The Great Refusal

OF the old feud between philosophy and poetry we all have heard, but I would ponder that older cleft between the poet and his fellow men. The tinge of antagonism against the artist, and of distrust of his tones or words or pigments, is felt by all, in some degree; and has been felt by ail since the dawn of time. It was surely that deeper recoil which Plato acknowledged, when he would have banished the poet — with all honor — from his Republic. Who would not shrink from Byron, Poe, de Musset, at his own fireside? Yet not for his excesses; every age is quick to forgive the poet’s errors of passion, proof of a common humanity. No — the cold spot of distaste is far within, a secret instinctive sense of some fatal meaning, some conflict with the demands of human nature and of life, in the æsthetic gift.

If I can diagnose and fix this subtle ill, it may be that some principle useful to criticism will emerge. For this æsthetic malady, I seem to see, is the cause not only of the tragic failure of many an artist’s life, but also of some strange lack or emptiness in much exquisite work.

What, then, do we mean by the æsthetic gift? It is not identical with the creative gift, for it covers also that power of inner vision which is the same for the enjoyment and for the creation of beauty, and is the necessary condition and precursor of the work of art. Let us say rather that it is the temper which sees and calls into being and rapturously dwells on beauty in whatever form. It is the talent for the aesthetic experience.

Now, as to one element, at least, of this aesthetic experience, most men have been agreed for more than a hundred years. The æsthetic thrill is disinterested. When I hold, of flower or fruit, that it is beautiful, I am not concerned that it is good to eat or to smell, that it is or is not mine to pluck, that it is a fine specimen, that it may yield a fertile seed. I am thinking of it only in itself, apart from its use by myself or another. I love to dwell on it, but I dwell on it with disinterested gaze, and should find a mirage or a dream-flower just as beautiful. In fact, it has meaning only as appearance — its existence as a material object does not even come in question for me. Therefore it is certainly not a part of the real world in which I move and act, but it inhabits alone an ideal one of its own. Thus the pure enjoyment of beauty draws a magic circle of isolation about the beautiful object. The æsthetic experience is impassioned contemplation across an impassable abyss.

Perhaps the meaning of this break between beauty and reality may be illumined by viewing it from the side of natural science. Here it is explained that the very condition of our seeing beauty at all, is bound up with its banning from the world of action. If we took it as real, we should have to miss its beauty; and when it comes to us as beauty, we cannot respond to it as real. Thus: —

Every conception is constituted largely by the elements of movement in it. Not primarily that we have distinct sensations of movements (as in envisaging an obelisk, for instance), but that the blending of sensations and memories which we call perception involves, first of all and more than all, a fund of experience in the way of past movements. It is by virtue of such a fund of experience, in the very texture of the mind, that the bare sensations from the outer world are given meaning: that we see objects in space, that we do not grasp at the moon or the end of the rainbow. Perception of my fountainpen, — what it is to me, — besides the general organized experience which lets me see it in shape and in place, involves a whole circle of impulses to touch, to grasp, to manipulate — the legacy of my long use of it. Many are the amusing experiments which can be made to show what an important, though unsuspected, factor of our conscious life is this instinctive preparation for movement. And the unit-impression of a thing can differ immensely from moment to moment, according as now one, now another group of these supplement-elements in the perception becomes more vivid.

With this in mind, let us recall that every object in experience may be approached in two different ways. If it is to be ‘dealt with,’ those elements in the perception of it which belong to the appropriate action take on a greatly increased strength and vividness, while all others are weakened and dimmed. The object becomes more and more a cue for action. You hardly ‘see’ your rod and book of flies, or your billiard cue, as you dispose them for action. But if the situation is not to be dealt with, the preparatory elements fade out, and those movement-elements in perception which correspond to form and shape take the centre of the mind.

Then ensues the phenomenon we know as æsthetic imitation. The suggestions to movement involved in the complete spatial perception of the object are alone, with nothing to oppose them — we needs must follow them out. Thus it is that we indeed innerly imitate the column in its upward thrust, the urn in its swelling lines, the Greek Victory in her onward sweep. It is something like looking at a landscape with head upside down. All the habitual reactions to the shapes and meanings of things are upset — and the color-sensations become so much the more vivid as the ‘intentions’ fade.

