The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent/Magic and Wonder in Literature
MAGIC AND WONDER IN
LITERATURE
MAGIC AND WONDER IN LITERATURE
I
WIDELY as we all differ in knowledge and in opinions, one general account of life we are supposed as educated men to accept. We are supposed to agree that we live in a universe of order; that every effect, though to us unexplained, has proceeded from a cause, and that the same causes operate faithfully at all times. If it is the outward world that engages us, we are supposed to perceive that the stars which seem to wander, nevertheless are true to their courses; that no wind bloweth where it listeth, for we do know whence it comes and whither it goes; that the flood and the earthquake, once monsters of caprice, are now phenomena of obedience; that even chance has its law. If we look inward upon our reason, our emotions, our instincts, we are supposed to see that the mind, like other instruments, can be controlled, and that its relation to the outer world is so much the same in all men that we can speak of colors or of sounds, can frame a syllogism, express a desire, distinguish between the abstract and the concrete, and be understood. Finally, if our concern is with morals, we are supposed to conclude that since ideas and emotions are an established currency among men, personality must be something constant and reliable. Knowing a man's mind and his character, we can predict that in a given situation he will think thus and behave so and so; and conversely, from the opinions uttered or the conduct adopted in a given situation, we can infer the character of a stranger. It seems that law of one kind or another is the condition on which we live, and that we illustrate as superb a logic as do the planets above us.
Whether or not there are dissenters from this account of the universe, at least we may fairly say that this account is the basis of most thinking to-day. It is accepted, of course, with humility. Even within the limits of our powers, we have as yet gained far less control of experience than our intellectual self-respect demands. We still blunder through life as though we did not know that the great game must be played according to the rules. But at least we admit that there are rules, and that when man has learned them, he will find the game much easier and happier to play. Having made this admission, however, it is to be feared that we forget our humility and become self-satisfied. This orderly definition of the universe, we reflect, is something of an achievement, and we assume that it is peculiarly our own. The Greeks, to be sure, and a few others, seem to have had the idea, but this only shows, as we say, how modern the Greeks were. Primitive man in general, we are quite certain, preferred mystery to order, refused to recognize the most obvious causes, and rarely did a thing directly if by indirection he could get it done more awkwardly. Here again we are somewhat checked when the archaeologist comes upon some primitive implement strangely effective—that is, strangely like our implements,—or discovers on forgotten cave-walls drawings which indicate a remarkable eye for things as they still are. Yet the mass impression remains, that this life was once a matter of chance or luck, and experience was unforeseeable; that the race-mind cleared very slowly; and that we are the first to imagine a universe of complete and unalterable law.
Our complacent attitude toward primitive man has of late been fostered by certain gifted classical scholars, chief among them Professor Gilbert Murray and Miss Jane Harrison, who with the help of anthropology have recreated that dim world which lay behind Greek letters. The beautiful logic by which these scholars reach their results increases our conceit that reason is a modern instrument, while the world they picture, a hopeless tangle of religion and superstition, of necromancy and the arts, reassures us as to what we have risen from. Against that sombre background Homer, once thought primitive, seems recent and enlightened. Professor J. A. K. Thompson, in his Studies in the Odyssey, published in 1914, provides us with numerous examples. The Homeric epics are full of what are called "expurgations" of earlier legend. Those stories of bodily transformation which Ovid gathered up as fairy tales in his Metamorphoses, the primitive Greek took quite literally; but since the Homeric way of seeing life would not countenance this make-believe, the transformations were "expurgated" by being turned into similes. When we read in the Odyssey, "So spake she and departed, the grey-eyed Athena and like an eagle of the sea she flew away," we surmise that in an older story the goddess turned herself into the sea-eagle. The Homeric conscience is reluctant to transmit this account of the outer world; the most that can be conceded is a resemblance between Athena and the sea-eagle. Sometimes, it must be confessed, the concession is more startling than the original transformation. When Hera and Athena came to the plains of Troy to aid the Greeks, we are told that "the goddesses went their way" into battle "with step like unto turtle-doves." The explanation is that as attendants on Zeus, the goddesses had originally been imagined in the form of his sacred doves. The most helpful example, however, of the Homeric expurgation is the story of Dolon, in the tenth book of the Iliad, When Dolon set out to spy on the Greeks, he "cast on his shoulders his crooked bow, and put on thereover the skin of a grey wolf, and on his head a helm of ferret-skin, and took a sharp javelin, and went on his way to the ships." In the Iliad that grey wolf-skin is only a garment. But in the Rhesus of Euripides, which appears to follow the earlier legends, Dolon explains his device to the chorus:
"Over my back a wolf-skin will I draw,
And the brute's gaping jaws shall frame my head:
Its forefeet will I fasten to my hands,
Its legs to mine; the wolf's four-footed gait
I'll mimic, baffling so our enemies,
While near the trench and pale of ships I am;
But whenso to a lone spot come my feet,
Two-footed will I walk."
