Part 14

How can we fight? Best of all, I believe, by establishing a standard of honour toward manual labour; and, quite definitely, wherever we have Art schools, by training all students to hate and despise shams and to loathe all waste of labour. But, perhaps, the most direct way would be for the State to set up, in every town, in connection with its Art schools and its technical schools, a standard of honesty by practical demonstration, in the staple industry of the locality. I would not trouble, so long as that industry had a useful purpose, how much or how little it was connected with Art; but I would give the youth of that place the chance of an honest apprenticeship under true human conditions to the trade in which they might be called upon to spend their lives. I would not have those schools of labour adopt any amateurishness of method or standard; they should not obstinately reject the aid of machinery where machinery can relieve monotony, but they should very carefully consider at what stage the dehumanising element came in, either by substituting mechanism for skill, or by separating the worker too much from his work in its completed form. And from those schools of labour I would allow people to purchase all the work of these State-apprentices which their master-craftsmen could pass as being of a standard quality. They would not compete in point of cheapness with the trade article, for their price would almost certainly be higher, but they would, I trust, compete in point of quality and design; and by exhibiting a standard, and making the thing procurable, they might create a demand which the very trade itself would at last be forced to recognise.

This is but a very bald and brief statement of the kind of extension I mean; but what I want to put to you is this, that wherever a nation has turned from agriculture to trade, there, if you want national Art you must invade those trade conditions and set up your standard of honour, not outside, but in the trades themselves; you must get hold of those who are going to be your workers and craftsmen and put into them (by exhibiting to them manual labour under right human conditions) the old craftsman’s pride which existed in the days of the Guilds, when the trade unions were not merely organisations to secure good wages, but to secure good work, and to maintain a standard of honour in labour. But you must not stop there. To make your training in any true sense national you must make it characteristic, or rather it must make itself. It must aim at bringing out racial and local character; and before it can do so we must recover that love of locality which we have so largely lost. A mere multiplication of schools and classes where a departmental system evolved at some city centre is put in force, is not national: it is only metropolitan, perhaps only departmental. You can put such a system, in a certain superficial way, into the heads and hands of your local students, but you cannot put it into the blood. Unless your Art training enters into and links up the lives of those you would teach with a larger sense of citizenship, it isn’t national. They won’t carry it away with them into their daily pursuits, they won’t make a spontaneous and instinctive application of it; they will only come to it at class-hours, and, when class-hours are over, quit again. I have spoken of the necessity of a standard of honour toward labour, but we need also a standard of honour toward life. It is still, you see, values--life-values--that I am trying to get at as a basis for Art.

Now to some of you I must have seemed, in all conscience, gloomy and pessimistic in my outlook on present conditions; and therefore, before I end, I will try to emit a ray of hope. There are certain social developments going on around us which make me hope that we may yet emerge from this valley of the shadows through which we are still stumbling. One is that there has been in the last generation a very general breakdown of the old artificial class notion of the kind of work which was compatible with “gentility.” And one meets to-day people, whose culture has given them every chance to develop that standard of honour toward life (without which their claim to be gentry means nothing); you meet with many such people nowadays who have come back to manual labour in various forms, in farming, in horticulture, and in craftsmanship--some also, I am glad to say, who have become shopkeepers--and who are bringing, presumably, their standard of honour to bear on those trades on which they no longer foolishly look down. Among these a definite revival of handicraft is taking place, and where they are doing their work honestly and well they are undoubtedly inculcating a better taste. It is especially among this class which has come back to handicraft that one meets with domestic interiors of a fine and scrupulous simplicity which we may eventually see imitated (meretriciously, perhaps, but on the whole beneficially) even in lodging-houses which are at present the dust-hung mausoleums of the aesthetic movement of thirty years ago.

Another matter for congratulation--not a movement, but a survival--is the unspoiled tradition of beauty which still exists in the cottage gardens of England. There, in our villages, you find a note of beauty that has scarcely been touched by the evil of our modern conditions. And I take it as a proof that where, by some happy chance, we have managed to “let well alone,” there the instinct for beauty and for fitness is still a natural ingredient of industrial life. That survival of taste in our cottage gardens is culture in the best sense of the word; and it is still popular. We do not yet dig our gardens by machinery; when we do they will die the death.

And two other bright points of movement, which I look to as having in them the basis of a true Art training, are the widespread revival, in so many of our towns and villages, through the efforts of Miss Mary Neal, Mr. Cecil Sharp and others, of our old folk-songs and Morris dances, and lastly--perhaps I shall surprise you--the Boy Scout movement.