But there is a third possibility. Those characteristics of the object which appear in this passive dwelling on them may be so vivid that they compel attention of themselves, shut out all other elements, crystallize the moment into one of æsthetic arrest. Thus the two groups are forever warring. If you dwell on the lineaments of the object, the very laws of mind not only forbid you to approach it, but actually hold you spell-bound. You can’t eat your peach and sketch it too.

This is the explanation, in the realm of mental causes and effects, of the ‘disinterested’ quality of the æsthetic experience. If the very condition of your complete æsthetic vision is the absence of all elements involving the self in activity, then the abyss between the æsthetic object and your own world and life is absolute. The object is not a real object to you: so far as you are concerned it is an appearance only.

Enthehren sollst du is the aesthetic motto. And this is the true secret of our sadness in looking on beauty. To the world of action, will, desire, — our private personal world, — as beauty it never can belong.

It is thus that we have a right to say that the æsthetic experience involves detachment, isolation, inhibition of action. However perfect the æsthetic moment, however harmonious and selfcomplete the ideal world into which we enter, it is none the less an interruption of real life. The æsthetic moment is a step out of life.

This, and this alone, is the reason why the greatest of pessimists welcomed the presence in life of beauty and of art. If life and the will to live are an unmixed evil, then that cessation and denial of life involved in the full experience of beauty is a relative good. And conversely, — if Schopenhauer’s evil, life, and the will to live, is our good, must not his good be in some sense fraught with ill to us?

The end of life is a unity. The ideal life must be that in which every act has a meaning for the whole, in which every purpose comes to fruition. Life is a unity, and responsibility is its watchword; for responsibility means obligation, a bond, one part of life answering to another part, a close-woven texture. But the æsthetic attitude is the explicit negation of all this. Whatever we contemplate in disinterested detachment is outside responsibility, because it is deliberately thrust beyond action. The æsthetic moment, the æsthetic object, is like the pearl in the oyster — a repellent unity, essentially repugnant to the inmost meaning of life.

The æsthetic as applied to life is a contradiction of itself; because it is of the essence of life to be linked, and of the essence of beauty to be an isolated whole. Thus it is that the episode, as, by definition, an isolated unity, is foreign to the meaning of life as a whole. The episode in love is felt as something without worth or dignity, for the meaning of love points beyond itself to the only immortality the finite creature can have: it holds, in its implications, liens on the whole future of action. For the same reason it is even a failure æsthetically, for the object or situation must be self-complete, not composed of elements that look beyond itself. Such was Goethe’s fatal error, when he sought to make of his relations with Cristiana ‘something noble, Roman, antique.’ He had thought to embrace a spirit from a dream-world, as his Faust the spirit of Helena. But life is not composed like art, nor can anything be beautiful which is a denial of its own meaning.

It is indeed when we try to take an {esthetic attitude toward personalities that the curse comes home, and we see what is really involved in the æsthetic attitude. Deliberately to cut one’s self off from active relation with and responsibility to a fellowman is to deny his personality, to treat him as a thing —the only real injury a person can suffer. But this is surely involved in the way of æsthetic appreciation.

Does one come upon a thatched cottage, among English fields, rose-embowered haunt of fever and misery? To the lover of beauty it is noli me tangere, for to touch it is to spoil it. — The budding poet, strolling city streets, drinks in the changing spectacle like wine. The beggar-woman, crouching in picturesque rags among burnt-umber shadows, makes for him a casual Rembrandt. Athwart the jeweled shoulders gleaming from passing carriages stands out the street girl’s haggard, painted face. Wonderful, terrible contrasts of this life! he thinks, with all of youth’s aesthetic thrill. But if the call of real life comes to him, he is ready to act, to dare, and to endure, that this wonderful contrast may disappear, and the world become a prosaic better place for a woman to live in.

