Part 10 (1/2)
They broadened its field. They gave the artist the right to write about a corpse or delirium tremens, to describe a murder or a crime without pointing out lessons. They permitted him to use his imagination to the full extent, and to invent any forms he chose.
But the theory overrode itself. It became an apology for abuses of art.
Writers began to create meaningless jargon, to waste words on trite ideas, to avoid all contact with life, to eliminate man as a subject of art. Art lacked soul, and if it showed a personality behind it, it was a petty, sterile and inane one. Art fought against intellect as well as against morals. Even those who advocated it were writing in direct violation of it. Flaubert's realistic novel _Madame Bovary_ and Swinburne's _Songs Before Sunrise_ were not art for art's sake. _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ was not art for art's sake; imprisonment had changed Wilde's views. Men like Gautier and Swinburne, who were the most ardent champions of the theory of art for art's sake, found themselves in a peculiarly inconsistent predicament by being the greatest admirers of Victor Hugo, much of whose work was written with humanitarian motives. Hearn in America started out as a believer in the theory and ended by attacking it.
Tolstoy wrote most bitterly against the idea, and we may say that from the time of the appearance of his _What is Art?_ in 1897, the theory fell into disrepute. Not that people accepted Tolstoy's views that art should teach the love of G.o.d and man, but his idea did much to humanize art. Before Tolstoy, Nietzsche had also taken a fling at the theory.
Critics to-day recognize that life forms the substance of art, that art gets all its material from life and that man is properly the subject of art, thinking man as well as emotional man. They further perceive that literature is so human in its origins that even unconscious human emotions are present where they were not suspected. The more we humanize literature the greater art does it become. It is true, however, that after the art work is completed, it has influence on life. Our lives may be devoted to art, we may have life for art's sake, but not art for art's sake.
Still, art for art's sake is a good theory to be invoked against the extreme didactic-minded one who thinks nothing should be written unless it ill.u.s.trates a lesson in our commonplace and bourgeois morality, a morality very often false and outworn. They would ask writers to show us men conforming to this morality, instead of revolting from it. They would make literature exalt self-sacrifice in all circ.u.mstances and would stamp out any tendencies to liberal speculation. They demand that poetry uphold society in all its inst.i.tutions, teach obedience, and prevail on us to bow down before the mandates of priests and capitalists. But literary men are often at variance with the moral views entertained by the clergy and the ruling cla.s.ses, and they have the right to ill.u.s.trate the views of morality that they consider much higher than the customs of society. An author should not be bound by the views of his age. He should in fact expose them and show their evil influence.
He does not, however, then write in conformity with the theory of art for art's sake, for he expresses another morality than that of society's, and thus has a higher moral purport in view. Ibsen's greatness lies in the fact that he did not subscribe to conventional morality: he attacked it and thus he really was an artist with a moral aim.
Brandes has shown in his essay on Bjornson how the attack upon art with a purpose is really often a disguised means of objecting to liberal thought in literature. Art for art's sake occasionally thus becomes an apology for conventional morals too. Most of the great works were written with a purpose. Dante and Milton have left records in their prose works of the purpose of their poems. But no one objected to the purpose of these poets, because they defend conventional morality. Yet as soon as literature tries to advance new ideas we hear the cry against its moralizing and didactic tendency. Art for art's sake is then the shout of even the conventional moralist. Those who declare themselves against the tendency of the intellectual element in literature are often those who fear new ideas; they would want only romance, homely morals, happy endings and impossible adventures, constant triumph of good, etc.
They do not understand what literature has to do with problems of marriage and divorce, the state and the individual. They want it to be separated from real life. Nevertheless, they cannot ignore the great books of our day which deal with these questions. They have been driven to the theory of ”art for art's sake” by their hatred of liberal ideas.
”The formula, 'written with a purpose,'” says Brandes, ”has been far too long employed as an effective scarecrow to drive authors away from the fruit that beckons to them from the modern tree of knowledge.”
