The Poetry of Rupert Brooke
Margaret C. Anderson
Poems, by Rupert Brooke. (Sidgwick and Jackson, London.)
The unusual thing about Rupert Brooke—the young Oxford don whose poetry is just finding its way in this country—is that he has graduated from the French school without having taken a course in decadence. The result is a type of English poetry minus those qualities we think of as typical of “the British mind” and plus those that stand as the highest expression of the French spirit. There is nothing of self-conscious reserve about Mr. Brooke; and yet it is not so obvious a quality as his frank, unashamed revealment that places him definitely with the French type. It is rather a matter of form—that quality of saying a thing in the most economic way it can be said, of finding the simple and the inevitable word. Mr. Brooke stands very happily between a poet like Alfred Noyes, in whom one rarely finds that careful selection, and the esthetes whose agony in that direction becomes monotonous. For example, in the first sonnet of this collection:
Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire
Of watching you; and swing me suddenly
Into the shade and loneliness and mire
Of the last land! There, waiting patiently,
One day, I think, I’ll feel a cool wind blowing,
See a slow light across the Stygian tide,
And hear the Dead about me stir, unknowing,
And tremble. And I shall know that you have died,
And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream,
Pass, light as ever, through the lightless host,
Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam—
Most individual and bewildering ghost!—
And turn, and toss your brown delightful head
Amusedly, among the ancient Dead.
There are about eighteen words in this one sonnet chosen with infinite pains; and yet the effect of the whole is quite unlabored—an effect of spontaneity reduced to its simplest terms.
Perhaps the point can be made more emphatically by a miscellaneous quotation of single lines, because the poignancy of Rupert Brooke’s phrasing leaves me in a torment of inexpressiveness, forced to quote him rather than talk about him. Here are a few: “Like hills at noon or sunlight on a tree”; “And dumb and mad and eyeless like the sky”; “The soft moan of any grey-eyed lute-player”; “Some gaunt eventual limit of our light”; “Red darkness of the heart of roses”; “And long noon in the hot calm places”; “My wild sick blasphemous prayer”; “Further than laughter goes, or tears, further than dreaming”; “Against the black and muttering trees”; “And quietness crept up the hill”; “When your swift hair is quiet in death”; “Savage forgotten drowsy hymns”; “And dance as dust before the sun”; “The swift whir of terrible wings”; “Like flies on the cold flesh”; “Clear against the unheeding sky”; “So high a beauty in the air”; “Amazed with sorrow”; “Haggard with virtue”; “Frozen smoke”; “Mist-garlanded,” and a thousand other things that somehow have a fashion of striking twelve. There’s a long poem about a fish, beginning
In a cool curving world he lies
And ripples with dark ecstasies.
that flashes through every tone of the stream’s “drowned colour” from “blue brilliant from dead starless skies” to “the myriad hues that lie between darkness and darkness.” And there’s one about Menelaus and Helen containing this description:
High sat white Helen, lonely and serene.
He had not remembered that she was so fair,
And that her neck curved down in such a way;
The simplicity of that last line—but what a picture it is!
The important things about Mr. Brooke, however—and of course this should have been said in the first paragraph—are his sense of life and his feeling for nature. Of the first it might be said that he is strong and radiant and sure—and at the same time reverently impotent. The Hill, which I like better than anything in this collection, will illustrate:
Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
You said, “Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old....” “And when we die
All’s over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips,” said I,
—“Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!”
“We are Earth’s best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!” we said;
“We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!” ... Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
—And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.
Everything in it—with the exception of “kissed the lovely grass,” which might easily be spared—is fine; “with unreluctant tread Rose-crowned into the darkness!” is vivid with beauty; and when the simple dignity of “such brave true things to say” has swung you to its great height, the drop in that sudden last line comes with the most moving wistfulness. There are several poems, too long to quote here, which show Mr. Brooke’s affinity with the outdoors; but perhaps even five lines from one of them will suggest it:
Then from the sad west turning wearily,
I saw the pines against the white north sky,
Very beautiful, and still, and bending over
Their sharp black heads against a quiet sky
And there was peace in them....
