Essay XII, from “Recent Developments in European Thought.” Essays arranged and edited by F. S. Marvin. Oxford University Press. 1920. (p. 293-306) [The single quote system is original.]
Remarks: Although we find music and other subjects in this cultural study, the core is philosophy and literature. Two main themes are human courage and renewal; as the finding of strength, and learning to choose while accepting uncertainty. The work appeared shortly after WWI.
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The Modern Renascence.
F. Melian Stawell.
“This determination is fierce enough to be taken for cynicism, but Conrad is far too tender ever to be a cynic. So also does his pitifulness prevent him from ever falling into the errors of a Nietzsche, but nonetheless he has all Nietzsche’s ardour for heroism. That to him is the core of life: — ‘to face it.’ ‘Keep on facing it,’ so the old skipper tells the young mate in Typhoon. And facing the mysterious universe, peering into the Darkness with steady alert eyes, Conrad has at once an endless wistfulness and, or so it seems to me, a secret unquenchable hope. Doubt certainly he has in plenty. The sea of which he is always dreaming is terrible and cruel in his eyes as well as august and ennobling.”
To understand in any degree the modern outlook on life it seems necessary to go back to the time of the French Revolution. For at that stirring epoch there flamed up in the minds of enthusiasts an ideal of man’s life larger than had ever yet been known, and one that has dominated us all ever since. If we give, as I think we should give, a wide sense to the word ‘Liberty’ and make it mean all that stands for self-development, then one may say that this ideal was fairly well summed-up in the famous Revolutionary watchword, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. It is impossible at any rate to read the idealists of that time and its sequel—say from 1793 to 1848—whether in France, Germany, England, or Italy, whether inside or outside the Revolutionary ranks, without feeling their buoyant hope that a fresh era was opening in which man, casting aside old shackles and prejudices, could advance at once towards knowledge, joy, splendour, both for himself and all his fellows. Shelley, perhaps, is most typical of what I mean. Hogg laughed at him for his belief in the ‘perfectibility’ of the race, but Hogg knew the belief was vital to the poet. To Shelley it was a damnable doctrine that the many should ever be sacrificed to the few: yet neither was the ultimate vision that inspired him the vision of the few being sacrificed for the many. He was anything but an ascetic seeking martyrdom. The martyrdom of his Prometheus is a prelude to the Unbinding when happiness shall flood the world: —
‘The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness!
The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
The vaporous exultation not to be confined!’
And not only happiness and love, but knowledge also: the Earth calls to the Sky: ‘Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.’ Soberer spirits shared this poet’s ecstasy. Wordsworth sang
‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.’
And that heaven was exactly this foretaste of the Spirit of Man entering undisturbed into his full inheritance at last: Science welcomed as a dear and honoured guest, Poetry known as ‘the breath and finer spirit that is in the countenance of all knowledge’.
It is scarcely necessary even to mention the high hopes of the French themselves, the confident anticipation of an Age of Reason when all men should be brothers and the earth bring forth all her treasures, but it is well worth noting the attitude of Goethe, an attitude the more significant because, in a sense, Goethe always stood outside the French Revolution. But he, like the best of its votaries—and this is less known than it should be— desired the development of all men every whit as much as he desired the high culture of a few. It was for the double goal that he worked. ‘Only through all men,’ he writes in a notable passage, ‘only through all men, can mankind be made.’ * All good lies in Man, he tells us again, and must be developed, ‘only not in one man, but in many’. Goethe, the so-called aristocrat, has given us here as true a formula for the democratic faith as could well be found. And to him, as to Shelley and to Wordsworth, Poetry and Science were not enemies but friends dearer than sisters. Those three, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Goethe, foreshadowed a new poetry of science that has never yet been achieved, though fine work has been done by Tennyson, Whitman, Sully Prudhomme, and Meredith.
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* Wilhehn Meister’s Lehrjahre, Bk. 8, c. 5.
