Title:      The Dance of Life (1923)
Author:     Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Dance of Life (1923)
Author:     Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)




First printed June, 1923,
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY




PREFACE


THIS book was planned many years ago. As to the idea running through
it, I cannot say when that arose. My feeling is, it was born with me.
On reflection, indeed, it seems possible the seeds fell imperceptibly
in youth--from F. A. Lange, maybe, and other sources--to germinate
unseen in a congenial soil. However that may be, the idea underlies
much that I have written. Even the present book began to be written,
and to be published in a preliminary form, more than fifteen years
ago. Perhaps I may be allowed to seek consolation for my slowness,
however vainly, in the saying of Rodin that "slowness is beauty," and
certainly it is the slowest dances that have been to me most beautiful
to see, while, in the dance of life, the achievement of a civilisation
in beauty seems to be inversely to the rapidity of its pace.

Moreover, the book remains incomplete, not merely in the sense that I
would desire still to be changing and adding to each chapter, but even
incomplete by the absence of many chapters for which I had gathered
material, and twenty years ago should have been surprised to find
missing. For there are many arts, not among those we conventionally
call "fine," which seem to me fundamental for living. But now I put
forth the book as it stands, deliberately, without remorse, well
content so to do.

Once that would not have been possible. A book must be completed as it
had been originally planned, finished, rounded, polished. As a man
grows older his ideals change. Thoroughness is often an admirable
ideal. But it is an ideal to be adopted with discrimination, having
due reference to the nature of the work in hand. An artist, it seems
to me now, has not always to finish his work in every detail; by not
doing so he may succeed in making the spectator his co-worker, and put
into his hands the tool to carry on the work which, as it lies before
him, beneath its veil of yet partly unworked material, still stretches
into infinity. Where there is most labour there is not always most
life, and by doing less, provided only he has known how to do well,
the artist may achieve more.

He will not, I hope, achieve complete consistency.  In fact a part of
the method of such a book as this, written over a long period of
years, is to reveal a continual slight inconsistency. That is not an
evil, but rather the avoidance of an evil. We cannot remain consistent
with the world save by growing inconsistent with our own past selves.
The man who consistently--as he fondly supposes "logically"--clings to
an unchanging opinion is suspended from a hook which has ceased to
exist. "I thought it was she, and she thought it was me, and when we
come near it weren't neither one of us"--that metaphysical statement
holds, with a touch of exaggeration, a truth we must always bear in
mind concerning the relation of subject and object.  They can neither
of them possess consistency; they have both changed before they come
up with one another.  Not that such inconsistency is a random flux or
a shallow opportunism. We change, and the world changes, in accordance
with the underlying organisation, and inconsistency, so conditioned by
truth to the whole, becomes the higher consistency of life. I am
therefore able to recognise and accept the fact that, again and again
in this book, I have come up against what, superficially regarded,
seemed to be the same fact, and each time have brought back a slightly
different report, for it had changed and I had changed. The world is
various, of infinite iridescent aspect, and until I attain to a
correspondingly infinite variety of statement I remain far from
anything that could in any sense be described as "truth." We only see
a great opal that never looks the same this time as when we looked
last time. "He never painted to-day quite the same as he had painted
yesterday," Elie Faure says of Renoir, and it seems to me natural and
right that it should have been so. I have never seen the same world
twice. That, indeed, is but to repeat the Heraclitean saying--an
imperfect saying, for it is only the half of the larger, more modern
synthesis I have already quoted--that no man bathes twice in the same
stream. Yet--and this opposing fact is fully as significant--we really
have to accept a continuous stream as constituted in our minds; it
flows in the same direction; it coheres in what is more or less the
same shape.  Much the same may be said of the ever-changing bather
whom the stream receives. So that, after all, there is not only
variety, but also unity. The diversity of the Many is balanced by the
stability of the One.  That is why life must always be a dance, for
that is what a dance is: perpetual slightly varied movements which are
yet always held true to the shape of the whole.

We verge on philosophy. The whole of this book is on the threshold of
philosophy. I hasten to add that it remains there. No dogmas are here
set forth to claim any general validity. Not that even the technical
philosopher always cares to make that claim. Mr. F. H.  Bradley, one
of the most influential of modern English philosophers, who wrote at
the outset of his career, "On all questions, if you push me far
enough, at present I end in doubts and perplexities," still says,
forty years later, that if asked to define his principles rigidly, "I
become puzzled." For even a cheese-mite, one imagines, could only with
difficulty attain an adequate metaphysical conception of a cheese, and
how much more difficult the task is for Man, whose everyday
intelligence seems to move on a plane so much like that of a
cheese-mite and yet has so vastly more complex a web of phenomena to
synthetise.

It is clear how hesitant and tentative must be the attitude of one
who, having found his life-work elsewhere than in the field of
technical philosophy, may incidentally feel the need, even if only
playfully, to speculate concerning his function and place in the
universe.  Such speculation is merely the instinctive impulse of the
ordinary person to seek the wider implications bound up with his own
little activities. It is philosophy only in the simple sense in which
the Greeks understood philosophy, merely a philosophy of life, of
one's own life, in the wide world. The technical philosopher does
something quite different when he passes over the threshold and shuts
himself up in his study--

  "Veux-tu découvrir le monde,
  Ferme tes yeux, Rosemonde"--

and emerges with great tomes that are hard to buy, hard to read, and,
let us be sure, hard to write. But of Socrates, as of the English
philosopher Falstaff, we are not told that he wrote anything.

So that if it may seem to some that this book reveals the expansive
influence of that great classico-mathe-matical Renaissance in which it
is our high privilege to live, and that they find here "relativity"
applied to life, I am not so sure. It sometimes seems to me that, in
the first place, we, the common herd, mould the great movements of our
age, and only in the second place do they mould us. I think it was so
even in the great earlier classico-mathematical Renaissance. We
associate it with Descartes. But Descartes could have effected nothing
if an innumerable crowd in many fields had not created the atmosphere
by which he was enabled to breathe the breath of life. We may here
profitably bear in mind all that Spengler has shown concerning the
unity of spirit underlying the most diverse elements in an age's
productivity. Roger Bacon had in him the genius to create such a
Renaissance three centuries earlier; there was no atmosphere for him
to live in and he was stifled. But Malherbe, who worshipped Number and
Measure as devoutly as Descartes, was born half a century before him.
That silent, colossal, ferocious Norman--vividly brought before us by
Tallement des Réaux, to whom, rather than to Saint-Simon, we owe the
real picture of seventeenth-century France--was possessed by the
genius of destruction, for he had the natural instinct of the Viking,
and he swept all the lovely Romantic spirit of old France so
completely away that it has scarcely ever revived since until the days
of Verlaine. But he had the Norman classico-mathematical architectonic
spirit--he might have said, like Descartes, as truly as it ever can be
said in literature, _Omnia apud me mathematica fiunt_--and he
introduced into the world a new rule of Order.  Given a Malherbe, a
Descartes could hardly fail to follow, a French Academy must come into
existence almost at the same time as the "Discours de la Méthode," and
Le Nôtre must already be drawing the geometrical designs of the
gardens of Versailles. Descartes, it should be remembered, could not
have worked without support; he was a man of timid and yielding
character, though he had once been a soldier, not of the heroic temper
of Roger Bacon. If Descartes could have been put back into Roger
Bacon's place, he would have thought many of Bacon's thoughts. But we
should never have known it. He nervously burnt one of his works when
he heard of Galileo's condemnation, and it was fortunate that the
Church was slow to recognise how terrible a Bolshevist had entered the
spiritual world with this man, and never realised that his books must
be placed on the Index until he was already dead.

So it is to-day. We, too, witness a classico-mathematical Renaissance.
It is bringing us a new vision of the universe, but also a new vision
of human life. That is why it is necessary to insist upon life as a
dance. This is not a mere metaphor. The dance is the rule of number
and of rhythm and of measure and of order, of the controlling
influence of form, of the subordination of the parts to the whole.
That is what a dance is. And these same properties also make up the
classic spirit, not only in life, but, still more clearly and
definitely, in the universe itself. We are strictly correct when we
regard not only life but the universe as a dance. For the universe is
made up of a certain number of elements, less than a hundred, and the
"periodic law" of these elements is metrical. They are ranged, that is
to say, not haphazard, not in groups, but by number, and those of like
quality appear at fixed and regular intervals.  Thus our world is,
even fundamentally, a dance, a single metrical stanza in a poem which
will be for ever hidden from us, except in so far as the philosophers,
who are to-day even here applying the methods of mathematics, may
believe that they have imparted to it the character of objective
knowledge.

I call this movement of to-day, as that of the seventeenth century,
classico-mathematical. And I regard the dance (without prejudice to a
distinction made later in this volume) as essentially its symbol. This
is not to belittle the Romantic elements of the world, which are
equally of its essence. But the vast exuberant energies and
immeasurable possibilities of the first day may perhaps be best
estimated when we have reached their final outcome on the sixth day of
creation.

However that may be, the analogy of the two historical periods in
question remains, and I believe that we may consider it holds good to
the extent that the strictly mathematical elements of the later period
are not the earliest to appear, but that we are in the presence of a
process that has been in subtle movement in many fields for half a
century. If it is significant that Descartes appeared a few years
after Malherbe, it is equally significant that Einstein was
immediately preceded by the Russian ballet. We gaze in admiration at
the artist who sits at the organ, but we have been blowing the
bellows; and the great performer's music would have been inaudible had
it not been for us.

This is the spirit in which I have written. We are all engaged--not
merely one or two prominent persons here and there--in creating the
spiritual world.  I have never written but with the thought that the
reader, even though he may not know it, is already on my side. Only so
could I write with that sincerity and simplicity without which it
would not seem to me worth while to write at all. That may be seen in
the saying which I set on the forefront of my earliest book, "The New
Spirit": he who carries farthest his most intimate feelings is simply
the first in file of a great number of other men, and one becomes
typical by being to the utmost degree one's self. That saying I chose
with much deliberation and complete conviction because it went to the
root of my book. On the surface it obviously referred to the great
figures I was there concerned with, representing what I regarded--by
no means in the poor sense of mere modernity--as the New Spirit in
life. They had all gone to the depths of their own souls and thence
brought to the surface and expressed--audaciously or beautifully,
pungently or poignantly--intimate impulses and emotions which,
shocking as they may have seemed at the time, are now seen to be those
of an innumerable company of their fellow men and women. But it was
also a book of personal affirmations.  Beneath the obvious meaning of
that motto on the title-page lay the more private meaning that I was
myself setting forth secret impulses which might some day be found to
express the emotions also of others. In the thirty-five years that
have since passed, the saying has often recurred to my mind, and if I
have sought in vain to make it mine I find no adequate iustification
for the work of my life.

And now, as I said at the outset, I am even prepared to think that
that is the function of all books that are real books. There are other
classes of so-called books: there is the class of history books and
the class of forensic books, that is to say, the books of facts and
the books of argument. No one would wish to belittle either kind. But
when we think of a book proper, in the sense that a Bible means a
book, we mean more than this. We mean, that is to say, a revelation of
something that had remained latent, unconscious, perhaps even more or
less intentionally repressed, within the writer's own soul, which is,
ultimately, the soul of mankind. These books are apt to repel;
nothing, indeed, is so likely to shock us at first as the manifest
revelation of ourselves. Therefore, such books may have to knock again
and again at the closed door of our hearts. "Who is there?" we
carelessly cry, and we cannot open the door; we bid the importunate
stranger, whatever he may be, to go away; until, as in the apologue of
the Persian mystic, at last we seem to hear the voice outside saying:
"It is thyself."

H. E.



CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION

II. THE ART OF DANCING

III. THE ART OF THINKING

IV. THE ART OF WRITING

V. THE ART OF RELIGION

VI. THE ART OF MORALS

VII. CONCLUSION

INDEX




CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION




I


IT has always been difficult for Man to realise that his life is all
an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it
so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it. At the
beginning, indeed, the primitive philosopher whose business it was to
account for the origin of things usually came to the conclusion that
the whole universe was a work of art, created by some Supreme Artist,
in the way of artists, out of material that was practically nothing,
even out of his own excretions, a method which, as children sometimes
instinctively feel, is a kind of creative art. The most familiar to us
of these primitive philosophical statements--and really a statement
that is as typical as any--is that of the Hebrews in the first chapter
of their Book of Genesis. We read there how the whole cosmos was
fashioned out of nothing, in a measurable period of time by the art of
one Jehovah, who proceeded methodically by first forming it in the
rough, and gradually working in the details, the finest and most
delicate last, just as a sculptor might fashion a statue. We may find
many statements of the like kind even as far away as the Pacific.
[Footnote: See, for instance, Turner's _Samoa_, chap. I. Usually,
however, in the Pacific, creation was accomplished, in a more
genuinely evolutionary manner, by a long series of progressive
generations.] And--also even at the same distance--the artist and the
craftsman, who resembled the divine creator of the world by making the
most beautiful and useful things for Mankind, himself also partook of
the same divine nature. Thus, in Samoa, as also in Tonga, the
carpenter, who built canoes, occupied a high and almost sacred
position, approaching that of the priest. Even among ourselves, with
our Roman traditions, the name Pontiff, or Bridge-Builder, remains
that of an imposing and hieratic personage.

