Science And Art

( Originally Published 1919 )

As old sanctions and authorities pass away hasty attempts are made to replace them, but with the crumbling of institutions there is an end of the ideas by which they were sustained. As small communities are merged in larger, and the single human community appears to view, it becomes clear that it has always existed, and that it has been supported, though all others were unfaithful, by the thinkers, who have been to all appearances a community apart, doing its work unrecognised and yet unconsciously honoured in the homage, usually posthumous, paid to great men, who, being of all human beings the most human, have met the ironic fate of being treated as demigods and given a reverence of the kind accorded to potentates, though nothing could be farther from the recognition of their seeking, since they, of all men, have understood and practised democracy and cooperation when other workers were lost in the mazes of competition. There has always been an international community, for the imagination overleaps the barriers set up on the ways of common tra e, and there is no property in ideas round which jealous defences can be set up. Confucius and Kant work together, regardless of the frontiers of time and place, and they work together as all men should for humanity. It has always been so and always the discoverers have been opposed by those whose profit seems to lie in thwarting change and readjustment, but though jealous communities are composed and decomposed, theirs persists as the grand model which humanity through all its upheavals must emulate. Here, then, is a community inspired by the authority of work, and it has always put all other authorities to shame, and has, in-deed, been stronger than any code of law ever devised; but from the minds of the great mass of men its existence has been concealed, and thinkers and artists have always been presented to them as isolated wonders, creatures almost of another sort, though their sole privilege has been a greater sensibility to the tides that move in humanity. Here, then, in works of philosophy, art, music, is the authority that is needed.

With the single community acknowledged, the workers in science and art can follow their calling in the open, and so soon as the Law, devised to protect property, is adapted to the protection of work, they will be able to establish what is lacking now direct contact with the lives of common men and no longer be dependent upon the caprices of politicians. This does not mean that government should be handed over to the artists and scientists. Government and authority are two very different things. The work of the artists and scientists is the maintenance of authority without which there can be no good government. Truth has to be re-stated for every generation, for no two generations speak the same language, In the decaying years of feudalism government usurped the position of authority, and that usurpation has to be removed. It can only be done in one way, and that slowly, by education, that is by helping the people to understand such truth as is revealed to them. A great discoverer is unintelligible to his contemporaries, but it is always possible for them to appreciate the tradition that has made his work possible. The tradition of science and art is a far greater thing than any national tradition, and it is in this that children should be educated, for without understanding of the greater there can be no true appreciation of the less. If, for instance, there was ever a true King of England his name was William Shakespeare; and President Wilson, in speaking caking nobly for America, is the mouthpiece of Walt Whitman. The destiny of humanity is shaped by vision, not by Law, which should be the means by which the vision is expresse in daily life. Laws which subserve the purposes of temporal power thwart the operation of vision and injure daily life, lead to the destruction of imagination, and blight the hopes of the future. Vision and the pressure of daily life lead slowly to inventions which the generations are apt to regard as their sole unaided work, but, as we have seen, no work is unaided, all work is done in common, and all work depends upon that of the community of artists and scientists, where there is emulation but no competition. The spirit of competition, which is go ardently defended by those whose fortune depends on it, is the outcome partly of jealousy, partly of the cruel system by which a man solely responsible for his wife and family. That system has been overthrown by the insurrection of women, and a new system of common responsibility is coming into being. In the community of artists and scientists that system has always prevailed, since without acceptance of it nothing can be done. Artists and scientists are allied in defence of the human spirit as expressed in ideas: following their example all men should be joined together in their work in defence of that spirit as expressed in flesh and blood. The system is the same, only the medium is different. Without system nothing is accomplished, and without consciousness of tradition no truth can be revealed. Unity can only be achieved through devotion which is native to every human heart. The pity of it is that so few have the courage of it, but by the revelation of the community of science and art that can be fortified, and men can be given what they most need: the sense of serving something beyond the purpose immediately be-fore them. That sense has in Europe been monstrously abused by the doctrine of the sovereign state, which has been suffered to absorb into itself both the sovereignty of the individual and the sovereignty of humanity, which are the two shining principles of the community of the artists and scientists. Without them life is reduced to nonsense, and the blind instinct of humanity has wasted four years and millions of lives in attempting to destroy it in the wrong way. A perversion that has grown through generations cannot be destroyed in a moment, and it certainly cannot be removed by the exhaustion of the young life which is its natural enemy, yet, though the waste has been disproportionate, there has been this much gained: that the perversion is revealed for what it is, and the distortion of society through it has become patent. Nowhere is this more so than in the quarrel to which it has given rise between the brain workers and the hand workers of the world, revealing the hideous fact that for two or three generations the executive brain work of the world has been neglected, owing to the ease with which, on paper, satisfactory results could be obtained by leaving it to the automatic working of commercial and social machinery. The complaint of the hand workers is just. They have been as grievously betrayed by the executive brain workers of the world as ever the peasants of the feudal system were by the barons, priests and kings who swindled them in the name of religion. The brain workers have exacted vast payment for work that they have left undone, and the bur-den laid upon the industrial millions is intolerable. They in their ignorance imagine despairingly that they must take unto themselves the brain-work for which they are so ill-equipped. They know perfectly well that men and classes who have lost the habit of work cannot regain it; and they do not know where to turn, be-cause they are unaware of the community of artists and scientists who, through all the abuses of society, have kept alive the principle of loyalty to the human spirit. Between the hand-workers and that community stands everywhere the indolent class which knows no loyalty. Meanwhile to defend themselves the hand-workers have thrown up their own brain-workers to protect them as a class against the depredations of the indolent and irresponsible, whose economic status gives them so devastating a power; but without the authority of art and science these brain-workers also can-not but become predatory, and becoming so they will cease to work. That is inevitable in any community in which work is not gradually refined until it flowers naturally and beautifully in art. Without such gradual refinement art becomes a plaything. Indeed, art has only flourished when by accident a community has for a tithe achieved this condition through some fleeting inspiration. There are always, and always will be, loyal workers in art to keep its tradition alive, but achievement depend upon the health of the community, which cannot always be measured by external events. There are obstacles which genius cannot surmount.

