Part 11

As who should say, “Take away the name and anybody can tell the artist.” But experience proves the contrary.

I do not say that the virtuosi would all be exposed, as by the pedigree of a Da Vinci bust, could we light on a source of certainty like the contemporary slatings in the _Renaissance Review_. Some of these sleuth-hounds might even be vindicated; and I opine that to you, _amico mio_, who of thirty-three Titians in a London exhibition pronounced no less than thirty-two to be hung on false evidence, the discovery of a set of _Accademia_ catalogues would not be unwelcome. But your career as a connoisseur would close. Dead too would be the school of Morelli, collapsed the drapery students and ear-measurers, whose mathematics had, indeed, as little relation to Art as it has to life.

The Sherlock Holmeses of Science and Art dig up old cities, reconstruct forgotten civilisations, redistribute famous pictures, and amend corrupt texts or corrupt them more hopelessly. It is but rarely that they have imaginative and historic insight. “Learning is but an adjunct to ourselves,” says Biron. Scholars are too often but an adjunct to learning. For men with real insight there are enough dead civilisations and forgotten customs still flourishing all about us. The taboo, the fetish, the totem, the oracle, and the myth are the very atmosphere of our being.

Our generation will leave newspapers and museums—nay, gramophone records and the films of bioscopes; the ghosts of our shapes and voices will haunt our posterity, and the only chance for scholars will be to condense the too, too ample materials—there are four miles of novels already in the British Museum—or perhaps a few beneficent fires will give scholarship a new lease of life. At their best and richest antiquarian studies only help to make the past present again, but how does that help us in essential insight? The past of to-morrow is here to-day and we are no wiser. In the hundredth century the excavator may exhume London, but we see London even more clearly to-day, and how does that help us in the real problems?

No; the only help for us lies in those elements of Truth which we draw from ourselves, not receive from without—in those emotional and volitional contacts with the essence of things which accompany all intellectual perception; in these motor aspects of reality which drive us along, these flashes of faith and spiritual intuition which, although they may vary from age to age under the spell of individual poets and prophets, and under the evolution of knowledge and civilisation,

“Are yet a master-light of all our seeing.”

They may have been intertwined with incorrect intellectual elements, but because one antenna of the apparatus of consciousness functions falsely we are not therefore justified in wholly rejecting the joint report. When we think of the vast number of contradictory truths by which men in all ages and countries have lived and died, we shall find consolation in the thought that the emotional and volitional elements of Truth are more important than its intellectual skeleton.

But what a curious confusion that these emotional and volitional elements should themselves come to be treated as intellectual, and desiccated into dogmas! This is the result of their seeking expression in words, that unsuitable, impossible and fading medium. It is through their felicitous escape from words that verbally inarticulate artists and musicians paint and compose truer things than philosophers say, things that survive vicissitudes of thought and are as true to-morrow as yesterday. With the music of the Roman Catholic Church we all agree, and who shall contradict the Venus of Milo?

Yes, a statue or a symphony is safe from syllogisms, at least until it gets into the hands of the art critic and the programme-concocter. But the truth airily embodied in words is at the mercy of system-builders and deduction-squeezers. Taken with the hard definiteness of coins—as if, indeed, even coins did not vary from day to day in purchasing power and according to the country of circulation,—the words are added together to yield a specific sum of truth. Flying prophetic phrases and wingèd mystical raptures are shot down and stuffed for Church Catechisms and Athanasian Creeds. As if the emotional and volitional fringe of living words permitted them to be thus sterilised into scientific propositions! For just as facts are the skeletons of truths, so words are single bones, and the dictionary is a vast ossuary. Talk of the dead languages—all languages are dead unless spoken, and spoken with real feeling. A parrot always speaks a dead language. It is the folly of a universal language that it assumes the same vocabulary could be used over a vast area of varying conditions, its words never expanding nor contracting in meaning, nor ever changing in pronunciation or colour. As if Latin was not once universal in those countries which have gradually transformed it into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Provençal, Roumanian, and Rumonsch! Idiomatic expressions cannot be torn from the soil they grow in. Mañana has not the same meaning outside Spain nor Kismet outside Islam. Language lays such traps for fools; the fools have always spoiled and fossilised what the men of genius have felt and thought. They have made logic out of poetry and have deadened worship and wonder into theology. “What do you read?” says Hamlet. “Words, words, words.”