But that is only the primitive view of the world.  When Man developed,
when he became more scientific and more moralistic, however much his
practice remained essentially that of the artist, his conception
became much less so. He was learning to discover the mystery of
measurement; he was approaching the beginnings of geometry and
mathematics; he was at the same time becoming warlike. So he saw
things in straight lines, more rigidly; he formulated laws and
commandments. It was, Einstein assures us, the right way. But it was,
at all events in the first place, most unfavourable to the view of
life as an art. It remains so even to-day.

Yet there are always some who, deliberately or by instinct, have
perceived the immense significance in life of the conception of art.
That is especially so as regards the finest thinkers of the two
countries which, so far as we may divine,--however difficult it may
here be to speak positively and by demonstration,--have had the finest
civilisations, China and Greece. The wisest and most recognisably
greatest practical philosophers of both these lands have believed that
the whole of life, even government, is an art of definitely like kind
with the other arts, such as that of music or the dance. We may, for
instance, recall to memory one of the most typical of Greeks. Of
Protagoras, calumniated by Plato,--though, it is interesting to
observe that Plato's own transcendental doctrine of Ideas has been
regarded as an effort to escape from the solvent influence of
Protagoras' logic,--it is possible for the modern historian of
philosophy to say that "the greatness of this man can scarcely be
measured." It was with measurement that his most famous saying was
concerned: "Man is the measure of all things, of those which exist and
of those which have no existence." It was by his insistence on Man as
the active creator of life and knowledge, the artist of the world,
moulding it it to his own measure, that Protagoras is interesting to
us to-day. He recognised that there are no absolute criteria by which
to judge actions. He was the father of relativism and of
phenomenalism, probably the initiator of the modern doctrine that the
definitions of geometry are only approximately true abstractions from
empirical experiences. We need not, and probably should not, suppose
that in undermining dogma-tism he was setting up an individual
subjectivism. It was the function of Man in the world, rather than of
the individual, that he had in mind when he enunciated his great
principle, and it was with the reduction of human activity and conduct
to art that he was mainly concerned. His projects for the art of
living began with speech, and he was a pioneer in the arts of
language, the initiator of modern grammar. He wrote treatises, on many
special arts, as well as the general treatise "On the Art" among the
pseudo-Hippocratic writings,--if we may with Gomperz attribute it to
him,--which embodies the spirit of modern positive science. [Footnote:
Gomperz, _Greek Thinkers_, vol. I, book III, chap, vi. ]

Hippias, the philosopher of Elis, a contemporary of Protagoras, and
like him commonly classed among the "Sophists," cultivated the largest
ideal of life as an art which embraced all arts, common to all mankind
as a fellowship of brothers, and at one with natural law which
transcends the convention of human laws.  Plato made fun of him, and
that was not hard to do, for a philosopher who conceived the art of
living as so large could not possibly at every point adequately play
at it. But at this distance it is his ideal that mainly concerns us,
and he really was highly accomplished, even a pioneer, in many of the
multifarious activities he undertook. He was a remarkable
mathematician; he was an astronomer and geometer; he was a copious
poet in the most diverse modes, and, moreover, wrote on phonetics,
rhythm, music, and mnemonics; he discussed the theories of sculpture
and painting; he was both mythologist and ethnologist, as well as a
student of chronology; he had mastered many of the artis-tic crafts.
On one occasion, it is said, he appeared at the Olympic gathering in
garments which, from the sandals on his feet to the girdle round his
waist and the rings on his fingers, had been made by his own hands.
Such a being of kaleidoscopic versatility, Gomperz remarks, we call
contemptuously a Jack-of-all-trades.  We believe in subordinating a
man to his work. But other ages have judged differently. The fellow
citizens of Hippias thought him worthy to be their ambassador to the
Peloponnesus. In another age of immense human activity, the
Renaissance, the vast-ranging energies of Leo Alberti were honoured,
and in yet a later like age, Diderot--Pantophile as Voltaire called
him--displayed a like fiery energy of wide-ranging interests, although
it was no longer possible to attain the same level of wide-ranging
accomplishment. Of course the work of Hippias was of unequal value,
but some of it was of firm quality and he shrank from no labour. He
seems to have possessed a gracious modesty, quite unlike the conceited
pomposity Plato was pleased to attribute to him. He attached more
importance than was common among the Greeks to devotion to truth, and
he was cosmopolitan in spirit. He was famous for his distinction
between Convention and Nature, and Plato put into his mouth the words:
"All of you who are here present I reckon to be kinsmen and friends
and fellow citizens, and by nature, not by law; for by nature like is
akin to like, whereas law is the tyrant of mankind, and often compels
us to do many things that are against nature." Hippias was in the line
of those whose supreme ideal is totality of existence. Ulysses, as
Benn remarks, was in Greek myth the representative of the ideal, and
its supreme representative in real life has in modern times been
Goethe.  [Footnote: I have here mainly followed Gomperz (_Greek
Thinkers_, vol. I, pp. 430-34); there is not now, however, much
controversy over the position of Hippias, which there is now, indeed,
rather a tendency to exaggerate, considering how small is the basis of
knowledge we possess. Thus Dupréel (_La Légende Socratique_, p. 432),
regarding him as the most misunderstood of the great Sophists,
declares that Hippias is "the thinker who conceived the universality
of science, just as Prodicus caught glimpses of the synthesis of the
social sciences. Hippias is the philosopher of science, the Great
Logician, just as Prodicus is the Great Moralist." He compares him to
Pico della Mirandola as a Humanist and to Leibnitz in power of wide
synthesis.]




II


BUT, in actual fact, is life essentially an art? Let us look at the
matter more closely, and see what life is like, as people have lived
it. This is the more necessary to do since, to-day at all events,
there are simple-minded people--well-meaning honest people whom we
should not ignore--who pooh-pooh such an idea.  They point to the
eccentric individuals in our Western civilisation who make a little
idol they call "Art," and fall down and worship it, sing
incomprehensible chants in its honour, and spend most of their time in
pouring contempt on the people who refuse to recognise that this
worship of "Art" is the one thing needed for what they may or may not
call the "moral uplift" of the age they live in. We must avoid the
error of the good simple-minded folk in whose eyes these "Arty" people
loom so large. They are not large, they are merely the morbid symptoms
of a social disease; they are the fantastic reaction of a society
which as a whole has ceased to move along the true course of any real
and living art. For that has nothing to do with the eccentricities of
a small religious sect worshipping in a Little Bethel; it is the large
movement of the common life of a community, indeed simply the outward
and visible form of that life.

Thus the whole conception of art has been so narrowed and so debased
among us that, on the one hand, the use of the word in its large and
natural sense seems either unintelligible or eccentric, while, on the
other hand, even if accepted, it still remains so unfamiliar that its
immense significance for our whole vision of life in the world is
scarcely at first seen. This is not altogether due to our natural
obtusity, or to the absence of a due elimination of subnormal stocks
among us, however much we may be pleased to attribute to that dysgenic
factor. It seems largely inevitable.  That is to say that, so far as
we in our modern civilisation are concerned, it is the outcome of the
social process of two thousand years, the result of the breakup of the
classic tradition of thought into various parta which under
post-classic influences have been pursued separately.  [Footnote:
Strictly speaking, in the technical sense of that much-abused word,
this is "decadence." (I refer to the sense in which I denned
"decadence" many years ago in _Affirmations_, pp. 175-87.) So that
while the minor arts have sometimes been classic and sometimes
decadent, the major art of living during the last two thousand years,
although one can think of great men who have maintained the larger
classic ideal, has mainly been decadent.] Religion or the desire for
the salvation of our souls, "Art" or the desire for beautification,
Science or the search for the reasons of things--these conations of
the mind, which are really three aspects of the same profound impulse,
have been allowed to furrow each its own narrow separate channel, in
alienation from the others, and so they have all been impeded in their
greater function of fertilising life.

It is interesting to observe, I may note in passing, how totally new
an aspect a phenomenon may take on when transformed from some other
channel into that of art. We may take, for instance, that remarkable
phenomenon called Napoleon, as impressive an individualistic
manifestation as we could well find in human history during recent
centuries, and consider two contemporary, almost simultaneous,
estimates of it. A distinguished English writer, Mr. H. G. Wells, in a
notable and even famous book, his "Outline of History," sets down a
judgment of Napoleon throughout a whole chapter. Now Mr. Wells moves
in the ethico-religious channel. He wakes up every morning, it is
said, with a rule for the guidance of life; some of his critics say
that it is every morning a new rule, and others that the rule is
neither ethical nor religious; but we are here concerned only with the
channel and not with the direction of the stream. In the "Outline" Mr.
Wells pronounces his ethico-religious anathema of Napoleon, "this dark
little archaic personage, hard, compact, capable, unscrupulous,
imitative, and neatly vulgar." The "archaic"--the old-fashioned,
outworn--element attributed to Napoleon, is accentuated again later,
for Mr. Wells has an extremely low opinion (hardly justifiable, one
may remark in passing) of primitive man. Napoleon was "a reminder of
ancient evils, a thing like the bacterium of some pestilence"; "the
figure he makes in history is one of almost incredible self-conceit,
of vanity, greed, and cunning, of callous contempt and disregard of
all who trusted him." There is no figure, Mr. Wells asserts, so
completely antithetical to the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. He was "a
scoundrel, bright and complete."

There is no occasion to question this condemnation when we place
ourselves in the channel along which Mr. Wells moves; it is probably
inevitable; we may even accept it heartily. Yet, however right along
that line, that is not the only line in which we may move.
Moreover--and this is the point which concerns us--it is possible to
enter a sphere in which no such merely negative, condemnatory, and
dissatisfying a conclusion need be reached. For obviously it is
dissatisfying. It is not finally acceptable that so supreme a
protagonist of humanity, acclaimed by millions, of whom many gladly
died for him, and still occupying so large and glorious a place in the
human imagination, should be dismissed in the end as merely an
unmitigated scoundrel.  For so to condemn him is to condemn Man who
made him what he was. He must have answered some lyric cry in the
human heart. That other sphere in which Napoleon wears a different
aspect is the sphere of art in the larger and fundamental sense. Élie
Faure, a French critic, an excellent historian of art in the ordinary
sense, is able also to grasp art in the larger sense because he is not
only a man of letters but of science, a man with medical training and
experience, who has lived in the open world, not, as the critic of
literature and art so often appears to be, a man living in a damp
cellar. Just after Wells issued his "Outline," Elie Faure, who
probably knew nothing about it since he reads no English, published a
book on Napoleon which some may consider the most remarkable book on
that subject they have ever come across. For to Faure Napoleon is a
great lyric artist.

It is hard not to believe that Faure had Wells's chapter on Napoleon
open before him, he speaks so much to the point. He entitled the first
chapter of his "Napoléon" "Jesus and He," and at once pierces to what
Wells, too, had perceived to be the core of the matter in hand: "From
the point of view of morality he is not to be defended and is even
incomprehensible.  In fact he violates law, he kills, he sows
vengeance and death. But also he dictates law, he tracks and crushes
crime, he establishes order everywhere. He is an assassin. He is also
a judge. In the ranks he would deserve the rope. At the summit he is
pure, distributing recompense and punishment with a firm hand. He is a
monster with two faces, like all of us perhaps, in any case like God,
for those who have praised Napoleon and those who have blamed him have
alike not understood that the Devil is the other face of God." From
the moral point of view, Faure says (just as Wells had said), Napoleon
is Antichrist. But from this standpoint of art, all grows clear. He is
a poet of action, as Jesus was, and like him he stands apart.  These
two, and these two alone among the world's supremely great men of whom
we have any definite knowledge, "acted out their dream instead of
dreaming their action." It is possible that Napoleon himself was able
to estimate the moral value of that acted dream. As he once stood
before the grave of Rousseau, he observed: "It would have been better
for the repose of France if that man and I had never existed." Yet we
cannot be sure. "Is not repose the death of the world?" asks Faure. Had
not Rousseau and Napoleon precisely the mission of troubling that
repose?  In another of the profound and almost impersonal sayings that
sometimes fell from his lips, Napoleon observed with a still deeper
intuition of his own function in the world: "I love power. But it is
as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin,
to draw out of it sounds and chords and harmonies. I love it as an
artist." As an artist! These words were the inspiration of this finely
illuminating study of Napoleon, which, while free from all desire to
defend or admire, yet seems to explain Napoleon, in the larger sense
to justify his right to a place in the human story, so imparting a
final satisfaction which Wells, we feel, could he have escaped from
the bonds of the narrow conception of life that bound him, had in him
the spirit and the intelligence also to bestow upon us.