Here the wolf-skin is a disguise, which, though not in itself magical, carries us nearer to that primitive age when stealthy men, for their own purposes, changed into were-wolves, and when every wild beast, therefore, implied a fearful possibility that it was a man transformed.
From such illuminating glimpses into the early world we make the conclusion that primitive man dwelt in mystery, that he was fond of make-believe, that he had a highly developed sense of magic—in other words, that he looked for delightful shortcuts and escapes from the facts of life, whereas we look for the law which explains and controls the facts. But the truth probably is that primitive man had no sense of magic whatever; when he busied himself with his incantations and his hocus-pocus, he probably had a quite modern sense of cause and effect. To us he seems a magician, because his method of getting at the cause or at the effect was not ours; but he had no measure by which to judge himself. He consulted the medicine-man as we consult the doctor, and his faith was no more shaken than ours is by a failure to cure. It is the conception of magic, not the conception of cause and effect, which has grown with time and enlightenment. Now, and only now, can we realize how much of primitive science was really magic; but in the essential desire to have a science—that is, to control and ameliorate our destiny by calculated means, it is not clear that we differ from our ultimate ancestors.
In one respect, however, we ought to differ from them. If time has provided us with a criticism of magic, of illegitimate and ineffective attempts at power, it should have taught us also to admire what is lawful, effective, and true. If primitive literature, recording an incomprehensible world, yearned after magic, our records, of a world understood, should be full of wonder—that is, full of idealizing joy in the truth and in the beauty before our eyes. Time should have distinguished us so from earlier man, because the ability to wonder comes late. To be sure, the Rousseau sentimentalists imagined the savage as contemplating the heavens and the earth beneath with astonishment and awe, and they drew substance for their fancy from the supposed exaltation of spirit with which young children make their acquaintance with this planet. But nothing in our observation of children or in the anthropologist's observation of primitive men, would allow much truth in this old doctrine; the very contrary seems to be the fact—that only the sophisticated can appreciate the miracles that are actually before our eyes. Children take their world for granted; when we disclose some amazement at life, some awe of facts, it is a sign that we are no longer children. Moreover, we wonder only at what lies on the border of our experience; what is totally beyond us we still take for granted. The unclothed savage of Borneo is brought to the settlements and treated to a ride in a motor-car. Knowing nothing of such things, he is neither surprised nor interested, but lets the car, like gravitation, do its work. But he gapes for hours at a steel hammer or a serviceable saw.
Our pity, then, for primitive man's defective science, hardly covers the situation. Surely we can forgive the first comers for taking hold by the wrong handles; we still revise our methods. But what if we, who think of the universe as a realm of law, feel toward it no great wonder, not even a hearty approval, but still yearn after a magic, after an escape of some kind from the inexorable logic of life; what if we, who know the majestic fidelity wherewith nature keeps her elements true to themselves, still desire, in the most spiritual things, an outworn alchemy! I wish to raise the question whether the literature even of modern times, far from expressing wonder, does not express a certain unwillingness to face the world we know; whether it does not display a tendency to make use—a more subtle use—of those primitive transformations which Homer rejected; whether it does not show a perverse delight in substituting the miraculous for the normal—preferring, that is, to give such an account of the outer and inner world as we know to be false, instead of the account which we know to be true.
