Principle in Art, Etc.

by Coventry Patmore

Coleridge, who had little technical knowledge of any art but that in which, when he was himself, he supremely excelled—poetry—had nevertheless a deeper insight into the fundamental principles of art than any modern writer, with the sole exception of Goethe. And this is one of his many fruitful sayings: “All harmony is founded on a relation to rest—on relative rest. Take a metallic plate and strew sand on it, sound an harmonic chord over the sand, and the grains will whirl about in circles and other geometrical figures, all, as it were, depending on some point of sand relatively at rest. Sound a discord, and every grain will whisk about without any order at all, in no figures, and with no point of rest.”

Without pretending to be able to trace this principle of rest to more than a very limited distance, and in a very few examples, I think it is worth notice in a time when art generally is characterised by a want of that repose which until recent times has especially “marked the manners of the great.” Look through the National Gallery, and few pictures will be found which would not add a grace of peace to the house they were hung in, no matter how wild the subject or passionate the motive. Step into an Academy Exhibition, and there will scarcely be discovered a dozen canvases in a thousand which, however skilful and in many respects admirable they may be, would not constitute points of unrest, if they were in daily and hourly sight. It is the same with nearly all modern poetry, sculpture, and architecture; and if it is not true of music, it is because music absolutely cannot exist without some reference to a point or points of rest, in keynote, fundamental strain, or reiterated refrain.

It might at first be supposed that, in a picture, this point should be that on which the eye should repose in order to bring the remainder into focal proportion; and this is true with regard to those painters who paint on the theory that the eye is fixed, and not roving in its regard. But this theory has never been that of the greatest times of art. Crome, Constable, and Gainsborough’s landscapes do not fade off from a certain point on which the eye is supposed to be fixed; yet there will usually be found some point, generally quite insignificant in matter, on which, indeed, the eye does not necessarily fix itself, but to which it involuntarily returns for repose.

The most noteworthy remark to be made about this point of rest is, that it is not in itself the most but the least interesting point in the whole work. It is the punctum indifferens to which all that is interesting is more or less unconsciously referred. In an elaborate landscape it may be—as it is in one of Constable’s—the sawn-off end of a branch of a tree: or a piece of its root, as it is in one of Michael Angelo’s pieces in the Sistine Chapel. In the Dresden “Madonna” of Raphael it is the heel of the Infant. No one who has not given some thought to the subject can have any idea of the value of these apparently insignificant points in the pictures in which they occur, unless he tries the experiment of doing away with them. Cover them from sight and, to a moderately sensitive and cultivated eye, the whole life of the picture will be found to have been lowered.

In proportion to the extent and variety of points of interest in a painting or a poem the necessity for this point of rest seems to increase. In a lyric or idyll, or a painting with very few details, there is little need for it. It is accordingly in the most elaborate plays of Shakespeare that we find this device in its fullest value; and it is from two or three of these that we shall draw our main illustrations of a little-noticed but very important principle of art. In King Lear it is by the character of Kent, in Romeo and Juliet by Friar Laurence, in Hamlet by Horatio, in Othello by Cassio, and in the Merchant of Venice by Bassanio, that the point of rest is supplied; and this point being also in each case a point of vital comparison by which we measure and feel the relationships of all the other characters, it becomes an element of far higher value than when it is simply an, as it were, accidental point of repose, like the lopped branch in Constable’s landscape. Each of these five characters stands out of the stream of the main interest, and is additionally unimpressive in itself by reason of its absolute conformity to reason and moral order from which every other character in the play departs more or less. Thus Horatio is the exact punctum indifferens between the opposite excesses of the characters of Hamlet and Laertes—over-reasoning inaction and unreasoning action—between which extremes the whole interest of the play vibrates. The unobtrusive character of Kent is, as it were, the eye of the tragic storm which rages round it; and the departure, in various directions, of every character more or less from moderation, rectitude, or sanity, is the more clearly understood or felt from our more or less conscious reference to him. So with the central and comparatively unimpressive characters in many other plays—characters unimpressive on account of their facing the exciting and trying circumstances of the drama with the regard of pure reason, justice, and virtue. Each of these characters is a peaceful focus radiating the calm of moral solution throughout all the difficulties and disasters of surrounding fate: a vital centre, which, like that of a great wheel, has little motion in itself, but which at once transmits and controls the fierce revolution of the circumference.

It is obvious, as I have indicated, that a point of rest and comparison is necessary only when the objects and interests are many and more or less conflicting; but the principle is sometimes at play in forms and works in which we should scarcely have expected to find it. An armlet, or even a finger-ring, gives every portion of the nude figure an increase of animation, unity, and repose. The artistic justification of the unmeaning “burthen” of many an old ballad may probably be found, at least in part, in the same principle; as may also be that of the trick—as old as poetry—of occasionally repeating a line or phrase without any apparent purpose in the repetition.

