to remove Christmas from the calendar. Drama originated in the liturgy
of Easter and of Christmas, and although Holy Week was more elaborate
and in substance more dramatic, Christmas to Twelfth Night, offering
more incentive to play and song and more holidays, exercised a larger
influence on the stage. In lyric poetry at the beginning of the sixth
century we have already the familiar, intimate and loving contact with
the Christ-Child, which finds its latest expression in Thompson and Tabb.
St. Ita, the Irish saint (480-570), is of their faith and tenderness in
the song of “Isucan,” “Little Jesus,” given in Sigerson’s _Bards of the
Gael and Gall_:
Jesukin
Lives my little cell within
...
Jesu of the skies who art
Next my heart thro’ every night.
The bambino shines through medieval song in Adam of St. Victor and in
other writers of hymns. The Catholic writers of the Renaissance celebrate
the same theme in the revived meters of classicism. Sarbievius, the
Jesuit lyricist of Poland, is full of the Christ-Child, and in his
well-known lines “To the Violet” he calls upon that “dawn of spring” to
crown his “Little Lad” with its flowers in place of the gold and gems and
purple which weighted the Infant. Sarbievius was doing what the painters
did, discarding the Byzantine ornament and convention.
Test Puritanism with the child and it fails; test it with the
Christ-Child, and you will get the ponderous “Hymn to the Nativity” of
Milton, an imperialistic ode which must have gladdened Cromwell. No
familiarity there, no mirthfulness, no Jesukin with violets for crown
jewels, not even Byzantine immobility. Milton does not even doff the
helmet of war, as Hector did; no, he sees
from Juda’s land
The dreaded Infant’s hand;
The rays of Bethlehem blind his [Osiris’] dusky eyes.
... Our Babe to show His Godhead true
Can in His swaddling clothes control the damnèd crew.
A Prince of Peace indeed with a mailed fist! Merry medieval England would
not recognize Jesukin in Miltonic panoply. Fortunately for art it had
attained excellence before the Puritanic blight fell upon the world, but
for literature in the English language we must wait until the nineteenth
century to see the child come to its own. Wordsworth attempted a revival
of Plato’s philosophy and found immortality, if not familiarity, in
childhood when he wrote his “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality.”
Wordsworth took a more fruitful lesson from the Greeks when he went back
to nature in other poems to study childhood. Even before him, Blake,
painter and poet, influenced no doubt by the traditions of painting,
began to see the heart in childhood. The interminable moralizing stories
of Ann and Jane Taylor and of Elizabeth Turner, which date from this
time, are heavy with grown up condescension. E. V. Lucas would have done
better to republish in his _Book of Verses for Children_ the graceful
and humorous lessons of the Greek fables than perpetuate Taylor and
Turner.
After Wordsworth we see the child _motif_ gradually taking a larger place
in the literature of England and America. Despite Francis Thompson’s
vigorous effort in his famous essay, he has not succeeded in making
Shelley pass the child-test. Shelley had no faith, no humility, no
humor, no real tenderness, and even granting him the dreaming power of
childhood, which in Thompson’s essay is largely a reflection of Thompson,
Shelley had not the heard of a child to enter into the Kingdom. Walter
Scott’s friendship for Marjorie Fleming shows that the great poet and
novelist had the necessary qualifications, but no performance comes
now to mind except a lullaby and the glorification of merry England at
Christmas. Swinburne glimpses gleams of a baby’s pink toes and lists to
low laughter of mouths of gold. The child is picturesque for him. Moore,
Byron, Browning, for different reasons, fail in the child-test. Tennyson
touched the surface, although in the “Princess” he came close to the
mystery. Patmore, uxorious and paternal, came closer and even touched the
depths of the child in “Toys.” Longfellow and Whittier were of the same
school.
It was Stevenson, in a _Child’s Garden of Verses_ who brought back into
poetry, as Lewis Carroll did in prose and verse, the natural child
that Homer saw about him, and that painting discerned in the Babe of
Bethlehem. Humor, imagination, sympathy, these were the factors which
discovered the heart of childhood for our modern world. Barry and Belloc
in England, Eugene Field and Riley in America, Earls and “Tom” Daly and
many others have furthered the discoveries. There is no hope for the
child in the “New Poetry” which takes itself too seriously. Who would
hold up the world if the “new poets” started in to mind the baby?