Not long ago I asked a poet in whose judgment I have a profound belief, to read these poems of Rupert Brooke’s and give me his opinion. After looking at two or three he said he was afraid he wasn’t going to like them, but the next day he reported that he wished to retract, making the magnificent concession that “some of Brooke’s moods are healthy!” Of course there are a number of things in this volume that can easily be interpreted as unhealthy or repulsive, like the Wagner:
Creeps in half wanton, half asleep,
One with a fat wide hairless face.
He likes love music that is cheap;
Likes women in a crowded place;
And wants to hear the noise they’re making.
His heavy eyelids droop half-over,
Great pouches swing beneath his eyes.
He listens, thinks himself the lover,
Heaves from his stomach wheezy sighs;
He likes to feel his heart’s a-breaking.
The music swells. His gross legs quiver.
His little lips are bright with slime.
The music swells. The women shiver,
And all the while, in perfect time
His pendulous stomach hangs a-shaking.
But it seems something more than that to me. As an attack on German emotionalism—however unjustly, from my point of view, through Wagner—the poem struck me as an exercise of extraordinary cleverness. I don’t know that anyone has ever said so effectively the things that ought be said about that type of emotion which feeds not upon life but, inversely, upon emotion.
Mr. Brooke’s pictures have much of the quality of Böcklin’s. That first sonnet can be imagined in the same tone values as Böcklin’s wonderful Isle of the Dead, and the closing lines of Victory need the same medium:
Down the supernal roads,
With plumes a-tossing, purple flags far flung,
Rank upon rank, unbridled, unforgiving,
Thundered the black battalions of the Gods.
Seaside needs an artist like Leon Dabo:
Swiftly out from the friendly lilt of the band,
The crowd’s good laughter, the loved eyes of men,
I am drawn nightward; I must turn again
Where, down beyond the low untrodden strand,
There curves and glimmers outward to the unknown
The old unquiet ocean. All the shade
Is rife with magic and movement. I stray alone
Here on the edge of silence, half afraid,
Waiting a sign. In the deep heart of me
The sullen waters swell towards the moon,
And all my tides set seaward.
From inland
Leaps a gay fragment of some mocking tune,
That tinkles and laughs and fades along the sand,
And dies between the seawall and the sea.
How perfect those last three lines are! How skilful, in painting the sea, to concentrate upon something from inland, making the ocean twice as old and vast and unquiet because of that little tinkling tune.
One will find in Rupert Brooke various kinds of things, but never attitudinizing and never insincerity. He is one of the most important of those young Englishmen who are doing so much for modern poetry. He is essentially a poet’s poet, and yet his feet are deep in the common soil. Swinburne would have liked him, but the significant thing is that Whitman would, too. There are several poems I have not mentioned that Whitman would have loved.
Tagore As a Dynamic
George Soule
[We do not agree that Tagore is a dynamic; we find him a poet whose music is more important than his thinking. But we are glad to print this interesting analysis.]
In The Crescent Moon, with its ravishing beauty of childhood, in The Gardener, with its passion of love, and especially in Gitanjali and Sadhana (Macmillan), with their life universal and all-permeating, we have found the poet Tagore and been grateful. It remains to ask: What has Tagore done to us? What is he likely to do for the future? What has been his answer to the promise and the challenge of the world?
Religions have provided one answer. In his zeal of affirmation the prophet has declared that the individual lives after death; that in some unseen world completion shall be attained. Yet increasing millions find this explanation fading into unreality. If one living organism is perpetuated after its physical dissolution, why not another? We can account for every particle of life which the blossom loses by its death. Some has passed to the seed; the rest finds its chemical reaction, which in turn produces other forms of life—in entirely new individuals. To assert that the original blossom lives in an unseen form outside the realm of thought is preposterous. Why should it? Its function has been accomplished. The sentimentality behind this thinking is a weak prop for a vigorous mind. And exactly the same reasoning applies to all living organisms, including man.
The more intelligent part of mankind has also outgrown the conception of a definite heaven. It is impossible to imagine a satisfactory heaven for the individual. A place where there is no strife, where everything is perfection and completion—what joy is to be found there? The essence of life as we know it is growth and survival; its happiness comes from the exercise of a function. Growth and survival postulate extinction; in heaven an individual would evaporate.
Some thinkers have made a substitute “religion of humanity.” They find solace in action tending to make the world a better place; they have been gratified by an imaginative conception of a future heaven on earth. As a religion of morality and action this is magnificent. Yet its dogma does not satisfy. A heaven on earth is no more conceivable than a heaven anywhere else. If we find our happiness in action, how shall our descendants find happiness when there are no more evils to conquer? Though a static condition of blessedness be the goal of humanitarian endeavor, it is the progress toward it which furnishes the joy.
