It is Plotinus whom we may fairly regard as the founder of Æsthetics in the philosophic sense, and it was as formulated by Plotinus, though this we sometimes fail to recognise, that the Greek attitude in these matters, however sometimes modified, has come down to us.[[137]] We may be forgiven for not always recognising it, because it is rather strange that it should be so. It is strange, that is to say, that the æsthetic attitude, which we regard as so emphatically Greek, should have been left for formulation until the Greek world had passed away, that it should not have been Plato, but an Alexandrian, living in Rome seven centuries after him, who set forth what seems to us a distinctively Platonic view of life.[[138]] The Greeks, indeed, seem to have recognised, apart from the lower merely “ethical” virtues of habit and custom, the higher “intellectual” virtues which were deliberately planned, and so of the nature of art. But Plotinus definitely recognised the æsthetic contemplation of Beauty, together with the One and the Good, as three aspects of the Absolute.[[139]] He thus at once placed æsthetics on the highest possible pedestal, beside religion and morals; he placed it above art, or as comprehending art, for he insisted that Contemplation is an active quality, so that all human creative energy may be regarded as the by-play of contemplation. That was to carry rather far the function of æsthetic contemplation. But it served to stamp for ever, on the minds of all sensitive to that stamp who came after, the definite realisation of the sublimest, the most nearly divine, of human aptitudes. Every great spirit has furnished the measure of his greatness by the more or less completeness in which at the ultimate outpost of his vision over the world he has attained to that active contemplation of life as a spectacle which Shakespeare finally embodied in the figure of Prospero.
It may be interesting to note in passing that, psychologically considered, all æsthetic enjoyment among the ordinary population, neither artists in the narrow sense nor philosophers, still necessarily partakes to some degree of genuine æsthetic contemplation, and that such contemplation seems to fall roughly into two classes, to one or other of which every one who experiences æsthetic enjoyment belongs. These have, I believe, been defined by Müller-Freienfels as that of the “Zuschauer,” who feels that he is looking on, and that of the “Mitspieler,” who feels that he is joining in; on the one side, we may say, he who knows he is looking on, the spectator, and on the other he who imaginatively joins in, the participator. The people of the first group are those, it may be, in whom the sensory nervous apparatus is highly developed and they are able to adopt the most typical and complete æsthetic attitude; the people of the other group would seem to be most developed on the motor nervous side and they are those who themselves desire to be artists. Groos, who has developed the æsthetic side of “miterleben,” is of this temperament, and he had at first supposed that every one was like him in this respect.[[140]] Plotinus, who held that contemplation embraced activity, must surely have been of this temperament. Coleridge was emphatically of the other temperament, spectator haud particeps, as he himself said. But, at all events in northern countries, that is probably not the more common temperament. The æsthetic attitude of the crowds who go to watch football matches is probably much more that of the imaginative participator than of the pure spectator.
There is no occasion here to trace the history of æsthetic contemplation. Yet it may be worth while to note that it was clearly present to the mind of the fine thinker and great moralist who brought the old Greek idea back into the modern world. In the “Philosophical Regimen” (as it has been named) brought to light a few years ago, in which Shaftesbury set down his self-communings, we find him writing in one place: “In the morning am I to see anew? Am I to be present yet longer and content? I am not weary, nor ever can be, of such a spectacle, such a theatre, such a presence, nor at acting whatever part such a master assigns me. Be it ever so long, I stay and am willing to see on whilst my sight continues sound; whilst I can be a spectator, such as I ought to be; whilst I can see reverently, justly, with understanding and applause. And when I see no more, I retire, not disdainfully, but in reverence to the spectacle and master, giving thanks.... Away, man! rise, wipe thy mouth, throw up thy napkin and have done. A bellyful (they say) is as good as a feast.”