When Whitman, Ibsen, Tolstoy and Zola brought us messages in ecstatic prose, the enemies of intellect in art called them preachers of filthy ideas, misguided moralists, and would not consider them as artists and poets. The moralist and aesthete joined forces in attacking Balzac and Stendhal when these novelists gave us unpopular ideas emotionally expressed. The critic who hates advanced thought exclaims that he wants no ideas in art at all; he does not wish it to become the vehicle of views he personally dislikes. Hence at times even the Philistine critic who opposed the introduction of intellect in art found himself in harmony with members of the art for art's sake school.
Nothing better ill.u.s.trates the harm which may result from the theory that shuns a purpose in art, than the neglect it brings about for books with an unpopular message. England, for example, has neglected the best work of one of the poets of the nineties, who intellectually ranks with her best poets. Who reads the later work of Robert Buchanan? Attention is riveted to his early lyrics, and good as these are, his more thoughtful poetry has been forgotten. A. Stoddart-Walker wrote after Buchanan's death _Robert Buchanan, the Poet of Modern Revolt_, and Harriet Jay wrote a biography. Attention was called in these volumes to the later works of Buchanan, where he stood for liberty of thought. Nor was he didactic in his pleas, in such poems as _The City of Dreams_, _The Wandering Jew_, _The Ballad of Mary the Mother_, _The Outcast_, _The Devil's Case_, and _The New Rome_. Lecky called _The City of Dreams_ the modern _Pilgrim's Progress_, and said that it would take a prominent position in the literature of the time. But no one knows these poems, and of Buchanan's work only a few ballads are known. Buchanan is not any more didactic than Browning, but since he represents bold speculation (and also made too many personal enemies) he was throttled by Philistinism.
The opponents of utilitarianism in art have been the calumniators of poets with ideas unacceptable to the majority. They have hindered the popularity of pessimistic poets like Leopardi and Thomson. They are shocked by the morbidities of Dostoievsky and Strindberg. But every author has the right to describe emotions without being compelled to draw a moral from them. In such case the writer becomes a great psychologist, and his work is by no means devoid of intellectual content. Thus the stories of Poe which have no moral outlook are really stories with a purpose for they are profound doc.u.ments in psychology. To them psychologists like Mosso have gone for studies of the emotion of fear. One finds ideas in them that throw light on the nature of our emotions. Hence Brownell in his well written essay on Poe which attacked him because of his indifference to moral problems (a view in which Howells and James concur) is wrong in denying to Poe a high place in art. Poe did what all artists do: he drew on his emotions and if he could portray fear and grief for death, it was because he had known them. Graham describes the timid nature of Poe, who was afraid to be himself alone. That feeling accounts for the _Fall of the House of Usher_. Poe's stories are rich in ideas, in valuable psychological data.
None of them, except _William Wilson_, has an ethical aim, but they all have an intellectual, utilitarian purport, in giving us profound knowledge of man's hidden emotions. They are the result of Poe's keen intellect as well as of his emotions. They have antic.i.p.ated many researches by psychologists; they have set circulating profound views of the psychic const.i.tution of man. They thus became art with a purpose, not however to spread ethical truisms, but broad liberating ideas.
Those art for art's sake critics who take their inspiration from Poe's essay on the _Poetic Principle_, sadly misunderstand their critic.
Except in two poems written as metrical and musical experiments, _The Bells_ and _Ulalume_, Poe's intellect adorned all the poetry he wrote in verse as well as prose. Read his prose poems, _Shadow_, _Silence_, _The Colloquy of Monos and Una_, _The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion_, _The Power of Words_, and _Eureka_. He was justified in his pleading that poetry should not become the mere vehicle of moral commonplaces, for these are not beautiful, and the vogue of the New England school was beginning to make the moral aims of poetry too paramount.
The poet should be free and if he wants to emotionalize a social message he should be allowed to do so, risking aesthetic value if he becomes didactic, or is false in his views. And he should also be allowed to describe beauty and emotions, without being compelled to draw a moral conclusion therefrom.
Croce, who defined poetry as intuition, has helped to keep on its last legs the idea of art for art's sake. He falsely teaches that poetry deals with pure emotions, and that emotions and ideas are two separate functions, one of the feeling man, the other of the thinking man.
