But the mental retina of the great painter can hold such things as he has seen till he transfers them to the canvas; so can the brain of the great masters who paint for us in words, till they embody them in delicate prose or exquisite poetry. The lack of power to express often comes of a lack of this power to realize; and that power, I believe, is what is meant by "the vision and the faculty divine," and by "shaping imagination," and by other phrases which get so bandied to and fro that the world almost ceases to attach any meaning to them at all.
I remember some years ago, in an essay on _Literary Judgment_, a.s.serting that the quality which chiefly distinguished the immortal works from the transient was sincerity, single-heartedness, reality of intention and love of the work for the work"s sake. That was only a partial view of the truth. It is right in a measure, since that sincerity, that absence of make-believe, in the literary creation is a prime necessity; but it is not sufficient. It is, indeed, a prime necessity, because it means that the superlative writer must write at first hand of things genuinely conceived and realized by his very self. It is, indeed, a prime necessity, because you cannot conjure up vividly and hold in steady view the communicable picture of your feeling or your thought, _unless_ you feel it or think it with all your own being. But the sincerity is only a pre-supposed condition. The supreme literary quality is the power to realize the picture and so body forth the thing thought or felt. The great dramatic genius, for example, first realizes a character and his thoughts and feelings, and then, identifying himself with that character, gives them expression. When Homer imagines Odysseus descending to the nether world and meeting there the shades of heroes whom he had known at Troy, his Odysseus accosts this one or that and receives answer as befits the person. But to Ajax, son of Telamon, Odysseus had indirectly done a wrong, and caused his suicide, and, when the ghost of Ajax appears, Odysseus speaks to it gentle and soothing words of explanation and self-defence. And what does that proud injured Ajax reply? Well, on Homer"s brain the picture is very vivid. His brain becomes practically the brain of the very Ajax, and the continuation shows it: "So I spake, but he answered me not a word, and pa.s.sed on to Erebus after the other spirits of the departed dead." That silence of Ajax is truer than the most scathing of speeches.
So is it with Shakespeare. He sees his characters and realizes their sensations so vividly that his brain and feelings become the brain and feelings of his creations; and thus only does his Lear say with such perfect naturalness, "Pray you, undo this b.u.t.ton." Hence, too, all the distinctness of character in his lifelike men and women, be it Hamlet or Falstaff, Cordelia or Lady Macbeth.
"Imagination," "the shaping gift of imagination," is this power of first presenting a thing to your own brain with luminousness. For once etymology lends real aid. _Imaginatio_ is "the making of pictures." It is inseparable from the power of perfect expression.
Why did the people of Verona whisper of Dante, "Yonder is the man who has been in h.e.l.l?" Simply because of this power. Dante saw the place of torment in his imagination, not as any of us might see it, vaguely terrible, but clear in every dread and horrid detail. And, having so seen it, he lends to that seeing the gift of expression, and with a few simple verbs and nouns and plain forceful similes he makes his readers see what he had seen. So did it come about that he was regarded as the man who had actually "been in h.e.l.l." How far does Milton stand below him in this imaginative vision! Milton, too, describes an Inferno, but it lacks the convincingness of one who has seen it for himself. We could never say that Milton was the man who had "been in h.e.l.l."
What is the special power of Carlyle in his dealings with history? It is the power of summoning up visions of the past, standing out clear to the last particular, as if lightning illuminated them against the background of the ages.
I do not know whether any better definition of imagination can be given than that of Ruskin in his _Modern Painters_. "Imagination is the power of seeing anything we describe as if it were real, so that, looking at it as we describe, points may strike us which will give a vividness to the description that would not have occurred to vague memory, or been easily borrowed from the expressions of other writers." I do not say we can necessarily describe a thing _because_ we so see it, but I do say that we cannot describe it _unless_ we so see it. Therefore the supreme literary gift of communicating exactly what we think and feel, exactly as we think and feel it, involves no mere control of language, but, therewith, an imaginative brain to realize conceptions as vivid pictures. To combine these powers is to be a genius of great rarity.
