Kepler may well bring us to Einstein, the greatest pioneer in the comprehension of the universe since his day, and, indeed, one who is more than a pioneer, since he already seems to have won a place beside Newton. It is a significant fact that Einstein, though he possesses an extremely cautious, critical mind, and is regarded as conspicuous for his common sense, has a profound admiration for Kepler, whom he frequently quotes. For Einstein also is an imaginative artist.[50] Einstein is obviously an artist, even in appearance, as has often been noted by those who have met him; “he looks far more the musician than the man of science,” one writes, while those who know him well say that he is “essentially as much an artist as a discoverer.” As a matter of fact he is an artist in one of the most commonly recognised arts, being an accomplished musician, a good violinist, it is said, while improvisation on the piano, he himself says, is “a necessity of his life.” His face, we are told, is illumined when he listens to music; he loves Bach and Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner much less, while to Chopin, Schumann, and the so-called romantics in music, as we might anticipate, he is indifferent. His love of music is inborn; it developed when, as a child, he would think out little songs “in praise of God,” and sing them by himself; music, Nature, and God began, even at that early age, to become a kind of unity to him. “Music,” said Leibnitz, “is the pleasure the human soul experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.” It is the most abstract, the most nearly mathematical of the arts—we may recall how music and mathematics had their scientific origin together in the discovery of Pythagoras—and it is not surprising that it should be Einstein’s favorite art.[51] It is even more natural that, next to music, he should be attracted to architecture—the art which Goethe called “frozen music”—for here we are actually plunged into mechanics, here statics and dynamics are transformed into visible beauty. To painting he is indifferent, but he is drawn to literature, although no great reader. In literature, indeed, it would seem that it is not so much art that he seeks as emotion; in this field it is no longer the austerely architectonic that draws him; thus he is not attracted to Ibsen; he is greatly attracted to Cervantes as well as Keller and Strindberg; he has a profound admiration for Shakespeare, but is cooler towards Goethe, while it would seem that there is no writer to whom he is more fervently attached than the most highly emotional, the most profoundly disintegrated in nervous organisation of all great writers, Dostoievsky, especially his masterpiece, “The Brothers Karamazov.” “Dostoievsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss.” All literary analysis or æsthetic subtlety, it seems to Einstein, fails to penetrate to the heart of a work like “The Karamazovs,” it can only be grasped by the feelings. His face lights up when he speaks of it and he can find no word but “ethical satisfaction.” For ethics in the ordinary sense, as a system, means little to Einstein; he would not even include it in the sciences; it is the ethical joy embodied in art which satisfies him. Moreover, it is said, the keynote of Einstein’s emotional existence is the cry of Sophocles’ Antigone: “I am not here to hate with you, but to love with you.” The best that life has to offer, he feels, is a face glowing with happiness. He is an advanced democrat and pacifist rather than (as is sometimes supposed) a socialist; he believes in the internationality of all intellectual work and sees no reason why this should destroy national characteristics.
Einstein is not—and this is the essential point to make clear—merely an artist in his moments of leisure and play, as a great statesman may play golf or a great soldier grow orchids. He retains the same attitude in the whole of his work. He traces science to its roots in emotion, which is exactly where art also is rooted. Of Max Planck, the physicist, for whom he has great admiration, Einstein has said: “The emotional condition which fits him for his task is akin to that of a devotee or a lover.” We may say the same, it would seem, of Einstein himself. He is not even to be included, as some might have supposed, in that rigid sect which asserts that all real science is precise measurement; he recognises that the biological sciences must be largely independent of mathematics. If mathematics were the only path of science, he once remarked, Nature would have been illegible for Goethe, who had a non-mathematical, even anti-mathematical, mind, and yet possessed a power of intuition greater than that of many an exact investigator.[52] All great achievements in science, he holds, start from intuition. This he constantly repeats, although he adds that the intuition must not stand alone, for invention also is required. He is disposed to regard many scientific discoveries commonly regarded the work of pure thought as really works of art. He would have this view embodied in all education, making education a free and living process, with no drilling of the memory and no examinations, mainly a process of appeal to the senses in order to draw out delicate reactions. With his end, and even for the sake of acquiring ethical personality, he would have every child learn a handicraft, joinery, bookbinding, or other, and, like Élie Faure,[53] he has great faith in the educational value of the cinema. We see that behind all Einstein’s activity lies the conception that the physicist’s work is to attain a picture, “a world-picture,” as he calls it. “I agree with Schopenhauer,” Einstein said at a celebration in honour of Planck in 1918, “that one of the most powerful motives that attract people to science and art is the longing to escape from everyday life with its painful coarseness and desolating bareness, and to break the fetters of their own ever-changing desires. It impels those of keener sensibility out of their personal existences into the world of objective perception and understanding. It is a motive force of like kind to that which drives the dweller in noisy confused cities to restful Alpine heights whence he seems to have an outlook on eternity. Associated with this negative motive is the positive motive which impels men to seek a simplified synoptic view of the world conformable to their own nature, overcoming the world by replacing it with this picture. The painter, the poet, the philosopher, the scientist, all do this, each in his own way.” Spengler has elaborately argued that there is a perfect identity of physics, mathematics, religion, and great art.[54] We might fairly be allowed to point to Einstein as a lofty embodiment of that identity.
