From this point of view the inexhaustible significance of a great work of art becomes clear, both as regards its definite revelation of racial and individual truth, and as regards its educational or culture quality and value. Ideas are presented not in isolation and detachment, but in their totality of origin and relationship; they are not abstractions, general propositions, philosophical generalisations; they are living truths—truths, that is, which have become clear by long experience, and to which men stand, or have stood, in personal relations. They are ideas, in other words, which stand together, not in the order of formal logic, but of the "logic of free life." They are not torn out of their normal relations; they bring all their relationships with them. We are offered a plant in the soil, not a flower cut from its stem. Every man is rooted to the soil, touches through his senses the physical, and through his mind and heart the spiritual, order of his time; all these influences are focussed in him, and according to his capacity he gathers them into his experience, formulates and expresses them. The greater and more productive the man, the wider his contact with and absorption of the life of his time. For the artist stands nearest, not farthest from his contemporaries. He is not, however, a mere medium in their hands, not a mere secretary or recorder of their ideas and feelings. He is separated from them in the clearness of his vision of the significance of their activities, the ends towards which they are moving, the ideas which they are working out; but, in the exact degree of his greatness, he is one with them in sympathy, experience, and comprehension. They live for him, and he lives with them; they work out ideas in the logic of free life, and he clarifies, interprets, and illustrates those ideas. The world is not saved by the remnant, as Matthew Arnold held; it is saved through the remnant. The elect of the race, its prophets, teachers, artists,—and every great artist is also a prophet and teacher,—are its leaders, not its masters; its interpreters, not its creators. The race is dumb without its artists; but the artists would be impossible without the sustaining fellowship of the race. In the making of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" the Greek race was in full partnership with Homer. The ideas which form the summits of human achievement are sustained by immense masses of earth; the higher they rise the vaster their bases. The richer and wider the race life, the freer and deeper the play of that vital logic which produces the formative ideas.



Chapter XII.

The Imagination.

The Lady of Shalott, sitting in her tower, looked into her magic mirror and saw the whole world go by,—monk, maiden, priest, knight, lady, and king. In the mirror of the imagination not only the world of to-day but the entire movement of human life moves before the eye as the throngs of living men move on the streets. For the imagination is the real magician, of whose marvels all simulated magic is but a clumsy and mechanical imitation. It is the real power, of which all material powers are very inadequate symbols. Rarely taken into account by teachers, largely ignored by educational systems and philosophies, it is the divinest of all the powers which men are able to put forth, because it is the creative power. It uses thought, but, in a way, it is greater than thought, because it builds out of thought that which thought alone is powerless to construct. It is, indeed, the essential element in great constructive thinking; for while we may have thoughts untouched by the imagination, one cannot think along high constructive lines without its constant aid. Isolated thoughts come unattended by it, but the thinking which issues in organised systems, in comprehensive interpretations of things and events, in those noble generalisations which have the splendour of the discovery of new worlds in them, in those concrete embodiments of idea which we call works of art, is conditioned on the use of the imagination. Plato's Dialogues were fashioned by it as truly as Homer's poems; Hegel's philosophy was created by it as definitely as Shakespeare's plays, and Newton and Kepler used it as freely as Dante or Rembrandt.

Upon the use of this supreme faculty we depend not only for creative power, but for education in the highest sense of the word; for culture is the highest result of education, and the final test of education is its power to produce culture. Goethe was in the habit of saying that sympathy is essential to all true criticism; for no man can discern the heart of a movement, of a work of art, or of a race who does not put himself into heart relations with that which he is trying to understand. We never really possess an idea, a bit of knowledge, or a fact of experience until we get below the mind of it into the heart of it. Now, sympathy in this sense is the imagination touched with feeling; it is the imagination bringing thought and emotion into vital relation. In the process of culture, therefore, the imagination plays a great part; for culture, it cannot too often be said, is knowledge, observation, and experience incorporate into personality and become part of the very nature of the individual. The man of culture is pre-eminently a man of imagination; lacking this quality, he may become learned by force of industry, or a scholar by virtue of a trained intelligence, but the ripeness, the balance, the peculiar richness of fibre which characterise the man of culture will be denied him. The man of culture, it is true, is not always a man of creative power; but he is never devoid of that kind of creative quality which transforms everything he receives into something personal and individual. And the more deeply one studies the work of the great artists, the more distinctly does he see the immense place which culture in the vital, as contrasted with the academic, sense held in their lives, and the great part it played in their productive activity. Dante, Goethe, Tennyson, Browning, Lowell, were men possessed in rare degree of culture of both kinds; but Shakespeare and Burns were equally men of culture. They shared in the possession of this faculty of making all they saw and knew a part of themselves. Between culture of this quality and the creative power there is something more than complete unity; there is almost identity, for they seem to be two forms of activity of the same power rather than distinct faculties. Culture enables us to receive the world into ourselves, not in the reflection of a magic mirror, but in the depths of a living soul; to receive that world in such a way that we possess it; it ceases to be outside us and becomes part of our very nature. The creative power enables us to refashion that world and to put it forth again out of ourselves, as it was originally put forth out of the life of the divine artist. The creative process is, therefore, a double process, and culture and genius stand in indissoluble union.

The development of the imagination, upon the power of which both absorption of knowledge and creative capacity depend, is, therefore, a matter of supreme importance. To this necessity educators will some day open their eyes, and educational systems will some day conform; meantime, it must be done mainly by individual work. Knowledge, discipline, and technical training of the best sort are accessible on every hand; but the development of the faculty which unites all these in the highest form of activity must be secured mainly by personal effort. The richest and most accessible material for this highest education is furnished by art; and the form of art within reach of every civilised man, at all times, in all places, is the book. To these masterpieces, which have been called the books of life, all men may turn with the assurance that as the supreme achievements of the imagination they have the power of awakening, stimulating, and enriching it in the highest degree. For the genuine reader, who sees in a book what the writer has put there, repeats in a way the process through which the maker of the book passed. The man who reads the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" with his heart as well as his intelligence must measurably enter into the life which these poems describe and interpret; he must identify himself for the time with the race whose soul and historic character are revealed in epic form as in a great mirror; he must see life from the Greek point of view, and feel life as the Greek felt it. He must, in a word, go through the process by which the poems were made, as well as feel, comprehend, and enjoy their final perfection. In like manner the open-hearted and open-minded reader of the Book of Job cannot rest content with that noble poem in the form which it now possesses; the imaginative impulse which even the casual reading of the poem liberates in him sends him behind the finished product to the life of which it was the immortal fruit; he enters into the groping thought of an age which has perished out of all other remembrance; he deals with a problem which is as old as man from the standpoint of men who have left no other record of themselves. In proportion to the depth of his feeling and the vitality of his imagination he must saturate himself with the rich life of thought, conviction, and emotion, of struggle and aspiration, out of which the greatest of the poems of nature took its rise. He must, in a word, receive into himself the living material upon which the unknown poet worked. In such a process the imagination is evoked in full and free play; it insensibly reconstructs a life gone out of knowledge; selects, harmonises, unifies, and in a measure creates. It illuminates and unifies knowledge, divines the wide relations of thought, and discerns its place in organic connection with the world which gave it birth.

The material upon which this great power is nourished is specifically furnished by the works which it has created. As the eye is trained to discover the line of beauty by companionship with the works in which it is revealed with the greatest clearness and power, so is the imagination developed by intimacy with the books which disclose its depth, its reality, and its method. The reader of Shakespeare cannot follow the leadings of his masterly imagination without feeling a liberation of his own faculty of seeing things as parts of a vast order of life. He does not gain the poet's creative power, but he is enlarged and enriched to the point where his own imagination plays directly on the material about it; he receives it into himself, and in the exact measure in which he learns the secret of absorbing what he sees, feels, and knows, becomes master and interpreter of the world of his time, and restorer of the world of other times and men. For the imagination, playing upon fact and experience, divines their meaning and puts us in possession of the truth and life that are in them. To possess this magical power is to live the whole of life and to enter into the heritage of history.



Chapter XIII.

Breadth of Life.