But it is time to turn from this aside. It is always possible to
dispute about individuals, even when so happy an illustration chances
to come before us. We are not here concerned with exceptional persons,
but with the interpretation of general and normal human civilisations.




III


I TAKE, almost at random, the example of a primitive people. There are
many others that would do as well or better. But this happens to come
to hand, and it has the advantage not only of being a primitive
people, but one living on an island, so possessing until lately its
own little-impaired indigenous culture, as far as possible remote in
space from our own; the record also has been made, as carefully and as
impartially as one can well expect, by a missionary's wife who speaks
from a knowledge covering over twenty years.  [Footnote: Emma
Hadfield, _Among the Natives of the Loyalty Group_. 1920. It would no
doubt have been more satisfactory to select a people like the Fijians
rather than the Lifuans, for they represented a more robust and
accomplished form of a rather similar culture, but their culture has
receded into the past,--and the same may be said of the Marquesans of
whom Melville left, in _Typee_, a famous and delightful picture which
other records confirm,--while that of the Lifuans is still recent.]

It is almost needless to add that she is as little concerned with any
theory of the art of life as the people she is describing.

The Loyalty Islands lie to the east of New Caledonia, and have
belonged to France for more than half a century. They are thus
situated in much the same latitude as Egypt is in the Northern
hemisphere, but with a climate tempered by the ocean. It is with the
Island of Lifu that we are mainly concerned. There are no streams or
mountains in this island, though a ridge of high rocks with large and
beautiful caves contains stalactites and stalagmites and deep pools of
fresh water; these pools, before the coming of the Christians, were
the abode of the spirits of the departed, and therefore greatly
reverenced. A dying man would say to his friends: "I will meet you all
again in the caves where the stalactites are."

The Loyalty Islanders, who are of average European stature, are a
handsome race, except for their thick lips and dilated nostrils,
which, however, are much less pronounced than among African negroes.
They have soft large brown eyes, wavy black hair, white teeth, and
rich brown skin of varying depth. Each tribe has its own well-defined
territory and its own chief. Although possessing high moral qualities,
they are a laughter-loving people, and neither their climate nor their
mode of life demands prolonged hard labour, but they can work as well
as the average Briton, if need be, for several consecutive days, and,
when the need is over, lounge or ramble, sleep or talk. The basis of
their culture--and that is doubtless the significant fact for us--is
artistic. Every one learned music, dancing, and song. Therefore it is
natural for them to regard rhythm and grace in all the actions of
life, and almost a matter of instinct to cultivate beauty in all
social relationships. Men and boys spent much time in tattooing and
polishing their brown skins, in dyeing and dressing their long wavy
hair (golden locks, as much admired as they always have been in
Europe, being obtained by the use of lime), and in anointing their
bodies. These occupations were, of course, confined to the men, for
man is naturally the ornamental sex and woman the useful sex. The
women gave no attention to their hair, except to keep it short. It was
the men also who used oils and perfumes, not the women, who, however,
wore bracelets above the elbow and beautiful long strings of jade
beads. No clothing is worn until the age of twenty-five or thirty, and
then all dress alike, except that chiefs fasten the girdle differently
and wear more elaborate ornaments. These people have sweet and musical
voices and they cultivate them. They are good at learning languages
and they are great orators. The Lifuan language is soft and liquid,
one word running into another pleasantly to the ear, and it is so
expressive that one may sometimes understand the meaning by the sound.
In one of these islands, Uvea, so great is the eloquence of the people
that they employ oratory to catch fish, whom indeed they regard in
their legends as half human, and it is believed that a shoal of fish,
when thus politely plied with compliments from a canoe, will
eventually, and quite spontaneously, beach themselves spellbound.

For a primitive people the art of life is necessarily of large part
concerned with eating. It is recognised that no one can go hungry when
his neighbour has food, so no one was called upon to make any great
demonstration of gratitude on receiving a gift. Help rendered to
another was help to one's self, if it contributed to the common weal,
and what I do for you to-day you will do for me to-morrow. There was
implicit trust, and goods were left about without fear of theft, which
was rare and punishable by death. It was not theft, however, if, when
the owner was looking, one took an article one wanted. To tell a lie,
also, with intent to deceive, was a serious offence, though to tell a
lie when one was afraid to speak the truth was excusable. The Lifuans
are fond of food, but much etiquette is practised in eating. The food
must be conveyed to the mouth gracefully, daintily, leisurely. Every
one helped himself to the food immediately in front of him, without
hurry, without reaching out for dainty morsels (which were often
offered to women), for every one looked after his neighbour, and every
one naturally felt that he was his brother's keeper. So it was usual
to invite passers-by cordially to share in the repast. "In the matter
of food and eating," Mrs. Hadfield adds, "they might put many of our
countrymen to shame." Not only must one never eat quickly, or notice
dainties that are not near one, but it would be indelicate to eat in
the presence of people who are not themselves eating.  One must always
share, however small one's portion, and one must do so pleasantly; one
must accept also what is offered, but slowly, reluctantly; having
accepted it, you may, if you like, openly pass it on to some one else.
In old days the Lifuans were, occasionally, cannibals, not, it would
seem, either from necessity or any ritual reason, but because, like
some peoples elsewhere, they liked it, having, indeed, at times, a
kind of craving for animal food. If a man had twenty or thirty wives
and a large family, it would be quite correct if, now and then, he
cooked one of his own children, although presumably he might prefer
that some one else's child was chosen. The child would be cooked
whole, wrapped in banana or coconut leaves. The social inconveniences
of this practice have now been recognised. But they still feel the
utmost respect and reverence for the dead and fail to find anything
offensive or repulsive in a corpse. "Why should there be, seeing it
was once our food?" Nor have they any fear of death. To vermin they
seem to have little objection, but otherwise they have a strong love
of cleanliness.  The idea of using manure in agricultural operations
seems to them disgusting, and they never do use it. "The sea was the
public playground." Mothers take their little ones for sea-baths long
before they can walk, and small children learn to swim as they learn
to walk, without teaching. With their reverence for death is
associated a reverence for old age. "Old age is a term of respect, and
every one is pleased to be taken for older than he is since old age is
honoured." Still, regard for others was general--not confined to the
aged. In the church nowadays the lepers are seated on a separate
bench, and when the bench is occupied by a leper healthy women will
sometimes insist on sitting with him; they could not bear to see the
old man sitting alone as though he had no friends. There was much
demonstration on meeting friends after absence. A Lifuan always said
"Olea" ("Thank you") for any good news, though not affecting him
personally, as though it were a gift, for he was glad to be able to
rejoice with another. Being divided into small tribes, each with its
own autocratic chief, war was sometimes inevitable. It was attended by
much etiquette, which was always strictly observed. The Lifuans were
not acquainted with the civilised custom of making rules for warfare
and breaking them when war actually broke out. Several days' notice
must be given before hostilities were commenced. Women and children,
in contrast to the practice of civilised warfare, were never molested.
As soon as half a dozen fighters were put out of action on one side,
the chief of that side would give the command to cease fighting and
the war was over. An indemnity was then paid by the conquerors to the
vanquished, and not, as among civilised peoples, by the vanquished to
the conquerors.  It was felt to be the conquered rather than the
conqueror who needed consolation, and it also seemed desirable to show
that no feeling of animosity was left behind. This was not only a
delicate mark of consideration to the vanquished, but also very good
policy, as, by neglecting it, some Europeans may have had cause to
learn. This whole Lifuan art of living has, however, been undermined
by the arrival of Christianity with its usual accompaniments. The
Lifuans are substituting European vices for their own virtues. Their
simplicity and confidence are passing away, though, even yet, Mrs.
Hadfield says, they are conspicuous for their honesty, truthfulness,
good-humour, kindness, and politeness, remaining a manly and
intelligent people.




IV


THE Lifuans furnish an illustration which seems decisive.  But they
are savages, and on that account their example may be invalidated. It
is well to take another illustration from a people whose high and
long-continued civilisation is now undisputed.

The civilisation of China is ancient: that has long been a familiar
fact. But for more than a thousand years it was merely a legend to
Western Europeans; none had ever reached China, or, if they had, they
had never returned to tell the tale; there were too many fierce and
jealous barbarians between the East and the West. It was not until the
end of the thirteenth century, in the pages of Marco Polo, the
Venetian Columbus of the East,--for it was an Italian who discovered
the Old World as well as the New,--that China at last took definite
shape alike as a concrete fact and a marvellous dream. Later, Italian
and Portuguese travellers described it, and it is interesting to note
what they had to say. Thus Perera in the sixteenth century, in a
narrative which Willes translated for Hakluyt's "Voyages," presents a
detailed picture of Chinese life with an admiration all the more
impressive since we cannot help feeling how alien that civilisation
was to the Catholic traveller and how many troubles he had himself to
encounter. He is astonished, not only by the splendour of the lives of
the Chinese on the material side, alike in large things and in small,
but by their fine manners in all the ordinary course of life, the
courtesy in which they seemed to him to exceed all other nations, and
in the fair dealing which far surpassed that of all other Gentiles and
Moors, while in the exercise of justice he found them superior even to
many Christians, for they do justice to unknown strangers, which in
Christendom is rare; moreover, there were hospitals in every city and
no beggars were ever to be seen. It was a vision of splendour and
delicacy and humanity, which he might have seen, here and there, in
the courts of princes in Europe, but nowhere in the West on so vast a
scale as in China.

The picture which Marco Polo, the first European to reach China (at
all events in what we may call modern times), presented in the
thirteenth century was yet more impressive, and that need not surprise
us, for when he saw China it was still in its great Augustan age of
the Sung Dynasty. He represents the city of Hang-Chau as the most
beautiful and sumptuous in the world, and we must remember that he
himself belonged to Venice, soon to be known as the most beautiful and
sumptuous city of Europe, and had acquired no small knowledge of the
world. As he describes its life, so exquisite and refined in its
civilisation, so humane, so peaceful, so joyous, so well ordered, so
happily shared by the whole population, we realise that here had been
reached the highest point of urban civilisation to which Man has ever
attained. Marco Polo can think of no word to apply to it--and that
again and again--but Paradise.

The China of to-day seems less strange and astonishing to the
Westerner. It may even seem akin to him--partly through its decline,
partly through his own progress in civilisation--by virtue of its
direct and practical character. That is the conclusion of a sensitive
and thoughtful traveller in India and Japan and China, G. Lowes
Dickinson. He is impressed by the friendliness, the profound humanity,
the gaiety, of the Chinese, by the unequalled self-respect,
independence, and courtesy of the common people.  "The fundamental
attitude of the Chinese towards life is, and has always been, that of
the most modern West, nearer to us now than to our mediaeval
ancestors, infinitely nearer to us than India." [Footnote: G. Lowes
Dickinson, _An Essay on the Civilisations of India, China, and Japan_
(1914), p. 47. No doubt there are shades to be added to this picture.
They may be found in a book, published two years earlier, _China as it
Really Is_, by "a Resident in Peking" who claims to have been born in
China. Chinese culture has receded, in part swamped by
over-population, and concerning a land where to-day, it has lately
been said, "magnificence, crudity, delicacy, fetidity, and fragrance
are blended," it is easy for Westerners to show violent difference of
opinion.]

So far it may seem scarcely as artists that these travellers regard
the Chinese. They insist on their cheerful, practical, social,
good-mannered, tolerant, peaceable, humane way of regarding life, on
the remarkably educable spirit in which they are willing, and easily
able, to change even ancient and deep-rooted habits when it seems
convenient and beneficial to do so; they are willing to take the world
lightly, and seem devoid of those obstinate conservative instincts by
which we are guided in Europe. The "Resident in Peking" says they are
the least romantic of peoples.  He says it with a _nuance_ of
dispraise, but Lowes Dick-inson says precisely the same thing about
Chinese poetry, and with no such _nuance_: "It is of all poetry I know
the most human and the least symbolic or romantic.  It contemplates
life just as it presents itself, without any veil of ideas, any
rhetoric or sentiment; it simply clears away the obstruction which
habit has built up between us and the beauty of things and leaves
that, showing in its own nature." Every one who has learnt to enjoy
Chinese poetry will appreciate the delicate precision of this comment.
The quality of their poetry seems to fall into line with the simple,
direct, childlike quality which all observers note in the Chinese
themselves. The unsympathetic "Resident in Peking" describes the
well-known etiquette of politeness in China: "A Chinaman will inquire
of what noble country you are. You return the question, and he will
say his lowly province is so-and-so. He will invite you to do him the
honour of directing your jewelled feet to his degraded house. You
reply that you, a discredited worm, will crawl into his magnificent
palace." Life becomes all play. Ceremony--the Chinese are unequalled
for ceremony, and a Government Department, the Board of Rites and
Ceremonies, exists to administer it--is nothing but more or less
crystallised play. Not only is ceremony here "almost an instinct,"
but, it has been said, "A Chinese thinks in theatrical terms." We are
coming near to the sphere of art.

