This is the gospel of non-resistance, of quietism. The absurdity of it is attested by every step we take, for do they not say we could not walk were it not for the resistance of the ground? Eating, alone, is a triumph over opposition. He wishes to steep us in the dolce far niente of Content, and tells us in order to do so all that is needed is our confidence and trust.
“An imperturbable faith in the stability of the universe and its intelligent ordering sleeps in everything that exists. The flowers, the trees, the beasts of the field live in calm strength, in entire security.”
We must remember that Wagner lives in Paris, and, therefore, make allowances for this last statement. He probably has never seen any beasts of the field except in the cages of the Zoo, else he could not have such exuberant faith in their confidence and security. He could never have studied the stealthy horrors of the forests—the furtive panther—the relentless viper—their trembling victims—and possess such a genial conviction of the mercy and goodness of this scheme of creation. No, he must look away from nature for his examples of harmony and peace.
His perpetual refrain is, “Be human and be simple.” Civilization’s answer is that the two are incompatible. Evolution tends to complexity as inevitably as growth leads to death. The beginnings of all things are simple—people, theories of government and vegetable seeds. But the laws of life will not leave them thus. Like American policemen, their continual order is “move on.”
We would have had no history had it not been for man’s love of novelty. It is the one enduring thing. The anthropology of the world is but the record of man’s taste for the strange. Yet Wagner says, “Novelty is ephemeral. Nothing endures but the commonplace, and if one departs from that, it is to run the most perilous risk. Happy he who is able to reclaim himself, who finds the way back to simplicity.”
After reading pages of hazy verbiage descriptive of this simplicity, one cannot but see that his ideal is a vapory creation, a fusing of the honest animality of the savage and the calloused quietism of the lotus-eater.
Simplicity! What prototypes have we for it in all humanity? Two possible types suggest themselves, the savage and the hermit. But Darwin shows us that we cannot find simplicity in the savage. Like civilized man, his instincts are toward exaggeration. He, too, in his limited way, tries to escape from the realities of life. His protest against truth is tattooing. His idea of beauty is distortion.
As the great anatomist, Bichat, long ago said, “If everyone were cast in the same mold, there would be no such thing as beauty. If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Venus de Medici, we should soon wish for a variety. We should wish to see certain characters a little exaggerated beyond the existing common standard.”
All the philosophizing of the optimist won’t thwart this tendency of human nature, and it is as futile to bewail “the Vice of the Superlative,” the complexities and hyperboles of life, as it would be to bewail the inevitability of death. Thus we see we cannot find simplicity in man’s primitive form, the savage.
We must, then, look for it in one of his acquired forms—in the idealist who can make of himself a mental Robinson Crusoe, or in the hermit of the monastery or the desert. It must be in some isolated being that we seek simplicity, for certainly it can never be found amid “the madding crowd” and its “ignoble strife.” In solitude alone can one cultivate that contemplative apathy of the mind which Wagner calls peace, which Mahatmas call divinity, and wives call selfishness.