One more element was needed, and sorely needed, to enter fully into
the mystery of the child. That element is faith. Evolution looked on
the child as an epitome of its theory; pedagogy plotted out, weighed
and measured the child and drew up formidable statistics; eugenics
faced the child as though it were a dire microbe, source of poverty,
ignorance, bootlegging, war, pestilence and famines. The modern child
had and still has before it a dismal prospect. It is the camping ground
of the specialist, the experimental laboratory of the theorist, and the
peculiarly delectable victim of physical and moral vivisectionists. Faith
must save the child, faith in the Babe of Bethlehem. Tabb and Thompson
had that faith. They are the counterpart in literature of a St. Anthony
or a St. Stanislaus in life and art. They play with the Child Jesus.
Isucan has come into His own again. Tabb sings in “Out of Bounds”:
O comrades, let us one and all
Join in to get Him back his ball!
And Francis Thompson with medieval intimacy asks in “Ex Ore Infantium”:
And did Thy Mother at the night
Kiss Thee, and fold the clothes in right?
And didst Thou feel quite good in bed,
Kissed, and sweet, and Thy prayers said?
“Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven,” said Thompson. He will surely
be at home there, and Tabb and many another will be with him.
The first seven chapters of this work were given in substance as lectures
at the Champlain Assembly, Cliff Haven, N. Y.
Chapter XII, Educating the Emotions, is a summary of an address given to
the Public School Teachers of Rhode Island.
Other chapters have appeared in _America_, _Catholic World_, _Educational
Review of Washington_, _School Interests_, _Classical Weekly_,
_Magnificat_ and are reproduced through the courtesy of the editors.
APPENDIX
GREEK SPEAKS FOR ITSELF
AN ETYMOLOGICAL PHANTASY[4]
During a period of lethargy I was petrified at a phantom, bounding from
my lexicon, with this cataract of phrases: “Are you Baptist, Methodist,
Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Catholic, or Christian? Without me, you are
anonymous. Do you stigmatize heresy and schism, hypocrisy and blasphemy.
Do you blame schemers against the Mosaic decalog? Do you impose anathemas
in apostates, idolaters and atheists or exorcise the devil and his demons
with their diabolical pomps? Are you zealous for proselytes, and to
baptize neophytes after catechism, and to canonize orthodox martyrs with
halos and emblems, scandalizing frenzied iconoclasts? Then all that is
done through me.
The ecclesiastical sphere is practically mine. I am the architect
of churches, cathedrals and basilicas, from the asphalt base in the
crypts of the catacomb, up to the apse and the chimes in the dome. I am
architect of monasteries for monks and anchorites, and of asylums for
orphans and lepers and maniacs. Mine is the Hierarchy, from the Pope on
his dais with his tiara, to the mitered Bishop in his diocese, and to
the parish priest in his presbytery. Deacons and acolytes, clergy and
laity, Papal encyclicals, diocesan synods, parochial homilies, and all
dogmatic theology, with its mysteries and myriad topics, are mine. The
Bible is mine from Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy of the Pentateuch, to
the Paralipomenon and the Psalms, to patriarchs and prophets, to the
Evangelists of Christ, to the Epistles and Apocalypse of His Apostles.
Epiphany, Pentecost, the Parasceve are mine The tunes of the hymns, the
quiring of anthems, the Gregorian tones of the litanies and antiphons are
melodious through me and I composed the canon of liturgy with its symbols.
Go to your home with me. Bushels of anthracite for the chimney, and a
diet of fancied nectar! Chairs and plates and dishes; oysters; butter
and treacle; perch or trout or sardines in olive oil; the aroma of capon
or partridge or pheasant; celery and asparagus and peppers; cherries
and dates and currants, citrons and melons, prunes and quinces and
plums; pumpkins marmalade and pastry; chestnuts and pippins; masses of
purple hyacinths, with lily and crocus, with geraniums and heliotropes,
with narcissus and peony, with asters and orchids and posies of roses.
What zest! Isn’t that a panorama of paradise to tantalize you? Be not
economical or dyspeptic. Masticate beneath your mustache. Let choruses
echo in the parlor with music of organ and guitar, or let there be
anecdotes on the piazza around a bottle of cheering tonic.
