grows with knowledge; and ideal literature asserts this faith against nature and against man in all their deformity, as the centre about which life revolves so far as it has become subject to rational knowledge, to beautiful embodiment, to joyful being, to the will to live.

Can the faith of which idealism is the holder of the keys, the faith as nigh to the intellect as to the heart, to the senses as to the spirit, exceed even this limit, and affirm that if man were perfect in knowledge and saw the universe as we believe God sees it, he would behold it as an artistic whole even now? Would it be that beatific vision, revolving like God's kaleidoscope, momentarily falling at each new arrangement into the perfect unities of art? and is our world of art, our brief model of such a world in single examples of its scheme, only a way of limiting the field to the compass of human faculties that we may see within our capacities as God sees, and hence have such faith? Is art after all a lower creation than nature, a concession to our frail powers? Has idealism such optimistic reach as that? Or must we see the evil principle encamped here, confusing truth, deforming beauty, depraving joy, deflecting the will, with wages of death for its victims, and the hell of final destruction spreading beneath its sway? so that the world as it now is cannot be thought of as the will of God exercised in Omnipotence, but a human opportunity of union with or separation from the ideal order in conflict with the order of death. I recall Newman's picture: "To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not toward final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, 'having no hope and without God in the world,'--all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution." In the face of such a world, even when partially made intelligible in ideal art, dare we assert that fatalistic optimism which would have it that the universe is in God's eyes a perfect world? I can find no warrant for it in ideal art, though thence the ineradicable effort arises in us to win to that world in the conviction that it is not indifferent in the sight of heaven whether we live in the order of life or that of death, in the faith that victory in us is a triumph of that order itself which increases and prevails in us, is a bringing of Christ's kingdom upon earth. Art rather becomes in our mind a function of the world's progress, and were its goal achieved would cease; for life would then itself be one with art, one with the divine order. So much of truth there is in Ruskin's statement that art made perfect denies progress and is its ultimate. But perfection in life, as ideal art presents it, it is a prophecy which enlists us as soldiers militant in its fulfilment. Its optimism is that of the issue, and may be that of the process; but it surely is not that of the state that now is in the world.

It thus appears more and more that art is educative; it is the race's foreknowledge of what may be, of the objects of effort and the methods of their attainment under mortal conditions. The difficulty of men in respect to it is the lax power they have to see in it the truth, as contradistinguished from the fact, the continuous reality of the things of the mind in opposition to the accidental and partial reality of the things of actuality. They think of it as an imagined, instead of as the real world, the model of that which is in the evolution of that which ought to be. In history the climaxes of art have always outrun human realization; its crests in Greece, Italy, and England are crests of the never-attained; but they still make on in their mass to the yet rising wave, which shall be of mankind universal, if, indeed, in the cosmopolitan civilization which we hope for, the elements of the past, yet surviving from the accomplishment of single famous cities and great empires, shall be blended in a world-ideal, expressing the spiritual uplifting to God of the reconciled and unified nations of the earth.

There remains but one last resort; for it will yet be urged that the impossibility of any scientific knowledge of the spiritual order is proved by the transience of the ideals of the past; one is displaced by another, there is no permanence in them. It is true that the concrete world, which must be employed by art, is one of sense, and necessarily imports into the form of art its own mortality; it is, even in art, a thing that passes away. It is also true that the world of knowledge, which is the subject-matter of art, is in process of being known, and necessarily imports into the contents of art its errors, its hypotheses, its imperfections of every kind; it is a thing that grows more and more, and in growing sheds its outworn shells, its past body. Let us consider the form and the contents separately. The element of mortality in the form is included in the transience of imagery. The poet uses the world as he knows it, and reflects in successive ages of literature the changing phases of civilization. The shepherd, the tiller of the soil, the warrior, the trader yield to him their language of the earth, the battle, and the sea; from the common altar he learns the speech of the gods; the elemental aspects of nature, the pursuits of men, and what is believed of the supernatural are the great storehouses of imagery. The fact that it is at first a living act or habit that the poet deals with, gives to his work that original vivacity, that direct sense of actuality, of contemporaneousness, which characterizes early literatures, as in Homer or the Song of Roland: even the marvellous has in them the reality of being believed. This imagery, however, grows remote with the course of time; it becomes capable of holding an inward meaning without resistance from too high a feeling of actuality; it becomes spiritualized. The process is the same already illustrated in lyric form as an expression of personality; but here man universal enters into the image and possesses it impersonally on the broad human scale. The pastoral life, for example, then yields the forms of art which hold either the simple innocence of happy earthly love, as in Daphnis and Chloe, or the natural grief of elegy made beautiful, as in Bion's dirge, or the shepherding of Christ in his church on earth, as in many an English poet; the imagery has unclothed itself of actuality and shows a purely spiritual body.