One of the prime characteristics of the man of culture is freedom from provincialism, complete deliverance from rigidity of temper, narrowness of interest, uncertainty of taste, and general unripeness. The villager, or pagan in the old sense, is always a provincial; his horizon is narrow, his outlook upon the world restricted, his knowledge of life limited. He may know a few things thoroughly; he cannot know them in true relation to one another or to the larger order of which they are part. He may know a few persons intimately; he cannot know the representative persons of his time or of his race. The essence of provincialism is the substitution of a part for the whole; the acceptance of the local experience, knowledge, and standards as possessing the authority of the universal experience, knowledge, and standards. The local experience is entirely true in its own sphere; it becomes misleading when it is accepted as the experience of all time and all men. It is this mistake which breeds that narrowness and uncertainty of taste and opinion from which culture furnishes the only escape. A small community, isolated from other communities by the accidents of position, often comes to believe that its way of doing things is the way of the world; a small body of religious people, devoutly attentive to their own observances, often reach the conclusion that these observances are the practice of that catholic church which includes the pious-minded of all creeds and rituals; a group of radical reformers, by passionate advocacy of a single reform, come to believe that there have been no reformers before them, and that none will be needed after them; a band of fresh and audacious young practitioners of any of the arts, by dint of insistence upon a certain manner, rapidly generate the conviction that art has no other manner.

Society is full of provincialism in art, politics, religion, and economics; and the essence of this provincialism is always the same,—the substitution of a part for the whole. Larger knowledge of the world and of history would make it perfectly clear that there has always been not only a wide latitude, but great variation, in ritual and worship; that the political story of all the progressive nations has been one long agitation for reforms, and that no reform can ever be final; that reform must succeed reform until the end of time,—reforms being in their nature neither more nor less than those readjustments to new conditions which are involved in all social development. A wider survey of experience would make it clear that art has many manners, and that no manner is supreme and none final.

A long experience gives a man poise, balance, and steadiness; he has seen many things come and go, and he is neither paralysed by depression when society goes wrong, nor irrationally elated when it goes right. He is perfectly aware that his party is only a means to an end, and not a piece of indestructible and infallible machinery; that the creed he accepts has passed through many changes of interpretation, and will pass through more; that the social order for which he contends, if secured, will be only another stage in the unbroken development of the organised life of men in the world. And culture is, at bottom, only an enlarged and clarified experience,—an experience so comprehensive that it puts its possessor in touch with all times and men, and gives him the opportunity of comparing his own knowledge of things, his faith and his practice, with the knowledge, faith, and practice of all the generations. This opportunity brings, to one who knows how to use it, deliverance from the ignorance or half-knowledge of provincialism, from the crudity of its half-trained tastes, and from the blind passion of its rash and groundless faith in its own infallibility.

Provincialism is the soil in which philistinism grows most rapidly and widely. For as the essence of provincialism is the substitution of a part for the whole, so the essence of philistinism is the conviction that what one possesses is the best of its kind, that the kind is the highest, and that one has all he needs of it. A true philistine is not only convinced that he holds the only true and consistent position, but he is also entirely satisfied with himself. He is infallible and he is sufficient unto himself. In politics he is a blind partisan, in theology an arrogant dogmatist, in art an ignorant propagandist. What he accepts, believes, or has, is not only the best of its kind, but nothing better can ever supersede it.

To this spirit the spirit of culture is antipodal; between the two there is inextinguishable antagonism. They can never compromise or agree upon a truce, any more than day and night can consent to dwell together. To destroy philistinism root and branch, to eradicate the ignorance which makes it possible for a man to believe that he possesses all things in their final forms, to empty a man of the stupidity and vulgarity of self-satisfaction, and to invigorate the immortal dissatisfaction of the soul with its present attainments, are the ends which culture is always seeking to accomplish. The keen lance of Matthew Arnold, flashing now in one part of the field and now in another, pierced many of the fallacies of provincialism and philistinism, and mortally wounded more than one Goliath of ignorance and conceit; but the work must be done anew in every generation and in every individual. All men are conceived in the sin of ignorance and born in the iniquity of half-knowledge; and every man needs to be saved by wider knowledge and clearer vision. It is a matter of comparative indifference where one is born; it is a matter of supreme importance how one educates one's self. There is as genuine a provincialism in Paris as in the remotest frontier town; it is better dressed and better mannered, but it is not less narrow and vulgar. There is as much vulgarity in the arrogance of a czar as in that of an African chief; as much absurdity in the self-satisfaction of the man who believes that the habit and speech of the boulevard are the ultimate habit and speech of the race, as in that of the man who accepts the manners of the mining camp as the finalities of human intercourse. Culture is not an accident of birth, although surroundings retard or advance it; it is always a matter of individual education.

This education finds no richer material than that which is contained in literature; for the characteristic of literature, as of all the arts, is its universality of interest, its elevation of taste, its disclosure of ideas, its constant appeal to the highest in the reader by its revelation of the highest in the writer. Many of the noblest works of literature are intensely local in colour, atmosphere, material, and allusion; but in every case that which is of universal interest is touched, evoked, and expressed. The artist makes the figure he paints stand out with the greatest distinctness by the accuracy of the details introduced and by the skill with which they are handled; but the very definiteness of the figure gives force and clearness to the revelation of the universal trait or characteristic which is made through it. Pere Goriot has the ineffaceable stamp of Paris upon him, but he is for that very reason the more completely disclosed as a typical individuality. Literature abounds in illustrations of this true and artistic adjustment of the local to the universal, this disclosure of the common humanity in which all men share through the highly elaborated individuality; and this characteristic indicates one of the deepest sources of its educational power. So searching is this power that it is safe to say that no one can know thoroughly the great books of the world and remain a provincial or a philistine; the very air of these works is fatal to narrow views, to low standards, and to self-satisfaction.



Chapter XIV.

Racial Experience.

There is a general agreement among men that experience is the most effective and successful of teachers; that for many men no other form of education is possible; and that those who enjoy the fullest educational opportunities miss the deeper processes of training if they fail of that wide contact with the happenings of life which we call experience. To touch the world at many points; to come into relations with many kinds of men; to think, to feel, and to act on a generous scale,—these are prime opportunities for growth. For it is not only true, as Browning said so often and in so many kinds of speech, that a man's greatest good fortune is to have the opportunity of giving out freely and powerfully all the force that is in him, but it is also true that almost equal good fortune attends the man who has the opportunity of receiving truth and instruction through a wide and rich experience.

But individual experience, however inclusive and deep, is necessarily limited, and the life of the greatest man would be confined within narrow boundaries if he were shut within the circle of his own individual contact with things and persons. If Shakespeare had written of those things only of which he had personal knowledge, of those experiences in which he had personally shared, his contribution to literature would be deeply interesting, but it would not possess that quality of universality which makes it the property of the race. In Shakespeare there was not only knowledge of man, but knowledge of men as well. His greatness rests not only on his own commanding personality, but on his magical power of laying other personalities under tribute for the enlargement of his view of things and the enrichment of his portraiture of humanity. A man learns much from his own contacts with his time and his race, but one of the most important gains he makes is the development of the faculty of appropriating the results of the contacts of other men with other times and races; and one of the finer qualities of rich experience is the quickening of the imagination to divine that which is hidden in the experience of other races and ages.

The man of culture must not only live deeply and intelligently in his own experience, rationalising and utilising it as he passes through it; he must also break away from its limitations and escape its tendency to substitute a part of life, distinctly seen, for the whole of life, vaguely discerned. The great writer, for instance, must first make his own nature rich in its development and powerful in harmony of aim and force, and he must also make this nature sensitive, sympathetic, and clairvoyant in its relations with the natures of other men. To become self-centred, and yet to be able to pass entirely out of one's self into the thoughts, emotions, impulses, and sufferings of others, involves a harmonising of opposing tendencies which is difficult of attainment.

It is precisely this poise which men of the highest productive power secure; for it is this nice adjustment of the individual discovery of truth to the general discovery of truth which gives a man of imaginative faculty range, power, and sanity of view. To see, feel, think, and act strongly and intelligently in our own individual world gives us first-hand relations to that world, and first-hand knowledge of it; to pass beyond the limits of this small sphere, which we touch with our own hands, into the larger spheres which other men touch, not only widens our knowledge but vastly increases our power. It is like exchanging the power of a small stream for the general power which plays through Nature. One of the measures of greatness is furnished by this ability to pass through individual into national or racial experience; for a man's spiritual dimensions, as revealed through any form of art, are determined by his power of discerning essential qualities and experiences in the greatest number of people. The four writers who hold the highest places in literature justify their claims by their universality; that is to say, by the range of their knowledge of life as that knowledge lies revealed in the experience of the race.