I telephone or telegraph for my “auto,” and my machine goes to my
theater or hippodrome. There is on my program the symphony orchestra
with harmonious melodies; or on my program are scenes melancholy with
tragedy, or hilarious with pantomime and melodrama, with comic monolog or
dramatic dialog, with cyclists, gymnasts and acrobats. After the drama or
kinematic photography, with match and lamp you go to attic canopies, and
to the climes of Morpheus. For all these you are to reimburse me with the
treasuries of the purse.
Go with me to the ocean, opposing the stratagems and tactics of barbarous
pirates, to meander by gulf and isthmus and archipelago, nomads through
all climates, charting geography with my nautical atlases, from the
Arctic to the Antarctic through the tropic zone, from Polynesia to its
antipodes. Then for my astronomy! What a panorama through my telescope in
the crystal atmosphere! Above the horizon in the empyrean are my planets
and comets and meteors and galaxies of asteroids.
Without me where is your “zoo” with its panthers and leopards with
dolphin and crocodile and hippopotamus, with lynxes and hyenas, with
ostrich and pelican, with buffalo and dromedary, with ichneumons and
scorpions, with the gigantic elephant and its proboscis and the pygmy
squirrel! Oh, what of my chimerical and utopian “zoo,” with the phenix
and dragon and griffins and chameleons and gorgons and gnomes and
basilisks and sphinxes and hybrids!
But I am not archaic; the scope of my dynamic energy is practical and
not eccentric. Mine are politics, the diadems of monarchs, the scepters
of tyrants, barbarous anarchy and despotic autocracy, the panics of
demagogue and the parliaments of autonomy and democracy. Chemistry and
chemical analysis, physics with phenomena of electricity, acoustics, and
optics, mechanics, botany, geology, entomology, and all the “ologies”
with their technical glossaries; they are mine.
So are all the apothecaries and pharmacies with glycerine and licorice
and creosote and the antidotes for quinsy; for catarrh, dropsy,
neuralgia, and for every “-itis” and “-osis”; emetics for the stomach;
the cathartics, calomel and castor-oil; doses of paregoric for colic;
plasters for imposthumes; arsenic for spasms of epilepsy, and tonics for
anemic arteries; a peptonoic diet for dysentery; oxygen against bronchial
phlegm; bromides for asthma; iodine for pleurisy and parasites; narcotics
to calm hysteria; antipyrin for agonizing rheumatism; antitoxins for
diphtheria and for the deleterious microbes of cholera or typhoid, and
bottles of panaceas.
Anatomy is mine and the surgeon, diagnosing symptoms, charting septic
organs on the diagrams, trepanning the cranium, cauterizing for
hemorrhage, is mine; so are his sponges and syringes and silk and his
styptics, and his prophylactic hygiene, and his anæsthetics, chloroform
and ether, and his antiseptics against bacteria and gangrene, and his
autopsy and his skeletons.
The school is mine with its desks, its programs and schedule and the
scholars, from their alphabet to their diploma, their arithmetic and
geometry, their gymnasiums and athletics, and the school diamond and
amphitheater. Pause before you ostracize me from my schools.
Would you be an essayist, sketching graphic stories or typical
characters; an historian, cataloging the treasures of archives,
and chronicling epochs of catastrophe and calm; or a philosopher,
systematizing theories of Stoics, Hedonists, Peripatetics and
Scholastics; or a poet, composing idylls and madrigals, lyrics and odes
with strophes and the epics with episodes, you are mine. Without me you
have not talents or ideas or paper or ink. Mine are your grammar and
syntax, your syllables, your paragraphs with their commas and colons and
parentheses, your lexicons and encyclopedias and card-catalogs, your
topics and themes for ecstatic rhapsodies or for austere logic, your
fantastic paradoxes and your idiotic theories. ’Tis I who phrase for you
your axioms, caustic criticisms, laconic epigrams, all your irony and
sardonic sarcasm. If your technique is idiomatic, your methods puzzling
or crystal, your tropes are metaphors graphic, your fancies hectic or
anæmic, you are mine. I am your enthusiastic stenographer, jotting down
and synopsizing your ideas and typing them to be stereotyped in your
authentic tomes, whether anonymous or under a pseudonym.
I apologize for my tautologies, for this monotonous labyrinth, for the
phalanx of technicalities and for the etymological mosaic which strangles
your larynx with “ics” and “isms.” Whether it is all abysmal bathos, or
the climax and acme of the practical, I am to blame for it.
