Beauty: the Vision whereunto,

In joy, with pantings, from afar,

Through sound and odour, form and hue,

And mind and clay, and worm and star—

Now touching goal, now backward hurled—

Toils the indomitable world.

Watson

La vie est un degré de l’échelle des mondes

Que nous devons franchir pour arriver ailleurs.

Lamartine

Mankind at its best and most promising—I propose now to take a glance at a more cheerful aspect of human life. In the fine arts man has travelled farther from the animals and nearer to the angels than in any other of his enterprises or accomplishments. He is there in some measure a creator. And we shall not, I fancy, be required to argue the proposition that of all his multifarious undertakings the production of music and poetry, of painting and sculpture have been the least denounced and condemned. You may not be greatly interested in these forms of human activity, but you will let them pass, you will not be enraged by them. They have not, indeed, altogether escaped the censure of the stricter moralists, but I have never heard of a society for their suppression. It would, I think, be difficult to prove that music and poetry, painting and sculpture have been responsible for much infelicity; easy, on the contrary, to show that they have added considerably to the sum of human happiness. Artists have in their works given to their fellow creatures the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of pain.

Now, if indisputable, this claim, in so carping and contentious a world as ours, is, when we come to consider it, of singular interest, and, it may be, of high importance. The peculiar place of the arts in human esteem, if we understood aright the reasons for it, should throw light on many dark matters, even the most obscure. For it is in the exploration of human nature rather than of the material world that we are likely to come to some understanding of our most pressing problems. Its secrets lie deeper than the secrets of the vault of heaven, and the astronomy of souls is a more difficult science than that of the stars. And it almost seems as if nature had taken man into partnership to carry on her creative design. For in the arts he has planted new flowers in her garden, which some think fairer than any of her own, since in the pictures, the music and the poems much has been said that nature herself never so much as thought, and could not herself have said. What shall we conclude, then? To see where we stand we shall have, I fear, to go back to the beginning.

The universe has brought us into existence, which is, of course, the fundamental thing, the basis of everything. Life, however, we have discovered, is not enough. Simply to be, to exist, is not in itself sufficient. We ask for more than existence, we ask for a happy existence, free from all vexation—in a word, for heaven. For some reason nature, possibly because she had done all she could, probably for some other and profounder reason, having given us life, stayed her hand, with the unfortunate results we see. She produced a world, but thoughtlessly failed or neglected to produce a paradise, leaving that undertaking to us; the making of a heaven for ourselves—a difficult business. And the best we have been able to do so far is to create a dream world, a world of the imagination, superior in a number of ways to the world in which we actually live, much pleasanter if less substantial. The root of the satisfaction the arts provide is thus easily explained. In the imaginative representation of the world and life we are freed of their disagreeable features, which are, as everyone knows, pretty numerous. ‘Since’, said Bacon, ‘the world is in proportion inferior to the soul, there is agreeable to the spirit of man a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness and a more absolute variety than can be found in the nature of things.’

Quite true, but how did we come to pitch our requirements so high? The other animals placidly accept things as they are. The soul of man, you might think, had strayed out of its native country into a dry and thirsty land, and recalls its happier childhood. Like the traveller lost in the desert, it revisits in dreams the country known in earlier days, or was it before birth? Since, then, in music and poetry the lost paradise is in a measure regained, where like birds we are free to fly whither we please, their appeal to human nature may, we think, easily be understood. The poet Blake, you remember, pertinently enquires:

What do we here,

In this land of unbelief and fear?

The land of dreams is better far,

Above the light of the Northern Star.

Very good, and all quite simple. You may say that dreams, and artists, who are the purveyors of dreams, with dreams to sell, reminding us of something lost and certainly in universal demand, a painless existence, have thus found favour in our eyes. But where is this bright paradise for which we pine, and how did we come to leave it? Meditate a little longer, recall the ancient fables of the Garden of Eden and of the Golden Age, those strange echoes from the depths of the human soul, and you presently find yourself at the heart of a great mystery, immersed in the metaphysics of Being and Becoming, surveying heights where there is no secure foothold for human reason, and only to be trodden by philosophical mountaineers. What are we to understand by these alarming terms?

