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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12329 ***
+
+HEART OF MAN
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT 1899,
+
+BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+
+1899
+
+
+
+"Deep in the general heart of man"
+
+--WORDSWORTH
+
+
+
+
+
+TO THE MEMORY OF
+
+EUGENE MONTGOMERY
+
+MY FRIEND
+
+
+DEAR WAS HIS PRAISE, AND PLEASANT 'TWERE TO ME,
+  ON WHOSE FAR GRAVE TO-NIGHT THE DEEP SNOWS DRIFT;
+IT NEEDS NOT NOW; TOGETHER WE SHALL SEE
+  HOW HIGH CHRIST'S LILIES O'ER MAN'S LAURELS LIFT
+
+
+February 18, 1899.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+OF the papers contained in this volume
+"Taormina" was published in the _Century
+Magazine_; the others are new. The intention
+of the author was to illustrate how poetry, politics,
+and religion are the flowering of the same
+human spirit, and have their feeding roots in
+a common soil, "deep in the general heart of
+men."
+
+COLUMBIA COLLEGE,
+
+February 22, 1809.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+TAORMINA
+
+A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY
+
+DEMOCRACY
+
+THE RIDE
+
+
+
+
+TAORMINA
+
+
+I
+
+What should there be in the glimmering lights of a poor fishing-village
+to fascinate me? Far below, a mile perhaps, I behold them in the
+darkness and the storm like some phosphorescence of the beach; I see the
+pale tossing of the surf beside them; I hear the continuous roar borne
+up and softened about these heights; and this is night at Taormina.
+There is a weirdness in the scene--the feeling without the reality of
+mystery; and at evening, I know not why, I cannot sleep without stepping
+upon the terrace or peering through the panes to see those lights. At
+morning the charm has flown from the shore to the further heights above
+me. I glance at the vast banks of southward-lying cloud that envelop
+Etna, like deep fog upon the ocean; and then, inevitably, my eyes seek
+the double summit of the Taorminian mountain, rising nigh at hand a
+thousand feet, almost sheer, less than half a mile westward. The nearer
+height, precipice-faced, towers full in front with its crowning ruined
+citadel, and discloses, just below the peak, on an arm of rock toward
+its right, a hermitage church among the heavily hanging mists. The other
+horn of the massive hill, somewhat more remote, behind and to the old
+castle's left, exposes on its slightly loftier crest the edge of a
+hamlet. It, too, is cloud-wreathed--the lonely crag of Mola. Over these
+hilltops, I know, mists will drift and touch all day; and often they
+darken threateningly, and creep softly down the slopes, and fill the
+next-lying valley, and roll, and lift again, and reveal the flank of
+Monte d'Oro northward on the far-reaching range. As I was walking the
+other day, with one of these floating showers gently blowing in my face
+down this defile, I noticed, where the mists hung in fragments from the
+cloud out over the gulf, how like air-shattered arches they groined the
+profound ravine; and thinking how much of the romantic charm which
+delights lovers of the mountains and the sea springs from such Gothic
+moods of nature, I felt for a moment something of the pleasure of
+recognition in meeting with this northern and familiar element in the
+Sicilian landscape.
+
+One who has grown to be at home with nature cannot be quite a stranger
+anywhere on earth. In new lands I find the poet's old domain. It is not
+only from the land-side that these intimations of old acquaintance come.
+When my eyes leave, as they will, the near girdle of rainy mountain
+tops, and range home at last upon the sea, something familiar is there
+too,--that which I have always known,--but marvellously transformed and
+heightened in beauty and power. Such sudden glints of sunshine in the
+offing through unseen rents of heaven, as brilliant as in mid-ocean, I
+have beheld a thousand times, but here they remind me rather of
+cloud-lights on far western plains; and where have I seen those still
+tracts of changeful colour, iridescent under the silvery vapours of
+noon; or, when the weather freshens darkens, those whirlpools of pure
+emerald in the gray expanse of storm? They seem like memories of what
+has been, made fairer. One recurring scene has the same fascination for
+my eyes as the fishers' lights. It is a simple picture: only an arm of
+mist thrusting out from yonder lowland by the little cape, and making a
+near horizon, where, for half an hour, the waves break with great dashes
+of purple and green, deep and angry, against the insubstantial mole. All
+day I gaze on these sights of beauty until it seems that nature herself
+has taken on nobler forms forever more. When the mountain storm beats
+the pane at midnight, or the distant lightnings awake me in the hour
+before dawn, I can forget in what climate I am; but the oblivion is
+conscious, and half a memory of childhood nights: in an instant comes
+the recollection, "I am on the coasts, and these are the couriers, of
+Etna."
+
+The very rain is strange: it is charged with obscure personality; it is
+the habitation of a new presence, a storm-genius that I have never
+known; it in born of Etna, whence all things here have being and draw
+nourishment. It is not rain, but the rain-cloud, spread out over the
+valleys, the precipices, the sounding beaches, the ocean plain; it is
+not a storm, but a season. It does not rise with the moist Hyades, or
+ride with cloudy Orion in the Mediterranean night; it does not pass like
+Atlantic tempests on great world-currents: it remains. Its home is upon
+Etna; thence it comes and thither it returns; it gathers and disperses,
+lightens and darkens, blows and is silent, and though it suffer the
+clear north wind, or the west, to divide its veils with heaven, again it
+draws the folds together about its abode. It obeys only Etna, who sends
+it forth; then with clouds and thick darkness the mountain hides its
+face: it is the Sicilian winter.
+
+
+II
+
+But Etna does not withdraw continuously from its children even in this
+season. On the third day, at farthest, I was told it would bring back
+the sun; and I was not deceived. Two days it was closely wrapped in
+impenetrable gray; but the third morning, as I threw open my casement
+and stepped out upon the terrace, I saw it, like my native winter,
+expanding its broad flanks under the double radiance of dazzling clouds
+spreading from its extreme summit far out and upward, and of the
+snow-fields whose long fair drifts shone far down the sides. Villages
+and groves were visible, clothing all the lower zone, and between lay
+the plain. It seemed near in that air, but it is twelve miles away.
+From the sea-dipping base to the white cone the slope measures more than
+twenty miles, and as many more conduct the eye downward to the western
+fringe--a vast bulk; yet one does not think of its size as he gazes; so
+large a tract the eye takes in, but no more realizes than it does the
+distance of the stars. High up, forests peer through the ribbed snows,
+and extinct craters stud the frozen scene with round hollow mounds
+innumerable. A thousand features, but it remains one mighty mountain.
+How natural it seems for it to be sublime! It is the peer of the sea and
+of the sky. All day it flashed and darkened under the rack, and I
+rejoiced in the sight, and knew why Pindar called it the pillar of
+heaven; and at night it hooded itself once more with the winter cloud.
+
+
+III
+
+Would you see this land as I see it? Come then, since Etna gives a fair,
+pure morning, up over the shelving bank to the great eastern spur of
+Taormina, where stood the hollow theatre, now in ruins, and above it the
+small temple with which the Greeks surmounted the highest point. It is
+such a spot as they often chose for their temples; but none ever
+commanded a more noble prospect. The far-shining sea, four or five
+hundred feet below, washes the narrow, precipitous descent, and on each
+hand is disclosed the whole of that side of Sicily which faces the
+rising sun. To the left and northward are the level straits, with the
+Calabrian mountains opposite, thinly sown with light snow, as far as the
+Cape of Spartivento, distinctly seen, though forty miles away; in front
+expands the open sea; straight to the south runs the indented coast, bay
+and beach, point after point, to where, sixty miles distant, the great
+blue promontory of Syracuse makes far out. On the land-side Etna fills
+the south with its lifted snow-fields, now smoke-plumed at the languid
+cone; and thence, though lingeringly, the eye ranges nearer over the
+intervening plain to the well-wooded ridge of Castiglione, and, next, to
+the round solitary top of Monte Maestra, with its long shoreward
+descent, and comes to rest on the height of Taormina overhead, with its
+hermitage of Santa Maria della Rocca, its castle, and Mola. Yet further
+off, at the hand of the defile, looms the barren summit of Monte
+Venere, with Monte d'Oro and other hills in the foreground, and
+northward, peak after peak, travels the close Messina range.
+
+A landscape of sky, sea, plain, and mountains, great masses majestically
+grouped, grand in contour! Yet to call it sublime does not render the
+impression it makes upon the soul. Sublime, indeed, it is at times, and
+dull were he whose heart from hour to hour awe does not visit here; but
+constantly the scene is beautiful, and yields that delight which dwells
+unwearied with the soul. One may be seldom touched to the exaltation
+which sublimity implies, but to take pleasure in loveliness is the habit
+of one who lives as heaven made him; and what characterizes this
+landscape and sets it apart is the permanence of its beauty, its
+perpetual and perfect charm through every change of light and weather,
+and in every quarter of its heaven and earth, felt equally whether the
+eye sweeps the great circuit with its vision, or pauses on the nearer
+features, for they, too, are wonderfully composed. This hill of my
+station falls down for half a mile with broken declivities, and then
+becomes the Cape of Taormina, and takes its steep plunge into the sea.
+Yonder picturesque peninsula to its left, diminished by distance and
+strongly relieved on the purple waves, is the Cape of Sant' Andrea, and
+beside it a cluster of small islands lies nearer inshore. On the other
+side, to the right of our own cape, shines our port, with Giardini, the
+village of my fishers' lights, the beach with its boats, and the white
+main road winding in the narrow level between the bluffs and the sands.
+The port is guarded on the south by the peninsula of Schiso, where
+ancient Naxos stood; and just beyond, the river Alcantara cuts the plain
+and flows to the sea. At the other extremity, northward of Sant' Andrea,
+is the cove of Letojanni, with its village, and then, perhaps eight
+miles away, the bold headland of Sant' Alessio closes the shore view
+with a mass of rock that in former times completely shut off the land
+approach hither, there being no passage over it, and none around it
+except by the strip of sand when the sea was quiet. All this ground,
+with in several villages, from Sant' Alessio to the Alcantara, and
+beyond into the plain, was anciently the territory of Taormina.
+
+The little city itself lies on its hill, between the bright shore and
+the gray old castle, on a crescent-like terrace whose two horns jut out
+into the air like capes. The northern one of these is my station, the
+site of the old temple and the amphitheatre; the southern one opposite
+shows the facade of the Dominican convent; and the town circles between,
+possibly a mile from spur to spur. Here and there long broken lines of
+the ancient wall, black with age, stride the hillside. A round Gothic
+tower, built as if for warfare, a square belfry, a ruined gateway, stand
+out among the humble roofs. Gardens of orange and lemon trees gleam like
+oblong parks, principally on the upper edge toward the great rock. If
+you will climb, as I have done, the craggy plateau close by, which
+overhangs the theatre and obstructs the view of the extreme end of the
+town at this point, you will see from its level face, rough with the
+plants of the prickly-pear, a cross on an eminence just below, and the
+gate toward Messina.
+
+The face of the country is bare. Here beneath, where the main ravine of
+Taormina cuts into the earth between the two spurs of the city, are
+terraces of fruit trees and vegetables, and, wherever the naked rock
+permits, similar terraces are seen on the castle hill and every less
+steep slope, looking as if they would slide off. Almond and olive trees
+cling and climb all over the hillsides, but their boughs do not clothe
+the country. It is gray to look at, because of the masses of natural
+rock everywhere cropping out, and also from the substructure of the
+terraces, which, seen from below, present banks of the same gray stone.
+The only colour is given by the fan-like plants of the prickly-pear,
+whose flat, thick-lipped, pear-shaped leaves, stuck with thorns, and
+often extruding their reddish fruit from the edge, lend a dull green to
+the scene. This plant grows everywhere, like wild bush, to a man's
+height, covering the otherwise infertile soil, and the goats crop it. A
+closer view shows patches of wild candytuft and marigolds, like those at
+my feet, and humble purple and blue blossoms hang from crannies or run
+over the stony turf; but these are not strong enough to be felt in the
+prevalent tones. The blue of ocean, the white of Etna, the gray of
+Taormina--this is the scene.
+
+Three ways connect the town with the lower world. The modern carriage
+road runs from the Messina gate, and, quickly dropping behind the
+northern spur, winds in great serpentine loops between the Campo Santo
+below and old wayside tombs, Roman and Arabic, above, until it slowly
+opens on the southern outlook, and, after two miles of tortuous courses
+above the lovely coves, comes out on the main road along the coast. The
+second way starts from the other end of the town, the gate toward Etna,
+and goes down more precipitously along the outer flank of the southern
+spur, with Mola (here shifted to the other side of the castle hill)
+closing the deep ravine behind; and at last it empties into the torrent
+of Selina, in whose bed it goes on to Giardini. The third, or short way,
+leaps down the great hollow of the spurs, and yet keeps to a ridge
+between the folds of the ravine which it discloses on each side, with
+here and there a contadino cutting rock on the steep hillsides, or a
+sportsman wandering with his dog; or often at twilight, from some coign
+of vantage, you may see the goats trooping home across the distant sands
+by the sea. It debouches through great limestone quarries on the main
+road. There, seen from below, Taormina comes out--a cape, a town, and a
+hill. It is, in fact, a long, steep, broken ridge, shaped like a wedge;
+one end of the broad lace dips into the sea, the other, high on land,
+exposes swelling bluffs; its back bears the town, its point lifts the
+castle.
+
+This is the Taorminian land. What a quietude hangs over it! How poor,
+how mean, how decayed the little town now looks amid all this silent
+beauty of enduring nature! It could not have been always so. This
+theatre at my feet, hewn in the living rock, flanked at each end by
+great piers of massive Roman masonry, and showing broken columns thick
+strewn in the midst of the broad orchestra, tells of ancient splendour
+and populousness. The narrow stage still stands, with nine columns in
+position in two groups; part are shattered half-way up, part are yet
+whole, and in the gap between the groups shines the lovely sea with the
+long southern coast, set in the beauty of these ruins as in a frame.
+Here Attic tragedies were once played, and Roman gladiators fought. The
+enclosure is large, much over a hundred yards in diameter. It held many
+thousands. Whence came the people to fill it? I noticed by the
+roadside, as I came up, Saracenic tombs. I saw in the first square I
+entered those small Norman windows, with the lovely pillars and the
+round arch. On the ancient church I have observed the ornamentation and
+mouldings of Byzantine art. The Virgin with her crown, over the
+fountain, was paltry enough, but I saw that this was originally a
+mermaid's statue. A water-clock here, a bath there; in all quarters I
+come on some slight, poor relics of other ages; and always in the faces
+of the people, where every race seems to have set its seal, I see the
+ruins of time. These echoes are not all of far-off things. That lookout
+below was a station of English cannon, I am told; and the bluff over
+Giardini, beyond the torrent, takes its name from the French tents
+pitched there long ago. The old walls can be traced for five miles, but
+now the circuit is barely two. I wonder, as I go down to my room in the
+Casa Timeo, what was the past of this silent town, now so shrunken from
+its ancient limits; and who, I ask myself, Timeo?
+
+IV
+
+I thought when I first saw the inaccessibility of this mountain-keep
+that I should have no walks except upon the carriage road; but I find
+there are paths innumerable. Leap the low walls where I will, I come on
+unsuspected ways broad enough for man and beast. They ran down the
+hillsides in all directions, and are ever dividing as they descend, like
+the branching streams of a waterfall. Some are rudely paved, and hemmed
+by low walls; others are mere footways on the natural rock and earth,
+often edging precipices, and opening short cross-cuts in the most
+unexpected places, not without a suggestion of peril, to make eye and
+foot alert, and to infuse a certain wild pleasure into the exercise. The
+multiplicity of these paths is a great boon to the lover of beauty, for
+here one charm of Italian landscape exists in perfection. Every few
+moments the scene rearranges itself in new combinations, as on the
+Riviera or at Amalfi, and makes an endless succession of lovely
+pictures. The infinite variety of these views is not to be imagined
+unless it has been witnessed; and besides the magic wrought by mere
+change of position, there is also a constant transformation of tone and
+colour from hour to hour, as the lights and shadows vary, and from day
+to day, with the unsettled weather.
+
+Yet who could convey to black-and-white speech the sense of beauty which
+is the better part of my rambles? It is only to say that here I went up
+and down on the open hillsides, and there I followed the ridges or kept
+the cliff-line above the fair coves; that now I dropped down into the
+vales, under the shade of olive and lemon branches, and wound by the
+gushing streams through the orchards. In every excursion I make some
+discovery, and bring home some golden store for memory. Yesterday I
+found the olive slopes over Letojanni--beautiful old gnarled trees, such
+as I have never seen except where the nightingales sing by the eastern
+shore of Spezzia. I did not doubt when I was told that those orchards
+yield the sweetest oil in the world. It was the lemon harvest, and
+everywhere were piles of the pale yellow fruit heaped like apples under
+the slender trees, with a gatherer here and there; for this is always a
+landscape of solitary figures. To-day I found the little beach of San
+Nicolo, not far from the same place. I kept inland, going down the
+hollow by the Campo Santo, where there is a cool, gravelly stream in a
+dell that is like a nook in the Berkshire hills, and then along the
+upland on the skirts of Monte d'Oro, till by a sharp turn seaward I came
+out through a marble quarry where men were working with what seemed slow
+implements on the gray or party-coloured stone. I passed through the
+rather silent group, who stopped to look at me, and a short distance
+beyond I crossed the main road, and went down by a stream to the shore.
+I found it strewn with seaside rock, as a hundred other beaches are, but
+none with rocks like these. They were marble, red or green, or shot with
+variegated hues, with many a soft gray, mottled or wavy-lined; and the
+sea had polished them. Very lovely they were, and shone where the low
+wave gleamed over them. I had wondered at the profusion of marbles in
+the Italian churches, but I had not thought to find them wild on a
+lonely Sicilian beach. Once or twice already I had seen a block rosy in
+the torrent-beds, and it had seemed a rare sight; but here the whole
+shore was piled and inlaid with the beautiful stone.
+
+I have learned now that Taormina is famous for these marbles. Over
+thirty varieties were sent to the Vienna Exhibition, and they won the
+prize. I got this information from the keeper of the Communal Library,
+with whom I have made friends. He recalls to my memory the ship that
+Hieron of Syracuse gave to Ptolemy, wonderful for its size. It had
+twenty banks of rowers, three decks, and space to hold a library, a
+gymnasium, gardens with trees in them, stables, and baths, and towers
+for assault, and it was provided by Archimedes with many ingenious
+mechanical devices. The wood of sixty ordinary galleys was required for
+its construction. I describe it because its architect, Filea, was a
+Taorminian by birth, and esteemed in his day second only to Archimedes
+in his skill in mechanics; and in lining the baths of this huge galley
+he used these beautiful Taorminian marbles. My friend the librarian told
+me also, with his Sicilian burr, of the wine of Taormina, the Eugenaean,
+which was praised by Pliny, and used at the sacred feasts of Rome; but
+now, he said sadly, the grape had lost its flavour.
+
+The sugar-cane, which nourished in later times, is also gone. But the
+mullet that is celebrated in Juvenal's verse, and the lampreys that once
+went to better Alexandrian luxury, are still the spoil of the fishers,
+the shrimps are delicate to the palate, and the marbles will endure as
+long as this rock itself. The rock lasts, and the sea. The most ancient
+memory here is of them, for this is the shore of Charybdis. It is stated
+in Sallust and other Latin authors, as well as by writers throughout the
+Middle Ages, that all which was swallowed up in the whirlpool of the
+straits, after being carried beneath the sea for miles, was finally cast
+up on the beach beneath the hill of Taormina.
+
+The rock and the sea were finely blended in one of my first discoveries
+in the land, and in consequence they have seemed, to my imagination,
+more closely united here than is common. On a stormy afternoon I had
+strolled down the main road, and was walking toward Letojanni. I came,
+after a little, to a great cliff that overhung the sea, with room for
+the road to pass beneath; and as I drew near I heard a strange sound, a
+low roaring, a deep-toned reverberation, that seemed not to come from
+the breaking waves, loud on the beach: it was a more solemn, a more
+piercing and continuous sound. It was from the rock itself. The grand
+music of the rolling sea beneath was taken up by the hollowed cliff, and
+reechoed with a mighty volume of sound from invisible sources. It seemed
+the voice of the rock, as if by long sympathy and neighbourhood in that
+lonely place the cliff were interpenetrated with the sea-music, and had
+become resonant of itself with those living harmonies heard only in the
+Psalmist's song. It seemed a lyre for the centuries; and I thought over
+how many a conqueror, how many a race, that requiem had been lifted upon
+it as they passed to their death on this shore. I came back slowly in
+the twilight, and was roused from my reverie by the cold wind breathing
+on me as I reached the top of the hill, pure and keen and frosted like
+the bright December breezes of my own land. It was the kiss of Etna on
+my cheek.
+
+
+V
+
+Will you hear the legend of Taormina?--for in these days I dare not call
+it history. Noble and romantic it is, and age-long. I had not hoped to
+recover it; but my friend the librarian has brought me books in which
+patriotic Taorminians have written the story celebrating their dear
+city. I was touched by the simplicity with which he informed me that the
+town authorities had been unwilling to waste on a passing stranger these
+little paper-bound memorials of their city. "But," he said, "I told them
+I had given you my word." So I possess these books with a pleasant
+association of Sicilian honour, and I have read them with real interest.
+As I turned the pages I was reminded once more how impossible it is to
+know the past. The past survives in human institutions, in the
+temperament of races, and in the creations of ideal art; but only in the
+last is it immortal. Custom and law are for an age: race after race is
+pushed to the sea, and dies; only epic and saga and psalm have one date
+with man, one destiny with the breath of his lips, one silence at the
+last with them. Least of all does the past survive in the living
+memories of men. Here and there the earth cherishes a coin or a statue,
+the desert embalms some solitary city, a few leagues of rainless air
+preserve on rock and column the lost speech of Nile; so the mind of man
+holds in dark places, or lifts to living fame, no more than ruins and
+fragments of the life that was. I have been a diligent reader of books
+in my time; and here in an obscure corner of the Old-World I find a
+narrative studded with noble names, not undistinguished by stirring
+deeds, and, save for the great movements of history and a few shadowy
+figures, it is all fresh to my mind. I have looked on three thousand
+years of human life upon this hill; something of what they have yielded,
+if you will have patience with such a tract of time, I will set down.
+
+My author is Monsignore Giovanni di Giovanni, a Taorminian, who
+flourished in the last century. He was a man of vast erudition, and
+there is in his pages the Old-World learning which delights me. He was
+born before the days of historic doubt. He tells a true story. To allege
+an authority is with him to prove a fact, and to cite all writers who
+repeat the original source is to render truth impregnable. Rarely does
+he show any symptom of the modern malady of incredulity. _Scripta
+littera_ is reason enough, unless the fair fame of his city chances to
+be at stake. He was really learned, and I do wrong to seem to diminish
+his authority. He was a patient investigator of manuscripts, and did
+important service to Sicilian history. The simplicity I have alluded to
+affects mainly the ecclesiastical part of his narrative. A few
+statements also in regard to the prehistoric period might disturb the
+modern mind, but I own to finding in them the charm of lost things. In
+my mental provinces I welcome the cave-man, the flint-maker, the
+lake-dweller, and all their primitive tribes to the abode of science;
+but I feel them to be intruders in my antiquity. I was brought up on
+quite other chronologies, and I still like a history that begins with
+the flood. I will not, however, ask any one of more serious mind to go
+back with Monsignore and myself to the era of autochthonous Sicily, when
+the children of the Cyclops inhabited the land, and Demeter in her
+search for Proserpina wept on this hill, and Charybdis lay stretched out
+under these bluffs watching the sea. It is precise enough to say that
+Taormina began eighty years before the Trojan War. Very dimly, it must
+be acknowledged, the ancient Sicani are seen arriving and driven, like
+all doomed races, south and west out of the land, and in their place the
+Siculi flourish, and a Samnite colony voyages over the straits from
+Italy and joins them. Here for three centuries these sparse communities
+lived along these heights in fear of the sea pirates, and warred
+confusedly from their mainhold on Mount Taurus, or the Bull, so called
+because the two summits of the mountain from a distance resemble a
+bull's horns; and they left no other memory of themselves.
+
+Authentic history begins toward the end of the eighth century before our
+era. It is a bright burst; for then, down by yonder green-foaming rock,
+the young Greek mariners leaped on the strand. This was their first
+land-fall in Sicily; that rock, their Plymouth; and here, doubtless, the
+alarmed mountaineers stood in their fastness and watched the bearers of
+the world's torch, and knew them not, bringing daybreak to the dark
+island for evermore, but fought, as barbarism will, against the light,
+and were at last made friends with it--a chance that does not always
+befall. Then quickly rose the lowland city of Naxos, and by the river
+sprang up the temple to Guiding Apollo, the earliest shrine of the
+Sicilian Greeks, where they came ever afterward to pray for a prosperous
+voyage when they would go across the sea, homeward. They were from the
+first a fighting race; and decade by decade the cloud of war grew
+heavier on each horizon, southward from Syracuse and northward from
+Messina, and swords beat fiercer and stronger with the rivalries of
+growing states--battles dimly discerned now. A single glimpse flashes
+out on the page of Thucydides. He relates that when once the Messenians
+threatened Naxos with overthrow, the mountaineers rushed down from the
+heights in great numbers to the relief of their Greek neighbours, and
+routed the enemy and slew many. This is the first bloodstain, clear and
+bright, on our Taorminian land. Shall I add, from the few relics of that
+age, that Pythagoras, on the journey he undertook to establish the
+governments of the Sicilian cities, wrought miracles here, curing a mad
+lover of his frenzy by music, and being present on this hill and at
+Metaponto the same day--a thing not to be done without magic? But at
+last we see plainly Alcibiades coasting along below, and the ill-fated
+Athenians wintering in the port, and horsemen going out from Naxos
+toward Etna on the side of Athens in the death-struggle of her glory.
+And then, suddenly, after the second three hundred years, all is over,
+the Greek city betrayed, sacked, destroyed, Naxos trodden out under the
+foot of Dionysius the tyrant.
+
+Other fortune awaited him a few years later when he came again, and our
+city (which, one knows not when, had been walled and fortified) stood
+its first historic siege. Dionysius arrived in the dead of winter. Snow
+and ice--I can hardly credit it--whitened and roughened these ravines, a
+new ally to the besieged; but the tyrant thought to betray them by a
+false security in such a season. On a bitter night, when clouds hooded
+the hilltop, and mists rolled low about its flanks, he climbed
+unobserved, with his forces, up these precipices, and gained two outer
+forts which gave footways to the walls; but the town roused at the sound
+of arms and the cries of the guards, and came down to the fray, and
+fought until six hundred of the foe fell dead, others with wounds
+surrendered, and the rest fled headlong, with Dionysius among them, hard
+pressed, and staining the snow with his blood as he went. This was the
+city's first triumph.
+
+Not only with brave deeds did Taormina begin, but, as a city should,
+with a great man. He was really great, this Andromachus. Do you not
+remember him out of Plutarch, and the noble words that have been his
+immortal memory among men? "This man was incomparably the best of all
+those that bore sway in Sicily at that time, governing his citizens
+according to law and justice, and openly professing an aversion and
+enmity to all tyrants." Was the defeat of Dionysius the first of his
+youthful exploits, as some say? I cannot determine; but it is certain
+that he gathered the surviving exiles of Naxos, and gave them this
+plateau to dwell upon, and it was no longer called Mount Taurus, as had
+been the wont, but Tauromenium, or the Abiding-place of the Bull. A few
+years later Andromachus performed the signal action of his life by
+befriending Timoleon, as great a character, in my eyes, as Plutarch
+records the glory of. Timoleon had set out from Corinth, at the summons
+of his Greek countrymen, to restore the liberty of Syracuse, then
+tyrannized over by the second Dionysius; and because Andromachus, in his
+stronghold of Taormina, hated tyranny, Plutarch says, he "gave Timoleon
+leave to muster up his troops there and to make that city the seat of
+war, persuading the inhabitants to join their arms with the Corinthian
+forces and to assist them in the design of delivering Sicily." It was on
+our beach that Timoleon disembarked, and from our city he went forth to
+the conquest foretold, by the wreath that fell upon his head as he
+prayed at Delphi, and by the prophetic fire that piloted his ship over
+the sea. The Carthaginians came quickly after him from Reggio, where he
+had eluded them, for they were in alliance with the tyrant; and from
+their vessels they parleyed with Andromachus in the port. With an
+insolent gesture, the envoy, raising his hand, palm up, and turning it
+lightly over, said that even so, and with such ease, would he overturn
+the little city; and Andromachus, mocking his hand-play, answered that
+if he did not leave the harbour, even so would he upset his galley. The
+Carthaginians sailed away. The city remained firm-perched. Timoleon
+prospered, brought back liberty to Syracuse, ruled wisely and nobly, and
+gave to Sicily those twenty years of peace which were the flower of her
+Greek annals. Then, we must believe, rose the little temple on our
+headland, the Greek theatre where the tongue of Athens lived, the
+gymnasium where the youths grew fair and strong. Then Taormina struck
+her coins: Apollo with the laurel, with the lyre, with the grape;
+Dionysus with the ivy, and Zeus with the olive; for the gods and temples
+of the Naxians had become ours, and were religiously cherished; and with
+the rest was struck a coin with the Minotaur, our symbol. But of
+Andromachus, the founder of the well-built and fairly adorned Greek city
+that then rose, we hear no more--a hero, I think, one of the true breed
+of the founders of states. But alas for liberty! A new tyrant,
+Agathocles, was soon on the Syracusan throne, and he won this city by
+friendly professions, only to empty it by treachery and murder; and he
+drove into exile Timaeus, the son of Andromachus. Timaeus? He,
+evidently, of my Casa Timeo. I know him now, the once famed historian
+whom Cicero praises as the most erudite in history of all writers up to
+his time, most copious in facts and various in comment, not unpolished
+in style, eloquent, and distinguished by terse and charming expression.
+Ninety years he lived in the Greek world, devoted himself to history,
+and produced many works, now lost. The ancient writers read him, and
+from their criticism it is clear that he was marked by a talent for
+invective, was given to sharp censure, and loved the bitter part of
+truth. He introduced precision and detail into his art, and is credited
+with being the first to realize the importance of chronology and to seek
+exactness in it. He never saw again his lovely birthplace, and I easily
+forgive to the exile and the son of Andromachus the vigour with which he
+depicted the crimes of Agathocles and others of the tyrants. In our
+city, meanwhile, the Greek genius waning to its extinction, Tyndarion
+ruled; and in his time Pyrrhus came hither to repulse the ever invading
+power of Carthage. But he was little more than a shedder of blood; he
+accomplished nothing, and I name him only as one of the figures of our
+beach.
+
+The day of Greece was gone; but those two clouds of war still hung on
+the horizon, north and south, with ever darker tempest. Instead of
+Syracuse and Messina, Carthage and the new name of Rome now sent them
+forth, and over this island they encountered. Our city, true to its
+ancient tradition, became Rome's ever faithful ally, as you may read in
+the poem of Silius Italicus, and was dignified by treaty with the title
+of a confederate city; and of this fact Cicero reminded the judges when
+in that famous trial he thundered against Verres, the spoiler of our
+Sicilian province, and with the other cities defended this of ours,
+whose people had signalized their hatred of the Roman praetor by
+overthrowing his statue in the market-place and sparing the pedestal, as
+they said, to be an eternal memorial of his infamy. From the Roman age,
+however, I take but two episodes, for I find that to write this town's
+history were to write the history of half the Mediterranean world. When
+the slaves rose in the Servile War, they intrenched themselves on this
+hill, and in their hands the city bore its siege by the Roman consul as
+hardily as was ever its custom. Cruel they were, no doubt, and
+vindictive. With horror Monsignore relates that they were so resolved
+not to yield that, starving, they ate their children, their wives, and
+one another; and he rejoices when they were at last betrayed and
+massacred, and this disgrace was wiped away. I hesitate. I cannot feel
+regret when those whom man has made brutal answer brutally to their
+oppressors. I have enough of the old Taorminian spirit to remember that
+the slaves, too, fought for liberty. I am sorry for those penned and
+dying men; their famine and slaughter in these walls were least horrible
+for their part in the catastrophe, if one looks through what they did to
+what they were, and remembers that the civilization they violated had
+stripped them of humanity. After the slave, I make room--for whom else
+than imperial Augustus? Off this shore he defeated Sextus Pompey, and he
+thought easily to subdue the town above when he summoned it. But Taormina
+was always a loyal little place, and it would not yield without a siege.
+Then Augustus, sitting down before it, prayed in our temple of Guiding
+Apollo that he might have the victory; and as he walked by the beach
+afterward a fish threw itself out of the water before him--an omen,
+said the diviners, that even so the Pompeians, who held the seas, after
+many turns of varied fortune, should be brought to his feet. Pompey
+returned with a fleet, and in these waters again the battle was fought
+and Augustus lost it, and the siege was raised. But when a third time
+the trial of naval strength was essayed, and the cause of the Pompeians
+ruined, Augustus remembered the city that had defied him, sent its
+inhabitants into exile, and planted a Roman colony in its place. Latin
+was now the language here. The massive grandeur of Roman architecture
+replaced the old Greek structures. The amphitheatre was enlarged and
+renewed in its present form, villas of luxury bordered the coasts as in
+Campania, and coins were struck in the Augustan name.
+
+The Roman domination in its turn slowly moved to its fall; and where
+should the new age begin more fitly than in this city of beginnings? As
+of old the Greek torch first gleamed here, here first on Sicilian soil
+was the Cross planted. The gods of Olympus had many temples about the
+hill slopes, shrines of venerable antiquity even in those days; but if
+the monkish chronicles be credited, the new faith signalized its victory
+rather over three strange idolatries,--the worship of Falcone, of
+Lissone, and of Scamandro, a goddess. I refuse to believe that the
+citizens were accustomed to sacrifice three youths annually to Falcone;
+and as for the other two deities, little is known of them except that
+their destruction marked the advent of the young religion. Pancrazio was
+the name of him who was destined to be our patron saint through the
+coming centuries. He was born in Antioch, and when a child of three
+years, going with his father into Judea, he had seen the living Christ;
+now, grown into manhood, he was sent by St. Peter to spread the gospel
+in the isles of the sea. He disembarked on our beach, and forthwith
+threw Lissone's image into the waves, and with it a holy dragon which
+was coiled about it like a garment and was fed with sacrifices; and he
+shattered with his cross the great idol Scamandro: and so Taormina
+became Christian, welcomed St. Peter on his way to Rome, and entered on
+the long new age. It was here, as elsewhere, the age of
+martyrs--Pancrazio first, and after him Geminiano, guided hither with
+his mother by an angel; and then San Nicone, who suffered with his one
+hundred and ninety-nine brother monks, and Sepero and Corneliano with
+their sixty; the age of monks--Luca, who fled from his bridal to live on
+Etna, with fasts, visions, and prophecies; and, later, simple-minded
+Daniele, the follower of St. Elia, of whom there is more to be recorded;
+the age of bishops, heard in Roman councils and the palace of Byzantium,
+of whom two only are of singular interest--Zaccaria, who was deprived,
+evidently the ablest in mind and policy of all the succession, once a
+great figure in the disputes of East and West; and Procopio, whom the
+Saracens slew, for the Crescent now followed the Cross.
+
+The ancient war-cloud had again gathered out of Africa. The Saracens
+were in the land, and every city had fallen except Syracuse and
+Taormina. For sixty years the former held out, and our city for yet
+another thirty, the sole refuge of the Christians. Signs of the
+impending destruction were first seen by that St. Elia already
+mentioned, who wandered hither, and was displeased by the manners and
+morals of the citizens. I am sorry to record that Monsignore believed
+his report, for only here is there mention of such a matter. "The
+citizens," says my author, "lived in luxury and pleasure not becoming to
+a state of war. They saw on all sides the fields devastated, houses
+burnt, wealth plundered, cities given to the flames, friends and
+companions killed or reduced to slavery, yet was there no vice, no sin,
+that did not rule unpunished among them." Therefore the saint preached
+the woe to come, and, turning to the governor, Constantine Patrizio, in
+his place in the cathedral, he appealed to him to restrain his people.
+"Let the philosophy of the Gentiles," he exclaimed, "be your shame.
+Epaminondas, that illustrious _condottiere_, strictly restrained himself
+from intemperance, from every lust, every allurement of pleasure. So,
+also, Scipio, the Roman leader, was valorous through the same continence
+as Epaminondas; and therefore they brought back signal victory, one over
+the Spartans, the other over the Carthaginians, and both erected
+immortal trophies." He promised them mercy with repentance, but ended
+threateningly: "So far as in me lies I have clearly foretold to you all
+that has been divinely revealed to me. If you believe my words, like
+the penitents of Nineveh, you shall find mercy; if you despise my
+admonitions, bound and captive you shall be reduced to the worst
+slavery." He prophesied yet more in private. He went to the house of a
+noble citizen, Crisione, who esteemed him as a father, and, lying in
+bed, he said to him: "Do you see, Crisione, the bed in which I now lie?
+In this same bed shall Ibrahim sleep, hungry for human blood, and the
+walls of the rooms shall see many of the most distinguished persons of
+this city all together put to the edge of the sword." Then he left the
+house and went to the square in the centre of the city, and, standing
+there, he lifted his garments above the knee. Whereupon simple Daniele,
+who always followed him about, marvelling asked, "What does this thing
+mean, father?" The old man had his answer ready, "Now I see rivers of
+blood running, and these proud and magnificent buildings which you see
+exalted shall be destroyed even to the foundations by the Saracens." And
+the monk fled from the doomed city, like a true prophet, and went
+overseas.
