Winds of Doctrine | Page 4

secure truth, spontaneity, and profuseness of religious
forms; the danger of course being that each form might become meagre
and the sum of them chaotic. If the accent, however, could only be laid
on the second phase of the transformation, reform might mean the
creation of order where it did not sufficiently appear, so that diffuse life
should be concentrated into a congenial form that should render it
strong and self-conscious. In this sense, if we may trust Mr. Gilbert
Murray, it was a great wave of reform that created Greece, or at least
all that was characteristic and admirable in it--an effort to organise,
train, simplify, purify, and make beautiful the chaos of barbaric
customs and passions that had preceded. The clanger here, a danger to
which Greece actually succumbed, is that so refined an organism may

be too fragile, not inclusive enough within, and not buttressed strongly
enough without against the flux of the uncivilised world. Christianity
also, in the first formative centuries of its existence, was an integrating
reform of the same sort, on a different scale and in a different sphere;
but here too an enslaved rabble within the soul claiming the suffrage,
and better equipped intellectual empires rising round about, seem to
prove that the harmony which the Christian system made for a moment
out of nature and life was partial and insecure. It is a terrible dilemma
in the life of reason whether it will sacrifice natural abundance to moral
order, or moral order to natural abundance. Whatever compromise we
choose proves unstable, and forces us to a new experiment.
Perhaps in the century that has elapsed since the French Revolution the
pendulum has had time to swing as far as it will in the direction of
negative reform, and may now begin to move towards that sort of
reform which is integrating and creative. The veering of the advanced
political parties from liberalism to socialism would seem to be a clear
indication of this new tendency. It is manifest also in the love of nature,
in athletics, in the new woman, and in a friendly medical attitude
towards all the passions.
In the fine arts, however, and in religion and philosophy, we are still in
full career towards disintegration. It might have been thought that a
germ of rational order would by this time have penetrated into fine art
and speculation from the prosperous constructive arts that touch the one,
and the prosperous natural and mathematical sciences that touch the
other. But as yet there is little sign of it. Since the beginning of the
nineteenth century painting and sculpture have passed through several
phases, representatives of each naturally surviving after the next had
appeared. Romanticism, half lurid, half effeminate, yielded to a brutal
pursuit of material truth, and a pious preference for modern and humble
sentiment. This realism had a romantic vein in it, and studied vice and
crime, tedium and despair, with a very genuine horrified sympathy.
Some went in for a display of archaeological lore or for exotic motifs;
others gave all their attention to rediscovering and emphasising abstract
problems of execution, the highway of technical tradition having long
been abandoned. Beginners are still supposed to study their art, but

they have no masters from whom to learn it. Thus, when there seemed
to be some danger that art should be drowned in science and history,
the artists deftly eluded it by becoming amateurs. One gave himself to
religious archaism, another to Japanese composition, a third to barbaric
symphonies of colour; sculptors tried to express dramatic climaxes, or
inarticulate lyrical passion, such as music might better convey; and the
latest whims are apparently to abandon painful observation altogether,
to be merely decorative or frankly mystical, and to be satisfied with the
childishness of hieroglyphics or the crudity of caricature. The arts are
like truant children who think their life will be glorious if they only run
away and play for ever; no need is felt of a dominant ideal passion and
theme, nor of any moral interest in the interpretation of nature. Artists
have no less talent than ever; their taste, their vision, their sentiment are
often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only
in their works.
In philosophy there are always the professors, as in art there are always
the portrait painters and the makers of official sculpture; and both sorts
of academicians are often very expert and well-educated. Yet in
philosophy, besides the survival of all the official and endowed systems,
there has been of late a very interesting fresh movement, largely among
the professors themselves, which in its various hues may be called
irrationalism, vitalism, pragmatism, or pure empiricism. But this
movement, far from being a reawakening of any organising instinct, is
simply an extreme expression