Goethe, moreover, again like Shelley and the French, broke with all ideals of mere self-abnegation. In his poem, ‘General Confession’, he makes his disciples repent of ever having missed an opportunity for enjoyment and resolve never so to offend again. Here, as often, Goethe comes into the closest touch with our modern feeling. We, too, can never return to the Franciscan ideal of poverty, celibacy, and obedience as the highest life for man on earth. We have done with self-denial except as the means to a human end. We are still in the tide of what I would call the Modern Renascence; we claim the whole garden of the world for our own, the tree with the knowledge of good and evil included, reacting even from Christian ideals if they can make no room for that. But, after all, the characteristic of the belief dominant a century ago was exactly that such room could be made, that Hellenism could be combined with Christianity, and self-development with self-denial.
And this belief is, I think, reflected in the music of the time. Schubert, that sweetest soul of tears and laughter, understands every shade of wistfulness, and yet again and again in his music it seems as though the universe had become, to quote a lover of his, one immense and glorious blackbird. Mozart, in ‘The Magic Flute’, as Goethe seems to have recognized, sings the very song of union between the unreflecting joy of the natural man and the strenuous self-devotion of the awakened spirit. Beethoven, greatest of them all, plumbs the lowest depths of suffering and then astounds and comforts us by ineffable vistas of happiness. After years of personal misery he crowns the glorious series of his symphonies by the one that ends in a hymn of joy, freedom, and faith, embracing the whole world—’Diese Kuss der ganzen Welt’—that majestic open melody, clear as the morning, fresh as though it came from far oversea, greater even than any of the great harmonies that have gone before, larger than the tortured human heart, steadier than the sudden ecstasy of the spirits set free, stronger than the swansong of the dying, a melody content with earth because it is conscious of heaven. I offer no apology for weaving my own fairy-tales round such music: I see no harm in the practice, but only good, so long as we understand what we are about. Music, it is true, is something other than, in a sense more than, either thought or feeling or even poetry, and cannot be reduced to any of them (nor any of them to it). The universe would be poor indeed if it could be so. But none the less the truth may be, as Spinoza thought, that the universe is at once a unity and a unity with many facets, so that any one facet, while forever unique, can bring to our minds all the mysteries of the rest.
In any case, the high confidence that breathes in the music of a hundred years ago meets us again in the philosophers.
Hegel, born in the same year as Beethoven and Wordsworth (1770), is sure that nothing can resist the onslaught of man’s spirit. ‘Stronger than the gates of Hell are the gates of Thought.’ Fichte is convinced that there waits in man, only to be developed, a power that will unite him with all other men and at the same time develop his own personality to the full. In a sense, the deepest, each man is his fellow-men, and they are he.
How much this conception has affected modern thought can be seen in a recent and very remarkable book, The New State* where the very basis of democracy is shown to be the faith in this essential unity, a unity to be worked out, not yet realized, but capable of realization, a faith stirring all through the modern world, in ways expected and unexpected, from Syndicalism to the League of Nations.
Later than Hegel and Fichte, the great Positivist conception of life preached by Comte is instinct with this belief that man united with his fellows, and only as so united, can attain heights undreamt-of and unlimited.
The flood-tide of this faith flowed far into the nineteenth century. The Italian Mazzini, leader of revolt in 1848, was filled with it. Prophet of the most generous political gospel ever preached, he lived on the hope that, if freedom were given to the nations and duty set before them, they would prove worthy of their double mission, and peace would come to pass between all peoples.
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* By M. P. Follett (Longmans).
But even Mazzini had his moments of agonizing doubt. And others beside him, men of lesser intellect as well as greater, were soon to raise, or had already raised, voices, stern or fretful, of protest and criticism. It became clear at last that this joyous confidence rested on a very definite view of life and one that might easily be challenged, the view, namely, that at bottom the universe meant well to man, that his greatest aspirations were compatible with each other and nowise beyond attainment. Almost from the first there were men of the modern world who did challenge this. Byron and Schopenhauer are significant figures, both born in the same year, only eighteen years later than the great Three of 1770, Wordsworth, Hegel, and Beethoven. Byron is full of moody questionings, Schopenhauer of much more than questionings. Against the dauntless optimism of Hegel, he flatly denies that the universe is good, or happiness possible for man. On the contrary, at the heart of it and of him there lies an infinite unrest, never to be quieted until man himself gives up the Will to Live and sinks back into the Unconscious from which he came.