I ask your attention, then, to the inconsistency between our faith that the universe is orderly and wonderful, and our pleasure in that literature which represents life as miraculous and magical—between, that is, our conviction that miracles are the measure of wonder, and our disposition to treat them as the products of magic. The difference is great. If we love the poetry of life, there is a sense in which we cannot get along without miracles; without them as a language to talk with, we cannot express that profound wonder at common facts which is the sign of enlightened manhood. For this reason we are unwilling to give up fairy stories or the legend of Santa Claus, until some other language is provided for dreams and aspirations. We boldly make use of miracles to express or interpret life. But to account for life by miracles is stupid and unnecessary. Plutarch says that on the farm of Pericles a ram was found having a single horn. Lampon the soothsayer declared that Pericles, by this omen, would become sole ruler in Athens. But an annoying person named Anaxagoras split the ram's skull in two, and showed that by a peculiar formation the horn had to grow single. So Anaxagoras confuted the soothsayer. But later Pericles did become ruler, and the soothsayer recovered his authority. Plutarch's comment is that they were both right, for one explained how the horn grew, and the other explained what it meant—just as, when the dinner-bell rings, we know how the sound is produced, and we know what it means. It would be stupid, however—though I believe some philosophers have been guilty—to confuse the interpretation with the cause, to say it is the significance of the dinner-bell that is ringing it. The quarrel with the miraculous in literature, therefore, is only with the miraculous when used as magic—as a wilful substitute for that continuity of cause and effect which outside of literature we believe in.
II
Of this kind of magic it is easy to find illustrations in medieval literature. Certain well-known French lays of the twelfth or thirteenth century picture just such an irresponsible, accidental world as we usually ascribe to primitive man. In one story a fair lady is shut up in a tower, that she may not see her lover. As she is bemoaning her fate, a magnificent eagle flies through the narrow window, and lighting on the chamber floor, turns into a handsome young man, her persevering suitor. In another story a fair lady is imprisoned, and her true knight, instead of coming himself in a magic disguise, sends to her a wonderful swan, which flies back and forth between the two, carrying always a letter beneath his plumage. In another story a man confides to his wife that during his frequent absences from home he turns himself into a were-wolf, and she straightway contrives that the next time he shall not resume his human form. Here are such transformations as we glanced at in pre-Homeric legend, but no attempt at the Homeric expurgation is here, unless the swan in the second story be such. Far from desiring any expurgation, the medieval audience may have been glad enough that literature should not give an accurate account of their life. They may have liked mystery for its own sake, as there is little reason to think primitive man ever did. Their faculty of wonder, we know, they exercised in contemplating the world to come; if, as we suspect, they rejoiced in this present life also with an almost renaissance paganism, at least they rejoiced surreptitiously. It is incredible that they did not recognize as magic such episodes as we have just summarized; and if this material was as frankly magical to them as it now seems to us, it is a fact of some importance that the middle ages left us few pictures of the world as it was actually seen. We are sometimes told that in those unlucky centuries the Church imposed miracles and legends on secular ignorance. Whether or not those centuries were unlucky, a reading of these secular stories suggests wonder that more miracles and legends were not imposed on the Church.
