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Title: Art principles in literature
Author: Donnelly, Francis P.
Language: English
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ART PRINCIPLES
IN LITERATURE
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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TORONTO
ART PRINCIPLES
IN LITERATURE
BY FRANCIS P. DONNELLY, S.J.
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK MCMXXV
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
COPYRIGHT, 1923,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
SET UP AND PRINTED. PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1923.
REPRINTED APRIL, 1925.
REPRINTED JULY, 1928.
WYNKOOP HALLENBECK CRAWFORD COMPANY, NEW YORK, U. S. A.
INTRODUCTION
In the _Art of Interesting_ (Kenedy, 1920) the writer began a discussion
of the principles of art and of their application to writing and
speaking. In this work the discussion is carried further and is not
restricted to the one feature of arousing and fixing attention,
especially in oratory, which was the chief topic of the _Art of
Interesting_. The following chapters represent the reactions of the
writer to literature both as composed today and as taught in our schools.
Any active mind, bewildered by the ceaseless experimenting in literature
and education, and not satisfied with a passive acceptance of even
excellent critics, is necessarily forced back upon first principles.
Such a mind will not yield to the despair of skepticism, that there
are no first principles, nor to the despair of agnosticism, that there
may be such principles but we cannot know them, nor yet to the despair
of pragmatism, that we must wait and see whether the human race ages
from now will give us assurance that there really are principles of art
because the last man has seen that these principles have been found to
work up to the moment prior to which he joined Tutankhamen.
Art, just as morals and pure science, differs entirely from the natural
sciences, which are generalizations based upon acquired information and
must change as long as the information upon which they are based can be
modified and enlarged. But where, as in art or pure science, principles
are based on final truths, the principles have also a finality and can
only be rejected if their basis can be changed or modified. Aristotle’s
principles have something of that finality. Aristotle had for his study
a body of literature that has for centuries met with the approval of
the best taste in every age and of every critic. Aristotle’s biology
or physics are not final, but his ethics, his logic, his esthetics
are in measurable distance of finality except where some additions
have been made to the materials upon which he based his analysis. In
religion, because of revelation, in music because of discoveries in
instrumentation, and perhaps in other arts, time has added to the
original store, but in literature there are few additions to the fields
which lay before Aristotle, and subsequent ages have not developed any
keener analytical powers than those of Aristotle.
It is Aristotle’s principles that in the main have dominated the writer’s
reactions to modern art and literature. When Greek literature held an
honored place in our schools, there was less need of insisting on obvious
truths of art. The intense modernism now predominating everywhere has
driven classical literature and classical methods from school and life.
History is modernized too or fails to supply the vital contact with
the ever-living past which earlier schools experienced in the poets,
historians, orators and philosophers of Greece and Rome. So-called
cultural subjects in modern education are chiefly informational. Culture
is a word which calls for definition, but on its intellectual side at
least, culture for the largest number of persons in the world can be
gauged most satisfactorily by their appreciation of literature and by
their capacity to produce literature. The study of literature as an art
is the chief topic of this book, and Aristotle’s great principles need
all the more stressing now that his philosophy of art and the supreme
literature on which he based his conclusions are passing away from
present-day consciousness.
The chapters that follow are popular rather than scientific in
presentation. Readers who seek a fuller and wider view may be interested
in such a work as Benedetto Croce’s _Æsthetic_, from the Italian by
Douglas Ainslie. Its historical summary, especially for modern times,
is valuable and good. For the Greeks and earlier periods, Butcher’s
_Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts_ is easily best. Professor
Rhys Roberts’ editions of the works of Dionysius, Longinus and Demetrius
are excellent for the traditions of classical rhetoric, a tradition weak
in America.
In theory Croce is an extreme intellectualist in the principles of art.
He locates all of esthetics in pure intuition, which is “lyrical,”
that is, emotional, because it represents “the states of the soul,”
“passionality, feeling, personality.” For Croce “natural beauty
is simply a stimulus to esthetic reproduction, which presupposes
previous production.” He is therefore an idealist in his conception of
beauty. Even monuments of art seem to be only “stimulants to esthetic
reproduction” and are not beautiful in themselves. In another place,
however, Croce seems to be a realist. “Art is governed entirely by
imagination; its only riches are images. Art does not classify objects
nor pronounce them real or imaginary nor qualify them nor define them.
Art feels and represents them. In as far as it apprehends ‘the real’
immediately before it is modified and made clear by the concept, it must
be called pure intuition.”
Quite to the other extreme in theory goes _The Psychology of Beauty_
by Ethel D. Puffer. This author has much about sensations and their
physiology and but little about ideas. For Croce the last stage is in the
idea; for Puffer it would seem to be in the work of art. “The low-lying
wide expanse of some of the old Dutch landscapists give us repose, not
because they remind us of the peaceful happiness of the land but because
we cannot melt ourselves into all those horizontal lines without the
restful feeling which accompanies such relaxation.” This passage might
almost class the writer with the _Einfühlung_ school,—the school which
gives Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy” a number of advocates. Pathetic fallacy
was a complete misnomer when applied by Ruskin to the well-known tropes
of metaphor and personification. Kingsley was not insane enough to
imagine that a wave was actually cruel and actually crawled. He likened
the wave that drowned to a wild animal. But the school of Lipps in
Germany desires you to moan with the wind and smile with the rose and lie
flat with painted horizontal lines.
Perhaps Puffer’s formula of stimulation with repose and Croce’s formula
of intuition with lyricism can be reconciled with Aquinas’ definition of
the beautiful, _quæ visa placent_. A study of Maurice De Wulf’s excellent
little volume _L’Œuvre d’Art et la Beauté_ gives us briefly and clearly
the neo-scholastic solution of the esthetic problem. The book is a
good example of the reasonable discussion which has won for scholastic
philosophy the universal designation as the philosophy of common sense.
Longhaye’s _Théorie des Belles Lettres_, which is scholastic philosophy
applied to literature, is another clear and sane presentation of the
principles of the art.
The reader who desires to supplement the popular exposition of this
book with a systematic treatise on the esthetic and its application to
literature is recommended to De Wulf and to Longhaye. English is rich in
criticism but is deficient in works treating of the philosophy of beauty
in literature.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION
Connection with author’s _Art of Interesting_—Need of principles
of an art amidst violent experimentation in art and
education—Aristotle’s principles valid except where the basis
of his deductions has been modified—With Greek literature
leaving our schools, Greek taste is needed against excessive
modernism—Recent art discussions— Croce’s _Æsthetic_; Puffer’s
_Psychology of Beauty_; De Wulf’s _L’Œuvre d’Art et la Beauté_ v
ART PRINCIPLES IN LITERATURE
PART FIRST
ART IN THE APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE
I
ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL
1. INDIVIDUALISM AND RESPONSIBILITY 1
Talking to oneself in art—Chaos in religion, morals
and art from unchecked individualism—Altruism a better
principle—Responsibility inevitable—Responsibility a
help, no hindrance to the artist—Greek drama; Italian
Madonnas; Horace.
II
ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL
2. VAGARIES OF INDIVIDUALISM 8
Modern literature and art and a sense of humor—Fiction,
biographical and pathological—New poetry shallow—Riot
of emotionalism—Novel of satire, European continental
type originating in low comedy—Novel of Scott, epic
in origin—Nature, experience, wisdom, the remedies of
individualism.
III
ART AND HUMAN NATURE
1. THE UNIVERSAL ELEMENT 14
Art movements begin in nature—Art is social—Permanence
of literature due to universal appeal—The camera and the
canvas—Personality and individuality—Shock of nerves not
the mental thrill of art.
IV
ART AND HUMAN NATURE
2. REALISM AND REALITY 20
Real cake of soap on a painted wave—Art a distinct world
from reality—Motivation, not through logical discussion
but through probable incident—Painting in the cake of
soap—Realism depressing because of cynic moralizing—Evil
in Shakespeare and Homer, relieved by pathos and humor,
not depressing.
V
ART AND THE DIVINE
1. RELIGIOUS ORIGIN OF ART 26
Rich tombs of the past testify to belief in
immortality—Cro-Magnon cave pictures probably
religious—Earliest art of all nations due to
religion—Dancing, song, music, sculpture, architecture,
drama, epic—Gothic cathedral of religious middle-ages,
synthesis of all arts.
VI
ART AND THE DIVINE
2. THE KINSHIP OF ART AND RELIGION 31
Hebraism, Puritanism, Islamism, reacting against art
and the result—Explanation of the origin of art—Taine’s
environment theory—Spencer’s play theory—Theory of fear
and magic spells—Adequate explanation found in man’s
intellectual nature—Art like religion intellectual—Art
and religion idealistic—Personal and emotional—Art and
religion social in appeal—Sublimity of art and the
revelation of _Genesis_—Harmonious equation between soul
and the truth of reality, between soul and the good of
morality, same as equation between soul and beauty, all
founded on the fact that both soul and triple reality are
images of God.
VII
ART AND THE DIVINE
3. ART IN ITS RELATION TO VIRTUE 39
The theomorphism of man in the threefold tendency
of science, morality and art—Religion, a virtue;
art, a function of perceptions—Ruskin’s school of
the religion of beauty—Moralizing not a function of
art—Estheticism neither asceticism nor sensualism—Evil
in art to be represented as evil—Evil to be a
rationalized element—Contemporary evil excites feelings
of reality—Art and religion ennobling—Art and religion
purifying—Creation and disinterestedness most divine
elements in art.
VIII
THE VISCERAL TEST OF BEAUTY
The critic’s equipment—Defective philosophy of
some modern critics, Mencken, Murry, Cohen—Ugly
in art and its subdual—Esthetic feeling not
concupiscence—Disinterestedness of beauty excludes
sensuality of appetites—Visceral reactions not from beauty 48
PART SECOND
ART IN THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE
IX
LOOKING FORWARD IN LITERATURE
Literature taught for use in Greece, Rome, and
elsewhere—Science and history always changing; literature
lasting—Object of literature in university—True humanism,
equipping man’s faculties with art—Every school subject
teaches its like—Correlations of literature and
creation—Contemporary literature not suitable—Scientific
study partly; artistic study is wholly satisfying 57
X
UNIFYING EDUCATION THROUGH LITERATURE
Necessity of unity—In university through profession—No
unity in college electivism—Unity impaired by
departments and by specializing—Unity in France, Germany
and England—Departmental system destroying the art appeal
of literature—Science through knowing; art through
doing—Recent mental tests accentuate expression and
language—General education through art of literature 64
XI
THE INTERESTING TEACHER OF LITERATURE
Spread of science—System and eliminating of
personality—Dissertations for the doctorate—Scholarly
means encyclopedic—The impersonal lecturer—Justin
McCarthy’s teacher and his methods—Not scientific
specialization, but exercise of mental powers—Formulas
and personality—Another interesting teacher—Literature
educates equally with science—The ideal 70
XII
EDUCATING THE EMOTIONS
Life full of emotions—Emotions intense in our crowded
civilization—Morale, organized emotion—Emotions
neglected in education—Education of facts dominating
schools—Twofold nature of emotions—Emotions from concrete
imagining—Kindled by contact—Literature embodiment of
emotions—Emotions developed by self-expression and
controlled by exercise 83
XIII
KEEP THE CLASSICS BUT TEACH THEM
Classics to be kept but taught differently—Former help of
translation—Literature overwhelmed by erudition—Germany,
France, England, America—True use of erudition—Natural
sciences change; art endures—Reproduction, the soul of
literary teaching—Method of training—Modern literatures
not yet able to supplant ancient literatures 91
XIV
THE VITALIZER OF THE WORLD
Literary renaissances associated with Greek
literature—Revivals through Irish monks—Spain,
France, Scholasticism—Germany with Wolf, Winckelmann,
Lessing—England under Queen Anne and Queen Victoria—Youth
of civilization in Greece 100
XV
TRUE PRINCIPLES OF HOMERIC CRITICISM
Story of Phidias’ statue and Homer—Homer tested
by art—Flaws in material—Absorption in immediate
effects—Told story different from story read—Outline of
a study on a broad scale—Variety, alternation, growth in
Homeric battling—Homeric palace, the place of Homer’s
recital 106
XVI
THE CHILD-TEST OF LITERATURE
Child-test in religion and morals, in the Bible—Homer’s
mother and child—Hector and Andromache—Child in later
literature rare—Latin writers—Conventionality instead of
Homeric naturalness 114
XVII
THE CHRIST-CHILD TEST OF LITERATURE
Christ-Child in art—Christmas and the drama—In
Ireland—Medieval and Renaissance writers—Milton’s
war-like child—Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson,
Longfellow—Return of naturalness in Stevenson, Carroll
and others—Faith and its effects in Thompson and Tabb 119
APPENDIX
GREEK SPEAKS FOR ITSELF
Mosaic of etymology—Ecclesiastical sphere—Diet, posies
and programs—Geography, zoology, politics—Pharmacies and
surgery—Schools and composition—Apology and epitaph 129
NOTE: THE NATURE OF ESTHETIC ENJOYMENT
Ownership not of the essence of beauty as of
good—Perception sufficient for the enjoyment of the
beautiful—No new faculty required—Pleasure is normal life
consciously localized—Esthetic Enjoyment in the simple
apprehension, not in judgment or inference as such—Fact
not of the essence of esthetic enjoyment, which is had
in fiction too—_Causa Exemplaris_—Imagination, source of
originality—Aristotle’s principles: creation, motivation,
unity, universality 134
A FORWARD-LOOKING LESSON IN LITERATURE 159
ART PRINCIPLES IN LITERATURE
PART FIRST
ART IN THE APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE
I
ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL
1. INDIVIDUALISM AND RESPONSIBILITY
A group was standing before a futurist or cubist picture. The group did
not know what the picture was all about, but one spoke up in defense
of the bewildering work: “Well, after all, art is a language, and why
shouldn’t a man be permitted to speak his own language?” A bystander,
not daring to address strangers, made answer under his breath: “If art
is a language, this artist is talking to himself.” Maudlin, incoherent
remarks, disjointed utterances, and in general talking to one’s self,
all that, does not pass for high art among men, but for something quite
different. To talk to one’s self is the extreme of individualism in
conversation; to ignore the world addressed through artistic composition
is the triumph of individualism in art.
The abrupt break with all tradition in every art, and the untrammeled
expression of the individual, have worked out to the inevitable and
bizarre conclusions which a like rebellion has brought about in religion
and morals. Every man his own dogmatist; every man his own moralist; that
is the individualism which has divided mankind into multitudinous sects
and has made millions of moral, unmoral and immoral moralists eager for
legislation of infinite variety without any fixed principles to enforce
the observance of even one law. Conscience, the executive impulse of all
legislation, used to be the voice of God, but individualism has made it
anything from a survival of the fittest or an economic standard, through
countless varieties all the way to a Freudian complex.
Individualism has run amuck in art from classicism to cubism. It is a
barren day which does not produce a new system of religion or morals, and
only the occurrence of earthquake, war, fire or some other tremendous
upheaval keeps our journals from recording some new theory of art,
some Tomism, Dickism or Harryism. Art for art’s sake has been given an
individualistic interpretation and has produced the same rich crop, as
the individualistic cry, every man his own dogmatist and moralist, has
produced—a rich crop of weeds.
If ever an individual could pursue his blissful way oblivious of the
existence of a surrounding universe, surely he may not do so now when
the universe impinges upon him every moment through ticker, telephone,
wireless and unlimited “extras.” There is, however, no such thing as
unrestricted individualism. Of God alone can be predicated existence for
its own sake. Everybody his own dogmatist means ultimately everybody his
own god. Art for art’s sake, interpreted in an individualistic sense,
would not only destroy art but would destroy the world. Art for art’s
sake should read art for everybody’s sake and for the sake of God, and
such a reading will be infinitely better for art’s sake.
It was an Irish colleen, accepting matrimony as a complete submergence
of individuality, who replied to a friend dwelling on the dangers of a
long ocean trip to be taken by the new bride and groom: “And why should I
be afraid, sure ’tis his loss if anything happen to me now!” She was the
counterpart of the Irish lad who sang under similar circumstances, “I’m
not myself at all.” There you have the complete altruism resulting from
the perfect union of matrimony. There is the antithesis of individualism,
and such matrimonial communism is far better for every one than any cry
of “wife for wife’s sake” or “husband for husband’s sake.”
It is quite evident that no artist can exempt himself from responsibility
as though his art were a deity. If a picture or statue or poem would be
an incentive to murder or suicide, the artist must stay his hand. He may
not manufacture bombs for soul destruction, no matter how artistic the
container, even if someone else is to supply the detonator. A lie in
beautiful language is a more ugly lie. Recent pretended upholders of
the Volstead law have printed an emphatic warning on compounds of their
manufacture: “Do not add such an ingredient or this compound will violate
the law.” May an artist naïvely dissociate himself from responsibility by
stating: “Do not add human nature to my art-product or you will violate
the law”? Were the artist a real creator, he would have to forecast
results and be dominated by a purpose. Nor may the artist, like God,
permit evil, because no artist has omnipotence and infinite wisdom and
justice and mercy, governing the permission of evil and guaranteeing
good as the final result. May a man who owns a wild tiger of surpassing
beauty, trusting in the right of property, parade down a crowded
thoroughfare with his jungle pet tethered to a thread?
But why all these truisms? Because individualism in art aims in principle
and production not only to free art from restrictions but even to exempt
the artist from responsibility. The artist may not talk to himself unless
he can find a South Sea island where there is neither man nor God. Nor
is it a deadening of his artistic impulse for the artist to be ruled by
high purposes, but rather it is a stimulus and an inspiration. Eschylus
and Sophocles have a sublimer beauty than Euripides because the earlier
dramatists recognized more fully and kept better in view the religious
purposes of Athenian drama. Euripides, wishing to cater more to theatric
effects, succeeded in being more emotional and in achieving a realistic
but transient interest, the hectic flush that marks decay and death
in twilight and autumn and sinister disease. Is the marked revival of
Euripides within recent years a sign of decadence?
