Heart of Man

by George Edward Woodberry

"Be thou me, impetuous one!"

and thence the poem swiftly falls to its end in a lyric burst of personality, in which, while the body of nature is retained, there is only a spiritual meaning. So Burns in some songs, and Keats in some odes, following the same method, make nature their own syllables, as of some cosmic language. This is the highest reach of the artist's power of conveying through the concrete image the soul in its pure emotional life; and in such poetry one feels that the whole material world seems lent to man to expand his nature and escape from the solitude in which he is born to that divine union to which he is destined. The evolution of this one moment of passion is lyric form, whose unity lies in personality exclusively, however it may seem to involve the external world which is its imagery,—its body lifted from the dust, woven of light and air, but alive only while the spirit abides there. And here, too, as elsewhere, to whatever height the poet may rise, it must be one to which man can follow, to which, indeed, the poet lifts men. Nor is it only nature which thus suffers spiritualization through the stress of imagination interpreting life in definite and sensible forms of beauty, but the imagery of action also may be similarly taken possession of, though this is rare in merely lyrical expression.

The ideal world, then, to present in full summary these views, is thus built up, through personality in all its richness, by a perfected imitation of life itself, and is set forth in universal unities of relation, causal or formal, to the intellect in its inward, to the sense of beauty in its outward, aspects; and thereby delighting the desire of the mind for lucid and lovely order, it generates joy, and thence is born the will to conform one's self to this order. If, then, this order be conceived as known in its principles and in operation in living souls, as existing in its completeness on the simplest scale in an entire series of illustrative instances but without multiplicity,—if it be conceived, that is, as the model of a world,—that would be to know it as it exists to the mind of God; that would be to contemplate the world of ideas as Plato conceived it seen by the soul before birth. That is the beatific vision. If it be conceived in its mortal movement as a developing world on earth, that would be to know "the plot of God," as Poe called the universe. Art endeavours to bring that vision, that plot, however fragmentary, upon earth. It is a world of order clothing itself in beauty, with a charm to the soul, such is our nature,—operative upon the will to live. It is preeminently a vision of beauty. It is true that this beauty which thus wins and moves us seems something added by the mind in its great creations rather than anything actual in life; for it is, in fact, heightened and refined from the best that man has seen in himself, and it partakes more of hope than of memory. Here is that woven robe of illusion which is so hard a matter to those who live in horizons of the eye and hand. Yet as idealism was found on its mental side harmonious with reason in all knowledge, and on its emotional side harmonious with the heart in its outgoings, so this perfecting temperament that belongs to it and most characterizes it, falls in with the natural faith of mankind. Idealism in this sense, too, existed in life before it passed into literature. The youth idealizes the maiden he loves, his hero, and the ends of his life; and in age the old man idealizes his youth. Who does not remember some awakening moment when he first saw virtue and knew her for what she is? Sweet was it then to learn of some Jason of the golden fleece, some Lancelot of the tourney, some dying Sydney of the stricken field. There was a poignancy in this early knowledge that shall never be felt again; but who knows not that such enthusiasm which earliest exercised the young heart in noble feelings is the source of most of good that abides in us as years go on? In such boyish dreaming the soul learns to do and dare, hardens and supples itself, and puts on youthful beauty; for here is its palaestra. Who would blot these from his memory? who choke these fountain-heads, remembering how often along life's pathway he has thirsted for them? Such moments, too, have something singular in their nature, and almost immortal, that carries them echoing far on into life where they strike upon us in manhood at chosen moments when least expected; some of them are the real time in which we live. It was said of old that great men were creative in their souls, and left their works to be their race; these ideal heroes have immortal souls for their children, age after age. Shall we in our youth, then, in generous emulation idealize the great of old times, and honour them as our fair example of what we most would be? Shall we, in our hearts, idealize those we love,—so natural is it to believe in the perfection of those we love,—and even if the time for forgiveness comes, and we show them the mercy that our own frailty teaches us to exercise, shall we still idealize them, since love continues only in the persuasion of perfection yet to come, and is the tenderer because it comes with struggle? Whether in our acts or our emotions shall we give idealism this range, and deny it to literature which discloses the habits of our daily practice in more perfection and with greater beauty? There we find the purest types to raise and sustain us; to direct our choice, and reenforce us with that emotion, that passion, which most supports the will in its effort. There history itself is taken up, transformed, and made immortal, the whole past of human emotion and action contained and shown forth with convincing power. Nor is it only with the natural habit of mankind that idealism falls in, but with divine command. Were we not bid be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect? And what is that image of the Christ, what is that world-ideal, the height of human thought, but the work of the creative reason,—not of genius, not of the great in mind and fortunate in gifts, but of the race itself, in proud and humble, in saint and sinner, in the happy and the wretched, in all the vast range of the millions of the dead whose thoughts live embodied in that great tradition,—the supreme and perfected pattern of mankind?

