Seventh Meeting
Ruth brought with her a “Christian Science” prayer. I said I would read it aloud at the meeting on Christian Science. One line in the prayer was, “purified from the flesh.” Ruth guessed, before I said anything, that I objected to this line. She believes the body is “something to be overcome.” All the others and myself disagreed with her.
I said: “I, who believe in endless progress, believe the means themselves to be good and wonderful. Unless this moment were good, nothing it led to could be wholly good.”
Ruth said: “The body is something unreal, unessential, which we do not keep.”
I answered: “We keep nothing but what we always possessed, the power of growth.” Ruth says we get certain new truths, and then keep them. She tries to think that my idea and Christian Science agree in every way, except that we use different language. But she has doubts and qualms. Then we spoke of “New Thought.” I said I thought most of what is called so was unanswerably true, only there seemed to be an enmity between “New Thought” and good English. Marian agreed with me. She said she could have no respect for a man who used poor English. I would not say that, for I had received too much information from men who did not know how to give it. But, I said, I had often missed information rather than rewrite a book for myself mentally, before I could read it. Marian’s father had read aloud to her, from a “New Thought” book, this sentence: “The seen is unreal, and the unseen is real.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said. “Do you?”
“No,” I answered; “I believe everything is real, the seen and the unseen. There is nothing but reality.”
I also said my chief objection to all these cults was that they insisted too often on physical health as the aim of life. Virginia said: “But just think, if we had not to be concerned about our bodies any more, if we were perfectly well, how much we could do!”
“Yes,” I answered, “that is true; but still it is not an end, but only a means.”
This was all before the meeting. Alfred had come very early, as usual, and told me he “thought” he believed as I did concerning immortality.
I opened the meeting by reading Marian’s paper:
“On Sunday, November 15th, the Seekers held a regular meeting. Our discussion was on Immortality. Most of us agreed that our self, our real or inner self, is immortal. In the first place, if this self in us and in every one should die there would be nothing left, because that is the real, the life-giving power. Moreover, if we were not immortal, what would be the use of life? Some people argue that we leave part of ourselves and the impressions of our characters to other generations, and so on. However, science has (almost) proved that the race is not immortal, and at least, it is harder to believe that it is, than to believe in the immortality of the real self. Personally, I feel that my real self is immortal, and that I will go on being. We do not attempt to picture any future state. This discussion is the only one in which we did not all agree.”
Next I read Henry’s paper:
“To-day we continued our talk on Immortality. Immortality is entirely a matter of faith, but the different ideas concerning it have influenced the fates of nations.
“The mind realizes so much that it does not accomplish, that it seems as though there must be a continuance of spiritual action after what we call death. If the spirit did not continue to exist, what would be the purpose of our life? Some say our purpose is to pave the walk of life for our descendants. Indeed, we do want those who come after us to find life pleasant and worth while living, but that alone would not be a sufficient purpose, for why need there be descendants? Why was there anybody in the beginning? And besides this, we have more reason to believe in the mortality of the race than for any of our beliefs in regard to the soul. Science teaches us that certain of the planets, which were once habitable, are now no longer so. This may some day happen to our planet, and then the race for which we have worked will cease to be. Although we do live for the race, we live more for the spirit. We have already said that we are part of one great union. If this is true there must be immortality, for when part of the spirit ceased to be, there would no longer be a great, perfect union.”
I said to Henry: “Your papers never begin as if they were going to be right, but they end especially well. You always keep the best for the last.”
Now we went on to our subject of beauty. What, I asked, was the one truly beautiful perfect thing, the thought of which gives us more delight than any other?
They said—bit by bit—that it was complete understanding, unity, sympathy.
I said I believed every beautiful thing was one which symbolized this completeness, something that in itself seemed complete and perfect and fulfilled. It took some time to explain this. Florence, of course, already understood it. Virginia and Marian caught at it as a new and elusive and valuable idea. All except Henry saw what I meant. Marian had said, even before I expressed this idea, that beauty was symmetry.
Henry said: “I don’t see what you mean, or why you need question it. A beautiful thing is one that gives us a thrill of delight.”
“Yes,” I answered, “certainly. That is like saying a thing is red because it has a red color. What I want to know is why things delight us with their beauty, so that we may make a standard from these, whereby to judge all things.”
I stopped them when they began to speak of special works of art, because, I insisted, we would first speak of beauty in all things in the world.
Virginia said: “When I am in a field among animals, playing with them all, that to me seems beautiful. I do feel sympathy with them, but it isn’t completeness.”
