来自：ITALIAN FANTASIES
What can be more nobly catholic than the prayer I found pasted outside Italian churches: “My God, I offer Thee all the masses which are being celebrated to-day in all the world for the sinners who are in agony and who must die to-day. May the most precious Blood of Jesus the Redeemer obtain for them mercy!” True, the poetry of this prayer is rather marred by the precise information that “every day in the universe about 140,000 persons die: 97 every minute, 51 millions every year,” but not so grossly as by the indulgences accorded to the utterers. Why must this fine altruism be thus tainted? But alas! Catholicism perpetually appears the caricature of a great concept. Take for another example the methods of canonisation, by which he or she who dies “in the odour of piety” may pass, in the course of centuries, from the degree of venerable servant of God to the apogee of blessed saintship. What can be grander than this notion of taking all time as all earth for the Church’s province? Yet consider the final test. The great souls she has produced must work two posthumous miracles, forsooth, before they can be esteemed saints. By what a perversion of the spiritual is it that holiness has come to be on a par with pills! Surely a true Church Universal should canonise for goodness of life, not for mortuary miracles. Joan of Arc, who must wait nigh five hundred years for saintship—did not the miracle of her life outweigh any possible prowess of her relics?
But despite, or rather because of, this grossness, the walls of the Catholic autocosm are still stout: centuries of friction with the macrocosm will be needed to wear them away. The love of noble ritual and noble buildings, of ordered fasts and feasts, of authority absolute; the comfortable concreteness of Orthodoxy beside the nebulousness of Modernism; the sinfulness of humanity, its helplessness before the tragic mysteries of life and death; the peace of confession, the therapeia of chance and hypnotism, the magnetism of a secular tradition, the _vis inertiæ_—all these are pillars of the mighty fabric of St. Peter. But even these would be as reeds but for the massive prop of endowments. ’Tis Mortmain—the dead hand—that keeps back Modernism. So long as any institution possesses funds, there will never be any lack of persons to administer them. This is the secret of all successful foundations. The rock on which the Church is founded is a gold-reef. And it is actively defended by Persecution and the Index, by which all thought is equally excluded, be it a Darwin’s or a Gioberti’s, a Zola’s or a Tyrrell’s. Who then shall set a term to its stability?
With such a marvellous machinery at hand for the Church Universal of the future—so democratic, so cosmopolitan, so free from sex injustice—it seems a thousand pities that there is nothing to be done with it but to scrap it. Surely it should be adapted to the macrocosm, brought into harmony with the modern mind, so that, becoming again the mistress of our distracted and divided world, moderating the frenzy of nationalisms by a European cult and a European culture, keeping in their place the mediocrities who are seated on our thrones, and the democracies when they stray from wisdom, it could send out a true blessing _urbi et orbi_. But this, I remember, is an Italian fantasy.
OF FACTS WITHOUT AUTOCOSMS: OR THE IRRELEVANCY OF SCIENCE
I did not need the lesson of the Scala ballet—Civiltà inspired by Luce and chasing Tenebre. I know that that light is electric. Have I not found it in the deepest crypt of the underground cathedral of Brescia, illuminating the two Corinthian pillars from the Temple of Vespasius? Have I not seen in the quaint sleepy alleys of rock-set Orvieto the wayside shrine of the Madonna utilised to hold an electric lamp? And have I not seen that ancient marble shrine between Carrara and Avenza supporting the telegraph wires, or the crumbling tower of Lucca the telephones? And did I not watch the thousand-year-old cathedral of Genoa—with St. Lorenzo’s martyrdom on its façade—preparing to celebrate the fourth centenary of St. Caterina—“whose mortal remains in their urn have not felt the injury of time”—by a thorough cleansing with a vacuum cleaner? Ceaselessly throbbed the engine, like the purr of a pious congregation, and the hose extended to the uttermost ledges of the roof, sucking in dust immemorially undisturbed. And the cathedral clock of Verona that looks down on Charlemagne’s paladins, Roland and Oliver, in rude stone—did it not tell me the correct time? Yes, ’tis the hour of Science.
