Is Polite Society Polite? Part 11

Art has no need to intervene in order to bring together those whom pa.s.sion inspires, whom inclination couples. But in crude Nature, pa.s.sion itself remains selfish, brutal, and short-lived.

The tender and grateful recollection of transient raptures, the culture and growth of generous sympathies, resulting in n.o.ble co-operation--Art brings these out of Nature by the second birth, of which Christ knew, and at which Nicodemus marvelled.

Nature gives the love of offspring. Human parents share the pa.s.sionate attachment of other animals for their young. With the regulation of this attachment Art has much to do. You love the child when it delights you by day; you must also love it when it torments you at night. This latter love is not against Nature, but Conscience has to apply the whip and spur a little, or the mother will take such amus.e.m.e.nt as the child can afford, and depute to others the fatigues which are its price.

A graver omission yet Nature makes. She does not teach children to reverence and cherish their parents when the relation between them reverses itself in the progress of time, and those who once had all to give have all to ask. Moses was not obliged to say: "Parents, love your children." But he was obliged to say: "Honor thy father and thy mother,"

in all the thunder of the Decalogue. The gentler and finer spirits value the old for their useful council and inestimable experience.

You know to-day; but your father can show you yesterday, bright with living traditions which history neglects and which posterity loses. We do not profit as we might by this source of knowledge. Elders question the young for their instruction. Young people, in turn, should question elders on their own account, not allowing the personal values of experience to go down to the grave unrealized. But Youth is cruel and remorseless. The young, in their fulness of energy, in their desire for scope and freedom, are often in unseemly haste to see the old depart.

Here Religion comes in with strong hands to moderate the tyrannous impulse, the controversy of the green with the ripe fruit. All religions agree in this intervention. The wors.h.i.+p of ancestors in the Confucian ethics shows this consciousness and intention. The aristocratic traditions of rank and race are an invention to the same end. Vanity, too, will often lead a man to glorify himself in the past and future, as well as in the present.

Still, the instinct to get rid of elders is a feature in unreclaimed nature. It shows the point at which the imperative suggestions of personal feeling stop,--the spot where Nature leaves a desert in order that Art may plant a garden. "Why don't you give me a carriage, now?"

said an elderly wife to an elderly husband. "When we married, you would scarcely let me touch the ground with my feet. I need a conveyance now far more than I did then." "That was the period of my young enthusiasm,"

replied the husband. The statement is one of unusual candor, but the fact is one of not unusual occurrence.

I think that in the present study I have come upon the true and simple sense of the parable of the talents. Of every human good, the initial half is bestowed by Nature. But the value of this half is not realized until Labor shall have acquired the other half. Talents are one thing: the use of them is another. The first depend on natural conditions; the second, on moral processes. The greatest native facilities are useless to mankind without the discipline of Art. So in an undisciplined life, the good that is born with a man dwindles and decays. The sketch of childhood, never filled out, fades in the objectless vacancy of manhood; and from the man is "taken away even that which he seemeth to have." Not judicial vengeance this, but inevitable consequence.

Education should clearly formulate this problem: Given half of a man or woman, to make a whole one. This, I need not say, is to be done by development, not by addition. Kant says that knowledge grows _per intus susceptionem_, and not _per appositionem_. The knowledges that you adjoin to memory do not fill out the man unless you reach, in his own mind, the faculty that generates thought. A single reason perceived by him either in numbers or in speech will outweigh in importance all the rules which memory can be taught to supply. With little skill and much perseverance, Education hammers upon the man until somewhere she strikes a nerve, and the awakened interest leads him to think out something for himself. Otherwise, she leaves the man a polite muddle, who makes his best haste to forget facts in forms, and who cancels the enforced production of his years of pedagogy by a lifelong non-production.

What Nature is able to give, she does give with a wealth and persistence almost pathetic. The good gifts afloat in the world which never take form under the appropriate influence, the good material which does not build itself into the structures of society,--you and I grieve over these sometimes. And here I come upon a doctrine which Fourier, I think, does not state correctly. He maintains that inclinations which appear vicious and destructive in society as at present const.i.tuted would become highly useful in his ideal society. I should prefer to state the matter thus: The given talent, not receiving its appropriate education, becomes a negative instead of a positive, an evil instead of a good.