+
+The danger was near, but perhaps not more felt than it must always have
+been where the prayer for defence against the Saracens had gone up for a
+hundred years in the cathedral. The governor, however, had taken pains
+to add to the strength of the city by strong fortifications upon Mola.
+Ahulabras came under the walls, but gave over the ever unsuccessful
+attempt to take the place, and went on to ruin Reggio beyond the
+straits. When it was told to his father Ibrahim that Tabermina, as the
+Saracens called it, had again been passed by, he cried out upon his son,
+"He is degenerate, degenerate! He took his nature from his mother and
+not from his father; for, had he been born from me, surely his sword
+would not have spared the Christians!" Therefore he recalled him to the
+home government, and came himself and sat down before the city. The
+garrison was small and insufficient, but, says my author, following old
+chronicles, "youths, old men, and children, without distinction of age,
+sex, or condition, fearing outrage and all that slavery would expose
+them to, all spontaneously offered themselves to fight in this holy war
+even to death: with such courage did love of country and religious zeal
+inspire the citizens." Ibrahim had other weapons than the sword. He
+first corrupted the captains of the Greek fleet, who were afterward
+condemned for the treason at Byzantium. Then, all being ready, he
+promised some Ethiopians of his army, who are described as of a
+ferocious nature and harsh aspect, that he would give them the city for
+booty, besides other gifts, if they would devote themselves to the bold
+undertaking. The catastrophe deserves to be told in Monsignore's own
+words:
+
+"This people, accustomed to rapine, allured by the riches of the
+Taorminians and the promises of the king, with the aid of the traitors
+entered unexpectedly into the city, and with bloody swords and mighty
+cries and clamour assailed the citizens. Meanwhile King Ibrahim, having
+entered with all his army by a secret gate under the fortress of Mola,
+thence called the gate of the Saracens, raged against the citizens with
+such unexpected and cruel slaughter that not only neither the weakness
+of sex, nor tender years, nor reverence for hoary age, but not even the
+abundance of blood that like torrents flowed down the ways, touched to
+pity that ferocious heart. The soldiers, masters of the beautiful and
+wealthy city, divided among them the riches and goods of the citizens
+according as to each one the lot fell; they levelled to the ground the
+magnificent buildings, public or private, sacred or profane, all that
+were proudest for amplitude, construction, and ornament; and that not
+even the ruins of ancient splendour should remain, all that had survived
+they gave to the flames."
+
+This city, which the Saracens destroyed, is the one the Taorminians
+cherish as the culmination of their past. In the Greek, the Roman, and
+the early Christian ages it had flourished, as both its ruins and its
+history attest, and much must have yet survived from those times; while
+its station as the only Christian stronghold in the island would
+naturally have attracted wealth hither for safety. In this first sack of
+the Saracens, the ancient city must have perished, but the destruction
+could hardly have been so thorough as is represented, since some of the
+churches themselves, in their present state, show Byzantine workmanship.
+
+There remains one bloody and characteristic episode to Ibrahim's
+victory. The king, says the Arab chronicler, was pious and naturally
+compassionate, but on this occasion he forgot his usual mildness. In the
+midst of fire and blood he ordered the soldiers to search the caverns of
+the hills, and they dragged forth many prisoners, among whom was the
+Bishop Procopio. The king spoke to him gently and nobly, "Because you
+are wise and old, O Bishop, I exhort you with soft words to obey my
+advice, and to have foresight for your own safety and that of your
+companions; otherwise you shall suffer what your fellow-citizens have
+suffered from me. If you will embrace my laws, and deny the Christian
+religion, you shall have the second place after me, and shall be more
+dear to me than all the Agarenes." The prelate only smiled. Then, full
+of wrath, the king said: "Do you smile while you are my prisoner? Know
+you not in whose presence you are?" "I smile truly," came the answer,
+"because I see you are inspired by a demon who puts these words into
+your mouth." Furious, the king called to his attendants, "Quick, break
+open his breast, tear out his heart, that we may see and understand the
+secrets of his mind." While the command was being executed, Procopio
+reproved the king and comforted his companions. "The tyrant, swollen
+with rage, and grinding his teeth," says the narrative, "barbarously
+offered him the torn-out heart that he might eat it." Then he bade them
+strike off the bishop's head (who, we are told, was already half dead),
+and also the heads of his companions, and to burn the bodies all
+together. And as St. Pancrazio of old had thrown the holy dragon into
+the sea, so now were his own ashes scattered to the winds of heaven; and
+Ibrahim, having accomplished his work, departed.
+
+Some of the citizens, however, had survived, and among them Crisione,
+the host of St. Elia. He went to bear the tidings to the saint; and
+being now assured of the gift of prophecy possessed by the holy man,
+asked him to foretell his future. He met the customary fate of the
+curious in such things. "I foresee," said the discomfortable saint,
+"that within a few days you will die." And to make an end of St. Elia
+with Crisione, let me record here the simple Daniele's last act of piety
+to his master. It is little that in such company he fought with devils,
+or that after he had written with much labour a beautiful Psalter, the
+old monk bade him fling it and worldly pride together over the cliff
+into a lake. Such episodes belonged to the times; and, after all, by
+making a circuit of six miles he found the Psalter miraculously unwet,
+and only his worldly pride remained at the lake's bottom. But it was a
+mind singularly inventive of penance that led the dying saint to charge
+poor Daniele to bear the corpse on his back a long way over the
+mountains, merely because, he said, it would be a difficult thing to do.
+Other survivors of the sack of Taormina, more fortunate than Crisione,
+watched their opportunity, and, at a moment when the garrison was weak,
+entered, seized the place, fortified it anew, and offered it to the
+Greek emperor once more. He could not maintain war with the Saracens,
+but by a treaty made with them he secured his faithful Taorminians in
+the possession of the city. After forty years of peace under this treaty
+it was again besieged for several months, and fell on Christmas night.
+Seventeen hundred and fifty of its citizens were sent by the victors
+into slavery in Africa. Greek troops, however, soon retook the city in
+a campaign that opened brilliantly in Sicily only to close in swift
+disaster; but for five years longer Taormina sustained continual siege,
+and when it fell at last, with the usual carnage of its citizens and the
+now thrice-repeated fire and ruin of Saracenic victory, we may well
+believe that, though it remained the seat of a governor, little of the
+city was left except its memory. Its name even was changed to Moezzia.
+
+The Crescent ruled undisturbed for a hundred years, until the landing of
+Count Roger, the Norman, the great hero of mediaeval Sicily, who
+recovered the island to the Christian faith. Taormina, true to its
+tradition, was long in falling; but after eighteen years of desultory
+warfare Count Roger sat down before it with determination. He surrounded
+it with a circumvallation of twenty-two fortresses connected by ramparts
+and bridges, and cut off all access by land or sea. Each day he
+inspected the lines; and the enemy, having noticed this habit, laid an
+ambush for him in some young myrtles where the path he followed had a
+very narrow passage over the precipices. They rushed out on him, and, as
+he was unarmed and alone, would have killed him, had not their cries
+attracted one Evandro, a Breton, who, coming, and seeing his chief's
+peril, threw himself between, and died in his place. Count Roger was not
+forgetful of this noble action. He recovered the body, held great
+funeral services, and gave gifts to the soldiers and the church. The
+story appealed so to the old chronicler Malaterra, that he told it in
+both prose and verse. After seven months the city surrendered, and the
+iron cross was again set up on the rocky eminence by the gate. It is a
+sign of the ruin which had befallen that the city now lost its bishopric
+and was ecclesiastically annexed to another see.
+
+Taormina, compared with what it had been, was now a place of the desert;
+but not the less for that did the tide of war rage round it for five
+hundred years to come. It was like a rock of the sea over which
+conflicting billows break eternally. I will not narrate the feudal story
+of internecine violence, nor how amidst it all every religious order set
+up monasteries upon the beautiful hillsides, of whose life little is now
+left but the piles of books in old bindings over which my friend the
+librarian keeps guard, mourning the neglect in which they are left.
+Among both the nobles and the fathers were some examples of heroism,
+sacrifice, and learning, but their deeds and virtues may sleep unwaked
+by me. The kings and queens who took refuge here, and fled again,
+Messenian foray and Chiaramontane faction, shall go unrecorded. I must
+not, however, in the long roll of the famous figures of our beach forget
+that our English Richard the Lion-hearted was entertained here by
+Tancred in crusading days; and of notable sieges let me name at least
+that which the city suffered for its loyalty to the brave and generous
+Manfred when the Messenians surprised and wasted it, and that which with
+less destruction the enemies of the second Frederick inflicted on it,
+and that of the French under Charles II, who, contrary to his word, gave
+up the surrendered city to the soldiery for eight whole days--a terrible
+sack, of which Monsignore has heard old men tell. What part the citizens
+took in the Sicilian Vespers, and how the Parliament that vainly sought
+a king for all Sicily was held here, and in later times the marches of
+the Germans, Spaniards, and English--these were too long a tale. With
+one more signal memory I close this world-history, as it began, with a
+noble name. It was from our beach yonder that Garibaldi set out for
+Italy in the campaign of Aspromonte; hither he was brought back,
+wounded, to the friendly people, still faithful to that love of liberty
+which flowed in the old Taorminian blood.
+
+I shut my books; but to my eyes the rock is scriptured now. What a leaf
+it is from the world-history of man upon the planet! Every race has
+splashed it with blood; every faith has cried from it to heaven. It is
+only a hill-station in the realm of empire; but in the records of such a
+city, lying somewhat aside and out of common vision, the course of human
+fate may be more simply impressive than in the story of world-cities.
+Athens, Rome, Constantinople, London, Paris, are great centres of
+history; but in them the mind is confused by the multiplicity and awed
+by the majesty of events. Here on this bare rock there is no thronging
+of illustrious names, and little of that glory that conceals imperial
+crime, the massacre of armies, and the people's woe. Again I use the
+figure: it is like a rock of the sea, set here in the midst of the
+Mediterranean world, washed by all the tides of history, beat on by
+every pitiless storm of the passion of man for blood. The torch of
+Greece, the light of the Cross, the streaming portent of the Crescent,
+have shone from it, each in its time; all governments, from Greek
+democracy to Bourbon tyranny, have ruled it in turn; Roman law and
+feudal custom had it in charge, each a long age: yet civilization in all
+its historic forms has never here done more, seemingly, than alleviate
+at moments the hard human lot. And what has been the end? Go down into
+the streets; go out into the villages; go into the country-side. The men
+will hardly look up from their burdens, the women will seldom stop to
+ask alms, but you will see a degradation of the human form that speaks
+not of the want of individuals, of one generation, or of an age, but of
+the destitution of centuries stamped physically into the race. There is,
+as always, a prosperous class, men well to do, the more fortunate and
+better-born; but the common people lead toilsome lives, and among them
+suffering is widespread. Three thousand years of human life, and this
+the result! Yet I see many indications of a brave patriotism in the
+community, an effort to improve general conditions, to arouse, to
+stimulate, to encourage--the spirit of free and united Italy awakening
+here, too, with faith in the new age of liberty and hope of its promised
+blessings. And for a sign there stands in the centre of the poor
+fishing-village yonder a statue of Garibaldi.
+
+
+VI
+
+The rain-cloud is gone. The days are bright, warm, and clear, and every
+hour tempts me forth to wander about the hills. It is not spring, but
+the hesitancy that holds before the season changes; yet each day there
+are new flowers--not our delicate wood flowers, but larger and coarser
+of fibre, and it adds a charm to them that I do not know their names.
+The trees are budding, and here and there, like a wave breaking into
+foam on a windless sea, an almond has burst into blossom, white and
+solitary on the gray slopes, and over all the orchards there is the
+faint suggestion of pale pink, felt more than seen, so vague is it--but
+it is there. I go wandering by cliff or sea-shore, by rocky beds of
+running water, under dark-browed caverns, and on high crags; now on our
+cape, among the majestic rocks, I watch the swaying of the smooth
+deep-violet waters below, changing into indigo as they lap the rough
+clefts, or I loiter on the beach to see the fishers about their boats,
+weather-worn mariners, and youths in the fair strength of manly beauty,
+like athletes of the old world: and always I bring back something for
+memory, something unforeseen.
+
+I have ever found this uncertainty a rare pleasure of travel. It is
+blessed not to know what the gods will give. I remember once in other
+days I left the beach of Amalfi to row away to the isles of the Sirens,
+farther down the coast. It was a beautiful, blowing, wave-wild morning,
+and I strained my sight, as every headland of the high cliff-coast was
+rounded, to catch the first glimpse of the low isles; and there came by
+a country boat-load of the peasants, and in the bows, as it neared and
+passed, I saw a dark, black-haired boy, bare breast, and dreaming eyes,
+motionless save for the dipping prow--a figure out of old Italian
+pictures, some young St. John, inexpressibly beautiful. I have
+forgotten how the isles of the Sirens looked, but that boy's face I
+shall never forget. It is such moments that give the Italy of the
+imagination its charm. Here, too, I have similar experiences. A day or
+two ago, when the bright weather began, I was threading the rough edge
+of a broken path under the hill, and clinging to the rock with my hand.
+Suddenly a figure rose just before me, where the land made out a little
+farther on a point of the crag, so strange that I was startled; but
+straightway I knew the goatherd, the curling locks, the olive face, the
+garments of goatskin and leather on his limbs. It came on me like a
+flash--_eccola_ the country of Theocritus!
+
+I have never seen it set down among the advantages of travel that one
+learns to understand the poets better. To see courts and governments,
+manners and customs, works of architecture, statues and pictures and
+ruins--this, since modern travel began, is to make the grand tour; but
+though I have diligently sought such obvious and common aims, and had my
+reward, I think no gain so great as that I never thought of, the light
+which travel sheds upon the poets; unless, indeed, I should except that
+stronger hold on the reality of the ideal creations of the imagination
+which comes from familiar life with pictures, and statues, and kindred
+physical renderings of art. This latter advantage must necessarily be
+more narrowly availed of by men, since it implies a certain peculiar
+temperament; but poetry, in its less exalted forms, is open and common
+to all who are not immersed in the materialism of their own lives, and
+whatever helps to unlock the poetic treasures of other lands for our
+possession may be an important part of life. I think none can fully
+taste the sweetness, or behold the beauty, of English song even, until
+he has wandered in the lanes and fields of the mother-country; and in
+the case of foreign, and especially of the ancient, poets, so much of
+whose accepted and assumed world of fact has perished, the loss is very
+great. I had trodden many an Italian hillside before I noticed how
+subtly Dante's landscape had become realized in my mind as a part of
+nature. I own to believing that Virgil's storms never blew on the sea
+until once, near Salerno, as I rode back from Paestum, there came a
+storm over the wide gulf that held my eyes enchanted--such masses of
+ragged, full clouds, such darkness in their broad bosoms broken with
+rapid flame, and a change beneath so swift, such anger on the sea, such
+an indescribable and awful gleaming hue, not purple, nor green, nor red,
+but a commingling of all these--a revelation of the wrath of colour! The
+waves were wild with the fallen tempest; quick and heavy the surf came
+thundering on the sands; the light went out as if it were extinguished,
+and the dark rain came down; and I said, "'Tis one of Virgil's storms."
+Such a one you will find also in Theocritus, where he hymns the children
+of Leda, succourers of the ships that, "defying the stars that set and
+rise in heaven, have encountered the perilous breath of storms. The
+winds raise huge billows about their stern, yea, or from the prow, or
+even as each wind wills, and cast them into the hold of the ship, and
+shatter both bulwarks, while with the sail limits nil the gear confused
+and broken, and the wide sea rings, being lashed by the gusts and by
+showers of iron hail."
+
+I must leave these older memories, to tell, so far as it is possible in
+words, of that land of the idyl which of all enchanted retreats of the
+imagination is the hardest for him without the secret to enter. Yet here
+I find it all about me in the places where the poets first unveiled it.
+Once before I had a sight of it, as all over Italy it glimpses at times
+from the hills and the campagna. Descending under the high peak of
+Capri, I heard a flute, and turned and saw on the neighbouring slopes
+the shepherd-boy leading his flock, the music at his lips. Then the
+centuries rolled together like a scroll, and I heard the world's morning
+notes. That was a single moment; but here, day-long is the idyl world. I
+read the old verses over, and in my walks the song keeps breaking in.
+The idyls are full of streams and fountains, just such as I meet with
+wherever I turn, and the water counts in the landscape as in the poems.
+It is always tumbling over rocks in cascades, brawling with rounded
+forms among the stones of the shallow brooks, bubbling in fountains, or
+dripping from the cliff, or shining like silver in the plain. The run
+that comes down from Mola, the torrent under the olive and lemon
+branches toward Letojanni, the more open course in the ravine of the
+mill down by Giardini, the cimeter of the far-seen Alcantara lying on
+the campagna in the meadows, and that further _fiume freddo_, the cold
+stream,--"chill water that for me deep-wooded Etna sends down from the
+white snow, a draught divine,"--each of these seems inhabited by a
+genius of its own, so that it does not resemble its neighbours. But all
+alike murmur of ancient song, and bring it near, and make it real.
+
+On the beach one feels most keenly the actuality of much of the idyls,
+and finds the continuousness of the human life that enters into them. No
+idyl appeals so directly to modern feeling, I suspect, as does that of
+the two fishermen and the dream of the golden fish. Go down to the
+shore; you will find the old men still at their toil, the same
+implements, the same poverty, the same sentiment for the heart. Often as
+I look at them I recall the old words, while the goats hang their heads
+over the scant herbage, and the blue sea breaks lazily and heavily on
+the sands.
+
+"Two fishers, on a time, two old men, together lay and slept; they had
+strewn the dry sea-moss for a bed in their wattled cabin, and there lay
+against the leafy wall. Beside them wore strewn the instruments of their
+toilsome bands, the fishing-creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the
+sails bedraggled with sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster-pots
+woven of rushes, the seines, two oars, and an old cobble upon props.
+Beneath their heads was a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailors'
+caps. Here was all their toil, here all their wealth. The threshold had
+never a door nor a watch-dog. All things, all, to them seemed
+superfluity, for Poverty was their sentinel; they had no neighbour by
+them, but ever against their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea."
+
+This is what the eye beholds; and I dare not say that the idyl is
+touched more with the melancholy of human fate for us than for the poet.
+Poverty such as this, so absolute, I see everywhere at every hour. It is
+a terrible sight. It is the physical hunger of the soul in wan limbs and
+hand, and the fixed gaze of the unhoping eyes--despair made flesh. How
+long has it suffered here? and was it so when Theocritus saw his fishers
+and gave them a place in the country of his idyls? He spreads before us
+the hills and fountains, and fills the scene-with shepherds, and
+maidens, and laughing loves, and among the rest are these two poor old
+men. The shadow of the world's poverty falls on this paradise now as
+then. With the rock and sea it, too, endures.
+
+A few traces of the old myths also survive on the landscape. Not far
+from here, down the coast, the rocks that the Cyclops threw after the
+fleeing mariners are still to be seen near the shore above which he
+piped to Galatea. Some day I mean to take a boat and see them. But now I
+let the Cyclops idyls go, and with them Adonis of Egypt, and Ptolemy,
+and the prattling women, and the praises of Hiero, and the deeds of
+Herakles; these all belong to the cities of the pastoral, to its
+civilization and art in more conscious forms; but my heart stays in the
+campagna, where are the song-contests, the amorous praise of maidens,
+the boyish boasting, the young, sweet, graceful loves. Fain would I
+recover the breath of that springtime; but while from my foot "every
+stone upon the way spins singing," make what speed I can, I come not to
+the harvest-feast. Bees go booming among the blossoms, and the flocks
+crop their pasture, and night falls with Hesperus; but fruitless on my
+lips, as at some shrine whence the god is gone, is Bion's prayer:
+"Hesperus, golden lamp of the lovely daughter of the foam--dear
+Hesperus, sacred jewel of the deep blue night, dimmer as much than the
+moon as thou art among the stars preeminent, hail, friend!" Dead now is
+that ritual. Now more silent than ever is the country-side, missing
+Daphnis, the flower of all those who sing when the heart is young. Sweet
+was his flute's first triumph over Menaleas: "Then was the boy glad, and
+leaped high, and clapped his hands over his victory, as a young fawn
+leaps about his mother"; but sweeter was the unwon victory when he
+strove with Damoetas: "Then Damoetas kissed Daphnis, as he ended his
+song, and he gave Daphnis a pipe, and Daphnis gave him a beautiful
+flute. Damoetas fluted, and Daphnis piped; the herdsmen, and anon the
+calves, were dancing in the soft green grass. Neither won the victory,
+but both were invincible." And him, too, I miss who loved his friend,
+and wished that they twain might "become a song in the ears of all men
+unborn," even for their love's sake; and prayed, "Would, O Father
+Cronides, and would, ye ageless immortals, that this might be, and that
+when two generations have sped, one might bring these tidings to me by
+Acheron, the irremeable stream: the loving-kindness that was between
+thee and thy gracious friend is even now in all men's mouths, and
+chiefly on the lips of the young." Hill and fountain and pine, the gray
+sea and Mother Etna, are here; but no children gather in the land, as
+once about the tomb of Diocles at the coming in of the spring,
+contending for the prize of the kisses--"Whoso most sweetly touches lip
+to lip, laden with garlands he returneth to his mother. Happy is he who
+judges those kisses of the children." Lost over the bright furrows of
+the sea is Europa riding on the back of the divine bull as Moschus
+beheld her--"With one hand she clasped the beast's great horn, and with
+the other caught up the purple fold of her garment, lest it might trail
+and be wet in the hoar sea's infinite spray"; and from the border-land
+of mythic story, that was then this world's horizon, yet more faintly
+the fading voice of Hylas answers the deep-throated shout of Herakles.
+Faint now as his voice are the voices of the shepherds who are gone,
+youth and maiden and children; dimly I see them, vaguely I hear them; at
+last there remains only "the hoar sea's infinite spray." And will you
+say it was in truth all a dream? Were the poor fisherman in their toil
+alone real, and the rest airy nothings to whom Sicily gave a local
+habitation and a name? It was Virgil's dream and Spenser's; and some
+secret there was--something still in our breasts--that made it immortal,
+so that to name the Sicilian Muses is to stir an infinite, longing
+tenderness in every young and noble heart that the gods have softened
+with sweet thoughts.
+
+And here I shut in my pages the one laurel leaf that Taormina bore. She,
+too, in her centuries has had her poet. Perhaps none who will see these
+words ever gave a thought to the name and fame of Cornelius Severus. Few
+of his works remain, and little is known of his life. He is said to have
+been the friend of Pollio, and to have been present in the Sicilian war
+between Augustus and Sextus Pompey. He wrote the first book of an epic
+poem on that subject, so excellent that it has been thought that, had
+the entire work been continued at the same level, he would have held the
+second place among the Latin epic poets. He wrote also heroic songs, of
+which fragments survive, one of which is an elegy upon Cicero, which
+Seneca quotes, saying of him, "No one out of so many talented men
+deplored the death of Cicero better than Cornelius Severus." Some
+dialogues in verse also seem to have been written by him. These
+fragments may not he easily obtained. But take down your Virgil; and, if
+it be like this of mine which I brought from Rome, you will find at the
+very end, last of the shorter pieces ascribed to the poet, one of the
+length of a book of the "Georgics," called "Etna." This is the work of
+Cornelius Severus. An early death took from him the perfection of his
+genius and the hope of fame; but happy was the fortune of him who wrote
+so well that for centuries his lines were thought not unworthy of
+Virgil, whose name still shields this Taorminian verse from oblivion.
+
+
+VII
+
+It is my last day at Taormina. I have seen the sunrise from my old
+station by the Greek temple, and watched the throng of cattle and men
+gathered on the distant beach of Letojanni and darkening the broad bed
+of the dry torrent that there makes down to the sea, and I wished I
+were among them, for it is their annual fair; and still I dwell on every
+feature of the landscape that familiarity has made more beautiful. The
+afternoon I have dedicated to a walk to Mola. It is a pleasant, easy
+climb, with the black ancient wall of the city on the left, where it
+goes up the face of the castle-rock, and on the right the deep ravine,
+closed by Monte Venere in the west. All is very quiet; a silent, silent
+country! There are few birds or none, and indeed I have heard no
+bird-song since I have been here. Opposite, on the other side of the
+wall of the ravine, are some cows hanging in strange fashion to the
+cliff, where it seems goats could hardly cling; but the unwieldy,
+awkward creatures move with sure feet, and seem wholly at home,
+pasturing on the bare precipice. I cannot hear the torrent, now a narrow
+stream, deep below me, but I see the women of Mola washing by the old
+fountain which is its source. There is no other sign of human life. The
+fresh spring flowers, large and coarse, but bright-coloured, are all I
+have of company, and the sky is blue and the air like crystal. So I go
+up, ever up, and at last am by the gate of Mola, and enter the
+stony-hearted town. A place more dreary, desolate to the eye, is seldom
+seen. There are only low, mean houses of gray stone, and the paved ways.
+If you can fancy a prison turned inside out like a glove, with all its
+interior stone exposed to the sunlight, which yet seems sunlight in a
+prison, and silence over all--that is Mola. The ruins of the fortress
+are near the gate on the highest point of the crag. Within is a barren
+spot--a cistern, old foundations, and some broken walls. Look over the
+battlement westward, and you will see a precipice that one thinks only
+birds could assail; and, observing how isolated is the crag on all
+sides, you will understand what an inaccessible fastness this was, and
+cannot be surprised at its record of defence.
+
+Perhaps here was the oldest dwelling-place of man upon the hill, and it
+was the securest retreat. Monsignore, indeed, believes that Ham, the son
+of Noah, who drove Japhet out of Sicily, was the first builder; but I do
+not doubt its antiquity was very great, and it seems likely that this
+was the original Siculian stronghold before the coming of the Greeks,
+and the building of the lower city of Taormina. The ruins that exist are
+part of the fortress made by that governor who lost the city to the
+Saracens, to defend it against them on this side; and here it stood for
+nigh a thousand years, like the citadel itself, an impregnable hold of
+war. It seldom yielded, and always by treachery or mutiny; for more than
+once, when Taormina was sacked, its citadel and Mola remained untaken
+and unconquerable on their extreme heights. I shall not tell its story;
+but one brave man once commanded here, and his name shall be its fame
+now, and my last tale of the Taorminian past.
+
+He was Count Matteo, a nobleman of the days when the Messenians revolted
+against the chancellor of Queen Margaret. He was placed over this
+castle; and when a certain Count Riccardo was discovered in a conspiracy
+to murder the chancellor, and was taken captive, he was given into
+Matteo's charge, and imprisoned here. The Messenians came and surprised
+the lower city of Taormina, but they could not gain Mola nor persuade
+Matteo to yield Riccardo up to them. So they thought to overcome his
+fidelity cruelly. They took his wife and children, who were at Messina,
+threw them into a dungeon, and condemned them to death. Then they sent
+Matteo's brother-in-law to treat with him. But when the count knew the
+reason of the visit he said: "It seems to me that you little value the
+zeal of an honest man who, loyal to his office, does not wish, neither
+knows how, to break his sworn faith. My wife and children would look on
+me with scornful eyes should I be renegade; for shame is not the reward
+that sweetens life, but burdens it. If the Messenians stain themselves
+with innocent blood, I shall weep for the death of my wife and sons, but
+the heart of an honest citizen will have no remorse." Then he was
+silent. But treachery could do what such threats failed to accomplish.
+One Gavaretto was found, who unlocked the prison, and Riccardo was
+already escaping when Matteo, roused at a slight noise, came, sword in
+hand, and would have slain him; but the traitor behind, "to save his
+wages," struck Matteo in the body, and the faithful count fell dead in
+his blood. I thought of this story, standing there, and nothing else in
+the castle's filled with bloom; then the infinite beauty, slowly
+fading, withdrew the scene, and sweetly it parted from my eyes.
+
+
+VIII
+
+Yet once more I step out upon the terrace into the night. I hear the
+long roar of the breakers; I see the flickering fishers' lights, and
+Etna pale under the stars. The place is full of ghosts. In the darkness
+I seem to hear vaguely arising, half sense, half thought, the murmur of
+many tongues that have perished here, Sicanian and Siculian and the lost
+Oscan, Greek and Latin and the hoarse jargon of barbaric slaves,
+Byzantine and Arabic confused with strange African dialects, Norman and
+Sicilian, French and Spanish, mingling, blending, changing, the sharp
+battle-cry of a thousand assaults rising from the low ravines, the
+death-cry of twenty bloody massacres within these walls, ringing on the
+hard rock and falling to silence only to rise more full with fiercer
+pain--century after century of the battle-wrath and the battle-woe. My
+fancy shapes the air till I see over the darkly lifted, castle-rock the
+triple crossing swords of Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman in the
+age-long duel, and as these fade, the springing brands of Byzantine,
+Arab, and Norman, and yet again the heavy blades of France, Spain, and
+Sicily; and ever, like rain or snow, falls the bloody dew on this lone
+hill-wide. "Oh, wherefore?" I whisper; and all is silent save the surge
+still lifting round the coast the far voices of the old Ionian sea. I
+have wondered that the children of Etna should dwell in its lovely
+paradise, as I thought how often, how terribly, the lava has poured
+forth upon it, the shower of ashes fallen, the black horror of volcanic
+eruption overwhelmed the land. Yet, sum it all, pang by pang, all that
+Etna ever wrought of woe to the sons of men, the agonies of her
+burnings, the terrors of her living entombments, all her manifold deaths
+at once, and what were it in comparison with the blood that has flowed
+on this hillside, the slaughter, the murder, the infinite pain here
+suffered at the hands of man. O Etna, it is not thou that man should
+fear! He should fear his brother-man.
+
+
+IX
+
+The stars were paling over Etna, white and ghostly, as I came out to
+depart. In the dark street I met a woman with a young boy clinging to
+her side. Her black hair fell down over her shoulders, and her bosom was
+scantily clothed by the poor garment that fell to her ankles and her
+feet. She was still young, and from her dark, sad face her eyes met mine
+with that fixed look of the hopeless poor, now grown familiar; the
+child, half naked, gazed up at me as he held his mother's hand. What
+brought her there at that hour, alone with her child? She seemed the
+epitome of the human life I was leaving behind, come forth to bid
+farewell; and she passed on under the shadows of the dawn. The last star
+faded as I went down the hollow between the spurs. Etna gleamed white
+and vast over the shoulder of the ravine, and, as I dipped down, was
+gone.
+
+
+
+
+A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY
+
+
+There was an old cry, Return to Nature! Let us rather return unto the
+soul. Nature is great, and her science marvellous; but it is man who
+knows it. In what he knows it is partial and subsidiary. Know thyself,
+was the first command of reason; and wisdom was an ancient thing when
+the sweet influences of the Pleiades and the path of Arcturus with his
+sons were young in human thought. These late conquests of the mind in
+the material infinities of the universe, its exploring of stellar space,
+its exhuming of secular time, its harnessing of invisible forces, this
+new mortal knowledge, its sudden burst, its brilliancy and amplitude of
+achievement, thought winnowing the world as with a fan; the vivid
+spectacle of vast and beneficent changes wrought by this means in human
+welfare, the sense of the increase of man's power springing from
+unsuspected and illimitable resources,--all this has made us forgetful
+of truth that is the oldest heirloom of the race. In the balances of
+thought the soul of man outweighs the mass that gravitation measures.
+Man only is of prime interest to men; and man as a spirit, a creature
+but made in the likeness of something divine. The lapse of aeons touches
+us as little as the reach of space; even the building of our planet, and
+man's infancy, have the faint and distant reality of cradle records.
+Science may reconstruct the inchoate body of animal man, the clay of our
+mould, and piece together the primitive skeleton of the physical being
+we now wear; but the mind steadily refuses to recognize a human past
+without some discipline in the arts, some exercise in rude virtue, and
+some proverbial lore handed down from sire to son. The tree of knowledge
+is of equal date with the tree of life; nor were even the tamer of
+horses, the worker in metals, or the sower, elder than those twin
+guardians of the soul,--the poet and the priest. Conscience and
+imagination were the pioneers who made earth habitable for the human
+spirit; they are still its lawgivers and where they have lodged their
+treasures, there is wisdom. I desire to renew the long discussion of the
+nature and method of idealism by engaging in a new defence of poetry,
+or the imaginative art in any of its kinds, as the means by which this
+wisdom, which is the soul's knowledge of itself, is stored up for the
+race in its most manifest, enduring, and vital forms. It is, by literary
+tradition and association, a proud task. May I not take counsel of
+Spenser and be bold at the first door? Sidney and Shelley pleaded this
+cause. Because they spoke, must we be dumb? or shall not a noble example
+be put to its best use in trying what truth can now do on younger lips?
+The old hunt is up in the Muses' bower; and I would fain speak for that
+learning which has to me been light. I use this preface not unwillingly
+in open loyalty to studies on which my youth was nourished, and the
+masters I then loved whom the natural thoughts of youth made eloquent;
+my hope is to continue their finer breath, as they before drank from old
+fountains; but chiefly I name them as a reminder that the main argument
+is age-long; it does not harden into accepted dogma; and it is thus
+ceaselessly tossed because it belongs in that sphere of our warring
+nature where conflict is perpetual. It goes on in the lives as well as
+on the lips of men. It is a question how to live as well as how to
+express life. Each race uses its own tongue, each age its dialect; but,
+change the language as man may, he ever remains the questioner of his
+few great thoughts.
+
+The defenders of the soul inherit an old cause that links them together
+in a long descent; but the battle is always to a present age.
+Continually something is becoming superfluous, inapplicable, or wanting
+in the work of the past. Victory itself makes arms useless, and consigns
+them to dark closets. New times, new weapons, is the history of all
+warfare. The doubt of the validity of the ideal, never absent from any
+intellectual period, is active on all sides, and in more than one
+quarter passes into denial. Literature and the other arts of expression
+suffer throughout the world. To that point is it come that those of the
+old stock who believe that the imagination exercises man's faculty at
+its highest pitch, and that the method of idealism is its law, are bid
+step down, while others more newly grounded in what belongs to
+literature possess the city; but seeing the shrines interdicted, the
+obliteration of ancient names, the heroes' statues thrown down, shall
+we learn what our predecessors never knew--to abdicate and abandon? I
+hear in the temples the footsteps of the departing gods--
+
+    Di quibus imperium hoc steterat;
+
+but no; for our opponents are worse off than those of whom it was said
+that though one rose from the dead they would not believe,--Plato, being
+dead, yet speaks, Shakspere treads our boards, and (why should I
+hesitate?) Tennyson yet breathes among us though already immortal. That
+which convinced the master minds of antiquity and many in later ages is
+still convincing, if it be attended to; the old tradition is yet
+unbroken; therefore, because I was bred in this faith, I will try to set
+forth anew in the phrases of our time the eternal ground of reason on
+which idealism rests.
+
+The specific question concerns literature and its method, but its import
+is not mainly literary. Life is the matter of literature; and thence it
+comes that all leading inquiries to which literature gives rise probe
+for their premises to the roots of our being and expand in their issues
+to the unknown limits of human fate. It is an error to think of idealism
+as a thing remote, fantastic, and unsubstantial. It enters intimately
+into the lives of all men, however humble and unlearned, if they live at
+all except in their bodies. What is here proposed is neither
+speculative, technical, nor abstruse; it is practical in matter,
+universal in interest, and touches upon those things which men most
+should heed. I fear rather to incur the reproach of uttering truisms
+than paradoxes. But he does ill who is scornful of the trite. To be
+learned in commonplaces is no mean education. They make up the great
+body of the people's knowledge. They are the living words upon the lips
+of men from generation to generation; the real winged words; the matter
+of the unceasing reiteration of families, schools, pulpits, libraries;
+the tradition of mankind. Proverb, text, homily,--happy the youth whose
+purse is stored with these broad pieces, current, in every country and
+for every good, like fairy gifts of which the occasion only when it
+arises shows the use. It is with truth as with beauty,--familiarity
+endears and makes it more precious. What is common is for that very
+reason in danger of neglect, and from it often flashes that divine
+surprise which most enkindles the soul. Why must Prometheus bring fire
+from heaven to savage man? Did it not sleep in the flint at his feet?
+How often, at the master stroke of life, has some text of Holy
+Scripture, which lay in the mind from childhood almost like the debris
+of memory, illuminated the remorseful darkness of the mind, or
+interpreted the sweetness of God's sunshine in the happy heart! Common
+as light is love, sang Shelley; and equally common with beauty and truth
+and love is all that is most vital to the soul, all that feeds it and
+gives it power; if aught be lacking, it is the eye to see and the heart
+to understand. Grain, fruit and vegetable, wool, silk and cotton, gold,
+silver and iron, steam and electricity,--were not all, like the spark,
+within arm's reach of savage man? The slow material progress of mankind
+through ages is paralleled by the slow growth of the individual soul in
+laying hold of and putting to use the resources of spiritual strength
+that are nigh unto it. The service of man to man in the ways of the
+spirit is, in truth, an act as simple as the giving of a cup of cold
+water to him who is athirst.
