The Pride of Modernity G. R. ELLIOTT

I

In European literature from Homer down to Milton and Racine (not to speak of Oriental literature) pride, wrong pride, is represented as far and away the chief of human evils. Such is not the case with the comparatively brief stretch of literature that ensues. Of course there are sharp exceptions to the rule. But speaking by and large recent literature—if that of the past two hundred years may so be termed in view of the long eras behind it—has not held up pride as the towering villain of the human drama. That villain has become more and more shrunken and shadowy. The hubris of the Greeks, the proud presumption against the high gods that constituted for ancient writers the crown of human errors, seems now an old, unhappy, far-off thing, quite hopeless for literary purposes in the opening twentieth century. Even more hopeless seems the lineal successor to hubris, the Pride that led the seven deadly sins in mediæval pageantry, and doomed the heroes of humane tragedy in the Renaissance.

The surface reason for the fading of pride on our literary scene is obvious enough. Pride used to be considered not only the most immoral but also the most dramatic quality of human life. But recently life, or our imaginative way with life, has assumed a non-dramatic air. The interminable series of the falls of proud heroes and princes, historical or legendary, that runs through the bulk of the world’s literature—well, this series seems now to have terminated. Democracy’s interest in such personages is lackadaisical. I heard a bright American undergraduate refer to them as “those old guys that used to get bumped off quick.” And one must bear in mind that America, if still a bright undergraduate, is widely representative of modern civilisation. Yesterday a remote collection of insignificant states, she is now becoming an international state of mind and, more significantly, of imagination. In this state of imagination the old proud-falling potentate cuts a small figure. Recently, to be sure, many princes have fallen, in fact the majority of them; but they have fallen softly. The downfall of a business corporation is far more noisy and generally disturbing; but a corporation is impersonal and undramatic. As for pride, doubtless some American presidents have shown promising tragic signs of it, but of course these had to be nipped in the bud. A prince, even so powerful and autocratic a prince as the American president, cannot fall proudly and dramatically when he has to fall regularly every four years.

Pride is not popular with democracy either as a vice or as a virtue. Even a just pride in oneself is publicly regarded as not justifiable. Self-esteem must be submerged in party loyalty; and party loyalty, in turn, must whitewash its rising arrogance with humanitarian sentiment, with eloquent devotion to the welfare of men in general. To be sure, intelligent persons dislike the blatancy of this sentiment. Most of them nevertheless are actually in accord with the very heart of it. They wince and shrug at the slogan trumpet of “Service to Mankind,” but they quietly salute the flag. They bow in spirit to the reigning standard of “Social Value.” Tacitly accepting it as prime motive they deprecate their own self-esteem. They abet the general feeling that pride as the ruler of this world, good and evil pride alike, has modernly been deposed: it is a thing of the past.

This feeling, more than any other feature of modernity, constitutes our break with the past. It has inspired the general conviction that the modern age, so far from being merely one phase, even the most important phase, of human history, has brought about a permanent alteration in the basic conditions of human history. And here again the majority of the leaders of opinion, while disavowing the popular view in its blatant extreme, have been moulded in spirit by the accumulating pressure of it. At the same time our knowledge of the facts of the past has continued to increase. Popular biographies and surveys have circulated through a vast reading public. Hence has arisen what may be termed the modern historical paradox. The opening twentieth century has a wider speaking acquaintance with the past, and a fainter grip of its essential reality, than was ever the case before. The past is quite vivid to us, and quite unreal. Its main motif, its pride, is a dramatic ghost.

Recently Lytton Strachey’s keen book on Queen Elizabeth and her Essex, and Francis Hackett’s glowing story of Henry Eighth and his wives, have made the pageant of the sixteenth century brilliantly alive for us. But in the end the pageant is more a pageant than ever; the past is more utterly past. The scene sparkles along before our eyes in sharp and multitudinous detail. Above all, the persons are amazingly human, as they loom toward us in vivid “close-ups.” Yet in the end they are human foreigners. They belong to a remote clime, and our attitude toward them is ironic and superior even when most sympathetic. In fact they seem to us amazingly human just because we are surprised that they can be human at all. For the central motive of their lives, their pride of spirit, is or seems to us entirely out of date. Their ordinary desires were the same as ours; we see that more fully every day. But the power of their pride, which swamped or swept before it all those common desires, like the gale that ruled their little sailing-ships on the Atlantic, is obsolete. It appears almost as strange and superstitious, when we pause to reflect upon it, as the spasmodic fits of humility that made those proud ghosts grovel at the feet of their kings and gods. We think we have changed all that.

But so deep-going an alteration in human nature, such a huge discrepancy between present and past, is disconcerting to the mind. It must needs be reduced and accounted for. Our emotional conviction of the obsolescence of pride, like every other strong and persistent feeling harboured by human beings, must needs be rationalised. And the rationalisation is now in progress. Pride has seemed to our imagination very unreal in the present; therefore our reason is demonstrating that it was also quite unreal in the past. Historical science aided by other sciences has undermined the pride of the past. It appears now that proud princes, as well as proud nations and empires, fell of old not by reason of pride but by reason of economics—or the lack of economics. Or else there were geographical, ethnological, biological, or psychological causes. The last-mentioned category is the most effective of all for eliminating moral factors from human history. For example, only an old-fashioned reader may still fancy that Henry the Second, by conquering the violence of his pride, could have refrained from causing the slaughter of Becket. That, to be sure, was the subsequent opinion of Henry himself. But, psychologically speaking, Henry and the old-fashioned reader are mistaken. Henry was subject to certain stimuli and certain complexes that completely determined, and completely explain, his extraordinary behaviour before and after the murder of the archbishop.

