Heart of Man

by George Edward Woodberry

There remains but one last resort; for it will yet be urged that the impossibility of any scientific knowledge of the spiritual order is proved by the transience of the ideals of the past; one is displaced by another, there is no permanence in them. It is true that the concrete world, which must be employed by art, is one of sense, and necessarily imports into the form of art its own mortality; it is, even in art, a thing that passes away. It is also true that the world of knowledge, which is the subject-matter of art, is in process of being known, and necessarily imports into the contents of art its errors, its hypotheses, its imperfections of every kind; it is a thing that grows more and more, and in growing sheds its outworn shells, its past body. Let us consider the form and the contents separately. The element of mortality in the form is included in the transience of imagery. The poet uses the world as he knows it, and reflects in successive ages of literature the changing phases of civilization. The shepherd, the tiller of the soil, the warrior, the trader yield to him their language of the earth, the battle, and the sea; from the common altar he learns the speech of the gods; the elemental aspects of nature, the pursuits of men, and what is believed of the supernatural are the great storehouses of imagery. The fact that it is at first a living act or habit that the poet deals with, gives to his work that original vivacity, that direct sense of actuality, of contemporaneousness, which characterizes early literatures, as in Homer or the Song of Roland: even the marvellous has in them the reality of being believed. This imagery, however, grows remote with the course of time; it becomes capable of holding an inward meaning without resistance from too high a feeling of actuality; it becomes spiritualized. The process is the same already illustrated in lyric form as an expression of personality; but here man universal enters into the image and possesses it impersonally on the broad human scale. The pastoral life, for example, then yields the forms of art which hold either the simple innocence of happy earthly love, as in Daphnis and Chloe, or the natural grief of elegy made beautiful, as in Bion's dirge, or the shepherding of Christ in his church on earth, as in many an English poet; the imagery has unclothed itself of actuality and shows a purely spiritual body.

This growing inwardness of art is a main feature of literary history. It is illustrated on the grand scale by the imagery of war. In the beginning war for its own sake, mere fighting, is the subject; then war for a cause, which ennobles it beyond the power of personal prowess and justifies it as an element in national life; next, war for love, which refines it and builds the paradox of the deeds of hate serving the will of courtesy; last, war for the soul's salvation, which is unseen battle within the breast. Achilles, Aeneas, Lancelot, the Red Cross Knight are the terms in this series; they mark the transformation of the most savage act of man into the symbol of his highest spiritual effort. Nature herself is subject to this inwardness of art; at first merely objective as a condition, and usually a hostile, or at least dangerous, condition of human life, she becomes the witness to omnipotent power in illimitable beauty and majesty, its infinite unknowableness, and its tender care for all creatures, as in the Scriptures; and at last the words of our Lord concentrate, in some simple flower, the profoundest of moral truths,—that the beauty of the soul is the gift of God, out of whose eternal law it blossoms and has therein its ever living roots, its air and light, its inherent grace and sweetness: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" Such is the normal development of all imagery; its actuality limits it, and in becoming remote it grows flexible. It is only by virtue of this that man can retain the vast treasures of race-imagination, and continue to use them, such as the worlds of mythology, of chivalry, and romance. The imagery is, in truth, a background, whose foreground is the ideal meaning. Thus even fairyland, and the worlds of heaven and hell, have their place in art. The actuality of the imagery is in fact irrelevant, just as history is in the idealization of human events. Its transience, then, cannot matter, except in so far as it loses intelligibility through changes of time, place, and custom, and becomes a dead language. It follows that that imagery which keeps close to universal phases of nature, to pursuits always necessary in human life, and to ineradicable beliefs in respect to the supernatural, is most permanent as a language; and here art in its most immortal creations returns again to its omnipresent character as a thing of the common lot.

The transience of the contents of art may be of two kinds. There is a passing away of error, as there is in all knowledge, but such a loss need not detain attention. What is really in issue is the passing away of the authority of precept and example fitted to one age but not to another, as in the case of the substitution of the ideal of humility for that of valour, owing to a changed emphasis in the scale of virtues. The contents of art, its general ideals, reproduce the successive periods of our earth-history as a race, by generalizing each in its own age. A parallel exists in the subject-matter of the sciences; astronomy, geology, paleontology are similar statements of past phases of the evolution of the earth, its aspects in successive stages. Or, to take a kindred example, just as the planets in their order set forth now the history of our system from nascent life to complete death as earths, so these ideals exhibit man's stages from savagery to such culture as has been attained. They have more than a descriptive and historical significance; they retain practical vitality because the unchangeable element in the universe and in man's nature is in the main their subject-matter. It is not merely that the child repeats in his education, in some measure at least, the history of the race, and hence must still learn the value of bravery and humility in their order; nor that in the mass of men many remain ethically and emotionally in the characteristic stages of past culture; but these various ideals of what is admirable have themselves identical elements, and in those points in which they differ respond to native varieties of human capacity and temperament. The living principles of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Christian thought and feeling are at work in the world, still formative; it is only by such vitality that their results in art truly survive.

