Part 29 (1/2)
Where interest is centered on a world to come, there not infrequently results a loss of interest and discrimination in the goods of earthly life. ”For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” The beauties, goods, and distinctions of this world coalesce into an indiscriminate triviality in comparison with that infinite glory hereafter to be attained. One does not trouble one's self about the furniture of earthly life any more than one would take pains with the beautification of a room in which one happens to be lodged for a night.
Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.
But lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.
Though on earth you may live in squalor, poverty, and disease, yet ”in my Father's house are many mansions.”
Poverty, indeed, became in the Middle Ages one of the vows of monastic orders. In the New Testament it is prescribed, ”Blessed are the poor in spirit” and the doctrine was in many cases literally accepted.
If any one of you will know whether he is really poor in spirit, let him consider whether he loves the ordinary consequences and effects of poverty, which are hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, and the denudation of all conveniences. See if you are glad to wear a worn-out habit full of patches. See if you are glad when something is lacking to your meal, when you are pa.s.sed by in serving it, when what you receive is distasteful to you, when your cell is out of repair. If you are not glad of these things, if instead of loving them you avoid them, then there is proof that you have not attained the perfection of poverty of spirit.[2]
[Footnote 2: Alfonso Rodriguez: _Pratique de la Perfection Chretienne_, part III, treatise III, chap. VI; quoted in James's _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 315.]
Contempt for this world's goods, when generalized, promotes an att.i.tude of indifference to the social conditions in which men live. The history of the saints is filled with references to their endurance of pain, ill health, poverty, and disease. And the ”world, the flesh, and the devil” are for some types of religious mind all one. For such, to be engaged in social betterment is an irrelevant business, it is to be lost in the world. People's souls must be saved; not their bodies.
Religions, on the other hand, have frequently emphasized man's social duty. In Christianity this is largely a derivative of the highly regarded virtue of Charity. Interest in one's own well-being was a prerequisite for the devout, but interest in the welfare of others was equally enjoined. To help the poor and the needy, the widowed and the fatherless, to bring succor to the oppressed and justice to the downtrodden, have been part of the religion whose Founder taught that all men were the children of their Father in Heaven. The mendicant orders of the Middle Ages were devoted to philanthropic works; and with religious inst.i.tutions, throughout their history, have been a.s.sociated works of philanthropy and social welfare.
Very recently urban churches in this country have been showing a tendency to reorganize with emphasis on the church as an instrument of social cooperation rather than as an aloof exponent of dogmatic theology. It is the ideal of some liberal theologians to use the churches chiefly as instruments for giving social effectiveness to the religious impulse and at the same time for making social betterment a spiritual enterprise.
CHAPTER XIII
ART AND THE aeSTHETIC EXPERIENCE
ART _VERSUS_ NATURE. In the Career of Reason man has gradually learned to control the world in which he lives in the interests of his own welfare as he imaginatively contemplated it.
Deliberate control has been made necessary because of the fact that man is born into a world which was not made for him, but in which he must, if anywhere, grow; in a world which was not designed to fulfill his desires, but where alone his desires can find fulfillment. Art may thus, in the broadest sense, be set over against Nature. It is the activity by which man realizes ideals. He may realize them practically, as when he builds a house which he has first imagined, or reaps a harvest in antic.i.p.ation of which he has first sown the seeds. He may realize them imaginatively, as when in color, form, or sound he creates some desiderated beauty out of the crude miscellaneous materials of experience. Art, in the broad sense of control or direction of Nature, arises in the double fact of man's instinctive activities and desires and the inadequacy of the environment as it stands to afford them satisfaction. Because nature is not considerate of his needs, man must himself take forethought, and devise means by which the forces and the materials of Nature may be exploited to his own good. And the realization of this forethought is made possible through the fact that natural conditions do lend themselves to modification. Nature, though indifferent to man's welfare, is yet partly congruous with it. While the wind blows careless of the good or ill it does to him, yet man may learn by means of windmills or sailboats to turn the wind to his own interest. Though the river may flow on forever, oblivious to the men that come and go along its sh.o.r.es, yet the pa.s.sing generations may transform this undeliberate flowing into the power that yields them clothing, machinery, and transportation. All civilization is, as Mill says, an exhibition of Art or Contrivance; it is ill.u.s.trated by
the junction by bridges of sh.o.r.es which Nature had made separate, the draining of Nature's marshes, the excavation of her wells, the dragging to light of what she has buried at immense depths in the earth; the turning away of her thunderbolts by lightning rods; of her inundations by embankments, of her oceans by breakwaters.[1]
[Footnote 1: Mill: _Three Essays on Religion_, p. 19 (essay on ”Nature”).]
By irrigation man has learned to make the ”wilderness blossom as the rose.” By railways, telegraphs, and telephones, he has learned to minimize the obstacles that time and s.p.a.ce offer to the fulfillment of his desires. By controlling, by means of education and social organization, his own instincts in the light of the purposes he would attain, by studying ”the secret processes of Nature,” man has learned to make the world a fit habitation for himself. To dig, to plough, to sow, to reap, are instances of the means whereby man has applied intelligent control to his half-friendly, half-hostile environment.
