Chapter XIV: The Growth of Humanity (6)

What was this, then, that had come to European art and literature? Clearly what we see is the transition from the heroic world of the tragedy, from the splendid beauty and force of the Italian painters, from the infinite grace of the romantic comedy, to some other artistic apprehension of the world. The movement was not indeed wholly dependent upon a reaction, but in its development it corresponds with the reaction against the continuance of a great tradition which had become merely a convention, when it had lost its vitality and sincerity. The best examples of this may perhaps be found in Dryden's attempt to carry on the heroic tradition in English tragedy, and in Voltaire's strenuous and meritorious efforts to continue the work of Racine and Corneille. They meant well, and their tragic dramas are not without merit, but it is clear enough that they could not bend the bow of Ulysses. They were great artists, as we can see clearly enough in _Absalom and Ahitophel_, or in _Candide_, but their genius lay in other directions. 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin' is a great judgement of life, one very wholesome and necessary for all time, but it was not the mood of Othello or of Hamlet.

European art had to come down from the empyrean, and though the descent was great, yet it gained new life by once again touching mother earth.

No doubt, however, the harsh reality of Hogarth and Defoe was not the whole of life, and, by a strange transition, before the middle of the eighteenth century we find the novelists and, though they are less important, the dramatists, turning from the faithful and minute study of the outward appearance and form of things to the study of sensibility and emotion, and the world, which had seemed so hard and unmoved, was dissolved in tears.

We find this a strange and even a ridiculous spectacle, the men who had prided themselves on their common sense and reasonableness, whose literature had sparkled with wit and epigram, blubbering and crying like great children; but whatever we think of it, that is what happened. The first artist of the new type was a Frenchman, Marivaux, and his _Vie de Marianne_ is a study of a young woman who is the embodiment of sensibility and self-consciousness, an amiable and virtuous girl, who is hardly able to enjoy the good that life brings her, for fear lest she should miss the opportunity of renunciation. The first great novel of sentiment is also French, the Abbe Prevost's _Manon Lescaut_, and here indeed we are in the deep waters of affliction; there are but few moments between the beginning and the end of his sad story when the hero is not in tears. And yet it is a great novel, for there are few studies of human nature, as absorbed and almost lost in emotion, which are more moving.

These novels, however, which appeared between 1730 and 1740, are overshadowed by the works of the great Englishmen, by Richardson and Sterne and Goldsmith, for these are not artists of England alone, but of all Europe, known and loved and imitated in every country in Europe. The sorrows of _Clarissa_, the pathetic or maudlin humour of Sterne, the idyllic grace and gentle laughter of Goldsmith, these, as they moved every heart, influenced even the greatest of European artists. The influence of _Clarissa_ on Rousseau, of Goldsmith on Goethe and Jean Paul Richter need no exposition.

The sentimental movement reached almost its highest level in the great and morbid genius of Rousseau, who was himself the living embodiment of the movement. Far more than even his creations, more than Julie or Saint-Preux, was he himself possessed by an emotionalism which finally became a disease. But, strangely enough, it was the Olympic genius of Goethe which gave its supreme form to the treatment of life under the terms of feeling. In _Werther_ this whole phase of art passed beyond itself into the tragedy of the vain and hopeless efforts of an honest but over-sensitive nature to control his emotion and to master his life. Not indeed that it was with _Werther_ the movement ended: it was continued in Byron: it was perhaps the most important element in what the Germans call specifically their _Romantische Schule_, and in the work of the French Romantic artists from Chateaubriand to Alfred de Musset. If you wish to see it in painting you have only to look at the work of Greuze, and at the engravings in our grandmothers' 'Forget-me-nots'. In spite of all its absurdities this sentimental movement played a great part in preparing men for the great revolution itself, for it opened men's hearts, it set free their emotions; if the realism of Defoe and Hogarth had enabled men to escape from convention and the mannerisms of good taste into a world of reality, the emotional movement gave this reality fullness and content, represented a larger and more intimate apprehension of life.

This brings us to another aspect of the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the poetry and painting of 'nature', to the beginnings of that great artistic movement which culminates in Wordsworth and Turner, and whose influence dominated all Europe in the eighteenth century and continues to do so in our own time. It seems a strange thing, but it is true, that it was not till the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that there appeared a school of painting which took landscape, and a poetry which took 'nature' specifically for its subject. There is indeed frequent reference to 'nature' in the poetry of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century, and this is often significant in the early English poetry and charming in the romances and in Petrarch and Chaucer, while in Dante and the Elizabethans, and especially in Shakespeare, it reaches an almost incomparable beauty; yet in all these it is, as in the backgrounds of the great Tuscan and Umbrian painters, exquisite and significant and true, but not the prime subject which engages their attention.