+
+Can there be any surprise when I say that the method of idealism is that
+of all thought? that in its intellectual process the art of the poet, so
+far from being a sort of incantation, is the same as belongs to the
+logician, the chemist, the statesman? It is no more than to say that in
+creating literature the mind acts; the action of the mind is thought;
+and there are no more two ways of thinking than there are two kinds of
+gravitation. Experience is the matter of all knowledge. It is given to
+the mind as a complex of particular facts, a series, ever continuing, of
+impressions outward and inward. It is stored in the memory, and were
+memory the only mental faculty, no other knowledge than this of
+particular facts in their temporal sequence could be acquired; the sole
+method of obtaining knowledge would be by observation. All literature
+would then be merely annals of the contents of successive moments in
+their order. Reason, however, intervenes. Its process is well known. In
+every object of perception, as it exists in the physical world and is
+given by sensation to our consciousness, there is both in itself and in
+its relations a likeness to other objects and relations, and this
+likeness the mind takes notice of; it thus analyzes the complex of
+experience, discerns the common element, and by this means classifies
+particular facts, thereby condensing them into mental conceptions,--
+abstract ideas, formulas, laws. The mind arrives at these in the
+course of its normal operation. As soon as we think at all, we speak
+of white and black, of bird and beast, of distance and size,--of
+uniformities in the behaviour of nature, or laws; by such classification
+of qualities, objects, and various relations, not merely in the sensuous
+but in every sphere of our consciousness, the mind simplifies its
+experience, compacts its knowledge, and economizes its energies. To this
+work it brings, also, the method of experiment. It then interferes
+arbitrarily with the natural occurrence of facts, and brings that to
+pass which otherwise would not have been; and this method it uses to
+investigate, to illustrate what was previously known, and to confirm
+what was surmised. Its end, whether through observation or experiment,
+is to reach general truth as opposed to matter-of-fact, universals more
+or less embracing as opposed to particulars, the units of thought as
+opposed to the units of phenomena. The body of these constitutes
+rational knowledge.
+
+Nature then becomes known, not as a series of impressions on the retina
+of sense merely, but as a system seized by the eye of reason; for the
+senses show man the aspect worn by the world as it is at the moment, but
+reason opens to him the order obtaining in the world as it must be at
+every moment; and the instrument by which man rises from the phenomenal
+plane of experience to the necessary sphere of truth is the generalizing
+faculty whose operation has just been described. The office of the
+reason in the exercise of this faculty is to find organic form in that
+experience which memory preserves in the mass,--to penetrate, that is,
+to that mould of necessity in the world which phenomena, when they
+arise, must put on. The species once perceived, the mind no longer cares
+for the individual; the law once known, the mind no longer cares for the
+facts; for in these universals all particular instances, past, present,
+and to come, are contained in their significance. All sciences are
+advanced in proportion as they have thus organized their appropriate
+matter in abstract conceptions and laws, and are backward in proportion
+as there remains much in their provinces not yet so coordinated and
+systematized; and in their hierarchy, from astronomical physics
+downward, each takes rank according to the nature of the universals it
+deals with, as these are more or less embracing.
+
+The matter of literature--that part of total experience which it deals
+with--is life; and, to confine attention to imaginative literature where
+alone the question of idealism arises, the matter with which imaginative
+literature deals is the inward and spiritual order in man's breast as
+distinguished from the outward and physical order with which science
+deals. The reason as here exercised organizes man's experience in this
+great tract of emotion, will, and meditation, and so possesses man of
+true knowledge of himself, just as in the realm of science it possesses
+him of true knowledge of the physical world, or, in psychology and
+metaphysics, of the constitution and processes of the mind itself. Such
+knowledge is, without need of argument, of the highest consequence to
+mankind. It exceeds, indeed, in dignity and value all other knowledge;
+for to penetrate this inward or spiritual order, to grasp it with the
+mind and conform to it with the will, is not, as is the case with every
+other sort of knowledge, the special and partial effort of selected
+minds, but the daily business of all men in their lives. The method of
+the mind here is and must be the same with that by which it accomplishes
+its work elsewhere, its only method. Here, too, its concern is with the
+universal; its end is to know life--the life with which literature
+deals--not empirically in its facts, but scientifically in its necessary
+order, not phenomenally in the senses but rationally in the mind, not
+without relation in its mere procession but organically in its laws; and
+its instrument here, as through the whole gamut of the physical sciences
+and of philosophy itself, is the generalizing faculty.
+
+One difference there is between scientific and imaginative truth,--a
+difference in the mode of statement. Science and also philosophy
+formulate truth and end in the formula; literature, as the saying is,
+clothes truth in a tale. Imagination is brought in, and by its aid the
+mind projects a world of its own, whose principle of being is that it
+reembodies general or abstract truth and presents it concretely to the
+eye of the mind, and in some arts gives it physical form. So, to draw an
+example from science itself, when Leverrier projected in imagination the
+planet Uranus, he incarnated in matter a whole group of universal
+qualities and relations, all that go to make up a world, and in so doing
+he created as the poet creates; there was as much of truth, too, in his
+imagined world before he found the actual planet as there was of reality
+in the planet itself after it swam into his ken. This creation of the
+concrete world of art is the joint act of the imagination and the reason
+working in unison; and hence the faculty to which this act is ascribed
+is sometimes called the creative reason, or shaping power of the mind,
+in distinction from the scientific intellect which merely knows. The
+term is intended to convey at once the double phase, under one aspect of
+which the reason controls imagination, and under the other aspect the
+imagination formulates the reason; it is meant to free the idea, on the
+one hand, from that suggestion of abstraction implied by the reason, and
+to disembarrass it, on the other, of any connection with the irrational
+fancy; for the world of art so conceived is necessarily both concrete,
+correspondent to the realities of experience, and truthful, subject to
+the laws of the universe; it cannot contain the impossible, it cannot
+amalgamate the actual with the unreal, it cannot in any way lie and
+retain its own nature. The use of this rational imagination is not
+confined to the world of art. It is only by its aid that we build up the
+horizons of our earthly life and fill them with objects and events
+beyond the reach of our senses. To it we are indebted for our knowledge
+of the greater part of others' lives, for our idea of the earth's
+surface and the doings of foreign nations, of all past history and its
+scene, and the events of primaeval nature which were even before man
+was. So far as we realize the world at all beyond the limit of our
+private experience of it, we do so by the power of the imagination
+acting on the lines of reason. It fills space and time for us through
+all their compass. Nor is it less operative in the practical pursuits of
+men. The scientist lights his way with it; the statesman forecasts
+reform by it, building in thought the state which he afterward realizes
+in fact; the entire future lives to us--and it is the most important
+part of life--only by its incantation. The poet acts no otherwise in
+employing it than the inventor and the speculator even, save that he
+uses it for the ends of reason instead of for his private interest. In
+some parts of this field there is, or was once, or will be, a physical
+parallel, an actuality, containing the verification of the imagined
+state of things; but so, for the poet, there is a parallel, a conception
+of the reason just as normal, which is not the less real because it is a
+tissue of abstract thought. In art this governance of the imagination by
+the reason is fundamental, and gives to the office of the latter a
+seeming primacy; and therefore emphasis is rightly placed on the
+universal element, the truth, as the substance of the artistic form. But
+in the light of this preliminary description of the mental processes
+involved, let us take a nearer view of their particular employment in
+literature.
+
+Human life, as represented in literature, consists of two main branches,
+character and action. Of these, character, which is the realm of
+personality, is generalized by means of type, which is ideal character;
+action, which is the realm of experience, by plot, which is ideal
+action. It is convenient to examine the nature of these separately. A
+type, the example of a class, contains the characteristic qualities
+which make an individual one of that class; it does not differ in this
+elementary form from the bare idea of the species. The traits of a tree,
+for instance, exist in every actual tree, however stunted or imperfect;
+and in the type which condenses into itself what is common in all
+specimens of the class, these traits only exist; they constitute the
+type. Comic types, in literature, are often simple abstractions of some
+single human quality, and hence easily afford illustrations. The
+braggart, the miser, the hypocrite, contain that one trait which is
+common to the class; and in their portrayal this characteristic only is
+shown. In proportion as the traits are many in any character, the type
+becomes complex. In simple types attention is directed to some one vice,
+passion, or virtue, capable of absorbing a human life in to itself. This
+is the method of Jonson, and, in tragedy, of Marlowe. As human energy
+displays itself more variously in a life, in complex types, the mind
+contemplates human nature in a more catholic way, with a less exclusive
+identification of character with specific trait, a more free conception
+of personality as only partially exhibited; thus, in becoming complex,
+types gather breadth and depth, and share more in the mystery of
+humanity as something incompletely known to us at the best. Such are the
+characters of Shakspere.
+
+The manner in which types are arrived at and made recognizable in other
+arts opens the subject more fully and throws light upon their nature.
+The sculptor observes in a group of athletes that certain physical
+habits result in certain moulds of the body; and taking such
+characteristics as are common to all of one class, and neglecting such
+as are peculiar to individuals, he carves a statue. So permanent are the
+physical facts he relies upon that, centuries after, when the statue is
+dug up, men say without hesitation--here is the Greek runner, there the
+wrestler. The habit of each in life produces a bodily form which if it
+exists implies that habit; the reality here results from the operation
+of physical laws and can be physically rendered; the type is
+constituted of permanent physical fact. There are habits of the soul
+which similarly impress an outward stamp upon the face and form so
+certainly that expression, attitude, and shape authentically declare the
+presence of the soul that so reveals itself. In the Phidian Zeus was all
+awe; in the Praxitelean Hermes all grace, sweetness, tenderness; in the
+Pallas Athene of her people who carved or minted her image in statue,
+bas-relief, or coin, was all serene and grave wisdom; or, in the glowing
+and chastened colours of the later artistic time, the Virgin mother
+shines out, in Fra Angelico all adoration, in Bellini all beatitude, in
+Raphael all motherhood. The sculptor and the painter are restricted to
+the bodily signs of the soul's presence; but the poet passes into
+another and wider range of interpretation. He finds the soul stamped in
+its characteristic moods, words, actions. He then creates for the mind's
+eye Achilles, Aeneas, Arthur; and in his verse are beheld their spirits
+rather than their bodies.
+
+These several sorts of types make an ascending series from the
+predominantly physical to the predominantly spiritual; but, from the
+present point of view, the arts which embody their creations in a
+material form should not be opposed to literature which employs the
+least interrelation of sensation, as if the former had a physical and
+the last a spiritual content. All types have one common element, they
+express personality; they have for the mind a spiritual meaning, what
+they contain of human character; they differ here only in fulness of
+representation. The most purely physical types imply spiritual
+qualities, choice, will, command,--all the life which was a condition
+precedent to the bodily perfection that was its flower; and, though the
+eye rests on the beautiful form, it may discern through it the human
+soul of the athlete as in life; and, moreover, the figure may be
+represented in some significant act, or mood even, but this last is
+rare. The more plainly spiritual types, physically rendered, are most
+often shown in some such mood or act expressive in itself of the soul
+whose habit lives in the form it has moulded. It is not that the plastic
+and pictorial arts cannot spiritualize the stone and the canvas as well
+as humanize it bodily; equally with the poetic art they reveal
+character, but within narrower bounds. The limitation of these arts in
+embodying personality is one of scope, not of intention; and though it
+springs out of their use of material forms, it does so in a peculiar
+way. It is not the employment of a physical medium of communication that
+differentiates them, for a physical medium of some sort is the only
+means of exchange between mind and mind; neither is it the employment of
+a physical basis, for all art, being concrete, rests on a physical
+basis--the world of imagination is exhaled from things that are. The
+physical basis of a drama, for instance, is manifest when it is enacted
+on the stage; but it is substantially the same whether beheld in thought
+or ocularly.
+
+The fact is that the limitation of sculpture and painting and their
+kindred arts results from their use of the physical basis of life only
+partially, and not as a whole as literature uses it. They set forth
+their works in the single element of space; they exclude the changes
+that take place in time. The types they show are arrested, each in its
+moment; or if a story is told by a series of representations, it is a
+succession of such moments of arrested life. The method is that of the
+camera; what is given is a fixed state. But literature renders life in
+movement; it revolves life through its moments as rapidly as on the
+retina of sense; its method is that of the kinetoscope. It holds under
+its command change, growth, the entire energy of life in action; it can
+chase mood with mood, link act to act. It alone can speak the word,
+which is the most powerful instrument of man. Hence the types it shows
+by presenting moods, words, and acts with the least obstruction of
+matter and the slightest obligation to the active senses, are the most
+complete. They have broken the bonds of the flesh, of moment and place.
+They exhibit themselves in actions; they speak, and in dialogue and
+soliloquy set forth their states of mind lying before, or accompanying,
+or following their actions, thus interpreting these more fully. Action
+by itself reveals character; speech illumines it, and casts upon the
+action also a forward and a backward light. The lapse of time, binding
+all together, adds the continuous life of the soul. This large compass,
+which is the greatest reached by any art, rests on the wider command and
+more flexible control which literature exercises over that physical
+basis which is the common foundation of all the arts. Hence it abounds
+in complex types, just as other arts present simple types with more
+frequency. All types, however, in so far as they appeal to the mind and
+interpret the inward world, under which aspect alone they are now
+considered, have their physical nature, materially or imaginatively,
+even though it be solely visible beauty, in order to express
+personality.
+
+The type, in the usage of literature, must be further distinguished from
+the bare idea of the species as it has thus far been defined. It is more
+than this. It is not only an example; it is an example in a high state
+of development, if not perfect. The best possible tree, for instance,
+does not exist in nature, owing to a confused environment which does not
+permit its formation. In literature a type is made a high type either by
+intensity, if it be simple, or by richness of nature, if it be complex.
+Miserliness, braggadocio, hypocrisy, in their extremes, are the
+characters of comedy; a rich nature, such as Hamlet, showing variety of
+faculty and depth of experience, is the hero of more profound drama.
+This truth, the necessity of high development in the type, underlay the
+old canon that the characters of tragedy should be of lofty rank, great
+place, and consequence in the world's affairs, preferably even of
+historic fame. The canon erred in mistaking one means of securing
+credible intensity or richness for the many which are possible. The end
+in view is to represent human qualities at their acme. In other times as
+a matter of fact persons highly placed were most likely to exhibit such
+development; birth, station, and their opportunities for unrestrained
+and conspicuous action made them examples of the compass of human
+energy, passion, and fate. New ages brought other conditions. Shakspere
+recognized the truth of the matter, and laid the emphasis where it
+belongs, upon the humanity of the king, not on the kingly office of the
+man. Said Henry V: "I think the king is but a man as I am; the violet
+smells to him as it doth to me; the element shows to him as it doth to
+me; all his senses have but human conditions; his ceremonies laid by, in
+his nakedness he appears but a man; and though his appetites are higher
+mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with like wing."
+Such, too, was Lear in the tempest. And from the other end of the scale
+hear Shylock: "Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
+dimensions, senses, appetites, passions? fed with the same food, hurt
+with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same
+means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian
+is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh?
+if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
+revenge?" Rank and race are accidents; the essential thing is that the
+type be highly human, let the means of giving it this intensity and
+richness be what they may.
+
+It is true that the type may seem defective in the point that it is at
+best but a fragment of humanity, an abstraction or a combination of
+abstracted qualities. There was never such an athlete as our Greek
+sculptor's, never a pagan god nor Virgin Mother, nor a hero equal to
+Homer's thought, so beautiful, brave, and courteous, so terrible to his
+foe, so loving to his friend. And yet is it not thus that life is known
+to us actually? does not this typical rendering of character fall in
+with the natural habit of life? What man, what friend, is known to us
+except by fragments of his spirit? Only one life, our own, is known to
+us as a continuous existence. Just as when we see an orange, we supply
+the further side and think of it as round, so with men we supply from
+ourselves the unseen side that makes the man completely and continuously
+human. Moreover, it is a matter of common experience that men, we
+ourselves, may live only in one part, and the best, of our nature at one
+moment, and yet for the moment be absorbed in that activity both in
+consciousness and energy; for that moment we are only living so; now, if
+a character were shown to us only in the moments in which he was living
+so, at his best and in his characteristic state as the soldier, the
+priest, the lover, then the ideal abstraction of literature would not
+differ from the actuality of our experience. In this selfsame way we
+habitually build for ourselves ideal characters out of dead and living
+men, by dwelling on that part of their career which we most admire or
+love as showing their characteristic selves. Napoleon is the conqueror,
+St. Francis the priest, Washington the great citizen, only by this
+method. They are not thereby de-humanized; neither do the ideal types of
+imagination fail of humanization because they are thus fragmentarily,
+but consistently, presented.
+
+The type must make this human appeal under all circumstances. Its whole
+meaning and virtue lie in what it contains of our common humanity, in
+the clearness and brilliancy with which it interprets the man in us, in
+the force with which it identifies us with human nature. If it is
+separated from us by a too high royalty or a too base villany, it loses
+intelligibility, it forfeits sympathy, it becomes more and more an
+object of simple curiosity, and removes into the region of the unknown.
+Even if the type passes into the supernatural, into fairyland or the
+angelic or demoniac world, it must not leave humanity behind. These
+spheres are in fact fragments of humanity itself, projections of its
+sense of wonder, its goodness, and its evil, in extreme abstraction
+though concretely felt. Fairy, angel, and devil cease to be conceivable
+except as they are human in trait, however the conditions of their
+nature may be fancied; for we have no other materials to build with save
+those of our life on earth, though we may combine them in ways not
+justified by reason. In so far as these worlds are in the limits of
+rational imagination, they are derived from humanity, partial
+interpretations of some of its moods, portions of itself; and the beings
+who inhabit them are impaired for the purposes of art in the degree to
+which their abstract nature is felt as stripping them of complete
+humanity. For this reason in dealing with such simple types, being
+natures all of one strain, it has been found best in practice to import
+into them individually some quality widely common to men in addition to
+that limited quality they possess by their conception. Some touch of
+weakness in an angel, some touch of pity in a devil, some unmerited
+misfortune in an Ariel, bring them home to our bosoms; just as the
+frailty of the hero, however great he be, humanizes him at a stroke.
+Thus these abstract fragments also are reunited with humanity, with the
+whole of life in ourselves.
+
+Types, then, whether simple or complex, whether apparently physical or
+purely spiritual, whether given fragmentary or as wholes of personality,
+express human character in its essential traits. They may be narrow or
+broad generalizations; but if to know ourselves be our aim, those
+types, which show man his common and enduring nature, are the most
+valuable, and rank first in importance; in proportion as they are
+specialized, they are less widely interpretative; in proportion as they
+escape from time and place, race, culture, and religion, and present man
+eternal and universal in his primary actions, moods, and passions, they
+appeal to a greater number and with more permanence; they become
+immortal in becoming universal. To preserve this universality is the
+essence of the type, and the degree of universality it reaches is its
+measure of value to men. It is immaterial whether it be simple as Ajax
+or complex as Hamlet, whether it be the work of imagination solely as in
+Hercules, or have a historical basis as in Agamemnon; its exemplary
+rendering of man in general is its substance and constitutor its
+ideality.
+
+Action, the second great branch of life, is generalized by plot. It
+lies, as has been said, in the region of experience. Character, though
+it may be conceived as latent, can be presented only energetically as it
+finds outward expression. It cannot be shown in a vacuum. It embodies or
+reveals itself in an act; form and feature, as expressive of character,
+are the record of past acts. This act is the link that binds type to
+plot. By means of it character enters the external world, determining
+the course of events and being passively affected by them. Plot takes
+account of this interplay and sets forth its laws. It is, therefore,
+more deeply engaged with the environment, as type is more concerned with
+the man in himself. It is, initially, a thing of the outward as type is
+a thing of the inward world. How, then, does literature, through plot,
+reduce the environment in its human relations to organic form?
+
+The course of events, taken as a whole, is in part a process of nature
+independent of man, in part the product of his will. It is a continuous
+stream of phenomena in great multiplicity, and proceeding in a temporal
+sequence. Science deals with that portion of the whole which is
+independent of man, and may be called natural events, and by discerning
+causal relations in them arrives at the conception of law as a principle
+of unchanging and necessary order in nature. Science seeks to reduce the
+multiplicity and heterogeneity of facts as they occur to these simple
+formulas of law. Science does not begin in reality until facts end;
+facts, ten or ten thousand, are indifferent to her after the law which
+contains them is found, and are a burden to her until it is found.
+Literature, in its turn, deals with human events; and, in the same way
+as science, by attending to causal relations, arrives at the conception
+of spiritual law as a similarly permanent principle in the order of the
+soul. This causal unity is the cardinal idea of plot which by
+definition is a series of events causally related and conceived as a
+unit, technically called the action. Plot is thus analogous to an
+illustrative experiment in science; it is a concrete example of law,--it
+is law operating.
+
+The course of events again, so far as they stand in direct connection
+with human life, may be thought of as the expression of the individual's
+own will, or of that of his environment. The will of the environment may
+be divided into three varieties, the will of nature, the will of other
+men, and the will of God. In each case it is will embodied in events. If
+these ideas be all merged in the conception of the world as a totality
+whose course is the unfolding of one Divine will operant throughout it
+and called Fate or Providence, then the individual will, through which,
+as through nature also, the Divine will works, is only its servant.
+Action so conceived, the march of events under some heavenly power
+working through the mass of human will which it overrules in conjunction
+with its own more comprehensive purposes, is epic action; in it
+characters are subordinate to the main progress of the action, they are
+only terms in the action; however free they may be apparently,
+considered by themselves, that freedom is within such limits as to allow
+entire certainty of result, its mutations are included in the
+calculation of the Divine will. The action of the Aeneid is of this
+nature: a grand series of destined events worked out through human
+agency to fulfil the plan of the ruler of all things in heaven and
+earth. On the other hand, if the course of events be more narrowly
+attended to within the limits of the individual's own activity, as the
+expression primarily and significantly of his personal will, then the
+successive acts are subordinate to the character; they are terms of the
+character which is thereby exhibited; they externalize the soul. Action,
+so conceived, is dramatic action. If in the course of events there
+arises a conflict between the will of the individual and that of his
+environment, whether nature, man, or God, then the seed of tragedy,
+specifically, is present; this conflict is the essential idea of
+tragedy. In all these varieties of action, the scene is the external
+world; plot lies in that world, and sets forth the order, the causal
+principle, obtaining in it.
+
+It is necessary, however, to refine upon this statement of the matter.
+The course of external events, in so far as it affects one person,
+whether as proceeding from or reacting upon him, reveals character, and
+has meaning as an interpretation of inward life. It is a series outward
+indeed, but parallel with the states of will, intellect, and emotion
+which make up the consciousness of the character; and it is interesting
+humanly only as a mirror of them. It is not the murderous blow, but the
+depraved will; not the pale victim, but the shocked conscience; not the
+muttered prayer, the frantic penance, the suicide, but remorse working
+itself out, that hold our attention. Plot here manifests the law of
+character outwardly; but the human reality lies within, and to be seen
+requires the illumination which only our own hearts can give. All
+fiction is such a shadowing forth of the soul. The constancy, the
+intimacy, the profundity with which Shakspere felt this, from the
+earliest syllables of his art, and the frequency with which he dwells
+upon it, mark a characteristic of genius. Says Richard II:--
+
+    "'Tis very true, my grief lies all within;
+    And those external manners of lament
+    Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
+    That swells in silence in the tortured soul;
+    There lies the substance."
+
+So Theseus, of the play of the rude artisans of Athens, excusing all
+art: "The best in this kind are but shadows." So Hamlet; so Prospero.
+
+Action is vital in us, and has a double order of phenomena; so far as
+these are physical, their law is one of the physical world, and
+interests us no more than other physical laws; so far as they belong in
+the inward world of self-consciousness, their law is spiritual, and has
+human interest as being operant in a soul like our own. The external
+fact is seized by the eye as a part of nature; the internal fact is of
+the unseen world, and is beheld only in the light which is within our
+own bosoms--it is spiritually discerned. On the stage plainly this is
+the case. So far as the actions are for the eye of sense alone they are
+merely spectacular; so far as they express desires and energies, they
+are dramatic, and these we do not see but feel according as our
+experience permits us so to comprehend them. We contemplate a world of
+emotion there in connection with the active energy of the will, a world
+of character in operation in man; we feed it from our life, interpret it
+therefrom, build it up in ourselves, suffering the illusion till
+absorbed in what is arising in our consciousness under the actor's
+genius we become ourselves the character. The greatest actor is he who
+makes the spectator play the part. So far is the drama from the scene
+that it goes on in our own bosoms; there is the stage without any
+illusion whatsoever; the play in vital for the moment in ourselves.
+
+And what is true of the stage is true of life. It is only through our
+own hearts that we look into the hearts of others. We interpret the
+external signs of sense in terms of personality and experience known
+only within us; the life of will, head, and heart that we ascribe to
+our nearest and dearest friends is something imagined, something never
+seen any more than our own personality. Thus our knowledge of them is
+not only fragmentary, as has been said; it is imaginative even within
+its limits. It is, in reality as well as in art, a shadow-world we live
+in, believing that within its sensuous films a spirit like unto
+ourselves abides,--the human soul, though never seen face to face. To
+enter this substantial world behind the phenomena of human life as
+sensibly shown in imagination, to know the invisible things of
+personality and experience, and to set them forth as a spiritual order,
+is the main end of ideal art. Though in plot the outward order is
+brought into the fullest prominence, and may seem to occupy the field,
+yet it is significantly only the shadow of that order within.
+
+In thus presenting plot as the means by which the history of a single
+soul is externalized, one important element has been excluded from
+consideration. The causal chain of events, which constitutes plot, has a
+double unity, answering to the double order of phenomena in action as a
+state of mind and a state of external fact. Under one aspect, so much
+of the action as is included in any single life and is there a linked
+sequence of mental states, has its unity in the personality of that
+individual. Under the other aspect, the entire action which sets forth
+the relations of all the characters involved, of their several courses
+of experience as elements in the working out of the joint result, has
+its unity in the constitution of the universe,--the impersonal order,
+that structure of being itself, which is independent of man's will,
+which is imposed upon him as a condition of existence, and which he must
+accept without appeal. This necessity, to give it the best name, to
+which man is exposed without and subjected within, is in its broadest
+conception the power that increases life, and all things are under its
+sway. Its sphere is above man's will; he knows it as immutable law in
+himself as it is in nature; it is the highest object of his thoughts.
+Its workings are submitted to his observation and experiment as a part
+of the world of knowledge; he sees its operation in individuals, social
+groups, and nations, and sets it forth in the action of the lyric, the
+drama, and the epic as the law of life. In its sphere is the higher
+unity of plot by virtue of which it integrates many lives in one main
+action. Such, then, is the nature of plot as intermediary between man
+and his environment, but deeply engaged in the latter, and not to be
+freed from it even by a purely spiritualistic philosophy; for though we
+say that, as under one aspect plot shadows forth the unseen world of the
+soul's life, so under the other it shadows forth the invisible will of
+God, we do not escape from the outward world. Sense is still the medium
+by which only man knows his brother man and God also as through a glass
+darkly,--
+
+    "The painted veil which those who live call life."
+
+It separates all spirits, the beautiful but dense element in which the
+pure soul is submerged.
+
+It is necessary only to summarize the characteristics of plot which are
+merely parallel to those of type already illustrated. Plot may be simple
+or complex; it may be more or less involved in physical conditions in
+proportion as it lays stress on its machinery or its psychology; it must
+be important, as the type must be high, but important by virtue of its
+essential human meaning and not of its accidents; it is a fragment of
+destiny only, but in this falls in with the way life in others is known
+to us; if it passes into the superhuman world, it must retain human
+significance and be brought back to man's life by devices similar to
+those used in the type for the same purpose; it rises in value in
+proportion to the universality it contains, and gains depth and
+permanence as it is interpretative of common human fate at all times and
+among all men; it may be purely imaginary or founded on actual
+incidents; and its exemplary interpretation of man's life is its
+substance, and constitutes its ideality.
+
+In the discussion of type and plot, the concrete nature of the world of
+art, which was originally stated to be the characteristic work of the
+creative reason, or imagination acting in conformity with truth, has
+been assumed; but no reason has been given for it, because it seemed
+best to develop first with some fulness the nature of that inward order
+which is thus projected in the forms of art. It belongs to the frailty
+of man that he seizes with difficulty and holds with feebleness the pure
+ideas of the intellect, the more in proportion as they are removed from
+sense; and he seeks to support himself against this weakness by framing
+sensible representations of the abstract in which the mind can rest.
+Thus in all lands and among savage tribes, as well as in the most
+civilized nations, symbols have been used immemorially. The flag of a
+nation has all its meaning because it is taken as a physical token of
+national honour, almost of national life itself. The Moslem crescent,
+the Christian cross, have only a similar significance, a bringing near
+to the eye of what exists in reality only for the mind and heart. A
+symbol, however, is an arbitrary fiction, and stands to the idea as a
+metaphor does to the thing itself. In literature the parable of the
+mustard seed to which the kingdom of heaven was likened, exemplifies
+symbolical or metaphorical method; but the tale of the court of Arthur's
+knights, ideal method; between them, and sharing something of both, lies
+allegorical method. Idolatry is the religion of symbolism, for the image
+is not the god; Christianity is the religion of idealism, for Christ is
+God incarnate. Idealism presents the reality itself, the universal truth
+made manifest in the concrete type, and there present and embodied in
+its characteristics as they are, not merely arbitrarily by a fiction of
+thought, symbolically or allegorically.
+
+The way in which type concretes truth is sufficiently plain; but it may
+be useful, with respect to plot, to draw out more in detail the analogy
+which has been said to exist between it and an illustrative scientific
+experiment. If scientific law is declared experimentally, the course of
+nature is modified by intent; certain conditions are secured, certain
+others eliminated; a selected train of phenomena is then set in motion
+to the end that the law may be illustrated, and nothing else. In a
+perfect experiment the law is in full operation. In plot there is a like
+selection of persons, situations, and incidents so arranged as to
+disclose the working of that order which obtains in man's life. The law
+may be simple and shown by means of few persons and incidents in a brief
+way, as in ancient drama, or complex and exhibited with many characters
+in an abundance of action over a wide scene as in Shakspere; in either
+case equally there is a selection from the whole mass of man's life of
+what shall illustrate the causal union in its order and show it in
+action. The process in the epic or prose narrative is the same. The
+common method of all is to present the universal law in a particular
+instance made for the purpose.
+
+In thus clothing itself in concrete form, truth suffers no
+transformation; it remains what it was, general truth, the very essence
+of type and plot being, as has been said, to preserve this universality
+in the particular instance. There is a sense in which this general truth
+is more real, as Plato thought, than particulars; a sense in which the
+phenomenal world is less real than the system of nature, for phenomena
+come and go, but the law remains; a sense in which the order in man's
+breast is more real than he is, in whom it is manifest, for the form of
+ideas, the mould of law, are permanent, but their expression in us
+transitory. It is this higher realism, as it was anciently called, that
+the mind strives for in idealism,--this organic form of life, the object
+of all rational knowledge. Types, under their concrete disguise, are
+thus only a part of the general notions of the mind found in every
+branch of knowledge and necessary to thought; plots, similarly, are only
+a part of the general laws of the ordered world; literature in using
+them, and specializing them in concrete form by which alone they differ
+in appearance from like notions and laws elsewhere, merely avails itself
+of that condensing faculty of the mind which most economizes mental
+effort and loads conceptions with knowledge. In the type it is not
+personal, but human character that interests the mind; in plot, it is
+not personal, but human fate.
+
+While it is true that the object of ideal method is to reach universals,
+and reembody them in particular instances, this reasoning action is
+often obscurely felt by the imagination in its creative process. The
+very fact that its operation is through the concrete complicates the
+process. The mind of genius working out its will does not usually start
+with a logical attempt consciously; it does not arrive at truth in the
+abstract and then reduce it to concrete illustration in any systemic
+way; it does not select the law and then shape the plot. The poet is
+rather directly interested in certain characters and events that appeal
+to him; his sympathies are aroused, and he proceeds to show forth, to
+interpret, to create; and in proportion as the characters he sets in
+motion and the circumstances in which they are placed have moulding
+force, they will develop traits and express themselves in influences
+that he did not foresee. This is a matter of familiar knowledge to
+authors, who frequently discover in the trend of the imaginary tale a
+will of its own, which has its unforeseen way. The drama or story, once
+set in motion, tends to tell itself, just as life tends to develop in
+the world. The vitality of the clay it works in, is one of the curious
+experiences of genius, and occasions that mood of mystery in relation to
+their creatures frequently observed in great writers. In fact, this mode
+of working in the concrete, which is characteristic of the creative
+imagination, gives to its activity an inductive and experimental
+character, not to be confounded with the demonstrative act of the
+intellect which states truth after knowing it, and not in the moment of
+its discovery. In literature this moment of discovery is what makes that
+flash which is sometimes called intuition, and is one of the great
+charms of genius.
+
+The concrete nature of ideal art, to touch conveniently here upon a
+related though minor topic, is also the reason that it expresses more
+than its creator is aware of. In imaging life he includes more reality
+than he attends to; but if his representation has been made with truth,
+others may perceive phases of reality that he neglected. It is the mark
+of genius, as has hitherto appeared, to grasp life, not fragmentarily,
+but in the whole. So, in a scientific experiment, intended to illustrate
+one particular form of energy, a spectator versed in another science may
+detect some truth belonging in his own field. This richer significance
+of great works is especially found where the union of the general and
+the particular is strong; where the fusion is complete, as in Hamlet. In
+a sense he is more real than living men, and we can analyze his nature,
+have doubts about his motives, judge differently of his character, and
+value his temperament more or less as one might with a friend. The more
+imaginative a character is, in the sense that his personality and
+experience are given in the whole so that one feels the bottom of
+reality there, the more significance it has. Thus in the world of art
+discoveries beyond the intention of the writer may be made as in the
+actual world; so much of reality does it contain.
+
+Will it be said that, in making primary the universal contents and
+spiritual significance of type and plot, I have made literature
+didactic, as if the word should stop my mouth? If it is meant by this
+that I maintain that literature conveys truth, it may readily be
+admitted, since only thus can it interest the mind which has its whole
+life in the pursuit and its whole joy in the possession of truth. But if
+it be meant that abstract or moral instruction has been made the
+business of literature, the charge may be met with a disclaimer, as
+should be evident, first, from the emphasis placed on its concrete
+dealing with persons and actions. On the contrary, literature fails in
+art precisely in proportion as it becomes expressly such a teacher.
+Secondly, the life which literature organizes, the whole of human nature
+in its relation to the world, is many-sided; and imaginative genius, the
+creative reason, grasps it in its totality. The moral aspect is but one
+among many that life wears. If ethics are implicit in the mass of life,
+so also are beauty and passion, pathos, humour, and terror; and in
+literature any one of these may be the prominent phase at the moment,
+for literature gives out not only practical moral wisdom, but all the
+reality of life. Literature is didactic in the reproachful sense of the
+word only in proportion as type and plot are distinctly separated from
+the truth they embody, and ceases to be so in proportion as these are
+blended and unified. The fable is one of the most ancient forms of such
+didactic literature; in it a story is told to enforce a lesson, and
+animals are made the characters, in consequence of which it has the
+touch of humour inseparable from the spectacle of beasts playing at
+being men; but the very fact that the moral is of men and the tale is of
+beasts involves a separation of the truth from its concrete embodiment,
+and besides the moral is stated by itself. In the Oriental apologue an
+advance is made. The parables of our Lord, in particular, are admirable
+examples of its method. The characters are few, the situations common,
+the action simple, and the moral truth or lesson enforced is so
+completely clothed in the tale that it needs no explanation; at the same
+time, the mind is aware of the teacher. In the higher forms of
+literature, however, the fusion of ethics with life may be complete.
+Here the poet works so subtly that the mind is not aware of the
+illumination of this light which comes without the violence of the
+preacher, until after the fact; and, indeed, the effect is wrought more
+through the sympathies than the reason. In such a case literature,
+though it conveys moral with other kinds of truth, is not open to the
+charge of didacticism, which is valid only when teaching is explicit and
+abstract. The educative power of literature, however, is not diminished
+because in its art it dispenses with the didactic method, which by its
+very definiteness is inelastic and narrow; in fact, the more imaginative
+a character is, the more fruitful it may be even in moral truth; it may
+teach, as has been said, what the poet never dreamed his work contained.
+
+If, then, to sum up the argument thus far, the subject-matter of
+literature is life in the forms of personality and experience, and the
+particular facts with respect to these are generalized by means of type
+and plot in concrete form, and so are set forth as phases of an ordered
+world for the intelligence, to the end that man may know himself in the
+same way as he knows nature in its living system--if this be so, what
+standing have those who would restrict literature to the actual in life?
+who would replace ideal types of manhood by the men of the time, and
+the ordered drama of the stage by the medley of life? They deny art,
+which is the instrument of the creative reason, to literature; for as
+soon as art, which is the process of creating a rational world, begins,
+the necessity for selection arises, and with it the whole question of
+values, facts being no longer equal among themselves on the score of
+actuality, nor in fitness for the work in hand. The trivial, the
+accidental, the unmeaning, are rejected, and there will be no stopping
+short of the end; for art, being the handmaid of truth, can employ no
+other than the method of all reason, wherefore idealism is to it what
+abstraction is to logic and induction to natural science,--the breath of
+its rational being. Those who hold to realism in its extreme form, as a
+representation of the actual only, behave as if one should say to the
+philosopher--leave this formulation of general notions and be content
+with sensible objects; or to the scientist--experiment no more, but
+observe the course of nature as it may chance to arise, and describe it
+in its succession. They bid us be all eye, no mind; all sense, no
+thought; all chance, all confusion, no order, no organization, no
+fabric of the reason. But there are no such realists; though pure
+realism has its place, as will hereafter be shown, it is usually found
+mixed with ideal method; and as commonly employed the word designates
+the preference merely for types and plots of much detail, of narrow
+application, of little meaning, in opposition to the highly generalized
+and significant types and plots usually associated with the term
+idealism. In what way such realism has its place will also appear at a
+later stage. Here it is necessary to say no more than that in proportion
+as realism uses the ideal method only at the lowest, it narrows its
+appeal, weakens its power, and takes from literature her highest
+distinction by virtue of which she grasps the whole of character and
+fate in her creation and informs man of the secrets of his human heart,
+the course of his mortal destiny, and the end of all his spiritual
+effort and aspiration.