The quality of play in the Chinese character and Chinese civilisation
has impressed alike them who have seen China from afar and by actual
contact. It used to be said that the Chinese had invented gunpowder
long before Europeans and done nothing with it but make fireworks.
That seemed to the whole Western world a terrible blindness to the
valuable uses of gunpowder, and it is only of late years that a
European commentator has ventured to remark that "the proper use of
gunpowder is obviously to make fireworks, which may be very beautiful
things, not to kill men." Certainly the Chinese, at all events,
appreciate to the full this proper use of gunpowder. "One of the most
obvious characteristics of the Chinese is their love of fireworks," we
are told. The gravest people and the most intellectual occupy
themselves with fireworks, and if the works of Bergson, in which
pyrotechnical allusions are so frequent, are ever translated into
Chinese, one can well believe that China will produce enthusiastic
Bergsonians. All toys are popular; everybody, it is said, buys toys of
one sort or another: paper windmills, rattles, Chinese lanterns, and
of course kites, which have an almost sacred significance. They
delight, also, in more complicated games of skill, including an
elaborate form of chess, far more difficult than ours.  [Footnote:
See, for instance, the chapter on games in Professor E. H. Parker's
_China: Past and Present_. Reference may be made to the same author's
important and impartial larger work, _China: Its History_, with a
discriminating chapter on Chinese personal characteristics. Perhaps,
tha most penetrating study of Chinese psychology is, however, Arthur
H.  Smith's _Chinese Characteristics_.] It is unnecessary to add that
to philosophy, a higher and more refined form of play, the Chinese are
peculiarly addicted, and philosophic discussion is naturally woven in
with an "art of exquisite enjoyment"--carried probably to greater
perfection than anywhere else in the world. Bertrand Russell, who
makes this remark, in the suggestive comments on his own visit to
China, observes how this simple, childlike, yet profound attitude
towards life results in a liberation of the impulses to play and
enjoyment which "makes Chinese life unbelievably restful and
delightful after the solemn cruelties of the West." We are reminded of
Gourmont's remark that "pleasure is a human creation, a delicate art,
to which, as for music or painting, only a few are apt."

The social polity which brings together the people who thus view life
is at once singular and appropriate.  I well remember how in youth a
new volume of the Sacred Books of the East Series, a part of the
Confucian Lî-kî, came into my hands and how delighted I was to leam
that in China life was regulated by music and ceremony. That was the
beginning of an interest in China that has not ceased to grow, though
now, when it has become a sort of fashion to exalt the spiritual
qualities of the Chinese above those of other peoples, one may well
feel disinclined to admit any interest in China. But the conception
itself, since it seems to have had its beginning at least a thousand
years before Christ, may properly be considered independently of our
Western fashions. It is Propriety--the whole ceremony of life--in
which all harmonious intercourse subsists; it is "the channel by which
we apprehend the ways of Heaven," in no supernatural sense, for it is
on the earth and not in the skies that the Confucian Heaven lies
concealed. But if human feelings, the instincts--for in this matter
the ancient Chinese were at one with our modern psychologists,--are
the field that has to be cultivated, and it is ceremony that ploughs
it, and the seeds of right action that are to be planted on it, and
discipline that is to weed it, and love that is to gather in the
fruits, it is in music, and the joy and peace that accompany music,
that it all ends. Indeed, it is also in music that it all begins. For
the sphere in which ceremonies act is Man's external life; his
internal life is the sphere of music. It is music that moulds the
manners and customs that are comprised under ceremony, for Confucius
held that there can be music without sound where "virtue is deep and
silent"; and we are reminded of the "Crescendo of Silences" on the
Chinese pavilion in Villiers de l'Isle Adam's story, "Le Secret de
l'ancienne Musique." It is music that regulates the heart and mind and
with that development brings joy, and joy brings repose. And so "Man
became Heaven." "Let ceremonies and music have their course until the
earth is filled with them!"

It is sometimes said that among Chinese moralists and philosophers
Lao-tze, the deepest of them all, alone stands aside from the chorus
in praise of music and ceremony. When once Confucius came to consult
Lao-tze concerning the rules of propriety, and reverence for the
teaching of the sages of antiquity, we are told, Lao-tze replied: "The
men of whom you speak, sir, have, if you please, together with their
bones, mouldered." Confucius went away, puzzled if not dissatisfied.
He was willing to work not only from within outwards, but from without
inwards, because he allowed so large a place for social solidity, for
traditionalism, for paternalism, though he recognised that ceremony is
subordinate in the scheme of life, as colour is in a painting, the
picture being the real thing. Lao-tze was an individualist and a
mystic. He was little concerned with moralities in the ordinary sense.
He recognised no action but from within outwards. But though Confucius
could scarcely have altogether grasped his conception, he was quite
able to grasp that of Confucius, and his indifference to tradition, to
rule and propriety was simply an insistence on essential reality, on
"music." "Ceremonies," he said, "are the outward expression of inward
feeling." He was no more opposed to the fundamental Chinese conception
than George Fox was opposed to Christianity in refusing to observe the
mere forms and ceremonies of the Church. A sound Confucianism is the
outward manifestation of Taoism (as Lao-tze himself taught it), just
as a sound socialism is the outward manifestation of a genuine
individualism. It has been well said that Chinese socialistic
solidarity rests on an individualistic basis, it is not a bureaucratic
State socialism; it works from within outward. (One of the first
European visitors to China remarked that there a street was like a
home.) This is well shown by so great and typical a Chinese
philosopher as Meh-ti, [Footnote: His ideas have been studied by
Madame Alexandra David, _Le Phi-losopse Meh-ti et l'Idée de
Solidarité_. London, 1907.] who lived shortly after Confucius, in the
fifth century B.C. He taught universal love, with universal equality,
and for him to love meant to act. He admitted an element of
self-interest as a motive for such an attitude. He desired to
universalise mutual self-help. Following Confucius, but yet several
centuries before Jesus, he declared that a man should love his
neighbour, his fellow man, as himself. "When he sees his fellow
hungry, he feeds him; when he sees him cold, he clothes him; ill, he
nurses him; dead, he buries him." This, he said, was by no means
opposed to filial piety; for if one cares for the parents of others,
they in turn will care for his.  But, it was brought against him, the
power of egoism?  The Master agreed. Yet, he said, Man accepts more
difficult things. He can renounce joy, life itself, for even absurd
and ridiculous ends. A single generation, he added, such is the power
of imitation, might suffice to change a people's customs. But Meh-ti
remained placid. He remarked that the great ones of the earth were
against human solidarity and equality; he left it at that. He took no
refuge in mysticism. Practical social action was the sole end he had
in view, and we have to remember that his ideals are largely embodied
in Chinese institutions.  [Footnote: Eugène Simon, _La Cité
Chinoise_.]

We may understand now how it is that in China, and in China alone
among the great surviving civilisations, we find that art animates the
whole of life, even its morality. "This universal presence of art,"
remarks an acute yet discriminating observer, Emile Hovelaque, whom I
have already quoted, [Footnote: E. Hovelaque, _La Chine_ (Paris,
1920), p. 47.] "manifested in the smallest utensil, the humblest
stalls, the notices on the shops, the handwriting, the rhythm of
movement, always regular and measured, as though to the tune of
unheard music, announces a civilisation which is complete in itself,
elaborated in the smallest detail, penetrated by one spirit, which no
interruption ever breaks, a harmony which becomes at length a
hallucinatory and overwhelming obsession." Or, as another writer has
summed up the Chinese attitude: "For them the art of life is one, as
this world and the other are one.  Their aim is to make the Kingdom of
Heaven here and now."

It is obvious that a natural temperament in which the art-impulse is
so all-embracing, and the aesthetic sensibility so acute, might well
have been of a perilous instability. We could scarcely have been
surprised if, like that surpassing episode in Egyptian history of
which Akhenaten was the leader and Tell-el-Amarna the tomb, it had
only endured for a moment. Yet Chinese civilisation, which has
throughout shown the dominating power of this sensitive temperament,
has lasted longer than any other. The reason is that the very excesses
of their temperament forced the Chinese to fortify themselves against
its perils. The Great Wall, built more than two thousand years ago,
and still to-day almost the most impressive work of man on the earth,
is typical of this attitude of the Chinese.  They have exercised a
stupendous energy in fortifying themselves against the natural enemies
of their own temperament. When one looks at it from this point of
view, it is easy to see that, alike in its large outlines and its
small details, Chinese life is always the art of balancing an
aesthetic temperament and guarding against its excesses. We see this
in the whole of the ancient and still prevailing system of Confucian
morality with its insistence on formal ceremony, even when, departing
from the thought of its most influential founder,--for ceremonialism
in China would have existed even if Confucius had not lived,--it
tended to become merely an external formalism. We see it in the
massive solidarity of Chinese life, the systematic social organisation
by which individual responsibility, even though leaving individuality
itself intact, is merged in the responsibility of the family and the
still larger group. We see it in the whole drift of Chinese
philosophy, which is throughout sedative and contemplative.  We see it
in the element of stoicism on the one hand and cruelty on the other
which in so genuinely good-natured a people would otherwise seem
puzzling. The Chinese love of flowers and gardens and landscape
scenery is in the same direction, and indeed one may say much the same
of Chinese painting and Chinese poetry.  [Footnote: This point has not
escaped the more acute students of Chinese civilisation. Thus Dr. John
Steele, in his edition of the _I-Li_, remarks that "ceremonial was far
from being a series of observances, empty and unprofitable, such as it
degenerated into in later time. It was meant to inculcate that habit
of self-control and ordered action which was the expression of a mind
fully instructed in the inner meaning of things, and sensitive to
every impression." Still more clearly, Reginald Farrer wrote, in _On
the Eaves of the World_, that "the philosophic calm that the Chinese
deliberately cultivate is their necessary armour to protect the
excessive susceptibility to emotion. The Chinese would be for ever the
victims of their nerves had they not for four thousand years pursued
reason and self-control with self-protective enthusiasm."]

That is why it is only to-day that we in the West have reached the
point of nervous susceptibility which enables us in some degree to
comprehend the aesthetic supremacy which the Chinese reached more than
a thousand years ago.

Thus, during its extremely long history--for the other great
civilisations with which it was once contemporary have passed away or
been disintegrated and transformed--Chinese civilisation has borne
witness to the great fact that all human life is art. It may be
because they have realised this so thoroughly that the Chinese have
been able to preserve their civilisation so long, through all the
violent shocks to which it has been subjected. There can be no doubt,
however, that, during the greater part of the last thousand years,
there has been, however slow and gradual, a decline in the vitality of
Chinese civilisation, largely due, it may well be, to the crushing
pressure of an excessive population.  For, however remarkable the
admiration which China arouses even to-day, its finest flowering
periods in the special arts lie far in the past, while in the art of
living itself the Chinese have long grown languid. The different
reports of ancient and modern travellers regarding one definite social
manifestation, the prevalence of beggary, cannot fail to tell us
something regarding the significant form of their social life. Modern
travellers complain of the plague constituted by the prevalence of
beggars in China; they are even a fixed and permanent institution on a
trades-union basis.  But in the sixteenth century Galeotto Perera
noticed with surprise in China the absence of beggars, as Marco Polo
had before him, and Friar Caspar de Cruz remarked that the Chinese so
abhorred idleness that they gave no alms to the poor and mocked at the
Portuguese for doing so: "Why give alms to a knave?  Let him go and
earn it." Their own priests, he adds, they sometimes whipped as being
knaves. (It should be noted at the same time that it was considered
reasonable only to give half the day to work, the other half to joy
and recreation.) But they built great asylums for the helpless poor,
and found employment for blind women, gorgeously dressed and painted
with ceruse and vermilion, as prostitutes, who were more esteemed in
early China than they have been since. That is a curious instance of
the unflinching practicality still shown by the Chinese in endless
ways. The undoubted lassitude in the later phases of this long-lived
Chinese culture has led to features in the art of life, such as
beggary and dirt among the poor, not manifested in the younger
offshoot of Chinese and Korean culture in Japan, though it is only
fair to point out that impartial English observers, like Parker,
consider this prevalence of vermin and dirt as simply due to the
prevalence of poverty, and not greater than we find among the poor in
England and elsewhere in the West. Marco Polo speaks of three hundred
public baths in one city alone in his time. We note also that in the
more specialised arts the transcendence of China belongs to the past,
and even sometimes a remote past. It is so in the art of philosophy,
and the arts of poetry and painting. It is so also in the art of
pottery, in which Chinese supremacy over the rest of the world has
been longest recognised--has not the word "china" for centuries been
our name for the finest pottery?--and is most beyond measure. Our
knowledge of the pottery of various cultures excels that of any other
human products because of all it is the most perdurable. We can better
estimate their relative eesthetic worth now than in the days when a
general reverence for Greek antiquity led to a popular belief in the
beauty of Greek pottery, though scarcely a single type of its many
forms can fairly be so considered or even be compared to the products
of the Minoan predecessors of Greek culture, however interesting they
may still remain for us as the awkward and inappropriate foundation
for exquisite little pictures. The greatest age of this universal
human art was in China and was over many centuries ago. But with what
devotion, with what absolute concentration of the spirit, the Chinese
potters of the great period struggled with the problem of art is
finely illustrated by the well-known story which an old Chinese
historian tells of the sacrifice of the divine T'ung, the spirit who
protects potters. It happened that a complicated problem had baffled
the potters. T'ung laid down his life to serve them and to achieve the
solution of the problem. He plunged into the fire and the bowl came
out perfect. "The vessel's perfect glaze is the god's fat and blood;
the body material is the god's body of flesh; the blue of the
decoration, with the brilliant lustre of gems, is the essence of the
god's pure spirit." That story embodies the Chinese symbol of the art
of living, just as we embody our symbol of that art in the Crucifixion
of Jesus. The form is diverse; the essence is the same.




