Here we touch upon one of the great crises in creation. As nutrition at

first established itself in the face of waste, and reproduction in the

face of death, so representation was able, by help of vocal symbols, to

confront that dispersion inherent in experience, which is something in

itself ephemeral. Merely to associate one thing with another brings

little gain; and merely to have added a vocal designation to fleeting

things—a designation which of course would have been taken for a part

of their essence—would in itself have encumbered phenomena without

rendering them in any way more docile to the will. But the encumbrance

in this instance proved to be a wonderful preservative and means of

comparison. It actually gave each moving thing its niche and cenotaph in

the eternal. For the universe of vocal sounds was a field, like that of

colour or number, in which the elements showed relations and transitions

easy to dominate. It was a key-board over which attention could run back

and forth, eliciting many implicit harmonies. Henceforth when various

sounds had been idly associated with various things, and identified with

them, the things could, by virtue of their names, be carried over

mentally into the linguistic system; they could be manipulated there

ideally, and vicariously preserved in representation. Needless to say

that the things themselves remained unchanged all the while in their

efficacy and mechanical succession, just as they remain unchanged in

those respects when they pass for the mathematical observer into their

measure or symbol; but as this reduction to mathematical form makes them

calculable, so their earlier reduction to words rendered them comparable

and memorable, first enabling them to figure in discourse at all.

[Sidenote: Language has a structure independent of things.]

Language had originally no obligation to subserve an end which we may

sometimes measure it by now, and depute to be its proper function,

namely, to stand for things and adapt itself perfectly to their

structure. In language as in every other existence idealism precedes

realism, since it must be a part of nature living its own life before it

can become a symbol for the rest and bend to external control. The vocal

and musical medium is, and must always remain, alien, to the spatial.

What makes terms correspond and refer to one another is a relation

eternally disparate from the relation of propinquity or derivation

between existences. Yet when sounds were attached to an event or

emotion, the sounds became symbols for that disparate fact. The net of

vocal relations caught that natural object as a cobweb might catch a

fly, without destroying or changing it. The object’s quality passed to

the word at the same time that the word’s relations enveloped the

object; and thus a new weight and significance was added to sound,

previously nothing but a dull music. A conflict at once established

itself between the drift proper to the verbal medium and that proper to

the designated things; a conflict which the whole history of language

and thought has embodied and which continues to this day.

[Sidenote: Words remaining identical, serve to identify things that

change.]

Suppose an animal going down to a frozen river which he had previously

visited in summer. Marks of all sorts would awaken in him an old train

of reactions; he would doubtless feel premonitions of satisfied thirst

and the splash of water. On finding, however, instead of the fancied

liquid, a mass of something like cold stone, he would be disconcerted.

His active attitude would be pulled up short and contradicted. In his

fairyland of faith and magic the old river would have been simply

annihilated, the dreamt-of water would have become a vanished ghost, and

this ice for the moment the hard reality. He would turn away and live

for a while on other illusions. When this shock was overgrown by time

and it was summer again, the original habit might, however, reassert

itself once more. If he revisited the stream, some god would seem to

bring back something from an old familiar world; and the chill of that

temporary estrangement, the cloud that for a while had made the good

invisible, would soon be gone and forgotten.

If we imagine, on the contrary, that this animal could speak and had

from the first called his haunt _the river_, he would have repeated its

name on seeing it even when it was frozen, for he had not failed to

recognise it in that guise. The variation afterwards noticed, upon

finding it hard, would seem no total substitution, but a _change_; for

it would be the same river, once flowing, that was now congealed. An

identical word, covering all the identical qualities in the phenomena

and serving to abstract them, would force the inconsistent qualities in

those phenomena to pass for accidents; and the useful proposition could

at once be framed that the same river may be sometimes free and

sometimes frozen.

[Sidenote: Language the dialectical garment of facts.]

This proposition is true, yet it contains much that is calculated to

offend a scrupulous dialectician. Its language and categories are not

purely logical, but largely physical and representative. The notion that

what changes nevertheless endures is a remarkable hybrid. It arises when

rigid ideal terms are imposed on evanescent existence. Feelings, taken

alone, would show no identities; they would be lost in changing, or be

woven into the infinite feeling of change. Notions, taken alone, would

allow no lapse, but would merely lead attention about from point to

point over an eternal system of relations. Power to understand the

world, logical or scientific mastery of existence, arises only by the

forced and conventional marriage of these two essences, when the actual

flux is ideally suspended and an ideal harness is loosely flung upon

things. For this purpose words are an admirable instrument. They have

dialectical relations based on an ideal import, or tendency to

definition, which makes their essence their signification; yet they can

be freely bandied about and applied for a moment to the ambiguous things

that pass through existence.

[Sidenote: Words are wise men’s counters.]

Had men been dumb, an exchange and circulation of images need not have

been wanting, and associations might have arisen between ideals in the

mind and corresponding reactive habits in the body. What words add is

not power of discernment or action, but a medium of intellectual

exchange. Language is like money, without which specific relative values

may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common

denominator. And as money must have a certain intrinsic value of its own

in order that its relation to other values may be stable, so a word, by

which a thing is represented in discourse, must be a part of that

thing’s context, an ingredient in the total apparition it is destined to

recall. Words, in their existence, are no more universal than gold by

nature is a worthless standard of value in other things. Words are a

material accompaniment of phenomena, at first an idle accompaniment, but

one which happens to subserve easily a universal function. Some other

element in objects might conceivably have served for a common

denominator between them; but words, just by virtue of their

adventitious, detachable status, and because they are so easily compared

and manipulated in the world of sound, were singularly well fitted for

this office. They are not vague, as any common quality abstracted from

things would necessarily become; and though vagueness is a quality only

too compatible with perception, so that vague ideas can exist without

end, this vagueness is not what makes them universal in their functions.

It is one thing to perceive an ill-determined form and quite another to

attribute to it a precise general predicate. Words, distinct in their

own category and perfectly recognisable, can accordingly perform very

well the function of embodying a universal; for they can be identified

in turn with many particulars and yet remain throughout particular

themselves.

[Sidenote: Nominalism right in psychology and realism in logic]

The psychology of nominalism is undoubtedly right where it insists that

every image is particular and every term, in its existential aspect, a

_flatum vocis_; but nominalists should have recognised that images may

have any degree of vagueness and generality when measured by a

conceptual standard. A figure having obviously three sides and three

corners may very well be present to the mind when it is impossible to

say whether it is an equilateral or a rectangular triangle. Functional

or logical universality lies in another sphere altogether, being a

matter of intent and not of existence. When we say that “universals

alone exist in the mind” we mean by “mind” something unknown to

Berkeley; not a bundle of psychoses nor an angelic substance, but quick

intelligence, the faculty of discourse. Predication is an act,

understanding a spiritual and transitive operation: its existential

basis may well be counted in psychologically and reduced to a stream of

immediate presences; but its meaning can be caught only by another

meaning, as life only can exemplify life. Vague or general images are as

little universal as sounds are; but a sound better than a flickering

abstraction can serve the intellect in its operation of comparison and

synthesis. Words are therefore the body of discourse, of which the soul

is understanding.

[Sidenote: Literature moves between the extremes of music and

denotation.]

The categories of discourse are in part merely representative, in part

merely grammatical, and in part attributable to both spheres. Euphony

and phonetic laws are principles governing language without any

reference to its meaning; here speech is still a sort of music. At the

other extreme lies that ultimate form of prose which we see in

mathematical reasoning or in a telegraphic style, where absolutely

nothing is rhetorical and speech is denuded of every feature not

indispensable to its symbolic rôle. Between these two extremes lies the

broad field of poetry, or rather of imaginative or playful expression,

where the verbal medium is a medium indeed, having a certain

transparency, a certain reference to independent facts, but at the same

time elaborates the fact in expressing it, and endows it with affinities

alien to its proper nature. A pun is a grotesque example of such

diremption, where ambiguities belonging only to speech are used to

suggest impossible substitutions in ideas. Less frankly, language

habitually wrests its subject-matter in some measure from its real

context and transfers it to a represented and secondary world, the world

of logic and reflection. Concretions in existence are subsumed, when

named, under concretions in discourse. Grammar lays violent hands upon

experience, and everything becomes a prey to wit and fancy, a material

for fiction and eloquence. Man’s intellectual progress has a poetic

phase, in which he imagines the world; and then a scientific phase, in

which he sifts and tests what he has imagined.

[Sidenote: Sound and object, in their sensuous presence, may have

affinity.]

In what measure do inflection and syntax represent anything in the

subject-matter of discourse? In what measure are they an independent

play of expression, a quasi-musical, quasi-mathematical veil interposed

between reflection and existence? One who knows only languages of a

single family can give but a biassed answer to this question. There are

doubtless many approaches to correct symbolism in language, which

grammar may have followed up at different times in strangely different

ways. That the medium in every art has a character of its own, a

character limiting its representative value, may perhaps be safely

asserted, and this intrinsic character in the medium antedates and

permeates all representation. Phonetic possibilities and phonetic habits

belong, in language, to this indispensable vehicle; what the throat and

lips can emit easily and distinguishably, and what sequences can appeal

to the ear and be retained, depend alike on physiological conditions;

and no matter how convenient or inconvenient these conditions may be for

signification, they will always make themselves felt and may sometimes

remain predominant. In poetry they are still conspicuous. Euphony,

metre, and rhyme colour the images they transmit and add a charm wholly

extrinsic and imputed. In this immersion of the message in the medium

and in its intrinsic movement the magic of poetry lies; and the miracle

grows as there is more or less native analogy between the medium’s

movement and that of the subject-matter.

Both language and ideas involve processes in the brain. The two

processes may be wholly disparate if we regard their objects only and

forget their seat, as Athena is in no way linked to an elephant’s tusk;

yet in perception all processes are contiguous and exercise a single

organism, in which they may find themselves in sympathetic or

antipathetic vibration. On this circumstance hangs that subtle congruity

between subject and vehicle which is otherwise such a mystery in

expression. If to think of Athena and to look on ivory are congruous

physiological processes, if they sustain or heighten each other, then to

represent Athena in ivory will be a happy expedient, in which the very

nature of the medium will already be helping us forward. Scent and form

go better together, for instance, in the violet or the rose than in the

hyacinth or the poppy: and being better compacted for human perception

they seem more expressive and can be linked more unequivocally with

other sources of feeling. So a given vocal sound may have more or less

analogy to the thing it is used to signify; this analogy may be obvious,

as in onomatopoeia, or subtle, as when short, sharp sounds go with

decision, or involved rhythms and vague reverberations with a floating

dream. What seems exquisite to one poet may accordingly seem vapid to

another, when the texture of experience in the two minds differs, so

that a given composition rustles through one man’s fancy as a wind might

through a wood, but finds no sympathetic response in the other organism,

nerved as it may be, perhaps, to precision in thought and action.

[Sidenote: Syntax positively representative.]

The structure of language, when it passes beyond the phonetic level,

begins at once to lean upon existences and to imitate the structure of

things. We distinguish the parts of speech, for instance, in

subservience to distinctions which we make in ideas. The feeling or

quality represented by an adjective, the relation indicated by a verb,

the substance or concretion of qualities designated by a noun, are

diversities growing up in experience, by no means attributable to the

mere play of sound. The parts of speech are therefore representative.

Their inflection is representative too, since tenses mark important

practical differences in the distribution of the events described, and

cases express the respective rôles played by objects in the operation.

“I struck him and he will strike me,” renders in linguistic symbols a

marked change in the situation; the variation in phrase is not

rhetorical. Language here, though borrowed no doubt from ancestral

poetry, has left all revery far behind, and has been submerged in the

Life of Reason.

[Sidenote: Yet it vitiates what it represents.]

The medium, however, constantly reasserts itself. An example may be

found in gender, which, clearly representative in a measure, cuts loose

in language from all genuine representation and becomes a feature in

abstract linguistic design, a formal characteristic in expression.

Contrasted sentiments permeate an animal’s dealings with his own sex and

with the other; nouns and adjectives represent this contrast by taking

on masculine and feminine forms. The distinction is indeed so important

that wholly different words—man and woman, bull and cow—stand for the

best-known animals of different sex; while adjectives, where declension

is extinct, as in English, often take on a connotation of gender and are

applied to one sex only—as we say a beautiful woman, but hardly a

beautiful man. But gender in language extends much farther than sex, and

even if by some subtle analogy all the masculine and feminine nouns in a

language could be attached to something suggesting sex in the objects

they designate, yet it can hardly be maintained that the elaborate

concordance incident upon that distinction is representative of any felt

quality in the things. So remote an analogy to sex could not assert

itself pervasively. Thus Horace says:

Quis _multa_ gracilis te puer in _rosa_

perfusis liquidis urget odoribus

_grato_, Pyrrha, sub _antro_?

Here we may perceive why the rose was instinctively made feminine, and

we may grant that the bower, though the reason escape us, was somehow

properly masculine; but no one would urge that a _profusion_ of roses

was also intrinsically feminine, or that the _pleasantness_ of a bower

was ever specifically masculine to sense. The epithets _multa_ and

_grato_ take their gender from the nouns, even though the quality they

designate fails to do so. Their gender is therefore non-representative

and purely formal; it marks an intra-linguistic accommodation. The

medium has developed a syntactical structure apart from any intrinsic

significance thereby accruing to its elements. Artificial concordance in

gender does not express gender: it merely emphasises the grammatical

links in the phrases and makes greater variety possible in the

arrangement of words.

[Sidenote: Difficulty in subduing a living medium.]

This example may prepare us to understand a general principle: that

language, while essentially significant viewed in its function, is

indefinitely wasteful, being mechanical and tentative in its origin. It

overloads itself, and being primarily music, and a labyrinth of sounds,

it develops an articulation and method of its own, which only in the

end, and with much inexactness, reverts to its function of expression.

How great the possibilities of effect are in developing a pure medium we

can best appreciate in music; but in language a similar development goes

on while it is being applied to representing things. The organ is

spontaneous, the function adventitious and superimposed. Rhetoric and

utility keep language going, as centrifugal and centripetal forces keep

a planet in its course. Euphony, verbal analogy, grammatical fancy,

poetic confusion, continually drive language afield, in its own

tangential direction; while the business of life, in which language is

employed, and the natural lapse of rhetorical fashions, as continually

draw it back towards convenience and exactitude.

[Sidenote: Language foreshortens experience.]

Between music and bare symbolism language has its florid expansion.

Until music is subordinated, speech has little sense; it can hardly tell

a story or indicate an object unequivocally. Yet if music were left

behind altogether, language would pass into a sort of algebra or vocal

shorthand, without literary quality; it would become wholly indicative

and record facts without colouring them ideally. This medium and its

intrinsic development, though they make the bane of reproduction, make

the essence of art; they give representation a new and specific value

such as the object, before representation, could not have possessed.

Consciousness itself is such a medium in respect to diffuse existence,

which it foreshortens and elevates into synthetic ideas. Reason, too, by

bringing the movement of events and inclinations to a head in single

acts of reflection, thus attaining to laws and purposes, introduces into

life the influence of a representative medium, without which life could

never pass from a process into an art. Language acquires scope in the

same way, by its kindly infidelities; its metaphors and syntax lend

experience perspective. Language vitiates the experience it expresses,

but thereby makes the burden of one moment relevant to that of another.

The two experiences, identified roughly with the same concretion in

discourse, are pronounced similar or comparable in character. Thus a

proverb, by its verbal pungency and rhythm, becomes more memorable than

the event it first described would ever have been if not translated into

an epigram and rendered, so to speak, applicable to new cases; for by

that translation the event has become an idea.

[Sidenote: It is a perpetual mythology.]

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature. Music, which in

a certain sense is a mass of pure forms, must leave its “ideas” imbedded

in their own medium—they are musical ideas—and cannot impose them on

any foreign material, such as human affairs. Science, on the contrary,

seeks to disclose the bleak anatomy of existence, stripping off as much

as possible the veil of prejudice and words. Literature takes a middle

course and tries to subdue music, which for its purposes would be

futile and too abstract, into conformity with general experience, making

music thereby significant. Literary art in the end rejects all unmeaning

nourishes, all complications that have no counterpart in things or no

use in expressing their relations; at the same time it aspires to digest

that reality to which it confines itself, making it over into ideal

substance and material for the mind. It looks at things with an

incorrigibly dramatic eye, turning them into permanent unities (which

they never are) and almost into persons, grouping them by their

imaginative or moral affinities and retaining in them chiefly what is

incidental to their being, namely, the part they may chance to play in

man’s adventures.

Such literary art demands a subject-matter other than the literary

impulse itself. The literary man is an interpreter and hardly succeeds,

as the musician may, without experience and mastery of human affairs.

His art is half genius and half fidelity. He needs inspiration; he must

wait for automatic musical tendencies to ferment in his mind, proving it

to be fertile in devices, comparisons, and bold assimilations. Yet

inspiration alone will lead him astray, for his art is relative to

something other than its own formal impulse; it comes to clarify the

real world, not to encumber it; and it needs to render its native

agility practical and to attach its volume of feeling to what is

momentous in human life. Literature has its piety, its conscience; it

cannot long forget, without forfeiting all dignity, that it serves a

burdened and perplexed creature, a human animal struggling to persuade

the universal Sphinx to propose a more intelligible riddle.

Irresponsible and trivial in its abstract impulse, man’s simian chatter

becomes noble as it becomes symbolic; its representative function lends

it a serious beauty, its utility endows it with moral worth.

[Sidenote: It may be apt or inapt, with equal richness.]

[Sidenote: Absolute language a possible but foolish art.]

These relations, in determining the function of language, determine the

ideal which its structure should approach. Any sort of grammar and

rhetoric, the most absurd and inapplicable as well as the most

descriptive, can be spontaneous; fit organisms are not less natural than

those that are unfit. Felicitous genius is so called because it meets

experience half-way. A genius which flies in the opposite direction,

though not less fertile internally, is externally inept and is called

madness. Ineptitude is something which language needs to shake off.

Better surrender altogether some verbal categories and start again, in

that respect, with a clean slate, than persist in any line of

development that alienates thought from reality. The language of birds

is excellent in its way, and those ancient sages who are reported to

have understood it very likely had merely perceived that it was not

meant to be intelligible; for it is not to understand nature to reduce

her childishly to a human scale. Man, who is merged in universal nature

at the roots of his being, is not without profound irrational intuitions

by which he can half divine her secret processes; and his heart, in its

own singing and fluttering, might not wholly misinterpret the birds. But

human discourse is not worth having if it is mere piping, and helps not

at all in mastering things; for man is intelligent, which is another way

of saying that he aspires to envisage in thought what he is dealing with

in action. Discourse that absolved itself from that observant duty would

not be cognitive; and in failing to be cognitive it would fail to redeem

the practical forces it ignored from their brute externality, and to

make them tributary to the Life of Reason. Thus its own dignity and

continued existence depend on its learning to express momentous facts,

facts important for action and happiness; and there is nothing which so

quickly discredits itself as empty rhetoric and dialectic, or poetry

that wanders in dim and private worlds. If pure music, even with its

immense sensuous appeal, is so easily tedious, what a universal yawn

must meet the verbiage which develops nothing but its own iridescence.

Absolute versification and absolute dialectic may have their place in

society; they give play to an organ that has its rights like any other,

and that, after serving for a while in the economy of life, may well

claim a holiday in which to disport itself irresponsibly among the fowls

of the air and the lilies of the field. But the exercise is trivial;

and if its high priests go through their mummeries with a certain

unction, and pretend to be wafted by them into a higher world, the

phenomenon is neither new nor remarkable. Language is a wonderful and

pliant medium, and why should it not lend itself to imposture? A

systematic abuse of words, as of other things, is never without some

inner harmony or propriety that makes it prosper; only the man who looks

beyond and sees the practical results awakes to the villainy of it. In

the end, however, those who play with words lose their labour, and

pregnant as they feel themselves to be with new and wonderful universes,

they cannot humanise the one in which they live and rather banish

themselves from it by their persistent egotism and irrelevance.

CHAPTER VI

POETRY AND PROSE

[Sidenote: Force of primary expressions.]

There is both truth and illusion in the saying that primitive poets are

sublime. Genesis and the Iliad (works doubtless backed by a long

tradition) are indeed sublime. Primitive men, having perhaps developed

language before the other arts, used it with singular directness to

describe the chief episodes of life, which was all that life as yet

contained. They had frank passions and saw things from single points of

view. A breath from that early world seems to enlarge our natures, and

to restore to language, which we have sophisticated, all its

magnificence and truth. But there is more, for (as we have seen)

language is spontaneous; it constitutes an act before it registers an

observation. It gives vent to emotion before it is adjusted to things

external and reduced, as it were, to its own echo rebounding from a

refractory world. The lion’s roar, the bellowing of bulls, even the

sea’s cadence has a great sublimity. Though hardly in itself poetry, an

animal cry, when still audible in human language, renders it also the

unanswerable, the ultimate voice of nature. Nothing can so pierce the

soul as the uttermost sigh of the body. There is no utterance so

thrilling as that of absolute impulse, if absolute impulse has learned

to speak at all. An intense, inhospitable mind, filled with a single

idea, in which all animal, social, and moral interests are fused

together, speaks a language of incomparable force. Thus the Hebrew

prophets, in their savage concentration, poured into one torrent all

that their souls possessed or could dream of. What other men are wont to

pursue in politics, business, religion, or art, they looked for from one

wave of national repentance and consecration. Their age, swept by this

ideal passion, possessed at the same time a fresh and homely vocabulary;

and the result was an eloquence so elemental and combative, so

imaginative and so bitterly practical, that the world has never heard

its like. Such single-mindedness, with such heroic simplicity in words

and images, is hardly possible in a late civilisation. Cultivated poets

are not unconsciously sublime.

[Sidenote: Its exclusiveness and narrowness.]

The sublimity of early utterances should not be hailed, however, with

unmixed admiration. It is a sublimity born of defect or at least of

disproportion. The will asserts itself magnificently; images, like

thunder-clouds, seem to cover half the firmament at once. But such a

will is sadly inexperienced; it has hardly tasted or even conceived any

possible or high satisfactions. Its lurid firmament is poor in stars. To

throw the whole mind upon something is not so great a feat when the

mind has nothing else to throw itself upon. Every animal when goaded

becomes intense; and it is perhaps merely the apathy in which mortals

are wont to live that keeps them from being habitually sublime in their

sentiments. The sympathy that makes a sheep hasten after its fellows, in

vague alarm or in vague affection; the fierce premonitions that drive a

bull to the heifer; the patience with which a hen sits on her eggs; the

loyalty which a dog shows to his master—what thoughts may not all these

instincts involve, which it needs only a medium of communication to

translate into poetry?

Man, though with less wholeness of soul, enacts the same dramas. He

hears voices on all occasions; he incorporates what little he observes

of nature into his verbal dreams; and as each new impulse bubbles to the

surface he feels himself on the verge of some inexpressible heaven or

hell. He needs but to abandon himself to that seething chaos which

perpetually underlies conventional sanity—a chaos in which memory and

prophecy, vision and impersonation, sound and sense, are inextricably

jumbled together—to find himself at once in a magic world,

irrecoverable, largely unmeaning, terribly intricate, but, as he will

conceive, deep, inward, and absolutely real. He will have reverted, in

other words, to crude experience, to primordial illusion. The movement

of his animal or vegetative mind will be far from delightful; it will be

unintelligent and unintelligible; nothing in particular will be

represented therein; but it will be a movement in the soul and for the

soul, as exciting and compulsive as the soul’s volume can make it. In

this muddy torrent words also may be carried down; and if these words

are by chance strung together into a cadence, and are afterwards written

down, they may remain for a memento of that turbid moment. Such words we

may at first hesitate to call poetry, since very likely they are

nonsense; but this nonsense will have some quality—some rhyme or

rhythm—that makes it memorable (else it would not have survived); and

moreover the words will probably show, in their connotation and order,

some sympathy with the dream that cast them up. For the man himself, in

whom such a dream may be partly recurrent, they may consequently have a

considerable power of suggestion, and they may even have it for others,

whenever the rhythm and incantation avail to plunge them also into a

similar trance.

[Sidenote: Rudimentary poetry an incantation or charm.]

Memorable nonsense, or sound with a certain hypnotic power, is the

really primitive and radical form of poetry. Nor is such poetry yet

extinct: children still love and compose it and every genuine poet, on

one side of his genius, reverts to it from explicit speech. As all

language has acquired its meaning, and did not have it in the beginning,

so the man who launches a new locution, the poet who creates a symbol,

must do so without knowing what significance it may eventually acquire,

and conscious at best only of the emotional background from which it

emerged. Pure poetry is pure experiment; and it is not strange that

nine-tenths of it should be pure failure. For it matters little what

unutterable things may have originally gone together with a phrase in

the dreamer’s mind; if they were not uttered and the phrase cannot call

them back, this verbal relic is none the richer for the high company it

may once have kept. Expressiveness is a most accidental matter. What a

line suggests at one reading, it may never suggest again even to the

same person. For this reason, among others, poets are partial to their

own compositions; they truly discover there depths of meaning which

exist for nobody else. Those readers who appropriate a poet and make him

their own fall into a similar illusion; they attribute to him what they

themselves supply, and whatever he reels out, lost in his own personal

revery, seems to them, like _sortes biblicoe_, written to fit their own

case.

[Sidenote: Inspiration irresponsible.]

Justice has never been done to Plato’s remarkable consistency and

boldness in declaring that poets are inspired by a divine madness and

yet, when they transgress rational bounds, are to be banished from an

ideal republic, though not without some marks of Platonic regard.

Instead of fillets, a modern age might assign them a coterie of

flattering dames, and instead of banishment, starvation; but the result

would be the same in the end. A poet is inspired because what occurs in

his brain is a true experiment in creation. His apprehension plays with

words and their meanings as nature, in any spontaneous variation, plays

with her own structure. A mechanical force shifts the kaleidoscope; a

new direction is given to growth or a new gist to signification. This

inspiration, moreover, is mad, being wholly ignorant of its own issue;

and though it has a confused fund of experience and verbal habit on

which to draw, it draws on this fund blindly and quite at random,

consciously possessed by nothing but a certain stress and pregnancy and

the pains, as it were, of parturition. Finally the new birth has to be

inspected critically by the public censor before it is allowed to live;

most probably it is too feeble and defective to prosper in the common

air, or is a monster that violates some primary rule of civic existence,

tormenting itself to disturb others.

[Sidenote: Plato’s discriminating view.]

Plato seems to have exaggerated the havoc which these poetic dragons can

work in the world. They are in fact more often absurd than venomous, and

no special legislation is needed to abolish them. They soon die quietly

of universal neglect. The poetry that ordinarily circulates among a

people is poetry of a secondary and conventional sort that propagates

established ideas in trite metaphors. Popular poets are the parish

priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since

converted public. Plato’s quarrel was not so much with poetic art as

with ancient myth and emotional laxity: he was preaching a crusade

against the established church. For naturalistic deities he wished to

substitute moral symbols; for the joys of sense, austerity and

abstraction. To proscribe Homer was a marked way of protesting against

the frivolous reigning ideals. The case is much as if we should now

proscribe the book of Genesis, on account of its mythical cosmogony, or

in order to proclaim the philosophic truth that the good, being an

adequate expression to be attained by creation, could not possibly have

preceded it or been its source. We might admit at the same time that

Genesis contains excellent images and that its poetic force is

remarkable; so that if serious misunderstanding could be avoided the

censor might be glad to leave it in everybody’s hands. Plato in some

such way recognised that Homer was poetical and referred his works,

mischievous as they might prove incidentally, to divine inspiration.

Poetic madness, like madness in prophecy or love, bursts the body of

things to escape from it into some ideal; and even the Homeric world,

though no model for a rational state, was a cheerful heroic vision,

congenial to many early impulses and dreams of the mind.

[Sidenote: Explosive and pregnant expression.]

Homer, indeed, was no primitive poet; he was a consummate master, the

heir to generations of discipline in both life and art. This appears in

his perfect prosody, in his limpid style, in his sense for proportion,

his abstentions, and the frank pathos of his portraits and principles,

in which there is nothing gross, subjective, or arbitrary. The

inspirations that came to him never carried him into crudeness or

absurdity. Every modern poet, though the world he describes may be more

refined in spots and more elaborate, is less advanced in his art; for

art is made rudimentary not by its date but by its irrationality. Yet

even if Homer had been primitive he might well have been inspired, in

the same way as a Bacchic frenzy or a mystic trance; the most blundering

explosions may be justified antecedently by the plastic force that is

vented in them. They may be expressive, in the physical sense of this

ambiguous word; for, far as they may be from conveying an idea, they may

betray a tendency and prove that something is stirring in the soul.

Expressiveness is often sterile; but it is sometimes fertile and capable

of reproducing in representation the experience from which it sprang. As

a tree in the autumn sheds leaves and seeds together, so a ripening

experience comes indifferently to various manifestations, some barren

and without further function, others fit to carry the parent experience

over into another mind, and give it a new embodiment there.

Expressiveness in the former case is dead, like that of a fossil; in the

latter it is living and efficacious, recreating its original. The first

is idle self-manifestation, the second rational art.

[Sidenote: Natural history of inspiration.]

Self-manifestation, so soon as it is noted and accepted as such, seems

to present the same marvel as any ideal success. Such self-manifestation

is incessant, many-sided, unavoidable; yet it seems a miracle when its

conditions are looked back upon from the vantage ground of their result.

By reading spirit out of a work we turn it into a feat of inspiration.

Thus even the crudest and least coherent utterances, when we suspect

some soul to be groping in them, and striving to address us, become

oracular; a divine afflatus breathes behind their gibberish and they

seem to manifest some deep intent. The miracle of creation or

inspiration consists in nothing but this, that an external effect should

embody an inner intention. The miracle, of course, is apparent only, and

due to an inverted and captious point of view. In truth the tendency

that executed the work was what first made its conception possible; but

this conception, finding the work responsive in some measure to its

inner demand, attributes that response to its own magic prerogative.

Hence the least stir and rumble of formative processes, when it

generates a soul, makes itself somehow that soul’s interpreter; and dim

as the spirit and its expression may both remain, they are none the less

in profound concord, a concord which wears a miraculous providential

character when it is appreciated without being understood.

[Sidenote: Expressions to be understood must be recreated, and so

changed.]

Primitive poetry is the basis of all discourse. If we open any ancient

book we come at once upon an elaborate language, and on divers

conventional concepts, of whose origin and history we hear nothing. We

must read on, until by dint of guessing and by confronting instances we

grow to understand those symbols. The writer was himself heir to a

linguistic tradition which he made his own by the same process of

adoption and tentative use by which we, in turn, interpret his phrases:

he understood what he heard in terms of his own experience, and

attributed to his predecessors (no matter what their incommunicable

feelings may have been) such ideas as their words generated in his own

thinking. In this way expressions continually change their sense; they

can communicate a thought only by diffusing a stimulus, and in passing

from mouth to mouth they will wholly reverse their connotation, unless

some external object or some recurring human situation gives them a

constant standard, by which private aberrations may be checked. Thus in

the first phrase of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens

and the earth,” the words have a stable meaning only in so far as they

are indicative and bring us back to a stable object. What “heavens” and

“earth” stand for can be conveyed by gestures, by merely pointing up and

down; but beyond that sensuous connotation their meaning has entirely

changed since they were here written; and no two minds, even to-day,

will respond to these familiar words with exactly the same images.

“Beginning” and “created” have a superficial clearness, though their

implications cannot be defined without precipitating the most intricate

metaphysics, which would end in nothing but a proof that both terms were

ambiguous and unthinkable. As to the word “God,” all mutual

understanding is impossible. It is a floating literary symbol, with a

value which, if we define it scientifically, becomes quite algebraic. As

no experienced object corresponds to it, it is without fixed indicative

force, and admits any sense which its context in any mind may happen to

give it. In the first sentence of Genesis its meaning, we may safely

say, is “a masculine being by whom heaven and earth were created.” To

fill out this implication other instances of the word would have to be

gathered, in each of which, of course, the word would appear with a new

and perhaps incompatible meaning.

[Sidenote: Expressions may be recast perversely, humorously, or

sublimely.]

Whenever a word appears in a radically new context it has a radically

new sense: the expression in which it so figures is a poetic figment, a

fresh literary creation. Such invention is sometimes perverse, sometimes

humorous, sometimes sublime; that is, it may either buffet old

associations without enlarging them, or give them a plausible but

impossible twist, or enlarge them to cover, with unexpected propriety, a

much wider or more momentous experience. The force of experience in any

moment—if we abstract from represented values—is emotional; so that

for sublime poetry what is required is to tap some reservoir of feeling.

If a phrase opens the flood-gates of emotion, it has made itself most

deeply significant. Its discursive range and clearness may not be

remarkable; its emotional power will quite suffice. For this reason

again primitive poetry may be sublime: in its inchoate phrases there is

affinity to raw passion and their very blindness may serve to bring that

passion back. Poetry has body; it represents the volume of experience as

well as its form, and to express volume a primitive poet will rely

rather on rhythm, sound, and condensed suggestion than on discursive

fulness or scope.

[Sidenote: The nature of prose.]

The descent from poetry to prose is in one sense a progress. When use

has worn down a poetic phrase to its external import, and rendered it an

indifferent symbol for a particular thing, that phrase has become

prosaic; it has also become, by the same process, transparent and purely

instrumental. In poetry feeling is transferred by contagion; in prose it

is communicated by bending the attention upon determinate objects; the

one stimulates and the other informs. Under the influence of poetry

various minds radiate from a somewhat similar core of sensation, from

the same vital mood, into the most diverse and incommunicable images.

Interlocutors speaking prose, on the contrary, pelt and besiege one

another with a peripheral attack; they come into contact at sundry

superficial points and thence push their agreement inwards, until

perhaps a practical coincidence is arrived at in their thought.

Agreement is produced by controlling each mind externally, through a

series of checks and little appeals to possible sensation; whereas in

poetry the agreement, where it exists, is vague and massive; there is an

initial fusion of minds under hypnotic musical influences, from which

each listener, as he awakes, passes into his own thoughts and

interpretations. In prose the vehicle for communication is a

conventional sign, standing in the last analysis for some demonstrable

object or controllable feeling. By marshalling specific details a

certain indirect suasion is exercised on the mind, as nature herself, by

continual checks and denials, gradually tames the human will. The

elements of prose are always practical, if we run back and reconstruct

their primitive essence, for at bottom every experience is an original

and not a copy, a nucleus for ideation rather than an object to which

ideas may refer. It is when these stimulations are shaken together and

become a system of mutual checks that they begin to take on ideally a

rhythm borrowed from the order in which they actually recurred. Then a

prophetic or representative movement arises in thought. Before this

comes about, experience remains a constantly renovated dream, as poetry

to the end conspires to keep it. For poetry, while truly poetical, never

loses sight of initial feelings and underlying appeals; it is

incorrigibly transcendental, and takes every present passion and every

private dream in turn for the core of the universe. By creating new

signs, or by recasting and crossing those which have become

conventional, it keeps communication massive and instinctive, immersed

in music, and inexhaustible by clear thought.

[Sidenote: It is more advanced and responsible than poetry.]

Lying is a privilege of poets because they have not yet reached the

level on which truth and error are discernible. Veracity and

significance are not ideals for a primitive mind; we learn to value them

as we learn to live, when we discover that the spirit cannot be wholly

free and solipsistic. To have to distinguish fact from fancy is so great

a violence to the inner man that not only poets, but theologians and

philosophers, still protest against such a distinction. They urge (what

is perfectly true for a rudimentary creature) that facts are mere

conceptions and conceptions full-fledged facts; but this interesting

embryonic lore they apply, in their intellectual weakness, to retracting

or undermining those human categories which, though alone fruitful or

applicable in life, are not congenial to their half-formed imagination.

Retreating deeper into the inner chaos, they bring to bear the whole

momentum of an irresponsible dialectic to frustrate the growth of

representative ideas: In this they are genuine, if somewhat belated,

poets, experimenting anew with solved problems, and fancying how

creation might have moved upon other lines. The great merit that prose

shares with science is that it is responsible. Its conscience is a new

and wiser imagination, by which creative thought is rendered cumulative

and progressive; for a man does not build less boldly or solidly if he

takes the precaution of building in baked brick. Prose is in itself

meagre and bodiless, merely indicating the riches of the world. Its

transparency helps us to look through it to the issue, and the signals

it gives fill the mind with an honest assurance and a prophetic art far

nobler than any ecstasy.

[Sidenote: Maturity brings love of practical truth.]

As men of action have a better intelligence than poets, if only their

action is on a broad enough stage, so the prosaic rendering of

experience has the greater value, if only the experience rendered covers

enough human interests. Youth and aspiration indulge in poetry; a mature

and masterful mind will often despise it, and prefer to express itself

laconically in prose. It is clearly proper that prosaic habits should

supervene in this way on the poetical; for youth, being as yet little

fed by experience, can find volume and depth only in the soul; the

half-seen, the supra-mundane, the inexpressible, seem to it alone

beautiful and worthy of homage. Time modifies this sentiment in two

directions. It breeds lassitude and indifference towards impracticable

ideals, originally no less worthy than the practicable. Ideals which

cannot be realised, and are not fed at least by partial realisations,

soon grow dormant. Life-blood passes to other veins; the urgent and

palpitating interests of life appear in other quarters. While things

impossible thus lose their serious charm, things actual reveal their

natural order and variety; these not only can entertain the mind

abstractly, but they can offer a thousand material rewards in

observation and action. In their presence, a private dream begins to

look rather cheap and hysterical. Not that existence has any dignity or

prerogative in the presence of will, but that will itself, being

elastic, grows definite and firm when it is fed by success; and its

formed and expressible ideals then put to shame the others, which have

remained vague for want of practical expression. Mature interests centre

on soluble problems and tasks capable of execution; it is at such points

that the ideal can be really served. The individual’s dream straightens

and reassures itself by merging with the dream of humanity. To dwell, as

irrational poets do, on some private experience, on some emotion without

representative or ulterior value, then seems a waste of time. Fiction

becomes less interesting than affairs, and poetry turns into a sort of

incompetent whimper, a childish fore-shortening of the outspread world.

[Sidenote: Pure prose would tend to efface itself.]

On the other hand, prose has a great defect, which is abstractness. It

drops the volume of experience in finding bodiless algebraic symbols by

which to express it. The verbal form, instead of transmitting an image,

seems to constitute it, in so far as there is an image suggested at

all; and the ulterior situation is described only in the sense that a

change is induced in the hearer which prepares him to meet that

situation. Prose seems to be a use of language in the service of

material life. It would tend, in that case, to undermine its own basis;

for in proportion as signals for action are quick and efficacious they

diminish their sensuous stimulus and fade from consciousness. Were

language such a set of signals it would be something merely

instrumental, which if made perfect ought to be automatic and

unconscious. It would be a buzzing in the ears, not a music native to

the mind. Such a theory of language would treat it as a necessary evil

and would look forward hopefully to the extinction of literature, in

which it would recognise nothing ideal. There is of course no reason to

deprecate the use of vocables, or of any other material agency, to

expedite affairs; but an art of speech, if it is to add any ultimate

charm to life, has to supervene upon a mere code of signals. Prose,

could it be purely representative, would be ideally superfluous. A

literary prose accordingly owns a double allegiance, and its life is

amphibious. It must convey intelligence, but intelligence clothed in a

language that lends the message an intrinsic value, and makes it

delightful to apprehend apart from its importance in ultimate theory or

practice. Prose is in that measure a fine art. It might be called poetry

that had become pervasively representative, and was altogether faithful

to its rational function.

[Sidenote: Form alone, or substance alone, may be poetical.]

We may therefore with good reason distinguish prosaic form from prosaic

substance. A novel, a satire, a book of speculative philosophy, may have

a most prosaic exterior; every phrase may convey its idea economically;

but the substance may nevertheless be poetical, since these ideas may be

irrelevant to all ulterior events, and may express nothing but the

imaginative energy that called them forth. On the other hand, a poetic

vehicle in which there is much ornamental play of language and rhythm

may clothe a dry ideal skeleton. So those tremendous positivists, the

Hebrew prophets, had the most prosaic notions about the goods and evils

of life. So Lucretius praised, I will not say the atoms merely, but even

fecundity and wisdom. The motives, to take another example, which Racine

attributed to his personages, were prosaically conceived; a physiologist

could not be more exact in his calculations, for even love may be made

the mainspring in a clock-work of emotions. Yet that Racine was a born

poet appears in the music, nobility, and tenderness of his medium; he

clothed his intelligible characters in magical and tragic robes; the

aroma of sentiment rises like a sort of pungent incense between them and

us, and no dramatist has ever had so sure a mastery over transports and

tears.

[Sidenote: Poetry has its place in the medium.]

In the medium a poet is at home; in the world he tries to render, he is

a child and a stranger. Poetic notions are false notions; in so far as

their function is representative they are vitiated by containing

elements not present in things. Truth is a jewel which should not be

painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.

The poetic way of idealising reality is dull, bungling, and impure; a

better acquaintance with things renders such flatteries ridiculous. That

very effort of thought by which opaque masses of experience were first

detached from the flux and given a certain individuality, seeks to

continue to clarify them until they become as transparent as possible.

To resist this clarification, to love the chance incrustations that

encumber human ideas, is a piece of timid folly, and poetry in this

respect is nothing but childish confusion. Poetic apprehension is a

makeshift, in so far as its cognitive worth is concerned; it is exactly,

in this respect, what myth is to science. Approaching its subject-matter

from a distance, with incongruous categories, it translates it into some

vague and misleading symbol rich in emotions which the object as it is

could never arouse and is sure presently to contradict. What lends these

hybrid ideas their temporary eloquence and charm is their congruity with

the mind that breeds them and with its early habits. Falsification, or

rather clouded vision, gives to poetry a more human accent and a readier

welcome than to truth. In other words, it is the medium that asserts

itself; the apperceptive powers indulge their private humours, and

neglect the office to which they were assigned once for all by their

cognitive essence.

[Sidenote: It is the best medium possible.]

That the medium should so assert itself, however, is no anomaly, the

cognitive function being an ulterior one to which ideas are by no means

obliged to conform. Apperception is itself an activity or art, and like

all others terminates in a product which is a good in itself, apart from

its utilities. If we abstract, then, from the representative function

which may perhaps accrue to speech, and regard it merely as an operation

absorbing energy and occasioning delight, we see that poetic language is

language at its best. Its essential success consists in fusing ideas in

charming sounds or in metaphors that shine by their own brilliance.

Poetry is an eloquence justified by its spontaneity, as eloquence is a

poetry justified by its application. The first draws the whole soul into

the situation, and the second puts the whole situation before the soul.

[Sidenote: Might it not convey what it is best to know?]

Is there not, we may ask, some ideal form of discourse in which

apperceptive life could be engaged with all its volume and transmuting

power, and in which at the same time no misrepresentation should be

involved? Transmutation is not erroneous when it is intentional;

misrepresentation does not please for being false, but only because

truth would be more congenial if it resembled such a fiction. Why

should not discourse, then, have nothing but truth in its import and

nothing but beauty in its form? With regard to euphony and grammatical

structure there is evidently nothing impossible in such an ideal; for

these radical beauties of language are independent of the

subject-matter. They form the body of poetry; but the ideal and

emotional atmosphere which is its soul depends on things external to

language, which no perfection in the medium could modify. It might seem

as if the brilliant substitutions, the magic suggestions essential to

poetry, would necessarily vanish in the full light of day. The light of

day is itself beautiful; but would not the loss be terrible if no other

light were ever suffered to shine?

[Sidenote: A rational poetry would exclude much now thought poetical.]

The Life of Reason involves sacrifice. What forces yearn for the ideal,

being many and incompatible, have to yield and partly deny themselves in

order to attain any ideal at all. There is something sad in all possible

attainment so long as the rational virtue (which wills such attainment)

is not pervasive; and even then there is limitation to put up with, and

the memory of many a defeat. Rational poetry is possible and would be

infinitely more beautiful than the other; but the charm of unreason, if

unreason seem charming, it certainly could not preserve. In what human

fancy demands, as at present constituted, there are irrational

elements. The given world seems insufficient; impossible things have to

be imagined, both to extend its limits and to fill in and vivify its

texture. Homer has a mythology without which experience would have

seemed to him undecipherable; Dante has his allegories and his mock

science; Shakespeare has his romanticism; Goethe his symbolic characters

and artificial machinery. All this lumber seems to have been somehow

necessary to their genius; they could not reach expression in more

honest terms. If such indirect expression could be discarded, it would

not be missed; but while the mind, for want of a better vocabulary, is

reduced to using these symbols, it pours into them a part of its own

life and makes them beautiful. Their loss is a real blow, while the

incapacity that called for them endures; and the soul seems to be

crippled by losing its crutches.

[Sidenote: All apperception modifies its object.]

There are certain adaptations and abbreviations of reality which thought

can never outgrow. Thought is representative; it enriches each soul and

each moment with premonitions of surrounding existences. If discourse is

to be significant it must transfer to its territory and reduce to its

scale whatever objects it deals with: in other words, thought has a

point of view and cannot see the world except in perspective. This point

of view is not, for reason, locally or naturally determined; sense alone

is limited in that material fashion, being seated in the body and

looking thence centrifugally upon things in so far as they come into

dynamic relations with that body. Intelligence, on the contrary, sallies

from that physical stronghold and consists precisely in shifting and

universalising the point of view, neutralising all local, temporal, or

personal conditions. Yet intelligence, notwithstanding, has its own

centre and point of origin, not explicitly in space or in a natural

body, but in some specific interest or moral aim. It translates animal

life into moral endeavour, and what figured in the first as a local

existence figures in the second as a specific good. Reason accordingly

has its essential bias, and looks at things as they affect the

particular form of life which reason expresses; and though all reality

should be ultimately swept by the eye of reason, the whole would still

be surveyed by a particular method, from a particular starting-point,

for a particular end; nor would it take much shrewdness to perceive that

this nucleus for discourse and estimation, this ideal life, corresponds

in the moral world to that animal body which gave sensuous experience

its seat and centre; so that rationality is nothing but the ideal

function or aspect of natural life. Reason is universal in its outlook

and in its sympathies: it is the faculty of changing places ideally and

representing alien points of view; but this very self-transcendence

manifests a certain special method in life, an equilibrium which a

far-sighted being is able to establish between itself and its

comprehended conditions. Reason remains to the end essentially human

and, in its momentary actuality, necessarily personal.

[Sidenote: Reason has its own bias and method.]

We have here an essential condition of discourse which renders it at

bottom poetical. Selection and applicability govern all thinking, and

govern it in the interests of the soul. Reason is itself a specific

medium; so that prose can never attain that perfect transparency and

mere utility which we were attributing to it. We should not wish to know

“things in themselves,” even if we were able. What it concerns us to

know about them is merely the service or injury they are able to do us,

and in what fashion they can affect our lives. To know this would be, in

so far, truly to know them; but it would be to know them through our own

faculties and through their supposed effects; it would be to know them

by their appearance. A singular proof of the frivolous way in which

philosophers often proceed, when they think they are particularly

profound, is seen in this puzzle, on which they solemnly ask us to fix

our thoughts: How is it possible to know reality, if all we can attain

in experience is but appearance? The meaning of knowledge, which is an

intellectual and living thing, is here forgotten, and the notion of

sensation, or bodily possession, is substituted for it; so what we are

really asked to consider is how, had we no understanding, we should be

able to understand what we endure. It is by conceiving what we endure to

be the appearance of something beyond us, that we reach knowledge that

something exists beyond us, and that it plays in respect to us a

determinate rôle. There could be no knowledge of reality if what

conveyed that knowledge were not felt to be appearance; nor can a medium

of knowledge better than appearance be by any possibility conceived. To

have such appearances is what makes realities knowable. Knowledge

transcends sensation by relating it to other sensation, and thereby

rising to a supersensuous plane, the plane of principles and causes by

which sensibles are identified in character and distributed in

existence. These principles and causes are what we call the intelligible

or the real world; and the sensations, when they have been so

interpreted and underpinned, are what we call experience.

[Sidenote: Rational poetry would envelop exact knowledge in ultimate

emotions.]

If a poet could clarify the myths he begins with, so as to reach

ultimate scientific notions of nature and life, he would still be

dealing with vivid feeling and with its imaginative expression. The

prosaic landscape before him would still be a work of art, painted on

the human brain by human reason. If he found that landscape

uninteresting, it would be because he was not really interested in life;

if he found it dull and unpoetical, he would be manifesting his small

capacity and childish whims. Tragic, fatal, intractable, he might well

feel that the truth was; but these qualities have never been absent from

that half-mythical world through which poets, for want of a rational

education, have hitherto wandered. A rational poet’s vision would have

the same moral functions which myth was asked to fulfil, and fulfilled

so treacherously; it would employ the same ideal faculties which myth

expressed in a confused and hasty fashion. More detail would have been

added, and more variety in interpretation. To deal with so great an

object, and retain his mastery over it, a poet would doubtless need a

robust genius. If he possessed it, and in transmuting all existence

falsified nothing, giving that picture of everything which human

experience in the end would have drawn, he would achieve an ideal

result. In prompting mankind to imagine, he would be helping them to

live. His poetry, without ceasing to be a fiction in its method and

ideality, would be an ultimate truth in its practical scope. It would

present in graphic images the total efficacy of real things. Such a

poetry would be more deeply rooted in human experience than is any

casual fancy, and therefore more appealing to the heart. Such a poetry

would represent more thoroughly than any formula the concrete burden of

experience; it would become the most trustworthy of companions. The

images it had worked out would confront human passion more intelligibly

than does the world as at present conceived, with its mechanism half

ignored and its ideality half invented; they would represent vividly the

uses of nature, and thereby make all natural situations seem so many

incentives to art.

[Sidenote: An illustration.]

Rational poetry is not wholly unknown. When Homer mentions an object,

how does he render it poetical? First, doubtless, by the euphony of its

name or the sensuous glow of some epithet coupled with it. Sometimes,

however, even this ornamental epithet is not merely sensuous; it is very

likely a patronymic, the name of some region or some mythical ancestor.

In other words, it is a signal for widening our view and for conceiving

the object, not only vividly and with pause, but in an adequate historic

setting. Macbeth tells us that his dagger was “unmannerly breeched in

gore.” Achilles would not have amused himself with such a metaphor, even

if breeches had existed in his day, but would rather have told us whose

blood, on other occasions, had stained the same blade, and perhaps what

father or mother had grieved for the slaughtered hero, or what brave

children remained to continue his race. Shakespeare’s phrase is

ingenious and fanciful; it dazzles for a moment, but in the end it seems

violent and crude. What Homer would have said, on the contrary, being

simple and true, might have grown, as we dwelt upon it, always more

noble, pathetic, and poetical. Shakespeare, too, beneath his occasional

absurdities of plot and diction, ennobles his stage with actual history,

with life painted to the quick, with genuine human characters, politics,

and wisdom; and surely these are not the elements that do least credit

to his genius. In every poet, indeed, there is some fidelity to nature,

mixed with that irrelevant false fancy with which poetry is sometimes

identified; and the degree in which a poet’s imagination dominates

reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

[Sidenote: Volume can be found in scope better than in suggestion.]

Before prosaic objects are descried, the volume and richness needful for

poetry lie in a blurred and undigested chaos; but after the common world

has emerged and has called on prose to describe it, the same volume and

richness may be recovered; and a new and clarified poetry may arise

through synthesis. Scope is a better thing than suggestion, and more

truly poetical. It has expressed what suggestion pointed to and felt in

the bulk: it possesses what was yearned for. A real thing, when all its

pertinent natural associates are discerned, touches wonder, pathos, and

beauty on every side; the rational poet is one who, without feigning

anything unreal, perceives these momentous ties, and presents his

subject loaded with its whole fate, missing no source of worth which is

in it, no ideal influence which it may have. Homer remains, perhaps, the

greatest master in this art. The world he glorified by showing in how

many ways it could serve reason and beauty was but a simple world, and

an equal genius in these days might be distracted by the Babel about

him, and be driven, as poets now are, into incidental dreams. Yet the

ideal of mastery and idealisation remains the same, if any one could

only attain it: mastery, to see things as they are and dare to describe

them ingenuously; idealisation, to select from this reality what is

pertinent to ultimate interests and can speak eloquently to the soul.

CHAPTER VII

PLASTIC CONSTRUCTION

[Sidenote: Automatic expression often leaves traces in the outer world.]

We have seen how arts founded on exercise and automatic self-expression

develop into music, poetry, and prose. By an indirect approach they come

to represent outer conditions, till they are interwoven in a life which

has in some measure gone out to meet its opportunities and learned to

turn them to an ideal use. We have now to see how man’s reactive habits

pass simultaneously into art in a wholly different region. Spontaneous

expression, such as song, comes when internal growth in an animal system

vents itself, as it were, by the way. At the same time animal economy

has playful manifestations concerned with outer things, such as

burrowing or collecting objects. These practices are not less

spontaneous than the others, and no less expressive; but they seem more

external because the traces they leave on the environment are more

clearly marked.

To change an object is the surest and most glorious way of changing a

perception. A shift in posture may relieve the body, and in that way

satisfy, but the new attitude is itself unstable. Its pleasantness,

like its existence, is transient, and scarcely is a movement executed

when both its occasion and its charm are forgotten. Self-expression by

exercise, in spite of its pronounced automatism, is therefore something

comparatively passive and inglorious. A man has hardly _done_ anything

when he has laughed or yawned. Even the inspired poet retains something

of this passivity: his work is not his, but that of a restless,

irresponsible spirit passing through him, and hypnotising him for its

own ends. Of the result he has no profit, no glory, and little

understanding. So the mystic also positively gloats on his own

nothingness, and puts his whole genuine being in a fancied

instrumentality and subordination to something else. Far more virile and

noble is the sense of having actually done something, and left at least

the temporary stamp of one’s special will on the world. To chop a stick,

to catch a fly, to pile a heap of sand, is a satisfying action; for the

sand stays for a while in its novel arrangement, proclaiming to the

surrounding level that we have made it our instrument, while the fly

will never stir nor the stick grow together again in all eternity. If

the impulse that has thus left its indelible mark on things is constant

in our own bosom, the world will have been permanently improved and

humanised by our action. Nature cannot but be more favourable to those

ideas which have once found an efficacious champion.

[Sidenote: Such effects fruitful.]

Plastic impulses find in this way an immediate sanction in the sense of

victory and dominion which they carry with them; it is so evident a

proof of power in ourselves to see things and animals bent out of their

habitual form and obedient instead to our idea. But a far weightier

sanction immediately follows. Man depends on things for his experience,

yet by automatic action he changes these very things so that it becomes

possible that by his action he should promote his welfare. He may, of

course, no less readily precipitate his ruin. The animal is more subject

to vicissitudes than the plant, which makes no effort to escape them or

to give chase to what it feeds upon. The greater perils of action,

however, are in animals covered partly by fertility, partly by

adaptability, partly by success. The mere possibility of success, in a

world governed by natural selection, is an earnest of progress.

Sometimes, in impressing the environment, a man will improve it: which

is merely to say that a change may sometimes fortify the impulse which

brought it about. As soon as this retroaction is perceived and the act

is done with knowledge of its ensuing benefits, plastic impulse becomes

art, and the world begins actually to change in obedience to reason.

One respect, for instance, in which man depends on things is for the

æsthetic quality of his perceptions. If he happens, by a twist of the

hand, to turn a flowering branch into a wreath, thereby making it more

interesting, he will have discovered a decorative art and initiated

himself auspiciously into the practice of it. Experimentation may

follow, and whenever the new form given to the object improves

it—_i.e._, increases its interest for the eye—the experimenter will

triumph and will congratulate himself on his genius. The garland so

arranged will be said to express the taste it satisfies; insight and

reason will be mythically thought to have guided the work by which they

are sustained in being. It is no small harmony, however, that they

should be sustained by it. The consonances man introduces into nature

will follow him wherever he goes. It will no longer be necessary that

nature should supply them spontaneously, by a rare adventitious harmony

with his demands. His new habit will habitually rear-range her chance

arrangements, and his path will be marked by the beauties he has strewn

it with. So long as the same plastic impulse continues operative it will

be accompanied by knowledge and criticism of its happy results.

Self-criticism, being a second incipient artistic impulse, contrasting

itself with the one which a work embodies, may to some extent modify the

next performance. If life is drawn largely into this deepening channel,

physical proficiency and its ideal sanctions will develop more or less

harmoniously into what is called a school of art.

[Sidenote: Magic authority of man’s first creations.]

The first felt utilities by which plastic instinct is sanctioned are of

course not distinctly æsthetic, much less distinctly practical; they

are magical. A stone cut into some human or animal semblance fascinates

the savage eye much more than would a useful tool or a beautiful idol.

The man wonders at his own work, and petrifies the miracle of his art

into miraculous properties in its product. Primitive art is incredibly

conservative; its first creations, having once attracted attention,

monopolise it henceforth and nothing else will be trusted to work the

miracle. It is a sign of stupidity in general to stick to physical

objects and given forms apart from their ideal functions, as when a

child cries for a broken doll, even if a new and better one is at hand

to replace it. Inert associations establish themselves, in such a case,

with that part of a thing which is irrelevant to its value—its material

substance or perhaps its name. Art can make no progress in such a

situation. A man remains incorrigibly unhappy and perplexed, cowed, and

helpless, because not intelligent enough to readjust his actions; his

idol must be the self-same hereditary stock, or at least it must have

the old sanctified rigidity and stare. Plastic impulse, as yet sporadic,

is overwhelmed by a brute idolatrous awe at mere existence and

actuality. What is, what has always been, what chance has associated

with one person, alone seems acceptable or conceivable.

[Sidenote: Art brings relief from idolatry.]

Idolatry is by no means incident to art; art, on the contrary, is a

release from idolatry. A cloud, an animal, a spring, a stone, or the

whole heaven, will serve the pure idolater’s purpose to perfection;

these things have existence and a certain hypnotic power, so that he may

make them a focus for his dazed contemplation. When the mind takes to

generalities it finds the same fascination in Being or in the Absolute,

something it needs no art to discover. The more indeterminate,

immediate, and unutterable the idol is, the better it induces panic

self-contraction and a reduction of all discourse to the infinite

intensity of zero. When idolaters pass from trying to evoke the

Absolutely Existent to apostrophising the sun or an ithyphallic bull

they have made an immense progress in art and religion, for now their

idols represent some specific and beneficent function in nature,

something propitious to ideal life and to its determinate expression.

Isaiah is very scornful of idols made with hands, because they have no

physical energy. He forgets that perhaps they represent something, and

so have a spiritual dignity which things living and powerful never have

unless they too become representative and express some ideal. Isaiah’s

conception of Jehovah, for instance, is itself a poetic image, the work

of man’s brain; and the innocent worship of it would not be idolatry, if

that conception represented something friendly to human happiness and to

human art. The question merely is whether the sculptor’s image or the

prophet’s stands for the greater interest and is a more adequate symbol

for the good. The noblest art will be the one, whether plastic or

literary or dialectical, which creates figments most truly

representative of what is momentous in human life. Similarly the least

idolatrous religion would be the one which used the most perfect art,

and most successfully abstracted the good from the real.

[Sidenote: Inertia in technique.]

Conservatism rules also in those manufactures which are tributary to

architecture and the smaller plastic arts. Utility makes small headway

against custom, not only when custom has become religion, but even when

it remains inert and without mythical sanction. To admit or trust

anything new is to overcome that inertia which is a general law in the

brain no less than elsewhere, and which may be distinguished in

reflection into a technical and a social conservatism. Technical

conservatism appears, for instance, in a man’s handwriting, which is so

seldom improved, even when admitted, perhaps, to be execrable. Every

artist has his tricks of execution, every school its hereditary,

irrational processes. These refractory habits are to blame for the rare

and inimitable quality of genius; they impose excellence on one man and

refuse it to a million. A happy physiological structure, by creating a

mannerism under the special circumstances favourable to expression, may

lift a man, perhaps inferior in intelligence, to heights which no

insight can attain with inferior organs. As a voice is necessary for

singing, so a certain quickness of eye and hand is needed for good

execution in the plastic arts. The same principle goes deeper.

Conception and imagination are themselves automatic and run in grooves,

so that only certain forms in certain combinations will ever suggest

themselves to a given designer. Every writer’s style, too, however

varied within limits, is single and monotonous compared with the ideal

possibilities of expression. Genius at every moment is confined to the

idiom it is creating.

[Sidenote: Inertia in appreciation.]

Social inertia is due to the same causes working in the community at

large. The fancy, for instance, of building churches in the shape of a

cross has largely determined Christian architecture. Builders were

prevented by a foregone suggestion in themselves and by their patrons’

demands from conceiving any alternative to that convention. Early

pottery, they say, imitates wicker-work, and painted landscape was for

ages not allowed to exist without figures, although even the old masters

show plainly enough in their backgrounds that they could love landscape

for its own sake. When one link with humanity has been rendered explicit

and familiar, people assume that by no other means can humanity be

touched at all; even if at the same time their own heart is expanding to

the highest raptures in a quite different region. The severer Greeks

reprobated music without words; Saint Augustine complained of chants

that rendered the sacred text unintelligible; the Puritans regarded

elaborate music as diabolical, little knowing how soon some of their

descendants would find religion in nothing else. A stupid convention

still looks on material and mathematical processes as somehow

distressing and ugly, and systems of philosophy, artificially

mechanical, are invented to try to explain natural mechanism away;

whereas in no region can the spirit feel so much at home as among

natural causes, or realise so well its universal affinities, or so

safely enlarge its happiness. Mechanism is the source of beauty. It is

not necessary to look so high as the stars to perceive this truth: the

action of an animal’s limbs or the movement of a waterfall will prove it

to any one who has eyes and can shake himself loose from verbal

prejudices, those debris of old perceptions which choke all fresh

perception in the soul. Irrational hopes, irrational shames, irrational

decencies, make man’s chief desolation. A slight knocking of fools’

heads together might be enough to break up the ossifications there and

start the blood coursing again through possible channels. Art has an

infinite range; nothing shifts so easily as taste and yet nothing so

persistently avoids the directions in which it might find most

satisfaction.

[Sidenote: Adventitious effects appreciated first.]

Since construction grows rational slowly and by indirect pressure, we

may expect that its most superficial merits will be the first

appreciated. Ultimate beauty in a building would consist, of course, in

responding simultaneously to all the human faculties affected: to the

eye, by the building’s size, form, and colour; to the imagination, by

its fitness and ideal expression. Of all grounds for admiration those

most readily seized are size, elaboration, splendour of materials, and

difficulties or cost involved. Having built or dug in the conventional

way a man may hang before his door some trophy of battle or the chase,

bearing witness to his prowess; just as people now, not thinking of

making their rooms beautiful, fill them with photographs of friends or

places they have known, to suggest and reburnish in their minds their

interesting personal history, which even they, unstimulated, might tend

to forget. That dwelling will seem best adorned which contains most

adventitious objects; bare and ugly will be whatever is not concealed by

something else. Again, a barbarous architect, without changing his

model, may build in a more precious material; and his work will be

admired for the evidence it furnishes of wealth and wilfulness. As a

community grows luxurious and becomes accustomed to such display, it may

come to seem strange and hideous to see a wooden plate or a pewter

spoon. A beautiful house will need to be in marble and the sight of

plebeian brick will banish all satisfaction.

Less irrational, and therefore less vulgar, is the wonder aroused by

great bulk or difficulty in the work. Exertions, to produce a great

result, even if it be material, must be allied to perseverance and

intelligent direction. Roman bridges and aqueducts, for instance, gain

a profound emotional power when we see in their monotonous arches a

symbol of the mightiest enterprise in history, and in their decay an

evidence of its failure. Curiosity is satisfied, historic imagination is

stimulated, tragic reflection is called forth. We cannot refuse

admiration to a work so full of mind, even if no great plastic beauty

happens to distinguish it. It is at any rate beautiful enough, like the

sea or the skeleton of a mountain. We may rely on the life it has made

possible to add more positive charms and clothe it with imaginative

functions. Modern engineering works often have a similar value; the

force and intelligence they express merge in an æsthetic essence, and

the place they hold in a portentous civilisation lends them an almost

epic dignity. New York, since it took to doing business in towers, has

become interesting to look at from the sea; nor is it possible to walk

through the overshadowed streets without feeling a pleasing wonder. A

city, when enough people swarm in it, is as fascinating as an ant-hill,

and its buildings, whatever other charms they may have, are at least as

curious and delightful as sea-shells or birds’ nests. The purpose of

improvements in modern structures may be economic, just as the purpose

of castles was military; but both may incidentally please the

contemplative mind by their huge forms and human associations.

[Sidenote: Approach to beauty through useful structure.]

Of the two approaches which barbaric architecture makes to beauty—one

through ornamentation and the other through mass—the latter is in

general the more successful. An engineer fights with nature hand to

hand: he is less easily extravagant than a decorator; he can hardly ever

afford to be absurd. He becomes accordingly more rapidly civilised and

his work acquires, in spite of itself, more rationality and a more

permanent charm. A self-sustaining structure, in art as in life, is the

only possible basis for a vital ideal. When the framework is determined,

when it is tested by trial and found to stand and serve, it will

gradually ingratiate itself with the observer; affinities it may have in

his memory or apperceptive habits will come to light; they will help him

to assimilate the new vision and will define its æsthetic character.

Whatever beauty its lines may have will become a permanent possession

and whatever beauties they exclude will be rejected by a faithful

artist, no matter how sorely at first they may tempt him. Not that these

excluded beauties would not be really beautiful; like fashions, they

would truly please in their day and very likely would contain certain

absolute excellences of form or feeling which an attentive eye could

enjoy at any time. Yet if appended to a structure they have no function

in, these excellences will hardly impose themselves on the next builder.

Being adventitious they will remain optional, and since fancy is quick,

and exotic beauties are many, there will be no end to the variations, in

endless directions, which art will undergo. Caprice will follow caprice

and no style will be developed.

[Sidenote: Failure of adapted styles.]

A settled style is perhaps in itself no desideratum. A city that should

be a bazaar of all possible architectures, adding a multitude of new

inventions to samples of every historical style, might have a certain

interest; yet carnival can hardly be enjoyed all the year round and

there is a certain latent hideousness in masquerades in spite of their

glitter. Not only are the effects juxtaposed incongruous, but each apart

is usually shallow and absurd. A perruque cannot bring back courtly

manners, and a style of architecture, when revived, is never quite

genuine; adaptations have to be introduced and every adaptation, the

bolder it is, runs the greater risk of being extravagant. Nothing is

more pitiable than the attempts people make, who think they have an

exquisite sensibility, to live in a house all of one period. The

connoisseur, like an uncritical philosopher, boasts to have patched his

dwelling perfectly together, but he has forgotten himself, its egregious

inhabitant. Nor is he merely a blot in his own composition; his presence

secretly infects and denaturalises everything in it. Ridiculous himself

in such a setting, he makes it ridiculous too by his æsthetic pose and

appreciations; for the objects he has collected or reproduced were once

used and prized in all honesty, when life and inevitable tradition had

brought them forth, while now they are studied and exhibited, relics of

a dead past and evidences of a dead present. Historic remains and

restorations might well be used as one uses historic knowledge, to serve

some living interest and equip the mind for the undertakings of the

hour. An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.

Ideas that have long been used may be used still, if they remain ideas

and have not been congealed into memories. Incorporated into a design

that calls for them, traditional forms cease to be incongruous, as words

that still have a felt meaning may be old without being obsolete. All

depends on men subserving an actual ideal and having so firm and genuine

an appreciation of the past as to distinguish at once what is still

serviceable in it from what is already ghostly and dead.

[Sidenote: Not all structure beautiful, nor all beauty structural.]

An artist may be kept true to his style either by ignorance of all

others or by love of his own. This fidelity is a condition of progress.

When he has learned to appreciate whatever is æsthetically appreciable

in his problem, he can go on to refine his construction, to ennoble, and

finally to decorate it. As fish, flesh, and fowl have specific forms,

each more or less beautiful and adorned, so every necessary structure

has its specific character and its essential associations. Taking his

cue from these, an artist may experiment freely; he may emphasise the

structure in the classic manner and turn its lines into ornament, adding

only what may help to complete and unite its suggestions. This

puritanism in design is rightly commended, but its opposite may be

admirable too. We may admit that nudity is the right garment for the

gods, but it would hardly serve the interests of beauty to legislate

that all mortals should always go naked. The veil that conceals natural

imperfections may have a perfection of its own. Maxims in art are

pernicious; beauty is here the only commandment. And beauty is a free

natural gift. When it has appeared, we may perceive that its influence

is rational, since it both expresses and fosters a harmony of

impressions and impulses in the soul; but to take any mechanism

whatever, and merely because it is actual or necessary to insist that it

is worth exhibiting, and that by divine decree it shall be pronounced

beautiful, is to be quite at sea in moral philosophy.

Beauty is adventitious, occasional, incidental, in human products no

less than in nature. Works of art are automatic figments which nature

fashions through man. It is impossible they should be wholly beautiful,

as it is impossible that they should offer no foothold or seed-plot for

beauty at all. Beauty is everywhere potential and in a way pervasive

because existence itself presupposes a modicum of harmony, first within

the thing and then between the thing and its environment. Of this

environment the observer’s senses are in this case an important part.

Man can with difficulty maintain senses quite out of key with the

stimuli furnished by the outer world. They would then be useless

burdens to his organism. On the other side, even artificial structures

must be somehow geometrical or proportional, because only such

structures hold physically together. Objects that are to be esteemed by

man must further possess or acquire some function in his economy;

otherwise they would not be noticed nor be so defined as to be

recognisable. Out of these physical necessities beauty may grow; but an

adjustment must first take place between the material stimulus and the

sense it affects. Beauty is something spiritual and, being such, it

rests not on the material constitution of each existence taken apart,

but on their conspiring ideally together, so that each furthers the

other’s endeavour. Structure by itself is no more beautiful than

existence by itself is good. They are only potentialities or conditions

of excellence.

[Sidenote: Structures designed for display.]

An architect, when his main structure is uninteresting, may have

recourse to a subsidiary construction. The façade, or a part of it, or

the interior may still have a natural form that lends itself to

elaboration. This beautiful feature may be developed so as to ignore or

even conceal the rest; then the visible portion may be entirely

beautiful, like the ideal human figure, though no pledges be given

concerning the anatomy within. Many an Italian palace has a false front

in itself magnificent. We may chance to observe, however, that it

overtops its backing, perhaps an amorphous rambling pile in quite

another material. What we admire is not so much a façade as a triumphal

gateway, set up in front of the house to be its ambassador to the world,

wearing decidedly richer apparel than its master can afford at home.

This was not vanity in the Italians so much as civility to the public,

to whose taste this flattering embassy was addressed. However our moral

sense may judge the matter, it is clear that two separate monuments

occupied the architect in such cases, if indeed inside and outside were

actually designed by the same hand. Structure may appear in each

independently and may be frankly enough expressed. The most beautiful

façades, even if independent of their building, are buildings

themselves, and since their construction is decorative there is the

greater likelihood that their decoration should be structural.

In relation to the house, however, the façade in such an extreme case

would be an abstract ornament; and so, though the ornament be structural

within its own lines, we have reverted to the style of building where

construction is one thing and decoration another. Applied ornament has

an indefinite range and there would be little profit in reasoning about

it. Philosophy can do little more at this point than expose the

fallacies into which dogmatic criticism is apt to fall. Everything is

true decoration which truly adorns, and everything adorns which enriches

the impression and pleasantly entertains the eye. There is a decorative

impulse as well as a sense for decoration. As I sit idle my stick makes

meaningless marks upon the sand; or (what is nearer to the usual origin

of ornament) I make a design out of somebody’s initials, or symbolise

fantastically something lying in my thoughts. We place also one thing

upon another, the better to see and to think of two things at once.

[Sidenote: Appeal made by decoration.]

To love decoration is to enjoy synthesis: in other words, it is to have

hungry senses and unused powers of attention. This hunger, when it

cannot well be fed by recollecting things past, relishes a profusion of

things simultaneous. Nothing is so much respected by unintelligent

people as elaboration and complexity. They are simply dazed and overawed

at seeing at once so much more than they can master. To overwhelm the

senses is, for them, the only way of filling the mind. It takes

cultivation to appreciate in art, as in philosophy, the consummate value

of what is simple and finite, because it has found its pure function and

ultimate import in the world. What is just, what is delicately and

silently adjusted to its special office, and thereby in truth to all

ultimate issues, seems to the vulgar something obvious and poor. What

astonishes them is the crude and paradoxical jumble of a thousand

suggestions in a single view. As the mystic yearns for an infinitely

glutted consciousness that feels everything at once and is not put to

the inconvenience of any longer thinking or imagining, so the barbarian

craves the assault of a myriad sensations together, and feels replete

and comfortable when a sort of infinite is poured into him without ideal

mediation. As ideal mediation is another name for intelligence, so it is

the condition of elegance. Intelligence and elegance naturally exist

together, since they both spring from a subtle sense for absent and

eventual processes. They are sustained by experience, by nicety in

foretaste and selection. Before ideality, however, is developed, volume

and variety must be given bodily or they cannot be given at all. At that

earlier stage a furious ornamentation is the chief vehicle for beauty.

[Sidenote: Its natural rights.]

That the ornate may be very beautiful, that in fact what is to be

completely beautiful needs to be somehow rich, is a fact of experience

which further justifies the above analysis. For sensation is the matter

of ideas; all representation is such only in its function; in its

existence it remains mere feeling. Decoration, by stimulating the

senses, not only brings a primary satisfaction with it, independent of

any that may supervene, but it furnishes an element of effect which no

higher beauty can ever render unwelcome or inappropriate, since any

higher beauty, in moving the mind, must give it a certain sensuous and

emotional colouring. Decoration is accordingly an independent art, to be

practised for its own sake, in obedience to elementary plastic

instincts. It is fundamental in design, for everything structural or

significant produces in the first instance some sensuous impression and

figures as a spot or pattern in the field of vision. The fortunate

architect is he who has, for structural skeleton in his work, a form in

itself decorative and beautiful, who can carry it out in a beautiful

material, and who finally is suffered to add so much decoration as the

eye may take in with pleasure, without losing the expression and

lucidity of the whole.

It is impossible, however, to imagine beforehand what these elements

should be or how to combine them. The problem must exist before its

solution can be found. The forms of good taste and beauty which a man

can think of or esteem are limited by the scope of his previous

experience. It would be impossible to foresee or desire a beauty which

had not somehow grown up of itself and been recognised receptively. A

satisfaction cannot be conceived ideally when neither its organ nor its

occasion has as yet arisen. That ideal conception, to exist, would have

to bring both into play. The fine arts are butter to man’s daily bread;

there is no conceiving or creating them except as they spring out of

social exigencies. Their types are imposed by utility: their

ornamentation betrays the tradition that happens to envelop and

diversify them; their expression and dignity are borrowed from the

company they keep in the world.

[Sidenote: Its alliance with structure in Greek architecture.]

The Greek temple, for instance, if we imagine it in its glory, with all

its colour and furniture, was a type of human art at its best, where

decoration, without in the least restricting itself, took naturally an

exquisitely subordinate and pervasive form: each detail had its own

splendour and refinement, yet kept its place in the whole. Structure and

decoration were alike traditional and imposed by ulterior practical or

religious purposes; yet, by good fortune and by grace of that

rationality which unified Greek life, they fell together easily into a

harmony such as imagination could never have devised had it been invited

to decree pleasure-domes for non-existent beings. Had the Greek gods

been hideous, their images and fable could not so readily have

beautified the place where they were honoured; and had the structural

theme and uses of the temple been more complicated, they would not have

lent themselves so well to decoration without being submerged beneath

it.

[Sidenote: Relations of the two in Gothic art.]

In some ways the ideal Gothic church attained a similar perfection,

because there too the structure remained lucid and predominant, while it

was enriched by many necessary appointments—altars, stalls, screens,

chantries—which, while really the _raison d’être_ of the whole edifice,

æsthetically regarded, served for its ornaments. It may be doubted,

however, whether Gothic construction was well grounded enough in utility

to be a sound and permanent basis for beauty; and the extreme

instability of Gothic style, the feverish, inconstancy of architects

straining after effects never, apparently, satisfactory when achieved,

shows that something was wrong and artificial in the situation. The

structure, in becoming an ornament, ceased to be anything else and could

be discarded by any one whose fancy preferred a different image.

For this reason a building like the cathedral of Amiens, where a

structural system is put through consistently, is far from representing

mediæval art in its full and ideal essence; it is rather an incidental

achievement, a sport in which an adventitious interest is, for a moment,

emphasised overwhelmingly. Intelligence here comes to the fore, and a

sort of mathematical virtuosity: but it was not mathematical virtuosity

nor even intelligence to which, in Christian art, the leading rôle

properly belonged. What structural elucidation did for church

architecture was much like what scholastic elucidation did for church

dogma: it insinuated a logic into the traditional edifice which was far

from representing its soul or its genuine value. The dialectic

introduced might be admirable in itself, in its lay and abstruse

rationality; but it could not be applied to the poetic material in hand

without rendering it absurd and sterile. The given problem was

scientifically carried out, but the given problem was itself fantastic.

To vault at such heights and to prop that vault with external buttresses

was a gratuitous undertaking. The result was indeed interesting, the

ingenuity and method exhibited were masterly in their way; yet the

result was not proportionate in beauty to the effort required; it was

after all a technical and a vain triumph.

[Sidenote: The result here romantic.]

The true magic of that very architecture lay not in its intelligible

structure but in the bewildering incidental effects which that structure

permitted. The part in such churches is better than the symmetrical

whole; often incompleteness and accretions alone give grace or

expression, to the monument. A cross vista where all is wonder, a side

chapel where all is peace, strike the key-note here; not that

punctilious and wooden repetition of props and arches, as a builder’s

model might boast to exhibit them. Perhaps the most beautiful Gothic

interiors are those without aisles, if what we are considering is their

proportion and majesty; elsewhere the structure, if perceived at all, is

too artificial and strange to be perceived intuitively and to have the

glow of a genuine beauty. There is an over-ingenious mechanism, redeemed

by its colour and the thousand intervening objects, when these have not

been swept away. Glazed and painted as Gothic churches were meant to be,

they were no doubt exceedingly gorgeous. When we admire their structural

scheme we are perhaps nursing an illusion like that which sentimental

classicists once cherished when they talked about the purity of white

marble statues and the ideality of their blank and sightless eyes. What

we treat as a supreme quality may have been a mere means to mediæval

builders, and a mechanical expedient: their simple hearts were set on

making their churches, for God’s glory and their own, as large, as high,

and as rich as possible. After all, an uninterrupted tradition attached

them to Byzantium; and it was the sudden passion for stained glass and

the goldsmith’s love of intricate fineness—which the Saracens also had

shown—that carried them in a century from Romanesque to flamboyant. The

structure was but the inevitable underpinning for the desired display.

If these sanctuaries, in their spoliation and ruin, now show us their

admirable bones, we should thank nature for that rational skeleton,

imposed by material conditions on an art which in its life-time was

goaded on only by a pious and local emulation, and wished at all costs

to be sumptuous and astonishing.

[Sidenote: The mediæval artist.]

It was rather in another direction that groping mediæval art reached its

most congenial triumphs. That was an age, so to speak, of epidemic

privacy; social contagion was irresistible, yet it served only to make

each man’s life no less hard, narrow, and visionary than that of every

one else. Like bees in a hive, each soul worked in its separate cell by

the same impulse as every other. Each was absorbed in saving itself

only, but according to a universal prescription. This isolation in

unanimity appears in those patient and childlike artists who copied each

his leaf or flower, or imagined each his curious angels and devils,

taking what was told of them so much to heart that his rendering became

deeply individual. The lamp of sacrifice—or perhaps rather of

ignorance—burned in every workshop; much labour was wasted in

forgetfulness of the function which the work was to perform, yet a

certain pathos and expression was infused into the detail, on which all

invention and pride had to be lavished. Carvings and statues at

impossible elevations, minute symbols hidden in corners, the choice for

architectural ornament of animal and vegetable forms, copied as

attentively and quaintly as possible—all this shows how abstractedly

the artist surrendered himself to the given task. He dedicated his

genius like the widow’s mite, and left the universal composition to

Providence.

Nor was this humility, on another side, wholly pious and sacrificial.

The Middle Ages were, in their way, merry, sturdy, and mischievous. A

fresh breath, as of convalescence, breathed through their misery. Never

was spring so green and lovely as when men greeted it in a cloistered

garden, with hearts quite empty and clean, only half-awakened from a

long trance of despair. It mattered little at such a moment where a work

was to figure or whether any one should ever enjoy it. The pleasure and

the function lay here, in this private revelation, in this playful

dialogue between a bit of nature and a passing mood. When a Greek

workman cut a volute or a moulding, he was not asked to be a poet; he

was merely a scribe, writing out what some master had composed before

him. The spirit of his art, if that was called forth consciously at

all, could be nothing short of intelligence. Those lines and none other,

he would say to himself, are requisite and sufficient: to do less would

be unskilful, to do more would be perverse. But the mediæval craftsman

was irresponsible in his earnestness. The whole did not concern him, for

the whole was providential and therefore, to the artist, irrelevant. He

was only responsible inwardly, to his casual inspiration, to his

individual model, and his allotted block of stone. With these he carried

on, as it were, an ingenuous dialectic, asking them questions by a blow

of the hammer, and gathering their oracular answers experimentally from

the result. Art, like salvation, proceeded by a series of little

miracles; it was a blind work, half stubborn patience, half unmerited

grace. If the product was destined to fill a niche in the celestial

edifice, that was God’s business and might be left to him: what

concerned the sculptor was to-day’s labour and joy, with the shrewd

wisdom they might bring after them.

[Sidenote: Representation introduced.]

Gothic ornament was accordingly more than ornament; it was sculpture. To

the architect sculpture and painting are only means of variegating a

surface; light and shade, depth and elaboration, are thereby secured and

aid him in distributing his masses. For this reason geometrical or

highly conventionalised ornament is all the architect requires. If his

decorators furnish more, if they insist on copying natural forms or

illustrating history, that is their own affair. Their humanity will

doubtless give them, as representative artists, a new claim on human

regard, and the building they enrich in their pictorial fashion will

gain a new charm, just as it would gain by historic associations or by

the smell of incense clinging to its walls. When the arts superpose

their effects the total impression belongs to none of them in

particular; it is imaginative merely or in the broadest sense poetical.

So the monumental function of Greek sculpture, and the interpretations

it gave to national myths, made every temple a storehouse of poetic

memories. In the same way every great cathedral became a pious

story-book. Construction, by admitting applied decoration, offers a

splendid basis and background for representative art. It is in their

decorative function that construction and representation meet; they are

able to conspire in one ideal effect by virtue of the common appeal

which they unwittingly make to the senses. If construction were not

decorative it could never ally itself imaginatively to decoration; and

decoration in turn would never be willingly representative if the forms

which illustration requires were not decorative in themselves.

[Sidenote: Transition to illustration.]

Illustration has nevertheless an intellectual function by which it

diverges altogether from decoration and even, in the narrowest sense

of the word, from art: for the essence of illustration lies neither

in use nor in beauty. The illustrator’s impulse is to reproduce

and describe given objects. He wishes in the first place to force

observers—overlooking all logical scruples—to call his work by the

name of its subject matter; and then he wishes to inform them further,

through his representation, and to teach them to apprehend the real

object as, in its natural existence, it might never have been

apprehended. His first task is to translate the object faithfully into

his special medium; his second task, somewhat more ambitious, is so to

penetrate into the object during that process of translation that this

translation may become at the same time analytic and imaginative, in

that it signalises the object’s structure and emphasises its ideal

suggestions. In such reproduction both hand and mind are called upon to

construct and build up a new apparition; but here construction has

ceased to be chiefly decorative or absolute in order to become

representative. The æsthetic element in art has begun to recede before

the intellectual; and sensuous effects, while of course retained and

still studied, seem to be impressed into the service of ideas.

CHAPTER VIII

PLASTIC REPRESENTATION

[Sidenote: Psychology of imitation.]

Imitation is a fertile principle in the Life of Reason. We have seen

that it furnishes the only rational sanction for belief in any fellow

mind; now we shall see how it creates the most glorious and interesting

of plastic arts. The machinery of imitation is obscure but its

prevalence is obvious, and even in the present rudimentary state of

human biology we may perhaps divine some of its general features. In a

motor image the mind represents prophetically what the body is about to

execute: but all images are more or less motor, so that no idea,

apparently, can occupy the mind unless the body has received some

impulse to enact the same. The plastic instinct to reproduce what is

seen is therefore simply an uninterrupted and adequate seeing; these two

phenomena, separable logically and divided in Cartesian psychology by an

artificial chasm, are inseparable in existence and are, for natural

history, two parts of the same event. That an image should exist for

consciousness is, abstractly regarded, a fact which neither involves

motion nor constitutes knowledge; but that natural relation to ulterior

events which endows that image with a cognitive function identifies it

at the same time with the motor impulse which accompanies the idea. If

the image involved no bodily attitude and prophesied no action it would

refer to no eventual existence and would have no practical meaning. Even

if it _meant_ to refer to something ulterior it would, under those

circumstances, miss its aim, seeing that no natural relation connected

it with any object which could support or verify its asseverations. It

might _feel_ significant, like a dream, but its significance would be

vain and not really self-transcendent; for it is in the world of events

that logic must find application, if it cares for applicability at all.

This needful bond between ideas and the further existences they forebode

is not merely a logical postulate, taken on trust because the ideas in

themselves assert it; it is a previous and genetic bond, proper to the

soil in which the idea flourishes and a condition of its existence. For

the idea expresses unawares a present cerebral event of which the

ulterior event consciously looked to is a descendant or an ancestor; so

that the ripening of that idea, or its prior history, leads materially

to the fact which the idea seeks to represent ideally.

[Sidenote: Sustained sensation involves reproduction.]

In some such fashion we may come to conceive how imitative art is simply

the perfection and fulfilment of sensation. The act of apperception in

which a sensation is reflected upon and understood is already an

internal reproduction. The object is retraced and gone over in the

mind, not without quite perceptible movements in the limbs, which sway,

as it were, in sympathy with the object’s habit. Presumably this

incipient imitation of the object is the physical basis for apperception

itself; the stimulus, whatever devious courses it may pursue,

reconstitutes itself into an impulse to render the object again, as we

acquire the accent which we often hear. This imitation sometimes has the

happiest results, in that the animal fights with one that fights, and

runs after one that runs away from him. All this happens initially, as

we may still observe in ourselves, quite without thought of eventual

profit; although if chase leads to contact, and contact stimulates

hunger or lust, movements important for preservation will quickly

follow. Such eventual utilities, however, like all utilities, are

supported by a prodigious gratuitous vitality, and long before a

practical or scientific use of sensation is attained its artistic force

is in full operation. If art be play, it is only because all life is

play in the beginning. Rational adjustments to truth and to benefit

supervene only occasionally and at a higher level.

[Sidenote: Imitative art repeats with intent to repeat, and in a new

material.]

Imitation cannot, of course, result in a literal repetition of the

object that suggests it. The copy is secondary; it does not iterate the

model by creating a second object on the same plane of reality, but

reproduces the form in a new medium and gives it a different function.

In these latter circumstances lies the imitative essence of the second

image: for one leaf does not imitate another nor is each twin the

other’s copy. Like sensibility, imitation remodels a given being so that

it becomes, in certain formal respects, like another being in its

environment. It is a response and an index, by which note is taken of a

situation or of its possible developments. When a man involuntarily

imitates other men, he does not become those other persons; he is simply

modified by their presence in a manner that allows him to conceive their

will and their independent existence, not without growing similar to

them in some measure and framing a genuine representation of them in his

soul. He enacts what he understands, and his understanding consists

precisely in knowing that he is re-enacting something which has its

collateral existence elsewhere in nature. An element in the percipient

repeats the total movement and tendency of the person perceived. The

imitation, though akin to what it imitates, and reproducing it, lies in

a different medium, and accordingly has a specific individuality and

specific effects. Imitation is far more than similarity, nor does its

ideal function lie in bringing a flat and unmeaning similarity about. It

has a representative and intellectual value because in reproducing the

forms of things it reproduces them in a fresh substance to a new

purpose.

If I imitate mankind by following their fashions, I add one to the

million and improve nothing: but if I imitate them under proper

inhibitions and in the service of my own ends, I really understand them,

and, by representing what I do not bodily become, I preserve and enlarge

my own being and make it relevant ideally to what it physically depends

upon. Assimilation is a way of drifting through the flux or of letting

it drift through oneself; representation, on the contrary, is a

principle of progress. To grow by accumulating passions and fancies is

at best to grow in bulk: it is to become what a colony or a hydra might

be. But to make the accretions which time brings to your being

representative of what you are not, and do not wish to be, is to grow in

dignity. It is to be wise and prepared. It is to survey a universe

without ceasing to be a mind.

[Sidenote: Imitation leads to adaptation and to knowledge.]

A product of imitative sensibility is accordingly on a higher plane than

the original existences it introduces to one another—the ignorant

individual and the unknown world. Imitation in softening the body into

physical adjustment stimulates the mind to ideal representation. This is

the case even when the stimulus is a contagious influence or habit,

though the response may then be slavish and the representation vague.

Sheep jumping a wall after their leader doubtless feel that they are not

alone; and though their action may have no purpose it probably has a

felt sanction and reward. Men also think they invoke an authority when

they appeal to the _quod semper et ubique et ab omnibus_, and a

conscious unanimity is a human if not a rational joy. When, however, the

stimulus to imitation is not so pervasive and touches chiefly a single

sense, when what it arouses is a movement of the hand or eye retracing

the object, then the response becomes very definitely cognitive. It

constitutes an observation of fact, an acquaintance with a thing’s

structure amounting to technical knowledge; for such a survey leaves

behind it a power to reconstitute the process it involved. It leaves an

efficacious idea. In an idle moment, when the information thus acquired

need not be put to instant use, the new-born faculty may work itself out

spontaneously. The sound heard is repeated, the thing observed is

sketched, the event conceived is acted out in pantomime. Then imitation

rounds itself out; an uninhibited sensation has become an instinct to

keep that sensation alive, and plastic representation has begun.

[Sidenote: How the artist is inspired and irresponsible.]

The secret of representative genius is simple enough. All hangs on

intense, exhaustive, rehearsed sensation. To paint is a way of letting

vision work; nor should the amateur imagine that while he lacks

technical knowledge he can have in his possession all the ideal burden

of an art. His reaction will be personal and adventitious, and he will

miss the artist’s real inspiration and ignore his genuine successes. You

may instruct a poet about literature, but his allegiance is to emotion.

You may offer the sculptor your comparative observations on style and

taste; he may or may not care to listen, but what he knows and loves is

the human body. Critics are in this way always one stage behind or

beyond the artist; their operation is reflective and his is direct. In

transferring to his special medium what he has before him his whole mind

is lost in the object; as the marksman, to shoot straight, looks at the

mark. How successful the result is, or how appealing to human nature, he

judges afterwards, as an outsider might, and usually judges ill; since

there is no life less apt to yield a broad understanding for human

affairs or even for the residue of art itself, than the life of a man

inspired, a man absorbed, as the genuine artist is, in his own travail.

But into this travail, into this digestion and reproduction of the thing

seen, a critic can hardly enter. Having himself the ulterior office of

judge, he must not hope to rival nature’s children in their sportiveness

and intuition.