Part 9

Emerson’s effect on young men is most significant, I think, in the case of Matthew Arnold. In Arnold’s Oxford days, Newman impressed him with a sense of the laborious difficulty of spiritual truth. But that sense was considerably soothed and weakened, I think, by the cheery, confident voice that came to him from across the Atlantic; throwing into contrast the melancholy beauty of Newman’s voice and relegating its religious message to a past which, however alluring in its beautiful melancholy, seemed now so utterly past. Arnold lost Newman for religion while continuing to patronise him for beauty and culture. He did not discern how greatly Newman, on account of his fresh and profound humility, joined with a mind unsurpassed in the modern age for analytic penetration, was needed by this age as a “friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit.” Therefore Arnold left the way open for T. H. Huxley to persuade the oncoming generation, in the blundering pride of his naturalistic sophistry, that Newman’s way with truth was in the main sophistic.[29] I am very far from wishing to disparage Arnold, as I am accused of having done in previous papers. It is just because he was so great and influential a critic, such a fine stronghold of humanism in the midst of the nineteenth century, that his deficiency in this matter is costly to-day. His tendency to a certain superior ease, not free from presumption, in his treatment of religious truth was doubtless due in good measure to the influence of Emerson. Hence when Arnold came to America in the eighteen-eighties he could tell us how matchless Emerson was as a modern “friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit” without telling us how deficient this friend was in the pertinent and prime requisite of spiritual humility.

Just here, perhaps, some readers are priding themselves on never having cared for Emerson, in other words on never having been young. But maybe they have absorbed some jots and tittles of his toxin by way of Arnold and the college professors, or of Huxley and the scientific metaphysicians, or of Whitman and the current poets. By de-personalising his individualism in a rare and not unspecious fashion, Emerson could send it seeping through an extraordinary variety of individuals. To-day wherever two or three, or two or three hundred, are gathered together in the name of God (modern)--in the name of the Over-Soul or the Under-Soul, of Reality, Nature, Humanity, Hinduism, Good Will, Progress, World Peace, World Religion, Individual Freedom, yes and even Enlightened Disillusion--there is Emerson in the midst of them. To be sure it is but a shade, a distorted shade, of the master. Yet it reminds us what a crooked, widening shadow is thrown forward through the years by a hidden grain of pride in a master mind. Emerson’s spiritual pride was veiled by his personal modesty, which was the tolerant deference and flexibility of the modern spirit at its brightest. His luminous nobility of nature and the underlying soundness of his humanism[30] enabled him to give unexampled force and radiance to the proud errors he inherited from the eighteenth-century naturists and the great Romantic poets. It was he, above all, who made naturism seem deeply natural and Romantic irresponsibility nigh divine.

He disclaimed responsibility for his words, yet spoke as one having authority. He claimed the moody freedom of a Romantic poet together with the plain weight of a prose prophet of common sense. He consummated the noxious amalgam that his predecessors in prose and verse had prepared: he _solidly_ confused poetic immediacy of experience with the immediate presence of Truth. Admirers, half perceiving his confusion, have wholly excused it on the ground of his unique constitution--just as he did! If gold rust, what will iron do? If Emerson could be vitally yet complacently muddled, what of the Emersonians? If the modern outlook is now confused and unhappy, one reason is that the chief modern sage was confused and at the same time spiritually proud.

The balefulness of his confusion was concealed from him by the subtle mingling of his pride into his modesty. He was too modest to believe that his individual outlook could become a public tragedy, and too proud to doubt that his individual inspirations were universally valid. He attributed these too much to deity and not at all to Rousseau. He disavowed all predecessors and all disciples. In his study or along the woodpath he deemed he was alone with the Soul; never realising how much the thoughts that arose in him were determined by the souls who had influenced his soul and by the souls whom his soul wanted to influence. His solitude of the Soul was thronged with unacknowledged souls. He dislimned them all into deity. His religious predecessors had loudly demolished one religious form after another to leave no barrier, so they thought, between the soul and God. He, the last great Protestant, serenely set fire to the limits of the soul itself. With suave and awful presumption, he melted all souls into God. The outcome is a new barrier between them and Him, a cool, unobtrusive glaze of pride.

The modern pride that Emerson helped so much to crystallise, wears a lucent, modest air. It looks like a lens turned directly upon Reality. But it has the opaqueness of a mirror and is turned upon ourselves--if only by the grace of God we could see our reflections in it. Its surface seems plain, undramatic, when compared with the ancient modes of _hubris_,--until one perceives therein the swarming shapes and conflicts of the modern tragedy.

