THE UNITY SERIES

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN EUROPEAN THOUGHT

ESSAYS ARRANGED AND EDITED

BY

F.S. MARVIN

AUTHOR OF 'THE LIVING PAST', ETC.

HUMPHREY MILFORD

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY

1920

AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

This volume, like its two predecessors, arises from a course of lectures delivered at a Summer School at Woodbrooke, near Birmingham, in August, 1919. The first, in 1915, dealt with 'The Unity of Western Civilization' generally, the second, in 1916, with 'Progress'. In this book an attempt has been made to trace the same ideas in the last period of European history, broadly speaking since 1870.

If any reader feels moved by interest or sympathy with the general idea to send suggestions, either as to possible places of meeting, or topics for treatment or any other kindred matter, they would be welcomed either by the Editor or by Edwin Gilbert, Woodbrooke, Selly Oak, Birmingham.

F.S.M.

BERKHAMSTED, December, 1919.

GENERAL SURVEY

F.S. MARVIN

We are trying in this book to give some impression of the principal changes and developments of Western thought in what might roughly be called 'the last generation', though this limit of time has been, as it must be, treated liberally. From the political point of view the two most impressive milestones, events which will always mark for the consciousness of the West the beginning and the end of a period, are no doubt the war of 1870 and the Great War which has just ended. From 1870 to 1914 would therefore be the most obvious delimitation of our study; and it is a striking illustration of human paradox, that a great stage in the growth of unity should be marked by two international tragedies and crowned by the most terrible of all.

Nearly coincident with the political divisions there are important landmarks in the history of thought. During the 'sixties, while the power of Prussia was rising to its culmination in the Franco-Prussian War, the Darwinian theory of development was gaining command in biology. To many thinkers there has appeared a clear connexion between that biological doctrine and the 'imperialism', Teutonic and other, which was so marked a feature of the time. In any case 'post-Darwinian' might well describe the scientific thought of the age we have in view.

In philosophy and literature a similar dividing line appears. In the 'sixties Herbert Spencer was publishing the capital works of his system. The Principles of Psychology was published in 1872. This 'Synthetic Philosophy' has proved up to the present the last attempt of its kind, and with the vast increase of knowledge since Spencer's day it might well prove the last of all such syntheses carried out by a single mind. Specialism and criticism have gained the upper hand, and the fresh turn to harmony, which we shall notice later on, is rather a harmony of spirit than an encyclopaedic unity such as the great masters of system from Descartes to Comte and Spencer had attempted before.

In literature also the dates agree. Dickens, most typical of all early Victorians, died in 1870. George Eliot's last great novel, Daniel Deronda, was published in 1876. Victor Hugo's greatest poem, La Légende des Siècles, the imaginative synthesis of all the ages, appeared in the 'seventies. There have been many writers since, with Tolstoi perhaps at their head, in whom the fire of moral enthusiasm has burnt as keenly, nor have the borders of human sympathy been narrowed. Yet one cannot fail to note a less pervading and ready confidence in human nature, a less fervent belief that the good must prevail if good men will only follow their better leading.

But it must be noted at once that these obvious landmarks, though striking, are in themselves superficial. They require explanation rather than give it, and in some cases an explanation, much less tragic than the symptom, is suggested by the symptom itself. We may at least fairly treat them at starting simply as beacon-hills to mark out the country we are traversing. We have to go deeper to find out the nature of the soil, and travel to the end to study the vista beyond.

It may serve as tonic—an antidote to that depression of spirits of which we have spoken—to consider that such an output of mental energy, rewarded by such a harvest of truth, is without precedent in man's evolution. No single generation before ever learnt so much not only of the world around it but also of the doings of previous generations. For since 1870 we have been living in an age as much distinguished for historical research as for natural science. If mankind is now to go down in a wrack of war, starvation, bankruptcy, and ruin, the sunset sky at least is glorious.

But the reader may here begin not unnaturally to feel some impatience with the argument, and to think that he is being carried into a region of ideal imaginings quite out of touch with the realities of blood and hatred and starvation with which we have been actually surrounded at the end of our period. It is well to be thus sharply reminded of the contrariety of facts, when we are sailing smoothly along on the current of any theory, whether of education or politics, religion or art. To get right with our objector, to set our sail so that the rocks in the stream may not completely wreck us, we will go back to the point where we were insisting on the obvious truth that the collective resources and capacity of mankind have of late enormously increased.

The war, tragically as it has shaken this growing oneness of mankind, has not destroyed it. In some ways it has even stimulated growth. Against a background of blood and fire the League of Nations has been forced into actual being, and the long isolation alike of the ancient East and the youthful West has been broken down at last. Within the State, again, even allowing for all setbacks, the efforts at social solidarity have on the whole been strengthened, not weakened. This war his been an accelerator of, not, as the Napoleonic, a brake upon, reform. Many reforms, especially in England, which had been long discussed and partly attempted before the war, were carried out with dispatch at its close. This was the case with education, with the franchise and with measures affecting the health, the housing, and the industrial conditions of the people. And there is now a greater and stronger demand among us for a further advance, above all for making every citizen not merely or even primarily a voting unit, but a consciously active, consciously co-operative, member of the community.

But even here, perhaps most of all here, it is the first word of wisdom to take stock of the favourable symptoms, to see clearly the forces on which we can rely in our forward march. And they are not far to seek in all classes and in every Western land. Read any account of an English community in the early nineteenth century, say George Eliot's 'Milby' in the Scenes of Clerical Life. How far more humane, more enlightened, and happier is the state of the succeeding community, the Nuneaton or Coventry of the present day! No question but the novelist would have welcomed as a convincing proof of her 'meliorist' doctrine the progress made in her own homeland in the century since her birth. We know by personal experience the general kindliness and cheerfulness of our fellow citizens, their tolerance, their readiness to hope, their prevalent orderliness and self-restraint. We are thinking perhaps of a certain tendency to slackness, a dangerous falling-off in the output of work. If that be so, we need only look at the activities of any playground, or of a class-room in a well-ordered school, to be sure of the future. The natural man, at least in our temperate climates, and as exhibited in the behaviour of his natural progenitor, the child, is all for vigour and experiment. It is we, the adult community, the trustees of the child, who are to blame if his maturity fails of the eager questioning and the untiring labours of his unspoilt youth.

Among much that is doubtful in the future of the League, one thing stands out as a capital certainty. Without losing the very spirit of its being it can never become a satellite system, revolving round one dominant Power or even a dominant clique. It was formed to contradict and destroy an oppressive imperialism: it can only thrive by the free co-operation of the partners, finding their proper end in a prosperity shared by all.

Such is a short summary of some of the leading topics treated here, those perhaps in which public interest has been most keenly aroused. But nothing has been said in this introduction of Art or Music, and of Religion only a little by implication. It may be well in conclusion to attempt a still more summary impression of the main drift of the period on the spiritual side. We may in such a wider view see some common tendency in all these activities, some inspiration of religion, some link with art, some impulse to live strongly and to hope.

To this we must admit the impossibility of any complete, or even approximate, answer with our present knowledge. We can only note one or two points of certainty or of confident belief. The first, that there have been individual men, an Aristotle or a Shakespeare, in the past, with whom later ages never have, and perhaps never may, compare. The second, that there are good grounds for thinking that the average man has improved in goodness and in knowledge since we first knew him dimly in the dawn of history. But more important and more certain is the fact that the collective soul of man has grown, and all the extensions of knowledge and of power of which our volume speaks bear witness to it. They are essentially social in origin and outlook, and rest on a foundation of common thought immeasurably wider than any in the more distant past.

The novelists who ushered in our age are significant of this, and none more so than George Eliot, whose work, though somewhat out of fashion for the moment, is yet marked by the transition from Victorian complacency to modern unrest and modern hopes. Full of love and appreciation for the old order in England—the contentment and humours of the country-side, the difference of classes, the respect for religion—she was carried by the evolutionary philosophy of her time into thoughts of an eternal and world-wide order, the growth of humanity, the kinship of man with the universe, the social nature of duty. Her contribution was essentially psychological; she enlarged our knowledge of the soul. She showed us, not certainly more living types than Scott or Dickens, but more play of motives, more varied interests in life, more mental crises. The soul, above all the woman's soul, had widened its horizon between Flora Macdonald and Dorothea Brooke.

On this enlargement of the soul, enlightened by science, we build the future. It is the crowning vision of the modern world, first sketched by Descartes, filled out and strengthened by the life and thought of three hundred years. In the interval we have lived much and learnt much, both of our own nature and of the world in which we live. In our own age a powerful stimulus has been given by a transformed biology and a new science which shows the soul itself in growth from an immemorial past, moulding the future by its own action, surmounting, while assimilating, the mechanism which surrounds it. But for this building two things are needed. One, that our souls, as builders, shall act as one with all our fellows and strive for unity as well as power. The other, that in the building the laws of growth shall be followed, which science has already revealed in part and will reveal more fully. For the spirit of science is the spirit of hope.

PHILOSOPHY

PROFESSOR A.E. TAYLOR

There is, to be sure, one way in which it is pretty plain that they are not related. You cannot learn what ought to be—what is beautiful or morally good—merely by first finding out what has been or what is likely to be. This simple consideration of itself deprives many of the big volumes which have been written about the 'evolution' of art and morals of most of their value. They may have interest if they are treated only as contributions to the history of opinion about art and morals. But unhappily their authors often assume that we can find out what really is right or beautiful by merely discovering what men have thought right and beautiful in the remote past or guessing what they will think right or beautiful in the distant future. The fallacy underlying this procedure has been happily exposed by Mr. Russell himself in an occasional essay where he remarks that it is antecedently just as likely that evolution is going from bad to worse as that it is going from good to better. Unless it is going from bad to worse it is obviously absurd to suppose that you can find out what is good by discovering what our distant ancestors thought good. And if (as may be the case) it is going from bad to worse, no amount of knowledge about what our posterity will think good can throw any light on the question what is good. There is, in fact, no ground whatever for believing that 'evolution' need be the same thing as progress, and this is enough to knock the bottom out of 'evolutionary ethics'.

In short, if we mean to be philosophical, our main concern will be that our beliefs should be true; we shall care very little whether they happen to be popular or unpopular with the intellectual 'proletarians' of the moment, and if we can get at a truth, we shall not mind having to go back a long way for it. Indeed, when one wants to get on the track of the most ultimate and important truths of all, there is usually a great positive advantage in going back a very long way for them. The questions which deal with first principles, being the simplest—though the hardest—of all, are mostly raised very simply and directly by Plato and Aristotle, who were the very first writers to raise them. In the discussions of later times, the great simple questions about principles have so often been overlaid by mainly irrelevant accretions of secondary details that it is usually very hard indeed 'to see the wood for the trees'. This is the chief reason why one who, like myself, finds it his main business in life to introduce younger men and women to the study of Philosophy must think indifference to Greek literature about the worst misfortune which could happen to our intellectual civilization.

