Search-Light Letters

by Robert Grant

That seemeth to deplore the dying day.

This is the hour when the Wordsworthian spirit, refined, conscientious, aspiring, beauty and duty loving, sees through the splendor of the lucent, saffron sky, heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending. Not always is the vision so adorable. Often enough the gazer knows the bitterness of divine discontent, and finds the golden glory but a bar, shutting out God. In the favorable hour, though, comes the rapture, and the transfiguration; the exquisite, refined feelings seem to find communion with the infinite, and a voice from heaven to say:

Well done, good and faithful servant.

I have selected this experience of the cultivated English household rather than that of the purely religious life as an example, for the reason that in it the æsthetic side is represented in the soul-hunger, and that the existing conditions of earth are, to a certain extent, taken into account. In the purely religious life, the emotions of the exalted soul have, in the past at least, been prone to exclude the actual conditions of human life from consideration. The thought has been that the earthly existence is travail, and at best a discipline; that the joys of life are vanity, and the mundane problems of life unworthy of the interested attention of the heaven-seeking soul. Modern religious theories have modified this point of view, but certainly in some sects still the æsthetic value of existence is almost contemptuously discarded by religion. I have taken the beautiful lives of the Wordsworthians as an example, also because the religious element is so manifestly cherished and cultivated in them. It is intended in them that art and God should work together, or, more accurately, the precept is that the æsthetic side of humanity is one of the noblest manifestations of the infinite within us. It is significant in this connection that though art has often reached its apogee in periods of moral decay, the ruin of the nation, thus robbed of spiritual vitality, has soon followed, in spite of the glory of its sculpture and canvasses. But that is a mere interjection. The point I wish to suggest is this: The sane soul recognizes, when face to face with truth, that what we see in the glory of the sunset, when we think we walk with God, must be, in order to be of value, an inspiration based on the conditions of mundane life. Without this, prayer and adoration become a mere nervous exhalation, reaching out for something which has no more substance than an ignus fatuus. The old saints who lived and died in prayer, ignoring human relations, seem to us to-day to have been wofully deluded. They yearned to be translated from a world to which they had contributed nothing but the desire to be holy. This desire is of the essence of the matter; and so we consent to give their reverences the benison of our distinguished consideration. But aspiring souls, as evidenced by the æsthetic man and woman of culture, presently perceived the error. They recognized that aspiration, to be vital, must start with a conception of the world as it was, and seek a realization of the world as it might be, and that in this seeking lay service to God and preparation for heaven. Proceeding they fixed on unselfish human love and on beauty as the motive of their creed, and endeavored to live lives animated by these principles. This creed has been the real creed of aspiring humanity during the past century and a half, and it still seems sufficient to many. There have been diverse differences of application and administration in connection with it, according as the pendulum swung more or less near to one or the other of the two cardinal points of faith, unselfish love, or exquisite beauty. There have been some who, in their desire to make the relations of man toward those with whom he lived and whom he loved more ideal, have been disposed to ignore the claims of color and elegance; and there have been others so eager in their allegiance to the cause of beauty that they have exalted sense and emotion at the expense of unselfishness and purity. Essentially, however, the ideal life of the modern centuries has sought to develop the individual soul by stimulating its faculties to cherish self-sacrificing devotion to familiar friends, æsthetic appreciation of form, color and sound, and exquisite personal refinement. The Christian life, in its highest form, from this amalgamation of human traits, has constructed an ideal for the soul founded on something tangible and substantial in human consciousness. When the Christian said, "O God, make me pure and noble," it has been no longer necessary to rhapsodize on a heaven concerning which he knew nothing, and to disclaim all interest in this earth. On the contrary, he has appreciated that conceptions of the ideal must be based on human conditions or they cease to be intelligible, and that the soul which seeks God can reach him only through faithfulness to a method of life, the aim of which is to make the best use of earth and its possibilities.

