Causes and Consequences

by John Jay Chapman

For note this, that while it takes the whole of a man to do anything true, no matter how small, anything that the whole of him does is right. Hence the inimitable grotesques of greatness, the puns in tragedy. These things belong to the very arcana of nature. By and by, when the reasons are understood, nature will be respected. No one will attempt to imitate genius, or to reproduce an artistic effect of any kind.

If we look at recent literature by the light of this canon, we find the reason for its inferiority. It is the work of half minds, of men upon whose intelligence the weight of a dogma is pressing.

The eclipse of philosophy was of course reflected in fiction. There is the same trouble with Herbert Spencer as with Zola. Each of them thinks to wrest the secrets of sociology from external observation. Their books lack objectivity and are ephemeral. Kant and Balzac did better because their method was truer.

Everything good that has been done in the last fifty years has been done in the teeth of current science. The whole raft of English scientists are children playing with Raphael’s brushes the moment they leave some specialty. There never lived a set of men more blinded by dogma, blinded to the meaning of the past, to the trend of the future, by the belief that they had found new truth. Not one of them can lift the stone and show what lies under Darwin’s demonstration. They run about with little pamphlets and proclaim a New Universe like Frenchmen. They bundle up all beliefs into a great Dogma of Unbelief, and throw away the kernel of life with the shell. This was inevitable. A generation or two was well sacrificed, in this last fusillade of the Dogma of Science—the old guard dogma that dies but never surrenders. Hereafter it will be plain that the whole matter is a matter of symbols on the one hand, knowledge of human nature on the other.

Herbert Spencer has been a useful church-warden to science, but his knowledge of life was so trifling, his own personal development so one-sided, that his sociology is a farce.

This canon of criticism explains in a very simple manner the art ages, times when apparently every one could paint, or speak, or compose. The art which is lost is really the art of courageous action. Neither war nor dogma nor revolution is necessary, for feeling can no more be lost than force, and the power to express it depends upon an interest in life. The past has enriched us with conventions, and whenever a man or a group of men arises who uses them and is not subdued to them, we have art. The thing is easy. To the doers it is a mere knack of the attention.

We had almost thought that art was finished, and we find we are standing at the beginning of all things. Froebel has found a formula which fits every human activity.

Let us take the supreme case, the apogee of human development, and what will it be?

The sum of all possible human knowledge is, as we have seen, an expansion of our understanding of human nature, and this is got by intercourse, by dealing with men, by getting them to do something. In order to make them do it, in order to govern, you must understand, and the rulers of mankind are the wisest of the species. They summarize society. Solomon, Cæsar, Hildebrand, Lincoln, Bismarck, these men knew their world.

But if a virtuous ruler be the prototype of all possible human fulfilment, there is no other art or province of employment to which the same views do not apply. When any man reaps some of the power which his toil has sown, and throws it out as a note or a book or a statue, it has an organic relation to the human soul and is valuable forever. There is only one rule of art. Let a man work at a thing till it looks right to him. Let him adjust and refine it till, as he looks at it, it passes straight into him, and he grows for a moment unconscious again, that the forces which produced it may be satisfied. As it stands then, it is the best he can do. In so far as we completely develop this power we become completely happy and completely useful, for our acts, our statements, our notes, our books, our statues become universally significant.