Part 16

Amongst tragic masks may be counted all systems of philosophy and religion. So long as they are still plastic in the mind of their creator, they seem to him to wear the very lineaments of nature. He cannot distinguish the comic cast of his own thought; yet inevitably it shows the hue and features of his race; it has its curious idiom and constitutional grammar, its quite personal rhetoric, its ridiculous ignorances and incapacities, and when his work is finished and its expression set, and other people behold it, it becomes under his name one of the stock masks or _dramatis personae_ of the moral world. In it every wrinkle of his soul is eternalized, its old dead passion persisted in, its open mouth, always with the same _rictus_, bawling one deaf thought for ever. Even to himself, if he could have seen his mind at a distance, it would have appeared limited and foreign, as to an old man the verses of his youth, or like one's own figure seen unexpectedly in a mirror and mistaken at first for another person. His own system, as much as those of others, would have seemed to him a mask for the truth, partial, over-emphatic, exaggerating one feature and distorting another, and above all severed from the context of nature, as a picture in a frame, where much may be shown with a wonderfully distilled beauty, yet without its substance, and without its changeful setting in the moving world. Yet this fate is in part a favour. A system, like a tell-tale glass, may reveal by a trick of reflection many a fact going on behind one's back. By it the eye of the mind travels where experience cannot penetrate; it turns into a spectacle what was never open to sight, and it disentangles things seen from the personal accidents of vision. The mask is greater than the man. In isolating what was important and pertinent in his thoughts, it rescues his spirit from the contamination of all alien dyes, and bequeaths it to posterity such as it would have wished to be.

39

THE VOYAGE OF THE _SAINT CHRISTOPHER_

The voyage of Peter's Bark in search of another world has been less fortunate than that of Columbus. There have been mutinies on board; the other world is not yet found. Soon after this good ship, the _Saint Christopher_, was launched from her Phoenician home-port, she had a strange experience very like that which legend attributes to her namesake, the sainted ferryman. Her freight at the beginning seemed to be of the lightest--only living Hopes and daily Miracles; and the crossing was to be very brief, the other shore being plainly visible at a stone's throw. But that promised land turned out to be a mirage, lying across the mouth of the port, which really opened out into a vast ocean. Meantime the cargo too was strangely transformed; for whilst the Hopes and Miracles were still reputed to be on board, they were hidden from sight and smothered in a litter of Possessions. These included a great load of Books, a heavy fund of Traditions, and a multitude of unruly passengers, with their clamorous wives and children, and all sorts of provender. So over-weighted, the _Saint Christopher_ sank down until the waves almost covered her deck; but she was staunch, like the wading saint when his light burden grew heavier and heavier, and she laboured on.

Not only was this ship named after a saint--which in so old a ship is no wonder--but incredible as it may seem, her captain was a saint too--Saint Simon or (since these vague roving people often have an _alias_) Saint Peter. He had been a fisherman by profession, and had only become a saint late in life; a fact which explained his good seamanship and his bad language. Besides, he did not pretend to be a saint except in his official capacity, as captain, and in matters of science and navigation: in his private life he was frankly not impeccable, and deprecated any strict scrutiny of it as not to the point. Not only might there have been some blemishes in his early career, but even when in command he might have his faults. People enjoy doing what they can do well from long habit; and he was perhaps too fond of fishing, of cursing, and of commanding.

These foibles once brought upon him a serious mutiny. A large part of the crew, imitating his expressive speech, cried, "Damn the captain!" and took to the boats, saying the ship was rotten and water-logged. They carried away with them most of the Hopes, whilst scrupulously leaving the Miracles alone. In their boats and rafts they pulled ahead in all directions, covering the sea with specks for a long distance; and the captain, after running down and sinking a few of them in his towering rage, got used to their existence, made things shipshape again on board, and fell to observing them, not without some chucklings of humour, rowing and splashing about, quarrelling and never getting anywhere, but often merely drifting and quietly fishing, much in his own old maimer.

The worst mutiny in the _Saint Christopher_, however, was of quite another kind. The remaining crew had no objection to the captain--they were human themselves--and no desire to paddle their own canoes. But they got thoroughly weary of sailing day after day into the same sunset, decided that there was no El Dorado, and insisted clamorously on putting the ship about. But in what direction? Some were for going home; they said all talk of another world was nonsense, that those Hopes and Miracles were worthless, and that the only thing to do was to return to the old country and live there in the old way, making the best of it. But the majority said that such an acknowledgment of defeat and error would be ignominious; and that life at home, never really happy, would now be doubly intolerable. They would never have set out on so problematical an expedition, had they found life possible in their native seats. But it had been horrible. They remembered with a shudder the cruelties and vanities of their ancestral heathenism. They were adventurers and mariners by nature. They might be now bewildered for a moment and discouraged in their explorations, but the impulse to hope for the better and to try the unknown was ineradicable in their breast.