Is it nevertheless true that there is falsehood in all this? that men were never such as the heart believes them, nor ideal characters able to breathe mortal air? by indulging our emotions, do we deceive ourselves, and end at last in cynicism or despair? Why, then, should we not boldly affirm that the falsehood is rather in us, in the defects by which we fail of perfection, in our ignorant error and voluntary wrong? that in the ideal, free as it is from the accidental and the transitory, inclusive as it is of the common truth, lies, as Plato thought, the only reality, the truth which outlasts us all? But this may seem a subtle evasion rather than a frank answer. Let us rather say that idealism is one of the necessary modes of man's faith, brings in the future, and assumes the reality of that which shall be actual; that the reality it owns is that of the rose in the bud, the oak in the acorn, the planet in its fiery mist. I believe that ideal character in its perfection is potentially in every man who is born into the world. We forecast the future in other parts of life; why should we not forecast ourselves? Would he not be thought foolish who should refuse to embark in great enterprises of trade, because he does not already hold the wealth to be gained? The ideal is our infinite riches, more than any individual or moment can hold. To refuse it is as if a man should neglect his estate because he can take but a handful of it in his grasp. It is the law of our being to grow, and it is a necessity that we should have examples and patterns in advance of us, by which we can find our way. There is no falsehood in such anticipation; there is only a faith in truth instead of a possession of it. Will you limit us to one moment of time and place? will you say to the patriot that his country is a geographical term? and when he replies that rather is it the life of her sons, will you point him to human nature as it seems at the period, to corruption, folly, ignorance, strife, and crime, and tell him that is our actual America? Will he not rather say that his America is a great past, a future whose beneficence no man can sum? Is there any falsehood in this ideal country that men have ever held precious? Did Pericles lie in his great oration, and Virgil in his noble poem, and Dante in his fervid Italian lines? And as there are ideals of country, so also of men, of the soldier, the priest, the king, the lover, the citizen, and beside each of us does there not go one who mourns over our fall and pities us, gladdens in our virtue, and shall not leave us till we die; an ideal self, who is our judgment? and if it be yet answered that this in truth is so, and might be borne but for the errors of the idealizing temperament, shall we not reply that the quack does not discredit the art of medicine, nor the demagogue the art of politics, and no more does the fool in all his motley the art of literature.

Must I, however, come back to my answer, and meet those who aver that however stimulating idealism is to the soul, yet it must be remembered that in the world at large there is nothing corresponding to ideal order, to poetic ethics, and that to act these forth as the supremacy of what ought to be is to misrepresent life, to raise expectations in youth never to be realized, to pervert practical standards, and in brief to make a false start that can be fruitful only in error, in subsequent suffering of mind, and with material disadvantage? I must be frank: I own that I can perceive in Nature no moral order, that in her world there is no knowledge of us or of our ideals, and that in general her order often breaks upon man's life with mere ruin, irrational and pitiful; and I acknowledge, also, the prominence of evil in the social, and its invasion in the individual, life of man. But, again, were we so situated that there should be no external divine order apparent to our minds, were justice an accident and mercy the illusion of wasted prayer, there would still remain in us that order whose workings are known within our own bosom, that law which compels us to be just and merciful in order to lead the life that we recognize to be best, and the whole imperative of our ideal, which, if we fail to ourselves, condemns us, irrespective of what future attends us in the world. Ideal order as the mind knows it, the mind must strive to realize, or stand dishonoured in its own forum. Within us, at least, it exists in hope and somewhat in reality, and following it in our effort, though we come merely to a stoical idea of the just man on whom the heavens fall, we should yet be nobler than the power that made us souls betrayed. But there is no such difference between the world as it is and the world as ideal art presents it.