When responsibility sets in, the æsthetic moment flies out of the window. For the æsthetic attitude toward life implies acceptance and welcome of things as they are; the moral calls to change. In the words of Nero, the first of æsthetes,

Here is indeed the great exemplar of æsthetics usurping the field of life. Stephen Phillips, in his play of Nero, has missed no ironical implications of the ‘disinterested.' This is the Emperor looking on the storm-background of his mother’s murder: —

Is it not now clear why the natural, the moral man dreads the corrosive action of the æsthetic interest on the relations of life as he knows it? The secret dread and distaste of the æsthetic temperament is in so far revealed and justified.

That it is possible to safeguard the relations of life while creating beauty or drawing refreshment and inspiration from it, is what I shall try to show later. But what is of present interest to me is to follow the trail of the æsthetic infection to the origin of certain interesting elements in the history of culture. We shall find it as a philosophy of life, ravaging souls; and as an occupational disease, leaving its stigma on worker and product.

Not to make too modest a claim, let me assert at once that the rise, growth, and decay of Romanticism in Germany and France are bounded by the limits and implications of the {esthetic malady. The sickness of Romanticism was an æsthetic sickness, its decline was æsthetic self-destruction. To say that in Rousseau was the original infection, is of course only a paraphrase of the present-day platitude of criticism, that Rousseau is the universal ancestor of revolution. He was not himself a conscious exponent of the aesthetic outlook on life; yet the logical outcome of his teaching and example was in Goethe and the Romantic School, in whom the {esthetic aim is raised to a philosophy. For the liberty to return to the natural man, which Rousseau demanded, involved also the demand not to be bound by any ties save those of feeling. Complete freedom for the individual was what he asked; obligation was for him a horror. But this freedom from obligations implies the detachment and isolation which we find ever the mark of the {esthetic attitude.

Such freedom, indeed, must issue in the {esthetic relation to life; for the man who is detached cannot act. ./Esthetic response is the only activity left to such a personality. But Goethe, although he owes much to Rousseau, reaches his completeness of detachment in the opposite direction. He is not pressing to revolt from obligations, but through his overwhelmingly endowed aesthetic nature he achieves detachment. It was in the inevitable logic of ideas that Goethe, the individualist and man of feeling, should give the complete case of the aesthetic personality.

Goethe’s every experience was for him an æsthetic experience, to be taken up into his gallery of pictures, but to be allowed no independent existence in the world of reality and consequence. As he said, ‘With me every idea transforms itself at once into an image.’ That image is what latter-day æsthetic criticism has come to know as the Fernbild — of which the essential quality is its detachment. Thus it was that he never gave a hostage to Fate, thus it was that the great opportunities of his life were missed. At the bourgeoning of German national feeling he had eyes only for Napoleon — the other Superman; and at the birth of critical philosophy he was ‘God-intoxicated ' in contemplation with Spinoza. He never knew love, because, in true æsthetic spirit, he always foresaw the end of an experience. Schiller wrote of him, ‘He makes his existence felt by means of his generosity, but only after the manner of a God, without giving himself.’ That his personality might be a rounded whole, he put his life into a series of episodes, out of which he sucked the juices, but which, nevertheless, as events, remained sterile for him. Amiel said of him, ‘He has never attained to the sentiment of obligation or of sin.’ And this was why he never knew happiness. In the æsthetic experience, man is free; but the man who is free is a pitiable creature. We should have liked to see the Goethe in whom the springs of thought and feeling were renewed and fed by action, fellowship, and ‘responsibility for the thing done.’ But he was afraid of life. He made the great refusal.

In after years Goethe had enough bitterness against the German Romanticists; but whatever his repudiation, it cannot be denied that they derive from him. It has indeed been the fashion to make of Fichte the philosophical godfather of the Romantic School, but there is no doubt that they developed as they did only by ignoring the central element of stability and restraint in Fichte’s system — the moral worldorder, expressed in the moral will. The Self of Fichte, the absolute principle of all knowledge, creates its own world, positing a sense-world to give itself something in which to work this moral will; but translated into the language of young genius, this meant only that one creates, one dreams out, one’s own world: one brings it into being as a supreme work of art.

