Chapter D: The "outward" Aspect of Nature

4. But though the world of nature is, in this sense, a world of man's own creation, it is so in a different way from the world of art and of philosophy. Thought is indeed its parent, but thought in its primary stage fails to recognize it as its own, fails to transfer to it its own attributes of universality, and identity in difference. It sees outward objects merely in their diversity and isolation. It seeks to penetrate nature by endless dichotomy, glorying in that dissection of unity which is the abdication of its own prerogative.[4] It treats outward things as ministering to animal wants, as the sources of personal and particular pleasures and pains; and thus induces the sense of bondage, of collision with a world in which it has not yet learnt to find itself. It places the end of human life not in harmony with the law which is the highest form of itself, but in happiness, _i.e._, in the extraction of the greatest possible amount of enjoyment from a world to which it seems to be accidentally related. The view of things corresponding to this stage of thought is what we commonly call their outward aspect. It is the aspect of matter-of-fact, of logic, of "mere morality," as opposed to that of art, of philosophy, and religion.

FOOTNOTE:

[4] "Life," says Professor Dewey ('Studies in Logical Theory,' p. 81), "proposes to maintain at all hazards the unity of its own process." And in a foot-note he adds: "Professor James's satisfaction in the contemplation of bare pluralism, of disconnection, of radical having-nothing-to-do-with-one-another, is a case in point. The satisfaction points to an aesthetic attitude in which the brute diversity becomes itself one interesting object; and thus unity asserts itself in its own denial. When discords are hard and stubborn, and intellectual and practical unification are far to seek, nothing is commoner than the device of securing the needed unity by recourse to an emotion which feeds on the very brute variety. Religion and art and romantic affection are full of examples."

E. CONQUEST OF NATURE BY ART

5. The perfection of this of latter and higher view involves the absolute fusion of thought and things. Its full attainment is a new creation of the world. Yet it is but the discovery of a relationship which was from the beginning, the adoption by thought of a child which was never other than its own. The habitual interpretation of natural events by the analogy of human design, to which every hour's conversation testifies, is the evidence that to the ordinary man nature presents itself not as something external, but, like a friend, as "another himself." The true conquest of nature is but the completion of the reconciliation thus anticipated in the everyday language and consciousness of mankind. When the mind has come to see in the endless flux of outward things, not a succession of isolated phenomena, but the reflex of its own development into an infinite variety of laws on a basis of identity--when the laws of nature are raised to the character of laws which regulate admiration and love--when the experiences of life are held together in a medium of pure emotion, and the animal element so fused with the spiritual as to form one organization through which the same impulse runs with unimpeded energy--then man has made nature his own, by becoming a conscious partaker of the reason which animates him and it.[5] The attainment of this consummation is the end of life: but it is an end that can never be fully realised, while "dualism" remains a necessary condition of humanity. To most men it is as a land very far off, of which occasional glimpses are caught from some "specular mount" of philosophic or poetic thought. It can only approach realisation through the operation of a power which can penetrate the whole man, and act on every moment of his life. But that power, which in the form of religion can make every meal a sacrament, and transform human passion into the likeness of divine love, is represented at a lower stage, not only by the unifying action of speculative philosophy, but by the combining force of art.

FOOTNOTE:

[5] The same thought may be found, in concrete and poetic form, in Wordsworth's lines:

"And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains."

F. THE ARTIST AS IDEALIZER

6. The artist, even at his lowest level, is more than an imitator of imitations.[6] Abridgment, selection, combination, are the necessary instruments of his craft; and by their aid he introduces harmony and order into the confused multiplicity of sensuous images. He substitutes for the primary outward aspect of things a new view, in which thought already finds a resting place. Just as strong emotion tends to make all known existence the setting of a single form; just as intense meditation sees in all experience the manifestation of a single idea; so the artist, even if he be merely telling a story, or painting a common landscape, puts some of his materials in a relief, and combines all in a harmony, which the untaught eye does not find in the world as it is. He presents to us the facts in the one case, the outward objects in the other, as already acted upon by thought and emotion. In this sense every artist, instead of copying nature, idealises it. In degree and mode, however, the idealisation varies infinitely in the various kinds of art. It is by considering the height to which it is carried in the epic poem and the drama that we shall best appreciate its limitations in the novel.

FOOTNOTE:

[6] Here are three beds: one existing in nature, which is made by God, as I think that we may say--for no one else can be the maker?--No.--There is another which is the work of the carpenter?--Yes.--And the work of the painter is a third?--Yes?--Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend them: God, the maker of the bed, and the painter?--Yes, there are three of them.--God, whether from choice or from necessity, made one bed in nature and one only; two or more such ideal beds neither ever have been nor ever will be made by God.... Shall we, then, speak of Him as the natural author or maker of the bed?--Yes, he replied; inasmuch as by the natural process of creation He is the author of this and of all other things.--And what shall we say of the carpenter--is he not also the maker of the bed?--Yes.--But would you call the painter a creator and maker?--Certainly not.--Yet if he is not the maker, what is he in relation to the bed?--I think, he said, that we may fairly designate him as the imitator of that which the others make.--Good, I said; then you call him who is third in the descent from nature an imitator?--Certainly, he said.--And the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth.--That appears to be so.--Plato, 'Republic,' X. 597.