And the contribution of Italy to Science is almost as great as her contribution to Art or Religion. A country that can produce St. Francis, Michelangelo, and Galileo, that founded at Verona the first geological museum and at Pisa the first botanical garden, has indeed all winds of the spirit blowing through her. But except in Da Vinci, Art and Science have not been able to lodge together. Him the sketches for his flying-machines in the Ambrosian library make a boon-fellow of Wright, Voisin, and Santos, as Luca Beltrami enthusiastically proclaims. Galileo had some pretensions to letters, writing essays and verses, and is even suspected of a comedy. But the life of Galileo practically divides Italy’s art period from her scientific, so far at least as the material arts are concerned. His amanuensis, Torricelli, preluded the barometer, and the creation of electrical science by Galvani and Volta was a main factor in the evolution of our modern world of machinery. Venice and Florence founded statistical science, and if Sicily and South Italy have relapsed from the Arabic-Aristotelian stimulus administered by Frederick II—perhaps for fear of sharing the imperial Epicurean’s furnace in the Sixth Circle of the Inferno—North Italy has remained a pioneer of the modern. It is not by accident that Marconi was born in Bologna, or Lombroso in Verona—which is to hold his statue—or that the most learned exponent of the dismal science of our day has been Luigi Cossa, Professor of Political Economy in the Universities of Pavia and Milan. But even Naples and Palermo have remained faithful to astronomy and the mathematics.
Far be it from me to say a word against Science as a magnified magical maid-of-all-work! But in so far as she pretends to set up in the parlour, ousting her old mistresses, Theology and Poetry, let me point out to her swains, the electro-plated youth of Lombardy, that the facts of Science, existing as they do outside autocosms, are as substantial to lean upon as the shadows of reeds. Of the need of a _Scientia Scientiarum_ to put all these facts in their place, the average scientific specialist is as unconscious as a ploughboy of the calculus.
For it follows from the doctrine of autocosms that a fact cannot exist as such till it has settled to which autocosm it belongs. It must be born into the world of meaning. The same raw material may go to form part of autocosms innumerable, as the same man may be the butler at a duke’s, the guest of honour at a grocer’s, and the chief dish at a cannibal banquet. The same fire that beacons a ship from destruction sucks a moth to its doom, and the same election figures scatter at once delight and despair. The “fact,” outside an autocosm, can only be regarded as a potentiality of entering into ratios; in other words, it is a “rational” possibility. But since there is a definite limit to its possibilities, and an election result cannot glut the cannibal appetite, nor a butler operate as a beacon-fire—except in the way of Ridley and Latimer—we are compelled to recognise an obstinate objective element fatal to the Pragmatic Philosophy. Potential facts are stubborn things. Pragmatism was a healthy reaction against the obsession of a world wholly gaugeable by Reason, like the reaction of Duns Scotus against Aquinas, but when it replaced Reason by Will, it fell into the other extreme of error. _Both_ Reason and Will must enter into the Science of Sciences, and they must even be supplemented by Emotion.
For the human consciousness, our sole instrument for apprehending the world, is trinitarian. I should say we have three antennæ—Reason, Will, Emotion—wherewith to grope out into our environment, were it not that those antennæ are triune, and no knowledge of the outer world ever comes to us save with all the three factors intertwined in varying proportions. Why then should we throw away all that Will and Emotion tell us, putting asunder what God has put together? To represent the Report of the bare intellectual faculty as the Report of the whole Commission is fraudulence. Will and Emotion have too meekly contented themselves with a Minority Report. It is time they insisted on their views colouring and fusing into the Report Proper. Even Kant, having reached spiritual bankruptcy by his “Critique of Pure Reason,” apologetically called in the Practical Reason to save the situation, thereby importing into his system an absurd dualism. Kant’s Practical Reason is simply Will and Emotion restored to their proper rank as conjoint antennæ of apprehension. The effort to probe the universe with an isolated antenna was foredoomed to failure. The Practical Reason should have been called in, not after the bankruptcy as a sort of receiver to make the best of a bad estate, but before starting operations, as a partner with additional capital.