Dramatic enough is the way this pride, during the past two hundred years, has worked out cogently from its religious centre to its secular circumference, in recent years with catastrophic speed. In religion it has meant more and more a blind emphasis upon the _immediacy_ of spiritual values--as though their close presence to Everyman were the same, or almost the same, as his real possession of them. Modern religionists have debased the great doctrine of the Immanence of God and, therewith, the doctrines of divine love, the brotherhood of man, the goodness of the human heart, and the “positiveness” of morality. The results for Everyman are now glaring.

Deity, from Everyman’s modern viewpoint, is fast disappearing into human nature; or into that mystic conglomerate of man and the universe which is either called Nature or, as Mark Twain might say, is “the same gentleman under another name.” New names are being invented for It daily by pseudo-science. Advanced Protestant theology lies at the proud foot of this conqueror. Forgetting that modern religion at the first did help to wound herself, the more conservative type of theist blames science for harming religion. The up-to-date theist blames religion for not equalling the flight of science, unaware how terribly religion has maimed her wing with pride. A common type of minister deprecates the spread of atheism while confidently advocating the very doctrine that fosters it. If he is shrewd enough to glimpse his dilemma, he can justify himself with Emersonian blandness by pointing out that the abuse of an excellent idea is not a good ground for the disuse of it--the excellent idea being a conceited, facile, and slippery sentiment of divine immanence.

This immanentism has proudly pawed down holy truths to the everyday level of Everyman. And he, finding that when thus muddied they sour the daily bread of his happiness, is now rejecting them wholesale; thereby exhibiting the destructive aspect of that divine justice, that relentless Love of Perfection, which his pastors have hidden behind a gross version of the divine love for men. Our religious leaders, announcing promiscuously the perfect love that casteth out fear--a doctrine which the holiest saints approached with awe--have succeeded in casting out the true fear that belongs with our imperfect love. They have speciously disparaged “negative” in favour of “positive” morality. With Emersonian impatience they have shrugged at the _definite_ moral precepts of the ages, as trite and rather forbidding antiquities, while advocating an _indefinite_ moral sentiment, as the prime discovery and panacea of the modern age. They have slurred the divine negation, the “Everlasting No,” which, acting down through the poor human conscience, constitutes the great _unadulterable_ factor of positive morals and, in the end, the most positive provision against positive unhappiness.

This proud religious blindness has opened the highway for blind secular naturism. The one has played into the hands of the other; the blind has led the blind toward the pit of spiritual anarchy. Consider, for example, the quick succession and interplay of these three phases of the modern spiritual drama: first, the Protestant notion of immediate justification by faith in Christ; second, the humanitarian notion of justification by faith in mankind; and third, the cynical notion of justification by faith in nothing--except primitive desire. In the third act of the tragedy, as in the other two, the leading motive is a specious emotional immediacy fed by subconscious pride. For the Nothing that modern sceptics are devoted to (its finest dramatic representation is in the works of Thomas Hardy) includes a concupiscent Something by the exercise of which, so they feel, we may be saved--or at least vitally damned. Hence our very disillusion to-day is flown with pride. Our current disillusionists, not humbled by the fact that the modern rejection of moral severity is eventuating in a febrile weakness of the vital human appetites, continue to disparage that severity and to advocate, as our only hope, a romantic resurgence of those appetites. They yearn for a flood-tide between rotten banks; fancying, apparently, that “sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains,” immediately. They hymn a spurious Primitive as their Protestant forbears hymned a spurious Christ.[31]

Consider, too, the dramatic inevitability with which the “psychists” and the “legislationists,” so to call them, have come swarming more and more into the breaches that modern religion has made in the human conscience. The psychists are proudly animated with the old Sophist hope of reducing that mysterious citadel and of rearranging the whole soul on modern rational lines. They are teaching the oncoming generation to _think_ in a fashion indicated in the following remark made to me by a thoughtful youth: “When a fellow tries to do the right thing, he has a satisfaction that seems at the time very real; but of course, as soon as he _thinks_, he sees that this satisfaction isn’t real at all.” At a recent American congress of thinkers, one of them explained how religion and morality are being taken over and saved, in so far as worth saving, by psychology. He was confident of tucking the setting sun, quite immediately, into his grandstand.

