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To A Young Man or Woman in Search of the Ideal. IV

That beatific mental condition associated by my midnight visitor, the reporter, with people of alleged cultivation and æsthetic tastes, when in the presence of the beauties or marvels of nature, like sunset, mountain scenery, ocean calm and ocean storm, is doubtless a familiar experience to you. The wonder book of nature is constantly being held up by poet and painter as the source of human ideality, and all the traditions of civilization urge you to attain that degree of artistic development under the white light of which the seals of that book become loosened, and you are able to read in the evening star and the mountain torrent lessons of inspiration and truth. Next to nature in their æsthetic potency are her hand-maids, music, sculpture, letters and painting – briefly, the civilized arts, the medium by which mortals seek to woo and hold fast to beauty. We listen to the gorgeous anthems of the world's most famous composers, and our souls thrill and vibrate with emotion; life seems grand and everything possible. We stand before the greatest marbles and canvasses, and we seem to have truth within our grasp and nature almost subjugated. How exquisitely falls on the senses the sublimity of the lines

Fair as a star, when only oneIs shining in the sky.

We catch a glimpse there of what we call heaven. Is there any more satisfactory occupation for a thirsty soul than to scan the fairness of the twilight heavens when the evening star shines alone and the saffron or purple glories of the departing day irradiate the west?

Noi andavam per lo vespero attentiOltre, quanto potean gli occhi allungarsi,Contro i raggi serotini e lucenti.

So wrote Dante in immortal verse, to portray the æsthetic value of a kindred experience.

I selected those lines of Wordsworth because he, of all the poets, suggests more ostensibly in his verse deliberate pursuit of the ideal. Shelley, indeed, reveals a bolder purpose to unmask the infinite, but his mood is oftener that of an audacious stormer of heaven than of a reverent seeker for perfect truth. We feel in Wordsworth a conscious intent to distill from the study of nature and of man a spiritual exhalation, which would enlighten him and enable him, by force of his poetic gifts, to enlighten us as to how best to live. When we think of him, we see him amid the exquisite scenery of his favorite lakes, walking in close communion with God; discerning the manifestations of the infinite in the mountain and the wild flower, in the splendor of the storm and the faithful doings of the humblest lives.

Ever since he wrote Wordsworth has been the patron saint of introspective souls. In his poetry they have found not merely suggestion but a creed. The poet himself was at heart an enthusiast and a revolutionary, and his worship of quiet beauty and subjective refinement was the expression of a design broader and deeper in its scope than many of his followers have been willing to adopt. He revealed not merely the æsthetic significance of the contemplative life which substitutes soul analysis, with God in nature as a guide, for the grosser interests of the flesh, but also the unholiness of class distinctions and of the indifference of man to his fellow-man as distinguished from himself. The followers of Wordsworth were, for the most part, prompt to accept the first without including the second and equally fundamental tenet of his philosophy. What, a quarter of a century ago, was the ordinary practice of the cultivated and refined, who had been stirred either directly or indirectly by the teaching of the great poet to adopt contemplation as the key-note of their daily lives? Their greatest number was in beautiful, rural England; but the spiritual atmosphere breathed by them soon found its way across the Atlantic, and served to exalt and modify the ever moral inclinations of New England.

Picture, if you will, the model country house of the English country gentleman of comfortable means and refined tastes. To begin with, the structure itself is charming; time has bestowed upon it picturesqueness, and art has made it beautiful with the simple but effective arrangement of vines and flowers. There is nothing of the vileness of earth at hand to mar or offend. The proprietor himself, an elder son, has been left with a competence; no riches, but sufficient to enable him to pursue his literary or other refined interests without molestation from pecuniary cares. The interior is tasteful and æsthetically satisfying; the spacious, comfortable rooms contain all that is desirable in the way of upholstery, ornaments, books, and pictures. The large drawing-room windows command a fair expanse of velvet lawn, flanked by stately trees. Beyond lies an undulating acreage of ancestral metes and bounds, rich in verdure and precious with associations. Here lives our gentleman the greater portion of the year; lives aspiringly according to his Wordsworthian creed. He eschews or uses with admirable moderation the coarser pleasures and vanities of life. Unselfishness, gentleness, and nicety of thought and speech are the custom of his household. He himself finds congenial occupation in literary or scientific research, in the hope of adding some book or monograph to the world's store of art or knowledge. His wife, in co-operation with the church, plays a gracious part among their tenants or among the village sick and poor, teaching her daughters to dispense charity in the form of soup, coals, jellies, and blankets. Parents and children alike, jealously intending to attain holiness and culture, continuously take an account of their individual spiritual successes and failures, and though they hold these auditings with God in the church, they renew them often under the inspiring influence of nature.

The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

or, as Dante expressed a similar conception,

'Twas now the hour that turneth back desireIn those who sail the sea, and melts the heartThe day they've said to their sweet friends farewell,And the new pilgrim penetrates with love,If he doth hear from far away a bellThat seemeth to deplore the dying day.

This is the hour when the Wordsworthian spirit, refined, conscientious, aspiring, beauty and duty loving, sees through the splendor of the lucent, saffron sky, heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending. Not always is the vision so adorable. Often enough the gazer knows the bitterness of divine discontent, and finds the golden glory but a bar, shutting out God. In the favorable hour, though, comes the rapture, and the transfiguration; the exquisite, refined feelings seem to find communion with the infinite, and a voice from heaven to say:

Well done, good and faithful servant.

