IVIV (12): 195-197

[alice wellintown]

"Sibi unitus et simplificatus esse," that is the long struggle of the
Imitatio Christi. The spirit which it forms is the very opposite of
that which regards life as a game of skill, and values things and
persons as marks or counters of something to be gained, or achieved,
beyond them. It seeks to value everything at its eternal worth, not
adding to it, or taking from it, the amount of influence it may have
for or against its own special scheme of life. It is the spirit that
sees external circumstances as they are, its own power and tendencies
as they are, and realises the given conditions of its life, not
disquieted by the desire for change, or the preference of one part in
life rather than another, or passion, or opinion. The character we
mean to indicate achieves this perfect life by a happy gift of nature,
without any struggle at all. Not the saint only, the artist also, and
the speculative thinker, confused, jarred, disintegrated in the world,
as sometimes they inevitably are, aspire for this simplicity to the
last. The struggle of this aspiration with a lower practical aim in
the mind of Savonarola has been subtly traced by the author of Romola.
As language, expression, is the function of intellect, as art, the
supreme expression, is the highest product of intellect, so this
desire for simplicity is a kind of indirect self-assertion of the
intellectual part of such natures. Simplicity in purpose and act is a
kind of determinate expression in dexterous outline of one's
personality. It is a kind of moral expressiveness; there is an
intellectual triumph implied in it. Such a simplicity is
characteristic of the repose of perfect intellectual culture. The
artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires only
to be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer and
nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life not simply expressive
of the inward becomes thinner and thinner. This intellectual throne is
rarely won. Like the religious life, it is a paradox in the world,
denying the first conditions of man's ordinary existence, cutting
obliquely the spontaneous order of things. But the character we have
before us is a kind of prophecy of this repose and simplicity, coming
as it were in the order of grace, not of nature, by [1] some happy
gift, or accident of birth or constitution, showing that it is indeed
within the limits of man's destiny. Like all the higher forms of
inward life this character is a subtle blending and interpenetration
of intellectual, moral and spiritual elements. But it is as a phase of
intellect, of culture, that it is most striking and forcible. It is a
mind of taste lighted up by some spiritual ray within. What is meant
by taste is an imperfect intellectual state; it is but a sterile kind
of culture. It is the mental attitude, the intellectual manner of
perfect culture, assumed by a happy instinct. Its beautiful way of
handling everything that appeals to the senses and the intellect is
really directed by the laws of the higher intellectual life, but while
culture is able to trace those laws, mere taste is unaware of them. In
the character before us, taste, without ceasing to be instructive, is
far more than a mental attitude or manner. A magnificent intellectual
force is latent within it. It is like the reminiscence of a forgotten
culture that once adorned the mind; as if the mind of one
philosophesas pote met' erotos,+ fallen into a new cycle, were
beginning its spiritual progress over again, but with a certain power
of anticipating its stages. It has the freshness without the
shallowness of taste, the range and seriousness of culture without its
strain and over-consciousness. Such a habit may be described as
wistfulness of mind, the feeling that there is "so much to know,"
rather as a longing after what is unattainable, than as a hope to
apprehend. Its ethical result is an intellectual guilelessness, or
integrity, that instinctively prefers what is direct and clear, lest
one's own confusion and intransparency should hinder the transmission
from without of light that is not yet inward. He who is ever looking
for the breaking of a light he knows not whence about him, notes with
a strange heedfulness the faintest paleness in the sky. That
truthfulness of temper, that receptivity, which professors often
strive in vain to form, is engendered here less by wisdom than by
innocence. Such a character is like a relic from the classical age,
laid open by accident to our alien modern atmosphere. It has something
of the clear ring, the eternal outline of the antique. Perhaps it is
nearly always found with a corresponding outward semblance. The veil
or mask of such a nature would be the very opposite of the "dim
blackguardism" of Danton, the type Carlyle has made too popular for
the true interest of art. It is just this sort of entire transparency
of nature that lets through unconsciously all that is really
lifegiving in the established order of things; it detects without
difficulty all sorts of affinities between its own elements, and the
nobler elements in that order. But then its wistfulness and a
confidence in perfection it has makes it love the lords of change.
What makes revolutionists is either self-pity, or indignation [2] for
the sake of others, or a sympathetic perception of the dominant
undercurrent of progress in things. The nature before us is
revolutionist from the direct sense of personal worth, that chlide,+
that pride of life, which to the Greek was a heavenly grace. How can
he value what comes of accident, or usage, or convention, whose
individual life nature itself has isolated and perfected? Revolution
is often impious. They who prosecute revolution have to violate again
and again the instinct of reverence. That is inevitable, since after
all progress is a kind of violence. But in this nature revolutionism
is softened, harmonised, subdued as by distance. It is the
revolutionism of one who has slept a hundred years. Most of us are
neutralised by the play of circumstances. To most of us only one
chance is given in the life of the spirit and the intellect, and
circumstances prevent our dexterously seizing that one chance. The one
happy spot in our nature has no room to burst into life. Our
collective life, pressing equally on every part of every one of us,
reduces nearly all of us to the level of a colourless uninteresting
existence. Others are neutralised, not by suppression of gifts, but by
just equipoise among them. In these no single gift, or virtue, or
idea, has an unmusical predominance. The world easily confounds these
two conditions. It sees in the character before us only
indifferentism. Doubtless the chief vein of the life of humanity could
hardly pass through it. Not by it could the progress of the world be
achieved. It is not the guise of Luther or Spinoza; rather it is that
of Raphael, who in the midst of the Reformation and the Renaissance,
himself lighted up by them, yielded himself to neither, but stood
still to live upon himself, even in outward form a youth, almost an
infant, yet surprising all the world. The beauty of the Greek statues
was a sexless beauty; the statues of the gods had the least traces of
sex. Here there is a moral sexlessness, a kind of impotence, an
ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with a divine beauty and
significance of its own.