V


IT will be seen that when we analyse the experiences of life and look
at it simply, in the old-fashioned way, liberated from the artificial
complexities of a temporary and now, it may be, departing
civilisation, what we find is easy to sum up. We find, that is to say,
that Man has forced himself to move along this line, and that line,
and the other line. But it is the same water of life that runs in all
these channels. Until we have ascended to a height where this is
clear, to see all our little dogmatisms will but lead us astray.

We may illuminatingly change the analogy and turn to the field of
chemistry. All these various elements of life are but, as it were,
allotropie forms of the same element. The most fundamental among these
forms is that of art, for life in all its forms, even morality in the
narrowest sense, is, as Duprat has argued, a matter of technique, and
technique at once brings us to the elements of art. If we would
understand what we are dealing with, we may, therefore, best study
these forms under that of art.

There is, however, a deeper chemical analogy than this to be seen. It
may well be, indeed, that it is more than an analogy. In chemistry we
are dealing, not merely with the elements of life, but with the
elements of the world, even of what we call our universe. It is not
unreasonable to think that the same law holds good for both. We see
that the forms of life may all be found, and then better understood,
in one form. Some day, perhaps, we shall also see that that fact is
only a corollary of the larger fact--or, if any one prefers so to
regard it, the smaller fact--that the chemical elements of our world
can be regarded as all only transmutations of one element. From of
old, men instinctively divined that this might be so, though they were
merely concerned to change the elements into gold, the element which
they most highly valued.  In our own times this transmutation is
beginning to become, on a minute scale, a demonstrable fact, though it
would seem easier to transmute elements into lead than into gold.
Matter, we are thus coming to see, may not be a confused variety of
separate substances, but simply a different quantitative arrangement
of a single fundamental stuff, which might possibly be identical with
hydrogen or some other already known element. Similarly we may now
believe that the men of old who thought that all human life was made
of one stuff were not altogether wrong, and we may, with greater
assurance than they were able to claim, analyse the modes of human
action into different quantitative or other arrangements of which the
most fundamental may well be identical with art.

This may perhaps become clearer if we consider more in detail one of
the separate arts, selecting the most widely symbolic of all, the art
that is most clearly made of the stuff of life, and so able to
translate most truly and clearly into beautiful form the various
modalities of life.




CHAPTER II

THE ART OF DANCING


I


DANCING and building are the two primary and essential arts. The art
of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express
themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or
architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the
person; and in the end they unite. Music, acting, poetry proceed in
the one mighty stream; sculpture, painting, all the arts of design, in
the other. There is no primary art outside these two arts, for their
origin is far earlier than man himself; and dancing came first.
[Footnote: It is even possible that, in earlier than human times,
dancing and architecture may have been the result of the same impulse.
The nest of birds is the chief early form of building, and Edmund
Selous has suggested (_Zoologist_, December, 1901) that the nest may
first have arisen a» an accidental result of the ecstatic sexual dance
of birds.]

That is one reason why dancing, however it may at times be scorned by
passing fashions, has a profound and eternal attraction even for those
one might suppose farthest from its influence. The joyous beat of the
feet of children, the cosmic play of philosophers' thoughts rise and
fall according to the same laws of rhythm. If we are indifferent to
the art of dancing, we have failed to understand, not merely the
supreme manifestation of physical life, but also the supreme symbol of
spiritual life.

The significance of dancing, in the wide sense, thus lies in the fact
that it is simply an intimate concrete appeal of a general rhythm,
that general rhythm which marks, not life only, but the universe, if
one may still be allowed so to name the sum of the cosmic influences
that reach us.. We need not, indeed, go so far as the planets or the
stars and outline their ethereal dances. We have but to stand on the
seashore and watch the waves that beat at our feet, to observe that at
nearly regular intervals this seemingly monotonous rhythm is
accentuated for several beats, so that the waves are really dancing
the measure of a tune. It need surprise us not at all that rhythm,
ever tending to be moulded into a tune, should mark all the physical
and spiritual manifestations of life. Dancing is the primitive
expression alike of religion and of love--of religion from the
earliest human times we know of and of love from a period long
anterior to the coming of man. The art of dancing, moreover, is
intimately entwined with all human tradition of war, of labour, of
pleasure, of education, while some of the wisest philosophers and the
most ancient civilisations have regarded the dance as the pattern in
accordance with which the moral life of men must be woven. To realise,
therefore, what dancing means for mankind--the poignancy and the
many-sidedness of its appeal--we must survey the whole sweep of human
life, both at its highest and at its deepest moments.



II


"WHAT do you dance?" When a man belonging to one branch of the great
Bantu division of mankind met a member of another, said Livingstone,
that was the question he asked. What a man danced, that was his tribe,
his social customs, his religion; for, as an anthropologist has put
it, "a savage does not preach his religion, he dances it."

There are peoples in the world who have no secular dances, only
religious dances; and some investigators believe with Gerland that
every dance was of religious origin. That view may seem too extreme,
even if we admit that some even of our modern dances, like the waltz,
may have been originally religious. Even still (as Skene has shown
among the Arabs and Swahili of Africa) so various are dances and their
functions among some peoples that they cover the larger part of life.
Yet we have to remember that for primitive man there is no such thing
as religion apart from life, for religion covers everything. Dancing
is a magical operation for the attainment of real and important ends
of every kind. It was clearly of immense benefit to the individual and
to society, by imparting strength and adding organised harmony. It
seemed reasonable to suppose that it attained other beneficial ends,
that were incalculable, for calling down blessings or warding off
misfortunes. We may conclude, with Wundt, that the dance was, in the
beginning, the expression of the whole man, for the whole man was
religious.  [Footnote: "Not the epic song, but the dance," Wundt says
(_Volkerpsychologie_, 3d ed. 1911, Bd. I, Teil 1, p. 277), "accompanied
by a monotonous and often meaningless song, constitutes everywhere the
most primitive, and, in spite of that primitiveness, the most highly
developed art.  Whether as a ritual dance, or as a pure emotional
expression of the joy in rhythmic bodily movement, it rules the life
of primitive men to such a degree that all other forms of art are
subordinate to it."]

Thus, among primitive peoples, religion being so large a part of life,
the dance inevitably becomes of supreme religious importance. To dance
was at once both to worship and to pray. Just as we still find in our
Prayer Books that there are divine services for all the great
fundamental acts of life,--for birth, for marriage, for death,--as
well as for the cosmic procession of the world as marked by
ecclesiastical festivals, and for the great catastrophes of nature,
such as droughts, so also it has ever been among primitive peoples.
For all the solemn occasions of life, for bridals and for funerals,
for seed-time and for harvest, for war and for peace, for all these
things there were fitting dances.  To-day we find religious people who
in church pray for rain or for the restoration of their friends to
health.  Their forefathers also desired these things, but, instead of
praying for them, they danced for them the fitting dance which
tradition had handed down, and which the chief or the medicine-man
solemnly conducted.  The gods themselves danced, as the stars dance in
the sky--so at least the Mexicans, and we may be sure many other
peoples, have held; and to dance is therefore to imitate the gods, to
work with them, perhaps to persuade them to work in the direction of
our own desires. "Work for us!" is the song-refrain, expressed or
implied, of every religious dance. In the worship of solar deities in
various countries, it was customary to dance round the altar, as the
stars dance round the sun. Even in Europe the popular belief that the
sun dances on Easter Sunday has perhaps scarcely yet died out. To
dance is to take part in the cosmic control of the world. Every sacred
dionysian dance is an imitation of the divine dance.

All religions, and not merely those of primitive character, have been
at the outset, and sometimes throughout, in some measure saltatory.
That was recognised even in the ancient world by acute observers, like
Lucian, who remarks in his essay on dancing that "you cannot find a
single ancient mystery in which there is no dancing; in fact most
people say of the devotees of the Mysteries that 'they dance them
out.'" This is so all over the world. It is not more pronounced in
early Christianity, and among the ancient Hebrews who danced before
the ark, than among the Australian, aborigines whose great corroborées
are religious dances conducted by the medicine-men with their sacred
staves in their hands. Every American Indian tribe seems to have had
its own religious dances, varied and elaborate, often with a richness
of meaning which the patient study of modern investigators has but
slowly revealed. The Shamans in the remote steppes of Northern Siberia
have their .ecstatic religious dances, and in modern Europe the
Turkish dervishes--perhaps of related stock--still dance in their
cloisters similar ecstatic dances, combined with song and prayer, as a
regular part of devotional service.

These religious dances, it may be observed, are sometimes ecstatic,
sometimes pantomimic. It is natural that this should be so. By each
road it is possible to penetrate towards the divine mystery of the
world. The auto-intoxication of rapturous movement brings the
devotees, for a while at least, into that self-forgetful union with
the not-self which the mystic ever seeks. The ecstatic Hindu dance in
honour of the pre-Aryan hill god, afterwards Siva, became in time a
great symbol, "the clearest image of the _activity_ of God," it has
been called, "which any art or religion can boast of." [Footnote: See
an interesting essay in _The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays_,
by Ananda Coomaraswamy. New York, 1918.] Pantomimic dances, on the
other hand, with their effort to heighten natural expression and to
imitate natural process, bring the dancers into the divine sphere of
creation and enable them to assist vicariously in the energy of the
gods. The dance thus becomes the presentation of a divine drama, the
vital reënactment of a sacred history, in which the worshipper is
enabled to play a real part.  [Footnote: This view was clearly put
forward, long ago, by W. W. Newell at the International Congress of
Anthropology at Chicago in 1893. It has become almost a commonplace
since.] In this way ritual arises.

It is in this sphere--highly primitive as it is--of pantomimic dancing
crystallised in ritual, rather than in the sphere of ecstatic dancing,
that we may to-day in civilisation witness the survivals of the dance
in religion. The divine services of the American Indian, said Lewis
Morgan, took the form of "set dances, each with its own name, songs,
steps, and costume." At this point the early Christian, worshipping
the Divine Body, was able to join in spiritual communion with the
ancient Egyptian or the later Japanese [Footnote: See a charming paper
by Marcella Azra Hincks, "The Art of Dancing in Japan," _Fortnightly
Review_, July, 1906. Pantomimic dancing, which has played a highly
important part in Japan, was introduced into religion from China, it
is said, in the earliest time, and was not adapted to secular purposes
until the sixteenth century.] or the modern American Indian. They are
all alike privileged to enter, each in his own way, a sacred mystery,
and to participate in the sacrifice of a heavenly Mass.

What by some is considered to be the earliest known Christian
ritual--the "Hymn of Jesus" assigned to the second century--is nothing
but a sacred dance.  Eusebius in the third century stated that Philo's
description of the worship of the Therapeuts agreed at all points with
Christian custom, and that meant the prominence of dancing, to which
indeed Eusebius often refers in connection with Christian worship. It
has been supposed by some that the Christian Church was originally a
theatre, the choir being the raised stage, even the word "choir," it
is argued, meaning an enclosed space for dancing. It is certain that
at the Eucharist the faithful gesticulated with their hands, danced
with their feet, flung their bodies about.  Chrysostom, who referred
to this behaviour round the Holy Table at Antioch, only objected to
drunken excesses in connection with it; the custom itself he evidently
regarded as traditional and right.

