[50]. It is probable that the reason why it is often difficult to trace the imaginative artist in great men of supposedly abstract science is the paucity of intimate information about them. Even their scientific friends have rarely had the patience, or even perhaps the intelligence, to observe them reverently and to record their observations. We know almost nothing that is intimately personal about Newton. As regards Einstein, we are fortunate in possessing the book of Moszkowski, Einstein (translated into English under the title of Einstein the Searcher), which contains many instructive conversations and observations by a highly intelligent and appreciative admirer, who has set them down in a Boswellian spirit that faintly recalls Eckermann’s book on Goethe (which, indeed, Moszkowski had in mind), though falling far short of that supreme achievement. The statements in the text are mainly gleaned from Moszkowski.
[51]. Spengler holds (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. X, p. 329) that the development of music throughout its various stages in our European culture really has been closely related with the stages of the development of mathematics.
[52]. I would here refer to a searching investigation, “Goethe und die mathematische Physik: Eine Erkenntnistheoretische Studie,” in Ernst Cassirer’s Idee und Gestalt (1921). It is here shown that in some respects Goethe pointed the way along which mathematical physics, by following its own paths, has since travelled, and that even when most non-mathematical Goethe’s scientific attitude was justifiable.
[53]. See the remarkable essay, “De la Cinéplastique,” in Élie Faure’s L’Arbre d’Éden (1922). It is, however, a future and regenerated cinema for which Élie Faure looks, “to become the art of the crowd, the powerful centre of communion in which new symphonic forms will be born in the tumult of passions and utilized for fine and elevating æsthetic ends.”
[54]. O. Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. I, p. 576.
[55]. It may be as well to point that it is the amateur literary grammarian and not the expert who is at fault in these matters. The attitude of the expert (as in C. T. Onions, Advanced English Syntax) is entirely reasonable.
[56]. It is interesting to note that another aristocratic master of speech had also made just the same observation. Landor puts into the mouth of Horne Tooke the words: “No expression can become a vulgarism which has not a broad foundation. The language of the vulgar hath its source in physics: in known, comprehended, and operative things.” At the same time Landor was as stern a judge as Baudelaire of the random use of clichés.
[57]. Speaking as a writer who has been much quoted,—it ought to be a satisfaction, but I have had my doubts,—I may say that I have observed that those who quote belong mostly to two classes, one consisting of good, or at all events indifferent, writers, and the other of bad writers. Those of the first class quote with fair precision and due acknowledgement, those of the second with no precision, and only the vaguest intimation, or none at all, that they are quoting. This would seem to indicate that the good writer is more honest than the bad writer, but that conclusion may be unjust to the bad writer. The fact is that, having little thought or knowledge of his own, he is not fully conscious of what he is doing. He is like a greedy child who, seeing food in front of him, snatches it at random, without being able to recognise whether or not it is his own. There is, however, a third class of those who cannot resist the temptation of deliberately putting forth the painfully achieved thought or knowledge of others as their own, sometimes, perhaps, seeking to gloss over the lapse with: “As every one knows—”
[58]. Croce, who is no doubt the most instructive literary critic of our time, has, in his own way, insisted on this essential fact. As he would put it, there are no objective standards of judgment; we cannot approach a work of art with our laws and categories. We have to comprehend the artist’s own values, and only then are we fit to pronounce any judgment on his work. The task of the literary critic is thus immensely more difficult than it is vulgarly supposed to be. The same holds good, I would add, of criticism in the fields of art, not excluding the art of love and the arts of living in general.
[59]. “This search is the art of all great thinkers, of all great artists, indeed of all those who, even without attaining expression, desire to live deeply. If the dance brings us so near to God, it is, I believe, because it symbolizes for us the movement of this gesture.” (Élie Faure, L’Arbre d’Éden, p. 318.)