G. THE EPIC

7. In outward form the epic poem is simply a narrative in verse. Historically it seems to have originated in the records of ancestral heroism, which passed from mouth to mouth in metre, as the natural form of oral communication in an unlettered age. In the Iliad and Odyssey we first find this outward form penetrated by a new spirit, which converts the narrative into the poem. There is no need to do violence to historical probability by supposing that Homer was a conscious artist, or that he imagined himself to be doing anything else than representing events as they happened. We have simply to notice that in him facts have become poetry, and to ask ourselves what constitutes the change. How is it that the epic poet, while "holding up the mirror to nature," yet shows us in the glass a glory which belongs not to nature as we see it, in its material limitations? The answer is, that though he follows the essential laws of the human spirit, his scene is not the earth we live in. He fills it with actors other than the men who "hoard and sleep and feed" around us. He places the action either in heroic ages--in the "past which was never present," when gods were more human and men more divine--or in heavenly places, and among the powers of the air. The action is simple in proportion to its remoteness from the reality of life, and rapid in proportion to its simplicity. It arises from the operation of the most elementary passions, the wrath of Achilles or the pride of Satan, in collision with an overruling power. For the animal wants and tricks of fortune, which entangle the web of man's affairs, it has no place. The animal element, if not banished from view altogether, becomes merely the organ of the ruling motions of the spirit; and fortune is lost in destiny or providence. Thus the incidents of the narrative cease to be mere incidents. They are held together by passion; they are themselves, so to speak, manifestations of passion working with more and more intensity to the final consummation. Not the laws which regulate curiosity, but those which regulate hope and awe, are the laws which they have to satisfy.

H. TRAGEDY AS PURIFIER OF THE PASSIONS

8. In tragedy, as the product of a more cultivated age, these characteristics appear more strongly than in the primitive epic. The Homeric poems are still legendary narratives, though narratives unconsciously transmuted by the highest art. Tragedy, on the contrary, has no extraneous elements. It implies a conscious effort of the spirit, made for its own sake, to re-create human life according to spiritual laws; to transport itself from a world, where chance and appetite seem hourly to give the lie to its self-assertion, into one where it may work unimpeded by anything but the antagonism inherent in itself and the presence of an overruling law. This result is attained simply by the action of the proper instruments of thought, abstraction and synthesis. The tragedian presents to us scenes of life, not its continuous flow of incident. In "Macbeth," for instance, there is an hiatus of some years between the earlier and later acts;[7] but we are not sensible of the void; for the passions which lead to the catastrophe are but the development of those which appear at the beginning, and to the law against which they struggle "a thousand years are but as yesterday." Time, however, is but one among many circumstances which the tragedian ignores. The common facts of life as it is, and always must have been, the influence of custom, the transition of passion into mechanical habit, the impossibility of continuous effort, the necessary arrangements of society, the wants of our animal nature and all that results from them, these are excluded from view, and so much only of the material of humanity is retained as can take its form from the action of the spirit, and become a vehicle of pure passion. But the synthesis keeps pace with the abstraction, for the tragedian creates not passions but men. The outer garment, the flesh itself, is stript off from man, that the spirit may be left to re-clothe itself, according to its proper impulses and its proper laws. The false distinctions of dress, of manner, of physiognomy, are obliterated, that the true individuality which results from the internal modifications of passion may be seen in clearer outline. These modifications are as infinite and as complex as the spirit of man itself; and if the characters of the ancient dramatists, in their broad simplicity, fail to exhibit the finer lineaments of real life, yet in Shakespeare the variations of pure passion are as numerous and as subtle as those of the fleshly or customary mask by which man thinks that he knows his neighbour. The essential difference lies in the fact that they are variations of the spiritual, not the animal, man; that they arise from the qualifications of the spirit by itself, not from its intermixture with matter. It is this which gives tragedy its power over life. The problem of the diabolic nature, of the possibility of a "fallen spirit," is not for man to solve. He may be satisfied with the diagnosis of his own disease, with the knowledge that it is his littleness, not his greatness, that separates him from the divine; that not intellectual pride, not spiritual self-assertion, but the meanness of his ordinary desires, the degradation of his higher nature to the pursuit of animal ends, keep him under the curse. From this curse tragedy, in its measure, helps to relieve him. It "purifies his passions"[8] by extricating them from their earthly immersion. For an hour, it may be, or a day, it raises him into a world of absolute ideality, where he may forget his wants and his vanity, and lose himself in a struggle in which the combatants are the forces of the spirit, and of which the end is that annihilation in collision with destiny which is but the blank side of reconciliation with it. And though his sojourn in this region be short, yet, when he falls again, the smell of the divine fire has passed upon him, and he bears about him, for a time at least, among the rank vapours of the earth, something of the freshness and fragrance of the higher air.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] The actual time represented in the play has been calculated to be nine days, with intervals of a week or two between Acts II and III, scenes ii and iii of Act IV, and scenes i and ii of Act V. See _New Shakespeare Society Publications_, 1877-79.

[8] The phrase is Aristotle's; cf. the 'Poetics,' Chap. vi, and, for comment, Butcher's 'Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art,' Chapter vi.