Emerson, looking back mildly from Concord upon the greedy and murderous pride of old days, found human history very tiresome because it was so very bad. To-day many disillusioned persons are finding it still more tiresome because it seems to them neither bad nor good. It is non-moral, and therefore non-dramatic. Never does it hang dramatically in the fearful balance of the free human will between a false pride and a right humility. It merely moves back and forth like the waves and currents of the sea. History, unhappily, just happens.

Perhaps, however, this ultra-modern view of history, in which pride seems so unreal, is itself the offspring of a very real pride. Modern pride is not of necessity less real than ancient pride just because, so far, its way is less conscious and dramatic. After all it takes time to dramatise ourselves to ourselves; and the modern age, so modernists say, is not yet in full swing. They say that the modern theatre has merely made a beginning and that in the future it will do great things. If so, I would claim that the greatest of those great things must be an adequate dramatisation of modern pride. But we cannot wait for that. If we did, it would never come. It cannot come until there is general recognition of the fact that pride is still the grand protagonist in the human drama; and that under its drab modern dress it has lost not a whit of its ancient sinew.

Pride is most virulent, indeed, when it wears plain clothes, when it hides itself from itself. Self-blindness, not dramatic display, is and always has been the very heart of it. Precisely when pride is most insidious is it least dramatic. Recognition of itself, which is the preliminary step toward cure, is also the preliminary step toward dramatic manifestation. Pride was very dramatic in old literature just because it was unearthed from its very undramatic lair in old human nature. Discovery is the essence of drama. Life is intensely dramatic as soon as its least discoverable motive is discovered, as soon as its “last infirmity,” its most hidden pride of spirit, is shown in action. Therefore if a superficial glance persuades us, as I said at the beginning, that pride has faded in modern literature because modern life is non-dramatic, a deeper search informs us that modern life seems non-dramatic because the meaning of pride has faded in our thought. We need to rediscover the truth of the truism that pride is the most insidious and blinding of all human qualities. Then we may discover the way of modern pride. We must see how utterly non-dramatic pride can be before our poets may show us how intensely dramatic modern life is. We cannot envisage the drama of modern life in its full reality, we cannot touch the very heart of its tragedy, until we realise the peculiar blindness of modern pride.

II

For example. Some twelve years ago President Wilson announced on behalf of the United States, or was quoted as announcing, that we were “too proud to fight.” Soon afterwards we were fighting, not without martial pride, in the greatest war of all time. The irony of this sequence was too broad to escape notice. Yet the notice was comparatively slight. And the whole matter has faded with ominous speed from the imagination of a public debauched with the most adulterous mixture of pacific and pugnacious prides that the world has ever known. The Wilsonian remark was easily smiled into oblivion. The full dramatic irony of the situation, and the tragedy behind it, cannot appear until that proud utterance is recognised, not as the passing whimsy of a single person or party or nation, but as a vivid symbol of the modern spirit at large. It may fairly be regarded, indeed, as the verbal apex of the whole bad pyramid of modern pride—the pride of quick and direct solutions, the pride of immediacy.

The basis of that pyramid is religious. No doubt the superstructure owes much to our triumphantly swift results in science, industry, and humanitarian reform. But the pride of practical achievement, thoroughly wholesome in its proper locale, would not have formed a modern Babel unless assembled and underpinned by modern religion. And modern religion, while denouncing more and more the various arrogancies of our material civilisation, has not unearthed the deep foundation which it itself has provided for them. As religion is properly the founder and guardian of human humility, so religious pride is the prime evil. We see this very easily in the past. We know that the most blinding and hateful pride that grew among the ancient Greeks and Romans was not the pride of city-state, of empire, of symmetric culture. It was the arrogance of the religious philosophy of the Stoics, their assumption of a pseudo-divine impassivity of spirit. Likewise the mediæval glorification of chivalry, and even of ecclesiastic and theological edifice, is as nothing to modern eyes in comparison with the spiritual presumption that grew in mediæval asceticism. We see how vicious it was for the Stoic to be proud of his pride, and for the monk to be proud of his humility. We have not yet seen how vicious it is for the modern citizen to be proud of being neither proud nor humble.

He is spiritually proud of having escaped from spiritual pride. He believes he has left that historic vice far and forever behind. In his leisure hours he has learned all about it, he thinks, from interesting books, periodicals, preachers, lecturers, travels, historical moving-pictures, and maybe survey courses in college. He is amused and in better moments saddened at the tremendous dramatic display of religious pride in old times,—unaware that this evil never displayed itself to the hearts it mastered, nor does to-day. What, then, can he know of real humility? “Why,” I was recently asked by a sincerely puzzled undergraduate whose psychological interests had led him to scrutinise certain ancient documents, “why were the old Christians always jawing about humility?” The modern man is conscious, explicitly or implicitly, of possessing a new form of humility much superior to the old. He is proud of his freedom from the fearful self-abasement of his benighted ancestors. He is certain that his own brand of humility, his kindly modesty in relation to nature and to other men, is far more reasonable and real. Reality, indeed, is his keynote. He believes he sees the facts of human nature with a plain and full reality, or immediacy, that was impossible to men of old, distracted as their vision was by the extremes of pride and humility. He has done away with those two “mighty opposites.” His realism, his direct contact with life, has antiquated their histrionic conflict. He is superior to that primitive battle in the human breast. He has emerged from that cave warfare into the light of immediate reality. He is “too proud to fight.”

