painful, and the question is raised how in literature painful emotions
become a pleasure. Aristotle's doctrine in respect to certain of these
emotions, tragic pity and terror, is well known, though variously
interpreted. He regards such emotions as a discharge of energy, an
exhaustion and a relief, in consequence of which their disturbing
presence is less likely to recur in actual life; it is as if emotional
energy accumulated, as vital force is stored up and requires to be
loosed in bodily exercise; but this, except in the point that pity and
terror, if they do accumulate in their particular forms latently, are
specifically such as it is wise to be rid of, does not differentiate
emotion from the rest of our powers in all of which there is a similar
pleasure in exercising, an exhaustion and a relief, with less liability
of immediate recurrence; this belongs to all expenditure of life. It is
not credible to me that painful emotion, under the illusions of art, can
become pleasurable in the common sense; what pleasure there is arises
only in the climax and issue of the action, as in case of the drama when
the restoration of the order that is joyful, beautiful, right, and wise
occurs; in other words, in the presence of the final poetic justice or
reconciliation of the disturbed elements of life. But here we come upon
darker and mysterious aspects of our general subject, now to be slightly
touched. Tragedy dealing with the discords of life must present painful
spectacles; and is saved to art only by its just ending. Comedy, which
similarly deals with discords, is endurable only while these remain
painless. Both imply a defect in order, and neither would have any place
in a perfect world, which would be without pity, fear, or humour, all of
which proceed from incongruities in the scheme. Tragedy and comedy
belong alike to low civilizations, to wicked, brutal, or ridiculous
types of character and disorderly events, to the confusion, ignorance,
and ignominies of mankind; the refinement of both is a mark of progress
in both art and civilization, and foretells their own extinction, unless
indeed the principle of evil be more deeply implanted in the universe
than we fondly hope; pathos and humour, which are the milder and the
kindlier forms of tragedy and comedy, must also cease, for both are
equally near to tears. But before leaving this subject it is interesting
to observe how in the Aristotelian scheme of tragedy, where it was
little thought of, the appeal is made to man's whole nature as here
outlined--the plot replying to reason, the scene to the sense of beauty,
the katharsis to the emotions, and poetic justice to the will, which
thus finds its model and exemplar in the supremacy of the moral law in
all tragic art.
This, then, being the nature of the ideal world in its whole range
commensurate with our being, and these the methods of its intellectual
and emotional appeal, it remains to examine the world of art in itself,
and especially its genesis out of life. The method by which it is built
up has long been recognized to be that of imitation of the actual, as
has been assumed hitherto in the statement that all art is concrete. But
the concrete which art creates is not a copy of the concrete of life;
it is more than this. The mind takes the particulars of the world of
sense into itself, generalizes them, and frames therefrom a new
particular, which does not exist in nature; it is, in fact, nature made
perfect in an imagined instance, and so presented to the mind's eye, or
to the eye of sense. The pleasure which imitation gives has been often
and diversely analyzed; it may be that of recognition, or that of new
knowledge satisfying our curiosity as if the original were present, or
that of delight in the skill of the artist, or that of interest in
seeing how his view differs from our own, or that of the illusion
created for us; but all these modes of pleasure exist when the imitation
is an exact copy of the original, and they do not characterize the
artistic imitation in any way to differentiate its peculiar pleasure. It
is that element which artistic imitation adds to actuality, the
difference between its created concrete and the original out of which
that was developed, which gives the special delight of art to the mind.
It is the perfection of the type, the intensity of the emotion, the
inevitability of the plot,--it is the pure and intelligible form
disclosed in the phases and movement of life, disengaged and set apart
for the contemplation of the mind,--it is the purging of the sensual
eye, enabling it to see through the mind as the mind first saw through
it, which renders the world of art the new vision it is, the revelation
accomplished by the mind for the senses. If the world of art were only a
reduplication of life, it would give only the pleasures that have been
mentioned; but its true pleasure is that which it yields from its
supersensual element, the reason which has entered into it with ordering
power. In the world thus created there will remain the imperfections
which are due to the limitation of the artist, in knowledge, skill, and
choice.