While the central function of Christian worship is a sacred drama, a
divine pantomime, the associations of Christianity and dancing are by
no means confined to the ritual of the Mass and its later more
attenuated transformations. The very idea of dancing had a sacred and
mystic meaning to the early Christians, who had meditated profoundly
on the text, "We have piped unto you and ye have not danced." Origen
prayed that above all things there may be made operative in us the
mystery "of the stars dancing in Heaven for the salvation of the
Universe." So that the'monks of the Cistercian Order, who in a later
age worked for the world more especially by praying for it ("orare est
la-borare"), were engaged in the same task on earth as the stars in
Heaven; dancing and praying are the same thing. St. Basil, who was so
enamoured of natural things, described the angels dancing in Heaven,
and later the author of the "Dieta Salutis" (said to have been St.
Bonaventura), which is supposed to have influenced Dante in assigning
so large a place to dancing in the "Paradiso," described dancing as
the occupation of the inmates of Heaven, and Christ as the leader of
the dance. Even in more modern times an ancient Cornish carol sang of
the life of Jesus as a dance, and represented him as declaring that he
died in order that man "may come unto the general dance." [Footnote: I
owe some of these facts to an interesting article by G. R. Mead, "The
Sacred Dance of Jesus," _The Quest_, October, 1910.]

This attitude could not fail to be reflected in practice.  Genuine
dancing, not merely formalised and unrecognisable dancing, such as the
traditionalised Mass, must have been frequently introduced into
Christian worship in early times. Until a few centuries ago it
remained not uncommon, and it even still persists in remote corners of
the Christian world. In English cathedrals dancing went on until the
fourteenth century. At Paris, Limoges, and elsewhere in France, the
priests danced in the choir at Easter up to the seventeenth century,
in Roussillon up to the eighteenth century.  Roussillon is a Catalan
province with Spanish traditions, and it is in Spain, where dancing is
a deeper and more passionate impulse than elsewhere in Europe, that
religious dancing took firmest root and flourished longest. In the
cathedrals of Seville, Toledo, Valencia, and Jeres there was formerly
dancing, though it now only survives at a few special festivals in the
first.  [Footnote: The dance of the Seises in Seville Cathedral is
evidently of great antiquity, though it was so much a matter of course
that we do not hear of it until 1690, when the Archbishop of the day,
in opposition to the Chapter, wished to suppress it. A decree of the
King was finally obtained permitting it, provided it was performed
only by men, so that evidently, before that date, girls as well as
boys took part in it. Rev. John Morris, "Dancing in Churches," _The
Month_, December, 1892; also a valuable article on the Seises by J. B.
Trend, in _Music and Letters_, January, 1921.] At Alaro in Mallorca,
also at the present day, a dancing company called Els Cosiers, on the
festival of St. Roch, the patron saint of the place, dance in the
church in fanciful costumes with tambourines, up to the steps of the
high altar, immediately after Mass, and then dance out of the church.
In another part of the Christian world, in the Abyssinian Church--an
offshoot of the Eastern Church--dancing is also said still to form
part of the worship.

Dancing, we may see throughout the world, has been so essential, so
fundamental, a part of all vital and un-degenerate religion, that,
whenever a new religion appears, a religion of the spirit and not
merely an anaemic religion of the intellect, we should still have to
ask of it the question of the Bantu: "What do you dance?"




III


DANCING is not only intimately associated with religion, it has an
equally intimate association with love.  Here, indeed, the
relationship is even more primitive, for it is far older than man.
Dancing, said Lucian, is as old as love. Among insects and among birds
it may be said that dancing is often an essential part of love. In
courtship the male dances, sometimes in rivalry with other males, in
order to charm the female; then, after a short or long interval, the
female is aroused to share his ardour and join in the dance; the final
climax of the dance is the union of the lovers. Among the mammals most
nearly related to man, indeed, dancing is but little developed: their
energies are more variously diffused, though a close observer of the
apes, Dr. Louis Robinson, has pointed out that the "spasmodic jerking
of the chimpanzee's feeble legs," pounding the partition of his cage,
is the crude motion out of which "the heavenly alchemy of evolution
has created the divine movements of Pavlova"; but it must be
remembered that the anthropoid apes are offshoots only from the stock
that produced Man, his cousins and not his ancestors.  It is the more
primitive love-dance of insects and birds that seems to reappear among
human savages in various parts of the world, notably in Africa, and in
a conventionalised and symbolised form it is still danced in
civilisation to-day. Indeed, it is in this aspect that dancing has so
often aroused reprobation, from the days of early Christianity until
the present, among those for whom the dance has merely been, in the
words of a seventeenth-century writer, a series of "immodest and
dissolute movements by which the cupidity of the flesh is aroused."

But in nature and among primitive peoples it has its value precisely
on this account. It is a process of courtship and, even more than
that, it is a novitiate for love, and a novitiate which was found to
be an admirable training for love. Among some peoples, indeed, as the
Omahas, the same word meant both to dance and to love. By his beauty,
his energy, his skill, the male must win the female, so impressing the
image of himself on her imagination that finally her desire is aroused
to overcome her reticence. That is the task of the male throughout
nature, and in innumerable species besides Man it has been found that
the school in which the task may best be learnt is the dancing-school.
Those who have not the skill and the strength to learn are left
behind, and, as they are probably the least capable members of the
race, it may be in this way that a kind of sexual selection has been
embodied in unconscious eugenics, and aided the higher development of
the race.  The moths and the butterflies, the African ostrich and the
Sumatran argus pheasant, with their fellows innumerable, have been the
precursors of man in the strenuous school of erotic dancing, fitting
themselves for selection by the females of their choice as the most
splendid progenitors of the future race.  [Footnote: See, for
references, Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, vol.
III; _Analysis of the Sexual Impulse_, pp. 29, etc.; and Westermarck,
_History of Human Marriage_, vol. I, chap, xm, p. 470.]

>From this point of view, it is clear, the dance performed a double
function. On the one hand, the tendency to dance, arising under the
obscure stress of this impulse, brought out the best possibilities the
individual held the promise of; on the other hand, at the moment of
courtship, the display of the activities thus acquired developed on
the sensory side all the latent possibilities of beauty which at last
became conscious in man. That this came about we cannot easily escape
concluding. How it came about, how it happens that some of the least
intelligent of creatures thus developed a beauty and a grace that are
enchanting even to our human eyes, is a miracle, even if not affected
by the mystery of sex, which we cannot yet comprehend.

When we survey the human world, the erotic dance of the animal world
is seen not to have lost, but rather to have gained, influence. It is
no longer the males alone who are thus competing for the love of the
females.  It comes about by a modification in the earlier method of
selection that often not only the men dance for the women, but the
women for the men, each striving in a storm of rivalry to arouse and
attract the desire of the other. In innumerable parts of the world the
season of love is a time which the nubile of each sex devote to
dancing in each other's presence, sometimes one sex, sometimes the
other, sometimes both, in the frantic effort to display all the force
and energy, the skill and endurance, the beauty and grace, which at
this moment are yearning within them to be poured into the stream of
the race's life.

>From this point of view we may better understand the immense ardour
with which every part of the wonderful human body has been brought
into the play of the dance. The men and women of races spread all over
the world have shown a marvellous skill and patience in imparting
rhythm and measure to the most unlikely, the most rebellious regions
of the body, all wrought by desire into potent and dazzling images. To
the vigorous races of Northern Europe in their cold damp climate,
dancing comes naturally to be dancing of the legs, so naturally that
the English poet, as a matter of course, assumes that the dance of
Salome was a "twinkling of the feet." [Footnote: At an earlier period,
however, the dance of Salome was understood much more freely and often
more accurately. As Enlart has pointed out, on a capital in the
twelfth-century cloister of Moissac, Salome holds a kind of castanets
in her raised hands as she dances; on one of the western Portals of
Rouen Cathedral, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, she is
dancing on her hands; while at Hemelverdeghem she is really executing
the _morisco_, the "_danse du ventre_."] But on the opposite side of
the world, in Japan and notably in Java and Madagascar, dancing may be
exclusively dancing of the arms and hands, in some of the South Sea
Islands of the hands and fingers alone. Dancing may even be carried on
in the seated posture, as occurs at Fiji in a dance connected with the
preparation of the sacred drink, ava. In some districts of Southern
Tunisia dancing, again, is dancing of the hair, and all night long,
till they perhaps fall exhausted, the marriageable girls will move
their heads to the rhythm of a song, maintaining their hair, in
perpetual balance and sway. Elsewhere, notably in Africa, but also
sometimes in Polynesia, as well as in the dances that had established
themselves in ancient Rome, dancing is dancing of the body, with
vibratory or rotatory movements of breasts or flanks.

The complete dance along these lines is, however, that in which the
play of all the chief muscle-groups of the body is harmoniously
interwoven. When both sexes take part in such an exercise, developed
into an idealised yet passionate pantomime of love, we have the
complete erotic dance. In the beautiful ancient civilisation of the
Pacific, it is probable that this ideal was sometimes reached, and at
Tahiti, in 1772, an old voyager crudely and summarily described the
native dance as "an endless variety of posturings and wagglings of the
body, hands, feet, eyes, lips, and tongue, in which they keep splendid
time to the measure." In Spain the dance of this kind has sometimes
attained its noblest and most harmoniously beautiful expression. From
the narratives of travellers, it would appear that it was especially
in the eighteenth century that among all classes in Spain dancing of
this kind was popular. The Church tacitly encouraged it, an Aragonese
Canon told Baretti in 1770, in spite of its occasional indecorum, as a
useful safety-valve for the emotions. It was not less seductive to the
foreign spectator than to the people themselves. The grave traveller
Peyron, towards the end of the century, growing eloquent over the
languorous and flexible movements of the dance, the bewitching
attitude, the voluptuous curves of the arms, declares that, when one
sees a beautiful Spanish woman dance, one is inclined to fling all
philosophy to the winds. And even that highly respectable Anglican
clergyman, the Reverend Joseph Townsend, was constrained to state that
he could "almost persuade myself" that if the fandango were suddenly
played in church the gravest worshippers would start up to join in
that "lascivious pantomime." There we have the rock against which the
primitive dance of sexual selection suffers shipwreck as civilisation
advances. And that prejudice of civilisation becomes so ingrained that
it is brought to bear even on the primitive dance. The pygmies of
Africa are described by Sir H. H. Johnston as a very decorous and
highly moral people, but their dances, he adds, are not so. Yet these
dances, though to the eyes of Johnston, blinded by European
civilisation, "grossly indecent," he honestly, and inconsistently,
adds, are "danced reverently."




IV


FROM the vital function of dancing in love, and its sacred function in
religion, to dancing as an art, a profession, an amusement, may seem,
at the first glance, a sudden leap. In reality the transition is
gradual, and it began to be made at a very early period in diverse
parts of the globe. All the matters that enter into courtship tend to
fall under the sway of art; their aesthetic pleasure is a secondary
reflection of their primary vital joy. Dancing could not fail to be
first in manifesting this tendency. But even religious dancing swiftly
exhibited the same transformation; dancing, like priesthood, became a
profession, and dancers, like priests, formed a caste. This, for
instance, took place in old Hawaii. The hula dance was a religious
dance; it required a special education and an arduous training;
moreover, it involved the observance of important taboos and the
exercise of sacred rites; by the very fact of its high specialisation
it came to be carried out by Paid performers, a professional caste. In
India, again, the Devadasis, or sacred dancing girls, are at once both
religious and professional dancers. They are married to gods, they are
taught dancing by the Brahmins, they figure in religious ceremonies,
and their dances represent the life of the god they are married to as
well as the emotions of love they experience for him. Yet, at the same
time, they also give professional performances in the houses of rich
private persons who pay for them.  It thus comes about that to the
foreigner the Devada-sis scarcely seem very unlike the Ramedjenis, the
dancers of the street, who are of very different origin, and mimic in
their performances the play of merely human passions. The Portuguese
conquerors of India called both kinds of dancers indiscriminately
Balheideras (or dancers) which we have corrupted in Bayaderes.
[Footnote: For an excellent account of dancing in India, now being
degraded by modern civilisation, see Otto Rothfeld, _Women of India_,
chap. VII.  "The Dancing Girl," 1922.]

In our modern world professional dancing as an art has become
altogether divorced from religion, and even, in any biological sense,
from love; it is scarcely even possible, so far as Western
civilisation is concerned, to trace back the tradition to either
source. If we survey the development of dancing as an art in Europe,
it seems to me that we have to recognise two streams of tradition
which have sometimes merged, but yet remain in their ideals and their
tendencies essentially distinct. I would call these traditions the
Classical, which is much the more ancient and fundamental, and may be
said to be of Egyptian origin, and the Romantic, which is of Italian
origin, chiefly known to us as the ballet. The first is, in its pure
form, sole dancing--though it may be danced in couples and many
together--and is based on the rhythmic beauty and expressiveness of
the simple human personality when its energy is concentrated in
measured yet passionate movement. The second is concerted dancing,
mimetic and picturesque, wherein the individual is subordinated to the
wider and variegated rhythm of the group. It may be easy to devise
another classification, but this is simple and instructive enough for
our purpose.