And this pride of immediacy, as I have called it, is at bottom religious. It was founded by the Protestant Reformation. More broadly speaking, it grows from that urgent religious revolution still going on which was publicly begun by the Protestant revolt of the sixteenth century. It goes on in Catholic and Protestant realms alike and has many modes, ranging all the way from the glittering wit of French Catholico-Modernism to the rash eloquence of the Protestant pulpits of New York. Revolution it is with a vengeance, not re-formation. And if it be true that the modern intelligence under the influence of science is coming to see the natural need of ordered evolution, instead of destructive revolution, in all human affairs, then we should see this need primarily in religion. Here the cost of revolution is heaviest. For the mischief of the revolutionary method—namely, that it externalises the issue—is greatest in that sphere which should be of all the most internal. The mental surfaces of religion are thrown into false prominence as the insignia of controversy. Sacred rites and dogmas, through the protective devotion of the loyalist and the pointed hostility of the rebel, are externalised. The imaginative flexibility properly belonging to them is congealed into a stiff surface that hides their inmost meaning, human and divine. Instead of vital human organisms, nourished in their growth and change by something of the divine circulation, they become fixed mechanisms; to be maintained in running order or else discarded altogether—windmills, pumping the living water direct to the household of faith, or suddenly assaulted into junk-heaps by quixotic insurgents.⁠[25] Loyalists and rebels, in reaction from each other, attribute to their own doctrines an impossible immediacy of truth. Thus both parties foster the pride of spiritual immediacy.

Obviously, however, it is not the conservative but the protestant or modernist pride of immediacy that, for the time being at least, has won the day. Indeed it has flourished like a weed in the very midst of our best achievements. The great achievement of modern times is the general realisation that life is of necessity experimental, that change is a constant law for us, and that the human spirit is more important than human customs and institutions however sacrosanct. Hence our pride of freedom, freedom from the past. And this pride is proper and sound in so far as it is a proud gratitude for the general dissemination of a truth that the great saints and sages, under all dispensations, knew—the experimentality of life. But our pride is rank and noxious when we imagine we know this truth as well as the saints and sages knew it, if not better. To be sure, we know it more widely in a certain sense than they did, having discovered with the aid of science many exterior illustrations of it which were unknown to them. We know it with a wide and superficial immediacy. But they knew it with a profound immediacy.

They knew the basal experimentality of life because they knew it was basifixed. They knew the depth and height of change because they knew the permanency below and above it. They knew the Permanency that does the experimenting, the Changeless that enables us to know change. Of this we have lost hold. And the main source of our modern spiritual catastrophe, the cancerous growth that disguises itself and induces the thronging diagnosticians to limit their attention to secondary symptoms and remedies, is the ancient evil in modern form, blind spiritual pride. The modern imagination has more and more lost hold of the changing Permanency as the modern mind has more and more developed its arrogance of change, its pride of immediacy. This very pride keeps us from seeing the permanence of the law of pride and humility in human nature. We patronise the wise men of old—confident writers on “personal religion” in American magazines patronise them—assuming that when they signalised spiritual pride as the permanent root of human ills, they were speaking only for an age and not for all time, at any rate not for our time.

This pride means a false emphasis on “personal religion” over against institutional religion. “Personal religion” now comprises a vast variety of creeds. Many of these are asserted by their proponents, sometimes angrily asserted, to be not religious at all, but they really are religious in the broadest or lowest extension of this term. A few years ago newspaper reporters discovered in a western state a not insane man who claimed that the earth was flat. As to the long story of geodesy, he said it meant little to him, for he had “a science of my own.” Nowadays many a person has in the same way “a religion of my own.” But this phenomenon, unlike the other, is too popular just at present to have any comic news-value. It would start a public laugh only in the thirteenth or, who knows, in the thirtieth century. To-day many persons who religiously swallow the authority of science, who religiously believe that Einsteinism is true and wish they could understand what it means, reject all authority in religion.

They say that Jesus himself rejected it, and patronise Him as the first of the moderns. They isolate Him from the religious organism to which he was deeply attached; which shaped his principles no less than his images; and through which indeed, during the long preceding centuries of Hebrew history, his sublime nature itself had been (if this may be said without irreverence) gradually “evolved.” Thus they affix to Him a singularity no less miraculous, no less disruptive of the laws of human nature and history, than that attributed to him by popular orthodoxy; but far better calculated to debauch with blind pride the souls of his worshippers or, as the case may be, his modern rivals or superseders. They have learned from Him, not wisely but too well, that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. They hug the false inference which he so sternly and constantly rejected, namely, that man was made to disuse instead of to use the Sabbath, to win spiritual maturity by discarding institutional religion. Jesus discarded revolution. He continued and reformed a great religious tradition. He made it capable of feeding itself—and us—upon the best of Greek as well as Hebrew thought. He made it nobly catholic in the very process of nourishing his individual soul upon it. He was crucified because he was more deeply true to it than the modernists, as well as the loyalists, of his day. Our modernists, however, deem that his hand was raised and pierced to direct us to bite the hand that fed us.