There has been an expansion of the field, and some rearrangement within it; but the evolution of human ideals has been, in our civilization, the growth of one spirit out of its dead selves carrying on into each reincarnation the true life that was in the form it leaves, and which is immortal. The substance in each ideal, its embodiment of what is cardinal in all humanity, remains integral. The alloy of mortality in a work of art lies in so much of it as was limited in truth to time, place, country, race, religion, its specific and contemporary part; so great is this in detail that a strong power of historical imagination, the power to rebuild past conditions, is a main necessity of culture, like the study of a dead language; an interpretative faculty, the power to translate into terms of our knowledge what was stated in terms of different beliefs, must go with this; and also a corrective power, if the work is to be truly useful and enter into our lives with effect. Such an alloy there is in nearly all great works even; much in Homer, something in Virgil, a considerable part of Dante, and an increasing portion in Milton have this mixture of death in them; but if by keeping to the primary, the permanent, the universal, they have escaped the natural body of their age, the substance of the work is still living; they have achieved such immortality as art allows. They have done so, not so much by the personal power of their authors as by their representative character. These ideal works of the highest range, which embody in themselves whole generations of effort and rise as the successive incarnations of human imagination, are products of race and state, of world experience and social personality; they differ, race from race, civilization from civilization, Hebrew or Greek, Pagan or Christian, just as on the individual scale persons differ; and they are solved, as personality in its individual form is solved, in the element of the common reason, the common nature in the world and man, which they contain,—in man,

"Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless";

in the unity of the truth of his spirit they are freed from mortality, they are mutually intelligible and interchangeable, they survive,—racial and secular states and documents of a spiritual evolution yet going on in all its stages in the human mass, still barbarous, still pagan, still Christian, but an evolution which at its highest point wastes nothing of the past, holds all its truth, its beauty, its vital energy, in a forward reach.

The nature of the changes which time brings may best be illustrated from the epic, and thus the opposition of the transient and permanent elements in art be, perhaps, more clearly shown. Epic action has been defined as the working out of the Divine will in society; hence it requires a crisis of humanity as its subject, it involves the conflict of a higher with a lower civilization, and it is conducted by means of a double plot, one in heaven, the other on earth. These are the characteristic epic traits. In dealing with ideas of such importance, the poets in successive eras of civilization naturally found much adaptation to new conditions necessary, and met with ever fresh difficulties; the result is a many-sided epic development. The idea of the Divine will, the theory of its operation, and the conception of society itself were all subject to change. Epics at first are historical; but, sharing with the tendency of all art toward inwardness of meaning, they become purely spiritual. The one thing that remains common to all is the notion of a struggle between a higher and a lower, overruled by Providence. They have two subjects of interest, one the cause, the other the hero through whom the cause works; and between these two interests the epic hovers, seldom if ever identifying them and yet preserving their dual reality.

The Iliad has all the traits that have been mentioned, but society is still loose enough in its bonds to give the characters free play; it is, in the main, a hero-epic. The Aeneid, on the contrary, exhibits the enormous development of the social idea; its subject is Roman dominion, which is the will of Zeus, localized in the struggle with Carthage and with Turnus, but felt in the poem pervasively as the general destiny of Rome in its victory over the world; and this interest is so overpowering as to make Aeneas the slave of Jove and almost to extinguish the other characters; it is a state-epic. So long as the Divine will was conceived as finding its operation through deities similar to man, the double plot presented little difficulty; but in the coming of Christian thought, even with its hierarchies of angels and legions of devils, the interpretation became arduous. In the Jerusalem Delivered the social conflict between Crusader and infidel is clear, the historical crisis in the wars of Palestine is rightly chosen, but the machinery of the heavenly plot is weakened by the presence of magic, and is by itself ineffectual in inspiring a true belief. So in the Lusiads, while the conflict and the crisis, as shown in the national energy of colonization in the East, are clear, the machinery of the heavenly plot frankly reverts to mythologic and pagan forms and loses all credibility.

