Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/870

808 We alluded to this trait a moment ago as one of tentation. As to what one shall do, it enters as an element into every free choice, involving a moment of hesitation, of rational consideration. But, in thinking, it is a more complex attitude; the intuition involves waiting, if we would see life and things as they are—that is, in their own light.

The culture of this attitude has an important bearing upon literature. If we must confront the living truth of life in its own aspects, we must also be faithful to our vision in the expression of it. It has made the thinker free, and the inspiration of this emancipation can be communicated only in the living, naming terms of the revelation. Positive assertion limits the truth, and what is called the naked truth is not truth at all, since only in all its veilings and not by the lifting of them can it be seen. The obvious appearance is misleading, and so is the random utterance. Truth—that is, of any living thing, seen as it is and not in an abstract—seems almost to belie itself, certainly to contradict itself and, as we follow its turnings, to present other faces. We often use the phrase, "the simplicity of truth," but it is misleading, as is any obvious reflection. If the truth makes us free, it is, first of all, an emancipation from the obvious.

Our progress, then, after the Hellenic type, and in this tentative mood, has been, in literature as in everything else, in pursuit of living truth, following its elusive hidings. In life a straight line is not one which takes the shortest distance between two points, but one that returns, and the longest way round is the shortest way home. The human courage which has been developed through the centuries has ceased to depend upon a fixed resting-place for the feet; the invincible spirit foregoes the certitude and fearlessly follows the flowing lines, finding greater safety in the softer medium of the air and sea than on the adamantine rock, and, what is more to its purpose, finding the clue to harmonies not attainable in charted courses.

This is the great psychical principle of the modern Indo-European—this dauntless faith in life. He is willing to accept rules and statutes in an unvital field, where the formal obligation is as negative as it is indispensable, and where the convention is his protection as it is that of the community—the hard wall enclosing his living garden in which he freely roams. He recognizes the true values of the Hebraic bequest to humanity—even when it takes the extremely reactionary form of Puritanic divestiture and like a wintry blast sweeps away the unwholesome foison of a summer fallen into decay. The Hellenist is even very easy in Zion, and with his native love of gladness he joyously responds to an evangel though it blossomed in a desert or sprang up like a "root out of dry ground." But his spirit is free and untethered in its own field—the study of life and the expression of life in art and letters.

It is of the greatest importance that those who are making literature should see what is the noble lineage of the culture they are called upon to continue, and what is the kind of courage essential to this high undertaking. Very few of the men of Athens in Plato's time rose to the height of his argument or put even to themselves the questions which he put to life. The multitude, indeed, had compelled his master to drink the hemlock, as they had stoned Anaxagoras because he did not see the sun as they saw it. It is doubtless true to-day that there are hundreds of thousands of readers of fair intelligence, but who run as they read, who cannot see life and the world as a George Meredith or a Joseph Conrad sees it. But there is a very large audience, permeated by that fine Hellenic culture, with its medieval modification, which has given us all that is best in our literature—an audience made up of men and women who have themselves boldly confronted the truths of life, and who eagerly await new disclosures from the great poet and the master novelist.

There are two kinds of curiosity—the lower and vulgar sort, which seeks only the novel and striking for a merely sensational effect, whether produced by ingenious invention or by the presentation of monstrous actualities in the field of superficial realism; and that other kind of curiosity which has a higher satisfaction in the disclosures of new and vital truths in nature and in human nature. This noble satisfaction is the reward of