Though Croce admits that the intellectual has its aesthetic side, that art deals with the philosophic and moral, yet this definition of literature in terms of intuition is not a true account of the nature of literature, for he regards the intuitive faculty as totally opposed to the logical faculty, a Kantian relic. Intuition, however, is the combined product of all the logical faculties exercised by man in the past, just as the action of an involuntary muscle is the continued action of a muscle once voluntary, but which by force of habit for ages became involuntary.
Intuition is not merely the knowledge of our hearts but of our brain as well. The great novels and plays of the world's literature are the artistic results of the intellect collaborating with the emotions. Croce presents an ingenious explanation to enable him to call works of art which are full of intellectuality, works of intuition. He says that the effect of the work as a whole is that of an intuition. He holds that when intellectual concepts are mingled with intuition they are not then intellectual concepts but part of the intuition. If this be so, the rule works the other way around. If intuition is mingled with intellectual concepts appearing in a philosophical or scientific work, why not then say that the intuitive quality disappears and becomes part of the intellectual concept and that the scientific or philosophic work becomes a work of intuition or a work of art as a whole? There is intellectual working in Hamlet and intuitive expression in a dialogue of Plato. The former is not wholly intuitive nor the latter wholly intellectual.
This is Croce's great fault--that he tries to rid poetry of what he calls any suggestion of intellectualism.[146:A] He identifies the first rudimentary form of knowledge with intuition, he distinguishes the so-called first degree of the activity of the mind, the unreflecting, unreasoning emotion, from intellectual and perceptual knowledge, which involves concepts, so that his view of poetry is that of the art for art's sake school,--that poetry deals not with ideas but with intuitive feeling.
Now, feeling and thought are not separable. Feeling involves knowledge and instant reflection. The bereaved poet knows and reflects on many things at the very instant he is suffering the shock of his loss. His intellectual and perceptual faculties cannot be set apart from the psychical activity of his emotions. The authors of the greatest English elegies philosophized while bemoaning their loss. The moral, intellectual and logical faculties are at work along with the intuitive faculty, or immediate knowledge of feeling, in all great poets.
It is in his views on intuition that Croce reduces art to presentation of childish impressions or views, divested of judgment and reflection.
He discourages reasoning and thinking on the part of the artist. He seeks only the first instant of the poet's emotions, though he admits that in real life sensations are followed by reflections and mental solutions. He thinks the purest artists are those who persist longest in that first moment of intuition, and are innocent and childish in their outlook.
Art is not, as Croce thinks, devoid of the character of conceptual knowledge. No, discrimination and judgment, distinction between reality and unreality, is an important part of the poet's work, and to say that it matters little what the poet thinks or says or concludes, that correct ideas, judgments, statements, are not to be sought from him, is to reduce him to the level of a babbling child. The ideality of poetry does not, as Croce thinks, disappear as soon as reflection and judgment enter, for these may be bathed in ecstasy. Croce's definition of imaginative literature excludes ideas, except as casually introduced, or as the utterances in accordance with the truth of the character portrayed. He levels literature to a primitive degree.
Croce seems to think that art is expression of only intuition, but is not expression of intellectual concepts which he claims belong to philosophy. He who did so much to clear away the artificial divisions reigning in the various arts, commits a greater error. He a.s.signs one kind of expression--intuition--to one branch of human endeavor--art; and another kind of expression--true concepts--to another branch of human endeavor,--logic. Yet he admits that intuition and concepts are two moments in a single process. As a matter of fact, expressed concepts are also literature when emotionalized, and logic is poetry when combined with ecstasy.
Man cannot separate the two faculties, and we seldom have what Croce calls pure intuition, that is, knowledge free of concepts. Hence poetry scarcely deals with intuition in Croce's understanding of the term.
Croce takes care to distinguish intuition from mere physical sensation, and from a.s.sociation. For him intuition is not unconscious memory but the first degree of the mind's activity which is expression. One fails to see why even sensation may not be intuition and hence art; some of the world's best literature describes hunger. And to deny that intuition includes unconscious memory is to deprive it of its essential quality.