It is the fortune of a very small group of men in any age to possess the power of divining, by the gift of genius, the world which lies, nebulous and shadowy, in the lives of men about them, or in the lives of men of other times; in the nature of things, the clairvoyant vision of poets like Tennyson, Browning, and Hugo, of novelists like Thackeray, Balzac, and Tolstoi, is not at the command of all men; and yet all men may share in it and be enlarged by it. This is one of the most important services which literature renders to its lover: it makes him a companion of the most interesting personalities in their most significant moments; it enables him to break the bars of individual experience and escape into the wider and richer life of the race. Within the compass of a very small room, on a very few shelves, the real story of man in this world may be collected in the books of life in which it is written; and the solitary reader, whose personal contacts with men and events are few and lacking in distinction and interest, may enter, through his books, into the most thrilling life of the race in some of its most significant moments.

No man can read "In Memoriam" or "The Ring and the Book" without passing beyond the boundaries of his individual experience into experiences which broaden and quicken his own spirit; and no one can become familiar with the novels of Tourgueneff or Tolstoi without touching life at new points and passing through emotions which would never have been stirred in him by the happenings of his own life. Such a story as "Anna Karenina" leaves no reader of imagination or heart entirely unchanged; its elemental moral and artistic force strikes into every receptive mind and leaves there a knowledge of life not possessed before. The work of the Russian novelists has been, indeed, a new reading in the book of experience; it has made a notable addition to the sum total of humanity's knowledge of itself. In the pages of Gogol, Dostoievski, Tourgueneff, and Tolstoi, the majority of readers have found a world absolutely new to them; and in reading those pages, so penetrated with the dramatic spirit, they have come into the possession of a knowledge of life not formal and didactic, but deep, vital, and racial in its range and significance. To possess the knowledge of an experience at once so remote and so rich in disclosure of character, so charged with tragic interest, is to push back the horizons of our own experience, to secure a real contribution to our own enrichment and development. Whoever carries that process far enough brings into his individual experience much of the richness and splendour of the experience of the race.



Chapter XV.

Freshness of Feeling.

The primary charm of art resides in the freshness of feeling which it reveals and conveys. An art which discloses fatigue, weariness, exhaustion of emotion, deadening of interest, has parted with its magical spell; for vitality, emotion, passionate interest in the experiences of life, devout acceptance of the facts of life, are the prime characteristics of art in those moments when its veracity and power are at the highest point. A great work of art may be tragic in the view of life which it presents, but it must show no sign of the succumbing of the spirit to the appalling facts with which it deals; even in those cases in which, as in the tragedy of "King Lear," blind fate seems relentlessly sovereign over human affairs, the artist must disclose in his attitude and method a sustained energy of spirit. Nothing shows so clearly a decline in creative force as a loss of interest on the part of the artist in the subject or material with which he deals.

That fresh bloom which lies on the very face of poetry, and in which not only its obvious but its enduring charm resides, is the expression of a feeling for nature, for life, and for the happenings which make up the common lot, which keeps its earliest receptivity and responsiveness. When a man ceases to care deeply for things, he ceases to represent or interpret them with insight and power. The preservation of feeling is, therefore, essential in all artistic work; and when it is lost, the artist becomes an echo or an imitation of his nobler self and work. It is the beautiful quality of the true art instinct that it constantly sees and feels the familiar world with a kind of childlike directness and delight. That which has become commonplace to most men is as full of charm and novelty to the artist as if it had just been created. He sees it with fresh eyes and feels it with a fresh heart. To such a spirit nothing becomes stale and hackneyed; everything remains new, fresh, and significant. It has often been said that if it were not for the children the world would lose the faith, the enthusiasm, the delight which constantly renew its spirit and reinforce its courage. A world grown old in feeling would be an exhausted world, incapable of production along spiritual or artistic lines. Now, the artist is always a child in the eagerness of his spirit and the freshness of his feeling; he retains the magical power of seeing things habitually, and still seeing them freshly. Mr. Lowell was walking with a friend along a country road when they came upon a large building which bore the inscription, "Home for Incurable Children." "They'll take me there some day," was the half-humorous comment of a sensitive man, to whom life brought great sorrows, but who retained to the very end a youthful buoyancy, courage, and faculty of finding delight in common things.

It is a significant fact that the greatest men and women never lose the qualities which are commonly associated with youth,—freshness of feeling, zest for work, joy in life. Goethe at eighty-four studied the problems of life with the same deep interest which he had felt in them at thirty or forty; Tennyson's imagination showed some signs of waning power in extreme old age, but the magic of feeling was still fresh in his heart; Dr. Holmes carried his blithe spirit, his gayety and spontaneity of wit, to the last year of his life; and Mr. Gladstone at eighty-six was one of the most eager and aspiring men of his time. Genius seems to be allied to immortal youth; and in this alliance resides a large part of its power. For the man of genius does not demonstrate his possession of that rare and elusive gift by seeing things which have never been seen before, but by seeing with fresh interest what men have seen so often that they have ceased to regard it. Novelty is rarely characteristic of great works of art; on the contrary, the facts of life which they set before us are familiar, and the thoughts they convey by direct statement or by dramatic illustration have always been haunting our minds. The secret of the artist resides in the unwearied vitality which brings him to such close quarters with life, and endows him with directness of sight and freshness of feeling. Daisies have starred fields in Scotland since men began to plough and reap, but Burns saw them as if they had sprung from the ground for the first time; forgotten generations have seen the lark rise and heard the cuckoo call in England, but to Wordsworth the song from the upper sky and the notes from the thicket on the hill were full of the music of the first morning. Shakespeare dealt with old stories and constantly touched upon the most familiar things; but with what new interest he invests both theme and illustration! One may spend a lifetime in a country village, surrounded by people who are apparently entirely uninteresting; but if one has the eye of a novelist for the facts of life, the power to divine character, the gift to catch the turn of speech, the trick of voice, the peculiarity of manner, what resources, discoveries, and diversion are at hand! The artist never has to search for material; it is always at hand. That it is old, trite, stale to others, is of no consequence; it is always fresh and significant to him.

This freshness of feeling is not in any way dependent on the character of the materials upon which it plays; it is not an irresponsible temperamental quality which seeks the joyful or comic facts of life and ignores its sad and tragic aspects. The zest of spirit which one finds in Shakespeare, for instance, is not a blind optimism thoughtlessly escaping from the shadows into the sunshine. On the contrary, it is drawn by a deep instinct to study the most perplexing problems of character, and to drop its plummets into the blackest abysses of experience. Literature deals habitually with the most sombre side of the human lot, and finds its richest material in those awful happenings which invest the history of every race with such pathetic interest; and yet literature, in its great moments, overflows with vitality, zest of spirit, freshness of spirit! There is no contradiction in all this; for the vitality which pervades great art is not dependent upon external conditions; it has its source in the soul of the artist. It is the immortal quality in the human spirit playing like sunshine on the hardest and most tragic facts of experience. It often suggests no explanation of these facts; it is content to present them with relentless veracity; but even when it offers no solution of the tragic problem, the tireless interest which it feels, the force with which it illustrates and describes, the power of moral organisation and interpretation which it reveals, carry with them the conviction that the spirit of man, however baffled and beaten, is superior to all the accidents of fortune, and indestructible even within the circle of the blackest fate. As OEdipus, old, blind, and smitten, vanishes from our sight, we think of him no longer as a great figure blasted by adverse fate, but as a great soul smitten and scourged, and yet still invested with the dignity of immortality. The dramatist, even when he throws no light on the ultimate solution of the problem with which he is dealing, feels so deeply and freshly, and discloses such sustained strength, that the vitality with which the facts are exhibited and the question stated affirms its superiority over all the adversities and catastrophes of fortune.

This freshness of feeling, which is the gift of men and women of genius, must be possessed in some measure by all who long to get the most out of life and to develop their own inner resources. To retain zest in work and delight in life we must keep freshness of feeling. Its presence lends unfailing charm to its possessor; its loss involves loss of the deepest personal charm. It is essential in all genuine culture, because it sustains that interest in events, experience, and opportunity upon which growth is largely conditioned; and there is no more effective means of preserving and developing it than intimacy with those who have invested all life with its charm. The great books are reservoirs of this vitality. When our own interest begins to die and the world turns gray and old in our sight, we have only to open Homer, Shakespeare, Browning, and the flowers bloom again and the skies are blue; and the experiences of life, however tragic, are matched by a vitality which is sovereign over them all.