The Madonnas of Italian art received from the painter a solemn beauty
not only because they depict Divine maternity, but even too because they
were to grace a religious shrine and to constitute part of a religious
service. That may be one reason why the Madonnas of Italy are far
superior to the prettiness and sentimentality of more recent Madonnas
which are painted for private homes and for ephemeral interest.
The purpose of the artist is one thing and the purpose of art is another
thing. The purpose of a watch is to keep time whatever purpose the
watch-maker may have. It is likely, however, that if he makes the watch
for his mother, he will produce better results than if he worked for
his usual wage or than if he functioned as part of a machine, having
no clearly defined ulterior purpose. So an artist will be inspired in
painting, in sculpture, in music, in all arts, to elicit better his
full powers and to achieve finer results when he toils for a cathedral
than when he works for a cabaret. Noble responsibility conscientiously
recognized and fulfilled is no check, but rather a spur to the artist.
“Art for art’s sake” may, however, be taken to mean, “Embody beauty
wherever found, or realize to the full your ideal,” and such a meaning
is excellent and fruitful unless excessive individualism insists upon
expressing its own perverted ideas of beauty and its own eccentric
ideals. When Horace said, “Let justice be done though the heavens come
crashing down,” a line that might be rendered, “Justice for justice’s
sake,” he was far from advocating the explosion of a bomb by some Roman
anarchist whose idea of justice was to bring all to a dead level of ruin.
The progressive improvement in the realization of art-ideals may be very
well illustrated from the career of Horace. Horace gradually worked
himself free from the conventionality and baseness of his epodes and
earlier satires, experienced the cleansing process of true humor in later
satires, took fire at the moral degeneracy of Rome in the initial odes
of the third and last book of his first edited lyrics. There the _sæva
indignatio_ of Horace brought him within distant sight of sublimity.
His progress in philosophy weighted the wings of his song but dowered
him with the crystal and clean wisdom of his epistles, of which it has
been said one need not blot out a single line. Had Horace retained the
youthful vehemence of the republican amid the enervating peace of the new
empire, he might have followed Dante and Milton from lyric beauty to epic
sublimity, or might have risen with Shakespeare and Molière from song to
comedy or even to tragedy, but his hedonistic sleekness and his excessive
self-consciousness kept his ripened philosophy in brief letters, when a
more vigorous mentality with the help of philosophy might have converted
his ennobled power of satire into comedy or transformed the lyric
portraits of his early days into tragedy or epic story.
II
ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL
2. VAGARIES OF INDIVIDUALISM
Modern art has not followed Horace very far. It has broken with
conventionality as Horace did with the _clichés_ of Alexandria, but it
has not yet entered upon the path of right philosophy. The _Spoon River
Anthology_, a typical specimen from the individualistic school of what
might be called localists or village gossips, is in the epode-stage of
Horace, the stage of personalities, lubricity and garlic gruesomeness.
Hopes might be entertained that _Spoon River_ and _Main Street_ and other
individualistic photographs would progressively improve with Horace
except for one sad deficiency: Horace had humor and laughed at others,
and even at himself; modern individualists are so heavily armored with
the seriousness of their own views, that they don’t even smile. To
imagine the New Art laughing is impossible; if the New Art had humor
and laughed, it would cease to be New Art and would join the larger
brotherhood of art uncapitalized. Had the new artists a sense of humor,
it would probably be their death sentence. In the course of time they
might catch sight of their own art products, whether of painting or of
poetry.
Is it not an indication of individualism that so many recent novels are
biographies, that the stage is not holding up the mirror to life but
applying the scalpel to an ulcer? The biography or personal views of
Scott and Shakespeare cannot be discovered in their works. The modern
pamphleteer distributes his paradoxes among various mouthpieces whose
only difference is in name, and this is called a play, when it is in
reality propaganda. There are probably now no less than 100,000 college
graduates turning college escapades and flirtations into chapters,
which their authors consider typical of life because the incidents
were individually experienced. And, as the long stories of the day are
biographies or problems and as the drama is a diagnosis of diseases,
in the same way many of the short stories are pathological, but all
are tending to be individualistic. The artist makes his own subjective
experience the full measure of his artistic expression and seems to
imagine that his own peculiarities are good art because he sincerely
expresses what he feels. Individual nature is not human nature.
Aristotle has described poetry as the universal in the concrete. The
“new poets” give the individual in the concrete. Homer, Shakespeare, the
true poets, plumb to the depths of the human heart; they voice ripened
experience and enshrine mellow wisdom, and so appeal to all men of all
times. Much of the new poetry ostentatiously disdains tradition and
rejects the wisdom of the ages in discarding its dress. You may see the
rouge on the cheek and the freckle on the nose, but as far as life and
experience and heart are concerned, most of the new poetry is pitiably
young and callous. Meticulous recording of disconnected and unrelated
novelties is no adequate substitute for the warmth and depth of life
crystallized by the ardent gaze of the true poet out of his experience.
New poetry is contemporaneous with the invention and use of the Kodak and
has all the responsibility and profundity of that instrument.
Individualism has come to such a pass in modern art that everything in
it is resolving itself into pure emotionalism, and that an emotionalism
which does not belong to art at all. Degenerates are the products of
civilization; they are decayed exotics. “The higher the organism, the
more noisome the decay,” a science professor used to say when paying
his respects to diseased metaphysics. As only a believer can blaspheme
luridly, so when an artist goes wrong, he goes wrong hideously. A
pistol in the hands of a marksman gone mad is more destructive than in
the hands of a savage. Colors, sounds, shapes, fair words and gorgeous
imaginings are instruments of degradation and death if they are a finer
veneer over what is false. Individual vagaries and whims, no matter how
unusual, will not have the permanence of art because they are based on no
principles, but devised simply to startle. Degrade the appeal of beauty
to a spinal thrill and your artist will pander to concupiscence.
It is noteworthy that Homer’s worst lapse in story-telling takes place
among the luxurious Phæacians, ancient prototypes of degeneracy. Homer
may have felt justified artistically because he was depicting the
non-Grecian world through whose monsters and marvels Odysseus was passing
and making the first collection of sailors’ yarns. But Homer shocked even
the pagan world and set an unhappy precedent. Lucian and Ovid, Petronius
and Apuleius and the Byzantine eroticists made what was incidental in
Homer their chief concern and practice. They perverted fiction into
calculated suggestiveness.
That depraved and sensual theory of story-telling was, however, more
Aristophanic than Homeric, despite the single unfortunate precedent in
the _Odyssey_. The tradition of Greek and Latin comedy was carried on
by the medieval troubadours and by the story-tellers who catered to the
decadent nobility of Italy and France. They retorted on their clerical
censors and stimulated jaded appetites, substituting in shameless
intrigues priests and nuns for the pagan gods. It was and is the glory
of Scott that he broke away from these evil traditions which made the
novel a hateful thing to our forefathers. Scott deserted the continental
school of novelists and their English imitators, Fielding, Sterne,
Smollett, the last of all Byron. Scott gave up the satirical purposes
which handed on in fiction the vulgar devices of low comedy. He went to
history, to chivalry, to healthy men and women and created romances, not
pathological studies. English, Irish and American fiction for a whole
century yielded to the healthy and bracing impulse of Scott, but the
younger novelists in vogue today in England, Ireland and America have
gone back to the continental type, individual, pathological biographical
problems, forsaking Scott’s revival through balladry of the best Homeric
manner, where men “drank delight of battle with their peers far on the
ringing plains of Troy.”
The individualist must emancipate himself by the contemplation of nature.
Pathological specimens, freakish oddities, all the surface impressions of
the local colorists are not nature any more than a face contorted with a
toothache is a man’s likeness. Such exceptional exhibitions cannot form
the enduring basis of art. Personal experience must be widened by length
of time, by merging into the stream of wisdom, flowing freighted from the
past, or must, in exceptional cases, be won quickly by that intense and
probing comprehension of genius, which seems almost Divine intuition.
Excessive individualism, like the latest fashion, will be quaint and
incongruous on the morrow. Homer lives eternal because through strange
names and strange language and strange costumes we see our own sun and
fields and ocean and sky and put our fingers on a pulse which registers
the beat of a heart throbbing as ours.
III
ART AND HUMAN NATURE
1. THE UNIVERSAL ELEMENT
A serious defect in most modern art movements is that they start from
art; they are modifications of previous art movements. True art movements
start from human nature. When perfection in any art is standardized, when
tradition and conventionality prevail, and the artist has originality
enough to chafe at the restraints of classicism but not originality
enough to reveal finer ideals through classic expression, his temptation
is to rebel at conventionalities and to deem himself original because he
is unconventional. He wishes to be different from other artists and seeks
for the difference by discarding the traditional medium rather than by
improving his own personal message. He prefers to be different and even
original by cutting his ginger-bread into the shape of automobiles and
air-planes instead of going back to mother’s classic make and blending
his ingredients into a new creation, a creation which will make fresh
appeal even in former animal shapes or in the traditional ginger-bread
cart-wheels.
Art is a social institution. If not by the people, art is of the people,
and certainly for the people. When Greek literary art grew conventional
in its different forms, the artists went back to the people for another
medium to be transfigured by art. Ruskin has called architecture a
“glorified roof.” The sonata is a glorified folk melody; epic is
glorified folk lore; and Greek drama is a glorified folk song, as
Elizabethan drama is a glorified folk chronicle. Both dramas have their
roots in the religious services of the people. Homer told us about the
public he had, but the nineteenth century would not trust his word until
Schliemann dug up the great halls where Demodokos and his fellows told
the people their own folk stories in a glorified, artistic form. Greek
lyric and Greek pastoral were as public as Greek oratory, Greek choruses,
temples and statuary. It was left for Roman conquerors to begin the
segregation of art into the cold storage of the modern millionaire and of
the modern museum.
The permanence of Greek art is based upon that public appeal. Art is
long because it embodies nature, and most of all human nature. Homer
has appealed to man, woman and child for thousands of years. His human
nature is our human nature despite external differences of every
kind. Homer himself was aware of the appeal of nature in art. On the
shield of Achilles, he marveled at the field which grew black behind
the plowing, a marvel of Homer’s close study of nature as well as an
expression of his ideal for art. Nature is a language all can understand
and human nature is a language all must and do understand. When lament
was made over the body of Patroklos, the elegy of Briseis stirred all,
“and thereon the women wailed, in semblance for Patroklos, but each
for her own woe.” Similar is the appeal of art where in semblance of
something else, each sees what belongs to self. Aristotle in seeking to
explain the characteristic pleasure of art ascribes it to _mimesis_ or
re-presentation in another medium. Such staging, he says, not only robs
the terrifying of its terrors but enables all to understand and reason
to the nature of each art product. Such understanding and reasoning
mean surely something more than the mere recognition of photographic
accuracy and likeness. If we may press the meaning of the Greek word used
for reason, the process of art enjoyment is similar to the syllogistic
process which involves an appeal to a general statement. The process is
one which recognizes the general in a particular case, as the grief of
Briseis found an echoing grief in every heart.
Whether Aristotle and this interpretation of him is correct or not, it
is evident that art must generalize. Art must select, both by choice of
the artist and by the limitations of his medium. Art does not photograph,
because it has no sensitive plate for its medium. The photographer’s
art largely precedes the camera and consists in selecting that pose
and that expression, out of many, which is yours. The camera is nature,
controlled by mechanism, and is not art. If the photographer or painter
or sculptor photographed you in some passing spasm, we should not
learn and reason that it was you. The spasm was realism and fact, but
it was peculiar and individual; it was not you whom we have known and
generalized from experience. In such a case, Aristotle says shrewdly,
we might get artistic pleasure from the workmanship or colors, that is,
from the medium and the mechanics of art, but we should have no artistic
pleasure from the soul and substance of the art product because the
product found no prototype in our experience, because we could not define
it or generalize it. Art selects. It cannot give everything, and if it
would be true, it must give what all may understand; it must give what is
generally true, and what is generally true of all men is human nature.
Selective idealism has usually the advantage of being intelligible, but
it labors under the disadvantage of becoming merely intelligible. It
gives the truth, but through familiarity the beauty or artistic appeal
of the truth has been dulled and tarnished, or, like the dandelion,
until a Lowell gives it a new luster, its very commonness leaves us
unmoved. We enjoy human nature in Homer because he was the creator of
sleeping winds and of rosy-fingered dawns and of the mother’s smile
alight through tears. A modern who would transfer these same touches to
his own composition would leave us cold. He too must create; he must be
personal, but he must not be individual. Personality is the knowing and
loving principle, and looks to the many with its thoughts and wishes.
Individuality is the principle of separation and isolation and is looking
inward, not outward. When the artist, therefore, creates and gives his
own winds or dawn or mother love, he should speak to us in his own
concrete embodiments of nature, and of human nature, using a language man
understands. If selective idealism tends to become merely intelligible
and unappealing, individualism tends to become unintelligible and to
mystify.
The poet, the novelist, the painter have more depth than silver nitrate
on a photographic plate. Artists do not simply mirror nature; they do
not catch at the odd or freakish. That is photography, not creation.
Horace did not give us a moving picture of a falling tree, but he saw
the humor and human interest of that “sorry log.” Burns did not give
us an anatomical study of the typhus-carrier on a lady’s bonnet in a
kirk, making it crawl upon ourselves and sending us after the kerosene
can and bath tub, but Burns soared away, from that sight with Horatian
humor and Horatian human nature, into the immortal lines, “O wad some
power the giftie gie us.” The artist who confounds the generalized mental
attractiveness found in true art with the shock of nerves or the tickling
of concupiscence or with misguided realism, will not produce things of
beauty. He gets a thrill, but it is not the permanent, undying thrill of
art, not the thing of beauty, which is a joy forever.
IV
ART AND HUMAN NATURE
2. REALISM AND REALITY
At an exhibition in New York City there was displayed a picture of an
ocean wave upon the crest of which the artist had nailed a real bar of
soap. The first idea of the spectator was to consider this peculiar
product an advertisement, but it seems to have been intended as a
serious, if perverted, attempt at art. If the artist was not slyly
proposing the caricature of excessive realism, the cake of soap will
serve well as a parable for those artists who do not distinguish between
realism and reality.
The ultra-realist forgets that art is a creation, the making of another
world. The artist cannot really create what he puts into his new world
of sight or hearing or imagination, of color, of sound, of words. If
he could actually make something new, not based on nature or on human
nature, he would do so on the penalty of being unintelligible. Neither
should he go to the other extreme and not leave the world of reality at
all. He may not eat his cake and have it. If what he takes from actuality
is not merged fully into his art form, he tries to give us fact and
fiction, history and art, in the same product, and he nails a piece of
soap on a painted wave.
Aristotle insists above all on probability in art, or motivation, as
it is now commonly called. A probable or well-motived impossibility,
he says, is more artistic and pleasing than an improbable, that is,
an unmotived fact. For a like reason he demands that fiction be more
philosophical than history. We accept a chronicle of facts without
necessarily being aware of their causal connections. In the realms of
art the connection must be established. This principle, so fruitful for
art, is not to be understood as justifying or approving that school of
subjective novelists which is parsimonious in happenings but diffuse
in reasoning and gives us a maximum of discussion with a minimum of
incident. Aristotle is thinking more of the people who witness the
drama. The spectators want the motivation and plausibility of action
rather than that of logic. The soliloquy has gone from the stage; the
printed soliloquy should be curtailed in the novel. A true understanding
of motivation will send all artists back to nature and to human nature
for those incidents which are the springs of action and do not require
lengthy logic to labor at their explanation. Homer is completely lacking
in logical refining. Incident leads to feeling and talk, which gives rise
to further incident. Action, feeling and character, Aristotle’s trinity
of art subjects, are mingled and detailed, and the story moves on in a
way plausible and pleasing to Homeric audiences. When Homer runs short of
motivation, he does not resort to logic; he refers the causality to the
gods, as modern writers refer all insoluble problems to evolution, which
puts hardly more restrictions upon imagination than Homeric mythology.
The artist must transfer his product wholly to the world of art.
Sculptured horses must not neigh, nor painted flowers give perfume, but
neighing and scents may be suggested even in stone, and in lines by
art happenings, which all may read running if the artist will use the
language of human nature. He should paint his cake of soap in, not nail
it on. If the exigencies of the story demand it, costumes of the night
or costumes of bathing may be in place, but it is nailing on a cake of
soap, it is outraging probabilities, to force a story into a setting or
to adopt a style of dress or of undress simply for the sake of producing
a shock. That is the shock of reality, not of art and beauty. Should the
dramatist have an excellent quartet and stop the play in order to give a
song, he is nailing on a piece of soap, which may be magnificent soap,
but it is not art.
Why is the so-called realism depressing? Why is the Russian novelist left
for the connoisseur but is caviar to the general? Is it the presence or
absence of evil? Hardly that. Homer’s stories are full of evil and of
death; Sophocles’ _King Œdipus_ and the _Prometheus_ of Eschylus are
surcharged with evil, but they do not depress. Euripides, on the other
hand, and Lucian have more alleged realism and are depressing, even when
they cause a smile. The realist is cynical, and cynics do not soar off
into the world of art, but keep tethering themselves to the real world.
They do not lose themselves in their story because they are always
thinking of keeping some one’s nose against their grindstone. Why should
the optimistic moralizing of Polyanna be resented by critics any more
than the cynic moralizing of Shaw or of _Main Street_? The cheerful idiot
and the purblind dyspeptic are depressing in real life, especially when
they are moralizing, but in and out of art we can laugh at the idiot,
while we squirm at the assumed superiority of the cynic. The moralizing
is a cake of soap.
Shakespeare is not depressing and Homer is not depressing. They do not
blink the facts of life, and beyond the humor and humanity which saves
them and their audience, they lose themselves in their story. The evil
they depict is true evil, so recognized, in their art-world. It is,
besides, evil called for by their story, not lugged in for a moral or to
exemplify a theory of art. They know that drab is not the only color in
life. They know that bright things are as real as black things, but they
are not illustrating a theory but giving us a story. We pass with them
into a fictitious world, and the things which depress the denizens of
that world do not depress us if we are not brought back to reality by
stumbling on a cake of real soap, not integrated with the story.
