Such is the distinction of the Fourth Age, whose light is all about us, flooding in from the eastern windows yonder like a great dawn. Man's spirit, tutored by lost illusion after lost illusion, advances to an ever deeper reality. The race, too, like the individual and the nation, is subject to the Law of Tragedy. Once more, in the way of a thousand years, it knows that it is not in time, nor in any cunning manipulation or extension of the things of time, that Man the Timeless can find the word which sums his destiny, and spurning at the phantoms of space, save as they grant access to the Spaceless, casts itself back upon God, and in art, thought, and action pierces to the Infinite through the finite.
This mystic attribute, this élan of the soul, discovers a fellowship in thinkers wide apart in circumstance and mental environment. It is, for instance, the trait which Schopenhauer, Tourgenieff,[[7]] Flaubert, and Carlyle possess in common[[8]]. These men are not as others of their time, but prophet voices that announce the Fourth, the latest Age, whose dawn has laid its hand upon the eastern hills.
The restless imagination of Flaubert, fused from the blood of the Norsemen, plunges into one period after another, Carthage, the Rome of the Caesars, Syria, Egypt, and Galilee, the unchanging East, and the monotony in change of the West, pursuing the one Vision in many forms, the Vision which leads on Carlyle from stage to stage of a course curiously similar. Flaubert has a wider range and more varied sympathies than Carlyle, and in intensity of vision occasionally surpasses him. Both are mystics, visionaries, from their youth; but in ethics Flaubert seems to attain at a bound the point of view which the dragging years alone revealed to Carlyle.
The chapter on the death of Frederick the Great reads like a passage from the Correspondance of Flaubert in his first manhood. In Saint Antoine, Flaubert found the secret of the same mystic inspiration as Carlyle found in Cromwell. To the brooding soul of the hermit, as to that of the warrior of Jehovah, what is earth, what are the shapes of time? Man's path is to the Eternal—dem Grabe hinan—and from the study of the Revolution of 1848 Flaubert arises with the same embittered insight as marks the close of "Frederick the Great."
And if, in such later works as Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet and the Latter-Day Pamphlets of Carlyle, only the difference between the two minds is apparent, the difference is, after all, but a difference in temperament. It is the contrast between the impassive aloofness of the artist, and the personal and intrusive vehemence of the prophet.
The structural thought, the essential emotion of the two works are the same—the revolt of a soul whose impulses are ever beyond the finite and the transient, against a world immersed in the finite and the transient. Hence the derision, the bitter scorn, or the laughter with which they cover the pretensions, the hypocrisies, the loud claims of modern science and mechanical invention. But whether surveyed with contemplative calm, or proclaimed with passionate remonstrance to an unheeding generation, the life vision of these two men is one and the same—"the eternities, the immensities."[[9]]
And this same passion for the infinite is the informing thought of Wagner's tone-dramas and Tschaikowsky's symphonies. Love's mystery is deepened by the mystery of death, and its splendour has an added touch by the breath of the grave. The desire of the infinite greatens the beauty of the finite and lights its sanctuary with a supernatural radiance. All knowledge there becomes wonder. Truth is not known, but the soul is there in very deed possessed by the Truth, and is one with it eternally.
Ibsen's protest against limited horizons, against theorists, formulists, social codes, conventions, derives its justice from the worthlessness of those conventions, codes, theories, in the light of the infinite. The achievements in art most distinctive of the present age—the paintings of Courbet, Whistler, Degas, for instance—proclaim the same creative principle, the unsubstantiality of substance, the immateriality of matter, the mutability of all that seems most fixed, the unreality of all things, save that which was once the emblem of unreality, the play of line and colour, and their impression upon the retina of the eye. "If I live to be a hundred, I shall be able to draw a line," said Hokousai. It was as if he had said, "I shall be able to create a world."
The pressing effects of Imperialism in such an environment, its swift influences upon the life of an age thus conditioned, thus sharply defined from all preceding ages, are of an import which it would be hard to over-estimate. The nation undowered with such an ideal, menaced with extinction or with a gradual depression to the rank of a protected nationality, passes easily, as in France and Holland and in the higher grades of Russian society, to the side of political and commercial indifferentism, of artistic or literary cosmopolitanism.
But to a race dowered with the genius for empire, it rescues politics from the taint of local or transient designs, and imparts to public affairs and the things of State that elevation which was their characteristic in the Rome of Virgil and the England of Cromwell. For not only the life of the individual, but the life of States, is by this conception robed in something of its initial wonder. These, the individual and the State, as we have seen, are but separate phases, aspects of one thought, that thought which in the Universe is realized.