“No,” I answered, “and it isn’t beautiful, though it is delightful in another way. Beauty is something apart from us, which we see and hear, and which wakes in us a sense of completeness, of harmony within itself, as if there were the whole world, nothing lacking, nor yet too much. A landscape, for instance.”
“It is sometimes not beautiful at all,” said Henry.
“No,” I answered, “surely not. A landscape, no matter how beautiful and wonderful, would be spoiled by a big sign on the nearest tree, advertising ‘Babbitt’s Soap.’”
“Or a sign ‘To Let,’” said Henry.
“Yes,” I answered, “though that might not be as bad, yet that, too, would be inharmonious, and suggest all sorts of irrelevant things.”
“But,” said Henry, “a burnt wood is harmonious, I suppose, and yet it would be ugly.”
“Not always,” said I, “not if it were blended into the landscape, and mellowed.”
“No,” Henry answered, “perhaps not, if the colors were beautiful.”
“But if it were ugly,” I said, “it would be inharmonious. A newly burnt forest suggests death and desolation in the midst of life and summer—an incongruity. It suggests destruction where the thought is most unwelcome and horrible.”
“Then,” said Marian, “it is not the thing itself, but the feeling which it gives us, that is beautiful.”
“Yes,” I said, “it gives us the thrill of that complete joy. We seem to see something which is what cannot be; complete harmony. The sight of the sea makes Virginia feel so. And you, the out-of-doors.”
Virginia said: “I have sometimes thought beauty is light, because the sun is most beautiful—and, at night, the moon.”
“But,” said I, “if there were no shadows and no darkness, sun and moon would not be beautiful.”
“Then contrast?” she asked.
I said: “There must be contrast in all beautiful things, because without contrast we could not have completeness.”
“Yes,” she said, “in pictures it is so.”
“A small thing,” I went on, “might symbolize completeness, as well as a large one. A dog, in his way, a beautiful Scotch collie, for instance, might be as beautiful as a man.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Ruth.
We criticized, and found lacking, according to our standard, the beauty of prize bulldogs; the teeth were too suggestive of strife and biting, the spots unsymmetrical, and so on. They spoke of many instances of beauty in things, especially the beauty of little children, and fitted them to this new standard.
Marian said: “A drop of water is so symmetrical and harmonious, so beautiful in the sunshine; and yet, on a dark day, on the sidewalk, it is not beautiful.”
I explained even that. I showed her how a drop on the sidewalk was not a drop, but a daub, how it suggested all sorts of ugly and incongruous things. “But,” I said, “if we take the trouble to look at a drop hanging from anything, say from a leaf, we shall always find it beautiful.”
She agreed to that. Then she said: “Don’t you think we sometimes do think of our own life as a beautiful thing?”
“Yes,” I answered. “There are moments when our own life suddenly seems complete, when we feel an artist’s delight in it, and for a while we, and the whole world with us, seem to have reached what we longed for.”
Florence asked: “Don’t you think it is usually when we are having a very good, jolly time?”
Marian answered quickly: “No, not at all.”
I understood what Marian meant, and did not attempt, naturally, to explain it to the others.
Now we all agreed, every one of us, that completeness and harmony were beauty. But the children had started time and again to bring up instances in art which to them seemed not to fit, and which they thoroughly misunderstood.
“You see,” I said, “that the beautiful thing is the same as that which seems to us most true and good.”
Marian said again that one idea seemed to cover everything, and that we came to conclusions quickly.
“Now I will tell you,” I said, “what I mean by art and the artist. In speaking of art here to-day I mean not only painting—as one of you thought—but everything which expresses beauty; poetry, the novel and drama, sculpture, music, acting. You see the difference between science and art?”
“Science gives us knowledge,” said Marian.
“Yes,” I answered, “or, rather, science gives us facts, truths, but never at all the complete truth. It gives us parts as parts, never the whole. Philosophy, on the other hand, does what we are doing here. It reaches out for the complete whole, for understanding, for unity, but it knows well that it can never attain the end. It reaches out for the complete good, and is satisfied with nothing less than that unattainable whole. But art does another thing; it tells us a lie—the most wonderful lie in the world—truer than any truth. It says: Look, here is completeness, harmony, wholeness, in this one small shape. And we know it cannot be so, but still we feel it to be there. That lie gives us, as no truth can, the thing we long for, and know to be most true.
“Now, what do you mean by the word genius? What is genius?” I asked.
“Usually,” said Virginia, “a genius is a crank. There is a girl in my art class who is the frousiest, queerest crank in the world, and every one calls her a genius.”
“Geniuses are often queer,” said Henry.