In one part of the _Inferno_ of Dante it rains fire. To say that much would be enough for the ordinary writer. But Dante not only sees fire falling; he sees exactly how it falls, and the picture in his mind becomes the picture in ours, when he simply says that it fell silently, steadily "as fall broad flakes of snow when winds are still." Perfectly easy, is it not? Yes, for Dante. But for the ordinary writer it would have been no more than "A rain of fire." But what manner of rain, O thou ordinary and inadequate writer? We do not, indeed, want scorching rhetoric and verse piled on verse. We want the "inevitable" word, the simple and the home-coming, the Dantesque. Byron now and again exhibits the power. Mazeppa is bound naked on the wild horse, and--
The skies spun like a mighty wheel, I saw the trees like drunkards reel, And a slight flash sprang o"er my eyes, Which saw no further....
With the consummate literary artists the picture, whether it be of a real scene, an imagined scene, or a feeling, is given in few but effective strokes. And it is so given simply because they see it all so distinctly. As Longinus says of Sappho"s famous ode of pa.s.sion, the supreme writer seizes upon the essential and salient features, combines them, and trusts to your and my imagination to supply the rest. When a writer welters in words and lines, when he elaborates touch upon touch, you may be sure that he is trying to fill the picture into his imagination, instead of being possessed by an imagination which determine the picture.
In the _Ancient Mariner_ Coleridge describes the pa.s.sing of the spectral ship:--
The western wave was all aflame, The day was well-nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave Rested the broad bright Sun, When that strange shape drove suddenly Betwixt us and the Sun.
And straight the Sun was fleck"d with bars, (Heaven"s Mother send us grace!) As if through a dungeon-grate he peer"d With broad and burning face.
Are those her ribs through which the Sun Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a Death? and are there two?
Is Death that Woman"s mate?
and then--
The Sun"s rim dips; the stars rush out; At one stride comes the dark; With far-heard whisper, o"er the sea, Off shot the spectre-bark.
For my own part those words make me see it all fully, vividly. I do not merely behold the scene: I feel the peculiar awe of the narrator. Can you doubt that Coleridge saw this in his brain exactly as if it were real?
When Keats in his mind"s eye saw Madeline praying under that Gothic window which was so "innumerable of stains and splendid dyes" he beheld the scene as if he were positively on the spot to paint it. And how does he paint it? What an opportunity for the display of pictorial technique in words! But Keats is not thinking of that. One does not really perceive a myriad little details at such a time. You never do actually see all the things which you would describe if you sat down to think details out one by one. If you had really fixed your eyes on the kneeling Madeline, as Porphyro did on that eve of St. Agnes, you could not also be taking an inventory of the particulars in the situation. The inferior writer forgets this, because he is writing from his wits, and not, as Keats wrote, from the spontaneous picture of imagination. What Keats sees is this:--
Full on this cas.e.m.e.nt shone the wintry moon, And threw warm gules on Madeline"s fair breast, As down she knelt for Heaven"s grace and boon; Rose bloom fell on her hands, together prest, And on her silver cross fair amethyst, And on her hair a glory, like a saint.
That is all, and it is enough. A kneeling figure, the wintry moon, and some few of the colours of the gla.s.s, described as they fall upon what you would really note, the head and breast and the clasped hands. What would not a Rossetti have done with such material!
These are descriptions. It is the same with emotions. "Pray you, undo this b.u.t.ton." The supreme writer does not tear pa.s.sion rhetorically to pieces. He does not elaborate it till he fritters it away. He condenses it all into the poignant cry which goes straight from heart to heart.
What in the circ.u.mstances could Burns have said more final than--
Had we never loved sae kindly, Had we never loved sae blindly, Never met and never parted, We had ne"er been broken-hearted.
I know that there are people who cannot see that these four simple lines are the consummate expression of a vast range of feeling. We can only pray that Heaven will some day be merciful to them.