There can scarcely be a doubt that Egypt has been for many thousands
of years, as indeed it still remains, a great dancing centre, the most
influential dancing-school the world has ever seen, radiating its
influence to south and east and north. We may perhaps even agree with
the historian of the dance who terms it "the mother-country of all
civilised dancing." We are not entirely dependent on the ancient
wall-pictures of Egypt for our knowledge of Egyptian skill in the art.
Sacred mysteries, it is known, were danced in the temples, and queens
and princesses took part in the orchestras that accompanied them. It
is significant that the musical instruments still peculiarly
associated with the dance were originated or developed in Egypt; the
guitar is an Egyptian instrument and its name was a hieroglyph already
used when the Pyramids were being built; the cymbal, the tambourine,
triangles, castanets, in one form or another, were all familiar to the
ancient Egyptians, and with the Egyptian art of dancing they must have
spread all round the shores of the Mediterranean, the great focus of
our civilisation, at a very early date.  [Footnote: I may hazard the
suggestion that the gypsies may possibly have acquired their rather
unaccountable name of Egyptians, not so much because they had passed
through Egypt, the reason which is generally suggested,--for they must
have passed through many countries,--but because of their proficiency
in dances of the recognised Egyptian type.] Even beyond the
Mediterranean, at Cadiz, dancing that was essentially Egyptian in
character was established, and Cadiz became the dancing-school of
Spain. The Nile and Cadiz were thus the two great centres of ancient
dancing, and Martial mentions them both together, for each supplied
its dancers to Rome. This dancing, alike whether Egyptian or
Gaditanian, was the expression of the individual dancer's body and
art; the garments played but a small part in it, they were frequently
transparent, and sometimes discarded altogether. It was, and it
remains, simple, personal, passionate dancing, classic, therefore, in
the same sense as, on the side of literature, the poetry of Catullus
is classic.  [Footnote: It is interesting to observe that Egypt still
retains, almost unchanged through fifty centuries, its traditions,
technique, and skill in dancing, while, as in ancient Egyptian
dancing, the garment forms an almost or quite negligible element in
the art. Loret remarks that a charming Egyptian dancer of the
Eighteenth Dynasty, whose picture in her transparent gauze he
reproduces, is an exact portrait of a charming Almeh of to-day whom he
has seen dancing in Thebes with the same figure, the same dressing of
the hair, the same jewels. I hear from a physician, a gynaecologist
now practising in Egypt, that a dancing-girl can lie on her back, and
with a full glass of water standing on one side of her abdomen and an
empty glass on the other, can by the contraction of the muscles on the
side supporting the full glass, project the water from it, so as to
fill the empty glass. This, of course, is not strictly dancing, but it
is part of the technique which underlies classic dancing and it
witnesses to the thoroughness with which the technical side of
Egyptian dancing is still cultivated.]

Ancient Greek dancing was essentially classic dancing, as here
understood. On the Greek vases, as reproduced in Emmanuel's attractive
book on Greek dancing and elsewhere, we find the same play of the
arms, the same sideward turn, the same extreme backward extension of
the body, which had long before been represented in Egyptian
monuments. Many supposedly modern movements in dancing were certainly
already common both to Egyptian and Greek dancing, as well as the
clapping of hands to keep time which is still an accompaniment of
Spanish dancing.  It seems clear, however, that, on this general
classic and Mediterranean basis, Greek dancing had a development so
refined and so special--though in technical elaboration of steps, it
seems likely, inferior to modern dancing--that it exercised no
influence outside Greece. Dancing became, indeed, the most
characteristic and the most generally cultivated of Greek arts.
Pindar, in a splendid Oxyrhynchine fragment, described Hellas, in what
seemed to him supreme praise, as "the land of lovely dancing," and
Athenaeus pointed out that he calls Apollo the Dancer.  It may well be
that the Greek drama arose out of dance and song, and that the dance
throughout was an essential and plastic element in it. Even if we
reject the statement of Aristotle that tragedy arose out of the
Dionysian dithyramb, the alternative suppositions (such as Ridgeway's
theory of dancing round the tombs of the dead) equally involve the
same elements. It has often been pointed out that poetry in Greece
demanded a practical knowledge of all that could be included under
"dancing." Aeschylus is said to have developed the technique of
dancing and Sophocles danced in his own dramas. In these developments,
no doubt, Greek dancing tended to overpass the fundamental limits of
classic dancing and foreshadowed the ballet.  [Footnote: "We must
learn to regard the form of the Greek drama as a dance form," says G.
Warre Cornish in an interesting article on "Greek Drama and the Dance"
(_Fortnightly Review_, February, 1913), "a musical symphonic
dance-vision, through which the history of Greece and the soul of man
are portrayed."]

The real germ of the ballet, however, is to be found in Rome, where
the pantomime with its concerted and picturesque method of expressive
action was developed, and Italy is the home of Romantic dancing. The
same impulse which produced the pantomime produced, more than a
thousand years later in the same Italian region, the modern ballet. In
both cases, one is inclined to think, we may trace the influence of
the same Etruscan and Tuscan race which so long has had its seat
there, a race with a genius for expressive, dramatic, picturesque art.
We see it on the walls of Etruscan tombs and again in pictures of
Botticelli and his fellow Tuscans. The modern ballet, it is generally
believed, had its origin in the spectacular pageants at the marriage
of Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, in 1489. The fashion for such
performances spread to the other Italian courts, including Florence,
and Catherine de' Medici, when she became Queen of France, brought the
Italian ballet to Paris. Here it speedily became fashionable. Kings
and queens were its admirers and even took part in it; great statesmen
were its patrons.  Before long, and especially in the great age of
Louis XIV, it became an established institution, still an adjunct of
opera but with a vital life and growth of its own, maintained by
distinguished musicians, artists, and dancers. Romantic dancing, to a
much greater extent than what I have called Classic dancing, which
depends so largely on simple personal qualities, tends to be vitalised
by transplantation and the absorption of new influences, provided that
the essential basis of technique and tradition is preserved in the new
development.  Lulli in the seventeenth century brought women into the
ballet; Camargo discarded the complicated costumes and shortened the
skirt, so rendering possible not only her own lively and vigorous
method, but all the freedom and airy grace of later dancing. It was
Noverre who by his ideas worked out at Stuttgart, and soon brought to
Paris by Gaétan Vestris, made the ballet a new and complete art form;
this Swiss-French genius not only elaborated plot revealed by gesture
and dance alone, but, just as another and greater Swiss-French genius
about the same time brought sentiment and emotion into the novel, he
brought it into the ballet.  In the French ballet of the eighteenth
century a very high degree of perfection seems thus to have been
reached, while in Italy, where the ballet had originated, it decayed,
and Milan, which had been its source, became the nursery of a
tradition of devitalised technique carried to the finest point of
delicate perfection.  The influence of the French school was
maintained as a living force into the nineteenth century,--when it was
renovated afresh by the new spirit of the age and Taglioni became the
most ethereal embodiment of the spirit of the Romantic movement in a
form that was genuinely classic,--overspreading the world by the
genius of a few individual dancers. When they had gone, the ballet
slowly and steadily declined. As it declined as an art, so also it
declined in credit and in popularity; it became scarcely respectable
even to admire dancing. Thirty or forty years ago, those of us who
still appreciated dancing as an art--and how few they were!--had to
seek for it painfully and sometimes in strange surroundings. A recent
historian of dancing, in a book published so lately as 1906, declared
that "the ballet is now a thing of the past, and, with the modern
change of ideas, a thing that is never likely to be resuscitated."
That historian never mentioned Russian ballet, yet his book was
scarcely published before the Russian ballet arrived to scatter
ridicule over his rash prophecy by raising the ballet to a pitch of
perfection it can rarely have surpassed, as an expressive, emotional,
even passionate form of living art.

The Russian ballet was an offshoot from the French ballet and
illustrates once more the vivifying effect of transplantation on the
art of Romantic dancing. The Empress Anna introduced it in 1735 and
appointed a French ballet-master and a Neapolitan composer to carry it
on; it reached a high degree of technical perfection during the
following hundred years, on the traditional lines, and the principal
dancers were all imported from Italy. It was not until recent years
that this firm discipline and these ancient traditions were vitalised
into an art form of exquisite and vivid beauty by the influence of the
soil in which they had slowly taken root. This contact, when at last
it was effected, mainly by the genius of Fokine and the enterprise of
Diaghilev, involved a kind of revolution, for its outcome, while
genuine ballet, has yet all the effect of delicious novelty. The
tradition by itself was in Russia an exotic without real life, and had
nothing to give to the world; on the other hand, a Russian ballet
apart from that tradition, if we can conceive such a thing, would have
been formless, extravagant, bizarre, not subdued to any fine aesthetic
ends. What we see here, in the Russian ballet as we know it to-day, is
a splendid and arduous technical tradition, brought at last--by the
combined skill of designers, composers, and dancers--into real fusion
with an environment from which during more than a century it had been
held apart; Russian genius for music, Russian feeling for rhythm,
Russian skill in the use of bright colour, and, not least, the Russian
orgiastic temperament, the Russian spirit of tender poetic melancholy,
and the general Slav passion for folk-dancing, shown in other branches
of the race also, Polish, Bohemian, Bulgarian, and Servian. At almost
the same time what I have termed Classic dancing was independently
revived in kmerica by I sadora Duncan, bringing back what seemed to be
the free naturalism of the Greek dance, and Ruth St. Denis, seeking to
discover and revitalise the secrets of the old Indian and Egyptian
traditions. Whenever now we find any restored art of theatrical
dancing, as in the Swedish ballet, it has been inspired more or less,
by an eclectic blending of these two revived forms, the Romantic from
Russia, the Classic from America. The result has been that our age
sees one of the most splendid movements in the whole history of the
ballet.




V


DANCING as an art, we may be sure, cannot die out, but will always be
undergoing a rebirth. Not merely as an art, but also as a social
custom, it perpetually emerges afresh from the soul of the people.
Less than a century ago the polka thus arose, extemporised by the
Bohemian servant girl Anna Slezakova out of her own head for the joy
of her own heart, and only rendered a permanent form, apt for
world-wide popularity, by the accident that it was observed and noted
down by an artist.  Dancing has for ever been in existence as a
spontaneous custom, a social discipline. Thus it is, finally, that
dancing meets us, not only as love, as religion, as art, but also as
morals.

All human work, under natural conditions, is a kind of dance. In a
large and learned book, supported by an immense amount of evidence,
Karl Bûcher has argued that work differs from the dance, not in kind,
but only in degree, since they are both essentially rhythmic.  There
is a good reason why work should be rhythmic, for all great combined
efforts, the efforts by which alone great constructions such as those
of megalithic days could be carried out, must be harmonised. It has
even been argued that this necessity is the source of human speech,
and we have the so-called Yo-heave-ho theory of languages. In the
memory of those who have ever lived on a sailing ship--that loveliest
of human creations now disappearing from the world--there will always
linger the echo of the chanties which sailors sang as they hoisted the
topsail yard or wound the capstan or worked the pumps. That is the
type of primitive combined work, and it is indeed difficult to see how
such work can be effectively accomplished without such a device for
regulating the rhythmic energy of the muscles. The dance rhythm of
work has thus acted socialisingly in a parallel line with the dance
rhythms of the arts, and indeed in part as their inspirer.  The
Greeks, it has been too fancifully suggested, by insight or by
intuition understood this when they fabled that Orpheus, whom they
regarded as the earliest poet, was specially concerned with moving
stones and trees. Bûcher has pointed out that even poetic metre may be
conceived as arising out of work; metre is the rhythmic stamping of
feet, as in the technique of verse it is still metaphorically called;
iambics and trochees, spondees and anapsests and dactyls, may still be
heard among blacksmiths smiting the anvil or navvies wielding their
hammers in the streets. In so far as they arose out of work, music and
singing and dancing are naturally a single art. A poet must always
write to a tune, said Swinburne. Herein the ancient ballad of Europe
is a significant type. It is, as the name indicates, a dance as much
as a song, performed by a singer who sang the story and a chorus who
danced and shouted the apparently meaningless refrain; it is
absolutely the chanty of the sailors and is equally apt for the
purposes of concerted work.  [Footnote: It should perhaps be remarked
that in recent times it has been denied that the old ballads were
built up on dance songs. Miss Pound, for instance, in a book on the
subject, argues that they were of aristocratic and not communal
origin, which may well be, though the absence of the dance element
does not seem to follow.] Yet our most complicated musical forms are
evolved from similar dances. The symphony is but a development of a
dance suite, in the first place folk-dances, such as Bach and Handel
composed. Indeed a dance still lingers always at the heart of music
and even the heart of the composer. Mozart, who was himself an
accomplished dancer, used often to say, so his wife stated, that it
was dancing, not music, that he really cared for. Wagner believed that
Beethoven's Seventh Symphony--to some of us the most fascinating of
them and the most purely musical--was an apotheosis of the dance, and,
even if that belief throws no light on the intention of Beethoven, it
is at least a revelation of Wagner's own feeling for the dance.