Now after Schopenhauer came Nietzsche, and though Nietzsche’s influence may have been exaggerated, yet undeniably it has been of immense importance both for Germany and Europe. He is typical of the change that begins to appear about the middle of the century. Reacting from the optimism of the idealists (which seemed to him both smug and false), Nietzsche welcomed Schopenhauer’s more Spartan view with a kind of fierce delight. But his criticism of Schopenhauer was fierce too, and he gave a strangely different turn to such parts of the doctrine as he did accept. To Schopenhauer, since it was folly to hope for real happiness in this life or any other, the wise course would be to kill outright, so far as possible, the Will to Live itself. To Nietzsche the wise course was to assert life, to claim it more and more abundantly, to face this tragic show with a courage so high that it could be gay, a courage that could do without happiness, and yet that turned aside from none of life’s joys simply because they were fleeting, that was more than content to ‘live dangerously’, picking flowers, as it were, clear-eyed, on the edge of the precipice. And this not merely in the temper of ‘Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’ For him the motto would have run, ‘Let us be up and doing, for to-morrow we die’, sustained by the belief that the heroic struggle now would lead inevitably to the production of a nobler type of man, a man who would be something more than man—the Super-man, to give him the name that every reader knows, if he knows nothing else about Nietzsche.
Even this short statement shows how Nietzsche shared the admiration for life and power characteristic of what I have called the Modern Renascence, and how deeply he was influenced by the doctrine of Evolution, and that in a not unhopeful form, the hope for an advance in the race at least, if not in the individuals now living. And it shows too how mistaken those are who see in him nothing but a preacher of brutal egotism. If he had been only that, he would never have won the influence he possessed and possesses. Yet there is important truth in the cursory popular judgement. If his teaching has its heroic side, a side that has enabled him to give succor to many when other and sweeter gospels are spurned as flattering unctions, he has also a most ruthless element. And this partly because of his very sincerity. Accept the doctrine that men and women perish like candles blown out in the night, accept it really and fully, with intellect, imagination, and feeling, and then see how much lightheartedness can be got out of life, if we still allow ourselves to pity men. Nietzsche had intellect, imagination, and feeling, and he saw plainly enough that, while even in such a universe there could be a grim happiness for the lives of heroes, there could be nothing but infinite sadness for the countless failures who have never been either happy or heroic. There was no immortality; these wretched beings would never have another chance. If joy was to be kept (and Nietzsche was avid for joy), if the universe was to be accepted (and Nietzsche desired above all to say Yes! to the universe), then he must root out pity from his heart as an unmanly weakness. In this way was sharpened the ruthlessness and savage arrogance latent in the man, a ruthlessness and an arrogance that have done so much harm both to his country and the world.
In fairness, we must add that Nietzsche could not succeed in his own attempt; the struggle tore him to pieces and he died in madness.
But it is above all instructive to contrast him here with several of his contemporaries and successors. Browning in England, Walt Whitman in America, facing the same problems of joy and struggle, of life and death, of the few great and the many commonplace, of Man himself and the Nature that seems at once his mother and his enemy, refused to give up the hope of a solution, nay, they were sure they had found a solution, and for them it was bound up with the hope of immortality. They go even beyond the earlier men in their insistence on the double ideal of Paganism and Christianity, but they have an insistence of their own on the belief in unending life as alone giving man elbow-room, so to speak, for working out his destiny. Browning claims eternity as the due of every man, however mean; and if Whitman feels his foothold ‘tenon’d and mortised in granite’, it is because he can ‘laugh at dissolution’ and knows ‘the amplitude of time’.