This growing inwardness of art is a main feature of literary history. It is illustrated on the grand scale by the imagery of war. In the beginning war for its own sake, mere fighting, is the subject; then war for a cause, which ennobles it beyond the power of personal prowess and justifies it as an element in national life; next, war for love, which refines it and builds the paradox of the deeds of hate serving the will of courtesy; last, war for the soul's salvation, which is unseen battle within the breast. Achilles, Aeneas, Lancelot, the Red Cross Knight are the terms in this series; they mark the transformation of the most savage act of man into the symbol of his highest spiritual effort. Nature herself is subject to this inwardness of art; at first merely objective as a condition, and usually a hostile, or at least dangerous, condition of human life, she becomes the witness to omnipotent power in illimitable beauty and majesty, its infinite unknowableness, and its tender care for all creatures, as in the Scriptures; and at last the words of our Lord concentrate, in some simple flower, the profoundest of moral truths,--that the beauty of the soul is the gift of God, out of whose eternal law it blossoms and has therein its ever living roots, its air and light, its inherent grace and sweetness: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" Such is the normal development of all imagery; its actuality limits it, and in becoming remote it grows flexible. It is only by virtue of this that man can retain the vast treasures of race-imagination, and continue to use them, such as the worlds of mythology, of chivalry, and romance. The imagery is, in truth, a background, whose foreground is the ideal meaning. Thus even fairyland, and the worlds of heaven and hell, have their place in art. The actuality of the imagery is in fact irrelevant, just as history is in the idealization of human events. Its transience, then, cannot matter, except in so far as it loses intelligibility through changes of time, place, and custom, and becomes a dead language. It follows that that imagery which keeps close to universal phases of nature, to pursuits always necessary in human life, and to ineradicable beliefs in respect to the supernatural, is most permanent as a language; and here art in its most immortal creations returns again to its omnipresent character as a thing of the common lot.

The transience of the contents of art may be of two kinds. There is a passing away of error, as there is in all knowledge, but such a loss need not detain attention. What is really in issue is the passing away of the authority of precept and example fitted to one age but not to another, as in the case of the substitution of the ideal of humility for that of valour, owing to a changed emphasis in the scale of virtues. The contents of art, its general ideals, reproduce the successive periods of our earth-history as a race, by generalizing each in its own age. A parallel exists in the subject-matter of the sciences; astronomy, geology, paleontology are similar statements of past phases of the evolution of the earth, its aspects in successive stages. Or, to take a kindred example, just as the planets in their order set forth now the history of our system from nascent life to complete death as earths, so these ideals exhibit man's stages from savagery to such culture as has been attained. They have more than a descriptive and historical significance; they retain practical vitality because the unchangeable element in the universe and in man's nature is in the main their subject-matter. It is not merely that the child repeats in his education, in some measure at least, the history of the race, and hence must still learn the value of bravery and humility in their order; nor that in the mass of men many remain ethically and emotionally in the characteristic stages of past culture; but these various ideals of what is admirable have themselves identical elements, and in those points in which they differ respond to native varieties of human capacity and temperament. The living principles of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Christian thought and feeling are at work in the world, still formative; it is only by such vitality that their results in art truly survive.

