ART PRINCIPLES
IN LITERATURE
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ART PRINCIPLES
IN LITERATURE
BY FRANCIS P. DONNELLY, S.J.
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK MCMXXV
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
COPYRIGHT, 1923,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
SET UP AND PRINTED. PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1923.
REPRINTED APRIL, 1925.
REPRINTED JULY, 1928.
WYNKOOP HALLENBECK CRAWFORD COMPANY, NEW YORK, U. S. A.
INTRODUCTION
In the _Art of Interesting_ (Kenedy, 1920) the writer began a discussion
of the principles of art and of their application to writing and
speaking. In this work the discussion is carried further and is not
restricted to the one feature of arousing and fixing attention,
especially in oratory, which was the chief topic of the _Art of
Interesting_. The following chapters represent the reactions of the
writer to literature both as composed today and as taught in our schools.
Any active mind, bewildered by the ceaseless experimenting in literature
and education, and not satisfied with a passive acceptance of even
excellent critics, is necessarily forced back upon first principles.
Such a mind will not yield to the despair of skepticism, that there
are no first principles, nor to the despair of agnosticism, that there
may be such principles but we cannot know them, nor yet to the despair
of pragmatism, that we must wait and see whether the human race ages
from now will give us assurance that there really are principles of art
because the last man has seen that these principles have been found to
work up to the moment prior to which he joined Tutankhamen.
Art, just as morals and pure science, differs entirely from the natural
sciences, which are generalizations based upon acquired information and
must change as long as the information upon which they are based can be
modified and enlarged. But where, as in art or pure science, principles
are based on final truths, the principles have also a finality and can
only be rejected if their basis can be changed or modified. Aristotle’s
principles have something of that finality. Aristotle had for his study
a body of literature that has for centuries met with the approval of
the best taste in every age and of every critic. Aristotle’s biology
or physics are not final, but his ethics, his logic, his esthetics
are in measurable distance of finality except where some additions
have been made to the materials upon which he based his analysis. In
religion, because of revelation, in music because of discoveries in
instrumentation, and perhaps in other arts, time has added to the
original store, but in literature there are few additions to the fields
which lay before Aristotle, and subsequent ages have not developed any
keener analytical powers than those of Aristotle.
It is Aristotle’s principles that in the main have dominated the writer’s
reactions to modern art and literature. When Greek literature held an
honored place in our schools, there was less need of insisting on obvious
truths of art. The intense modernism now predominating everywhere has
driven classical literature and classical methods from school and life.
History is modernized too or fails to supply the vital contact with
the ever-living past which earlier schools experienced in the poets,
historians, orators and philosophers of Greece and Rome. So-called
cultural subjects in modern education are chiefly informational. Culture
is a word which calls for definition, but on its intellectual side at
least, culture for the largest number of persons in the world can be
gauged most satisfactorily by their appreciation of literature and by
their capacity to produce literature. The study of literature as an art
is the chief topic of this book, and Aristotle’s great principles need
all the more stressing now that his philosophy of art and the supreme
literature on which he based his conclusions are passing away from
present-day consciousness.
The chapters that follow are popular rather than scientific in
presentation. Readers who seek a fuller and wider view may be interested
in such a work as Benedetto Croce’s _Æsthetic_, from the Italian by
Douglas Ainslie. Its historical summary, especially for modern times,
is valuable and good. For the Greeks and earlier periods, Butcher’s
_Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts_ is easily best. Professor
Rhys Roberts’ editions of the works of Dionysius, Longinus and Demetrius
are excellent for the traditions of classical rhetoric, a tradition weak
in America.
In theory Croce is an extreme intellectualist in the principles of art.
He locates all of esthetics in pure intuition, which is “lyrical,”
that is, emotional, because it represents “the states of the soul,”
“passionality, feeling, personality.” For Croce “natural beauty
is simply a stimulus to esthetic reproduction, which presupposes
previous production.” He is therefore an idealist in his conception of
beauty. Even monuments of art seem to be only “stimulants to esthetic
reproduction” and are not beautiful in themselves. In another place,
however, Croce seems to be a realist. “Art is governed entirely by
imagination; its only riches are images. Art does not classify objects
nor pronounce them real or imaginary nor qualify them nor define them.
Art feels and represents them. In as far as it apprehends ‘the real’
immediately before it is modified and made clear by the concept, it must
be called pure intuition.”
Quite to the other extreme in theory goes _The Psychology of Beauty_
by Ethel D. Puffer. This author has much about sensations and their
physiology and but little about ideas. For Croce the last stage is in the
idea; for Puffer it would seem to be in the work of art. “The low-lying
wide expanse of some of the old Dutch landscapists give us repose, not
because they remind us of the peaceful happiness of the land but because
we cannot melt ourselves into all those horizontal lines without the
restful feeling which accompanies such relaxation.” This passage might
almost class the writer with the _Einfühlung_ school,—the school which
gives Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy” a number of advocates. Pathetic fallacy
was a complete misnomer when applied by Ruskin to the well-known tropes
of metaphor and personification. Kingsley was not insane enough to
imagine that a wave was actually cruel and actually crawled. He likened
the wave that drowned to a wild animal. But the school of Lipps in
Germany desires you to moan with the wind and smile with the rose and lie
flat with painted horizontal lines.