Ruth said, too, that many geniuses were anything but great and good in their private lives.
“Well,” I answered, “I am surprised by your definition of a genius. But perhaps you will be more surprised, and sorry you said so much, when I tell you that I consider every one of you a genius.”
“Oh, my,” said Virginia, “how nice! I wish I were.”
I said: “What we usually call genius is but a larger power of understanding, a sense of unity, of the relations of things. And we all have that, in some degree. So we all have genius. It is not a matter of quality but of quantity. We are all the same stuff, only some more and some less.”
Henry said I might use the word in that sense, but he didn’t think it was the true meaning. He said: “What definition is in the dictionary?” We had no dictionary at hand, so I tried to prove my definition true without a dictionary, and I succeeded.
I said: “There is no gulf between the genius and the stupid looker-on. Don’t you see why there could not be?”
“I see,” said Marian; “it is because the looker-on would have to have some genius, or else——” She could not finish.
“Just so, Marian,” I went on; “or else he could not appreciate the artist’s work. It is the genius in the onlooker that appreciates the genius in the artist. And in so far as you can appreciate the genius of Shakespeare, in so far you have the same sort of genius.”
“Then,” said she, “art makes us recognize ourselves.”
“Yes,” I answered, “our bigger selves.”
“So one might speak,” she said, “of a person developing his genius for music, or his genius for painting, and so on?”
“Yes,” I answered; “and you see how easily and well one can use the word in that sense.”
Ruth asked: “If the great genius is really one who understands better than the rest of us, and has a more harmonious vision, how is it that so many geniuses are incomplete and very imperfect in their personal lives?”
“I think it is,” I said, “for the same reason that I gave you for disease in highly developed beings.”
“I see,” said Marian; “it is one part developed at the expense of another.”
They wanted to know why so many artists were peculiar, erratic, “Bohemian”—Marian used that word. Virginia spoke again of the happy-go-lucky people down at the art league.
I said I thought one reason for this manner among artists was that, as they were always looking for the new, the beautiful—which is ever new—they had no patience with so-called respectable people, who clung to old things because they were old, and so these artists often purposely went to the other extreme.
I said: “You must see that there is the tendency in all of us to make of life a work of art, to live a complete, beautiful life.”
“I know some people,” said Virginia, “whose lives do not seem to me in the least artistic.”
“That may be,” I answered, “but the tendency is there to make of life a complete expression.”
“That isn’t all I mean,” said Marian. “I want to know what is meant by the artistic temperament.”
“It is in great part,” I said, “a fiction and a false generalization. Many experts have not the artistic temperament, and many not-artists have it. As for artists going astray more often than others, if that be true—which I doubt—there’s a good reason for it. Artists are always very sensitive—naturally—and so, unless they are very strong-willed, too, they will be more easily swayed by outside events and their impressions.”
“I don’t believe every one has genius,” Virginia said. “I know some people who are perfectly stupid, and don’t understand anything.”
“That is scarcely possible,” I answered, “if they are human beings.”
“Do you mean to say,” asked Henry, “that you know any utterly selfish person?”
“Yes,” she answered; “or, at least, people who are not interested in anything worth while outside themselves; people who can walk through an art gallery and not look at the pictures; who love nothing beautiful.”
“I may be one of those,” said Ruth, “for I do not care for pictures.”
“One’s genius might not be developed in that particular direction,” I said; “none of us are developed in all directions. But grant, at least, Virginia, that your most stupid people have undeveloped genius which might be awakened.”
“All right,” she said.
“Because if you don’t,” I answered, “I shall think your understanding of those people is very limited. Genius does not necessarily show itself in relation to art, to the sense of beauty. Genius is in the understanding a man must have to be a man. How could he have any relations with his fellows, any intercourse without some understanding?
“But there is one essential difference between the genius of the looker-on and the genius of the artist; it is that the artist creates, that he must have talent. No matter how much genius a man may have, if he does not or cannot express his genius, he is not an artist.”
“Do you think,” asked Marian, “that an artist knows himself to be a great genius?”
“I think,” I answered her, “that no man ever does a great thing unless he first believes he can do it.
“You remember, I once said that to understand life well one must be creative, one must do things, because life is forever creating. And so the genius who is an artist, who has talent, who creates, by that very creation understands better than other men. He who can draw a thing sees it better than he who cannot.”
“Yes,” said Virginia, “the fact that he can draw it proves that he sees it better.”
“And in learning to draw it,” I went on, “he came to see it better.”
“The great artist,” said Henry, “is one who expresses his idea perfectly.”