In some of them, indeed, this brave impulse was so vigorous, that they now had a sudden intuition of the romantic principle of life, and harangued their companions as follows:

"What need, O shipmates, to sail for _any_ port? The sailor is not a land animal. How we chafed and stifled when we lived on _terra firma_, pent in those horrible stone dungeons called houses and churches, and compelled to till those inert and filthy clods, year in and year out--a most stupefying existence! Let us sail for the sake of sailing. It was not in putting forth into this infinite sea that we were ill-advised, but only in imagining that we could reach an opposite shore, and that the sea was not infinite but hemmed about by dead land. That was a gross illusion. In reality there is no _terra firma_ at all, but only ships and rafts more or less extensive, covered over with earth and trees, riding on the water. Fancy deceived us, when we supposed that our Earth was anchored in some deeper earth. It floats and drifts upon a bottomless flood, and will dissolve into it. Do not dream of any backward voyage, or of reaching home. You will never find that old home again; it exists no longer. But this good ship of ours, with its wind-blown sails, can never sink and can never stop. If the banners and crosses, which we still fly in deference to custom, have lost their meaning for us, other symbols will take their place. We must not confuse our infinite task with the illusions that may first have prompted us to undertake it. A brave and an endless life awaits us, battling with the storms of winter; in the summer days, leaping over the waves with the dolphins and the porpoises; in the watches of the night hailing the ever-new constellations which, as we sail onward, will rise to greet us, and pass over our heads. For ocean is a river that flows unendingly, and the stars and clouds are exhalations attendant upon it; they rise and soar in great circles perpetually before its course, like loosed doves before the bounding shell of Galatea."

These words were not at all relished by the majority of those who listened to them. They were stay-at-homes by temperament, who had embarked only in the hope of gain, or of finding peace and plenty in some softer climate. They were alarmed and disgusted at what they had just heard, and not being quite sore that it was false, they denied it with some irritation.

"What folly," they cried, "what nonsense you are talking. Of course it is the land that is infinite, since it is much better than the sea; and the sea is no river, or its water would be fresh, and you know how brackish and bitter it is: indeed, but for the rain we have collected in pans and hogsheads, we should already have died of thirst. This sea is nothing but a stagnant lake in the midst of the green earth, one of the myriad salt ponds studded all over it; and as for this leaky little ship, which we were induced to embark in only by fraud, it is not really sea-worthy. The planks and cordage are already rotting, and how shall we replace them, unless we speedily sight land--and God grant it may be a civilized country! And look there! Is not that land on the horizon! Through the clearing mists I can discern a lighthouse, quite distinctly; and beyond lies a low shore, overhung with smoke. Something tells me this is the New Atlantis described by Bacon. A prosperous and populous city, full of docks and factories, where we shall find everything needful--warehouses, shops, inns, theatres, baths, even churches and chapels of every sect and denomination. What joy!"

This sight was so welcome to those heartsick passengers, that they could not wait for the ship to make fast, though they steered her straight for the coast, but jumped over-board and eagerly swam ashore. Their example was contagious. The other party could not bear to be left behind without experiencing the new life, whatever it might bring. They reflected that as the land was really a part of the sea, it was not bad seamanship sometimes to run aground, that in leaving the ship they would, in a higher sense, be continuing their voyage, and that they would not be true to the supreme principle of their philosophy, which was absolute free-will, if they did not often change their principles in minor matters. The chief point was to experience everything. They did not regret the past, as did their narrow-minded positivistic friends, simply because it had involved hardships and errors. Hardships and errors were blessings, if you could only outgrow them; and they, in their splendid vitality, knew how to outgrow everything. Sacred history, classic fable, chivalry, and the cure of one's soul had, in that former age, proved absorbing themes for the fancy, and had exquisitely modulated the emotions; but the fountain of those emotions had always been their own breast, and since after such dramatic adventures their breast remained deeply unsatisfied, it was time to look again narrowly into its depths to discover some newer and truer way of expressing it. Why should not the development of material arts be the next phase in their career? They would not be less free amid the gusts and the billows of politics than they had been in their marine adventure; commerce would offer them glorious opportunities to exercise their will-power and their invention; infinite vistas, here too, were open before them: cities always more populous, possessions always more varied, instruments always more wonderful, and labour always more intense.