One word more seems necessary to be said. How can we tell when a writer is succeeding in his effort to communicate, to body forth what he seeks to body forth? Simply by our own complete apprehension, by the universal humanity in us, by the fact that we keenly recognize that such and such a sensation is one in which we have at least shared, but which we have never known how to express. We realize how it has been brought over us by loneliness, mountain solitude, a sunset, great heights, stormy seas, music, sorrow, love, the sound of distant bells, calm evenings, summer and the perfume of the flowers, fine characters, heroic deeds, and a thousand other causes, within us and without: and, when the supreme writer voices it for us, whatever it may be, we feel and know it at once for the final and the perfect.
If that test is not sufficient, I know no other.
Hebraism and h.e.l.lenism
Students of the history of society and literature have grown fond of distinguishing between two powerful influences upon our ways of thinking and of looking at life. They find two chief att.i.tudes of mind, two chief animating spirits, so different from each other in the main that they deserve and have received special and practically ant.i.thetical names.
Our manner of regarding life and society, morals and sentiment, nature and art, is determined by whichever of these two spirits predominates in us. Sometimes one whole nation has its view in almost all things pervaded by the one set of principles; another nation is no less manifestly informed by the other set. At other times it is an individual who stands out in broad spiritual and intellectual contrast with another of the same people and the same age. These two spirits have been called by Matthew Arnold the "Hebraic" and the "h.e.l.lenic"; the one Hebraic, because its clearest and most consistent manifestation has been among the Hebrews; the other h.e.l.lenic, because its clearest and most consistent manifestation has been among the h.e.l.lenes, or ancient Greeks.
And not only have these two spirits been specially manifested there, but it is directly from those peoples that two corresponding influences have spread to all the more highly civilized portions of the world. From the Hebrews there has spread one great force, and from the h.e.l.lenes another great force, and these two forces have in a larger or smaller measure determined the characters and views of those peoples, who, being neither Hebrews nor h.e.l.lenes, had not of themselves developed so intense a spirituality or so active an intellectuality as one or other of these two possessed.
It is rather in their historical aspect that I propose to make some observations upon these two forces.
I feel a natural diffidence and some little constraint in treating such a subject before a specially Hebrew gathering. But the Hebrews of whom I have to speak are not yourselves, but your ancestors, and they are ancestors with a history so remarkable and a spirit so potent that, though I have no share in your pride, I can in a large measure cordially share in your admiration of them. In a large measure, I say, for I propose to show how the mental view and temperament of Israel, when Israel was his truest self, needed to be qualified and corrected by another mental view and temperament--that of the Greeks, when the Greeks were their truest selves. And if there were here any descendant of Pericles or Sophocles or Phidias, I should similarly say to him that, though I feel the keenest zest of admiration for the many sublime things which his Athenian ancestors did and wrote and wrought, yet the full perfection of human character and life was not reached by them, and could not be reached by them, until their own spirit was corrected by another, the spirit exemplified in the Hebrews. You will, I am sure, allow me to say whatever I feel to be just. And that there may be no misconception, let me add that, whenever I speak of the Hebraic spirit, I shall mean, not the spirit which an individual contemporary Hebrew may happen to display, but the spirit which was characteristic of Israel as a nation before the dispersion. In the same way the h.e.l.lenic spirit will mean the spirit which was characteristic of the pure h.e.l.lene before he was demoralized and adulterated by Roman, Slav, and Turk.
Man, chameleon-like, is apt to take the colour of the land on which he happens to be, and a Jew who lives in modern times, amid social and religious conditions, education, and material circ.u.mstances so different from those of ancient Palestine, may differ very widely from the type of the race as we gather it from history and literature. Nor is race everything. Even if the Jews once more gathered together into one nation from all quarters of the earth, we should by no means necessarily behold a people of the same spiritual attributes and ideals as the Hebrews who built the Temple under Ezra, or who fought like lions under the Maccabees. As with the early Saracens, it is often some one great idea or principle which--for the time at least--determines the whole current of a nation"s mental and spiritual being. But that idea may gradually lose its intensity and its energizing power, and the Saracen sinks into the voluptuous Mussulman. Hebraism and h.e.l.lenism, therefore, mean the diverse spirits of two peoples as they once were, not as they may be now, or will necessarily be again.