It is, however, the dance itself, apart from the work and apart from
the other arts, which, in the opinion of many to-day, has had a
decisive influence in socialising, that is to say in moralising, the
human species.  Work showed the necessity of harmonious rhythmic
cooperation, but the dance developed that rhythmic cooperation and
imparted a beneficent impetus to all human activities. It was Grosse,
in his "Beginnings of Art," who first clearly set forth the high
social significance of the dance in the creation of human
civilisation.  The participants in a dance, as all observers of
savages have noted, exhibit a wonderful unison; they are, as it were,
fused into a single being stirred by a single impulse.  Social
unification is thus accomplished. Apart from war, this is the chief
factor making for social solidarity in primitive life; it was indeed
the best training for war. It has been a twofold influence; on the one
hand, it aided unity of action and method in evolution: on the other,
it had the invaluable function--for man is naturally a timid
animal--of imparting courage; the universal drum, as Louis Robinson
remarks, has been an immense influence in human affairs.  Even among
the Romans, with their highly developed military system, dancing and
war were definitely allied; the Salii constituted a college of sacred
military dancers; the dancing season was March, the war-god's month
and the beginning of the war season, and all through that month there
were dances in triple measure before the temples and round the altars,
with songs so ancient that not even the priests could understand them.
We may trace a similar influence of dancing in all the cooperative
arts of life. All our most advanced civilisation, Grosse insisted, is
based on dancing. It is the dance that socialised man.

Thus, in the large sense, dancing has possessed peculiar value as a
method of national education. As civilisation grew self-conscious,
this was realised. "One may judge of a king," according to ancient
Chinese maxim, "by the state of dancing during his reign." So also
among the Greeks; it has been said that dancing and music lay at the
foundation of the whole political and military as well as religious
organisation of the Dorian states.

In the narrow sense, in individual education, the great importance of
dancing came to be realised, even at an early stage of human
development, and still more in the ancient civilisations. "A good
education," Plato declared in the "Laws," the final work of his old
age, "consists in knowing how to sing and dance well." And in our own
day one of the keenest and most enlightened of educationists has
lamented the decay of dancing; the revival of dancing, Stanley Hall
declares, is imperatively needed to give poise to the nerves,
schooling to the emotions, strength to the will, and to harmonise the
feelings and the intellect with the body which supports them.

It can scarcely be said that these functions of dancing are yet
generally realised and embodied afresh in education. For, if it is
true that dancing engendered morality, it is also true that in the
end, by the irony of fate, morality, grown insolent, sought to crush
its own parent, and for a time succeeded only too well. Four centuries
ago dancing was attacked by that spirit, in England called Puritanism,
which was then spread over the greater part of Europe, just as active
in Bohemia as in England, and which has, indeed, been described as a
general onset of developing Urbanism against the old Ruralism. It made
no distinction between good and bad, nor paused to consider what would
come when dancing went. So it was that, as Remy de Gourmont remarks,
the drinking-shop conquered the dance, and alcohol replaced the
violin.

But when we look at the function of dancing in life from a higher and
wider standpoint, this episode in its history ceases to occupy so
large a place. The conquest over dancing has never proved in the end a
matter for rejoicing, even to morality, while an art which has been so
intimately mixed with all the finest and deepest springs of life has
always asserted itself afresh.  For dancing is the loftiest, the most
moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere
translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself. It is the
only art, as Rahel Varnhagen said, of which we ourselves are the
stuff. Even if we are not ourselves dancers, but merely the spectators
of the dance, we are still--according to that Lippsian doctrine of
_Einfuhlung_ or "empathy" by Groos termed "the play of inner
imitation"--which here, at all events, we may accept as true--feeling
ourselves in the dancer who is manifesting and expressing the latent
impulses of our own being.

It thus comes about that, beyond its manifold practical significance,
dancing has always been felt to possess also a symbolic significance.
Marcus Aurelius was accustomed to regard the art of life as like the
dancer's art, though that Imperial Stoic could not resist adding that
in some respects it was more like the wrestler's art. "I doubt not yet
to make a figure in the great Dance of Life that shall amuse the
spectators in the sky," said, long after, Blake, in the same strenuous
spirit. In our own time, Nietzsche, from first to last, showed himself
possessed by the conception of the art of life as a dance, in which
the dancer achieves the rhythmic freedom and harmony of his soul
beneath the shadow of a hundred Damoclean swords. He said the same
thing of his style, for to him the style and the man were one: "My
style," he wrote to his intimate friend Rohde, "is a dance." "Every
day I count wasted," he said again, "in which there has been no
dancing." The dance lies at the beginning of art, and we find it also
at the end The first creators of civilisation were making the dance,
and the philosopher of a later age, hovering over the dark abyss of
insanity, with bleeding feet and muscles strained to the breaking
point, still seems to himself to be weaving the maze of the dance.





CHAPTER III

THE ART OF THINKING


I


HERBERT SPENCER pointed out, in his early essay on "The Genesis of
Science," that science arose out of art, and that even yet the
distinction is "purely conventional," for "it is impossible to say
when art ends and science begins." Spencer was here using "art" in the
fundamental sense according to which all practice is of the nature of
art. Yet it is of interest to find a thinker now commonly regarded as
so prosaic asserting a view which to most prosaic people seems
fanciful.  To the ordinary solid man, to any would-be apostle of
common sense, science--and by "science" he usually means applied
science--seems the exact opposite of the vagaries and virtuosities
that the hard-headed _homme moyen sensuel_ is accustomed to look upon
as "art."

Yet the distinction is modern. In classic times there was no such
distinction. The "sciences"--reasonably, as we may now see, and not
fancifully as was afterwards supposed--were "the arts of the mind." In
the Middle Ages the same liberal studies--grammar, logic, geometry,
music, and the rest--could be spoken of either as "sciences" or as
"arts," and for Roger Bacon, who in the thirteenth century was so
genuine a man of science, every branch of study or learning was a
"scientia." I am inclined to think that it was the Mathematical
Renaissance of the seventeenth century which introduced the undue
emphasis on the distinction between "science" and "art." "All the
sciences are so bound together," wrote Descartes, the banner-bearer of
that Renaissance, in his "Règles pour la Direction de l'Esprit," "that
it is much easier to learn them all at once than to learn one alone by
detaching it from the others." He added that we could not say the same
of the arts. Yet we might perhaps say of arts and sciences that we can
only understand them all together, and we may certainly say, as
Descartes proceeded to say of the sciences alone, that they all
emanate from the same focus, however diversely coloured by the media
they pass through or the objects they encounter. At that moment,
however, it was no doubt practically useful, however theoretically
unsound, to overemphasise the distinction between "science," with its
new instrumental precision, and "art." [Footnote: It would not appear
that the pioneers of the Mathematical Renaissance of the twentieth
century are inclined to imitate Descartes in this matter. Einstein
would certainly not, and many apostles of physical science to-day
(see, e.g., Professor Smithells, _From a Modern University: Some Aims
and Aspirations of Science_) insist on the aesthetic, imaginative, and
other "art" qualities of science.] At the same time the tradition of
the old usage was not completely put aside, and a Master of "Arts"
remained a master of such sciences as the directors of education
succeeded in recognising until the middle of the nineteenth century.
By that time the development of the sciences, and especially of the
physical sciences, as "the discovery of truth," led to a renewed
emphasis on them which resulted in the practical restriction of the
term "art" to what are ordinarily called the fine arts. More formally,
science became the study of what were supposed to be demonstrable and
systematically classifiable truths regarding the facts of the world;
art was separated off as the play of human impulses in making things.
Sir Sidney Colvin, in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," after discussing
the matter (which Mill had already discussed at length in his "Logic"
and decided that the difference is that Science is in the Indicative
Mood and Art in the Imperative Mood), concluded that science is
"ordered knowledge of natural phenomena and of the relations between
them," or that "Science consists in knowing, Art consists in doing."
Men of science, like Sir E. Ray Lankester, accepted this conclusion.
That was as far as it was possible to go in the nineteenth century.

But the years pass, and the progress of science itself, especially the
sciences of the mind, has upset this distinction.  The analysis of
"knowing" showed that it was not such a merely passive and receptive
method of recognising "truth" as scientists had innocently supposed.
This is probably admitted now by the Realists among philosophers as
well as by the Idealists. Dr.  Charles Singer, perhaps our most
learned historian of science, now defines science, no longer as a body
of organized knowledge, but as "the process which makes knowledge," as
"knowledge in the making"; that is to say, "the growing edge between
the unknown and the known." [Footnote: C. Singer. "What is Science?"
_British Medical Journal_, 25th June, 1921. Singer refuses the name of
"science" in the strict sense to fields of completely organised
knowledge which have ceased growing, like human anatomy (though, of
course, the anatomist still remains a man of science by working
outwards into adjoining related fields), preferring to term any such
field of completed knowledge a _discipline_. This seems convenient and
I should like to regard it as sound. It is not, however, compatible
with the old doctrine of Mill and Colvin and Ray Lankester, for it
excludes from the field of science exactly what they regarded as most
typically science, and some one might possibly ask whether in other
departments, like Hellenic sculpture or Sung pottery, a completed art
ceases to be art.] As soon as we thus regard it, as a making process,
it becomes one with art. Even physical science is perpetually laying
aside the "facts" which it thought it knew, and learning to replace
them by other "facts" which it comes to know as more satisfactory in
presenting an intelligible view of the world.  The analysis of
"knowing" shows that this is not only a legitimate but an inevitable
process. Such a process is active and creative. It clearly partakes at
least as much of the nature of "doing" as of "knowing." It involves
qualities which on another plane, sometimes indeed on the same plane,
are essentially those involved in doing. The craftsman who moulds
conceptions with his mind cannot be put in a fundamentally different
class from the craftsman who moulds conceptions with his hand, any
more than the poet can be put in a totally different class from the
painter. It is no longer possible to deny that science is of the
nature of art.

So it is that in the fundamental sense, and even it will have to be
added, in a sense that comprehends the extravagancies of wild
variations from the norm, we have to recognise that the true man of
science is an artist.  Like the lunatic, the lover, the poet (as a
great physician, Sir William Osier, has said), the student is "of
imagination all compact." It was by his "wonderful imagination," it
has been well pointed out, that Newton was constantly discovering new
tracks and new processes in the region of the unknown. The
extraordinary various life-work of Helmholtz, who initiated the
valuation of beauty on a physiological basis, scientifically precise
as it was, had, as Einstein has remarked, anaesthetic colouring.
"There is no such thing as an unimaginative scientific man," a
distinguished professor of mechanics and mathematics declared some
years ago, and if we are careful to remember that not every man who
believes that his life is devoted to science is really a "scientific
man," that statement is literally true.  [Footnote: It has often been
pointed out that the imaginative application of science--artistic
ideas like that of the steam locomotive, the flying-machine heavier
than air, the telegraph, the telephone, and many others--were even at
the moment of their being achieved, elaborately shown to be
"impossible" by men who had been too hastily hoisted up to positions
of "scientific" eminence.] It is not only true of the scientific man
in the special sense; it is also true of the philosopher. In every
philosopher's work, a philosophic writer has remarked, "the
construction of a complete system of conceptions is not carried out
simply in the interests of knowledge. Its underlying motive is
aesthetic. It is the work of a creative artist." [Footnote: J. B.
Baillie, _Studies in Human Nature_ (1921), p. 221. This point has
become familiar ever since F. A. Lange published his almost
epoch-marking work, _The History of Materialism_, which has made so
deep an impress on many modern thinkers from Nietzsche to Vaihinger;
it is indeed a book which can never be forgotten (I speak from
experience) by any one who read it in youth.] The intellectual lives
of a Plato or a Dante, Professor Graham Wallas from a different
standpoint has remarked, "were largely guided and sustained by their
delight in the sheer beauty of the rhythmic relation between law and
instance, species and individual, or cause and effect." [Footnote: G.
Wallas, _The Great Society_, p. 107.]

That remark, with its reference to the laws and rhythm in the
universe, calls to mind the great initiator, so far as our knowledge
extends back, of scientific research in our European world. Pythagoras
is a dim figure, and there is no need here to insist unduly on his
significance. But there is not the slightest doubt about the nature of
that significance in its bearing on the point before us. Dim and
legendary as he now appears to us, Pythagoras was no doubt a real
person, born in the sixth century before Christ, at Samos, and by his
association with that great shipping centre doubtless enabled to
voyage afar and glean the wisdom of the ancient world