A fact, then, to be a fact, must be born into an autocosm, must be caught up not only into intellectual perception, but into emotional and volitional relations. The so-called scientific fact is thus two-thirds unborn. It is not a fact, but a facet of a fact. ’Tis only by a shorthand convention, indeed, that anything can be treated as purely an object of intellectual discrimination. Every substantive in the dictionary is a shrivelled leaf which requires the sap and greenness of a living sentence to restore it to life. This is best seen in words with more than one meaning, like “bark,” which needs to be in a sentence to show whether it is canine or marine. But every word is in the same ambiguous case, and acquires its nuance from its relations with life. The molecule or structural unit of reality being thus triune, it is obvious that the isolated presentation of the material aspect of things in the shape of words under the name of Science can never be a presentation of Truth. It is a mere abstraction from the trinitarian wholeness of experience. Full life exists in three dimensions, Art in two, and Science in one, like a solid, a superficies, and a line, and the line as little reproduces the plenitude of being as the coast-line of a map the beetling cliffs and thundering seas.
But the subject-matter of the sciences is not even the universe treated as a material whole, but the universe cut up into abstract ’ologies and ’onomies, each of which insidiously tends to swell into a full-seeming sphere of Truth, as when Political Economy, having proved that Free Trade produces the cheapest article, tends to assume that humanity is therefore _bound_ to buy in the cheapest market; so that even the Tariff Reformer, under the same hypnosis, seeks to deny this economic law, instead of admitting and overriding it by considerations from supplementary spheres of Truth. Similar fallacies spring from pathology, psychology, physiology, criminology, and other methods of vivisecting our noble selves. We are parcelled out among the professors, each of them magnifying his office.
“Hark, hark, the lark at Heaven’s gate sings!”
says the beautiful song in _Cymbeline_. The sciences pounce upon that lark like hawks, and tear it to pieces between them. But the truth about the lark—is it in the unreal abstractions of the sciences, or is it in the poet’s perception of the lark in all the fulness, colour, and richness of actual existence?
The little Gradgrinds, says Dickens, had cabinets in various departments of science. “They had a little chronological cabinet, and a little metallurgical cabinet, and a little mineralogical cabinet, and the specimens were all arranged and labelled, and the bits of stones and ore looked as though they might have been broken off from the parent substances by those tremendously hard instruments, their own names.”
But it is only in the falsificatory museums of science that things exist in little cabinets, or that the butterfly is impaled on a pin and ranged in a glass case with other _Lepidoptera_. In the real universe it flutters alone amid the flowers. It is full of its own vivid life; it does not know it has been classified. This classification exists only in some student’s mind; the truth is in the fluttering butterfly. And Truth really flutters like a butterfly, free and joyous, winged with iridescent splendours and subtle shades. Truth is not a dead formula, but an airy aliveness.