The romantic party accordingly joined the lovers of material progress in their new city, called Mechanapolis: but the old opposition in their temperaments remained undiminished. The lovers of adventure wanted machines in order to make war, and the lovers of thrift wanted peace in order to make other machines.

Meantime Peter the captain, with much grumbling and shaking of his grey beard, had got the old _Saint Christopher_ afloat again, and accompanied still by a faithful boatswain and cook, and some nondescript recruits that he had got together, set out again to sea, in search of that other land beyond the ocean which is called heaven. And every evening with a trembling finger he pointed to it in the setting sun, not seeing that heaven was above his head.

40

CLASSIC LIBERTY

When ancient peoples defended what they called their liberty, the word stood for a plain and urgent interest of theirs: that their cities should not be destroyed, their territory pillaged, and they themselves sold into slavery. For the Greeks in particular liberty meant even more than this. Perhaps the deepest assumption of classic philosophy is that nature and the gods on the one hand and man on the other, both have a fixed character; that there is consequently a necessary piety, a true philosophy, a standard happiness, a normal art. The Greeks believed, not without reason, that they had grasped these permanent principles better than other peoples. They had largely dispelled superstition, experimented in government, and turned life into a rational art. Therefore when they defended their liberty what they defended was not merely freedom to live. It was freedom to live well, to live as other nations did not, in the public experimental study of the world and of human nature. This liberty to discover and pursue a natural happiness, this liberty to grow wise and to live in friendship with the gods and with one another, was the liberty vindicated at Thermopylae by martyrdom and at Salamis by victory.

As Greek cities stood for liberty in the world, so philosophers stood for liberty in the Greek cities. In both cases it was the same kind of liberty, not freedom to wander at hazard or to let things slip, but on the contrary freedom to legislate more precisely, at least for oneself, and to discover and codify the means to true happiness. Many of these pioneers in wisdom were audacious radicals and recoiled from no paradox. Some condemned what was most Greek: mythology, athletics, even multiplicity and physical motion. In the heart of those thriving, loquacious, festive little ant-hills, they preached impassibility and abstraction, the unanswerable scepticism of silence. Others practised a musical and priestly refinement of life, filled with metaphysical mysteries, and formed secret societies, not without a tendency to political domination. The cynics railed at the conventions, making themselves as comfortable as possible in the rôle of beggars and mocking parasites. The conservatives themselves were radical, so intelligent were they, and Plato wrote the charter of the most extreme militarism and communism, for the sake of preserving the free state. It was the swan-song of liberty, a prescription to a diseased old man to become young again and try a second life of superhuman virtue. The old man preferred simply to die.

Many laughed then, as we may be tempted to do, at all those absolute physicians of the soul, each with his panacea. Yet beneath their quarrels the wranglers had a common faith. They all believed there was a single solid natural wisdom to be found, that reason could find it, and that mankind, sobered by reason, could put it in practice. Mankind has continued to run wild and like barbarians to place freedom in their very wildness, till we can hardly conceive the classic assumption of Greek philosophers and cities, that true liberty is bound up with an institution, a corporate scientific discipline, necessary to set free the perfect man, or the god, within us.

Upon the dissolution of paganism the Christian church adopted the classic conception of liberty. Of course, the field in which the higher politics had to operate was now conceived differently, and there was a new experience of the sort of happiness appropriate and possible to man; but the assumption remained unchallenged that Providence, as well as the human soul, had a fixed discoverable scope, and that the business of education, law, and religion was to bring them to operate in harmony. The aim of life, salvation, was involved in the nature of the soul itself, and the means of salvation had been ascertained by a positive science which the church was possessed of, partly revealed and partly experimental. Salvation was simply what, on a broad view, we should see to be health, and religion was nothing but a sort of universal hygiene.