The gnawing pride of religious individualism cloaks itself in the assumption that the individual has transferred his reverence entire from the traditional deity to “the present; God” as Emerson called Him, or to the present Reality as successors of Emerson often prefer to call It. But actually that transfer is never accomplished. The reverence never arrives entire. Always some of it, often most of it, leaks away unnoticed during the transshipment. Therefore this exchange is never attempted by the greatest men of religion, nor advocated by the truest realists or humanists. Jesus and Socrates both found the “Father’s business” in the Temple, in the moral and imaginative organism of orthodox religion, and never more so than when they were doing their best to cleanse it of thieves. They were wrongly accused of an intention for which some of our modern spiritual leaders have been wrongly praised, the intention of destroying the Temple in order to rebuild it on their own insights, as it were in three days. No doubt all men of deepest insight are strongly tempted, in their first maturity, by this pseudo-divine impatience with tradition. They yearn to show immediately that the Power within them is more reliable than the “pinnacle of the Temple.”⁠[26] But they perceive the spiritual pride of this yearning, its tempting of God, and they forthwith school themselves to the divine patience. They recognise that the Temple is essential for their own fullest development. They do not patronise it diplomatically for the public welfare while deprecating it for themselves. They see that the fullest type of spiritual life is attainable only through the unbroken “tension,”⁠[27] the constant critical interaction, between personal and institutional religion, between individual inspiration and a rich tradition. They know that their own humility, like that of the multitudes whom they influence, must grow and bear fruit in the kind of temple that George Herbert saw, the temple which is at once, and mysteriously, within and without. In short, the greatest leaders of the spirit faced the pride of spiritual immediacy and subdued it.

But Emerson did not. He only partly faced it, and he very considerably succumbed to it.⁠[28] He fell, and modern spirituality fell with him. The greatness of this default in so great a man is admitted very reluctantly by those of us who have loved him from youth. When they were beginning life, he told them what a happy day it was for the youth when he discovered that “the above” was the same as “the within.” He did not tell them that “the within,” on the same happy day, begins to leak down through an unseen pride to “the below.” He told them that “I the imperfect adore my own Perfect.” He was not careful to explain to them how very imperfect is this Perfect—or else, how scantily It is my own.

Emerson’s effect on young men is most significant, I think, in the case of Matthew Arnold. In Arnold’s Oxford days, Newman impressed him with a sense of the laborious difficulty of spiritual truth. But that sense was considerably soothed and weakened, I think, by the cheery, confident voice that came to him from across the Atlantic; throwing into contrast the melancholy beauty of Newman’s voice and relegating its religious message to a past which, however alluring in its beautiful melancholy, seemed now so utterly past. Arnold lost Newman for religion while continuing to patronise him for beauty and culture. He did not discern how greatly Newman, on account of his fresh and profound humility, joined with a mind unsurpassed in the modern age for analytic penetration, was needed by this age as a “friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit.” Therefore Arnold left the way open for T. H. Huxley to persuade the oncoming generation, in the blundering pride of his naturalistic sophistry, that Newman’s way with truth was in the main sophistic.⁠[29] I am very far from wishing to disparage Arnold, as I am accused of having done in previous papers. It is just because he was so great and influential a critic, such a fine stronghold of humanism in the midst of the nineteenth century, that his deficiency in this matter is costly to-day. His tendency to a certain superior ease, not free from presumption, in his treatment of religious truth was doubtless due in good measure to the influence of Emerson. Hence when Arnold came to America in the eighteen-eighties he could tell us how matchless Emerson was as a modern “friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit” without telling us how deficient this friend was in the pertinent and prime requisite of spiritual humility.

Just here, perhaps, some readers are priding themselves on never having cared for Emerson, in other words on never having been young. But maybe they have absorbed some jots and tittles of his toxin by way of Arnold and the college professors, or of Huxley and the scientific metaphysicians, or of Whitman and the current poets. By de-personalising his individualism in a rare and not unspecious fashion, Emerson could send it seeping through an extraordinary variety of individuals. To-day wherever two or three, or two or three hundred, are gathered together in the name of God (modern)—in the name of the Over-Soul or the Under-Soul, of Reality, Nature, Humanity, Hinduism, Good Will, Progress, World Peace, World Religion, Individual Freedom, yes and even Enlightened Disillusion—there is Emerson in the midst of them. To be sure it is but a shade, a distorted shade, of the master. Yet it reminds us what a crooked, widening shadow is thrown forward through the years by a hidden grain of pride in a master mind. Emerson’s spiritual pride was veiled by his personal modesty, which was the tolerant deference and flexibility of the modern spirit at its brightest. His luminous nobility of nature and the underlying soundness of his humanism⁠[30] enabled him to give unexampled force and radiance to the proud errors he inherited from the eighteenth-century naturists and the great Romantic poets. It was he, above all, who made naturism seem deeply natural and Romantic irresponsibility nigh divine.

He disclaimed responsibility for his words, yet spoke as one having authority. He claimed the moody freedom of a Romantic poet together with the plain weight of a prose prophet of common sense. He consummated the noxious amalgam that his predecessors in prose and verse had prepared: he solidly confused poetic immediacy of experience with the immediate presence of Truth. Admirers, half perceiving his confusion, have wholly excused it on the ground of his unique constitution—just as he did! If gold rust, what will iron do? If Emerson could be vitally yet complacently muddled, what of the Emersonians? If the modern outlook is now confused and unhappy, one reason is that the chief modern sage was confused and at the same time spiritually proud.

