THE FOURTH ORDER OF HUMANITY
IN the beginning of things came man, sequent to him woman; on woman followed the child, and on the child the doll. It is a climax of development; and the crown of these is the doll.
To the doll's supremacy in beauty woman's self bears testimony, implicit, if unconscious. For ages has she tricked her face in pigment, and her brows in alien hair; her contours she has filled to counterfeit roundness, her eyes and lashes tinged: and all in a frustrate essay to compass by Art what in the doll is right of Nature. Even the child exhibits distind inferiorities. It is full of thwartness and eating and drinking, and selffulness (selfishness were a term too dully immitigate), and a plentiful lack of that repose wherein the doll is nearest to the quiet gods. For my own part, I profess that much acquaintance only increases my consideration for this fourth order of humanity: always excepting the very light-blue-eyed doll, in whose regard there is a certain chill hauteur against which my diffidence is not proof.
Consider the life of dolls. At the whim of some debonair maternal tyranness, they veer on every wind of mutability; are the sport of imputed moods, suffer quahties over which they have no eledion, — are sorry or glad, indocile or amiable, at their mistress' whim and mandate; they are visited with stripes, or the soft aspersion of kisses; with love dele£lably persecuted, or consigned to the clement quiet of negle6l; exalted to the dimple of their mistress' cheek, or dejedled to the servile floor; rent and mutilated, or rocked and murmured over; blamed or petted, be-rated or loved. Nor why it is thus or thus with them, are they any wise witting; wherefore these things should be, they know not at all.
Consider the life of us — Oh, my cousins the dolls!
Some consciousness, I take it, there was; some secret sense of this occult co-rivalry in fate, which withheld me even in childhood from the youthful male's contempt for these short-Uved parasites of the nursery. I questioned, with wounded feelings, the straitened feminine intolerance which said to the boy: ' Thou shalt not hold a baby; thou shalt not possess a doll.' In the matter of babies, I was hopeless to shake the illiberal prejudice; in the matter of doUs, I essayed to confound it. By eloquence and fine diplomacy I wrung from my sisters a concession of dolls; whence I date my knowledge of the kind.
But includible sex declared itself. I dramatized them, I fell in love with them; I did not father them; intolerance was justified of its childxen. One in particular I seleded, one with surpassing fairness crowned, and bowed before the fourteen inches of her skirt. She was beautiful. She was one of Shakespeare's heroines. She was an amity of inter-removed miracles; all wrangling excellencies at paft in one sole doll; the frontiers of jealous virtues marched in her, yet trespassed not against her peace. I desired for her some worthy name; and asked of my mother: Who was the fairest among living women? Laughingly was I answered that I was a hard questioner, but that perhaps the Empress of the French bore the bell for beauty. Hence, accordingly, my Princess of puppetdom received her style; and at this hour, though she has long since vanished to some realm where all sawdust is ^'viped for ever from dolls' wounds, I cannot hear that name but the Past touches me with a rigid agglomeration of small china fingers.
But why Vv'ith childhood and v/ith her should I close the blushing recital of my puppetloves? Men are but children of a larger growth; and your statue, I warrant me, is but your crescent doll. Wherefore, then, should I leave unmemorized the statue which thralled my youth in a passion such as feminine mortality was skill-less to instigate? Nor at this let any boggle; for she was a goddess. Statue I have called her; but indeed she was a bust, a head, a face — and who that saw that face could have thought to regard further? She stood nameless in the gallery of sculptural casts which she strangely deigned to inhabit; but I have since learned that men called her the Vatican Melpomene. ■ Rightly stood she nameless, • for Melpomene she never was: never went words of hers from bronzed lyre in tragic order; never through her enspelled lips moaned any svllables of woe. Rather, with her leaf-twined locks, she seemed some strayed Bacchante, indissolubly filmed in secular reverie. The expression which gave her divinity resistless I have always suspedled for an accident of the cast; since in frequent engravings of her prototype I never met any such aspe6l. The secret of this indecipherable significance, I slowly discerned, lurked in the singularly diverse set of the two corners of the mouth; so that her profile wholly shifted its meaning according as it was viewed from the right or left. In one corner of her mouth the little languorous firstling of a smile had gone to sleep; as if she had fallen a-dream, and forgotten that it was there. The other had drooped, as of its own listless weight, into a something which guessed at sadness; guessed, but so as indolent lids are easily grieved by the pricks of the slate-blue dawn. And on the full countenance those two expressions blended to a single expression inexpressible; as if pensiveness had played the Marnad, and now her arms grew heavy under the cymbals. Thither each evening, as twilight fell, I stole to meditate and worship the baflling mysteries of her meaning: as twilight fell, and the blank noon surceased arrest upon her life, and in the vaguening countenance the eyes broke out from their daylong ambuscade. Eyes of violet blue, drowsedamorous, which surveyed me not, but looked ever beyond, where a spell enfixed them,
Waiting for something, not for me.