All this was, however, more or less a philosophical afterthought of the Romantics, an ex-post-facto sanction. What they really built on, and swore by, because they really understood it, was the free æsthetic attitude toward life which they first learned and worshiped in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and recognized in Goethe himself. Wilhelm Meister was the text-book of German Romanticism. Not only was it the model of all works of fiction, as containing all forms of literature, but its hero was the exponent of that Lebenskunst, that art of life, which all professed and strove to practice.

Faust itself, indeed, is the great apotheosis of Romanticism. There have always been moralists who have professed to find, in at least the ending of Faust, a refutation of the plain lesson to be drawn from everything else that Goethe ever wrote or did: a new thesis that altruistic and creative work is the end of life, and gives at last that moment to which one may well cry, ‘Verweile doch, du bist so schön!’ But that view gives the lie to all the other implications of the story. Here, too, with his reclaiming works, Faust is irresponsible. It is activity for the ‘experience,’ that he wants. He ignores the rights of others, proceeds by magic, and ends in theft and piracy. To me the absolute truth of the matter is summed up in Mr. Santayana’s vivid interpretation in his ‘Three Philosophical Poets.’ ‘He would continue, if life could last, doing things, that, in some respect, he would be obliged to regret; but he would banish that regret easily, in the pursuit of some new interest; and, on the whole, he would not regret having been obliged to regret them. Otherwise, he would not have shared the whole experience of mankind, but missed the important experience of self-accusation and of self-recovery.’ No; Faust, like his glorious creator, ‘has never attained to a sentiment of obligation or of sin.’ It is, for him too, the art of life, to create the possibility of the complete circle of experience.

But alas — since the world is the product of one’s genial caprice and impulse to self-expression and may be even so annihilated, there is nothing stable, nothing worth in itself. ‘The deepest truth known to me is that erelong my present truth will change.’ This is the Romantic Irony, of which one has heard so much — the Socratic Irony through young German spectacles. The joke is, that one’s own acts, too, are but a passing semblance, without value, for there is nothing of absolute value to measure them by. So the world is hollow, and the spirit yearns into the void in vain.

Let us say rather — agitates in a vacuum. The strangest logical transformation is that by which the daring freischaffende Geist finds himself in God-like isolation, so detached that he cannot act effectively anywhere. He will not be bound by obligations, so all is episodic for him. He will not act for fear of endangering an inner harmony, and so he falls into an inevitable passivity, and, from the nemesis of all unused powers, into that ennui, melancholy, paralysis, romantic despair — le mal de René,— that is bewailed by all, from Goethe, Chateaubriand, de Sénancour, Byron, to that grandchild of Romanticism, the author of the Fleurs du Mal — ‘un oasis d’horreur dans un desert d’ennui.’

The defiant sensibility of Rousseau, the free creative spirit of Wilhelm Meister, the beautiful waywardness and genial caprice of all the Romantic tribe of Schleiermacher and Schlegel respond alike to one touchstone. They are experiencing natures; yet experience itself melts away under their fingers like a globule of mercury. They take life as an opportunity for æsthetic moulding, and so it becomes for them an æsthetic spectacle, with themselves outside. For it is the condition, the meaning, and the nemesis of the æsthetic object, to be without relations to anything but itself. The romanticists are intransitive. They don’t bite. Who was it called Wilhelm Meister ‘a menagerie of tame creatures’? ‘Blake, Stendhal, Goethe, Pascal, all were rebels,’ says a critic. Far from it; a rebel is a man of energy who will not submit himself to outworn conventions, because he has things to do. The Romanticists were not rebels, they were truants. The Romanticist does n’t want to tempt the irrevocable by deeds; he doesn’t want his bluff called.

Perhaps the type, and the reductio ad absurdum for our modern world, of the free-creative personality, is Peer Gynt. Ibsen has surely paid his respects not only to Romantic Idealism, but to the particular embodiments of Romantic Irony in this figure. Mr. William Archer has told us that we must not seek in Peer Gynt a clear consistent, cut-and-dried allegory, but I confess that it seems to me to leap to the eyes. Peer Gynt has all the stigmata. He will ‘realize himself’ and make his life a work of art. And he will ‘to himself be — enough!’ Nor will he ‘tempt the irretrievable’ — though it does overtake him.

