CHAPTER IX

THE MODERN SPIRIT

The world has tried fighting, and preaching and fasting and buying and selling, pomp and parsimony, pride and humiliation—every possible manner of existence in which it could conjecture there was any happiness or dignity: and all the while, as it bought, sold, and fought and fasted and wearied itself with policies and ambitions and self-denials, God had placed its real happiness in the keeping of the little mosses of the wayside and of the clouds of the firmament. Now and then a wearied king, or a tormented slave, found out where the true kingdoms of the world were, and possessed himself in a furrow or two of garden ground, of a truly infinite dominion. JOHN RUSKIN, Hopes and Fears for Art.

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OUR age, we are often told, is predominantly scientific. The fact implies both danger and hope. For if science can more and more teach men the need of intellectual honesty, it can also starve their sympathies. It is not generally recognised that the mind alone is as material as the body alone. The sins of the old world against the Holy Ghost were customarily sins of the flesh, surrenders to lust; those of the modern world are more often sins of the mind, surrenders to logic. For the spirit can be killed either by lust or logic, or, worst of all, by both in combination. On the other hand it is upon physical force and logical faculty rightly blended

that the soul depends for energy and direction. The mechanical intelligence which science uses to examine facts is in itself both limited and unmoral. It will apply itself to the discovery of poison gas with as earnest an efficiency as to that of a cure for cancer. Alone it is an exact instrument for calculating cause and effect within a given circle of particulars. In the integrity of its method it offers an example well worth emulating by vague and careless minds, but only when its impartial equity is directed towards life as a whole, and when an appreciation of the beautiful is added to a demand for the precise, do science and art unite to form both a religion and a morality, to satisfy man's longing for vital perfection, and his enquiry after the data upon which he should base his actions. In the poetry of to-day we see the first sign on a wide scale of this combination of accurate thought and sympathy. All evolution in art as in life is towards a higher, more intense and more embracing form of consciousness. This is the only true aristocracy, and the danger of the scientific spirit is that it tends to the accumulation of knowledge instead of the comprehension of values. Modern poets in their fear of sentimentalism and in their fidelity to facts have for the most part at present an incomplete grasp of idealism, a diffidence sometimes bordering upon scepticism. They dare not devote their sensibility to life for fear of error or excess, because in the poetry

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of the last age they see so often examples of an emotional conviction imposed arbitrarily upon facts which, rightly considered, denied it. They see, in short, truth sacrificed to feeling. They are timid, therefore, of attempting to comprehend the cosmos, and some of them exaggerate their own egotism, and thus dwarf their sensibility in their consciousness of the rights and responsibility of the human will. They are in a less aggravated way like some of Dostoievsky's characters who compel themselves to do things against which their whole natures revolt, that they may at least be sure of their own human prerogative; who are even in the last degree prepared to kill themselves to assert their own wills. Yet already it is tentatively recognised that an assertion of will, no more than an indulgence of appetite or a barren intellectuality can bring man happiness or reconcile his aspirations with his environment, but that only through imaginative effort, that is through the light of reason working in harmony with, but also more finely than the forces of nature, can men learn the truth of life and how to realise through it the highest possibilities of their humanity.

This fusion of all the human faculties is still to be realised in the future; in preceding chapters we have traced briefly how in man's nature a state of dualism sprang up with developing consciousness out of an instinctive unity. We can only vision by

faith the possibility of a new and ultimate reconciliation. At present man's body made half-conscious of mind, has lost the secret or the desire of mere physical satisfaction, while his mind, uncertain how to form a free but wise alliance with the body, seeks in vain for intellectual certainty; and so he is content merely to protest against a supposed celestial providence, long accepted blindly by simple minds -but now discredited. This revolt against the sanctifying of nature is perhaps the most marked and hopeful symptom of the modern consciousness.

It is the latest tendency of Protestantism, the culmination of the doctrine of free-will, the consummation of humanity; and when the critical element in it has ceased to preponderate in its denial of life, and men are content rather to welcome all experience positively, and are able to discriminate the true from the false in the very act of accepting, Protestantism will have ceased to be a partial instrument of progress and a negative check upon natural impulse, and will finally justify itself in the complete realisation of human as distinct from animal values.

At present the critical attitude, of which circumstances have, particularly during the last hundred years, enforced the need, exists to a degree prejudicial to great creative energy. For manifestly it must always be the hardest of all tasks to write great poetry-poetry of compelling power and subtle rhythm, of daring image and dithyrambic

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energy, which yet serves a true and not distorted imagination, and which is therefore rational at its Prejudice and partisanship of their nature excite passion and so beget the matter of poetry. Reason tends to neutralise passion, unless it can be persuaded to serve and sublimate it into pure vision as in all the greatest moments of poetry (beyond the habitual reach of a Byron or a Swinburne) it has done.

Poets, however, looking back upon the last century, are with reason suspicious of prolific energies. They doubt the quality and the consequences of large emotions. For the leading figures of the Romantic revival threw off the control of tradition, whether embodied in an outworn moral or social code or in a cult of dead humanism, because they demanded the right to express their natures to the full. Ideally this should have led to a great imaginative revival and a restoration of absolute values to both life and art. In a few poets of genius and for a few brief years such an ideal was enthusiastically embraced, if often imperfectly realised. Ceasing merely to rebel rhetorically against relative standards, they visioned a life of true spiritual liberty. On a wave of emotional desire they mounted to a conception of absolute beauty and justice as imaginative as it was in the last resort sincerely humanitarian.

But a sensation, however high, of Paradise regained is a dangerous thing. Even the leaders of this movement frequently confused their facts and their ideals,