The hand-workers of the world are aware that more than material comfort ha been withheld from them. They know that economic justice alone cannot satisfy them. They know that the truth of their generati n has been kept from them. They are beginning to perceive that just as their work was on the point of breaking through national boundaries those boundaries were strengthened, and that the wealth that should have removed then was used to turn them into battlefields, and they know that life has become as barren as those burned and scarred areas. It is welling up in their minds that only brain work can repair this monstrous damage, and that they are in the hands of people who cannot use their brains, people incapable of suffering, egoists, unhappy, inert ; and they are realising that these people are the boundaries which they have been urged to defend. The earth on one side of a river is the same as that on the other; the two sides of a mountain reach to the same summit, but the people may not reach the summit because they may not trespass on the pleasure-grounds that bask in the sunlight of the slopes. They have been taught that art also is a pleasure-ground on which they may not trespass, and this is the most shameful lie of all. They have been led to think that science is a darkness and a menace from which they must keep their eyes averted, and they have behind them generations of the habit of docility; but, once it becomes plain that they are separated only by the inertia of a few thousand people, then energy will leap in them to ally their labour with that of the artists and scientists, where alone they can find the brain-work. without which they cannot find escape from the dishonourable condition thrust upon them by the in-compatible alliance of honest work and commercial cunning which at present governs humanity.

The split, then, is between honesty and dishonesty, the growing decency of private life and the increasing corruption in public affairs. Assertive nationalism in vain attempts to conceal the true nature of the division, and the fact that behind the demand of the hand workers are imperishable moral principles and the insistence of the human conscience upo the social contract. There may, there probably will, be compromise, but the outcome will be, consciously or unconsciously, an admission that humanity is greater than any portion of it , and some glimmering of the truth that artists have maintained ever since the human mind was kindled by the glow that comes from work honestly and honourably carried out. That is the sole light in our darkness. Love contains no other illumination. The task of science and art is simply to increase that light, that under-standing may increase to bring to greater perfection the marriage of the inward beauty of the soul with the overwhelming beauty f the universe. Without such marriage me and women are overcome, their passions smoulder away and are never fully used in the service to which in their birth they are dedicated. They remain the victims of fear, and are only allied to their fellows in panic, when they should be continuously joined in devotion.