But however the twelfth century may have understood its literature, there is little doubt that the fourteenth century liked a certain class of stories which must have been recognized as false to experience. I refer to those tales of reckless or scandalous love—merry tales, as the Elizabethan translators would call them—such as Boccaccio included in a part of his famous collection. Their real immorality is not often observed, nor is it obvious in any single story; but when one reflects on all such stories as a class, whether in the Decameron or in other collections, the amazing thing is that though they picture villainy, cruelty, and treachery, they picture no effects of villainy, cruelty, or treachery; their escapades continue to be merry; there is no hint of possible tragedy for man nor of pity for woman. To be sure, the medieval story-teller does chronicle sorrow, and he does treat womanhood sympathetically, but never when dealing with such themes as we are thinking of. Patient Griselda is a medieval heroine; Tess of the D'Urbervilles is not. The middle ages, moreover, defined tragedy as a fall from good fortune to bad, and comedy as a rise from bad fortune to good; doubtless God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous, but in His own miraculous way, not in the inherent consequences of a moral choice. It is only by the caprice of her husband that Griselda is rewarded; to a dramatic imagination she seems not so much rewarded as tortured.
In the Renaissance there was a conception of virtue which carried with it a belief, if not in a miraculous world in general, at least in a special magic or talisman for the individual. To the Greek mind a virtue was a state, a condition between two extremes, and Renaissance philosophers, piously accepting Aristotle's terms, continued to speak of virtue as a mean. But the imaginative literature of the Renaissance, in which we get the less academic account of life, has a tendency to speak of virtue, not as a quality or condition, but as a thing, to be acquired and possessed. The Renaissance man is not courageous—he has courage; the Renaissance woman is not beautiful—she has beauty. Whether this idea of virtue brought about the belief in a magic or talisman, or whether the belief in a magic, helped by Platonic ideas, brought about this conception of virtue, it is at least clear that beauty, courage, friendship, or any other virtue, is often treated in Renaissance literature as a magical instrument, like the enchanted spears and shields of medieval romance. In the Provençal tradition beauty was such a magic. The story of Aucassin and Nicolete, which though medieval in date is renaissance in spirit, tells how Nicolete passed by the door where a pilgrim lay sick, and the sight of her made him a well man. In the Faerie Queene, when Artegal is jousting with Britomart, he happens to strike off the front of her helmet. Her divine beauty causes his sword to fall powerless, and he is taken captive. In Paradise Lost, when the serpent approaches to tempt Eve, her loveliness renders the devil, for one moment, stupidly good.
Nicolete and Britomart had a permanent magic; Eve's beauty was effective only for a moment. Milton was skeptical of magic, not only because he came late in the Renaissance, but because he had an unusual intellect, and a mathematician's sense for order. In him the tradition of virtue as a talisman or miraculous instrument temporarily died out. For example, chivalry had fostered a belief in the magic of being right, the magic on which the institution of judicial combat was founded. He who had the right in any encounter must of necessity prevail. This institution was accepted throughout Spenser's Faerie Queene; unless they had first committed a sin or fallen into an error, the good champions could not be overcome by the powers of evil. We remember, in passing, how Scott accommodated this large faith to modern skepticism, killing off the Templar by a stroke of apoplexy just in time to save Ivanhoe. It might have been thought that Shakspere, who was closer than most men to the realities of experience, would have taken the edge off the miracle, as Scott did; but in As You Like It Orlando, having a just cause, is able to throw the professional wrestler. It remained for Milton to reject magic. To see how far he advanced beyond Spenser, for example, we have but to imagine how Spenser would have written Comus. The heroine of the poem, another Britomart, possessing the heavenly virtue of chastity, would have been armed against the spells of the sorcerer. All that Milton claims in the end, though he starts out bravely, is that the lady's soul was unharmed, though Comus did enchant her body. This concession is larger than at first might appear, for it contradicts the fine boast of the elder brother, who in the poem speaks for Milton—
"Against the threats
Of malice or of sorcery, or that power
Which erring men call chance, this I hold firm:
Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt,
Surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled.
Yet virtue is enthralled, and it is the grace of heaven, not the lady's innocence, that releases her. In Paradise Lost Milton still clings, poet-like, to the magic of beauty, but the magic of being right he gives over, preferring to read man's fortunes dramatically, as the inevitable result of his choice among fixed laws. He holds to the dramatic attitude in Sampson Agonistes, although he does represent the giant's strength as still residing in his hair. This survival of primitive magic, however, is only figurative, a symbol of moral power lost and regained. Having given his allegiance to what he believed was a righteous cause, and having seen that cause collapse, Milton could but agree with Sir Thomas Browne, that a man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.