Chapter XVI.

Liberation from One's Time.

The law of opposites under which men live is very strikingly brought out in the endeavour to secure a sound and intelligent adjustment to one's time,—a relation intimate and vital, and at the same time deliberately and judicially assumed. To be detached in thought, feeling, or action, from the age in which one lives, is to cut the ties that bind the individual to society, and through which he is very largely nourished and educated. To live deeply and really through every form of expression and in every relationship is so essential to the complete unfolding of the personality that he who falls below the full measure of his capacity for experience and for expression falls below the full measure of his possible growth. Life is not, as some men of detached moods or purely critical temper have assumed, a spectacle of which the secret can be mastered without sharing in the movement; it is rather a drama, the splendour of whose expression and the depth of whose meaning are revealed to those alone who share in the action. To stand aside from the vital movement and study life in a purely critical spirit is to miss the deeper education which is involved in the vital process, and to lose the fundamental revelation which is slowly and painfully disclosed to those whose minds and hearts are open to receive it. No one can understand love who has not loved and been loved; no one can comprehend sorrow who has not had the companionship of sorrow. The experiment has been made in many forms, but no one has yet been nourished by the fruit of the tree of knowledge who has eaten of that fruit alone. In the art of living, as in all the arts which illustrate and enrich living, the amateur and the dilettante have no real position; they never attain to that mastery of knowledge or of execution which alone give reality to a man's life or work. Mastery in any art comes to those only who give themselves without reservation or stint to their task; mastery in the supreme art of living is within reach of those only who live completely in every faculty and relation.

To stand in the closest and most vital relation to one's time is, therefore, the first condition of comprehending one's age and getting from it what it has to give. But while a man must be in and with his time in the most vital sense, he must not be wholly of it. To get the vital enrichment which flows from identification with one's age, and at the same time to get the detachment which enables one to see his time in true relation to all time, is one of the problems which requires the highest wisdom for its solution. It is easy to become entirely absorbed in one's age, or it is easy to detach one's self from it, and study it in a cold and critical temper; but to get its warmth and vitality and escape its narrowing and limiting influence is so difficult that comparatively few men succeed in striking the balance between two divergent tendencies.

A man gets power and knowledge from his time in the degree in which he suffers it to enlarge and vitalise him; he loses power and knowledge in the degree in which he suffers it to limit his vision and confine his interests. The Time Spirit is the greatest of our teachers so long as it is the interpreter of the Eternal Spirit; it is the most fallible and misleading of teachers when it attempts to speak for itself. The visible and material things by which we are surrounded are of immense helpfulness so long as they symbolise invisible and spiritual things; they become stones of stumbling and rocks of offence when they are detached from the spiritual order and set apart in an order of their own. The age in which we live affords a concrete illustration of the vital processes in society and means of contact with that society, but it is comprehensible and educative in the exact degree in which we understand its relation to other times. The impression which the day makes upon us needs to be tested by the impression which we receive from the year; the judgment of a decade must be corrected by the judgment of the century. The present hour is subtly illusive; it fills the whole stage, to the exclusion of the past and the present; it appears to stand alone, detached from all that went before or is to follow; it seems to be the historic moment, the one reality amid fleeting shadows. As a matter of fact, it is a logical product of the past, bound to it by ties so elusive that we cannot trace them, and so numerous and tenacious that we cannot sever them; it is but a fragment of a whole immeasurably greater than itself; its character is so completely determined by the past that the most radical changes we can make in it are essentially superficial; for it is the future, not the present, which is in our hands. To get even a glimpse of the character and meaning of our own time, we must, therefore, see it in relation to all time; to master it in any sense we must set it in its true historical relations. That which to the uneducated mind seems portentous is lightly regarded by the mind which sees the apparently isolated event in a true historic perspective; while the occurrence or condition which is barely noticed by the untrained, seen in the same perspective, becomes tragic in its prophecy of change and suffering. History is full of corrections of the mistaken judgments of the hour; and from the hate or adoration of contemporaries, the wise man turns to the clear-sighted and inexorable judgment of posterity. In the far-seeing vision of a trained intelligence the hour is never detached from the day, nor the day from the year; and the year is always held in its place in the century.

Now, the man of culture has pre-eminently the gift of living deeply in his own age, and at the same time of seeing it in relation to all ages. It has no illusion for him; it cannot deceive him with its passionate acceptance or its equally passionate rejection. He sees the crown shining above the cross; he hears the long thunders of applause breaking in upon execrations which they will finally silence; he foresees the harvest in the seed that lies barely covered on the surface; and, afar off, his ear notes the final crash of that which at the moment seems to carry with it the assurance of eternal duration. Such a man secures the vitality of his time, but he escapes its limitation of vision by seeing it clearly and seeing it whole; he corrects the teaching of the time spirit by constant reference to the teaching of the Eternal Spirit imparted in the long training and the wide revelation of history. The day is beautiful and significant, or ominous and tragic, to him as it discloses its relation to the good or the evil of the years that are gone. And these vital associations, these deep historic connections, are brought to light with peculiar clearness in literature. Beyond all other means of enfranchisement, the book liberates a man from imprisonment within the narrow limits of his own time; it makes him free of all times. He lives in all periods, under all forms of government, in all social conditions; the mind of antiquity, of mediaevalism, of the Renaissance, is as open to him as the mind of his own day, and so he is able to look upon human life in its entirety.



Chapter XVII.

Liberation from One's Place.

The instinct which drives men to travel is at bottom identical with that which fills men with passionate desire to know what is in life. Time and strength are often wasted in restless change from place to place; but real wandering, however aimless in mood, is always education. To know one's neighbours and to be on good terms with the community in which one lives are the beginning of sound relations to the world at large; but one never knows his village in any real sense until he knows the world. The distant hills which seem to be always calling the imaginative boy away from the familiar fields and hearth do not conspire against his peace, however much they may conspire against his comfort; they help him to the fulfilment of his destiny by suggesting to his imagination the deeper experience, the richer growth, the higher tasks which await him in the world beyond the horizon. Man is a wanderer by the law of his life; and if he never leaves his home in which he is born, he never builds a home of his own.

It is the law of life that a child should leave his father and separate himself from his inherited surroundings, in order that by self-unfolding and self-realisation he may substitute a conscious for an unconscious, a moral for an instinctive relation. The instinct of the myth-makers was sound when it led them to attach such importance to the wandering and the return; the separation effected in order that individuality and character might be realised through isolation and experience, the return voluntarily made through clear recognition of the soundness of the primitive relations, the beauty of the service of the older and wiser to the younger and the more ignorant. We are born into relations which we accept as normal and inevitable; we break away from them in order that by detachment we may see them objectively and from a distance, and that we may come to self-consciousness; we resume these relations of deliberate purpose and with clear perception of their moral significance. So the boy, grown to manhood, returns to his home from the world in which he has tested himself and seen for the first time, with clear eyes, the depth and beauty of its service in the spiritual order; so the man who has revolted from the barren and shallow dogmatic statement of a spiritual truth returns, in riper years and with a deeper insight, to the truth which is no longer matter of inherited belief but of vital need and perception.

The ripe, mature, full mind not only escapes the limitation of the time in which it finds itself; it also escapes from the limitations of the place in which it happens to be. A man of deep culture cannot be a provincial; he must be a citizen of the world. The man of provincial tastes and ideas owns the acres; the man of culture commands the landscape. He knows the world beyond the hills; he sees the great movement of life from which the village seems almost shut out; he shares those inclusive experiences which come to each age and give each age a character of its own. He is in fellowship and sympathy with the smaller community at his doors, but he belongs also to that greater community which is coterminous with humanity itself. He is not disloyal to his immediate surroundings when he leaves them for exploration, travel, and discovery; he is fulfilling that law of life which conditions true valuation of that into which one is born upon clear perception of that which one must acquire for himself.