The church, therefore, little as it tolerated heretical liberty, the liberty of moral and intellectual dispersion, felt that it had come into the world to set men free, and constantly demanded liberty for itself, that it might fulfil this mission. It was divinely commissioned to teach, guide, and console all nations and all ages by the self-same means, and to promote at all costs what it conceived to be human perfection. There should be saints and as many saints as possible. The church never admitted, any more than did any sect of ancient philosophers, that its teaching might represent only an eccentric view of the world, or that its guidance and consolations might be suitable only at one stage of human development. To waver in the pursuit of the orthodox ideal could only betray frivolity and want of self-knowledge. The truth of things and the happiness of each man could not lie elsewhere than where the church, summing up all human experience and all divine revelation, had placed it once for all and for everybody. The liberty of the church to fulfil its mission was accordingly hostile to any liberty of dispersion, to any radical consecutive independence, in the life of individuals or of nations.

When it came to full fruition this orthodox freedom was far from gay; it was called sanctity. The freedom of pagan philosophers too had turned out to be rather a stiff and severe pose; but in the Christian dispensation this austerity of true happiness was less to be wondered at, since life on earth was reputed to be abnormal from the beginning, and infected with hereditary disease. The full beauty and joy of restored liberty could hardly become evident in this life. Nevertheless a certain beauty and joy did radiate visibly from the saints; and while we may well think their renunciations and penances misguided or excessive, it is certain that, like the Spartans and the philosophers, they got something for their pains. Their bodies and souls were transfigured, as none now found upon earth. If we admire without imitating them we shall perhaps have done their philosophy exact justice. Classic liberty was a sort of forced and artificial liberty, a poor perfection reserved for an ascetic aristocracy in whom heroism and refinement were touched with perversity and slowly starved themselves to death.

Since those days we have discovered how much larger the universe is, and we have lost our way in it. Any day it may come over us again that our modern liberty to drift in the dark is the most terrible negation of freedom. Nothing happens to us as we would. We want peace and make war. We need science and obey the will to believe, we love art and flounder among whimsicalities, we believe in general comfort and equality and we strain every nerve to become millionaires. After all, antiquity must have been right in thinking that reasonable self-direction must rest on having a determinate character and knowing what it is, and that only the truth about God and happiness, if we somehow found it, could make us free. But the truth is not to be found by guessing at it, as religious prophets and men of genius have done, and then damning every one who does not agree. Human nature, for all its substantial fixity, is a living thing with many varieties and variations. All diversity of opinion is therefore not founded on ignorance; it may express a legitimate change of habit or interest. The classic and Christian synthesis from which we have broken loose was certainly premature, even if the only issue of our liberal experiments should be to lead us back to some such equilibrium. Let us hope at least that the new morality, when it comes, may be more broadly based than the old on knowledge of the world, not so absolute, not so meticulous, and not chanted so much in the monotone of an abstracted sage.

41

GERMAN FREEDOM

There is a fine theory of Hegel's that the universe exists in order to realize freedom. In Oriental despotisms, he tells us, only one man was free. In ancient republican cities a minority, the aristocracy of citizens, obtained freedom. Now at last freedom has extended to all; not, however, as we might fondly suppose, in free and casual America, but under the perfect organization of the Prussian monarchy. For freedom in the mouth of German philosophers has a very special meaning. It does not refer to any possibility of choice nor to any private initiative. It means rather that sense of freedom which we acquire when we do gladly and well what we should have to do anyhow, as when in passing from a close room into the open air we say we breathe freely at last. German freedom is like the freedom of the angels in heaven who see the face of God and cannot sin. It lies in such a deep love and understanding of what is actually established that you would not have it otherwise; you appropriate and bless it all and feel it to be the providential expression of your own spirit. You are enlarged by sympathy with your work, your country, and the universe, until you are no longer conscious of the least distinction between the Creator, the state, and yourself. Your compulsory service then becomes perfect freedom.

For liberal freedom, for individualism, these philosophers have a great contempt. They say a man is nothing but the sum of his relations to other things, and if he should throw off one after another these constitutive bonds, he would find his private residuum of a self to be a mathematical point and a naked cipher, incapable of willing or of choosing anything. And they further say that a dutiful soul is right in feeling that the world it accepts and co-operates with is its own work; for, according to their metaphysics, the world is only an idea which each man makes after his own image, and even as you are, so is the world you imagine you live in. Only a foolish recalcitrant person, who does not recognize the handiwork of his own spirit about him, rebels against it, and thereby cancels his natural freedom; for everywhere he finds contradictions and closed doors and irksome necessities, being divided against himself and constantly bidding his left hand undo what his right hand is doing. So that, paradoxical as it may seem, it is only when you conform that you are free, while if you rebel and secede you become a slave. Your spiritual servitude in such a case would only be manifesting itself in a phenomenal form if the government should put you in prison.