Here, where we reach the sphere of mathematics, we are among processes which seem to some the most inhuman of all human activities and the most remote from poetry. Yet it is here that the artist has the fullest scope for his imagination. “Mathematics,” says Bertrand Russell in his “Mysticism and Logic,” “may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.” We are in the imaginative sphere of art, and the mathematician is engaged in a work of creation which resembles music in its orderliness, and is yet reproducing on another plane the order of the universe, and so becoming as it were a music of the spheres. It is not surprising that the greatest mathematicians have again and again appealed to the arts in order to find some analogy to their own work. They have indeed found it in the most various arts, in poetry, in painting, in sculpture, although it would certainly seem that it is in music, the most abstract of the arts, the art of number and of time, that we find the closest analogy. “The mathematician’s best work is art,” said Mittag-Lefler, “a high and perfect art, as daring as the most secret dreams of imagination, clear and limpid. Mathematical genius and artistic genius touch each other.” And Sylvester wrote in his “Theory of Reciprocants”: “Does it not seem as if Algebra had attained to the dignity of a fine art, in which the workman has a free hand to develop his conceptions, as in a musical theme or a subject for painting? It has reached a point in which every properly developed algebraical composition, like a skilful landscape, is expected to suggest the notion of an infinite distance lying beyond the limits of the canvas.” “Mathematics, rightly viewed,” says Bertrand Russell again, “possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture...The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.”
The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought. But it is the same ladder which we have all of us been always ascending, alike from the infancy of the individual and the infancy of the race. Molière’s Jourdain had been speaking prose for more than forty years without knowing it. Mankind has been thinking poetry throughout its long career and remained equally ignorant.
Footnote 26: It would not appear that the pioneers of the Mathematical Renaissance of the twentieth century are inclined to imitate Descartes in this matter. Einstein would certainly not, and many apostles of physical science to-day (see, e.g., Professor Smithells, _From a Modern University: Some Aims and Aspirations of Science_) insist on the æsthetic, imaginative, and other “art” qualities of science.
Footnote 27: Footnote 27: C. Singer. “What is Science?” _British Medical Journal_, 25th June, 1921. Singer refuses the name of “science” in the strict sense to fields of completely organised knowledge which have ceased growing, like human anatomy (though, of course, the anatomist still remains a man of science by working outwards into adjoining related fields), preferring to term any such field of completed knowledge a _discipline_. This seems convenient and I should like to regard it as sound. It is not, however, compatible with the old doctrine of Mill and Colvin and Ray Lankester, for it excludes from the field of science exactly what they regarded as most typically science, and some one might possibly ask whether in other departments, like Hellenic sculpture or Sung pottery, a completed art ceases to be art.
Footnote 28: It has often been pointed out that the imaginative application of science—artistic ideas like that of the steam locomotive, the flying-machine heavier than air, the telegraph, the telephone, and many others—were even at the moment of their being achieved, elaborately shown to be “impossible” by men who had been too hastily hoisted up to positions of “scientific” eminence.