It is clear that such a philosophy ought to end in unqualified Agnosticism. The Hegelians, to be sure, made merry over the Unknowable of Mr. Spencer, but their own Absolute is really just the Unknowable in its 'Sunday best'. Nothing that we can say about anything which is not the Absolute is really true, because there really is nothing but the Absolute to speak about, and nothing that we can say about the Absolute is quite true either, because we can never succeed in saying itself of it. Mr. Bradley, far the most eminent of the philosophers of the Absolute, has made persistent and brilliant attempts to show that, in spite of this, we do know enough to be sure that our own mind is more like the Absolute than a cray-fish, and a cray-fish more like it than a crystal. But when all is said, though I owe more to Mr. Bradley than I can ever acknowledge adequately, I cannot help feeling that there are two men in Mr. Bradley, a great constructive thinker and a subtle destructive critic, and that the destructive Hyde is perpetually pulling to pieces all that the constructive Jekyll has built up. Of course it is obvious that the truth of mathematics, if mathematics are true, is a fatal stone of stumbling for this type of philosophy. Mathematics never attempts to say anything about the 'Absolute'—the only 'Absolute' of which it knows is only a 'degraded conic'—yet it claims that its statements, if once they have been correctly expressed, are not 'partial' but complete.

The general state of things at the time of which I am speaking was thus that relations were decidedly strained between a body of philosophers and a body of scientific men who ought at least to have met on the common ground of a complete Agnosticism. The philosophers were, in general, shy of Science, mainly, no doubt, because they were modest men who knew their own limitations, but they had a way of being condescending to Science, which naturally annoyed the scientific men. These latter professed a theory of the structure of knowledge which the philosophers could easily show to be grotesque, but the retort was always ready to hand that at any rate Science seemed somehow to be getting somewhere while Philosophy appeared to lead nowhere in particular.

Varisco, The Great Problem (Macmillan).

Varisco, Know Thyself (Macmillan).

Aliotta, The Idealistic Reaction against Science (Macmillan).

Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World (Open Court Publishing Co.).

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Home University Library).

A.N. Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (Cambridge Press).

G.E. Moore, Ethics (H.U.L.).

W. McDougall, Philosophy (H.U.L.).

A.N. Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (H.U.L.).

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN EUROPEAN THOUGHT ON THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

F.B. JEVONS

When the conception of evolution, which had been employed to explain the origin of species and the descent of man, and which had been gained by a consideration of material organisms, came to be applied to the world of man's thoughts, to the non-material and spiritual domain, and to be used for the purpose of explaining the growth and the development of religion, it was natural that the conception which had proved so valuable in the one case should be applied without modification to the other—as natural as that the first railway coach should be built on the model of the stagecoach. The possibility that the theory of evolution might itself evolve, and in evolving change, was one that was not, and at that time could hardly be, present to the minds of those who were extending the theory and in the process of extending it were developing it. Yet the possibility was there, implicit in the very conception of evolution, which involves continuous change—change in continuity and continuity in change.

On the foundation thus laid by the intuition of Robertson Smith and approved in 1899 by Sir James Frazer, a simple and complete theory of the evolution of religion was possible. In any one tribe there were several totem-kins. The totem of each kin was divine, but the personality of a totem was so undeveloped in conception that, though it might, and on the theory did, develop into a deity, it was originally more of the nature of a spirit than a god, and totemism proper might easily pass into polydaemonism, that is a system in which the beings worshipped were conceived to possess a personality more clearly defined than that attributed to totems but less developed than that assigned to deities. From the beginning each tribe had worshipped a plurality of totems; it was, therefore, readily intelligible that, as these totems came to be credited with more and more definite and developed personality, the plurality of totems became not only a polydaemonism, but afterwards a plurality of deities, and a system of polytheism came to be established. From polytheism then, amongst the Israelites, monotheism was conceived to have been gradually developed.

What then is it in totemism from which, on Sir James Frazer's view, something comes? We might, perhaps, have expected that it was from the 'mystic' bond uniting man with the world which is not only around him but of which he is part, and in which he lives and moves and has his being. To say so, however, would be to admit that in totemism there was something not only 'mystic' but potentially religious. And Sir James Frazer does not follow that line of thought, so dangerous in his view. On the contrary, he maintains that 'the aspect of the totemic system, which we have hitherto been accustomed to describe as religious, deserves rather to be called magical'. The totem rites which Robertson Smith had interpreted as being sacramental and as being intended as a means of communion with the totem-gods Sir James Frazer regards as merely magical: 'totemism,' he says, 'is merely an organized system of magic intended to secure a supply of food.'

The attraction of the view that religion is but magic under another name, that prayers are to the end but spells, that 'priest' is but 'magician' written differently, is that it is a simplicist theory. It simplifies things. It exhibits religion as evolved out of magic and as containing at the end nothing more or other than was present at the beginning in magic. It is but a variant of the pre-formation theory of the evolution of religion. In fine, the notion that in magic we have religion pre-formed is the counterpart of the idea that we can find religion pre-formed in totemism. In both cases we secure continuity in the process of evolution apparently, but the continuity secured is appearance merely and is gained only at the price of ignoring the facts.

The fundamental distinction, then, and even opposition of principle between magic and religion, is that in the one case man thinks that he can gain all that he desires by means of magic, and that in the other he turns with offerings and supplication to the personal beings superior to man whom he imagines to control the course of nature and of human life.

If we wish to escape from this conclusion, if we wish to maintain the validity of science and yet always to remember 'that every single profession and claim put forward by the magician, as such, is false—not one of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or unconscious', we must consider whether Sir James Frazer's account of magic, according to which the principles of magic are identical with those of science, is the only account that can be given of magic; and for that purpose we may contrast it with the view of Wilhelm Wundt. But before doing so, since Sir James Frazer holds that there is 'a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle between magic and religion', it will be well to try to see not only what he means by magic, but also whether his description or definition of religion is acceptable.

Now it is indeed undeniable that prayer and sacrifice may be made by a man for the sake of what he is going to get, and may from the beginning have been made, partly at least, from that motive. But if evolution in one of its aspects is change, then one of the changes brought about by evolution in religion is precisely that prayer and sacrifice come to be regarded as no longer a means whereby a man can get his desires accomplished—his will done—but as the indispensable condition for doing God's will. Prayer then becomes communion with God, and the sacrifice of self the living exhibition of love—the first principle of religion, the principle which manifests itself now in prayer and now in sacrifice.

Wundt, whilst differing from Frazer in his description of magic, is at one with him in believing that before religion existed there was an age of magic. But Wundt's view that marvels are magic when supposed to have been done by man, but miracles when supposed to have been done by a god or his priests, suggests the possibility that, as the belief in magic is found usually, if not always, to exist side by side with the belief in miracles, the two beliefs may from the beginning have co-existed, that the age of magic is not prior in the course of evolution to the age of religion. This possibility, it will be admitted, derives some colour at least from the way in which the theory of evolution is employed to account for the origin of species: different though reptiles are from birds, the serpent from the dove, both are descended from a common ancestor, the archaeopteryx. If this instance be taken as typical of the process of evolution in general, then the course of evolution is not, so to speak, linear or rectilinear, but—to use M. Bergson's word—'dispersive'. To suppose that religion is descended from magic would then be as erroneous as to suppose that birds are descended from reptiles or man from the monkey. The true view will be that the course of evolution is not linear, is not a line produced for ever in the same direction, not a succession of stages, but is 'dispersive', that from a common starting point many lines of evolution radiate in different directions. The course of evolution is not unilinear but multilinear; it runs on many lines which diverge, but all the diverging lines start from the same point.

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 gods, has himself become a god 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.

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 analysis, 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.

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 god 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 identity 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 identity. 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.

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 God (Grant Richards, 1897).

H. Bergson, L'Évolution créatrice (F. Alcan, 1908).

F.B. Jevons, The Idea of God 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).

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 compass, 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.

The first, most clearly seen in the French Parnassians, 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 Hellenic lucidity and Hellenic calm—in the example most familiar to us, the Stoic calm and 'sad lucidity' of Matthew Arnold.

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

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.

If we turn from the negations of the anti-romantic revolt to consider what it actually sought and achieved in poetry, we find that its positive ideals, too, without being derived from science, reflect the temper of a scientific time. Thus the supreme gift of all the greater poets of this group was a superb vision of beauty, and of beauty—pace Hogarth—there is no science. But their view of beauty was partly limited, partly fertilized and enriched, by the sources they discovered and the conditions they imposed, and both the discoveries and the limitations added something to the traditions and resources of poetry. Thus:

(1) They exploited the aesthetic values to be had by knowledge. They pursued erudition and built their poetry upon erudition, not in the didactic way of the Augustans, but as a mine of poetic material and suggestion. Far more truly than Wordsworth's this poetry could claim to be the impassioned expression which is in the face of science; for Wordsworth's knowledge is a mystic insight wholly estranged from erudition; his celandine, his White Doe, belong to no fauna or flora. When Leconte de Lisle, on the other hand, paints the albatross of the southern sea or the condor of the Andes, the eye of a passionate explorer and observer has gone to the making of their exotic sublimity. The strange regions of humanity, too, newly disclosed by comparative religion and mythology, he explores with cosmopolitan impartiality and imaginative penetration; carving, as in marble, the tragedy of Hjalmar's heart and Angentyr's sword, of Cain's doom, and Erinnyes never, like those of Aeschylus, appeased. The Romantics had loved to play with exotic suggestions; but the East of Hugo's Orientales or Moore's Lalla Rookh is merely a veneer; the poet of Qain has heard the wild asses cry and seen the Syrian sun descend into the golden foam.

II. DREAM AND SYMBOL

The rise of French symbolism towards the end of the 'seventies was a symptom of a changed temper of thought and feeling traceable in some degree throughout civilized Europe. Roughly, it marked the passing of the confident and rather superficial security of the 'fifties into a vague unrest, a kind of troubled awe. As if existence altogether was a bigger, more mysterious, and intractable thing than was assumed, not so easily to be captured in the formulas of triumphant science, or mirrored and analysed by the most consummate literary art.

Political and social conditions contributed to the change. France stood on the morrow of a shattering catastrophe. The complacency of mid-Victorian England began to be disturbed by menaces from the workshops of industry. And it was precisely in triumphant Germany herself that revolutionary Socialism found, in Karl Marx, its first organizing mind and authoritative exponent. The millennium was not so near as it had seemed; the problems of society, instead of having been solved once for all, were only, it appeared, just coming into view.