“Then,” Virginia said, “I wonder if I will ever get to be a great artist. For the thing I draw is never the thing that was in my mind.”
“Now,” said I, “you see the distinction between genius and talent. Genius is the power of understanding. Talent is the power of expression. A man may have very little to say, and yet say it wonderfully well. And another man may have much to say, and marvellous understanding of life, but not nearly so great power of expression. That is what Florence meant the other day, when she spoke of ‘Jenny Kissed Me,’ and of ‘Faust.’ But the man who expresses even the smallest thing well understands, at least, that thing. The power of expression itself implies understanding and a sense of unity and harmony. For no matter how well a man may be able to draw lines and objects, unless he understands composition—which is the knowledge of harmony and completeness—he cannot paint a good picture. And no matter how well a man may write English, however perfect his style may be, unless he understands something of life, of symmetry and structure, he cannot write a good book.”
Henry said: “Poe expressed himself very well. Was he a genius?”
“Now, stop,” I answered. “Don’t ask, ‘Was he a genius?’ Of course, he was that. We all have genius. The question is, how much?”
“It seems to me,” said Henry, “that in some way Poe was as great as Shakespeare.”
“Yes,” I said, “in some ways; and that is a very good example. Poe’s power of expression may have been as great in some ways as Shakespeare’s. But just think how immeasurably greater was Shakespeare’s genius, his understanding, and grasp of life!”
“Poe, for instance,” said Henry, “was a great mathematician, and used his deductions in his stories.”
The others told Henry this had nothing to do with his genius. They had a long talk on the relative genius—that is, understanding of life—of Poe and Hawthorne, and brought up many instances.
Marian said: “Was Milton a great genius?”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I suppose he was,” she said, “but I don’t think he had a great understanding of human life.”
“Have you read ‘Paradise Lost’?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Then you must have noticed his wonderful sympathy with, and understanding of, the devil himself. He saw the tremendous contrasts of life, and understood them.”
“I must read that,” said Virginia, “if he wrote with understanding sympathy of the devil. Don’t you think,” she asked, “that those who write books for children generally understand life very well, and have true genius?”
“Perhaps,” I said. “What do you think? How about those artists who write for children in the Sunday comic papers?”
Now I spoke of the artist in us all, who sees things ever as distinct wholes, who picks out, as he goes through life, complete visions of beauty to reproduce in his mind. These visions have to be distant, separate from himself. For life is so distracting and full of contradictory passions, so vast, and, as we know it in our limited lives, so incomplete, that we must get rid of it, we must separate ourselves, with our universal and unfinished relations, from the perfect and whole beauty which we wish to see in the artistic vision.
“You must have noticed,” I said, “and you have often heard, that far-off things are most beautiful. It is because our life, interwoven with endless distracting circumstances, does not seem to touch those far-off things.”
“Autumn leaves,” said Marian, “far off look so beautiful, and near by are full of imperfections.”
Virginia said: “And perfection of detail in a picture, as if the things were very near and real, does not make it better. It does not seem good. You know Millet’s ‘Sower,’ at the Metropolitan Museum: when you go close, it is all streaks.”
“This dimness of detail is for two reasons, in most great pictures,” I said. “First, the artist often paints a picture with the intention of having it looked upon from a distance. Second, in the perfect whole, detail is merged. All must blend and harmonize.”
“I never thought of that,” said Virginia. “The too precise details in a picture attract a person’s attention, and want to be looked at for their own sake, and so break in on the harmony and wholeness of the picture.”
“Yes, just so,” I answered. I spoke again of the sublime lie of art—the untruth which is most true. I said: “I once had an English teacher who used to tell us that in art one was not to give the truth, but the impression of truth. Truths often break in and destroy the impression of that whole truth.
“Now,” I asked, “what is the one, the only object, of art in the world?”
We decided, all of us, that it was complete understanding and sympathy. Art is a symbol of that completeness for which our whole life longs. One of them—I think it was Henry—said its aim was progress. I said it was rather the picturing and prophecy of the end and aim of progress itself.
They had probably heard, I said, of “art for art’s sake,” the cant of those who believed mere form and expression to be the whole of art, and left out of account the thing expressed. Virginia misunderstood me to say: “Art for its own sake,” quite a different thing. So, thinking I would agree with her, she quoted, with disapproval, an article by Kenyon Cox, saying: “He who worked for gold sold himself, and he who worked for fame was utterly lost.” I said I quite agreed with him; that unless one worked first of all for the sake of expression, and the joy of it, he was no artist.
“And, meanwhile, his wife and children might be starving,” she answered.
“It is praiseworthy,” I said, “to support one’s wife and children, but it has nothing to do with art.”