The Oriental thinker has looked for his answer in a different direction. Though the individual is partial and unsuccessful, life as a whole is always triumphant. Cannot the individual by contemplation identify himself with the world-soul? Can he not tack himself on to this all-inclusive life by denial and forgetfulness of himself? Brahmin saints have done so imaginatively. But such an answer is no answer. We are individuals, after all, and thinking of Nirvana will not rob us of our separate bodies and minds. Contemplation is not a substitute for living.
The doctrine of transmigration is equally unsatisfying. If an individual never succeeds in any single life, innumerable chances will be mere repetitions of tragedy. The only hope of such a process would be a final “heaven on earth,” which is just as inconceivable as that of the humanitarians.
We cannot now be satisfied with theological answers. Nor will the world ever find an answer permanently satisfactory. Is not this as it should be? A fixed system of thought which answers every spiritual craving must be a shell around the individual, preventing growth. It finally ceases to be a dynamic and becomes a wall in the way of the feelers which mankind is constantly sending into his spiritual environment. It forces him to rest. It eventually turns all his expansion into the lower planes of life. It is deadening, suffocating, as soon as he reaches its limits.
Of what nature, then, must be the religion of the modern man and woman? First of all, it must not be imposed from without; it must grow through the personality and find its being there. It must not only square with every known fact of science and thought; it must stimulate to a fervent desire for new understanding. It must not deny or destroy life; it must be life’s essence. It must ring with a call to the individual to assume his proper dignity of life. It must harmonize with the laughter of children and with the bitter beauty of a winter sea. It must flame with emotion, yet be keen and hard as a sword. And it must be not a self-constituted standard with which every other thing is arbitrarily compared, but a principle of growth making necessary in us vision, strength, freedom, and fearlessness.
It is my feeling that Tagore will suggest to the modern man such a religion. He gives expression, though not, of course, perfect expression, to a synthesis of many latent instincts of the modern mind. He glories in understanding, not only facts and truth, but emotions and all manifestations of life. He calls us to see vivid beauty wherever it is found. He acclaims the aid of science in extending man’s personality throughout the universe. He sees the oneness of all life, and bids man stand erect on account of this eternal and timeless force coursing through him. He sees the oneness of humanity, and the necessity of perfecting human relations. He depicts purity without asceticism, vigor without brutality. He emphasizes joy and action. He does not blink the fact of death, but robs it of horror by showing it as the natural end of a victorious life. While he encourages by the idea of an ultimate goal, he inspires by the conception of a real connection with infinity here and now. Revering the universal life, he sees that it finds expression only in individuals, and that the law of our being must be to live as completely as possible.
Many before Tagore have said these things partially. But it remained for a poet who combines the intelligence of the Orient with that of the Occident to say them all, and to say them with such beauty and simplicity that a large part of the world listens. If he succeeds in making us conscious of such a religion, he will have quickened life and made it potent as few artists can.
Ethel Sidgwick’s “Succession”
Margaret C. Anderson
Succession: A Comedy of the Generations, by Ethel Sidgwick. (Small, Maynard and Company, Boston.)
Ethel Sidgwick is the world’s next great woman novelist. Though I confess eagerly that I enjoy her novels more than any novels I’ve ever read—I mean it literally—it isn’t on so personal a basis that I offer the judgment. But I’m confident that within ten years the critical perspective will show her on this pinnacle. Since George Eliot and the Brontës, I can think of no woman who has focused art and life so intensely into novel writing—though even as I say this Ethan Frome looms up and leaves me a little uncomfortable. But the important thing is that Ethel Sidgwick is going to count—enormously.
People who aren’t yet aware of her (and there seem to be a lot of them) can be easily explained as that body of the public that neglects a masterpiece until it has become the fashion to acclaim it. But Ethel Sidgwick has written a novel that’s more important than any number of our traditional masterpieces. For instance, it’s a much more important story than Vanity Fair; just as Jean Christophe is more valuable than Ivanhoe. The novel of manners has its delightful place, and so has the historical romance; but the novel that chronicles with subtlety the intellectual or artistic temper of an age is as much more important than these as Greek drama is than the moving picture show.