Beautiful as have been the lives which have resulted from this æsthetic spirituality, the world has been beginning to realize, during the last twenty-five years, that this is a creed partially outworn, or, rather, a creed hampered by its limitations. In taking its suggestion for the ideal from the world, noble society chose to accept economic conditions as they were, and to fashion an ideal which necessarily shut out the larger portion of humanity from the possibility of attaining it. The æsthetic satisfaction which we draw from the sunset is due to the pleasure which conscience feels in its allegiance to an ideal of its own devising, and seeing God is only another term for the solemn identification of man's aspirations. The Wordsworthian soul, as interpreted by his followers, assumed that the political conditions of society were always to remain the same, or, more accurately speaking, it accepted those conditions as permanent and continuously inevitable. In other words, it did not foresee democracy. In short, its ideal was essentially aristocratic and exclusive, and it continues so stubbornly in the present day in many circles. To be sure, it has included and continues to include in its formula the carrying of soups, jellies, coals, and blankets to the poor, and the proffering of educational advantages to the ignorant, but it never has predicated, as essential to the world's true progress, such fundamental changes in the social status of society as would involve the annihilation of class distinctions and a greater general happiness for the mass of humanity. To be sure, there have always been individual philanthropists, who insisted upon these changes as vital, but they have been ignored by the leaders of ideal thought as visionary enthusiasts, or maligned as disturbers of permanent society. It has been the struggle of democracy itself that has been the chief revealer of a new vision in the sunset, until now, at last, the soul in search of the ideal appreciates that it does not walk with God unless it sees in the saffron glory its own sympathy with these new conditions.

The development of this recognition has been tolerably swift in certain directions. New hospitals, new colleges, college settlements among the poor, are concrete evidences of the modern spirit, and equally significant, if less heralded, are the faithful, zealous labors of physicians, teachers, clergymen, and the host of workers in various lines of industry, where the earnest, self-sacrificing work done is rarely if ever paid for, in dollars and cents, commensurate with its value. The serious energy of the best humanity, instead of pluming itself in the seductive contemplation of æsthetic beauty, seems rather to be celebrating the apotheosis of dirt. It feels that the cleansing of the physical and moral filth from our slums, the relief of appalling ignorance and superstition, the combating of political dishonesty and the checking of private greed are more to be desired at this time than great marbles and a great literature. Or, rather, perhaps, it seems probable that great marbles and a great literature will not come to us until the leaven of this new ideal expresses itself in the truths of art. The sane, aspiring soul can no longer be satisfied unless it recognizes the inevitableness and the pathos of democracy and adjusts its human perspective accordingly.

The world of vested rights and wealth is still reluctant to accept this new æstheticism, and the soul in search of the ideal will find the allurements of aristocratic culture still insisted on as the secret of noble living. Social arrogance and the exclusive tendencies of class are slow in yielding to the hostility even of republican forms of government. In this country parents who profess to be Americans still choose to send their children to private instead of to the public schools, in order to separate them from the mass of the people. The doctrine of social caste, thus early impressed upon the youth of both sexes, serves to produce a class of citizens who are not really in sympathy with popular government. If one questions sometimes the depth of purpose of highly evolved man, and doubts the existence of God, it is because of the lavish wantonness of living of some of the very rich in the presence of the thousands of miserable and wretched creatures who still degrade our large cities. But there is this to be said in this connection: This new æsthetic ideal is at least partially the fruit of the awakening of humanity to a keener appreciation of the conditions of human life; but its progress is made certain by the coming evolution of democracy, which slowly but surely will overwhelm the aristocratic spirit forever, even though æstheticism, as realized by the arrogant and exclusive, perish in the process. The ideal life to-day is that which maintains the noblest aims of the aspiring past, cherishing unselfishness, purity, courage, truth, joy, existence, fineness of sentiment and æsthetic beauty; but cherishes these in the spirit and for the purposes of a broader humanity than the melting soul has hitherto discerned in the sunset, the ocean, or the starry heavens. There are among us men and women living in this spirit of idealism, and they, O, my correspondents! are the first-class passengers.

To A Modern Woman with Social Ambitions. I.