But it was not merely particular doctrines that lost ground; the scope and validity of scientific method itself began to be questioned. In the most varied fields of thought there set in that 'idealistic reaction against science' which has been described in one of the most penetrating books of our time. Most significant of all, science itself, in the person of Mach, and Pearson, has abandoned the claim to do more than provide descriptive formulas for phenomena the real nature of which is utterly beyond its power to discover.

There Baudelaire had touched a chord that was to sound loud and long; for what else than this thought of all the senses meeting in union inspired the music drama of Wagner?—only one of his points of kinship, as we shall see, with symbolism.

Thus the symbolists, in quest of reality, touched it only through the inner life. There they are, in their fashion, realists. 'A landscape', said Albert Samain, 'is a state of soul.' The landscape may be false, but the state of soul is veracious. What interests them in life is the image of life, not lucidly reflected but exquisitely transformed. Yet the vision of the world caught in that transforming mirror was not without strange revealing glimpses, invisible, like stars mirrored in a well, to the plain observer. They could hear the music of the spheres; or in the language of Samain's sonnet

For that, the French had only the Fauns of a literary neo-classicism. The passion for France was yet indeed to find a voice in poetry. But this was reserved for the more trumpet-tongued tones of the contemporary phase to which I now turn.

III. 'CREATIVE EVOLUTION'

1. Philosophic Analogies

Nietzsche and Bergson thus, with all their obvious and immense divergences, concurred in this respect, important from our present point of view, that their influence tended to transfer authority from the philosophic reason to those 'irrational' elements of mind which reach their highest intensity in the vision and 'rage' of the poet. James's vindication of drunken exaltation as a source of religious insight was not the least symptomatic passage of his great book. And both concurred, however remote their methods or their speech, in conceiving reality as creation, creation in which we take part—a conception which again, in the hands of the constructive religious thinker, led directly to the type of faith announced in that last—the Jamesian—'Variety' of religious experience, which represents us as indispensable fellow-workers and allies of a growing and striving God.

2. The New Freedom

No doubt a fiercer note of revolt may be heard at times in the poetry of contemporary France, and that precisely where devotion to some parts of the heritage of the past is most impassioned. The iconoclastic scorn of youth's idealism for the effeteness of the 'old hunkers', as Whitman called them, has rarely rung out more sharply than in the closing stanzas of Claudel's great Palm Sunday ode. All the pomp and splendour of bishops and cardinals is idle while victory yet is in suspense: that must be won by youth in arms.

In the same spirit Charles Péguy—like Claudel, be it noted, a student of Bergson at the École Normale—found his ideal in the great story of the young girl of Domremy who saved France when all the pomp and wisdom of generals had broken down. And in our own poetry has not Mr. Bottomley rewritten the Lear story, with the focus of power and interest transferred from the old king—left with not an inch of king in him—to a glorious young Artemis-Goneril?

But among our English Georgians this tense iconoclastic note is rare. Their detachment from what they repudiate is not fanatical or ascetic; it is conveyed less in invective than in paradox and irony; their temper is not that which flies to the wilderness and dresses in camel hair, but of mariners putting out to the unknown and bidding a not unfriendly good-bye at the shore. The temper of adventure is deeply ingrained in the new romance as in the old; the very word adventure is saturated with a sentiment very congenial to us both for better and worse; it quickens the hero in us and flatters the devil-may-care.

and a few less vocal swallows, anticipated the more sustained flights and melodies of to-day, while Borrow's wonderful company of vagabond heroes and heroines is similarly premonitory of the alluring gipsies and circus-clowns of our Georgian poetry. Sometimes a traditional motive is creatively transformed; as when Father Time, the solemn shadow with admonitory hour-glass, appears in Mr. Hodgson's poem as an old gipsy pitching his caravan 'only a moment and off once again'.

Elsewhere a deeper note is sounded. It is not for nothing that Jeanne d'Arc is the saint of French Catholic democracy, or that Péguy, her poet, calls the Incarnation the 'sublime adventure of God's Son'. That last adventure of the Dantesque Ulysses beyond the sunset thrills us to-day more than the Odyssean tale of his triumphant home-return, and D'Annunzio, greatly daring, takes it as the symbol of his own adventurous life. Francis Thompson's most famous poem, too, represents the divine effort to save the erring soul under the image of the hound's eager chase of a quarry which may escape; while Yeats hears God 'blowing his lonely horn' along the moonlit faery glades of Erin. And Meredith, who so often profoundly voiced the spirit of the time in which only his ripe old age was passed, struck this note in his sublime verses on revolutionary France—

It was natural in such a time to assume that any living art of poetry must itself be new, and in fact the years immediately before and after the turn of the century are crowded with announcements of 'new' movements in art of every kind. Beside Claudel's Art Poétique we have in England the New Aestheticism of Grant Allen; in Germany the 'new principle' in verse of Arno Holz. And here again the English innovators are distinguished by a good-humoured gaiety, if also by a slighter build of thought, from the French or Nietzschean 'revaluers'. Rupert Brooke delightfully parodies the exquisite hesitances and faltering half-tones of Pater's cloistral prose; and Mr. Chesterton pleasantly mocks at the set melancholy of the aggressive Decadence in which he himself grew up:

In Germany, on the other hand, the rhythmic emancipation of Whitman was carried out, in the school of Arno Holz, with a revolutionary audacity beyond the example even of Claudel. Holz states with great clearness and trenchancy what he calls his 'new principle of lyric'; one which 'abandons all verbal music as an aim, and is borne solely by a rhythm made vital by the thought struggling through it to expression'. Rhyme and strophe are given up, only rhythm remains.

Of our Georgian poetry, it must suffice to note that here, too, the temper of adventure in form is rife. But it shows itself, characteristically, less in revolutionary innovation than in attempts to elicit new and strange effects from traditional measures by deploying to the utmost, and in bold and extreme combinations, their traditional resources and variations, as in the blank verse of Mr. Abercrombie and Mr. Bottomley. This, and much beside in Georgian verse, has moods and moments of rare beauty. But, on the whole, verse-form is the region of poetic art in which Georgian poetry as a whole is least secure.

3. The New Realism

Poetry, in these cases, wins perhaps at most a Pyrrhic victory over reluctant matter. It is otherwise with the second of the great Belgian poets.

In the work of Verhaeren, the modern industrial city, with its spreading tentacles of devouring grime and squalor, its clanging factories, its teeming bazaars and warehouses, and all its thronging human population, is taken up triumphantly into poetry. Verhaeren is the poet of 'tumultuous forces', whether they appear in the roar and clash of 'that furnace we call existence', or in the heroic struggles of the Flemish nation for freedom. And he exhibits these surging forces in a style itself full of tumultuous power, Germanic rather than French in its violent and stormy splendour, and using the chartered licence of the French 'free verse' itself with more emphasis than subtlety.

4. The Cult of Force

And it is no considerable step from him to the poets who in this third phase of our period have unequivocally exulted in power and burnt incense or offered sacrifice before the altar of the strong man. The joy in creation which, we saw, gives its romance to so much of the realism of our time, now appears accentuated in the fiercer romance of conflict and overthrow. Thanks largely to Nietzsche, this romance acquired the status of an authoritative philosophy—even, in his own country, that of an ethical orthodoxy.

The German people was doubtless less deeply and universally imbued with this faith than our war-prejudice assumes. But phenomena such as the enormous success of a cheap exposition of it, Rembrandt als Erzieher (1890) by a fervent Bismarckian, and of the comic journal Simplicissimus (founded 1895) devoted to systematic ridicule of the old-fashioned German virtues of tenderness and sympathy, indicated a current of formidable power and compass, which was soon to master all the other affluents of the national stream.

But older, and in part foreign, influences concurred to colour and qualify, while they sustained, the Nietzschean influence,—the daemonic power of Carlyle, the iron intensity and masterful reticence of Ibsen. This was the case especially, as is well known, in the drama. Gerhardt Hauptmann, who painted the tragedy of the self-emancipated superman,—as Mr. Shaw about the same time showed us his self-achieved apotheosis,—was no doubt the most commanding (as Mr. Shaw was the most original) figure in the European drama of the early century.

He began, in fact, as a disciple of Verlaine, and we may detect in the unrestraint of his early erotics the example of the French poet's fureur d'aimer. But Dehmel's more strongly-built nature, and perhaps the downright vigour of the German language, broke through the tenuities of la nuance. It was not the subtle artistry of the Symbolists, but the ethical and intellectual force of the German character, which finally drew into a less anarchic channel the vehement energy of Dehmel. Nietzsche had imagined an ethic of superhuman will 'beyond good and evil'. The poet, replied Dehmel, had indeed to know the passion which transcends good and evil, but he had to know no less the good and evil themselves of the world in and by which common men live. And if he can cry with the egoism of lawless passion, in the Erlösungen, 'I will fathom all pleasure to the deepest depths of thirst, ... Resign not pleasure, it waters power',—he can add, in the true spirit of Goethe and of the higher mind of Germany, 'Yet since it also makes slack, turn it into the stuff of duty!'

Claudel, even more remote as a thinker from Nietzsche than Péguy, exhibits a kindred temper in the ingrained violence of his art. His stroke is vehement and peremptory; he is an absolutist in style as in creed. It is the style of one who apprehends the visible world with an intensity as of passionate embrace, such as the young Browning expresses in Pauline. 'I would fain have seen everything,' he cries, 'possessed and made it my own, not with eyes and senses only, but with mind and spirit.' And after he was converted he saw and painted supernatural things with the same carnal and robust incisiveness. The half-lights of Symbolist mysticism are remote from his hard glare. As a dramatist he drew upon and exaggerated that which in Aeschylus and Shakespeare seems to the countrymen of Racine nearest to the limit of the terrible and the brutal permissible in art: a princess nailed by the hands like a sparrow-hawk to a pine by a brutal peasant; the daughter of a noble house submitting to a loathed marriage with a foul-mouthed plebeian in order to save the pope.

5. The New Idealism

(1) Nationality

What is the distinctive note of this new poetry of nationality? And for the moment I speak of the years before the War. May we not say that in it the ideal of country is saturated with that imaginative grip of reality in all its concrete energy and vivacity which I have called the new realism? The nation is no abstraction, whether it be called Britannia, or Deutschland über Alles. It is seen, and felt; seen in its cities as well as in its mountains, in the workers who have made it, as well as in the heroes who have defended it; in its roaring forges as well as in its idyllic woodlands and its tales of battles long ago; and all these not as separate strands in a woven pattern, but as waters of different origin and hue pouring along together in the same great stream.

you read the whole lineage of sterling English yeomen and woodlanders from whom Lob springs.

This note is indeed relatively absent from the work of the venerable master who has made 'Wessex' the most vividly realized of all English provinces to-day, and whose prose Egdon Heath may well be put at the head of all the descriptive poetry of our time. But Mr. Hardy, in this respect, belongs to an earlier generation than that into which he happily survives.