I know there are people who’ll read Succession and continue to prefer Thackeray’s geniality to Miss Sidgwick’s brilliant seriousness and her humor that’s not at all genial—but rapid, sophisticated, impatient of comedy in the accepted sense. Ethel Sidgwick might write a radiant tragedy, or a wistful satire, or a sad comedy; I can never imagine her being anything so obvious as merely comic—or genial! She doesn’t laugh; she couldn’t chuckle; she has just the flash of a smile, and then she hurries on dazzlingly, as though things were too important to be anything but passionate about. She doesn’t “warm the cockles of your heart”—or whatever that silly phrase is; and she doesn’t do crude, raw things to show you that she “knows life.” She goes down into the darkness rose-crowned, in Rupert Brooke’s gorgeous phrase; when she goes into the sunlight it is always with something of remembered agony. That’s the fine quality of her vitalism. She’s too strong to be hard, too steel-like to be robust. She’s like fire and keen air—to borrow another poet’s phrase. She reflects life through the mirror of a vivid personality—which is one way of being an important artist. She assumes that you’re also vivid, and quick, and subtle, and this gives her writing the most beautiful quality of nervousness—the kind you mean when you’re not talking about nerves. In short, Ethel Sidgwick is the most definitely magnetic personality I’ve ever felt through a book’s pages.
Succession, though complete in itself, is really a sequel to Promise, published a year ago. The sub-title presents the idea, and can be concretely expanded in a sentence: Antoine, child-wonder violinist, and the youngest of the celebrated Lemaures, revolts against the musical ideas of his grandfather. Here it is again—the battle of youth and age, made particularly interesting because it’s a purely intellectual warfare, and particularly charming because its participants are such delightful people.
The first glimpse of Antoine is irresistible. After a series of concerts in England, he is being taken by his uncle to their home in France. M. Lucien Lemaure has chosen the long route because his nephew has an odd habit of sleeping better on the water than in any house or hotel on shore; and while he doesn’t understand this nephew, he has vital reasons for considering him: for upon Antoine’s delicate shoulders rests the musical honor of the family.
“Sleep well, mon petit,” he said, in the tiny cabin. “We are going home.”
Antoine, who had no immediate intention of sleeping, was staring out of the dim porthole of a fascinating space of the unknown. “That is home to you?” he asked vaguely.
“To be sure. My first youth was passed there, like thine.”
After an interval passed spent in a vain effort to imagine his uncle with no hair on his face, Antoine gave it up and recurred to the window. “I wish I lived on the sea,” he murmured.
In the train, flying toward Paris, Lucien refers to the last London recital, when Antoine had made both his uncle’s and his conductor’s lives a burden by his indifferent rehearsal of his grandfather’s latest composition. Antoine’s outburst had outraged Lucien, to whom faith in his father’s character and genius had, all his life, amounted to a religion.
“What will you tell him then?” said Antoine, turning his dark eyes without deranging his languid attitude along the seat. “Just that I said some ‘sottises,’ the same as always?”
“He is not a child,” thought Lucien instantly. “He is clever, maddening. Of course, my action will have to be explained. I shall say,” he said aloud, with deliberation, “that we differed about the concerto. That you were difficult and headstrong over that, which is certainly true. You have admitted since that it was too much for you, eh?”
“Yes,” said the boy. “It is an awful thing, but I played it. I had to have something real that night.”
“You imply my father’s composition is not real?”
“Oh, do not,” said the boy, under his breath. “I have remembered he is your father now.”
“To be sure,” said M. Lucien, with stateliness. “And have you no duty to him as well?”
“I shall see him soon. I shall remember then.” Antoine diverted his eyes, to his uncle’s private relief. “Do you think I do not want to remember, after that?”
“I should think you would be ashamed,” said Lucien, by way of the last word in argument, and retired to his paper.
“You like me to be ashamed,” said Antoine, snatching the last word from him, though still with a manner of extreme languor. “Good, then, I have been. It is not”—he watched the trees of Normandy sleepily—“a very nice feeling.”
“I am glad you know what it is like, at least,” growled his uncle into the paper.
“Don’t you?” said his nephew. “What it is like, is to make you feel rather sick—all the time—especially while you are playing it.”
“What?”
“The thing you are ashamed of.”
How I wanted to hug him!
