Tenth Meeting
Virginia could not come. We did have six present, however, as we had a visitor, Leo, a boy of sixteen.
Ruth brought with her a box of candy, given her by a sympathetic aunt, who has an opinion, I surmise, of our club. They all assured me that candy would not disturb their thoughts. Marian said: “There’s nothing I can’t do, and eat candy at the same time.” I do, myself, think it was an improvement. We had a lively and interesting meeting, and much sweetness.
Marian wrote a paper on our meeting of two weeks past, following the notes I had made for Florence to use in her talk with Henry. It lacked Marian’s usual originality, as it was built directly on my thought. She even used one phrase of mine, word for word, namely: “Life proves all things by creative action.”
“Why did you use it?” I asked.
“Because,” she said, “I didn’t understand what it meant, and I wanted to ask you.”
“I am glad,” I said, “for it is a thing of which I meant to speak to-day. All action is creation and self-expression; everything is changing and in action all the time, because it is striving to come into better relation with all other things. All art and all life is self-expression and action at every moment. We must create if we would be complete. That is why I love the active and creative life.”
“Yes,” said Marian, “I understand. You had told us so before. But I didn’t know it was what you meant by that sentence.”
Now I read Marian’s paper for this week:
“On December 6th the Seekers held a meeting, in which we continued our discussion on Art. We first considered the subject of Art in Poetry. Poetry differs from prose in two essential respects, namely, it is farther off, and it expresses the emotions, and does so in a musical form. Our standard for Art applies in poetry, as well as in other things. In connection with poetry we took up the subject of controversy in art, and especially in poetry. We decided that a controversial poem, or novel, is not good art because it is one-sided and incomplete. If a man writes on one side of a question he cannot be really in that sympathetic frame of mind that is necessary for the production of a good piece of art. We next took up art in music, and decided that music is the most complete or artistic of all arts, because it is farthest off, and expresses most completely our ideal. We also considered sculpture, and noted the fact that the sculpture is the expression in human form of the sculptor’s ideas. We also considered painting, and after we had again applied our standard, Miss Sampter told us that every picture has a central object or figure, the figure of most importance; that all the lines of the picture are direct toward it; and that in every good painting there must be contrast, and all the primary colors must be in it. It is complete in every way. All the colors, light and shade, and the idea of the painter well worked out, complete it. We considered, besides, the subject of architecture, and said that a building should in some measure express the purpose for which it was to be used.”
Ruth said she understood all this, and could gather something of our last meeting. She did not quite see what was meant by a thing in art being “far off.” Henry told her it meant that though removed from reason, and not clearly defined or lifelike, it appealed to our sympathies and emotions, and we understood it all the better. Then I read Henry’s paper:
“In poetry and music, as in all the other arts, it is completeness, complete harmony, which makes a thing beautiful. Of all the arts the most beautiful is music. Harmony is everything in music, and is the principal in musical composition. A piece of music always closes with the first note of the scale, thus completing the chord. If it were otherwise we would say there was something lacking. The phrase itself shows us that what we want is completeness, though few people stop to think of its full meaning when they use it.
“We have said that the farther away we are from something, the more beautiful it seems. This is true of music, which, besides being the most beautiful of arts, is the farthest away, for we cannot say anything definite with it, but must leave so much to the sympathy of the listeners. I like to think of this as a symbol of the beautiful completeness we hope to realize some far-distant day, and that then there will be something still more beautiful, that we shall know in times still farther off.”
I thought this an excellent paper, and I told Henry so. I said I was glad he had written more of musical composition than I had been able to tell him.
We spoke of some of our past meetings. Florence said: “I couldn’t make Henry see the difference between wit and humor.”
“I see it now,” he answered. “We discussed it in school.”
“So did we,” said Marian. “Isn’t it queer?”
They had been taking up drama, too, and so their club and school work harmonized.
I said: “You have heard people speak of the art of life. To me it seems that to make an art of life, to live it as if it were our creation, our work of art, is the best way, the most complete and beautiful way. You remember, I spoke to you of the three ways of looking at life, of writing books, for instance: The scientific way, the philosophic way, the artistic way. One can live life in these three ways, too; but to me the artistic way seems best.”
“Don’t you think,” asked Marian, “that if we lived as an art, we should be too apt to excuse ourselves?”
“How do you mean, Marian?”
