Part 17 (1/2)

They represent nothing of the sort.

The drastic revelations of ”conscience” are, as I have pointed out again and again, fused and blended in their supreme moments with the equally drastic revelations of reason and the aesthetic sense.

They are inevitably blended with these, because, as we have proved, they are all three nothing less than divergent aspects of the one irresistible projection of the soul itself which I have named ”creative love.”

Thus it comes about that in the great, terrible moments of tragic art there may be an apparent catastrophic despair, which in our normal moods seems hopeless, final, absolute.

It is only when the complex rhythm of the apex-thought is brought to bear upon these _moments of midnight_ that a strange and unutterable healing emerges from them, a shy, half-hinted whisper or something deeper than hope, a magical effluence, a ”still, small voice” from beneath the disastrous eclipse, which not only ”purges our pa.s.sions by pity and terror” but evokes an a.s.sured horizon, beyond truth, beyond beauty, beyond goodness, where the mystery of love, in its withdrawn and secret essence, transforms all things into its own likeness.

The nature of art is thus found to be intimately a.s.sociated with the universal essence of every personal life. Art is not, therefore, a thing for the ”coteries” and the ”cliques”; nor is it a thing for the exclusive leisure of any privileged cla.s.s. It is a thing springing from the eternal ”stuff of the soul,” of every conceivable soul, whether human, sub-human, or super-human.

Art is nearer than ”philosophy” or ”morality” to the creative energy; because, while it is impossible to think of art as ”philosophy” or ”morality,” it is inevitable that we should think of both of these as being themselves forms and manifestations of art.

All that the will does, in gathering together its impressions of life and its reactions to life, must, even in regard to the most vague, shadowy, faint and obscure filcherings of contemplation, be regarded as a kind of intimate ”work of art,” with the soul as the ”artist” and the flow of life as the artist's material.

Every personal soul, however ”inartistic,” is an artist in this sense; and every personal life thus considered is an effective or ineffective ”work of art.”

The primal importance of what in the narrow and restricted sense we have come to call ”art” can only be fully realized when we think of such ”art” as concentrating upon a definite material medium the creative energy which is for ever changing the world in the process of changing our att.i.tude to the world.

The deadly enemy of art--the power that has succeeded, in these commercial days, in reducing art to a pastime for the leisured and wealthy--is the original inert malice of the abyss.

This inert malice a.s.sumes, directly it comes in contact with practical affairs, the form of the possessive instinct. And the att.i.tude towards art of the ”collector” or the leisured ”epicurean,”

for whom it is merely a pleasant sensation among other sensations, is an att.i.tude which undermines the basis of its life. The very essence of art is that it should be a thing common to all, within the reach of all, expressive of the inherent and universal nature of all.

And that this is the nature of art is proved by the fact that art is the personal expression of the personal centrifugal tendency in all living souls; an expression which, when it goes far enough, becomes _impersonal_, because, by expressing what is common to all, it reaches the point where the particular becomes the universal.

It thus becomes manifest that the true nature of art will only be incidentally and occasionally manifested, and manifested among us with great difficulty and against obstinate resistance, until the hour comes when, to an extent as yet hardly imaginable, the centripetal tendency of the possessive instinct in the race shall have relinquished something of its malicious resistance to the out-flowing force which I have named ”love.” And this yielding of the centripetal power to that which we call centrifugal can only take place in a condition of human society where the idea of communism has been accepted as the ideal and, in some effective measure, realized in fact.

For every work of art which exists is the rhythmic articulation, in terms of any medium, of some personal vision of life. And the more entirely ”original” such a vision is, the more closely--such is the ultimate _paradox_ of things--will it be found to approximate to a re-creation, in this particular medium, of that ”eternal vision”

wherein all souls have their share.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE NATURE OF LOVE

The secret of the universe, as by slow degrees it reveals itself to us, turns out to be personality. When we consider, further, the form under which personality realizes, itself, we find it to consist in the struggle of personality to grapple with the objective mystery. When, in a still further movement of a.n.a.lysis, we examine the nature of this struggle between the soul and the mystery which surrounds the soul, we find it complicated by the fact that the soul's encounter with this mystery reveals the existence, in the depths of the soul itself, of two conflicting emotions, the emotion of love and the emotion of malice.

The word ”love” has been used so indiscriminately in its surprising history that it becomes necessary to elucidate a little the particular meaning I give to it in connection with this ultimate duality. A strange and grotesque commentary upon human life, these various contradictory feelings that have covered their ”mult.i.tude of sins”

under this historic name!

The l.u.s.t of the satyr, the affectionate glow of the domestic habitue, the rare exalted pa.s.sion of the lover, the cold, clear attraction of the intellectual platonist, the will to possession of the s.e.x-maniac, the will to voluptuous cruelty of the s.e.x-pervert, the maternal instinct, the race-instinct, the instinct towards fetish-wors.h.i.+p, the instinct towards art, towards nature, towards the ultimate mystery--all these things have been called ”love” that we should follow them and pursue them; all these things have been called ”love” that we should avoid them and fly from them.

The emotion of love in which we seem to detect the ultimate creative force is not precisely any of these things. Of all normal human emotions it comes nearest to pa.s.sionate sympathy. But it is much more than this. The emotion of love is not a simple nor an easily defined thing. How should it be that, when it is one aspect of the outpouring of the very stuff of the soul itself? How should it be that when it is the projection, into the heart of the objective mystery, of the soul's manifold and complicated essence?

The best definition of love is that it is the creative apprehension of life, or of the objective mystery, under the form of an eternal vision. At first sight this definition might seem but a cold and intellectual account of love; an account that has omitted all feeling, all pa.s.sion, all ecstasy.

But when we remember that what we call ”the eternal vision” is nothing less than the answer of love to love, nothing less than the reciprocal rhythm of all souls, in so far as they have overcome malice, with one another and with the mystery which surrounds them, it will be seen that the thing is something in which what we call ”intellect” and what we call ”feeling” are both transcended.

Love, in this sense, is an ecstasy; but it is an ecstasy from which all troubling, agitating, individual exactions have been obliterated.

It is an ecstasy completely purged of the possessive instinct. It is an ecstasy that brings to us a feeling of indescribable peace and calm. It is an ecstasy in which our personal self, in the fullest realization of its inmost ident.i.ty, loses itself, even at the moment of such realization, in something which cannot be put into words. At one moment our human soul finds itself hara.s.sed by a thousand vexations, outraged by a thousand miseries. Physical pain torments it, spiritual pain torments it; and a great darkness of thick, heavy, poisonous obscurity wraps it round like a grave-cloth. Then, in a sudden movement of the will, the soul cries aloud upon love; and in one swift turn of the ultimate wheel, the whole situation is transformed.

The physical pain seems to have no longer any hold upon the soul.

The mental misery and trouble falls away from it like an unstrapped load. And a deep, cool, tide--calm and still and full of infinite murmurs--rolls up around it, and pours through it, and brings it healing and peace. The emotion of love in which personality, and therefore in which the universe, finds the secret of its life, has not the remotest connection with s.e.x. s.e.xual pa.s.sion has its place in the world'; but it is only when s.e.xual pa.s.sion merges itself in the sort of love we are now considering that it becomes an instrument of real clairvoyance.