Morality as an Art
I
THAT living is an art, and the moralist the critic of that art, is a very ancient belief. It was especially widespread among the Greeks. To the Greeks, indeed, this belief was so ingrained and instinctive that it became an implicitly assumed attitude rather than a definitely expressed faith. It was natural to them to speak of a virtuous person as we should speak of a beautiful person. The ‘good’ was the ‘beautiful’; the sphere of ethics for the Greeks was not distinguished from the sphere of æsthetics. They spoke of life as of a craft or a fine art. Protagoras regarded life as the sum of many crafts, and Socrates, his opponent, still always assumed that the moralist’s position is that of a critic of a craft. So influential a moralist as Aristotle remarks, in a matter-of-fact way, in his Poetics, that if we wish to ascertain whether an act is, or is not, morally right we must consider not merely the intrinsic quality of the act, but the person who does it, the person to whom it is done, the time, the means, the motive. Such an attitude toward life puts out of court an appeal to any rigid moral laws; it means that an act must befit its particular relationships at a particular moment, and that its moral value can, therefore, be judged only by the standard of the spectator’s instinctive feeling for proportion and harmony. That is the attitude that we adopt toward a work of art, or any beautiful object in Nature. It is only implicitly, also, that we ever detect this attitude among the Romans, the pupils of the Greeks. For the most part, the Romans, whose impulses of art were very limited, whose practical mind craved precision and definition, proved rebellious to the idea that living is an art; while the Hebrews, who were scarcely artists at all, never even dreamed of such an art. Their attitude is sufficiently embodied in the story of Moses and that visit to Sinai which resulted in the production of the table of Ten Commandments which we may still see inscribed in old churches. For even our modern feeling about morals is largely Jewish, in some measure Roman, and scarcely Greek at all. We still accept, in theory at all events, the Mosaic conception of morality as a code of rigid and inflexible rules, arbitrarily ordained, and to be blindly obeyed.
The conception of morality as an art, which Christendom once disdained, seems now again to be finding favor in men’s eyes. Its path has been made smooth by great thinkers of various complexion. Nietzsche and Bergson, William James and Jules de Gaultier, to name but a few, profoundly differing in many fundamental points, all alike assert the relativity of truth and the inaptitude of rigid maxims to serve as guiding forces in life. They also assert, for a large part, implicitly or explicitly, the authority of art.
The nineteenth century was usually inspired by the maxims of Kant, and lifted its hat reverently when it heard Kant declaiming his famous sayings concerning the supremacy of an inflexible moral law. They are fine sayings. But as guides, as motives to practical action in the world? The excellent maxims of the valetudinarian professor at Königsberg scarcely seem that to us to-day. Nor do we any longer suppose that we are impertinent in referring to the philosopher’s personality. In the investigation of the solar spectrum, personality may count for little; in the investigation of moral laws it counts for much. For personality is the very stuff of morals. The moral maxims of an elderly invalid in a provincial university town have their interest. But so have those of a Casanova. And the moral maxims of a Goethe may possibly have more interest than either. There is the rigid categorical imperative of Kant; and there is also that other dictum, less rigid but more reminiscent of Greece, which some well-inspired person has put into the mouth of Walt Whitman: ‘Whatever tastes sweet to the most perfect person, that is finally right.’
II
Fundamentally considered, there are two roads by which we may travel toward the moral ends of life: the road of Tradition, which is ultimately that of Instinct, and the road of Reason. It is true that the ingenuity of analytic investigators like Henry Sidgwick has succeeded in enumerating many ‘methods of ethics.’ But, roughly speaking, there can be only two main roads of life, and only one has proved supremely important. It was by following the path of tradition moulded by instinct that man reached the threshold of civilization; whatever may have been the benefits he derived from the guidance of reason he never consciously allowed reason to control his moral life. Tables of commandments have ever been ‘given by God’; they represented, that is to say, obscure impulses of the soul striving to respond to practical needs. No one dreamed of commending them by declaring that they were reasonable.
It is clear how Instinct and Tradition, thus working together, act vitally and beneficently in moulding the moral life of primitive peoples. The ‘divine command’ was always a command conditioned by the special circumstance under which the tribe lived. That is so even when the moral law is, to our civilized eyes, ‘unnatural.’ The infanticide of Polynesian islands, where the means of subsistence and the possibilities of expansion were limited, was obviously a necessary measure, beneficent and humane in its effects. The killing of the aged among the migrant Eskimos was equally a necessary and kindly measure, recognized as such by the victims themselves, when it was essential that every member of the community should be able to help himself. Primitive rules of moral action, greatly as they differ among themselves, are all more or less advantageous and helpful on the road of primitive life. It is true that they allow very little, if any, scope for divergent individual moral action.
