They have exhausted the faith-faculty of the species.Their legacy to us is the scepticism of which they were afraid.Had they put it into words,it might not live within us as thought.No,Ernest,no.We cannot go back to the saint.There is far more to be learned from the sinner.We cannot go back to the philosopher,and the mystic leads us astray.Who,as Mr.Pater suggests somewhere,would exchange the curve of a single rose-leaf for that formless intangible Being which Plato rates so high?What to us is the Illumination of Philo,the Abyss of Eckhart,the Vision of Bohme,the monstrous Heaven itself that was revealed to Swedenborg's blinded eyes?Such things are less than the yellow trumpet of one daffodil of the field,far less than the meanest of the visible arts,for,just as Nature is matter struggling into mind,so Art is mind expressing itself under the conditions of matter,and thus,even in the lowliest of her manifestations,she speaks to both sense and soul alike.To the aesthetic temperament the vague is always repellent.The Greeks were a nation of artists,because they were spared the sense of the infinite.Like Aristotle,like Goethe after he had read Kant,we desire the concrete,and nothing but the concrete can satisfy us.
ERNEST.What then do you propose?
GILBERT.It seems to me that with the development of the critical spirit we shall be able to realise,not merely our own lives,but the collective life of the race,and so to make ourselves absolutely modern,in the true meaning of the word modernity.For he to whom the present is the only thing that is present,knows nothing of the age in which he lives.To realise the nineteenth century,one must realise every century that has preceded it and that has contributed to its making.To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathise,no dead mode of life that one cannot make alive.Is this impossible?I think not.By revealing to us the absolute mechanism of all action,and so freeing us from the self-imposed and trammelling burden of moral responsibility,the scientific principle of Heredity has become,as it were,the warrant for the contemplative life.It has shown us that we are never less free than when we try to act.It has hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter,and written upon the wall the prophecy of our doom.We may not watch it,for it is within us.We may not see it,save in a mirror that mirrors the soul.It is Nemesis without her mask.It is the last of the Fates,and the most terrible.It is the only one of the Gods whose real name we know.
And yet,while in the sphere of practical and external life it has robbed energy of its freedom and activity of its choice,in the subjective sphere,where the soul is at work,it comes to us,this terrible shadow,with many gifts in its hands,gifts of strange temperaments and subtle susceptibilities,gifts of wild ardours and chill moods of indifference,complex multiform gifts of thoughts that are at variance with each other,and passions that war against themselves.And so,it is not our own life that we live,but the lives of the dead,and the soul that dwells within us is no single spiritual entity,making us personal and individual,created for our service,and entering into us for our joy.It is something that has dwelt in fearful places,and in ancient sepulchres has made its abode.It is sick with many maladies,and has memories of curious sins.It is wiser than we are,and its wisdom is bitter.
It fills us with impossible desires,and makes us follow what we know we cannot gain.One thing,however,Ernest,it can do for us.
It can lead us away from surroundings whose beauty is dimmed to us by the mist of familiarity,or whose ignoble ugliness and sordid claims are marring the perfection of our development.It can help us to leave the age in which we were born,and to pass into other ages,and find ourselves not exiled from their air.It can teach us how to escape from our experience,and to realise the experiences of those who are greater than we are.The pain of Leopardi crying out against life becomes our pain.Theocritus blows on his pipe,and we laugh with the lips of nymph and shepherd.In the wolfskin of Pierre Vidal we flee before the hounds,and in the armour of Lancelot we ride from the bower of the Queen.We have whispered the secret of our love beneath the cowl of Abelard,and in the stained raiment of Villon have put our shame into song.We can see the dawn through Shelley's eyes,and when we wander with Endymion the Moon grows amorous of our youth.Ours is the anguish of Atys,and ours the weak rage and noble sorrows of the Dane.Do you think that it is the imagination that enables us to live these countless lives?Yes:it is the imagination;and the imagination is the result of heredity.It is simply concentrated race-experience.
ERNEST.But where in this is the function of the critical spirit?
GILBERT.The culture that this transmission of racial experiences makes possible can be made perfect by the critical spirit alone,and indeed may be said to be one with it.For who is the true critic but he who bears within himself the dreams,and ideas,and feelings of myriad generations,and to whom no form of thought is alien,no emotional impulse obscure?And who the true man of culture,if not he who by fine scholarship and fastidious rejection has made instinct self-conscious and intelligent,and can separate the work that has distinction from the work that has it not,and so by contact and comparison makes himself master of the secrets of style and school,and understands their meanings,and listens to their voices,and develops that spirit of disinterested curiosity which is the real root,as it is the real flower,of the intellectual life,and thus attains to intellectual clarity,and,having learned 'the best that is known and thought in the world,'lives -it is not fanciful to say so -with those who are the Immortals.