One cannot with truth draw absolutely clear and sharp distinctions between the mental processes of different peoples. One cannot say that a Hebrew, in virtue of being a Hebrew, would necessarily act and think thus and thus, while a Greek, in virtue of being a Greek, would necessarily act and think in some other definite way. Here and there a fervid or brooding mind among the Greeks, such as that of aeschylus, might often approach the lines of Hebraism. Here and there some son of Shem must have been mentally const.i.tuted more like the sons of Javan.
None the less, when we survey the history and study the literature of these two races as a whole, it is impossible not to perceive a clear and consistent difference between their respective ways of looking at things, at life and conduct, sentiment and nature and art.
Max Muller, speaking of the English people, says that we are Jewish in our religion, Greek in our philosophy, Roman in our politics, and Saxon in our morality. This ingenious remark is, as such absolute a.n.a.lyses are apt to be, only partially true. We have, indeed, borrowed from the Jews, from the Greeks, and from the Romans, in those several departments. But those departments over-lap and interpenetrate each other. The fact is that, in us English, with certain Teutonic qualities ineradically at the bottom of our nature, the modes in which our religion, philosophy, politics, and morality have developed themselves have been determined by a blending of all that we have learned from Jews, Greeks, and Romans alike. In the workings of our intellect and morals, Athens and Jerusalem in particular have operated upon us far more than we can now exactly estimate.
Looking at the matter historically, the special quality and type of Hebraism we must deduce from Hebrew literature, from Hebrew history, from the characteristics of eminent Hebrews, and from the average of testimony to Hebrew character supplied to us by reputable authors, Jew and Gentile, in poetry, drama, fiction, or other forms of literary creation. The special quality and type of h.e.l.lenism we must deduce from similar material concerning Greeks and things Grecian. And here I must confess that I am no Hebraist. I am not intimately acquainted with the heterogeneous compilation called the Talmud, nor with Alexandrine and mediaeval Jewish literature. Nevertheless no one brought up strictly in a Christian Church can help becoming in some measure versed in things Hebraic. To be perpetually exercised from early childhood in reading, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting the one great Hebrew doc.u.ment, the Bible; to have its very words and phrases ready to spring to one"s lips; to be saturated with its sentiments; to have been made much more familiar with the sayings and doings of Abraham and Joseph, David and Solomon, Isaiah and Ezekiel, than even with those of the kings, heroes, and poets of one"s own people--all this cannot but impart to a receptive mind the power of distinguishing with fair accuracy the Hebraic quality from the un-Hebraic. On the other hand, in h.e.l.lenic studies I may be allowed to take a more confident stand; and as sometimes the long august procession of Hebrew history and Hebrew letters pa.s.ses across the mind, and sometimes again the brilliant march of Grecian deeds and Grecian words, one cannot fail to be more and more impressed with the contrast between the excellences or the shortcomings of the two.
Up till the present time, the life and literature of Europe in general has twice pa.s.sed beneath Hebraic influences, twice beneath h.e.l.lenic.
Each influence has been greater or less, more or less durable, in different regions; nevertheless there are two clearly distinguishable invasions of the influences in each case. The intellectual influence of Greece was first felt in pagan times, when Greek ideas and Greek philosophy pa.s.sed westward to Rome and through Rome permeated the peoples under Roman sway. The spiritual influence of Hebraism was first felt when, soon after this, the Christian Jews carried the doctrine of one G.o.d amongst the pagans, and when Christianity,--which, however otherwise diverse from Judaism, is none the less its outcome--became the religion of all the European stocks. The first influence which came from Greece was an intellectual influence, the pa.s.sing of a fresh and stimulating breeze. The first influence of Jerusalem was a moral re-awakening and revelation, the shaking of a rushing mighty wind. The moral principle of Hebraism, in the special guise of Christianity, transformed the whole life and conduct and ideals of European men. What had been virtues in some cases became vices, what had been weaknesses became virtues.
