THE idea of culture begins to define itself for us a little more
clearly, or at least it has put away from it in a clear contrast its natural
opposites. The unmental, the purely physical life is very obviously its
opposite, it is barbarism; the unintellectualised vital, the crude economic or
the grossly domestic life which looks only to money-getting, the procreation of
a family and its maintenance, are equally its opposites; they are another and
even uglier barbarism. We agree to regard the individual who is dominated by
them and has no thought of higher things as an uncultured and undeveloped human
being, a prolongation of the savage, essentially a barbarian even if he lives
in a civilised nation and in a society which has arrived at the general idea
and at some ordered practice of culture and refinement. The societies or
nations which bear this stamp we agree to call barbarous or semi-barbarous.
Even when a nation or an age has developed within itself knowledge and science
and arts, but still in its general outlook, its habits of life and thought is
content to be governed not by knowledge and truth and beauty and high ideals of
living, but by the gross vital, commercial, economic view of existence, we say
that that nation or age may be civilised in a sense, but for all its abundant
or even redundant appliances and apparatus of civilisation it is not the
realisation or the promise of a cultured humanity. Therefore upon even the
European civilisation of the nineteenth century with all its triumphant and
teeming production, its great developments of science, its achievement in the
works of the intellect we pass a certain condemnation, because it has turned
all these things to commercialism and to gross uses of vitalistic success. We
say of it that this was not the perfection to which humanity ought to aspire
and that this trend travels away from and not towards the higher curve of human
evolution. It must be our definite verdict
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upon it that it was inferior as an age of culture to
ancient Athens, to Italy of the Renascence, to ancient or classical India. For
great as might be the deficiencies of social organisation in those eras and
though their range of scientific knowledge and material achievement was
immensely inferior, yet they were more advanced in the art of life, knew better
its object and aimed more powerfully at some clear ideal of human perfection.
In the range of the mind's life
itself, to live in its merely practical and dynamic activity or in the
mentalised emotional or sensational current, a life of conventional conduct,
average feelings, customary ideas, opinions and prejudices which are not one's
own but those of the environment, to have no free and open play of mind, but to
live grossly and unthinkingly by the unintelligent rule' of the many, to live
besides according to the senses and sensations controlled by certain
conventions, but neither purified nor enlightened nor chastened by any law of beauty, - all this too is
contrary to the ideal of culture. A-
man may so live with all the appearance or all the pretensions of a
civilised existence, enjoy successfully all the plethora of its appurtenances,
but he is not in the real sense a developed human being. A society following
such a rule of life may be anything else you will, vigorous, decent,
well-ordered, successful, religious, moral, but it is a Philistine society; it
is a prison which the human soul has to break. For so long as it dwells there,
it dwells in an inferior, uninspired and unexpandjng mental status; it
vegetates infructuously in the lower stratum and is governed not by the higher
faculties of man, but by the crudities of the un- uplifted sense-mind. Nor is
it enough for it to open windows in this prison by which it may get draughts of
agreeable fresh air, something of the free light of the intellect, something of
the fragrance of art and beauty, something of the large breath of wider
interests and higher ideals. It has yet to break out of its prison altogether
and live in that free light, in that fragrance and large breath; only then does
it breathe the natural atmosphere of the developed mental being. Not to live
principally in the activities of the sense-mind, but in the activities of
knowledge and reason and a wide intellectual curiosity, the activities of the
cultivated aesthetic being, the activities of the enlightened will which make
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for character and high ethical ideals and a large human
action, not to be governed by our lower or our average mentality but by truth
and beauty and the self-ruling will is the ideal of a true culture and the
beginning of an accomplished humanity;
We get then by elimination to a
positive idea and definition of culture. But still on still on the higher plane
of the mental life we are apt to be pursued by old exc1usivenesses and
misunderstandings. We see that in the past there seems often to have been a
quarrel between culture and conduct; yet according to our definition conduct
also is a part of the cultured life and the ethical ideality one of the master
impulses of the cultured being. The opposition which puts on one side the
pursuit of ideas and knowledge and beauty and calls that culture and on the
other the pursuit of character and conduct and exalts that as the moral life
must start evidently from an imperfect view of human possibility and
perfection. Yet that opposition has not only existed, but is a naturally strong
tendency of the human mind and therefore must answer to some real and important
divergence in the very composite elements of our being. It is the opposition
which Arnold drew between Hebraism and Hellenism. The trend of the Jewish
nation which gave us the severe ethical religion of the Old Testament, - crude,
conventional and barbarous enough in the Mosaic law, but rising to undeniable
heights of moral exaltation when to the Law were added the Prophets, and
finally exceeding itself and blossoming into a fine flower of spirituality in
Judaic Christianity, () - was dominated
by the preoccupation of a terrestrial and ethical righteousness and the
promised rewards of right worship and right doing, but innocent of science and
philosophy, careless of knowledge, indifferent to beauty. The Hellenic mind was
less exclusively but still largely dominated by a love of the play of reason
for its own sake, but even more powerfully by a high sense of beauty, a clear
aesthetic sensibility and a worship of the beautiful in every activity, in
every creation, in thought, in art, in life, in religion. So strong was this
sense that not only manners, but ethics were seen by it to a very remark-
1
The
epithet is needed, for European Christianity has been something different, even
at its best of another temperament, Latinised, Graecised, Celticised or else
only a rough
Teutonic imitation of the old-world Hebraism.