Ay, think of it, — wish it done — will it to boot —

But do it — No, that ’s past my understanding.

(ACT III. Scene 1.)

Reference to the unfortunate author of De Profundis as the classical case in modern life of the self-destruction of the aesthetic temperament is too obvious. Yet it is not the course of his life that seems to me most eloquent in this connection, but the completeness w ith which his written word upholds and confirms all my contentions. ‘The Critic as Artist’ goes straight as an arrow to those necessary conclusions from their premises which the Romanticists would fain evade. ‘Life!' cries Oscar Wilde, ‘don’t let us go to life for our experiences, it makes us pay too high a price for them.’

But ‘The Critic as Artist’ is still playful — De Profundis is supposed to be the bed-rock of conviction. It is professedly the resolution of tragic despair into a composed humility; and one would have thought, indeed, that out of a searing tragedy would have come some grasp of the basic conditions of life. Yet this is the burden of the book: the writer accepts sorrow because to complete self-realization sorrow is as necessary as joy. ‘Pleasure for the beautiful body, pain for the beautiful soul.’ That Christ, the Man of Sorrows, is the greatest of individualists, the artist in life, justifies the æsthetic, the ‘flower-like’ life, bound to no law or obligation except to realize itself. ‘Humility in the artist is the frank acceptance of all experiences.’ It is difficult, for me at least, to see in this reaffirmation of the æsthetic philosophy of life anything but the only defiance left against a universe which still hatefully exacts responsibility for the thing done.

But it is one thing to choose for one’s end in life the perfecting and free creation of one’s own personality; it is another to fall unconsciously, and by the fatality of conditions, into the æsthetic attitude toward life. Yet how can the literary artist, at least, escape it? He must be a very miracle of strength and sanity if the tool of his trade does not leave a mark upon him and his work. The disease of the will from which all the literary grandchildren of Romanticism suffer is but the obverse of the perceptive view of life — the intransitive striking in. It is a very hyperæsthesia of the senses and æsthetic paralysis, which one feels everywhere. Nothing can be more instructive than a volume of studies like The Symbolist Movement of Mr. Arthur Symons, who is himself a disciple. ‘ I write what I see, what I feel, what I have experienced,’ says one of the typical figures — significant omission! Of Verlaine, ‘Eves wherein contemplation was itself an act.’ ‘To Verlaine happily, experience taught nothing; rather, it taught him only to cling the more closely to those moods in whose succession lies the more intimate part of our spiritual life.’ ‘Action,’ discovers Rimbaud, ‘is not life, but a way of spoiling something.’ ‘As for living,’ cries the Axel of Villiers-Adam, ‘our servants will do that for us!’

Yet the personal doom of this occupational disease is, after all, its least sinister aspect. Let the poet make an æsthetic hell for himself, if he will, so long as he does n’t insist in taking us with him. But how can the secondrate sensitive mind view the world in detachment, vividly yet objectively — as must be to fix it on canvas — and escape taking this detachment as the very meaning and secret of life? This

— this it is, this transference of the craftsman’s necessary pose into a whole philosophy of life, which makes the whole literature of the decadence so hopelessly, exquisitely hollow. Nothing is in it but the experience of perception. It is bad enough that the poet in his own life only ‘experiences’; but that he should never see any other attitude possible for anyone else is a refinement of exasperation. That phrase, of which one is so weary, ’The man for whom the visible world exists,’ might be extended to say of these ‘and nothing else!’ From Maeterlinck’s figures, ‘enduring the presence of their soul and their destiny,’ to D’Annunzio’s, assuming that there is no other way to take the world than the æsthetic (and the revolted æsthetic, at that!)

— all, paralyzed as by a Gorgon’s head, they sit spell-bound before the spectacle of life.