III
But the career of magic was not over. Milton rejected it, as Homer had done, as Scott did later, and many another individual here and there; but it is not for their rejection of magic that Homer or Milton or Scott has been widely praised. We have advanced far enough to ask that our talismans be of a less obvious kind than satisfied men a thousand years ago, but a talisman of some kind we still delight in. Witness three novelists, undeniably great, who are supposed to account for life genuinely and honestly, yet who show a certain reluctance to accept the universe of order, and hark back rather to the old magical transformation.
One of these novelists is Fielding. Criticism has stressed his manliness, his insistence on frankness, his ability to deal with a fact. Yet in none of his stories, except Jonathan Wild, does he treat his heroes as though character were really conditioned by causes and consequences. We watch the good and the bad traits in Tom Jones, for the first twenty-five years of his life, and then we are asked to believe that, once happily married, he reformed, and his faults not only disappeared, but obligingly left no traces. In Amelia we must believe the same miracle of Booth, with the added difficulty that he is older when he reforms. In the minor details of both stories, as also in Joseph Andrews there is a lucky juxtaposition of events to help out the character, which suggests the fairy godmother rather than the observer of this world. No ill effects result from bad choices, and good fortune is not the result of wisdom in the characters, but of benevolence in the author. Fielding has had his reputation from his hearty interest in life and his advance in verisimilitude over his predecessors. Looking back now, however, we see that his interest in life was neither wide nor deep, and that he had no use for the conception of the world as a sequence of inexorable justice; he preferred to think of it as a career where manliness was a sufficient talisman—where the effects of conduct suspended themselves for a possibly erring heart, so long as it was stout.
To make a similar criticism of Dickens requires some resolution, for he enlists our loyalty as Fielding never does. Our affection convinces us rightly that whatever the literary critic may pronounce upon David Copperfield or Old Curiosity Shop or Our Mutual Friend, the emotions which those books stirred in us were noble. The fact is that Dickens uses the miraculous in both ways at once, as an interpretation and as an account of life. With him the same incident serves to state an ideal and to chronicle a fact. If only his facts had been correct, he would have illustrated the perfect formula of art. As it is, we fall in love with his ideals; and we learn better than to believe his picture of life. He accounted for experience, and explained it, by the simple magic of goodness. Before a good man, the problems of this world melt away. There is a wide difference between this goodness and the old chivalric magic of being right. If one is right, at least one is in unconscious accord with the facts and the laws of the universe. In Dickens the admirable characters are often mistaken, even horribly in the wrong, but they are good, and so long as they remain good they excite admiration and surmount difficulties. The illustrations of this magic occur in the most characteristic parts of Dickens' work—in the Christmas Carol, for example. To read this story for its emotions is to learn generosity and brotherly love; but how disconcerting to learn our virtues from a false picture of life! Do misers like Scrooge repent? Can anyone turn over a new leaf and undo all his past? And does such goodness as Tiny Tim's or Bob Cratchit's really solve the difficulties of their situation as completely as Dickens represents? The pity that we feel for Tiny Tim is a tribute to what is true in the story; the comfortable optimism with which we put down the book, is evidence of some trick of magic, some eluding of truth—for looking at men and women around us, we are convinced that such satisfaction is not reached that way. Besides, we have learned to think that people in poverty or misery are still in trouble even though they are brave about it; if we could agree that goodness is a talisman, we might as well give up all social work, on the ground that the worthy poor are as happy as possible, and the unhappy poor must be unworthy.