There are indeed two great poets in whom we begin to feel that the background begins to be almost as important as the figures of the foreground; Spenser is genuinely interested in his stories of chivalry and honour, and in his moral allegory, but we sometimes wonder whether the most important thing in his poetry is not the chequered light and shade of his forests, the picturesque splendour of his castles, and the gloom of his caverns and dungeons. Spenser's poetry is like a tapestry on which indeed some story of human life is presented, but which is in the end a great work of decorative art, to which the immediate subject contributes form and pattern and colour, but in which it is in a measure lost.

In Milton the matter is different: no one can doubt that he is a great artist of human life and fate; even if _Paradise Lost_ were to leave us in some uncertainty, the _Samson_ would convince us all. But, while I think this is true, it is also clear that not only in the grace of his earlier poetry, but in the maturity of his genius, in the _Lycidas_ and even in the _Paradise_, Milton is at least as great an artist of nature and its beauty as he is of life. And near Milton there stands a poet, lesser indeed, but individual and unique, that is Henry Vaughan, who had unhappily strayed into the 'metaphysical' maze, and who helplessly enough tries to endue himself with the giant armour of Donne, but who, when he is himself, is one of the most exquisite and gracious poets of nature.

We may perhaps, without being fanciful, find a parallel to these poets in the great Venetian painters of the sixteenth century, in whose work we see the landscape of Venetia and the Cadore compelling more and more our attention, as not a mere background, but as an integral part of the picture; but it was not till the seventeenth century and the Flemish and Dutch painters that we see the transition complete, and the artist sets before us not some scene in human life, but simply the beauty and splendour of 'nature' herself.

It was not till Thomson began to publish _The Seasons_ in 1726 that the development was complete in poetry. Thomson is a difficult poet to appreciate rightly, for though his subject was 'nature' his method was often as conventional and artificial as that of any Augustan; but he was a lover of the fields and woods, and his imagination, if it is not very powerful, is often very sincere. What was begun by Thomson was carried on with greater sincerity and reality by Cowper, and was transformed by the imagination of Gray and Collins. We sometimes think of this development as specifically English, and it is true that in Wordsworth and Shelley the poetry of nature grew into something which is unique and unmatched, but we must not think of the poetry of Wordsworth as though it were the only form under which nature can be presented. That would be to ignore the qualities, in England of Keats and Tennyson, and in Europe of great artists in whom the treatment of nature assumed other forms. The great poetry of nature began in England, but it was carried on in all the European countries, and for more than a century it was dominated mainly by the genius of Rousseau in France and of Goethe in Germany. I cannot here pretend to deal with the treatment of nature in Rousseau, or with the outcome of his influence first in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand, and then in the elegiac beauty of Lamartine and de Musset's _Nuits_; nor can I deal with the poetry of nature in Goethe, and its lesser but often beautiful expression in the German 'Romanticists', and in Heine. It is only possible here to remind ourselves that neither the poetry nor the painting of nature belongs to any one country, but is an intimate part of all modern art.

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And thus at last we come to the great revolution itself, that great revolution in art and thought and life, of which the political and social revolution is one form, and of which we are all the children. In this, all the elements of which we have been thinking are gathered up and come to perfection; reality, sentiment, nature. And this was of no one country or nationality. The first and also the greatest artist of the revolution is Goethe himself, for it all culminates and reaches its highest expression in _Faust_. The passion for freedom, for the complete experience of life, for life itself, and not mere knowledge or mere words--this is the motive which drives Faust till he is willing to make his bargain with any power which will give him this. The infinite, the insatiable desire of the human soul, which can never be wholly satisfied, which can never reach its term, this is the passion which possesses Faust, this is the rock upon which the hopes of the poor devil are shipwrecked, the poor devil who in the limitation of the merely critical and negative temper cannot understand that Faust can never be satisfied, will never say to the moment, 'Verweile doch, du bist zu schoen.' For the drama of _Faust_ is not a drama of damnation, but of redemption, and though the breadth and scope of the whole conception pass beyond all presentation in complete and rounded form, the great tragedy of Gretchen takes us from the splendid but abstract world of ideas into the simplest experience of human life, where Faust becomes human through love itself, but too slowly, too late to avert the tragedy.

If Goethe represents the great humane conceptions of the revolution most profoundly, Wordsworth comes very near him in the depth of his knowledge of humanity, and in his supreme sense of the unity of all life and nature with the living spirit who is in all things; and the great romantic artists of France are governed by the same sense of nature and love and the spiritual, and in Victor Hugo this reaches a level only just below that of Goethe himself.

