CHAPTER IXActual and Possible MisapprehensionsWhoSaith that? It is not written so on high!—Cain.Everytrue view, perhaps, has its crude analogues, due sometimes to a confused perception of the real state of affairs, sometimes to faulty statement. Often these clumsy or mistaken offshoots are responsible for the difficulty with which the true view gains acceptance. Like shadows, reflections, or echoes, they obscure and baffle apprehension. Nowhere are they more inconvenient than in the problem of the moral function of art. A consideration of some instances will help to make clearer what has been said, to distinguish the view recommended from its disreputable relatives and to remove possible misapprehensions.Allusion has several times been made to Tolstoy, and nothing in the recent history of æsthetic opinion is so remarkable as the onslaught made by that great artist against all the arts. No better example could be found of hownotto introduce moral preoccupations into the judgment of values. Blinded by the light of a retarded conversion, knowing, as an artist, the extreme importance of the arts, but forgetting in the fierceness of his new convictions all the experience that had in earlier years made up his own creations, he flung himself, a Principle in each hand, upon the whole host of European masterpieces and left as he believed hardly a survivor standing.He begins by emphasising the enormous output of energy which is devoted to Art in civilised countries. He then very rightly asserts that it is of great importance to know what this activity is about; and he devotes thirty pages to the various definitions which have been attempted of Art and Beauty. He concludes, after ransacking the somewhat uncritical compilations of Schasler and Knight, that æsthetics have been hitherto an idle amalgam of reverie and phantasy, from which no definition of Art emerges. Partly he traces this result to the use in æsthetics of notions of beauty; partly to an anxiety in the critics to justify the existent forms of Art. They are, he insists, less concerned to discover what Art is, than to show that those things which are currently termed Art must in fact be Art. To these sections ofWhat is Art?assent may be accorded. He then sets out his own definition. “To evoke in oneself a sensation which one has experienced before, and having evoked it in oneself, to communicate this sensation in such a way that others may experience the same sensation . . . so that other men are infected by these sensations and pass through them; in this does the activity of Art consist.”†So far excellent; if we translate ‘sensation’, the current æsthetico-psychological jargon of the art schools in Tolstoy’s day, by some more general term such as experience. But this is only a first stage of the definition; there are additions to be made. Any Art which is infective, as he uses that word in the quotation above, is pure Art as opposed to modern or adulterated Art; but in deciding the full value of any work of Art we have to consider the nature of its contents, the nature, that is, of the experiences communicated. The value of art contents is judged, according to Tolstoy, by the religious consciousness of the age. For Tolstoy the religious consciousness is the higher comprehension of the meaning of life, and this, according to him, is the universal union of men with God and with one another.When Tolstoy applies his criterion to the judgment of particular works of art, he is able to deduce striking results: “Christian Art, that is, the Art of our time, must be catholic in the direct sense of that word—that is, universal—and so must unite all men. There are but two kinds of sensations which unite all men—the sensations which arise from the recognition of man’s filial relation to God and of the brotherhood of men, and the simplest vital sensations which are accessible to all men without exception, such as the sensations of joy, meekness of spirit, alacrity, calm, etc. It is only these two kinds of sensations that form the subject of the Art of our time, which is good according to its contents.” Tolstoy in fact denied the value of all human endeavours except those which tenddirectlyto the union of men. It may be suspected that his religious enthusiasm was due to his belief that Religion had this tendency. He distinguished, it will be remembered, very sharply between Religion and religions; a distinction with which many besides Tolstoy have consoled themselves. But his essential aim, his single value, was the union of men. All other things are of value only in so far as they tend to promote this, and art shares the general subordination. Even a joke, for Tolstoy, is only a joke so long as all men may share in it, a truly revolutionary amendment. The sharing is more important than the merriment. On these principles he surveys European Art and Literature. With magnificent defiance of accepted values, and the hardness of heart of a supreme doctrinaire, one after another of the unassailables is toppled from its eminence. Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, etc., are rejected; Wagner in especial is the object of a criticaltour de force. In their place are setA Tale of Two Cities,The Chimes,Adam Bede,Les Miserables(almost the only thing in French literature of which Tolstoy could approve), andUncle Tom’s Cabin.†All art which does not directly urge the union of men, or whose appeal is suspected to be limited to cultured and aristocratic circles, is condemned. “All who are not hand in hand with me are against me,” thought Tolstoy, under the urgency of his sense of human misery. Any diversion of art from a single narrow channel seemed to him an irreparable waste. Remembering no doubt how deeply he had been affected and influenced in the past by the things which he now deplored, he came in the end to assign unlimited powers to art when rightly directed. But, if we think of the other things which he also invoked to the same end, there is a ring of despair in his final cry: “Art must remove violence, only Art can do this.”We may compare with this a famous utterance of another aristocrat, equally a supreme artist, equally in rebellion against the whole fabric of conventional civilisation, whose “passion for reforming the world” was not less than Tolstoy’s, but who differed from him in the possession of a wider and more complete sense of values and a mind not riven and distorted by a late conversion.