Ariel (5 page)

The perfection of human morality would be to cast the spirit of charity in the moulds of Grecian elegance. And that sweet harmony had once in the world a passing realization. It was when the word of newborn Christianity came to Greek colonies in Macedonia with Saint Paul; to Thessaly and Philippi the Evangel, still pure, informed the soul of those refined and spiritual communities, in whom the seal of Hellenic culture maintained an enchanting native distinction. One might have hoped then that the two ideals most lofty that the world had known were going now to be united for all time. In the epistolary style of Saint Paul lingers a trace of that moment when charity was being Hellenized. But that sweet union did not last. The harmony and serenity of the Pagan conception of life was left each day more distant by the new idea which was already marching to the conquest of the world. But to conceive of a way in which once more a step in advance might be shown for the moral perfectionment of humanity, one would have to dream that the Christian ideal again were reconciled with the serene and luminous joy of ancient times, and that again the Evangel was being spread in Philippi and Thessaly.

To cultivate good taste should mean not only to perfect the external form of culture, to develop an artistic attitude, and with exquisite superfluity some elegance of civilization. Good taste “is the strong check-rein of the critical judgment.” Martha was able to call it like a second
conscience, which sees us right and brings us back to the light when the first grows obscure or hesitating; and a delicate sense of beauty is for Bagehot as a helpmate of unerring tact in life and of perfect dignity in manners. “The education of good taste,” said he, “favours the growth of good sense, which is our necessary viewpoint for the complexities of civilized life. If ever you see such education united in the mind of individuals or societies with any extravagance either of moral or of sentiment, it will be because in such cases it has been cultivated as an isolated, exclusive quality, so rendering impossible the effect of moral perfectionment which it might have brought about in a manner of culture in which no faculty of the mind is developed out of relation to the others.” In a soul which has been the object of harmonious and perfect culture, the inner grace and fineness of the sentiment of the beautiful will be the same thing with
strength and straightness of the reason. Thus Taine points out that in the grand works of ancient architecture, beauty is but sensible manifestation of strength, and elegance the outer appearance of solidity: “The same lines of the Parthenon which delight the view with harmonious proportions, content the intelligence with their promise of durability.”

There is some organic relation, some natural and close sympathy, which connects the perversions of the will and feeling with the falsities and crudities of bad taste. If it were given to us to penetrate into the mysterious labyrinth of the soul, to reconstruct the intimate story of souls in the past, in order to discover the formula of their definite moral natures, it would be an interesting object of study to determine what, in the refined perversity of a Nero, corresponds to the germ of a monstrous histrionism left in the soul of that sanguinary comedian by the affected
rhetoric of Seneca. And when one calls to mind the oratory of the French Convention and detects a rhetorical perversion everywhere apparent like the feline fur of Jacobinism, it is impossible not to connect like the radii that part from one centre, like the signs of an identical insanity, the extravagance of taste, the vertigo of all moral sentiment, and the fanatical limitation of the reason.

Undoubtedly there is no more certain result of the aesthetic sense than that which teaches us to distinguish as relative the good and the true and the beautiful, and accept some possibility of beauty in evil and error. Yet one need not neglect this truth, definitively true, by believing in some sympathetic connection between all these lofty objects of the soul and considering each one of them as but the starting- point, not the only one, but still one, whence it is possible to go to a meeting with the others.

The notion, then, of a higher accord between good taste and the moral sense is therefore true, as well in the spirit of individuals as of societies. For what concerns these last, that accord may have its example in the relation affirmed by
Rosenk
ranz to exist between liberty and the moral order, on the one hand, and the beauty of the human form which results from the development of races, on the other. That typical beauty reflects, for the Hegelian thinker, the ennobling effect of liberty; for slavery makes ugly at the same time that it degrades, while the consciousness of their harmonious development impresses the outward seal of beauty on races that are free.

In the characters of peoples, the gifts derived from fine taste, the mastery of gracious form, the delicate power to interest, the virtue of making ideas likeable, go with the genius of propaganda—that is to say, the mighty gift of universality.

Certain it is that to the possession of these chosen attributes may be referred the meaning of the word
human,
which the French spirit is quick to apply to all it chooses out and commends. Ideas grow strong and speedy wings, not in the cold bosom of abstractions, but in the warm and luminous air of actual shape. Their superior diffusion, their greater prevalence at times, result because the Graces have bathed them in their light. And just so, in the evolution of life itself, those enchanting outward signs of nature which in seeming represent only the gift of superfluous caprice—music, the painted plumage of birds, the corolla of flowers, their perfume —are as advertisement to the insect that bears the fecund pollen. They have played, amid the elements of the struggle for life, a function of great realism, in that, showing a superior motive, a reason for preference, to the love instinct, they have caused to survive in every species those beings
that are best endowed with beauty over all the others.