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You must not misunderstand me, nationality has real meaning, it has something akin, but distantly, to personality; but in the main it affects the more superficial aspects of art. In painting and sculpture the European artists use a language which we can all understand, imagine life and nature under terms which we all feel and know to be true. And, though in literature the language creates a real difference, and causes a difficulty in recognizing the unity which lies behind the difference, yet the moment we begin to overcome that difficulty we find ourselves in a world intelligible, familiar, moving to us all; and intelligible just in proportion to the greatness of the artist.

It is idle for us to dispute about the relative greatness of our national arts, for their greatness lies not in national idiosyncrasies, but in the personality of the artist, and in the single, the unique quality of the particular works of art, and these belong not to this country or nation or to that, but to us all. It is not to Frenchmen only that the intellectual passion of Pascal, or the hatred of shams and the love of the honest man of Moliere or of Voltaire, appeal, but to us all. It is not only Germans who understand the splendour of human experience, and the infinite pathos of the mistakes of the human heart, but we all. And the spectacle of the tempest in the heart of Lear, that tempest of the soul, of which the storms of nature are but a faint reflection, or the exquisite serenity and humanity of the recognition of Cordelia, these are not the prerogative possessions of England, but they speak to the heart and soul of the whole world.

We may be divided from each other by many things, material or political, but in the supreme art and poetry we rise above all these distinctions and are only men and women, with the earth under our feet and the heavens above us.

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BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

The subject treated in the essay may be considered in relation to the following works:

_Beowulf_; _The Song of Roland_; _The Nibelungenlied_.

_Tristan and Iseult_ (Thomas, or Beroul); Mary of France, _Lais_.

Dante, _Divina Commedia_.

Boccaccio, _Decameron_; Chaucer, _Canterbury Tales_.

Shakespeare; Lope de Vega; Calderon.

Defoe, _Robinson Crusoe_; Le Sage, _Gil Blas_.

Marivaux, _Marianne_; Prevost, _Manon Lescaut_.

Richardson, _Clarissa_; Goethe, _Werther_.

Goethe, _Faust_; Wordsworth, _Michael_, &c..

Victor Hugo, _Legende des Siecles_.

There are English translations of the greater number of these.

VII

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY AS UNIFYING FORCES

Some political thinkers have taken the State for the highest form of human association. Humanity is for them a mere abstract idea. It is no organized whole; owns, they think, no common allegiance, pursues no common aim. To find such an organized whole, such an allegiance, such an aim, we must look to the State and to nothing beyond it. We find such a whole in Germany, in France, in England, but not in anything common to the three and to other States as well. This opinion, due in its modern shape to Hegel and his followers, is false to history, false in political theory, and mischievous in ethics, but it is nowhere more false than in relation to the world of thought. The essential unity of Western civilization as an intellectual, moral, and spiritual commonwealth is indeed illustrated--unfortunately illustrated as it happens--by this very theory of the State which denies it. For the theory is of German make. It arose out of the historical conditions of Prussia in the early years of the nineteenth century, was fostered in Germany by the peculiar method by which the unity of the nation was effected, and, setting out from its home, has permeated much of the thought of the West, effectively combating the Liberal humanitarianism which was the especial contribution of England to the movement of the nineteenth century. The reaction of the German idea of the State on the English conception of liberty is the dominating influence of the last forty years in English political thought and progress. There can hardly be a more striking testimony to the reality of that unity which the theorists who embody it seek to depreciate or deny.

When we speak of unity in this connexion we may mean one of three things. There is a unity of character or type. There is the unity involved in continuous unbroken descent from a common origin, and there is unity of effective interconnexion and mutual dependence. These senses of the term unity are confused by some writers, but must clearly be distinguished before any useful inquiry can be made. Unity of character, for example, is a different thing from continuity of historical development, for a civilization might radically change its character in the course of generations. It might lose all the specific features of its own family and come into closer resemblance with others of quite distinct parentage. Again unity of character is not the same thing as the effective interconnexion and co-operation of different centres. On the contrary, such co-operation is of most value where there is marked difference of character, where, for instance, a lack of a quality in one nation is counteracted by a surplus in another. Thus these three forms of unity are distinct, but if distinct they are not unrelated. Naturally, where there is a common origin, many traits of the primitive unity of character are likely to persist, and where there is effective intercommunication, many differences may be rubbed off. So, where we start with unity of origin, we are likely to find some measure of unity in other respects, and this is what we do find, in fact, in the case of Western civilization. It does possess a certain unity of character, and this is largely due to unity of origin, and is maintained in spite of marked divergences, which have not impeded an effective intercommunication but have tended rather to add interest and value to the results which that intercommunication has produced.