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able extent in the light of its master idea of beauty;
the good was to its instinct largely the becoming and the beautiful. In
philosophy itself it succeeded in arriving at the conception of the Divine as
Beauty, a truth 'which the metaphysician very readily misses and impoverishes
his thought by missing it. But still, striking as is this great historical
contrast and powerful as were its results on European culture, we have to go
beyond its outward manifestation if we would understand in its source this
psycho- logical opposition.
The conflict arises from that sort
of triangular disposition of the higher or more subtle mentality which we have
already had occasion to indicate. There is in our mentality a side of will,
conduct, character which creates the ethical man; there is another side of
sensibility to the beautiful, -
understanding beauty in no narrow or hyperartistic sense, - which creates the artistic and
aesthetic man. Therefore there can be such a thing as a predominantly or even
exclusively ethical culture; there can be too, evidently, a predominantly or
even exclusively aesthetic culture. There are at once created two conflicting
ideals which must naturally stand opposed and look askance at each other with a
mutual distrust or even reprobation. The aesthetic man tends to be impatient of
the ethical rule; he feels it to be a barrier to his aesthetic freedom and an
oppression on the play of his artistic sense and his artistic faculty; he is
naturally hedonistic, - for beauty and delight are inseparable
powers, - and the ethical rule tramples on pleasure, even very often on
quite innocent pleasures, and tries to put a strait waistcoat on the human
impulse to delight. He may accept the ethical rule when it makes itself
beautiful or even seize on it as one of his instruments for creating beauty,
but only when he can subordinate it to the aesthetic principle of his nature, -
just as he is often drawn to religion by its side of beauty, pomp, magnificent
ritual, emotional satisfaction, repose or poetic ideality and aspiration, - we
might almost say, by the hedonistic aspects of religion. Even when fully
accepted, it is not for their own sake that he accepts them. The ethical man
repays this natural repulsion with interest. He tends to distrust art and the
aesthetic sense as some- thing lax and emollient, something in its nature
undisciplined and
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by its attractive appeals to the passions and emotions
destructive of a high and strict self-control. He sees that it is hedonistic
and he finds that the hedonistic impulse is non-moral and often immoral. It is
difficult for him to see how the indulgence of the aesthetic impulse beyond a
very narrow and carefully guarded limit can be combined with a strict ethical
life. He evolves the puritan who objects to pleasure on principle; not only in
his extremes - and a predominant impulse tends to become absorbing and leads
towards extremes - but in the core of his temperament he remains fundamentally
the puritan. The misunderstanding between these two sides of our nature is an
inevitable circumstance of our human growth which must try them to their
fullest separate possibilities and experiment in extremes in order that it may
understand the whole range of its capacities.