Sometimes this feeling is given in a single intense concentrated touch. When Rupert Brooke tells us of

But the poetry of shires and provinces reacts too upon the poetry of nationality. It infuses something of the more instinctive and rudimentary attachments from which it springs into a passion peculiarly exposed to the contagion of rhetoric and interest. Some of the most strident voices among living nationalist poets have found an unexpected note of tenderness when they sang their home province. Mr. Kipling charms us when he tells, in his close-knit verse, of the 'wooded, dim, Blue goodness of the Weald'. And the more strident notes of D'Annunzio's patriotism are also assuaged by the tenderness and depth of his home feeling. We read with some apprehension his dedication of La Nave to the god of seas:

But he dedicated a noble drama, the Figlia d'Iorio, in a different tone, 'To the land of the Abruzzi, to my Mother, to my Sisters, to my brother in exile, to my father in his grave, to all my dead and all my race in the mountains and by the sea, I dedicate this song of the ancient blood.'

(2) Democracy

It was the dogma of damnation which for long kept Péguy out of its fold, that barbarous mixture of life and death, he called it, which no man will accept who has won the spirit of collective humanity. But he revolted not because he was tolerant of evil; on the contrary to damn sins was for him a weak and unsocial solution; evil had not to be damned but to be fought down. Whether this vision of Christ weeping because he could not save Judas was un-Christian, or more Christian than Christianity itself, we need not discuss here; but I am sure that the spirit of a Catholic democracy as transfigured in the mind of a great poet could not be more nobly rendered.

(3) Catholicism

There the nationalist passion of Claudel animates his Catholic religion, yet does not break through its confines. But sometimes the strain of suffering and ruin is too intense for Christian submission, and he takes his God to task truculently for not doing his part in the contract; we are his partner in running the world, and see, he is asleep!

Yet the devout passion emerges again, with notes of piercing pathos:

(4) Effects of the War upon Poetry

Thus could the great Catholic poet sing under pressure of the supreme national crisis of his country. Poetry at such times may become a great national instrument—a trumpet whence Milton or Wordsworth, Arndt or Whitman, blow soul-animating strains. The war of 1914 was for all the belligerent peoples far more than a stupendous military event. It shattered the patterns of our established mentality, and compelled us to seek new adjustments and support in the chaotically disorganized world. The psychical upheaval was most violent in the English-speaking peoples, where the military shock was least direct; for here a nation of civilians embraced suddenly the new and amazing experience of battle. Here too, the imaginatively sensitive minds who interpret life through poetry, and most of all the youngest and freshest among them, themselves shared in the glories and the throes of the fight as hardly one of the signers of our most stirring battle poetry had ever done before. How did this new and amazing experience react upon their poetry? This, our final question, is perhaps the crucial one in considering the tendencies of recent European poetry.

with the thrill of seeing and painting in all its lurid colouring the volcanic chaos of this 'stir and smoke' itself. Thus the same Siegfried Sassoon who renders with so much close analytic psychology the moods that cross and fluctuate in the dying hospital patient, or the haunted fugitive, as he flounders among snags and stumps, to feel at last the strangling clasp of death, can as little as the visionary Shelley overcome the insurgent sense that these dead are for us yet alive, made one with Nature.

He visits the deserted home of his dead friend—

And so the undying dead

the Englishman whom the Germans had killed in fight, to be themselves slain by his friend, the speaker. Their ghosts throng around him,—

To have found and kept and interwoven these two musics—a language of unflinching veracity and one of equally unflinching hope and faith—is the achievement of our war-poetry. May we not say that the possession together of these two musics, of these two moods, springing as they do from the blended grip and idealism of the English character, warrants hope for the future of English poetry? For it is rooted in the greatest, and the most English, of the ways of poetic experience which have gone to the making of our poetic literature—the way, ultimately, of Shakespeare, and of Wordsworth. But that temper of catholic fraternity which finds the stuff of poetry everywhere does not easily attain the consummate technique in expression of a rarer English tradition, that of Milton, and Gray, and Keats. Beauty abounds in our later poets, but it is a beauty that flashes in broken lights, not the full-orbed radiance of a masterpiece. To enlarge the grasp of poetry over the field of reality, to apprehend it over a larger range, is not at once to find consummate expression for what is apprehended. The flawless perfection of the Parnassians—of Heredia's sonnets—is nowhere approached in the less aristocratically exclusive poetry of to-day. But the future, in poetry also, is with the spirit which found the aristocracy of noble art not upon exclusions, negations, and routine, but upon imagination, penetration, discovery, and catholic openness of mind.

Pellissier, Le Mouvement Littéraire au XIXme Siècle.

Brunetière, La Poésie Lyrique au XIXme Siècle.

Eccles, F.Y., A Century of French Poets.

Vigié-Lecocq, La Poésie Contemporaine.

Phelps, Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century.

Muret, La Littérature Italienne d'aujourd'hui.

Ladenarde, G. Carducci.

Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature.

Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties.

McDowall, Realism.

Aliotta, The Idealist Reaction against Science.

Soergel, Die deutsche Litteratur unserer Zeit.

Bithell, Contemporary German Poetry (Translated).

Halévy, Charles Péguy.

HISTORICAL RESEARCH

G.P. GOOCH

The scientific study of history began a hundred years ago in the University of Berlin. Preparatory work of the highest importance had been accomplished by laborious collectors like Baronius and Muratori, keen-sighted critics such as Mabillon and Wolf, and brilliant narrators like Gibbon and Voltaire. But it was not till Niebuhr, Böckh, and above all Ranke preached and practised the critical use of authorities and documentary material that historical scholarship entered on the path which it has pursued with ever-increasing success for the last three generations. It is my task to-day to direct your attention to some of its main achievements during the last half-century.

Among the most sensational events of the nineteenth century was the resurrection of the Ancient East. We now know that Greece and Rome, far from standing near the beginning of recorded history, were the heirs of a long series of civilizations. Our whole perspective has been changed or should be changed by the discovery. The ancient world thus revealed by the partnership of philology and archaeology ceases to be merely the vestibule to Christian Europe, and becomes in point of duration the larger part of human history.

The revelation of Assyrian civilization through Rawlinson's decipherment of cuneiform and the excavations of Botta and Layard in the middle of the nineteenth century was followed by a concerted attack on Babylonia. It was clear from the Nineveh tablets that most of the literary treasures of Assyria were merely copies of Babylonian originals; and when in 1877 de Sarzec, French Vice-Consul at Basra, bored into the mounds at Tello, the ancient Lagash, in Southern Babylonia, the most eager anticipations were surpassed. Texts had been found which Rawlinson pronounced to be pre-Semitic; but for the purpose of history the Sumerians were discovered at Tello. When de Sarzec died in 1901 he had opened a new chapter of history. The palaces of Sargon and Sennacherib, at which the world had marvelled in the 'forties, appeared relatively modern beside the vast antiquity of the Chaldean city. The chain of human experience lengthened before our eyes when it was realized that as Assyrian culture derived from Babylonia, so a large part of Babylonian culture, including the art of writing, was inherited by the Semites from the Sumerians.

Scarcely if at all less remarkable has been the discovery of an advanced civilization in Crete in the second and third millenniums before Christ. While in Egypt and Mesopotamia the frontiers of knowledge were pushed back, in Crete an unknown world was brought to light. Its romantic interest was intensified by the establishment of an historic foundation for one of the most celebrated legends of the ancient world. How the Minotaur devoured the tribute of youths and maidens in the labyrinth, how Ariadne, daughter of Minos, fell in love with Theseus and gave him a sword to slay the Minotaur and a thread to retrace his steps, was known to every Greek child and has thrilled the imagination of the centuries. The exploration of the city called by Homer 'Great Knossus' was among the ambitions of Schliemann; but it was carried out by Sir Arthur Evans, whose labours have outlined a series of chapters in Cretan history extending two thousand years before the destruction of the palace about the year 1400. Though the Minoan language still defies attack, the frescoes, sculptures, and objects of art tell their tale of a luxurious and peace-loving community, closely connected with Egypt and forming one of the main sources of the Greek culture of a later age.

Byzantium has emerged from the scholarship of two generations no longer decadent and inert but the mother of great statesmen and soldiers, the home of culture while Central and Western Europe was plunged in darkness, the rampart of Christian Europe for a thousand years against the Arab and Turk, the educator of the Slavonic races. Freeman truly remarked that Constantinople was for ages the seat of the only regular and systematic Government in the world. Its administrative machine was the most elaborate yet invented by man, and the Court was to mediaeval Europe what Versailles was to the rulers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was indeed a bureaucratic despotism in which liberty was unknown, and, except in art, its spirit was imitative; but to preserve Greek culture during the barbarism of the Middle Ages and to defend it against the repeated assaults of Islam was to deserve well of civilization.

In the middle decades of last century the history of the mediaeval Church was related from very different standpoints in the widely-read works of Neander and Milman; but it was only with the opening of the Vatican archives by Pope Leo XIII in 1881 that it became possible to set forth the whole story of the Papacy and to understand the working of the machinery of Catholicism. So vast is the accumulation of official acts and documents, and such technical training is required for the task, that we shall have to wait many years till the material is surveyed in its entirety and its results made available for the use of the historian. Some idea of the value of the Registers may be gained from the Master of Balliol's pregnant lectures on Church and State in the Middle Ages, based on the 8,000 documents of the eleven years of the rule of Innocent IV in the middle of the thirteenth century. The study of these documents, he tells us, stirred him to admiration of the organization of the Papacy, and convinced him of its enormous superiority over its secular contemporaries as a centre not merely of religion but of law and government; but he adds that he derived an equally profound impression of the abuses which ate into the heart of the system, of the growing bitterness which it inspired, and of the devastating effects of the passion to erect a powerful principality in the heart of Italy.

Janssen's object was to show that the fifteenth century was not a period of moral or intellectual decrepitude, with a few 'Reformers before the Reformation' crying like voices in the wilderness, but an era of healthy activity and abounding promise. He describes the flourishing state of religious and secular education, the vitality of art, the comfort of the peasantry, and the prosperity of the towns. On reaching the sixteenth century, he denounces the paganism of the Humanists and paints a terrible picture of the material and moral chaos into which Germany was plunged by the Lutheran revolt. The later volumes are devoted to the era of the Counter-Revolution and present a canvas of unrelieved gloom, immorality and drunkenness, ignorance, superstition and violence. Thus the story which opened with the bright colours of the fifteenth century closes in deep shadows, and the moral is drawn that Germany was ruined not by the Thirty Years War but by the Reformation.