A truth, then, may be formulated, but it is not true till it is felt and acted on, and ceases to be true when it ceases to be felt and acted on. Nor does this canon apply only to inner truths. Without an element of feeling and volition, however shadowy, even the simple realities of the outer world have never been perceived, and the omission of these elements invalidates the total reality. If so many readers skip scenery in novels, ’tis because the scene is described as though it existed in itself. The dead chunk of landscape bores and depresses. The reader subconsciously feels that so impersonal a vision is untrue to the actualities of perception. Nobody has ever seen a landscape without some emotion, if only the traveller’s desire to be at the other end of it. A dozen persons—even omitting the colour-blind—would see it in as many different ways, each with different accompaniments of feeling, thought, and volition, potential or actual, just as every person in _The Ring and the Book_ sees Pompilia differently. Let the novelist describe the scene, not for itself, but for its relation to the emotions and purposes of his personages, and it leaps into life. Similar is the case of Science, whose facts in divesting themselves of all emotion and individual error divest themselves likewise of reality. The dry scientific coldness with which the universe must be envisaged is an artificial method of vision. True, the scientist himself may be impelled by the most tingling curiosity. But the passion and thrill of his chase for truth does not appear in the quarry: that is a mere carcase. His report on his speciality is always carefully divested of emotion. But our emotional and volitional relations to the spectacle of existence are as much a part of the total truth of things as colour is of the visible world. The world is not complete without

“The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet’s dream.”

When Lear cries to the heavens that they too are old, or Lamartine calls on the lake to remember his happiness, Ruskin would tell us that this suffusion of Nature with our own emotions is the pathetic fallacy. On the contrary, its absence is the scientific fallacy. Science registers the world as the phonograph registers sound or the camera space—without any emotion of its own. As the former with equal phlegm records a song or a curse, or the latter a wedding or a funeral, so does Science register its impassive observations. For once admit such a shifting subjective factor as emotion, and what becomes of the glorious objectivity of Science? Away, therefore, with all but the frigid intellectual view of things! Since the other elements of Truth elude our grasp, let us boldly declare them irrelevant. The bankruptcy of Science, you see, comes not at the end of its operations. Science starts bankrupt. It has not sufficient capital to begin trading. Its methods and apparatus are entirely inadequate for the attainment of truth. A cat may look at a king—but its observation will not be very profound. And Science is as little equipped for observing the universe as the cat for observing the king. All it can perceive or establish is chains of causation, or rather recurring sequences of phenomena, in an unconscious _continuum_. It is a _post-mortem_ investigation to ascertain, not the cause of death, but the cause of life.

But the universe is not a quaint collection of dead things in a vacuum, not a museum of stuffed birds or transfixed butterflies, but a breathing, flying, singing, striving, and suffering process—an unfinished infinitude. This kinetic process cannot be expressed in terms of statics. “What is Truth?” says the jesting cosmos, and does not _stay_ for an answer. But by an artificial abstraction parts of it can be expressed for the intellect in static ’ologies and ’onomies, on the understanding that the intellect never forgets to put back its results into the palpitating flux to which they belong and in which alone they have true significance. This understanding the intellect too frequently violates or forgets, and therefore for Truth we must go, not to the man of science, but to the poet, who registers his universe synthetically with soul as well as with brain. Tragedy, comedy, heroic drama, sombre suffering, majestic mystery, all these are in the flux—more surely than ether waves and dancing atoms—and the poet in painting the fulness of life with the fulness of his own emotion is giving us a fuller truth than any that Science can attain to. “We cannot really know the truth unless we love the truth,” said Fénelon. “They who love well will know well.” This is not mysticism but common sense, and Goethe repeated it when he said that “No one can write about anything unless he writes about it with love.” “To see things in their beauty,” said Matthew Arnold, “is to see them in their truth.” It may be that the knowledge of things through pure intellect is pure delusion, that to pigeon-hole the universe is to make it into a cemetery. Instead of that “love is blind,” the truth may be that only love sees. There is a sense in which every mother’s babe _is_ the most beautiful in the world.

Knowledge, then, as a mere function of the intellect, is only the dead knowledge that appears in school-books. But who shall say that knowledge was meant to be only a function of the intellect, that we do not know with our heart and soul as well as with our brains? Nay, as if to mock at mere intellect, the universe absolutely refuses to yield up its secret to the intellect. Hence the antinomies of Kant or Mansel or Plato’s “Parmenides.” Follow up mere thought, however apparently clear, and it lands us in nonsense. Perhaps wisdom does not lie that way at all. Perhaps the fear of the Lord is really the beginning of wisdom.

For if Science is Truth in one dimension and Art Truth in two dimensions, it is only when we complete emotional vision by volition that we arrive at Truth’s full-orbed reality. Even love cannot bring wisdom unless the love translates itself into action. In short, the meaning of Truth must be changed from a dead fact of the intellect into a live fact of the whole being. The Truth is also the Way and the Life.

Aristotle in his “Metaphysics” tells us that Cratylus carried the scepticism of Heraclitus to such a degree that he at last was of opinion one ought to speak of nothing, but merely moved his finger. Aristotle does not see that in this moving of his finger Cratylus was asserting at least the volitional element of Truth and perhaps its most important. For the universe is not a museum, placarded “Look, but please do not touch.” It says, “Touch, and then you will really see. Live, work, love, fight, and then you will really know what the nature of your universe is.”

The world of the physical sciences is only the stage-setting for the spiritual drama. Though there is a truth of dead things called Science, the real truth is of live things—a triple truth in which intellect, will, and emotion are one. Our sense of this truth—obtained as it is during emotional volition—is individual, irreducible to the simpler planes of Science and Art, and thus incommunicable. And the measure of our attainment of it will be the measure of our sympathetic insight and of the depth to which we have penetrated by action into the heart of the phenomena. Then what seemed a mass of dull facts may break into music like a Beethoven score under the baton of a master.

The scientist who should say that a Beethoven symphony consisted of the atoms of the paper and ink which constitute the score, or even who expressed it mathematically as a sequence of complex air-vibrations made by strings and holes, would be talking truth; but as incomplete and irrelevant truth as the ignoramus who should say it was curious black strokes and dots on ruled paper, or the statistician who should count the semi-breves or fortissimo passages. The true truth of the symphony comes into being only when it is interpreted by the finest performers to souls whose life it enlarges.

And so with the universe, which is not a dead, complete thing outside of us, but a palpitating spiritual potentiality, for the fullest truth about which the co-operation of our own souls is needed, our souls that create a part of the truth they perceive or aspire to. The universe, in short, is a magic storehouse from which we may draw—or into which put—what we will to the extent of our faith, our emotion, our sense of beauty our righteousness. “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”

OF FACTS WITH ALIEN AUTOCOSMS: OR THE FUTILITY OF CULTURE

When I betake me to a zoological garden, equipped with a pennyworth of popcorn, a food strangely popular even among the carnivora, I am touched by a prescience of all the pleasure and dumb gratitude to be evoked by those humble grains. And in truth how many eager caged creatures are destined to have a joyous thrill of sniffing suspense, followed by the due titillation of the palate! My proffering fingers shall meet the gentle nose of the deer, the sensitive arching trunk of the elephant, the kindly peck of parrots, the mischievous hands of monkeys, the soft snouts of strange beasts. Not otherwise is it when, faring forth to Italy, I provision myself with a bag of coin. Into what innumerable itching tentacles these gilded or cuprous grains are to drop: white-cuffed hands of waiters, horny digits of _vetturini_ and _facchini_, gnarled fins of gondoliers and hookers, grimy paws of beggars, shrivelled stumps of cripples, dexterous toes of armless ancients, spluttering mouths of divers, rosy fingers of flower-throwing children, persuasive plates of serenading musicians, deceptive ticket-holes of dishonest railway clerks, plethoric pockets of hotel-keepers, greedy tills of bargaining shopkeepers, pious palms of monks and sacristans, charity-boxes of cathedrals, long-handled fishing-nets of little churches, musty laps of squatting, mumbling crones, greasy caps of guides, official pyxes of curators and janitors, clutching claws of unbidden cicerones. All these—and how many more!—photographers and painters and copyists and forgers, modellers and restorers and lecturers on ruins, landlords and cooks and critics—live by Italy’s ancient art. Great Cæsar dead—and turned to Show.

The beauty of Italy is elemental fodder for the autochthones; yet how strange the existence of the Neapolitan swimmer whose _métier_ is to dive for coppers when the steamer sails for the witching cliffs of Sorrento, and to cry in enticing gurgles, “Money in the water!” the spluttering syllables flowing into one another as in the soft _patois_ of Venice! Precisely when the Bay of Naples is a violet dancing flame, and Vesuvius, majestically couchant, sends her white incense to the blue, and you are tranced with beauty and sunshine, comes this monetary merman to drag you down to the depths.

“Nutritive chains” the biologists name the inter-related organisms whose existence depends on one another, and another link of this chain you shall count the boatmen waiting to show you the blue grotto of Capri. Their skiffs dart upon you like creatures whose prey comes only at a fixed hour; like creatures, moreover, shaped in the struggle for existence to the only function by which they can survive, for they are fittest to pass under the low arch of the cerulean grotto (the occupant consenting to crouch like an antenna drawn in). That ardent water in the Capri cave—that lovely flame of light blue in a bluer burning spirit—sustains likewise the naked diver who stands poised on a rock, ready to show its chromatic effects upon flesh; the culminating moment of whose day—the feeding-time, as it were—comes when the tourists glide in.

Apt symbol indeed of the tourist, that shallow skiff skimming over beauty with which the native is in deep elemental contact, from which, indeed, he wrests his living.

Since Goethe with his gospel of culture spent those famous _Wanderjahre_ in Italy, a swollen stream of pious art-pilgrims has been pouring over the land. And coming into Florence from Lucca and a sheaf of quiet cities on an afternoon of this spring, I had a horrid impression of modern bustling streets and motors and trams and a great press of people, and ten thousand parasites battening on the art and beauty of the city, and it was not till I had won my way to my beloved Ponte Vecchio, with its mediæval stalls, that the city of the lily seemed to possess her soul again. Then as I saw her compose herself under her deep blue sky into a noble harmony, with her heights and her palaces and her river and her arches and arcades, and group herself round a tower, and brood in Venetian glamour over her water with her ancient rusty houses, and rise behind into a fantasy of quaint roofs and brick domes and steeples and belfries, all floating in a golden glory; and as I reflected on all she was and held within her narrow compass, how the names of great men and great days were written on every stone, and how every sort of art had been poured over her as prodigally as every sort of earth-beauty; and as I thought of the enchanting villages around and above her, where the cypress and the olive, the ilex and the pine slumbered in the sunshine, amid great rocks that shadowed cool glooming pools, and white roads went winding odorous with may and sweet with the song of thrush and blackbird, framing and arabesquing the faery city below in magic tangles of leafy boughs; and as I remembered that here to-day in this same city was not only spring, but Botticelli’s _Spring_—then it seemed to me that her flowers and her palaces, her frescoes and the curves of her hills were pushed up from the same deep elemental core of beauty, and that she lay like some great princess of Brobdingnag on whose body a colony of all the culture-snobs of the world had dumped its masses of raw building, run up its hundreds of hotels and _pensions_, piled its pyramids of handbooks, biographies, _Dantes_, histories, essays, landed its hordes of guides and interpreters, encamped its army of lecturers and art critics, installed its cohort of copyists, dragged up its heavy battery of professional photographers, supplemented by an amateur corps of Kodak snapshooters; but that, breathing lightly beneath all this mountainous cumber, unasphyxiated even by the works on the Renaissance, she could still rise radiant in her immortal strength and beauty, shaking off the Lilliputian creatures and their spawn of print, ungalled by that ceaseless fire of snapshots, imperturbable amid the lecturing, unimpaired even by all that immemorial admiration.

The pioneers of this culture-colony blundered sometimes, as pioneers will, and even Goethe, one notes with malicious glee, spent himself upon the wrong pictures, gloating over Guercino, wrestling with Caracci, Guido and Domenichino, and passing Botticelli by, nay taking all Florence as an afternoon excursion. And Pater himself, the pontifical Pater, though he has the merit of a Botticelli pioneer, yet thought it necessary to apologise for criticising “a second-rate painter”: which is as though one should apologise for discussing Keats.

Nor were Byron and Shelley more felicitous in their admirations. The _Kunstforscher_, that Being usually made in Germany, has been busy since their day. Amid the great movement of life, while men have been sowing and reaping, writing and painting, voyaging and making love, this spectacled creature has been peering at pictures and statues, scientifically analysing away their authenticity and often their charm. There is the Venus de’ Medici, which generations have raved over, which innumerable processions of tourists have journeyed to admire and found admirable. The connoisseurs have now pronounced her “spurious and meretricious,” and to-day nobody who respects himself would allow himself a thrill at the sight of her. Yet Childe Harold cried:

“We gaze and turn away, and know not where, Dazzled and drunk with beauty, till the heart Reels with its fulness.”

I must admit that after the Venus of Milo the beauty of the Medici Venus does appear a trivial prettiness. But even the Venus of Milo—though we are still permitted to admire her—is “late and eclectic.”

The unhappy Byron also wrote to somebody: “The Venus is more for admiration than for love. What struck me most was the mistress of the Raphael portrait.” Alas! nobody believes now that the picture has anything to do with La Fornarina.

As for Shelley, when in 1819 he saw at Florence the _Medusa_ attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, he broke into lyric raptures,

“Its horror and its beauty are divine, Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie Loveliness like a shadow, &c. &c. * * * “’Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare, Kindled by that inextricable error! . . .”

Kindled indeed by that inextricable error! For the _Medusa_ is now given up by every connoisseur. It is a mere inartistic futility and to-day every lover of the arts must grow stony at the sight of it. That immortal line “the tempestuous loveliness of terror” is the only thing to its credit, though some might count, too, the passage in which Pater gloats over its beauty of conception.

Then there is that little matter of Leonardo’s _St. John_ in the Louvre. Michelet saw the whole Renaissance in it, and Pater alludes to it as “one of the few naked figures Leonardo painted,” and builds upon it a complex theory of Leonardo’s symbolic suggestive method, and is not surprised at the saint’s “strange likeness to the Bacchus which hangs near it, which set Théophile Gautier thinking of Heine’s notion of decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves after the fall of Paganism, took employment in the new religion.” And now the _St. John_ turns out to have been a pupil’s or an imitator’s, and probably not even a St. John.