Coming into contact with these two movements, I have found that they have in them certain elements in common. Instituted with a rare combination of tact and enthusiasm, they have taken hold of the blood; they have got home at a certain point in boy and girl nature which has already made them become native. I find that these two organisations tend to develop among their members grace and vigour of movement, good manners, a cheerful spirit, a more alert interest in the things about them, a feeling of comradeship, and best of all, a certain sense of honour toward life. And therefore, even in a place technically devoted to the training of students, I say boldly that I see nowhere better hope of a sound basis for national Art than in this revival of village dancing and folk-song and in the Boy Scout movement.

The assertion may perhaps seem strange and ironic to some of you that it is not from a study of beautiful objects that the sense of beauty can be made national, but only in the recovery of an ordered plan for our social and industrial life, and in the finding of a true and worthy purpose for all that our hands are put to do. But in that connection you may remember how Ruskin maintained that great Art has only flourished in countries which produced in abundance either wine or corn; in countries, that is to say, where the greatest industries were those with which we most readily associate that note of joy which has become proverbial, the joy of the harvest. It is perhaps too much to dream that we shall ever again see England living upon its own corn; and the greatest forms of Art may, therefore, remain for ever beyond our reach. But until a nation does honour to the human hand as the most perfect and beautiful of all instruments under the sun, by giving it only honourable and useful tasks--until then I must rather wish you to be good valuers, keen--indignantly keen--to destroy the false values which you see about you, than that you should be either good draughtsmen or good artists.

You can do honest and good work as designers and illustrators and architects, as workers in wood and metal and stone; but you are hampered and bound by the conditions of your day, and you cannot by your best efforts make Art national till you have established joy in labour. No great school of Art can ever arise in our midst in such a form as to carry with it through all the world its national character, until the nation itself has found that voice (which to-day seems so conspicuously absent, even when we close our shops to make holiday); I mean the voice of joy.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] _By that reckoning we in Europe are to-day the best comedians the world has ever seen. Out of peace-conditions nations produce their wars._

CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS IMMORTALITY.

(1915.)

We are frequently told (more especially by those whose profession it is to preach belief in a revealed religion), that if man be not endowed with an immortal soul, then the game of life is not worth the candle. Incidentally we are warned that if the bottom were knocked out of that belief, morals would go to pieces and humanity would become reprobate.

Now I can imagine a similar sort of claim put forward in other departments of life for other pursuits which seem to their advocate to make life more appetising.

I can imagine sportsmen saying that without sport men would cease to be manly, morals and physique would deteriorate and life be no longer worth living. I can imagine the butcher saying that without meat, and the licensed victualler that without beer, men were of all things the most miserable. I have recently seen advertisements which say that only by supporting the cinema (made beautiful by the feet of Charlie Chaplin), can we hope to be victorious in the present war.

The assertion that man cannot do without certain things which, as a matter of fact, vast numbers of his fellows are constantly doing without--(and with no very marked set-back as regards health, efficiency, or general morals)--is a questionable way of forcing home conviction that these things or beliefs are indispensable. It is quite possible that beer, meat, the pursuit of game, the personality of Charlie Chaplin, and a belief in immortality are all alike capable of giving stimulus to the human soul (especially to those souls which have come by habit to depend upon them). But it is quite certain that other human souls have found without them sufficient stimulus to make life worth living. And though, against that fact, it may be argued that these unconsciously receive their driving force, their social and ethical standards, from those whose motive power they reject as superfluous, and that we, who do not go to see Charlie Chaplin on the films, are winning this war somewhat circuitously through the powers of those who do--the argument is hardly a convincing one, since it remains for ever in the nature of an unproved hypothesis.

But when the majority of those who believe in personal immortality are asked for the ground of their belief, it generally resolves itself into this: they have an intense individual conviction that it is so--so intense that to hold the contrary becomes “unthinkable.” But that intense, individual conviction, over things we greatly care about, is a constant phenomenon of the working of the human mind, and is not limited to belief in a future state. To a convinced Liberal it is “unthinkable” that he should ever pass into such a state of mental annihilation as to become a Conservative. To a convinced Conservative it is unthinkable that he should fall from the grace which guides him into the slough of Liberalism. It is the same with Protestant or Catholic, with Socialist, Universalist, or Sectarian: conviction always presents an adamantine front to opposing forces and arguments--so long as it lasts.