I said a man might well use his expression to earn himself bread; that it was necessary and natural, and had often even spurred a man on to work, but that it could not be his first aim if he were an artist. We spoke of Shakespeare, and of Goldsmith, and of their writing under the stress of poverty. I pointed out how, nevertheless, these men wrote of the things they loved and understood, and how the joy of work must have been their first aim.
I spoke of play, and of art being like play; of the old saying: “Work first, then play.”
Henry said that was meant for little children.
I told them how scientists tried to explain play by calling it a preparation for work. Virginia liked that idea. I said that I thought work a preparation for play, that play, interplay, the joy of creation, was life itself. The children easily understood play in this sense of the beloved work. Virginia said her work was all play. I reminded her that she might have to work hard, but she would do it gladly for the sake of that play. Marian said her school-work was almost always play. Ruth said: “I think play and work are the same thing, and that we human beings have made the distinction of words.”
Art cannot rightly have any object but whole representation, but expression of the understanding of life. I said that whenever art tried to be moral—which was rather the business of philosophy—it lost thereby; that whenever one took sides for a thing, one took sides against something else, and had lost the completeness and symmetry of art.
Henry said he thought art ought to teach a lesson.
I answered: “Art ought to show us the whole of life, which is beautiful.”
Virginia spoke of Dickens’ novels, and said she thought those were best in which he wrote with an object, and against an abuse.
I answered her that they were best and also worst. They were best because he described in them the life which he knew and loved. But the parts of these very good novels which were directed against any people or institutions were always bad, inartistic, incongruous. As an example I quoted the dreary dissertations on Chancery in “Bleak House,” and those who had read it immediately agreed with me.
Henry and Virginia questioned me several times concerning ugly pictures which were considered “good art.” I told them that a subject not usually thought beautiful, an old, old woman, for instance, might be made beautiful by the artist’s insight. I did not go into details, however, to-day. A great many ugly pictures, such as the work of Teniers, Steen, and others, seem to me very bad art. But now I spoke to them of Wiertz, the Belgian, who seems to me no artist at all, and concerning whom they had both questioned me. I took as an example of bad partisan art his picture of Napoleon in hell, with crowds of poor people making faces at him, and pelting him with brimstone. Such a subject in itself is impossible to art. What could be more unintelligent, petty, scattered and ugly!
Ruth said she did not see why an artist need understand human nature especially well unless he was one who treated of human nature; that a musician, for instance, need not do so. I began my answer, but gave way to a burst of enthusiasm from Henry.
How, said he, could a musician not understand human nature, he who knew how to rouse us to the depths with his notes, who could move us to tears? Surely he knew what he was doing, and the heart which he stirred.
Ruth said she did not see why Shakespeare showed greater understanding or completeness in his work than Emerson, for instance. Henry thought the same. I tried to show them that Emerson in his essays was not an artist—or, at least, not nearly so much of an artist as a philosopher—that he strove to reach the good, the complete harmony of the universe, but that he did not give us the vision of a present, finished, concrete beauty. They both maintained that he did. Henry spoke of the essays on “Friendship” and “Manners.”
“Have you read the essay on ‘Manners’?” he asked.
“Yes, several times,” I said.
“And doesn’t it give you a picture?” he asked. Ruth added: “And the one on friendship. I seem to see that friend.”
I owned I did not feel so. I said it gave me an inspiration, an ideal of conduct, not a picture. “Mind you,” I said, “when I call Emerson more philosopher than artist, I am not saying philosophy is less than art.”
“No, I understand that,” said Ruth, “but I, for one, when I read Shakespeare, get not any especial feeling of the completeness or whole understanding of what I read. Emerson uplifts me much more, and gives me power to do things.”
“That may be,” I said. “You may rate either as high or as low as you please, but their genius is different.”
I pointed out, too, how in Emerson’s poetry, with its rare, beautiful couplets, and its many lapses, the genius and philosopher far outshone the man of artistic talent. We had not time to go into detail, or to quote largely, and I did not wish to speak much of literary criticism and methods at this meeting, for I had planned to do so at the next, so I think Henry and Ruth went home unconvinced of the artistic superiority of Shakespeare over Emerson. One might almost as profitably argue who was a greater man, Beethoven or Napoleon!
Marian asked me whether George Eliot was an artist or a philosopher. I told her I thought she was both, but that I believed she would have been more of an artist had she been less a philosopher.
I asked Alfred why he had kept so silent. Did he agree with us?
“Yes,” he said, “I do. It is very interesting. But I don’t talk unless I disagree.”