For one who has instinctive love of beauty, there is indeed a certain kind of mortification in stooping to defend it by arguments that are based on any other reason or principle than that impossible and disinterested love for it which satisfies a fundamental impulse of any rational being. But unfortunately this motive has lost its empire over a vast number of men, to whom it is necessary to teach a due respect for a love they do not share by showing them what are the relations which connect it with other classes of human interest. And to do this one must often cope with a vulgar view of such relations: that anything that tends to soften the outlines of the social character or customs and sharpens the sense of beauty, to make of taste a delicate sensibility of the soul and of grace the universal form of action is (for such critics, disciples of the harsh and useful only) to depreciate all that is heroic, virile in the temper of society, on the one hand, and its positive utilitarian capacity on the other. In “The Toilers of the Sea” we read how the people of Jersey when they first saw a steamboat anathematized it on account of the tradition that fire and water are hostile elements; the common
critique
abounds with beliefs in similar enmities. If you propose to make common love of the beautiful, you must begin by making men understand the possibility of harmonic concert between all legitimate human activities; and that will be an easier task than to convert them straightway to a love of the beautiful, in itself. To make the mass of men unwilling to expel the swallows from the home, one must, as Pythagoras counselled, first convince them —not of the gracefulness of the bird or its legendary virtue—but that its nests will in no manner interfere with the durability of the shingles or tiles where they build!

To that conception of human life which is formed on the free and harmonious development of our nature, and therefore includes among its essential objects the satisfaction of our feeling for the beautiful, is opposed—as a rule for human conduct —the conception called utilitarian, under which our whole activities are governed by their relation to the immediate ends of self-interest. The blame of a narrow utilitarianism as the only monitor of the spirit of our century, meted out to it in the name of the ideal with all the rigours of Anathema, is based in part in the failure to recognize that its Titanic efforts for the subordination of the forces of Nature to the human will and for the extension of material well-being are a necessary labour to prepare, as by the laborious enrichment of an exhausted soil, for the flowering of future idealisms. The transitory predomi
nance
of that function of utility which has absorbed the agitated and feverish life
of the last hundred years with its most potent energies explains, however, although it does not justify, many of the painful yearnings, many discontents and grievances of the intelligence, which show themselves either by a melancholy and exalted idealization of the past, or by a cruel despair of the future. For this there is one fruitful and well-adventured thought in the proposition of a certain group of thinkers of these last generations, among whom I need only cite again the noble figure of Guyau, who have tried to seal the definitive reconciliation of the conquests of the century with the renovation of many old human devotions, and have put into this blessed work as many treasures of love as of genius.

Often you will have heard attributed to two main causes that torrent of the spirit of utility which gives its note to the moral physiognomy of the present century, with
its neglect of the aesthetic and disinterested view of life. The revelations of natural science, whose interpreters, favourable or the reverse, agree in destroying all ideality for its base, are one; the other is the universal diffusion and triumph of democratic ideas. I propose to speak to you exclusively of this latter cause; because I trust that your first initiation in the revelations of Science has been so directed as to preserve you from the danger of a vulgar interpretation. Upon democracy weighs the accusation of guiding humanity, by making it mediocre, to a Holy Empire of Utilitarianism. This accusation is reflected with vibrant intensity in the pages—for me always full of a suggestive charm—of the most amiable among the masters of the Modem Spirit: the seductive pages of Renan, to whose authority you have often heard me refer and of whom I may often speak again. Read Renan, those of you who have not done
so already, and you will have to love him as I do. No one as he, among the modems, appears to me such a master “of that art of teaching with Grace” which Anatole France considers divine. No one so well as he has succeeded in combining irony with pity; even in the rigour of the analysis he can put the unction of the priest. And even when he teaches us to doubt, his exquisite gentleness sheds a balsam over the doubt itself. His thoughts ring in our minds with echoes ineffable, so vague as to remind one of sacred music. His infinite comprehension makes critics class him among those dilettantes of a light scepticism who wear the gown of the philosopher like the domino of a mask; but, once you penetrate his spirit, you will see that the vulgar tolerance of the mere sceptic differs from his as the hospitality of a w
orldly
salon
from the real spirit of charity.

This master holds, then, that high preoccupation with the ideal interests of our
race is irre
concilable
with the spirit of democracy. He believes that the conception of life in a society where that spirit dominates will gradually come to seek only material welfare, as the good most attainable for the greatest number. According to him, democracy is the enthronement of Caliban, Ariel can but be vanquished by its triumph. Many others who most care for aesthetic culture and select spirit are, of a like mind. Thus Bourget thinks that universal triumph of democratic institutions will make civilization lose in profundity
what
it gains in extension. He sees its necessary end in the empire of individual mediocrity. “Who says democracy voices the evolution of individual tendencies and the devolution of culture.” These judgments have a lively interest for us Americans who love the cause and consequence of that Revolution which in our America is entwined with the glory of its origin, and believe instinctively in the possibility
of a noble and rare individual life which need never sacrifice its dignity to the caprices of the rabble. To confront the problem one must first recognize that if democracy do not uplift its spirit by a strong ideal interest which it shares with its preoccupation by material interests, it does lead, and fatally, to the favouring of mediocrity, and lacks, more than any other social system, barriers within which it may safely seek the higher culture. Abandoned to itself, without the constant rectification of some active moral sanction which shall purify and guide its motives to the dignifying of life—democracy will, gradually, extinguish the idea of any superiority which may not be turned into a more efficient training for the war of interests. It is then the most ignoble form of the brutalities of power. Spiritual preference, exaltation of life by unselfish motive, good taste and art and manners, and the admiration of all that is worthy and of good
repute,
will then alike vanish unprotected when social equality has destroyed all grades of excellence without replacing them with others that shall also rule by moral influence and the light of reason.

Any equality of conditions in the order of society, like homogeneity in nature, is but an unstable equilibrium. From that moment when democracy shall have worked its perfect work of negation by the levelling of unjust superiorities, the equality so won should be but a starting-point. Its affirmation remains; and the affirmation of democracy and its glory consist in arousing in itself by fit incentives the revelation and the mastery of the true superiorities of men.