The Sherlock Holmeses of Science and Art dig up old cities, reconstruct forgotten civilisations, redistribute famous pictures, and amend corrupt texts or corrupt them more hopelessly. It is but rarely that they have imaginative and historic insight. “Learning is but an adjunct to ourselves,” says Biron. Scholars are too often but an adjunct to learning. For men with real insight there are enough dead civilisations and forgotten customs still flourishing all about us. The taboo, the fetish, the totem, the oracle, and the myth are the very atmosphere of our being.
Our generation will leave newspapers and museums—nay, gramophone records and the films of bioscopes; the ghosts of our shapes and voices will haunt our posterity, and the only chance for scholars will be to condense the too, too ample materials—there are four miles of novels already in the British Museum—or perhaps a few beneficent fires will give scholarship a new lease of life. At their best and richest antiquarian studies only help to make the past present again, but how does that help us in essential insight? The past of to-morrow is here to-day and we are no wiser. In the hundredth century the excavator may exhume London, but we see London even more clearly to-day, and how does that help us in the real problems?
No; the only help for us lies in those elements of Truth which we draw from ourselves, not receive from without—in those emotional and volitional contacts with the essence of things which accompany all intellectual perception; in these motor aspects of reality which drive us along, these flashes of faith and spiritual intuition which, although they may vary from age to age under the spell of individual poets and prophets, and under the evolution of knowledge and civilisation,
“Are yet a master-light of all our seeing.”
They may have been intertwined with incorrect intellectual elements, but because one antenna of the apparatus of consciousness functions falsely we are not therefore justified in wholly rejecting the joint report. When we think of the vast number of contradictory truths by which men in all ages and countries have lived and died, we shall find consolation in the thought that the emotional and volitional elements of Truth are more important than its intellectual skeleton.
But what a curious confusion that these emotional and volitional elements should themselves come to be treated as intellectual, and desiccated into dogmas! This is the result of their seeking expression in words, that unsuitable, impossible and fading medium. It is through their felicitous escape from words that verbally inarticulate artists and musicians paint and compose truer things than philosophers say, things that survive vicissitudes of thought and are as true to-morrow as yesterday. With the music of the Roman Catholic Church we all agree, and who shall contradict the Venus of Milo?
Yes, a statue or a symphony is safe from syllogisms, at least until it gets into the hands of the art critic and the programme-concocter. But the truth airily embodied in words is at the mercy of system-builders and deduction-squeezers. Taken with the hard definiteness of coins—as if, indeed, even coins did not vary from day to day in purchasing power and according to the country of circulation,—the words are added together to yield a specific sum of truth. Flying prophetic phrases and wingèd mystical raptures are shot down and stuffed for Church Catechisms and Athanasian Creeds. As if the emotional and volitional fringe of living words permitted them to be thus sterilised into scientific propositions! For just as facts are the skeletons of truths, so words are single bones, and the dictionary is a vast ossuary. Talk of the dead languages—all languages are dead unless spoken, and spoken with real feeling. A parrot always speaks a dead language. It is the folly of a universal language that it assumes the same vocabulary could be used over a vast area of varying conditions, its words never expanding nor contracting in meaning, nor ever changing in pronunciation or colour. As if Latin was not once universal in those countries which have gradually transformed it into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Provençal, Roumanian, and Rumonsch! Idiomatic expressions cannot be torn from the soil they grow in. Mañana has not the same meaning outside Spain nor Kismet outside Islam. Language lays such traps for fools; the fools have always spoiled and fossilised what the men of genius have felt and thought. They have made logic out of poetry and have deadened worship and wonder into theology. “What do you read?” says Hamlet. “Words, words, words.”
A truth, then, may be formulated, but it is not true till it is felt and acted on, and ceases to be true when it ceases to be felt and acted on. Nor does this canon apply only to inner truths. Without an element of feeling and volition, however shadowy, even the simple realities of the outer world have never been perceived, and the omission of these elements invalidates the total reality. If so many readers skip scenery in novels, ’tis because the scene is described as though it existed in itself. The dead chunk of landscape bores and depresses. The reader subconsciously feels that so impersonal a vision is untrue to the actualities of perception. Nobody has ever seen a landscape without some emotion, if only the traveller’s desire to be at the other end of it. A dozen persons—even omitting the colour-blind—would see it in as many different ways, each with different accompaniments of feeling, thought, and volition, potential or actual, just as every person in The Ring and the Book sees Pompilia differently. Let the novelist describe the scene, not for itself, but for its relation to the emotions and purposes of his personages, and it leaps into life. Similar is the case of Science, whose facts in divesting themselves of all emotion and individual error divest themselves likewise of reality. The dry scientific coldness with which the universe must be envisaged is an artificial method of vision. True, the scientist himself may be impelled by the most tingling curiosity. But the passion and thrill of his chase for truth does not appear in the quarry: that is a mere carcase. His report on his speciality is always carefully divested of emotion. But our emotional and volitional relations to the spectacle of existence are as much a part of the total truth of things as colour is of the visible world. The world is not complete without
“The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet’s dream.”