These sound principles have been applied by the scholars of all countries who have jointly built up the history of the last four centuries. We may study the Tudors under the guidance of Pollard, the Stuarts under Gardiner and Firth, the Hanoverians under Lecky, without fear that we are being misled or that essential facts are being withheld from our notice. We continue to admire the literary brilliance of Macaulay and Carlyle, Motley and Froude; but we are instinctively aware that their partisanship is out of date. The same cooling process has taken place in France, where the passions and tempers of Thiers and Michelet have tended to yield place to the calm lucidity of which Mignet and Guizot were the earliest masters. There is, it must be confessed, a good deal of the old Adam in Taine's elaborate study of Jacobinism, in Masson's innumerable volumes on Napoleon, and even in Aulard's priceless contributions to our knowledge of the French Revolution; but such works as Lavisse's full-length portrait of Louis XIV, Ségur's volumes on Turgot and Necker, Sorel's massive treatise on Europe and the Revolution, and Vandal's incomparable presentation of the Consulate rank as high in scholarship as in literature.

FOR REFERENCE

Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (Longmans).

POLITICAL THEORY

A.D. LINDSAY

For the first half of the nineteenth century all the forces inspiring individualism seemed to work together, for economics and biology breathed a benevolent optimism which promised that if the scientific forces of individualism were left to work unchecked by state restriction, they would of themselves produce that individual liberty and free development which idealistic individualism desired.

Scientific individualism, which found its unit in the economic man and sought to absorb in economics both ethics and politics, was not in essence affected by the discrediting of economic optimism. It painted the struggle between individuals in gloomy instead of in attractive colours, its 'scientific' prepossessions inclined it to a determinism which led easily to the economic theory of history and even, by a curious conversion of opposites, to the 'scientific socialism' of Karl Marx. In its essence it is a denial of the real existence of politics. For it is a theory of society which denies the possibility of a will for the common good and therefore the possibility of political ideals.

The main principles of this idealistic school may be safely said to have by this time established themselves against criticism. Of recent years Social Psychology has done much to explain the gap between the contemplated purpose and the actual working of institutions, and has given precision and definiteness to those elements in human nature which strengthen or weaken social solidarity. Economists have come to see that economic relations are possible only within the framework of a society which has its root in moral and political purpose, although within that framework they may be theoretically isolated and studied by themselves. Sociology, after many false starts, inspired by the mistaken belief that a scientific treatment of society should interpret higher forms in the light of lower, has now found it possible to study the manifold variety of institutional and social life on the basis provided by idealistic philosophy.

As a theory of society, in short, this philosophy holds the field. It has been criticized of late years as a theory of the state, and as these criticisms show both where the idealistic theory was in some respects defective and also where the chief problems for political philosophy in the future are to be found, I shall devote the greater part of my lecture to these considerations.

The Greek city state failed conspicuously to solve the problem of inter-state relations, and its philosophers, instead of recognizing the failure and trying to remedy it, made their ideal state even more self-centred and autonomous than the existing states around them. Modern Idealism, just because it glorifies the state as the necessary upholder of moral relations, has often found it hard to regard the state as in its turn a member of a moral world.

Curiously enough, the central doctrine of the later idealistic school, the personality of the state, lent a force to the criticism of the doctrine of state absolutism. If the state can be described as a person, may not also a church and a trade union? We have begun to learn from Gierke, interpreted and reinforced to us by Maitland, that what is sauce for the state goose is also sauce for the corporation gander, and that associations within the state may claim from the state a greater independence and a recognition of their intrinsic worth because they, as it, embody in some sense a real will over and above the wills of their members. This doctrine of corporate personality is of great interest and complexity, and has not yet been satisfactorily worked out. But I shall not discuss it now because it will not help us far towards a solution of the problem of what are the proper relations between associations and the state, be they personalities or not.

We seem to have come now to the discussion of political machinery, but, as in our discussion of the League of Nations, we can see that our attitude to such questions of machinery will vary as we regard the force-bearing organization with its national and territorial basis as the primary fact in the community, to be distinguished sharply from all other organizations, or regard the possession of organized force as the expression of men's settled and permanent will to maintain their common interests and safeguard the conditions of the good life. If we consistently follow out Green's dictum that will, not force, is the basis of the state, we shall be anxious that the political organization to which we render obedience shall follow the actual ramifications of common interests and of men's willingness to co-operate, and shall recognize that the national state with its territorial basis represents only one form of such ramification.

If, then, we accept the political theory of idealism as a theory of society, we must recognize in social life the distinction between ethical, economic, and political relations, and the task before Political Theory is to define the relations between politics and economic activities on the one side and ethical activities on the other, and that in a society which is not confined within the bounds of a single nation state. The intricate ramifications of vast economic undertakings and the common aspirations and ideals of humanity are but signs of a solidarity of mankind that political philosophy must recognize in all the problems it has to face.

FOR REFERENCE

Green, Principles of Political Obligation.

Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State.

Barker, Political Thought in England from Spencer to to-day.

Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State.

Figgis, Churches in the Modern State.

Cole, Labour in the Commonwealth.

Cole, Self Government in Industry.

Delisle Burns, The Morality of Nations.

'Bradshaw's Railway Time Tables and Assistant to
Railway Travelling'.

'10th Mo. 19th, 1839.        Price Sixpence.'

What a comment on England's industrial supremacy—England with her virtual monopoly of large-scale manufacture in Europe! It must have been a puzzle, too, for the Poor Law Commissioners, who were then building workhouses in these parts for the purpose of depauperizing hand-loom weavers on the less eligibility principle.

But how was it, with such a Poor Law, that the hand-loom weavers did not die of starvation by the thousand? If we enter a cotton mill we shall see why. Within these gaunt walls, which are illumined at night by sputtering gas-light, the factory children work, earning twice as much as their parents, who were too old and too respectable to become factory hands.

In 1842 conditions are better than they were in 1833—thanks to the factory inspectors. There is little positive cruelty, and the sight of deformity—enlarged ankle bones, bow legs, and knock knees, caused by excessive standing as a child—is rare. The problem now is one of industrial fatigue. The children are 'sick-tired'.

5. The Midlands of Leicestershire, Notts, and Derbyshire are a region of red bricks and pantiles, dotted over valleys of exquisite green. So let us leave the smoke of Lancashire and hover here for a while. Here dwell the stocking workers or frame-work knitters—the people who knit on frames stockings, gloves, and other articles of hosiery. It does not look like a region of industry. There are only a few towns, such as Nottingham, Leicester, and Loughborough; and except for a few lace factories in Nottingham, large buildings are rare. The town knitters either work in their own homes or in shops with standings for perhaps as many as fifty frames. In the villages the knitting is nearly all done in the cottages, opposite long low windows, or in a small out-house which might well be a fowl-house.

But in the streets of Leicester we can see 'life' of a sort. We can watch the procession to the pawnbrokers. Some of the knitters pawn their blankets for the day, and most lodge their Sunday clothing during the week. Says a Leicester pawnbroker:

West of Birmingham lies the black country, an area of some twenty square miles. Here, if we have read the evidence of the Truck Commissioners, we can interpret a dumb-show in Dudley, where the nail-makers dwell.

On Monday mornings the nail-maker emerges from a small hovel containing a smithy and walks into Dudley to call on a gentleman known as a fogger, a petty-fogger if he is a middleman, a market-fogger if he is a master. The nailer comes out with a bundle of metal which he takes to a second house and changes for a second bundle of metal, and with this he walks away. (The next nailer, not so lucky, hangs about till Wednesday morning, waiting for his metal.) On Saturday the nailer comes back with his nails, enters the fogger's shop, and emerges with 12s. in his hand. But he does not go home. He slips into a shop close by and parts company with the shillings. In return he gets a parcel, the contents of which are obviously displeasing to him. What has happened?

The nailer is a Government servant. But the Government only employs him indirectly. It puts out contracts for rivets and nails to contractors who sublet their contract, so that the work reaches the nailer at third or fourth hand. The Government, in the interest of public economy (Victorian England is famous for retrenchment), gives its contract to the lowest tenderer; and the policy of the lowest tender is responsible for the dumb-show we have watched.

1. Coal was king of the nineteenth century. The first steam-engine was built to pump water out of coal mines, the first canal was cut to carry the Duke of Bridgwater's coal from Worsley to Manchester. The first railroads were laid around Newcastle to convey the coals from the pit mouth to the river. George Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive, began life as a trapper on a Tyneside colliery.

Where would English industry have been without its king? In 1780 (in round figures) 5,000,000 tons of coal were raised in the United Kingdom: in 1800, 10,000,000; in 1865, 100,000,000; and in 1897, 200,000,000. Coal enticed the cotton factories from the dales of the Pennines to the moist lowlands of West Lancashire. At every stage of their work the iron-makers depended on coal; and the great inventions in the iron and steel industry are land-marks in the expansion of the demand for coal—Cort's puddling process 1783, Watt's steam-engine 1785, Neilson's hot blast 1824, Naysmith's steam-hammer 1835, Bessemer's steel-converter 1855, Siemen's open hearth 1870, Thomas' basic process for the treatment of highly phosphoric ores 1878. The steamship, a novelty in 1820, ruled the seas in 1870; and ironclads followed steamships. The smokeless steam-coal of South Wales guarded the heritage of Trafalgar. By the end of the nineteenth century, coaling stations were an important item in international politics.

Up and down the Durham coalfields tramped a misguided agitator (in after life the veteran servant of the Durham Miners' Association), by name Tommy Ramsey. With bills under his arm and crake in hand, he went from house-row to house-row calling the miners out. He had only one message:

No. 9. Population, or Patty's Marriage.

No. 10. The Poor's Rate, or the Treacherous Friend.

They had lotteries to which each man contributed 20 fortnightly shillings. Each week a name was drawn, and the lucky man stood a feast; while every member, in addition to a shilling for the box, produced 6d. for drinks.

In all these festivities the butty was in the offing. When they would have him he presided; and so at his worst an obnoxious bully, at his best he was an accommodating landlord.

5. The Report of the Truck Commissioners (1871-2) enables us to complete the picture. It also enables us to understand why, at this late day, truck was still rife in certain districts.

In the remaining colliery districts in 1871 truck was prevalent only in West Scotland and South Wales.

The Commissioners drew a vivid picture of Turn Book morning in South Wales at the close of the pay month.

At 1 or 2 a.m. the women and children begin to arrive with their Advance Books. Perhaps one hundred would be there, wet or fine, sleeping on the doorsteps or singing ballads until morning.

At 5.30 a.m. the doors opened, and the waiters made a rush for the counter. Advance Books were produced, and goods handed over up to the amount of wages which would shortly fall due. Women took their pick of the articles, groceries, tobacco, occasionally a few shillings.

6. We are given to understand that the miners of South Wales insist on economics written by sound labour men. We therefore offer them a few suggestions for a history of the currency in the nineteenth century from the worker's point of view.

Bentham lived during the first period and his name is rightly given to the second period.

