Recent Developments in European Thought Part 3

Further, a special tie is felt to exist between the worshipper and the personality worshipped: religion is the bond of union between them, and it is also a bond which unites the worshippers to one another. It is by its very nature a bond of union, a means of communion between persons, human and divine. That is the mystic aspect of religion which finds expression in the rite of sacrifice and in the sacramental meals which are felt somehow to bind together, or rather to reunite and keep together, the worshippers and their G.o.d. This communion however is not merely mystic: it has its practical effects inasmuch as it affects the conduct of the worshipper and enables him to do what without it he would not have had strength to do.

If fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism radiate from a common centre, the heart of man, then the heart of man must also be regarded as the starting-point of magic. If they spring straight from the heart, though in different directions, dispersively, then magic must also start from the common centre; and, though its divergence from religion tends to become total, at first, and indeed it may be for long, the discrepancy between them is rather felt uneasily than recognized clearly.

Categories, such as those of cause and effect, ident.i.ty and difference, which are the common property of civilized thought, and which among us, Mr. L.T. Hobhouse says, 'every child soon comes to distinguish in practice, are for primitive thought interwoven in wild confusion.' Two categories, which in primitive thought are thus interwoven in wild confusion, are, it may be suggested, religion and magic; and only in the dispersive process of evolution do they tend to become discriminated. In ancient Egypt, in Babylon, in Brahminism, religion fails to disentangle itself from magic; and not even has Christianity always succeeded in throwing it off. Different as we may conceive magic and religion to be, the fact remains that at first they grow up intertwined together. In the lower forms of religion magic is worked not only by magicians but by priests as well; spells and prayers are hardly to be distinguished from one another. The idea that 'priest' is but 'magician' writ differently, that prayers are but spells under another name, is now obsolete. The truth may be that religion neither follows on, nor is evolved from magic, but that both radiate from a common centre, the heart of man; and that at first both are attempts made by man to secure the fulfilment of his desires, to do his will, though eventually he finds that the way to control nature is to obey her, not to try to command her by working magic; and that it is in endeavouring to do G.o.d's will, not his own, that man finds peace at the last.

In the three forms of religion which thus far we have taken into account, fetishism, polytheism, monotheism, religion is felt to be a personal relation--a relation between the human personality and some personality more than human; and the human heart is reaching out and groping after some divine personality, if peradventure it may find Him.

But there is yet another form of religion proceeding from the human heart in which this does not seem to be the case--and that is Buddhism.

The Buddha definitely renounced the search after G.o.d and would not allow his disciples to engage in the pursuit. Practically the pursuit was useless, according to the Buddha: escape from suffering is all that man can want or strive or hope for. Escape from suffering is possible only by cessation from existence; and that cessation from existence, here and hereafter, can be attained by man himself, who can reach Nirvana without the aid of G.o.ds, if G.o.ds there be. From the point of view of metaphysics the idea that there is any relation between the human personality and the divine falls to the ground, according to the Buddha, because, whether there be G.o.ds or not, at any rate there is no human personality.

As in a conflagration--and according to the Buddha the whole world, burning with desire, is in a state of conflagration--the flames leap from one house that is burning to the next, so in its transmigrations the self, or rather the character, _Karman_, like a flame, leaps from one form of existence to another. The flame indeed appears to be there all the time the fire is burning; but the flame has no permanence, it is changing all the time the process of combustion is going on; and 'I'

have no more permanence than the flame. 'I' only appear to be there as long as the process of life goes on. And as the flame only continues so long as there is something for it to feed on, so the process of transmigration or re-birth continues only so long as the thirst for being continues: the escape from re-birth is conditional on the extinction of that thirst or desire; and the disciple who has succeeded in putting off l.u.s.t and desire has attained to deliverance from death and re-birth, has attained to rest, to Nirvana.