That, indeed, is the rock on which an instinctive traditional morality must strike as civilization is approached. The tribe has no longer the same unity. Social differentiation has tended to make the family a unit, and psychic differentiation to make even the separate individuals units. The community of interests of the whole tribe has been broken up, and therewithal traditional morality has lost alike its value and its power.
The development of abstract intelligence, which coincides with civilization, works in the same direction. Reason is, indeed, on one side an integrating force, for it shows that the assumption of traditional morality — the identity of the individual’s interests with the interests of the community — is soundly based. But it is also a disintegrating force. For if it reveals a general unity in the ends of living, it devises infinitely various and perplexingly distracting excuses for living. Before the active invasion of reason, living had been an art, a highly conventionalized and even hieratic art, but the motive forces of living lay in life itself and had all the binding sanction of instincts; the penalty of every failure in living, it was felt, would be swiftly and automatically experienced. To apply reason here was to introduce a powerful solvent into morals. Objectively it made morality clearer, but subjectively it destroyed the existing motives for morality; it deprived man, to use the fashionable phraseology of the present day, of a vital illusion.
Henceforth morality in the fundamental sense, the actual practices of the population, sank into the background, divorced from the moral theories which a variegated procession of prancing philosophers gayly flaunted before the world. Kant, whose personal moral problems were concerned with the temptation to eat too many sweetmeats, and other philosophers of even much inferior calibre, were regarded as the law-givers of morality, though they carried little enough weight with the world at large.
Thus it comes about that abstract moral speculations, culminating in rigid maxims, are necessarily sterile and vain. They move in the sphere of reason, and that is the sphere of comprehension, but not of vital action. In this way there arises a moral dualism in civilized man. Objectively he has become like the gods and able to distinguish the ends of life; he has eaten of the fruit of the tree and has knowledge of good and evil. Subjectively he is still not far removed from the savage, most frequently stirred to action by a confused web of emotional motives, among which the interwoven strands of civilized reason are as likely to produce discord or paralysis as to furnish efficient guides.
On the one hand he cannot return to the primitive state in which all the motives for living flowed harmoniously in the same channel; he cannot divest himself of his illuminating reason; he cannot recede from his hardly acquired personal individuality. On the other hand he can never expect, he can never even reasonably hope, that, save in a few abnormal persons, the cold force of reason will ever hold in leash the massive forces of vital emotion. It is clear that along neither path separately can the civilized man pursue his way in harmonious balance with himself.
We begin to realize that what we need is not a code of beautifully cutand-dried maxims — whether emanating from sacred mountains or from philosophers’ studies — but a happy combination of two different ways of living. We need, that is, a traditional and instinctive way of living, based on real motor instincts, which will blend with reason and the manifold needs of personality, instead of being destroyed by their solvent actions, as rigid rules inevitably are. Our only valid rule is a creative impulse that is one with the illuminative power of intelligence.
III
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the seed-time of our modern ideas, as it has so often seemed to be, the English people, having at length brought their language to a high degree of clarity and precision, became much interested in philosophy, psychology, and ethics. Their interest was, indeed, often superficial and amateurish, although they were soon to produce some of the most notable figures in the whole history of thought.
The third Earl of Shaftesbury, one of the earliest of the group, himself illustrated this unsystematic method of thinking. He was an amateur, an aristocratic amateur, careless of consistency, and not by any means concerned to erect a philosophic system. Not that he was a worse thinker on that account. The world’s greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professorial chair offers no special opportunities. Shaftesbury was, moreover, a man of fragile physical constitution, as Kant was; but, unlike Kant, he was heroically seeking to live a complete and harmonious life. By temperament he was a Stoic, and he wrote a characteristic book of Exercises, as he proposed to call his Philosophical Regimen, in which he consciously seeks to discipline himself in fine thinking and right living, plainly acknowledging that he is a disciple of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But Shaftesbury was also a man of genius, and as such it was his good fortune to throw afresh into the stream of thought a fruitful conception, absorbed indeed from Greece, and long implicit in men’s minds, but never before made clearly recognizable as a moral theory and an ethical temper, susceptible of being labeled by the philosophic historian, as it since has been, under the name, as passable no doubt as any other, of Æsthetic Intuitionism.