But pause before you ostracize me from my schools; pause ere the nemesis
of chaos and disaster is yours; but if you are to be characterized as
adamant and without sympathy, let the poets echo a threnody about my
coffin; let there be a chorus of pæans under the cypress and cedar, the
larch and osier, the myrtle and amaranth, about my cenotaph; let there be
in my cemetery a mausoleum with a monolith, and on it my epitaph:
The Lexicons of Europe Are the Trophies of Greece.
NOTE: THE NATURE OF ESTHETIC ENJOYMENT
Esthetic pleasure or the enjoyment of the beautiful is generally
admitted to be disinterested. Possession and ownership do not enter
into the esthetic act. The ownership of Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” is not
an object of indifference or of disinterested attention. Thieves scheme
for the ownership, thousands covet it, guards protect it. But the
enjoyment of “Mona Lisa” is not selfish and exclusive in its nature.
Esthetic enjoyment makes abstraction of possession and of selfish good.
It follows therefore that esthetic enjoyment is a function of man’s
knowledge, not of man’s desires and appetites. The only condition upon
which the appetites, whether bodily or spiritual, can operate is that
they be energized by personal good. Volition may be free, but it cannot
be disinterested. You may enjoy another’s picture; you cannot eat his
dinner, nor can you be indifferent to what you know to be for your good.
Some have asserted that esthetic enjoyment belongs to a special power
apart from both knowledge and appetite. There is however no need of
such power. Certainly beauty must be known to be enjoyed, but is not
the knowledge itself adequate to produce the characteristic effect of
beauty? Is not Aquinas right in saying, “Pulchrum dicitur id cujus
ipsa apprehensio placet” (that is called beautiful which simply by
its perception pleases)? Good, being an end, cannot delight solely by
being perceived; good must be attained. But for beauty, is not its very
perception an enjoyment? The solution of this question will be found in
the nature of enjoyment.
Emotions and feelings, pleasure and pain are easy to understand and
for that reason difficult to express in satisfactory formulas. By its
very nature every faculty of man operating normally has an accompanying
pleasure, while if operating abnormally it has pain. The faculty itself
is therefore the subject of the feeling just as life is inherent in the
organism. Indeed feeling is consciously localized life. The feeling of
the toe is felt by the toe; the joy of seeing is felt by the eye. No
distinct power is required to carry the feeling. So it is with esthetic
emotions. The mind itself feels the delight of beauty. Esthetic enjoyment
is a function of perception.
Does esthetic enjoyment belong to the senses and to the imagination?
Here again there is difference of opinion. It is probable, however, that
sensible perception has no accompanying esthetic pleasure. St. Augustine
appealed to experience and declared that esthetic enjoyment of the
beauty, say, of the sun, was possible, even when the sight suffered pain.
A better reason may be found in the behavior of animals which, though
clothed in beauty, give us no certain evidence of esthetic appreciation
and enjoyment.
Esthetic enjoyment therefore belongs to intellectual cognition. Now the
intellect has many operations. Which one of these carries the esthetic
pleasure or esthetic pain, which one is charged with the vital thrill
that creates and appreciates the world of art? The mind reasons, the mind
judges, the mind apprehends. Esthetic enjoyment belongs to the last.
Judgments and inferences may be objects of esthetic enjoyment; to reason,
to judge may precede or follow or may be even necessary conditions,
but the esthetic act is most probably one of simple apprehension.
There would seem to be general agreement that contemplation is the
characteristic attitude of the mind in the presence of beauty. Aquinas
excludes distinctly the idea of end from beauty. Beauty is a form which
we contemplate. Croce calls the esthetic perception intuition. Theodore
Watts-Dunton seems to be describing the same act when he calls poetry
“the renascence of wonder.” The efforts of reasoning and of judging
appear to be alien to the mental attitude in the presence of beauty.
The simple apprehension is concerned with what is termed ontological
truth, whereas reasoning and judging result in logical truth. Now, just
as esthetic enjoyment abstracts from possession or good, so does it
abstract from the affirmations belonging to the logical truth of judgment
and of rational inference. There is esthetic enjoyment of fiction as
well as of fact. Aristotle long ago saw that although the substance of
art must be the persons, actions and feelings of man, the pleasure found
in the work of art does not arise from its correspondence with reality.