Footnote 29: Footnote 29: J. B. Baillie, _Studies in Human Nature_ (1921), p. 221. This point has become familiar ever since F. A. Lange published his almost epoch-marking work, _The History of Materialism_, which has made so deep an impress on many modern thinkers from Nietzsche to Vaihinger; it is indeed a book which can never be forgotten (I speak from experience) by any one who read it in youth.
Footnote 30: Footnote 31: Gomperz, _Greek Thinkers_, vol. I, chap. III, where will be found an attractive account of Pythagoras’ career and position.
Footnote 32: Always, it may perhaps be noted in passing, it seems to have been difficult for the sober and solemn Northerner, especially of England, to enter into the Greek spirit, all the more since that spirit was only the spirit of a sprinkling of people amid a hostile mass about as unlike anything we conventionally call “Greek” as could well be imagined, so that, as Élie Faure, the historian of art, has lately remarked, Greek art is a biological “monstrosity.” (Yet, I would ask, might we not say the same of France or of England?) That is why it is usually so irritating to read books written about the Greeks by barbarians; they slur over or ignore what they do not like and, one suspects, they instinctively misinterpret what they think they do like. Better even the most imperfect knowledge of a few original texts, better even only a few days on the Acropolis, than the second-hand opinions of other people. And if we must have a book about the Greeks, there is always Athenæus, much nearer to them in time and in spirit, with all his gossip, than any Northern barbarian, and an everlasting delight.
Footnote 33: Footnote 33: Along another line it should have been clear that the dialogues of the philosophers were drama and not history. It would appear (Croiset, _Littérature Grecque_, vol. III, pp. 448 _et seq._) that with Epicharmus of Cos, who was settled in Megara at the beginning of the fifth century, philosophic comedy flourished brilliantly at Syracuse, and indeed fragments of his formal philosophic dialogue survive. Thus it is suggested that Athenian comedy and sophistic prose dialogues may be regarded as two branches drawn from the ancient prototype of such Syracusan comedy, itself ultimately derived from Ionian philosophy. It is worth noting, I might add, that when we first hear of the Platonic dialogues they were being grouped in trilogies and tetralogies like the Greek dramas; that indicates, at all events, what their earliest editors thought about them. It is also interesting to note that the writer of, at the present moment, the latest handbook to Plato, Professor A. E. Taylor (_Plato_, 1922, pp. 32-33), regards the “Socrates” of Plato as no historical figure, not even a mask of Plato himself, but simply “the hero of the Platonic drama,” of which we have to approach in much the same way as the work of “a great dramatist or novelist.”
Footnote 34: Footnote 34: He had often been bidden in dreams to make music, said the Platonic Socrates in _Phædo_, and he had imagined that that was meant to encourage him in the pursuit of philosophy, “which is the noblest and best of music.”
Footnote 35: In discussing Socrates I have made some use of Professor Dupréel’s remarkable book, _La Légende Socratique_ (1922). Dupréel himself, with a little touch of irony, recommends a careful perusal of the beautiful and monumental works erected by Zeller and Grote and Gomperz to the honour of Socrates.
Footnote 36: Count Hermann Keyserling, _Philosophie als Kunst_ (1920), p. 2. He associates this with the need for a philosophy to possess a subjective personal character, without which it can have no value, indeed no content at all.
Footnote 37: Croce, _Problemi d’ Estetica_, p. 15. I have to admit, for myself, that, while admiring the calm breadth of Croce’s wide outlook, it is sometimes my misfortune, in spite of myself, when I go to his works, to play the part of a Balaam _à rebours_. I go forth to bless: and, somehow, I curse.
Footnote 38: Footnote 38: James Hinton, a pioneer in so many fields, clearly saw that thinking is really an art fifty years ago. “Thinking is no mere mechanical process,” he wrote (_Chapters on the Art of Thinking_, pp. 43 _et seq._), “it is a great Art, the chief of all the Arts...Those only can be called thinkers who have a native gift, a special endowment for the work, and have been trained, besides, by assiduous culture. And though we continually assume that every one is capable of thinking, do we not all feel that there is somehow a fallacy in this assumption? Do we not feel that what people set up as their ‘reasons’ for disbelieving or believing are often nothing of the sort?...The Art faculty is Imagination, the power of seeing the unseen, the power also of putting ourselves out of the centre, of reducing ourselves to our true proportions, of truly using our own impressions. And is not this in reality the chief element in the work of the thinker?...Science _is_ poetry.”