The same phenomenon constantly occurs in the domain of the amative passion. The lover (if he be really in love), believes that his love will last for ever--that nothing can possibly change it; and all the evidence in the world that lovers of a like faith have too often lived to see the immortal dream put on mortality, will fail to convince him (while he is in the toils) that his own love is liable to any such change as theirs.

The reason is that strongly vitalised forces always carry with them a sense of permanence.

The vital spark (focused within us by strong conviction or emotion), is but an individually apprehended part of a great whole: for this thread of life passing through us has already stretched itself out over millions of years, and countless atavisms have touched it to individual ends which were not ours; the will to live has clung to it by myriads of adhesions, feelers, tentacles, and not by human hands alone (though our palms still moisten, and our arms fly upward to the imaginary branch overhead when danger of falling threatens us, because the instinct of our arboreal ancestry still prevails in us over reason). And through those atavisms, the struggle to secure survival for the family, the clan, the race, has left an impress which may very naturally convey from the general to the individual a sense of immortality.

For of all these constituent forces the majority knew and thought very little about death, except in their instinctive and spasmodic efforts to escape from it; and when at last man began to envisage death consciously and philosophically, straightway, with all these atavisms behind him, he belittled it with dreams of a future life.

It was as perfectly natural a thing to do as for the lover to declare that his love for his mistress was eternal and not merely for a season, since any lesser statement would fail to convey adequately the intensity of the force by which he was moved. Moreover, though in millions of individual cases the statement and the sincere belief that the love experienced will remain changeless and eternal, are contradicted by later fact, it is at least true that the passion itself is an ever-recurring phenomenon of life, and does, by its infinite recurrence and resurrection in form beyond form through evolving generations, present to finite minds an aspect of immortality. Just as the water we drink is an imperishable thing, though after drinking it we shall thirst again, so is that love, which satisfies the lover’s soul, a principle of life extending illimitably beyond his own use for it. And if that be true about love, why should it not be true about life?

For surely (put it thus), when across limited vision a thread passes, of which the eye can see neither the beginning nor the end, and when upon that thread, for the time being, the limited life hangs all its hopes, is it not quite natural for that clinging life to identify itself, through the closeness of its momentary contact, with the spiritually apprehended whole, and to identify with that concept of a general continuity its own present degree of individual consciousness. Moreover, in a world governed by cause and effect, it can hardly be predicated that the results either of love or hatred, individually indulged, are not, or may not be illimitable, even though the individual spirit be not there to preside consciously over their extended operations.

When, therefore, so much is true, when so many elements which pass through our lives have (by association), links and connections which to finite minds seem infinite, they may well impress us (by reason of the close identification established between us and them for the time being) with a sense that our own individual share and apprehension of them are addressed also to a universal goal.

“Universal,” for surely mere continuity--a stretching out of length without corresponding breadth--ought not to be the limit of our claim. Yet it is significant that, in their demand for personal immortality, so many thinkers have found sufficient satisfaction in the idea of an extended survival through time into eternity, without making a corresponding demand for extension into unity through space. They are willing, that is to say, to put up for all eternity with those limitations of personality which they enjoy--the relations of _meum_ and _tuum_ upon which the possessive life of the senses is based, but not with those limitations (the prospect of which they do not enjoy), the termination of those same relationships imposed by death. It seems rather a one-sided way of doing things--this narrowing of the claim in a two-dimensional direction (one might almost say in a one-dimensional), yet it has been very generally done--I shall presently hope to show why--and most of our Western theology has built up our future hopes for us entirely on those lines. Personality, the sort of personality we have learned to enjoy, is based upon limitations. Abolish limitations in your conception of future life, and for the majority of those pious minds which now clamour for it as their due you abolish personality also; it is swallowed up not in death but in a life from which the individual power to focus and to enjoy has disappeared.

It is true that there has now begun, in modern socialistic Christianity, a yeasting of desire for an all round, or expansive, as well as a forward, or extensive personality after death; that an all-embracing and not merely an all-surviving consciousness is more and more predicated for the full satisfaction of man’s spiritual need. But that was by no means the form of moral hunger which permeated primitive or mediæval Christianity, and sufficed, we are to suppose, to keep poor human nature from that depravity into which it will fall if belief in personal immortality is surrendered. Oregon, as we know, looked forward to finding in the nether groans of the damned a full completion of the orchestral harmonies of Heaven; and in the whole conception of immortality as it has illumined the path of the Church from its beginning down to quite modern times, individualism has been rampant. On that basis, so long as it satisfied his moral conscience, man did great things with it, making it shine as a great light by the unflinching witness which he bore to its efficacy through suffering and through martyrdom.