Thus, on the 'dispersive' view of the evolution of religion, Buddhism is a radiation from the common centre, from the heart of man, though it radiates in a direction very different from that followed by any other religion. The direction is indeed one which, as the history of religion shows, it has been impossible for man long to follow, for, wherever Buddhism has been established, it has relapsed; and the Buddha, who strove to divert man from prayer and from the worship of G.o.ds, has himself become a G.o.d to whom prayer and worship are addressed. Whether in the future the direction may be pursued more permanently than it has been by Buddhism up to now lies with the future to show.

Buddhism, however, on the 'dispersive' view of the evolution of religion, is not the only radiation from the common centre, of which we have to take account, in addition to fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. From the human heart also proceeds 'the religion of humanity', the Positivist Church. Here, as originally in Buddhism, the conception of a divine personality plays no part; but here the human personality, the very existence of which is denied by the Buddha, is raised to a high, indeed to the highest, level. There is no such thing as an individual, if by 'individual' is meant a man existing solely by himself, for a man can neither come into existence nor continue in existence by himself alone. It is an essential part of the conception of personality that it includes fellowship: a person to be a person must stand in some relation to other persons. They are presented to him, the subject, as objects of his awareness; and he, the subject, is also an object of their awareness. Humanity is thus a complex, in which alone persons are found and apart from which they have in fact no existence.

Humanity thus plays in Positivism, as a religion, the part of 'the great Being', _le grand etre_, which in other religions is fulfilled by G.o.d, but with this difference, that humanity is human always and never divine.

The ruler of a country steers the ship of state, but he is a pilot only metaphorically. Whether the terms worship and prayer are used more than metaphorically by the Positivist seems hard to decide. On the one hand, if it is felt that worship and prayer are indispensable to religion, it may be argued that in religions other than Positivism they prove not only on a.n.a.lysis, but in the course of history, to be, as by Positivism they are recognized to be, of purely subjective import. On the other hard, it may be that they provide merely a means of transition from the religions of the past to the religion of the future.

Another matter of interest is the place of morality in Positivism as a religion. According to M. Alfred Loisy in his book _La Religion_, morality and religion are bound up together. They cannot exist apart from one another: they might, he says, 'be dissociated in fact and thought, were it not that they are inseparable in the life of humanity.' And in his view morality is summed up in the idea of duty. He says, 'in the beginning was duty, and duty was in humanity, and duty was humanity. Duty was at the beginning in humanity. By it all things were made, and without it nothing was made.' Thus, where duty is, there also is religion. Not only, according to Loisy, has that always been so in every stage through which the evolution of religion has pa.s.sed, but it will also be the case with the religion of the future. Thus the conception of evolution which Loisy holds is the same as that entertained by Robertson Smith, the difference being that, whereas on the one view the idea of G.o.d and of communion with Him has been present from the beginning, and, much though it may have changed, it remains to the end the same thing; on the other view it is the idea of duty--the duty which is humanity--that was in the beginning and will continue to the end. Both views are applications of the 'pre-formation' theory of evolution.

But Positivism perhaps is not necessarily tied to the 'pre-formation'

theory. It seems equally capable of being fitted in to the 'dispersive'

theory, and of being regarded as an emanation or radiation proceeding direct from the human heart. It may be so regarded, if we consider the essence of it to be found not in the concept of duty, which seems to imply the existence of some superior who imposes duties on man, but in that love of one's fellow-man which, to be love, must be given freely, and simply because one loves. The sense of obligation, the feeling of duty, obedience to the commandments of authority and to the prohibitions which the community both enforces and obeys, are, all of them, various expressions of the primitive feeling of taboo--a feeling of alarm and fear. If we confine our attention to this set of facts, we may say, with M. Loisy, 'in the beginning was duty, and duty was in humanity'. We may however hesitate to follow him when he goes on to say, 'by duty all things were made, and without it nothing was made'. We may hesitate and the Positivist may hesitate, because, primitive though the feeling of fear may be, the feeling of love is equally original: on it and in it the family and society have their base and their origin; and to it they owe not only their origin but their continuance. Love however is not a matter of duty and obedience; it is not subject to commandment or prohibition; nor does it strive by commands or authority to enforce itself. In the process by which duty--legal and moral obligation--evolves out of the primitive feeling of taboo, love is not implicated: love springs from its own source, the human heart, and runs its own course. Taboo may have existed from the beginning; but to the end, whatever its form--duty, obligation, obedience to authority--it remains in character what it was at first, prohibitive, negative. Love alone is creative: without it 'was not anything made that was made'.