But in such insistence and such conviction they have not been followed, speaking broadly, by our leading writers since. On the other hand, they have been so followed, again speaking broadly, in their loyalty to the twofold ideal. Here and there, no doubt, as I have said, writers like Nietzsche, on the one hand, have tried to be satisfied with the splendid development of a Few, or, on the other hand, like Tolstoy, have flung back in a kind of despair to the old ideal of abnegation, of sheer brotherly love and nothing else, turning their backs on all splendours of art, knowledge, or delight, that do not directly minister to the one thing they hold needful. But the earlier and wider ideal, the ideal of our Renascence, once envisaged by man, that has not been lost, and I believe never can be lost. Its own greatness will keep the foremost men true to it.’ Meredith is one of the men I mean. He is full of pity, but he does not only pity men and women — he wants them to grow, and to grow for themselves. His whole attitude towards Woman shows this: for the women’s movement is nothing more and nothing less, as Ibsen also felt, than one big stream of the general movement towards liberty and self-determination. So far Meredith marches with Browning and Whitman. But he will never commit himself about immortality. It seems enough for him to take part in the struggle for a finer life, at once heroic and tender, not caring overmuch whether we reach it or no. ‘Spirit raves not for a goal’ is one of his hard and characteristic sayings, and here he seems to me typical both of modern thought in general and especially of English thought, and that both for good and ill. We see in him the want of precision, the lack of logical coherence, that have prevented us from ever producing a philosopher of the first rank. At the same time there is something true and profound in his instinct that the moment has not yet come in which to formulate our faith. We all feel that we are on the brink of tremendous, perhaps terrifying, discoveries ; we resent any cut-and-dried solution, however pleasant, perhaps all the more if it is pleasant, and we resent it because we feel that at bottom our hopes would be travestied by any conception we, with our little intellect and minute knowledge, could at present frame. It was once said to me by a far-seeing friend* that the modern dislike of churchgoing, the modern incapacity to write a long coherent poem, the modern passion for music and for realism, even for sordid realism, all sprang from the same roots, from the thirst for an infinite harmony, the belief that everything was somehow involved in that harmony, and the conviction that all systems, as yet made or makeable, were entirely inadequate.
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* Professor A. C. Bradley, to whom also is due the passage about Schubert and the parallel drawn between Beethoven, Hegel, and Wordsworth.
And to the list we may add, I think, the modern passion for history and for science. We study history not merely to be warned by failures or inspired by shining examples: at bottom we have a belief that somehow the lives and struggles of those men in the distant past are still quite as important as our own. We follow the discoveries of science not only for their commercial value or because we share the excitement of the chase, but because, deeper than all, we suspect that the universe is a glorious thing.
And there is another matter, perhaps the most important of all, on which I would dwell as I draw to a close, where Meredith leads directly to the dominant thought of the present day. I mean his feeling that, if the universe is to be proved acceptable to man’s conscience, it will be through the effort of man himself struggling towards his own ideal. It is as though the world itself had to be redeemed by man. This hope is the real hope of our time. So far as the modern world believes the doctrine of the Incarnation, it is in this sense that it believes.
And this belief we find everywhere in all hopeful writers, great or small. It gives dignity to the latest writings of H. G. Wells, this faith in a spirit moving in man greater than man himself, worthy to fight and fit to overcome all that is wrong in the universe. Bernard Shaw’s creed is just the same, sometimes thinly disguised under respect for ‘the Life-Force’, sometimes coming boldly forward in audacious, profound assertions that God needs Man to accomplish His own will and is helpless without him. ‘There is something I want to do,’ Shaw imagines his God as saying,’ and I don’t know what it is; I must make a brain, the human brain, to find it out.’ Rodin modelled a mighty hand, the Hand of God, holding within it Man and Woman. Shaw, it is reported, asked the sculptor: ‘I suppose you meant your own hand after all? ‘ ‘Yes,’ said Rodin, ‘as the tool.’
The same idea is at the base of what is most stimulating in Bergson, the idea of what he calls Creative Evolution, an undefined splendour not yet fully existing, but, as it were, crying out to be born, and only to be born through the struggle of man’s spirit with matter. This is one function of matter, perhaps the supreme function, to be the material through which alone man’s vague ideal can become definite and actual, just as an artist can only get close to his own conception through the effort to embody it in visible form or audible sound.
