Pastiche and prejudice

by Arthur Bingham Walkley

Why does this queer combination of anthropoid appearance, unearthly noises, physical agility, and musical talent—so flat in description—make one laugh so immoderately in actual presentation? Well, there is, first, the old idea of the parturient mountains and the ridiculous mouse. Of the many theories of the comic (all, according to Jean Paul Richter, themselves comic) the best known perhaps is the theory of suddenly relaxed strain. Your psychic energies have been strained (say by Grock’s huge portmanteau), and are suddenly in excess and let loose by an inadequate sequel (the tiny fiddle). Then there is the old theory of Aristotle, that the comic is ugliness without pain. That will account for your laughter at Grock’s grotesque appearance, his baggy breeches, his beetle-like dress clothes, his hideous mouth giving utterance to harmless sentiments. Again, there is the pleasure arising from the discovery that an apparent idiot has wholly unexpected superiorities, acrobatic skill, and virtuosity in musical execution. But “not such a fool as he looks” is the class-badge of clowns in general. There is something still unexplained in the attraction of Grock. One can only call it his individuality—his benign, bland outlook on a cosmos of which he seems modestly to possess the secret hidden from ourselves. One comes in the end to the old helpless explanation of any individual artist. Grock pleases because he is Grock.

And now I think one can begin to see why literature (or if you think that too pretentious a word, say letterpress) fails to do justice to clowns. Other comic personages have their verbal jokes, which can be quoted in evidence, but the clown (certainly the clown of the Grock type) is a joke confined to appearance and action. His effects, too, are all of the simplest and broadest—the obvious things (obvious when he has invented them) which are the most difficult of all to translate into prose. You see, I have been driven to depend on general epithets like grotesque, bland, macabre, which fit the man too loosely (like ready-made clothes cut to fit innumerable men) to give you his exact measure. My only consolation is that I have failed with the best. Grock, with all his erudition, all his nicety of analysis, has failed to realize Pulcinella for me. And that is where clowns may enjoy a secret, malign pleasure; they proudly confront a universe which delights in them but cannot describe them. A critic may say to an acrobat, for instance:—“I cannot swing on your trapeze, but I can understand you, while you cannot understand me.” But Grock seems to understand everything (he could do no less, with that noble forehead), probably even critics, while they, poor souls, can only struggle helplessly with their inadequate adjectives, and give him up. But if he condescended to criticism, be sure he would not struggle helplessly. He would blandly thrust his feet through the seat of his chair, and then write his criticism with them. And (Grock is a Frenchman) it would be better than Sainte-Beuve.

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

Every critic or would-be critic has his own little theory of criticism, as every baby in Utopia Limited had its own ickle prospectus. This makes him an avid, but generally a recalcitrant, student of other people’s theories. He is naturally anxious, that is, to learn what the other people think about what inevitably occupies so much of his own thoughts; at the same time, as he cannot but have formed his own theory after his own temperament, consciously or not, he must experience a certain discomfort when he encounters other theories based on temperaments alien from his own. You have, in fact, the converse of Stendhal’s statement that every commendation from confrère to confrère is a certificate of resemblance; every sign of unlikeness provokes the opposite of commendation. So I took up with somewhat mixed feelings an important leading article in the Literary Supplement on “The Function of Criticism.” Important because its subject is, as Henry James said once in a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward, among “the highest speculations that can engage the human mind.” (Oho! I should like to hear Mr. Bottles or any other homme sensuel moyen on that!) Well, after reading the article, I have the profoundest respect for the writer, whoever he may be; he knows what he is talking about au fond, and can talk admirably about it. But then comes in that inevitable recalcitrancy. It seems to me that if the writer is right, then most art and criticism are on the wrong tack. Maybe they are—the writer evidently thinks they are—but one cannot accept that uncomfortable conclusion offhand, and so one cannot but ask oneself whether the writer is right, after all.

He is certainly wrong about Croce. The ideal critic, he says, “will not accept from Croce the thesis that all expression is art; for he knows that if expression means anything it is by no means all art.” Now the very foundation-stone of the Crocean æsthetic is that art is the expression of intuitions; when you come to concepts, or the relations of intuitions, though the expression of them is art, the concepts themselves (what “expression means”) are not; you will have passed out of the region of art. Thus your historian, logician, or zoologist, say, has a style of his own; that side of him is art. But historical judgments, logic, or zoology are not. Croce discusses this distinction exhaustively, and, I should have thought, clearly. Yet here our leader-writer puts forward as a refutation of Croce a statement carefully made by Croce himself. But this is a detail which does not affect the writer’s main position. I only mention it as one of the many misrepresentations of Croce which students of that philosopher are, by this time, used to accepting as, apparently, inevitable.

Now, says the writer, the critic must have a philosophy and, what is more, a philosophy of a certain sort. That the critic must have a philosophy we should, I suppose, all agree; for the critic is a historian, and a historian without a theory of realities, a system of values, i.e., a philosophy, has no basis for his judgments—he is merely a chronicler. (And a chronicler, let me say in passing, is precisely what I should call the writer’s “historical critic”—who “essentially has no concern with the greater or less literary excellence of the objects whose history he traces—their existence is alone sufficient for him.”) But what particular philosophy must the critic have? It must be, says the writer, “a humanistic philosophy. His inquiries must be modulated, and subject to an intimate, organic governance by an ideal of the good life.” Beware of confusing this ideal of good life with mere conventional morality. Art is autonomous and therefore independent of that. No; “an ideal of the good life, if it is to have the internal coherence and the organic force of a true ideal, must inevitably be æsthetic. There is no other power than our æsthetic intuition by which we can imagine or conceive it; we can express it only in æsthetic terms.” And so we get back to Plato and the Platonic ideas and, generally, to “the Greeks for the principles of art and criticism.” “The secret” of the humanistic philosophy “lies in Aristotle.”

But is not this attempt to distinguish between conventional morality and an ideal of the good life, æsthetically formed, rather specious? At any rate, the world at large, for a good many centuries, has applauded, or discountenanced, Greek criticism as essentially moralistic—as importing into the region of æsthetics the standards of ordinary, conventional morality. That is, surely, a commonplace about Aristotle. His ideal tragic hero is to be neither saint nor utter villain, but a character between these two extremes. Further, he must be illustrious, like Œdipus or Thyestes (Poetics, ed. Butcher, XIII. 3). Again, tragedy is an imitation of persons who are above the common level (XV. 8). It seems to me that the standards applied here are those of our ordinary, or conventional, morality, and I am only confused by the introduction of the mysterious “ideal of the good life.” It seems to me—that may be my stupidity—but it seemed so, also, to our forefathers, for it was this very moralism of Greek criticism that led men for so many centuries to demand “instruction” from art. And that is why it was such a feather in Dryden’s cap (Dryden, of whom our leader-writer has a poor opinion, as a critic without a philosophy) to have said the memorable and decisive thing: “delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy; instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it delights.”

This “ideal of good life” leads our leader-writer far—away up into the clouds. Among the activities of the human spirit art takes “the place of sovereignty.” It “is the manifestation of the ideal in human life.” This attitude, of course, will not be altogether unfamiliar to students of æsthetics. Something not unlike it has been heard before from the “mystic” æstheticians of a century ago. It leaves me unconvinced. I cannot but think that that philosophy makes out a better case which assigns to art, as intuition-expression, not the “place of sovereignty” but the place of foundation in the human spirit; for which it is not flower nor fruit, but root. You see, Croce, like “cheerfulness” in Boswell’s story of the other philosopher, will come “breaking in.”