The balefulness of his confusion was concealed from him by the subtle mingling of his pride into his modesty. He was too modest to believe that his individual outlook could become a public tragedy, and too proud to doubt that his individual inspirations were universally valid. He attributed these too much to deity and not at all to Rousseau. He disavowed all predecessors and all disciples. In his study or along the woodpath he deemed he was alone with the Soul; never realising how much the thoughts that arose in him were determined by the souls who had influenced his soul and by the souls whom his soul wanted to influence. His solitude of the Soul was thronged with unacknowledged souls. He dislimned them all into deity. His religious predecessors had loudly demolished one religious form after another to leave no barrier, so they thought, between the soul and God. He, the last great Protestant, serenely set fire to the limits of the soul itself. With suave and awful presumption, he melted all souls into God. The outcome is a new barrier between them and Him, a cool, unobtrusive glaze of pride.

The modern pride that Emerson helped so much to crystallise, wears a lucent, modest air. It looks like a lens turned directly upon Reality. But it has the opaqueness of a mirror and is turned upon ourselves—if only by the grace of God we could see our reflections in it. Its surface seems plain, undramatic, when compared with the ancient modes of hubris,—until one perceives therein the swarming shapes and conflicts of the modern tragedy.

Dramatic enough is the way this pride, during the past two hundred years, has worked out cogently from its religious centre to its secular circumference, in recent years with catastrophic speed. In religion it has meant more and more a blind emphasis upon the immediacy of spiritual values—as though their close presence to Everyman were the same, or almost the same, as his real possession of them. Modern religionists have debased the great doctrine of the Immanence of God and, therewith, the doctrines of divine love, the brotherhood of man, the goodness of the human heart, and the “positiveness” of morality. The results for Everyman are now glaring.

Deity, from Everyman’s modern viewpoint, is fast disappearing into human nature; or into that mystic conglomerate of man and the universe which is either called Nature or, as Mark Twain might say, is “the same gentleman under another name.” New names are being invented for It daily by pseudo-science. Advanced Protestant theology lies at the proud foot of this conqueror. Forgetting that modern religion at the first did help to wound herself, the more conservative type of theist blames science for harming religion. The up-to-date theist blames religion for not equalling the flight of science, unaware how terribly religion has maimed her wing with pride. A common type of minister deprecates the spread of atheism while confidently advocating the very doctrine that fosters it. If he is shrewd enough to glimpse his dilemma, he can justify himself with Emersonian blandness by pointing out that the abuse of an excellent idea is not a good ground for the disuse of it—the excellent idea being a conceited, facile, and slippery sentiment of divine immanence.

This immanentism has proudly pawed down holy truths to the everyday level of Everyman. And he, finding that when thus muddied they sour the daily bread of his happiness, is now rejecting them wholesale; thereby exhibiting the destructive aspect of that divine justice, that relentless Love of Perfection, which his pastors have hidden behind a gross version of the divine love for men. Our religious leaders, announcing promiscuously the perfect love that casteth out fear—a doctrine which the holiest saints approached with awe—have succeeded in casting out the true fear that belongs with our imperfect love. They have speciously disparaged “negative” in favour of “positive” morality. With Emersonian impatience they have shrugged at the definite moral precepts of the ages, as trite and rather forbidding antiquities, while advocating an indefinite moral sentiment, as the prime discovery and panacea of the modern age. They have slurred the divine negation, the “Everlasting No,” which, acting down through the poor human conscience, constitutes the great unadulterable factor of positive morals and, in the end, the most positive provision against positive unhappiness.

This proud religious blindness has opened the highway for blind secular naturism. The one has played into the hands of the other; the blind has led the blind toward the pit of spiritual anarchy. Consider, for example, the quick succession and interplay of these three phases of the modern spiritual drama: first, the Protestant notion of immediate justification by faith in Christ; second, the humanitarian notion of justification by faith in mankind; and third, the cynical notion of justification by faith in nothing—except primitive desire. In the third act of the tragedy, as in the other two, the leading motive is a specious emotional immediacy fed by subconscious pride. For the Nothing that modern sceptics are devoted to (its finest dramatic representation is in the works of Thomas Hardy) includes a concupiscent Something by the exercise of which, so they feel, we may be saved—or at least vitally damned. Hence our very disillusion to-day is flown with pride. Our current disillusionists, not humbled by the fact that the modern rejection of moral severity is eventuating in a febrile weakness of the vital human appetites, continue to disparage that severity and to advocate, as our only hope, a romantic resurgence of those appetites. They yearn for a flood-tide between rotten banks; fancying, apparently, that “sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains,” immediately. They hymn a spurious Primitive as their Protestant forbears hymned a spurious Christ.⁠[31]

Consider, too, the dramatic inevitability with which the “psychists” and the “legislationists,” so to call them, have come swarming more and more into the breaches that modern religion has made in the human conscience. The psychists are proudly animated with the old Sophist hope of reducing that mysterious citadel and of rearranging the whole soul on modern rational lines. They are teaching the oncoming generation to think in a fashion indicated in the following remark made to me by a thoughtful youth: “When a fellow tries to do the right thing, he has a satisfaction that seems at the time very real; but of course, as soon as he thinks, he sees that this satisfaction isn’t real at all.” At a recent American congress of thinkers, one of them explained how religion and morality are being taken over and saved, in so far as worth saving, by psychology. He was confident of tucking the setting sun, quite immediately, into his grandstand.