Of course the “point of rest” will not create harmony where—as in most modern works—its elements are absent; but, where harmony exists, it will be strangely brought out and accentuated by this in itself often trifling, and sometimes, perhaps, even accidental accessory.

VII
IMAGINATION

There are things which can never be more than approximately defined, and which, even when so defined, are only to be rightly understood in proportion to the degrees in which they are possessed by those who would attempt to comprehend them. Such are, for example, “imagination” and “genius”; which, being faculties that are possessed in a very low degree by nearly all and in a very high degree by extremely few, are matters of the most general interest and the most variable apprehension. That such faculties should, however, as far as possible, be understood is of great practical importance to all persons; inasmuch as it greatly concerns all to know something of the signs, sanctions, and claims of those powers by which they are inevitably more or less ruled, externally and internally.

It is nothing against a definition of an entity which cannot be fully defined to say that such definition is “new.” It was objected against an interpretation by St. Augustine of some Old Testament history or parable, that other authorities had given other interpretations. “The more interpretations the better,” was the saint’s reply. In such cases various definitions and interpretations are merely apprehensions of various sides of a matter not wholly to be embraced or comprehended by any single definition or interpretation. In recent times genius and imagination have come to be widely regarded as one and the same thing. They are not so, however, though they are perhaps indissolubly connected. The most peculiar and characteristic mark of genius is insight into subjects which are dark to ordinary vision and for which ordinary language has no adequate expression. Imagination is rather the language of genius: the power which traverses at a single glance the whole external universe, and seizes on the likenesses and images, and their combinations, which are best able to embody ideas and feelings which are otherwise inexpressible; so that the “things which are unseen are known by the things which are seen.” Imagination, in its higher developments, is so quick and subtle a power that the most delicate analysis can scarcely follow its shortest flights. Coleridge said that it would take a whole volume to analyse the effect of a certain passage of only a few syllables in length. In dealing with such a work as The Tempest criticism is absolutely helpless, and its noblest function is to declare its own helplessness by directing attention to beauty beyond beauty which defies analysis. The Tempest, like all very great works of art, is the shortest and simplest, and indeed the only possible expression of its “idea.” The idea is the product of genius proper; the expression is the work of imagination. There are cases, however, in which it is hard to distinguish at all between these inseparable qualities. The initiation of a scientific theory seems often to have been due to the action of the imagination working independently of any peculiar direct insight; the analogy-discovering faculty—that is, the imagination—finding a law for a whole sphere of unexplained phenomena in the likeness of such phenomena to others of a different sphere of which the law is known. Hence the real discoverers of such theories are scarcely ever those who have obtained the credit of them; for nothing is usually more abhorrent to men of extraordinary imagination than “fact-grinding.” Such men, after having flung out their discoveries to the contempt or neglect of their contemporaries, leave the future proof of them to mental mechanics; religiously avoiding such work themselves, lest, as Goethe said of himself, they should find themselves imprisoned in “the charnel-house of science.” Genius and imagination of a very high kind are not at all uncommon in children under twelve years of age, especially when their education has been “neglected.” The writer can guarantee the following facts from personal witness: A clever child of seven, who could not read, and had certainly never heard of the Newtonian theory of gravitation, said to his mother suddenly, “What makes this ball drop when I leave hold of it?—Oh, I know: the ground pulls it.” Another child, a year or two older, lay stretched on a gravel path, staring intently on the pebbles. “They are alive,” he cried, in the writer’s hearing; “they are always wanting to burst, but something draws them in.” This infantine rediscovery of the doctrine of the coinherence of attraction and repulsion in matter seems to have been an effort of direct insight. The repetition of the Newtonian apple revelation seems rather to have been the work of the imagination, tracking likeness in difference; but to discern such likeness is, again, an effort of direct insight, and justifies Aristotle’s saying that this power of finding similitude in things diverse is a proof of the highest human faculty, and that thence poetry is worthier than history. The poet’s eye glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; and his faculty of discerning likeness in difference enables him to express the unknown in the terms of the known, so as to confer upon the former a sensible credibility, and to give the latter a truly sacramental dignity. The soul contains world upon world of the most real of realities of which it has no consciousness until it is awakened to their existence by some parable or metaphor, some strain of rhythm or music, some combination of form or colour, some scene of beauty or sublimity, which suddenly expresses the inexpressible by a lower likeness. The vulgar cynic, blessing when he only means to bray, declares that love between the sexes is “all imagination.” What can be truer? What baser thing is there than such love, when it is not of imagination all compact? or what more nearly divine when it is? Why? Because the imagination deals with the spiritual realities to which the material realities correspond, and of which they are only, as it were, the ultimate and sensible expressions. And here it may be noted, by the way, that Nature supplies the ultimate analogue of every divine mystery with some vulgar use or circumstance, in order, as it would seem, to enable the stupid and the gross to deny the divine without actual blasphemy.