From this point of view, the world is conceived as anything but ready-made, rather it is in the process of making, and we ourselves are among the makers. Or, to take a metaphor that perhaps appeals more to the modern world, it is a fight, and an unfinished fight. To quote William James, ‘It feels like a real fight—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears.’ He goes on to confess that he himself does not know, and certainly cannot prove scientifically, that the redemption will surely be accomplished. Such proof, he admits, ‘may not be clear before the day of judgement (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize)’. ‘But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may turn to the fainthearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those with which Henry IV greeted the tardy Crillon after a great battle had been gained:
“Hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques, and you were not there!”
(From The Will to Believe, quoted in Bridges’ The Spirit of Man, No. 425.)
Thus, if the idea of the splendour and perfection of the universe has sunk into the background, if the sense of worship and the feeling of ecstasy have been dimmed (and I think they have), at least the reverence for heroism and for tenderness has not been impaired, and there after all lies the root of human majesty. There is deep pathos in the change, but maybe, paradoxical as it sounds, deep hope as well. The world may grow the stronger for having to live now by what Carlyle called ‘desperate hope’ as distinct from ‘hoping hope’. The triumphant harmony that seemed attained a century ago by certain poets and thinkers may have been, after all, too cheap and easy, if not for their own large spirits, at least for us, their lesser readers. Mystics have spoken of ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’ as the stage inevitable before the crowning glory, and to-day some of those who call to us out of great darkness are among our greatest leaders.
Of such certainly is a living writer, now beginning to be acclaimed as he deserves, the writer Conrad. In some ways this noble novelist might stand as the special representative of modern feeling. A Pole by birth and more than half an Englishman by sympathy, his view of life is as wide as it is profound and grave. It has all the sternness of temper of which I have spoken, the determination to look facts in the face whatever the consequences. Conrad would echo Sartor’s noble cry for Truth — ‘Truth! though the Heavens crush me for following her;—no Falsehood! though a whole celestial Lubberland were the price of Apostasy!’ This determination is fierce enough to be taken for cynicism, but Conrad is far too tender ever to be a cynic. So also does his pitifulness prevent him from ever falling into the errors of a Nietzsche, but nonetheless he has all Nietzsche’s ardour for heroism. That to him is the core of life: — ‘to face it.’ ‘Keep on facing it,’ so the old skipper tells the young mate in Typhoon. And facing the mysterious universe, peering into the Darkness with steady alert eyes, Conrad has at once an endless wistfulness and, or so it seems to me, a secret unquenchable hope. Doubt certainly he has in plenty. The sea of which he is always dreaming is terrible and cruel in his eyes as well as august and ennobling.
But he is sure of one thing: it is through the struggle with it and such as it that man alone can become Man. It is through facing the horrors of a dead calm, with a sick crew on board and no medicine, that the young master of the sailing-vessel in the Pacific crosses successfully the Shadow Line that divides youth from manhood. And it is through facing the unleashed fury of the tornado that the old captain of the ‘full-powered steam-ship’ in Typhoon shows what he has in him, compassion and kindness as well as shrewd knowledge of men, expert seamanship, and indomitable heroism. The whole thing is driven home with a power, an incisiveness, and a delicate irradiating humour which I should despair of conveying by mere criticism. The book must be read for itself, and read again and again. It is told, in one way, simply as a sailor’s yarn, but it awakes in us the feeling that the struggle is a symbol of man’s life.
[ … ]
And so noble is the power with which Conrad uses our tongue, the tongue he has made his own by adoption and genius, that I must let him speak for himself, and can find no better close for my own lame words. Jukes has been shouting to his captain again:
‘And again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man’s voice—the frail and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of thought, resolution, and purpose, that shall be pronouncing confident words on the last day, when heavens fall and justice is done—again he heard it, and it was crying to him, as if from very, very far — “All right.” ‘
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