+
+I am aware that I have not proceeded so far without starting objections.
+To meet that which is most grave, what shall I say when it is alleged
+that there is no order such as I have assumed in life; or, if there be,
+that it is insufficiently known, too intangible and complex, too
+various in different races and ages, to be made the subject of such an
+exposition as obtains of natural order? Were this assertion true, yet
+there would be good reason to retain our illusion; for the mind delights
+in order, and will invent it. The mind is perplexed and disturbed until
+it finds this order; and in the progressive integration of its
+experience into an ordered world lies its work. Art gives pleasure to
+the intellect, because in its structure whatever is superfluous and
+extrinsic has been eliminated, so that the mind contemplates an artistic
+work as a unity of relations bound each to each which it fully
+comprehends. Such works, we say, have form, which is just this
+interdependence of parts wholly understood which appeals to the
+intellect, and satisfies it: they would please the mind, though the
+order they embody were purely imaginary, just as science would delight
+it, were the order of nature itself illusory. Creative art would thus
+still have a ground of being under a sceptical philosophy; man would
+delight to dream his dream. But it is not necessary to take this lower
+line of argument.
+
+It does not appear to me to be open to question that there is in the
+soul of man a nature and an order obtaining in it as permanent and
+universal as in the material world. The soul of man has a common being
+in all. There could be no science of logic, psychology, or metaphysics
+on the hypothesis of any uncertainty as to the identity of mind in all,
+nor any science of ethics on the hypothesis of any variation as to the
+identity of the will in all, nor any ground of expression even, of
+communication between man and man, on the hypothesis of any radical
+difference in the experience and faculties to which all expression
+appeals for its intelligibility; neither could there be any system of
+life in social groups, or plan for education, unless such a common basis
+is accepted. The postulate of a common human nature is analogous to that
+of the unity of matter in science; it finds its complete expression in
+the doctrine of the brotherhood of man, for if race be fundamentally
+distinguished from race as was once thought, it is only as element is
+distinguished from element in the old chemistry. So, too, the postulate
+of an order obtaining in the soul, universal and necessary, independent
+of man's volition, analogous in all respects to the order of nature, is
+parallel with that of the constancy of physical law. A rational life
+expects this order. The first knowledge of it comes to us, as that of
+natural law, by experience; in the social world--the relations of men to
+one another--and in the more important region of our own nature we learn
+the issue of certain courses of action as well as in the external world;
+in our own lives and in our dealings with others we come to a knowledge
+of, and a conformity to, the conditions under which we live, the laws
+operant in our being, as well as those of the physical world. Literature
+assumes this order; in Aeschylus, Cervantes, or Shakspere, it is this
+that gives their work interest. Apart from natural science, the whole
+authority of the past in its entire accumulation of wisdom rests upon
+the permanence of this order, and its capacity to be known by man; that
+virtue makes men noble and vice renders them base, is a statement without
+meaning unless this order is continuous through ages; all principles of
+action, all schemes of culture, would be uncertain except on this
+foundation.
+
+So near is this order to us that it was known long before science came
+to any maturity. We have added, in truth, little to our knowledge of
+humanity since the Greeks; and if one wonders why ethics came before
+science, let him own at least that its priority shows that it is near
+and vital in life as science is not. We can do, it seems, without
+Kepler's laws, but not without the Decalogue. The race acquires first
+what is most needful for life; and man's heart was always with him, and
+his fate near. A second reason, it may be noted, for the later
+development of science is that our senses, as used by science, are more
+mental now, and the object itself is observable only by the intervention
+of the mind through the telescope or microscope or a hundred instruments
+into which, though physical, the mind enters. Our methods, too, as well
+as our instruments, are things of the mind. It behooves us to remember
+in an age which science is commonly thought to have materialized, that
+more and more the mind enters into all results, and fills an ever larger
+place in life; and this should serve to make materialism seem more and
+more what it is--a savage conception. But recognizing the great place of
+mind in modern science, and its growing illumination of our earthly
+system, I am not disposed to discredit its earliest results in art and
+morals. I find in this penetration of the order of the world within us
+our most certain truth; and as our bodies exist only by virtue of
+sharing in the general order of nature, so, I believe, our souls have
+being only by sharing in this order of the inward, the spiritual world.
+
+What, then, is this order? We do not merely contemplate it: we are
+immersed in it, it is vital in us, it is that wherein we live and move
+and have our being, ever more and more in proportion as the soul's life
+outvalues the body in our experience. It is necessary to expand our
+conception of it. Hitherto it has been presented only as an order of
+truth appealing to the intellect: but the intellect is only one function
+of the soul, and thinkers are the merest fraction of mankind. We know
+this order not only as truth, but as righteousness; we know that certain
+choices end in enlarging and invigorating our faculties, and other
+choices in their enfeeblement and extinction; and the race adds, acting
+under the profound motive of self-preservation, that it is a duty to do
+the one thing and avoid the other, and stores up this doctrine in
+conscience. We know this order again under the aspect of joy, for joy
+attends some choices, and sorrow others; and again under the aspect of
+beauty, for certain choices result in beauty and others in deformity.
+What I maintain is that this order exists under four aspects, and may be
+learned in any of them--as an order of truth in the reason, as an order
+of virtue in the will, as an order of joy in the emotions, as an order
+of beauty in the senses. It is the same order, the same body of law,
+operating in each case; it is the vital force of our fourfold life,--it
+has one unity in the intellect, the will, the emotions, the senses,--is
+equal to the whole nature of man, and responds to him and sustains him
+on every side. A lover of beauty in whom conscience is feeble cannot
+wander if he follow beauty; nor a cold thinker err, though without a
+moral sense, if he accept truth; nor a just man, nor a seeker after pure
+joy merely, if they act according to knowledge each in his sphere. The
+course of action that increases life may be selected because it is
+reasonable, or joyful, or beautiful, or right; and therefore one may say
+fearlessly, choose the things that are beautiful, the things that are
+joyful, the things that are reasonable, the things that are right, and
+all else shall be added unto you. The binding force in this order is
+what literature, ideal literature, most brings out and emphasizes in its
+generalizations, that causal union which has hitherto been spoken of in
+the region of plot only; but it exists in every aspect of this order,
+and literature universalizes experience in all these realms, in the
+provinces of beauty and passion no less than in those of virtue and
+knowledge, and its method is the same in all.
+
+Is not our knowledge of this fourfold order in its principles, in those
+relations of its phenomena which constitute its laws, of the highest
+importance of anything of human concern? In harmony with these laws, and
+only thus, we ourselves, in whom this order is, become happy, righteous,
+wise, and beautiful. In ideal literature this knowledge is found,
+expressed, and handed down age after age--the knowledge of necessary and
+permanent relations in these great spheres which, taken together,
+exhaust the capacities of life. Man's moral sense is strong in
+proportion as he apprehends necessity in the sequence of will and act;
+his intellect is strong, his emotions, his sense of beauty, are strong
+in the same way in proportion as he apprehends necessity in each several
+field of experience. And conversely, the weakness of the intellect lies
+in a greater or less failure to realise relations of fact in their
+logic; and the other faculties, in proportion as they fail to realize
+such relations in their own region, have a similar incapacity. Insanity,
+in the broad sense, is involuntary error in a nature incapable of
+effectual enlightenment, and hence abnormal or diseased; but the state
+of error, whether more or less, whether voluntary or involuntary,
+whether curable or incurable, in itself is the same. To take an example
+from one sphere, in the moral world the criminal through ignorance of or
+distrust in or revolt from the supreme divine law seeks to maintain
+himself by his own power solitarily as if he might be a law unto
+himself; he experiences, without the intervention of any human judge,
+the condemnation which consigns him to enfeeblement and extinction
+through the decay and death of his nature, as a moral being, stage by
+stage; this is God's justice, visiting sin with death. Similarly, and to
+most more obviously, in society itself, the criminal against society,
+because he does not understand, or believe, or prefers not to accept
+arbitrary social law as the means by which necessarily the general good,
+including his own, is worked out, seeks to substitute for it his own
+intelligence, his cunning, in his search for prosperity, as he conceives
+it, by an adaptation of means to ends on his own account. This is why
+the imperfection of human law is sometimes a just excuse for social
+crime in those whom society does not benefit, its slaves and pariahs.
+But whether in God's world or in man's, the mind of the criminal,
+disengaging itself from reliance on the whole fabric for whatever
+reason, pulverizes because he fails to realize the necessary relations
+of the world in which he lives in their normal operation, and has no
+effectual belief in them as unavoidably operant in his nature or over
+his fortunes. This was the truth that lay in the Platonic doctrine that
+all sin is ignorance; but Plato did not take account of any possible
+depravity in the will. Nor is what has been illustrated above true of
+the mind and the will only. In the region of emotion and of beauty,
+there may be similar aberration, if these are not grasped in their vital
+nature, in organic relation to the whole of life.
+
+These several parts of our being are not independent of one another, but
+are in the closest alliance. They act conjointly and with one result in
+the single soul in which they find their unity as various energies of
+one personal power. It cannot be that contradiction should arise among
+them in their right operation, nor the error of one continue undetected
+by the others; that the base should be joyful or the wicked beautiful in
+reality, is impossible. In the narrow view the lust of the eye and the
+pride of life may seem beautiful, but in the broad perspective of the
+inward world they take on ugliness; in the moment they may seem
+pleasurable, but in the backward reach of memory they take on pain; to
+assert eternity against the moment, to see life in the whole, to live as
+if all of life were concentrated in its instant, is the chief labour of
+the mind, the eye, the heart, the enduring will, all together. To
+represent a villain as attractive is an error of art, which thus
+misrepresents the harmony of our nature. Satan, as conceived by Milton,
+may seem to be a majestic figure, but he was not so to Milton's
+imagination. "The Infernal Serpent" is the first name the poet gives
+him; and though sublime imagery of gloom and terror is employed to
+depict his diminished brightness and inflamed malice, Milton repeatedly
+takes pains to degrade him to the eye, as when in Paradise he is
+surprised at the ear of Eve "squat like a toad"; and when he springs up
+in his own form there, as the "grisly king," he mourns most his beauty
+lost; neither is his resolute courage long admirable. To me, at least,
+so far from having any heroic quality, he seems always the malign fiend
+sacrificing innocence to an impotent revenge. In all great creations of
+art it is necessary that this consistency of beauty, virtue, reason, and
+joy should he preserved.
+
+It is true that the supremacy of law in this inward world, so
+constituted, is less realized than in the physical world; but even in
+the latter the wide conviction of its supremacy is a recent thing, and
+in some parts of nature it is still lightly felt, especially in those
+which touch the brain most nearly, while under the stress of exceptional
+calamity or strong desire or traditional religious beliefs it often
+breaks down. But if the order of the material universe seems now a more
+settled thing than the spiritual law of the soul, once the case was
+reversed; God was known and nature miraculous. It must be remembered,
+too, in excuse of our feebleness of faith, that we are born bodily into
+the physical world and are forced to live under its law; but life in the
+spiritual world is more a matter of choice, at least in respect to its
+degree; its phenomena are, in part, contingent upon our development and
+growth, on our living habitually and intelligently in our higher nature,
+the laws of which as communicated to us by other minds are in part
+prophecies of experience not yet actual in ourselves. It is the
+touchstone of experience, after all, that tries all things in both
+worlds, and experience in the spiritual world may be long delayed; it is
+power of mind that makes wide generalizations in both; and the
+conception of spiritual law is the most refined as perhaps it is the
+most daring of human thoughts.
+
+The expansion of the conception of ideal literature so as to embrace
+these other aspects, in addition to that of rational knowledge which has
+thus far been exclusively dwelt upon, requires us to examine its nature
+in the regions of beauty, joy, and conscience, in which, though
+generalization remains its intellectual method, it does not make its
+direct appeal to the mind. It is not enough to show that the creative
+reason in its intellectual process employs that common method which is
+the parent of all true knowledge, and by virtue of its high matter,
+which is the divine order in the soul, holds the primacy among man's
+faculties; the story were then left half told, and the better part yet
+to come. To enlighten the mind is a great function; but in the mass of
+mankind there are few who are accessible to ideas as such, especially on
+the unworldly side of life, or interested in them. Idealism does not
+confine its service to the narrow bounds of intellectuality. It has a
+second and greater office, which is to charm the soul. So characteristic
+of it is this power, so eminent and shining, that thence only springs
+the sweet and almost sacred quality breathing from the word itself.
+Idealism, indeed, by the garment of sense does not so much clothe wisdom
+as reveal her beauty; so the Greek sculptor discloses the living form by
+the plastic folds. Truth made virtue is her work of power, and she
+imposes upon man no harder task than the mere beholding of that sight--
+
+    "Virtue in her shape how lovely,"
+
+which since it first abashed the devil in Paradise makes wrong-doers
+aware of their deformity, and yet has such subtle and penetrating might,
+such fascination for all finer spirits, that they have ever believed
+with their master, Plato, that should truth show her countenance
+unveiled and dwell on earth, all men would worship and follow her.
+
+The images of Plato--those images in which alone he could adequately
+body forth his intuitions of eternity--present the twofold attitude of
+our nature, in mind and heart, toward the ideal with vivid distinctness;
+and they illustrate the more intimate power of beauty, the more
+fundamental reach of emotion, and the richness of their mutual life in
+the soul. Under the aspect of truth he likens our knowledge of the ideal
+to that which the prisoners of the cave had of the shadows on the wall;
+under the aspect of beauty he figures our love for it as that of the
+passionate lover. As truth, again,--taking up in his earliest days what
+seems the primitive impulse and first thought of man everywhere and at
+all times,--under the image of the golden chain let down from the
+throne of the god, he sets forth the heavenly origin of the ideal and
+its descent on earth by divine inspiration possessing the poet as its
+passive instrument; and later, bringing in now the cooperation of man in
+the act, he again presents the ideal as known by reminiscence of the
+soul's eternal life before birth, which is only a more defined and
+rationalized conception of inspiration working normally instead of by
+the special act and favour of God. As beauty, again, he shows forth the
+enthusiasm evoked by the ideal in the image of the charioteer of the
+white and black horses mastering them to the goal of love. In these
+various ways the first idealist thought out these distinctions of truth
+and beauty as having a real community, though a divided life in the mind
+and heart; and, as he developed,--and this is the significant
+matter,--the poet in him controlling his speech told ever more
+eloquently of the charm with which beauty draws the soul unto itself,
+for to the poet beauty is nearer than truth. It is the persuasion with
+which he sets forth this charm, rather than his speculation, which has
+fastened upon him the love of later ages. He was the first to discern in
+truth and beauty equal powers of one divine being, and thus to effect
+the most important reconciliation ever made in human nature.
+
+So, too, from the other great source of the race's wisdom, we are told
+in the Scriptures that though we be fallen men, yet is it left to us to
+lift our eyes to the beauty of holiness and be healed; for every ray of
+that outward loveliness which strikes upon the eye penetrates to the
+heart of man. Then are we moved, indeed, and incited to seek virtue with
+true desire. Prophet and psalmist are here at one with the poet and the
+philosopher in spiritual sensitiveness. At the height of Hebrew genius
+in the personality of Christ, it is the sweet attractive grace, the
+noble beauty of the present life incarnated in his acts and words, the
+divine reality on earth and not, as Plato saw it, in a world removed,
+that has drawn all eyes to the Judean hill. The years lived under the
+Syrian blue were a rending of the veil of spiritual beauty which has
+since shone in its purity on men's gaze. It is this loveliness which
+needs only to be seen that wins mankind. The emotions are enlisted; and,
+however we may slight them in practice, the habit of emotion more than
+the habit of mind enters into and fixes inward character. More men are
+saved by the heart than by the head; more youths are drawn to excellence
+by noble feelings than are coldly reasoned into virtue on the ground of
+gain. Some there are among men so colourless in blood that they embrace
+the right on the mere calculation of advantage, but they seem to possess
+only an earthly virtue; some, beholding the order of the world, desire
+to put themselves in tune with nature and the soul's law, and these are
+of a better sort; but most fortunate are they who, though well-nurtured,
+find virtue not in profit, nor in the necessity of conforming to
+implacable law, but in mere beauty, in the light of her face as it first
+comes to them with ripening years in the sweet and noble nature of those
+they grow to love and honour among the living and the dead. For this is
+Achilles made brave, that he may stir us to bravery; and surely it were
+little to see the story of Pelops' line if the emotions were not
+awakened, not merely for a few moments of intense action of their own
+play, but to form the soul. The emotional glow of the creative
+imagination has been once mentioned in the point that it is often more
+absorbed in the beauty and passion than in the intellectual
+significance of its work; here, correspondingly, it is by the heart to
+which it appeals rather than by the mind it illumines that it takes hold
+of youth.
+
+What, then, is the nature of this emotional appeal which surpasses so
+much in intimacy, pleasure, and power the appeal to the intellect? It is
+the keystone of the inward nature, that which binds all together in the
+arch of life. Emotion has some ground, some incitement which calls it
+forth; and it responds with most energy to beauty. In the strictest
+sense beauty is a unity of relations of coexistence in coloured space
+and appeals to the eye; it is in space what plot is in time. Like plot,
+it is deeply engaged in the outward world; it exists in the sensuous
+order, and it shadows forth the spiritual order in man only in so far as
+a fair soul makes the body beautiful, as Spenser thought,--the mood, the
+act, and the habit of heroism, love, and the like nobilities of man,
+giving grace to form, feature, and attitude. It is primarily an outward
+thing, as emotion, which is a phase of personality, is an inward thing;
+what the necessary sequence of events, the chain of causation, is to
+plot,--its cardinal idea,--that the necessary harmony of parts, the
+chime of line and colour, is to beauty; thus beauty is as inevitable as
+fate, as structurally planted in the form and colour of the universe as
+fate is in its temporal movement. And as plot has its characteristic
+unity in the impersonal order of God's will, shown in time's event, so
+beauty has its characteristic unity in the same order shown in the
+visible creation of space. It is true that all phenomena are perceived
+by the mind, and are conditioned, as is said, by human modes of
+perception; but within the limits of the relativity of all our
+knowledge, beauty is initially a sensuous, not a spiritual, thing, and
+though the structure of the human eye arranges the harmonies of line and
+colour, it is no more than as the form of human thought arranges cause
+and effect and other primary relations in things; beauty does not in
+becoming humanly known cease to be known as a thing external,
+independent of our will, and imposed on us from without. It is this
+outward reality, the harmony of sense, that sculpture and painting add
+in their types to the interpretation they otherwise give of personality,
+and often in them this physical element is predominant; and in the
+purely decorative arts it may be exclusive. In landscape, which is in
+the realm of beauty, personality altogether disappears, unless, indeed,
+nature be interpreted in the mood of the Psalmist as declaring its
+Creator; for the reflection which the presence of man may cast upon
+nature as his shadow is not expressive of any true personality there
+abiding, but enters into the scene as the face of Narcissus into the
+brook. The pleasure which the mind takes in beauty is only a part of its
+general delight in order of any sort; and visible artistic form as
+abstracted from the world of space is merely a species of organic form
+and is included in it.
+
+The eye, however, governs so large a part of the sensuous field, the
+idea of beauty as a unity of space-relations giving pleasure is so
+simple, and the experience is so usual, that the word has been carried
+over to the life of the more limited senses in which analogous phenomena
+arise, differing only in the fact that they exist in another sense. Thus
+in the dominion of the ear especially, we speak commonly of the beauty
+of music; but the life of the minor senses, touch, taste, and smell, is
+composed of too simple elements to allow of such combination as would
+constitute specific form in ordinary apprehension, though in the blind
+and deaf the possibility of high and intelligible complexity in these
+senses is proved. Similarly, the term is carried over to the invisible
+and inaudible world of the soul within itself, and we speak of the
+beauty of Sidney's act, of Romeo's nature, and, in the abstract, of the
+beauty of holiness, and, in a still more remote sphere, of the beauty of
+a demonstration or a hypothesis; by this usage we do not so much
+describe the thing as convey the charm of the thing. This charm is more
+intimate and piercing to those of sensuous nature who rejoice in visible
+loveliness or in heard melodies; but to the spiritually minded it may be
+as close and penetrating in the presence of what is to them dearer than
+life and light, and is beheld only by the inner eye. It is this charm,
+whether flowing from the outward semblance or shining from the unseen
+light, that wins the heart, stirs emotion, wakes the desire to be one
+with this order manifest in truth and beauty, in the spirit and the body
+of things, to go out toward it in love, to identify one's being with it
+as the order of life, mortal and immortal; last the will quickens, and
+its effort to make this order prevail in us and possess us is virtue.
+The act through all its phases is, as has been said, one act of the
+soul, which first perceives, then loves, and finally wills. Emotion is
+the intermediary between the divine order and the human will; it
+responds to the beauty of the one and directs the choice of the other,
+and is felt in either function as love controlling life in the new
+births of the spirit.
+
+The emotion, to return to the world of art, which is felt in the
+presence of imaginary things is actual in us; but the attempt is made to
+fix upon it a special character differentiating it from the emotion felt
+in the presence of reality. One principle of difference is sought in the
+point that in literature, or in sculpture and painting, emotion entails
+no action; it has no outlet, and is without practical consequences; the
+will is paralyzed by the fatuity of trying to influence an unreal series
+of events, and in the case of the object of beauty in statue or painting
+by the impossibility of possession. The world of art is thus thought of
+as one of pure contemplation, a place of escape from the difficulties,
+the pangs, and the incompleteness that beset all action. It is true that
+the imagined world creates special conditions for emotion, and that the
+will does not act in respect to that world; but does this imply any
+radical difference in the emotion, or does it draw after it the
+consequence that the will does not act at all? Checked emotion, emotion
+dying in its own world, is common in life; and so, too, is contemplation
+as a mode of approach to beauty, as in landscape, or even in human
+figures where there is no thought of any other possession than the
+presence of beauty before the eye and soul; escape, too, into a sphere
+of impersonality, in the love of nature or the spectacle of life, is a
+common refuge. Art does not give us new faculties, generate unknown
+habits, or in any way change our nature; it presents to us a new world
+only, toward which our mental behaviour is the same as in the rest of
+life. Why, then, should emotion, the most powerful element in life, be
+regarded as a fruitless thing in that ideal art which has thus far
+appeared as a life in purer energy and higher intensity of being than
+life itself?
+
+The distinction between emotion depicted and that felt in response must
+be kept in mind to avoid confusion, for both sorts are present at the
+same time. In literature emotion may be set forth as a phase of the
+character or as a term in the plot; it may be a single moment of high
+feeling as in a lyric or a prolonged experience as in a drama; it may be
+shown in the pure type of some one passion as in Romeo, or in the
+various moods of a rich nature as in Hamlet; but, whether it be
+predominant or subordinate in any work, it is there treated in the same
+way and for the same purpose as other materials of life. What happens
+when literature gives us, for instance, examples of moral experience? It
+informs the mind of the normal course of certain lines of action, of the
+inevitable issues of life; it breeds habits of right thinking in respect
+to these; it is educative, and though we do not act at once upon this
+knowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to act. So, when
+literature presents examples of emotional experience, it informs us of
+the nature of emotion, its causes, occasions, and results, its value in
+character, its influence on action, the modes of its expression; it
+breeds habits of right thinking in respect to these, and is educative;
+and, just as in the preceding case, though we do not act at once upon
+this knowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to act.
+Concurrently with emotions thus objectively presented there arises in us
+a similar series of emotions in the beholding; by sympathy we ourselves
+feel what is before us, the emotions there are also in us in proportion
+as we identify ourselves with the character; or, in proportion as our
+own individuality asserts itself by revolt, a contrary series arises of
+hatred, indignation, or contempt, of pity for the character or of terror
+in the feeling that what has happened to one may happen to us in our
+humanity. We are taught in a more intimate and vital way than through
+ideas alone; the lesson has entered into our bosoms; we have lived the
+life. Literature is thus far more powerfully educative emotionally than
+intellectually; and if the poet has worked with wisdom, he has bred in
+us habits of right feeling in respect to life, he has familiarized our
+hearts with love and anger, with compassion and fear, with courage, with
+resolve, has exercised us in them upon their proper occasions and in
+their noble expression, has opened to us the world of emotion as it
+ought to be in showing us that world as it is in men with all its
+possibilities of baseness, ugliness, and destruction. This is the
+service which literature performs in this field. Imagination shows us a
+scheme of emotion attending the scheme of events and presents it in its
+general connection with life, in simple, powerful, and complete
+expression, on the lines of inevitable law in its sphere. We go out from
+the sway of this imagined world, more sensitive to life, more accessible
+to emotion, more likely and more capable, when the occasion arises, to
+feel rightly, and to carry that feeling out into an act. In all
+literature the knowledge gained objectively, whether of action or
+emotion, is a preparation for life; but this intimate experience of
+emotion in connection with an imagined world is a more vital
+preparation, and enters more directly, easily, and effectually into
+men's bosoms.
+
+Two particular phases of this educative power should be specifically
+mentioned. The objective presentation of emotion in literature, as has
+been often observed, corrects the perspective of our own lives, as does
+also the action which it envelops; and by showing to us emotion in
+intense energy, which by this intensity corresponds to high type and
+important plot, and in a compass far greater than is normal in ordinary
+life, the portrayal leads us better to bear and more justly to estimate
+the petty trials, the vexations, the insignificant experiences of our
+career; we see our lives in a truer relation to life in general, and
+avoid an overcharged feeling in regard to our private fortune. And,
+secondly, the subjective emotion in ourselves is educative in the point
+that by this outlet we go out of ourselves in sympathy, lose our egoism,
+and become one with man in general. This is an escape; but not such as
+has been previously spoken of, for it is not a retreat. There is no
+escape for us, except into the lives of others. In nature it is still
+our own face we see; and before the ideal creations of art we are still
+aware, for all our contemplation, of the ineffable yearning of the
+thwarted soul, of the tender melancholy, the sadness in all beauty,
+which is the measure of our separation therefrom, and is fundamental in
+the poetic temperament. This is that pain, which Plato speaks of--the
+pain of the growing of the wings of the spirit as they unfold. But in
+passing into the lives of other men, in sharing their joys, in taking on
+ourselves the burden of humanity, we escape from our self-prison, we
+leave individuality behind, we unite with man in common; so we die to
+ourselves in order to live in lives not ours. In literature, sympathy
+and that imagination by which we enter into and comprehend other lives
+are most trained and developed, made habitual, instinctive, and quick.
+It begins to appear, I trust, that ideal art is not only one with our
+nature intellectually, but in all ways; it is the path of the spirit in
+all things. Moreover, emotion is in itself simple; it does not need
+generalization, it is the same in all. It is rather a means of
+universalizing the refinements of the intellect, the substantive
+idealities of imagination, by enveloping them in an elementary,
+primitive feeling which they call forth. Poetry, therefore, especially
+deals, as Wordsworth pointed out, in the primary affections, the
+elementary passions of mankind; and, whatever be its intellectual
+contents of nature or human events, calls these emotions forth as the
+master-spirit of all our seeing. Emotion is more fundamental in us than
+knowledge; it is more powerful in its working; it underlies more
+deliberate and conscious life in the mind, and in most of us it rules,
+as it influences in all. It is natural, therefore, to find that its
+operation in art is of graver importance than that of the intellectual
+faculty so far as the broad power of art over men is concerned.
+
+Another special point arises from the fact that some emotions are
+painful, and the question is raised how in literature painful emotions
+become a pleasure. Aristotle's doctrine in respect to certain of these
+emotions, tragic pity and terror, is well known, though variously
+interpreted. He regards such emotions as a discharge of energy, an
+exhaustion and a relief, in consequence of which their disturbing
+presence is less likely to recur in actual life; it is as if emotional
+energy accumulated, as vital force is stored up and requires to be
+loosed in bodily exercise; but this, except in the point that pity and
+terror, if they do accumulate in their particular forms latently, are
+specifically such as it is wise to be rid of, does not differentiate
+emotion from the rest of our powers in all of which there is a similar
+pleasure in exercising, an exhaustion and a relief, with less liability
+of immediate recurrence; this belongs to all expenditure of life. It is
+not credible to me that painful emotion, under the illusions of art, can
+become pleasurable in the common sense; what pleasure there is arises
+only in the climax and issue of the action, as in case of the drama when
+the restoration of the order that is joyful, beautiful, right, and wise
+occurs; in other words, in the presence of the final poetic justice or
+reconciliation of the disturbed elements of life. But here we come upon
+darker and mysterious aspects of our general subject, now to be slightly
+touched. Tragedy dealing with the discords of life must present painful
+spectacles; and is saved to art only by its just ending. Comedy, which
+similarly deals with discords, is endurable only while these remain
+painless. Both imply a defect in order, and neither would have any place
+in a perfect world, which would be without pity, fear, or humour, all of
+which proceed from incongruities in the scheme. Tragedy and comedy
+belong alike to low civilizations, to wicked, brutal, or ridiculous
+types of character and disorderly events, to the confusion, ignorance,
+and ignominies of mankind; the refinement of both is a mark of progress
+in both art and civilization, and foretells their own extinction, unless
+indeed the principle of evil be more deeply implanted in the universe
+than we fondly hope; pathos and humour, which are the milder and the
+kindlier forms of tragedy and comedy, must also cease, for both are
+equally near to tears. But before leaving this subject it is interesting
+to observe how in the Aristotelian scheme of tragedy, where it was
+little thought of, the appeal is made to man's whole nature as here
+outlined--the plot replying to reason, the scene to the sense of beauty,
+the katharsis to the emotions, and poetic justice to the will, which
+thus finds its model and exemplar in the supremacy of the moral law in
+all tragic art.
+
+This, then, being the nature of the ideal world in its whole range
+commensurate with our being, and these the methods of its intellectual
+and emotional appeal, it remains to examine the world of art in itself,
+and especially its genesis out of life. The method by which it is built
+up has long been recognized to be that of imitation of the actual, as
+has been assumed hitherto in the statement that all art is concrete. But
+the concrete which art creates is not a copy of the concrete of life;
+it is more than this. The mind takes the particulars of the world of
+sense into itself, generalizes them, and frames therefrom a new
+particular, which does not exist in nature; it is, in fact, nature made
+perfect in an imagined instance, and so presented to the mind's eye, or
+to the eye of sense. The pleasure which imitation gives has been often
+and diversely analyzed; it may be that of recognition, or that of new
+knowledge satisfying our curiosity as if the original were present, or
+that of delight in the skill of the artist, or that of interest in
+seeing how his view differs from our own, or that of the illusion
+created for us; but all these modes of pleasure exist when the imitation
+is an exact copy of the original, and they do not characterize the
+artistic imitation in any way to differentiate its peculiar pleasure. It
+is that element which artistic imitation adds to actuality, the
+difference between its created concrete and the original out of which
+that was developed, which gives the special delight of art to the mind.
+It is the perfection of the type, the intensity of the emotion, the
+inevitability of the plot,--it is the pure and intelligible form
+disclosed in the phases and movement of life, disengaged and set apart
+for the contemplation of the mind,--it is the purging of the sensual
+eye, enabling it to see through the mind as the mind first saw through
+it, which renders the world of art the new vision it is, the revelation
+accomplished by the mind for the senses. If the world of art were only a
+reduplication of life, it would give only the pleasures that have been
+mentioned; but its true pleasure is that which it yields from its
+supersensual element, the reason which has entered into it with ordering
+power. In the world thus created there will remain the imperfections
+which are due to the limitation of the artist, in knowledge, skill, and
+choice.
+
+It will be said at once that all these concrete representations
+necessarily fail to realize the artist's thought, and are inadequate,
+inferior in exactness, to scientific and philosophic knowledge; in a
+measure this is true, and would be important if the method of art were
+demonstrative, instead of being, as has been said, experimental and
+inductive. So, too, all thinkers, using the actual world in their
+processes, are at a disadvantage. The figures of the geometer, the
+quantities of the chemist, the measurements of the astronomer, are
+inexact approximations to their equivalent in the mind. Art, as an
+embodiment in mortal images, is subject to the conditions of mortality.
+Hence arises its human history, the narrative of its rise, climax, and
+decline in successive ages. The course of art is known; it has been run
+many times; it is a simple matter. At first art is archaic, the sensible
+form being rudely controlled by the artist's hand; it becomes, in the
+second stage, classical, the form being adequate to the thought, a
+transparent expression; last, it is decadent, the form being more than
+the thought, dwarfing it by usurping attention on its own account. The
+peculiar temptation of technique is always to elaboration of detail;
+technique is at first a hope, it becomes a power, it ends in being a
+caprice; and always as it goes on it loses sight of the general in its
+rendering, and dwells with a near eye on the specific. Nor is this
+attention to detail confined to the manner; the hand of the artist draws
+the mind after it, and it is no longer the great types of manhood, the
+important fates of life, the primary emotions in their normal course,
+that are in the foreground of thought, but the individual is more and
+more, the sensational in plot, the sentimental in feeling. This
+tendency to detail, which is the hallmark of realism, constitutes
+decline. It arises partly from the exhaustion of general ideas, from the
+search for novelty of subject and sensation, from the special phenomena
+of a decaying society; but, however manifold may be the causes, the fact
+of decline consists in the lessened scope of the matter and the
+increased importance of the form, both resulting in luxuriant detail.
+Ideas as they lose generality gain in intensity, but in the history of
+art this has not proved a compensation. In Greece the three stages are
+clearly marked both in matter and manner, in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
+Euripides; in England less clearly in Marlowe, Shakspere, and Webster.
+How monstrous in the latter did tragedy necessarily become! yet more
+repulsive in his tenderer companion-spirit, Ford. In Greek sculpture,
+passing into convulsed and muscular forms or forms of relaxed
+voluptuousness, in Italian painting, in the romantic poetry of this
+century with us, the same stages are manifest. Age parallels age.
+Tennyson in artistic technique is Virgilian, we are aware of the style;
+but both Virgil and Tennyson remain classic in matter, in universality,
+and the elemental in man. Browning in substance is Euripidean, being
+individualistic, psychologic, problematic, with special pleading;
+classicism had departed from him, and left not even the style behind.
+The great opposition lies in the subject of interest. Is it to know
+ourselves in others? Then art which is widely interpretative of the
+common nature of man results. Is it to know others as different from
+ourselves? Then art which is specially interpretative of abnormal
+individuals in extraordinary environments results. This is the
+opposition between realism and idealism, while both remain in the limits
+of art, as these terms are commonly used. It belongs to realism to tend
+to the concrete of narrow application, but with fulness of special trait
+or detail. It belongs to idealism to tend to the concrete of broad
+application, but without peculiarity. The trivial on the one hand, the
+criminal on the other, in the individual, are the extremes of realistic
+art, while idealism rises to an almost superhuman emphasis on that
+wisdom and virtue, and the beauty clothing them, which are the goal of a
+nation's effort. Race-ideas, or generalizations of a compact and
+homogeneous people summing up their serious interpretations of life,
+their moral choices, their aspiration and hope in the lines of effort
+that seem to them highest, are the necessary matter of idealism; when
+these are expressed they are the Greek spirit, the Roman genius, great
+types of humanity on the impersonal, the national scale. As these
+historic generalizations dissolve in national decay, art breaks up in
+individual portrayal of less embracing types; the glorification of the
+Greek man in Achilles yields place to the corruptions of the homunculus;
+and in general the literature of nationality gives way to the unmeaning
+and transitory literature of a society interested in its vices,
+superstitions, and sensations. In each age some genius stands at the
+centre of its expression, a shining nucleus amid its planetary stars;
+such was Dante, such Virgil, such Shakspere. Few indeed are the races
+that present the spectacle of a double-sun in their history, as the
+Hebrews in Psalm and Gospel, the Greeks in Homer and in Plato. And yet,
+all this enormous range of life and death, this flowering in centuries
+of the human spirit in its successive creations, reposes finally on the
+more or less general nature of the concretes used in its art, on their
+broad or narrow truth, on their human or individualistic significance.
+The difference between idealism and realism is not more than a question
+which to choose. At the further end and last remove, when all art has
+been resolved into a sensation, an effect, lies impressionism, which, by
+its nature, is a single phase at a single moment as seen by a single
+being; but even then, if the mind be normal, if the phase be veritable,
+if the moment be that of universal beauty which Faust bade be eternal,
+the artistic work remains ideal; but on the other hand, it is usually
+the eccentric mind, the abnormal phase, the beauty of morbid sensation
+that are rendered; and impressionism becomes, as a term, the
+vanishing-point of realism into the moment of sense.
+
+The world of art, to reach its last limitation, through all this wide
+range is in each creation passed through the mind of the artist and
+presented necessarily under all the conditions of his personality. His
+nature is a term in the process, and the question of imperfection or of
+error, known as the personal equation, arises. Individual differences of
+perceptive power in comprehending what is seen, and of narrative skill,
+or in the plastic and pictorial arts of manual dexterity, import this
+personal element into all artistic works, the more in proportion to the
+originality of the maker and the fulness of his self-expression. In
+rendering from the actual such error is unavoidable, and is practically
+admitted by all who would rather see for themselves than take the
+account of a witness, and prefer the original to any copy of it, though
+they thereby only substitute their own error for that of the artist.
+This personal error, however, is easily corrected by the consensus of
+human nature.