“The whole objection of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive and subjugate one another.“But poetry acts in a diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. It exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed.”It is curious how the insertion of particular names here seems to weaken the argument. The world, we feel fairly certain, would be on the whole much the same even if there had been no Boccaccio and no Lord Bacon. Things would not be very different, some people will think, even if none of these authors had ever bestirred themselves to write. Shakespeare, as so often, would perhaps be counted an exception. But this sense that there are, after all, very few poets who individually make much difference is not in the least an objection to Shelley’s main thesis. We could bale a vast amount of water out of the sea without making any apparent difference to it, but this would not prove that it does not consist of water. Even if the removal of the influence of all the poets whose names we know made no appreciable difference in human affairs, it would still be true that the enlargement of the mind, the widening of the sphere of human sensibility, is brought about through poetry.A too narrow view of values, or a too simple conception of morality is usually the cause of these misunderstandings of the arts. The agelong controversy as to whether the business of poetry is to please or to instruct shows this well. “Poets wish either to instruct or to delight or to combine solid and useful with the agreeable.” “It is only for the purpose of being useful that Poetry ought to be agreeable; pleasure is only a means which she uses for the end of profit.” So thought Boileau and Rapin. Dryden, modest and penetrating in his fashion, was “satisfied if it cause delight: for delight is the chief, if not the only, end of poetry: instruction can be admitted but in the second place; for poesy only instructs as it delights.” But he does not further specify the nature of the delight or the instruction, an omission in which most critics except Shelley agree. Our view on the point entirely depends upon this. If we set the sugarcoated-pill view aside as beneath serious consideration, there still remains a problem. A reviewer of the recent performance of theCenciwill state it excellently for us.“It had been better had Shelley’sCenciremained for ever banned. It represents three hours of unrelieved, agonising misery. . . . What excuse is there for the depicting of horrors such as these? There must be some, for a house packed with literary celebrities fiercely applauded. If the function of the theatre is to amuse, then in the presentation of theCenciit has missed its aim. If it is to instruct, what moral can be pointed for the better conduct of our lives by a tragedy such as this? If Art be the answer, then Art may well be sacrificed.”No doubt the literary celebrities, with their applause, were to blame, in part, for this. Our relic of the Age of Good Sense made a just reaction. He accurately registered the effect to which bad acting and inept production*gave rise. But it is with his argument not with his reaction that we are concerned. The celebrities, if they had not been too busy giving vent (though in a mistaken form) to their loyalty to the memory of Shelley, and to their sense of triumph over the Censor, might have told him that neither amusement nor instruction is what the judicious seek from Tragedy, and referred him to Aristotle. Neither term, unless we wrench it right out of its usual setting, is appropriate to the greater forms of art. The experiences which they occasion are too full, too varied, too whole, too subtly balanced upon opposing impulses, whether of pity and terror or of joy and despair, to be so easily described. Tragedy—beneath whose sable roofOf boughs as if for festal purpose deckedWith unrejoicing berries—ghostly shapesMay meet at noontide; Fear and Trembling Hope,Silence and Foresight, Death the SkeletonAnd Time the Shadow,is still the form under which the mind may most clearly and freely contemplate the human situation, its issues unclouded, its possibilities revealed. To this its value is due and the supreme position among the arts which it has occupied in historical times and still occupies; what will happen in the future we can only conjecture. Tragedy is too great an exercise of the spirit to be classed among amusements or even delights, or to be regarded as a vehicle for the inculcation of such crude valuations as may be codified in a moral. But the fuller discussion of Tragedy we must defer.These remarks seemed necessary in order to avoid the impression, which our theory of value might have given, that the arts are merely concerned with happy solutions and ingenious reconciliations of diverse gratifications, “a box where sweets compacted lie.” It is not so. Only a crude psychology, as we shall see, would identify the satisfaction of an impulse with a pleasure. No hedonic theory of value will fit the facts over even a small part of the field, since it must take what is a concomitant merely of a phase in the process of satisfaction as the mainspring of the whole. Pleasure, however, has its place in the whole account of values, and an important place, as we shall see later. But it must not be allowed to encroach on ground to which it has no right.
WhoSaith that? It is not written so on high!—Cain.
WhoSaith that? It is not written so on high!—Cain.
WhoSaith that? It is not written so on high!—Cain.