“Antoine,” said Lucien, rising and discarding the paper, “do not be absurd. Here, look at me. You suffered that night at the concert, eh? You excited yourself so much, little imbecile. Are you tired now?”
“No, thank you—this is France,” replied Antoine. “That is a French cow,” he murmured, “not so fat. That is a French tree, not so thick. The sky is different, and the sun. The concerts will be easier, I expect.”
But the first glimpse of M. Lemaure, the grandfather, is reassuring. In fact, he’s almost as irresistible as Antoine, making you realize immediately that the battle is going to be a subtle one, and that it may be difficult to know which side to take, after all.
The old musician asks about the last recital.
“I was not at the last orchestral,” Lucien answers. “I left him in Wurst’s charge, and went to the country, ... I should not easily desert my post, as you know; but the boy made it clear enough he had no use for me. He clung to that sacré concerto of Tschedin, which he knows you detest, and which I never thought in a condition to perform. He mocked himself of my objections, contradicted me, eluded me, and twisted Wurst round his finger at rehearsals.”
“And Wurst?”
“Wurst found him charming. He has Russian blood himself, and had known the composer. He has encouraged Antoine’s revolutionary tendencies from the first. The pair of them took the last concert so completely out of my hands that it seemed fruitless to remain.”
“Bébé forgot himself,” pronounced M. Lemaure, still quite at ease. Indeed the situation so reminded him of Antoine’s childhood that he longed to laugh. “What did he say, and when?”
“We will not revive it,” said Lucien. “When he came to his senses, he apologized sufficiently. Perhaps he was not well ... when is the first engagement—Sunday?”
“Let him be for a time. There is no harm.”
Lucien grunted. “I shall not disturb him while he is seasick, if that is what you mean. It would do him no harm to play scales all the week.”
“Scales—as you will, but not persons. Not Dmitri Tschedin, I mean, nor even me. It is intrusive personality, always, that disturbs the current of Antoine’s philosophy.”
“Father! How absurd.”
“But I have long remarked it. His own individuality fights the alien matter, and it is not till he has either rejected it or absorbed that he is steady again. Wurst and his Russians have excited him—nothing more natural. For me,” said M. Lemaure, plunging into memory, as he stood by his son’s side at the window, “at his age, the realm of music did not hold such petulant passions, any more than it held flat heresy, like that of Sorbier and Duchâtel.”
“Antoine adores Duchâtel,” remarked Lucien. “There is no fighting there.”
“Bon!” The old man laughed. “Heresy on the hearth then, if it must be so. So long as he does not play the stuff in my hearing.”
There are over six hundred pages in the story, and they cover just a year and a half of Antoine’s life. This appears to be an impossible literary feat; any orthodox novelist will tell you that you can’t hold a reader through six hundred pages with the story of a fourteen-year-old boy. But Miss Sidgwick’s holding power is—well, I read Succession during a brief trip to Boston, and much as I longed to absorb Concord and all its charms, I found I only had half my capacity with me; the rest was with Antoine, and it stayed there till in desperation I shut myself up in a hotel room and saw him safely off to America with his nice, wholesome, inartistic father. Then came the awful realization that I’d have to wait a whole year for the next volume—for surely Miss Sidgwick intends to make a trilogy.
The explanation of this absorption is simply that Antoine is so interesting. His professional life is dramatic; but even in the commonest experiences of every day his world is as vivid as it can only be to a dramatic nature. For instance, in this little scene with his brother:
“There was a little thing on legs,” he announced, “that went under the carpet just now. It was rather horrible, and I have not looked for it.”
“A blackbeetle, I presume,” said Philip.
“It was not black,” said Antoine. “It was pink—a not-clean pink, you understand. I found it”—a pause—“disagreeable.”
“How could you find it when you had not looked for it?” said Philip. Another pause, Antoine considering the point, which was an old one.
“You will catch it,” he suggested, shooting a soft glance at his brother.
“Why should I?” said Philip. “They’re perfectly harmless.”
“I shall dream of it,” said Antoine, shutting his eyes. “It was too long, do you see, and pink as well.” His brow contracted, and he finished with gentle conviction. “If it comes upon my bed in the night, I shall be sick.”