The student, therefore, comes to wonder if there is anything which is not Benthamism. Benthamism, he says to himself, stands for individualism. How then can the period of Benthamism include the humanitarian legislation which begins with the first Factory Act of 1802 and broadens out during the middle of the century into the elaborate code regulating from then onwards the conditions of employment in workshops, factories, and mines? How can a monster beget an angel?

We may perhaps throw light on this difficulty by suggesting that the social trend from 1825-70 cannot be compressed into a single word. Individualism may suffice to define the dominant legal trend, but it conceals the influence exerted on the legislature from without and from below by the action of voluntary associations. The period of voluntary association coincides with and overlaps the period of individualism.

2. What Bentham was to individualism, Robert Owen was to voluntary association. Bentham himself was an admirer of Owen and supported his philanthropy, but, as expressions of a social attitude, Benthamism and Owenism were poles asunder. The contrast between the two is admirably displayed in the evidence given before the Factory Committee of 1816 by two representatives of the employing class, Josiah Wedgwood of pottery fame and Robert Owen himself.

It is not contended that Owen was responsible for all the associative effort of his generation; for with political and religious associations he had no sympathy. But the spirit which infected him infected others after him, rousing them to associate now for this, and now for that social or religious or political purpose.

3. We may divide associations for social purposes into two classes.

To the first class belong associations formed to secure the abolition of some abuse. These naturally disappear when their object is attained.

For example, there was the Anti-slavery Campaign in which Joseph Sturge and other Quakers played so prominent a part. By an organized crusade of political education the Abolitionists induced an originally hostile Parliament to emancipate the West Indian negroes in 1833, and to shorten the period of semi-servile apprenticeship in 1838. Yorkshire was the home of the Short Time Committees, which organized the campaign against White Slavery at home. The Ten Hours Movement caused the Ten Hours Bill to become the law of the land. From Lancashire came the Anti-Corn Law League, whose story is told in another chapter.

The second class of association was the association for economic betterment—the Friendly Society, the Co-operative Society, the Trade Union. Conceived in enthusiasm and self-inspired, these associations asked only of the State a legal framework in which to develop, but they did not win it without struggle and delay.

These deterrents were removed by enabling legislation. In 1829 a central authority, the Registrar of Friendly Societies, was appointed to supervise Friendly Societies, and between 1829 and 1875 further privileges and safeguards were conferred. But the Friendly Society Movement throughout the nineteenth century was wholly voluntary. In 1911 the situation was suddenly reversed by the passing of the National Insurance Act.

The Co-operative Societies were more suspect. They crept into legal recognition as the children of the Friendly Society, under the 'frugal investments' clause of the Act of 1846, being compelled by the legal prejudice against association in restraint of trade to adopt this unnatural mother. Their real nature was recognized in 1852, when they were brought under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act, and in 1862, when they were granted the boon of limited liability. But the accident of their legal origin still survives; for they are regulated to-day by the Industrial and Provident Societies Act of 1893. The Co-operative Movement is now drawing closer to politics, following the lead of most of the continental countries, notably Belgium and Germany. Though we cannot say that there is any indication of the State taking over the movement, we may note that the growth of municipal trading in the 'nineties was, in principle, an application of the consumers' association to monopolies of distribution such as tramways, water, electricity, and gas.

FOR REFERENCE

Dicey, Law and Opinion.

Robinson, The Spirit of Association.

Hovell, The Chartist Movement.

Sombart (tr. Epstein), Socialism and the Socialist Movement.

[Cd. 9236], Report of Committee on Trusts.

ATOMIC THEORIES

PROFESSOR W.H. BRAGG, C.B.E., D.SC., F.R.S.

When a lecture on the progress of Science is given before a conference concerned largely with historical subjects, it is not inappropriate to point out that Science has a history of its own and that its progress makes a connected story. The discovery of new facts is not made in an isolated fashion, nor is it a matter of pure chance, unaffected by what has gone before. On the contrary, scientific progress is made step by step, each new point that is reached forming a basis for further advances. Even the direction of discovery is not entirely in the explorer's control; there is always a next step to be taken and a limited number of possible steps forward from which a choice can be made. The scientific discoverer has to go in the direction in which his discoveries lead him. When discoveries have been made it is possible to think of uses to which they may be put, but in the first instance all discoveries are made without any knowledge whatever of what use may afterwards be made of them.

One of the most important forms of energy is radiation. The constant outpouring by the sun of energy in this form is vital to us. The fact was obvious long ago and that is one of the reasons why light and heat have interested students of science in all ages.

There exist then three main subjects of study—matter, electricity, and energy. These themselves and their mutual relations have been, and are, the principal objects of interest to the scientific student, and from our strivings to understand them we have learnt most of what we know. All three are quantities and all are expressible in terms of units.

Now there is one point which I have thought would especially interest you. A very remarkable tendency of modern discovery shows more and more clearly that not only are these things quantities which we can express in units of our own choosing, but that Nature herself has already chosen units for them. The natural unit does not, of course, bear any exact connexion with our own. This being so, it must be of the utmost importance that we should know what these natural units are and so be able to understand what Nature is ready to tell us. Nature has chosen to speak in a certain language; we must get to know that language.

It should be observed that the atom, in spite of its name, is not something which is incapable of all further division; it is only incapable of retaining its properties on division. When an atom of radium breaks down in the unique operation during which its singular properties are manifested, it dies as radium and becomes two atoms, one of helium, the other of a different and rare substance. It will interest you to know that the airships of the future are expected to be filled with this non-inflammable helium.

Every electric discharge is essentially a hurried rush of electrons. When we rub two bodies together and they become electrified we have in some way or other torn electrons from one of the bodies and piled them on the other. The former becomes the positively charged body and the latter the negative. A film of moisture stops this action. When wool is spun in factories it tends to become in certain stages of the process too dry and too free from grease; the yarn then becomes electrified as it passes over the leather rollers, and when the machine tries to spin the threads together they fly apart and refuse to join up the minute hooks with which the wool fibres are furnished. The spinning operation would come to an end were there not means provided by which the air can be so filled with moisture that the fibres become damp and the action ceases. So in some cases a stream of air filled with positive and negative ions is made to play upon the fibres; the fibres select what ions they want, and so neutralizing themselves, spinning can proceed again.

Electrons are involved in the emission of wireless signals, and in their receipt. The so-called 'valve', which multiplies minute electric signals and was so greatly improved during the war, depends entirely on the action of electrons, and the brilliant experimental work was based on the newly-acquired knowledge of their properties.

I have told you that under certain circumstances a stream of electrons may generate X-Rays, in reality a form of light rays. This action is a very common one, and it is curious that the faster the electron goes the shorter is the wave-length of the radiation. A very fast electron generates an X-Ray of so short a wave-length that the penetrating power of the ray, which goes with the shortness of the wave, is excessive, and in this way we may have rays which go right through the human body or even through inches of steel. As the speed of the exciting electron becomes less, the X-Rays are less penetrating. With still slower electrons we may generate ordinary light, and it will take a slower electron to generate red than to generate blue. The slowest electrons we use in this way have a speed of many hundred miles per second; the fastest have a speed which nearly approaches that of light, or 186,000 miles a second.

And conversely radiation can set electrons in motion. When X-Rays are driven into a patient's body electrons are set in motion within, and moving over certain minute distances, initiate chemical actions which are necessary to some cure. Or they may go right through the body and fall on a photographic plate, setting in operation chemical action which forms a picture on the plate.

Now it is found that when the speed approaches that of light, 186,000 miles or 3 x 10¹⁰ centimetres per second, the energy is higher than it should be if it followed the usual rule, viz. energy is equal to half the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity. It would seem that an electron moving with the velocity of light would have infinite energy; or, to put the matter in another way, the experimenter in his laboratory can never hope to observe an electron moving so fast; it would be the end of his laboratory and of himself if ever it turned up.

I will only add that the whole position of physics is indeed at this time of extraordinary interest, and at any moment there may be some great discovery or illuminating thought which will explain the present startling difficulties and open up new worlds of thought.

FOR REFERENCE

Bragg, Rays and Crystals (Ball & Sons).

PROGRESS IN BIOLOGY DURING THE LAST SIXTY YEARS

PROFESSOR LEONARD DONCASTER, F.R.S.

On November 24, 1859, The Origin of Species was published, and this date marks the beginning of an epoch in every branch of biology. Before it, Biology had been almost entirely a descriptive science, but within a few years after the publication of the Origin its effects began to colour all aspects of biological research. A co-ordinating and unifying principle had been found, and the leading idea of biologists ceased to be to describe living things as they are, and became transformed into the attempt to discover how they are related to one another. The first effect of this change of attitude was chiefly to turn biologists towards the task of tracing phylogenetic or evolutionary relationships between different groups of animals—the drawing up of probable or possible genealogical trees and the explanation of natural classification on an evolutionary basis. When once, however, the notion of cause and effect, or more correctly of relationship, between the phenomena seen in living beings had become familiar to biologists, it spread far beyond the limits of tracing genealogical connexions between different animals and plants. It made possible the conception of a true Science of Life, in which every phenomenon seen in a living organism should fall into its true place in relation to the rest, and in which also the phenomena of life should be correlated with those discovered in the inorganic sciences of Chemistry and Physics.

While the problem of the transmission of acquired characters, and of the cause of variation and its relation to evolution, was occupying much of the attention of biologists, the whole problem entered upon a new phase in the year 1900 with the re-discovery of Mendel's work on heredity. Mendel worked with plants, and published his results in 1865, but at that time the biological world was too much occupied with the fierce controversy which raged over The Origin of Species to take much notice of a paper the bearing of which upon it was not appreciated. Mendel's discovery never came to the notice of Darwin, was buried in an obscure periodical, and remained unknown until many years after the death of its author. In 1900 it was unearthed, and, largely owing to the work of Bateson, it rapidly became known as one of the most important contributions to Biology made during the period under review.

An important consequence of the advance in our knowledge of heredity associated with the work of Mendel and his successors is a tendency to doubt whether natural selection is of such fundamental importance in shaping the course of evolution as was supposed in the years of the first enthusiasm which followed the publication of the Origin.

Before leaving this side of the subject, reference must be made to one important aspect of modern work on heredity—that of the inheritance of 'mental and moral' characteristics. As a result of the work of the biometric school founded by Galton and Pearson, it has been shown that the so-called mental and moral characteristics of man are inherited in the same manner and to the same extent as his physical features. Of the theoretical importance of this demonstration this is not the place to speak; its practical value is unquestionable, and may in the future have important effects on sociological problems.

It was said at the beginning of this sketch that most of the more notable lines of advance in Biology could be traced back to the impetus given by the acceptance of the theory of Evolution, and the desire to test and prove that theory in every biological field. It is most convenient, therefore, to take this root-idea as a starting-point, and to see how the various branches of study have diverged from it and have themselves branched out in various ways, and how these branches have often again become intertwined and united in the later development of the science.