The legislationists, on the other hand, would save the fading rays by immediate public measures, national and international. In a world dim with unprecedented bloodshed, misty with subtle suspicion and self-seeking, and darkening ever more with impiety and lust, they would produce by political or social machinery the lights of peace, good will, purity, and temperance. They are busily wiring a twilight world for incandescent goodness. They would arrest and soften with electric legislation the awful working-out of divine laws. The leader in this project is an ideal figure of Columbia. But under grave scrutiny the radiant figure reveals a good many lineaments of her who was the leader of the seven deadly sins. One recalls with something of a shiver the queenly “progress” of Lucifera in her pleasant twilight--oblivious of the dead men’s bones thick under foot and the “foggy mist” all along the way.[32]

Columbia, the progressive modern spirit, is too proud to face the fearful carnage of human values and the foggy confusion of principles brought about by the modern _heart_. Kindly persons after criticising various modern ills, take comfort by concluding that, after all, the modern age is sound and right at heart. But here, precisely, is the source of all those ills. The modern heart has gone wrong. The chief leaders of imagination during the past two centuries assumed that modernity meant a real change of heart, a change for the better; that owing to the long schooling of the past and the new lights of the present, the human heart could now afford to relax its old combat with itself. This assumption is parroted to-day, with varying degrees of subtlety, by preachers, philosophers, educators, youngsters, legislationists, artists, Rotarians, and disillusionists. At the same time they are demonstrating conclusively that the old human heart, unregenerate, is still with us. They are showing its ancient and amazing capacity for inventing new ways of disguising old Duty,--the kind of duty that means a daily, painful, but not inglorious battle within the heart itself. They are showing us how inglorious human thought and art can become, how shallow, cheap, and in the end intolerable, when the human _heart_ has become “too proud to fight.”

III

This catastrophe, when fully recognised, can point us to fresh hope and faith. We may win afresh the old faith which goes hand in hand with a certain disillusion, a certain kind of scepticism, foreign to our current disillusionists. This faith, says Newman, “looks for no essential improvements or permanent reformations in the dispensation of those precious gifts which are ever pure in their origin, ever corrupted in man’s use of them.”[33]

So far, the moral corruption of the twentieth century has not produced the flagrancy of conduct that characterised a good many earlier ages. “My _ideas_ of life have become so rotten,” thus a Pragmatised and Behaviourised youngster confessed to me, “that I wonder my _life_ is not rottener.” He looked startled when I told him to give his ideas time. However, it appeared that, partly in spite of and partly by means of his marked self-consciousness, he had attained to some veracity of inward unhappiness. We may hope that his case is quite typical. In other words, our self-conscious modern age has provided a wide and unprecedented demonstration of the fact that the chief danger to human happiness is immorality of _ideas_. Previous ages have done lip-homage to high moral standards while grossly violating them in practice. The modern age has proudly assumed that it has grown far beyond such hypocrisy. Meanwhile it has developed the subtler hypocrisy of cultivating depraved and specious ideas while shrinking from the _full_ consequences of them in conduct. The result is that life looks dully undramatic, culture and art degenerate, and thoughtful persons who are harmless enough in their acts have a real misery in their spirit. Surely, therefore, we have now a chance to learn afresh the _inward_ relentlessness of the Moral Laws; particularly that “precious gift” which we have so bitterly corrupted, the law of humility. We may now perceive that the universal proverb “Pride goes before a fall” is no less applicable to our age than to the old aristocratic ages; and that, far from being merely a maxim of external prudence, it is the folk-sign of an _inward_ region of cause and effect that we, with all our self-consciousness, have scarcely penetrated.

We may find again the inward and yet superhuman rigour of the Laws. We may learn that they are supernatural without being ever _un_natural; always immanent in us and yet, in a mystery beyond the reach of our science, always transcendent of us. Browning’s Paracelsus, embodying the modern mixture of romance and science, complained in regard to his own catastrophe that “God’s intimations fail in clearness rather than in force.” Precisely so; but there is no use in whining about it. The human task is to clarify and obey, as well as we can, Laws which we did not invent; which no man, except when stupified by pride--either his own pride or the pride of his teachers, relentlessly visited upon him to the third and fourth generation--can conceive to be merely human inventions.

Those Laws fail in human clearness, certainly, but not in force. They came to send a sword into the earth, more than Peace. They have been the cause of agony and misery for millions of innocent or ignorant people; and no man has succeeded in making clear the full ground of this. From the standpoint of human justice, those Laws are fearfully general, vague, and incalculable. Yet our truest happiness, and indeed our truest originality, depend on a constant effort to elucidate them and apply them afresh to each new generation and individual. This task is of course, in a worldly sense, an impossible one. New sins and difficulties, or rather old sins and difficulties in inexhaustibly new modes, appear at every step. Salvation for the individual never becomes easier; and the social frame is so built, beneath our building, that it cannot be saved. Old seers and new scientists are true to a deep human instinct in prophesying that some day the world will be destroyed by fire, collision, or decay; will “dissolve like an insubstantial pageant faded.” Our surest Comfort, at the opposite pole from modern comfortableness and not divisible from right conduct, is in knowing that those Laws, while “ever corrupted by man’s use of them” are indeed “precious gifts ever pure in their origin.” Clough, that fine religious humanist who faced the modern situation without blinking, had a sound humility when he wrote:

“I steadier step When I recall That though I slip Thou dost not fall.”

