V
The sceptic has been referred to here as a member of a wonderful triumvirate, and, leaving now the field of historical illustration, we must return to that characterization. The other members of the triumvirate were the loyal defender of the formal law and the great spiritual leader. All three were said to be parties to the real life of the spirit, and the sceptic seemed to have a co-ordinate part with the others in this life. But was I not conceding too much? Certainly there are many who will wish to protest. Yet I was only making the doubter and the believer face each other squarely and honestly. Both are parties to any reform. No leader or true reformer ever can neglect or betray the contentions of either. In the organizations of society professional conditions may hold the two characters apart, but vitally they always belong together. If truly we must believe in what we doubt, how can there fail to be between them, not indeed a shallow and sentimental sympathy, but a deep, heroic sympathy that is always superior to the differences of the disrupted life, of a professionally organized society, without betraying them?
At once opponents and companions—this is the truth about the doubter and the believer. Consider how taken alone neither would be quite justified, while together both are justified. Perfect approval or, for that matter, perfect disapproval, can belong to neither singly, not to you or me in our doubting, even though we fully confess, nor yet to him who hides his doubts in an outward show that almost deceives him as well as others. Of course in all matters as well as in this of intellectual honesty, the conceit of individual righteousness or individual possession is a very strong one, but it is “easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye” than for a man who is anything or has anything to himself alone, to enter into any kingdom. Is not life everywhere a movement and a struggle? And who is there, rich or poor, law-abiding or lawless, righteous or unrighteous, faithful or treacherous, believing or doubting, who can stand aloof, or who needs to stand aloof, and say to himself: “I personally, within my own nature, have no part in the struggle; for good or for ill, I am just what I am, and with him that is against me I have and can have no dealings”? The doubter, then, and the believer may have to look askance at each other; the looking askance may be quite appropriate to the conflict in which each has and must feel his social rôle, but, at most and worst, they are only jealous lovers. They may be given, and profitably given, as much to quarrelling as to gentleness, but they love still, and, to borrow part of a line from a familiar college song, their battling love affords just one more view of that which “makes the world go ’round”—instead of off at some tangent.
Should some one awake to new views come to me and ask which I would have him do, break away from his traditions and all that they involve or hold to them, I could only say, in the first place, that, whichever way he turned, he would have some, though only some, justification, for he could not be either right or wrong exclusively; in the second place, that his decision not only must be made, and made strongly, one way or the other, but must also be his, not mine; and in the third place, that no decision should ever be an absolutely final settlement. Decisions are only means to action, and as such they can settle nothing finally. They are not even protocols of peace, often being, on the contrary, merely signals for firing at closer range. Sometimes I know they seem even like real treaties, providing the terms of a permanent harmony, and they appear to determine just where the parties to them really stand. But, after all, they do but bring the conflict home, making it domestic or personal instead of settling it. So once more to my inquirer I may say only this: Choose; fight; fight fair; fight with yourself as well as with your enemy; with your belief, not merely with his dogma; or with your doubt, not merely with his dishonesty. So fighting you and he will truly be at once opponents and companions.
VI.
Is life, then, only a comedy? Is it no better than one of those well-conducted duels that save the honour of all, concerned but bring injury to no one? Let me say, in these last pages, that life appears to be three things, to which I should like to call attention. It truly and seriously is a comedy; secondly, it is poetic; and lastly, it has all the gravity and earnestness of duty. Its very tragedy comprises all of these. An old teacher of mine, a much respected and somewhat old-fashioned professor at one of our larger universities,2 once published a book entitled, Poetry, Comedy and Duty. Exactly what his reasons were for associating these apparently incongruous phases of life I do not recall, but the man and his title have remained pleasantly and significantly in my memory, and the reasons which follow, in substance if not in form, can not be very far from his.
Thus, as to the comedy of life, we need only to reflect that where extremes always meet, where there is always conflict, but conflict of such a nature that the parties to it not only may change sides, but also in a genuine sense are always on both sides, in such a life politics cannot be alone in making strange bedfellows, but the opportunity for comic situations must be unlimited. A life in which reality has no residence, and truth no place where to lay its head, in which fools may utter wisdom and the wise may speak folly, in which reformers are easily confused with transgressors and death itself is said to be life, is bound to be richly and deeply humorous. Of such a life there can be no understanding, into it there can be no insight, without the keenest sense of humour. To say no more, that doubter and believer are companions as well as opponents, is cause for a deal of merriment—at least among the gods.