Footnote 39: So far, indeed, as I am aware, I was responsible for the first English account of his work (outside philosophical journals); it appeared in the London _Nation and Athenæum_ a few years ago, and is partly embodied in the present chapter.
Footnote 40: I have based this sketch on an attractive and illuminating account of his own development written by Professor Vaihinger for Dr. Raymund Schmidt’s highly valuable series, _Die Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen_ (1921), vol. II.
Footnote 41: “Most workers on the problem of atomic constitution,” remarks Sir Ernest Rutherford (_Nature_, 5th August, 1922), “take as a working hypothesis that the atoms of matter are purely electrical structures, and that ultimately it is hoped to explain all the properties of atoms as a result of certain combinations of the two fundamental units of positive and negative electricity, the proton and electron.”
Footnote 42: Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, vol. I.
Footnote 43: Otto Rank, _Der Künstler: Ansätze zu einer Sexual Psychologie_.
Footnote 44: The sexual strain in the symbolism of language is touched on in my _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, vol. V, and similar traits in primitive legends have been emphasised—many would say over-emphasised—by Freud and Jung.
Footnote 45: Einstein, in conversation with Moszkowski, expressed doubt as to the reality of Leonardo’s previsions of modern science. But it scarcely appeared that he had investigated the matter, while the definite testimony of the experts in many fields who have done so cannot be put aside.
Footnote 46: For the Italian reader of Leonardo the fat little volume of _Frammenti_, edited by Dr. Solmi and published by Barbèra, is a precious and inexhaustible pocket companion. For the English reader Mr. MacCurdy’s larger but much less extensive volume of extracts from the _Note-Books_, or the still further abridged _Thoughts_, must suffice. Herbert Horne’s annotated version of Vasari’s _Life_ is excellent for Leonardo’s personality and career.
Footnote 47: Morley Roberts, who might be regarded as a pupil in the school of Leonardo and trained like him in the field of art, has in various places of his suggestive book, _Warfare in the Human Body_, sprinkled irony over the examples he has come across of ignorant specialists claiming to be men of “science.”
Footnote 48: Footnote 48: Needless to say, I do not mention this to belittle Galton. A careful attention to words, which in its extreme form becomes pedantry, is by no means necessarily associated with a careful attention to things. Until recent times English writers, even the greatest, were always negligent in spelling; it would be foolish to suppose they were therefore negligent in thinking.
Footnote 49: Darwin even overestimated the æsthetic element in his theory of sexual selection, and (I have had occasion elsewhere to point out) unnecessarily prejudiced that theory by sometimes unwarily assuming a conscious æsthetic element.
Footnote 50: It is probable that the reason why it is often difficult to trace the imaginative artist in great men of supposedly abstract science is the paucity of intimate information about them. Even their scientific friends have rarely had the patience, or even perhaps the intelligence, to observe them reverently and to record their observations. We know almost nothing that is intimately personal about Newton. As regards Einstein, we are fortunate in possessing the book of Moszkowski, _Einstein_ (translated into English under the title of _Einstein the Searcher_), which contains many instructive conversations and observations by a highly intelligent and appreciative admirer, who has set them down in a Boswellian spirit that faintly recalls Eckermann’s book on Goethe (which, indeed, Moszkowski had in mind), though falling far short of that supreme achievement. The statements in the text are mainly gleaned from Moszkowski.
Footnote 51: Spengler holds (_Der Untergang des Abendlandes_, vol. X, p. 329) that the development of music throughout its various stages in our European culture really has been closely related with the stages of the development of mathematics.
Footnote 52: I would here refer to a searching investigation, “Goethe und die mathematische Physik: Eine Erkenntnistheoretische Studie,” in Ernst Cassirer’s _Idee und Gestalt_ (1921). It is here shown that in some respects Goethe pointed the way along which mathematical physics, by following its own paths, has since travelled, and that even when most non-mathematical Goethe’s scientific attitude was justifiable.