+
+The differences in personality go far deeper than this common liability
+of humanity to mere mistakes in sight and in representation. The
+isolating force that creates a solitude round every man lies in his
+private experience, and results from his original faculties and the
+special conditions of his environment, his acquired habits of attending
+to some things rather than others open to him, the choices he has made
+in the past by which his view of the world and his interest in it have
+been determined. Memory, the mother of the Muses, is supreme here; a
+man's memory, which is the treasury of his chosen delights in life,
+characterizes him, and differentiates his work from that of others,
+because he must draw on that store for his materials. Thus a man's
+character, or, what is more profound, his temperament, acting in
+conjunction with the memory it has built up for itself, is a controlling
+force in artistic work, and modifies it in the sense that it presents
+the universal truth only as it exists in his personality, in his
+apprehension of it and its meaning.
+
+Genius is this power of personality, and exists in proportion as the man
+differs from the average in ways that find significant expression. This
+difference may proceed along two lines. It may be aberration from normal
+human nature, due to circumstances or to inherent defect or to a
+thousand causes, but existing always in the form of an inward perversion
+approaching disease of our nature; such types of genius are pathological
+and may be neglected. It may, on the other hand, be development of
+normal human nature in high power, and it then exists in the form of
+inward energy, showing itself in great sensitiveness to outward things,
+in mental power of comprehension, in creative force of recombination
+and expression. Of genius of this last sort the leaders of the human
+spirit are made. The basis of it is still, human faculty dealing with
+the universe--the same faculty, the same universe, that are common to
+mankind; but with an extraordinary power, such that it can reveal to men
+at large what they of themselves might never have arrived at, can
+advance knowledge and show forth goals of human hope, can in a word
+guide the race. The isolation of such a nature is necessarily profound,
+and intense loneliness has ever been a characteristic of genius. The
+solvent of all personality, however, lies at last in this fact of a
+common world and a common faculty for all, resulting in an experience
+intelligible to all, even if unshared by them. The humanity of genius
+constitutes its sanity, and is the ground of its usefulness; though it
+lives in isolation, it does so only as an advanced outpost may; it
+expects the advent of the race behind and below it, and shows there its
+signal and sounds there its call. Its escape from personality lies in
+its identifying itself with the common order in which all souls shall
+finally be merged and be at one. The limitations of genius are
+consequently not so much limitations as the abrogation of limits in the
+ordinary sense; its originality of insight, interpretation, and
+expression broadens the human horizons and enriches the fields within
+them; it tells us what we may not have known or felt or guessed, but
+what we shall at last understand. Thus, as the theory of art is most
+fixed in the doctrine of order, so here it is most flexible in the
+doctrine of personality, through which that order is most variously set
+forth and illustrated. Imitation, so far from becoming a defective or
+false method because of personality, is really made catholic by it, and
+gains the variety and breadth that characterizes the artistic world as a
+whole.
+
+The element of self which thus enters into every artistic work has
+different degrees of importance. In objective art, it is clear that it
+enters valuably in proportion as the universe is seized by a mind of
+right reason, of profound penetration, of truthful imagination; and if
+the work be presented enveloped in a subjective mood, while it remains
+objective in contents, as in Virgil the mood pervades the poem so deeply
+as to be a main part of it, then the mood must be one of those felt or
+capable of being felt universally,--the profound moods of the meditative
+spirit in grand works, the common moods of simple joy and sorrow in less
+serious works. In proportion as society develops, whether in historic
+states singly or in the progress of mankind, the direct expression of
+self for its own sake becomes more usual; literature becomes more
+personal or purely subjective. If the poet's private story be one of
+action, it is plain that it has interest only as if it were objectively
+rendered, from its being illustrative of life in general; so, too, if
+the felt emotion be given, this will have value from its being treated
+as typical; and, in so far as the intimate nature of the poet is
+variously given as a whole in his entire works, it has real importance,
+has its justification in art, only in so far as he himself is a high
+normal type of humanity. The truth of the matter is, in fact, only a
+detail of the general proposition that in art history has no value of
+its own as such; for the poet is a part of life that is, and his nature
+and career, like that of any character or event in history, have no
+artistic value beyond their universal significance. In such
+self-portraiture there may be sometimes the depicting of a depraved
+nature, such as Villon; but such a type takes its place with other
+criminal types of the imagination, and belongs with them in another
+sphere.
+
+This element of self finds its intense expression in lyrical
+love-poetry, one of the most enduring forms of literature because of its
+elementariness and universality; but it is also found in other parts of
+the emotional field. In seeking concrete material for lyrical use the
+poet may take some autobiographical incident, but commonly the world of
+inanimate nature yields the most plastic mould. It is a marvellous
+victory of the spirit over matter when it takes the stars of heaven and
+the flowers of earth and makes them utter forth its speech, less as it
+seems in words of human language than in the pictured hieroglyph and
+symphonic movement of natural things; for in such poetry it is not the
+vision of nature, however beautiful, that holds attention; it is the
+colour, form, and music of things externalizing, visualizing the inward
+mood, emotion, or passion of the singer. Nature is emptied of her
+contents to become the pure inhabitancy of one human soul. The poet's
+method is that of life itself, which is first awakened by the beauty
+without to thought and feeling; he expresses the state evoked by that
+beauty and absorbing it. He identifies himself with the objects before
+him through his joy in them, and entering there makes nature translucent
+with his own spirit.
+
+Shelley's Ode to the West Wind is the eminent example of such magical
+power. The three vast elements, earth, air, and water, are first brought
+into a union through their connection with the west wind; and, the wind
+still being the controlling centre of imagination, the poet, drawing all
+this limitless and majestic imagery with him, by gradual and spontaneous
+approaches identifies himself at the climax of feeling with the object
+of his invocation,--
+
+    "Be thou me, impetuous one!"
+
+and thence the poem swiftly falls to its end in a lyric burst of
+personality, in which, while the body of nature is retained, there is
+only a spiritual meaning. So Burns in some songs, and Keats in some
+odes, following the same method, make nature their own syllables, as of
+some cosmic language. This is the highest reach of the artist's power
+of conveying through the concrete image the soul in its pure emotional
+life; and in such poetry one feels that the whole material world seems
+lent to man to expand his nature and escape from the solitude in which
+he is born to that divine union to which he is destined. The evolution
+of this one moment of passion is lyric form, whose unity lies in
+personality exclusively, however it may seem to involve the external
+world which is its imagery,--its body lifted from the dust, woven of
+light and air, but alive only while the spirit abides there. And here,
+too, as elsewhere, to whatever height the poet may rise, it must be one
+to which man can follow, to which, indeed, the poet lifts men. Nor is it
+only nature which thus suffers spiritualization through the stress of
+imagination interpreting life in definite and sensible forms of beauty,
+but the imagery of action also may be similarly taken possession of,
+though this is rare in merely lyrical expression.
+
+The ideal world, then, to present in full summary these views, is thus
+built up, through personality in all its richness, by a perfected
+imitation of life itself, and is set forth in universal unities of
+relation, causal or formal, to the intellect in its inward, to the sense
+of beauty in its outward, aspects; and thereby delighting the desire of
+the mind for lucid and lovely order, it generates joy, and thence is
+born the will to conform one's self to this order. If, then, this order
+be conceived as known in its principles and in operation in living
+souls, as existing in its completeness on the simplest scale in an
+entire series of illustrative instances but without multiplicity,--if it
+be conceived, that is, as the model of a world,--that would be to know
+it as it exists to the mind of God; that would be to contemplate the
+world of ideas as Plato conceived it seen by the soul before birth. That
+is the beatific vision. If it be conceived in its mortal movement as a
+developing world on earth, that would be to know "the plot of God," as
+Poe called the universe. Art endeavours to bring that vision, that plot,
+however fragmentary, upon earth. It is a world of order clothing itself
+in beauty, with a charm to the soul, such is our nature,--operative upon
+the will to live. It is preeminently a vision of beauty. It is true that
+this beauty which thus wins and moves us seems something added by the
+mind in its great creations rather than anything actual in life; for it
+is, in fact, heightened and refined from the best that man has seen in
+himself, and it partakes more of hope than of memory. Here is that woven
+robe of illusion which is so hard a matter to those who live in horizons
+of the eye and hand. Yet as idealism was found on its mental side
+harmonious with reason in all knowledge, and on its emotional side
+harmonious with the heart in its outgoings, so this perfecting
+temperament that belongs to it and most characterizes it, falls in with
+the natural faith of mankind. Idealism in this sense, too, existed in
+life before it passed into literature. The youth idealizes the maiden he
+loves, his hero, and the ends of his life; and in age the old man
+idealizes his youth. Who does not remember some awakening moment when he
+first saw virtue and knew her for what she is? Sweet was it then to
+learn of some Jason of the golden fleece, some Lancelot of the tourney,
+some dying Sydney of the stricken field. There was a poignancy in this
+early knowledge that shall never be felt again; but who knows not that
+such enthusiasm which earliest exercised the young heart in noble
+feelings is the source of most of good that abides in us as years go on?
+In such boyish dreaming the soul learns to do and dare, hardens and
+supples itself, and puts on youthful beauty; for here is its palaestra.
+Who would blot these from his memory? who choke these fountain-heads,
+remembering how often along life's pathway he has thirsted for them?
+Such moments, too, have something singular in their nature, and almost
+immortal, that carries them echoing far on into life where they strike
+upon us in manhood at chosen moments when least expected; some of them
+are the real time in which we live. It was said of old that great men
+were creative in their souls, and left their works to be their race;
+these ideal heroes have immortal souls for their children, age after
+age. Shall we in our youth, then, in generous emulation idealize the
+great of old times, and honour them as our fair example of what we most
+would be? Shall we, in our hearts, idealize those we love,--so natural
+is it to believe in the perfection of those we love,--and even if the
+time for forgiveness comes, and we show them the mercy that our own
+frailty teaches us to exercise, shall we still idealize them, since love
+continues only in the persuasion of perfection yet to come, and is the
+tenderer because it comes with struggle? Whether in our acts or our
+emotions shall we give idealism this range, and deny it to literature
+which discloses the habits of our daily practice in more perfection and
+with greater beauty? There we find the purest types to raise and sustain
+us; to direct our choice, and reenforce us with that emotion, that
+passion, which most supports the will in its effort. There history
+itself is taken up, transformed, and made immortal, the whole past of
+human emotion and action contained and shown forth with convincing
+power. Nor is it only with the natural habit of mankind that idealism
+falls in, but with divine command. Were we not bid be perfect as our
+Father in heaven is perfect? And what is that image of the Christ, what
+is that world-ideal, the height of human thought, but the work of the
+creative reason,--not of genius, not of the great in mind and fortunate
+in gifts, but of the race itself, in proud and humble, in saint and
+sinner, in the happy and the wretched, in all the vast range of the
+millions of the dead whose thoughts live embodied in that great
+tradition,--the supreme and perfected pattern of mankind?
+
+Is it nevertheless true that there is falsehood in all this? that men
+were never such as the heart believes them, nor ideal characters able to
+breathe mortal air? by indulging our emotions, do we deceive ourselves,
+and end at last in cynicism or despair? Why, then, should we not boldly
+affirm that the falsehood is rather in us, in the defects by which we
+fail of perfection, in our ignorant error and voluntary wrong? that in
+the ideal, free as it is from the accidental and the transitory,
+inclusive as it is of the common truth, lies, as Plato thought, the only
+reality, the truth which outlasts us all? But this may seem a subtle
+evasion rather than a frank answer. Let us rather say that idealism is
+one of the necessary modes of man's faith, brings in the future, and
+assumes the reality of that which shall be actual; that the reality it
+owns is that of the rose in the bud, the oak in the acorn, the planet in
+its fiery mist. I believe that ideal character in its perfection is
+potentially in every man who is born into the world. We forecast the
+future in other parts of life; why should we not forecast ourselves?
+Would he not be thought foolish who should refuse to embark in great
+enterprises of trade, because he does not already hold the wealth to be
+gained? The ideal is our infinite riches, more than any individual or
+moment can hold. To refuse it is as if a man should neglect his estate
+because he can take but a handful of it in his grasp. It is the law of
+our being to grow, and it is a necessity that we should have examples
+and patterns in advance of us, by which we can find our way. There is no
+falsehood in such anticipation; there is only a faith in truth instead
+of a possession of it. Will you limit us to one moment of time and
+place? will you say to the patriot that his country is a geographical
+term? and when he replies that rather is it the life of her sons, will
+you point him to human nature as it seems at the period, to corruption,
+folly, ignorance, strife, and crime, and tell him that is our actual
+America? Will he not rather say that his America is a great past, a
+future whose beneficence no man can sum? Is there any falsehood in this
+ideal country that men have ever held precious? Did Pericles lie in his
+great oration, and Virgil in his noble poem, and Dante in his fervid
+Italian lines? And as there are ideals of country, so also of men, of
+the soldier, the priest, the king, the lover, the citizen, and beside
+each of us does there not go one who mourns over our fall and pities us,
+gladdens in our virtue, and shall not leave us till we die; an ideal
+self, who is our judgment? and if it be yet answered that this in truth
+is so, and might be borne but for the errors of the idealizing
+temperament, shall we not reply that the quack does not discredit the
+art of medicine, nor the demagogue the art of politics, and no more does
+the fool in all his motley the art of literature.
+
+Must I, however, come back to my answer, and meet those who aver that
+however stimulating idealism is to the soul, yet it must be remembered
+that in the world at large there is nothing corresponding to ideal
+order, to poetic ethics, and that to act these forth as the supremacy of
+what ought to be is to misrepresent life, to raise expectations in youth
+never to be realized, to pervert practical standards, and in brief to
+make a false start that can be fruitful only in error, in subsequent
+suffering of mind, and with material disadvantage? I must be frank: I
+own that I can perceive in Nature no moral order, that in her world
+there is no knowledge of us or of our ideals, and that in general her
+order often breaks upon man's life with mere ruin, irrational and
+pitiful; and I acknowledge, also, the prominence of evil in the social,
+and its invasion in the individual, life of man. But, again, were we so
+situated that there should be no external divine order apparent to our
+minds, were justice an accident and mercy the illusion of wasted prayer,
+there would still remain in us that order whose workings are known
+within our own bosom, that law which compels us to be just and merciful
+in order to lead the life that we recognize to be best, and the whole
+imperative of our ideal, which, if we fail to ourselves, condemns us,
+irrespective of what future attends us in the world. Ideal order as the
+mind knows it, the mind must strive to realize, or stand dishonoured in
+its own forum. Within us, at least, it exists in hope and somewhat in
+reality, and following it in our effort, though we come merely to a
+stoical idea of the just man on whom the heavens fall, we should yet be
+nobler than the power that made us souls betrayed. But there is no such
+difference between the world as it is and the world as ideal art
+presents it.
+
+What, then, is the difference between art and nature? Art is nature
+regenerate, made perfect, suffering the new birth into what ought to be;
+an ordered and complete world. But this is the vision of art as the
+ultimate of good. Idealism has also another world, of which glimpses
+have already appeared in the course of this argument, though in the
+background. In the intellectual sphere evil is as subject to general
+statement as is good, and there is in the strict sense an idealization
+of evil, a universal statement of it, as in Mephistopheles, or in more
+partial ways in Iago, Macbeth, Richard III. In the emotional sphere also
+there is the throb of evil, felt as diabolic energy and presented as the
+element in which these characters have their being. Even in the sphere
+of the will, who shall say that man does not knowingly choose evil as
+his portion? So, too, as the method of idealism in the world of the good
+tends to erect man above himself, the same generalizing method in the
+world of the evil tends to degrade human nature below itself; the
+extremes of the process are the divine and the devilish; both transcend
+life, but are developed out of it. The difference between these two
+poles of ideality is that the order of one is an order of life, that of
+the other an order of death. Between these two is the special province
+of the human will. What literature, what all art, presents is not the
+ultimate of good or the ultimate of evil separately; it is, taking into
+account the whole range, the mixed world becoming what it ought to be in
+its evolution from what it is, and the laws of that progress. Hence
+tragedy on the one hand and comedy, or more broadly humour, on the other
+hand, have their great place in literature; for they are forms of the
+intermediate world of conflict. I speak of the spiritual world of man's
+will. We may conceive of the world optimistically as a place in which
+all shall issue in good and nothing be lost; or as a place in which, by
+alliance with or revolt from the forces of life, the will in its
+voluntary and individual action may save or lose the soul at its choice.
+We may think of God as conserving all, or as permitting hell, which is
+death. We do not know. But as shown to us in imagination, idealism,
+which is the race's dream of truth, hovers between these two worlds
+known to us in tendency if not in conclusion,--the world of salvation on
+the one hand, in proportion as the order of life is made vital in us,
+the world of damnation on the other hand, in proportion as the order of
+death prevails in our will; but the main effort of idealism is to show
+us the war between the two, with an emphasis on the becoming of the
+reality of beauty, joy, reason, and virtue in us. Not that prosperity
+follows righteousness, not that poverty attends wickedness, in worldly
+measure, but that life is the gift of a right will is her message; how
+we, striving for eternal life, may best meet the chances and the bitter
+fates of mortal existence, is her brooding care; ideal characters, or
+those ideal in some trait or phase, in the midst of a hostile
+environment, are her fixed study. So far is idealism from ignoring the
+actual state of man that it most affirms its pity and evil by setting
+them in contrast with what ought to be, by showing virtue militant not
+only against external enemies but those inward weaknesses of our
+mortality with its passion and ignorance, which are our most undermining
+and intimate foes. Here is no false world, but just that world which is
+our theatre of action, that confused struggle, represented in its
+intelligible elements in art, that world of evil, implicit in us and the
+universe, which must be overcome; and this is revealed to us in the ways
+most profitable for our instruction, who are bound to seek to realize
+the good through all the strokes of nature and the folly and sin of men.
+Ideal literature in its broad compass, between its opposed poles of good
+and evil, is just this: a world of order emerging from disorder, of
+beauty and wisdom, of virtue and joy, emerging from the chaos of things
+that are, in selected and typical examples.
+
+It follows from this that what remains in the world of observation in
+personality or experience, whether good or evil, whether particular or
+general, not yet coordinated in rational knowledge as a whole, all for
+which no solution is found, all that cannot be or has not been made
+intelligible, must be the subject-matter of realism in the exact use of
+that term. This must be recorded by literature, or admitted into it, as
+matter-of-fact which is to the mind still a problem. Earthly mystery
+therefore is the special sphere of realism. The borderland of the
+unknown or the irreducible is its realm. This old residuum, this new
+material, is not yet capable of art. Hence, too, realism in this sense
+characterizes ages of expansion of knowledge such as ours. The new
+information which is the fruit of our wide travel, of our research into
+the past, has enlarged the problem of man's life by showing us both
+primitive and historical humanity in its changeful phases of progress
+working out the beast; and this new interest has been reenforced by the
+attention paid, under influences of democracy and philanthropy, to the
+lower and baser forms of life in the masses under civilization, which
+has been a new revelation of persistent savagery in our midst. Here
+realism illustrates its service as a gatherer of knowledge which may
+hereafter be reduced to orderliness by idealistic processes, for
+idealism is the organizer of all knowledge. But apart from this incoming
+of facts, or of laws not yet harmonized in the whole body of law, for
+which we may have fair hope that a synthesis will be found, there
+remains forever that residuum of which I spoke, which has resisted the
+intelligence of man, age after age, from the first throb of feeling,
+the first ray of thought; that involuntary evil, that unmerited
+suffering, that impotent pain,--the human debris of the social
+process,--which is a challenge to the power of God, and a cry to the
+heart of man that broods over it in vain, yet cannot choose but hear. In
+this region the near affinity of realism to pessimism, to atheism, is
+plain enough; its necessary dealing with the base, the brutal, the
+unredeemed, the hopeless darkness of the infamies of heredity, criminal
+education, and successful malignity, eating into the being as well as
+controlling the fortune of their victims, is manifest; and what answer
+has ever been found to the interrogation they make? It is not merely
+that particular facts are here irreconcilable; but laws themselves are
+discernible, types even not of narrow application, which have not been
+brought into any relation with what I have named the divine order.
+Millions of men in thousands of years are included in this holocaust of
+past time,--eras of savagery, Assyrian civilizations, Christian
+butcheries, the Czar yet supreme, the Turk yet alive.
+
+And how is it at the other pole of mystery, where life rises into a
+heavenly vision of eternities of love to come? There is no place for
+realism here, where observation ceases and our only human outlook is by
+inference from principles and laws of the ideal world as known to us;
+yet what problems are we aware of? Must,--to take the special problem of
+art,--must the sensuous scheme of life persist, since of it warp and
+woof are woven all our possibilities of communication, all our
+capabilities of knowledge? it is our language and our memory alike. Must
+God be still thought of in the image of man, since only in terms of our
+humanity can we conceive even divine things, whether in forms of mortal
+pleasure as the Greeks framed their deities, or in shapes of spiritual
+bliss as Christians fashion saint, angel, and archangel? These are
+rather philosophical problems. But in art, as at the realistic end of
+the scale, we admit the portraiture, as a part of life, of the bestial,
+the cruel, the unforgiven, and feel it debasing, so must we at the
+idealistic end admit the representation of the celestial after human
+models, and feel it, even in Milton and in Dante, minimizing. The
+mysticism of the borderland at its supreme is a hope; at its nadir, it
+is a fear. We do not know. But within the narrow range of the
+intelligible and ordered world of art, which has been achieved by the
+creative reason of civilized man in his brief centuries and along the
+narrow path from Jerusalem and Athens to the western world, we do know
+that for the normal man born into its circle of light the order of life
+is within our reach, the order of death within reach of us. Shut within
+these limits of the victory of our intellect and the upreaching of our
+desires and the warfare of our will, we assert in art our faith that the
+divine order is victorious, that the righteous man is not forsaken, that
+the soul cannot suffer wrong either from others or from nature or from
+God,--that the evil principle cannot prevail. It is faith, springing
+from our experience of the working of that order in us; it transcends
+knowledge, but it grows with knowledge; and ideal literature asserts
+this faith against nature and against man in all their deformity, as the
+centre about which life revolves so far as it has become subject to
+rational knowledge, to beautiful embodiment, to joyful being, to the
+will to live.
+
+Can the faith of which idealism is the holder of the keys, the faith as
+nigh to the intellect as to the heart, to the senses as to the spirit,
+exceed even this limit, and affirm that if man were perfect in knowledge
+and saw the universe as we believe God sees it, he would behold it as an
+artistic whole even now? Would it be that beatific vision, revolving
+like God's kaleidoscope, momentarily falling at each new arrangement
+into the perfect unities of art? and is our world of art, our brief
+model of such a world in single examples of its scheme, only a way of
+limiting the field to the compass of human faculties that we may see
+within our capacities as God sees, and hence have such faith? Is art
+after all a lower creation than nature, a concession to our frail
+powers? Has idealism such optimistic reach as that? Or must we see the
+evil principle encamped here, confusing truth, deforming beauty,
+depraving joy, deflecting the will, with wages of death for its victims,
+and the hell of final destruction spreading beneath its sway? so that
+the world as it now is cannot be thought of as the will of God exercised
+in Omnipotence, but a human opportunity of union with or separation from
+the ideal order in conflict with the order of death. I recall Newman's
+picture: "To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various
+history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their
+mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits,
+governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses,
+their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of
+long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending
+design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or
+truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not
+toward final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his
+far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his
+futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success
+of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of
+sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless
+irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly
+described in the Apostle's words, 'having no hope and without God in the
+world,'--all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the
+mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human
+solution." In the face of such a world, even when partially made
+intelligible in ideal art, dare we assert that fatalistic optimism which
+would have it that the universe is in God's eyes a perfect world? I can
+find no warrant for it in ideal art, though thence the ineradicable
+effort arises in us to win to that world in the conviction that it is
+not indifferent in the sight of heaven whether we live in the order of
+life or that of death, in the faith that victory in us is a triumph of
+that order itself which increases and prevails in us, is a bringing of
+Christ's kingdom upon earth. Art rather becomes in our mind a function
+of the world's progress, and were its goal achieved would cease; for
+life would then itself be one with art, one with the divine order. So
+much of truth there is in Ruskin's statement that art made perfect
+denies progress and is its ultimate. But perfection in life, as ideal
+art presents it, it is a prophecy which enlists us as soldiers militant
+in its fulfilment. Its optimism is that of the issue, and may be that of
+the process; but it surely is not that of the state that now is in the
+world.
+
+It thus appears more and more that art is educative; it is the race's
+foreknowledge of what may be, of the objects of effort and the methods
+of their attainment under mortal conditions. The difficulty of men in
+respect to it is the lax power they have to see in it the truth, as
+contradistinguished from the fact, the continuous reality of the things
+of the mind in opposition to the accidental and partial reality of the
+things of actuality. They think of it as an imagined, instead of as the
+real world, the model of that which is in the evolution of that which
+ought to be. In history the climaxes of art have always outrun human
+realization; its crests in Greece, Italy, and England are crests of the
+never-attained; but they still make on in their mass to the yet rising
+wave, which shall be of mankind universal, if, indeed, in the
+cosmopolitan civilization which we hope for, the elements of the past,
+yet surviving from the accomplishment of single famous cities and great
+empires, shall be blended in a world-ideal, expressing the spiritual
+uplifting to God of the reconciled and unified nations of the earth.
+
+There remains but one last resort; for it will yet be urged that the
+impossibility of any scientific knowledge of the spiritual order is
+proved by the transience of the ideals of the past; one is displaced by
+another, there is no permanence in them. It is true that the concrete
+world, which must be employed by art, is one of sense, and necessarily
+imports into the form of art its own mortality; it is, even in art, a
+thing that passes away. It is also true that the world of knowledge,
+which is the subject-matter of art, is in process of being known, and
+necessarily imports into the contents of art its errors, its hypotheses,
+its imperfections of every kind; it is a thing that grows more and more,
+and in growing sheds its outworn shells, its past body. Let us consider
+the form and the contents separately. The element of mortality in the
+form is included in the transience of imagery. The poet uses the world
+as he knows it, and reflects in successive ages of literature the
+changing phases of civilization. The shepherd, the tiller of the soil,
+the warrior, the trader yield to him their language of the earth, the
+battle, and the sea; from the common altar he learns the speech of the
+gods; the elemental aspects of nature, the pursuits of men, and what is
+believed of the supernatural are the great storehouses of imagery. The
+fact that it is at first a living act or habit that the poet deals with,
+gives to his work that original vivacity, that direct sense of
+actuality, of contemporaneousness, which characterizes early
+literatures, as in Homer or the Song of Roland: even the marvellous has
+in them the reality of being believed. This imagery, however, grows
+remote with the course of time; it becomes capable of holding an inward
+meaning without resistance from too high a feeling of actuality; it
+becomes spiritualized. The process is the same already illustrated in
+lyric form as an expression of personality; but here man universal
+enters into the image and possesses it impersonally on the broad human
+scale. The pastoral life, for example, then yields the forms of art
+which hold either the simple innocence of happy earthly love, as in
+Daphnis and Chloe, or the natural grief of elegy made beautiful, as in
+Bion's dirge, or the shepherding of Christ in his church on earth, as in
+many an English poet; the imagery has unclothed itself of actuality and
+shows a purely spiritual body.
+
+This growing inwardness of art is a main feature of literary history. It
+is illustrated on the grand scale by the imagery of war. In the
+beginning war for its own sake, mere fighting, is the subject; then war
+for a cause, which ennobles it beyond the power of personal prowess and
+justifies it as an element in national life; next, war for love, which
+refines it and builds the paradox of the deeds of hate serving the will
+of courtesy; last, war for the soul's salvation, which is unseen battle
+within the breast. Achilles, Aeneas, Lancelot, the Red Cross Knight are
+the terms in this series; they mark the transformation of the most
+savage act of man into the symbol of his highest spiritual effort.
+Nature herself is subject to this inwardness of art; at first merely
+objective as a condition, and usually a hostile, or at least dangerous,
+condition of human life, she becomes the witness to omnipotent power in
+illimitable beauty and majesty, its infinite unknowableness, and its
+tender care for all creatures, as in the Scriptures; and at last the
+words of our Lord concentrate, in some simple flower, the profoundest of
+moral truths,--that the beauty of the soul is the gift of God, out of
+whose eternal law it blossoms and has therein its ever living roots, its
+air and light, its inherent grace and sweetness: "Consider the lilies of
+the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I
+say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like
+one of these. Shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?"
+Such is the normal development of all imagery; its actuality limits it,
+and in becoming remote it grows flexible. It is only by virtue of this
+that man can retain the vast treasures of race-imagination, and continue
+to use them, such as the worlds of mythology, of chivalry, and romance.
+The imagery is, in truth, a background, whose foreground is the ideal
+meaning. Thus even fairyland, and the worlds of heaven and hell, have
+their place in art. The actuality of the imagery is in fact irrelevant,
+just as history is in the idealization of human events. Its transience,
+then, cannot matter, except in so far as it loses intelligibility
+through changes of time, place, and custom, and becomes a dead language.
+It follows that that imagery which keeps close to universal phases of
+nature, to pursuits always necessary in human life, and to ineradicable
+beliefs in respect to the supernatural, is most permanent as a language;
+and here art in its most immortal creations returns again to its
+omnipresent character as a thing of the common lot.
+
+The transience of the contents of art may be of two kinds. There is a
+passing away of error, as there is in all knowledge, but such a loss
+need not detain attention. What is really in issue is the passing away
+of the authority of precept and example fitted to one age but not to
+another, as in the case of the substitution of the ideal of humility for
+that of valour, owing to a changed emphasis in the scale of virtues. The
+contents of art, its general ideals, reproduce the successive periods of
+our earth-history as a race, by generalizing each in its own age. A
+parallel exists in the subject-matter of the sciences; astronomy,
+geology, paleontology are similar statements of past phases of the
+evolution of the earth, its aspects in successive stages. Or, to take a
+kindred example, just as the planets in their order set forth now the
+history of our system from nascent life to complete death as earths, so
+these ideals exhibit man's stages from savagery to such culture as has
+been attained. They have more than a descriptive and historical
+significance; they retain practical vitality because the unchangeable
+element in the universe and in man's nature is in the main their
+subject-matter. It is not merely that the child repeats in his
+education, in some measure at least, the history of the race, and hence
+must still learn the value of bravery and humility in their order; nor
+that in the mass of men many remain ethically and emotionally in the
+characteristic stages of past culture; but these various ideals of what
+is admirable have themselves identical elements, and in those points in
+which they differ respond to native varieties of human capacity and
+temperament. The living principles of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and
+Christian thought and feeling are at work in the world, still formative;
+it is only by such vitality that their results in art truly survive.
+
+There has been an expansion of the field, and some rearrangement within
+it; but the evolution of human ideals has been, in our civilization, the
+growth of one spirit out of its dead selves carrying on into each
+reincarnation the true life that was in the form it leaves, and which is
+immortal. The substance in each ideal, its embodiment of what is
+cardinal in all humanity, remains integral. The alloy of mortality in a
+work of art lies in so much of it as was limited in truth to time,
+place, country, race, religion, its specific and contemporary part; so
+great is this in detail that a strong power of historical imagination,
+the power to rebuild past conditions, is a main necessity of culture,
+like the study of a dead language; an interpretative faculty, the power
+to translate into terms of our knowledge what was stated in terms of
+different beliefs, must go with this; and also a corrective power, if
+the work is to be truly useful and enter into our lives with effect.
+Such an alloy there is in nearly all great works even; much in Homer,
+something in Virgil, a considerable part of Dante, and an increasing
+portion in Milton have this mixture of death in them; but if by keeping
+to the primary, the permanent, the universal, they have escaped the
+natural body of their age, the substance of the work is still living;
+they have achieved such immortality as art allows. They have done so,
+not so much by the personal power of their authors as by their
+representative character. These ideal works of the highest range, which
+embody in themselves whole generations of effort and rise as the
+successive incarnations of human imagination, are products of race and
+state, of world experience and social personality; they differ, race
+from race, civilization from civilization, Hebrew or Greek, Pagan or
+Christian, just as on the individual scale persons differ; and they are
+solved, as personality in its individual form is solved, in the element
+of the common reason, the common nature in the world and man, which they
+contain,--in man,
+
+    "Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless";
+
+in the unity of the truth of his spirit they are freed from mortality,
+they are mutually intelligible and interchangeable, they survive,--
+racial and secular states and documents of a spiritual evolution yet
+going on in all its stages in the human mass, still barbarous, still
+pagan, still Christian, but an evolution which at its highest point
+wastes nothing of the past, holds all its truth, its beauty, its vital
+energy, in a forward reach.
+
+The nature of the changes which time brings may best be illustrated from
+the epic, and thus the opposition of the transient and permanent
+elements in art be, perhaps, more clearly shown. Epic action has been
+defined as the working out of the Divine will in society; hence it
+requires a crisis of humanity as its subject, it involves the conflict
+of a higher with a lower civilization, and it is conducted by means of a
+double plot, one in heaven, the other on earth. These are the
+characteristic epic traits. In dealing with ideas of such importance,
+the poets in successive eras of civilization naturally found much
+adaptation to new conditions necessary, and met with ever fresh
+difficulties; the result is a many-sided epic development. The idea of
+the Divine will, the theory of its operation, and the conception of
+society itself were all subject to change. Epics at first are
+historical; but, sharing with the tendency of all art toward inwardness
+of meaning, they become purely spiritual. The one thing that remains
+common to all is the notion of a struggle between a higher and a lower,
+overruled by Providence. They have two subjects of interest, one the
+cause, the other the hero through whom the cause works; and between
+these two interests the epic hovers, seldom if ever identifying them and
+yet preserving their dual reality.
+
+The Iliad has all the traits that have been mentioned, but society is
+still loose enough in its bonds to give the characters free play; it is,
+in the main, a hero-epic. The Aeneid, on the contrary, exhibits the
+enormous development of the social idea; its subject is Roman dominion,
+which is the will of Zeus, localized in the struggle with Carthage and
+with Turnus, but felt in the poem pervasively as the general destiny of
+Rome in its victory over the world; and this interest is so overpowering
+as to make Aeneas the slave of Jove and almost to extinguish the other
+characters; it is a state-epic. So long as the Divine will was conceived
+as finding its operation through deities similar to man, the double plot
+presented little difficulty; but in the coming of Christian thought,
+even with its hierarchies of angels and legions of devils, the
+interpretation became arduous. In the Jerusalem Delivered the social
+conflict between Crusader and infidel is clear, the historical crisis in
+the wars of Palestine is rightly chosen, but the machinery of the
+heavenly plot is weakened by the presence of magic, and is by itself
+ineffectual in inspiring a true belief. So in the Lusiads, while the
+conflict and the crisis, as shown in the national energy of colonization
+in the East, are clear, the machinery of the heavenly plot frankly
+reverts to mythologic and pagan forms and loses all credibility.
+
+In the Paradise Lost arises the spiritual epic, but still historically
+conceived; the crisis chosen, which is the fall of man in Adam, is the
+most important conceivable by man; the powers engaged are the superior
+beings of heaven and hell in direct antagonism; but here, too, the
+machinery of the heavenly plot is handled with much strain, and, however
+strongly supported by the Scriptures, has little convincing power. The
+truth is that the Divine will was coming to be conceived as implicit in
+society, being Providence there, and operating in secret but normal ways
+in the guidance of events, not by special and interfering acts; and also
+as equally implicit in the individual soul, the influence of the Spirit,
+and working in the ways of spiritual law. One change, too, of vast
+importance was announced by the words "The Kingdom of Heaven is within
+you." This transferred the very scene of conflict, the theatre of
+spiritual warfare, from an external to an internal world, and the social
+significance of such individual battle lay in its being typical of all
+men's lives. The Faerie Queene, the most spiritual poem in all ways in
+English, is an epic in essence, though its action is developed by a
+revolution of the phases of the soul in succession to the eye, and not
+by the progress of one main course of events. The conflict of the higher
+and the lower under Divine guidance in the implicit sense is there
+shown; the significance is for mankind, though not for a society in its
+worldly fortunes; but there is little attempt to externalize the
+heavenly power in specific action in superhuman forms, though in mortal
+ways the good knights, and especially Arthur, shadow it forth. The
+celestial plot is humanized, and the poem becomes a hero-epic in almost
+an exclusive way; though the knight's achievement is also an achievement
+of God's will, the interest lies in the Divine power conceived as man's
+moral victory. In the Idyls of the King there are several traits of the
+epic. There is the central idea of the conflict between the higher and
+lower, both on the social and the individual side; the victory of the
+Round Table would have meant not only pure knights but a regenerate
+state. Here, however, the externalization of the Divine will in the Holy
+Grail, and, as in the Christian epic generally, its confusion on the
+marvellous side with a world of enchantment passing here into the
+sensuous sphere of Merlin, are felt to be inadequate. The war of "soul
+with sense" was the subject-matter, as was Spenser's; the method of
+revolution of its phases was also Spenser's; but the two poems differ in
+the point that Spenser's knight wins, but Tennyson's king loses, so far
+as earth is concerned; nor can it be fairly pleaded that as in Milton
+Adam loses, yet the final triumph of the cause is known and felt as a
+divine issue of the action though outside the poem, so Arthur is saved
+to the ideal by virtue of the faith he announces in the New Order coming
+on, for it is not so felt. The touch of pessimism invades the poem in
+many details, but here at its heart; for Arthur alone of all the heroes
+of epic in his own defeat drags down his cause. He is the hero of a lost
+cause, whose lance will never be raised again in mortal conflict to
+bring the kingdom of Christ on earth, nor its victory be declared except
+as the echo of a hope of some miraculous and merciful retrieval from
+beyond the barriers of the world to come. But in showing the different
+conditions of the modern epic, its spirituality, its difficulties of
+interpreting in sensuous imagery the working of the Divine will, its
+relaxed hold on the social movement for which it substitutes man's
+universal nature, and the mist that settles round it in its latest
+example, sufficient illustration has been given of the changes of time
+to which idealism is subject, and also of the essential truth surviving
+in the works of the past, which in the epics is the vision of how the
+ends of God have been accomplished in the world and in the soul by the
+union of divine grace with heroic will,--the interpretation and
+glorification, of history and of man's single conflict in himself ago
+after age, asserting through all their range the supremacy of the ideal
+order over its foes in the entire race-life of man.