What, then, is the difference between art and nature? Art is nature regenerate, made perfect, suffering the new birth into what ought to be; an ordered and complete world. But this is the vision of art as the ultimate of good. Idealism has also another world, of which glimpses have already appeared in the course of this argument, though in the background. In the intellectual sphere evil is as subject to general statement as is good, and there is in the strict sense an idealization of evil, a universal statement of it, as in Mephistopheles, or in more partial ways in Iago, Macbeth, Richard III. In the emotional sphere also there is the throb of evil, felt as diabolic energy and presented as the element in which these characters have their being. Even in the sphere of the will, who shall say that man does not knowingly choose evil as his portion? So, too, as the method of idealism in the world of the good tends to erect man above himself, the same generalizing method in the world of the evil tends to degrade human nature below itself; the extremes of the process are the divine and the devilish; both transcend life, but are developed out of it. The difference between these two poles of ideality is that the order of one is an order of life, that of the other an order of death. Between these two is the special province of the human will. What literature, what all art, presents is not the ultimate of good or the ultimate of evil separately; it is, taking into account the whole range, the mixed world becoming what it ought to be in its evolution from what it is, and the laws of that progress. Hence tragedy on the one hand and comedy, or more broadly humour, on the other hand, have their great place in literature; for they are forms of the intermediate world of conflict. I speak of the spiritual world of man's will. We may conceive of the world optimistically as a place in which all shall issue in good and nothing be lost; or as a place in which, by alliance with or revolt from the forces of life, the will in its voluntary and individual action may save or lose the soul at its choice. We may think of God as conserving all, or as permitting hell, which is death. We do not know. But as shown to us in imagination, idealism, which is the race's dream of truth, hovers between these two worlds known to us in tendency if not in conclusion,—the world of salvation on the one hand, in proportion as the order of life is made vital in us, the world of damnation on the other hand, in proportion as the order of death prevails in our will; but the main effort of idealism is to show us the war between the two, with an emphasis on the becoming of the reality of beauty, joy, reason, and virtue in us. Not that prosperity follows righteousness, not that poverty attends wickedness, in worldly measure, but that life is the gift of a right will is her message; how we, striving for eternal life, may best meet the chances and the bitter fates of mortal existence, is her brooding care; ideal characters, or those ideal in some trait or phase, in the midst of a hostile environment, are her fixed study. So far is idealism from ignoring the actual state of man that it most affirms its pity and evil by setting them in contrast with what ought to be, by showing virtue militant not only against external enemies but those inward weaknesses of our mortality with its passion and ignorance, which are our most undermining and intimate foes. Here is no false world, but just that world which is our theatre of action, that confused struggle, represented in its intelligible elements in art, that world of evil, implicit in us and the universe, which must be overcome; and this is revealed to us in the ways most profitable for our instruction, who are bound to seek to realize the good through all the strokes of nature and the folly and sin of men. Ideal literature in its broad compass, between its opposed poles of good and evil, is just this: a world of order emerging from disorder, of beauty and wisdom, of virtue and joy, emerging from the chaos of things that are, in selected and typical examples.

It follows from this that what remains in the world of observation in personality or experience, whether good or evil, whether particular or general, not yet coordinated in rational knowledge as a whole, all for which no solution is found, all that cannot be or has not been made intelligible, must be the subject-matter of realism in the exact use of that term. This must be recorded by literature, or admitted into it, as matter-of-fact which is to the mind still a problem. Earthly mystery therefore is the special sphere of realism. The borderland of the unknown or the irreducible is its realm. This old residuum, this new material, is not yet capable of art. Hence, too, realism in this sense characterizes ages of expansion of knowledge such as ours. The new information which is the fruit of our wide travel, of our research into the past, has enlarged the problem of man's life by showing us both primitive and historical humanity in its changeful phases of progress working out the beast; and this new interest has been reenforced by the attention paid, under influences of democracy and philanthropy, to the lower and baser forms of life in the masses under civilization, which has been a new revelation of persistent savagery in our midst. Here realism illustrates its service as a gatherer of knowledge which may hereafter be reduced to orderliness by idealistic processes, for idealism is the organizer of all knowledge. But apart from this incoming of facts, or of laws not yet harmonized in the whole body of law, for which we may have fair hope that a synthesis will be found, there remains forever that residuum of which I spoke, which has resisted the intelligence of man, age after age, from the first throb of feeling, the first ray of thought; that involuntary evil, that unmerited suffering, that impotent pain,—the human debris of the social process,—which is a challenge to the power of God, and a cry to the heart of man that broods over it in vain, yet cannot choose but hear. In this region the near affinity of realism to pessimism, to atheism, is plain enough; its necessary dealing with the base, the brutal, the unredeemed, the hopeless darkness of the infamies of heredity, criminal education, and successful malignity, eating into the being as well as controlling the fortune of their victims, is manifest; and what answer has ever been found to the interrogation they make? It is not merely that particular facts are here irreconcilable; but laws themselves are discernible, types even not of narrow application, which have not been brought into any relation with what I have named the divine order. Millions of men in thousands of years are included in this holocaust of past time,—eras of savagery, Assyrian civilizations, Christian butcheries, the Czar yet supreme, the Turk yet alive.