Avoiding, as we must, the technical language of the academic schools, and putting upon them our own interpretation, let us begin by saying that there are two modes of existence, which we may call passive and active ways of existing, its positive and negative poles. As we have had so often to remind ourselves in speaking of the One and the Many, we are surrounded by a great multitude of things, to which in the aggregate we give the name, nature. Nature presents an astonishing scene of varied shapes and colours, and of creatures pursuing innumerable and diverse ways of life. As the support of these surroundings, of all we see, know and experience, human reason is driven to postulate some underlying foundation or principle upon which they rest, the ground of all that is, or appears, which is the

Form in all forms, and of all souls the soul.

This is Being, which exists in its own right: ‘The One, without Predicates’ of Plotinus, to which many names have been given—the Absolute, Mind or God. You may call it what you will. Let us call it simply Being, ‘ageless and deathless’, the all-pervading Spirit in whom ‘our dark foundations rest’, revealed in the world’s existence and the surprising aspirations of the mind.

As we cannot doubt, though no eye has ever seen it, that the moon has another side than that she presents to the earth, so with this sustaining principle. Reason compels us to assume behind the visible scene its everlasting presence. Further, as we have previously agreed, Being in isolation, undisclosed or undistributed Being, is with difficulty, if at all, to be distinguished from Not-Being. A power never manifested, how could it be known? The world with which we are acquainted is a manifold. It has many observable parts. By that airy syllable ‘world’ we mean an assemblage of particulars, a variety, a heterogeneous multiplicity, interlocked and most intimately associated, yet, in appearance and on the surface at least, infinitely diversified. Now Being is not open to our inspection, and if it is to exhibit or reveal itself, if it is to be explicitly known as a world, it must somehow pass into Becoming, an active state, or, you may say, be projected on a different plane, the plane of measurable extension and duration, of space and time, with which we have some little acquaintance. And this variegated, moving pageant we term the world is just this other mode or pole of Being, its progressive manifestation or creation, which thus declares itself, and becomes visible in action. ‘What appears’, as Anaxagoras said, ‘is a vision of the unseen.’

The world of our acquaintance, the Many or nature, is, then, Being externalised, our view of it; and Becoming is, we might say, its revealed or lighted side. How this actualisation or manifestation has come about we need not ask. It is clean beyond our range. Somehow from pure Being has emerged the procession of the starry universe, and all that followed in its train. Somehow in Becoming, in this diversified scene, the true nature of Being is displayed.

Observe now, bearing in mind that the language we employ is necessarily metaphorical and figurative, that in these two modes of existence, the passive and the active, we have our own small share. We describe them as our sleeping and waking states. We may think of a man asleep as in Being, as alive, as a potential force, but if we are to think of him as his true self we must see him awake. Not when alone and asleep, but when at the opposite pole of his existence, when he has exchanged passivity for activity, does he reveal his true nature. When he is awake, when he is up and doing, we come to know him on his lighted side.

And what of the man himself, how is he affected? In his waking condition, in his state of active Becoming, he has sacrificed something, the sweet oblivion in which men forget their anxieties, the pauper his poverty, the diseased his sickness, the ruined man the loss of his wealth, the bereaved his bereavement. The man awake has left behind him the divine repose, the heavenly peace he enjoyed in the blissful condition simply of Being. He has, you might say, mounted the battlements, and is now perpetually oh anxious guard. He looks out upon the battle in the plain beneath him, upon the conflicts, the antagonisms, the swaying tide of events, in which he has his own part to play. He is no longer alone with himself, but immersed in the seething flux of the public world, a man among innumerable other men and creatures, whose desires, aims and purposes run counter to his own. He has entered the turbulent arena of the contending opposites.