There seems, therefore, no necessity to regard the 'pre-formation'

theory of evolution, rather than the 'dispersive theory, as essential to Positivism.

Common to all the views about the evolution of religion that have been mentioned in this paper is the belief that, the more religion changes, the more it remains the same thing. If identified with duty, then duty it was in the beginning, and duty it will remain to the end. For those who conceive it to be merely magic, magic it was and magic it remains.

Those who define it as belief in a G.o.d and communion with him find that belief in the earliest as well as the latest stages. All would agree in rejecting Bergson's view of evolution--that in evolution there is change, but nothing which changes. All would agree that in the evolution of religion there is something which, change though it may, remains the same thing, and that is religion itself. But on the question what religion is, there is no agreement: no definition of religion as yet--and there have been many attempts to define it--has gained general acceptance. We may even surmise, and admit, that no attempt ever will be successful. Such admission, indeed, may at first to some seem equivalent to admitting that religion is a nullity, and the admission may accordingly be welcomed or rejected. But a moment's reflection will show that the admission has no such consequence. None of our simple feelings can be defined: pleasure and pain can neither be defined; nor, when experienced, doubted. And some of our general terms, those at any rate which are ultimate, are beyond our power either to define or doubt: no one imagines that 'life' can be defined, but no one doubts its existence. And religion both as a term and as a fact of experience is ultimate, and, because ultimate, incapable of definition. It is not to be defined but only to be felt. It is an affair not merely of the intellect, but still more of the heart.

In what sense, then, can we speak of the evolution of religion?

Evolution implies change; and no one doubts that there have been changes in religion. No one can imagine that it has from the beginning till now remained identically the same. What seems conceivable is that throughout there has been, not ident.i.ty but continuity--change indeed in continuity but also continuity in change. The child 'learns to speak the words and think the ideas, to reproduce the mode of thought, as he does the form of speech' of the community into which he is born. In the speech, thought, and feelings--even in the religious feelings--of the community, from generation to generation, there is continuity, but not ident.i.ty.

From generation to generation they are not identical but are continuously changing; and they change because each child who takes them over reproduces them; and, in reproducing them, changes them, not much in most cases, but very considerably in the case of men of genius and the great religious reformers. The heart is the treasure-house in which not only old things are stored, but from which also new things are brought forth. The process of evolution implies indeed that the old things, though not everlasting, persist for a time; but it also implies the manifestation of that which, though continuous with the old, is at the same time new. It is from the heart of man, of some one man, that what is new proceeds: the community it is which is conservative of the old. The heart of man, or man himself, exhibits both change in continuity and continuity in change.

The acorn, the sapling, and the oak are different stages of one continuous process. But it is the same tree throughout the whole process. So, too, perhaps it may be said, religion is a term which includes or is applicable to all stages in the one process, and not to the stage of monotheism alone, or of polytheism alone, or even to those stages alone in which there is a reference to personal beings. Each of these stages is a stage in the process of religion but no stage is by itself the whole process. But this view of the evolution of religion regards religion as though it were an organism, self-subsistent, existing and evolving as independently of man as the oak-tree does; whereas in truth religion has no such independent existence or evolution. It is not from polytheism that monotheism proceeds; nor does polytheism proceed from fetishism: it is from the heart of man that they and all other forms of religion emanate and radiate. To conceive fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism as three successive stages in one process, to represent the evolution of religion by a straight line marked off into three parts, or any other number of parts, is to forget that they do not produce one another but that each emanates from the heart of man. The fact that they emanate in temporal succession does not prove that one springs from the other.

Nor can we say that values--religious or aesthetic--are to be determined on the simple principle that the latest edition is the best. To say that an _editio princeps_ has value only for the bibliophile is to admit that all values are personal, as are all thoughts and all feelings, all goodness and all love.