The wanderings of individuals and races, which form so large a part of the substance of history, are witnesses of that craving for deeper experience and wider knowledge which is one of the springs of human progress. The American cares for Europe not for its more skilful and elaborate ministration to his comfort; he is drawn towards it through the appeal of its rich historic life to his imagination and through the diversity and variety of its social and racial phenomena. And in like manner the European seeks the East, not simply as a matter of idle curiosity, but because he finds in the East conditions which are set in such sharp contrast with those with which he is familiar. The instinct for expansion which gives human history its meaning and interest is constantly urging the man of sensitive mind to secure by observation that which he cannot get by experience.

To secure the most complete development one must live in one's time and yet live above it, and one must also live in one's home and yet live, at the same time, in the world. The life which is bounded in knowledge, interest, and activity by the invisible but real and limiting walls of a small community is often definite in aim, effective in action, and upright in intention; but it cannot be rich, varied, generous, and stimulating. The life, on the other hand, which is entirely detached from local associations and tasks is often interesting, liberalising, and catholic in spirit; but it cannot be original or productive. A sound life—balanced, poised, and intelligently directed—must stand strongly in both local and universal relations; it must have the vitality and warmth of the first, and the breadth and range of the second.

This liberation from provincialism is not only one of the signs of culture, but it is also one of its finest results; it registers a high degree of advancement. For the man who has passed beyond the prejudices, misconceptions, and narrowness of provincialism has gone far on the road to self-education. He has made as marked an advance on the position of the great mass of his contemporaries as that position is an advance on the earlier stages of barbarism. The barbarian lives only in his tribe; the civilised man, in the exact degree in which he is civilised, lives with humanity. Books are among the richest resources against narrowing local influences; they are the ripest expositions of the world-spirit. To know the typical books of the race is to be in touch with those elements of thought and experience which are shared by men of all countries. Without a knowledge of these books a man never really gets at the life of localities which are foreign to him; never really sees those historic places about which the traditions of civilisation have gathered. Travel is robbed of half its educational value unless one carries with him a knowledge of that which he looks at for the first time with his own eyes. No American sees England unless he carries England in his memory and imagination. Westminster Abbey is devoid of spiritual significance to the man who is ignorant of the life out of which it grew, and of the history which is written in its architecture and its memorials. The emancipation from the limitations of locality is greatly aided by travel, but it is accomplished only by intimate knowledge of the greater books.



Chapter XVIII.

The Unconscious Element.

While it is true that the greatest books betray the most intimate acquaintance with the time in which they are written, and disclose the impress of that time in thought, structure, and style, it is also true that such books are so essentially independent of contemporary forms and moods that they largely escape the vicissitudes which attend those forms and moods. The element of enduring interest in them outweighs the accidents of local speech or provincial knowledge, as the force and genius of Caesar survive the armor he wore and the language he spoke. A great book is a possession for all time, because a writer of the first rank is the contemporary of every generation; he is never outgrown, exhausted, or even old-fashioned, although the garments he wore may have been laid aside long ago.

In this permanent quality, unchanged by changes of taste and form, resides the secret of that charm which draws about the great poets men and women of each succeeding period, eager to listen to words which thrilled the world when it was young, and which have a new meaning for every new age. It is safe to say that Homer will speak to men as long as language survives, and that translation will follow translation to the end of time. What Robinson said of the Bible in one of the great moments of modern history may be said of the greater works of literature: more light will always stream from them. Indeed, many of them will not be understood until they are read in the light of long periods of history; for as the great books are interpretations of life, so life in its historic revelation is one continuous commentary on the greater books.

This preponderance of the permanent over the accidental or temporary in books of this class is largely due to the unconscious element which plays so great a part in them: the element of universal experience, in which every man shares in the exact degree in which, in mind and heart, he approaches greatness. It is idle to attempt to separate arbitrarily in Shakespeare, for instance, those elements in the poet's work which were deliberately introduced from those which went into it by the unconscious action of his whole nature; but no one can study the plays intelligently without becoming more and more clearly aware of those depths of life which moved in the poet before they moved in his work; which enlarged, enriched, and silently reorganised his view of life and his power of translating life out of individual into universal terms. It would be impossible, for instance, to write such a play as "The Tempest" by sheer force of intellect; in the creation of such a work there is involved, beyond literary skill, calculation, and deep study of the relation of thought to form, a ripeness of spirit, a clearness of insight, a richness of imagination, which are so much part of the very soul of the poet that he does not separate them in thought, and cannot consciously balance, adjust, and employ them. They are quite beyond his immediate control, as they are beyond all attempts to imitate them.

Cleverness may learn all the forms and methods, but it is powerless to imitate greatness; it can simulate the conscious, dexterous side of greatness, but it cannot simulate the unconscious, vital side. The moment a man like Voltaire attempts to deal with such a character as Joan of Arc, his spiritual and artistic limitations become painfully apparent; of cleverness there is no lack, but of reverence, insight, depth of feeling, the affinity of the great imagination for the great nature or deed, there is no sign. The man is entirely and hopelessly incapacitated for the work by virtue of certain limitations in his own nature of which he is obviously in entire ignorance. The conscious skill of Voltaire was delicate, subtle, full of vitality; but the unconscious side of his nature was essentially shallow, thin, largely undeveloped; and it is the preponderance of the unconscious over the conscious in a man's life which makes him great in himself and equips him for work of the highest quality. No man can put his skill to the highest use and give his knowledge the final touch of individuality until both are so entirely incorporated in his personality that they have become part of himself.

This deepest and most vital of all the processes of self-education and self-unfolding, which is brought to such perfection in men of the highest creative power, is the fundamental process of culture,—the chief method which every man uses, consciously or unconsciously, who brings his nature to complete ripeness of quality and power. The absorption of vital experience and knowledge which went on in Shakespeare enlarged and clarified his vision and insight to such a degree that both became not only searching, but veracious in a rare degree; life was opened to him on many sides by the expansion first accomplished in himself. This is saying again what has been said so many times, but cannot be said too often,—that, in order to give one's work a touch of greatness, a man must first have a touch of greatness in his own nature. But greatness is not an irresponsible and undirected growth; it is as definitely conditioned on certain obediences to intellectual discipline and spiritual law as is any kind of lesser skill conditioned on practice and work. One of these conditions is the development of the power to turn conscious processes of observation, emotion, and skill into unconscious processes; to enrich the nature below the surface, so to speak; to make the soil productive by making it deep and rich. Men of mere skill always stop short of this final process of self-development, and always stop short of those final achievements which sum up and express all that has been known or felt about a subject and give it permanent form; men of essential greatness take this last step in that higher education which makes one master of the force of his personality, and give his words and works universal range and perennial interest.

Now, this is the deepest quality in the books of life, which a student may not only enjoy to the full, but may also absorb and make his own. When Alfred de Musset, in an oft-repeated phrase, said that it takes a great deal of life to make a little art, he was not only affirming the reality of this process of passing experience through consciousness into the unconscious side of a man's nature, but he was also hinting at one of the greatest resources of pleasure and growth. For time and life continually enrich the man who has learned the secret of turning experience and observation into knowledge and power. It is a secret in the sense in which every vital process is a secret; but it is not a trick, a skill, or a method which may be communicated in a formula. Mrs. Ward describes a character in one of her stories as having passed through a great culture into a great simplicity of nature; in other words, culture had wrought its perfect work, and the man had passed through wide and intensely self-conscious activity into the repose and simplicity of self-unconsciousness; his knowledge had become so completely a part of himself that he had ceased to be conscious of it as a thing distinct from himself. There is no easy road to this last height in the long and painful process of education; and time is an essential element in the process, because it is a matter of growth.