When I was a youth studying mathematics and the ’ologies, I became infected with the sense of superiority to the crowd which these pursuits bring: such cold, logical reasoning, such rare reaches of thought! To think that men eminent in these branches should remain unrewarded by popular fame, while every petty scribbler with a gift of invention commanded the applause of the mob! To be a novelist seemed a paltry affair; yet later on I came to recognise that the crowd is right, and that those who decry the predominance of the novel are wrong. All these sciences and speculations deal with human life, not in its living fulness, but with an abstractness which makes it dead, unreal, false. The world’s instinctive distrust of pedants and students and mathematicians is justified. They isolate one aspect of life, one thread of the tangled skein, one _motif_ in the eternal symphony, and sometimes drawing from reality the merest shred of tune, execute upon it an enormous fantasia—as in the higher mathematics—which plays itself out inaudibly _in vacuo_. The cold perfection of mathematics is due to our having eliminated in advance all the accidents of reality, and even the supposed infallibility of the proposition that two and two are four shatters itself upon the futility of adding two elephants to two speeches on the Irish question. And yet in those callow days it was to Number that I, like Pythagoras, was fain to look for the key of the riddle. But that was under the glittering spell of the late Monsieur Taine, who well-nigh persuaded me that a Science was only truly Scientific when it passed from the qualitative to the quantitative stage. If you could only express everything by mathematical formulæ, then at last you would catch that shy bird, Truth, by the tail. Strip away Truth’s feathers, then the flesh, then even the bones, till you get a meaningless world of imaginary atoms, and that, forsooth, is the ultimate Truth. “The universe,” said Taine triumphantly, “will one day be expressed in mathematical formulæ.” In other words, strip away all there is to know, get rid of all that interests you, the colour and the form and the glow of life, and then you will really know the thing. The only way to know a thing is elaborately to prevent yourself from knowing it.
That invaluable institution the Post Office annually provides us with statistics. So many billion letters are sent a year, so many postcards, so many packages, and of these so many are left open, and so many unaddressed or unstamped, and so many go astray. These figures have as much to do with the realities implied in this correspondence as the figures of the quantitative sciences with the realities they are drawn from. Even could it be proved that the ratio of unaddressed letters to addressed is constant over a given area, or that the percentage of postcards varies inversely with the status of the senders, how much nearer are we to the hot passions and wild despairs, the commercial greeds and the loving humours which are the actuality of the phenomena under calculation?
Even the lines and angles of geometry, which have more body than statistics, are a poor substitute for the full, rich world, with its forests and skies. Mathematics may be indispensable to navigation, but on the sea of life we sail very well without it. Some of the most charming women I know count on their fingers. When
“A Rosalind-face at the lattice shows, * * * And Sir Romeo sticks in his ear a rose,”
it is indifferent to the situation that the rose is compact of chemical atoms dancing in complex figures, setting to partners, visiting and retreating.
Biron in “Love’s Labour Lost,” professing to derive his learning from women’s eyes, which are
“the ground, the books, the academes, From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire,”
was, though the sentiment may be unpopular in this educational age, wiser than Faust in his study soliloquising on the curse of useless learning. Many of the statements of science are true for the abstract logical faculty; they are not actually conceivable. We laugh at the mediæval controversies as to how many angels could dance on the point of a needle, but surely our modern theory of the atomic constitution of the needle-point justifies the question. One angel per atom would exhaust the angelic hosts. Perhaps the sparks emitted for years by one drop of bromide of radium on the point of a needle are really a dance of demons. Or take the undulatory theory of light—that to produce the varying colours of the spectrum the luminiferous ether must vibrate from 458 to 727 million of million times per second. It might as well have been a thousand billions or ten trillions for all the difference to our understanding. To give us such figures is like offering a million-pound note to an omnibus conductor and expecting change. The best scientists admit that these conceptions are but working hypotheses. Nay, I find a worthy German actually calling them “useful fictions.” Indeed, they cannot endure cross-examination, and if you want to see a scientific man as angry as a theologian of the Inquisition era, you will treat his mystic conceptions as Tom Paine treated the mysteries of religion. The world went very well ere we knew the fairy-tales of science and learned to dread death in every breath we took, every crumb we ate, every drop of non-alcoholic drink we drank. As if it were not tragic enough to read the newspapers, we are harassed with the life-histories of insects invisible to the naked eye, thirty generations or so of which live and die every day in a drop of ditch-water. At the same time such surface questions as why a man lives six times as long as a dog and a tortoise six times as long as a man are left in absolute darkness.