Of course, most interesting of all is his musical development, in which are involved several personalities of striking character: Duchâtel, the revolutionary, more a son, after the French fashion, than a man or a musician; Savigny, the celebrated alienist, who treats the child hypnotically in his severe illnesses; Lemonski, a rival child wonder, who is like a pig, and vulgar—which it is silly to say, because he is a beautiful artist, according to Antoine; Reuss, the great German conductor, and the boy’s staunch friend, who hates “the cursed French training” of making life weigh so heavily on its youth; Jacques Charretteur, the vagabond violinist, “a man to play French music in France”; Cécile, the aunt, who has the perception to understand the little genius with the dark eyes, whose “expression was so beautiful that she could hardly bear it”; and Ribiera, the famous Spanish pianist, who “warms” the piano, in Antoine’s words, and calls the boy an intelligent ape, by way of expressing his admiration. All these people are drawn with consummate skill.
I think one of the most poignant passages in the book, to me, is Antoine’s description of how he had raté the solo at a London concert. It was at the end of the season, and he had been harassed by a thousand needless frictions:
“The first part had gone pretty well, though I did not like how the Duchâtel sounded. I thought that was the violin, perhaps—and a new room. It was a bad room, pretty, but stupid for the sound. I heard much too much, so I was sure they were not hearing properly. They were extremely still, and made a little clapping at the end. I did not find it a good concert, but Wurst in the interval said it was very well, and I should not excite myself. So when I did not, then I was tired, and it seemed stupider than before. And at last that thing came, the Mirski ‘Caprice,’ which you know how detestable. The passages are hard in that thing, but I know them. Every morning I played them to Moricz, so now I do not trouble.... And then, in the middle of it, I heard Peter Axel playing wrong.... And I was frightened horribly.... And I made him an awful frown for forgetting it, and Peter was looking at me. His face was not happy like it generally is. It was like one of those worst dreams. And, of course, I stopped playing, because it cannot be like that. And Peter said ‘Go back,’ very quietly, making a lot of little passages and returning for me to find, do you see?”
“He gave you a chance to pick up, eh?” said Philip. “And you couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t! I would not. I was furious—awful.... I said a rude thing to Axel in passing, and went off the estrade. And they all clapped together down there, bah!—though they knew it was not finished. They were sorry I had stopped—because they were people who like a difficult Caprice, to be amused by it. But I was not amused. Nor Peter, very much.” He laughed sharply.
“Don’t, I say,” said Philip. “It’s all over now. It doesn’t matter, really. Everybody forgets, now and then” ...
“I do not,” said Antoine. “I do not know how it is to forget. I know that thing—I know all the little notes, long ago, before Moricz—since years. It is not possible to forget a little concert piece that you know....”
“Did you go on again?”
“Yes. After Wurst had finished talking, I had to. I should not have for my uncle, but I had to for him. He was violent, Wurst. He said it was indigne and lôche if I stopped, and a lot of other words. He was like a little dog barking. A man like Wurst does not ‘rater.’ He does not know how that is done. His head has all the big scores inside.... He did not see how it was for me to stand up on the estrade again, with quantities of beautiful people looking kind. It would have been so better if they had siffli, like here in Paris.”
The book closes on an unexpected and suggestive note. Antoine, who had always realized that his grandfather couldn’t bear his being “different” in music, had taken quietly to composing the kind of things he loved. He “made” a quintet in which Ribiera was given a brilliant piano part, and which he thought beautiful—extremely. But when they played it for him, though he was moved to cry, he found its “ideas” not so good as he had thought. Whereupon he plans to produce better ones in his new overture.
Succession is a masterpiece of art, and Antoine is the most lovable and interesting character in new fiction.
The Meaning of Bergsonism
Llewellyn Jones
Bergson’s philosophy is the antithesis of the natural-science view of the universe as mechanism. In that view the laws of nature are fixed sequences controlling matter, or energy, and the more complicated and faultless the mechanism the higher the life. Just how this mechanism became conscious of the fact that it was a mechanism—caught itself at itself, so to speak, and announced the laws of its own being—is a question as puzzling as the old theological one of the aseity of God—which is simply a Latinized way of asking how the deity could, being infinite, turn himself inside out in such a manner as to become aware of his own existence and attributes. In fact, the two questions are one and the same. According to Bergson, mechanism not only cannot explain consciousness, but it is the very antithesis of conscious life. Behind mechanism he places an inextinguishable but not uncheckable vital urge with endless potentialities and with no fixed goal. The progress of this “elan vital” is through resistance to matter, which is simply the reversal of its own movement. The onward urge is what Bergson calls “pure duration” or motion, and its collision with its own reverse movement is what appears to us as space. The actual situation of life at any given time is simply a modus vivendi between this spiritual activity striving to be free, and the reverse movement.