+
+Out of these changes of time, in response to the varying moods of men in
+respect to the world they inhabit, arise those phases of art which are
+described as classical and romantic, words of much confusion. It has
+been attempted to distinguish the latter as having an element of
+remoteness, of surprise, of curiosity; but to me, at least, classical
+art has the same remoteness, the same surprise, and answers the same
+curiosity as romantic art. If I were to endeavour to oppose them I
+should say that classical art is clear, it is perfectly grasped in form,
+it satisfies the intellect, it awakes an emotion absorbed by itself, it
+definitely guides the will; romantic art is touched with mystery, it has
+richness and intricacy of form not fully comprehended, it suggests more
+than it satisfies, it stirs an unconfined and wandering emotion, it
+invigorates an adventurous will; classicism is whole in itself and lives
+in the central region, the white light, of that star of ideality which
+is the light of our knowledge; romanticism borders on something
+else,--the rosy corona round about our star, carrying on its dawning
+power into those unknown infinities which embosom the spark of life. The
+two have always existed in conjunction, the romantic element in ancient
+literature being large. But owing to the disclosure of the world to us
+in later times, to the deeper sense of its mysteries which are our
+bounding horizons round about, and especially to the impulse given to
+emotion by the opening of the doors of immortality by Christianity to
+thought, revery, and dream, to hope and effort, the romantic element has
+been more marked in modern art, has in fact characterized it, being fed
+moreover by the ever increasing inwardness of human life, the greater
+value and opportunity of personality in a free and high civilization,
+and by the uncertainty, confusion, and complexity of such masses of
+human experience as our observation now controls. The romantic temper is
+inevitable in men whose lives are themselves thought of as, in form, but
+fragments of the life to come, which shall find their completion an
+eternal task. It is the natural ally of faith which it alone can render
+with an infinite outlook; and it is the complement of that mystery which
+is required to supplement it, and which is an abiding presence in the
+habit of the sensitive and serious mind. Yet in classical art the
+definite may still be rendered, the known, the conquered. Idealism has
+its finished world therein; in romanticism it has rather its prophetic
+work.
+
+Such, then, as best I can state it in brief and rapid strokes, is the
+world of art, its methods, its appeals, its significance to mankind.
+Idealism, so presented, is in a sense a glorification of the
+commonplace. Its realm lies in the common lot of men; its distinction is
+to embrace truth for all, and truth in its universal forms of experience
+and personality, the primary, elementary, equally shared fates,
+passions, beliefs of the race. Shakspere, our great example, as
+Coleridge wisely said, "kept in the highway of life." That is the royal
+road of genius, the path of immortality, the way ever trodden by the
+great who lead. I have ventured to speak at times of religious truth.
+What is the secret of Christ's undying power? Is it not that he stated
+universal truth in concrete forms of common experience so that it comes
+home to all men's bosoms? Genius is supreme in proportion as it does
+that, and becomes the interpreter of every man who is born into the
+world, makes him know his brotherhood with all, and the incorporation of
+his fate in the scheme of law, and ideal achievement under it, which is
+the common ground of humanity. Ideal literature is the treasury of such
+genius in the past; here, as I said in the beginning, the wisdom of the
+soul is stored; and art, in all its forms, is immortal only in so far as
+it has done its share in this same labour of illumination, persuasion,
+and command, forecasting the spirit to be, companioning the spirit that
+is, sustaining us all in the effort to make ideal order actual in
+ourselves.
+
+What, then, since I said that it is a question how to live as well as
+how to express life,--what, then, is the ideal life? It is to make
+one's life a poem, as Milton dreamed of the true poet; for as art works
+through matter and takes on concrete and sensible shape with its mortal
+conditions, so the soul dips in life, is in material action, and,
+suffering a similar fate, sinks into limitations and externals of this
+world and this flesh, through which it must live. In such a life, mortal
+in all ways, to bring down to earth the vision that floats in the soul's
+eyes, the ideal order as it is revealed to the poet's gaze,
+incorporating it in deed and being, and to make it prevail, so far as
+our lives have power, in the world of our life, is the task set for us.
+To disengage reason from the confusion of things, and behold the eternal
+forms of the mind; to unveil beauty in the transitory sights of our
+eyes, and behold the eternal forms of sense; so to act that the will
+within us shall take on this form of reason and our manifest life wear
+this form of beauty; and, more closely, to live in the primary
+affections, the noble passions, the sweet emotions,--
+
+    "Founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure,
+    Relations dear, and all the charities
+    Of father, son, and brother,--"
+
+and also in the general sorrows of mankind, thereby, in joy and grief,
+entering sympathetically into the hearts of common men; to keep in the
+highway of life, not turning aside to the eccentric, the sensational,
+the abnormal, the brutal, the base, but seeing them, if they must come
+within our vision, in their place only by the edges of true life; and,
+if, being men, we are caught in the tragic coil, to seek the restoration
+of broken order, learning also in such bitterness better to understand
+the dark conflict forever waging in the general heart, the terror of the
+heavy clouds hanging on the slopes of our battle, the pathos that looks
+down even from blue skies that have kept watch o'er man's
+mortality,--so, even through failure, to draw nearer to our race; this,
+as I conceive it, is to lead the ideal life. It is a message blended of
+many voices of the poets whom Shelley called, whatever might be their
+calamity on earth, the most fortunate of men; it rises from all lands,
+all ages, all religions; it is the battle-cry of that one great idea
+whose slow and hesitating growth is the unfolding of our long
+civilization, seeking to realize in democracy the earthly, and in
+Christianity the heavenly, hope of man,--the idea of the community of
+the soul, the sameness of it in all men. To lead this life is to be one
+with man through love, one with the universe through knowledge, one with
+God through the will; that is its goal, toward that we strive, in that
+we believe.
+
+And Thou, O Youth, for whom these lines are written, fear not; idealize
+your friend, for it is better to love and be deceived than not to love
+at all; idealize your masters, and take Shelley and Sidney to your
+bosom, so shall they serve you more nobly and you love them more sweetly
+than if the touch and sight of their mortality had been yours indeed;
+idealize your country, remembering that Brutus in the dagger-stroke and
+Cato in his death-darkness knew not the greater Rome, the proclaimer of
+the unity of our race, the codifier of justice, the establisher of our
+church, and died not knowing,--but do you believe in the purpose of God,
+so shall you best serve the times to be; and in your own life, fear not
+to act as your ideal shall command, in the constant presence of that
+other self who goes with you, as I have said, so shall you blend with
+him at the end. Fear not either to believe that the soul is as eternal
+as the order that obtains in it, wherefore you shall forever pursue that
+divine beauty which has here so touched and inflamed you,--for this is
+the faith of man, your race, and those who were fairest in its records.
+And have recourse always to the fountains of this life in literature,
+which are the wells of truth. How to live is the one matter; the wisest
+man in his ripe age is yet to seek in it; but Thou, begin now and seek
+wisdom in the beauty of virtue and live in its light, rejoicing in it;
+so in this world shall you live in the foregleam of the world to come.
+
+
+
+
+DEMOCRACY
+
+
+Democracy is a prophecy, and looks to the future; it is for this reason
+that it has its great career. Its faith is the substance of things hoped
+for and the evidence of things unseen, whose realization will be the
+labour of a long age. The life of historic nations has been a pursuit
+toward a goal under the impulse of ideas often obscurely
+comprehended,--world-ideas as we call them,--which they have embodied in
+accomplished facts and in the institutions and beliefs of mankind,
+lasting through ages; and as each nation has slowly grown aware of the
+idea which animated it, it has become self-conscious and conscious of
+greatness. That men are born equal is still a doctrine openly derided;
+that they are born free is not accepted without much nullifying
+limitation; that they are born in brotherhood is less readily denied.
+These three, the revolutionary words, liberty, equality, fraternity, are
+the substance of democracy, if the matter be well considered, and all
+else is but consequence.
+
+It might seem singular that man should ever have found out this creed,
+as that physical life could invent the brain, since the struggle for
+existence in primitive and early times was so adverse to it, and rested
+on a selfish and aggrandizing principle, in states as well as between
+races. In most parts of the world the first true governments were
+tyrannies, patriarchal or despotic; and where liberty was indigenous, it
+was confined to the race-blood. Aristotle speaks of slavery without
+repugnance save in Greeks, and serfdom was incorporated in the northern
+tribes as soon as they began to be socially organized. Some have alleged
+that religious equality was an Oriental idea, and borrowed from the
+relation of subjects to an Asiatic despot, which paved the way for it;
+some attribute civil equality to the Roman law; some find the germ of
+both in Stoical morals. But so great an idea as the equality of man
+reaches down into the past by a thousand roots. The state of nature of
+the savage in the woods, which our fathers once thought a pattern, bore
+some outward resemblance to a freeman's life; but such a condition is
+rather one of private independence than of the grounded social right
+that democracy contemplates. How the ideas involved came into historical
+existence is a minor matter. Democracy has its great career, for the
+first time, in our national being, and exhibits here most purely its
+formative powers, and unfolds destiny on the grand scale. Nothing is
+more incumbent on us than to study it, to turn it this way and that, to
+handle it as often and in as many phases as possible with lively
+curiosity, and not to betray ourselves by an easy assumption that so
+elementary a thing is comprehended because it seems simple. Fundamental
+ideas are precisely those with which we should be most familiar.
+
+Democracy is not merely a political experiment; and its governmental
+theory, though so characteristic of it as not to be dissociated from it,
+is a result of underlying principles. There is always an ideality of the
+human spirit in all its works, if one will search them, which is the
+main thing. The State, as a social aggregate with a joint life which
+constitutes it a nation, is dynamically an embodiment of human
+conviction, desire, and tendency, with a common basis of wisdom and
+energy of action, seeking to realize life in accordance with its ideal,
+whether traditional or novel, of what life should be; and government is
+no more than the mode of administration under which it achieves its
+results both in national life and in the lives of its citizens. All
+society is a means of escape from personality, and its limitations of
+power and wisdom, into this larger communal life; the individual, in so
+far, loses his particularity, and at the same time intensifies and
+strengthens that portion of his life which is thus made one with the
+general life of men,--that universal and typical life which they have in
+common and which moulds them with similar characteristics. It is by this
+fusion of the individual with the mass, this identification of himself
+with mankind in a joint activity, this reenforcement of himself by what
+is himself in others, that a man becomes a social being. The process is
+the same, whether in clubs, societies of all kinds, sects, political
+parties, or the all-embracing body of the State. It is by making himself
+one with human nature in America, its faith, its methods, and the
+controlling purposes in our life among nations, and not by birth
+merely, that a man becomes an American.
+
+The life of society, however, includes various affairs, and man deals
+with them by different means; thus property is a mode of dealing with
+things. Democracy is a mode of dealing with souls. Men commonly speak as
+if the soul were something they expect to possess in another world; men
+are souls, and this is a fundamental conception of democracy. This
+spiritual element is the substance of democracy, in the large sense; and
+the special governmental theory which it has developed and organized,
+and in which its ideas are partially included, is, like other such
+systems, a mode of administration under which it seeks to realize its
+ideal of what life ought to be, with most speed and certainty, and on
+the largest scale. What characterizes that ideal is that it takes the
+soul into account in a way hitherto unknown; not that other governments
+have not had regard to the soul, but, in democracy, it is spirituality
+that gives the law and rules the issue. Hence, a great preparation was
+needed before democracy could come into effective control of society.
+Christianity mainly afforded this, in respect to the ideas of equality
+and fraternity, which were clarified and illustrated in the life of the
+Church for ages, before they entered practically into politics and the
+general secular arrangements of state organization; the nations of
+progress, of which freedom is a condition, developed more definitely the
+idea of liberty, and made it familiar to the thoughts of men. Democracy
+belongs to a comparatively late age of the world, and to advanced
+nations, because such ideas could come into action only after the crude
+material necessities of human progress--illustrated in the warfare of
+nations, in military organizations for the extension of a common rule
+and culture among mankind, and in despotic impositions of order,
+justice, and the general ideas of civilization--had relaxed, and a free
+course, by comparison at least, was opened for the higher nature of man
+in both private and public action. A conception of the soul and its
+destiny, not previously applicable in society, underlies democracy; this
+is why it is the most spiritual government known to man, and therefore
+the highest reach of man's evolution; it is, in fact, the spiritual
+element in society expressing itself now in politics with an unsuspected
+and incalculable force.
+
+Democracy is contained in the triple statement that men are born free,
+equal, and in brotherhood; and in this formula it is the middle term
+that is cardinal, and the root of all. Yet it is the doctrine of the
+equality of man, by virtue of the human nature with which he is clothed
+entire at birth, that is most attacked, as an obvious absurdity, and
+provocative more of laughter than of argument. What, then, is this
+equality which democracy affirms as the true state of all men among
+themselves? It is our common human nature, that identity of the soul in
+all men, which was first inculcated by the preaching of Christ's death
+for all equally, whence it followed that every human soul was of equal
+value in the eyes of God, its Creator, and had the same title to the
+rites of the Christian Church, and the same blessedness of an infinite
+immortality in the world to come; thence we derived it from the very
+fountain of our faith, and the first true democracy was that which
+levelled king and peasant, barbarian and Roman, in the communion of our
+Lord. Yet nature laughs at us, and ordains such inequalities at birth
+itself as make our peremptory charter of the value of men's souls seem a
+play of fancy. There are men of almost divine intelligence, men of
+almost devilish instincts, men of more or less clouded mind; and they
+are such at birth, so deeply has nature stamped into them heredity,
+circumstance, and the physical conditions of sanity, morality and
+wholesomeness, in the body which is her work. Such differences do exist,
+and conditions vary the world over, whence nature, which accumulates
+inequalities in the struggle for life, "with ravin shrieks against our
+creed." But we have not now to learn for the first time that nature,
+though not the enemy of the human spirit, is indifferent to all the soul
+has erected in man's own realm, peculiar to humanity. What has nature
+contributed to the doctrine of freedom or of fraternity? Man's life to
+her is all one, tyrant or slave, friend or foe, wise or foolish,
+virtuous or vicious, holy or profane, so long as her imperative physical
+conditions of life, the mortal thing, are conformed to; society itself
+is not her care, nor civilization, nor anything that belongs to man
+above the brute. Her word, consequently, need not disturb us; she is
+not our oracle. It rather belongs to us to win further victory over her,
+if it may be, by our intelligence, and control her vital, as we are now
+coming to control her material, powers and their operation.
+
+This equality which democracy affirms--the identity of the soul, the
+sameness of its capacities of energy, knowledge, and enjoyment--draws
+after it as a consequence the soul's right to opportunity for
+self-development by virtue of which it may possess itself of what shall
+be its own fulness of life. In the inscrutable mystery of this world,
+the soul at birth enters on an unequal struggle, made such both by
+inherent conditions and by external limitations, in individuals,
+classes, and races; but the determination of democracy is that, so far
+as may be, it will secure equality of opportunity to every soul born
+within its dominion, in the expectation that much in human conditions
+which has hitherto fed and heightened inequality, in both heredity and
+circumstance, may be lessened if not eradicated; and life after birth is
+subject to great control. This is the meaning of the first axiom of
+democracy, that all have a right to the pursuit of happiness, and its
+early cries--"an open career," and "the tools to him who can use them."
+In this effort society seems almost as recalcitrant as nature; for in
+human history the accumulation of the selfish advantage of inequality
+has told with as much effect as ever it did in the original struggle of
+reptile and beast; and in our present complex and extended civilization
+a slight gain over the mass entails a telling mortgage of the future to
+him who makes it and to his heirs, while efficiency is of such high
+value in such a society that it must needs be favoured to the utmost; on
+the other hand a complex civilization encourages a vast variety of
+talent, and finds a special place for that individuation of capacity
+which goes along with social evolution. The end, too, which democracy
+seeks is not a sameness of specific results, but rather an equivalence;
+and its duty is satisfied if the child of its rule finds such
+development as was possible to him, has a free course, and cannot charge
+his deficiency to social interference and the restriction of established
+law.
+
+The great hold that the doctrine of equality has upon the masses is not
+merely because it furnishes the justification of the whole scheme,
+which is a logic they may be dimly conscious of, but that it establishes
+their title to such good in human life as they can obtain, on the
+broadest scale and in the fullest measure. What other claim, so rational
+and noble in itself, can they put forth in the face of what they find
+established in the world they are born into? The results of past
+civilization are still monopolized by small minorities of mankind, who
+receive by inheritance, under natural and civil law, the greater
+individual share of material comfort, of large intelligence, of
+fortunate careers. It does not matter that the things which belong to
+life as such, the greater blessings essential to human existence, cannot
+be monopolized; all that man can take and appropriate they find
+preoccupied so far as human discovery and energy have been able to
+reach, understand, and utilize it; and what proposition can they assert
+as against this sequestering of social results and material and
+intellectual opportunity, except to say, "we, too, are men," and with
+the word to claim a share in such parts of social good as are not
+irretrievably pledged to men better born, better educated, better
+supplied with the means of subsistence and the accumulated hoard of the
+past, which has come into their hands by an award of fortune? It is not
+a fanciful idea. It is founded in the unity of human nature, which is as
+certain as any philosophic truth, and has been proclaimed by every
+master-spirit of our race time out of mind. It is supported by the
+universal faith, in which we are bred, that we are children of a common
+Father, and saved by one Redeemer and destined to one immortality, and
+cannot be balked of the fulness of life which was our gift under divine
+providence. I emphasize the religious basis, because I believe it is the
+rock of the foundation in respect to this principle, which cannot be
+successfully impeached by any one who accepts Christian truth; while in
+the lower sphere, on worldly grounds alone, it is plain that the immense
+advantage of the doctrine of equality to the masses of men, justifies
+the advancement of it as an assumption which they call on the issue in
+time to approve.
+
+It is in this portion of the field that democracy relies most upon its
+prophetic power. Within the limits of nature and mortal life the hope
+of any equal development of the soul seems folly; yet, so far as my
+judgment extends, in men of the same race and community it appears to me
+that the sameness in essentials is so great as to leave the differences
+inessential, so far as power to take hold of life and possess it in
+thought, will, or feeling is in question. I do not see, if I may
+continue to speak personally, that in the great affairs of life, in
+duty, love, self-control, the willingness to serve, the sense of joy,
+the power to endure, there is any great difference among those of the
+same community; and this is reasonable, for the permanent relations of
+life, in families, in social ties, in public service, and in all that
+the belief in heaven and the attachments to home bring into men's lives,
+are the same; and though, in the choicer parts of fortunate lives,
+aesthetic and intellectual goods may be more important than among the
+common people, these are less penetrating and go not to the core, which
+remains life as all know it--a thing of affection, of resolve, of
+service, of use to those to whom it may be of human use. Is it not
+reasonable, then, on the ground of what makes up the substance of life
+within our observation, to accept this principle of equality, fortified
+as it is by any conception of heaven's justice to its creatures? and to
+assume, if the word must be used, the principle primary in democracy,
+that all men are equally endowed with destiny? and thus to allow its
+prophetic claim, till disproved, that equal opportunity, linked with the
+service of the higher to the lower, will justify its hope? At all
+events, in this lies the possibility of greater achievement than would
+otherwise be attained within our national limits; and what is found to
+be true of us may be extended to less developed communities and races in
+their degree.
+
+The doctrine of the equality of mankind by virtue of their birth as men,
+with its consequent right to equality of opportunity for
+self-development as a part of social justice, establishes a common basis
+of conviction, in respect to man, and a definite end as one main object
+of the State; and these elements are primary in the democratic scheme.
+Liberty is the next step, and is the means by which that end is secured.
+It is so cardinal in democracy as to seem hardly secondary to equality
+in importance. Every State, every social organization whatever, implies
+a principle of authority commanding obedience; it may be of the absolute
+type of military and ecclesiastical use, or limited, as in
+constitutional monarchies; but some obedience and some authority are
+necessary in order that the will of the State may be realized. The
+problem of democracy is to find that principle of authority which is
+most consistent with the liberty it would establish, and which acts with
+the greatest furtherance and the least interference in the
+accomplishment of the chief end in view. It composes authority,
+therefore, of personal liberty itself, and derives it from the consent
+of the governed, and not merely from their consent but from their active
+decree. The social will is impersonal, generic, the will of man, not of
+men; particular wills enter into it, and make it, so constituted,
+themselves in a larger and external form. The citizen has parted with no
+portion of his freedom of will; the will of the State is still his own
+will, projected in unison with other wills, all jointly making up one
+sum,--the authority of the nation. This is social self-government,--not
+the anarchy of individuals each having his own way for himself, but
+government through a delegated self, if one may use the phrase,
+organically combined with others in the single power of control
+belonging to a State. This fusion is accomplished in the secondary
+stage, for the continuous action of the State, by representation,
+technically; but, in its primary stage and original validity, by
+universal suffrage; for the characteristic trait of democracy is that in
+constituting this authority, which is social as opposed to personal
+freedom,--personal freedom existing in its social form,--it includes
+every unit of will, and gives to each equivalence. Democracy thus
+establishes the will of society in its most universal form, lying
+between the opposite extremes of particularism in despotism and anarchy;
+it owns the most catholic organ of authority, and enters into it with
+the entire original force of the community.
+
+This universal will of democracy is distinguished from the more limited
+forms of states partially embodying democratic principles by the fact
+that nothing enters into it except man as such. The rival powers which
+seek to encroach upon this scheme, and are foreign elements in a pure
+democracy, are education, property, and ancestry, which last has its
+claim as the custodian of education and property and the advantages
+flowing from their long possession; the trained mind, the accumulated
+capital, and the fixed historic tradition of the nation in its most
+intense and efficient personal form are summed up in these, and would
+appropriate to themselves in the structure of government a
+representation not based on individual manhood but on other grounds. If
+it be still allowed that all men should have a share in a
+self-government, it is yet maintained that a share should be granted, in
+addition, to educated men and owners of property, and to descendants of
+such men who have founded permanent families with an inherited capacity,
+a tradition, and a material stake. Yet these three things, education,
+property, and ancestry, are in the front rank of those inequalities in
+human conditions which democracy would minimize. They embody past custom
+and present results which are a deposit of the past; they plead that
+they found men wards and were their guardians, and that under their own
+domination progress was made, and all that now is came into being; but
+they must show farther some reason in present conditions under
+democracy now why such potent inequalities and breeders of inequality
+should be clothed with governing power.
+
+Universal suffrage is the centre of the discussion, and the argument
+against it is twofold. It is said that, though much in the theory of
+democracy may be granted and its methods partially adopted, men at large
+lack the wisdom to govern themselves for good in society, and also that
+they control by their votes much more than is rightfully their own. The
+operation of the social will is in large concerns of men requiring
+knowledge and skill, and it has no limits. In state affairs education
+should have authority reserved to it, and certain established interests,
+especially the rights of property, should be exempted from popular
+control; and the effectual means of securing these ends is to magnify
+the representatives of education and property to such a degree that they
+will retain deciding power. But is this so? or if there be some truth in
+the premises, may it not be contained in the democratic scheme and
+reconciled with it? And, to begin with, is education, in the special
+sense, so important in the fundamental decisions which the suffrage
+makes? I speak, of course, of literary education. It may well be the
+case that the judgment of men at large is sufficiently informed and
+sound to be safe, and is the safest, for the reason that the good of
+society is for all in common, and being, from the political point of
+view, in the main, a material good, comes home to their business and
+bosoms in the most direct and universal way, in their comfort or
+deprivation, in prosperity and hard times, in war and famine, and those
+wide-extended results of national policies which are the evidence and
+the facts. Politics is very largely, and one might almost say normally,
+a conflict of material interests; ideas dissociated from action are not
+its sphere; the way in which policies are found immediately to affect
+human life is their political significance. On the broad scale, who is a
+better judge of their own material condition and the modifications of it
+from time to time, of what they receive and what they need from
+political agencies, than the individual men who gain or suffer by what
+is done, on so great a scale that, combined, these men make the masses?
+Experience is their touchstone, and it is an experience universally
+diffused. Education, too, is a word that will bear interpretation. It is
+not synonymous with intelligence, for intelligence is native in men,
+and, though increased by education, not conditioned upon it.
+Intelligence, in the limited sphere in which the unlearned man applies
+it, in the things he knows, may be more powerful, more penetrating,
+comprehensive, and quick, in him, than in the technically educated man;
+for he is educated by things, and especially in those matters which
+touch his own interests, widely shared. The school of life embodies a
+compulsory education that no man escapes. If politics, then, be in the
+main a conflict of material interests broadly affecting masses of men,
+the people, both individually and as a body, may well be more competent
+to deal with the matter in hand intelligently than those who, though
+highly educated, are usually somewhat removed from the pressure of
+things, and feel results and also conditions, even widely prevalent, at
+a less early stage and with less hardship, and at best in very mild
+forms. Besides, to put it grossly, it is often not brains that are
+required to diagnose a political situation so much as stomachs. The
+sphere of ideas, of reason and argument, in politics, is really
+limited; in the main, politics is, as has been said, the selfish
+struggle of material interests in a vast and diversified State.
+
+Common experience furnishes a basis of political fact, well known to the
+people in their state of life, and also a test of any general policy
+once put into operation. The capacity of the people to judge the event
+in the long run must be allowed. But does broad human experience,
+however close and pressing, contain that forecast of the future, that
+right choice of the means of betterment, or even knowledge of the remedy
+itself, which belong in the proper sphere of enlightened intelligence? I
+am not well assured that it is not so. The masses have been long in
+existence, and what affects them is seldom novel; they are of the breed
+that through
+
+    "old experience do attain
+    To something like prophetic strain."
+
+The sense of the people, learning from their fathers and their mothers,
+sums up a vast amount of wisdom in common life, and more surely than in
+others the half-conscious tendencies of the times; for in them these are
+vital rather than reflective, and go on by the force of universal
+conditions, hopes, and energies. In them, too, intelligence works in
+precisely the same way as in other men, and in politics precisely as in
+other parts of life. They listen to those they trust who, by
+neighbourhood, by sympathetic knowledge of their own state, or actual
+share in it, by superior powers of mind and a larger fund of
+information, are qualified to be their leaders in forming opinion and
+their instruments in the policy they adopt. These leaders may be called
+demagogues. They may be thought to employ only resources of trickery
+upon dupes for selfish ends; but such a view, generally, is a shallow
+one, and not justified by facts. It is right in the masses to make men
+like themselves and nigh to them, especially those born and bred in
+their own condition of life, their leaders, in preference to men,
+however educated, benevolent, and upright, who are not embodiments of
+the social conditions, needs, and aspirations of the people in their
+cruder life, if it in fact substantially be so, and to allow these men,
+so chosen, to find a leader among themselves. Such a man is a true chief
+of a party, who is not an individual holding great interests in trust
+and managing them with benevolent despotism by virtue of his own
+superior brain; he is the incarnation, as a party chief, of other brains
+and wills, a representative exceeding by far in wisdom and power
+himself, a man in whom the units of society, millions of them, have
+their governmental life. No doubt he has great qualities of sympathy,
+comprehension, understanding, tact, efficient power, in order to become
+a chief; but he leads by following, he relies on his sense of public
+support, he rises by virtue of the common will, the common sense, which
+store themselves in him. Such the leaders of the people have always
+been.
+
+If this process--and it is to be observed that as the scale of power
+rises the more limited elements of social influence enter into the
+result with more determining force--be apparently crude in its early
+stages, and imperfect at the best, is it different from the process of
+social expansion in other parts of life? Wherever masses of men are
+entering upon a rising and larger life, do not the same phenomena occur?
+in religion, for example, was there not a similar popular crudity, as it
+is termed by some, a vulgarity as others name it, in the Methodist
+movement, in the Presbyterian movement, in the Protestant movement,
+world-wide? Was English Puritanism free from the same sort of
+characteristics, the things that are unrefined as belong to democratic
+politics in another sphere? The method, the phenomena, are those that
+belong to life universal, if life be free and efficient in moving masses
+of men upward into more noble ranges. Men of the people lead, because
+the people are the stake. On the other hand, educated leaders, however
+well-intentioned, may be handicapped if they are not rooted deeply in
+the popular soil. Literary education, it must never be forgotten, is not
+specially a preparation for political good judgment. It is predominantly
+concerned, in its high branches, with matters not of immediate political
+consequence--with books generally, science, history, language, technical
+processes and trades, professional outfits, and the manifold activity of
+life not primarily practical, or if practical not necessarily political.
+Men of education, scholars especially, even in the field of political
+system, are not by the mere fact of their scholarship highly or
+peculiarly fitted to take part in the active leadership of politics,
+unless they have other qualifications not necessarily springing from
+their pursuits in learning; they are naturally more engaged with ideas
+in a free state, theoretical ideas, than with ideas which are in reality
+as much a part of life as of thought; and the method of dealing with
+these vitalized and, as it were, adulterated ideas has a specialty of
+its own.
+
+It must be acknowledged, too, that in the past, the educated class as a
+whole has commonly been found to entertain a narrow view; it has been on
+the side of the past, not of the future; previous to the revolutionary
+era the class was not--though it is now coming to be--a germinating
+element in reform, except in isolated cases of high genius which
+foresees the times to come and develops principles by which they come;
+it has been, even during our era, normally in alliance with property and
+ancestry, to which it is commonly an appurtenance, and like them is
+deeply engaged in the established order, under which it is comfortable,
+enjoying the places there made for its functions, and is conservative of
+the past, doubtful of the changing order, a hindrance, a brake, often a
+note of despair. I do not forget the great exceptions; but revolutions
+have come from below, from the masses and their native leaders, however
+they may occasionally find some preparation in thinkers, and some
+welcome in aristocrats. The power of intellectual education as an
+element in life is always overvalued; and, within its sphere, which is
+less than is represented, it is subject to error, prejudice, and
+arrogance of its own; and, being without any necessary connection with
+love or conscience, it has often been a reactionary, disturbing, or
+selfish force in politics and events, even when well acquainted with the
+field of politics, as ever were any of the forms of demagogy in the
+popular life. Intelligence, in the form of high education, can make no
+authoritative claim, as such, either by its nature, its history, or, as
+a rule, its successful examples in character. The suffrage, except as by
+natural modes it embodies the people's practical and general
+intelligence, in direct decisions and in the representatives of
+themselves whom it elects to serve the State, need not look to high
+education as it has been in the privileged past, for light and leading
+in matters of fundamental concern; education remains useful, as expert
+knowledge is always useful in matters presently to be acted on; but in
+so far as it is separable from the business of the State, and stands by
+itself in a class not servants of the State and mainly critical and
+traditionary, it is deserving of no special political trust because of
+any superiority of judgment it may allege. In fact, education has
+entered with beneficent effect into political life with the more power,
+in proportion as it has become a common and not a special endowment, and
+the enfranchisement of education, if I may use the term, is rather a
+democratic than an aristocratic trait. Education, high education even,
+is more respected and counts for more in a democracy than under the
+older systems. But in a democracy it remains true, that so far as
+education deserves weight, it will secure it by its own resources, and
+enter into political results, as property does, with a power of its own.
+There, least of all, does it need privilege. Education is one inequality
+which democracy seems already dissolving.
+
+What suffrage records, in opposition it may be to educated opinion, as
+such, is the mental state of the people, and their choices of the men
+they trust with the accomplishment of what is to be done. If the
+suffrage is exposed to defect in wisdom by reason of its dulness and
+ignorance, which I by no means admit, the remedy lies not in a
+guardianship of the people by the educated class, but in popular
+education itself, in lower forms, and the diffusion of that general
+information which, in conjunction with sound morals, is all that is
+required for the comprehension of the great questions decided by
+suffrage, and the choice of fit leaders who shall carry the decisions
+into effect. The vast increase of this kind of intelligence, bred of
+such schools and such means for the spread of political information as
+have grown up here, has been a measureless gain to man in many other
+than political ways. No force has been so great, except the discussion
+of religious dogma and practice under the Reformation in northern
+nations, in establishing a mental habit throughout the community. The
+suffrage also has this invaluable advantage, that it brings about a
+substitution of the principle of persuasion for that of force, as the
+normal mode of dealing with important differences of view in State
+affairs; it is, in this respect, the corollary of free speech and the
+preservative of that great element of liberty, and progress under
+liberty, which is not otherwise well safe-guarded. It is also a
+continuous thing, and deals with necessities and disagreements as they
+arise and by gradual means, and thus, by preventing too great an
+accumulation of discontent, it avoids revolution, containing in itself
+the right of revolution in a peaceable form under law. It is, moreover,
+a school into which the citizen is slowly received; and it is capable of
+receiving great masses of men and accustoming them to political thought,
+free and efficient action in political affairs, and a civic life in the
+State, breeding in them responsibility for their own condition and that
+of the State. It is the voice of the people always speaking; nor is it
+to be forgotten, especially by those who fear it, that the questions
+which come before the suffrage for settlement are, in view of the whole
+complex and historic body of the State, comparatively few; for society
+and its institutions, as the fathers handed them down, are accepted at
+birth and by custom and with real veneration, as our birthright,--the
+birthright of a race, a nation, and a hearth. The suffrage does not
+undertake to rebuild from the foundations; the people are slow to remove
+old landmarks; but it does mean to modify and strengthen this
+inheritance of past ages for the better accomplishment of the ends for
+which society exists, and the better distribution among men of the goods
+which it secures.
+
+Fraternity, the third constituent of democracy, enforces the idea of
+equality through its doctrine of brotherhood, and enlarges the idea of
+liberty, which thus becomes more than an instrument for obtaining
+private ends, is inspired with a social spirit and has bounds set to its
+exercise. Fraternity leads us, in general, to share our good, and to
+provide others with the means of sharing in it. This good is
+inexhaustible and makes up welfare in the State, the common weal. It is
+in the sphere of fraternity, in particular, that humanitarian ideas, and
+those expressions of the social conscience which we call moral issues,
+generally arise, and enter more or less completely into political life.
+In defining politics as, in the main, a selfish struggle of material
+interests, this was reserved, that, from time to time, questions of a
+higher order do arise, such as that of slavery in our history, which
+have in them a finer element; and, though it be true that government has
+in charge a race which is yet so near to the soil that it is never far
+from want, and therefore government must concern itself directly and
+continuously with arrangements for our material welfare, yet the higher
+life has so far developed that matters which concern it more intimately
+are within the sphere of political action, and among these we reckon all
+those causes which appeal immediately to great principles, to liberty,
+justice, and manhood, as things apart from material gain or loss, and in
+our consciousness truly spiritual; and such a cause, preeminently, was
+the war for the Union, heavy as it was with the fate of mankind under
+democracy. In such crises, which seldom arise, material good is
+subordinated for the time being, and life and property, our great
+permanent interests, are held cheap in the balance with that which is
+their great charter of value, as we conceive our country.
+
+Yet even here material interests are not far distant. Such issues are
+commonly found to be involved with material interests in conflict, or
+are alloyed with them in the working out; and these interests are a
+constituent, though, it may be, not the controlling matter. It is
+commonly felt, indeed, that some warrant of material necessity is
+required in any great political act, for politics, as has been said, is
+an affair of life, not of free ideas; and without such a plain
+authorization reform is regarded as an invasion of personal liberty of
+thought, expression, or action, which is the breeding-place of
+progressive life and therefore carefully guarded from intrusion. In
+proportion as the material interests are less clearly affected
+injuriously, a cause is removed into the region of moral suasion, and
+loses political vigour. Religious issues constitute the extreme of
+political action without regard to material interests, wars of
+conversion being their ultimate, and they are more potent with less
+developed races. For this reason the humanitarian and moral sphere of
+fraternity lies generally outside of politics, in social institutions
+and habits, which political action may sometimes favour as in public
+charities, but which usually rely on other resources for their support.
+On occasions of crisis, however, a great idea may marshal the whole
+community in its cause; and, more and more, the cause so championed
+under democracy is the spiritual right of man.
+
+But fraternity finds, perhaps, its great seal of sovereignty in that
+principle of persuasion which has been spoken of already, and in that
+substitution of it for force, in the conduct of human affairs, which
+democracy has made, as truly as it has replaced tyranny with the
+authority of a delegated and representative liberty. Persuasion, in its
+moral form, outside of politics,--which is so largely resorted to in a
+community that does not naturally regard the imposition of virtue, even,
+with favour, but believes virtue should be voluntary in the man and
+decreed by him out of his own soul,--need not be enlarged upon here; but
+in its intellectual form, as a persuasion of the mind and will
+necessarily precedent to political action, it may be glanced at, since
+law thus becomes the embodied persuasion of the community, and is itself
+no longer force in the objectionable sense; even minorities, to which it
+is adversely applied, and on which it thus operates like tyranny,
+recognize the different character it bears to arbitrary power as that
+has historically been. But outside of this refinement of thought in the
+analysis, the fact that the normal attitude of any cause in a democracy
+is that men must be persuaded of its justice and expediency, before it
+can impose itself as the will of the State on its citizens, marks a
+regard for men as a brotherhood of equals and freemen, of the highest
+consequence in State affairs, and with a broad overflow of moral habit
+upon the rest of life.