There is a certain philosophical fancy of an object, containing a picture of that object, which shall in turn contain a picture of that object; as, say, a miniature of your beloved wearing her own miniature in a brooch, which miniature must be a portrait wearing another miniature in a brooch — and so on ad infinitum. This self-representative mania has taken hold on the descendants of the Romantic school. I see the world as a picture; that picture is then only of people who look on the world as a picture in which others are regarding others. That way lies madness! But there is the same vertigo in following out the self-representative maze in some of the later James novels. As the author says, ‘I confess I never see the leading interest of any human hazard but in a consciousness (on the part of the moved and moving creature) subject to fine intensification and wide enlargement.' But, at least for him, there is the human hazard. At the end of a passage there may be the all but inaudible click of a decision made. Among the others an act of will would be impossible. Nothing happens in their writings save by the sullen expansion or contraction of a vegetative soul. And this soul is vegetative because the soul of its creator is vegetative. The passivity of the æsthetic function has poisoned the spring of æsthetic creation at its source, in a personality not of the strongest.

This is the secret malady of the half-genius. We used to be told that the great man saw objectively, while the lesser gave us life at his own angle. Rather is it that the great man can picture life as it is lived at first-hand, while the lesser gives us the automatic contemplative thing which his own detached experience has made him mistake for life.

What, then, is the right and healthy regimen for t he lover of beauty who yet would not fall into aesthetic heartlessness, congealment, impotence? What must be the true place and office of beauty in a world of action and of suffering?

The first answer must be, Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cesar’s. One right every human being can claim — the acknowledgment of his personal existence in the same world. Yet by taking him as an æsthetic object you do put him out of the same world, beyond judgment of good and evil. The beggar, the prostitute, the amusing child, the pirate of high finance, are insulted in their inmost natures when you make t hem the mere objects of your aesthetic interest. ‘I wonder the poor do not put on gloves to beg — they would make money by it,’ said someone once to Baudelaire. If you acknowledge a living, real personality, you have a duty toward him, if only to judge him.

That is the darling error of our American people. In the realm where it has no place, in social relations, we fall at the least excuse into the æsthetic attitude. We enjoy the clever rogue or the Napoleon of finance, and contemplate him with a paralysis of responsibility entirely characteristic of the æsthetic moment.

On the other hand, the heart that craves beauty and perfection can find them innocently and freely in the works of art and the wonders of nature. No duty is owed to these save to enjoy them; therein their end is fulfilled. It is not for me to dwell here on the moral therapeutics of such æsthetic experience. Its enlarging, purifying, rectifying office is assumed. The work of art which is truly beautiful possesses those qualities which induce the harmonious interplay of the faculties; gives of its own perfection a ‘perfect moment It is indeed a step out of the web of responsible life — but so is sleep. Like sleep, it sends one back to life a new man. Yet one must sharply separate sleep and waking. What I have tried to show is how the æsthetic obsession works on life like a sleeping sickness.

To linger in the æsthetic moment, for the man who will grasp life as a whole, is but to ‘render pour mieux sauter * Beauty, in whatever guise, supplies the image of that perfection toward which we may press on with heart the higher. Any perfection incarnate is the vindication of our hopes for the world, hopes which then more securely become our aims and our determinations. The Utopia of harmony and of happiness, once rightly envisaged, becomes a wellspring of energy for daily effort. It is indeed the promised land.

But this is rest upon and acceptance of a symbol, for the sake of unrelenting effort toward the greater symbolized. And let not the symbol lead us to ignoble quiescence. It is a danger to society that intrenched abuses or outworn creeds maintain themselves through this æsthetic quiescence which their beautiful forms impose on sensitive natures. Many people who think they are religious are only susceptible to æsthetic rapture. There is no moral passion which does not mean change and effort and discomfort.

Is there then no ‘beautiful’ life, and no right æsthetic appreciation of personalities? By our definition, the ‘beautiful’ life can be only the complete, the coherent, the perfect life, that in which any impulse is linked with its central scheme and principle, as every note in a symphony belongs to its own close-woven texture. Such a life we may æsthetically appreciate, because we can rest in it and apart, from it, as in any other microcosm of perfection. We may not either help or hurt it. But a personality or situation to which we cannot enthusiastically assent, is one which demands action from us, and bars us from the æsthetic attitude. It is at least possible that our safety lies to-day rather in steadfastly refusing the æsthetic eye to all but works of art and happy chances of nature.

In this tragic world of ours, such moments can be only few and far between. Not. being gods, we cannot look upon it and say that it is good.