Here we might paraphrase the Scripture saying, and affirm that the stone which is not built into the corner becomes a stumbling-block for the wayfarer to fall over. So great mischief lies in those uneducated, unconsecrated talents! This cordial companion becomes a sot. This could-be knight remains a prize-fighter. This incipient mathematician does not get beyond cards or billiards. This clever mechanic picks locks and robs a bank, instead of endowing one.

Modern theories of education do certainly point toward the study, by the party educating, of the party appointed to undergo education. But this education of others is a very complex matter, not to be accomplished unless the educator educates himself in the light afforded him by his pupils. The boys or girls committed to you may study what you will: be sure, first of all, that you study them to your best ability. Education in this respect is forced to a continual rectification of her processes.

The greatest power and resource are needed to awaken and direct the energies of the young. No speech in Congress is so important as are the lessons in the primary school; no pulpit has so great a field of labor as the Sunday school. The Turkish government showed a cruel wisdom of instinct when it levied upon Greece the tribute of Christian children to form its corps of Janissaries. It recognized alike the Greek superiority of race, and the invaluable opportunity of training afforded by childhood.

The work, then, of education demands an investigation of the elements which Nature has granted to the individual, with the view of matching that in which he is wanting with that which he has. I have heard of lovers who, in plighting their faith, broke a coin in halves, whose matching could only take place with their meeting. In true education as in the love, these halves should correspond.

"What hast thou?" is, then, the first question of the educator. His second is, "What hast thou not?" The third is, "How can I help thee to this last?"

To my view, the man remains incomplete his whole life long. Most incomplete is he, however, in the isolations of selfishness and of solitude. Study is not necessarily solitude, but ideal society in the highest grade in which human beings can enjoy it. It is, nevertheless, dangerous to suffer the ideal to distance the real too largely.

Desk-dreamers end by being mental cripples. Divorce of this sort is not wholesome, nor holy. Life is a perpetual marriage of real and ideal, of endeavor and result. The solitary departure of physical death is hateful, as putting asunder what G.o.d has joined together.

Must I go hence as lonely as I was born? My mother brought me into the infinite society: I go into the absolute dissociation. I go many steps further back than I came,--to the _ur_ mother, the common matrix which bears plants, animals, and human creatures. Where, oh where, shall I find that infinite companions.h.i.+p which my life should have earned for me? My friends.h.i.+p has been hundred-handed. My love has consumed the cities of the plain, and built the heavenly Jerusalem. And I go, without lover or friend, in a box, into an earth vault, from which I cannot even turn into violets and primroses in any recognizable and conscious way.

The completeness of our severance or deficiency may be, after all, the determining circ.u.mstance of our achievement. What I would have is cut so clean off from what I have as to leave no sense of wholeness in my continuing as I am. Something of mine is mislaid or lost. It is more mine than anything that I have, but where to find it? Who has it? I reach for it under this bundle and under that. After my life's trial, I find that I have pursued, but not possessed it. What I have gained of it in the pursuit, others must realize. I bequeath, and cannot take it with me. Did Dante regard the parchments of his "Divina Commedia" with a sigh, foreseeing the long future of commentators and booksellers, he himself absolving them beforehand by the quitclaim of death? You and I may also grieve to part from certain unsold volumes, from certain ma.n.u.scripts of doubtful fate and eventuality. Oh! out of this pang of death has come the scheme and achievement of immortality. "_Non omnis moriar_." "I am the resurrection and the life." "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body."

This tremendous leap and feat of the human soul across the bridge of dark negativity would never have been made without the sharp spur and bitter pang of death. "My life food for worms? No; never. I will build and bestow it in arts and charities, spin it in roads and replicate it in systems; but to be lopped from the great body of humanity, and decay like a black, amputated limb? My manhood refuses. The infinite hope within me generates another life, realizable in every moment of my natural existence, whose moments are not in time, whose perfect joys are not measured by variable duration. Thus every day can be to me full of immortality, and the matter of my corporeal decease full of indifference, as sure to be unconscious."

I think this attainment the first, fundamental to all the others. We console the child with a simple word about heaven. He is satisfied, and feels its truth. How to attain this deathlessness is the next problem whose solution he will ask of us. We point him to the plane on which he will roll; for our life is a series of revolutions,--no straight-forward sledding, but an acceleration by ideal weight and propulsion, through which our line becomes a circle, and our circle itself a living wheel of action, creating out of its mobile necessity a past and a future.