Perhaps Puffer’s formula of stimulation with repose and Croce’s formula
of intuition with lyricism can be reconciled with Aquinas’ definition of
the beautiful, _quæ visa placent_. A study of Maurice De Wulf’s excellent
little volume _L’Œuvre d’Art et la Beauté_ gives us briefly and clearly
the neo-scholastic solution of the esthetic problem. The book is a
good example of the reasonable discussion which has won for scholastic
philosophy the universal designation as the philosophy of common sense.
Longhaye’s _Théorie des Belles Lettres_, which is scholastic philosophy
applied to literature, is another clear and sane presentation of the
principles of the art.
The reader who desires to supplement the popular exposition of this
book with a systematic treatise on the esthetic and its application to
literature is recommended to De Wulf and to Longhaye. English is rich in
criticism but is deficient in works treating of the philosophy of beauty
in literature.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION
Connection with author’s _Art of Interesting_—Need of principles
of an art amidst violent experimentation in art and
education—Aristotle’s principles valid except where the basis
of his deductions has been modified—With Greek literature
leaving our schools, Greek taste is needed against excessive
modernism—Recent art discussions— Croce’s _Æsthetic_; Puffer’s
_Psychology of Beauty_; De Wulf’s _L’Œuvre d’Art et la Beauté_ v
ART PRINCIPLES IN LITERATURE
PART FIRST
ART IN THE APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE
I
ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL
1. INDIVIDUALISM AND RESPONSIBILITY 1
Talking to oneself in art—Chaos in religion, morals
and art from unchecked individualism—Altruism a better
principle—Responsibility inevitable—Responsibility a
help, no hindrance to the artist—Greek drama; Italian
Madonnas; Horace.
II
ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL
2. VAGARIES OF INDIVIDUALISM 8
Modern literature and art and a sense of humor—Fiction,
biographical and pathological—New poetry shallow—Riot
of emotionalism—Novel of satire, European continental
type originating in low comedy—Novel of Scott, epic
in origin—Nature, experience, wisdom, the remedies of
individualism.
III
ART AND HUMAN NATURE
1. THE UNIVERSAL ELEMENT 14
Art movements begin in nature—Art is social—Permanence
of literature due to universal appeal—The camera and the
canvas—Personality and individuality—Shock of nerves not
the mental thrill of art.
IV
ART AND HUMAN NATURE
2. REALISM AND REALITY 20
Real cake of soap on a painted wave—Art a distinct world
from reality—Motivation, not through logical discussion
but through probable incident—Painting in the cake of
soap—Realism depressing because of cynic moralizing—Evil
in Shakespeare and Homer, relieved by pathos and humor,
not depressing.
V
ART AND THE DIVINE
1. RELIGIOUS ORIGIN OF ART 26
Rich tombs of the past testify to belief in
immortality—Cro-Magnon cave pictures probably
religious—Earliest art of all nations due to
religion—Dancing, song, music, sculpture, architecture,
drama, epic—Gothic cathedral of religious middle-ages,
synthesis of all arts.
VI
ART AND THE DIVINE
2. THE KINSHIP OF ART AND RELIGION 31
Hebraism, Puritanism, Islamism, reacting against art
and the result—Explanation of the origin of art—Taine’s
environment theory—Spencer’s play theory—Theory of fear
and magic spells—Adequate explanation found in man’s
intellectual nature—Art like religion intellectual—Art
and religion idealistic—Personal and emotional—Art and
religion social in appeal—Sublimity of art and the
revelation of _Genesis_—Harmonious equation between soul
and the truth of reality, between soul and the good of
morality, same as equation between soul and beauty, all
founded on the fact that both soul and triple reality are
images of God.
VII
ART AND THE DIVINE
3. ART IN ITS RELATION TO VIRTUE 39
The theomorphism of man in the threefold tendency
of science, morality and art—Religion, a virtue;
art, a function of perceptions—Ruskin’s school of
the religion of beauty—Moralizing not a function of
art—Estheticism neither asceticism nor sensualism—Evil
in art to be represented as evil—Evil to be a
rationalized element—Contemporary evil excites feelings
of reality—Art and religion ennobling—Art and religion
purifying—Creation and disinterestedness most divine
elements in art.