That may seem but a simple and homely way of stating the matter, though a few years later, in 1727, a yet greater spirit than Shaftesbury, Swift, combining the conception of life as æsthetic contemplation with that of life as art, wrote in a letter, “Life is a tragedy, wherein we sit as spectators awhile, and then act our own part in it.” If we desire a more systematically philosophical statement we may turn to the distinguished thinker of to-day who in many volumes has most powerfully presented the same essential conception, with all its implications, of life as a spectacle. “Tirez le rideau; la farce est jouée.” That Shakespearian utterance, which used to be attributed to Rabelais on his death-bed, and Swift’s comment on life, and Shaftesbury’s intimate meditation, would seem to be—on the philosophic and apart from the moral side of life—entirely in the spirit that Jules de Gaultier has so elaborately developed. The world is a spectacle, and all the men and women the actors on its stage. Enjoy the spectacle while you will, whether comedy or tragedy, enter into the spirit of its manifold richness and beauty, yet take it not too seriously, even when you leave it and the curtains are drawn that conceal it for ever from your eyes, grown weary at last.
Such a conception, indeed, was already to be seen in a deliberately philosophical form in Schopenhauer (who, no doubt, influenced Gaultier) and, later, Nietzsche, especially the early Nietzsche, although he never entirely abandoned it; his break with Wagner, however, whom he had regarded as the typical artist, led him to become suddenly rather critical of art and artists, as we see in “Human-all-too-Human,” which immediately followed “Wagner in Bayreuth,” and he became inclined to look on the artist, in the narrow sense, as only “a splendid relic of the past,” not, indeed, altogether losing his earlier conception, but disposed to believe that “the scientific man is the finest development of the artistic man.” In his essay on Wagner he had presented art as the essentially metaphysical activity of Man, here following Schopenhauer. “Every genius,” well said Schopenhauer, “is a great child; he gazes out at the world as something strange, a spectacle, and therefore with purely objective interest.” That is to say that the highest attitude attainable by man towards life is that of æsthetic contemplation. But it took on a different character in Nietzsche. In 1878 Nietzsche wrote of his early essay on Wagner: “At that time I believed that the world was created from the æsthetic standpoint, as a play, and that as a moral phenomenon it was a deception: on that account I came to the conclusion that the world was only to be justified as an æsthetic phenomenon.”[[141]] At the end of his active career Nietzsche was once more reproducing this proposition in many ways. Jules de Gaultier has much interested himself in Nietzsche, but he had already reached, no doubt through Schopenhauer, a rather similar conception before he came in contact with Nietzsche’s work, and in the present day he is certainly the thinker who has most systematically and philosophically elaborated the conception.[[142]]
Gaultier is most generally known by that perhaps not quite happily chosen term of “Bovarism,” embodied in the title of his earliest book and abstracted from Flaubert’s heroine, which stands for one of his most characteristic conceptions, and, indeed, in a large sense, for the central idea of his philosophy. In its primary psychological sense Bovarism is the tendency—the unconscious tendency of Emma Bovary and, more or less, all of us—to conceive of ourselves as other than we are. Our picture of the world, for good or for evil, is an idealised picture, a fiction, a waking dream, an als ob, as Vaihinger would say. But when we idealise the world we begin by first idealising ourselves. We imagine ourselves other than we are, and in so imagining, as Gaultier clearly realises, we tend to mould ourselves, so that reality becomes a prolongation of fiction. As Meister Eckhart long since finely said: “A man is what he loves.” A similar thought was in Plato’s mind. In modern times a variation of this same idea has been worked out, not as by Gaultier from the philosophic side, but from the medical and more especially the psycho-analytic side, by Dr. Alfred Adler of Vienna.[[143]] Adler has suggestively shown how often a man’s or a woman’s character is constituted by a process of fiction,—that is by making an ideal of what it is, or what it ought to be,—and then so far as possible moulding it into the shape of that fiction, a process which is often interwoven with morbid elements, especially with an original basis of organic defect, the reaction being an effort, sometimes successful, to overcome that defect, and even to transform it into a conspicuous quality, as when Demosthenes, who was a stutterer, made himself a great orator. Even thinkers may not wholly escape this tendency, and I think it would be easily possible to show that, for instance, Nietzsche was moved by what Adler calls the “masculine protest”; one remembers how shrinkingly delicate Nietzsche was towards women and how emphatically he declared they should never be approached without a whip. Adler owed nothing to Gaultier, of whom he seems to be ignorant; he found his first inspiration in Vaihinger’s doctrine of the “as if”; Gaultier, however, owes nothing to Vaihinger, and, indeed, began to publish earlier, though not before Vaihinger’s book was written. Gaultier’s philosophic descent is mainly from Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.