Men of science are to be admired for their patient and fearless groping after knowledge, the only reward of which is the applause of that splendid international brotherhood of learning. But this knowledge of theirs is never more than raw material for the philosopher at the centre to weave into his synopsis. No doubt there are men of science who preserve their perspective, who do not view the universe as heaven-sent material for a series of text-books, but this part of their thinking is done, not as scientists, but as poets or philosophers. Classification is all that Science Proper can do, and when the pigeon-holing is complete to the last Z, the universe will remain as mysterious as before. When the astronomers have determined the size, weight, orbit, speed, and spectrum lines of all the four hundred millions of visible stars, we shall still look up and say,
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star, _How_ I wonder what you are!”
But this pigeon-holing of the universe by Science is conspicuously _in_complete. For by a paradoxical modesty the man of science too often forgets to include himself in the inventory.
In this way Herbert Spencer explained everything—except Herbert Spencer. Possibly the forgetfulness is wilful, because the existence of the man of science upsets so many of his explanations. “I find in the Universe no trace of Will or Reason,” protested one of them to me. “I see only the blind movement of forces, mechanical as billiard-balls.” “Naturally,” I retorted, “if you omit to look in the one direction where Reason and Will assuredly exist—in your own self.”
On the physical plane we get movement without will, on the animal plane the will to live, on the human plane the will to live divinely. These three strata cannot be reduced to a lowest common denominator of blind force. And if they could, the miracle of their differentiation would still remain. That blind forces should rise to consciousness and write books about themselves is even more wonderful than an eternity of spirit. Reduce all the seventy odd elements to one, as Chemistry hopes, and instead of an explanation you will only get the new puzzle of how the one could contain the seeds of the many. Even the popular Evolution theory is but a juggling with time. You do not get rid of Creation by shifting the beginning back to a billion years last Tuesday.
And with all my admiration for the fine qualities of the man of science I cannot away with his cocksureness, so curiously proof against the fact that scientific conceptions are always changing—witness the revolution wrought by radium. Even such a simple analysis as the composition of air has taken in many new and important constituents—argon, xenon, helium, krypton, neon, &c.—since the days when as a schoolboy I got full marks for stating them inaccurately. And yet to this day the scientist recounting the constituents of air forgets to wind up, “With power to add to their number.”
As for those sciences which do not depend on intellectual conceptions and practical experiments, but on antiquarian research, those learned and dry-as-dust studies which academies delight to honour, they owe all their importance simply to antiquity’s lack of self-consciousness and its failure to provide for the curiosity of posterity. Had the first man who evolved from the ape drawn up a note upon his ancestor, or, better still, made a picture of his ancestral tree, what controversies we should have been spared! Had the builders of the Pyramids or the delvers of the Roman catacombs put up little tablets to explain their ideas, what scholarship would have been nipped in the bud! The reputation of the Egyptologists depends on the fact that the writers of hieroglyphics apparently left no dictionary. If one were to turn up, the reputation of these savants would be gone. At present they are able to translate the same text by “The King went a-hunting” or “My grandmother is dead” without ceasing to be taken seriously.
But it is in the realm of Italian art-connoisseurship that the greatest havoc would be wrought did an official catalogue come to light, say in one of the recesses of the Vatican or in that wilderness of the Venetian archives. For the lordly neglect of the Old Masters to put their names to their pictures has flooded us with a tedious pedantry of rival attributions, and the thing of beauty, instead of being a joy for ever, is an eternal source of dulness.
“Ass who attributes it to Mantegna,” I saw scribbled on a fresco, at Padua, of St. Antony admonishing Ezzelino, and connoisseurship is merely politer. As long ago as 1527 a quiz or a braggart of an artist, Zacchia da Vezzano, painted underneath a sacred picture of his, now in Lucca:
“His operis visis hujus cognoscere quis sit Auctorem dempto nomine quisque potest.”
As who should say, “Take away the name and anybody can tell the artist.” But experience proves the contrary.
I do not say that the virtuosi would all be exposed, as by the pedigree of a Da Vinci bust, could we light on a source of certainty like the contemporary slatings in the _Renaissance Review_. Some of these sleuth-hounds might even be vindicated; and I opine that to you, _amico mio_, who of thirty-three Titians in a London exhibition pronounced no less than thirty-two to be hung on false evidence, the discovery of a set of _Accademia_ catalogues would not be unwelcome. But your career as a connoisseur would close. Dead too would be the school of Morelli, collapsed the drapery students and ear-measurers, whose mathematics had, indeed, as little relation to Art as it has to life.
