The Dance of Life

IT has always been difficult for Man to realise that his life is all
an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it
so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it. At the
beginning, indeed, the primitive philosopher whose business it was to
account for the origin of things usually came to the conclusion that
the whole universe was a work of art, created by some Supreme Artist,
in the way of artists, out of material that was practically nothing,
even out of his own excretions, a method which, as children sometimes
instinctively feel, is a kind of creative art. The most familiar to us
of these primitive philosophical statements--and really a statement
that is as typical as any--is that of the Hebrews in the first chapter
of their Book of Genesis. We read there how the whole cosmos was
fashioned out of nothing, in a measurable period of time by the art of
one Jehovah, who proceeded methodically by first forming it in the
rough, and gradually working in the details, the finest and most
delicate last, just as a sculptor might fashion a statue. We may find
many statements of the like kind even as far away as the Pacific.
[Footnote: See, for instance, Turner's _Samoa_, chap. I. Usually,
however, in the Pacific, creation was accomplished, in a more
genuinely evolutionary manner, by a long series of progressive
generations.] And--also even at the same distance--the artist and the
craftsman, who resembled the divine creator of the world by making the
most beautiful and useful things for Mankind, himself also partook of
the same divine nature. Thus, in Samoa, as also in Tonga, the
carpenter, who built canoes, occupied a high and almost sacred
position, approaching that of the priest. Even among ourselves, with
our Roman traditions, the name Pontiff, or Bridge-Builder, remains
that of an imposing and hieratic personage.

But that is only the primitive view of the world. When Man developed,
when he became more scientific and more moralistic, however much his
practice remained essentially that of the artist, his conception
became much less so. He was learning to discover the mystery of
measurement; he was approaching the beginnings of geometry and
mathematics; he was at the same time becoming warlike. So he saw
things in straight lines, more rigidly; he formulated laws and
commandments. It was, Einstein assures us, the right way. But it was,
at all events in the first place, most unfavourable to the view of
life as an art. It remains so even to-day.

Yet there are always some who, deliberately or by instinct, have
perceived the immense significance in life of the conception of art.
That is especially so as regards the finest thinkers of the two
countries which, so far as we may divine,--however difficult it may
here be to speak positively and by demonstration,--have had the finest
civilisations, China and Greece. The wisest and most recognisably
greatest practical philosophers of both these lands have believed that
the whole of life, even government, is an art of definitely like kind
with the other arts, such as that of music or the dance. We may, for
instance, recall to memory one of the most typical of Greeks. Of
Protagoras, calumniated by Plato,--though, it is interesting to
observe that Plato's own transcendental doctrine of Ideas has been
regarded as an effort to escape from the solvent influence of
Protagoras' logic,--it is possible for the modern historian of
philosophy to say that "the greatness of this man can scarcely be
measured." It was with measurement that his most famous saying was
concerned: "Man is the measure of all things, of those which exist and
of those which have no existence." It was by his insistence on Man as
the active creator of life and knowledge, the artist of the world,
moulding it it to his own measure, that Protagoras is interesting to
us to-day. He recognised that there are no absolute criteria by which
to judge actions. He was the father of relativism and of
phenomenalism, probably the initiator of the modern doctrine that the
definitions of geometry are only approximately true abstractions from
empirical experiences. We need not, and probably should not, suppose
that in undermining dogma-tism he was setting up an individual
subjectivism. It was the function of Man in the world, rather than of
the individual, that he had in mind when he enunciated his great
principle, and it was with the reduction of human activity and conduct
to art that he was mainly concerned. His projects for the art of
living began with speech, and he was a pioneer in the arts of
language, the initiator of modern grammar.