Everytrue view, perhaps, has its crude analogues, due sometimes to a confused perception of the real state of affairs, sometimes to faulty statement. Often these clumsy or mistaken offshoots are responsible for the difficulty with which the true view gains acceptance. Like shadows, reflections, or echoes, they obscure and baffle apprehension. Nowhere are they more inconvenient than in the problem of the moral function of art. A consideration of some instances will help to make clearer what has been said, to distinguish the view recommended from its disreputable relatives and to remove possible misapprehensions.
Allusion has several times been made to Tolstoy, and nothing in the recent history of æsthetic opinion is so remarkable as the onslaught made by that great artist against all the arts. No better example could be found of hownotto introduce moral preoccupations into the judgment of values. Blinded by the light of a retarded conversion, knowing, as an artist, the extreme importance of the arts, but forgetting in the fierceness of his new convictions all the experience that had in earlier years made up his own creations, he flung himself, a Principle in each hand, upon the whole host of European masterpieces and left as he believed hardly a survivor standing.
He begins by emphasising the enormous output of energy which is devoted to Art in civilised countries. He then very rightly asserts that it is of great importance to know what this activity is about; and he devotes thirty pages to the various definitions which have been attempted of Art and Beauty. He concludes, after ransacking the somewhat uncritical compilations of Schasler and Knight, that æsthetics have been hitherto an idle amalgam of reverie and phantasy, from which no definition of Art emerges. Partly he traces this result to the use in æsthetics of notions of beauty; partly to an anxiety in the critics to justify the existent forms of Art. They are, he insists, less concerned to discover what Art is, than to show that those things which are currently termed Art must in fact be Art. To these sections ofWhat is Art?assent may be accorded. He then sets out his own definition. “To evoke in oneself a sensation which one has experienced before, and having evoked it in oneself, to communicate this sensation in such a way that others may experience the same sensation . . . so that other men are infected by these sensations and pass through them; in this does the activity of Art consist.”†So far excellent; if we translate ‘sensation’, the current æsthetico-psychological jargon of the art schools in Tolstoy’s day, by some more general term such as experience. But this is only a first stage of the definition; there are additions to be made. Any Art which is infective, as he uses that word in the quotation above, is pure Art as opposed to modern or adulterated Art; but in deciding the full value of any work of Art we have to consider the nature of its contents, the nature, that is, of the experiences communicated. The value of art contents is judged, according to Tolstoy, by the religious consciousness of the age. For Tolstoy the religious consciousness is the higher comprehension of the meaning of life, and this, according to him, is the universal union of men with God and with one another.
When Tolstoy applies his criterion to the judgment of particular works of art, he is able to deduce striking results: “Christian Art, that is, the Art of our time, must be catholic in the direct sense of that word—that is, universal—and so must unite all men. There are but two kinds of sensations which unite all men—the sensations which arise from the recognition of man’s filial relation to God and of the brotherhood of men, and the simplest vital sensations which are accessible to all men without exception, such as the sensations of joy, meekness of spirit, alacrity, calm, etc. It is only these two kinds of sensations that form the subject of the Art of our time, which is good according to its contents.” Tolstoy in fact denied the value of all human endeavours except those which tenddirectlyto the union of men. It may be suspected that his religious enthusiasm was due to his belief that Religion had this tendency. He distinguished, it will be remembered, very sharply between Religion and religions; a distinction with which many besides Tolstoy have consoled themselves. But his essential aim, his single value, was the union of men. All other things are of value only in so far as they tend to promote this, and art shares the general subordination. Even a joke, for Tolstoy, is only a joke so long as all men may share in it, a truly revolutionary amendment. The sharing is more important than the merriment. On these principles he surveys European Art and Literature. With magnificent defiance of accepted values, and the hardness of heart of a supreme doctrinaire, one after another of the unassailables is toppled from its eminence. Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, etc., are rejected; Wagner in especial is the object of a criticaltour de force. In their place are setA Tale of Two Cities,The Chimes,Adam Bede,Les Miserables(almost the only thing in French literature of which Tolstoy could approve), andUncle Tom’s Cabin.†All art which does not directly urge the union of men, or whose appeal is suspected to be limited to cultured and aristocratic circles, is condemned. “All who are not hand in hand with me are against me,” thought Tolstoy, under the urgency of his sense of human misery. Any diversion of art from a single narrow channel seemed to him an irreparable waste. Remembering no doubt how deeply he had been affected and influenced in the past by the things which he now deplored, he came in the end to assign unlimited powers to art when rightly directed. But, if we think of the other things which he also invoked to the same end, there is a ring of despair in his final cry: “Art must remove violence, only Art can do this.”