The Sherlock Holmeses of Science and Art dig up old cities, reconstruct forgotten civilisations, redistribute famous pictures, and amend corrupt texts or corrupt them more hopelessly. It is but rarely that they have imaginative and historic insight. “Learning is but an adjunct to ourselves,” says Biron. Scholars are too often but an adjunct to learning. For men with real insight there are enough dead civilisations and forgotten customs still flourishing all about us. The taboo, the fetish, the totem, the oracle, and the myth are the very atmosphere of our being.
Our generation will leave newspapers and museums—nay, gramophone records and the films of bioscopes; the ghosts of our shapes and voices will haunt our posterity, and the only chance for scholars will be to condense the too, too ample materials—there are four miles of novels already in the British Museum—or perhaps a few beneficent fires will give scholarship a new lease of life. At their best and richest antiquarian studies only help to make the past present again, but how does that help us in essential insight? The past of to-morrow is here to-day and we are no wiser. In the hundredth century the excavator may exhume London, but we see London even more clearly to-day, and how does that help us in the real problems?
No; the only help for us lies in those elements of Truth which we draw from ourselves, not receive from without—in those emotional and volitional contacts with the essence of things which accompany all intellectual perception; in these motor aspects of reality which drive us along, these flashes of faith and spiritual intuition which, although they may vary from age to age under the spell of individual poets and prophets, and under the evolution of knowledge and civilisation,
“Are yet a master-light of all our seeing.”
They may have been intertwined with incorrect intellectual elements, but because one antenna of the apparatus of consciousness functions falsely we are not therefore justified in wholly rejecting the joint report. When we think of the vast number of contradictory truths by which men in all ages and countries have lived and died, we shall find consolation in the thought that the emotional and volitional elements of Truth are more important than its intellectual skeleton.
But what a curious confusion that these emotional and volitional elements should themselves come to be treated as intellectual, and desiccated into dogmas! This is the result of their seeking expression in words, that unsuitable, impossible and fading medium. It is through their felicitous escape from words that verbally inarticulate artists and musicians paint and compose truer things than philosophers say, things that survive vicissitudes of thought and are as true to-morrow as yesterday. With the music of the Roman Catholic Church we all agree, and who shall contradict the Venus of Milo?
Yes, a statue or a symphony is safe from syllogisms, at least until it gets into the hands of the art critic and the programme-concocter. But the truth airily embodied in words is at the mercy of system-builders and deduction-squeezers. Taken with the hard definiteness of coins—as if, indeed, even coins did not vary from day to day in purchasing power and according to the country of circulation,—the words are added together to yield a specific sum of truth. Flying prophetic phrases and wingèd mystical raptures are shot down and stuffed for Church Catechisms and Athanasian Creeds. As if the emotional and volitional fringe of living words permitted them to be thus sterilised into scientific propositions! For just as facts are the skeletons of truths, so words are single bones, and the dictionary is a vast ossuary. Talk of the dead languages—all languages are dead unless spoken, and spoken with real feeling. A parrot always speaks a dead language. It is the folly of a universal language that it assumes the same vocabulary could be used over a vast area of varying conditions, its words never expanding nor contracting in meaning, nor ever changing in pronunciation or colour. As if Latin was not once universal in those countries which have gradually transformed it into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Provençal, Roumanian, and Rumonsch! Idiomatic expressions cannot be torn from the soil they grow in. Mañana has not the same meaning outside Spain nor Kismet outside Islam. Language lays such traps for fools; the fools have always spoiled and fossilised what the men of genius have felt and thought. They have made logic out of poetry and have deadened worship and wonder into theology. “What do you read?” says Hamlet. “Words, words, words.”