There are, it is true, a few men and women who seem born with this power of living in the heart of things and possessing them in the imagination without having gone through the long and painful stages of preparatory education; but genius is not only inexplicable, it is also so rare that for the immense majority of men any effort to comprehend it must be purely academic. It is enough to know that if we are in any degree to share with men and women of genius the faculty of vision, insight, and creative energy, we must master the conditions which favor the development of those supreme gifts. There is laid, therefore, upon the student who wishes to get the vital quality of literature the necessity of repeating, by deliberate and intelligent design, the process which in so many of the masters of the arts has been, apparently, accomplished instinctively. To make observation, study, and experience part of one's spiritual and intellectual capital, it is, in the first place, necessary to saturate one's self with that which one is studying; to possess it by constant familiarity; to let the imagination play upon it; to meditate upon it. And it is necessary, in the second place, to make this practice habitual; when it becomes habitual, it will become largely unconscious: one does it by instinct rather than by deliberation. This process is illustrated in every successful attempt to master any art. In the art of speaking, for instance, the beginner is hampered by an embarrassing consciousness of his hands, feet, speech; he cannot forget himself and surrender himself to his thought or his emotion; he dare not trust himself. He must, therefore, train himself through mind, voice, and body; he must submit to constant and long-sustained practice, thinking out point by point what he shall say and how he shall say it. This process is, at the start, partly mechanical; in the nature of things it must be entirely within the view and control of a vigilant consciousness. But as the training progresses, the element of self-consciousness steadily diminishes, until, in great moments, the true orator, become one harmonious instrument of expression, surrenders himself to his theme, and his personality shines clear and luminous through speech, articulation, and gesture. The unconscious nature of the man subordinates his skill wholly to its own uses. In like manner, in every kind of self-expression, the student who puts imagination, vitality, and sincerity into the work of preliminary education, comes at last to full command of himself, and gives complete expression to that which is deepest and most individual in him. Time, discipline, study, and thought enrich every nature which is receptive and responsive.



Chapter XIX.

The Teaching of Tragedy.

No characters appeal more powerfully to the imagination than those impressive figures about whom the literature of tragedy moves,—figures associated with the greatest passions and the most appalling sorrows. The well-balanced man, who rises step by step through discipline and work to the highest place of influence and power, is applauded and admired; but the heart of the world goes out to those who, like OEdipus, are overmatched by a fate which pursues with relentless step, or, like Hamlet, are overweighted with tasks too heavy or too terrible for them. Agamemnon, OEdipus, Orestes, Hamlet, Lear, Pere Goriot, are supreme figures in that world of the imagination in which the poets have endeavoured both to reflect and to interpret the world as men see it and act in it.

The essence of tragedy is the collision between the individual will, impulse, or action, and society in some form of its organisation, or those unwritten laws of life which we call the laws of God. The tragic character is always a lawbreaker, but not always a criminal; he is, indeed, often the servant of a new idea which sets him, as in the case of Giordano Bruno, in opposition to an established order of knowledge; he is sometimes, as in the case of Socrates, a teacher of truths which make him a menace to lower conceptions of citizenship and narrower ideas of personal life; or he is, as in the case of Othello and Paolo, the victim of passions which overpower the will and throw the whole life out of relation to its moral and social environment. The interest with which the tragic character is always invested is due not only to the exceptional experience in which the tragic situation always culminates, but also to the self-surrender which precedes the penalty and the expiation.

There is a fallacy at the bottom of the admiration we feel when a rich nature throws restraint of any kind to the winds and gives itself up wholly to some impulse or passion,—the fallacy of supposing that by a violent break with existing conditions freedom can be secured; for the world loves freedom, even when it is too slothful or too cowardly to pay the price which it exacts. That admiration arises, however, from a sound instinct,—the instinct which makes us love both power and self-sacrifice, even when the first is ill-directed and the second wasted. The vast majority of men are content to do their work quietly and in obscurity, with no disclosure of originality, freshness, or force; they obey law, conform to custom, respect the conventionalities of their age; they appear to be lacking in representative quality; they are, apparently, the faithful and uninteresting drudges of society. There are, it is true, a host of commonplace persons, in every generation, who perform uninteresting tasks in a mechanical spirit; but it must not be inferred that a man is either craven or cowardly because he does not break from the circle in which he finds himself and make a bold and picturesque rush for freedom; it may be that freedom is to be won for him in the silent and faithful doing of the work which lies next him; it is certain that the highest power and the noblest freedom are secured, not by the submission which fears to fight, but by that which accepts the discipline for the sake of the mastery which is conditioned upon it.

There are, however, conditions which no man can control, and which are in their nature essentially tragic; and men and women who are involved in these conditions cannot elude a fate for which they are not responsible and from which they cannot escape. This was true of many of the greatest characters in classical tragedy, and it is true also of many of the characters in modern tragedy. The world looks with bated breath on a struggle of the noblest heroism, in which men and women, matched against overwhelming social forces, bear their part with sublime and unfaltering courage, and by the completeness of their self-surrender assert their sovereignty even in the hour when disaster seems to crush and destroy them. To these striking figures, isolated by the greatness of their fate, the heart of the world has always gone out as to the noblest of its children. Solitary in the possession of some new conception of duty or of truth, separated from the mass of their fellows by that lack of sympathy which springs from imperfect comprehension of higher aims or deeper insight, these sublime strugglers against ignorance, prejudice, caste, and power, become the heroes and martyrs of the race; they announce the advent of new conceptions of social order and individual rights; they incarnate the imperishable soul of humanity in its long and terrible endeavour to bring the institutions and the ideas of men into harmony with a higher order of life.

The tragic element has, therefore, many aspects,—sometimes lawless and destructive, sometimes self-sacrificing and instructive; but its illustration in literature in any form is not only profoundly interesting, but profoundly instructive as well. In no other literary form is the stuff of which life is made wrought into such commanding figures; in no other form are the deeper possibilities of life brought into such clear view; in no other form are the fundamental laws of life disclosed in a light at once so searching and so beautiful in its revealing power. If all the histories were lost and all the ethical discussions forgotten, the moral quality of life and the tremendous significance of character would find adequate illustration in the great tragedies. They lay bare the very heart of man under all historic conditions; they make us aware of the range of his experiences; they uncover the depths by which he is surrounded. They enable us to see, in lightning flashes, the undiscovered territory which incloses the little island on which we live; they light up the mysterious background of invisible forces against which we play our parts and work out our destiny.

To the student of literature, who strives not only to enjoy but to comprehend, tragedy brings all the materials for a deep and genuine education. Instead of a philosophical or ethical statement of principles, it offers living illustration of ethical law as revealed in the greatest deeds and the most heroic experiences; it discloses the secret of the age which created it,—for in no other literary form are the fundamental conceptions of a period so deeply involved or so clearly set forth. The very springs of Greek character are uncovered in the Greek tragedies; and the tremendous forces liberated by the Renaissance are nowhere else so strikingly brought to light as in that group of tragedies which were produced in so many countries, by so many men, at the close of that momentous epoch. When literature runs mainly to the tragic form, it may be assumed that the spiritual force of the race has expressed itself afresh, and that a race, or a group of races, has passed through one of those searching experiences which bring men again face to face with the facts of life; for the production of tragedy involves thought of such depth, insight of such clearness, and imaginative power of such quality and range that it is possible, on a great scale, only when the springs of passion and action have been profoundly stirred. The appearance of tragedy marks, therefore, those moments when men manifest, without calculation or restraint, all the power that is in them; and into no other literary form is the vital force poured so lavishly. It is the instinctive recognition of this unveiling of the soul of man which gives the tragedy such impressiveness even when it is haltingly represented on the stage, and which subdues the imagination to its mood when the solitary reader comes under its spell. The life of the race is sacred in those great passages which record its sufferings; and nothing makes us so aware of our unity with our kind in all times and under all circumstances as the community of suffering in which, actively or passively, all men share.

In the tragedy the student of literature is brought into the most intimate relation with his race in those moments when its deepest experiences are laid bare; he enters into its life when that life is passing through its most momentous passages; he is present in those hidden places where it confesses its highest hopes, reveals its most terrible passions, suffers its most appalling punishments, and passes on, through anguish and sacrifice, to its new day of thought and achievement.



Chapter XX.

The Culture Element in Fiction.

One of the chief elements in fiction which make for culture is, primarily, its disclosure of the elementary types of character and experience. A single illustration of this quality will suggest its presence in all novels of the first rank and its universal interest and importance. The aspirations, dreams, devotions, and sacrifices of men are as real as their response to self-interest or their tendency to the conventional and the commonplace; and they are, in the long run, a great deal more influential. They have wider play; they are more compelling; and they are of the very highest significance, because they spring out of that which is deepest and most distinctive in human nature. A host of men never give these higher impulses, these spiritual aptitudes and possibilities, full play; but they are in all men, and all men recognise them and crave an expression of them. Nothing is truer, on the lowest and most practical plane, than the old declaration that men do not live by bread alone; they sometimes exist on bread, because nothing better is to be had at the moment; but they live only in the full and free play of all their activities, in the complete expression not only of what is most pressing in interest and importance at a given time, but of that which is potential and possible at all times.