The legislationists, on the other hand, would save the fading rays by immediate public measures, national and international. In a world dim with unprecedented bloodshed, misty with subtle suspicion and self-seeking, and darkening ever more with impiety and lust, they would produce by political or social machinery the lights of peace, good will, purity, and temperance. They are busily wiring a twilight world for incandescent goodness. They would arrest and soften with electric legislation the awful working-out of divine laws. The leader in this project is an ideal figure of Columbia. But under grave scrutiny the radiant figure reveals a good many lineaments of her who was the leader of the seven deadly sins. One recalls with something of a shiver the queenly “progress” of Lucifera in her pleasant twilight—oblivious of the dead men’s bones thick under foot and the “foggy mist” all along the way.⁠[32]

Columbia, the progressive modern spirit, is too proud to face the fearful carnage of human values and the foggy confusion of principles brought about by the modern heart. Kindly persons after criticising various modern ills, take comfort by concluding that, after all, the modern age is sound and right at heart. But here, precisely, is the source of all those ills. The modern heart has gone wrong. The chief leaders of imagination during the past two centuries assumed that modernity meant a real change of heart, a change for the better; that owing to the long schooling of the past and the new lights of the present, the human heart could now afford to relax its old combat with itself. This assumption is parroted to-day, with varying degrees of subtlety, by preachers, philosophers, educators, youngsters, legislationists, artists, Rotarians, and disillusionists. At the same time they are demonstrating conclusively that the old human heart, unregenerate, is still with us. They are showing its ancient and amazing capacity for inventing new ways of disguising old Duty,—the kind of duty that means a daily, painful, but not inglorious battle within the heart itself. They are showing us how inglorious human thought and art can become, how shallow, cheap, and in the end intolerable, when the human heart has become “too proud to fight.”

III

This catastrophe, when fully recognised, can point us to fresh hope and faith. We may win afresh the old faith which goes hand in hand with a certain disillusion, a certain kind of scepticism, foreign to our current disillusionists. This faith, says Newman, “looks for no essential improvements or permanent reformations in the dispensation of those precious gifts which are ever pure in their origin, ever corrupted in man’s use of them.”⁠[33]

So far, the moral corruption of the twentieth century has not produced the flagrancy of conduct that characterised a good many earlier ages. “My ideas of life have become so rotten,” thus a Pragmatised and Behaviourised youngster confessed to me, “that I wonder my life is not rottener.” He looked startled when I told him to give his ideas time. However, it appeared that, partly in spite of and partly by means of his marked self-consciousness, he had attained to some veracity of inward unhappiness. We may hope that his case is quite typical. In other words, our self-conscious modern age has provided a wide and unprecedented demonstration of the fact that the chief danger to human happiness is immorality of ideas. Previous ages have done lip-homage to high moral standards while grossly violating them in practice. The modern age has proudly assumed that it has grown far beyond such hypocrisy. Meanwhile it has developed the subtler hypocrisy of cultivating depraved and specious ideas while shrinking from the full consequences of them in conduct. The result is that life looks dully undramatic, culture and art degenerate, and thoughtful persons who are harmless enough in their acts have a real misery in their spirit. Surely, therefore, we have now a chance to learn afresh the inward relentlessness of the Moral Laws; particularly that “precious gift” which we have so bitterly corrupted, the law of humility. We may now perceive that the universal proverb “Pride goes before a fall” is no less applicable to our age than to the old aristocratic ages; and that, far from being merely a maxim of external prudence, it is the folk-sign of an inward region of cause and effect that we, with all our self-consciousness, have scarcely penetrated.

We may find again the inward and yet superhuman rigour of the Laws. We may learn that they are supernatural without being ever unnatural; always immanent in us and yet, in a mystery beyond the reach of our science, always transcendent of us. Browning’s Paracelsus, embodying the modern mixture of romance and science, complained in regard to his own catastrophe that “God’s intimations fail in clearness rather than in force.” Precisely so; but there is no use in whining about it. The human task is to clarify and obey, as well as we can, Laws which we did not invent; which no man, except when stupified by pride—either his own pride or the pride of his teachers, relentlessly visited upon him to the third and fourth generation—can conceive to be merely human inventions.

Those Laws fail in human clearness, certainly, but not in force. They came to send a sword into the earth, more than Peace. They have been the cause of agony and misery for millions of innocent or ignorant people; and no man has succeeded in making clear the full ground of this. From the standpoint of human justice, those Laws are fearfully general, vague, and incalculable. Yet our truest happiness, and indeed our truest originality, depend on a constant effort to elucidate them and apply them afresh to each new generation and individual. This task is of course, in a worldly sense, an impossible one. New sins and difficulties, or rather old sins and difficulties in inexhaustibly new modes, appear at every step. Salvation for the individual never becomes easier; and the social frame is so built, beneath our building, that it cannot be saved. Old seers and new scientists are true to a deep human instinct in prophesying that some day the world will be destroyed by fire, collision, or decay; will “dissolve like an insubstantial pageant faded.” Our surest Comfort, at the opposite pole from modern comfortableness and not divisible from right conduct, is in knowing that those Laws, while “ever corrupted by man’s use of them” are indeed “precious gifts ever pure in their origin.” Clough, that fine religious humanist who faced the modern situation without blinking, had a sound humility when he wrote:

The fresh humility that we need must be built up patiently by religion and by humanism; each working in its own way and carefully respectful of the other, even (perhaps especially) when these two approaches are equally employed by one person.