A second important piece of evidence in favour of evolution is provided by the study of the geographical distribution of animals, on which much work was done in the earlier part of the period under review. And in this connexion mention must be made of the science of Oceanography, for our whole knowledge of life in the abysses of the ocean, and almost all that we know of the conditions of life in the sea in general, has been gained in the last fifty years.

Hence we are led back to consider the progress of Physiology as a whole—a subject with which the present writer hesitates to deal except in a very superficial manner. Physiology as an organized science has inevitably been deeply influenced by its close relation with medicine, with the result that through a large portion of the period under review it has concerned itself chiefly with the functions of the human body in particular, or at least chiefly with Vertebrates from which, by analogy, the human functions may be inferred. In this field it has made enormous progress, and a vast amount of knowledge has been gained with regard to the function and mechanism of all the parts and organs of the body. It may perhaps be suggested, however, that in the pursuit of this detailed (and in practice absolutely necessary) knowledge, physiologists have to some extent lost sight of the wood in their preoccupation with the trees. That is to say, while they have advanced an immense distance in their knowledge of organs, they have not yet got as far as might be hoped in the understanding of the organism—which is to say no more than that the great and fundamental problem of Biology, the nature and meaning of Life, is apparently almost as far from solution as ever. To this further reference will be made below.

The nervous system is the chief co-ordinating link between the various organs of the body, but in recent years it has been discovered that the relations of the different parts to one another are greatly influenced by substances known as internal secretions or 'hormones'. These substances are produced by ductless glands (the thyroid, suprarenals, &c.), from which they diffuse into the blood-stream and exercise a remarkable influence either on particular organs or systems, or on the body as a whole. Some of these secretions act specifically on the involuntary muscles of the body, others control growth, others the development of the secondary sexual characters, such as the distinctive plumage of male birds, and also greatly influence the sexual instinct. Much still remains to be discovered with regard to them, but it seems clear that they are of immense importance in the economy of the body. It has been suggested, without much experimental support, however, that if a part of the body becomes modified by use or environment, it may produce a modified hormone, and that so, by the action of this on the germ-cells, the modification may be transmitted to subsequent generations.

As in other instances, however, some of which have been mentioned above, the elucidation of the organism from this point of view has turned out to be a much less simple process than the more sanguine of the early investigators supposed. The more knowledge has progressed, the more complex and intricate has even the simplest organism shown itself to be, and although the mechanism of the parts is gradually becoming understood, the fundamental mystery of life remains as elusive as ever.

From what has been said it will be evident that, fundamentally, all biological research, whether its authors are conscious of it or not, is directed towards the solution of one central problem—the problem of the real and ultimate nature of life. And the main outcome of the work of sixty years has been that this problem has begun clearly to emerge as the central aim of the science. The theory of evolution made the problem a reality, for without evolution the mystery of life must for ever be insoluble, but whatever direction biological investigation has taken, it has led, often by devious paths, to the borderland between the living and the inorganic, and in that borderland the central problem inevitably faces us.

On the other hand, there has been a revival of the ancient tendency towards what is called a vitalistic solution. A certain number of biologists, impressed by the apparent similarity between the control and co-ordination exercised by the organism over its functions and the conscious control of voluntary activity with which we are familiar in ourselves, have supposed that these things are not merely superficially similar but have a real and fundamental affinity. This does not mean that organic control is always conscious, but that there is a controlling entity, non-material in nature, which is similar in kind to the 'ego' of a self-conscious human being. They suppose that the organism is not simply material, but is a material mechanism controlled by a non-material entity the nature of which is more akin to what we mean by the word spirit than anything else of which we are accustomed to think. They are in fact dualists, and divide reality into the material and spatial on the one hand, and non-material principle or entity which may fairly be called spiritual on the other.

It is evident from this brief review that Biology in the period considered has passed through three main stages. The first of these was the acceptance of a new illuminating and unifying idea, which led to enthusiastic research in many directions for the purpose of proving and amplifying it. Very rapidly new facts, or new interpretations of facts already known, were shown to fall into line, and the evolution theory became converted from a hypothesis into something approaching a dogma. Not only the idea of organic evolution itself, but all the current beliefs about the method of evolution, and the larger speculations to which it gave rise, were widely regarded as almost indisputable, and where difficulties and inconsistencies appeared, these were supposed to be due solely to the insufficiency of our knowledge, which would soon be remedied. Then, however, as detailed knowledge increased, the voice of criticism and doubt was more frequently heard. The various branches of Biology began once more to overlap, and to join hands with chemistry and physics, and it became clear that the interpretation of life was very far from being a simple problem. And so, as with the Atomic Theory in chemistry, the present position is one of dissolution of the older ideas and of hesitation to express a fixed belief, for while Biology has a clearer vision of the problem before it than ever it had, its wider knowledge reveals the fact that the problem is far from being solved. Perhaps one of the chief results of the great increase of knowledge during the past sixty years has been to show us the immensity of the field still remaining to be explored.

FOR REFERENCE

Centenary volume on Darwin (Cambridge University Press).

ART

A. CLUTTON-BROCK

My subject is art and thought about art. I deal with aesthetics only so far as they concern art, that is to say I shall not attempt any purely philosophic speculations about the nature of art and I shall speak of the speculations of others, such as Croce and Tolstoy, only so far as they seem to me likely to have a practical effect upon art. My subject is the art of to-day and our ideas about it. We are beginning at last to connect aesthetics with our own experience of art and to see that our beliefs about the nature and value of art will affect the art we produce. Hence a new aesthetic is very slowly appearing; but I have to confess it has not yet appeared.

Indeed there are at present two conflicting theories of art, one or other of which is held consciously or unconsciously by most people who are interested in art at all, and both of which I think are not only imperfect but to some extent false. They are theories about the relation of the artist to the public, and because of the conflict between them and the falsity of each, we are confused in our ideas about art, and the artists are often confused in their practice of it.

Whistler states it in the form of a New Testament of his own.

Whistler means that they did not notice the patterns the artist had traced on it.

So gradually there came the great ages of art.

And, he says, the people questioned not, and had nothing to do or say in the matter.

I do not think this can be a true account of the matter; for, if the people were not aware of the existence of art and did not value it at all, how came they to imitate it? One imitates only that which one values. Imitation, as we know, is the sincerest form of flattery; and you cannot flatter that which you do not know to exist.

What is Art? is a most interesting book, full of incidental truth; but I believe that the main contention in it is false. I will give this contention as shortly as I can in his own words.

Now this is well enough as far as it goes, but it is not enough, and just because it is not enough it leads Tolstoy into error. Clearly, if art is nothing but the infection of the public with the feelings of the artist, it follows that a work of art is to be judged by the number of people who are infected. And Tolstoy with his usual sincerity accepts these conclusions; indeed, he wrote his book to insist upon them. He judges art entirely as a thing of use, moral use, and he says it can be of no use unless a large audience is infected by it. A work of art that few can enjoy fails as art, just as a railway from nowhere to nowhere fails as a railway. A railway exists to be travelled by and a work of art exists to be experienced by as many people as possible. Here are the actual words of Tolstoy:

According to him the proper aim of art is to do good.

The word unjust implies that the aim of art is to do good. The artist sins if he does not try to do good to as many people as possible, and I sin if I am ready to enjoy and encourage a work of art which most people do not enjoy.

But as a matter of fact a work of art is good to me, not morally good but good as a work of art, if I enjoy it. In my estimate of the work of art I can ask only if it is a work of art to me, not if it is one to other people. I may wish and try to make them enjoy it, but if I do that is as a result of my own enjoyment of it. I can't begin by asking whether other people enjoy it; I must begin with my own experience of it, for I have nothing else to go by.

In fact, art in its nature is a social activity, because man in his nature is a social being. Art does not exist in isolation because man does not exist in isolation. His very faculties are in their nature social always and whether for good or for evil. The individual in isolation is a figment of man's mind, and so is art in isolation.

But although art is a social activity, it is not, as Tolstoy thinks, a moral activity. The artist does not address mankind with the object of doing them good. It is useless to say that he ought to have that object; if he had he would not be an artist. The aim of doing good is itself incompatible with the artistic aim. But that is not to say that art does not do good. It may do good all the more because the artist is not trying to do good.

It is a fact of human nature that the experience of any beauty does arouse in us the desire to communicate our experience; and this desire is instinctive. It is not that we wish to do good to others by communicating it. It is simply that we wish to communicate it. The experience itself is incomplete for us until we communicate it. The happiness which it gives us is frustrated by our failure to communicate it. We should be utterly happy if we could make others see what we see and feel what we feel, but we fail of happiness because we cannot.

Why? One can only conjecture and express conjectures in dull language. This beauty is itself a universal quality or virtue which makes particular things more real when they have it. It speaks to the universal in us, to the everyman in us, and, speaking so, it makes us aware of the universal in all men. We too wish to speak to that universal, we wish to find it and the more intense reality which is to be seen only where it is seen, we wish ourselves to be a part of it; and we can do that only when all other men also are a part of it. Beauty seems to speak not merely to us but to the whole listening earth, and we would be assured that all the earth is listening to it, not to us.

But it follows from this that the audience to which the artist addresses himself is not any particular men and women: it is mankind. The moment he addresses himself to any particular men and women and considers their particular wants and desires, he is giving up that very sense of the universal that impelled him to expression; he is ceasing to be an artist and becoming something else, a tradesman, a philanthropist, a politician. The artist as artist speaks to mankind, not to any particular set of men; and he speaks not of himself but of that universal which he has experienced. His effort is to establish that universal relation which he has seen, a universal relation of feeling. And to him, in his effort, there is neither time nor space. Mankind are not here or there or of this moment or of that; they are everywhere and for ever. The voice in Mozart's music is itself a universal voice speaking to the universe of universal things. And all art is an acting of the beauty that has been experienced, a perpetuation of it so that all men may share it for ever. The artist's effort is to be the sunset he has seen, to eternalize it in his art, but always so that he and all men may be part of this universal by their common experience of it.

So, as I say, the artist must not speak to any particular audience with the aim of pleasing them—there is that amount of truth in Whistler's doctrine; and he does fail if he does not communicate, since his aim is communication—there is that amount of truth in Tolstoy's doctrine.

We have to remember that he is speaking not to us in particular, but to all mankind, and that he speaks, not to please us or to satisfy any particular demand of ours, but to communicate to us that universal he has experienced so that we with him may become part of it.