Man's deliberate control of Nature arises thus under the sharp pressure of practical necessity. Man is inherently active, but, as pointed out in an earlier connection, his activity takes coherent and consecutive form primarily under the compulsion of satisfying his physical wants, of finding food, clothing, and shelter. The greater part of human energy, certainly under primitive conditions, is devoted to maintaining a precarious equilibrium among the mysterious and terrifying forces of a half-understood environment. There is not much time for leisure, play, or art, where food is a continuously urgent problem, where one's shelter is likely to be destroyed by storm or wind, where one is threatened incessantly by beasts of prey, and, as primitive man supposed, by capricious supernatural powers. Under such circ.u.mstances, life is largely spent in instrumental or imperative pursuits. Action is fixed by necessity. It is controlled with immediate and urgent reference to the business of keeping alive. There is scarcely time for the activity of art, which is spontaneous and free.
In civilized life, also, the greater part of human energy must be spent in necessary or instrumental business. Men must, as always, be fed, clothed, and housed, and the fulfillment of these primary human demands absorbs the greater part of the waking hours of the majority of mankind. Our civilization is predominantly industrial; it is devoted almost entirely to the transforming of the world of nature into products for the gratification of the physical wants of men. These wants have, of course, become much complicated and refined: men wish not only to live, but to live commodiously and well.
They want not merely a roof over their heads, but a pleasant and comfortable house in which to live. They want not merely something to stave off starvation, but palatable foods.
In the satisfaction of these increasingly complicated demands a great diversity of industries arises. With every new want to be fulfilled, there is a new occupation, pursued not for its own sake, but for the sake of the good which it produces. There are industrial leaders, of course, who find in the development and control of the productive energies of thousands of men, in the manipulation of immense natural resources, satisfactions a.n.a.logous to that of the fine artist. But for most men engaged in the routine operations of industry, the work they do is clearly not pursued on its own account. Industry, viewed in the total context of the activities of civilization, is a practical rather than a fine art. Its ideal is efficiency, which means economy of effort. Its interest is primarily in producing many goods cheaply.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE FINE ARTS. In the sharp struggle of man with his environment, those instincts survived which were of practical use. The natural impulses with which a human being is at birth endowed, are chiefly those which enable him to cope successfully and efficiently with his environment. But even in primitive life, so exuberant and resilient is human energy that it is not exhausted by necessary labors.
The plastic arts, for example, began in the practical business of pottery and weaving. The weaver and the potter who have acquired skill and who have a little more vitality than is required for turning out something that is merely useful, turn out something that is also beautiful. The decorations which are made upon primitive pottery exhibit the excess vitality and skill of the virtuoso. Similarly, religious ritual, which, as we have seen, arises in practical commerce with the G.o.ds, comes to be in itself cherished and beautiful. The chants which are prescribed invocations of divinity, become songs intrinsically interesting to singer and listener alike; the dance ceases to be merely a necessary religious form and becomes an occasion of beauty and delight. Jane Harrison has shown in detail how ritual arises out of practical need, and art out of ritual.[1] Thus the Greek drama had its beginnings in Greek religion; the incidental beauty of the choruses of the Greek festivals developed into the eventual tragic art of aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Ceasing to be a practical invocation to the G.o.ds it became an artistic enterprise in and for itself. Repeatedly we find in primitive life that activity is not exhausted in agriculture, hunting, and handicraft, or in a desperate commerce with divinity. Harvest becomes a festival, pottery becomes an opportunity for decoration, and prayer, for poetry. Even in primitive life men find the leisure to let their imaginations loiter over these intrinsically lovely episodes in their experience.
The potter may be more interested in making a beautifully moulded and decorated vessel than merely in turning out a thing of use; the maker of baskets may come to ”play with his materials,” to make baskets not so much for their usefulness as for the possible beauty of their patterns. When this interest in beauty becomes highly developed, and when circ.u.mstances permit, the fine arts arise. The crafts come to be practiced as intrinsically interesting employments of the creative imagination. The moulding of miscellaneous materials into beautiful forms becomes a beloved habitual practice.
[Footnote 1: See Jane Harrison: _Ancient Art and Ritual_, especially chap. I.]
The context in which art appears in primitive life is paralleled in civilized society. The energies of men are still largely consumed in necessary pursuits. Men must, as of old, by the inadequacy of the natural order in which they find themselves, find means by which to live; and, being by nature const.i.tuted so that they must live together, they must find ways of living together justly and harmoniously. ”Industry,”
writes Santayana, ”merely gives to Nature that form which, if more thoroughly humane, she might already have possessed for our benefit.” It is creative in so far as it transforms matter from its crude indifferent state to forms better adapted to human ideals. It makes cotton into cloth, wool into clothing, wheat into flour, leather into shoes, coal into light and power, iron into skysc.r.a.pers. It is devoted to annulling the discrepancies between nature and human nature. It turns refractory materials and obdurate forces into commodious goods and useful powers.
But, in the broadest sense, industry is a means to an end.
Interesting and attractive it may well become, as when a bookbinder or a printer takes a craftsman's proud delight in the manner in which he performs his work, and in the quality of its product. But the industrial arts, for the most part, serve more ultimate purposes. It is imaginable that Nature might have provided clothing, food, and shelter ready to our hand. It is questionable whether under such circ.u.mstances men would out of deliberate choice continue industries which are now made imperative through necessity. The mines and the stockyards are necessary rather than beautiful or intrinsically attractive occupations. But in the world of fact, those things which are necessary to us are not ready to our hand.
Our civilization is predominantly industrial, and must be so, if the billion and a half inhabitants of our world are to be maintained by the resources at our command.