‘He seems,’ wrote Mandeville, his unfriendly contemporary, of Shaftesbury, ‘to require and expect goodness in his species as we do a sweet taste in grapes and China oranges, of which, if any of them are sour, we boldly pronounce that they are not come to that perfection their nature is capable of.’ In a certain sense this was correct. Shaftesbury, it has been said, was the father of that new ethics which recognizes that Nature is not a mere impulse of self-preservation, as Hobbes thought, but also a racial impulse, having regard to others; there are social inclinations in the individual, he realized, that go beyond individual ends. Therewith ‘goodness’was seen, for the first time, to be as ‘natural’ as the sweetness of ripe fruit. Shaftesbury held that human actions should have a beauty of symmetry, proportion, and harmony, which should appeal to us, not because they accord with any rule or maxim (although they may possibly be susceptible of measurement), but because they satisfy our instinctive feelings, evoking an approval which is strictly an æsthetic judgment of moral action.
This instinctive judgment was not, as Shaftesbury understood it, a guide to action. He held, rightly enough, that the impulse to action is fundamental and primary, that fine action is the outcome of finely tempered natures. It is a feeling for the just time and measure of human passion, and maxims are useless to him whose nature is ill-balanced. ‘Virtue is no other than the love of order and beauty in society.’
Æsthetic appreciation of an act, and even an ecstatic pleasure in it, are part of our aesthetic delight in Nature generally, which includes Man. Nature, it is clear, plays a large part in this conception of the moral life. To lack balance in any plane of moral conduct is to be unnatural.
‘Nature is not mocked,’ said Shaftesbury. She is a miracle, for miracles are not things that are performed but things that are perceived, and to fail here is to fail in perception of the divinity of Nature, to do violence to her, and to court moral destruction.
A return to Nature is not a return to ignorance or savagery, but to the first instinctive feeling for the beauty of well-proportioned affection. ‘The most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth,’he asserts, and he recurs again and again to ‘the beauty of honesty.' ‘ Dulce et decorum est was his sole reason,’he says of the classical pagan, adding, ‘And this is still a good reason.' It seems natural to him to refer to the magistrate as an artist; ‘the magistrate, if he be an artist,’he incidentally says. We must not make morality depend on authority. The true artist, in any art, will never act below his character.’ ‘Let who will make it for you as you fancy,’the artist declares, ‘I know it to be wrong. Whatever I have made hitherto has been true work. And neither for your sake or anybody’s else shall I put my hand to any other.' ‘This is virtue!’ exclaims Shaftesbury. ‘This disposition transferred to the whole of life perfects a character. For there is a workmanship and a truth in actions.' our modern world. Not merely the socalled Scottish Philosophers, but most of the great thinkers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England, France, and Germany, were in some measure inspired, influenced, or anticipated by Shaftesbury. Voltaire and Diderot, Lessing and Herder, even Kant, helped to develop the conception that Shaftesbury first formulated.
Shaftesbury, it may be repeated, was an amateur, not only in philosophy but even in the arts. He regarded literature as one of the schoolmasters for fine living, yet he was not a fine artist in writing, though, directly or indirectly, he helped to inspire, not only Pope but Thomson and Cowper and Wordsworth. He was inevitably interested in painting, but his tastes were merely those of the ordinary connoisseur of his time. This gives a certain superficiality to his general æsthetic vision, though it was far from true, as the theologians supposed, that he was lacking in seriousness. His chief immediate followers, like Hutcheson, came out of Calvinistic Puritanism. He was himself an austere Stoic who adapted himself to the tone of the well-bred world he lived in. But if an amateur, he was an amateur of genius. He threw a vast and fruitful conception, caught from the Poetics of Aristotle, ‘the Great Master of Arts,’ and developed with fine insight, into
As Shaftesbury stated the matter, however, it was left on the whole vague and large. He made no very clear distinction between the creative artistic impulse in life and critical æthetic appreciation. In the sphere of morals we cannot always afford to wait until our activity is completed to appreciate its beauty or its ugliness. On the background of general æsthetic judgment we have to concentrate on the forces of creative artistic activity, whose work it is painfully to mould the clay of moral action, and forge its iron, long before the æsthetic criterion can be applied to the final product. Shaftesbury, indeed, would have recognized this, but it was not enough to say, as he said, that we may prepare ourselves for moral action by study in literature. One may be willing to regard living as an art, and yet be of opinion that it is as unsatisfactory to learn the art of living in literature as to learn, let us say, the art of music in architecture.