FOR REFERENCE

Robertson Smith, _The Religion of the Semites_ (A. & C. Black, 1889).

J.G. Frazer, _The Golden Bough_ (Macmillan & Co., 1890-1915).

Grant Allen, _The Evolution of the Idea of G.o.d_ (Grant Richards, 1897).

H. Bergson, _L'evolution creatrice_ (F. Alcan, 1908).

F.B. Jevons, _The Idea of G.o.d in Early Religions_ (1910), and _Comparative Religion_ (1913) (Cambridge University Press).

G.F. Moore, _History of Religions_ (T. & T. Clark, 1914).

A. Loisy, _La Religion_ (E. Nourry, 1917).

IV

RECENT TENDENCIES IN EUROPEAN POETRY

WITH OCCASIONAL REFERENCES TO THE NOVEL, DRAMA, AND CRITICISM

PROFESSOR C.H. HERFORD

When Matthew Arnold declared that every age receives its best interpretation in its poetry, he was making a remark hardly conceivable before the century in which it was made. Poetry in the nineteenth century was, on the whole, more charged with meaning, more rooted in the stuff of humanity and the heart of nature, less a mere province of _belles-lettres_ than ever before. Consciously or unconsciously it reflected the main currents in the mentality of European man, and the reflection was often most clear where it was least conscious. Two of these main currents are:

(1) The vast and steady enlargement of our knowledge of the compa.s.s, the history, the potencies, of Man, Nature, the World.

(2) The growth in our sense of the _worth_ of every part of existence.

Certain aspects of these two processes are popularly known as 'the advance of science', and 'the growth of democracy'. But how far 'science' reaches beyond the laboratory and the philosopher's study, and 'democracy' beyond political freedom and the ballot-box, is precisely what poetry compels us to understand; and not least the poetry of the last sixty years with which we are to-day concerned.

How then does the history of poetry in Europe during these sixty years stand in relation to these underlying processes? On the surface, at least, it hardly resembles growth at all. In France above all--the literary focus of Europe, and its sensitive thermometer--the movement of poetry has been, on the surface, a succession of p.r.o.nounced and even fanatical schools, each born in reaction from its precursor, and succ.u.mbing to the triumph of its successor. Yet a deeper scrutiny will perceive that these warring artists were, in fact, groups of successive discoverers, who each added something to the resources and the scope of poetry, and also retained and silently adopted the discoveries of the past; while the general line of advance is in the direction marked by the two main currents I have described. Nowhere else is the succession of phases so sharp and clear as in France. But since France does reflect more sensitively than any other country the movement of the mind of Europe, and since her own mind has, more than that of any other country, radiated ideas and fashions out over the rest of Europe, these phases are in fact traceable also, with all kinds of local and national variations, in Italy and Spain, Germany and England, and I propose to take this fact as the basis of our present very summary and diagrammatic view. The three phases of the sixty years are roughly divided by the years 1880 and 1900.

The first, most clearly seen in the French Parna.s.sians, is in close, if unconscious, sympathy with the temper of science. Poetry, brought to the limit of expressive power, is used to express, with the utmost veracity, precision, and impersonal self-suppression, the beauty and the tragedy of the world. It sought h.e.l.lenic lucidity and h.e.l.lenic calm--in the example most familiar to us, the Stoic calm and 'sad lucidity' of Matthew Arnold.

The second, best seen in the French Symbolists, was directly hostile to science. But they repelled its confident a.n.a.lysis of material reality in the name of a part of reality which it ignored or denied, an immaterial world which they mystically apprehended, which eluded direct description, frustrated rhetoric, and was only to be come at by the magical suggestion of colour, music, and symbol. It is most familiar to us in the 'Celtic' verse of Mr. Yeats and 'A.E.'.