Footnote 53: See the remarkable essay, “De la Cinéplastique,” in Élie Faure’s _L’Arbre d’Éden_ (1922). It is, however, a future and regenerated cinema for which Élie Faure looks, “to become the art of the crowd, the powerful centre of communion in which new symphonic forms will be born in the tumult of passions and utilized for fine and elevating æsthetic ends.”
Footnote 54: CHAPTER IV THE ART OF WRITING I FROM time to time we are solemnly warned that in the hands of modern writers language has fallen into a morbid state. It has become degenerate, if not, indeed, the victim of “senile ataxy” or “general paralysis.” Certainly it is well that our monitors should seek to arouse in us the wholesome spirit of self-criticism. Whether we write ill or well, we can never be too seriously concerned with what it is that we are attempting to do. We may always be grateful to those who stimulate us to a more wakeful activity in pursuing a task which can never be carried to perfection.
Yet these monitors seldom fail at the same time to arouse a deep revolt in our minds. We are not only impressed by the critic’s own inability to write any better than those he criticises. We are moved to question the validity of nearly all the rules he lays down for our guidance. We are inclined to dispute altogether the soundness of the premises from which he starts. Of these three terms of our revolt, covering comprehensively the whole ground, the first may be put aside—since the ancient retort is always ineffective and it helps the patient not at all to bid the physician heal himself—and we may take the last first.
Men are always apt to bow down before the superior might of their ancestors. It has been so always and everywhere. Even the author of the once well-known book of Genesis believed that “there were giants in the earth in those days,” the mighty men which were of old, the men of renown, and still to-day among ourselves no plaint is more common than that concerning the physical degeneracy of modern men as compared with our ancestors of a few centuries ago. Now and then, indeed, there comes along a man of science, like Professor Parsons, who has measured the bones from the remains of the ancestors we still see piled up in the crypt at Hythe, and finds that—however fine the occasional exceptions—the average height of those men and women was decidedly less than that of their present-day descendants. Fortunately for the vitality of tradition, we cherish a wholesome distrust of science. And so it is with our average literary stature. The academic critic regards himself as the special depository of the accepted tradition, and far be it from him to condescend to any mere scientific inquiry into the actual facts. He half awakens from slumber to murmur the expected denunciation of his own time, and therewith returns to slumber. He usually seems unaware that even three centuries ago, in the finest period of English prose, Swift, certainly himself a supreme master, was already lamenting “the corruption of our style.”
If it is asserted that the average writer of to-day has not equalled the supreme writer of some earlier age,—there are but one or two in any age,—we can only ejaculate: Strange if he had! Yet that is all that the academic critic usually seems to mean. If he would take the trouble to compare the average prose writer of to-day with the average writer of even so great an age as the Elizabethan, he might easily convince himself that the former, whatever his imperfections, need not fear the comparison. Whether or not Progress in general may be described as “the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance,” it is certainly so with the progress of style, and the imperfections of our average everyday writing are balanced by the quite other imperfections of our forefathers’ writing. What, for instance, need we envy in the literary methods of that great and miscellaneous band of writers whom Hakluyt brought together in those admirable volumes which are truly great and really fascinating only for reasons that have nothing to do with style? Raleigh himself here shows no distinction in his narrative of that discreditable episode,—as he clearly and rightly felt it to be,—the loss of the _Revenge_ by the wilful Grenville. Most of them are bald, savourless, monotonous, stating the obvious facts in the obvious way, but hopelessly failing to make clear, when rarely they attempt it, anything that is not obvious. They have none of the little unconscious tricks of manner which worry the critic to-day. But their whole manner is one commonplace trick from which they never escape. They are only relieved by its simplicity and by the novelty which comes through age. We have to remember that all mediocrity is impersonal and that when we encourage its manifestations on printed pages we merely make mediocrity more conspicuous. Nor can that be remedied by teaching the mediocre to cultivate tricks of fashion or of vanity. There is more personality in Claude Bernard’s “Leçons de Physiologie Expérimentales,” a great critic of life and letters has pointed out, Remy de Gourmont, than in Musset’s “Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle.” For personality is not something that can be sought; it is a radiance that is diffused spontaneously. It may even be most manifest when most avoided, and no writer—the remark has doubtless often been made before—can be more personal than Flaubert who had made almost a gospel of Impersonality. But the absence of research for personality, however meritorious, will not suffice to bring personality out of mediocrity.
