Causes and Consequences

by John Jay Chapman

Take the matter up on its other side. You can only discover in the universe, try how you will, strain your eyes how you please, you can only see what you have lived. Out of our activity comes our character, and it is with this that we see beauty or ugliness, hope or despair. It is by this that we gauge the operation of economic law and of all other spiritual forces. It is with this that we interpret all things. What we see is only our own lives.

We are all more or less in contact with human life. We live in a pandemonium, a paradise of illustrations, and if we have only eyes to see, there is enough in any tenement house to-day to lay bare the heart and progress of Greek art.

But the worst is to come—the horror that makes intellect a plaything. By a double consequence the past fetters the future. Once take any course and our eyes begin to see it as right, our hearts to justify it. Only fighting can save us, and we see nothing to fight for. Thraldom enters and night like death where no voice reaches. The eternal struggle is for vision.

How idiotic are the compliments or the contempt of the inexperienced. Nothing but life teaches. Hallam thinks Juliet immodest, and he had read all the literatures of Europe. If you want to understand the Greek civilization you have got to be Sophocles. If you want to understand the New Testament you have got to be Christ. If you want to understand that most complex and difficult of all things, the present, you must be some or all of it, some of it any way. You must have it ground into you by a contact so wrenchingly close, by a struggle so severe, that you lose consciousness, and afterwards—next year—you will understand.

Here is the reaction familiar to all men since the dawn of history, which makes the man of action the hero of all times. It goes in courage, it comes out power.

This reaction, this transformation goes forward in the very stuff that we are made of, and if we come to look at it closely, we are obliged to speak of it in terms of consciousness. There are so many different kinds of consciousness, that the best we can do is to remind some one else of the kind we mean. The hand of the violinist is unconscious to the extent that it is functioning properly, and as his command over music develops, this unconsciousness creeps up his arm and possesses his brain and being, until he, as he plays, is completely unself-conscious and his music is the mere projection of an organism which is functioning freely.

But this condition of complete concentration makes us in a different sense of the word self-conscious in the highest degree, self-comprehending, self-controlled, self-expressing. And it is in this philosophical sense that the word self-conscious is used by the Germans, and may sometimes be conveniently used by us, if we can do so without foregoing the right to use the words conscious and unconscious in their popular sense at other times.

The discovery of Froebel was that this mastery over our own powers was to be obtained only through creative activity. The suggestion, it may be noted, is destined to reorganize every school of violin playing in Europe. For we have here the major canon of a rational criticism. We find that in the old vocabulary such words as genius, temperament, style, originality, etc., have always been fumblingly used to denote different degrees in which some man’s brain was working freely and with full self-consciousness. A deliverance of this kind has always been designated as ‘creative,’ no matter in what field it was found.

Approaching the matter more closely, we see that the whole of the man must have responded in real life to every particle of experience which he uses in his work. An imitation means something which does not represent an original unitary vibration.

Goethe puts in the mouth of the mad Gretchen a snatch of German song in imitation of Ophelia. The treatment does not fit the character. It has only been through that part of Goethe’s mind with which he read Shakespeare. As a sequel to this suggestion, the peasant of the early scenes has lavished upon her all the various reminiscences of the pathetic that Goethe could muster. It is moving, but it is inorganic. It is not true.