+
+That portion of the community which is not reached by persuasion, and
+remains in opposition, must obey the law, and submit, such is the nature
+of society; but minorities have acknowledged rights, which are best
+preserved, perhaps, by the knowledge that they may be useful to all in
+turn. Those rights are more respected under democracy than in any other
+form of government. The important question here, however, is not the
+conduct of the State toward an opposition in general, which is at one
+time composed of one element and at another time of a different element,
+and is a shifting, changeable, and temporary thing; but of its attitude
+toward the more permanent and inveterate minority existing in class
+interests, which are exposed to popular attack. The capital instance is
+property, especially in the form of wealth; and here belongs that
+objection to the suffrage, which was lightly passed over, to the effect
+that, since the social will has no limits, to constitute it by suffrage
+is to give the people control of what is not their own. Property,
+reenforced by the right of inheritance, is the great source of
+inequality in the State and the continuer of it, and gives rise
+perpetually to political and social questions, attended with violent
+passions; but it is an institution common to civilization, it is very
+old, and it is bound up intimately with the motive energies of
+individual life, the means of supplying society on a vast scale with
+production, distribution, and communication, and the process of taking
+possession of the earth for man's use. Its social service is
+incalculable. At times, however, when accumulated so as to congest
+society, property has been confiscated in enormous amounts, as in
+England under Henry VIII, in France at the Revolution, and in Italy in
+recent times. The principle of paramount right over it in society has
+been established in men's minds, and is modified only by the
+social conviction that this right is one to be exercised with the
+highest degree of care and on the plainest dictates of a just necessity.
+Taxation, nevertheless, though a power to destroy and confiscate in its
+extreme exercise, normally takes nothing from property that is not due.
+It is not a levy of contributions, but the collection of a just debt;
+for property and its owners are the great gainers by society, under
+whose bond alone wealth finds security, enjoyment, and increase,
+carrying with them untold private advantages. Property is deeply
+indebted to society in a thousand ways; and, besides, much of its
+material cannot be said to be earned, but was given either from the
+great stores of nature, or by the hand of the law, conferring privilege,
+or from the overflowing increments of social progress. If it is
+naturally selfish, acquisitive, and conservative, if it has to be
+subjected to control, if its duties have to be thrust upon it
+oftentimes, it has such powers of resistance that there need be little
+fear lest it should suffer injustice. Like education, it has great
+reserves of influence, and is assured of enormous weight in the life of
+the community. Other vested interests stand in a similar relation to the
+State. These minorities, which are important and lasting elements in
+society, receive consideration, and bounds are set to liberty of dealing
+adversely with them in practice, under that principle of fraternity
+which seeks the good of one in all and the good of all in one.
+
+Fraternity, following lines whose general sense has been sufficiently
+indicated, has, in particular, established out of the common fund public
+education as a means of diffusing intellectual gain, which is the great
+element of growth even in efficient toil, and also of extending into all
+parts of the body politic a comprehension of the governmental scheme and
+the organized life of the community, fusing its separate interests in a
+mutual understanding and regard. It has established, too, protection in
+the law, for the weak as against the strong, the poor as against the
+rich, the citizen as against those who would trustee the State for their
+own benefit; and, on the broad scale, it provides for the preservation
+of the public health, relief of the unfortunate, the care of all
+children, and in a thousand humane ways permeates the law with its
+salutary justice. It has, again, in another great field, established
+toleration, not in religion merely, but of opinion and practice in
+general; and thereby largely has built up a mutual and pervading faith
+in the community as a body in all its parts and interests intending
+democratic results under human conditions; it has thus bred a habit of
+reserve at moments of hardship or grave difficulty,--a respect that
+awaits social justice giving time for it to be brought about,--which as
+a constituent of national character cannot be too highly prized.
+
+The object of all government, and of every social system is, in its end
+and summary, to secure justice among mankind. Justice is the most sacred
+word of men; but it is a thing hard to find. Law, which is its social
+instrument, deals with external act, general conditions, and mankind in
+the mass. It is not, like conscience, a searcher of men's bosoms; its
+knowledge extends no farther than to what shall illuminate the nature of
+the event it examines; it makes no true ethical award. It is in the main
+a method of procedure, largely inherited and wholly practical in intent,
+applied to recurring states of fact; it is a reasonable arrangement for
+the peaceful facilitation of human business of all social kinds; and to
+a considerable degree it is a convention, an agreement upon what shall
+be done in certain sets of circumstances, as an approximation, it may
+be, to justice, but, at all events, as an advantageous solution of
+difficulties. This is as true of its criminal as of its civil branches.
+Its concern is with society rather than the individual, and it
+sacrifices the individual to society without compunction, applying one
+rule to all alike, with a view to social, not individual, results, on
+the broad scale. Those matters which make individual justice
+impossible,--especially the element of personal responsibility in
+wrong-doing, how the man came to be what he is and his susceptibility to
+motives, to reason and to passion, in their varieties, and all such
+considerations,--law ignores in the main question, however it may admit
+them in the imperfect form in which only they can be known, as
+circumstances in extenuation or aggravation. This large part of
+responsibility, it will seem to every reflective moralist, enters little
+into the law's survey; and its penalties, at best, are "the rack of
+this rude world." Death and imprisonment, as it inflicts them, are for
+the protection of society, not for reformation, though the philanthropic
+element in the State may use the period of imprisonment with a view to
+reformation; nor in the history of the punishment of crime, of the
+vengeance as such taken on men in addition to the social protection
+sought, has society on the whole been less brutal in its repulse of its
+enemies than they were in their attack, or shown any eminent justice
+toward its victims in the sphere of their own lives. It is a terrible
+and debasing record, up to this century at least, and uniformly
+corrupted those who were its own instruments. It was the application of
+force in its most material forms, and dehumanized those upon whom it was
+exercised, placing them outside the pale of manhood as a preliminary to
+its work. The lesson that the criminal remains a man, was one taught to
+the law, not learned from it. On the civil side, likewise, similar
+reservations must be made, both as regards its formulation and
+operation. The law as an instrument of justice is a rough way of dealing
+with the problems of the individual in society, but it is effective for
+social ends; and, in its total body and practical results, it is a
+priceless monument of human righteousness, sagacity, and mercy, and
+though it lags behind opinion, as it must, and postpones to a new age
+the moral and prudential convictions of the present, it is in its
+treasury that these at last are stored.
+
+If such be the case within the law, what indifference to justice does
+the course of events exhibit in the world at large which comes under the
+law's inquisition so imperfectly! How continuous and inevitable, how
+terrible and pitiful is this aspect of life, is shown in successive ages
+by the unending story of ideal tragedy, in poem, drama, and tale, in
+which the noble nature through some frailty, that was but a part, and by
+the impulse of some moment of brief time, comes to its wreck; and, in
+connection with this disaster to the best, lies the action of the
+villain everywhere overflowing in suffering and injury upon his victims
+and all that is theirs. What is here represented as the general lot of
+mankind, in ideal works, exists, multiplied world-wide in the lives and
+fortunes of mankind, an inestimable amount of injustice always
+present. The sacrifice of innocence is in no way lessened by aught of
+vengeance that may overtake the wrong-doer; and it is constant. The
+murdered man, the wronged woman, can find no reparation. What shall one
+say of the sufferings of children and of the old, and of the great curse
+that lies in heredity and the circumstances of early life under
+depraved, ignorant, or malicious conditions? These brutalities, like the
+primeval struggle in the rise of life, seem in a world that never heard
+the name of justice. The main seat of individual justice and its
+operation is, after all, in the moral sense of men, governing their own
+conduct and modifying so far as possible the mass of injustice
+continually arising in the process of life, by such relief as they can
+give by personal influence and action both on persons and in the realm
+of moral opinion.
+
+But, such questions apart, and within the reach of the rude power of the
+law over men in the mass, where individuality may be neglected, there
+remains that portion of the field in which the cause of justice may be
+advanced, as it was in the extinction of slavery, the confiscation of
+the French lands, the abolition of the poor debtor laws, and in similar
+great measures of class legislation, if you will. I confess I am one of
+those who hold that society is largely responsible even for crime and
+pauperism, and especially other less clearly defined conditions in the
+community by which there exists an inveterate injustice ingrained in the
+structure of society itself. The process of freeing man from the fetters
+of the past is still incomplete, and democracy is a faith still early in
+its manifestation; social justice is the cry under which this progress
+is made, and, being grounded in material conditions and hot with men's
+passions under wrong, it is a dangerous cry, and unheeded it becomes
+revolutionary; but in what has democracy been so beneficent to society
+as in the ways without number that it has opened for the doing of
+justice to men in masses, for the moulding of safe and orderly methods
+of change, and for the formation as a part of human character of a habit
+of philanthropy to those especially whose misfortunes may be partly laid
+to the door of society itself? Charity, great as it is, can but
+alleviate, it cannot upon any scale cure poverty and its attendant ills;
+nor can mercy, however humanely and wisely exerted, do more than
+mollify the misfortune that abides in the criminal. Social justice asks
+neither charity nor mercy, but such conditions, embodied in institutions
+and laws, as shall diminish, so far as under nature and human nature is
+possible, the differences of men at birth, and in their education, and
+in their opportunity through life, to the end that all citizens shall be
+equal in the power to begin and conduct their lives in morals, industry,
+and the hope of happiness. Social justice, so defined, under temporal
+conditions, democracy seeks as the sum and substance of its effort in
+governmental ways; some advance has been made; but it requires no wide
+survey, nor long examination, to see that what has been accomplished is
+a beginning, with the end so far in the future as to seem a dream, such
+as the poets have sung almost from the dawn of hope. What matters it? It
+is not only poets who dream; justice is the statesman's dream.
+
+Such in bold outline are the principles of democracy. They have been
+working now for a century in a great nation, not wholly unfettered and
+on a complete scale even with us, but with wider acceptance and broader
+application than elsewhere in the world, and with most prosperity in
+those parts of the country where they are most mastering; and the nation
+has grown great in their charge. What, in brief, are the results, so
+clear, so grand, so vast, that they stand out like mountain ranges, the
+configuration of a national life? The diffusion of material comfort
+among masses of men, on a scale and to an amount abolishing peasantry
+forever; the dissemination of education, which is the means of life to
+the mind as comfort is to the body, in no more narrow bounds, but
+through the State universal, abolishing ignorance; the development of
+human capacity in intelligence, energy, and character, under the
+stimulus of the open career, with a result in enlarging and
+concentrating the available talent of the State to a compass and with an
+efficiency and diversity by which alone was possible the material
+subjugation of the continent which it has made tributary to man's life;
+the planting of self-respect in millions of men, and of respect for
+others grounded in self-respect, constituting a national characteristic
+now first to be found, and to be found in the bosom of every child of
+our soil, and, with this, of a respect for womanhood, making the common
+ways safe and honourable for her, unknown before; the moulding of a
+conservative force, so sure, so deep, so instinctive, that it has its
+seat in the very vitals of the State and there maintains as its blood
+and bone the principles which the fathers handed down in institutions
+containing our happiness, security, and destiny, yet maintains them as a
+living present, not as a dead past; the incorporation into our body
+politic of millions of half-alien people, without disturbance, and with
+an assimilating power that proves the universal value of democracy as a
+mode of dealing with the race, as it now is; an enthronement of reason
+as the sole arbiter in a free forum where every man may plead, and have
+the judgment of all men upon the cause; a rooted repugnance to use
+force; an aversion to war; a public and private generosity that knows no
+bounds of sect, race, or climate; a devotion to public duty that excuses
+no man and least of all the best, and has constantly raised the standard
+of character; a commiseration for all unfortunate peoples and warm
+sympathy with them in their struggles; a love of country as
+inexhaustible in sacrifice as it is unparalleled in ardour; and a will
+to serve the world for the rise of man into such manhood as we have
+achieved, such prosperity as earth has yielded us, and such justice as,
+by the grace of heaven, is established within our borders. Is it not a
+great work? and all these blessings, unconfined as the element, belong
+to all our people. In the course of these results, the imperfection of
+human nature and its institutions has been present; but a just
+comparison of our history with that of other nations, ages, and systems,
+and of our present with our past, shows that such imperfection in
+society has been a diminishing element with us, and that a steady
+progress has been made in methods, measures, and men. No great issue, in
+a whole century, has been brought to a wrong conclusion. Our public life
+has been starred with illustrious names, famous for honesty, sagacity,
+and humanity, and, above all, for justice. Our Presidents in particular
+have been such men as democracy should breed, and some of them such men
+as humanity has seldom bred. We are a proud nation, and justly; and,
+looking to the future, beholding these things multiplied million-fold
+in the lives of the children of the land to be, we may well humbly own
+God's bounty which has earliest fallen upon us, the first fruits of
+democracy in the new ages of a humaner world.
+
+It will be plain to those who have read what has elsewhere been said of
+the ideal life, that democracy is for the nation a true embodiment of
+that life, and wears its characteristics upon its sleeve. In it the
+individual mingles with the mass, and becomes one with mankind, and
+mankind itself sums the totality of individual good in a well-nigh
+perfect way. In it there is the slow embodiment of a future nobly
+conceived and brought into existence on an ideal basis of the best that
+is, from age to age, in man's power. It includes the universal wisdom,
+the reach of thought and aspiration, by virtue of which men climb, and
+here manhood climbs. It knows no limit; it rejects no man who wears the
+form Christ wore; it receives all into its benediction. Through
+democracy, more readily and more plainly than through any other system
+of government or conception of man's nature and destiny, the best of men
+may blend with his race, and store in their common life the energies of
+his own soul, looking for as much aid as he may give. Democracy, as
+elsewhere has been said, is the earthly hope of men; and they who stand
+apart, in fancied superiority to mankind, which is by creation equal in
+destiny, and in fact equal in the larger part of human nature, however
+obstructed by time and circumstance, are foolish withdrawers from the
+ways of life. On the battle-field or in the senate, or in the humblest
+cabin of the West, to lead an American life is to join heart and soul in
+this cause.
+
+
+
+
+THE RIDE
+
+
+Mystery is the natural habitat of the soul. It is the child's element,
+though he sees it not; for, year by year, acquiring the solid and
+palpable, the visible and audible, the things of mortal life, he lives
+in horizons of the senses, and though grown a youth he still looks
+intellectually for things definite and clear. Education in general
+through its whole period induces the contempt of all else, impressing
+almost universally the positive element in life, whose realm in early
+years at least is sensual. So it was with me: the mind's eye saw all
+that was or might be in an atmosphere of scepticism, as my bodily eye
+beheld the world washed in colour. Yet the habitual sense of mystery in
+man's life is a measure of wisdom in the man; and, at last, if the mind
+be open and turn upon the poles of truth, whether in the sage's
+knowledge or the poet's emotion or such common experience of the world
+as all have, mystery visibly envelops us, equally in the globed sky or
+the unlighted spirit,
+
+I well remember the very moment when a poetical experience precipitated
+this conviction out of moods long familiar, but obscurely felt and
+deeply distrusted. I was born and bred by the sea; its mystery had
+passed into my being unawares, and was there unconscious, or, at least,
+not to be separated from the moods of my own spirit. But on my first
+Italian voyage, day by day we rolled upon the tremendous billows of a
+stormy sea, and all was strange and solemn--the illimitable tossing of a
+wave-world, darkening night after night through weird sunsets of a
+spectral and unknown beauty, enchantments that were doorways of a new
+earth and new heavens; and, on the tenth day, when I came on deck in
+this water-world, we had sighted Santa Maria, the southernmost of the
+Azores, and gradually we drew near to it. I shall never forget the
+strangeness of that sight--that solitary island under the sunlit showers
+of early morning; it lay in a beautiful atmosphere of belted mists and
+wreaths of rain, and tracts of soft sky, frequent with many near and
+distant rainbows that shone and faded and came again as we steamed
+through them, and the white wings of the birds, struck by the sun, were
+the whitest objects I have ever seen; slowly we passed by, and I could
+not have told what it was in that island scene which had so arrested me.
+But when, some days afterward, at the harbor of Gibraltar I looked upon
+the magnificent rock, and saw opposite the purple hills of Africa, again
+I felt through me that unknown thrill. It was the mystery of the land.
+It was altogether a discovery, a direct perception, a new sense of the
+natural world. Under the wild heights of Sangue di Christo I had dreamed
+that on the further side I should find the "far west" that had fled
+before me beyond the river, the prairies, and the plains; but there was
+no such mystery in the thought, or in the prospect, as this that saluted
+me coming landward for the first time from the ocean-world. Since that
+morning in the Straits, every horizon has been a mystery to me, to the
+spirit no less than to the eye; and truths have come to me like that
+lone island embosomed in eternal waters, like the capes and mountain
+barriers of Africa thrusting up new continents unknown, untravelled, of
+a land men yet might tread as common ground.
+
+"A poet's mood"--I know what once I should have said. But mystery I then
+accepted as the only complement, the encompassment, of what we know of
+our life. In many ways I had drawn near to this belief before, and I
+have since many times confirmed it. One occasion, however, stands out in
+my memory even more intensely than those I have made bold to
+mention,--one experience that brought me near to my mother earth, as
+that out of which I was formed and to which I shall return, and made
+these things seem as natural as to draw my breath from the sister
+element of air. I had returned to the West; and while there, wandering
+in various places, I went to a small town, hardly more than a hamlet,
+some few hundred miles beyond the Missouri, where the mighty railroad,
+putting out a long feeler for the future, had halted its great steel
+branch--sinking like a thunderbolt into the ground for no imaginable
+reason, and affecting me vaguely with a sense of utmost limits. There a
+younger friend, five years my junior, in his lonely struggle with life
+bore to live, in such a camp of pioneer civilization as made my heart
+fail at first sight, though not unused to the meagreness, crudity, and
+hardness of such a place; but there I had come to take the warm welcome
+of his hands and look once more into his face before time should part
+us. He flung his arms about me, with a look of the South in his eyes,
+full of happy dancing lights, and the barren scene was like Italy made
+real for one instant of golden time.
+
+But if we had wandered momentarily, as if out of some quiet sunlit
+gallery of Monte Beni, I soon found it was into the frontier of our
+western border. A herd of Texas ponies were to be immediately on sale,
+and I went to see them--wild animals, beautiful in their wildness, who
+had never known bit or spur; they were lariated and thrown down, as the
+buyers picked them out, and then led and pulled away to man's life. It
+was a typical scene: the pen, the hundred ponies bunched together and
+startled with the new surroundings, the cowboys whose resolute habit sat
+on them like cotillion grace--athletes in the grain--with the gray,
+close garb for use, the cigarette like a slow spark under the broad
+sombrero, the belted revolver, the lasso hung loose-coiled in the hand,
+quiet, careless, confident, with the ease of the master in his craft,
+now pulling down a pony without a struggle, and now showing strength and
+dexterity against frightened resistance; but the hour sped on, and our
+spoil was two of these creatures, so attractive to me at least that
+every moment my friend's eye was on me, and he kept saying, "They're
+wild, mind!" The next morning in the dark dawn we had them in harness,
+and drove out, when the stars were scarce gone from the sky, due north
+to the Bad Lands, to give me a new experience of the vast American land
+that bore us both, and made us, despite the thousands of miles that
+stretched between ocean and prairie, brothers in blood and
+brain,--brothers and friends.
+
+Yet how to tell that ride, now grown a shining leaf of my book of
+memory! for my eyes were fascinated with the land, in the high blowing
+August wind, full of coolness and upland strength, like new breath in my
+nostrils; and forward over the broken country, fenceless, illimitable,
+ran the brown road, like a ploughed ribbon of soil, into the distance,
+where pioneer and explorer and prospector had gone before, and now the
+farmer was thinly settling,--the new America growing up before my eyes!
+and him only by me to make me not a stranger there, with talk of absent
+friends and old times, though scarce the long age of a college course
+had gone by,--talk lapsing as of old on such rides into serious strains,
+problems such as the young talk of together and keep their secret,
+learning life,--the troubles of the heart of youth. And if now I recur
+to some of the themes we touched on, and set down these memoranda,
+fragments of life, thinking they may be of use to other youths as they
+were then to us, I trust they will lose no privacy; for, as I write, I
+see them in that place, with that noble prospect, that high sky, and him
+beside me whose young listening yet seems to woo them from my breast.
+
+We mounted the five-mile ridge,--and, "Poor Robin," he said, "what of
+him?" "Poor Robin sleeps in the Muses' graveyard," I laughed, "in the
+soft gray ashes of my blazing hearth. One must live the life before he
+tells the tale." "I loved his 'awakening,'" he replied, "and I have
+often thought of it by myself. And will nothing come of him now?" "Who
+can tell?" I said, looking hard off over the prairie. "The Muses must
+care for their own. That 'awakening,'" I went on, after a moment of
+wondering why the distant stream of the valley was called "the
+Looking-glass," and learning only that such was its name, "was when
+after the bookish torpor of his mind--you remember he called books his
+opiates--he felt the beauty of the spring and the marvel of human
+service come back on him like a flood. It was the growing consciousness
+of how little of life is our own. Youth takes life for granted; the hand
+that smoothed his pillow the long happy years, the springs that brought
+new blossoms to his cheeks, the common words that martyr and patriot
+have died to form on childish lips, and make them native there with
+life's first breath, are natural to him as Christmas gifts, and bring no
+obligation. Our life from babyhood is only one long lesson in
+indebtedness; and we best learn what we have received by what we give.
+This was dawning on my hero then. I recall how he ran the new passion.
+That outburst you used to like, amid the green bloom of the prairies,
+like the misted birches at home, under the heaven-wide warmth of April
+breathing with universal mildness through the softened air--why, you can
+remember the very day," I said. "It was one--" "Yes, I can remember more
+than that," he interrupted; "I know the words, or some of them; what you
+just said was the old voice--tang and colour--Poor Robin's voice;" and
+he began, and I listened to the words, which had once been mine, and now
+were his.
+
+"By heaven, I never believed it. 'Clotho spins, Lachesis weaves, and
+Atropos cuts,' I said, 'and the poor illusion vanishes; the loud
+laughter, the fierce wailing, die on pale lips; the foolish and the
+wise, the merciful and the pitiless, the workers in the vineyard and the
+idlers in the market-place, are huddled into one grave, and the heart of
+Mary Mother and of Mary Magdalen are one dust.' Duly in those years the
+sun rose to cheer me; the breath of the free winds was in my nostrils;
+the grass made my pathways soft to my feet. Spring with its blossomed
+fruit trees, and the ungarnered summer, gladdened me; the flame of
+autumn was my torch of memory, and winter lighted my lamp of solitude.
+Men tilled the fields to feed me, and worked the loom to clothe me, and
+so far as in them was power and in me was need, brought to my doors
+sustenance for the body and whatsoever of divine truth was theirs for my
+soul. Women ministered to me in blessed charities; and some among my
+fellows gave me their souls in keeping. How true is that which my friend
+said to the poor boy-murderer condemned to die,--'I tell you, you cannot
+escape the mercy of God;' and tears coursed down the imbruted face, and
+once more the human soul, that the ministers of God could not reach,
+shone in its tabernacle. Now the butterfly has flown in at the
+tavern-window, and rebuked me. I go out, and on the broad earth the warm
+sun shines; the spring moves throughout our northern globe as when first
+man looked upon it; the seasons keep their word; the birds know their
+pathways through the air; the animals feed and multiply; the succession
+of day and night has no shadow of turning; the stars keep their order in
+the blue depths of infinite space; Sirius has not swerved from his
+course, nor Aldebaran flamed beyond his sphere; nature puts forth her
+strength in all the vast compass of her domain, and is manifest in life
+that continues and is increased in fuller measures of joy, heightened to
+fairer beauty, instinct with love in the heart of man. Wiser were the
+ascetics whom I used to scorn; they made themselves ascetics of the
+body, but I have been an ascetic of the soul."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"_Eccola!_" I said, "was it like that? But a heady rhetoric is not
+inconsistent with sobriety of thought, as many a Victorian page we have
+read together testifies. The style tames with the spirit; and wild blood
+is not the worst of faults in poets or boys. But I will change old coin
+for the new mintage with you, if you like, and it is not so very
+different. There is a good stretch ahead, and the ponies never seem to
+misbehave both at once." In fact, these ponies, who seemed to enjoy the
+broad, open world with us, had yet to learn the first lesson of
+civilization, and unite their private wills in rebellion; for, while one
+or the other of them would from time to time fling back his heels and
+prepare to resist, the other dragged him into the course with the steady
+pace, and, under hand and voice, they kept going in a much less
+adventurous way than I had anticipated. And so I read a page or two from
+the small blank-book in which I used to write, saying only, by way of
+preface, that the April morning my friend so well remembered marked the
+time when I began that direct appeal to life of which these notes were
+the first-fruits.
+
+The waters of the Looking-glass had been lost behind its bluffs to the
+west as we turned inland, though we still rose with the slope of the
+valley; and now on higher land we saw the open country in a broad sweep,
+but with bolder configuration than was familiar to me in prairie
+regions, the rolling of the country being in great swells; and this
+slight touch of strangeness, this accentuation of the motionless lines
+of height and hollow, and the general lift of the land, perhaps, was
+what first gave that life to the soil, that sense of a presence in the
+earth itself, which was felt at a later time. Then I saw only the
+outspread region, with here and there a gleam of grain on side-hills and
+far-curved embrasures of the folded slopes, or great strands of Indian
+corn, acres within acres, and hardly a human dwelling anywhere; the
+loneliness, the majesty, the untouched primitiveness of it, were the
+elements I remember; and the wind, and the unclouded great expanse of
+the blue upper sky, like a separate element lifted in deep color over
+the gold of harvest, the green of earth, and the touches of brown road
+and soil. So, with pauses for common sights and things, and some word of
+comment and fuller statement and personal touches that do not matter
+now, I read my brief notes of life in its most sacred part.
+
+"The gift of life at birth is only a little breath on a baby's lips; the
+air asks no consent to fill the lungs, the heart beats, the senses
+awaken, the mind begins, and the first handwriting of life is a child's
+smile; but as boyhood gathers fuller strength, and youth hives a more
+intimate sweetness, and manhood expands in richer values, life is not
+less entirely a gift. As well say a self-born as a self-made man. Nature
+does not intrust to us her bodily processes and functions, and the
+fountains of feeling within well up, and the forms of thought define,
+without obligation to man's wisdom; body and soul alike are above his
+will--our garment of sense comes from no human loom, nor were the bones
+of the spirit fashioned by any mortal hands; in our progress and growth,
+too, bloom of health and charm of soul owe their loveliness to that law
+of grace that went forth with the creative word. Slow as men are to
+realize the fact and the magnitude of this great grant, and the supreme
+value of it as life itself in all its abundance of blessings, there
+comes a time to every generous and open heart when the youth is made
+aware of the stream of beneficence flowing in upon him from the forms
+and forces of nature with benedictions of beauty and vigour; he knows,
+too, the cherishing of human service all about him in familiar love and
+the large brothering of man's general toil; he begins to see, shaping
+itself in him, the vast tradition of the past,--its mighty sheltering of
+mankind in institution and doctrine and accepted hopes, its fostering
+agencies, its driving energies. What a breaking out there is then in him
+of the emotions that are fountain-heads of permanent life,--filial love,
+patriotic duty, man's passion for humanity! It is then that he becomes a
+man. Strange would it be, if, at such tidal moments, the youth should
+not, in pure thankfulness, find out the Giver of all good!
+
+"As soon as man thus knows himself a creature, he has established a
+direct relation with the Creator, did he but realize it,--not in mere
+thought of some temporal creation, some antecedent fact of a beginning,
+but in immediate experience of that continuing act which keeps the
+universe in being,
+
+    'Which wields the world with never wearied love,
+    Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above,'--
+
+felt and known now in the life which, moment to moment, is his own. The
+extreme sense of this may take on the expression of the pantheistic
+mood, as here in Shelley's words, without any logical irreverence: for
+pantheism is that great mood of the human spirit which it is, permanent,
+recurring in every age and race, as natural to Wordsworth as to Shelley,
+because of the fundamental character of these facts and the
+inevitability of the knowledge of them. The most arrogant thought of
+man, since it identifies him with deity, it springs from that same sense
+of insignificance which makes humility the characteristic of religious
+life in all its forms. A mind deeply penetrated with the feeling that
+all we take and all we are, our joys and the might and grace of life in
+us, are the mere lendings of mortality like Lear's rags, may come to
+think man the passive receptacle of power, and the instrument scarce
+distinguishable from the hand that uses it; the thought is as nigh to
+St. Paul as to Plato. This intimate and infinite sense of obligation
+finds its highest expression, on the secular side, and takes on the
+touch of mystery, in those great men of action who have believed
+themselves in a special manner servants of God, and in great poets who
+found some consecration in their calling. They, more than other men,
+know how small is any personal part in our labours and our wages alike.
+But in all men life comes to be felt to be, in itself and its
+instruments, this gift, this debt; to continue to live is to contract a
+greater debt in proportion to the greatness of the life; it is greatest
+in the greatest.
+
+"This spontaneous gratitude is a vital thing. He who is most sensitive
+to beauty and prizes it, who is most quick to love, who is most ardent
+in the world's service, feels most constantly this power which enfolds
+him in its hidden infinity; he is overwhelmed by it: and how should
+gratitude for such varied and constant and exhaustless good fail to
+become a part of the daily life of his spirit, deepening with every hour
+in which the value, the power and sweetness of life, is made more plain?
+Yet at the same instant another and almost contrary mood is twin-born
+with this thankfulness,--the feeling of helplessness. Though the secret
+and inscrutable power, sustaining and feeding life, be truly felt,--
+
+    'Closer is He than breathing and nearer than
+    hands and feet,'--
+
+though in moments of life's triumphs it evokes this natural burst of
+happy gratitude, yet who can free himself from mortal fear, or dispense
+with human hope, however firm and irremovable may be his confidence in
+the beneficent order of God? And especially in the more strenuous trials
+of later ages for Christian perfection in a world not Christian, and
+under the mysterious dispensation of nature, even the youth has lived
+little, and that shallowly, who does not crave companionship, guidance,
+protection. Dependent as he feels himself to be for all he is and all
+he may become, the means of help--self-help even--and the law of it must
+be from that same power, whose efficient working he has recognized with
+a thankful heart. Where else shall he look except to that experience of
+exaltation during whose continuance he plucked a natural trust for the
+future, a reasonable belief in Providence, and a humble readiness to
+accept the partial ills of life? In life's valleys, then, as on its
+summits, in the darkness as in the light, he may retain that once
+confided trust; not that he looks for miracle, or any specific and
+particularizing care, it may be, but that in the normal course of things
+he believes in the natural alliance of that arm of infinite power with
+himself. In depression, in trouble, in struggle, such as all life
+exhibits, he will be no more solitary than in his hours of blessing.
+Thus, through helplessness also, he establishes a direct relation with
+God, which is also a reality of experience, as vital in the cry for aid
+as in the offering of thanks. The gratitude of the soul may be likened
+to that morning prayer of the race which was little more than praise
+with uplifted hands; the helplessness of man is rather the evening
+prayer of the Christian age, which with bowed head implores the grace of
+God to shield him through the night. These two, in all times, among all
+races, under ten thousand divinities, have been the voices of the heart.
+
+"There is a third mood of direct experience by which one approaches the
+religious life. Surely no man in our civilization can grow far in years
+without finding out that, in the effort to live a life obeying his
+desires and worthy of his hopes, his will is made one with Christ's
+commands; and he knows that the promises of Christ, so far as they
+relate to the life that now is, are fulfilled in himself day by day; he
+can escape neither the ideal that Christ was, nor the wisdom of Christ
+in respect to the working of that ideal on others and within himself. He
+perceives the evil of the world, and desires to share in its redemption;
+its sufferings, and would remove them; its injustice, and would abolish
+it. He is, by the mere force of his own heart in view of mankind, a
+humanitarian. But he is more than this in such a life. If he be sincere,
+he has not lived long before he knows in himself such default of duty
+that he recognizes it as the soul's betrayal; its times and occasions,
+its degrees of responsibility, its character whether of mere frailty or
+of an evil will, its greater or less offence, are indifferent matters;
+for, as it is the man of perfect honour who feels a stain as a wound,
+and a shadow as a stain, so poignancy of repentance is keenest in the
+purest souls. It is death that is dull, it is life that is quick. It may
+well be, in the world's history in our time, that the suffering caused
+in the good by slight defections from virtue far overbalances the
+general remorse felt for definite and habitual crime. Thus none--those
+least who are most hearts of conscience--escapes this emotion, known in
+the language of religion as conviction of sin. It is the earliest moral
+crisis of the soul; it is widely felt,--such is the nature and such the
+circumstances of men; and, as a man meets it in that hour, as he then
+begins to form the habit of dealing with his failures sure to come, so
+runs his life to the end save for some great change. If then some
+restoring power enters in, some saving force, whether it be from the
+memory and words of Christ, or from the example of those lives that
+were lived in the spirit of that ideal, or from nearer love and more
+tender affection enforcing the supremacy of duty and the hope of
+struggle,--in whatever way that healing comes, it is well; and, just as
+the man of honest mind has recognized the identity of his virtue with
+Christ's rule, and has verified in practice the wisdom of its original
+statement, so now he knows that this moral recovery, and its method, is
+what has been known on the lips of saint and sinner as the life of the
+Spirit in man, and even more specially he cannot discriminate it from
+what the servants of Christ call the life of Christ in them. He has
+become more than a humanitarian through this experience; he is now
+himself one of those whom in the mass he pities and would help; he has
+entered into that communion with his kind and kin which is the earthly
+seal of Christian faith.
+
+"Yet it seems to me a profound error in life to concentrate attention
+upon the moral experience here described; it is but initial; and, though
+repeated, it remains only a beginning; as the vast force of nature is
+put forth through health, and its curative power is an incident and
+subordinate, so the spiritual energy of life is made manifest, in the
+main, in the joy of the soul in so far as it has been made whole. A
+narrow insistence on the fact of sin distorts life, and saddens it both
+in one's own conscience and in his love for others. Sin is but a part of
+life, and it is far better to fix our eyes on the measureless good
+achieved in those lines of human effort which have either never been
+deflected from right aims, or have been brought back to the paths of
+advance, which I believe to be the greater part, both in individual
+lives of noble intention, and in the Christian nations. Sin loses half
+its dismaying power, and evil is stripped of its terrors, if one
+recognizes how far ideal motives enter with controlling influence into
+personal life, and to what a degree ideal destinies are already
+incarnate in the spirit of great nations.
+
+"However this may be, I find on examination of man's common experience
+these three things, which establish, it seems to me, a direct relation
+between him and God: this spontaneous gratitude, this trustful
+dependence, this noble practice, which is, historically, the Christian
+life, and is characterized by its distinctive experiences. They are
+simple elements: a faith in God's being which has not cared further to
+define the modes of that being; a hope which has not grown to specify
+even a Resurrection; a love that has not concentrated itself through
+limitation upon any instrumental conversion of the world; but, inchoate
+as they are, they remain faith, hope, love--these three. Are they not
+sufficient to be the beginnings of the religious life in the young? To
+theological learning, traditional creeds, and conventional worship they
+may seem primitive, slight in substance, meagre in apparel; but one who
+is seeking, not things to believe, but things to live, desires the
+elementary. In setting forth first principles, the elaboration of a more
+highly organized knowledge may be felt as an obscuration of truth, an
+impediment to certainty, a hindrance in the effort to touch and handle
+the essential matter; and for this reason a teacher dispenses with much
+in his exposition, just as in talking to a child a grown man abandons
+nine-tenths of his vocabulary. In the same way, learning as a child,
+seeking in the life of the soul with God what is normal, vital, and
+universal, the beginner need not feel poor and balked, because he does
+not avail himself as yet of resources that belong to length of life,
+breadth of scholarship, intellectual power, the saint's ardour, the
+seer's insight.
+
+"The spiritual life here defined, elementary as it is, appears
+inevitable, part and parcel of our natural being. Why should this be
+surprising? Surely if there be a revelation of the divine at all, it
+must be one independent of external things; one that comes to all by
+virtue of their human nature; one that is direct, and not mediately
+given through others. Faith that is vital is not the fruit of things
+told of, but of things experienced. It follows that religion may be
+essentially free from any admixture of the past in its communication to
+the soul. It cannot depend on events of a long-past time now disputable,
+or on books of a far-off and now alien age. These things are the
+tradition and history of the spiritual life, but not the life. To the
+mass of men religion derived from such sources would be a belief in
+other men's experience, and for most of them would rest on proofs they
+cannot scrutinize. It would be a religion of authority, not of personal
+and intimate conviction. Just as creation may be felt, not as some
+far-off event, but a continuing act, revelation itself is a present
+reality. Do not the heavens still declare the glory of God as when they
+spoke to the Psalmist? and has the light that lighteth every man who is
+born into the world ceased to burn in the spirit since the first candle
+was lit on a Christian altar? If the revelation of glory and mercy be an
+everlasting thing, and inextinguishable save in the life itself, then
+only is that direct relation of man with God, this vital certainty in
+living truth,--living in us,--this personal religion, possible.