Moreover, the obvious fact seems often to be overlooked by the critic that a vastly larger proportion of the population now write, and see their writing printed. We live in what we call a democratic age in which all are compulsorily taught how to make pothooks and hangers on paper. So that every nincompoop—in the attenuated sense of the term—as soon as he puts a pen in ink feels that he has become, like M. Jourdain, a writer of prose. That feeling is justified only in a very limited sense, and if we wish to compare the condition of things to-day with that in an age when people wrote at the bidding of some urgent stimulus from without or from within, we have at the outset to delete certainly over ninety-five per cent of our modern so-called writers before we institute any comparison. The writers thus struck out, it may be added, cannot fail to include many persons of much note in the world. There are all sorts of people to-day who write from all sorts of motives other than a genuine aptitude for writing. To suppose that there can be any comparison at this point of the present with the past and to dodder over the decay of our language would seem a senile proceeding if we do not happen to know that it occurs in all ages, and that, even at the time when our prose speech was as near to perfection as it is ever likely to be, its critics were bemoaning its corruption, lamenting, for instance, the indolent new practice of increasing sibilation by changing “arriveth” into “arrives” and pronouncing “walked” as “walkd,” sometimes in their criticisms showing no more knowledge of the history and methods of growth of English than our academic critics show to-day.
For we know what to-day they tell us; it is not hard to know, their exhortations, though few, are repeated in so psittaceous a manner. One thinks, for instance, of that solemn warning against the enormity of the split infinitive which has done so much to aggravate the Pharisaism of the bad writers who scrupulously avoid it. This superstition seems to have had its origin in a false analogy with Latin in which the infinitive is never split for the good reason that it is impossible to split. In the greater freedom of English it is possible and has been done for at least the last five hundred years by the greatest masters of English; only the good writer never uses this form helplessly and involuntarily, but with a definite object; and that is the only rule to observe. An absolute prohibition in this matter is the mark of those who are too ignorant, or else too unintelligent, to recognise a usage which is of the essence of English speech.[55] One may perhaps refer, again, to those who lay down that every sentence must end on a significant word, never on a preposition, and who reprobate what has been technically termed the post-habited prefix. They are the same worthy and would-be old-fashioned people who think that a piece of music must always end monotonously on a banging chord. Only here they have not, any more than in music, even the virtue—if such it be—of old fashion, for the final so-called preposition is in the genius of the English language and associated with the Scandinavian—in the wider ancient sense Danish—strain of English, one of the finest strains it owns, imparting much of the plastic force which renders it flexible, the element which helped to save it from the straitlaced tendency of Anglo-Saxon and the awkward formality of Latin and French influence. The foolish prejudice we are here concerned with seems to date from a period when the example of French, in which the final preposition is impossible, happened to be dominant. Its use in English is associated with the informal grace and simplicity, the variety of tender cadence, which our tongue admits.
In such matters as the “split infinitive” and the “post-habited preposition,” there should never have been any doubt as to the complete validity and authority of the questioned usages. But there are other points at which some even good critics may be tempted to accept the condemnation of the literary grammarians. It is sufficient to mention one: the nominative use of the pronoun “me.” Yet, surely, any one who considers social practice as well as psychological necessity should not fail to see that we must recognise a double use of “me” in English. The French, who in such matters seem to have possessed a finer social and psychological tact, have realised that je cannot be the sole nominative of the first person and have supplemented it by _moi_ (_mi_ from _mihi_). The Frenchman, when asked who is there, does not reply “Je!” But the would-be English purist is supposed to be reduced to replying “I!” Royal Cleopatra asks the Messenger: “Is she as tall as me?” The would-be purist no doubt transmutes this as he reads into: “Is she as tall as I?” We need not envy him.