Society is only an enlargement of the individual; therefore this contrast and
opposition between individual types reproduces itself in a like contrast and
opposition between social and national types. We must not go for the best
examples to social formulas which do not really illustrate these tendencies but
are depravations, deformations or deceptive conformities. We must not take as
an instance of the ethical turn the middle-class puritanism touched with a
narrow, tepid and conventional religiosity which was so marked an element in
nineteenth-century England; that was not an ethical culture, but simply a local
variation of the general type of bourgeois respectability you will find every-
where at a certain stage of civilisation, - it was Philistinism pure and
simple. Nor should we take as an instance of the aesthetic any merely Bohemian
society or such examples as London of the Restoration or Paris in certain brief
periods of its history; that, whatever some of its pretensions, had for its
principle, always, the indulgence of the average sensational and sensuous man
freed from the conventions of morality by a superficial intellectualism and
aestheticism. Nor even can we take Puritan England as the ethical type; for
although there was there a strenuous, an exaggerated culture of character and
the ethical being, the determining tendency was religious, and the religious
impulse is a phenomenon quite apart from our other subjective tendencies,
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though it influences them all; it is sui generis and must be treated
separately. To get at real, if not always quite pure examples of the type we
must go back a little farther in time and contrast early republican Rome or, in
Greece itself, Sparta with Periclean Athens. For as we come down the stream of Time
in its present curve of evolution, humanity in the mass, carrying in it its
past collective experience, becomes more and more complex and the old distinct
types do not recur or recur precariously and with difficulty.
Republican Rome - before it was touched and finally
taken captive by conquered Greece -
stands out in relief as one of the most striking psychological phenomena
of human history. From the point of view of human development it presents
itself as an almost unique experiment in high and strong character-building
divorced as far as may be from the sweetness which the sense of beauty and the
light which the play of the reason brings into character and uninspired by the
religious temperament; for the early Roman creed was a superstition, a superficial
religiosity and had nothing in it of the true religious spirit. Rome was the
human will oppressing and disciplining the emotional and sensational mind in
order to arrive at the self-mastery of a definite ethical type; and it was this
self-mastery which enabled the Roman republic to arrive also at the mastery of
its environing world and impose on the nations its public order and law. All
supremely successful imperial nations have had in their culture or in their
nature, in their formative or expansive periods, this predominance of the will,
the character, the impulse to self- discipline and self-mastery which
constitutes the very basis of the ethical tendency. Rome and Sparta like other
ethical civilisations had their considerable moral deficiencies, tolerated or
deliberately encouraged customs and practices which we should call immoral,
failed to develop the gentler and more delicate side of moral character, but
this is of no essential importance. The ethical idea in man changes and
enlarges its scope, but the kernel of the true ethical being remains always the
same, - will, character,
self-discipline, self-mastery.
Its limitations
at once appear, when we look back at its prominent examples. Early Rome and
Sparta were barren of
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thought, art, poetry, literature, the larger mental
life, all the amenity and pleasure. of human existence; their art of life
excluded or discouraged the delight of living. They were distrustful, as the
exclusively ethical man is always distrustful, of free and flexible thought and
the aesthetic impulse. The earlier spirit of republican Rome held at arm's
length as long as possible the Greek influences that invaded her, closed the
schools of the Greek teachers, banished the philosophers, and her most typical
minds looked upon the Greek language as a peril and Greek culture as an
abomination: she felt instinctively the arrival at her gates of an enemy,
divined a hostile and destructive force fatal to her principle of living.
Sparta, though a Hellenic city, admitted as almost the sole aesthetic element
of her deliberate ethical training and education a martial music and poetry,
and even then, when she wanted a poet of war, she had to import an Athenian. We
have a curious example of the repercussion of this instinctive distrust even on
a large and aesthetic Athenian mind in the utopian speculations of Plato who
felt himself obliged in his Republic first to censure and then to banish the
poets from his ideal polity. The end of these purely ethical cultures bears witness to their insufficiency. Either they
pass away leaving nothing or little behind them by which the future can be
attracted and satisfied, as Sparta passed, or they collapse in a revolt of the
complex nature of man against an unnatural restriction and repression, as the
early Roman type collapsed into the egoistic and often orgiastic license of
later republican and imperial Rome. The human mind needs to think, feel, enjoy,
expand; expansion is its very nature and restriction is only useful to it in so
far as it helps to steady, guide and strengthen its expansion. It readily
refuses the name of culture to those civilisations or periods, however noble
their aim or even however 'beautiful in itself their order, which have not
allowed an intelligent freedom of development.