It is probably true that an individualistic form to the doctrine was then, and always will be, necessary to attract those whose lives have been run from a highly individualised standpoint; and that, for them, death-bed consolation would hardly be achieved in the presentation of a doctrine so defined as to threaten annihilation to all the fetish worship and social values of the past.

“God would think twice,” said a courtly French Abbé of the seventeenth century to a King’s mistress who, upon her death-bed, was seized by spiritual qualms--“God would think twice before damning a lady of your quality.” And no one who holds by class-distinctions really wishes to find in the New Jerusalem any abolition of that respect for persons or prejudices which has, in this world, been the main ground on which their self-esteem and their estimate of personality have been based.

To them the most “unthinkable” proposition would be not the contraction of the future world to narrower and more select limits than those of the one they know, but a future world conducted on any code of morals which had not their own entire approval and sanction.

We are told that the late Queen Victoria looked forward with very great interest to a future meeting with the Hebrew patriarchs, with Abraham, Moses, and Elijah, but hoped to be excused from any personal acquaintance with King David on account of his affair with Bathsheba. And when we realise how very often the hope of Heaven is really a species of self-love and self-applause, conditional on Heaven being what we ourselves want it to be, one is led to wonder whether the real condition for entry into that state of bliss may not prove to be the precise opposite, and whether the disciplinary motto upon its portal may not be those mystic words, hitherto attributed to another place, “All hope abandon ye who enter here.” That, after all, is only a more emphatic way of stating what Christ Himself laid down as the path by which man should attain; that only those namely who were ready to lose life should find it. And I rather question whether our Christian individualists have, up till now, been honestly prepared to “lose life” in the full sense, without condition or reserve, and whether, (if they have not), they have yet attained the spiritual standpoint necessary to bring them within the terms of the promise.

So far I have dealt with the doctrine of immortality as presented to us from the individualistic basis alone. But, in some form or another, the doctrine of immortality belongs to many religions and schools (indeed, one might almost say to all) and has, therefore, most varied and even contradictory meanings attached to it. In some schools, as we have seen, it sets great store on the survival of the individual; in others individuality is held to be of small account--a diminishing rather than a persistent factor in the ultimate ends of life viewed as a whole.

I remember in that connection discussing with the late Father George Tyrrell, in the days before Rome’s excommunication fell on him, the divergent views as to immortality of Christianity and Buddhism; and at that time he held that the superiority of the Christian faith lay in its insistence on the personal immortality, conscious and self-contained, of every human being. Some years later, a month before his death, we discussed the matter again; and I asked him then, in what degree, if at all, his view as to personal immortality had changed. His answer gave me a curious instance of those scientific analogies by which Modernism has been seeking to deliver the Roman Church from its mediæval entanglements.

“In the main,” he said, “I have only changed in my apprehension of what ‘personality’ really is. Just as one may find in an hysterical subject five or six pseudo-personalities which reveal themselves in turn, each one of which is a character quite separately and consistently defined, but not one of them (however completely in possession for the time) a real person, so it seems to me must we regard all those limitations of ‘personality’ which find expression in individual form. There is only one true personality, and that is Christ; anything less than the one all-embracing whole is but a simulacrum, concealing rather than revealing the true substance and form.”

I cannot pretend to give his actual words, but I believe that I have accurately stated the sense of them; and you will see, I think, that they go a long way toward the adaptation of the Christian to the Buddhistic standpoint. That tendency, I believe, we shall find more and more at work in the Christian Church as time goes on--not merely because by such a definition the doctrine will be better able to hold its own against the inroads of science--but because it gives also a better response to that socialising genius of the human race which is coming more and more to demand a perfect unity as the ultimate expression of good.

That, then, we shall probably find to be the future tendency of idealism. There remains, of course, the Rationalistic school of thought, by which the possibility of individual or personal survival after death is from first to last either absolutely denied or very severely discountenanced as an idea based upon wholly insufficient evidence.

Nevertheless, in some form or another, immortality, conscious or unconscious, personal or impersonal, is accepted by all schools alike; the scientific law of the conservation of energy being one form of it which human reason would now find it very difficult to deny.

Let us for one moment apply that law to our own individual lives and consciousness.