In the Paradise Lost arises the spiritual epic, but still historically conceived; the crisis chosen, which is the fall of man in Adam, is the most important conceivable by man; the powers engaged are the superior beings of heaven and hell in direct antagonism; but here, too, the machinery of the heavenly plot is handled with much strain, and, however strongly supported by the Scriptures, has little convincing power. The truth is that the Divine will was coming to be conceived as implicit in society, being Providence there, and operating in secret but normal ways in the guidance of events, not by special and interfering acts; and also as equally implicit in the individual soul, the influence of the Spirit, and working in the ways of spiritual law. One change, too, of vast importance was announced by the words "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." This transferred the very scene of conflict, the theatre of spiritual warfare, from an external to an internal world, and the social significance of such individual battle lay in its being typical of all men's lives. The Faerie Queene, the most spiritual poem in all ways in English, is an epic in essence, though its action is developed by a revolution of the phases of the soul in succession to the eye, and not by the progress of one main course of events. The conflict of the higher and the lower under Divine guidance in the implicit sense is there shown; the significance is for mankind, though not for a society in its worldly fortunes; but there is little attempt to externalize the heavenly power in specific action in superhuman forms, though in mortal ways the good knights, and especially Arthur, shadow it forth. The celestial plot is humanized, and the poem becomes a hero-epic in almost an exclusive way; though the knight's achievement is also an achievement of God's will, the interest lies in the Divine power conceived as man's moral victory. In the Idyls of the King there are several traits of the epic. There is the central idea of the conflict between the higher and lower, both on the social and the individual side; the victory of the Round Table would have meant not only pure knights but a regenerate state. Here, however, the externalization of the Divine will in the Holy Grail, and, as in the Christian epic generally, its confusion on the marvellous side with a world of enchantment passing here into the sensuous sphere of Merlin, are felt to be inadequate. The war of "soul with sense" was the subject-matter, as was Spenser's; the method of revolution of its phases was also Spenser's; but the two poems differ in the point that Spenser's knight wins, but Tennyson's king loses, so far as earth is concerned; nor can it be fairly pleaded that as in Milton Adam loses, yet the final triumph of the cause is known and felt as a divine issue of the action though outside the poem, so Arthur is saved to the ideal by virtue of the faith he announces in the New Order coming on, for it is not so felt. The touch of pessimism invades the poem in many details, but here at its heart; for Arthur alone of all the heroes of epic in his own defeat drags down his cause. He is the hero of a lost cause, whose lance will never be raised again in mortal conflict to bring the kingdom of Christ on earth, nor its victory be declared except as the echo of a hope of some miraculous and merciful retrieval from beyond the barriers of the world to come. But in showing the different conditions of the modern epic, its spirituality, its difficulties of interpreting in sensuous imagery the working of the Divine will, its relaxed hold on the social movement for which it substitutes man's universal nature, and the mist that settles round it in its latest example, sufficient illustration has been given of the changes of time to which idealism is subject, and also of the essential truth surviving in the works of the past, which in the epics is the vision of how the ends of God have been accomplished in the world and in the soul by the union of divine grace with heroic will,—the interpretation and glorification, of history and of man's single conflict in himself ago after age, asserting through all their range the supremacy of the ideal order over its foes in the entire race-life of man.

Out of these changes of time, in response to the varying moods of men in respect to the world they inhabit, arise those phases of art which are described as classical and romantic, words of much confusion. It has been attempted to distinguish the latter as having an element of remoteness, of surprise, of curiosity; but to me, at least, classical art has the same remoteness, the same surprise, and answers the same curiosity as romantic art. If I were to endeavour to oppose them I should say that classical art is clear, it is perfectly grasped in form, it satisfies the intellect, it awakes an emotion absorbed by itself, it definitely guides the will; romantic art is touched with mystery, it has richness and intricacy of form not fully comprehended, it suggests more than it satisfies, it stirs an unconfined and wandering emotion, it invigorates an adventurous will; classicism is whole in itself and lives in the central region, the white light, of that star of ideality which is the light of our knowledge; romanticism borders on something else,—the rosy corona round about our star, carrying on its dawning power into those unknown infinities which embosom the spark of life. The two have always existed in conjunction, the romantic element in ancient literature being large. But owing to the disclosure of the world to us in later times, to the deeper sense of its mysteries which are our bounding horizons round about, and especially to the impulse given to emotion by the opening of the doors of immortality by Christianity to thought, revery, and dream, to hope and effort, the romantic element has been more marked in modern art, has in fact characterized it, being fed moreover by the ever increasing inwardness of human life, the greater value and opportunity of personality in a free and high civilization, and by the uncertainty, confusion, and complexity of such masses of human experience as our observation now controls. The romantic temper is inevitable in men whose lives are themselves thought of as, in form, but fragments of the life to come, which shall find their completion an eternal task. It is the natural ally of faith which it alone can render with an infinite outlook; and it is the complement of that mystery which is required to supplement it, and which is an abiding presence in the habit of the sensitive and serious mind. Yet in classical art the definite may still be rendered, the known, the conquered. Idealism has its finished world therein; in romanticism it has rather its prophetic work.