The halfness of the individual is literally shown in the division of s.e.x. The Platonic fancy runs into an anterior process, by which what was originally one has been made two. We will say that the two halves were never historically, though always ideally, one. Here Art comes to the a.s.sistance of Nature. The mere contrast of s.e.x does not lift society out of what is animal and slavish. The integrity of s.e.x relation is not to be found in a succession or simultaneity of mates, easily taken and as easily discarded. This great value of a perfected life is to be had only through an abiding and complete investment,--the relations of s.e.x lifted up to the communion of the divine, unified by the good faith of a lifetime, enriched by a true sharing of all experience. This august partners.h.i.+p is Marriage, one of the most difficult and delicate achievements of society. Too sadly does its mockery afflict us in these and other days. Either party, striving to dwarf the other, dwarfs itself. This mystic selfhood, inexpressible in literal phrases, is at once the supreme of Nature and the sublime of inst.i.tutions. The ideal human being is man and woman united on the ideal plane. The church long presented and represented this plane. The state is hereafter to second and carry out its suggestions. The ideal a.s.sembly, which we figure by the communion of the saints, is a coming together of men and women in the highest aims and views to which Humanity can be a party.

Pa.s.sing from immediate to projected consciousness, I can imagine expression itself to spring from want. The sense of the incompleteness of life in itself and in each of its acts calls for this effort to show, at least, what life should be,--to vindicate the shortcoming of action out of the fulness of speech. This that eats and sleeps is so little of the man! These processes are so little what he understands by life!

Listen; let him tell you what life means to him.

And so sound is differentiated into speech, and hammered into grammar, and built up into literature--all of whose creations are acoustic palaces of imagination. For the eye in reading is only the secondary sense: the written images the spoken word.

How the rhythm of the blood comes to be embodied in verse is more difficult to trace. But the justification of Poetry is obvious. When you have told the thing in prose, you have made it false by making it literal. Poesy lies a little to complete the truth which Honesty lacks skill to embody. Her artifices are subtle and wonderful. You glance sideways at the image, and you see it. You look it full in the face, and it disappears.

The plastic arts, too. This beautiful face commands me to paint from it a picture twice as beautiful. Its charm of Nature I cannot attain. My painting must not try for the edge of its flesh and blood forms, the evanescence of its color, the light and shadow of its play of feature.

But something which the beautiful face could not know of itself the artist knows of it. That deep interpretation of its ideal significance marks the true master, who is never a Chinese copyist. Some of the portraits that look down upon you from the walls of Rome and of Florence calmly explain to you a whole eternity. Their eyes seem to have seized it all, and to hold it beyond decay. This is what Art gives in the picture,--not simply what appears and disappears, but that which, being interpreted, abides with us.

Who shall say by what responsive depths the heights of architecture measure themselves? The uplifted arches mirror the introspective soul.

So profoundly did I think, and plot, and contrive! So loftily must my stone climax balance my cogitations! To such an amount of prayer allow so many aisles and altars. The pillars of cloisters image the brotherhood who walked in the narrow pa.s.sages; straight, slender, paired in steadfastness and beauty, there they stand, fair records of amity.

Columns of retrospect, let us hope that the souls they image did not look back with longing upon the scenes which they were called upon to forsake.

Critical belief asks roomy enclosures and windows unmasked by artificial impediments. It comes also to desire limits within which the voice of the speaker can reach all present. Men must look each other in the face, and construct prayer or sermon with the human alphabet. We are glad to see the n.o.ble structures of older times maintained and renewed; but we regret to see them imitated in our later day. (St. Peter's is, in all save dimension, a church of Protestant architecture--so is St. Paul's, of London.) The present has its own trials and agonies, its martyrdoms and deliverances. With it, the old litanies must sink to sleep; the more Christian of to-day efface the most Christian of yesterday. The very att.i.tude of saints.h.i.+p is changed. The practical piety of our time looks neither up nor down, but straight before it, at the men and women to be relieved, at the work to be done. Religion to-day is not "height nor depth nor any other creature," but G.o.d with us.

There is a mystic birth and Providence in the succession of the Arts; yet are they designed to dwell together, each needing the aid of all.

People often speak of sculpture as of an art purely and distinctively Grecian. But the Greeks possessed all the Arts, and more, too,--the substratum of democracy and the sublime of philosophy. No natural jealousy prevails in this happy household. The Arts are not wives, of whom one must die before another has proper place. They are sisters, whose close communion heightens the charm of all by the excellence of each. The Christian unanimity is as favorable to Art as to human society.

We may say that the Greeks attained a great perfection in sculpture, and have continued in this art to offer the models of the world.