The sight of his dog Argos made the heart of Odysseus sink. Even for
those who think ugliness the only reality, Argos was covered with
realities and squatted on reality. He depressed his master but he does
not depress us. He lies upon Main Street and has a Polyanna wag to his
tail. His optimism and his pessimism are, however, not tacked on. “And
lo, a hound raised up his head and pricked his ears, Argos, the hound of
Odysseus.... Despised he lay (his master being afar) in the deep dung of
mules and swine.... There lay the dog Argos, full of vermin. Yet even now
when he was aware of Odysseus standing by, he wagged his tail and dropped
both his ears, but nearer to his master he had not the strength to draw.
But Odysseus looked aside and wiped a tear.” Argos is the ideal dog of
a far away master; “who has lost his dominion,” as Eumæus, the shepherd
of Odysseus, says. Argos registers the fate of his master. We feel, but
we do not feel depressed. It is human; it is all inevitable; it is real
as life but perfectly idealized by perfect transfer to the realm of art.
Eumæus gives us the morality of it, the truth of it, but he is far from
moralizing, either pessimistically or optimistically. Argos is the dog
Schneider that Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle could not find to recognize
him; he is the picture in brief of his master’s fate. Eumæus is as free
from all obtrusive soap as Argos himself. The dog’s fate is ascribed
to the careless women who “are no more inclined to honest service when
their masters have lost dominion, for Zeus takes away the half of a man’s
virtue when the day of slavery comes upon him.”
V
ART AND THE DIVINE
1. RELIGIOUS ORIGIN OF ART
The recent discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen has aroused the
interest of the world. The perseverance of the explorer, the variety,
artistic excellence and intrinsic value of the discovery gave the news
a place in the press and signalized the latest triumph of the spade,
which Schliemann converted into the best of historians. Dig in your
back-yard, and you can read its past in the layers before your eyes.
Make a cross-section of the country, and successive deposits will
tell you its story. Lay bare the strata of the earth, and the buried
fossils, the minerals, the gas, the oil, reveal the history of the world.
Grave-digging is the most productive occupation to which science, art and
even commerce can now be vocationally guided.
What was it that enriched the Egyptian tomb and other tombs of the past
in which man was buried? It was religion, and specifically it was belief
in the immortality of the soul. The latest opened tomb repeats the truth
that was manifest in the pyramids of Egypt, which were temples as well
as tombs. The beehive tombs of Mycenæ from which Schliemann actually
shoveled gold ornaments of various kinds were also temples as well as
tombs. The altar-stones in Catholic churches with their tiny _loculi_ for
the relic of a saint keep still the memory of the days when persecuted
Christians found the Catacombs of the dead places of worship as well as
of escape from the persecutor.
The caves of Cro-Magnon and Aurignac and other ancient deposits in France
and Spain have disclosed the earliest evidence of man’s art. The man was
no mean artist, and the coloring and skillful drawing have astonished
every one. Why dark caverns, inaccessible to light, should have been
so decorated has puzzled observers. Reinach calls the pictures early
“magic,” painting of animals to capture them. But there are paintings of
men as well as of bisons and reindeer. Professor Osborne is quoted as
saying that it seems to be art for art’s sake, namely, that the sheer
pleasure of the drawing is its reason. An admission, it would seem, that
the professor has no real explanation to offer. Sir Bertram Windle has
recently asserted the religious origin of these pictures. They would
seem to be the earliest appearance of stained-glass windows. The caves
were temples, and the explanation is confirmed by a comparison with the
beehive tombs of Mycenæ and with the Egyptian tombs. The altar, the
sacrifice, the victims, the food, clothing and other accompaniments
of life, are all evidences of religious feelings and a belief in a
continued existence. The absence of the bodies in these caves may easily
be accounted for. Fleeting time with prowling animals has destroyed
them while it left the pictures on the wall. Art is even longer than
Longfellow imagined.
If the earliest art so far found is religious in origin, these so called
Cro-Magnon or Aurignacian artists exemplify again what is a commonplace
in the history of art. It would be easy to add to the following
statements found under “Art” in Hasting’s _Dictionary of Religion_:
“The religious aspect of art in Egypt includes almost all that is known
of it.” “There is hardly any doubt that the high level of Assyrian and
Babylonian art is due to the deep religious feeling of the two nations.”
“The history of art in Greece is throughout its course intimately
connected with religion.” The fact is beyond all denying. Religion and
art are united, in music and song, from the dances of savages to the
Hebrew psalms and the stateliest liturgies; in painting, from the early
caveman to the modern man; in sculpture, from the crudest icons dug up
at Troy to the idol statues of Greece and Rome, in the lions and bulls
of buried Mycenæ and Crete, of Assyria and Egypt, in the tiny seal
rings, in the ornaments and statuary of our modern churches; in oratory,
from the prayers of the priest in the _Iliad_, to the fulminations of
the prophet and the eloquence of the pulpit; even in civic oratory
we find Demosthenes and Cicero in their sublimest heights touching
upon religious motives; in the poetry of incantation, of oracle, of
revelation, in liturgy and drama; in the little tale of the fable and
in the mighty story of the epic, for the full sweep of which Homer and
Virgil, Dante and Milton must stage their events upon the background of
a Divine Providence; in architecture, from the tombs and temples of the
eastern world, to the temples of the Aztecs and to the Gothic cathedral.
Aquinas gave in his _Summa_ a synthesis of all science; Dante gave in
his _Divina Comedia_ a synthesis of man’s life and destiny; the Gothic
cathedral of the same age gave a synthesis of all the arts in one
structure, exemplifying in fullness and excellence the mutual interaction
of art and religion in the middle ages, where manifestly religion
held sway as never before or since. The Morgan “Collection” in the
Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts in New York exhibits the dusty wreckage
of that wonderful union of religion and art. No poet’s imagination is
needed to rebuild those fragments into that marvelous structure, under
whose myriad statuary of serious saints and grotesque gargoyles, you pass
through carved portals into the spacious aisles over which arches leap
aspiringly. The painter fascinates you with the story of many colors
in the windows. The weaver hangs other pictures on the rich tapestry
curtaining the walls. The wood-carver is everywhere evoking beauty with
cunning fingers. Music and song in the dramatic and antiphonal liturgy,
the sublime eloquence of the pulpit in turn charm and rest the ears.
The minutest detail is as artistic as the rich magnificence. The missal
on the altar will be a “Book of Kells,” a reflection on illuminated
parchment of the religious and monastic life which produced it, by
its patience, learning, devotion, silent application, and scrupulous
exactness; “examined with a microscope for hours,” says an authority,
“without detecting a false line or irregular interlacement.” Near the
missal of the Gothic cathedral would be found a jeweled chalice, like
that of Ardagh, with three hundred and fifty-four distinct pieces,
classic and rich in all kinds of ornament. Baldwin Brown was surely right
in declaring: “It is probable that nothing more artistically beautiful
has ever been seen than the Gothic cathedral,” and the Gothic cathedral
is the crowning glory of a deeply religious age.
VI
ART AND THE DIVINE
2. THE KINSHIP OF ART AND RELIGION
The history of art from its lowest manifestations to its highest gives
evidence of its union and intimacy with religion. The fact is admitted,
and might easily be confirmed by the very way in which religious
movements violently reacted against art. Hebraism knew the power of art
over its followers, and Hebraic antagonism to sculpture and painting
served to give religious impulse freer outlet in Hebrew poetry and
oratory and other literature. The Bible is the supreme illustration of
the influence of religion upon literary art. Islamism opposed art, but
gradually succumbed to its influence at least in architecture. That Islam
has not yielded more to art is an evidence of arrested civilization, as
well as of baser and more sensual religious feelings. Puritanism, the
intensest form of Protestantism, opposed art in all its manifestations,
but Puritanism either diverted art energy to poetry and literature or
provoked excesses by its attempt to check the natural impulses of art,
and Puritanism finally yielded to art. It is clear then that religious
opposition to art serves but to show more strikingly the union of
religion and art. The religion that opposes art must direct the art
impulse into other channels or the religion degenerates. By their nature
religion and art are congenial.
What now is the explanation of this close and continuous union of art
and religion, found everywhere and in all ages? Taine and his school,
led astray by some details in the artist’s subject matter, have tried to
explain art by environment; but environment is an explanation absurd in
itself, and cannon be adequate for an ubiquitous fact which transcends
all environment. The theorists who ascribe the origin of art to play and
the deploying of superfluous energies liken, with Herbert Spencer, the
art impulse to the acts of a kitten playing with a ball. Play may be
partly an excess of energy, but not all energy is artistic, and animal
play is the stirring of appetite, bearing but a slight, superficial
resemblance to man’s early strivings for artistic expression. How many
games are imitative and made more attractive by art! From the very first,
mind enters into early and even child art, and at the last the devotion
of the artists to their ideals in the higher manifestations of art, a
devotion quite unlike play, shows that the art impulse is essentially
different from the instinctive impulse of the kitten, which pounces on a
rat as it pounced on a ball of wool.[1]
Another school, striving to explain the connection between art and
religion, takes a directly opposite view to the play theory. Fear and
magic are, according to these authors, the controlling factors. The
difficulty in this theory is the utterly selfish element in the fear and
magic impulse, whereas the art impulse is disinterested and unselfish.
Besides, religious belief precedes the fear and magic propitiation of
offended powers. The voodoo and the hoodoo mark degradations of religious
impulses. Impulses in harmony with man’s nature may go down as well as
up, and even should we suppose that the unselfish impulse of art, which
finally becomes the evidence and glory of man’s highest civilization,
could be traced back to the sordid details of selfish superstition, why
should such an ugly duckling evolve into a fair swan? Devolution and
degradation are easier than evolution. Why did the art impulse take the
narrow, upward path and shun the broad way down to perdition?
The perfection of the oak must have been in the potency of the acorn. The
oak could not come from a peanut, nor can all the powers of sun, rain
and soil or any other factor of the environment evolve the fruit of the
peanut vine into the majesty of the oak. We can explain by an extrinsic
cause the stunting of an oak or the rotting of an oak, but we cannot
account for the existence of the oak—except by an acorn. We may find
perhaps a thwarted or corrupted art tendency in superstitious fear and
its products, but that element of fear could not write a poem or compose
a sonata or rear a Gothic cathedral. The perfection reached by the art
product must have been in the potency of the first artistic impulse in
germ.
Religion and art were then united potentially in the original art impulse
just as the strength and lofty beauty of the oak were latent in the
acorn. The art impulse is natural to man; it is intellectual. It requires
brains to be artistic, as it requires brains to laugh, and no animal
has done either or will ever do either. The bird in building its nest
displays an intelligence not its own; its nest building is inherited
just as its song is. Jean Fabre’s observations have shown conclusively
the wonders of instinct, coupled with the stupidity of the creature
possessing the instinct. But the earliest scrawl or daub of the child
displays the mind working on matter and the deliberate shaping of means
to an end. All intellectual testers from Simon-Binet to the latest have
found the making or interpreting of pictures a measure of intellectual
power. They are right. Art is rationalized pigments or sounds or words
with their images or some other rationalized material. Dr. James Harvey
Robinson in _Mind in the Making_ says that we are wrong in rationalizing
the past to make up our minds, and how does he show it? By rationalizing
another past for us. The truth is we must rationalize the past, and Dr.
Robinson should induce us, not to stop rationalizing, but to rationalize
correctly and should give us something better than universal skepticism
with which to rationalize. The art tendency is one with the religious
tendency in being rational and intellectual.
Art and religion strive for high ideals; they are disinterested and
unselfish. LaFarge says to Saint Gaudens: “That work is not worthy of
you,” and Saint Gaudens picks up a hammer and smashes the sculpture. That
is an instance paralleling the heroic following of religious ideals with
like sacrifices. Was it fear of bogies or love of their dead which filled
so many tombs with precious articles? Believing in immortality, Egyptians
and Myceneans gave to the dead what was most precious, and what was most
precious was the finest art in the costliest material. Love keeps graves
green: fear erects a crematory.
Art and religion are personal and emotional. Each has its own proper
expression. Of religion the expression is worship and of art it is
concrete embodiment of the ideal, and in both cases the expression is
intimately personal and permeated with feeling. Art is more sensible and
so more emotional because its expression must be presented to the senses
or at least to the imagination. Religion whose primary expression is
an act of the will, need not of its nature be attended with emotion or
external display but it usually is, and feeling and expression commonly
help to the fuller expression of religion. The rapture of art and the
ecstasy of religion, though differing in much, have also much in common.
In their social appeal art and religion are akin. The artist and the
saint have their hours of solitary contemplation. St. Peter at Pentecost,
describing the religious ecstasy of the inspired apostles, cried out:
“These are not drunk as you suppose,” and, continuing, he quoted the
prophet Joel: “Your young men shall see visions and your old men shall
dream dreams.” In the forming of their visions and dreams saint and
artist are alike, though the substance of their visions differ. They
are alike also in their impulse to give their visions expression and to
influence men with them. Religion is apostolic and art is social, and
that is why in history they have gone forth so often hand in hand to
subdue the world. Whole nations had to conspire to erect the Egyptian
pyramids, the tower of Babel, the temples of Israel, of Rome, of Greece
and of the Orient, and the Gothic cathedrals. Only a union of art and
religion could produce such stupendous results. Patriotism and the
state have at times come near to these great effects, when patriotism
or love of country assumed the nature of religion. To produce these
national monuments a lasting cause as well as a cause of wide appeal
was necessary. Here again art and religion are akin. Art is long, and
religion is immortal.
Art reaches its highest and most perfect expression in the sublime. Here
religion does not walk hand in hand with art, but bears art on high and
gives to art some of its own divinity by endowing the artistic expression
with sublimity. The literature of the Bible attained to heights which
writers of other nations could not dream of nor ambition. Genesis sets
poets and all artists upon a lofty eminence. By the revelation of
creation, the imagination and the vision of the artist became coterminous
almost with that of the Creator. Newton’s theory of gravitation which
shepherded the starry hosts of the universe into one obedient flock,
gives us a realization of the effect of Genesis upon the world’s
imagination. The creation _motif_ in literature emancipating man’s
imagination, enlarging the boundaries of vision, and dowering the artist
with sublimity, deserves a treatise by itself and a history worthy of its
greatness.
Art and religion are united in fact, so history teaches; art and religion
are akin, so the study of their attributes reveals. What then is the only
and full explanation of that fact and of that harmony? Philosophers hold
that the only and the full explanation of the harmony subsisting between
the mind and reality, which is called truth, is found in the fact that
both mind and reality are reproductions in creation of God’s truthful
knowledge of Himself. Ethicists hold that the only and full explanation
of the harmony subsisting between the will and law, which is called moral
good, is found in the fact that both will and law are reproductions in
the finite of God’s love of Himself. So philosophers must hold that the
full and only explanation of the harmony subsisting between the soul and
art, which is called the expression of the beautiful, is found in the
fact that like the innate tendency to truth and good, the tendency to
beauty is a reproduction of God’s contemplation of Himself. Creation, as
has often been declared, is a manifestation of the art of God, a mimetic
presentation in finite matter and spirit of the infinite ideal. All
advance in truth and virtue is an approach to divine truth and goodness,
and all true progress in art is an approach to divine beauty. “Filled
with enthusiasm,” says De Wulf in _L’Œuvre d’Art et la Beauté_, “before
the greatness of the artist’s power, Dante Alighieri compares it to that
of Omnipotence:
“‘Your art like the grand-child of God’
(_Inferno_, XI, 103).
“Art is the grand-child of God because it is the offspring of man’s
creative power as man himself has come from the hands of God.”
VII
ART AND THE DIVINE
3. ART IN ITS RELATION TO VIRTUE
The fact that religion and art are connected is abundantly established
by history. The naturalness of that connection is made clear by the many
traits art and religion possess in common. As philosophers have argued
to the existence of God from the fact that the universal belief in His
existence can be accounted for satisfactorily on no other supposition;
as philosophers also argue to the immortality of the soul from man’s
universal and inevitable tendency to unending existence, so in like
manner, it may be argued that since always and everywhere the art impulse
is connected in its origin and growth with religion, that impulse too,
like belief in God and desire of immortality and conscience for law and
tendency to truth, is a projection of the divine upon humanity, not the
anthropomorphism of God but the theomorphism of man. The structure of our
eye, made to respond to light, justifies us in concluding there is light.
The nature of the soul, which can respond to infinite beauty, justifies
us in concluding there is infinite beauty. He who said, “Let there be
light,” said also, “Let us make man after our own image and likeness.”
An explanation of the nature of these two human acts of art and religion
will disclose more analogies while revealing essential differences.
Religion is a virtue of the will, a habit developed by the free act of
man, a virtue which culminates in worship of God as the supreme being.
The impulse of art has not been analyzed as fully and as satisfactorily
as the virtue of religion, but from Aristotle’s analysis in the
_Poetics_, through the Neo-Platonists and the Scholastics down to Kant
and his followers, there is common agreement that the tendency to beauty
does not belong to the inclination towards good, actuating appetite and
will, but that the enjoyment of beauty is a function of the perceptions,
the imagination, and the mind. The admitted disinterestedness of the
art impulse is the paramount and irresistible evidence that it differs
essentially from the self-seeking tendency of will and appetite which
cannot be indifferent to good, since good is the very cause and condition
of the appetite’s existence. The enjoyment of a painted fruit is akin to
the enjoyment of verified theory or of a triumphant conclusion, and not
like the satisfaction felt in the ownership of the painting of fruit or
in the actual craving or eating of the fruit.