And I was content. Content; for by such tenure of unnoticedness I knew that I held my privilege to worship: had she beheld me, she would have denied, have contemned my gaze. Between us, now, are years and tears: but the years waste her not, and the tears wet her not; neither misses she me or any man. There, I think, she is standing yet; there, I think, she will stand for ever: the divinity of an accident, awaiting a divine thing impossible, which can never come to her, and she knows this not.
For I reje6l the vain fable that the ambrosial creature is really an unspiritual compound of lime, which the gross ignorant call plaster of Paris. If Paris indeed had to do with her, it was he of Ida. And for him, perchance, she waits.
FORM AND FORMALISM
MANY think in the head; but it is the thinking in the heart that is most wanted. Theology and philosophy are the soul of truth; but they must be clothed with flesh, to create an organism which can come down and live among men. Therefore Christ became incarnate, to create Christianity. Be it spoken with reverence, a great poet, for example, who is likewise a great thinker, does for truth what Christ did for God, the Supreme Truth. And though the world may be loath to admit it, the saint does for truth even more; for he gives to truth his own flesh. What of the man who — like the illustrious English Canon of Loreto — should be poet and saint? Ah, ' hard and rarest union ' indeed! for he is a twofold incarnation of truth. He gives to it one body which has the life of man, another which has the life of humanity and the diuturnal hills. This is a concrete example of an abstraft principle — the supreme necessity under which truth is bound to give itself a definite shape. Of such immutable importance is form that without this efiigy and witness of spirit, spirit walks invisible among men. Yet, except in literature (and possibly in art), where a materialistic worship of form curiously prevails, form is a special objeft of the age's blasphemy. In politics, music, society, ethics, the cry is: ' Dirumpamus vincula eorum! ' I am led to this reflection by the strange miscomprehensions which have beset even so wise and sympathetic a teacher as Mr Ruskin, when he has touched on Rehgious Orders; and the passage which led to it is a passage in one of his most wise and charming books, the Ethics of the Dust.
* Half the monastic system,' he says, * rose out of the notion of future reward a£ling on the occuk pride and ambition of good people.... There is always a considerable quantity of pride, to begin with, in what is called " giving oneself to God." As if one had ever belonged to anybody else!... When it had become the principal amusement, and the most admired art, of Christian men, to cut one another's throats, and burn one another's towns, of course the few feeble or reasonable persons left, who desired quiet, safety, and kind fellowship, got into cloisters; and the gentlest, thoughtfullest, noblest men and women shut themselves up, precisely where they could be of least use.'
It is a most representative passage, for many reasons. Mr Ruskin is, as he truly says, a witness favourable to the monasteries. So it comes about that his words represent not mere Protestant prejudice, but the current secular prejudice of the age. ' All the good people,' as he says further on, * getting themselves hung up out of the way of mischief.' That then, as now, it was only the minority, even of ' good people,' who became monks; that, numerous though monks were, the world must have been in a worse way than in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, if these were all its just; that the majority of monks by no means let the world slide, hut very a6tively combated it; — on all this a professed thinker might have been cxpe(?i:ed to think. • But confine monasticism, if you will, to contemplative monasticism. Not by the good in general, but by the good with a contemplative bent, are contemplative Orders entered. Is it unlawful to lead the life contemplative, only when the obje6l of contemplation is God? Was Wordsworth right, St Bernard wrong? Or does Mr Ruskin consider the poet's contemplation fruitful, but the saint's unfruitful? Yes, there is the root of it; and there again is Mr Ruskin representative. The modern world profoundly and hopelessly disbelieves the power of prayer. It is not always scornful, this modern world; it simply does not comprehend, and is doubtful whether anything may lawfully be supposed to exist which it cannot comprehend. Yet I would sooner be prayed for by John of Patmos than written for by John of Coniston. But Mr Ruskin's words indicate that not only the R^cligious Orders, but the Religious life itself is held by him ' suspcft.' In what is called ' giving oneself to God ' he sees pride. He desires life, in fad:, to be religious without the form of religion; even as, in his own later tendencies, he has apparently aimed to be a Catholic without Catholic belief. One sees this revolt from form, with its inevitable consequences, in his teaching and in his thought. In his teaching, which is full of insulated and capricious beauty, but has little unity beyond that of his own individuahty. And that makes artistic, not ethical, unity. In his thought, which is often strangely unprecise. He can, for instance, as the basis of his diatribe against monasticism, assert that ' nothing is ever done so as really to please our Great Father, unless we would also have done it, though we had had no Father to know of it.' Why,then,are we to do it? ' Because it is right,' Mr Ruskin imphes. Which is so dearly fine in sound, that it is a pity it should be so childishly empty in sense. W'e are not to do a thing for the pleasure of God; but we are to do it because it is right — i.e., the pleasure of God. For what is right, but the pleasure of God? If Mr Ruskin had asked himself that question, he would not have spun this Penelope-web. It is an example, not of thinking in the heart (which I have averred to be so much needed), but of thinking with the heart, which is quite another thing, and the peculiar curse of sentimentalists.