It was necessary to concentrate and apply these large general ideas. To some extent this was done by Shaftesbury’s immediate successors and followers, such as Hutcheson and Arbuckle, who taught that man is, ethically, an artist whose work is his own life. They concentrated attention on the really creative aspects of the artist in life, æsthetic appreciation of the finished product being regarded as secondary. For all art is, primarily, not a contemplation but a doing, a creative action, and morality is so preëminently.
With Schiller, whose attitude was not, however, based directly on Shaftesbury, the æsthetic conception of morals, which in its definitely conscious form had until then been especially English, may be said to have entered the main stream of culture. Schiller regarded the identity of Duty and Inclination as the ideal goal of human development, and looked on the Genius of Beauty as the chief guide of life. Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the greatest spirits of that age, was moved by the same ideas throughout his life, although in many respects he changed, and even shortly before his death wrote in deprecation of the notion that conformity to duty is the final aim of morality. Goethe, who was the intimate friend of both Schiller and Humboldt, largely shared the same attitude, and through him it had a subtle and boundless influence. Kant, who, it has been said, mistook Duty for a Prussian drillsergeant, still ruled the academic moral world. But a new vivifying and moulding force had entered the larger moral world, and to-day we may detect its presence on every side.
IV
It has often been brought against the conception of morality as an art that it lacks seriousness. It seems to many people to involve an easy, self-indulgent, dilettante way of looking at life. Certainly it is not the way of the Old Testament. The Hebrews were no æsthetic intuitionists. They hated art, for the most part, and in face of the problems of living they were not in the habit of considering the lilies how they grow. It was not the beauty of holiness, but the stern rod of a jealous Jehovah, which they craved for their encouragement along the path of Duty. And it is the Hebrew mode of feeling which has been, more or less violently and imperfectly, grafted upon our Christianity.
It is a mistake, however, to suppose that the conception of life as an art makes no appeal to those who look seriously at life. The very reverse is the fact. This way of looking at life has spontaneously commended itself to men of the gravest and deepest character, in all other respects widely unlike each other. Shaftesbury was temperamentally a Stoic whose fragile constitution involved a perpetual endeavor to mould life to the form of his ideal. And if we go back to Marcus Aurelius we find an austere and heroic man whose whole life, as we trace it in his Meditations, was a splendid struggle; a man who — even, it seems, unconsciously — had adopted the æsthetic criterion of moral goodness and the artistic conception of moral action. Dancing and wrestling express to his eyes the activity of the man who is striving to live, and the goodness of moral actions instinctively appears to him as the beauty of natural objects; it is to Marcus Aurelius that we owe that immortal utterance of æsthetic intuitionism, ‘As though the emerald should say: “Whatever happens I must be emerald.”’
There could be no man more unlike the Roman Emperor and in any more remote field of action than the French saint and philanthropist, Vincent de Paul. At once a genuine Christian mystic and a very wise and marvelously effective man of action, Vincent de Paul adopts precisely the same simile of the moral attitude that in the next century was to be taken up by Shaftesbury. ‘My daughters,’ he wrote to the Sisters of Charity, ‘we are each like a block of stone which is to be transformed into a statue. What must the sculptor do to carry out his design? First of all he must take the hammer and chip off all that he does not need. For this purpose he strikes the stone so violently that if you were watching him you would say he intended to break it to pieces. Then, when he has got rid of the rougher parts, he takes a smaller hammer, and afterwards a chisel, to begin the face with all the features. When that has taken form he uses other and finer tools to bring it to that perfection he has intended for his statue.’
If we desire to find a spiritual artist as unlike as possible to Vincent de Paul we may take Nietzsche. Alien as any man could ever be to a cheap or superficial vision of the moral life, and far too intellectually keen to confuse moral problems with purely æthetic problems, Nietzsche, when faced by the problem of living, set himself — almost as instinctively as Marcus Aurelius or Vincent de Paul — at the standpoint of art. A man must make himself a work of art, he again and again declares, moulded into beauty by suffering, for such art is the highest morality, the morality of the Creator.