“Because,” she went on, “we should admit the shadows in life as well as the light.”
“The shadows,” I answered, “are not the wrong, the bad. How can you think so? Are shadows in a picture the mistakes in it? Shadows make the rhythm and the contrast; and in life would be repose and sleep. That necessary pulsation of activity and rest alone can make life whole and perfect.”
“I see,” said Marian, “that is true.”
“As for blaming ourselves for things past, I think it is silly to do so.”
“What,” they asked, “is the scientific way of life?”
“It is,” I answered, “living according to small definite truths, knowing certain separate things to be good or bad for us, and living according to that knowledge, without any general aim of life. It is to bathe regularly, to tell the truth carefully, to be honest, to look out for your neighbor, always because each one of these things is expedient in itself. The philosophic way is to see the final, complete good, and to want that once, to lose yourself and the beauty of your own life in the desperate effort to make the whole world perfect now. Suppose, for instance, that on Christmas a starving family came to the door of a middle-class man for food. If he were a scientist in his life he would send the poor family at once to the public food kitchen, with a ticket of recommendation, because he did not believe in indiscriminate charity and pauperism. If he were a philosopher he would be horrified at the idea of any man lacking a dinner, and without further thought would give his whole dinner to the poor, and go without, and let his children go without. That is just what Bronson Alcott did—the typical philosopher in life—who neglected his own family for the good of the universe.”
“I have often known of people,” said Henry, “who went out to do charity and neglected their families.”
“Yes,” I said, “but that is sometimes for still worse reasons. Now what would the artist in life do? He would be full of the delight of Christmas feeling; and he would either share his dinner with the other man—according to circumstances—or ask him in to his table, if the poor children were not too dirty. He would look out for himself and for the other man, and do it gracefully, beautifully. He knows that first of all he must make his own life sane and beautiful, but he wants to include as many other lives as he can in that life of his, and to make all his relations with men beautiful.”
“What you call the philosophic way,” said Ruth, “is what I had always called the artistic way.”
“That is,” I said, “because you have all of you had a ridiculous, false idea of what the artist is. The scientific life is the life according to particular truths, without an aim. The philosophic life is the life dreaming of supreme good, and neglecting the particular, individual beauty of life.”
“But doesn’t the philosophic way help toward that good?” asked Henry.
“Yes,” I said, “though often it tries only impracticable schemes. The artistic way combines and transcends the two. For the artist must have knowledge of facts, must know science, and must love supreme good, as well. Facts according to the supreme good, life made beautiful to be like completeness, that is the artistic life. It includes both the scientific and the philosophic.”
“It is as it were the middle way?” asked Ruth.
“Yes,” I said, “because beauty includes all extremes.”
Henry remarked: “It may be the best way, but I wouldn’t guarantee to live according to it.”
I smiled. “You mean,” I said, “that you didn’t like the idea of asking the poor man in to dinner?” He assented. “But you misunderstood me. That was only a picture, a story, not a law. If we make large laws for life—such laws as those of art—we shall avoid petty moralizing, which I, for one, detest. We shall see that every circumstance alters the case.
“It’s just this petty moralizing that is unnecessary, when one has big laws and standards which he can use in life, each for himself.”
We did come very near having a discussion on truth-telling, but I stopped it at once. I was glad to discover, however, that Ruth is not a stickler for literal truth under all circumstances.
“I don’t like little laws laid down,” I said, “because they are never true and necessary in all cases. They make me feel rebellious.”
“Yes,” said Marian, “they make one feel contrary, and want to do just the opposite.”
I spoke of the undeniable fact that all great action, all history sprang from imaginative thought, that a deed had to be imagined before it could be done, that all history was inspired by the bards and prophets. I spoke of even such scientific theories as evolution springing from imaginative thought. They all seemed to have realized this before, and none dissented. I read to them O’Shawnessy’s Ode, “We are the Music-makers.”
Florence said: “We spoke of the thinker’s influence lately, at home. But I always thought of those great men, not as poets, but as philosophers.”
“Yes,” I answered, “they often were. But they were poets, too. The greatest artist—as I showed you—is a scientist and philosopher as well. Goethe to me seems the best example of such a complete man. His life was so many-sided, and yet so artistic, so definite in its aim; it might stand as an example of the artistic life.”
