III
THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE
In modern Europe political revolutions have invariably been preceded or accompanied by revolutions in thought or religion. The nineteenth century, which has been convulsed by thirty-three revolutions, the overthrow of dynasties, and the assassination of kings, has also been characterized by the range and daring of its speculative inquiry. Every system of thought which has perplexed or enthralled the imagination of man, every faith that has exalted or debased his intelligence, has had in this age its adherents. The Papacy in each successive decade has gained by this tumult and mental disquietude. Thought is anguish to the masses of men, any drug is precious, and to escape from its misery the soul conspires against her own excellence and the perfection of Nature. Even in 1802 Napoleon in his Hamlet-like musings in the Tuileries despaired of Liberty as the safety of the world, and in his tragic course this despair adds a metaphysical touch to his doom. Five Popes have succeeded him who anointed Bonaparte, and the very era of Darwin and Strauss has been illustrated or derided by the bull, "Ineffabilis Deus," the Council of the Vatican, the thronged pilgrimages to Lourdes, and the neo-Romanism of French littérateurs. The Hellenism of Goethe was a protest against this movement, at once in its intellectual and its literary forms, the Romanticism of Tieck and Novalis, the cultured pietism of Lammenais and Chateaubriand. Yet in Faust Goethe attempted a reconciliation of Hellas and the Middle Age, and the work is not only the supreme literary achievement of the century, but its greatest prophetic book. Then science became the ally of poetry and speculative thought in the war against Obscurantism, Ultramontanism, and Jesuitism in all its forms. Geology flung back the aeons of the past till they receded beyond imagination's wing. Astronomy peopled with a myriad suns the infinite solitudes of space. The theory of evolution stirred the common heart of Europe to a fury of debate upon questions confined till then to the studious calm of the few. The ardour to know all, to be all, to do all, here upon earth and now, which the nineteenth century had inherited from the Renaissance, quickened every inventive faculty of man, and surprise has followed surprise. The aspirations of the Revolutionary epoch towards some ideal of universal humanity, its sympathy with the ideals of all the past, Hellas, Islam, the Middle Age, received from the theories of science, and from increased facilities of communication and locomotion, a various and most living impulse. As man to the European imagination became isolated in space, and the earth a point lost in the sounding vastness of the atom-shower of the worlds, he also became conscious to himself as one. The bounds of the earth, his habitation, drew nearer as the stars receded, and surveying the past, his history seemed less a withdrawal from the Divine than an ever-deepening of the presence of the Divine within the soul.
That which in speculation pre-eminently distinguishes the Europe of the nineteenth century from preceding centuries—the gradually increasing dominion of Oriental thought, art, and action—has strengthened this impression. An age mystic in its religion, symbolic in its art, and in its politics apathetic or absolutist, succeeds an age of formal religion, conventional art, and Republican enthusiasm. Goethe in 1809, from the overthrow of dynasties and the crash of thrones, turned to the East and found peace. What were the armies of Napoleon and the ruin of Europe's dream to Háfiz and Sádi, and to the calm of the trackless centuries far behind? The mood of Goethe has become the characteristic of the art, the poetry, the speculation of the century's end. The bizarre genius of Nietzsche, whose whole position is implicit in Goethe's Divan, popularized it in Germany. The youngest of literatures, Norway and Russia, reveal its power as vividly as the oldest, Italy and France. It controls the meditative depth of Leopardi, the melancholy of Tourgenieff, the nobler of Ibsen's dramas, and the cadenced prose of Flaubert. It informs the teaching of Tolstoi and the greater art of Tschaikowsky. Goethe, at the beginning of the century, moulded into one the ideals of the Middle Age and of Hellas, and so Wagner at the close, in Tristan and in Parsifal, has woven the Oriental and the mediaeval spirit, thought, and passion, the Minnesinger's lays and the mystic vision of the Upanishads into a rainbow torrent of harmony, which, with its rivals, the masterpieces of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Tschaikowsky, make this century the Periclean age of Music as the fifteenth was the Periclean age of painting, and the sixteenth of poetry.
What a vision of the new age thus opens before the gaze! The ideal of Liberty and all its hopes have turned to ashes; but out of the ruins Europe, tireless in the pursuit of the Ideal, ponders even now some profounder mystery, some mightier destiny. More than any race known to history the Teuton has the power of making other religions, other thoughts, other arts his own, and sealing them with the impress of his own spirit. The poetry of Shakespeare, of Goethe, the tone-dramas of Wagner attest this. Out of the thought and faith of Judaea and Hellas, of Egypt and Rome, the Teutonic imagination has carved the present. Their ideals have passed into his life imperishably. But the purple fringe of another dawn is on the horizon. Teutonic heroism and resolution in action, transformed by the centuries behind and the ideals of the elder races, confront now, creative, the East, its mighty calm, its resignation, its scorn of action and the familiar aims of men, its inward vision, its deep disdain of realized ends. What vistas arise before the mind which seeks to penetrate the future of this union! The eighteenth century at its close coincided with an accomplished hope clearly defined. The last sun of the dying century goes down upon a world brooding over an unsolved enigma, pursuing an ideal it but darkly discerns.