We may compare with this a famous utterance of another aristocrat, equally a supreme artist, equally in rebellion against the whole fabric of conventional civilisation, whose “passion for reforming the world” was not less than Tolstoy’s, but who differed from him in the possession of a wider and more complete sense of values and a mind not riven and distorted by a late conversion.
“The whole objection of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive and subjugate one another.
“But poetry acts in a diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. It exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed.”
It is curious how the insertion of particular names here seems to weaken the argument. The world, we feel fairly certain, would be on the whole much the same even if there had been no Boccaccio and no Lord Bacon. Things would not be very different, some people will think, even if none of these authors had ever bestirred themselves to write. Shakespeare, as so often, would perhaps be counted an exception. But this sense that there are, after all, very few poets who individually make much difference is not in the least an objection to Shelley’s main thesis. We could bale a vast amount of water out of the sea without making any apparent difference to it, but this would not prove that it does not consist of water. Even if the removal of the influence of all the poets whose names we know made no appreciable difference in human affairs, it would still be true that the enlargement of the mind, the widening of the sphere of human sensibility, is brought about through poetry.
A too narrow view of values, or a too simple conception of morality is usually the cause of these misunderstandings of the arts. The agelong controversy as to whether the business of poetry is to please or to instruct shows this well. “Poets wish either to instruct or to delight or to combine solid and useful with the agreeable.” “It is only for the purpose of being useful that Poetry ought to be agreeable; pleasure is only a means which she uses for the end of profit.” So thought Boileau and Rapin. Dryden, modest and penetrating in his fashion, was “satisfied if it cause delight: for delight is the chief, if not the only, end of poetry: instruction can be admitted but in the second place; for poesy only instructs as it delights.” But he does not further specify the nature of the delight or the instruction, an omission in which most critics except Shelley agree. Our view on the point entirely depends upon this. If we set the sugarcoated-pill view aside as beneath serious consideration, there still remains a problem. A reviewer of the recent performance of theCenciwill state it excellently for us.
“It had been better had Shelley’sCenciremained for ever banned. It represents three hours of unrelieved, agonising misery. . . . What excuse is there for the depicting of horrors such as these? There must be some, for a house packed with literary celebrities fiercely applauded. If the function of the theatre is to amuse, then in the presentation of theCenciit has missed its aim. If it is to instruct, what moral can be pointed for the better conduct of our lives by a tragedy such as this? If Art be the answer, then Art may well be sacrificed.”
No doubt the literary celebrities, with their applause, were to blame, in part, for this. Our relic of the Age of Good Sense made a just reaction. He accurately registered the effect to which bad acting and inept production*gave rise. But it is with his argument not with his reaction that we are concerned. The celebrities, if they had not been too busy giving vent (though in a mistaken form) to their loyalty to the memory of Shelley, and to their sense of triumph over the Censor, might have told him that neither amusement nor instruction is what the judicious seek from Tragedy, and referred him to Aristotle. Neither term, unless we wrench it right out of its usual setting, is appropriate to the greater forms of art. The experiences which they occasion are too full, too varied, too whole, too subtly balanced upon opposing impulses, whether of pity and terror or of joy and despair, to be so easily described. Tragedy—
beneath whose sable roofOf boughs as if for festal purpose deckedWith unrejoicing berries—ghostly shapesMay meet at noontide; Fear and Trembling Hope,Silence and Foresight, Death the SkeletonAnd Time the Shadow,
beneath whose sable roofOf boughs as if for festal purpose deckedWith unrejoicing berries—ghostly shapesMay meet at noontide; Fear and Trembling Hope,Silence and Foresight, Death the SkeletonAnd Time the Shadow,
is still the form under which the mind may most clearly and freely contemplate the human situation, its issues unclouded, its possibilities revealed. To this its value is due and the supreme position among the arts which it has occupied in historical times and still occupies; what will happen in the future we can only conjecture. Tragedy is too great an exercise of the spirit to be classed among amusements or even delights, or to be regarded as a vehicle for the inculcation of such crude valuations as may be codified in a moral. But the fuller discussion of Tragedy we must defer.
These remarks seemed necessary in order to avoid the impression, which our theory of value might have given, that the arts are merely concerned with happy solutions and ingenious reconciliations of diverse gratifications, “a box where sweets compacted lie.” It is not so. Only a crude psychology, as we shall see, would identify the satisfaction of an impulse with a pleasure. No hedonic theory of value will fit the facts over even a small part of the field, since it must take what is a concomitant merely of a phase in the process of satisfaction as the mainspring of the whole. Pleasure, however, has its place in the whole account of values, and an important place, as we shall see later. But it must not be allowed to encroach on ground to which it has no right.