It follows then that we must not make any particular demands upon him. We must not come with our own ideas of what he ought to give us. If we do, we shall be an obstruction between him and that ideal universal audience to which he would address himself. We shall be tempting him, with our egotistical demands, to comply with them. But these demands we are always making; and that is why the relation between the artist and any actual public is usually nowadays wrong. I was once looking at Tintoret's 'Crucifixion' in the Scuola di San Rocco with a lady, and she said to me—'That isn't my idea of a horse.' 'No'—I answered—'it's Tintoret's. If it were your idea of a horse, why should you look at it? You look at a picture to get the artist's idea.' But that isn't the truth about art either. The artist doesn't try to substitute his own particular for yours. He tries to communicate to you that universal which he has experienced, because it is to him a universal, not his own, but all men's, and he wishes to realize it by sharing it with all men. His faith, though he may never have consciously expressed it to himself, is in this universal which, because it is a universal, can be communicated to all men. His effort is based on that faith. He speaks because he believes all men can hear, if they will.

But why should we want art at all? I hope I have answered that question incidentally. It is so that we may have life more abundantly; for we can have life more abundantly only when we are in communication with each other, mind flowing into mind, the universal expressing itself in and through all of us. We all more or less blindly desire this communication, but we seldom know why we desire it or even what exactly it is we desire. We make the strangest, clumsiest efforts to communicate with each other—I am making one now—and we are constantly inhibited by false shame from real communication. We are afraid to be serious with each other, afraid of beauty, of the universal, when we see it. On this point I will tell a little story from Mr. Kirk's Study of Silent Minds. At a concert behind the front, an audience of soldiers had listened to the ordinary items, a performance, as Mr. Kirk says, 'clean, bright, and amusing', which means of course silly and ugly. Then the orchestra played the introduction to the Keys of Heaven, and a gunner remarked—'Sounds like a bloody hymn.' That was his fear of beauty, his false shame. But when the Keys of Heaven was ended, the whole audience, including the gunner, gave a sigh of content; and after that they went to hear it time after time. Well, the beauty of that song, and of all art, is the 'Key of Heaven' itself. For Heaven is a state of being of which we all dream, however dully, in which all have the power of communication with each other; in which all are aware of the universal, possessed by it and a part of it, all members of one body, all notes in one tune, and therefore all the more intensely themselves, for a note is itself, finds itself, only in a tune; otherwise it is mere nonsense.

Tolstoy believes that the very word beauty is a useless one because, he says, all efforts to define beauty are vain. But that is true of the word life, yet we have to use the word because life exists. And all explanations of art which refuse to believe in beauty as a reality independent of us, yet one of which we may become a part, do fall into incredible nonsense. We are told that art is play; the only answer to which is that it isn't. Others say that it is an expression of the sexual instinct, which has forgotten itself. They discover that in some savage tribe the male beats a tom-tom to attract the female; and they conclude that Beethoven's Choral Symphony is only a more elaborate tom-tom beaten to attract a more sophisticated female. But again the only answer is that it isn't; and that if all our ancestors were, not Whistler's dreamers apart, but beaters of tom-toms to attract females, then there was something in the sound of the tom-tom that made them forget the female. The reality of art is to be found not in its origins but in what it is trying to be; and what it is trying to be is always a communication between mind and mind; what we aim at in art is a fellowship not for purposes of use but for its own sake, the fellowship we feel when we are all together singing a great tune.

FOR REFERENCE

W. Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art.

A GENERATION OF MUSIC

DR. ERNEST WALKER

But I must not allow this little preliminary apology to stray into the field of abstract aesthetics. The subject proposed to me, the correlation of the progress of specifically musical thought during the last generation with the progress of European thought in general, is so extensive that I cannot within the necessary limits attempt to deal with more than some of the most salient features, and even those I shall have to treat in very broad outlines, with a certain disregard of detail and nicely balancing qualifications. I shall only attempt to put before you what seem to me the most prominent considerations, and to throw out suggestions which I hope you may perhaps, if sufficiently interested, develop at leisure for yourselves.

All this development of instrumental music into territories more or less adjacent makes a very imposing show; and it is so markedly a product of the last generation that we easily over-estimate the novelty of its essential results. As I have said, instrumental music is more and more asking for external spurs to creative activity; but this does not mean that music as a whole is, so to speak, breaking loose from its moorings and adventurously voyaging on to uncharted seas. What it means is, simply, that, under the stress of modern culture, the barriers between vocal and instrumental, dramatic and non-dramatic, music have been to a great extent abolished.

The feeling for music as such, that is still the one thing needful. And by this canon, so it seems to me, we must judge all these alarums and excursions of modern composers. If we hold firmly by it, we shall not be unduly worried when we learn that the music which seems so perfectly to realize the composer's expressed meaning has been originally designed by him quite otherwise—as has happened oftener than is generally known; though this fact does not excuse wilful contradictions of a composer's definite intentions, as in the vulgar perversion of Rimsky-Korsakoff's Scheherezade popularized by the latest fashionable toy, the Russian Ballet, which would do more musically unexceptionable service were it to confine itself to works specially designed for it, such as the fascinating and finely-wrought scores of Stravinsky, or concert works like Balakireff's Thamar, based on programmes that can be mimetically reproduced without unfaithfulness. And anyhow, in the midst of all these appeals to the eye or the literary memory or what not, we may call to mind the simple truth that music is something to be heard with either the inward or the outward ear, and if we are too much distracted otherwise, our hearing sense suffers. We shall pay too high a price for our latter-day correlation of music with literature and the other arts if the music itself has to play the part of Cinderella. 'We do it wrong, being so majestical.'

THE MODERN RENASCENCE

F. MELIAN STAWELL

And not only happiness and love, but knowledge also: the Earth calls to the Sky: 'Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.' Soberer spirits shared this poet's ecstasy. Wordsworth sang

And that heaven was exactly this foretaste of the Spirit of Man entering undisturbed into his full inheritance at last: Science welcomed as a dear and honoured guest, Poetry known as 'the breath and finer spirit that is in the countenance of all knowledge'.

Goethe, moreover, again like Shelley and the French, broke with all ideals of mere self-abnegation. In his poem, 'General Confession', he makes his disciples repent of ever having missed an opportunity for enjoyment and resolve never so to offend again. Here, as often, Goethe comes into the closest touch with our modern feeling. We, too, can never return to the Franciscan ideal of poverty, celibacy, and obedience as the highest life for man on earth. We have done with self-denial except as the means to a human end. We are still in the tide of what I would call the Modern Renascence; we claim the whole garden of the world for our own, the tree with the knowledge of good and evil included, reacting even from Christian ideals if they can make no room for that. But, after all, the characteristic of the belief dominant a century ago was exactly that such room could be made, that Hellenism could be combined with Christianity, and self-development with self-denial.

In any case, the high confidence that breathes in the music of a hundred years ago meets us again in the philosophers.

Hegel, born in the same year as Beethoven and Wordsworth (1770), is sure that nothing can resist the onslaught of man's spirit. 'Stronger than the gates of Hell are the gates of Thought.' Fichte is convinced that there waits in man, only to be developed, a power that will unite him with all other men and at the same time develop his own personality to the full. In a sense, the deepest, each man is his fellow-men, and they are he.

Now after Schopenhauer came Nietzsche, and though Nietzsche's influence may have been exaggerated, yet undeniably it has been of immense importance both for Germany and Europe. He is typical of the change that begins to appear about the middle of the century. Reacting from the optimism of the idealists (which seemed to him both smug and false), Nietzsche welcomed Schopenhauer's more Spartan view with a kind of fierce delight. But his criticism of Schopenhauer was fierce too, and he gave a strangely different turn to such parts of the doctrine as he did accept. To Schopenhauer, since it was folly to hope for real happiness in this life or any other, the wise course would be to kill outright, so far as possible, the Will to Live itself. To Nietzsche the wise course was to assert life, to claim it more and more abundantly, to face this tragic show with a courage so high that it could be gay, a courage that could do without happiness, and yet that turned aside from none of life's joys simply because they were fleeting, that was more than content to 'live dangerously', picking flowers, as it were, clear-eyed, on the edge of the precipice. And this not merely in the temper of 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' For him the motto would have run, 'Let us be up and doing, for to-morrow we die', sustained by the belief that the heroic struggle now would lead inevitably to the production of a nobler type of man, a man who would be something more than man—the Super-man, to give him the name that every reader knows, if he knows nothing else about Nietzsche.

In fairness, we must add that Nietzsche could not succeed in his own attempt; the struggle tore him to pieces and he died in madness.

And there is another matter, perhaps the most important of all, on which I would dwell as I draw to a close, where Meredith leads directly to the dominant thought of the present day. I mean his feeling that, if the universe is to be proved acceptable to man's conscience, it will be through the effort of man himself struggling towards his own ideal. It is as though the world itself had to be redeemed by man. This hope is the real hope of our time. So far as the modern world believes the doctrine of the Incarnation, it is in this sense that it believes.

And this belief we find everywhere in all hopeful writers, great or small. It gives dignity to the latest writings of H.G. Wells, this faith in a spirit moving in man greater than man himself, worthy to fight and fit to overcome all that is wrong in the universe. Bernard Shaw's creed is just the same, sometimes thinly disguised under respect for 'the Life-Force', sometimes coming boldly forward in audacious, profound assertions that God needs Man to accomplish His own will and is helpless without him. 'There is something I want to do,' Shaw imagines his God as saying, 'and I don't know what it is; I must make a brain, the human brain, to find it out.' Rodin modelled a mighty hand, the Hand of God, holding within it Man and Woman. Shaw, it is reported, asked the sculptor: 'I suppose you meant your own hand after all?' 'Yes,' said Rodin, 'as the tool.'

From this point of view, the world is conceived as anything but ready-made, rather it is in the process of making, and we ourselves are among the makers. Or, to take a metaphor that perhaps appeals more to the modern world, it is a fight, and an unfinished fight. To quote William James, 'It feels like a real fight—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears.' He goes on to confess that he himself does not know, and certainly cannot prove scientifically, that the redemption will surely be accomplished. Such proof, he admits, 'may not be clear before the day of judgement (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize)'. 'But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may turn to the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those with which Henry IV greeted the tardy Crillon after a great battle had been gained:

But he is sure of one thing: it is through the struggle with it and such as it that man alone can become Man. It is through facing the horrors of a dead calm, with a sick crew on board and no medicine, that the young master of the sailing-vessel in the Pacific crosses successfully the Shadow Line that divides youth from manhood. And it is through facing the unleashed fury of the tornado that the old captain of the 'full-powered steam-ship' in Typhoon shows what he has in him, compassion and kindness as well as shrewd knowledge of men, expert seamanship, and indomitable heroism. The whole thing is driven home with a power, an incisiveness, and a delicate irradiating humour which I should despair of conveying by mere criticism. The book must be read for itself, and read again and again. It is told, in one way, simply as a sailor's yarn, but it awakes in us the feeling that the struggle is a symbol of man's life.

And so noble is the power with which Conrad uses our tongue, the tongue he has made his own by adoption and genius, that I must let him speak for himself, and can find no better close for my own lame words. Jukes has been shouting to his captain again: