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_ Art is a great thing. But it is not the greatest. The most important of all
perceptions is the continual perception of cause and effect-in other words,
the perception of the continuous development of the universe-in still other
words, the perception of the course of evolution. When one has thoroughly
got imbued into one's head the leading truth that nothing happens without a
cause, one grows not only large-minded, but large-hearted.
It is hard to have one's watch stolen, but one reflects that the thief of the
watch became a thief from causes of heredity and environment which are
as interesting as they are scientifically comprehensible; and one buys
another watch, if not with joy, at any rate with a philosophy that makes
bitterness impossible. One loses, in the study of cause and effect, that
absurd air which so many people have of being always shocked and pained
by the curiousness of life. Such people live amid human nature as if human
nature were a foreign country full of awful foreign customs. But, having
reached maturity, one ought surely to be ashamed of being a stranger in a
strange land!
The study of cause and effect, while it lessens the painfulness of life, adds
to life's picturesqueness. The man to whom evolution is but a name looks
at the sea as a grandiose, monotonous spectacle, which he can witness in
August for three shillings third-class return. The man who is imbued with
the idea of development, of continuous cause and effect, perceives in the
sea an element which in the day-before-yesterday of geology was vapour,
which yesterday was boiling, and which to-morrow will inevitably be ice.
He perceives that a liquid is merely something on its way to be solid, and
he is penetrated by a sense of the tremendous, changeful picturesqueness of
life. Nothing will afford a more durable satisfaction than the constantly
cultivated appreciation of this. It is the end of all science.
Cause and effect are to be found everywhere. Rents went up in Shepherd's
Bush. It was painful and shocking that rents should go up in Shepherd's
Bush. But to a certain point we are all scientific students of cause and effect,
and there was not a clerk lunching at a Lyons Restaurant who did not scienti-
fically put two and two together and see in the (once) Two-penny Tube the
cause of an excessive demand for wigwams in Shepherd's Bush, and in the
excessive demand for wigwams the cause of the increase in the price of
wigwams.
"Simple!" you say, disdainfully. Everything-the whole complex movement
of the universe-is as simple as that-when you can sufficiently put two and
two together. And, my dear sir, perhaps you happen to be an estate agent's
clerk, and you hate the arts, and you want to foster your immortal soul, and
you can't be interested in your business because it's so humdrum.
Nothing is humdrum.
The tremendous, changeful picturesqueness of life is marvellously shown
in an estate agent's office. What! There was a block of traffic in Oxford
Street; to avoid the block people actually began to travel under the cellars
and drains, and the result was a rise of rents in Shepherd's Bush! And you
say that isn't picturesque! Suppose you were to study, in this spirit, the
property question in London for an hour and a half every other evening.
Would it not give zest to your business, and transform your whole life?
You would arrive at more difficult problems. And you would be able to
tell us why, as the natural result of cause and effect, the longest straight
street in London is about a yard and a half in length, while the longest
absolutely straight street in Paris extends for miles. I think you will
admit that in an estate agent's clerk I have not chosen an example that
specially favours my theories.
You are a bank clerk, and you have not read that breathless romance
(disguised as a scientific study), Walter Bagehot's "Lombard Street"?
Ah, my dear sir, if you had begun with that, and followed it up for ninety
minutes every other evening, how enthralling your business would be to
you, and how much more clearly you would understand human nature.
You are "penned in town," but you love excursions to the country and
the observation of wild life-certainly a heart-enlarging diversion. Why
don't you walk out of your house door, in your slippers, to the nearest
gas lamp of a night with a butterfly net, and observe the wild life of
common and rare moths that is beating about it, and co-ordinate the
knowledge thus obtained and build a superstructure on it, and at last
get to know something about something?
You need not be devoted to the arts, not to literature, in order to live fully.
The whole field of daily habit and scene is waiting to satisfy that curiosity
which means life, and the satisfaction of which means an understanding heart.
I promised to deal with your case, O man who hates art and literature, and
I have dealt with it. I now come to the case of the person, happily very
common, who does "like reading." _
Read next: CHAPTER XI - SERIOUS READING, 90
Read previous: CHAPTER IX - INTEREST IN THE ARTS, 76
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