We know, of course, that the physical universe is simply energy running down. Just as a glass of water cools off, so the sun dissipates its heat, and so, we are learning, the elements break up into simpler forms, giving off their contained energy in the forms of heat and electricity as they do so. But on the other hand the plant takes unto itself that energy of the sun, and with it builds up again the inorganic salts from its soil into higher forms with a greater content of stored energy. What the plant does, says Bergson, is typical and symbolical of what all life does at all times: sets up a reverse current to the running-down tendency of the universe of matter.
Life cannot do this easily, but has to adapt itself to the resistance of the downward flow. It does this through its motor reactions, its sense organs, and above all through its intelligence when that is evolved. The evolution of these things gives us our ideas of space. The insect cuts up its environment into spatial forms easy for it to deal with. Man with different sense organs probably lives in a different space world. As “a thing is where it acts,” it is obvious that the boundaries of things in the material realm would be quite different if we had, for example, some sort of sense organ adapted to identify things by their electrical properties. But this identifying of things by spatial and material concepts—the mathematical order—is instrumental to the ends of action, and the original consciousness of life, while it included the potentialities of intellectual knowledge, was instinctive. Instinct, according to Bergson, is first-hand knowledge, but knowledge incapable of conceptual extension. It is therefore no use in the practical affairs of life, but certain and immediate in its apprehension of the actual flow of life itself. In its broadened form of intuition it is responsible for all the valid and original insights of the philosophers and poets. The structural and dialectic forms in which philosophies have been given to the world are simply the intellectualizing process which philosophers have used to buttress—and which they have often thought produced—the insight which was prior to and independent of the system.
Bergson’s doctrine has been seized upon by apologists for every creed and for every iconoclasm. Bergson has been accused of every intellectual crime, from being the intellectual father of syndicalism to being the last rich relative of struggling obscurantism. The protestant theologians talk glibly of Bergson’s idea of God, and use him as a stick with which to beat the hated materialist. Bergson himself would never apply his philosophy to the uses of the syndicalists. The argument of the syndicalists themselves is simply an ingenious parody of the Bergsonian philosophy, as it is so far developed. As mechanism and the mathematical order, they say, do not represent life, we cannot by the means of natural and sociological sciences predict in advance what life will do, and what forms it will take. We cannot base revolutionary action, for instance, along Marxian lines, because the whole Marxist philosophy rests upon the assumption that life is the slave of material forces—chemical firstly, and economical in the human drama—and that it will therefore follow along predetermined lines. If life is an “elan vital,” breaking its path as it goes, and only able to think in terms of the past, then revolutionary activity must cut loose from the reactionary intellect, and trust itself to its instincts; fight its way to that freedom which is impossible in the mathematically determined intellectual realm, and which is equally impossible of achievement by mere intellectual foresight. So the syndicalist in the name of Bergson cuts loose from all theories of the future he wishes to bring in, preaches the “general strike” for its stimulating effect on the emotions of the proletarian constituents of his social “elan vital”—quite careless of whether it would ever be a practical success or not—and deliberately cuts loose from all forms of “bourgeoise culture.”
But the anti-revolutionists point out that Bergson does believe in the intellect as a guide to the practical affairs of life; and industry and production—the field of the syndicalist—are far more mechanical than they are vital. In man’s industrial relations he has to approximate himself as much to the machine as possible, and for Bergson’s anti-intellectualism to be applied to this particular realm of life is as great a calamity as could happen to the doctrine. And then these conservatives proceed, less justifiably perhaps, to train the captured gun of intuition upon the syndicalists. The racial intuitions, they say, are older than the race’s newly-found intellectual conceptions. For generations the race has lived by certain instinctive rules of conduct. Religion, custom, and patriotism, these are all sacred because they are extra-intellectual, and they dare us to disturb these sacred things. It is a strange sight—this most revolutionary philosophical doctrine being used to support all the prejudices that the ages have handed down—but we cannot deny that it is a plausible use of intuitionism, and a more legitimate use than that to which Sorel and his followers have put the teachings emanating from the College of France.