When the great period of Italian art attained its full splendor, it seemed as if the frozen crystals of Greek sculpture had melted before the fire of Christian inspiration. But this transformation, like the transfiguration of Hindoo deities, did not destroy the anterior in its issue.

The soul of sculpture ripened into painting, but Sculpture, the beautiful mother, still lived and smiled upon her glowing daughter. See Michael Angelo studying the torso! See the silent galleries of the Vatican, where Form holds you in one room, Color presently detaining you in another! And what are our Raphaels, Angelos, making to-day? Be sure they are in the world, for the divine spirit of Art never leaves itself without a witness. But what is their n.o.ble task? They are moulding character, embodying the divine in human culture and in human inst.i.tutions. The Greek sculptures indicate and continue a fitting reverence for the dignity and beauty of the human form; but the reverence for the human soul which fills the world to-day is a holier and happier basis of Art. From it must come records in comparison with which obelisk and pyramid, triumphal arch and ghostly cathedral, shall seem the toys and school appliances of the childhood of the race.

To return to our original problem,--how shall we attain the proper human stature, how add the wanting half to the half which is given?

I answer: By labor and by faith, in which there is nothing accidental or arbitrary. The very world in which we live is but a form, whose spirit, breathing through Nature and Experience, slowly creates its own interpretation, adding a new testament to an old testament, lifting the veil between Truth and Mercy, clasping the mailed hand of Righteousness in the velvet glove of Peace.

The spirit of Religion is the immanence of the divine in the human, the image of the eternal in the transitory, of things infinite in things limited. I have heard endless discussions and vexed statements of how the world came out of chaos. From the Mosaic version to the last rationalistic theory, I have been willing to give ear to these. It is a subject upon which human ingenuity may exercise itself in its allowable leisure. One thing concerns all of us much more; _viz._, how to get heaven out of earth, good out of evil, instruction out of opportunity.

This is our true life work. When we have done all in this that life allows us, we have not done more than half, the other half lying beyond the pale struggle and the silent rest. Oh! when we shall reach that bound, whatever may be wanting, let not courage and hope forsake us.

Dante and Beatrice

DANTE and Beatrice--names linked together by holy affection and high art. Ary Scheffer has shown them to us as in a beatific vision,--the stern spirit which did not fear to confront the horrors of h.e.l.l held in a silken leash of meekness by the gracious one through whose intervention he pa.s.sed unscathed through fire and torment, bequeathing to posterity a record unique in the annals alike of literature and of humanity.

My first studies of the great poet are in the time long past, antedating even that middle term of life which was for him the starting-point of a new inspiration. Yet it seems to me that no part of my life, since that reading, has been without some echo of the "Divine Comedy" in my mind.

In the walk through h.e.l.l, I strangely believe. Its warnings still admonish me. I see the boat of Charon, with its mournful freight. I pa.s.s before the judgment seat of Midas. I see the souls tormented in hopeless flame. I feel the weight of the leaden cloaks. I shrink from the jar of the flying rocks, hurled as weapons. For me, dark Ugolino still feeds upon his enemy. Francesca still mates with her sad lover.

From this hopeless abyss, I emerge to the kindlier pain of Purgatory, whose end is almost Heaven. And of that blessed realm, my soul still holds remembrance--of its solemn joy, of its unfolding revelation. The vision of that mighty cross in which all the stars of the highest heaven range themselves is before me, on each fair cl.u.s.ter the word "Cristo"

outs.h.i.+ning all besides.

Among my dearest recollections is that of an Easter sermon devised by me for an ignorant black congregation in a far-off West Indian isle, in which I told of this vision of the cross, and tried to make it present to them. But this grateful remembrance which I have carried through so many years does not regard the poet alone. In the world's great goods, as in its great evils, a woman has her part. And this poem, which has been such a boon to humanity, has for its central inspiration the memory of a woman.

In the prologue, already we hear of her. It is she who sends her poet his poet-guide. When he shrinks from the painful progress which lies before him, and deems the companions.h.i.+p even of Virgil an insufficient pledge of safety, the words of his lady, repeated to him by his guide, restore his sinking courage, and give him strength for his immortal journey.

Here are those words of Beatrice, spoken to Virgil, and by him brought to Dante:--

O courteous shade of Mantua! thou whose fame Yet lives and shall live long as Nature lasts!

A friend, not of my fortune, but myself, On the wide desert in his road has met Hindrance so great that he through fear has turned.