Now, what the children seemed to know of Goethe was that he had a great many love affairs, and did not behave well in any of them. Marian and Henry had a clearer idea, and knew this was not the whole or the chief part of his life, nor quite so faulty as represented. Henry said: “He could appreciate the good points in a woman without always falling in love with her.”
When Ruth said she didn’t know anything of Goethe but his lover’s weakness, Marian turned on her with: “Now, isn’t it a shame to know that of him, and nothing else!”
I told them again that as every work of art was a symbol of completeness, so every self, being a self, symbolized the complete self of understanding and unity; every man was a symbol of completeness, of the Divine Self.
Before we went on to enumerate for ourselves the laws of art, now that we all agreed they would be one with the laws of life, I wished to read aloud some slips from a Ruskin calendar, which Ruth had brought me two weeks before. The most fruitful of conversation were the following:
“All are to be men of genius in their degree—rivulets or rivers, it does not matter, so that the souls be clear and pure.”
This, they said, was exactly our idea of genius in all.
“Good work is never done for hatred, any more than for hire—but for love only.”
Surely, then, not for controversy, we said.
“Neither a great fact, nor a great man, nor a great poem, nor a great picture, nor any other great thing, can be fathomed to the bottom in a moment of time.”
“Every great man is always being helped by everybody, for his gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.”
This, I reminded them, was what we had said when we spoke of the good and bad, that we must use all things for good.
“The ennobling difference between one man and another—between one animal and another—is precisely in this, that one feels more than another.”
“Doesn’t it seem,” said Florence, “as if Ruskin had written those papers especially for us?”
“That last one,” I said, “expresses exactly our idea; here ‘feeling’ means the same as ‘sympathy,’ or ‘feeling with.’ So you find, all through the old books, the striving for this same truth, always vaguely expressed, never fully understood, as an ideal, as a religion of life.”
Ruth asked: “Don’t you think all great religions have always believed in that final unity?”
“Not quite in this way,” I answered. “They have vaguely striven for it and implied it, but never realized it as the one meaning in life, the moving force of the universe.”
I gave each of them a pencil and a piece of paper, and said we would find out and write down what were the chief laws of all arts, and then follow that written paper throughout our meetings. I said: “It looks like a party, with the candy and the paper and pencils.”
“Yes,” said Florence; “and now we are going to play a guessing game!”
The first law upon which we decided, after some conversation, was:
1. Art is the symbol of completeness, in a definite shape.
On this last part, “in a definite shape,” I especially insisted, showing them how the definite, the particular, the finite—the drop as opposed to the mist—symbolized completeness. I said for them Goethe’s poem, “Ueber allen Gipfeln,” to show them how so short, clearcut and simple a thing gave us the sense of immensity.
Henry said he had thought at one time that if one only knew the truth, it was not necessary to be a good orator; one had simply to state the truth. But now he believed the form an essential part of the thought.
Marian said something of the artistic life as meaning one must have a single aim. I answered her it might be so, but the single aim would be immense and inclusive. Now we went on to the second law, which we formulated thus:
2. Art is self-expression and self-fulfilment.
Self-expression means action, creation. “Thinking, writing, the work of the artist is action,” I said. They understood. I quoted: “There is only one gift worth giving, and that is one’s self.” “To give one’s self,” I said, “that is action, that is life, creation and fulfilment.”
“How so fulfilment?” asked Marian.
“Because it is always fulfilment to do the thing we love to do. Now what comes next?”
Henry said: “To leave out the distracting; to leave out detail.”
“Not necessarily detail,” I answered; “certain definite details are essential.”
They said to leave out the irrelevant, the inharmonious, the unnecessary. I said:
3. To leave out the unimportant.
“Can you see,” I asked, “how that will apply to life?”
4. Must have variety and many-sidedness.
That is, contrast, rhythm, the all-roundness which makes the whole.
We had just begun to speak of the next law when I was called from the room.
As I returned, Henry said to me: “Well, then, let us write down: ‘must not be for or against.’”
So they had formulated it while I was away. I answered: “Rather let us use the word ‘partisan,’ which means part, not whole.”
5. Must not be partisan, and must be sympathetic.
Now, I said, art,
6. Must give the impression of truth.
I did not linger on this point, and was glad the children accepted it without question, for I wanted more time to explain it.