The correspondence with reality gives the satisfaction of logical truth,
of scientific truth, of historical fact. The truth which is the object
of esthetic pleasure in art is the truth of consistency, of realization
of ideal, the truth of reasonable congruity, of plot in a wide sense of
the term. This vision, this dream of the artist, scholastic philosophers
call _causa exemplaris_ or ideal. If we are right in our understanding
of Croce, his intuition is nothing else but the simple apprehension of
the ideal. Esthetic enjoyment comes also, as is clear, from the simple
apprehension of beauty in natural realities where there is no fiction of
art.
To localize the esthetic enjoyment in this way does not determine the
constituent elements of beauty, but clear definitions help to exclude
many false notions of beauty. The ideal of the artist is embodied in his
imagination before it is expressed in its proper medium. The art of man
always must have a medium which can be perceived by the senses. That is
why a vigorous imagination, which stores up and dispenses to its owner
quickly and abundantly of its riches, is so useful to the artist. Through
his imagination the artist is original and personal. The pure thought of
science is abstract and alike in all minds; the artistic vision formed
from individual experience will be different in every one. Therefore no
two artists expressing themselves in the concrete can be alike as no two
scenes of nature are alike in beauty.
Aristotle put the pleasure of art in perception. Art for him is a
_mimesis_, which does not mean an imitation, in the sense of mirroring or
copying. That was Plato’s notion, which Aristotle combated. Art is, in
Aristotle, a power analogous to nature, working like nature in another
and limited world, of sound, of color, of human thoughts. Art is fiction,
a dramatizing, a staging of life, to be judged, not by correspondence
with fact, but by its own plausible and convincing rationalization. No
one has done more for art than Aristotle in his insistence upon the
necessity of cause and effect, of a motivation, sufficient at least for
the artist’s public. Intrinsic unity, the fruit of perfect motivation,
was another necessary requisite in Aristotle’s analysis of art. It is
only when the varied elements of the artist’s imaginative experience
have fused themselves into a unity by having a well-motivated beginning,
middle and end that the mind feels the beauty of its vision.
Universality in art is another fruitful idea of Aristotle. While confined
to his sensible medium, the artist must link up the separate elements
of his vision more closely than in the realm of fact. He will by that
very reason be general and universal because his motivation must approve
itself to all. A moving picture of the death of Cæsar as it really
occurred would be valuable history. It would, however, be individual.
Shakespeare’s death of Cæsar has a beginning, middle and end, and the
spectators see in it the working out of a plot in which every word
and act has been carefully planned and fitted into the design. The
individuating notes are left out, and the death of a Cæsar has universal
appeal.
Artistic creation, motivation, unity, universality, these are great
principles of art formulated by Aristotle and not likely ever to
be superseded. The cognitive idea of beauty and those principles of
Aristotle have been followed in the chapters of this book.
For further discussion of the nature of esthetic pleasure, see author’s
“Art of Interesting,” Chap. V, Interest from Emotions; Chap. XVII, Is
Esthetic Emotion a Spinal Thrill?
A FORWARD-LOOKING LESSON IN LITERATURE
(_To exemplify Chapter IX_)
THE METHOD
THE dry bones in the cold print of this lesson are to be galvanized into
life by a teacher in constant touch with the class and enlisting the
coöperation by questions, by having the passage read aloud, by writing
on the board, by interchanges of ideas, by lively disputes between
individuals. No mere lecture with passive listeners, no mere study period
with a passive overseer, but real teaching, which is a fine conversation,
directed upon select subjects and carried to a destined end under expert
guidance.
All of the technical terms, apprehension, judgment, inference and the
rest are to be omitted. The intelligent use of such terms belongs to
college, although the operations and objects which the terms designate
belong to all grades. Through simple, untechnical questions the whole
truth may be understood by each, and every student may be made to go
through operations which are of daily occurrence and which the student
must make habitual by repeated exercise to insure a mastery of the art of
expression. The teacher is an expert mental director, and, setting before
the class a good passage of literature, he will make them think again
and put in order again and express again what the author has done; he
will make them conceive, arrange and express thoughts of their own with
the excellence which teacher and class have noted and appreciated in the
passage. The teacher of literature will be no lecturer in history or in
philosophy or in mathematics, but will be like the teacher of music or
like the physical trainer, who makes his class go through exercises which
he himself has exemplified and which the class immediately practice to
acquire bodily skill then and for the future.