But in such utterances, and in his protest against the formal ' giving oneself to God,' Mr Ruskin has latter-day feeling at his back. Formalism is the repressor of vitality: therefore let us away with form. Let us all stop short where the young man stopped, who went to Christ for a counsel of perfe6lion, and departed sad at heart. When a maid takes a man to husband, she goes forth from her father's house; and none cries out upon the inhuman sundering of family ties by the relentless system of marriage. But when a soul takes Christ to husband, and goes forth from her father's house, we will cry, like them that cried Diana great. Christ alone we admit not to have His spouse all to Himself. Without form, formalism is impossible; then let us give short shrift to dogma! The letter killeth, but the spirit quickeneth; then let us have the Essence without the Word!
What, you builders of futurity! You will have life, yet not form? Such thing is not known to man as life without form. To avoid formalism by destroying form, is to remedy carnality by committing suicide. You have the spirit freed from the letter then, with a vengeance; but the spirit, somehow, no longer quickens. Yet may not form change? Yes, in so far as the life changes, not otherwise. The Church is like man's body: which grows to completion altering or adding a little in superficialities and details of figure, but unchanging in essential line and strudure. Each bone, muscle, nerve, and blood-vessel, though it have increase, is in form, position, and constitution immutable. And with the Church, also, which is Christ's body, you may add in non-essentials, you may develop in essentials; but you shall not alter in essentials by so much as a clause of its dogmatic theology. * That the Scripture may be fulfilled: You shall not break a bone of Him.'
In things more general, the same confusion of form with its abuse, the same uncomprehending iconoclasm, is patent. What is the widest ideal of this age? ' The parliament of man, the federation of the world.' Universal federation, in government or in no government, in religion or in no religion. And the decided tendency of what are called ' popular leaders ' is towards federation with the minimum of government, and no religion. Yet when it comes (as come I believe it will), it can only be federation in both government and religion of plenary and ordered dominance. I see only two rehgions constant enough to effeft this: each based upon the past — which is stabihty; each growing according to an interior law — which is strength. Paganism and Christianism; the religion of the queen of heaven* who is Astarte, and of the queen of heaven who is Mary.
' Under which king? ' For under a king it must be, not merely a flag. No common aim can triumph, till it is crystallized in an individual, at once its child and ruler. Man himself must become incarnate in a man before his cause can triumph. Thus the universal Word became the individual Christ; that total God
We offer sacrifice to the queen of heaven.' (Jer. xliv, 19.) The Phoenicians represented Astarte wth a veil blown out by the wind, and the crescent moon under her feet.
and total man being particularized in a single symbol, the cause of God and man might triumph. In Christ, therefore, centres and is solved that supreme problem of life — the marriage of the Unit with the Sum. In Him is perfe6llv^ shown forth the All for one and One for all, which is the justificatory essence of that substance we call Kingship; and from which, in so far as each particular kingship derogates, it forfeits justificatory right. When the new heavens and the new earth, which multitudinous Titans are so restlessly forging, at length stand visible to resting man, it needs no prophecy to foretell that they will be like the old, with head, and form, and hierarchic memberment, as the six-foot bracken is like the bracken at your knee. For out of all its disintegrations and confusion earth emerges, like a strong though buffeted swimmer, nearer to the unseen model and term of all social growth; which is the civil constitution of angeldom, and Uranian statecraft of imperatorial God.