And at the last, lessoned by those ancient instructors, winds and tides, and the ever-moving spheres of heaven, how does the soul attain its glory, and in Music, the art of arts, the form of forms, poise on the starry battlements of God's dread sanctuary, tranced in prayer, in wonder ineffable, at the long pilgrimage accomplished at last—in the adagio of the great Concerto, in the Requiem, or those later strains of transhuman sadness and serenity trans-human, in which the soul hears again the song sung by the first star that ever left the shaping hands of God and took its way alone through the lonely spaces, pursuing an untried path across the dark, the silent abysses—how dark, how silent!—a moving harmony, foreboding even then in its first separate delight and sorrow of estrangement all the anguish and all the ecstasy that the unborn universes of which it is the herald and precursor yet shall know!
Aristotle indeed affirms that in the universe there are many things more excellent than man, the planets, for instance. He is thinking of the mighty yet perfect curve which they describe, though with all the keenness of his analytic perception, he is in this judgment not unaffected by the fancy, current in his time, that those planets are living things each with its attendant soul, which shapes its orbit and that fixed path athwart the night. How much higher a will that steadfast motion argues than the wavering purposes, the unstable desires of human life. But we know that the planet with all its mighty curve is but as the stage to the piece enacted thereon; it is the moving theatre on which the drama of life, from its first dark unconscious motions to the freest energy of the soul in its airy imaginings, is accomplished. And the thought of Pascal which might be a rejoinder to this of Aristotle is well known, that though the universe rise up against man to destroy him, yet man is greater than the universe, because he knows that he dies, but of its power to destroy the universe knows nothing.
If this then be the origin of the individual soul, and if its recorded and unrecorded history and action in the universe be of this height, it is not astonishing that the laws and operations of the soul of the State, which is of an order yet more complex and mysterious, should baffle investigation, and foil the most assiduous efforts to reduce them to a system, and compel speculation to have recourse to such false analogies and misleading resemblances as those to which reference has in these lectures more than once been made.
§ 2. THE STATE, EMPIRES, AND ART
Thus we trace the unity of the State to the unity of the individual soul, and thence to the Divine unity. The soul of the State is the higher, the more complex unity, and it is not merely in the actions of the individual in relation to or as an organic part of the State that we must seek for the entire influence of the State upon individual life, or for the perfect expression of the abstract energy of the State in itself and by itself. Man in such relations does often merit the reprobation of Rousseau, and his theory of the deteriorating effects of a complex unity upon the single unity of the individual soul seems often to find justification. Similarly, the exclusive admiration of many unwitting disciples of Rousseau for the deeds of the individual as opposed to the deeds of the State, for art as opposed to politics, discovers in a first study of these relations strong support. But the artist is not isolated and self-dependent. If the supreme act of a race is war, if its supreme thought is its religion, and its supreme poems, its language—deeds, thoughts, and poems to which the whole race has contributed—so in manifold, potent, if unperceived ways the State affects those energizings in art and thought which seem most independent of the State. The sentence of Aristotle is familiar, "The solitary man is either a brute or a god," but the solitariness whether of the Thebaid or of Fonte Avellano, of Romualdo, Damiani, or of that Yogi, who, to exhibit his hate and scorn of life, flung himself into the flames in the presence of Alexander, is yet indebted and bound by ties invisible, mystic, innumerable, to the State, to the race, for the structural design of the soul itself, for that very pride, that isolating power which seems most to sever it from the State.[[2]] And who shall determine the limits of the unconscious life which in that lonely contemplation or that lonelier scorn, the soul receives from the State? For from the same source the component and the composite, the constituent and the constituted unity alike arise, and the Immanence that is in each is One. "Whither shall I go from Thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from Thee; but the night shineth as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to Thee."
The everyday topic which makes man "the creature of his time" derives whatever truth it possesses from this unity, but Sophocles did not write the Ajax because Miltiades fought at Marathon, nor Tirso, El Condennado because Cortez defeated Montezuma. Whatever law connect greatness in art and greatness in action, it is not the law of cause and effect, of necessary succession in time. They are the mutually dependent manifestations of the same immortal energy which uplifts the whole State, whose motions arise from beyond Time, the roots of whose being are beyond the region of cause and effect.
Consider now as an illustration of the interdependence of the soul of the individual and of the State, and of the immanence in each of the Divine, the relation which world-history reveals as existing between the higher manifestations of the life of the individual and of the State. The greatest achievements of individual men, whether in action, or in art, or in thought, are, it will generally be found, coincident with, and synchronous with, the highest form which in its development the State assumes, that is, with some form or mode of empire. For it is not merely the art of Phidias, of Sophocles, that springs from the energy aroused by the Persian invasions; the energy which finds expression in the Empire of Athens is to be traced thither, empire and art arising from the same exaltation of the State and of the individual. But they are not related as cause and effect, nor is the art of Sophocles caused by Marathon; but the Agamemnon and Salamis, the Parthenon and the Ajax, are incarnations in words, in deeds, or in marble of the divine Idea immanent in the whole race of the Hellenes. A race capable of empire, the civic form of imperialism, thus arises simultaneously with its greatest achievements in art. Similarly in the civic State of mediaeval Florence, the age of Leonardo and of Savonarola is also the age of Lorenzo, when in politics Florence competes with Venice and the Borgias for the hegemony of Italy, and the actual bounds of her civic empire are at their widest. So in Venetian history empire and art reach their height together, and the age which succeeds that of Giorgione and of Titian is an end not only to the painting but to the political greatness of Venice.
As in civic so in national empires. In Spain, Charles V and the Philips are the tyrants of the greatest single military power and of the first nation of the earth, and have as their subjects Rojas and Tirso, Lope and Cervantes, Calderon and Velasquez. Racine and Molière serve le grand Monarque, as Apelles served Alexander. The mariners who sketched the bounds of this empire, which is at last attaining to the full consciousness of its mighty destinies, were the contemporaries of Marlowe and Webster, of Beaumont and Ford.
Napoleon's fretful impatience that its victories should have as their literary accompaniments only the wan tragedies of Joseph Chénier and the unleavened odes of Millevoye was just. An empire so glorious, if based on the people's will, should not have found in the genius of the age its sworn antagonist. This stamped his empire as spurious.
But these simultaneous phenomena, these supreme attainments at once in action and in art, are not connected as cause and effect. For the roots of their identity we must search deeper. The transcendent deed and the work of art alike have their origin in the élan of the soul, the diviner vision or the diviner desire. The will which becomes the deed, the vision which becomes the poem or the picture, are here as yet one; and this élan, this energy of the soul, what is it but the energy of the infinite within the finite, of the eternal within time? Art in whatever perfection it attains is but an illustration, imperfect, of the spirit of man. The greatest books that ever were written, the most exquisite sculptures that ever were carved, the most delicate temples that ever were reared, the richest paintings that ever came from Titian are all in themselves ultimately but the dust of the soul of him who composes them, builds them, carves them. The unrevealed and the unrevealable is the soul itself that in such works is dimly adumbrated. The most perfect statue is but an imperfect semblance of the beauty which the sculptor beheld, though intensifying and reacting upon, and even in a sense consummating, that inward vision; and the sublimest energy of imperial Rome derives its tragic height from the degree to which it realizes the energy of the race.