VIII
THE VISCERAL TEST OF BEAUTY
The critic’s equipment—Defective philosophy of
some modern critics, Mencken, Murry, Cohen—Ugly
in art and its subdual—Esthetic feeling not
concupiscence—Disinterestedness of beauty excludes
sensuality of appetites—Visceral reactions not from beauty 48
PART SECOND
ART IN THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE
IX
LOOKING FORWARD IN LITERATURE
Literature taught for use in Greece, Rome, and
elsewhere—Science and history always changing; literature
lasting—Object of literature in university—True humanism,
equipping man’s faculties with art—Every school subject
teaches its like—Correlations of literature and
creation—Contemporary literature not suitable—Scientific
study partly; artistic study is wholly satisfying 57
X
UNIFYING EDUCATION THROUGH LITERATURE
Necessity of unity—In university through profession—No
unity in college electivism—Unity impaired by
departments and by specializing—Unity in France, Germany
and England—Departmental system destroying the art appeal
of literature—Science through knowing; art through
doing—Recent mental tests accentuate expression and
language—General education through art of literature 64
XI
THE INTERESTING TEACHER OF LITERATURE
Spread of science—System and eliminating of
personality—Dissertations for the doctorate—Scholarly
means encyclopedic—The impersonal lecturer—Justin
McCarthy’s teacher and his methods—Not scientific
specialization, but exercise of mental powers—Formulas
and personality—Another interesting teacher—Literature
educates equally with science—The ideal 70
XII
EDUCATING THE EMOTIONS
Life full of emotions—Emotions intense in our crowded
civilization—Morale, organized emotion—Emotions
neglected in education—Education of facts dominating
schools—Twofold nature of emotions—Emotions from concrete
imagining—Kindled by contact—Literature embodiment of
emotions—Emotions developed by self-expression and
controlled by exercise 83
XIII
KEEP THE CLASSICS BUT TEACH THEM
Classics to be kept but taught differently—Former help of
translation—Literature overwhelmed by erudition—Germany,
France, England, America—True use of erudition—Natural
sciences change; art endures—Reproduction, the soul of
literary teaching—Method of training—Modern literatures
not yet able to supplant ancient literatures 91
XIV
THE VITALIZER OF THE WORLD
Literary renaissances associated with Greek
literature—Revivals through Irish monks—Spain,
France, Scholasticism—Germany with Wolf, Winckelmann,
Lessing—England under Queen Anne and Queen Victoria—Youth
of civilization in Greece 100
XV
TRUE PRINCIPLES OF HOMERIC CRITICISM
Story of Phidias’ statue and Homer—Homer tested
by art—Flaws in material—Absorption in immediate
effects—Told story different from story read—Outline of
a study on a broad scale—Variety, alternation, growth in
Homeric battling—Homeric palace, the place of Homer’s
recital 106
XVI
THE CHILD-TEST OF LITERATURE
Child-test in religion and morals, in the Bible—Homer’s
mother and child—Hector and Andromache—Child in later
literature rare—Latin writers—Conventionality instead of
Homeric naturalness 114
XVII
THE CHRIST-CHILD TEST OF LITERATURE
Christ-Child in art—Christmas and the drama—In
Ireland—Medieval and Renaissance writers—Milton’s
war-like child—Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson,
Longfellow—Return of naturalness in Stevenson, Carroll
and others—Faith and its effects in Thompson and Tabb 119
APPENDIX
GREEK SPEAKS FOR ITSELF
Mosaic of etymology—Ecclesiastical sphere—Diet, posies
and programs—Geography, zoology, politics—Pharmacies and
surgery—Schools and composition—Apology and epitaph 129
NOTE: THE NATURE OF ESTHETIC ENJOYMENT
Ownership not of the essence of beauty as of
good—Perception sufficient for the enjoyment of the
beautiful—No new faculty required—Pleasure is normal life
consciously localized—Esthetic Enjoyment in the simple
apprehension, not in judgment or inference as such—Fact
not of the essence of esthetic enjoyment, which is had
in fiction too—_Causa Exemplaris_—Imagination, source of
originality—Aristotle’s principles: creation, motivation,
unity, universality 134
A FORWARD-LOOKING LESSON IN LITERATURE 159
ART PRINCIPLES IN LITERATURE
PART FIRST
ART IN THE APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE
I
ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL
1. INDIVIDUALISM AND RESPONSIBILITY
A group was standing before a futurist or cubist picture. The group did
not know what the picture was all about, but one spoke up in defense
of the bewildering work: “Well, after all, art is a language, and why
shouldn’t a man be permitted to speak his own language?” A bystander,
not daring to address strangers, made answer under his breath: “If art
is a language, this artist is talking to himself.” Maudlin, incoherent
remarks, disjointed utterances, and in general talking to one’s self,
all that, does not pass for high art among men, but for something quite
different. To talk to one’s self is the extreme of individualism in
conversation; to ignore the world addressed through artistic composition
is the triumph of individualism in art.
The abrupt break with all tradition in every art, and the untrammeled
expression of the individual, have worked out to the inevitable and
bizarre conclusions which a like rebellion has brought about in religion
and morals. Every man his own dogmatist; every man his own moralist; that
is the individualism which has divided mankind into multitudinous sects
and has made millions of moral, unmoral and immoral moralists eager for
legislation of infinite variety without any fixed principles to enforce
the observance of even one law. Conscience, the executive impulse of all
legislation, used to be the voice of God, but individualism has made it
anything from a survival of the fittest or an economic standard, through
countless varieties all the way to a Freudian complex.