And how is it at the other pole of mystery, where life rises into a heavenly vision of eternities of love to come? There is no place for realism here, where observation ceases and our only human outlook is by inference from principles and laws of the ideal world as known to us; yet what problems are we aware of? Must,—to take the special problem of art,—must the sensuous scheme of life persist, since of it warp and woof are woven all our possibilities of communication, all our capabilities of knowledge? it is our language and our memory alike. Must God be still thought of in the image of man, since only in terms of our humanity can we conceive even divine things, whether in forms of mortal pleasure as the Greeks framed their deities, or in shapes of spiritual bliss as Christians fashion saint, angel, and archangel? These are rather philosophical problems. But in art, as at the realistic end of the scale, we admit the portraiture, as a part of life, of the bestial, the cruel, the unforgiven, and feel it debasing, so must we at the idealistic end admit the representation of the celestial after human models, and feel it, even in Milton and in Dante, minimizing. The mysticism of the borderland at its supreme is a hope; at its nadir, it is a fear. We do not know. But within the narrow range of the intelligible and ordered world of art, which has been achieved by the creative reason of civilized man in his brief centuries and along the narrow path from Jerusalem and Athens to the western world, we do know that for the normal man born into its circle of light the order of life is within our reach, the order of death within reach of us. Shut within these limits of the victory of our intellect and the upreaching of our desires and the warfare of our will, we assert in art our faith that the divine order is victorious, that the righteous man is not forsaken, that the soul cannot suffer wrong either from others or from nature or from God,—that the evil principle cannot prevail. It is faith, springing from our experience of the working of that order in us; it transcends knowledge, but it grows with knowledge; and ideal literature asserts this faith against nature and against man in all their deformity, as the centre about which life revolves so far as it has become subject to rational knowledge, to beautiful embodiment, to joyful being, to the will to live.

Can the faith of which idealism is the holder of the keys, the faith as nigh to the intellect as to the heart, to the senses as to the spirit, exceed even this limit, and affirm that if man were perfect in knowledge and saw the universe as we believe God sees it, he would behold it as an artistic whole even now? Would it be that beatific vision, revolving like God's kaleidoscope, momentarily falling at each new arrangement into the perfect unities of art? and is our world of art, our brief model of such a world in single examples of its scheme, only a way of limiting the field to the compass of human faculties that we may see within our capacities as God sees, and hence have such faith? Is art after all a lower creation than nature, a concession to our frail powers? Has idealism such optimistic reach as that? Or must we see the evil principle encamped here, confusing truth, deforming beauty, depraving joy, deflecting the will, with wages of death for its victims, and the hell of final destruction spreading beneath its sway? so that the world as it now is cannot be thought of as the will of God exercised in Omnipotence, but a human opportunity of union with or separation from the ideal order in conflict with the order of death. I recall Newman's picture: "To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not toward final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, 'having no hope and without God in the world,'—all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution." In the face of such a world, even when partially made intelligible in ideal art, dare we assert that fatalistic optimism which would have it that the universe is in God's eyes a perfect world? I can find no warrant for it in ideal art, though thence the ineradicable effort arises in us to win to that world in the conviction that it is not indifferent in the sight of heaven whether we live in the order of life or that of death, in the faith that victory in us is a triumph of that order itself which increases and prevails in us, is a bringing of Christ's kingdom upon earth. Art rather becomes in our mind a function of the world's progress, and were its goal achieved would cease; for life would then itself be one with art, one with the divine order. So much of truth there is in Ruskin's statement that art made perfect denies progress and is its ultimate. But perfection in life, as ideal art presents it, it is a prophecy which enlists us as soldiers militant in its fulfilment. Its optimism is that of the issue, and may be that of the process; but it surely is not that of the state that now is in the world.

It thus appears more and more that art is educative; it is the race's foreknowledge of what may be, of the objects of effort and the methods of their attainment under mortal conditions. The difficulty of men in respect to it is the lax power they have to see in it the truth, as contradistinguished from the fact, the continuous reality of the things of the mind in opposition to the accidental and partial reality of the things of actuality. They think of it as an imagined, instead of as the real world, the model of that which is in the evolution of that which ought to be. In history the climaxes of art have always outrun human realization; its crests in Greece, Italy, and England are crests of the never-attained; but they still make on in their mass to the yet rising wave, which shall be of mankind universal, if, indeed, in the cosmopolitan civilization which we hope for, the elements of the past, yet surviving from the accomplishment of single famous cities and great empires, shall be blended in a world-ideal, expressing the spiritual uplifting to God of the reconciled and unified nations of the earth.