We need not dwell upon this immense change; its nature is known to all, and its source was Jewish. Centuries pa.s.s by. The Christianised world has sunk its intelligence beneath the prescriptions of a demoralized Church; the moral impulse of the religion borrowed from the Hebrews has died down into formalism. I speak of the period immediately preceding the later Renaissance and the Reformation. Strange to say, it was in a large measure the Ottoman Turk who came to the rescue. He over-ran Greece, captured Constantinople, and was the cause of a great westward exodus of Greek talent and learning. Italy in particular was filled with Greeks whose profit and pride it was to spread far and wide the literature and culture of their nation. The avidity with which this new learning was received was marvellous; still more marvellous was the effect. It was, in truth, a _renaissance_, a new birth of intellect. It meant no less than a general revival of the spirit of inquiry, of open-eyed observation, of a desire and a resolve to see things as they were, and not as tradition and dogma had taught men to see them. Italy, France, Germany and England became alive with fresh efforts of the reason, inspired with fresh ideas of taste and beauty in artistic creation, and with new hopes and schemes of progress. The astonishing abundance, the immense variety, and the splendid quality of the Elizabethan literature are due to no other recognisable cause. It was one and the same cause that made Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, and Bacon possible. A new springtime seemed to have dawned upon the world of thought. This was the second period of h.e.l.lenic influence, an influence wholly intellectual and artistic.
Following the re-awakening of speculation came the Reformation. The Reformation brought the reading of the Bible at first hand, and a new style of preaching and exhorting directly from it. In religion and morals the reformers fell back upon the Scriptures themselves. They drank in the Scriptures, and therewith the Hebraic spirit which pervades them. In most cases the salutary effect upon character and conduct can hardly be overstated. In other cases there was extravagance and harm.
Uncompromisingly, and not very intelligently, did they speak Scripture, think Scripture, and act Scripture, like Hebrews born out of due season. Knox invested himself with the austere authority of the Hebrew prophet; Calvin was fain to hew Agag in pieces before the Lord. The Puritans of England became fanatical in their sombre conception of sin and in the rigour of their exaggerated Hebraism. Here was the second period of Hebraic influence, an influence wholly moral and religious.
In each case the new invasion of the h.e.l.lenic spirit precedes, and is the handmaid of, the Hebraic. In each case the influence of Greece is to procure the open mind, that of Jerusalem, to mould the unsteady heart.
The Greek works first upon the intellect to make it supple, the Hebrew comes after and gives robustness to the moral will. Such, in the main, is the distinction and the historic sequence of the two forces. We have twice pa.s.sed under each, and we shall, I believe and hope, feel the strong power of each again, for we sorely need, on the one hand, something to give stamina to our weak moral conceptions, and, on the other, something to give us clear principles of social life, art, and culture.
Let us look a little closer at what our distinction implies.
Physically the unlikeness of Hebrew to Greek was very marked. Allowing for climatic effects, the Hebrew physiognomy has preserved itself until to-day. The true, or at least the ideal, Greek type is almost lost in hybrid forms, yet we know what it was. The ideal h.e.l.lene was tall, upright, strong and supple withal, his lightish hair and beard were thick and curling, his features straight and firm, his brow broad, his eyes full and light. The whole form and aspect expressed a healthy zest of life, an open-eyed contemplation of men and things, and a belief in the sovereign virtue of reason. The outward aspect of the Hebrew type is very different from this. The inward difference of the two races was no less great. The essential contrast between them is not one of brow and eye, it is one of thinking and seeing, a contrast between two sets of ideals and principles, two ways of looking at life and the world. Romans like Juvenal, who saw both Greeks and Jews numerous in the imperial city, could only superficially observe that the Jew was unsocial, narrow in his prejudices and obstinate in his superst.i.tions, while the Greek was as devoid of principle as he was brilliantly versatile. The Jew and Greek whom he saw were those of a demoralised period; but in any case the Roman did not understand either; he did not know that each was the representative of a certain important set of principles carried to excess. He would hardly have thought it worth his while to reflect on such a matter. It is otherwise with us, to whom all great human phenomena are of significance for that sound thinking which is essential to progress.
How can we describe in brief and intelligible terms these two spirits, the Hebraic and the h.e.l.lenic? One might use many figures of speech.