I went on to the last law, which was the only one I had some trouble in making clear. I asked why was the photograph inartistic? They said because of inharmonious details. I asked, why is the statue more beautiful than wax works? Henry spoke again of the “distance” of material, which just thereby appealed to the sympathies. I wanted to speak of the artist’s aloofness, how he was creator of his work, within it, and yet around it and above it. They did not understand. They said, if he were above it, he would be unsympathetic. They did not understand the creator’s attitude toward himself, the created; the dramatic attitude in life, in which we are both actor and spectator. Marian said she thought she understood it. “Haven’t you ever laughed at yourself?” she asked the others.
“I have sworn at myself,” said Leo.
I meant to pass by the subject, and leave out the last law, rather than arouse a self-consciousness, which was the opposite of what I hoped to awaken. But unintentionally the conversation led to a better understanding.
I spoke again of reverence, as I had done to Alfred, of the small self awed in supreme moments, before the immensity of its whole self.
“Do you mean,” asked Leo, “that it makes us feel how small we are?”
I tried to make it clear. I spoke of the feeling of nothingness that overcomes us, when we stand under the stars at night, and realize them as worlds and suns, and our planet as a dot of light in immensity.
They had all felt so, except Henry.
He said: “It does not make me feel small. I feel that I am a part of it all, and one with the universe.”
“Yours is the true feeling,” I answered, “for you are, indeed, a part of it, and the realization of it is within yourself. A kitten in your place would not feel it.”
“I know,” said Marian, “that many people do not feel it. For I have sometimes walked with some one out in the night, or by the sea, and could not speak. And suddenly they said some trivial thing, which showed they did not feel as I did.”
Alfred said he felt overawed by the sea, because it was so strong and big.
“You mean,” I asked, “that it makes you feel helpless before its might?”
“Yes.”
“It has been said,” Henry went on, “that one cannot be an astronomer and not worship, I believe it is true.”
“And now,” I said, “we are coming to the seventh law after all. For by aloofness I mean that the artist, during his act of creation, feels his own immense self, feels the whole universe, and sees himself and all other things as a part in relation to it.”
“I have felt that way sometimes,” said Florence, “just for a moment.”
“It is a momentary realization,” I answered.
“Don’t you think,” asked Ruth, “that it is a superior feeling, though; a cold, perfect feeling?”
“No,” I answered; “though it lifts us above petty concern for ourselves, it does not lift us out of sympathy and action.”
Henry said: “When I go to Riverside and see all the lights, and think of the millions of people, I feel them all.”
It reminded me of the day Marian had said she felt so when she thought of all the windows and rooms in all the apartment houses.
“Suppose,” I asked, “that you had failed in a very important examination, Henry, would you feel bad?”
“Yes,” he said, “if it were a very, very important one.”
“Then, if you went to Riverside Drive and forgot yourself in that immense feeling, when you returned home you would not only be over your sore, bitter disappointment, but you would be full of energy to begin work again.”
“Yes,” he answered, “I would.”
“So, you see, it is a creative, sympathetic, living aloofness, not cold and far off.”
We put down for the seventh law:
7. Aloofness.
Knowing what we meant thereby.
Ruth said she had noticed that the artistic life was a selfish ideal.
“Yes,” I said, “selfish in the best sense.”
“It is self-development, you mean,” said Alfred.
“Yes,” I answered, “and that selfishness includes the whole world.”
“Why use the word ‘selfishness,’ then,” asked Marian, “that has been used in another sense?”
We spent the rest of the time telling Leo our idea of God and progress. Henry, Ruth, Florence and Marian did it; Florence told him of complete human sympathy, Marian of progress toward it as the good, Henry explained the poem, “Abou ben Adhem,” and Ruth—when Leo objected that knowing men was not knowing God—quoted a passage from the Bible to show it was.
“I always think of God as a supreme power,” said Leo.
I told him something of our idea. What I cared for was to hear the others talk. All, except Henry, seemed satisfied with a merely human conception of self—that is, Florence set the key, and all but Henry kept the tune. He spoke of the “something outside.”
I remarked that, as I had foreseen, we no longer used the word God.
“I use it to myself,” said Ruth.
Henry said: “I use it when I speak to other people; but not here, because we know what we mean, without saying it.”
Marian said: “We have made a vocabulary of our own. Ought we to?”
“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps we can impose it on others?”
“I don’t think that would be fair or right,” she answered.
“Why not? That is just what every great thinker has done. He has imposed a new vocabulary upon the world. Unless our words are good and great and true, they will not last.”