Individualism has run amuck in art from classicism to cubism. It is a
barren day which does not produce a new system of religion or morals, and
only the occurrence of earthquake, war, fire or some other tremendous
upheaval keeps our journals from recording some new theory of art,
some Tomism, Dickism or Harryism. Art for art’s sake has been given an
individualistic interpretation and has produced the same rich crop, as
the individualistic cry, every man his own dogmatist and moralist, has
produced—a rich crop of weeds.
If ever an individual could pursue his blissful way oblivious of the
existence of a surrounding universe, surely he may not do so now when
the universe impinges upon him every moment through ticker, telephone,
wireless and unlimited “extras.” There is, however, no such thing as
unrestricted individualism. Of God alone can be predicated existence for
its own sake. Everybody his own dogmatist means ultimately everybody his
own god. Art for art’s sake, interpreted in an individualistic sense,
would not only destroy art but would destroy the world. Art for art’s
sake should read art for everybody’s sake and for the sake of God, and
such a reading will be infinitely better for art’s sake.
It was an Irish colleen, accepting matrimony as a complete submergence
of individuality, who replied to a friend dwelling on the dangers of a
long ocean trip to be taken by the new bride and groom: “And why should I
be afraid, sure ’tis his loss if anything happen to me now!” She was the
counterpart of the Irish lad who sang under similar circumstances, “I’m
not myself at all.” There you have the complete altruism resulting from
the perfect union of matrimony. There is the antithesis of individualism,
and such matrimonial communism is far better for every one than any cry
of “wife for wife’s sake” or “husband for husband’s sake.”
It is quite evident that no artist can exempt himself from responsibility
as though his art were a deity. If a picture or statue or poem would be
an incentive to murder or suicide, the artist must stay his hand. He may
not manufacture bombs for soul destruction, no matter how artistic the
container, even if someone else is to supply the detonator. A lie in
beautiful language is a more ugly lie. Recent pretended upholders of
the Volstead law have printed an emphatic warning on compounds of their
manufacture: “Do not add such an ingredient or this compound will violate
the law.” May an artist naïvely dissociate himself from responsibility by
stating: “Do not add human nature to my art-product or you will violate
the law”? Were the artist a real creator, he would have to forecast
results and be dominated by a purpose. Nor may the artist, like God,
permit evil, because no artist has omnipotence and infinite wisdom and
justice and mercy, governing the permission of evil and guaranteeing
good as the final result. May a man who owns a wild tiger of surpassing
beauty, trusting in the right of property, parade down a crowded
thoroughfare with his jungle pet tethered to a thread?
But why all these truisms? Because individualism in art aims in principle
and production not only to free art from restrictions but even to exempt
the artist from responsibility. The artist may not talk to himself unless
he can find a South Sea island where there is neither man nor God. Nor
is it a deadening of his artistic impulse for the artist to be ruled by
high purposes, but rather it is a stimulus and an inspiration. Eschylus
and Sophocles have a sublimer beauty than Euripides because the earlier
dramatists recognized more fully and kept better in view the religious
purposes of Athenian drama. Euripides, wishing to cater more to theatric
effects, succeeded in being more emotional and in achieving a realistic
but transient interest, the hectic flush that marks decay and death
in twilight and autumn and sinister disease. Is the marked revival of
Euripides within recent years a sign of decadence?
The Madonnas of Italian art received from the painter a solemn beauty
not only because they depict Divine maternity, but even too because they
were to grace a religious shrine and to constitute part of a religious
service. That may be one reason why the Madonnas of Italy are far
superior to the prettiness and sentimentality of more recent Madonnas
which are painted for private homes and for ephemeral interest.
The purpose of the artist is one thing and the purpose of art is another
thing. The purpose of a watch is to keep time whatever purpose the
watch-maker may have. It is likely, however, that if he makes the watch
for his mother, he will produce better results than if he worked for
his usual wage or than if he functioned as part of a machine, having
no clearly defined ulterior purpose. So an artist will be inspired in
painting, in sculpture, in music, in all arts, to elicit better his
full powers and to achieve finer results when he toils for a cathedral
than when he works for a cabaret. Noble responsibility conscientiously
recognized and fulfilled is no check, but rather a spur to the artist.
“Art for art’s sake” may, however, be taken to mean, “Embody beauty
wherever found, or realize to the full your ideal,” and such a meaning
is excellent and fruitful unless excessive individualism insists upon
expressing its own perverted ideas of beauty and its own eccentric
ideals. When Horace said, “Let justice be done though the heavens come
crashing down,” a line that might be rendered, “Justice for justice’s
sake,” he was far from advocating the explosion of a bomb by some Roman
anarchist whose idea of justice was to bring all to a dead level of ruin.
The progressive improvement in the realization of art-ideals may be very
well illustrated from the career of Horace. Horace gradually worked
himself free from the conventionality and baseness of his epodes and
earlier satires, experienced the cleansing process of true humor in later
satires, took fire at the moral degeneracy of Rome in the initial odes
of the third and last book of his first edited lyrics. There the _sæva
indignatio_ of Horace brought him within distant sight of sublimity.
His progress in philosophy weighted the wings of his song but dowered
him with the crystal and clean wisdom of his epistles, of which it has
been said one need not blot out a single line. Had Horace retained the
youthful vehemence of the republican amid the enervating peace of the new
empire, he might have followed Dante and Milton from lyric beauty to epic
sublimity, or might have risen with Shakespeare and Molière from song to
comedy or even to tragedy, but his hedonistic sleekness and his excessive
self-consciousness kept his ripened philosophy in brief letters, when a
more vigorous mentality with the help of philosophy might have converted
his ennobled power of satire into comedy or transformed the lyric
portraits of his early days into tragedy or epic story.
II
ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL
2. VAGARIES OF INDIVIDUALISM
Modern art has not followed Horace very far. It has broken with
conventionality as Horace did with the _clichés_ of Alexandria, but it
has not yet entered upon the path of right philosophy. The _Spoon River
Anthology_, a typical specimen from the individualistic school of what
might be called localists or village gossips, is in the epode-stage of
Horace, the stage of personalities, lubricity and garlic gruesomeness.
Hopes might be entertained that _Spoon River_ and _Main Street_ and other
individualistic photographs would progressively improve with Horace
except for one sad deficiency: Horace had humor and laughed at others,
and even at himself; modern individualists are so heavily armored with
the seriousness of their own views, that they don’t even smile. To
imagine the New Art laughing is impossible; if the New Art had humor
and laughed, it would cease to be New Art and would join the larger
brotherhood of art uncapitalized. Had the new artists a sense of humor,
it would probably be their death sentence. In the course of time they
might catch sight of their own art products, whether of painting or of
poetry.
Is it not an indication of individualism that so many recent novels are
biographies, that the stage is not holding up the mirror to life but
applying the scalpel to an ulcer? The biography or personal views of
Scott and Shakespeare cannot be discovered in their works. The modern
pamphleteer distributes his paradoxes among various mouthpieces whose
only difference is in name, and this is called a play, when it is in
reality propaganda. There are probably now no less than 100,000 college
graduates turning college escapades and flirtations into chapters,
which their authors consider typical of life because the incidents
were individually experienced. And, as the long stories of the day are
biographies or problems and as the drama is a diagnosis of diseases,
in the same way many of the short stories are pathological, but all
are tending to be individualistic. The artist makes his own subjective
experience the full measure of his artistic expression and seems to
imagine that his own peculiarities are good art because he sincerely
expresses what he feels. Individual nature is not human nature.
Aristotle has described poetry as the universal in the concrete. The
“new poets” give the individual in the concrete. Homer, Shakespeare, the
true poets, plumb to the depths of the human heart; they voice ripened
experience and enshrine mellow wisdom, and so appeal to all men of all
times. Much of the new poetry ostentatiously disdains tradition and
rejects the wisdom of the ages in discarding its dress. You may see the
rouge on the cheek and the freckle on the nose, but as far as life and
experience and heart are concerned, most of the new poetry is pitiably
young and callous. Meticulous recording of disconnected and unrelated
novelties is no adequate substitute for the warmth and depth of life
crystallized by the ardent gaze of the true poet out of his experience.
New poetry is contemporaneous with the invention and use of the Kodak and
has all the responsibility and profundity of that instrument.
Individualism has come to such a pass in modern art that everything in
it is resolving itself into pure emotionalism, and that an emotionalism
which does not belong to art at all. Degenerates are the products of
civilization; they are decayed exotics. “The higher the organism, the
more noisome the decay,” a science professor used to say when paying
his respects to diseased metaphysics. As only a believer can blaspheme
luridly, so when an artist goes wrong, he goes wrong hideously. A
pistol in the hands of a marksman gone mad is more destructive than in
the hands of a savage. Colors, sounds, shapes, fair words and gorgeous
imaginings are instruments of degradation and death if they are a finer
veneer over what is false. Individual vagaries and whims, no matter how
unusual, will not have the permanence of art because they are based on no
principles, but devised simply to startle. Degrade the appeal of beauty
to a spinal thrill and your artist will pander to concupiscence.
It is noteworthy that Homer’s worst lapse in story-telling takes place
among the luxurious Phæacians, ancient prototypes of degeneracy. Homer
may have felt justified artistically because he was depicting the
non-Grecian world through whose monsters and marvels Odysseus was passing
and making the first collection of sailors’ yarns. But Homer shocked even
the pagan world and set an unhappy precedent. Lucian and Ovid, Petronius
and Apuleius and the Byzantine eroticists made what was incidental in
Homer their chief concern and practice. They perverted fiction into
calculated suggestiveness.
That depraved and sensual theory of story-telling was, however, more
Aristophanic than Homeric, despite the single unfortunate precedent in
the _Odyssey_. The tradition of Greek and Latin comedy was carried on
by the medieval troubadours and by the story-tellers who catered to the
decadent nobility of Italy and France. They retorted on their clerical
censors and stimulated jaded appetites, substituting in shameless
intrigues priests and nuns for the pagan gods. It was and is the glory
of Scott that he broke away from these evil traditions which made the
novel a hateful thing to our forefathers. Scott deserted the continental
school of novelists and their English imitators, Fielding, Sterne,
Smollett, the last of all Byron. Scott gave up the satirical purposes
which handed on in fiction the vulgar devices of low comedy. He went to
history, to chivalry, to healthy men and women and created romances, not
pathological studies. English, Irish and American fiction for a whole
century yielded to the healthy and bracing impulse of Scott, but the
younger novelists in vogue today in England, Ireland and America have
gone back to the continental type, individual, pathological biographical
problems, forsaking Scott’s revival through balladry of the best Homeric
manner, where men “drank delight of battle with their peers far on the
ringing plains of Troy.”
The individualist must emancipate himself by the contemplation of nature.
Pathological specimens, freakish oddities, all the surface impressions of
the local colorists are not nature any more than a face contorted with a
toothache is a man’s likeness. Such exceptional exhibitions cannot form
the enduring basis of art. Personal experience must be widened by length
of time, by merging into the stream of wisdom, flowing freighted from the
past, or must, in exceptional cases, be won quickly by that intense and
probing comprehension of genius, which seems almost Divine intuition.
Excessive individualism, like the latest fashion, will be quaint and
incongruous on the morrow. Homer lives eternal because through strange
names and strange language and strange costumes we see our own sun and
fields and ocean and sky and put our fingers on a pulse which registers
the beat of a heart throbbing as ours.
III
ART AND HUMAN NATURE
1. THE UNIVERSAL ELEMENT
A serious defect in most modern art movements is that they start from
art; they are modifications of previous art movements. True art movements
start from human nature. When perfection in any art is standardized, when
tradition and conventionality prevail, and the artist has originality
enough to chafe at the restraints of classicism but not originality
enough to reveal finer ideals through classic expression, his temptation
is to rebel at conventionalities and to deem himself original because he
is unconventional. He wishes to be different from other artists and seeks
for the difference by discarding the traditional medium rather than by
improving his own personal message. He prefers to be different and even
original by cutting his ginger-bread into the shape of automobiles and
air-planes instead of going back to mother’s classic make and blending
his ingredients into a new creation, a creation which will make fresh
appeal even in former animal shapes or in the traditional ginger-bread
cart-wheels.
Art is a social institution. If not by the people, art is of the people,
and certainly for the people. When Greek literary art grew conventional
in its different forms, the artists went back to the people for another
medium to be transfigured by art. Ruskin has called architecture a
“glorified roof.” The sonata is a glorified folk melody; epic is
glorified folk lore; and Greek drama is a glorified folk song, as
Elizabethan drama is a glorified folk chronicle. Both dramas have their
roots in the religious services of the people. Homer told us about the
public he had, but the nineteenth century would not trust his word until
Schliemann dug up the great halls where Demodokos and his fellows told
the people their own folk stories in a glorified, artistic form. Greek
lyric and Greek pastoral were as public as Greek oratory, Greek choruses,
temples and statuary. It was left for Roman conquerors to begin the
segregation of art into the cold storage of the modern millionaire and of
the modern museum.
The permanence of Greek art is based upon that public appeal. Art is
long because it embodies nature, and most of all human nature. Homer
has appealed to man, woman and child for thousands of years. His human
nature is our human nature despite external differences of every
kind. Homer himself was aware of the appeal of nature in art. On the
shield of Achilles, he marveled at the field which grew black behind
the plowing, a marvel of Homer’s close study of nature as well as an
expression of his ideal for art. Nature is a language all can understand
and human nature is a language all must and do understand. When lament
was made over the body of Patroklos, the elegy of Briseis stirred all,
“and thereon the women wailed, in semblance for Patroklos, but each
for her own woe.” Similar is the appeal of art where in semblance of
something else, each sees what belongs to self. Aristotle in seeking to
explain the characteristic pleasure of art ascribes it to _mimesis_ or
re-presentation in another medium. Such staging, he says, not only robs
the terrifying of its terrors but enables all to understand and reason
to the nature of each art product. Such understanding and reasoning
mean surely something more than the mere recognition of photographic
accuracy and likeness. If we may press the meaning of the Greek word used
for reason, the process of art enjoyment is similar to the syllogistic
process which involves an appeal to a general statement. The process is
one which recognizes the general in a particular case, as the grief of
Briseis found an echoing grief in every heart.
