And all the while, in perfect time
His pendulous stomach hangs a-shaking.
Now, a passion for ugliness like this is really a revolt against ugliness,—not the tender-skinned æsthete’s revolt, which consists in denying ugliness and escaping into a remote dream, but the strong man’s, the poet’s,—the revolt that is in effect a seizing of ugliness in all its repulsiveness and giving it a reason for existence by embodying it in a chosen pattern that is beautiful. By this method the poet masters emotion, even unpleasant emotion, making it subservient to a decorative design dictated by his own sense of proportion. It is thus that he is able to endure the world of actualities, and to find it comparable in interest with the world of his own thoughts. And by this process he saves himself from the sharpest bite of evil. For there is a curious consolation in transforming a spontaneous cry into a calculated work of art. By such a process one can give, to elements that before seemed only parts of a torturing chaos, their ordered places in a known scheme. One can impose propitious form upon one’s recollections, and create a little world of design-relations where the poignancy of experience is lost in the discipline of beauty. It is for this reason that the poet must be considered, in spite of everything, the happiest of men.
THE NEW LOYALTY
GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER
Back to the Old Greek for a starting-point! Two seeds, of the same species, though distant in space and time, go through an identical development. Root corresponds with root, stem with stem, flower with flower, fruit with fruit. Something seems to control all this change. It is not mere change. It is change with a plan, a purpose, a pattern. Hence the Greek said that there must be an unchanging type, a fixed “idea,” a spiritual, invisible norm, the “first” and “final” cause of all this change, to which all concrete, particular plants of the species are true. Back of the visible tangible plant must be its Eidos, its eternal norm, form, idea, “species.” So with everything. An elaboration of this conclusion gives the real unchanging, fixed eternal world back of, underpinning, supporting this visible changing, temporal world.
Such a world-view as this was made more valuable and more imperative by the break-up of the traditional morals and religion of the Greek state. The search for the meaning of life was precipitated by the disintegration of social sanctions and of the guarantees of custom. This search was voiced in the questionings of Socrates. It was made serious by the menacing individualism of the sophists. The outcome was that stability, security, confidence were found in the Platonic doctrine. Back of this ephemeral world is the real world of “ideas,” the unchanging and eternal, upon which we may rest our minds and hearts amid all this disappointing and desperate flux.
Passing by the Middle Ages, which, mutatis mutandis, appropriated this scheme, we pause over the significance of the Renaissance period. Two things are uppermost in one’s mind and as one thinks of the tumultuous beginnings of modern life which characterized the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. For one thing, the Renaissance was the culmination of a long period of absorption in which men had been gradually working their way back, by intellectual assimilation, towards the beginnings of the rich tradition which Church and Empire had stored up. This period of absorption was that five hundred years during which pagan hordes that had conquered Rome were conquered by the knowledge, faith, custom, civilization of their victims. From the cultural standpoint the new nations were hungry, the larder of the old civilization was replete, and hence authority on one side and absorption on the other became natural and inevitable. Thus, the philosophical preconceptions, the cosmological ground-principles, the whole general attitude toward life’s problems of the whole old world were fastened upon the mind of the young European peoples. It must not be forgotten that all this was aat the hatural achievement of the new European life and genius, but as foreign to it, as inherited (and at first as cherished) as grandfatherly ideas are in the mind of a child. If some day the child must shake off the old conceptions because he hears the call of life to go forth and achieve his own inner world, it would be only natural to expect that this young European giant should some day struggle to cast aside his intellectual inheritance and go forth to conquer reality for himself, in his own way, with his own weapons.
Well—and this is the second matter—it was just that very thing that was happening in the early “teens” of our era. The young western world began to look at life for itself, and a curious, astonished, wild-eyed look it was. Europe had learned at its mother’s knee to say: “The true world is fixed and final. Reality is static.” But looking out now in wonderment, seeing farther than the ancient world had ever seen, the new world said: “Ah, no! The world is not static. The world moves. Things change.”
Two well-known anecdotes are told of Galileo, which, if not authentic, are well invented. The one tells how, in the dome at Pisa during worship, the litany or the sermon boring him, he observed the cathedral chandelier move by the wind and, studying its vibrations, discovered a basic law of mechanics. The profound meaning of this anecdote is, obviously, that God spoke to the man more effectively through the self-moving pendulum than in the rigid, immobile litany from a rigid, immobile, hieratic heart; and that, if we do not understand such litany, and it bores us, we may still devoutly worship by meditating upon what we can understand.