There is another deeper and wider sense, a more abstract esoteric sense, in which Jules de Gaultier understands Bovarism. It is not only the human being and human groups who are psychologically Bovaristic, the Universe itself, the Eternal Being (to adopt an accepted fiction), metaphysically partakes of Bovarism. The Universe, it seems to Gaultier, necessarily conceives itself as other than it is. Single, it conceives itself multiple, as subject and object. Thus is furnished the fundamental convention which we must grant to the Dramatist who presents the cosmic tragi-comedy.[[144]]
It may seem to some that the vision of the world which Man pursues on his course across the Universe becomes ever more impalpable and visionary. And so perhaps it may be. But even if that were an undesirable result, it would still be useless to fight against God. We are, after all, merely moulding the conceptions which a little later will become commonplaced and truisms. For really—while we must hold physics and metaphysics apart, for they cannot be blended—a metaphysics which is out of harmony with physics is negligible; it is nothing in the world. And it is our physical world that is becoming more impalpable and visionary. It is “matter,” the very structure of the “atom,” that is melting into a dream, and if it may seem that on the spiritual side life tends to be moulding itself to the conception of Calderon as a dream, it is because the physical atom is pursuing that course. Unless we hold in mind the analysis of the world towards which the physicist is bringing us, we shall not understand the synthesis of the world towards which the philosopher is bringing us. Gaultier’s philosophy may not be based upon physics, but it seems to be in harmony with physics.
This is the metaphysical scaffolding—we may if we like choose to dispense with it—by aid of which Jules de Gaultier erects his spectacular conception of the world. He is by no means concerned to deny the necessity of morality. On the contrary, morality is the necessary restraint on the necessary biological instinct of possession, on the desire, that is, by the acquisition of certain objects, to satisfy passions which are most often only the exaggeration of natural needs, but which—through the power of imagination such exaggeration inaugurates in the world—lead to the development of civilisation. Limited and definite so long as confined to their biological ends, needs are indefinitely elastic, exhibiting, indeed, an almost hysterical character which becomes insatiable. They mark a hypertrophy of the possessive instinct which experience shows to be a menace to social life. Thus the Great War of recent times may be regarded as the final tragic result of the excessive development through half a century of an economic fever, the activity of needs beyond their due biological ends producing suddenly the inevitable result.[[145]] So that the possessive instinct, while it is the cause of the formation of an economic civilised society, when pushed too far becomes the cause of the ruin of that society. Man, who begins by acquiring just enough force to compel Nature to supply his bare needs, himself becomes, according to the tragic Greek saying, the greatest force of Nature. Yet the fact that a civilisation may persist for centuries shows that men in societies have found methods of combating the exaggerated development of the possessive instinct, of retaining it within bounds which have enabled societies to enjoy a fairly long life. These methods become embodied in religions and moralities and laws. They react in concert to restrain the greediness engendered by the possessive instinct. They make virtues of Temperance and Sobriety and Abnegation. They invent Great Images which arouse human hopes and human fears. They prescribe imperatives, with sanctions, in part imposed by the Great Images and in part by the actual executive force of social law. So societies are enabled to immunise themselves against the ravaging auto-intoxication of an excessive instinct of possession, and the services rendered by religions and moralities cannot be too highly estimated. They are the spontaneous physiological processes which counteract disease before medical science comes into play.
But are they of any use in those periods of advanced civilisation which they have themselves contributed to form? When Man has replaced flint knives and clubs and slings by the elaborate weapons we know, can he be content with methods of social preservation which date from the time of flint knives and clubs and slings? The efficacy of those restraints depends on a sensibility which could only exist when men scarcely distinguished imaginations from perceptions. Thence arose the credulity on which religions and moralities flourished. But now the Images have grown pale in human sensibility, just as they have in words, which are but effaced images. We need a deeper reality to take the place of these early beliefs which the growth of intelligence necessarily shows to be illusory. We must seek in the human ego an instinct in which is manifested a truly autonomous play of the power of imagination, an instinct which by virtue of its own proper development may restrain the excesses of the possessive instinct and dissipate the perils which threaten civilisation. The æsthetic instinct alone answers to that double demand.