Whether Aristotle and this interpretation of him is correct or not, it
is evident that art must generalize. Art must select, both by choice of
the artist and by the limitations of his medium. Art does not photograph,
because it has no sensitive plate for its medium. The photographer’s
art largely precedes the camera and consists in selecting that pose
and that expression, out of many, which is yours. The camera is nature,
controlled by mechanism, and is not art. If the photographer or painter
or sculptor photographed you in some passing spasm, we should not
learn and reason that it was you. The spasm was realism and fact, but
it was peculiar and individual; it was not you whom we have known and
generalized from experience. In such a case, Aristotle says shrewdly,
we might get artistic pleasure from the workmanship or colors, that is,
from the medium and the mechanics of art, but we should have no artistic
pleasure from the soul and substance of the art product because the
product found no prototype in our experience, because we could not define
it or generalize it. Art selects. It cannot give everything, and if it
would be true, it must give what all may understand; it must give what is
generally true, and what is generally true of all men is human nature.
Selective idealism has usually the advantage of being intelligible, but
it labors under the disadvantage of becoming merely intelligible. It
gives the truth, but through familiarity the beauty or artistic appeal
of the truth has been dulled and tarnished, or, like the dandelion,
until a Lowell gives it a new luster, its very commonness leaves us
unmoved. We enjoy human nature in Homer because he was the creator of
sleeping winds and of rosy-fingered dawns and of the mother’s smile
alight through tears. A modern who would transfer these same touches to
his own composition would leave us cold. He too must create; he must be
personal, but he must not be individual. Personality is the knowing and
loving principle, and looks to the many with its thoughts and wishes.
Individuality is the principle of separation and isolation and is looking
inward, not outward. When the artist, therefore, creates and gives his
own winds or dawn or mother love, he should speak to us in his own
concrete embodiments of nature, and of human nature, using a language man
understands. If selective idealism tends to become merely intelligible
and unappealing, individualism tends to become unintelligible and to
mystify.
The poet, the novelist, the painter have more depth than silver nitrate
on a photographic plate. Artists do not simply mirror nature; they do
not catch at the odd or freakish. That is photography, not creation.
Horace did not give us a moving picture of a falling tree, but he saw
the humor and human interest of that “sorry log.” Burns did not give
us an anatomical study of the typhus-carrier on a lady’s bonnet in a
kirk, making it crawl upon ourselves and sending us after the kerosene
can and bath tub, but Burns soared away, from that sight with Horatian
humor and Horatian human nature, into the immortal lines, “O wad some
power the giftie gie us.” The artist who confounds the generalized mental
attractiveness found in true art with the shock of nerves or the tickling
of concupiscence or with misguided realism, will not produce things of
beauty. He gets a thrill, but it is not the permanent, undying thrill of
art, not the thing of beauty, which is a joy forever.
IV
ART AND HUMAN NATURE
2. REALISM AND REALITY
At an exhibition in New York City there was displayed a picture of an
ocean wave upon the crest of which the artist had nailed a real bar of
soap. The first idea of the spectator was to consider this peculiar
product an advertisement, but it seems to have been intended as a
serious, if perverted, attempt at art. If the artist was not slyly
proposing the caricature of excessive realism, the cake of soap will
serve well as a parable for those artists who do not distinguish between
realism and reality.
The ultra-realist forgets that art is a creation, the making of another
world. The artist cannot really create what he puts into his new world
of sight or hearing or imagination, of color, of sound, of words. If
he could actually make something new, not based on nature or on human
nature, he would do so on the penalty of being unintelligible. Neither
should he go to the other extreme and not leave the world of reality at
all. He may not eat his cake and have it. If what he takes from actuality
is not merged fully into his art form, he tries to give us fact and
fiction, history and art, in the same product, and he nails a piece of
soap on a painted wave.
Aristotle insists above all on probability in art, or motivation, as
it is now commonly called. A probable or well-motived impossibility,
he says, is more artistic and pleasing than an improbable, that is,
an unmotived fact. For a like reason he demands that fiction be more
philosophical than history. We accept a chronicle of facts without
necessarily being aware of their causal connections. In the realms of
art the connection must be established. This principle, so fruitful for
art, is not to be understood as justifying or approving that school of
subjective novelists which is parsimonious in happenings but diffuse
in reasoning and gives us a maximum of discussion with a minimum of
incident. Aristotle is thinking more of the people who witness the
drama. The spectators want the motivation and plausibility of action
rather than that of logic. The soliloquy has gone from the stage; the
printed soliloquy should be curtailed in the novel. A true understanding
of motivation will send all artists back to nature and to human nature
for those incidents which are the springs of action and do not require
lengthy logic to labor at their explanation. Homer is completely lacking
in logical refining. Incident leads to feeling and talk, which gives rise
to further incident. Action, feeling and character, Aristotle’s trinity
of art subjects, are mingled and detailed, and the story moves on in a
way plausible and pleasing to Homeric audiences. When Homer runs short of
motivation, he does not resort to logic; he refers the causality to the
gods, as modern writers refer all insoluble problems to evolution, which
puts hardly more restrictions upon imagination than Homeric mythology.