What Dickens has done, then, is to state his ideals in terms of what pretends to be real experience. Our admiration cannot be withheld from the ideals, nor can our intelligence endorse the account of life. If it is a fairy story that we are reading, we ought not to be deceived into mistaking it for history. There is reason to think, however, that Dickens did not consider it a disadvantage to be the victim of illusion. At least he portrayed many "illusionists," as a German scholar called them, who tabulated and classified them all. Mr. Pickwick, Mrs. Nickleby, Swiveller, Tom Pinch, David Copperfield, and of course Mr. Micawber, are among the illusionists. The French critic Taine made the same point by saying that many characters in Dickens have a touch of insanity.
In the world as Dickens represents it, these illusioned characters get on very well, but in the real world they come to grief. Of such disillusion Thackeray is the kindliest example. At least he represents a partial reaction from the magic of goodness; he can no longer believe in it, but he wishes with all his heart he could. What really happens to absolute goodness in this world is portrayed, not in Bob Cratchit, nor in David Copperfield, but in Colonel Newcome. With magic Thackeray is convinced, we might say, that the novel should have nothing to do, yet he devotes his art to no religion of wonder. Because he has so gently and persuasively corrected Dickens' picture of life, at the same time endorsing, as it were, his ideals, Thackeray has had much reputation for wisdom and modernness. Yet in the cardinal emotions of wonder and delight he is not modern at all; the logic of character, the unalterable order, whereby Colonel Newcome suffered for his mistakes, however excellent his motives—this saddens Thackeray, even though he is in honor bound to present it. For an ordered universe he has no love, nor any passion for the career of the mind. Perhaps it is only his sentimentality that hides from us the materialism in his picture of life—the implication that the good are victims of inevitable laws; whereas they are really victims of their own ignorance. The laws of human nature, if Colonel Newcome were only wise enough to make them the instruments of happiness, would seem reliable, to wonder at, rather than inexorable, to fear.
Of stories and plays written in our own time it is enough to say that few of them show any persuasion that there is consequence in the world. If you open any of the numerous manuals which tell you how to write fiction, you may read that actions should be motivated, that there should be reasons why things happen—as though cause and effect were subdivisions of the literary art. Few of our contemporary writers seem to practise this instruction, and still fewer of their readers know whether they practise it or not. We have with us still, of course, special schools of fiction, which insist on a precise or a continuous or an unselected rendering of experience—realistic and naturalistic schools; and individual masters of realism or naturalism from time to time captivate many readers. But even these individual successes, added together, seem to make no total impression on the reading world. In contemporary fiction characters slough off the past, serpent-like, and emerge brighter than ever; or they change their nature in a twinkling; and it seems that few readers seriously protest against the miracle. Our supposed faith in the logic of personality, our faith that a given character will act in a certain way, our faith especially that a man's conduct or occupation influences his character, that he is marked by what he does—all this we seem to have surrendered, substituting in its place a misty benevolence, a magic of the Dickens type, a persuasion that any character, viewed sympathetically, will seem, or will actually become, as admirable as any other character.
One illustration may be found in the stories of the underworld, where the professional criminal or wrongdoer is shown in the final paradox to be essentially righteous and permanently reformed. We are convinced, of course, that to be a professional crook will in the end lead to some moral deterioration. We read with pleasure, however, these fables which keep the soul of the crook unspotted from his own conduct. Our pleasure is based on a fine humaneness, on the undoubted fact that criminals are largely manufactured or at least encouraged by circumstances, and that few of them were originally bad at heart. But this doctrine, excellent as a vantage-point from which to enter upon social responsibility and rescue, has been stretched in our fiction until it misrepresents the consequences of wrongdoing, and even diminishes, strangely enough, that sense of social responsibility from which it sprang. We felt to blame for letting our fellow-man become a criminal, but after the story or the play has demonstrated how excellent morally the criminal is, we feel less guilty. In such tales, however, there is always an inconsistency; the hero is singled out for admiration, but his comrades in guilt are saved by no miracle—so much is conceded to our general knowledge of the facts.