There is much lamentation over the decay of religion in the industrial community; but religion that denies art and science must decay, because it attempts to deny Man's approach through humanity to the highest mysteries, as if any other way were open to him. The religious impulse awakened and yet given no channel simply reacts in misery, for it springs from the instinct of love and is creative, and cannot rest content with expression in an act of vacant worship. Prayer clarifies the soul for action as the soul understands action, swift, direct, yet patient and indomitable; but if the mind be darkened the soul is impeded and doomed to disappointment. Art and science, being work at its highest, bring the only avail-able illumination to the darkened mind, and a religion which denies them deprives all other work of its illuminating power and leaves the soul dependent upon the fitful fire of the passions. Action then becomes spasmodic and unintelligible, discouraging and baffling rather than inspiring, and the soul gains no strength but gradually weakens, and the burden of humanity is increased. How cruel, then, is it for religion, pretending to care for the soul, to deprive it of its only sustenance; and what miseries, what disasters does it prepare through its arrogance ! Art was once the handmaid of eligion, but art fortified by science is denied by the institutions to which religion has given birth. In the education grudgingly allowed by those institutions to the people, art and science are cunningly divorced, and neither is held up in honour. The result is, that education has debauched the innocence of the people's minds. The ignorance of the peasant is transparent compared with the opaque fog in the minds of the town-dwellers, and this fog reverts upon the heart; stultifying the emotions so that individuality and spontaneity are lost, and the word Education means a thing cursed rather than blessed. Science i exploited to bring material comfort and wealth, never to spread knowledge : art is not suffered to bring spiritual ease nor to fortify imagination. Knowledge and imagination are denied in favour of the assimilation of unco-ordinated facts as the only mental process suffered to operate in social existence. It is small Wonder, then, that a need is discovered foi discipline, but if it is made impossible for the individual to discipline himself it cannot be achieved by any external agency. A habit of obedience in public affairs may be inculcated, but against that the private person is mutinous, and finds stealthy relief in personal disloyalty, in deception, slackness and an in-creasing inability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and finally a definite preference for ugliness over beauty, and with that of falsehood over truth. The streets, the news-papers, of any modern town betray the prevalence of this condition in the minds of men, vitiating their capacity for service and their aptness for the democratic form of society in which the efforts of their forefathers have made it possible for them to live. Without a drastic change they will only be able to exist in it, disloyal both to the past and the future.

It is said in extenuation that this is a scientific age, and that science is not concerned with beauty but with facts. That is not true. With-out the illumination of intellectual beauty facts cannot be discovered. They remain concealed behind the mists of illusion. The beauty served by the scientist is not that served by the artist, but it is akin to it, and the spirit of their service is the same. The discoveries of science are used with no sense of service, and there-fore do not take with them the spirit that produced them : the shadow is taken, and the sub-stance is left, for in all human things the spirit is the substance. The discoveries of science have been gulped down in such haste th. t the industrial generations, like a greedy dog, have had to vomit them. Bare facts are an un holesome diet, and, indeed, are only palatable in an artful concoction, as we are beginng to find to our cost, so that art from being an epicurean diversion has become a practical , indeed a hard necessity. Religion has been discarded : facts have been found an inadequate substitute, and it is slowly dawning on our numbed intelligence that it was not the discoveries of science that mattered, but the brave and adventurous spirit: just as it was n t the discoveries of Columbus, Drake and Coo that made them great, but the spirit in which they went forth on uncharted seas. That brings forth fruit an hundredfold in the power to use their discoveries. As with the explorers of the earth, so with the explorers of the forces that animate it, and both need the support Of the explorers of human . experience. Without moral discovery no noble use can be made of the powers placed in our hands by physical and scientific adventure, for of all work the bravest and the hardest is that of the artist, and it is from that work that the light of authority shines most brightly. Both art and science repudiate economic power as firmly as they have done religion as a firm basis for human existence, and economic power, like religion, has perished in the wars of its own creation. Men fight when they feel the ground giving way beneath their feet. The sickening dread that fills them darkens their minds and infuriates their senses until, despairing of higher aims, they remember primitive satisfactions which surge through the memory and drive them mad, and when the madness leaves them they are brought face to face with the fact that these satisfactions have lost their potency. Men of heart, men of imagination know this, and are driven to labour in art and science hoping always to overtake the despair creeping in the veins of their fellows: always hitherto in vain, because the pleasure or the power created by their efforts has been kept by the few from the many. That systematic deprivation should be nearing its end. The artists and scientists are the aristocracy, without which democracy can-not exist, that is, they live in a democracy which transcends death and time, and makes possible a democratic society in an existence limited by time and death. In a healthy community this is acknowledged by the mainte- nance of public galleries, libraries, theatres, concert halls, universities; but in an unhealthy society the communal force of art is ignored, and science, except in so far as it is profitable, is flouted lest the people should discover in themselves the secret of freedom, and begin to perceive that he who turns his work into drudgery for higher wages loses more than he gains: by self-exploitation increases the tyranny of the economic system, by th that increase inflates prices, and meets in the en that very trouble of insufficient means which e designed to avoid.

Self-exploitation is a definite act which in a modern community every worker is fore d to commit under the menace of starvation. The community of artists and scientists is democratic precisely because it is impossible for the workers in it to exploit themselves. If they do so they cannot achieve art or science. The revolt of the hand-workers is against self-exploitation. The strength of their organisations gives them breathing-space in which to realise that if they had not to commit this act they could not be exploited by the classes who have betrayed them. Directly they assert the right to contribute their work freely to any undertaking, they will be able to break the vicious circle, and to let in authority as the ruling principle which will quickly reveal to them the fact that the democracy of art and science is the heart of humanity from which its life-blood, work, flows as mysteriously and as easily as the vivid stream in the human body. The sustenance taken from the earth turns in the body to blood, in society to work. The principle is the same, and it should dominate the great organisations now being formed to give men the strength to add the conquest of themselves to their victory over Nature.