+
+"What has reform in religion ever been other than the demolition of the
+interfering barriers, the deposit of the past, between man and God? The
+theory of the office of the Holy Spirit in the Church expresses man's
+need of direct contact with the divine; the doctrine of
+transubstantiation symbolizes it; and what is Puritanism in all ages,
+affirming the pure spirit, denying all forms, but the heart of man in
+his loneliness, seeking God face to face? what is its iconoclasm of
+image and altar, of prayer-book and ritual, of the Councils and the
+Fathers, but the assertion of the noble dignity in each individual soul
+by virtue of which it demands a freeman's right of audience, a son's
+right of presence with his father, and believes that such is God's way
+with his own? This immediacy of the religious life, being once accepted
+as the substance of vitality in it, relieves man at once of the greater
+mass of that burden in which scepticism thrives and labours. The
+theories of the past respecting God's government, no longer possible in
+a humaner and Christianized age, the impaired genuineness of the
+Scriptures and all questions of their text and accuracy, even the great
+doctrine of miracles, cease to be of vital consequence. A man may
+approach divine truth without them. Simple and bare as the spiritual
+life here presented is, it is not open to such sceptical attack, being
+the fundamental revelation of God bound up in the very nature of man
+which has been recognized at so many critical times, in so many places
+and ages, as the inward light. We may safely leave dogma and historical
+criticism and scientific discovery on one side; it is not in them that
+man finds this inward wisdom, but in the religious emotions as they
+naturally arise under the influence of life.
+
+"This view is supported rather than weakened by such records of the
+spiritual life in man as we possess. Man's nature is one; and, just as
+it is interpreted and illuminated by the poets from whom we derive
+direction in our general conduct, it is set forth and illustrated by
+saintly men and holy women in the special sphere of the soul's life with
+God. Our nature is one with theirs; but as there are differences in the
+aptitudes, sensibilities, and fates of all men, so is it with spiritual
+faculties and their growth; and, from time to time, men have arisen of
+such intense nature, so sensitive to religious emotions, so developed in
+religious experience, through instinct, circumstance, and power, that
+they can aid us by the example and precept of their lives. To them
+belongs a respect similar to that paid to poets and thinkers. Yet it is
+because they tell us what they have seen and touched, not what they have
+heard,--what they have lived and shown forth in acts that bear testimony
+to their words, that they have this power. Such were St. Augustine, St.
+Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas à Kempis, and many a humbler name whose
+life's story has come into our hands; such were the Apostles, and,
+preeminently, Christ. It is the reality of the life in them, personal,
+direct, fundamental, that preserves their influence in other lives. They
+help us by opening and directing the spiritual powers we have in common;
+and beyond our own experience we believe in their counsels as leading to
+what we in our turn may somewhat attain to in the life they followed. It
+is not what they believed of God, but what God accomplished in them,
+that holds our attention; and we interpret it only by what ourselves
+have known of his dealing with us. It is life, and the revelation of God
+there contained, that in others or ourselves is the root of the
+matter--God in us. This is the corner stone."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sun was high in the heavens when we ceased talking of these matters
+and saw in a lowland before us a farmhouse, where we stopped. It was a
+humble dwelling--almost the humblest--partly built of sod, with a barn
+near by, and nothing to distinguish it except the sign, "Post Office,"
+which showed it was the centre of this neighborhood, if "the blank miles
+round about" could be so called. We were made welcome, and, the ponies
+being fed and cared for, we sat down with the farmer and his wife and
+the small brood of young children, sharing their noonday meal. It was a
+rude table and a lowly roof; but, when I arose, I was glad to have been
+at such a board, taking a stranger's portion, but not like a stranger.
+It was to be near the common lot, and the sense of it was as primitive
+as the smell of the upturned earth in spring; it had the wholesomeness
+of life in it. Going out, I lay down on the ground and talked with the
+little boy, some ten years old, to whom our coming was evidently an
+event of importance; and I remember asking him if he ever saw a city. He
+had been once, he said, to--the hamlet, as I thought it, which we had
+just left--with his father in the farm-wagon. That was his idea of the
+magnificence of cities. I could not but look at him curiously. Here was
+the creature, just like other boys, who knew less of the look of man's
+world than any one I had ever encountered. To him this overstretching
+silent sky, this vacant rolling reach of earth, and home, were all of
+life. What a waif of existence!--but the ponies being ready, we said our
+good-byes and drove on along fainter tracks, still northward. We talked
+for a while in that spacious atmosphere--the cheerful talk, half
+personal, half literary, lightly humorous, too, which we always had
+together; but tiring of it at last, and the boy still staying in my mind
+as a kind of accidental symbol of that isolated being whom my notes had
+described, and knowing that I had told but half my story and that my
+friend would like the rest, I turned the talk again on the serious
+things, saying--and there was nothing surprising in such a change with
+us--"After all, you know, we can't live to ourselves alone or by
+ourselves. How to enter life and be one with other men, how to be the
+child of society, and a peer there, belongs to our duty; and to escape
+from the solitude of private life is the most important thing for men of
+lonely thought and feeling, such as meditation breeds. There is more of
+it, if you will listen again;" and he, with the sparkle in his eyes, and
+the youthful happiness in the new things of life for us, new as if they
+had not been lived a thousand years before,--listened like a child to a
+story, grave as the matter was, which I read again from the memoranda I
+had made, after that April morning, year by year.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Respect for age is the natural religion of childhood; it becomes in men
+a sentiment of the soul. An obscure melancholy, the pathos of human
+fate, mingles with this instinctive feeling. The fascination of the sea,
+the sublimity of mountains, are indebted to it, as well as the beautiful
+and solemn stars, which, like them, the mind does not distinguish from
+eternal things, and has ever invested with sacred awe. It is the sense
+of our mortality that thus exalts nature. Yet before her antiquity
+merely, veneration is seldom full and perfect; her periods are too
+impalpable, and, in contemplating their vastness, amazement dissipates
+our faculties. Rather some sign of human occupancy, turning the desert
+into a neglected garden, is necessary to give emotional colour and the
+substance of thought; some touch of man's hand that knows a writing
+beyond nature's can add what centuries could not give, and makes a rock
+a monument. The Mediterranean islet is older for the pirate tower that
+caps it, and for us the ivied church, with its shadowed graves, makes
+England ancestral soil. Nor is it only such landmarks of time that bring
+this obscure awe; occupations, especially, awake it, and customary
+ceremonies, and all that enters into the external tradition of life,
+handed down from generation to generation. On the Western prairies I
+have felt rather the permanence of human toil than the newness of the
+land.
+
+"The sense of age in man's life, relieved, as it is, on the seeming
+agelessness of nature, is a meditation on death, deep-set far below
+thought. We behold the sensible conquests of death, and the sight is so
+habitual, and remains so mysterious, that it leaves its imprint less in
+the conscious and reflective mind than in temperament, sentiment,
+imagination, and their hidden stir; the pyramids then seem fossils of
+mankind; Stonehenge, Indian mounds, and desolate cities are like broken
+anchors caught in the sunken reef and dull ooze of time's ocean, lost
+relics of their human charge long vanished away. Startling it is, when
+the finger of time has touched what we thought living, and we find in
+some solitary place the face of stone. I learned this lesson on the low
+marshes of Ravenna, where, among the rice-fields and the thousands of
+white pond lilies, stands a lonely cathedral, from whose ruined sides
+Christianity, in the face and figure it wore before it put on the form
+and garb of a world-wide religion, looked down on me with the unknown
+eyes of an alien and Oriental faith. 'Stranger, why lingerest thou in
+this broken tomb,' I seemed to hear from silent voices in that death of
+time; and still, when my thoughts seek the Mother-Church of Christendom,
+they go, not to St. John Lateran by the Roman wall, but are pilgrims to
+the low marshes, the white water lilies, the lone Byzantine ruin that
+even the sea has long abandoned.
+
+"The Mother-Church?--is then this personal religious life only a state
+of orphanage? Because true life necessarily begins in the independent
+self, must it continue without the sheltering of the traditional past,
+the instructed guidance of older wisdom, and man's joint life in common
+which by association so enlarges and fortifies the individual good? Why
+should one not behave with respect to religion as he does in other
+parts of life? It is our habit elsewhere in all quarters to recognize
+beyond ourselves an ampler knowledge, a maturer judgment, a more
+efficient will enacting our own choice. To obey by force is a childish
+or a slavish act, but intelligently and willingly to accept authority
+within just limits is the reasonable and practical act of a free man in
+society; the recognition of this by a youth marks his attainment of
+intellectual majority. Authority, in all its modes, is the bond of the
+commonwealth; until the youth comprehends it he is a ward; thereafter he
+is either a rebel or a citizen, as he lists. For us, born to the largest
+measure of freedom society has ever known, there is little fear lest the
+principle of authority should prove a dangerous element. The right of
+private judgment, which is, I believe, the vital principle of the
+intellectual life, is the first to be exercised by our young men who
+lead that life; and quite in the spirit of that education which would
+repeat in the child the history of the race, we are scarce out of the
+swaddling bands of the primer and catechism before we would remove all
+questions to the court of our own jurisdiction. The mind is not a
+_tabula rasa_ at birth, we learn, but, so soon as may be, we will remedy
+that, and erase all records copied there. The treasure doors of our
+fathers' inheritance are thrown open to us; but we will weigh each gold
+piece with balance and scale. All that libraries contain, all that
+institutions embody, all the practice of life which, in its innocence,
+mankind has adopted as things of use and wont, shall be certified by our
+scrutiny. So in youth we say, and what results? What do the best become?
+Incapables, detached from the sap of life, forced to escape to the
+intellectual limbo of a suspension of judgment, extending till it fills
+heaven and earth. We no longer discuss opinions even; the most we can
+attain to is an attitude of mind. In view of the vast variety of phases
+in which even man's great ideas have been held, a sense of indifference
+among them, a vacuity in all, grows up. Pilate's question, 'What is
+truth?' ends all.
+
+"This is the extreme penalty of the heroic sceptical resolve in strong
+and constant minds; commonly those who would measure man's large scope
+by the gauge of their own ability and experience fall into such
+idiosyncrasy as is the fruitful mother of sects, abortive social
+schemes, and all the various brood of dwarfed life; but, for most men,
+the pressure of life itself, which compels them, like Descartes,
+doubting the world, to live as if it were real, corrects their original
+method of independence. They find that to use authority is the better
+part of wisdom, much as to employ men belongs to practical statecraft;
+and they learn the reasonable share of the principle of authority in
+life. They accept, for example, the testimony of others in matters of
+fact, and their mental results in those subjects with which such men are
+conversant, on the ground of a just faith in average human capacity in
+its own sphere; and, in particular, they accept provisional opinions,
+especially such as are alleged to be verifiable in action, and they put
+them to the test. This is our habit in all parts of secular life--in
+scholarship and in practical affairs. 'If any man will do His will, he
+shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God,' is only a special
+instance of this law of temporary acceptance and experiment in all life.
+It is a reasonable command. The confusion of human opinion largely
+arises from the fact that the greater part of it is unverifiable, owing
+to the deficient culture or opportunity of those who hold it; and the
+persistency with which such opinion is argued, clung to, and cherished,
+is the cause of many of the permanent differences that array men in
+opposition. The event would dispense with the argument; but in common
+life, which knows far more of the world than it has in its own
+laboratory, much lies beyond the reach of such real solution. It is the
+distinction of vital religious truth that it is not so withdrawn from
+true proof, but is near at hand in the daily life open to all.
+
+"Such authority, then, as is commonly granted in science, politics, or
+commerce to the past results and expectations of men bringing human life
+in these provinces down to our time and delivering it, not as a new, but
+as an incomplete thing, into the hands of our generation, we may yield
+also in religion. The lives of the saints and all those who in history
+have illustrated the methods and results of piety, their convictions,
+speculations, and hopes, their warning and encouragement, compose a
+great volume of instruction, illustration, and education of the
+religious life. It is folly to ignore this, as it would be to ignore
+the alphabet of letters, the Arabic numerals, or the Constitution; for,
+as these are the monuments of past achievement and an advantage we have
+at our start over savage man, so in religion there are as well
+established results of life already lived. Though the religious life be
+personal, it is not more so than all life of thought and emotion; and in
+it we do not begin at the beginning of time any more than in other parts
+of life. We begin with an inheritance of many experiments hitherto, of
+many methods, of a whole race-history of partial error, partial truth;
+and we take up the matter where our fathers laid it down, with the
+respect due to their earnest toil, their sincere effort and trial, their
+convictions; and the youth who does not feel their impressiveness as
+enforcing his responsibility has as nascent a life in religion as he
+would have, in the similar case, in learning or in citizenship.
+
+"The question of authority in the religious life, however, is more
+specific than this, and is not to be met by an admission of the general
+respect due to the human past and its choicer spirits, and our
+dependence thereon for the fostering of instinctive impulses,
+direction, and the confirmation of our experience. It is organized
+religion that here makes its claim to fealty, as organized liberty,
+organized justice do, in man's communal life. There is a joint and
+general consent in the masses of men with similar experience united
+into the Church, with respect to the religious way of life, similar to
+that of such masses united into a government with respect to secular
+things. The history of the Church with its embodied dogmas--the past of
+Christendom--contains that consent; and the Church founds its claim to
+veneration on this broad accumulation of experience, so gathered from
+all ages and all conditions of men as to have lost all traces of
+individuality and become the conviction of mankind to a degree that no
+free constitution and no legal code can claim. To substitute the simple
+faith of the young heart, however immediate, in the place of this hoary
+and commanding tradition is a daring thing, and may seem both arrogance
+and folly; to stand apart from it, though willing to be taught within
+the free exercise of our own faculties, abashes us; and it is necessary,
+for our own self-respect, to adopt some attitude toward the Church
+definitely, not as a part of the common mass of race-tradition in a
+diffused state like philosophy, but as an institution like the Throne or
+the Parliament.
+
+"But may it not be pleaded that, however slight by comparison personal
+life may seem, yet if it be true, the Church must include this in its
+own mighty sum; and that what the Church adds to define, expand, and
+elevate, to guide and support, belongs to growth in spiritual things,
+not to those beginnings which only are here spoken of? And in defence of
+a private view and hesitancy, such as is also felt in the organized
+social life elsewhere, may it not be suggested that the past of
+Christendom, great as it is in mental force, moral ardour, and spiritual
+insight, and illustrious with triumphs over evil in man and in society,
+and shining always with the leading of a great light, is yet a human
+past, an imperfect stage of progress at every era? Is its historic life,
+with all its accumulation of creed and custom, not a process of
+Christianization, in which much has been sloughed off at every new birth
+of the world? In reading the Fathers we come on states of mind and forms
+of emotion due to transitory influences and surroundings; and in the
+history of the Church, we come upon dogmas, ceremonials, methods of work
+and aims of effort, which were of contemporary validity only. Such are
+no longer rational or possible; they have passed out of life, belonging
+to that body of man which is forever dying, not to the spirit that is
+forever growing; and, too, as all men and bodies of men share in
+imperfection, we come, in the Fathers and in the Church, upon passions,
+persecutions, wars, vices, degradation, and failure, necessarily to be
+accounted as a portion of the admixture of sin and wrong, of evil, in
+the whole of man's historic life. In view of these obvious facts, and
+also of the great discrepancies of such organic bodies as are here
+spoken of in their total mass as the Church, and of their emphasis upon
+such particularities, is not an attitude of reserve justifiable in a
+young and conscientious heart? It may seem to be partial scepticism,
+especially as the necessity for rejection of some portion of this
+embodied past becomes clearer in the growth of the mind's information
+and the strengthening of moral judgment in a rightful independence. But
+if much must be cast away, let it not disturb us; it must be the more
+in proportion as the nature of man suffers redemption. Let us own, then,
+and reverence the great tradition of the Church; but he has feebly
+grasped the idea of Christ leavening the world, and has read little in
+the records of pious ages even, who does not know that even in the
+Church it is needful to sift truth from falsehood, dead from living
+truth.
+
+"If, however, a claim be advanced which forbids such a use of reason as
+we make in regard to all other human institutions, viewing them
+historically with reference to their constant service to mankind and
+their particular adaptation to a changing social state; if, as was the
+case with the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, the Church
+proclaims a commission not subject to human control, by virtue of which
+it would impose creed and ritual, and assumes those great offices,
+reserved in Puritan thought to God only,--then does it not usurp the
+function of the soul itself, suppress the personal revelation of the
+divine by taking from the soul the seals of original sovereignty, remove
+God to the first year of our era, relying on his mediate revelation in
+time, and thus take from common man the evidence of religion and
+therewith its certainty, and in general substitute faith in things for
+the vital faith? If the voice of the Church is to find only its own echo
+in the inner voice of life, if its evidences of religion involve more
+than is near and present to every soul by virtue of its birth, if its
+rites have any other reality than that of the heart which expresses
+itself in them and so gives them life and significance, then its
+authority is external wholly and has nothing in common with that
+authority which free men erect over themselves because it is themselves
+embodied in an outward principle. If personality has any place in the
+soul, if the soul has any original office, then the authority that
+religion as an organic social form may take on must lie within limits
+that reserve to the soul its privacy with God, to truth an un-borrowed
+radiance, and to all men its possession, simple or learned, lay or
+cleric, through their common experience and ordinary faculties in the
+normal course of life. Otherwise, it seems to me, personal experience
+cannot be the beginning of Christian conviction, the true available test
+of it, the underlying basis of it as we build the temple of God's
+presence within us, and, as I have called it, the vitality of the whole
+matter.
+
+"Within these limits, then, imposed by the earlier argument, what, under
+such reserves of the great principles of liberty, democracy, and justice
+in which we are bred and which are forms of the cardinal fact of the
+value of the personal soul in all men,--what to us is the office of the
+Church? In theology it defines a philosophy which, though an
+interpretation of divine truth, takes its place in the intellectual
+scheme of theory like other human philosophies, and has a similar value,
+differing only in the gravity of its subject-matter, which is the most
+mysterious known to thought. In its specific rites it dignifies the
+great moments of life--birth, marriage, and death--with its solemn
+sanctions; and in its general ceremonies it affords appropriate forms in
+which religious emotion finds noble and tender expression; especially it
+enables masses of men to unite in one great act of the heart with the
+impressiveness that belongs to the act of a community, and to make that
+act, though emotional in a multitude of hearts, single and whole in
+manifestation; and it does this habitually in the life of its least
+groups by Sabbath observances, and in the life of nations by public
+thanksgivings, and in the life of entire Christendom by its general
+feasts of Christmas and Easter, and, though within narrower limits, by
+its seasons of fasting and prayer. In its administration it facilitates
+its daily work among men. The Church is thus a mighty organizer of
+thought in theology, of the forms of emotion in its ritual, and of
+practical action in its executive. Its doctrines, however conflicting in
+various divisions of the whole vast body, are the result of profound,
+conscientious, and long-continued thought among its successive synods,
+which are the custodians of creeds as senates are of constitutions, and
+whose affirmations and interpretations have a like weight in their own
+speculative sphere as these possess in the province of political thought
+age after age. Its counsels are ripe with a many-centuried knowledge of
+human nature. Its joys and consolations are the most precious
+inheritance of the heart of man. Its saints open our pathways, and go
+before, following in the ways of the spirit. Its doors concentrate
+within their shelter the general faith, and give it there a home. Its
+table is spread for all men. I do not speak of the Church Invisible,
+but mean to embrace with this catholicity of statement all
+organizations, howsoever divided, which own Christ as their Head.
+Temple, cathedral, and chapel have each their daily use to those who
+gather there with Christian hearts; each is a living fountain to its own
+fold. The village spire, wherever it rises on American or English
+ground, bespeaks an association of families who find in this bond an
+inward companionship and outward expression of it in a public habit
+continuing from the fathers down, sanctified by the memories of
+generations gone, and tender with the hope of the generation to come;
+and this is of measureless good within such families for young and old
+alike. It bespeaks also an instrument of charity, unobtrusive, friendly,
+and searching, and growing more and more unconfined; it bespeaks a rock
+of public morality deep-set in the foundations of the state.
+
+"It is true that in uniting with such a Church, under the specific
+conditions natural to both temperament and residence, a man yields
+something of private right, and sacrifices in a greater or less degree
+his personality; but this is the common condition of all social
+cooperation, whether in party action or any union to a common end. The
+compromise, involved in any platform of principles, tolerates essential
+differences in important matters, but matters not then important in view
+of what is to be gained in the main. The advantages of an organized
+religious life are too plain to be ignored; it is reasonable to go to
+the very verge in order to avail of them, both for a man's self and for
+his efficiency in society, just as it is to unite with a general party
+in the state, and serve it in local primaries, for the ends of
+citizenship; such means of help and opportunities of accomplishment are
+not to be lightly neglected. Happy is he who, christened at the font,
+naturally accepts the duties devolved upon him, and stands in his
+parents' place; and fortunate I count the youth who, without stress and
+trouble, undertakes in his turn his father's part. But some there are,
+born of that resolute manliness of the fathers, which is finer than
+tempered steel, and of the conscience of the mothers which is more
+sensitive than the bare nerve,--the very flower of the Puritan
+tradition, and my heart goes out to them. And if there be a youth in
+our days who feels hesitancy in such an early surrender into the bosom
+of a Church, however broadly inclusive of firm consciences, strong
+heads, and free hearts; if primitive Puritanism is bred in his bone and
+blood and is there the large reserve of liberty natural to the American
+heart; if the spirit is so living in him that he dispenses with the
+form, which to those of less strenuous strain is rather a support; if
+truth is so precious to him that he will not subscribe to more or less
+than he believes, or tolerate in inclusive statements speculative and
+uncertain elements, traditional error, and all that body of rejected
+doctrine which, though he himself be free from it, must yet be slowly
+uprooted from the general belief; if emotion is so sacred to him that
+his native and habitual reticence becomes so sensitive in this most
+private part of life as to make it here something between God and him
+only; if his heart of charity and hand of friendship find out his
+fellow-men with no intervention; if for these reasons, or any of them,
+or if from that modesty of nature, which is so much more common in
+American youth than is believed, he hesitates, out of pure awe of the
+responsibility before God and man which he incurs, to think himself
+worthy of such vows, such hopes, such duties,--if in any way, being of
+noble nature, he keeps by himself,--let him not think he thereby
+withdraws from the life of Christendom, nor that in the Church itself he
+may not still take some portion of its great good. So far as its
+authority is of the heart only, so far as it has organized the religious
+life itself without regard to other ends and free from intellectual,
+historical, and governmental entanglements that are supplementary at
+most, he needs no formal act to be one with its spirit; and, however
+much he may deny himself by his self-limitation, he remains a
+Christian."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was no doubt about it; we were lost. The faint tracks in the soil
+had long ago disappeared, and we followed, as was natural, the draws
+between the slopes; and now, for the last quarter-hour, the grass had
+deepened till it was above the wheels and to the shoulders of the
+ponies. They did not mind; they were born to it. What solitude there was
+in it, as we pulled up and came to a stand! What wildness was there!
+Only the great blue sky, with a westward dropping sun of lonely
+splendour, and green horizons, broken and nigh, of the waving prairie,
+whispering with the high wind,--and no life but ours shut in among the
+group of low, close hills all about, in that grassy gulf! The earth
+seemed near, waiting for us; in such places, just like this, men lost
+had died and none knew it; half-unconsciously I found myself thinking of
+Childe Roland's Tower,--
+
+        "those two hills on the right
+    Couched,"--
+
+and the reality of crossing the prairie in old days came back on me.
+That halt in the cup of the hills was our limit; it was a moment of
+life, an arrival, an end.
+
+The sun was too low for further adventuring. We struck due west on as
+straight a course as the rugged country permitted, thinking to reach the
+Looking-glass creek, along which lay the beaten road of travel back to
+mankind. An hour or two passed, and we saw a house in the distance to
+which we drove,--a humble house, sod-built, like that we had made our
+nooning in. We drove to the door, and called; it was long before any
+answer came; but at last a woman opened the door, her face and figure
+the very expression of dulled toil, hard work, bodily despair. Alone on
+that prairie, one would have thought she would have welcomed a human
+countenance; but she looked on us as if she wished we would be gone, and
+hardly answered to our question of the road. She was the type of the
+abandonment of human life. I did not speak to her; but I see her now, as
+I saw her then, with a kind of surprise that a woman could come to be,
+by human life, like that. There was no one else in the house; and she
+shut the door upon us after one sullen look and one scant sentence, as
+if we, and any other, were naught, and went back to her silence in that
+green waste, now gilded by the level sun, miles on miles. I have often
+thought of her since, and what life was to her there, and found some
+image of other solitudes--and men and women in them--as expansive, as
+alienating as the wild prairie, where life hides itself, grows
+dehumanized, and dies.
+
+We drove on, with some word of this; and, eating what we had with us in
+case of famine, made our supper from biscuit and flask; and, before
+darkness fell, we struck the creek road, and turned southward,--a
+splendour of late sunset gleaming over the untravelled western bank, and
+dying out in red bloom and the purple of slow star-dawning overhead; and
+on we drove, with a hard road under us, having far to go. At the first
+farmhouse we watered the willing ponies, who had long succumbed to our
+control, and who went as if they could not tire, steadily and evenly,
+under the same strong hand and kindly voice they had felt day-long. It
+was then I took the reins for an easy stretch, giving my friend a
+change, and felt what so unobservably he had been doing all day with
+wrist and eye, while he listened. So we drove down, and knew the moon
+was up by the changed heavens, though yet unseen behind the bluffs of
+the creek upon our left; and far away southward, in the evening light,
+lay the long valley like a larger river. We still felt the upland,
+however, as a loftier air; and always as, when night comes, nature
+exercises some mysterious magic of the dark hour in strange places,
+there, as all day long, we seemed to draw closer to earth--not earth as
+it is in landscape, a thing of beauty and colour and human kinship, but
+earth, the soil, the element, the globe.
+
+This was in both our minds, and I had thought of it before he spoke
+after a long pause over the briar pipes that had comraded our talk since
+morning. "I can't talk of it now," he said; "it's gone into me in an
+hour that you have been years in thinking; but that is what you are to
+us." I say the things he said, for I cannot otherwise give his way, and
+that trust of love in which these thoughts were born on my lips; all
+those years, in many a distant place, I had thought for him almost as
+much as for myself. "You knighted us," he said, "and we fight your
+cause,"--not knowing that kingship, however great or humble, is but the
+lowly knights made one in him who by God's grace can speak the word. "I
+have no doubt it's true, what you say; but it is different. I expected
+it would be; but we used to speak of nature more than the soul, and of
+nature's being a guide. Poor Robin, I remember, began with that." "There
+is a sonnet of Arnold's you know," I answered, "that tells another
+tale. But I did not learn it from him. And, besides, what else he has to
+say is not cheerful. Nothing is wise," I interjected, "that is not
+cheerful."
+
+But without repeating the wandering talk of reality with its changeful
+tones,--and however serious the matter might be it was never far from a
+touch of lightness shuttling in and out like sunshine,--I told him, as
+we drove down the dark valley, my hand resting now on his shoulder near
+me, how nature is antipodal to the soul; or, if not the antipodes, is
+apart from us, and cares not for the virtues we have erected, for
+authority and mercy, for justice, chastity, and sacrifice, for nothing
+that is man's except the life of the body itself, the race-life, as if
+man were a chemical element or a wave-motion of ether that are parts of
+physics. "I convinced myself," I said, "that the soul is not a term in
+the life of nature, but that nature is in it as a physical vigour and to
+it an outward spectacle, whereby the soul acquires a preparation for
+immortality, whether immortality come or not. And I have sometimes
+thought," I continued, "that on the spiritual side an explanation of the
+inequalities of human conditions, both past and present, may be
+contained in the idea that for all alike, lowly and lofty, wretched and
+fortunate, simple and learned, life remains in all its conditions an
+opportunity to know God and exercise the soul in virtue, and is an
+education of the soul in all its essential knowledge and faculties, at
+least within Christian times, broadly speaking, and in more than one
+pagan civilization. Material success, fame, wealth, and power--birth
+even, with all it involves of opportunity and fate--are insignificant,
+if the soul's life is thus secured. I do not mean that such a thought
+clears the mystery of the different lots of mankind; but it suggests
+another view of the apparent injustice of the world in its most rigid
+forms. This, however, is a wandering thought. The great reversal of the
+law of nature in the soul lies in the fact that whereas she proceeds by
+the selfish will of the strongest trampling out the weak, spiritual law
+requires the best to sacrifice itself for the least. Scientific ethics,
+which would chloroform the feeble, can never succeed until the race
+makes bold to amend what it now receives as the mysterious ways of
+heaven, and identifies a degenerate body with a dead soul. Such a code
+is at issue with true democracy, which requires that every soul, being
+equal in value in view of its unknown future, shall receive the benefit
+of every doubt in earthly life, and be left as a being in the hands of
+the secret power that ordained its existence in the hour when nature was
+constituted to be its mode of birth, consciousness, and death. And if
+the choice must be made on the broad scale, it is our practical faith
+that the service of the best, even to the point of death, is due to the
+least in the hope of bettering the lot of man. Hence, as we are willing
+that in communities the noblest should die for a cause, we consent to
+the death of high civilizations, if they spread in some Hellenization of
+a Roman, some Romanizing of a barbaric world; and to the extinction of
+aristocracies, if their virtues thereby are disseminated and the social
+goods they monopolized made common in a people; and to the falling of
+the flower of man's spirit everywhere, if its seeds be sown on all the
+winds of the future for the blessing of the world's fuller and more
+populous life. Such has been the history of our civilization, and still
+is, and must be till the whole earth's surface be conquered for
+mankind, embodied in its highest ideals, personal and social. This is
+not nature's way, who raises her trophy over the slain; our trophy is
+man's laurel upon our grave. So, everywhere except in the physical
+sphere of life, if you would find the soul's commands, reverse nature's
+will. This superiority to nature, as it seems to me, this living in an
+element plainly antithetical to her sphere, is a sign of 'an ampler
+ether, a diviner air.'"
+
+So I spoke, as the words came to me, while we were still driving down
+the dark valley, in deeper shadows, under higher bluffs, looking out on
+a levelled world westward, stretching off with low, white, wreathing
+mists and moonlit distances of plains beyond the further bunk. We turned
+a great shoulder of the hills, and the moon shone out bright and clear,
+riding in heaven; and the southward reach unlocked, and gave itself for
+miles to our eyes. At the instant, while the ponies came back upon their
+haunches at the drop of the long descent ahead, we both cried out, "the
+Looking-glass!" There it was, about a mile away before and below us, as
+plain as a pikestaff,--a silvery reach, like a long narrow lake, smooth
+as the floor of cloud seen from above among mountains, silent,
+motionless,--for all the world like an immense, spectral looking-glass,
+set there in the half-darkened waste. It was evidently what gave the
+name to the creek, and I have since noticed the same name elsewhere in
+the Western country, and I suppose the phenomenon is not uncommon. For
+an hour or more it remained; we never seemed to get nearer to it; it was
+an eerie thing--the earth-light of the moon on that side,--I saw it all
+the time.
+
+"The difference you spoke of," I began, with my eyes upon that spectral
+pool, "is only that change which belongs to life, dissolving like
+illusion, but not itself illusion. I am not aware of any break; it is
+the old life in a higher form with clearer selfhood. Life, in the soul
+especially, seems less a state of being than a thing of transformation,
+whose successive shapes we wear; and so far as that change is
+self-determined," I continued, making almost an effort to think, so
+weird was that scene before us, "the soul proceeds by foreknowledge of
+itself in the ideal, and wills the change by ideal living, which is not
+a conflict with the actual but a process out of it, conditioned in
+almost a Darwinian way on that brain-futuring which entered into the
+struggle for animal existence even with such enormous modifying power.
+In our old days, under the sway of new scientific knowledge, we
+instinctively saw man in the perspective of nature, and then man seemed
+almost an after-thought of nature; but having been produced, late in her
+material history, and gifted with foresight that distinguished him from
+all else in her scheme, his own evolution gathered thereby that speed
+which is so perplexing a contrast to the inconceivable slowness of the
+orbing of stars and the building of continents. He has used his powers
+of prescience for his own ends; but, fanciful as the thought is, might
+it happen that through his control of elemental forces and his
+acquaintance with infinite space, he should reach the point of applying
+prescience in nature's own material frame, and wield the world for the
+better accomplishment of her apparent ends,--that, though unimaginable
+now, would constitute the true polarity to her blind and half-chaotic
+motions,--chaotic in intelligence, I mean, and to the moral reason.
+Unreal as such a thought is, a glimpse of some such feeling toward
+nature is discernible in the work of some impressionist landscape
+painters, who present colour and atmosphere and space without human
+intention, as a kind of artistry of science, having the same sort of
+elemental substance and interest that scientific truth has as an object
+of knowledge,--a curious form of the beauty of truth."
+
+We spoke of some illustrations of this, the scene before us lending
+atmosphere and suggestion to the talk, and enforcing it like nature's
+comment. "But," I continued, "what I had in mind to say was concerning
+our dead selves. The old phrase, _life is a continual dying_, is true,
+and, once gone life is death; and sometimes so much of it has been
+gathered to the past, such definite portions of it are laid away, that
+we can look, if we will, in the lake of memory on the faces of the dead
+selves which once we were." Instinctively we looked on the mystic
+glamour in the low valley, as on that Lake of the Dead Souls I spoke of.
+I went on after the natural pause,--I could not help it,--"'I was a
+different man, then,' we say, with a touch of sadness, perhaps, but
+often with better thoughts, and always with a feeling of mystery. How
+old is the youth before he is aware of the fading away of vitality out
+of early beliefs? and then he feels the quick passing of the enthusiasms
+of opening life, as one cause after another, one hero, one poet,
+disclosing the great interests of life, in turn engages his heart. As
+time goes on, and life comes out in its true perspective, one thing with
+another, and he discovers the incompleteness of single elements of
+ardour in the whole of life, and also the defects of wisdom, art, and
+action in those books and men that had won his full confidence and what
+he called perfect allegiance, there comes often a moment of pause, as if
+this growth had in it some thing irrational and derogatory. The thinkers
+whose words of light and leading were the precious truth itself, the
+poets he idolized, the elders he trusted, fall away, and others stand in
+their places, who better appeal to his older mind, his finer impulses,
+his sounder judgment; and what true validity can these last have in the
+end? After a decade he can almost see his youth as something dead, his
+early manhood as something that will die. The poet, especially, who
+gives expression to himself, and puts his life at its period into a
+book, feels, as each work drops from his hand, that it is a portion of a
+self that is dead, though it was life in the making; and so with the
+embodiments of life in action, the man looks back on past greatness,
+past romance; for all life, working itself out--desire into
+achievement--dies to the man. Vital life lies always before. It is a
+strange thought that only by the death of what we now are, can we enter
+into our own hopes and victories; that it is by the slaying of the self
+which now is that the higher self takes life; that it is through such
+self-destruction that we live. The intermediate state seems a waste, and
+the knowledge that it is intermediate seems to impair its value; but
+this is the way ordained by which we must live, and such is life's magic
+that in each stage, from childhood to age, it is lived with trustfulness
+in itself. It is needful only, however much we outlive, to live more and
+better, and through all to remain true to the high causes, the faithful
+loves, the sacred impulses, that have given our imperfect life of the
+past whatever of nobility it may have; so shall death forever open into
+life. But," I ended, lifting my moist eyes toward the sweep of the dark
+slopes, "the wind blows, and leaves the mystic to inquire whence and
+whither, the wild shrub blossoms and only the poet is troubled to excuse
+its beauty, and happy is he who can live without too much thought of
+life."
+
+The sheen of the river had died out, and the creek was only a common
+stream lit with the high moon, and bordered far off to the west with the
+low indistinguishable country. We drove in silence down the valley along
+that shelf of road under the land. The broken bluffs on the left rose
+into immense slopes of rolling prairie, and magnified by the night
+atmosphere into majesty, heavy with deep darkness in their folds, stood
+massive and vast in the dusk moonlight, like a sea. Then fell on me and
+grew with strange insistence the sense of this everlasting mounded power
+of the earth, like the rise and subsidence of ocean in an element of
+slower and more awful might. The solid waste began to loom and lift,
+almost with the blind internal strength of the whirl of the planet
+through space. Deeper into the shadow we plunged with every echoing
+tread of the hoofs. The lair of some mysterious presence was about
+us,--unshaped, unrealized, as in some place of antique awe before the
+time of temples or of gods. It seemed a corporal thing. If I stretched
+out my hand I should touch it like the ground. It came out from all the
+black rifts, it rolled from the moonlit distinct heights, it filled the
+chill air,--it was an envelopment--it would be an engulfment--horse and
+man we were sinking in it. Then it was--most in all my days--that I felt
+dense mystery overwhelming me. "O infinite earth," I thought, "our
+unknowing mother, our unknowing grave!"--"What is it?" he said, feeling
+my wrist straighten where it lay on his shoulder, and the tremor and the
+hand seeking him. Was it a premonition? "Nothing," I answered, and did
+not tell him; but he began to cheer me with lighter talk, and win me
+back to the levels of life, and under his sensitive and loving ways, the
+excitement of the ride died out, and an hour later, after midnight, we
+drove into the silent town. We put the ponies up, praising them with
+hand and voice; and then he took both my hands in his and said, "The
+truest thing you ever said was what you wrote me, 'We live each others'
+lives.'" That was his thanks.
+
+O brave and tender heart, now long lapped under the green fold of that
+far prairie in his niche of earth! How often I see him as in our first
+days,--the boy of seventeen summers, lying on his elbows over his
+Thackeray, reading by the pictures, and laughing to himself hour after
+hour; and many a prairie adventure, many happy days and fortunate
+moments come back, with the strength and bloom of youth, as I recall the
+manly figure, the sensitive and eager face, and all his resolute ways.
+Who of us knows what he is to another? He could not know how much his
+life entered into mine, and still enters. But he is dead; and I have set
+down these weak and stammering words of the life we began together, not
+for the strong and sure, but for those who, though true hearts, find it
+hard to lay hold of truth, and doubt themselves, in the hope that some
+younger comrade of life, though unknown, may make them of avail and find
+in them the dark leading of a hand.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Heart of Man, by George Edward Woodberry
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12329 ***