Another illustration may be drawn from a very different region of interest, from those stories or plays, like The Passing of the Third Floor Back, or The Servant in the House, which show the miraculous influence of a perfect character. In such fiction a stranger is represented as entering a community, a group of people formed and settled, and by the magic of his presence transmuting them into quite different persons. This kind of story must express some precious ideal, or it would not be so tenderly popular; but as a picture of life it is both incorrect and immoral, for it both contradicts our experience and relieves us—provided we can entertain the stranger—of responsibility for our conduct. To be sure, the public thinks this type of story far from immoral—rather a religious parable, for does not the author suggest that the stranger is Christ? And does not that suggestion explain the miracles? But here we see how an inclination to magic befuddles our ordinary intelligence. Because the stranger converts everybody he meets, we think he is Christ-like, forgetting that the New Testament gives no such account of Christ.
IV
Perhaps the contrast has been indicated sufficiently between the universe of law which we are supposed to believe in, and the world of magic which we like to read about. What does this inconsistency mean? Perhaps it is rash to venture on so large a question in so short a space, but in this balancing of magic against wonder a conviction steals on one that the love of magic, though it may be stupid, indicates something far higher than stupidity. The connotations of the words themselves convince us. Magic suggests power, however obtained, whereas wonder suggests no power at all. Is there such merit in enlightenment if one is to be, after all, only an enlightened bystander? The magician at least wanted control of experience—and so do we! Magic sought to engage the help of alien forces, foreign gods, in the problems of this world; we, believing that no gods are alien to our universe, ought logically to make the remotest force effective in our daily aspirations; we cannot stop with a passive wonder. Or if we do, our sympathies, and the sympathy of our fellows, will return to magic, which with all its defects dreamt of power.
When we consider how many noble intellects have tried in vain to take from the race its love of magic, and to teach it instead the habit of wonder, the long failure can be explained, I think, by the fact that the ideal of wonder has rarely included the ideal of control, without which we refuse to be fascinated. This is true of the philosophers, who though they have sought to correct all haphazard and irresponsible impressions of the universe, yet have so far failed, in that they have not greatly disturbed man's love of magical stories. Some of them, Francis Bacon, for example, have opened up visions of scientific control more magical than magic itself; we shall owe it to them eventually that our magic and our wonder have become identical. But most philosophers have been content to attack the ignorance of magic without satisfying its aspiration; and the wonder which they would substitute, though nobly imaginative, has stopped short of that power men yearn for. Lucretius serves for example, whose poem on the Nature of Things sought to take away our fear of death by removing our faith in immortality—or, as he would say, our superstition. This intended service has not roused the gratitude of mankind. What stirs us in the poem is the vision of an ordered world, and an impassioned rebuke that the vision has not stirred us before. To feed our sense of wonder we have had recourse to fairy tales; but, says the poet, "Look up at the bright and unsullied hue of heaven, and the stars which it holds within it, wandering about, and the moon and the sun's light of dazzling brilliancy; if all these things were now for the first time suddenly presented to mortals, what could have been named that would be more marvelous?" Here is an escape from ignorance, if you please, a sense of wonder in the presence of the actual universe; but when we have felt this wonder, what next? Having got rid of our superstitions, shall we then be ready to die?
The same criticism can be made of Milton, the one English poet comparable with Lucretius in loftiness and fervor. His sense of reality, as we saw, kept him from believing in magic; his special gift, it seems, was for wonder on an infinite scale. But he stops with wonder; he would not have mankind seek knowledge for the magic purpose of control. When Adam voices his suspicion that the sun, the moon, and the stars, are not circling the earth, as they appear to be doing, for the sole uneconomic purpose of furnishing light for one man and his wife, Raphael replies with a superb summary of both the Ptolemaic and the Copernican theories, but he advises Adam not to bother his head with either hypothesis, nor to prosecute any scientific inquiry. The great Architect, he says,
"Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge
His secrets to be scann'd by them who ought
Rather admire.…
Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid,
Leave them to God above, Him serve and fear."