There is a certain indefiniteness about the conception of morality as an artistic impulse, to be judged by an æsthetic criterion, which is profoundly repugnant to at least two classes of minds fully entitled to make their antipathy felt. In the first place it makes no appeal to the abstract reasoner, indifferent to the manifoldly concrete problems of living. For the man whose brain is hypertrophied and whose practical life is shriveled to an insignificant routine, — the man of whom Kant is the supreme type, — it is always a temptation to rationalize morality. Such a pure intellectualist, overlooking the fact that human beings are not mathematical figures, may even desire to transform ethics into a species of geometry. Thus we may see in Spinoza a nobler and more inspiring figure, no doubt, but of the same temperament as Kant. The impulses and desires of ordinary men and women are manifold, inconstant, often conflicting, and sometimes overwhelming. But to men of the intellectualist type this consideration is almost negligible; all the passions and affections of humanity seem to them meek as sheep which they may shepherd, and pen within the flimsiest hurdles. William Blake, who could cut down to that central core of the world where all things are fused together, knew better when he said that the only golden rule of life is ‘ the great and golden rule of art.’ James Hinton was forever expatiating on the close resemblance between the methods of art, as shown especially in painting, and the methods of moral action. Thoreau, who also belonged to this tribe, declared, in the same spirit as Blake, that there is no golden rule in morals, for rules are only current silver; ‘it is golden not to have any rule at all.’
There is another quite different type of person who shares this antipathy to the indefiniteness of æsthetic morality: the ambitious moral reformer. The man of this class is usually by no means devoid of strong passions; but for the most part he possesses no great intellectual calibre, and so is unable to estimate the force and complexity of human impulses. The moral reformer, eager to introduce the millennium at once by the aid of the newest mechanical devices, is righteously indignant with anything so vague as an æsthetic morality. He must have definite rules and regulations, clear-cut laws and bylaws, with an arbitrary list of penalties attached, to be duly inflicted in this world or the next. The popular conception of Moses, descending from the sacred mount with a brand-new table of commandments, which he declares have been delivered to him by God, though he is ready to smash them to pieces on the slightest provocation, furnishes the image of the typical moral reformer of every age. It is, however, only in savage and barbarous stages of society, or among the uncultivated classes of civilization, that the men of this type can find their faithful followers.
In Pascal we have a man of the highest genius who belonged to both these types, at once a keenly precise mathematician and an ardently theocratic moralist. It is not surprising that he was ferociously opposed to all indefiniteness in morals. The Jesuits can scarcely be regarded as the champions of æsthetic morality, and the eccentric complacencies of some of their adepts may arouse indignation or amusement; the exercise of the art-impulse in life, moreover, is scarcely compatible with the Jesuits’ passion for spiritual direction. Yet the casuists had grasped a great vital principle: they realized, as Aristotle had realized, that the morality of an action depends on a great many circumstances, and cannot be crystallized, once for all, in a formula. So it is, as Remy de Gourmon has pointed out, that some of the Jesuitic propositions which Pascal held up for scorn seem to us to-day self-evidently true, and the irony falls flat. So significant a fact enables us to realize that the instinctive feelings of men, so far at any rate as Pascal may claim to represent them, have undergone a change, and are now on the side of the harmonious flexibility of moral action rather than on the side of unflexible rigidity.
Yet there is more to be said. That very indefiniteness of the criterion of moral action, falsely supposed to be a disadvantage, is really the prime condition for effective moral action. The academic philosophers of ethics, had they possessed virility enough to enter the field of real life, would have realized — as we cannot expect the moral reformers blinded by the smoke of their own fanaticism to realize — that the slavery to rigid formulas which they preached was the death of all high moral responsibility. Life must always be a great adventure, with risks on every hand; a clear-sighted eye, a many-sided sympathy, a fine daring, an endless patience, are forever necessary to all good living. With such qualities alone may the artist in life reach success; without them even the most devoted slave to formulas can meet only disaster. No responsible moral being may draw breath without an open-eyed freedom of choice, and if the moral world is to be governed by laws, better to people it with automatic machines than with living men and women.
In our human world the precision of mechanism is forever impossible. The indefiniteness of morality is a part of its necessary imperfection. There is not only room in morality for the high aspiration, the courageous decision, the tonic thrill of the muscles of the soul, but we have to admit also sacrifice and pain. The lesser good, our own or that of others, is merged in a larger good, and that cannot be without some rending of the heart. So all moral action, however in the end it may be justified by its harmony and balance, is in the making cruel and in a sense even immoral. Therein lies the final justification of the æsthetic conception of morality. It opens wider perspectives and reveals loftier standpoints; it shows how the seeming loss is part of an ultimate gain, so restoring that harmony and beauty which the unintelligent partisans of a hard and barren duty so often destroy for ever. ‘Art,’ as Paulhan declares, ‘is often more moral than morality itself.’ Or, as Jules de Gaultier holds, ‘Art is in a certain sense the only morality which life admits.’ In so far as we can infuse it with the spirit and method of art, we have transformed morality into something beyond morality.