Art principles in literature

by Francis P. Donnelly

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.