That Milton, himself pre-eminently a thinker and a student, should have represented the powers of good as opposed to enquiry, has greatly puzzled his admirers. We should like to find an argument on the other side in Adam's reply to the angel,
"To know
That which before us lies in daily life
Is the prime wisdom."
We should like to translate this speech into a praise of practical science, of enquiry which has for object the control of one's destiny. But there is nothing in the context to aid this interpretation.
If the philosophers have not lured us to a reasonable view of life, the satirists have not driven us to it. Wherever satire has dealt with man's ignorance, it has attacked magic in some form. Even magic-lovers themselves, as to some extent Fielding and Thackeray were, have appealed to the inexorable order when they wrote satirically, as in Jonathan Wild and Barry Lyndon. The stock in trade of George Bernard Shaw today is our persisting trust in magic formulas. The substance of his art is but to prick that bubble. In Androcles and the Lion, for example, he gives a reading of Christian martyrdom in what professes to be the unchanging law of character; his audience wonder why he should have demonstrated the obvious, and they remark as they go home that he is losing his old sparkle. But they have applauded with spontaneous and unembarrassed delight that moment in the play where the lion refuses to eat Androcles—which proves, I suppose, that they have fallen into Shaw's trap. Yet with all this clever exposing of our inconsistencies, the satirist gives us no vision of what life would be like, were we to make intelligent use of the laws we profess to believe in.
Here and there, however, poets have given us glimpses of the vision. Such a poet is Shelley. We do not usually praise him for a sense of fact. Yet few men have tried so honestly to give their enthusiasms to the proper objects, or have contemplated with such genuine rapture the control over experience which a knowledge of nature's order should give. His education in science was amateurish and fragmentary, but no specialist conceives more clearly or more rapturously the magic possibilities of exact knowledge. For Shelley, science was to be the key to nature's secrets, and those secrets, once known, were to subject nature to man. The fullest expression of this faith is in Prometheus Unbound, the last act of which, in praise of what may be called scientific living, might be read as a commentary on The Newcomes.
"Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul,
Whose nature is its own divine control,
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea;
Familiar acts are beautiful through love;
Labor, and pain, and grief, in life's green grove
Sport like tame beasts, none knew how gentle they could be!
•••••••All things confess man's strength—Through the cold mass
Of marble and of color his dreams pass;
Bright threads whence mothers weave the robes their children wear;
Language is a perpetual Orphic song,
Which rules with Dædal harmony a throng
Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.
The lightning is his slave; heaven's utmost deep
Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep
They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on!
The tempest is his steed, he strides the air;
And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare,
Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.
Such a poet, to name a second, is Emerson. He, also, is not famous for any grasp on reality. His fame, however, does him injustice. He was indeed a mystic, and much of his teaching seems to belittle the facts of life, the terms on which we move in this present world. But he did not belittle facts, nor undervalue whatever is actual. There is no real power, he taught, which is not based on nature, and the beginning of power is the belief that things go not by luck, but by law. Even when the mystic in him was uppermost, he often meant in a nobly practical way what we have taken as an extravagance of idealism. "Hitch your wagon to a star." We translate "aim high"—but that was not his meaning. He meant that we should be scientific, if you choose—that having learned to wonder at the laws and forces of the universe, we should then turn the laws to our advantage and should ourselves control the forces. These are his words: "I admire the skill which, on the seashore, makes the tides drive the wheels and grind corn, and which thus engages the assistance of the moon, like a hired hand, to grind, and wind, and pump, and saw, and split stone, and roll iron. Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star."
Here is an invitation to a greater power than magic, and here, I think, is a foretaste of what poetry may be. Lucretius stood in awe before the universe, but he stood aloof; Shelley and Emerson, modern of the moderns, beheld man entering into control of a vaster universe than the Roman poet merely contemplated. When literature expresses the miracle of that control, our common life will be transfigured in wonder, our dreams will lie, not in the impossible, but in the path of our happy destiny, and the gods will walk with us.
THE END