Part 11 (1/2)

In the end it ives us the moment of perfection, and is thus possessed of beauty, when it reveals ourselves to ourselves in a better world of experience; in the conditions of our , in the conditions of our utterance and our breathing;--all these, concentric circles, in which the centre of repose is given by the underlying identity of ourselves with this world

Because it goes to the roots of experience, and seeks to give the conditions of our being as they really are, literature may be truly called a criticism of life Yet the end of literature is not the criticism of life; rather the appreciation of life--the full savour of life in its entirety

The final definition of literature is the art of experience

VI

But then literature would give only the perfect edies, ironies, pettiness of life! Such an interpretation is a quiteuses the vivid reproduction of an ugly face, a squalid hovel, to create a beautiful picture, beautiful because all the conditions of seeing are reat literature can attain through any given set of facts to the deeper harmony of life, can touch the one poised, unconquerable soul, and can reinforce the moment of self-completeness by every parallel device of stimulation and concentration And because it isare laid bare, and the strings which reverberate to the ereatest books of all will be the tragedies themselves The art of experience needs contrasts no less than does the visual or auditory art

This beauty of literature, because it is a hierarchy of beauties more and less essential, exists in all varieties and in all shades If the old comparison and contrast of idealism and realism is referred to here, it is because that ancient controversy seems not even yet entirely outworn If realislect of ideas, and idealislect of prosaic facts and devotion to ideas, then we must admit that realism and idealis, whatever goes deep enough to the truth of things, gets nearer reality, is realiset nearer reality is to attain true ideas, and that is idealisreat work of literature is realistic because it does not lose sight of the ideal Our popular use of idealistic refers, indeed, to the world seen through rose- colored glasses; but for that possible variety of literary effort it is better to use the word Ros, not as they do happen, but as, without any special deeper , we should wish theold-haired maiden, ”the lover with the red-roan steed of steeds,” the purse of Fortunatus, the treasure-trove, the villain confronted with his guilt ”Never the tiether!” But in Roether The total depravity of inani for us Stevenson calls it the poetry of circumstance--for the dreae from the wreck in ”Robinson Crusoe,”

he tells us, satisfies the ives us the perfect moment of the material and human--with the divine left out

It has sometimes been made a reproach to critics--more often, I fear, by those who hold, like myself, that beauty and excellence in art are identical--that they discourse too little of for thought will have been vain, if it is not now patent that the first beauty of literature is, and must be, its identity with the central fla Thus it is that the critic is justified in asking first of all, How does this man look on life? Has he revealed a new--or better--the eternal oldis the critic's first consideration, and after that he rasp of the conditions of our being in mental processes, revealed in the structure, march of incidents, suspense, and climaxes, and the beauty or idiosyncracy of style It is then literally false that it does not matter what a man says, but only how he says it What he says is all that reatness in the saying Art for art's sake in literature is then art for life's sake, and the ”infor purpose,” in so far as that means the vision of our deepest selves, is its first condition

And because the Beauty of Literature is constituted by its quality as life itself, we may defer detailed consideration of the species and varieties of literature Prose and poetry, draing from the respective situations they had, and have, to reat power they all ive the perfect experience of life in its fullness and vividness, and in its identity with the central ether,--in a form which offers to our mental functions the perfect moment of stimulation and repose

VII

THE NATURE OF THE EMOTIONS OF THE DRAMA

VII

THE NATURE OF THE EMOTIONS OF THE DRAMA

I

THAT psychologist riting on the probleedy,” gave the right naular situation Of all the riddles of aesthetic experi8ence, none has been so early propounded, so indefatigably attempted, so variously and unsatisfactorily solved, as this What is draedy? How can we take pleasure in painful experiences?