The artist must transfer his product wholly to the world of art.
Sculptured horses must not neigh, nor painted flowers give perfume, but
neighing and scents may be suggested even in stone, and in lines by
art happenings, which all may read running if the artist will use the
language of human nature. He should paint his cake of soap in, not nail
it on. If the exigencies of the story demand it, costumes of the night
or costumes of bathing may be in place, but it is nailing on a cake of
soap, it is outraging probabilities, to force a story into a setting or
to adopt a style of dress or of undress simply for the sake of producing
a shock. That is the shock of reality, not of art and beauty. Should the
dramatist have an excellent quartet and stop the play in order to give a
song, he is nailing on a piece of soap, which may be magnificent soap,
but it is not art.
Why is the so-called realism depressing? Why is the Russian novelist left
for the connoisseur but is caviar to the general? Is it the presence or
absence of evil? Hardly that. Homer’s stories are full of evil and of
death; Sophocles’ _King Œdipus_ and the _Prometheus_ of Eschylus are
surcharged with evil, but they do not depress. Euripides, on the other
hand, and Lucian have more alleged realism and are depressing, even when
they cause a smile. The realist is cynical, and cynics do not soar off
into the world of art, but keep tethering themselves to the real world.
They do not lose themselves in their story because they are always
thinking of keeping some one’s nose against their grindstone. Why should
the optimistic moralizing of Polyanna be resented by critics any more
than the cynic moralizing of Shaw or of _Main Street_? The cheerful idiot
and the purblind dyspeptic are depressing in real life, especially when
they are moralizing, but in and out of art we can laugh at the idiot,
while we squirm at the assumed superiority of the cynic. The moralizing
is a cake of soap.
Shakespeare is not depressing and Homer is not depressing. They do not
blink the facts of life, and beyond the humor and humanity which saves
them and their audience, they lose themselves in their story. The evil
they depict is true evil, so recognized, in their art-world. It is,
besides, evil called for by their story, not lugged in for a moral or to
exemplify a theory of art. They know that drab is not the only color in
life. They know that bright things are as real as black things, but they
are not illustrating a theory but giving us a story. We pass with them
into a fictitious world, and the things which depress the denizens of
that world do not depress us if we are not brought back to reality by
stumbling on a cake of real soap, not integrated with the story.
The sight of his dog Argos made the heart of Odysseus sink. Even for
those who think ugliness the only reality, Argos was covered with
realities and squatted on reality. He depressed his master but he does
not depress us. He lies upon Main Street and has a Polyanna wag to his
tail. His optimism and his pessimism are, however, not tacked on. “And
lo, a hound raised up his head and pricked his ears, Argos, the hound of
Odysseus.... Despised he lay (his master being afar) in the deep dung of
mules and swine.... There lay the dog Argos, full of vermin. Yet even now
when he was aware of Odysseus standing by, he wagged his tail and dropped
both his ears, but nearer to his master he had not the strength to draw.
But Odysseus looked aside and wiped a tear.” Argos is the ideal dog of
a far away master; “who has lost his dominion,” as Eumæus, the shepherd
of Odysseus, says. Argos registers the fate of his master. We feel, but
we do not feel depressed. It is human; it is all inevitable; it is real
as life but perfectly idealized by perfect transfer to the realm of art.
Eumæus gives us the morality of it, the truth of it, but he is far from
moralizing, either pessimistically or optimistically. Argos is the dog
Schneider that Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle could not find to recognize
him; he is the picture in brief of his master’s fate. Eumæus is as free
from all obtrusive soap as Argos himself. The dog’s fate is ascribed
to the careless women who “are no more inclined to honest service when
their masters have lost dominion, for Zeus takes away the half of a man’s
virtue when the day of slavery comes upon him.”
V
ART AND THE DIVINE
1. RELIGIOUS ORIGIN OF ART
The recent discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen has aroused the
interest of the world. The perseverance of the explorer, the variety,
artistic excellence and intrinsic value of the discovery gave the news
a place in the press and signalized the latest triumph of the spade,
which Schliemann converted into the best of historians. Dig in your
back-yard, and you can read its past in the layers before your eyes.
Make a cross-section of the country, and successive deposits will
tell you its story. Lay bare the strata of the earth, and the buried
fossils, the minerals, the gas, the oil, reveal the history of the world.
Grave-digging is the most productive occupation to which science, art and
even commerce can now be vocationally guided.
What was it that enriched the Egyptian tomb and other tombs of the past
in which man was buried? It was religion, and specifically it was belief
in the immortality of the soul. The latest opened tomb repeats the truth
that was manifest in the pyramids of Egypt, which were temples as well
as tombs. The beehive tombs of Mycenæ from which Schliemann actually
shoveled gold ornaments of various kinds were also temples as well as
tombs. The altar-stones in Catholic churches with their tiny _loculi_ for
the relic of a saint keep still the memory of the days when persecuted
Christians found the Catacombs of the dead places of worship as well as
of escape from the persecutor.