It will be said at once that all these concrete representations
necessarily fail to realize the artist's thought, and are inadequate,
inferior in exactness, to scientific and philosophic knowledge; in a
measure this is true, and would be important if the method of art were
demonstrative, instead of being, as has been said, experimental and
inductive. So, too, all thinkers, using the actual world in their
processes, are at a disadvantage. The figures of the geometer, the
quantities of the chemist, the measurements of the astronomer, are
inexact approximations to their equivalent in the mind. Art, as an
embodiment in mortal images, is subject to the conditions of mortality.
Hence arises its human history, the narrative of its rise, climax, and
decline in successive ages. The course of art is known; it has been run
many times; it is a simple matter. At first art is archaic, the sensible
form being rudely controlled by the artist's hand; it becomes, in the
second stage, classical, the form being adequate to the thought, a
transparent expression; last, it is decadent, the form being more than
the thought, dwarfing it by usurping attention on its own account. The
peculiar temptation of technique is always to elaboration of detail;
technique is at first a hope, it becomes a power, it ends in being a
caprice; and always as it goes on it loses sight of the general in its
rendering, and dwells with a near eye on the specific. Nor is this
attention to detail confined to the manner; the hand of the artist draws
the mind after it, and it is no longer the great types of manhood, the
important fates of life, the primary emotions in their normal course,
that are in the foreground of thought, but the individual is more and
more, the sensational in plot, the sentimental in feeling. This
tendency to detail, which is the hallmark of realism, constitutes
decline. It arises partly from the exhaustion of general ideas, from the
search for novelty of subject and sensation, from the special phenomena
of a decaying society; but, however manifold may be the causes, the fact
of decline consists in the lessened scope of the matter and the
increased importance of the form, both resulting in luxuriant detail.
Ideas as they lose generality gain in intensity, but in the history of
art this has not proved a compensation. In Greece the three stages are
clearly marked both in matter and manner, in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides; in England less clearly in Marlowe, Shakspere, and Webster.
How monstrous in the latter did tragedy necessarily become! yet more
repulsive in his tenderer companion-spirit, Ford. In Greek sculpture,
passing into convulsed and muscular forms or forms of relaxed
voluptuousness, in Italian painting, in the romantic poetry of this
century with us, the same stages are manifest. Age parallels age.
Tennyson in artistic technique is Virgilian, we are aware of the style;
but both Virgil and Tennyson remain classic in matter, in universality,
and the elemental in man. Browning in substance is Euripidean, being
individualistic, psychologic, problematic, with special pleading;
classicism had departed from him, and left not even the style behind.
The great opposition lies in the subject of interest. Is it to know
ourselves in others? Then art which is widely interpretative of the
common nature of man results. Is it to know others as different from
ourselves? Then art which is specially interpretative of abnormal
individuals in extraordinary environments results. This is the
opposition between realism and idealism, while both remain in the limits
of art, as these terms are commonly used. It belongs to realism to tend
to the concrete of narrow application, but with fulness of special trait
or detail. It belongs to idealism to tend to the concrete of broad
application, but without peculiarity. The trivial on the one hand, the
criminal on the other, in the individual, are the extremes of realistic
art, while idealism rises to an almost superhuman emphasis on that
wisdom and virtue, and the beauty clothing them, which are the goal of a
nation's effort. Race-ideas, or generalizations of a compact and
homogeneous people summing up their serious interpretations of life,
their moral choices, their aspiration and hope in the lines of effort
that seem to them highest, are the necessary matter of idealism; when
these are expressed they are the Greek spirit, the Roman genius, great
types of humanity on the impersonal, the national scale. As these
historic generalizations dissolve in national decay, art breaks up in
individual portrayal of less embracing types; the glorification of the
Greek man in Achilles yields place to the corruptions of the homunculus;
and in general the literature of nationality gives way to the unmeaning
and transitory literature of a society interested in its vices,
superstitions, and sensations. In each age some genius stands at the
centre of its expression, a shining nucleus amid its planetary stars;
such was Dante, such Virgil, such Shakspere. Few indeed are the races
that present the spectacle of a double-sun in their history, as the
Hebrews in Psalm and Gospel, the Greeks in Homer and in Plato. And yet,
all this enormous range of life and death, this flowering in centuries
of the human spirit in its successive creations, reposes finally on the
more or less general nature of the concretes used in its art, on their
broad or narrow truth, on their human or individualistic significance.