The novel of romance and adventure has had a long history, and the elements of which it is compounded are recognisable long before they took the form of fiction. Two figures appear and reappear in the mythology of every poetic people,—the hero and the wanderer; the man who achieves and the man who experiences; the man who masters life by superiority of soul or body, and the man who masters it by completeness of knowledge. It is interesting and pathetic to find how universally these two figures held the attention and stirred the hearts of primitive men; how infinitely varied are their tasks, their perils, and their vicissitudes. They wear so many guises, they bear so many names, they travel so far and compass so much experience that it is impossible, in any interpretation of mythology, to escape the conviction that they were the dominant types in the thought of the myth-makers. And these earliest story-makers were not idle dreamers, entertaining themselves by endless manufacture of imaginary incidents, conditions, and persons. They were, on the contrary, the observers, the students, the scientists of their period; their endeavour was not to create a fiction, but to explain the world and themselves. Their observation was imperfect, and they made ludicrous mistakes of fact because they lacked both knowledge and training; but they made free use of the creative faculty, and there is, consequently, a good deal more truth in their daring guesses than in many of those provisional explanations of nature and ourselves which have been based too exclusively on scrutiny of the obvious fact, and indifference to the fact, which is not less a fact because it is elusive.

The myth-makers endeavoured to explain the world, but that was only one-half of their endeavour; they attempted also to explain themselves. They discovered the striking analogies between certain natural phenomena or processes and the phenomena and processes of their own nature; they discovered the tasks and wanderings of the sun, and they perceived the singular resemblance of these tasks and wanderings to the happenings of their own lives. So the hero and the wanderer became subjective as well as objective, and symbolised what was deepest and most universal in human nature and human experience, as well as what was most striking in the external world. When primitive men looked into their hearts and their experience, they found their deepest hopes, longings, and possibilities bound up and worked out in two careers,—the career of the hero and the career of the wanderer.

These two figures became the commanding types of all the nobler mythologies, because they symbolised what was best, deepest, and most real in human nature and life. They represent the possible reach and the occasional achievement of the human soul; they stand for that which is potential as well as for that which is actual in human experience. Few men achieve or experience on a great scale; but these few are typical, and are, therefore, transcendent in interest. The average commonplace man fills great space in contemporary history, as in the history of all times, and his character and career are well worth the closest study and the finest art of the writer; but the average man, who never achieves greatly, and to whom no striking or dramatic experience comes, has all the possibilities of action and suffering in his nature, and is profoundly interested in these more impressive aspects of life. Truth to fact is essential to all sound art, but absolute veracity involves the whole truth,—the truth of the exceptional as well as of the average experience; the truth of the imagination as well as of observation.

The hero and the wanderer are still, and always will be, the great human types; and they are, therefore, the types which will continue to dominate fiction; disappearing at times from the stage which they may have occupied too exclusively, but always reappearing in due season,—the hero in the novel of romance, the wanderer in the novel of adventure. These figures are as constant in fiction as they were in mythology; from the days of the earliest Greek and Oriental stories to these days of Stevenson and Barrie, they have never lost their hold on the imagination of the race. When the sense of reality was feeble, these figures became fantastic, and even ridiculous; but this false art was the product of an unregulated, not of an illegitimate, exercise of the imagination; and while "Don Quixote" destroyed the old romance of chivalry, it left the instinct which produced that romance untouched. As the sense of reality becomes more exacting and more general, the action of the imagination is more carefully regulated; but it is not diminished, either in volume or in potency. Men have not lost the power of individual action because society has become so highly developed, and the multiplication of the police has not materially reduced the tragic possibilities of life. There is more accurate and more extensive knowledge of environment than ever before in the history of the race, but temperament, impulse, and passion remain as powerful as they were in primitive men; and tragedy finds its materials in temperament, impulse, and passion, much more frequently than in objective conditions and circumstances.

The soul of man has passed through a great education, and has immensely profited by it; but its elemental qualities and forces remain unchanged. Two things men have always craved,—to come to close quarters with life, and to do something positive and substantial. Self-expression is the prime need of human nature; it must know, act, and suffer by virtue of its deepest instincts. The greater and richer that nature, the deeper will be its need of seeing life on many sides, of sharing in many kinds of experience, of contending with multiform difficulties. To drink deeply of the cup of life, at whatever cost, appears to be the insatiable desire of the most richly endowed men and women; and with such natures the impulse is to seek, not to shun, experience. And that which to the elect men and women of the race is necessary and possible is not only comprehensible to those who cannot possess it: it is powerfully and permanently attractive. There is a spell in it which the dullest mortal does not wholly escape.[1]

1. Reprinted in part, by permission, from the "Forum."



Chapter XXI.

Culture through Action.

It is an interesting fact that the four men who have been accepted as the greatest writers who have yet appeared, used either the epic or the dramatic form. It can hardly have been accidental that Homer and Dante gave their greatest work the epic form, and that Shakespeare and Goethe were in their most fortunate moments dramatists. There must have been some reason in the nature of things for this choice of two literary forms which, differing widely in other respects, have this in common, that they represent life in action. They are very largely objective; they portray events, conditions, and deeds which have passed beyond the stage of thought and have involved the thinker in the actual historical world of vital relationships and dramatic sequence. The lyric poet may sing, if it pleases him, like a bird in the recesses of a garden, far from the noise and dust of the highway and the clamour of men in the competitions of trade and work; but the epic or dramatic poet must find his theme and his inspiration in the stir and movement of men in social relations. He deals, not with the subjective, but with the objective man; with the man whose dreams are no longer visions of the imagination, but are becoming incorporate in some external order; whose passions are no longer seething within him, but are working themselves out in vital consequences; whose thought is no longer purely speculative, but has begun to give form and shape to laws, habits, or institutions. It is the revelation of the human spirit in action which we find in the epic and the drama; the inward life working itself out in material and social relations; the soul of the man becoming, so to speak, externalised.

The epic, as illustrated in the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," deals with a main or central movement in Greek tradition; a series of events which, by reason of their nature and prominence, imbedded themselves in the memory of the Greek race. These events are described in narrative form, with episodes, incidents, and dialogues, which break the long story and relax the strain of attention from time to time, without interrupting the progress of the narrative. There are heroes whose figures stand out in the long story with great distinctness, but we are interested much more in what they do than in what they are; for in the epic, character is subordinate to action. In the dramas of Shakespeare, on the other hand, while action is more constantly employed and is thrown into bolder relief, our deepest interest centres in the actors; the action is no longer the matter of first importance; it is significant mainly because it involves men and women not only in the chain of external consequences, but also in the order of spiritual sequences. We are deeply stirred by our perception of the intimate connection between the possibilities which lie sleeping in the individual life, and the tragic events which are set in motion when those possibilities are realised in action. In both epic and drama men are seen, not in their subjective moods, but in their objective struggles; not in the detachment of the life of speculation and imagination, but in vital association and relation with society in its order and institutions. With many differences, both of spirit and form, the epic and the drama are at one in portraying men in that ultimate and decisive stage which determines individual character and gives history its direction and significance.

And it is from men in action that much of the deepest truth concerning life and character has come; indeed, it is not until we pass out of the region of the speculative, the merely potential, that the word "character" takes on that tremendous meaning with which thousands of years of actual happenings have invested it. A purely ideal world—a world fashioned wholly apart from the realities which convey definite, concrete revelations of what is in us and in our world—would necessarily be an unmoral world. The relationships which bind men together and give human intercourse such depth and richness spring into being only when they are actually entered upon; they could never be understood or foreseen in a world of pure thought; nor would it be possible, in such a world, to realise that reaction of the deed upon the doer which creates character, nor that far-reaching influence of the deed upon society, and the sequence of events which so often issues in tragedy and from which history derives its immense interest and meaning. A world which stopped short of realisation in action would not only lose the fathomless dramatic interest which inheres in human life, but it would part with all those moral implications of the integrity and persistence of the individual soul, its moral quality and its moral responsibility, which make man something different from the dust which whirls about him on the highway, or the stone over which he stumbles. This is precisely the character of those speculative systems which deny the reality of action and substitute the idea for the deed; such a world does more than suffocate the individual soul; it destroys the very meaning of life by robbing it of moral order and meaning. The end of such a conception of the universe is necessarily annihilation, and its mood is necessarily despair.

