Modern Æstheticism [pp. 148-163]

MOD~ERN S THE TICISM.
So runs the verse through all the grades of doubt to bold
denial of God and good. We are not to be deceived by words
and symbols and rhythmic metres. If this modern craze expended itself in peculiar styles of dress and furniture, or in its
literary province were confined to writing senseless stanzas to
despairing maidens to relieve the ennui of the hour, then might
it be tolerated or dismissed with pleasantry. Beneath the
aesthetic, however, are the ethic and the philosophic, revealing
themselves through it as a medium. If it be asked in what way
this modern philosophy of the material reveals itself in practical life through aestheticism, we answer that it begets the theory
.of indifference as to human life; its mission and final ends, an
evident degradation of life from the lofty moral plane on which
the Bible places it to a selfish and mercenary level.
It is in the direct interests of this lower view that men are
aiming to reason out of life the supernatural element and all
there is in it that gives it solemnity and spiritual hope. God is
made but the highest expression of an order of developments.
The Word of God is made the product of human teachers.
Miracle is the exceptional action of ordinary physical laws.
Providence is a childish delusion of timid and dependent natures; our present state but a necessary condition of something
that follows in an infinite series of stages; conscience an effeminate sentiment, and the future world one of the scares of the
nursery. It is evident that on such a basis the world becomes
either a playground for thoughtless merriment or a theatre for
lawless riot. Life is reduced to a serio-comic farce or an utterly
cheerless struggle for profitless objects, and every man is the
beginning and the end of his own being. This is the view of life
which Tennyson graphically satirizes in "The Vision of Sin" as
the rider o'er the withered heath halts at the inn and says to
the host:
"Fill the cup and fill the can;
Have a rouse before the morn:
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.
Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance,
While we keep a little breath!
Drink to heavy Ignorance!
Hob-and-nob with brother Death!"
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