Religion is normally theistic, and therewith mediatorial and sacramental. Otherwise she is not catholic and, in the long run, loses her right humility. This should be evident enough from the long history of religion, Christian and non-Christian, past and present. Theism decays continually, but by reason of its own sins rather than the virtues of opposing doctrines. Pantheism, deism, and all the others flourish in its decadencies, more or less parasitically, but cannot take deep root in human humility. I do not mean that theism is true because it works, but that it works because at its best it is our truest mode of conceiving the Eternal One. Voltaire’s epigram, “God created man in His own image and man promptly returned the compliment,” is superb and lasting because the doctrine here parodied is lasting and sublime. The parody is catholically critical because the doctrine itself is deeply catholic. Modernism, when strictly criticising catholic doctrine, is helpful; when frankly rejecting it, respectable; when blandly attempting to reduce it to poetry, baneful—baneful in its hidden pride—and, I trust, hopeless. Not similarly hopeless is Latin Fundamentalism; by which I mean the attempt of Latinised theology, no matter in what branch of the Christian church it appears, to define religious mysteries with a literalism that is too precise to be accurate. Most hopeful is the work of a small and quiet group of theologians, belonging to various churches, who are resuming and carrying forward the thwarted hope of the great Christian humanists of the Renaissance. They are striving for a non-revolutionary, a firm and organic, development of Christian doctrine; that is, for a real catholicity. It is they, studious, ethical, open-eyed, and humble who are rebuilding the foundations of the Temple.

Yet the Temple, or let us say “the church militant here upon earth,” is at its best inadequate. The man of good sense has always found and will always find it necessary to take the church with a grain of salt, even though the salt loseth its savour without the church. Good sense is a distinct foundation; and humanism is built upon it. Humanism may be theistic or non-theistic; it is unsound when it is anything between. When non-theistic, it falls short of the full truth that is in the human imagination. The pre-eminent example of course is the sublime religious humanism of the Buddha. However, if it be true that the primitive Hindu pantheon had 330,000,000 gods, doubtless the Buddha had several million good reasons for not being a theist. Theism at its worst fosters, as nothing else can, the proud imaginations of the human heart. Humanism, which in one of its most important functions is a criticism of religion, is essential for sound religious humility. Religion needs the humility derivable from the consideration that happiness may be obtained without religion. Humanism is the study and practice of the principles of human happiness uncomplicated by naturistic dogmas on the one side and religious dogmas on the other. When religion, as at present, has degraded “God’s love” and abolished “God’s anger,” humanism will insist that the former doctrine (though at its best supreme) is no less metaphorical than the latter, and not less subject to unconscious superstition. When religion assists irreligion in softening God’s laws, humanism will insist that a rediscovery of their severity is essential for right humility and happiness.

Just here I am forced to express the hope that those estimable critics, Mr. T. S. Eliot and Mr. Walter Lippmann, will at one point counteract each other’s influence upon the public. Mr. Eliot, aiming toward humane religion, tends to reduce humanism to a mere balance of mind, a ghost of the Arnoldian culture, subservient to anglo-catholicism. Mr. Lippmann, aiming toward religious humanism, tends to reduce deity to “an ideal of the human personality,”⁠[34] a rather ghostly ally of practical morals. Each is somewhat swayed by the modern desire for immediate measures.

Providentially, however, a more catholic attitude has already been erected by two older critics, Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Professor Irving Babbitt—the two most potent and distinguished personalities, though not the finest writers, that have so far appeared in English literature of the twentieth century. The one, a devout Roman Catholic of England, has indirectly done much for the best interests of humanism. The other, a rigorous moral humanist of New England, has indirectly done much for the best interests of religion. Their extraordinary scholarship is guided by a sound humility of spirit. In their writings, neither ventures further than his equipment warrants into the other’s field, and they do not contradict each other in fundamental points. They agree in the conviction that now, for the sake of religion itself, the way of humanism must be clearly discriminated from the way of religion. Mr. Babbitt has urged that religion at its best is far above, and at its worst far below, a sound humanism. Baron von Hügel has urged that Christians should face now, more frankly and fully than they have ever faced before, the fact that the ethical or humane way has a distinct and divinely ordained validity of its own for those who cannot honestly follow the religious way; and that the full health of each way depends upon the health of the other.

This truly catholic attitude, which is essential for modern humility, is not palatable to the pseudo-catholicity of the modern mind. We have fancied, especially in America, that expert reason aided by democratic tolerance could soon discover the underlying relationships between the different ways of salvation, thus federating these in a single “concern,” a sort of efficient successor and substitute for the universal infallible church of the Middle Ages. Behind this enterprise stands the overweening assumption of modern philosophy that the universe itself is a single organism with a large variety of inter-assimilable aspects, such as religion and science, love and morals, good and evil, God and Nature. Tennyson would not have been so shocked by his rediscovery of the perennial fact that God and Nature are at strife if he had not been so infected by the modern notion that they ought not to be,—that properly they belong in a universal banking trust whose members, however they may quarrel on the surface, never suffer a real severance of business relations. Nor would our current disillusionists feel so badly about the inevitable dissolution of that trust if their grandfathers had not credited it so heavily. Let us now recognise pride as the grand sponsor of that trust—the pride of unity and immediacy, or of universal “continuity” as the late T. E. Hulme would say. Let us humbly admit that the universe is faulted, geologically speaking, deeper and higher than our knowing. What of ultimate plan and unity its strata may have, God only knows.