"How can a man come to know himself?" asked Goethe. "Never by thinking, but by doing." Now, this knowledge of self in the large sense is precisely the knowledge which ripens and clarifies us, which gives us sanity, repose, and power. To know what is in humanity and what life means to humanity, we must study humanity in its active, not in its passive, moods; in the hours when it is doing, not thinking. Sooner or later all its thinking which has any reality in it passes on into action. The emotion, passion, thought, impulse, which never gets beyond the subjective stage, dies before birth; and all those philosophies which urge abstinence from action would cut the plant of life at the root; they are, in the last analysis, pleas for suicide. Men really live only as they freely express themselves through thought, emotion, and action. They get at the deepest truth and enter into the deepest relationships only as they act. Inaction involves something more than the disease and decay of certain faculties; it involves the deformity of arrested development, and failure to enter into that larger world of truth which is open to those races alone which live a whole life. It is for this reason that the drama must always hold the first place among those forms which the art of literature has perfected; it is for this reason that Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, consciously or unconsciously, chose those forms of expression which are specially adapted to represent and illustrate life in action; it is for this reason, among others, that these writers must always play so great a part in the work of educating the race. Culture is, above all things, real and vital; knowledge may deal with abstractions and unrelated bits of fact, but culture must always fasten upon those things which are significant in a spiritual order. It has to do with the knowledge which may become incorporate in a man's nature, and with that knowledge especially which has come to humanity through action. It is this deeper knowledge which holds a lighted torch aloft in the deepest recesses of the soul, or over those abysses of possible experience which open on all sides about every man, which is to be found in the pages of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, and of all those great artists who have seen men in those decisive and significant moments when they strike into the movement of history, or, through their deeds and sufferings, the order of life suddenly shines forth.



Chapter XXII.

The Interpretation of Idealism.

Idealism has so often been associated in recent years with vagueness of thought, slovenly construction, and a weak sentimentalism, that it has been discredited, even among those who have recognised the reality behind it and the great place it must hold in all rich and noble living. It is the misfortune of what is called Idealism, that, like other spiritual principles, it attracts those who mistake the longings of unintelligent discontent for aspiration, or the changing outlines of vapory fancies for the firm and consistent form and shape of real conceptions deeply realised in the imagination. Idealism has suffered much at the hands of feeble practitioners who have substituted irrational dreams for those far-reaching visions and those penetrating insights which are characteristic of its true use and illustration in the arts. The height of the reaction so vigorously and impressively illustrated in a great group of modern realistic works is due largely to the weakness and extravagance of the idealistic movement. When sentiment is exchanged for its corrupting counterfeit, sentimentalism, and clear and definite thinking gives place to vague and elusive emotions and fancies, reaction is not only inevitable but wholesome; the instinct for sanity in men will always prevent them from becoming mere dreamers and star-gazers.

The true Idealist has his feet firmly planted on reality, and his idealism discloses itself not in a disposition to dream dreams and see visions, but in the largeness of a vision which sees realities in the totality of their relations and not merely in their obvious and superficial relations. It is a great mistake to discern in men nothing more substantial than that movement of hopes and longings which is so often mistaken for aspiration; it is equally a mistake to discern in men nothing more enduring and aspiring than the animal nature; either report, standing by itself, would be fundamentally untrue. Man is an animal; but he is an animal with a soul, and the sane view of him takes both body and soul into account. The defect of a good deal of current Realism lies in its lack of veracity; it is essentially untrue, and it is, therefore, fundamentally unreal. The love of truth, the passion for the fact, the determination to follow life wherever life leads, are noble, artistic instincts, and have borne noble fruit; but what is often called Realism has suffered quite as much as Idealism from weak practitioners, and stands quite as much in need of rectification and restatement.

The essence of Idealism is the application of the imagination to realities; it is not a play of fancy, a golden vision arbitrarily projected upon the clouds and treated as if it had an objective existence. Goethe, who had such a vigorous hold upon the realities of existence, and who had also an artist's horror of mere abstractions, touched the heart of the matter when he defined the Ideal as the completion of the real. In this simple but luminous statement he condensed the faith and practice not only of the greater artists of every age, but of the greater thinkers as well. In the order of life there can be no real break between things as they now exist and things as they will exist in the remotest future; the future cannot contradict the present, nor falsify it; for the future must be the realisation of the full possibilities of the present. The present is related to it as the seed is related to the flower and fruit in which its development culminates. There are vast changes of form and dimension between the seed and the tree hanging ripe with fruit, but there is no contradiction between the germ and its final unfolding.

A rigid Realism, however, sees in the seed nothing but its present hardness, littleness, ugliness; a true and rational Idealism sees all these things, but it sees also not only appearances but potentialities; or, to recall another of Goethe's phrases, it sees the object whole.

To see life clearly and to see it whole is not only to see distinctly the obvious facts of life, but to see these facts in sequence and order; in other words, to explain and interpret them. The power to do this is one of the signs of a great imagination; and, other things being equal, the rank of a work of art may, in the last analysis, be determined by the clearness and veracity with which explanation and interpretation are suggested. Homer is, for this reason, the foremost writer of the Greek race. He is wholly free from any purpose to give ethical instruction; he is absolutely delivered from the temptation to didacticism; and yet he reveals to us the secret of the temperament and genius of his race. And he does this because he sees in his race the potentialities of the seed; the vitality, beauty, fragrance, and growth which lie enfolded in its tiny and unpromising substance. If the reality of a thing is not so much its appearance as the totality of that which is to issue out of it, then nothing can be truly seen without the use of the imagination. All that the Idealist asks is that life shall be seen not only with his eyes but with his imagination. His descriptions are accurate, but they are also vital; they give us the thing not only as it looked standing by itself, but as it appeared in the complete life of which it was a part; he makes us see the physical side of the fact with great distinctness, but he makes us see its spiritual side as well. As a result, there is left in our minds by the intelligent reading of Homer a clear impression of the spiritual, political, and social aptitudes and characteristics of the Greek people of his age,—an impression which no exact report of mere appearances could have conveyed; an impression which is due to the constant play of the poet's imagination upon the facts with which he is dealing.

This is true Idealism; but it is also true Realism. It is not only the fact, but the truth. The fact may be observed, but the truth must be discerned by insight,—it is not within the range of mere observation; and it is this insight, this discernment of realities in their relation to the whole order of things, which characterises true Idealism, and which makes all the greater writers Idealists in the fundamental if not in the technical sense. Tolstoi has often been called a Realist by those who are eager to label everything and everybody succinctly; but Tolstoi is one of the representative Idealists of his time, and his "Master and Man" is one of the most touching and sincere bits of true Idealism which has been given the world for many a day.

There is nothing which needs such constant reinforcement as this faculty of seeing things in their totality; for we are largely at the mercy of the hour unless we invoke the aid of the imagination to set the appearances of the moment in their large relations. To the man who sees things as they rush like a stream before him, there is no order, progression, or intelligent movement in human affairs; but to the student who brings to the study of current events wide and deep knowledge of the great historic movements, these apparently unrelated phenomena disclose the most intimate inter-relations and connections. The most despairing pessimism would be born in the heart of the man who should be fated to see to-day apart from yesterday and to-morrow; a rational and inspiring hope may be born in the soul of the man who sees the day as part of the year and the year as part of the century. The great writers are a refuge from the point of view of the moment, because they set the events of life in a fundamental order, and make us aware of the finer potentialities of our race. They are Idealists in the breadth of their vision and the nobility of the interpretation of events which they offer us.



Chapter XXIII.

The Vision of Perfection.

These writers are also, by virtue of the faculty of discerning the interior relations of appearances and events, the expositors of that ultimate Idealism which not only discovers the possibility of the whole in the parts, of the perfect in the imperfect, but which discovers the whole, the complete and the perfect, and brings each before us in some noble form. The reality of the Ideal as Plato saw it is by no means universally accepted as a philosophical conclusion, but all high-minded men and women accept it as a rule of life. Idealism is wrought into the very fibre of the race, and is as indestructible as the imagination in which it has its roots. Deep in the heart of humanity lies the unshakable faith in its essential divinity, and in the reality of its highest hopes of development and attainment. The failure of noble schemes, the decline of enthusiasms, the fading of visions and dreams which seemed to have the luminous constancy of fixed stars, breed temporary depressions and passing moods of scepticism and despair; but the spiritual vitality of the race always reasserts itself, and faith returns after every disaster or disillusion.