The third, still about us, and too various and incomplete for final definition, is in closer sympathy with science, but, in great part, only because science has itself found accommodation between nature and spirit, a new ideality born of, and growing out of, the real. If the first found Beauty, the end of art, in the plastic repose of sculpture, and the second in the mysterious cadences of music, the poetry of the twentieth century finds its ideal in life, in the creative evolution of being, even in the mere things, the 'prosaic' pariahs of previous poetry, on which our shaping wills are wreaked. We know it in poets unlike one another but yet more unlike their predecessors, from D'Annunzio and Dehmel and Claudel to our Georgian experimenters in the poetry of paradox and adventure.

I. POETIC NATURALISM

The third quarter of the nineteenth century opened, in western Europe, with a decided set-back for those who lived on dreams, and a corresponding complacency among those who throve on facts. The political and social revolution which swept the continent in 1848 and 1849, and found ominous echoes here, was everywhere, for the time, defeated. The discoveries of science in the third and fourth decades, resting on calculation and experiment, were investing it with the formidable prestige which it has never since lost; and both metaphysics and theology reeled perceptibly under the blows delivered in its name. The world exhibition of 1851 seemed to announce an age of settled prosperity, peace, and progress.

In literature the counterpart of these phenomena was the revolt from _Romanticism_, a movement, in its origins, of poetic liberation and discovery, which had rejuvenated poetry in Germany and Italy, and yet more signally in England and in France, but was now petering out in emotional incoherence, deified impulse, and irresponsible caprice.

The revolt accordingly everywhere sought to bring literature into closer conformity with reality; with reality as interpreted by science; and to make art severe and precise. In the novel, Flaubert founded modern naturalism with his enthralling picture of dull provincials, _Mme Bovary_ (1857); two years later George Eliot tilted openly in _Adam Bede_ against the romancers who put you off with marvellous pictures of dragons, but could not draw the real horses and cattle before their eyes.[3]

Realism, at once more unflinching and more profoundly poetic, and yet penetrated, especially in Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, with an intensity of moral conviction beside which the ethical fervour of George Eliot seems an ineffectual fire, was one of the roots of the Russian Novel; which also reached its climax in the third quarter of the century. But though it concurred with a.n.a.logous movements in the West, it drew little of moment from them; even Turgenjev, a greater Maupa.s.sant in artistry, drew his inner inspiration from wholly alien springs of Slavonic pa.s.sion and thought. And it was chiefly through them that the Russian novel later helped to nourish the radically alien movement of Symbolism in France.

In drama, Ibsen broke away from the Romantic tradition of his country with the iconoclastic energy of one who had spent his own unripe youth in offering it a half-reluctant homage. The man of actuality in him denounced the drama built upon the legends of the Scandinavian past--the mark for him of a people of dreamers oblivious of the calls of the hour.

On the morrow of the disastrous (and for Norway in his view ignominious) Danish war of 1864, his scorn rang out with prophetic intensity in the fierce tirade of _Brand_. Happily for his art, revolt against romance in him was united, more signally than in more than two or three of his contemporaries, with the power of seizing and presenting contemporary life. 'Realism' certainly expresses inadequately enough the genius of an art like his, enormously alive rather than fundamentally like life, and no less charged with purpose and idea than the work of the great Russians, though under cover of reticences and irony little known to them. The great series of prose dramas--from 1867 (_The League of Youth_) onwards--with their experimental prelude _Love's Comedy_ (1863)--were to be for all Europe the most considerable literary event of the fourth quarter of the century, and they generated affiliated schools throughout the West. They did not indeed themselves remain untouched by the general intellectual currents of the time, and it will be noticed below that the later plays (from _The Lady of the Sea_ onward) betray affinities, like the Russian novel, with what is here called the second phase of the European movement.

In Criticism, the showy generalizations of Villemain gave place to Sainte-Beuve's series of essays towards a 'natural history of minds'[4]

and Taine's more sweeping attempt to explain literature by environment.[5] Among ourselves, Meredith's _Essay on Comedy_ (1872) brilliantly restated Moliere's dictum that the comic is founded on the real, and not on a fantastic distortion of it, while Matthew Arnold applied alike to literature and to theology a critical insight fertilized by his master Sainte-Beuve's delicate faculty for disengaging the native quality of minds from the incrustations of tradition and dogma.