Perhaps the most detailed application that Bergson has yet made of his philosophy to the affairs of life is his application of its principles to the puzzling æsthetic problem of laughter and the comic. His theory is that laughter is a social corrective directed against the man who allows the dogging steps of mechanism to overtake him and imprison his spirit in a web of meaningless action. The man who is walking along the street should be going in a determinate direction with a determinate end in view, and with the ability to get there in spite of reasonable obstacles. So says society. When he becomes abstracted, walks mechanically, and in consequence falls over a brick, we laugh at him. He has permitted himself to become a machine for the nonce instead of a self-conscious spirit, and society cannot afford to have its interests jeopardized in that way.
The International Journal of Ethics for January, 1914, contains an article by J. W. Scott, who accuses Bergson of ethical pessimism on the grounds of his view of the comic. He points out that the psychology of comic action, as Bergson works it out, is precisely that of moral action. For in moral action, too, a man does what is habitual, what is against his own self-conscious impulse, what is mechanical in that it is a fixed course of conduct pursued without reference to the favor or disfavor of the environment. The life impulse must be, he convicts Bergson of saying, adaptable to its circumstances; it must insert itself between the determinisms of matter; it must pursue the crooked path where the straight path is too difficult. It cannot follow its moral ideal without making itself ridiculous, as indeed in real life moral people are always doing.
This criticism hangs on the acceptance of a moral ideal, and if we must have an ideal in the sense of a goal beckoning us from the future, then the criticism is well founded and Bergson is an ethical pessimist. But systematic ethics have been denied by other philosophers before Bergson, and most people of modern temperament are quite willing to let the whole question of a priori ethics drop. They might not be willing to exchange it for the very unpoetic utilitarianism which has so often been offered in its place, but Bergson offers something more than that. If he be an ethical pessimist, he is not a religious pessimist. Of religion he has not yet spoken, except incidentally. Obviously so long as he uses the scientific method in his philosophy, proceeding from facts to their subordination in a picture whose values are given by intuitions, he cannot present a systematic philosophy. But in spite of the fact that pessimism—not only in ethics but in his view of the content of personality and its relations with the universe—is charged against him, Bergson means to be decidedly optimistic in his treatment of personality. In his article in The Hibbert Journal for October, 1911, occur these remarkable words:
If then, in every province, the triumph of life is expressed by creation, ought we not to think that the ultimate reason of human life is a creation which, in distinction from that of the artist or man of science, can be pursued at every moment and by all men alike? I mean the creation of self by self, the continual enrichment of personality by elements which it does not draw from outside but causes to spring forth from itself.... If we admit that with man consciousness has finally left the tunnel; that everywhere else consciousness has remained imprisoned; that every other species corresponds to the arrest of something which in man succeeded in overcoming resistance and in expanding almost freely, thus displaying itself in true personalities capable of remembering all and willing all and controlling their past and their future, we shall have no repugnance in admitting that in man, though perhaps in man alone, consciousness pursues its path beyond this earthly life.
On the other suppositions of Bergson’s philosophy this is by no means so far-fetched as are most theories of immortality. For the consciousness which cuts out the patterns of our spatial life here could easily cut out others in the beyond, like enough to our present ones to carry on the continuity of our active existence. The idea of survival, or an idea that may be applied to transmundane survival, is suggested by Laurence Binyon in a recent volume of poems entitled “Auguries.” He writes:
And because in my heart is a flowing no hour can bind
Because through the wrongs of the world looking forth and behind
I find for my thoughts not a close, not an end,
With you will I follow, nor crave the strength of the strong
Nor a fortress of time to enshield me from storms that rend.
This is life, this is home, to be poured as a stream as a song.
This is quoted not only because it represents the poetical realization of Bergson’s message, but because it points to one reason why the charge of pessimism has been brought against Bergson even in this connection.
If only progress is our home, if there be no stability, how is that permanence of values to be achieved which Höffding declares to be the essential axiom of religion? We may love our faithful dog, but according to Bergson it represents an evolutionary blind alley. We may create as we will, but we shall survive our creations. Here, after all, is at the best a tempered optimism. No reunions are promised in the Bergsonian paradise. Only a perpetual streaming that does not, so far as Bergson has yet told us (and that is an important point) ever wind safely home to sea.