The fresh humility that we need must be built up patiently by religion and by humanism; each working in its own way and carefully respectful of the other, even (perhaps _especially_) when these two approaches are equally employed by one person.

Religion is normally theistic, and therewith mediatorial and sacramental. Otherwise she is not catholic and, _in the long run_, loses her right humility. This should be evident enough from the long history of religion, Christian and non-Christian, past and present. Theism decays continually, but by reason of its own sins rather than the virtues of opposing doctrines. Pantheism, deism, and all the others flourish in its decadencies, more or less parasitically, but cannot take deep root in human humility. I do not mean that theism is true because it works, but that it works because at its best it is our truest mode of conceiving the Eternal One. Voltaire’s epigram, “God created man in His own image and man promptly returned the compliment,” is superb and lasting because the doctrine here parodied is lasting and sublime. The parody is catholically critical because the doctrine itself is deeply catholic. Modernism, when strictly criticising catholic doctrine, is helpful; when frankly rejecting it, respectable; when blandly attempting to reduce it to poetry, baneful--baneful in its hidden pride--and, I trust, hopeless. Not similarly hopeless is Latin Fundamentalism; by which I mean the attempt of Latinised theology, no matter in what branch of the Christian church it appears, to define religious mysteries with a literalism that is too precise to be accurate. Most hopeful is the work of a small and quiet group of theologians, belonging to various churches, who are resuming and carrying forward the thwarted hope of the great Christian humanists of the Renaissance. They are striving for a non-revolutionary, a firm and organic, development of Christian doctrine; that is, for a real catholicity. It is they, studious, ethical, open-eyed, and humble who are rebuilding the foundations of the Temple.

Yet the Temple, or let us say “the church militant here upon earth,” is at its best inadequate. The man of good sense has always found and will always find it necessary to take the church with a grain of salt, even though the salt loseth its savour without the church. Good sense is a distinct foundation; and humanism is built upon it. Humanism may be theistic or _non_-theistic; it is unsound when it is anything between. When non-theistic, it falls short of the full truth that is in the human imagination. The pre-eminent example of course is the sublime religious humanism of the Buddha. However, if it be true that the primitive Hindu pantheon had 330,000,000 gods, doubtless the Buddha had several million good reasons for not being a theist. Theism at its worst fosters, as nothing else can, the proud imaginations of the human heart. Humanism, which in one of its most important functions is a criticism of religion, is essential for sound religious humility. Religion needs the humility derivable from the consideration that happiness may be obtained without religion. Humanism is the study and practice of the principles of human happiness _uncomplicated_ by naturistic dogmas on the one side and religious dogmas on the other. When religion, as at present, has degraded “God’s love” and abolished “God’s anger,” humanism will insist that the former doctrine (though at its best supreme) is no less _metaphorical_ than the latter, and not less subject to unconscious superstition. When religion assists irreligion in softening God’s laws, humanism will insist that a rediscovery of their severity is essential for right humility and happiness.

Just here I am forced to express the hope that those estimable critics, Mr. T. S. Eliot and Mr. Walter Lippmann, will at one point counteract each other’s influence upon the public. Mr. Eliot, aiming toward humane religion, tends to reduce humanism to a mere balance of mind, a ghost of the Arnoldian culture, subservient to anglo-catholicism. Mr. Lippmann, aiming toward religious humanism, tends to reduce deity to “an ideal of the human personality,”[34] a rather ghostly ally of practical morals. Each is somewhat swayed by the modern desire for immediate measures.

Providentially, however, a more catholic attitude has already been erected by two older critics, Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Professor Irving Babbitt--the two most potent and distinguished personalities, though not the finest writers, that have so far appeared in English literature of the twentieth century. The one, a devout Roman Catholic of England, has indirectly done much for the best interests of humanism. The other, a rigorous moral humanist of New England, has indirectly done much for the best interests of religion. Their extraordinary scholarship is guided by a sound humility of spirit. In their writings, neither ventures further than his equipment warrants into the other’s field, and they do not contradict each other in fundamental points. They agree in the conviction that now, for the sake of religion itself, the way of humanism must be clearly discriminated from the way of religion. Mr. Babbitt has urged that religion at its best is far above, and at its worst far below, a sound humanism. Baron von Hügel has urged that Christians should face now, more frankly and fully than they have ever faced before, the fact that the ethical or humane way has a distinct and _divinely ordained_ validity of its own for those who cannot honestly follow the religious way; and that the full health of each way depends upon the health of the other.