It is evident, therefore, why a man may be artistic without being
religious. There is no more difficulty in understanding why an artist is
not a saint than in knowing that conscience is one thing and acting up
to it another thing. Improvement in art does not always mean improvement
in morals or in religion, any more than to know is to will. Nor, on the
other hand, will the evil of an artist or of his work be evidence against
the divinity of art. The divine origin of conscience and the natural law
is evident in the vice of the sinner as in the virtues of the saint. The
essential difference between art and religion shows also that the school
in which the prophet is Ruskin, the school which finds a religion in the
beauty of world or of art, is incorrect in its teaching. Love and fear
are the mainsprings of action, the incentives to virtue. Beauty may grace
the attraction of good; it cannot take the place of good in virtue and
religion. Estheticism is not asceticism. Francis of Assisi was a poet
and a saint, Francesca da Rimini enjoyed poetry, might have been a poet,
but was not always a saint, and many a Francisco and Francesca may be
found neither artistic nor religious, as many are talented without being
virtuous and virtuous without being talented.
Despite the sad lack of harmony between the beauty of their art and the
virtue of their lives, artists have nevertheless always been revered. The
honor of their art has won them in their lapses a gentleness of treatment
not accorded to less favored mortals. They are fallen angels if they fall.
Does the union of religion and art mean then that the artist must be
a moralist? To moralize is not a function of art as such. I enjoy
the beauty of a tree without any feeling that it conveys a truth or
inculcates a virtue. The artist may transfer the tree to canvas, where I
enjoy it as I did in nature without any accessory implication, informing
or ethical. Joyce Kilmer may put the tree in a poem and with it add
beauty to the truth that, “only God can make a tree.” The psalmist may
put a tree in his sacred hymn and with it add beauty to his praise of
the life of a good man, who shall be “like a tree planted near the
running waters.” Logical truth and moral good are not excluded from art,
although the artist by profession is not a teacher. Modern critics are
often inconsistent and hypocritical in welcoming every dramatist or poet
or novelist who undisguisedly advocates various theories, but will be
withering in their scorn for any one who advocates the ten commandments.
To moralize, to dogmatize, to theorize is not the function of art, and
though these actions are not incompatible with the functions of art, very
rarely in the history of art has it been successful when it undertook to
teach or to preach. Didactic poetry, satire poetry and propaganda drama,
have great difficulty in becoming poetry and remaining poetry.
Religion then is a virtue of the will, resulting in acts of worship;
art, a power of the mind, resulting in various artistic creations.
Religion may remain wholly spiritual, even in its expression, but, though
the mind’s appreciation of beauty may rest on purely spiritual and
intellectual objects, such as theories or virtues or God and heaven,
art must express itself in sensible objects. Even in literature, the
most intellectual of arts, words and pictures of the imagination are
essential. Angels might be conceived as having an art whose sole medium
was spiritual ideas, not so man, whose mind works through imagination.
Aquinas, stressing the intellectual nature of beauty, calls attention
to the fact that while men speak of beautiful sights and beautiful
sounds, they will rarely and only figuratively consider the acts of other
senses, as taste, touch and scent, beautiful. The actions of these senses
are immersed in the material, whereas sight and hearing are closer to
the intellectual and spiritual. Man has not yet succeeded in making a
fine art whose medium would be tastes and touches and fragrances. The
unselfish enjoyment of art cannot be released in objects so material and
so near to the appetites. The sensualist is not an artist in yielding
to sense enjoyment, although he may wish to give his unhallowed ways
an artistic gloss. The one who sees only an apple pie in rosy apples
or senses slumbrous ease in soft velvets and in iridescent silks or
perceives only the perfume in flower and fruit, is not experiencing
esthetic emotions, but rather stirrings of the bodily appetites. If
estheticism is not asceticism, neither is it, on the other hand,
concupiscence or mere sensualism.
Does the connection between art and religion exclude the presentation of
evil in art? Art would be much handicapped if it were restricted entirely
to good objects. Art is a manifestation of man’s intellect and must
act in accord with the nature of that faculty. If evil is artistically
presented, it must be depicted as evil. To present moral evil as a good
is a falsification as repugnant to the mind as would be the painting of
a blue sunrise, of a green moon or of a black-and-tan sea, and as absurd
as the sculpture of a five-legged lion. The enlightened mind rejects
such physical monstrosities, and the enlightened mind, despite the lower
appetites, rejects moral disorders with equal, if not greater, repugnance.
Again, art requires that the evil, the moral ugliness or physical
ugliness, be a necessary and rational part of the presentation. A fact of
nature becomes at once the material of science, because science concerns
itself with unadorned truth. But for a fact of nature to be material of
art, it must be idealized, that is, it must be made an integral part of
the art product. The pleasure of art does not arise from deception but
from illusion which does not deceive. Painted grapes might deceive birds;
but did they deceive men, then the effect would not be that of art but of
reality. The evil or ugly can never be pleasant as long as it is present
and actual. The transfer of evil to the world of art if it becomes an
integral, justified and rationalized part of the illusion, is usually
enough to rob evil of its actuality and unpleasantness.
Sometimes in contemporary realism, with every justification of ugliness
from the art product, there is depression and not true art pleasure,
because we cannot forget the actual world when contemplating the
imaginary world of art. Suppose “Macbeth” or “Œdipus” were really
historical and were acted in the presence of their contemporaries or of
the next generation. Would there be satisfaction and the emotional relief
arising from illusion? Hardly. Memories would be too much lacerated
with the actual to surrender to the illusion of art and to enjoy its
contemplation. Actuality would put back the salt into the tears that else
might have been sweetened by transfer of evil to remote and imaginary
realms. The Greeks and Shakespeare were right in making their tragedies
historical, whereas modern realists are somber with pessimism because
they never forsake the actual.
Art and religion are both concerned with life and so they both must
touch evil and ugliness, unhappily a large part of life. Religion as
a virtue must overcome evil and not permit it to master the will. Art
depicts evil in such a way as not to offend the enlightened mind, by
approval of evil or by the artistically unjustified introduction of
evil or by actual experience of evil. In all these cases the mind would
not experience the true and lasting pleasure of art. The taste of fruit
passes; the contemplation of painted fruit is a joy forever. Art pleasure
is not the playing with toys, as Plato would seem to make it, but the
fine occupation of rational minds, which Aristotle made it, an occupation
worthy of man because art interprets nature and man to himself, because
art exercises man’s rational faculties, because art releases man’s
emotions under conditions where the evil of actual life is removed.
Macbeth and Œdipus in life were saddening spectacles; the echo of that
sadness felt through dramatic representation has high pleasure for the
mind.
The cathartic function of art brings it close to the virtuous and the
divine. What virtue does really, art does ideally, transforming evil into
good. The vicarious sacrifice of Calvary was the catharsis of mankind,
an infinite cleansing, compared with which the vicarious feeling of
dramatically enacted evil is but as a drop to the ocean. Close to the
divine, too, although at the same time infinitely remote, is the creation
of art. Wisdom and love inspired God in His creation, but so also did
the quest of beauty. Aquinas called the universe God’s sermon, and the
universe is a divine picturing and sculpturing and harmonizing. The
artist follows far after, rethinking through finite images the ideals
which filled the thoughts of the Divine Artist.
In idealizing, in creating, is art akin to the divine, and, lastly,
in its disinterestedness is art divine. All appreciation of beauty
is divine. Contemplation will be the occupation of eternity, and
contemplation is the proper and the congenial attitude of the soul
towards beauty. Good inspires love and attracts to union, but when union
has been effected in eternity, the enraptured ecstasy of the beautiful
will be the soul’s unending activity. Beauty is the supreme excellence
of truth, the polish on the granite of fact, the uncloying fascination
arrested upon perfection. In eternity infinite good and infinite truth,
obscured in time, will stream into the soul unclouded and refulgent, and
beauty will grace love and crown wisdom.
The millions of mankind who admire the red of every morning, and the
forests breaking green through the silver mists and the birds in awakened
song rising from the flowers to the brightening sky, these millions
do not begrudge one another such beautiful spectacles, nor are they
mutually jealous as they listen to beautiful sounds. That unselfish,
that unenvious contemplation of beauty marks off man from animals by an
impassable chasm and makes him an image of the self-sufficing Creator,
the source of all beauty, the exemplar of all beauty, whom the Blessed
forever contemplate and forever enjoy, unenvying and unenviously.
VIII
THE VISCERAL TEST OF BEAUTY
“What is the prime requisite of a critic?” was the question. “His
sincerity,” said one; “his sympathy,” said a second; “his philosophy,”
said a third, “because everything he says will be ruled by his
principles, even his sincerity and sympathy.” The answer of the third
speaker is pertinent to a symposium printed in the _New Republic_ on the
function of criticism.
It is the common view of the seven writers that criticism is an art and
the critics, artists, but no one, except Mr. Francis Hackett, tries to
show what the label of artist means. Mr. Dickinson Miller, a professor
in a theological seminary, very justly and quite fittingly insists on
the social responsibility of the artist, as one who deals with life.
Mr. Lovett goes to history and prepares the ground for a discussion
of principles by grouping critics in several classes. Mr. Clive takes
the humblest and most practical view of the critic, calling him an
appraiser, a function which Mr. H. L. Mencken vehemently repudiates and
places a chip on his shoulder while belligerently proclaiming himself
impressionistic. He makes one deep remark which would seem to put him in
the same school of esthetics with Mr. Hackett. Presumably with humorous
intent, or perhaps seriously, Mr. Mencken locates the artistic impulse in
“hormones and intestinal flora.” Hormones are secretions of the glands
(we just looked it up!) and “intestinal flora” may mean ferments. Mr.
Mencken is abreast of the times. Graft on a new gland and masticate
yeast, these are the new specifics for all the ills that flesh is heir to.
The other contributors to this interesting symposium, though not, with
the exception of Mr. Hackett, delving as deep as Mr. Mencken, would
appear to be in philosophy individualists and subjectivists. The former
editor of the _Athenæum_, Mr. J. Middleton Murry, accepts the dictum
of Rémy de Gourmont: “Erect personal impressions into laws,” as the
“true motto of a critic.” Mr. Murry is, however, too sensible to accord
to individual impressions undue freedom and with some violence to his
consistency asserts that personal laws stand or fall by their agreement
with common experience and with human nature.
Mr. Morris Cohen puts himself into a fallacious dilemma from which he
does not successfully extricate himself. According to Mr. Cohen, all
critics are led by personal impressions or by the authority of others. He
should know that between the blind feeling of impressionism and the blind
faith of authority there is enlightened reason. Mr. Cohen does not take
the path of reason, but endeavors to escape the horns of his own dilemma
by recourse to pragmatism. He claims, what will be news to historians of
philosophy, that Euclid was the first pragmatist, although in the next
breath Mr. Cohen states that “mathematicians of the nineteenth century
have shown that Euclid’s axioms are mere guesses to be justified by
their consequences in the factual realm.” “Factual realm” seems to mean
the indefinitely remote future of pragmatism where the gold of truth
is separated from meaner elements. Some chosen spirits of the “factual
realm” now assure us that the “self-evident principles” of Euclid are
“guesses.” Mr. Cohen is equipped to write an inside history of philosophy
with some entirely original features. The “factual realm” leads back to
skepticism, and Mr. Cohen is still impaled by his dilemma.
Mr. Francis Hackett makes the most serious attempt to get at the
philosophy of criticism and of art, and attacks at once the question
of the beautiful. It is evidence of his thoroughness that he goes
straightway to the great problem of esthetics, “Can an object be at once
beautiful and evil?” Mr. Hackett answers promptly in the negative, but
then proceeds to confuse the point by going to another and different
question, “Can evil or an ugly object be represented in art?” The answer
to this question is evident. The elopement of Helen, the patricide and
incest of Œdipus, the galleries of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, and
countless other happenings in the world of art, show that the evil
and the ugly have been and may be represented in art. “I can hardly
conceive,” says Mr. Hackett, “an artist as subduing a cancerous object
to an esthetic design.” But why not? Marriage with one’s mother is
more repugnant than a cancer, and yet it was handled successfully by
Sophocles, however repulsive some of his imitators have been in their
details.
The very transfer to the realm of art robs the ugly object of its
actuality and imminence. Surely the ugly and evil have been and may be
represented in art, but such objects may not be represented as beautiful
and good. That were as false and untrue to nature as a centipede cow in a
picture. Perhaps a cancer could not appear in a picture or poem or story
except by suggestion. A stark realism would disgust, but a true artist
might subdue a cancerous object to artistic design as effectively as
Homer subdued in his story the fleas of the dog, Argos, and the dung-heap
where he lay.
Beauty in art would lose one of its charms, the splendor of contrast, did
not admitted ugliness or evil occur in art. Bad art disgusts and so does
badness in art, when badness is approved or when it is projected into art
for purposes not artistic. Mr. Hackett’s real trouble is that he has not
properly isolated the feeling of art awakened by beauty. He thinks that
the esthetic sense is sexual and visceral. If the mouth waters at painted
fruit, would Mr. Hackett call art salival? Human beings are composites,
and external objects while producing their essential and proper effects
may have concomitant effects accidentally brought into being. To admire
the beauty of an apple is an esthetic feeling entirely distinct in cause
and faculty and in operation from the feeling of sensible satisfaction,
anticipated or actual, which comes to the taste-buds, and different again
from any visceral qualms that may arise from associated ideas of unhappy
experience with other apples.
Mr. Hackett has been led astray by not distinguishing the disinterested
emotions of beauty from the selfish emotions of appetite. He calls
beauty, “disinterested satisfaction,” and in that word “disinterested”
he has a fact about beauty, a fact solving his problems, a fact which
has been admitted by every one who has studied the subject, and a fact
which is capable of experimental demonstration at any moment. Professor
Phelps of Yale once called esthetic emotions a spinal thrill; Mr. Mencken
would call them “hormones or intestinal flora”; and Mr. Hackett declares
that “the true sources of esthetic satisfaction and dissatisfaction are
deep in our emotional and visceral life.” The one essential quality of
disinterestedness, found in esthetic satisfaction, shows the absurdity of
all such statements. Bodily emotions are all the outcome of appetites,
and appetites are never disinterested but always self-seeking by their
very nature. They are actuated by good; they tend to an end, an end which
they do not and cannot seek disinterestedly. Even the act of the highest
disinterested love may be akin to the sense of beauty, but it is not as
wholly disinterested because that unselfish love is still seeking good,
and good as such does not come within the purview of beauty at all. It is
impossible to be disinterested towards good or evil.
Mr. Hackett speaks of beauty being a “sensuous satisfaction.” Here again
there is a confusion between beauty of art and other beauty. Art appeals
to the senses because art presents its beauty in concrete embodiments. To
that extent the satisfaction of beauty arises from sensible objects, but
the feeling of beauty transcends mere sensation. “Art is long.” “A thing
of beauty is a joy forever.” The satisfaction of appetite is passing;
the satisfaction of beauty abides. Mr. Hackett does well to seek the
springs of beauty in personality. Personality is an abiding principle
of intellectual beings. The enduring joy of beauty argues to an abiding
principle which bears the dynamic charge of that joy. Beauty supposes a
soul.
“Beauty is a light that may follow any reality whatever and give us the
power to release our emotions happily in the presence of that reality.”
So states Mr. Hackett, and he is right, if he gives the correct meaning
to “emotions.” Light or luster has been recognized from all time as an
objective element of beauty, which has been defined as the light of
truth. Mr. Hackett paraphrases a definition which has been incorrectly
attributed to Plato. Kleutgen has defined beauty as the perfection of
anything resplendently manifested.
Let us hope that Mr. Hackett will remove “visceral” from among the
qualities of beauty and preclude critics from adding a fiftieth
explanation of Aristotle’s _catharsis_ to the forty-nine varieties
already set forth. Wearers of Murphy buttons or those who have lost or
may lose sections of the intestinal tract should be assured in an amended
edition of Mr. Hackett’s esthetics that their sense of beauty has not
been abbreviated or impaired. Sane philosophy is the prime requisite of
true criticism.
PART SECOND
ART IN THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE
IX
LOOKING FORWARD IN LITERATURE
The teacher of literature today is looking backward when he should be
looking forward. Greek literature, Latin literature and, to a large
extent, English literature are not orientated; they do not face the
rising sun. It was not so in the Greek schools of Greek literature.
Gorgias and Isocrates taught literature for the morrow, and for practical
and immediately practical purposes. In the Roman schools it was so from
first to last. Recall Cicero’s studies under Greek rhetoricians and
Cicero’s own preachment in the _Archias_ speech. “Shame on those who bury
themselves so deep in literature that they harvest nothing for the good
of all and bring nothing to light for our eyes to look upon.” Recall
Quintilian’s _Institutes of Oratory_, and all the intervening schools
of Rome. Rome had no vocational schools for road-building, but Rome did
have schools of grammar, poetry, rhetoric and philosophy where it trained
leaders with vision and with the power to act. The brains of Rome trained
in literature guided barbarian hands to lay down the roads over which
Christianity traveled and civilization came down to us.
Literature looked forward in every period of the world’s schooling.
Ausonius and Isidore, Alcuin and Petrarch, Boileau and Pope, England and
France, and even Germany until about the middle of the nineteenth century
and America until a little later, kept the literatures of Greece and Rome
orientated to the future by teaching them as arts, by making composition
of literature the goal of the teaching of literature.
Science is ever growing old; history is always being rewritten;
literature is ever young. We know more about Homer’s history than
Longinus knew, but we do not taste the delight of his poetry any better
than Longinus tasted it. “Handing on the torch of learning” is a trite
phrase, but it is literally verified in the true teaching of literature.
Each age adds to the advance of science and information, but art is long.
Literature and art do not belong to the past. Literally and without
figure of speech they are the past living in the present. They are the
flaming torch, kindled in the past, never dimming and never to dim.
Write a history of artists; do not write a history of art. “A thing
of beauty is a joy forever.” The information of science changes
every moment; the appreciation of art once gained is enduring. The
_Encyclopedia Britannica_ has rewritten all its science and history; it
reprints its appreciations of Sophocles by Campbell and of Demosthenes
by Jebb and even of Johnson by Macaulay. Where the cause is the same,
the effect is the same, and so the beauty of Homer’s rosy-fingered dawn
awakens still the same appreciation.
Of literature as a subject of investigation in university or graduate
work there is here no question. The investigator studies the origin, the
development, the history of literature. He looks backward; his purpose
is to amass information and to codify a science. That is not or should
not be the purpose of the teacher in high school and college. He is
educating; he wishes to set in operation and perfect the faculties of
the class before him, to impress upon every faculty its own proper art,
that is, its habitual and excellent way of acting. The school teacher is
concerned with the education of acts; the university lecturer with the
education of facts.
Take the _Ratio Studiorum_ of the Jesuits, a system embodying the
traditions of education and not differing fundamentally from other
systems of its time. The _Ratio Studiorum_ had no history of literature
or lectures on the evolution of literature. It did not approach
literature as a science but as an art. It took the standard authors of
Latin and Greek. Cicero was the staple of every class in Latin because
for nearly every kind of Latinity, history and poetry excepted, he was
a model. Cicero was analyzed, was appreciated, was imitated, that the
student might express himself in writing and speaking as clearly, as
interestingly, as forcibly as Cicero, that the student might be master
of acts of literature, not of facts about literature. That was and is
humanism; that is, making a man a man by equipping all his faculties with
the art proper to each. The humanities were so called because they embody
man. Science is classified nature; literature is nature brought into
touch with man’s personality and transmuted into art, man’s only creation.
You cannot get grapes from thorns or figs from thistles. Every other
subject in the curriculum produces its kind; so should literature.
Mathematics makes mathematicians, chemistry chemists, and physics
physicists. Art should produce artists; literature should result in
literature, in artistic expression, but it is made to produce historians,
biographers, perhaps critics. The history of literature, the evolution
of literature should be put out of high school and college and relegated
to the university or handed over to the lectures on history, leaving the
valuable time of literature for appreciation and expression.
Today we have literature in one class and composition in another
and perhaps rhetoric in another. Departments are the offspring of
universities and the instruments of science. The rational school of
literary expression correlates author, precept and exercise. Information
may be imparted piecemeal and from different sources; it is multitudinous
and capable of division. Formation is one and united; it is the faculty
or power brought to the perfection of self-expression. Art requires a
teacher and unifying of means; science may have a score of lecturers as
its truths are found in a score of books. Let the teacher of literature
therefore take standard literature, make it understood, feel its
personality that students may feel it, note and appreciate its beauty
that others may take fire or at least get heat from the enthusiasm
kindled within him, and then let the teacher see to it that his class
express their own selves as the author expressed himself. Let students
do for Lincoln what Shakespeare did for Julius Cæsar. If they cannot do
a play, perhaps they can do an act; if they cannot create a character,
perhaps they can give one characteristic action; if they cannot write a
description or tell a story, perhaps they can supply a noun for Lincoln
or visualize his deeds in a verb or paint him in an epithet or coin him
in a metaphor. And all this, not for an Elizabethan public, but for the
students’ own public here and now, looking forward, not backward.
Desperate efforts have been made to galvanize literary courses by
lectures on modern novels, current magazines and daily papers. The
lamentable fact is that most recent products are not literature; that
if there is in them art, it has not been made available for students,
as the art of literary classics has been made available by centuries
of criticism, and that, finally, the contents of contemporary writings
are so easy of access and so inviting to the reader and yet often so
ephemeral, that the artistic form is neglected. There is no contemporary
history, neither is there contemporary criticism. Literature, like all
art, must pass beyond the prejudices and passions of the day to be known
and appreciated as art at all. It is for the enlightened teacher of
literature to make the students embody their own experience in the finest
art molds of the past, not distracting them by the multiplicity of modern
literature, but holding up the ideals, like torches, to light the paths
before them and, like expert guides, to direct the trembling steps of
beginners to new goals.
Literature is not the study of words. Grammar or philology is the study
of words. Science dehumanizes everything; it eliminates the personal
equation; it is objective, unimpassioned, impersonal, subordinating
everything to laws and principles. Literature is the opposite in every
respect. It is embodied humanity. Science contains some of man’s
operations; literature enshrines all; not truth alone, but good and
beauty as well; not simply the clear idea, the accurate statement, the
correct conclusion, the consistent reasoning, but also the myriad visions
of the imagination, the subtle analogies, the suggestive creations,
haunting beauties and idealized good. So literature actuates every power
of man whether that power is a constituent part of man’s soul or is a
bodily power whose operation by reaction terminates in man’s soul.
As literature is therefore the whole man, so far as humanity can be
put in language, the understanding of literature, its appreciation and
most of all its creation will make every power of the student operate,
if literature is taught as literature. Such results will not come
automatically; they come when the teacher by true appreciation creates
again before the student the literary masterpiece and when the student
strives to rival the masterpiece in the expression of his own experience
and of his own dawning humanity. Literature is looking forward when it is
making minds think and imaginations imagine and reasons reason and tastes
taste and emotions thrill. Teach literature as an art, which it is; not
as a science, which it is not.
X
UNIFYING EDUCATION THROUGH LITERATURE
Unity is most useful, if not essential, to a satisfactory course of
studies. In the university this unity is effected by the profession which
the student has chosen. His field of concentration in art, literature,
law, medicine, science, engineering or divinity dictates to him his
subjects, and his own earnest choice, together with prescriptions and
examinations, insures unity and thoroughness in concentration courses.
Lecturing is the predominant method of the university because professors
of higher branches are few and students are comparatively numerous.
Lecturing is the weakest and most ineffective of all means of education,
and is only saved from complete failure by the serious purposes of
university students and much more by the sanction of repetitions and
examinations.
In the colleges, however, with the advent of electivism there was no
unifying bond to the studies. University methods of studies and lectures
prevailed where there were no university conditions. Thoroughgoing
electivists, like Dr. Eliot, admitted that the purpose of the college was
a general education or culture, but held that any and every study could
give such general training. President Lowell, Dr. Eliot’s successor,
began to put order into the chaos of extreme electivism. He saw his
coaches on the athletic fields build up expert athletes by a rigidly
prescribed course of training, and proclaimed the analogy between body
and mind, an analogy which would have been all the more cogent had his
philosophy been materialistic like that of Dr. Eliot. The prescribed
examination in one department at the end of four years is the latest
advance of Harvard toward definiteness and unity.
All colleges in America took up electivism to some extent, and even
where studies were still prescribed they adopted in their catalogs the
language and methods of electivism. No longer were there classes, but
everywhere you had courses and departments. One effect of this system
has been to make coördinate and of equal importance many subjects which
had formerly been subordinate. Colleges whose major subject, or field
of concentration, had been language, with other subjects subordinate,
now tended to make every subject a major and every field a field of
concentration. The departmental system has helped to impair unity
of education by disturbing the hierarchy of studies and by removing
all subordination. It does not appear to be feasible to concentrate
on everything. In some cases colleges seem about to give up the
general-training idea and are tending to make their whole course
subservient to a profession, obliging every one to take a pre-medical
course because the American Medical Association is mighty and medical
schools are very exacting.
Formerly high schools and colleges made language or self-expression the
field of concentration, and other subjects, like history, mathematics,
sciences, were kept subordinate. College and high school had then one
purpose, which unified all their studies, as a profession unified
lectures in the university—that purpose was the mastery of the art of
expression. The French lycées, the German gymnasia, the English public
schools, the Jesuit _Ratio Studiorum_, prepared for the university by
making students masters of writing and speaking. The writer and speaker
could express himself; his intellectual faculties could work properly,
and therefore they had received a general training which prepared them
for professional work of a special kind. The field of concentration was
shown in the names of the classes. The teachers were teachers, not of
Latin, Greek, English, but of grammar, of poetry, of oratory, of clear,
interesting, forceful expression.
The departmental system destroys this fine unity or renders it very
difficult of attainment. The departmental system has been perhaps the
chief reason why the classics have been taught as means towards the
acquisition of various sciences rather than as exemplifications of
literary art. It is as literature and as models of perfect expression
that the classics have hitherto survived; as literature and models of
expression they were taught in the days preceding the university system
of departments. Cicero was a model of letter-writing, of essay-writing,
of speech-making. He was chosen with a view to composition; he was graded
with a view to composition.
How can a department teacher preserve the former unity of system, where
all literature was studied with one dominating purpose, self-expression?
If the grade of the class is rhetoric or oratorical expression, will each
department teach its own authors, Greek, Latin and English, following
the same rhetorical precepts in the same order, or will each department
follow its own terminology and its own order, or will, as has happened
everywhere, the teaching of rhetoric be relegated to English or to a
separate professor, leaving Cicero and Demosthenes to be taught as
grammatical documents or historical documents or as legal documents, not
as speeches, not as models of oratorical expression? Will the professor
of Latin teach Virgil as epic poetry, and the professor of Greek teach
Homer as epic poetry, and the professor of English teach Milton as epic
poetry, or will the teaching of poetry be avoided by the Greek and Latin
departments entirely? Cicero and Demosthenes survive because they are
orators; Homer and Virgil live because they are epic poets, but the
departmental system either forgets that fact entirely or has three
professors teaching the same thing with confusion in the order and in
the rules of art. The departmental system, which is a university device
adapted for specialization, makes unity of education extremely difficult,
and has taken all the interest out of literature by teaching it as
everything else but literature!
Besides, as art is the power of doing, and science is chiefly
systematized information, the process of education for doing will be
different from the process of acquiring information. Too many cooks may
spoil the broth because cooking is an art, but too many sign-posts may
not always confuse the traveler. It is far easier to divide information
among various agents and impart it piecemeal than to apportion the
different faculties used in an art to different individuals who will
train them to act together harmoniously. Different teachers may very well
teach the geography of different countries, but it would not be feasible
to let one teacher have the right hand and another the left in teaching
the art of piano-playing.
Omitting the effect of personality, which is paramount in art, as the
history of all religious movements shows it also to have been in the
formation of character and in virtue, one cannot fail to see that
departments cannot well coöperate in giving the formation of art. In
fact, practically the art of composition has ceased to be the field of
concentration in modern high schools and colleges. All literatures,
even English, are taught mostly as sciences. The only wholesome reaction
in modern education against the predominance of science or systematized
information is found in the present vogue for psychological tests.
These are professedly tests of power, not of mere information, and in
them the power of self-expression through language is preëminent. All
the examinations are conditioned by the necessary medium of language,
and by far the greater number of tests are and must always be tests in
linguistic expression.
Language is the only practical measure of intelligence, and if such
tests win favor, they may result in establishing once more the art of
expression as the field of concentration or major subject in high schools
and colleges which give a general education. Language, when taught as an
art, educates the mind, giving it the powers of expression which are the
guaranties of the mind’s adequate education. Professors become teachers
of an art, not lecturers in a science. Perfect unity is found where
the finest models of self-expression in all languages, especially the
classical languages, are directed by one teacher to the mastery of the
art of expression in one’s own language.
XI
THE INTERESTING TEACHER OF LITERATURE
The nineteenth century was a century of science. Its atmosphere was
surcharged with scientific discoveries and scientific theories, and
radiated a scientific influence in every direction. Among other
effects of that all-pervading spirit we may mention two that entered
the classroom and deeply modified the teaching of literature. Science
insisted on concrete results and tended to emphasize mechanical methods,
enhancing system at the expense of personality.
System was looked upon in some sense as automatic. Such a widespread
delusion, which is not yet fully dissipated, was the logical outcome
of the mechanical explanation of the universe. The world had evolved
along the lines of inflexible laws. Man was part of the machine, and
though the mechanism was complicated in his case, yet it was nothing but
mechanism after all. If system could run the universe without the help of
personality, it would not be hard for it to run the little universe of
man. The same reasoning would hold in a classroom. The teacher might be
asked to touch the button, but the system would do the rest.
It would not seem to require much argumentation to show the fallacy of
such a theory. Do we not all know that nothing in this world is wholly
automatic? Motion is a function of personality. Perpetual motion in
systems and organizations, that would dispense with personality, is just
as absurd as the same proposal in the physical order. Nothing in this
world will run of itself without personal coöperation. Somewhere there
must be a living, breathing, responsible individual. We may have to
travel a long way to find him, but we shall find him, the man behind the
motion. It is so with machines; it is much more so with organizations and
systems and laws; it is most of all so in education. Latin or German or
physics or anything else without a teacher (cf. catalog of correspondence
schools) are phrases that belong to the language of advertisement which
has omitted from its ethics the chapter on lying. All success, all
interest, all enthusiasm are harvests whose sowing is in a human head or
human heart. Even the universe calls for the constantly applied force
of omnipotence to keep it from disintegrating into nothingness and the
watchfulness of Providence to prevent it from wrecking itself. While
writers on education have been tracing the causes of the decrease of
interest in the classics have they not been overlooking the necessary
factor of personality?
The other depressing effect upon education exercised by the scientific
atmosphere was the insistence upon concrete results, leading likewise
to the elimination of human interest. Science said to every branch
of knowledge, “Collect your data, classify your instances, make your
deductions, enunciate your laws.” The literary classics were bade to
stand and deliver. They had to have data and deductions and laws. Homer
and Virgil, Demosthenes and Cicero became the chosen camping-ground
of the specialists. The pupils that finished the _Iliad_ with a taste
developed, an imagination warmed, a soul uplifted, might be refused
a degree. The pupil who had Homer undergo the surgical operations of
specialism, who had him pigeon-holed, who had him weighed and counted,
was the honor man of the class. He could write an essay on Homeric
Æolisms or Homeric ship-building or Homeric word-building. He knew more
about Homeric pottery than Homeric poetry. What if his heart never beat
faster as he read; what if he was too busy measuring the length of
Homeric swords or analyzing the metal of Homeric armor, to drink in the
imaginative delight of battle, with Homeric peers, “far on the ringing
plains of windy Troy,” he was scientific, he had some concrete results to
show for his schooling, and he was the pet child of the century. Assets
of the mind could not be weighed or measured; his doctor’s dissertation
in his grip could. It contained just twenty-five thousand words, and
weighed one pound and a half, and had a superficial area of about a
hundred square yards.
The final outcome of the baneful influence of the scientific atmosphere
is the almost complete perversion of the good old word, scholar. No
one can lay claim now to the title scholarly, unless he is equipped
with a formidable array of facts and figures. He must bristle with the
fretful quills of half a hundred sciences. In the study of the classics
he is so busy with the words of the text that he has not time for their
meaning. When he has settled the conflicting claims of innumerable
variant readings and all the arguments for the same, he has no leisure
left for the old-fashioned practice of trying to appreciate the accepted
reading. Scholarship is now a matter of memory, a something that deals
with introductions, footnotes, excursuses and critical apparatuses. Plead
guilty to an ignorance of all this, and you may be indulgently permitted
to call yourself judicious, appreciative, discerning, capable of enjoying
a literary masterpiece, but you could not presume to call yourself
scholarly. Justin McCarthy, in an article about his old schoolmaster,
alludes to the same fact. “I never knew a scholar,” he declares, “so
thorough who was less of a pedant, but I ought to say, perhaps, that the
general character of his teaching was not what would be called in our
days scholarly.”
This steady elimination of the subjective element of education with
the corresponding development of the objective side during the years of
the nineteenth century, all tended to the extinction of the individual.
Another factor also coöperated in achieving this result. The classes in
school and college grew more numerous, and the schoolmaster became in
turn a teacher, a professor, a lecturer. With each change he drew further
away from his hearers. The greater the audience the weaker the personal
note, the less individual the expression. The lecturer on a classical
author must stray more from the text than the teacher. He is necessarily
more general and hence more impersonal. He feels bound to give facts more
than impressions. He is committed to the formulating of theories based
on a dissection of the text, and shrinks from setting forth the feelings
which a masterpiece excites. The lecturer tends to subordinate the author
to his lecture, where the teacher’s more humble lot leads him to efface
himself in the presence of the author.
This leads us to set forth the proper attitude of the teacher toward
the text, and we could not begin the discussion better than by giving a
further description of Justin McCarthy’s old schoolmaster.
“I have,” he wrote, in March, 1899, “the most delightful and
tender memories of my dear old schoolmaster in Cork. He was
not, indeed, the first schoolmaster I ever had, but he taught
me all or put me in the way of learning all that I have ever
known, and after this long lapse of time I feel as strongly as
ever how much I owe him. His name was John Goulding, and he
kept a school in the city of Cork, my birthplace.
“To make us understand what we were reading and enjoy it, to
make us wish to read more and understand it better—such was the
object of his whole method. There was very little of what is
called ‘getting by heart’ in his system, unless when he wished
to train memory merely for the sake of training it. When we
were studying some Latin author he told us all about the author
and the scenes described in the pages before us, and he invited
all manner of questions on the subject. He showed us on the
maps where the places were which the author was describing, and
he illustrated the author’s meaning as if he were an artist
illustrating a story.
“I do not know to describe his method of teaching better than
by saying that it was literary rather than scholastic. His
great desire was that a boy should be able to read Greek and
Latin as easily as he read Shakespeare and Addison, and he
regarded grammar as a necessary means to that end, but not
as the end itself. He always took care that historical and
geographical knowledge should work in with and illustrate our
literary studies.
“I can only say for myself that whatever love of books I
may have had I owe in the main to his teaching and to his
influence, and I can say with literal truthfulness that
throughout a busy life in public and in private his influence
and teaching have always been with me and are with me still.”
John Goulding would not be considered in our day a remarkable pedagogist
and has not bequeathed his name to a system of education; yet he presents
many traits of the true teacher, and these details of his life are
pertinent to our question.
The true commentator, whose suggestion we see in the Cork schoolmaster,
will not be a philologist, but will use philology; he will not be a
grammarian, but he will refuse no point of grammar that will help. He
will press every science into service, but he will be the slave of
none. He will remember that his supreme object in teaching is not to
compose a dictionary of antiquities nor to collect extracts for rhetoric
or examples for grammar. His object rather is and should be to bring
the pupil to the text, to bring the mind of the author to the mind of
the reader. Away from dictionary and grammar, away from footnote and
appendix, back to the text, should be the teacher’s cry. The text should
be the center upon which every source of information should be focused,
not the center from which to radiate to the cheerless circumference of
specializations. We do not contend for superficiality, for slipshod
grammar, for inaccurate erudition. Thoroughness, care, accuracy, must
rule in the classroom. We are simply for liberal education, which opposes
early specialization in courses and must equally oppose it in the
teaching of literature.
The study of the classics should key up the whole intellectual apparatus.
It should sharpen the critical faculties, warm the imagination, cultivate
the judgment, develop the taste, ennoble the appreciation, exercise,
partially at least, the reasoning faculty, and finally endow the student
with perfected powers of expression. To subordinate literature to any one
of the swarm of sciences that sprang into life last century is to limit
its efficiency and degrade it as a means of general culture.
The teacher, however, must not look for an infallible recipe in this
matter. He cannot expect to stir up interest in the pupils by any
prescribed formula, by a rigid system of handling the text. A scheme
of suggestions may be drawn up, topics for discussion or observation
may be arranged. Such devices are helpful, but they should not become
stereotyped, because they deaden when they are hard and fast. It is a
mark of a crystal to settle into straight lines at fixed angles; it is
characteristic of organisms to be yielding and pliable in their outlines,
while they retain their life. The meaning is the life of the text, the
meaning as it was in the author’s mind, with all the associations that it
had for him. Let the meaning be the guide, and the explanation will not
be dead. Let the teacher use systems and hints and topics and all other
devices as helps to arrive at the sense and meaning, not as inflexible
molds into which he must always pour his commentary. A chemist may have
weighed and labeled all the constituent elements of a living cell, and
he may even succeed in mingling them in such a way as to have all these
elements in the very places they are in life, but his mixture will not
have the principle of life, that wonderful, unanalyzable bond that
unites into one organism, permeates and vivifies the separate atoms and
molecules. Because his analysis is complete and perfect, it does not
follow that his synthesis will be complete and perfect. Neither may a
teacher expect to get the synthesis of a vital, interesting commentary
from the detailed formula of the literary laboratory. He must have his
finger on the pulse; he must have seized the beating, warm heart; he
must have grasped the permeating, vivifying soul of his author, if he
would make his commentary living, and there is no other way to the heart
blood of an author, except by loving, enthusiastic meditation of his full
meaning.
I remember the first time in class that Homer ceased to be for me an
example factory for grammar or a shop for Grecian antiquities. We had
been translating Homer and parsing Homer; we now began to read him. The
change was as easy as it was pleasant. The teacher simply went back
behind the dictionary and the grammar, behind the cases and the tenses,
to the author’s meaning. He made us see the old priest of Apollo walking
along the seashore. He made us realize the fact that he was coming to
speak for his daughter. Our attention was called to the completeness and
appropriateness of his little speech. In a word, we began to move in
the poet’s world. We had used the grammar and dictionary to get there,
but when we reached our destination, we alighted from the train. We
were bound for the land of Homer, not for that of Goodwin or Liddell &
Scott, and the sooner we left our dusty, noisy cars, the better for us.
Our professor knew the translation and knew the grammar, but he had
left them behind him. He was on higher levels, and he threw away his
mountain staff and his guide rope. We were with him there, and we entered
into his enthusiasm for the broad view before us. Homer had been for us
a venerable mausoleum of well-preserved and dignified, but very dead
mummies. His enthusiasm let the life and light into that ancient tomb,
and the mummies took off their wraps and lived and moved. From that day
of resurrection until the present, Homer has lived for me; from that time
I have heard the Homeric heart beat and felt the Homeric pulse throb.
Nor need the teacher who follows these methods have fear that he is going
wrong, or that he is neglecting the proper education of his pupils. He
is achieving, too, concrete results, an achievement that must not be
considered the monopoly of science. Science may not supplant literature
in the school-room. It would be a sad day for both if ever it did. As
regards observation and induction, it has not been our wish to protest
against the use of these methods, but rather against the limiting of
their scope. To observe grammar only or archeology or philology and
neglect the author’s meaning is as ridiculous as to observe the paint and
not the picture, to put a microscope to the marble and not notice the
statue. We do not want less development, rather we want more. Develop the
powers of observation, but do not think that the only powers are the
senses. The world of imagination and the world of thought offer wider
fields for observation than the world of external sense. The horizon of
the mind is not restricted to the sky line that narrows the vision of the
eye.
If you train the powers of observation in the laboratory by asking
the pupil to see, to touch, to taste, to smell, train them, too, in
the classroom, by asking them to listen to the harmony of a sentence,
to trace out the development of a thought, to appreciate the wit, the
beauty, the sublimity of a passage. There was observation and training of
the powers of observation before the test tube was blown or the dynamo
was wound. Science has opened up new and wonderful worlds, not one of
which would we see closed; but the lands of literature have not ceased
for that reason to be inviting, and the soul, wearied with facts and
hampered with figures, gladly escapes into the restful regions of higher
and ampler realities.
The crossing of the borders of mere expression, the living and moving
in the realms of meaning, the appreciative following of an author’s
mind in all journeyings, may not develop grammarians or philologists
or ethnologists or archeologists. Perhaps it is not the life-work of
classical literature to stock the market with such commodities. The
student who travels with a master-mind through the land of thought, now
captivated with a view just under his eyes, again catching a glimpse
of some far-off scene, all the more glorious in promise, because it
lacks definiteness of detail, such a one may turn out to be more of a
tourist than a local antiquarian and may suffer some inconveniences in
consequence. He will be set right by the local antiquarian on names and
dates connected with some obscure town, but in turn he will convey to his
learned friend some ideas on the relative importance of localities and on
the topography of the whole country. The tourist will not be provincial
or municipal or suburban. He will not mistake his native hamlet for the
world or make it the sole standard of excellence. The tourist will give
you a map; the local antiquarian will draw up a surveyor’s chart, with
the number of inches to the grade and the number of feet to the surface.
Should not the teacher of literature consider it his duty to encourage
the tourist, to introduce the student into the world of meaning, and not
to keep him with theodolite and the leveling-rod along the borders of
expression, counting words, measuring phrases, or drawing up lifeless
charts of tabulated facts? When the student has come home from his
travels, he may, if he chooses, lay aside his guide book, and, having
seen the world, confine his energies to mastering a portion of it. If,
however, he should have brought home from his wanderings nothing more
than a love of literature and all that means, will his teacher’s life
have been in vain? John Goulding of Cork might be considered not entirely
useless, if he gave us no more than Justin McCarthy, who thus describes
the results of his master’s work:
“I do not venture to say that Mr. Goulding’s method of teaching
was directly adapted to create a thoroughly scholastic
knowledge of Greek and Latin, and I do not know whether his
pupils would have been likely by means of his instruction alone
to take honors in any university competition, but I know that
it made all of us, who had a taste for such, ready and fluent
readers in Greek and Latin and as familiar with most of the
Greek and Latin poets as with Shakespeare and Keats. It was in
truth literary rather than scholastic instruction.”
XII
EDUCATING THE EMOTIONS
Life is full to the brim with emotions. Not war only nor political
rallies nor the excited throngs at sports are vibrant with emotion, but
there is not a single act of life which has not some emotion, quiet
or intense, as its source, its companion and its effect. Man ought to
be ruled by cold reason, but he responds to feelings and succumbs to
feelings.
Today more than ever in the history of the world is emotionalism rampant.
Civilization has made mankind a crowd. We touch elbows with the world.
The Egyptian hermit has now “the privacy of a goldfish in a glass bowl.”
An individual by himself may indeed deliberate and philosophize, but
a crowd feels and acts. As soon as it stops cheering, it begins to
disintegrate into thinking individuals, who creep silently back to the
hermitage of home. The war, with its drives of all kinds, the elections,
the athletic contests, have made us familiar with the nature of a crowd.
The mob is a high-pressure crowd, and the feelings which burn in the
crowd explode violently in a mob. Civilization has brought mankind into
the closeness of a crowd, but not yet to the explosive confusion of a mob.
War taught us too the great value of morale. What is morale? What is that
light in the sky, that solid ground under foot, that winged buoyancy of
the heart? Morale might be described as organized emotion. A crowd is
fickle because it feels instead of reasons. Morale is the counter-force
to fickleness. Emotions are awakened, are focused on a given point, are
stabilized, and the result is morale. Courage hardens to pluck, duty
flames into devotion and bravery is transfigured into heroism.
Life therefore is flooded with emotion, all the way from every action of
the individual up to the responsive crowd, yielding to panic, exploding
into violence or steadied by morale. What then is education doing for the
emotions? Whether education be considered a development of the individual
capacities, or an adjustment of man to the community, education should
not neglect the emotions. The controlling tendencies, however, of the
modern school would seem to ignore or belittle emotions. Modern schools
pride themselves on being practical and scientific. They have become
more immersed in matter than in man. They are materialistic in the wide
sense, or naturalistic, but they are less and less humanistic. Three
great fields lie before the spirit of man, the field of truth, the field
of beauty and the field of good. No traveler can reach beauty and good
except through truth, but education seems to think its work is done if it
travels the regions of truth and ignores the regions of beauty and good.
All education formerly could be divided into two stages, the earlier of
preparation, the later of application. The individual was taught to speak
and write and was equipped with the general information necessary to
all. He who was able to speak and write was able to express himself, and
self-expression, which argued that man’s powers were working normally,
was the satisfactory goal in the first stage of education. After the
development of the individual came his application to the study of his
life-work in professional schools and universities.
In the former of these two stages, as self-expression was the end,
language was the chief and almost exclusive means. Sciences were
relegated to the university and informational subjects were left strictly
subordinated, and the whole course was predominately humanistic.
Modern education has profoundly changed this simple arrangement. The
university method of education and electivism and specialization have
been advanced to college, to high school and to grade school. Many
natural sciences have been systematized and brought into early classes.
The university chemistry and physics of fifty years ago are now in the
grades. Besides professional courses, pre-medical, pre-law, pre-divinity,
pre-engineering, pre-journalism, and in general pre-professional
studies are in our schools or at the doors. The trades are not behind
the professions. The million trades which concern themselves with the
production of raw material or with the manufacture of raw material into
finished products or with the distribution of finished products, all
these are knocking at the door or looking in the window of our school.
Nor is that all. As the professions want pre-professional and the trades
pre-trade courses, so the state demands pre-citizen courses in civic and
hygienics and military tactics, and the home exacts pre-family courses in
eugenics and many domestic sciences. Do not close your curriculum list
yet. The profession, the trade, the home, the state are not all, and to
leave out religion, which calls for pre-religious courses in private
schools, we have the whole field of sport and play in pre-dancing,
pre-ball-playing, and at last pre-movies. To make the conquest of the
practical complete, it is seriously advocated by a special committee of
the N. E. A. that this bewildering multiplicity of sciences, professions,
trades, civic, domestic and amusement courses should be begun at the
junior high school or seventh grade.
There is the contrast. Life is emotional. The early schools that used
to be devoted chiefly to writing and speaking, are now crowded with
a multiplicity of fact subjects, and even language and literature,
the most humanistic and emotional subjects of our courses, are taught
theoretically by university and scientific methods. In the Jesuit _Ratio
Studiorum_, which did not differ essentially from other systems, four
years of the lower schools were given to correct expression of the truth,
one year to the element of interest, or beauty, in expression, and one
whole year to the element of force, or good, in expression. These two
latter classes were called humanities and rhetoric and correspond to the
present freshman and sophomore classes in Jesuit colleges.
The reason why a whole year was given to the elements of interest and
force in self-expression is found in the twofold nature of emotions.
One set of emotions arises from the apprehension of good or avoidance
of evil. Another set arises from the perception of the novel, humorous
and beautiful. These latter comprehend the emotions of surprise, wonder,
delight, awe, in general, the esthetic emotions. The other emotions,
called appetitive, include love and hate, with desire and fear, joy and
sadness, pity and anger and many others.
Fortunately for the teacher the teaching of emotions is somewhat
simplified by the fact that both kinds of emotions respond, not to
abstract truth but to truth in the concrete and concrete truth takes on
beauty or good and awakens emotions through the imaginations of teacher
and student. Teachers who themselves imagine will awaken emotions and
educate emotions by exercising them. Teachers who imagine will make
pupils imagine by making them translate all truth from the abstract
to the concrete. The perpetual question on the lips of the teacher,
“For instance?” will embody truth in the concrete, exercise students in
imagination and make truth emotional and abiding.
Interesting and enthusiastic teachers are always training emotions.
Emotion is not imparted by instruction; it is kindled by contact.
Teachers who have their subjects transferred from dead books to their
warm, living imaginations, will be interesting, will be moving. They
will excite surprise and wonder by novelty and beauty of presentation.
They will make their classes expand with love or shrink in horror at the
pictures of good or evil.
After imagination and actual feeling on the part of both student and
teacher, the next best means of educating emotions is the stimulating
of action, especially in the way of original self-expression through
the written and spoken word. One of the happy tendencies of our modern
education is the restoring of oral expression to its former high place.
These means just mentioned will be helpful in any subject of the
curriculum, but the principal instrument in the schools for training
the emotions will be literature. Literature is the embodiment of human
emotions, in story, in essay, poem, and speech. The schools must hold
on to the teaching of literature. They must make a stand against the
imperialism of facts and so-called practical subjects. The schools must
never forget that it is at least just as practical to have a heart in
life as to have a head. A modern French scholar has said: “Humanities
and letters are man himself, to remove them from education, it would be
necessary to commence by taking man from man.”
Instruction in trades is a knack, not an education of man. A savage can
learn to run an automobile, and there are many today running automobiles,
but a savage does not enjoy literature or produce literature. Science has
its center outside of man, it is impersonal and unemotional. Literature
is human, is personal, it appeals to the heart which must not be starved
while the head is stuffed.
But even when the teachers of literature have the works of man in their
hands, they must not rob them of all emotions by making their teaching of
them historical only, or analytical only or theoretical only, lowering
Macbeth to a footnote in Scottish history or to an argument for the
theory of the romantic movement or to a dissertation on the psychology of
temptation. Literature must be taught as literature, not as history, not
as ethics. Literature should be taught as an art, not as a science. The
teacher should keep self-expression in view. The teacher will consider
the work of literature as the expression of a man. Before the class the
masterpiece of literature will grow and crystallize into unity. The
students will watch its creation; they will reflect the light from the
eyes of an enthusiastic teacher; they will grasp the truth vividly and
emotionally; they will be thrilled with the truth that has taken shape
in their teacher’s imagination, that has been dramatized before them in
suggestive detail, that will teach the students themselves how to think,
how to imagine, how to find for the embodied truth a local habitation and
a name, how to express themselves in words which fascinate and inflame.
So will the emotions by their exercise be developed and by their
expression be controlled. The world of the classroom is a little world
and its tiny emotions are as dew-drops to a deluge, but for the young
hearts in school the world of the classroom is a gigantic world and its
slight emotions are adequate to teach beginners. For a dew drop may be a
deluge for a violet and its very food and life.
XIII
KEEP THE CLASSICS BUT TEACH THEM
This is not the time to drop Latin or Greek openly or under the
subterfuge of optional electives. Colleges everywhere are crowded.
Buildings are too small for the students; classes are too large for the
professors. Now is the time to impose stricter conditions rather than to
open wider the doors to colleges, and now is the proper time to restore
the classical languages, and especially Greek, if not to favor, because
knowledge maketh a bloody entrance, and its weapons are resented, at
least to respectable toleration, by teaching them in the right way. Do
not empty the baby with the bath, but do draw off the stagnant waters
and let the bright showers sparkle and sing and refresh. Don’t throw out
Greek, but do teach Greek as literature, as the art of self-expression,
as a practical and permanent possession of the student through
appreciation and through composition in his own language.
Greek authors used to be put in the students’ hands with a Latin
paraphrase. In Jesuit schools the explanation of the author included a
translation which might be dictated to the class. This was done because
in Latin, and especially in Greek, which was not the language to be
used in life, the proper and real work began after the interpretation
was known. That proper work was artistic appreciation and artistic
reproduction in one’s own language, formerly Latin and now various
languages. Rather than cast out Greek, furnish the students with Loeb
or Jebb or Murray or Lang, shorten grammatical drill, and then center
attention on the appreciation and the reproduction of the finest
literary art of all ages, exacting compositions written and spoken in
the student’s own language. This is not a revolutionary proposal, the
system now prevalent is revolutionary; but it is a proposal to relegate
to the university the specialism and scientific handling of literature,
and an earnest plea to retain or restore to the classics, especially
Greek, their age-old method, proper to the general training of academy
and of college and profitable to every student if the art of speaking and
writing is of lifelong utility.
The teaching of literature has a handicap which is not found in the
teaching of other arts. A painter must know some practical facts about
preparing and applying paints, but he need not know the whole chemistry
of pigments or the physics of colors. The sculptor must choose the
right kind of marble, but he does not take a course in geology. In all
arts except literature the contact with the artist’s work is almost
immediate. But in literature a language must be mastered, and in
mastering that language a thousand sciences have obtruded themselves
between the student and the masterpiece. Gustav Foch of Leipsic published
some years ago a catalog of dissertations printed in Germany during the
latter part of the nineteenth century. The catalog, which was by no means
complete, containing only the items he was prepared to furnish, listed
27,000 titles. This formidable number concerned itself entirely with the
Greek and Roman writers and embodied special studies on the history, the
evolution, the text, the erudition of classical literature. Practically
nothing of this immense flood of special dissertations touched on the art
of literature.
Now, if all this tremendous erudition were left to the university,
where it properly belongs, not much harm would be done; but unhappily
the study of literature as a science has almost completely excluded its
study as an art. The small school of Dissen, Rehdantz and Blass, who
represented in Germany the artistic appreciation of Greek literature, was
submerged by the immensely greater number of scientific investigators.
The classical poets, with the exception of Homer, fared better than the
prose authors; but all literature, instead of being a help to the art of
composition, was subordinated to establishing a theory or to exemplifying
a generalization.
France resisted almost entirely this scientific obsession of literature.
England held out long. In both of these nations composition in the
classical languages was a fixed feature of the schools. Victorian
literature is steeped in the classics, especially of Greece; the golden
age of England’s eloquence, the age of Chatham, Fox and Burke, preceded
the scientific era of classicism and was the product of artistic
appreciation and of composition.
What of America? The earlier schools followed French and English
traditions and taught the classics with literary appreciation and with
fruitful results for the literature of America. Then later America
sent its professors to Germany; specialism and the departmental system
separated literature entirely from the classics; composition ceased
except as a means of learning grammar, thus establishing a complete
reversal of the original practice, where grammar was a means to
composition.
It would be untrue to say that all the erudition, discovered and
systematized by numerous sciences and centering upon the classics, was
useless or unprofitable. Even the immense library which the Wolfian
theory of Homeric origins brought into existence has not been entirely
in vain. Germany of the nineteenth century was the Alexandria of the
modern world, and as Alexandrian criticism was the forerunner of the
best in Latin literature, perhaps the immense activity of scientific
investigators may have an artistic outcome. A selection of what is
good and true, and a clear, concise presentation of well-established
facts, such as Père Laurand gives in his excellent series, _Manuels des
Etudes Grecques et Latines_ (Picard, Paris), will help the study of the
classics. Erudition should take now its proper place of subordination.
The classics should resume the functions which history, evolution,
origins and other scientific approaches have taken away; the classics
should once more be studied primarily as works of art. The medium
and materials do not dominate other arts; they should not dominate
literature. Self-expression is the goal of all art; it should be the goal
of literature.
Have the teachers of the classics lost faith? Is artistic appreciation an
idle thing or is it a thing of beauty, a joy forever? The experimental
sciences are always changing in facts and theories. The chemistry of
a century ago is absurd; the chemistry of twenty-five years ago is
antiquated; the chemistry of today will be old tomorrow. As Remsen long
ago saw and insisted on, what is valuable in the teaching of chemistry
are the processes, not the theories, which will likely change tomorrow.
Chemistry, as a science, is a bit of classified information always
modified by research. Art and artistic appreciation is a thing of beauty
and a joy forever. Give a man appreciation of literature; let him taste
the beauty of Homer and of Sophocles and of Demosthenes, and you have
given him, not a catalog of facts which must always be rectified, not
a theory which must change with the facts, but a precious treasure in
the mind which will always remain. In teaching chemistry the processes
are more important than the temporary information; in the teaching of
literature the processes are at least equally valuable, and besides last
through life in abiding taste and in perfected self-expression.
Formerly reproduction was the aim of the teacher of the classics.
“Reproduction is the soul of the explanation or prelection,” is the way
early Jesuit pedagogy put it, and every student of philosophy knows
what the soul or formal cause contributes to the effect. How many in
explaining classical literature today guide themselves throughout by
the principle that their students are to reproduce artistically the
masterpiece which they explain? No doubt professors insist upon the
formation of clear ideas and further demand explicit judgments in the
way of propositions. Most too require that the links of reasoning
be sharply and definitely stated. Interpretation, in a word, is
well done. The intellectual element of the masterpiece is handled
satisfactorily. But what of the artistic form? Does the literature take
shape in the student’s imagination? Is the picture realized in the
teacher’s imagination and then by suggestion, through the sparkling
eye and sympathetic voice and interpreting gesture, by vivid, though
not histrionic, dramatization, is the author’s message staged in the
student’s imagination? Scientific analysis, especially where a text
becomes a tag to some learned generalization, often prevents imaginative
realization and thus precludes artistic appreciation of literature.
The teaching of the classics has been and is now justified by the general
training they impart, but it is chiefly when taught as literature that
they impart that general training. If the classics are subordinated to
the university lecturer’s specialty, then the classics are imparting
little general training and have hardly more right in the classroom,
except for indirect results which may accrue from contact with art, than
have special courses in conchology or entomology. Let the teacher look
upon the classics as art to be reproduced after being appreciated, and a
general training will be the outcome. Composition should be made the aim
of literature.
Idioms of languages, and their vocabulary and their structure differ, but
thought and imagination may be the same. Set all the languages of the
world before a moving-picture, and each language will tell the common
story on the screen to its children in its own way of speaking. So the
student of any language may learn from Homer how to select details and
group them into artistic wholes, how to carry on the narrative through
significant and choice events, how to dwell on the important and touch
lightly on the insignificant, how to relieve a story and intensify a part
of it by appropriate comparisons. As the student learns how to tell a
story, so too may he master the art of describing a scene, of creating
a character, of making a speech. He will be taught the way to focus an
idea and give it discriminating expression by the right word, the way to
embody good or evil in concrete and picturesque words and the way to be
proficient in all the elements and processes of composition. The Greek
Homer made the Latin Æneid, the Greek Theocritus made the Latin Eclogue
and, if Stedman is right, also the Tennysonian Idyll. The literary art of
Greek and Latin has given and will give artistic form to the student’s
vernacular.
The classics will give a general training if they are made to do so.
Literature will not impart a general training automatically. Art is
a habit arising from a repetition of acts. The art of thinking is
mastered by thinking, and the art of imagining by imagining, and that
thinking and imagining will be done well if done under the guidance of
masters. Has the literary art of Greece, which created Latin literature
and directly and indirectly shaped the literature of all civilization,
done its full work? Who can believe it? Every generation since Homer
has been influenced by the art of Homer in translation and imitation,
and no generations more so than those of Cowper and Morris and Lang in
England and of Bryant and Palmer in America. The time may come when
literary taste and literary art will be as well studied and demonstrated
in modern languages as in those of Latin and Greek; the time may come
when modern classics may be as well adapted for education as the
classics of Greek and Rome which have been in the classroom for century
upon century, but that time does not appear to be tomorrow or the day
after. If the art of self-expression is the best test of education,
if the art of self-expression is the most practical thing in life and
the most permanent treasure that can be gained in school, then Greek
literature, the finest masterpiece of self-expression, should remain,
and Greek literature should be taught, as for centuries it was taught,
with interpretation and translation furnished to the student, leaving
the time of training to be devoted not to special sciences proper to the
university, but to the general training in appreciation and expression,
proper to academy and college.
XIV
THE VITALIZER OF THE WORLD
This title is not an advertisement for a patent medicine; it is the
brief statement of an important historical fact. “Every schoolboy knows”
that the revival of learning in Italy came from the vitalizing touch of
Greek. Out of that renaissance, which the Jesuits took over and embodied
in their system of teaching, grew modern scholarship in England through
Linacre, Lilly, Colet and More, the forerunners of the Elizabethans. It
was the beginning of modern scholarship in Germany, through Erasmus, the
friend of these Englishmen, and through Melanchthon, whose name, like
that of Erasmus, marks the power of Greek: out of that renaissance sprang
the rejuvenated civilization of our day. Every schoolboy knows that Greek
brought the modern world to life, but is it as well known or remembered
that Greek has always been vivifying everything it touched?
The civilization of Rome in every part felt the influence of Greece. Rome
conquered the world by force of arms, but itself was humanized and then
humanized the world through Greece. Every modern language today feels
the force of Isocrates and Demosthenes through Cicero, and of Alcæus
and Sappho through Horace, and of Greek tragedy through Seneca and of
Homer through Virgil. When later the barbarians of the north severed
Rome from Greece and the Roman Empire and its civilization lay dead, who
brought the world to life again? “When the accurate knowledge of Latin
was declining in Gaul, even Greek was not unknown in Ireland.”[2] It
was the Irish monks who freshened into flame the blackening embers of
European civilization and began its restoration. The revival was brought
about through the schools of Bobbio and St. Gall, mostly indeed as the
scattered books of their libraries show, by means of Latin literature but
always with the help of Greek, as the same libraries testify. That was
an earlier renaissance in Italy and Switzerland. And who was the leading
figure in the revival in Spain about the same time? It was the Greek
scholars, Isidore of Seville and, a little earlier, Hosius of Cordova,
and, a little later, John of Gerona. Then France began to grope out of
barbarism under the leadership of Charlemagne, resuming close relations
with Greece and importing the Irish monks, Clement and Dungal, and the
English monk, Alcuin. But it was under Charlemagne’s successor, Charles
the Bald, that this new renaissance took on a fresh energy which did not
spend itself before the decline of scholasticism. John Scotus, John
the Irishman, who styled himself in his translation of Dionysius from
the Greek by the title of Erin-born, for a quarter of a century kept
France intellectually alive, and did it chiefly by his Greek. John, the
Erin-born, was the forerunner of scholastic philosophy, which caught
the vital force of Greek through another channel also. When Spain was
conquered by barbarians and lost its civilization, where did its Arabian
conquerors go for the seeds of the new life? The Arabs went to Greece,
gave Aristotle in translation to Europe, and ushered in the golden age
of medieval philosophy. Rightly does Traini (1345), on an altar-piece in
Pisa, picture St. Thomas Aquinas receiving the light of knowledge from
Christ through the Greek New Testament and from Aristotle on his right
and from Plato on his left. As Aquinas combined patristic and scholastic
theology, he merged in his works the twofold Greek influences of Plato
and Aristotle, who were the human aids in each of these theologies.
Pass over several centuries to the time when the Italian renaissance
had grown senile and when scholarship left Spain, Italy and, to a large
extent, France, and found its home in the north. These nations lost
touch with Greek and their scholarship died down, while life moved
northward in the wake of Greek. When F. A. Wolf went to Halle about the
beginning of the nineteenth century, he represented the reaction against
the realism of that day, and “his conflict with the school of useful
knowledge brought into clear relief his ideal of a culture founded on
Greek traditions.”[3] Time has shown that Wolf’s theories of Homeric
authorship are all wrong, but the stimulus he gave to scholarship lasted
all through the nineteenth century, and to no other single influence more
than to Wolf may Germany ascribe its undoubted supremacy in classical
learning during the last century. His inspiration came from the Greek,
and in his vitalizing of Germany he was associated with others who had
felt the same inspiration and were already beginning the influence that
still in a measure persists: Heyne in the classics, Lessing in criticism
and Winckelmann in art.
England’s partial reawakening under Queen Anne saw Bentley, the Greek
scholar, and his contemporary, Pope, translator of the _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_, and let scholars say what they will about Pope’s translation,
they cannot impugn the fine criticism of his introductions or the
lasting influence for good of his versions. Passing over the prime of
English eloquence, whose living roots, as Goodrich has shown, are in
Greek literature, we come to the fresh memories of our own time and to
the Victorian era. Again it is Greek which vitalizes every branch of
literature, philosophy and art with new and unexpected truth and life.
Without Greek the Victorian revival would not have come about. In poetry
recall Keats, who awoke to life through the reflected glory of Homer;
recall Cowper, translator of Homer, and Byron, who died for Greece,
and Moore, who translated Anacreon, and Landor and Arnold and Tennyson
and Browning, all of whom took substance and form and fire from Greek
sources. In essay-writing you have Brougham, eloquent advocate of Greek
oratory; De Quincey, who could, as his tutor said, at the age of thirteen
harangue a Greek crowd; Macaulay, who, even in manhood, weeps over his
Homer on the streets of London. In art there are Ruskin and Morris and
Pater, who are saturated with Greek thought. Think of statesmanship and
you will recall Lord Derby and Gladstone, political rivals, at one in
their love of Homer; think of criticism, and Lang, Saintsbury, Blackie,
Butcher and Jebb will say that through Greek they have dominated modern
criticism; think of history, and the names of Rawlinson and Grote and
Hallam, Grecians, will come forward in your mind. History! Why, you will
remember that all ancient history has recently been rewritten with the
spade, and it was Schliemann under the spell of Homer who turned the
first sod.
Go over the great names in literature and art, in philosophy, theology
and scripture, in the sciences of history, mathematics, law, government,
and you will find Greek giving life and vigor. Even in the newer sciences
founded on observation and experience, which have come into being within
a century, whenever an observer gets beyond the elementary stage of
research and classification, he will resort to Greece for principles
and intellectual categories just as he borrows the language of Greece
with which to name his discoveries. History shows that every people and
every system of education and every house of learning, when it gives up
Greek, is headed towards inferiority and decay, but when it turns with
fresh endeavor toward Greek it reaches forth to life and to light. Nor
is all this surprising or strained. Our civilization was born and grew
for centuries in Greece. Our Christianity was early translated into the
language of Greece and for centuries spoke and thought chiefly in that
tongue. So then in our minds and souls our youth will ever have been
Greek, and from Greek must ever come, as it has come in the past, the new
blood that will flush with dynamic energy the anemic arteries of cosmos,
the world, and of the microcosm, man.
XV
TRUE PRINCIPLES OF HOMERIC CRITICISM
The story of Phidias and his pupil, Alcamenes has often been told. They
competed for a prize in sculpture. The statue of Alcamenes was about
to be chosen because of its exquisite finish when Phidias objected
to any decision until the statues should be put in the high position
they were designed to occupy. At once, the opinions of the judges were
reversed, for the apparently rough lines of Phidias’s creation stood out
in sublime majesty, while the polish of Alcamenes’s was lost when the
statues were raised aloft. The story illustrates a splendid rule of art
which has often been forgotten in the study of Homer. The epics of Homer
were not made for the test-tube and the microscope. They were not made
even for readers; they were composed for listeners. Put them on their
proper pedestals and the minutiæ revealed by the grammarian’s microscope
will be lost in the grand sweep of the story. You would as soon halt
Shakespeare’s _Macbeth_ because of the anachronisms, or condemn Leonardo
da Vinci’s “Last Supper” because of modern masonry in the walls or
carpentry in the table, as apply the philological and archeological tests
of the higher critics to Homer.
Apply the tests of art to Homer and judge him by those. Take the matter
of the contradictions which critics have talked so much about. In many
cases, especially where mythology was concerned, the material the poet
had to handle bristled with inconsistencies and contradictions. Long ago
Aristotle laid down the sensible rule for drama, and it is equally true
for epic poetry, that the poet is not responsible for the improbabilities
in his materials. The sculptor may have flaws in his block of marble; the
painter may have defects in his lead or oil, or pigments; and the epic
poet found contradictions in the fairy stories of mankind which he wove
into the story he sang. That one consideration will sweep away instantly
heaps of higher criticism.
Again, the artist is more taken up with the end than he is with
the means. In the fervor of his composition he wreaks himself upon
expression, he burns to embody his ideal and, engrossed in that, he is
likely to be less observant of the material of his art. The achieving of
the effect is more to him than mathematical accuracy in the use of the
instruments by which he achieves the effect. He makes his hero win his
battle; he may unhappily forget some of the tactics or even the geography
of the battlefield. His object is not to teach the art of warfare or
furnish the topography of the country, but to tell an interesting story
in an interesting way. The _Iliad_ has a wall that vexes many critics.
It was built in the tenth year of the war, which was no time to build a
wall, and was put up simply because Achilles left the field. Besides,
according to these critics the wall appears and disappears strangely.
So the conclusion is: Homer did not build the wall, but some other poet
came along and projected his masonry into the epic. In answer it has been
shown that the wall behaves very well, but, whether it does or not, it
matters little. The poet is not a surveyor or a street commissioner. He
wished to make his story interesting, to make the character of Achilles
prominent, to bring some agreeable variety into what might prove a
monotonous catalog of similar battles. Those are reasons enough for a
poet to build a Chinese wall or reduce it to dust when he does not want
it, or conveniently overlook it in the heat of an imaginary charge.
A story-teller is more concerned to please his hearers than to guard
against inconsistencies which they would never detect as listeners, and
which even close readers did not detect for about thirty centuries. A
work of art is not to be judged as a mass of machinery is, nor is a poem
to be scrutinized with dictionary and grammar as you would a schoolboy’s
exercise. This is the statue of Phidias over again. A stage scene will
differ somewhat from a miniature, and an epic takes liberties with walls
and rivers and even mountains and oceans, liberties which would not be
tolerated in a quatrain. These principles are as obvious as daylight, but
apostles of the obvious are needed in abundance in the harvest fields of
higher criticism.
What is needed for Homer is a study of his art in a broad but not shallow
way, comprehensive and fundamental like Aristotle’s brief discussion.
For the wonderfully analytical mind of Aristotle Homer’s _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_ were models of unity, because he looked upon them as works of
art, not scrap-heaps of philology and archeology. Put the poems of Homer
on the pedestals for which he made them, for listeners who had to be
entertained and clamored for variety. “It is a trait of Homer,” says a
writer, “constantly to shift the scene. The motive may be weak, but the
eye of the poet was not on the motive, but on the scene; so he not only
shifts the scene but varies the description of the events.” The poet’s
eye, it might be added, is also like the orator’s, fixed steadily on his
audience, and the audience must be relieved even if masonry or geography
suffer.
The paramount principles of variety and growth of interest which govern
every good story hold sway in Homer. Take a staple action of the _Iliad_,
the battles. Homer’s audience wanted fighting, yet jaded listeners
and the artistic poet knew there must be in the fighting variety and
growth of interest. Even in the matter of killing men, which seems to us
unimportant but which would not be to an audience of fighters, Homer has
shown a wonderful variety. A German professor has diagnosed the Homeric
surgery with all the thoroughness of his class. The conclusions may be
found in Seymour’s _Life in the Homeric Age_. The number and variety of
the wounds, the weapons used, the percentages of fatalities, are all
given in full detail. “Hardly could the poet have covered more completely
the possibilities of wounds for the human body if he had proceeded
systematically and mechanically.” Some will have it that Homer was a
surgeon and an army doctor. Certainly the history of anatomy has its
first chapter in the _Iliad_.
But to pass over the variety displayed in the wounds and other smaller
points, consider the actual fighting. For the maneuvers we may refer to
two interesting chapters in Lang’s _World of Homer_, where the variety
and consistency of Homeric warfare are well described and defended
against the dissectionists. The point, however, we are working toward
is the variety shown in even the external circumstances of the warfare.
A closer study than we can afford to give would reveal more variety,
but we may mention the plain, the wall, the river, the night as in the
tenth book, the mist. These are the various circumstances which the poet
introduces into his battles, relieving the monotony and sustaining the
interest. There is no falling off. The different heroes, too, succeed one
another; the victory alternates from one side to the other; the battle
on earth has its echo among the gods. The interest rises. Patroclos
enters the fight, and then his fallen body becomes the center of the
struggle, as the wall and the ships had been before. Something, too, is
left for Achilles. Ferocious as may have been the fighting before, it
becomes a veritable shambles when Achilles enters the fray. Never were
such frightful wounds, never such rivers of blood as may be witnessed in
Book XX “when the black earth ran blood,” “when beneath the great-hearted
Achilles his whole-hooved horses trampled corpses and shields together;
and with blood all the axle-tree below was sprinkled and the rims that
ran around the car, for blood-drops from the horses’ hooves splashed
them and blood-drops from the tires of the wheels. But the son of Peleus
pressed on to win his glory, flecking with gore his irresistible hands.”
Then follows the battle in the river, and finally the battle of the gods
themselves, and after the necessary relief and lull and reawakening of
interest comes the last battle of all and the climax of the poem in the
conflict of Achilles and Hector.
A study of the art of Homer along its great lines will give us the true
principles upon which to judge him. Such a study will put him in the
right perspective. The statue of Phidias will mount on high where its
artist wished to have it enshrined. The _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ were meant
to cross the bronze threshold of some great palace, “where there was
a gleam as it were of sun or moon through the high roofed hall of a
great-hearted King. Brazen were the walls which ran this way and that
from the threshold to the inmost chamber, and round then was a frieze of
blue and within were seats arrayed against the wall this way and that.”
Then “after the men had put from them the desire of meat and drink,”
they called upon the minstrel. “For minstrels from all men on earth get
their meed of honor and worship; inasmuch as the muse teacheth them the
paths of song and loveth the tribe of minstrels.” “And the minstrel being
stirred by the god began and showed forth his minstrelsy and took up the
tale where it tells how the Argives sailed away.” That was the setting of
the Homeric Epic, and thus speaks one whose “heart had melted at the song
and whose tears wet his cheeks beneath his eyelids.” “Verily it is a good
thing to list to a minstrel, like to the gods in voice. Nay, as for me, I
say there is no more gracious or perfect delight than when a whole people
makes merry, and the men sit orderly at feasts in the halls and listen
to the singer and the tables by them are laden with bread and flesh, and
pours it into cups. This fashion seems to me the fairest thing in the
world.”
There is the place that Homer chose for his matchless poems, and there
they should be judged. The hearts that melt with song are not searching
for digammas or Æolic forms. They want the story, the long voyages and
the strange adventures, the swaying lines of battle and the prowess of
heroes. They look for and recognize the different characters which must
be as varied and as clearly marked as in the life around them. They must
not be surfeited with too much of anything. Voyages and battles must vary
and grow in intensity and be crossed with pictures of nature, brief but
thrilling and immensely relieving,—the lion, the wheat field, the tossing
ocean and the steady downfall of an unending snow storm. With these and
the plot entangling and disentangling, the listeners to Homeric song and
story will not look for that polished smoothness and frigid exactness,
the absence of which vexes the minds of modern Germany. Phidias’ statue
occupies its proper pedestal, and the true judges award to Phidias his
well-deserved prize.
XVI
THE CHILD-TEST OF LITERATURE
Their elders are too busy these days devising tests for the children. Is
it not time for the children to retort on their testers? “Having pried
and prodded into us to see if we measure up to you, dear elders, let us
now see,” the children may well say, “whether you measure up to us.” A
great philosopher wished to make man the measure of everything. We have
a truer, a divine philosophy, a philosophy all the more persuasive, and
that philosophy makes the child the measure and test of man’s worth
and the arbiter of his eternal destiny. “Whosoever shall not receive
the kingdom of God, as a child, shall not enter it.” The millstone
mooring the scandalizer in the ooze of ocean’s darkest depths and the
angels who see the face of their little one’s Father, these are the
extreme sanctions which guarantee the accuracy of the child-test for the
measurement of man.
The child-test has often been applied to man’s morals. Onan and Sanger,
Sparta and China, Calvin’s unchristian infant damnation and the
Christless infant sanctification of Pelagius, Malthus with his “Decrease
and subtract” and Moses with his “Increase and multiply,” all, from
individuals to nations, are ample evidence that the child is set for the
ruin and resurrection of many in Israel. The child-test is surely potent
in rating the world’s moral morons and moral geniuses.
Can the child-test be applied to man’s art and literature? Recall the
words of Job, “Who shut up the sea with doors, when I made a cloud the
garment thereof and wrapt it in a mist in swaddling bands?” That view of
the sea in the swaddling bands of infancy is a proof of an imagination
looking at the universe with the eyes of the Creator. The child-test
is a measure of the sublimity of Hebrew literature. The revelation of
Genesis gave the literature of the Bible an outlook never reached by
other literatures. As the promise of the Messiah kept a hallowing guard
over the cradles of Israel, so the vision of the Creator blotted out from
the concepts of the Hebrew imagination the crude and monstrous nativities
which make all pagan mythologies hybrid and miscegenetic.
Homer has fewer than others have of these nightmares, but it is not in
them nor in the tinsel sublimity of his divine machinery that Homer has
touched a wider circle of readers than any of his epic brethren. Rather
it is in his unaffected and transparent portrayal of the human nature
we all understand that Homer has set the heart of the world throbbing
faster. Not the celibate Virgil, nor the Puritanic Milton, dissolver
of matrimony, nor yet Dante, idealizer of the maiden Beatrice, gave us
childhood and motherhood as Homer has done. Homer is no sentimentalist,
but he has wider sympathies with mother and child than any author on the
rolls of literature. The mother cow, lowing over its first-born; the
mother dog, growling in defense of its litter; the mother lion, all its
brow wrinkled with the greatest frown ever sketched; the mother bird,
starving and dying for its young, yes, even the mother wasp, solicitous
for its menaced brood (note that, S. P. C. A.!) these are evidences of
Homer’s tenderness. Achilles likens his friend Patroclus to a little
maid fondly catching at her mother’s dress and getting in her way with
persistent tearful pleading till the mother takes her up. In the _Iliad_,
Helen’s sorrow for her abandoned Hermione is a pleasing element in her
repentance. Odysseus proudly styles himself the father of Telemachus;
the mother of Odysseus dies for longing of him, and his father, Laertes,
in the most exquisite of the many recognition scenes of the _Odyssey_,
passes from view in that story, while his long-absent son tells him of
the fruit trees, “which,” says Odysseus, “thou once gavest me for mine
own, and I was begging of thee this and that, being but a child and
following thee through the garden.” We have natural sketches of the
babyhood of his two heroes, Achilles and Odysseus.
Yet, more than all these pictures, stands out in the world’s imagination
Hector’s boy, whose future fate Andromache, after Hector’s death,
details with a mother’s despairing vividness, whose childish terror at
his father’s helmet, while Andromache smiles through her tears, has
brought home to unnumbered thousands the grim specter of war. That scene
has etched itself so deeply into the heart of mankind that it has almost
ruined Homer’s poem, alienating universal sympathy from Achilles to
Hector.
After Homer, the child _motif_ in literature is less in evidence.
Drama, of its nature, has little place for the child except to put a
keener poignancy in tragedy. So Sophocles used the children of Œdipus.
So in his time did Shakespeare with the princes of _Richard III_, with
Marcellus in _Coriolanus_, with Macduff’s sprightly lad, and with others.
Theocritus has a child to furnish an aside for the gossipy Syracusan
dames. Anacreon introduces the counterfeit of childhood in the Cupids,
whose sophisticated conventionality checked invention in Elizabethan
lyrics as it did in art from Pompeii to Rubens and later. Cupids are
symbols, children of the brain, not of the heart, and figure in song and
painting as signs. They have a message for the mind; they do not touch
the feelings, while on the other hand, they free the artist from seeking
in life the expressive significance that Homer gave the child.
Literature had to wait long for the naturalness of Homer to reappear.
Virgil has a little of it in Ascanius, another Cupid, and it is
significant that Virgil’s one outstanding natural touch is found in
the famous Messianic eclogue: _Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere
matrem._ As for other Latins, whether it be bachelorship or the erotic
preoccupation of the lyricists, or the supreme power of the father
in Roman customs and law, Latin literature does not mirror for us
prominently the child and mother nor reflect their natural attractiveness
as found in Homer. Well, even Greece seems to have lost the art, and a
new inspiration was needed. That inspiration came with the Divine Child
of Bethlehem.
XVII
THE CHRIST-CHILD TEST OF LITERATURE
The influence of the Christ-Child on painting was tremendous and
lasting. A history of Christian art could be written around the Madonna,
and the subject has attracted the notice of many writers, indexed in
art libraries. Alice Meynell has treated the subject attractively and
with her studious insight in the _Children of the Old Masters_. In the
Catacombs, Christian art felt and portrayed the Divine Child and His
Mother. Byzantine ornamentation and mosaics gave the Child a rigid
majesty which veiled His winsomeness, but the master painters came
closer to childhood and brought Madonnas from the walls of crypts and of
cathedrals to the devotional shrine and the chapel, making the Child less
architectural and more natural.
In literature the Christ-Child had equal influence until Puritanism tried
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.
A passage of poetry is designedly taken in this lesson to show how poetry
can be made to contribute to the art of expression. Literature for some
is history, for others philosophy. These center attention on the facts
or ideas. Literature for others is a dreamy, mysterious thing, which you
must look at with awe, speak about with esoteric rhapsody and carefully
lock up again in a glass case. A forward looking lesson in literature
must know what the passage means, but is usually not concerned with the
origin and past history of the author’s meaning. The forward-looking
lesson will not pretend to solve all the mysteries of art and beauty but
will take out of the clouds and put clearly before the class some point
in the art of expression, a point which will be practical and of everyday
use. Such a lesson will be as decidedly vocational as hammering a nail or
rigging up a radio set or rushing around a gymnasium.
The purpose ever before the literature teacher’s mind is appreciation,
leading to mental action and through repeated action to the art of
expression.
THE LESSON
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
I. ANALYSIS OF THOUGHT
1. _Understanding._—The meaning of each word, the meaning of each line,
the meaning of the whole stanza. This should not be a mere passive
understanding. Students should be made to reëxpress the ideas, not only
by paraphrase in other words but especially by _imaginative realization_.
“For instance,” “Just like what?” are two phrases to be often on the
teacher’s lips. “Have you a heard a curfew?” “Have you heard a knell
tolling?” “Did you ever see in picture or in reality a lowing herd
winding o’er the lea?” A thought illustrated by the thinker’s imagination
is realized fully, is felt as well as grasped, and will persist.
2. _Judgment._—What is the logical subject and logical predicate of each
line and of the whole stanza? That is, what is the author’s chief topic
and what does he say about it? This need not always be the grammatical
subject of the passage. The art of expression is not only apprehending by
vivid understanding, but it is also judging by predication, by affirming
or denying something of the subject. There is not a class of any grade
which cannot profitably exercise itself in clear and concise judgements.
The successive judgements briefly put are: The bell tells the end of day:
the cows return to the barn: the ploughman comes home: I am left alone in
the darkness.
3. _Reasoning._—As as single sentence may be analyzed into a definite
subject and a definite predicate for a judgment, so two or more sentences
may be compared to grasp the relation between them. Poetry does not go
through a process of reasoning. It states thoughts and presents pictures,
permitting the mind to infer. The three pictures in the opening lines
have a common trait which the mind detects: all three pictures are signs
of nightfall. The mind draws an inference which is inductive in nature,
and the whole stanza may be briefly stated: The coming of night leaves me
alone in darkness.
These stages in analyzing the thought are elaborated here. In practice
they may be expedited. Before being read, the judgment and inference
may be presented as problems for solution: What does the writer say in
each line? What one idea is found in the first three lines? What will
be the title, the head-line, the summary of each line and of the whole
stanza?[5]
II. ANALYSIS OF FORM
Form includes not only the words and sentences, their choice and their
arrangement, but also the texture and color of the thoughts and their
modification ending in their perfect expression, as contrasted with
the bare and limited statements already determined. In the study of
literature, words are not merely materials for philologizing, or merely
sentences, free opportunities for grammatical anatomizing with all the
bones properly numbered and labeled. Such analyses look chiefly backward
and are not productive of writers. Language anatomy has its great
utility, but literature, or the art of expression, must look to the
flesh and blood of the thoughts, to the personality, to the imagination,
to the concrete embodiment of the writer’s art. The student will take
up, therefore, the thought already analyzed and note and appreciate how
his author has clothed the ideas, the judgments, the reasoning. He will
reënact the creative process the author went through, and so here, with a
view to expression, he will strive to rival the excellence of Gray, but
will do so with his own thoughts.
_Grading._—At this stage the teacher may point out incidentally many
excellences in the art of expression, but will drill and have practice
on the particular excellence in expression, proper to his class. The
textbook ordinarily determines the grade, but if there is no textbook or
prescribed program, the teacher will determine his own order of matter.
_Right Word._—Let us suppose the teacher is teaching the art of using the
right word (_Model English_, 3), the word which states the thing exactly
in kind. He may center attention on the line:
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea.
The class will be drilled in the author’s choice of the right word
by considering other possible but less exact combinations, e.g.: A
number of noisy cows went reluctantly along. After this drill, the
class will appreciate what the right word is and be ready for the
expression of their own ideas in right words. They are not to paraphrase
Gray’s meaning. That has already been done, but they are to provide
subject-matter of their own and express it with a like excellence. Did
they continue to speak of cows, they could not better Gray, but if they
speak of bees or bloodhounds or cavalry or autumn leaves or rioters or
anything else that has come under their experience in life or in reading,
they might approach the exactness of Gray in giving the right word for
the sound, for the collection, for the action, for the manner and for the
place.
_Bees_: the buzzing swarm of bees circled thickly about the
hive.
_Bloodhounds_: the baying pack of hounds followed the trail
eagerly.
_Cavalry_: the clattering squadron of cavalry galloped swiftly
along the road.
_Autumn_: the heaps of rustling leaves were swept into every
corner by autumn winds.
_Rioters_: the yelling mob of rioters rushed wildly towards the
jail.
_Imagination._—Suppose the teacher is giving a lesson in imagination
(“Model English,” Chap. X). If one of the _General Methods_, say
_Reflecting_ (No. 69), is to be taught, then the class must vividly
picture in their imaginations Gray’s stanza. With the help of books on
the desk and with a gesture or two the scene and all its characters may
be _dramatized_. All this suggestively rather than with exact mimicry,
unless there is in question a passage that may be reproduced by the class
in a miniature pageant or play. To test whether the class is actually
imagining, have them quickly number, one after another, the things they
see and hear directly by the words and indirectly suggested by the words.
Or test in another way. Let each draw an outline of the frame of a
picture and show how they would illustrate any line or the whole stanza,
putting numbers on the blank space to locate the details and explaining
to the side what the numbers stand for.
Suppose a _particular method, significant part for the whole_ (No.
73) be the matter of the lesson, then the whole which is expressed by
Gray is “evening,” or “parting day,” pictured by three significant
details—curfew, cows and ploughman. Have the class take an opposite
situation—not evening in a graveyard in preparation for gloomy thoughts,
but morning on the farm looking to a busy, joyous day. Or again, what
significant details will suggest the hush of evening in a city or on
the sea; noon in a factory, closing of school in the afternoon, coming
of winter in December, dawning of spring in April, etc. Interest may be
accentuated if one student gives the details and others imagine what is
the whole suggested. For example: The cock crows a greeting to the rising
sun; the team of horses is hitched to the mowing machine, and soon the
clicking knives lay low the waving grass (farm); the crank is whirled
about with a swift revolution and jerking stop; the low purr of a hidden
engine steals upon the ear and a cloud of dust swallows up the rattling
car (a Ford); a sprig of shamrock graces the lapel of the coat; green
ribbons flaunt gayly above ruddy cheeks, and down the street steps a band
jigging Garryowen (St. Patrick’s Day). In the same way elements of force
or interest, metrical charm or poetic thought and many other points could
be taught from this stanza, according to the grade of the class before
the teacher. Whatever the passage taken, once the grade has been settled,
the artistic drill should be carried through the stages of grasping the
thought definitely, of appreciating it with discrimination, of repeating
the process of creation, of dramatizing the complete product, and finally
of self-expression on the part of the student, striving to rival the
author in the excellence he has studied.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Cf. De Wulf: _L’Œuvre d’Art et la Beauté_, p. 40.
[2] Sandys: _History of Classical Scholarship_, I, 438.
[3] Sandys, III, 54.
[4] This “mosaic of etymology” which I offer is not, I think, simply an
ingenious _tour de force_. It has a significance and a practical value.
It may illustrate the composite nature of the English language; it may
amuse a curious reader; it may enliven a Greek class with the touch of
actuality; it may disclose dim vistas into the distant past through the
medium of everyday language, exemplifying history through common things.
All the words of this phantasy are of Greek origin, except the article,
the pronouns, the prepositions and conjunctions, and a few other small
words: “so, as, then, home, let, go, do, all” and parts of the verb
“to be.” Skeat’s _Etymological Dictionary_ (Student’s edition) is the
authority. The exclusively technical words of modern sciences which are
almost wholly Greek have not, for the most part, been mentioned. It is
needless to remark that the prescriptions of the phantom’s pharmacy are
not authoritative.
This _jeu d’esprit_ has attracted so much attention as to be reprinted
by the American Classical Association and to be noticed by several
metropolitan editors. That attention is the motive for giving the article
permanent position in a book with which a novel plea for Greek has a
certain, though remote, connection.
[5] For analysis of thought, see _Model English_, bk. II, chap. X, by F.
P. Donnelly, S. J. Allyn and Bacon: Boston, New York and Chicago.
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