Principle in Art, Etc.

by Coventry Patmore

Fain would I something say, yet to what end?
Thou hast nor ear, nor soul to apprehend
The sublime notion and high mystery
That must be utter’d to unfold the sage
And serious doctrine of virginity.
And thou art worthy that thou should’st not know
More happiness than is thy present lot.
Enjoy your dear wit and gay rhetoric,
That hath so well been taught her dazzling fence;
Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinced.

Wordsworth, in a still greater passion, calls his scientific adversary “a fingering slave.” Of course this sort of thing tends to make the relations of the parties unpleasant; and in the eyes of the world the man of immense “information” and convinced ignorance goes off with the laurels.

Metaphysics for the most part is justly open to the objection that it attempts to explain things which Aristotle declares to be too simple to be intelligible—things which we cannot see with definiteness, not because they are beyond the focus of the mind’s eye, but because they are too much within it. The metaphysician Hegel says that the sense of honour arises from our consciousness of infinite personal value. This may not be wholly satisfactory, but it is helpful; it is a part of the truth. But what do physicists make of such things as honour and chastity? They certainly endeavour to explain such ideas and feelings as they do everything else, but their explanations necessarily discredit these and all other things which profess to have “infinite value,” and which wise men know to have infinite value.

The knowledge which can be made common to all, is a foundation upon which a certain increasing school, finding popular “opinion” too sandy, is endeavouring to build up a new state of things, religious, moral, political, and social. This kind of “positivism,” which claims for its sanction the common, that is to say, the lowest experience of mankind, is and always has been the religion of the vulgar, to whatever class they belong. The growth of an unconscious and undogmatic positivism among the people at large is perhaps the most notable fact of the time. It shows itself not only in an increasing impatience of the notion that there is any reality which cannot be seen and felt, but in an intolerance even of any experience which is not, or cannot immediately be made, the experience of all. As boards and committees proverbially have to work on the level of the least wise of their members, so the ideal perfection of this positivism would be government by the insight of the greatest dunderhead, since his experiences and perceptions alone would be sufficiently communicable to have the character of universality. Under such ideal conditions, every reality that makes life human would be completely eliminated. A man who should be detected in secretly entertaining principles of abstract honour, or trying to form his life upon the pattern of a beauty unknown to the arch-dunderhead, would fare as it fared in Athens with the man who dared to crown his house with a pediment; and vestries, consisting of the prophets of commonplace and popular experience, would vote everything in painting and poetry to be “bosh” which should be more esoteric in character than Frith’s “Railway Station” or Martin Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy.

Science has already come very generally to mean, not that which may be known, but only such knowledge as every animal with faculties a little above those of an ant or a beaver can be induced to admit. Incommunicable knowledge, or knowledge which can be communicated at present only to a portion—perhaps a small portion—of mankind, is already affirmed to be no knowledge at all. A man who knows and acts up to his knowledge that it is better to suffer or inflict any extremity of temporal evil, rather than lie or cheat, though he may not be able to give any universally intelligible account of his knowledge, is already beginning to be looked upon as a prig or a fanatic; and chastity is already widely declared to be one of the “dead virtues,” and marriage only legalised fornication, because “the sublime notion and high mystery that must be uttered to unfold the sage and serious doctrine” of purity must be taken, if taken at all by the many, upon trust.

The pure and simple ideal of life founded upon facts of universal experience is, however, too base ever to be perfectly attained in this world. There will always be a lingering suspicion with many that some have powers of discernment and an experience which are not granted to all; there will always be hidden heretics who will believe that there are realities which cannot be seen or touched by the natural eye or hand, or even by the rational perception of the many; and the present downward tendency may perhaps be checked, or at least delayed, by recalling to the minds of men that, as yet, we are all living more or less by faith in the better knowledge of the few, and by reminding them of that abyss towards which a new step is taken whenever any item of that knowledge is denied, in order to widen the foundations of the throne of popular experience.

The religion of universal experience must of course begin, as the dogmatic positivist insists, in the denial of God, or, what is exactly equivalent, in the assertion that, if God exists, He is altogether unknowable and removed from the practical interests of life. Now, let it be remembered that for a man to deny that God can be known is quite a different thing from his not being able to affirm, from positive knowledge, the reverse. A very small minority of mankind, but a minority which includes almost all who have attained the highest peaks of heroic virtue, and many who have been no less eminent for power of intellect and practical wisdom, have declared that, to them at least, God is knowable, communicable with, and personally discernible with a certainty which exceeds all other certainties; and they have further affirmed that this knowledge comes and can only come from a man’s putting himself en rapport with the Divinity by an, in the beginning, more or less experimental faith, and by a conformity to the dictates of the highest conscience, so perfect as to involve, for a considerable period at least, laborious and painful self-denial. Now it would be placing oneself upon a level with such assertors of the highest knowledge to say that one knows that these declarations are true, however strong the presumption of their truth may appear; but it is simply vulgar and brutal impudence for any one to assert positively that they are untruths or illusions, merely because his own experience and that of his pot-companions contains nothing which gives the least clue to their meaning. The reductio ad absurdum becomes complete when the same argument is carried into regions of more extended experience. A drunken bargeman has exactly the same right to deny the reality of the asserted experiences of a Petrarch or a Wordsworth as these would have to deny those of the saint or the apostle; and to descend a few steps farther, the amateur of abominable delights and the violator of natural relationships would justly, upon the widest experimental grounds, claim exemption from a condemnation chiefly founded upon an obscure perception and an intuitive horror of which he for his part had no experience.

Popular positivism will, however, always stop short of the length to which the doctrines of its prophets would lead it, and will, from time to time, be beaten back into the paths of the positivism of the nobler few on which all virtue and religion are founded, by finding itself in contact with the tremendous paradox, that the most universally beneficial and admired fruits of civilisation are and always have been gathered from trees of which the roots are wholly out of common view. The heroes themselves of the people will always refute popular experience better than any philosopher can. Though a Gladstone may dazzle them for a day by investing with a fatuous glamour the principles and platitudes with which the vulgar are familiar, it is to a Gordon, with inimitable courage and honour, the obvious outcome of unintelligible thoughts and experiences, that they will look with abiding reverence, and an elevating instinct that such men habitually move about in worlds by them unrealised.

The immense and unalterable inequalities in the knowing faculties of man are the source and in part the justification of that social inequality which roughly and very partially reflects them. Many otherwise amiable and conservative thinkers have, however, made the mistake of conceding that such inequality is, abstractedly considered, an evil, though a hopelessly incurable one. Conservative teaching would be much more effective than it is, were it more frequently occupied with proving that such inequality is no evil, but a very great good for all parties.

Dr. Johnson, who sometimes let fall, in off-hand talk, sayings of such depth, simplicity, and significance that we must go back to the philosophers of antiquity to find the like of them, once remarked that “inequality is the source of all delight.” This saying, which must seem surprising to most modern ears, is absolutely true and even demonstrable.