The difference between idealism and realism is not more than a question
which to choose. At the further end and last remove, when all art has
been resolved into a sensation, an effect, lies impressionism, which, by
its nature, is a single phase at a single moment as seen by a single
being; but even then, if the mind be normal, if the phase be veritable,
if the moment be that of universal beauty which Faust bade be eternal,
the artistic work remains ideal; but on the other hand, it is usually
the eccentric mind, the abnormal phase, the beauty of morbid sensation
that are rendered; and impressionism becomes, as a term, the
vanishing-point of realism into the moment of sense.
The world of art, to reach its last limitation, through all this wide
range is in each creation passed through the mind of the artist and
presented necessarily under all the conditions of his personality. His
nature is a term in the process, and the question of imperfection or of
error, known as the personal equation, arises. Individual differences of
perceptive power in comprehending what is seen, and of narrative skill,
or in the plastic and pictorial arts of manual dexterity, import this
personal element into all artistic works, the more in proportion to the
originality of the maker and the fulness of his self-expression. In
rendering from the actual such error is unavoidable, and is practically
admitted by all who would rather see for themselves than take the
account of a witness, and prefer the original to any copy of it, though
they thereby only substitute their own error for that of the artist.
This personal error, however, is easily corrected by the consensus of
human nature.
The differences in personality go far deeper than this common liability
of humanity to mere mistakes in sight and in representation. The
isolating force that creates a solitude round every man lies in his
private experience, and results from his original faculties and the
special conditions of his environment, his acquired habits of attending
to some things rather than others open to him, the choices he has made
in the past by which his view of the world and his interest in it have
been determined. Memory, the mother of the Muses, is supreme here; a
man's memory, which is the treasury of his chosen delights in life,
characterizes him, and differentiates his work from that of others,
because he must draw on that store for his materials. Thus a man's
character, or, what is more profound, his temperament, acting in
conjunction with the memory it has built up for itself, is a controlling
force in artistic work, and modifies it in the sense that it presents
the universal truth only as it exists in his personality, in his
apprehension of it and its meaning.
Genius is this power of personality, and exists in proportion as the man
differs from the average in ways that find significant expression. This
difference may proceed along two lines. It may be aberration from normal
human nature, due to circumstances or to inherent defect or to a
thousand causes, but existing always in the form of an inward perversion
approaching disease of our nature; such types of genius are pathological
and may be neglected. It may, on the other hand, be development of
normal human nature in high power, and it then exists in the form of
inward energy, showing itself in great sensitiveness to outward things,
in mental power of comprehension, in creative force of recombination
and expression. Of genius of this last sort the leaders of the human
spirit are made. The basis of it is still, human faculty dealing with
the universe--the same faculty, the same universe, that are common to
mankind; but with an extraordinary power, such that it can reveal to men
at large what they of themselves might never have arrived at, can
advance knowledge and show forth goals of human hope, can in a word
guide the race. The isolation of such a nature is necessarily profound,
and intense loneliness has ever been a characteristic of genius. The
solvent of all personality, however, lies at last in this fact of a
common world and a common faculty for all, resulting in an experience
intelligible to all, even if unshared by them. The humanity of genius
constitutes its sanity, and is the ground of its usefulness; though it
lives in isolation, it does so only as an advanced outpost may; it
expects the advent of the race behind and below it, and shows there its
signal and sounds there its call. Its escape from personality lies in
its identifying itself with the common order in which all souls shall
finally be merged and be at one. The limitations of genius are
consequently not so much limitations as the abrogation of limits in the
ordinary sense; its originality of insight, interpretation, and
expression broadens the human horizons and enriches the fields within
them; it tells us what we may not have known or felt or guessed, but
what we shall at last understand. Thus, as the theory of art is most
fixed in the doctrine of order, so here it is most flexible in the
doctrine of personality, through which that order is most variously set
forth and illustrated. Imitation, so far from becoming a defective or
false method because of personality, is really made catholic by it, and
gains the variety and breadth that characterizes the artistic world as a
whole.
The element of self which thus enters into every artistic work has
different degrees of importance. In objective art, it is clear that it
enters valuably in proportion as the universe is seized by a mind of
right reason, of profound penetration, of truthful imagination; and if
the work be presented enveloped in a subjective mood, while it remains
objective in contents, as in Virgil the mood pervades the poem so deeply
as to be a main part of it, then the mood must be one of those felt or
capable of being felt universally,--the profound moods of the meditative
spirit in grand works, the common moods of simple joy and sorrow in less
serious works. In proportion as society develops, whether in historic
states singly or in the progress of mankind, the direct expression of
self for its own sake becomes more usual; literature becomes more
personal or purely subjective. If the poet's private story be one of
action, it is plain that it has interest only as if it were objectively
rendered, from its being illustrative of life in general; so, too, if
the felt emotion be given, this will have value from its being treated
as typical; and, in so far as the intimate nature of the poet is
variously given as a whole in his entire works, it has real importance,
has its justification in art, only in so far as he himself is a high
normal type of humanity. The truth of the matter is, in fact, only a
detail of the general proposition that in art history has no value of
its own as such; for the poet is a part of life that is, and his nature
and career, like that of any character or event in history, have no
artistic value beyond their universal significance. In such
self-portraiture there may be sometimes the depicting of a depraved
nature, such as Villon; but such a type takes its place with other
criminal types of the imagination, and belongs with them in another
sphere.
This element of self finds its intense expression in lyrical
love-poetry, one of the most enduring forms of literature because of its
elementariness and universality; but it is also found in other parts of
the emotional field. In seeking concrete material for lyrical use the
poet may take some autobiographical incident, but commonly the world of
inanimate nature yields the most plastic mould. It is a marvellous
victory of the spirit over matter when it takes the stars of heaven and
the flowers of earth and makes them utter forth its speech, less as it
seems in words of human language than in the pictured hieroglyph and
symphonic movement of natural things; for in such poetry it is not the
vision of nature, however beautiful, that holds attention; it is the
colour, form, and music of things externalizing, visualizing the inward
mood, emotion, or passion of the singer. Nature is emptied of her
contents to become the pure inhabitancy of one human soul. The poet's
method is that of life itself, which is first awakened by the beauty
without to thought and feeling; he expresses the state evoked by that
beauty and absorbing it. He identifies himself with the objects before
him through his joy in them, and entering there makes nature translucent
with his own spirit.
Shelley's Ode to the West Wind is the eminent example of such magical
power. The three vast elements, earth, air, and water, are first brought
into a union through their connection with the west wind; and, the wind
still being the controlling centre of imagination, the poet, drawing all
this limitless and majestic imagery with him, by gradual and spontaneous
approaches identifies himself at the climax of feeling with the object
of his invocation,--
"Be thou me, impetuous one!"
and thence the poem swiftly falls to its end in a lyric burst of
personality, in which, while the body of nature is retained, there is
only a spiritual meaning. So Burns in some songs, and Keats in some
odes, following the same method, make nature their own syllables, as of
some cosmic language. This is the highest reach of the artist's power
of conveying through the concrete image the soul in its pure emotional
life; and in such poetry one feels that the whole material world seems
lent to man to expand his nature and escape from the solitude in which
he is born to that divine union to which he is destined. The evolution
of this one moment of passion is lyric form, whose unity lies in
personality exclusively, however it may seem to involve the external
world which is its imagery,--its body lifted from the dust, woven of
light and air, but alive only while the spirit abides there. And here,
too, as elsewhere, to whatever height the poet may rise, it must be one
to which man can follow, to which, indeed, the poet lifts men. Nor is it
only nature which thus suffers spiritualization through the stress of
imagination interpreting life in definite and sensible forms of beauty,
but the imagery of action also may be similarly taken possession of,
though this is rare in merely lyrical expression.