Our youths who have learned to smile with a weary superior air at the traditional division of reality into God, Man, and Nature, would breathe more freely and begin again to taste the vital zest of the universal drama, if we would now teach them that this traditional division is less naïve than the theory of universal continuity; is better grounded in universal human experience; and, above all, is more truly accordant with the profound division which any thinking man may find within himself to-day when he is sufficiently self-reliant and experimental to plumb beneath the surfaces where our ephemeral psycho-physicisms weave and flutter. Recently humanism, in its attempt to fulfil and deepen the experimentality of the modern spirit, has of necessity placed its chief emphasis upon that inward division. It has insisted that the opposition between the higher and lower wills within us, whether they be called “divine” and “natural” or what not, is essentially inexplicable by expert reason and is nevertheless, from the present standpoint of human happiness, the most important feature of the universe arrived at by free and full experimentation.

This humane dualism strikes at the very heart of modern pride, the pride of spiritual monism. It sets a true immediacy over against a false immediacy. It assigns a central value to the paradox established by the immediate experience of Everyman when he tries (in the terminology of common sense) to be “at one with himself” by keeping his “better self” above his “worser self.” It depreciates the expert reasonings and romantic emotions which, overriding that vital paradox of good sense, would leap immediately at spiritual unity and continuity. Consequently the humane dualism, more than any other doctrine of recent criticism, has met with angry rejection or obfuscating comment. A good example of the latter is afforded by a generous and intelligent reviewer who comments as follows upon the dualistic humanism of Milton: “Milton, after all, had not read Darwin; we have ... Milton’s energetic dualism was based on religious conceptions which are genuinely outlived; the power behind his allegory of the soul was his belief that the world was shaped and created for mankind; and, conceiving of ourselves now so much more humbly than he did, we cannot set our lives on such a stage.... We cannot invent an opposition we do not feel.”⁠[35]

The above, in a representative modern fashion, confuses modesty and humility. The modern modest dogma that the world was not “shaped and created for mankind” has shown itself, when all its implications are considered, no less deficient in real humility than the conceited belief that the world was created for human comfortableness. This belief was far more radically repudiated by Milton than by us. Only with the aid of modern pride can we be sure that his basic religious ideas have been “genuinely outlived” and that we, having read Darwin, conceive of ourselves “much more humbly than he did.” He, to be sure, was no adept either in Darwinian or in Emersonian modesty. As a man among men he had strong intellectual and even personal pride. But above it he had true spiritual humility; which may consist with, and derive support from, that virtue too much obscured by modern modesty, namely “self-esteem, founded on justice and right, well managed.” This kind of self-reliance enabled Milton to assign full value to the moral division he found within himself. His “energetic dualism,” as the reviewer calls it, his dramatic sense of the real opposition between the nature of lust, pride, and Chaos and the nature of purity, humility, and Peace, was not “based on” transient religious concepts. It was “based on” the duality he found at the centre of himself as well as at the centre of European experience, Christian and pagan. He would have found it also at the centre of ancient Buddhism, if he had known this as we know it to-day. But, says my reviewer, “we cannot invent an opposition we do not feel.” Very true. Nevertheless, with the aid of right self-esteem and humility, with a patient critical reverence for what is best in ourselves and in accumulated tradition, European and Oriental, we may not only “feel” but realise, in thought and conduct, an opposition we did not invent.

Only thus can we proceed to a spiritual use of our scientific modesty. Over against the self-flattery of religious superstition, science has revealed the indifference of a vast physical universe. Here is wholesome seed for a fresh humility. But so far its growth in the modern spirit is blighted; blighted much less by the old superstitions which the modern religionist enjoys attacking than by the new superstition which he himself has fostered—the bastard ideal of love. This ideal, religiously derived from an illegitimate mixture of two fallibles, democracy and St. John, infects to-day the blood of many who, rejecting St. John and perhaps also democracy, believe loudly in Sex; or who, tired of Sex also, believe in nothing because it seems the sole alternative to the spurious all-immanent divinity of modern love. This love, though masquerading as powerful and strenuous, is essentially soft. It has succeeded in masking the Cross, not only the Christian but the universal Cross, in soft flummeries. The hard universe of science disowns it. And so does the severity of the divine Laws. If we learn again to revere these in their full severity as we find it in history (especially recent history) and in ourselves, to bow before their awful beauty with a love that fears to call itself worthy of casting out fear, then the outward laws can again become real images of the inward Laws.

Outward nature with her unfathomable self-subsistence, her rigorous detachment from the egoistic delusions of the human heart, and her firm satisfactions for those who seek only to know and follow her laws, can again be seen as a real though very distant representation of the Divine Nature itself. The dual nature of man, freed from the intervolving vapours of old metaphysical dualisms and new metaphysical monisms, guarded from insidious loves, and cultivated with renewed moral vigour, can be seen again as the isthmus between Time and Eternity: our firm and fruitful land between unfathomable, unmixing, but not unkindly seas.

FOOTNOTES