I have selected this experience of the cultivated English household rather than that of the purely religious life as an example, for the reason that in it the æsthetic side is represented in the soul-hunger, and that the existing conditions of earth are, to a certain extent, taken into account. In the purely religious life, the emotions of the exalted soul have, in the past at least, been prone to exclude the actual conditions of human life from consideration. The thought has been that the earthly existence is travail, and at best a discipline; that the joys of life are vanity, and the mundane problems of life unworthy of the interested attention of the heaven-seeking soul. Modern religious theories have modified this point of view, but certainly in some sects still the æsthetic value of existence is almost contemptuously discarded by religion. I have taken the beautiful lives of the Wordsworthians as an example, also because the religious element is so manifestly cherished and cultivated in them. It is intended in them that art and God should work together, or, more accurately, the precept is that the æsthetic side of humanity is one of the noblest manifestations of the infinite within us. It is significant in this connection that though art has often reached its apogee in periods of moral decay, the ruin of the nation, thus robbed of spiritual vitality, has soon followed, in spite of the glory of its sculpture and canvasses. But that is a mere interjection. The point I wish to suggest is this: The sane soul recognizes, when face to face with truth, that what we see in the glory of the sunset, when we think we walk with God, must be, in order to be of value, an inspiration based on the conditions of mundane life. Without this, prayer and adoration become a mere nervous exhalation, reaching out for something which has no more substance than an ignus fatuus. The old saints who lived and died in prayer, ignoring human relations, seem to us to-day to have been wofully deluded. They yearned to be translated from a world to which they had contributed nothing but the desire to be holy. This desire is of the essence of the matter; and so we consent to give their reverences the benison of our distinguished consideration. But aspiring souls, as evidenced by the æsthetic man and woman of culture, presently perceived the error. They recognized that aspiration, to be vital, must start with a conception of the world as it was, and seek a realization of the world as it might be, and that in this seeking lay service to God and preparation for heaven. Proceeding they fixed on unselfish human love and on beauty as the motive of their creed, and endeavored to live lives animated by these principles. This creed has been the real creed of aspiring humanity during the past century and a half, and it still seems sufficient to many. There have been diverse differences of application and administration in connection with it, according as the pendulum swung more or less near to one or the other of the two cardinal points of faith, unselfish love, or exquisite beauty. There have been some who, in their desire to make the relations of man toward those with whom he lived and whom he loved more ideal, have been disposed to ignore the claims of color and elegance; and there have been others so eager in their allegiance to the cause of beauty that they have exalted sense and emotion at the expense of unselfishness and purity. Essentially, however, the ideal life of the modern centuries has sought to develop the individual soul by stimulating its faculties to cherish self-sacrificing devotion to familiar friends, æsthetic appreciation of form, color and sound, and exquisite personal refinement. The Christian life, in its highest form, from this amalgamation of human traits, has constructed an ideal for the soul founded on something tangible and substantial in human consciousness. When the Christian said, "O God, make me pure and noble," it has been no longer necessary to rhapsodize on a heaven concerning which he knew nothing, and to disclaim all interest in this earth. On the contrary, he has appreciated that conceptions of the ideal must be based on human conditions or they cease to be intelligible, and that the soul which seeks God can reach him only through faithfulness to a method of life, the aim of which is to make the best use of earth and its possibilities.

Beautiful as have been the lives which have resulted from this æsthetic spirituality, the world has been beginning to realize, during the last twenty-five years, that this is a creed partially outworn, or, rather, a creed hampered by its limitations. In taking its suggestion for the ideal from the world, noble society chose to accept economic conditions as they were, and to fashion an ideal which necessarily shut out the larger portion of humanity from the possibility of attaining it. The æsthetic satisfaction which we draw from the sunset is due to the pleasure which conscience feels in its allegiance to an ideal of its own devising, and seeing God is only another term for the solemn identification of man's aspirations. The Wordsworthian soul, as interpreted by his followers, assumed that the political conditions of society were always to remain the same, or, more accurately speaking, it accepted those conditions as permanent and continuously inevitable. In other words, it did not foresee democracy. In short, its ideal was essentially aristocratic and exclusive, and it continues so stubbornly in the present day in many circles. To be sure, it has included and continues to include in its formula the carrying of soups, jellies, coals, and blankets to the poor, and the proffering of educational advantages to the ignorant, but it never has predicated, as essential to the world's true progress, such fundamental changes in the social status of society as would involve the annihilation of class distinctions and a greater general happiness for the mass of humanity. To be sure, there have always been individual philanthropists, who insisted upon these changes as vital, but they have been ignored by the leaders of ideal thought as visionary enthusiasts, or maligned as disturbers of permanent society. It has been the struggle of democracy itself that has been the chief revealer of a new vision in the sunset, until now, at last, the soul in search of the ideal appreciates that it does not walk with God unless it sees in the saffron glory its own sympathy with these new conditions.

The development of this recognition has been tolerably swift in certain directions. New hospitals, new colleges, college settlements among the poor, are concrete evidences of the modern spirit, and equally significant, if less heralded, are the faithful, zealous labors of physicians, teachers, clergymen, and the host of workers in various lines of industry, where the earnest, self-sacrificing work done is rarely if ever paid for, in dollars and cents, commensurate with its value. The serious energy of the best humanity, instead of pluming itself in the seductive contemplation of æsthetic beauty, seems rather to be celebrating the apotheosis of dirt. It feels that the cleansing of the physical and moral filth from our slums, the relief of appalling ignorance and superstition, the combating of political dishonesty and the checking of private greed are more to be desired at this time than great marbles and a great literature. Or, rather, perhaps, it seems probable that great marbles and a great literature will not come to us until the leaven of this new ideal expresses itself in the truths of art. The sane, aspiring soul can no longer be satisfied unless it recognizes the inevitableness and the pathos of democracy and adjusts its human perspective accordingly.

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