The waking state affords, indeed, opportunities denied him when alone in the quiet he has left, opportunities to see and be seen, occasions for the acquisition of experiences, the exercise of his energies, in which there is perpetual delight, opportunities for expansion, for becoming more than he has so far been. But all at a price, the price of unremitting anxiety, watchfulness, frustration, disappointment, wounds and pain. He gains, doubtless, much, yet he has relinquished the blessed ease of his former state. He is an exile from Nirvana, the Nirvana of pure Being. In the realm of Becoming we are busy among other creatures like ourselves. We enjoy the pursuit of our personal inclinations, the exertion of our powers. Its adventures and undertakings have their value. But they are only to be had in the society of the Many, the others like ourselves, bent equally upon their separate ends and individual needs. They are only to be enjoyed amid the crowd of jostling fellow travellers, pushing and elbowing their way through the streets and markets, a bustling, noisy, hearty, pleasure-seeking, love-making, jesting, quarrelling, competitive, making-the-best-of-it crowd.

The soul in solitude, the sleeping soul, is in seclusion and at peace, but it is at a standstill. In that quiescent state, however heavenly it be, there can be no fulfilment of its nature, nothing accomplished. A man asleep, what can he be said to be? All differences between him and other men are obliterated. He is neither a pagan nor a Christian. He belongs to no party and assists no cause. He is neither a lover of beauty nor a searcher for truth, neither a good nor a bad man. He is an occupant of space, but his existence has neither value nor significance, and his Being is hardly to be distinguished from Not-Being. Yet a touch may wake him, may transform him into a maker of history, a poet, a founder of states, an Alexander or Napoleon storming through the world, a demi-god, worshipped by millions; a touch may transfigure him into the statesman, the saint, the thinker, whose force the world may feel, and by whose power the centuries may be shaken.

The soul, we may agree, exists for itself, and is concerned for itself. None the less for the growth and expansion of its native and latent powers it is in need of an arena, a world of souls. If I am to exist in any true sense it can only be in relation with other existences. You may say, indeed, if you like, that the realm of Being is the world of reality, the realm of Becoming a world of appearances. There is no more favourite thesis with philosophers. You may say with Shelley that, lost in its stormy visions, ‘we keep’ there ‘with phantoms an unprofitable strife’; nevertheless, it is in the latter state, and there only, that experience is possible, or a realisation of the nature that to the soul essentially belongs. It was built for this voyage. And the company of others is as much a necessity for each living thing as the necessity of remaining simply itself alone.

Here, then, is the dilemma. Which is the better state, which to be preferred, Being or Becoming? In which is the soul’s true home? Can we say either, or should we say both? We can only reply that the question was answered once upon a time by the many souls in the bosom of the One, the One of Being. They could find in its eternal tranquillity no field for development. Existence there did not suffice them. And the desire to be awake, to be abroad and at work for themselves, to be makers of their own world, that, or a creative fiat which launched them into Becoming, gave birth to the universe we see and know.

So we may most reasonably account, as it seems to me, for things as they are and our present state. I can think of no better way. For the universe is no unorganised conglomeration of senseless things. It has a structure which calls for explanation. We are certainly not to suppose the whole of Being as once and for all, and in its present actualisation, complete. Its resources are vast, and there will always remain more to be revealed. We must think of Being as manifesting in space and time all that it can be, displaying there its inexhaustible wealth, unfolding itself in the succeeding phases of a world without end. And that process is throughout periodic or rhythmical, exhibited to us in the lesser rhythms, echoes of the unseen and greater—in the seasonal pulsations of nature, the alternation of her phases of activity and repose. The undulations of whatever it be that underlies matter, or constitutes it, are invariably periodic. A molecule of hydrogen vibrates, we are told, 450 million times a second. The souls, too, in the universe similarly display their twofold nature, in that they are wayfarers, continually passing from quiescent Being into active Becoming, and from active Becoming into quiescent Being. In our pulses throbs the pulse of nature in her alternating phases.

The running winds of springtime call

For culmination and repose,

And autumn, letting roses fall,

Sighs for the spring that brings the rose.

Nor can we suppose ourselves here and now to have full knowledge of ourselves, or to be fully known. For as the whole of Being is displayed at any time on the plane of action only in process and in part, so also with its constituent souls.

Empedocles is cited as saying that ‘of necessity Love and Strife control things and move them part of the time, and that they are at rest during the intervening time’. If the One reassemble the Many, it will send them forth again as before. No one has yet shown us, or can show us, that it will be a different Many, as some philosophies assume. Why should it be? The bonds of affection are as real as the sympathies between electrons and protons. All that exists, all reality, is permanent, and spaces and times are for the souls but the media of their intercommunication with each other. They will sleep out the nights, but the days will see them again. ‘There is’, as Sir Thomas Browne said, ‘something in us that can be without us, and will be after us; though it is strange that it has no history of what it was before us, nor cannot tell us how it entered in us.’ The souls which were in the beginning within the whole of Being ‘last’, in the words of Leibniz, ‘as long as the universe’, and ‘go from better to better … although most of this takes place imperceptibly, and sometimes with great circuits backwards.’

And what could be more simple or reasonable, more agreeable to thought, than the balanced rhythm of repose and activity that nature exhibits in her ebb and flow, in the counterpoise or antiphony of sleep and waking, death and life, withdrawal and renewal? As a longing for activity and companionship, native to the soul, invades it in the sphere of Being, so its counterpart, a longing for release from the buffetings of Becoming, the sailor’s longing for a haven, returns it to the peace of Being.

Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,

Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.

So rocked in nature’s cradle we feel the motion of her rising and her falling tides. Whatever the varying shapes and alliances the vision of life presents, nothing can enter existence that was not for ever there, nothing passes out of existence. You cannot go in and out, enter or leave the universe as if it were a house amid surrounding scenery. And the vast assembly of which Being consists has in Becoming its scene of action. Theirs is the patterned world around us, theirs the figured tapestry on the loom of time. What else than overwhelming, what less than wonderful and terrible, could it be when we consider its extent, duration, and the myriad agencies and activities, ‘the many operations of gods and men’, as Plutarch has it, there represented?

We have fetched a wide compass. What, you may ask, have Being and Becoming, or the cosmic rhythms to do with the music and poetry, painting and sculpture, we set out to discuss? Here is the answer in the words of Hegel. ‘It is in works of art that nations have deposited their profoundest intuitions, and ideas of their hearts; and fine art is frequently the key—with many nations there is no other—to the understanding of their wisdom and of their religion.’ Yes, but why? Why in the fine arts? Why in them rather than in the religions themselves, in the sciences and philosophies, the civic structures, the political institutions should we have the key to the human soul, to the deepest strata of its intuitions, its innermost wisdom? For the simple reason, shall we not answer, that they speak in the language of the soul rather than of the intellect, in a universal language, universally understood?

‘There seems’, said Aristotle, ‘to be a sort of relationship between the soul on the one hand, and harmonies and rhythms on the other.’ There is, indeed, such a relationship. And there is an undeniable knowledge possessed by the soul, when it keeps silence and appears to be asleep. The human body contains, or consists of, a vast system of inter-related rhythmical processes. If that be so, and we are in no doubt that it is so, and if these processes preserve it in an environment which is itself a system of rhythms, the accentuated, pulsing system of nature, whose swelling and subsiding waves are everywhere in their periods clearly in a thousand ways to be discerned—as, for example, even in the ripple which the distribution of the lines in the spectrum so exquisitely displays—if in sober fact we are from birth to death, in soul and body, in all our vital processes immersed in a pulsing ocean, it would, indeed, be surprising if in such a rhythmical universe we were left unmoved by the rhythmical arts, which reproduce its measures, and thus play upon the corresponding and fundamental strings of our nature. ‘Whatever is harmonically disposed’, in Sir Thomas Browne’s words, ‘delights in harmony’, and music, he held, following the inspired thought of Pythagoras, ‘is an Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole World … such a melody as the whole World, well understood, would afford the understanding.’ Schopenhauer was of the same opinion. ‘We may regard the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing.’

Is this mere mystical rhetoric? I do not think so. Through rhythm we are in the closest, most vital and intimate relationship with the entire Cosmos, which in this, its primary and proper language, speaks to us in every fibre of our being. And with compelling authority, an authority the human race has from the earliest times and in all lands acknowledged. From prehistoric ages music appears in association with the magical, religious and medicinal rites of all primitive peoples, invariably accompanied, as they were, with an incantation, a song or chant. ‘Tis, then, no unwarrantable thought that in the highest reaches of the rhythmical arts we are privileged to hear, however fitfully, utterances ‘above a mortal mouth’, when

‘Tis scarce like sound, it tingles through the frame

As lightning tingles.

To the soul’s instincts and intuitions, such as direct the lives of animals, by which they navigate their course, the talent of the spider, the genius of the bee, the occult chemistry by which the caterpillar transforms itself into a butterfly, to these mysterious powers that brilliant detective, the wide-awake intellect, has no vestige of a clue. Nor could it have. For consciousness is not thought, nor thought an activity of consciousness, nor possibly even assisted by it. Thought, noticed or unnoticed, proceeds like a subterranean stream on its unruffled course. The poor soul, despised, denied existence, laughed out of court by the rationalists, how much more it knows, how many more miracles it can perform; how it must smile to itself at their pride and blind, groping labours. So far, indeed—as they fondly imagine—from enlarging our vision in the brain and nervous system of the body, nature has there, and of deliberation, contracted and concentrated our conscious attention upon the outer world, as with a searchlight directed upon a selected situation, confining our observation to things of the present hour. By them, its mortal instruments, the soul’s horizon is narrowed, its sight confined. They are there, the nerves and brain, and of necessity, to contract, not to widen its field of attention, to anchor, to preoccupy its gaze. They focus, you may say, a single wave-length of its ray on mundane and material things. For the truth is that ‘The ear, the eye doth make us deaf and blind.’

So it is that our conscious lives are our surface lives, and upon our association with nature at the deeper levels, upon our wider and true selves nature herself draws down the blind. She would have us, undistracted, attend only to this place and this moment, the events of here and now. By our bodily senses we are limited to the realm of Becoming, pre-engaged with a particular part of the universe, to the immediate surroundings of our daily lives, which are at this present our instant and direct concern. Our senses are our guides to action in a restricted field. For that field only nature has given us eyes and ears; and with it alone, that is with sensible things, the intellect and its servant the brain are qualified to deal.

Yet to conclude that field the beginning and the end of things were sheer delusion. Who is not aware that there are hours in which the soul sinks, as it were, beneath the threshold of its conscious and daily experiences, when its ties with the body are relaxed, when it stands at gaze within its spiritual environment. For, as we have seen, we must admit the possibility of supersensible knowledge. And it is to this wider field, haunted by such strange fleeting gleams as are not to be translated into the coinage of the brain, the speech adapted to the traffic of social life, that we are in happy moments afforded entrance by poetry and the other arts. Surprised and momentarily absorbed, as Professor Stewart so well described in his Myths of Plato, by their imagery and rhythms, we are caught up into the abiding presence of ‘That which was, and is and ever shall be’, and it is then ‘We feel that we are greater than we know’.

For rhythm appears to be the distinctive and peculiar dialect, or style of the soul, its idiom or vernacular—as ordinary language is the natural tongue of the workaday intelligence—a vernacular instantly acceptable, and by all men understood. Hence, as Emerson phrased it, ‘You can speak truth uncontradicted in verse, you cannot in prose’. Imagery, too, has upon us an occult and arresting power. Of this staying or arresting influence, the momentary entrancement of attention an image induces, since we have not time to dwell upon it, take a single instance, from Browning’s poem, Colombe’s Birthday:

I will keep your honour safe;

With mine I trust you as the sculptor trusts

Yon marble woman with the marble rose,

Loose on her hand, she never will let fall.