Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West/Part First, 6
VI
GREEN LOGS AND BRUSHWOOD
OUR ideals are the vehicles of our illusions;
our illusions are the motor
forces of our desires; our desires are born
of an innate, insatiable longing for the
Beautiful, the Good, and the True,—for
the superlatives, in other words, of what,
according to our own light, is the truth;
and our own light, that undying spiritual
flame in the temple of our being, has its
eternal sources in the sun and soil, as in
the schools and universities, and the arts
and sciences of our time.
That is why, from a pure amber flame in the past, when religion was the supreme dominating force in life, it has developed into a complex, many-colored, spasmodically burning mass of inharmonies. The amber hue is seldom seen nowadays; a green ray filters through the smoke; a golden spark now and then illumines it, but only for a spell; the opalescent rays fitfully rise and swell only to be eclipsed by the blaze of reddish smoke, akin to the scientist's nebular beginning—the reddish smoke of the chaos of our time.
And why this chaos? The innate eternal flame of the soul is not extinguished in man—his spirituality is not dead. But while in the past it was fed by one stoker, so to speak, it is to-day fed by a hundred, a thousand stokers, indifferent and indiscriminate, who gather their fuel at random in forests young and old, in rocky copses, in distant bogs. Hence the smoking, coruscating, crepitating, fitfully glowing flame. There are many wet logs and green logs in the fire; much brushwood too and peat; and the ash-heap of the ages, which never can be entirely removed.
But the fire is not extinguished, will not be extinguished, can not be extinguished. Gradually the wet and green logs, the brushwood, the peat will all be consumed, and the amber golden flame will become purer, steadier, more enduring and more beautiful than ever. This is my understanding of the spiritual and intellectual chaos of our time. The true essence of the flame is still there; the eternal sources of it are still there; and the means of communication are by no means cut off. We still have stokers, although they are not called prophets and priests, who go direct to the sun and soil for their fuel. They can not, to be sure, exclude, like the prophets of old, the wet and green logs from the fire. In a democratic state and a universal state of education, every one has the right to bring his little armful to the pile; but only the good wood in the end will prevail, will dominate with its pure glow and warmth, with its steady flame, the burning mass.
To drop the metaphor, the truth, which rests on the eternal verities of existence, will always prevail. Like the seasons of the year, like history, truth also repeats itself. But we seldom recognize it, when great poets or true artists—the prophets and the priests of our day—present it to us in garments spick and span, following the fashion of the age, the slant of its fancy, the turn and temper of its mind.
By a trick of the pen or the brush we are cozened into old beliefs; and lest we see through the diapheneities of our new deities, we are forced to put on the smoked glasses of culture, assume a conventional pose, scientific or artistic, and worship at a distance sufficiently safe for our vanities and illusions.
But when a man of uncommon courage, insight and zeal raises a little altar of his own to the old fashioned truths and the old fashioned virtues,—when he comes, to go back to my metaphor, with fuel for our innate fire direct from the sun and soil,—he is banned from the temple of the elect, denounced as a reactionary or, what is worse, poo-poohed as a high-brow. Yes, the builder nowadays, paradoxical as it may seem, is looked upon as a destroyer. But the iconoclast of the past is incarnate in the devote worshipper of the present. This, the little red-eyed iconoclasts of the times, can not see.
Are we not solving the great Riddle, these loud-lunged children of spiritual poverty and squalor, of intellectual anarchy and chaos, cry out. Are we not advancing in the way of new discoveries, we the apostles of the New Freedom, the forerunners of the New Era? Granted that you are, my emancipated Brothers. But dare you approach your new ideals, new truths, new virtues, and divest them of their trappings and their masks? Even the most radical among you, the Bolsheviki of the soul, the Anti-Christs, when they stand on their heads, are but a crude symbol of the Cross reversed.
And the ideals of your superman, as conceived by their Teuton protagonist, not as they are poetized by his interpreters and parroters, find their highest and noblest expression in self-sacrifice. The old fashioned virtue again.
Yes, indeed; even Nietzsche who thought he had murdered Christianity, fled to the forest and brought back a few good logs for the inner fire. Even Nietzsche was made the sport of his own "blond beast" and sent back to the foot of the cross—a caricature of the Christ.