But life’s comedy is also a poem, and no one save a poet can truly comprehend it. Even a metaphysician must be not merely a humorist, but also a poet; perhaps he must be more the poet than any other. Poetry is the portrayal of life through suggestion of harmony, or poise, among its conflicting elements. Nor can life be seen, or known, in any more direct way; only the balance of opposites, which always makes the poem, can possibly present it to our ken. Commonly men feel this when they insist that all portrayal of life, or of reality in general, must be dualistic. Dualism, be it the theologian’s or the moralist’s or the metaphysician’s, the statesman’s or the scientist’s, never is and never can be anything but so much poetry; richly and deeply significant always, and always alive with what is real, but always poetry, never prose. Can a reality, that is real only if, to the forms of experience, it is always a tertium quid, can such a reality ever be present to any other than a poet’s consciousness? Reality is not knowable face to face; it is beyond the reach of positive knowledge; though dwelling in, and informing all knowledge, it can never come to the surface of knowledge; for so, to its own betrayal, it would take sides and get a habitation and a name. True, by analogies one may conceive it, as the religious man thinks of God’s personality, or as the philosopher thinks of the unity of his world, or as the scientist thinks of nature’s law; but the analogies are always so many tethers, and are accordingly necessarily partial, whereas no whole can ever be quite in kind with any of its parts. We may conceive reality, then, by the use of analogy—that is, by projecting what we do know of one or another side of life beyond its natural sphere; but such projection, at least for him who has both insight and humour, who feels the limits of his knowledge and the grandly transcendent way in which he has used his knowledge for the crossing of some chasm, and the solution of some conflict in his life, is poetry. For him who is lacking in both insight and humour, who sees just what he sees and no more, who insists on making reality accord literally with his own formal experience, it is only prose. Prose is simply formally consistent experience, experience that is wholly bound to some determined standpoint, and, being this, in what it presents—that is, in its subject-matter—it is always, not adequate and inclusive, but partial and narrow and one-sided to reality. Prose, in short, sacrifices wholeness, that is to say, depth and breadth of view, to mere formal consistency. Poetry, at least in its subject-matter, is above formal consistency and above partiality. Through its very license poetry bears the message of what is real and whole. Poetry forever prefers reality to prosaic peace.
So life is a comedy, rich and deep, and it is a poem, realistic and inclusive. It is, finally, a serious duty. To many, stern and oracular in their moral sense, the character of duty will seem not to fit at all well into a life that is always humorous, and that is never real and complete without being also poetic. But it does fit. Duty, they hold, is quite too sober ever to be mingled with humour or comedy, and quite too precise and explicit, too plainly prescribed, and in its spirit, when not in its letter, too legal ever to appeal to a poet or to be in any way associated with what appeals to him. But tell me, is the Puritan’s notion of duty an accurate one? Is it the highest notion? Is it even profoundly moral? Has duty no chance at all on any other plan? In a word, are humour and poetry truly fatal to real duty? Why, even such questions must make the stern rigorists among us hope just a little, though also these good men may still fear, for the relief that the questions seem to promise. Perhaps they mingle their hope with fear, only because, as I feel quite sure, they forget that comedy and poetry always bring more than mere relief. The real comedy and the true poetry of life are altogether too deep to do only that. They do indeed bring relief from the rigour and prosaic consistency of any specific programme or uniform, and so to any man they are always welcome, though he continue to suspect them of being wrong; but they bring also a responsibility that is fuller and larger and harder than the formal precept or prescription. Should the rigorist ever love his enemies? Not if he would be consistent. Should he ever find hope in what he fears? Should he ever laugh at his own manifest smallness? Yet these are real duties; they are great, transcendent duties; and, richly humorous as they are, only a poetic consciousness can ever appreciate them and truly feel their living obligation.
For this, our life of comedy and poetry, which is real only as it is both, no principle can come nearer to the very foundation of duty than just the principle, deeply true: Whatever is, is right. Men have laughed and men have wept over this truth. Was ever more perfect mingling of doubt and belief? Was ever greater jest? Or more tragic fact? But truth it is; the truth of all duty; and it is life’s eternal comedy—the alpha and the omega, too, of life’s own poem.
Notes
1 As a positive event in history, belonging to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Machiavellism was symptomatic of the great change of the period. Cherished institutes, whether of politics or economics, of art or morals, of the spiritual life or the intellectual life, were becoming instruments. Thus, democracy was supplanting monarchy, Protestantism Catholicism, modern science scholasticism, etc.
2 The late Professor C.C. Everett, of Harvard University.