There has been an expansion of the field, and some rearrangement within it; but the evolution of human ideals has been, in our civilization, the growth of one spirit out of its dead selves carrying on into each reincarnation the true life that was in the form it leaves, and which is immortal. The substance in each ideal, its embodiment of what is cardinal in all humanity, remains integral. The alloy of mortality in a work of art lies in so much of it as was limited in truth to time, place, country, race, religion, its specific and contemporary part; so great is this in detail that a strong power of historical imagination, the power to rebuild past conditions, is a main necessity of culture, like the study of a dead language; an interpretative faculty, the power to translate into terms of our knowledge what was stated in terms of different beliefs, must go with this; and also a corrective power, if the work is to be truly useful and enter into our lives with effect. Such an alloy there is in nearly all great works even; much in Homer, something in Virgil, a considerable part of Dante, and an increasing portion in Milton have this mixture of death in them; but if by keeping to the primary, the permanent, the universal, they have escaped the natural body of their age, the substance of the work is still living; they have achieved such immortality as art allows. They have done so, not so much by the personal power of their authors as by their representative character. These ideal works of the highest range, which embody in themselves whole generations of effort and rise as the successive incarnations of human imagination, are products of race and state, of world experience and social personality; they differ, race from race, civilization from civilization, Hebrew or Greek, Pagan or Christian, just as on the individual scale persons differ; and they are solved, as personality in its individual form is solved, in the element of the common reason, the common nature in the world and man, which they contain,--in man,

"Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless";

in the unity of the truth of his spirit they are freed from mortality, they are mutually intelligible and interchangeable, they survive,-- racial and secular states and documents of a spiritual evolution yet going on in all its stages in the human mass, still barbarous, still pagan, still Christian, but an evolution which at its highest point wastes nothing of the past, holds all its truth, its beauty, its vital energy, in a forward reach.

The nature of the changes which time brings may best be illustrated from the epic, and thus the opposition of the transient and permanent elements in art be, perhaps, more clearly shown. Epic action has been defined as the working out of the Divine will in society; hence it requires a crisis of humanity as its subject, it involves the conflict of a higher with a lower civilization, and it is conducted by means of a double plot, one in heaven, the other on earth. These are the characteristic epic traits. In dealing with ideas of such importance, the poets in successive eras of civilization naturally found much adaptation to new conditions necessary, and met with ever fresh difficulties; the result is a many-sided epic development. The idea of the Divine will, the theory of its operation, and the conception of society itself were all subject to change. Epics at first are historical; but, sharing with the tendency of all art toward inwardness of meaning, they become purely spiritual. The one thing that remains common to all is the notion of a struggle between a higher and a lower, overruled by Providence. They have two subjects of interest, one the cause, the other the hero through whom the cause works; and between these two interests the epic hovers, seldom if ever identifying them and yet preserving their dual reality.

The Iliad has all the traits that have been mentioned, but society is still loose enough in its bonds to give the characters free play; it is, in the main, a hero-epic. The Aeneid, on the contrary, exhibits the enormous development of the social idea; its subject is Roman dominion, which is the will of Zeus, localized in the struggle with Carthage and with Turnus, but felt in the poem pervasively as the general destiny of Rome in its victory over the world; and this interest is so overpowering as to make Aeneas the slave of Jove and almost to extinguish the other characters; it is a state-epic. So long as the Divine will was conceived as finding its operation through deities similar to man, the double plot presented little difficulty; but in the coming of Christian thought, even with its hierarchies of angels and legions of devils, the interpretation became arduous. In the Jerusalem Delivered the social conflict between Crusader and infidel is clear, the historical crisis in the wars of Palestine is rightly chosen, but the machinery of the heavenly plot is weakened by the presence of magic, and is by itself ineffectual in inspiring a true belief. So in the Lusiads, while the conflict and the crisis, as shown in the national energy of colonization in the East, are clear, the machinery of the heavenly plot frankly reverts to mythologic and pagan forms and loses all credibility.