These questions are like Banquo's ghost, and will not down

The ingenious Bernays has said that it was all the fault of Aristotle The last phrase of the famous definition in the ”Poetics,” which should relate the nature, end, and aiedy, is left, in his works as we have theh the suppression or loss of context, without elucidating coedy have ever since so striven to guess his , and to make their answers square with conteht attention to the iation of the phenoedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, coe embellished with each kind of artistic orna found in separate parts of the play: in the for the proper purgation of these emotions” In what follows, he takes up and explains this definition, phrase by phrase, until the very last What is h pity and fear? It is at least what tragedy ”effects,” and is thus evidently the function of tragedy But a thing is deter to its function; the function is, so to speak, its genetic formula With a clear view of that, the rest of the definition could conceivably have been constructed without further explanation; without it, the key to the whole fails ”Purgation of these eation of the soul FROM the emotions? And what emotions? Pity and fear, or ”these and suchlike,” thus including all e to expression?

<1> SH Butcher, _Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_, 1895

Our knowledge of the severely moral bent of the explicit art criticism of the Greeks has inclined many to accept the first interpretation; and modern interests impel in the saenerally elevating and softening effects of great art as a kind of , and the question how this should be effected just by pity and fear was not pressed So Lessing in the ”Haie” takes Katharsis as the conversion of the eeneral into virtuous dispositions

Before we ask ourselves seriously how far this represents our experience of the draht of Aristotle; and that question seems to have received a final answer in the exhaustive discussion of Bernays<1> Without going into his arguments, suffice it to say that Aristotle, scientist and physician's son as he was, had inmetaphor of the Katharsis of the emotions, a perfectly definite procedure, fa music, of persons overcome by the ecstasy or ”enthusiasious rites

Bernays quotes Milton's preface to ”Saedy is said by Aristotle to be of power, by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions; that is, to teht, stirred by reading or seeing those passions well iood his assertion; for so in physic, things of ainst ainst sour, salt to re ”the homoeopathic comparison sho near he was to the correct notion”

Bernays concludes that by Katharsis is denoted the ”alleviating discharge” of the emotions theood thing to get rid of them in a harmless way, as it is better to be vaccinated than to have sen uber d Aristotelische Theories d

Drae is pleasurable (es, to arise not in the accomplished relief froible from the point of view of Aristotle's definition of pleasure as an ecstatic condition of the soul For every e to Aristotle, be it ever so painful, an ecstatic degree would effect, at the sae, a pleasure also Pity and fear are aroused to be allayed, and to give pleasure in the arousing and the relief

Such, approxiic Emotion, or Katharsis Is it also our own? To clear the field for this inquiry, it will be well first of all to insist on a distinction which is ranted We speak o Aristotle's Katharsis as the Tragic Eic are no longer identical Aristotle conceives hi with the peculiar emotion aroused by a certain dra to do with its content For Tragedy is literally goat-song, perhaps frouised as satyrs Since then we have borrowed the name of that dramatic form to apply to events which have the same type or issue as in that foric attaches itself rather to the catastrophe than to the struggle, and therefore, I cannot but think,to co, and to ele definition

Aristotle is dealing with the whole effect of the draic occurrence It is really the theory of the draic, in our sense, which occupies him Therefore, as I say, we must not assuic in experience will solve the probleic event,” it is true, is of the kind which dra about this peculiar effect But the question of Aristotle and our problem of Katharsis is the probleic Drama What, then, is the nature of dray of Aristotle's conception of the eedy with certain modern views is evident To feel pain is to live intensely, it is said; to be absorbed in great, even though overwhel life The criticism to be made on this theory is, however, no less siive us pleasure to have painful emotions or to see other people's sorrows, in spite of the reorille feroce” in us, to which Taine and M faguet attribute this imputed pleasure And if we feel pleasure, exciteic, it must be due to some other element in the experience than theIt is indeed our first impulse to say that the painful quality vanishes when the exciting events are known to be unreal; pity and fear are painful because too intense, and in the drama are just sufficiently moderated The rejoinder is easy, that pity and fear are never anything, but painful down to the vanishi+ng point The slight pity for a child's bruised finger is not , whatever it is, for Ophelia or Gretchen, becomes more pleasurable in proportion to its intensity