On the other hand, we are tempted
to give the name of a full culture to all those periods and civilisations,
whatever their defects, which have encouraged a freely human development and
like ancient Athens have concentrated on thought and beauty and the delight of
living. But there were in the' Athenian deve-
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lopment two distinct periods, one of art and beauty, the
Athens of Phidias and Sophocles, and one of thought, the Athens of the
philosophers. In the first period the sense of beauty and the need of freedom
of life and the enjoyment of life are the determining forces. This Athens
thought, but it thought in the terms of art and poetry, in figures of music and
drama and architecture and sculpture; it delighted in intellectual discussion,
but not so much with any will to arrive at truth as for the pleasure of
thinking and the beauty of ideas. It had its moral order, for with out
that no society can exist, but it had no true ethical impulse or ethical type,
only a conventional and customary morality; and when it thought about ethics,
it tended to express it in the terms of beauty, to kalon, to epieikes, the beautiful, the becoming. Its very
religion was a religion of beauty and an occasion for pleasant ritual and
festivals and for artistic creation, an aesthetic enjoyment touched with a
superficial religious sense. But without character, without some kind of high
or strong discipline there is no enduring power of life. Athens exhausted its
vitality within one wonderful century which left it enervated, will-less,
unable to succeed in the struggle of life, uncreative. It turned indeed for a
time precisely to that which had been lacking to it, the serious pursuit of
truth and the evolution of systems of ethical self-discipline; but it could
only think, it could not successfully practise. The later Hellenic mind and
Athenian centre of culture gave to Rome the great Stoic system of ethical
discipline which saved her in the midst of the orgies of her first imperial
century, but could not itself be stoical in its practice; for to Athens and to
the characteristic temperament of Hellas, this thought was a straining to
something it had not and could not have; it was the opposite of its nature and
not its fulfilment.
This insufficiency of the aesthetic
view of life becomes yet more evident when we come down to its other great
example, Italy of the Renascence. The Renascence was regarded at one time as
pre-eminently a revival of learning, but in its Mediterranean birth-place it was
rather the efflorescence of art and poetry and the beauty of life. Much more
than was possible even in the laxest times of Hellas, aesthetic culture was
divorced from the ethical impulse and at times was even anti-ethical and re-
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miniscent of the license of imperial Rome. It had
learning and curiosity, but gave very little of itself to high thought and
truth and the more finished achievements of the reason, although it helped to
make free the way for philosophy and science. It so corrupted religion as to
provoke in the ethically minded Teutonic nations the violent revolt of the
Reformation, which, though it vindicated the freedom of the religious mind, was
an insurgence not so much of the reason, - that was left to Science, - but of the moral instinct and its ethical
need. The subsequent prostration and loose weakness of Italy was the inevitable
result of the great defect of its period of fine culture, and it needed for its
revival the new impulse of thought and will and character given to it by
Mazzini. If the ethical impulse is not sufficient by itself for the development
of the human being, yet are will, character, self- discipline; self-mastery
indispensable to that development. They are the backbone of the mental body.
Neither the ethical being nor the
aesthetic being is the whole man, nor can either be his sovereign principle;
they are merely two powerful elements. Ethical conduct is not the whole of
life; even to say that it is three-fourths of life is to indulge in a very
doubtful mathematics. We cannot assign to it its position in any such definite
language, but can at best say that its kernel of will, character and
self-discipline are almost the first condition for human self-perfection. The
aesthetic sense is equally indispensable, for without that the self-perfection
of the mental being cannot arrive at its object, which is on the mental plane
the right and harmonious possession and enjoyment of the truth, power, beauty
and delight of human existence. But neither can be the highest principle of the
human order. We can combine them; we can enlarge the sense of ethics by the
sense of beauty and delight and introduce into it to correct its tendency of
hardness and austerity the element of gentleness, love, amenity, the hedonistic
side of morals; we can steady, guide and strengthen the delight of life by the
introduction of the necessary will and austerity and self-discipline which will
give it endurance and purity. These two powers of our psychological being,
which represent in us the essential principle of energy and the essential
principle of delight, - the Indian terms
are more profound and expressive, Tapas and
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Ananda,1
- can be thus helped by each
other, the one to a richer, the other to a greater self-expression. But that
even this much re- conciliation may come about they must be taken up and
enlightened by a higher principle which must be capable of understanding and
comprehending both equally and of disengaging and combining disinterestedly
their purposes and potentialities. That higher principle seems to be provided
for us by the human faculty of reason and intelligent will. Our crowning
capacity, it would seem to be by right the crowned sovereign of our nature.
1 Tapas is the energising
conscious-power of cosmic being by which the world is created,
maintained and governed; it
includes all concepts of force, will, energy, power, everything dynamic and
dynamising. Ananda is the essential nature of bliss of the cosmic consciousness
and, in activity, its delight of self-creation and self-experience.
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