beneath whose sable roof
Of boughs as if for festal purpose decked
With unrejoicing berries—ghostly shapes
May meet at noontide; Fear and Trembling Hope,
Silence and Foresight, Death the Skeleton
And Time the Shadow,
is still the form under which the mind may most clearly and freely contemplate the human situation, its issues unclouded, its possibilities revealed. To this its value is due and the supreme position among the arts which it has occupied in historical times and still occupies; what will happen in the future we can only conjecture. Tragedy is too great an exercise of the spirit to be classed among amusements or even delights, or to be regarded as a vehicle for the inculcation of such crude valuations as may be codified in a moral. But the fuller discussion of Tragedy we must defer.
These remarks seemed necessary in order to avoid the impression, which our theory of value might have given, that the arts are merely concerned with happy solutions and ingenious reconciliations of diverse gratifications, “a box where sweets compacted lie.” It is not so. Only a crude psychology, as we shall see, would identify the satisfaction of an impulse with a pleasure. No hedonic theory of value will fit the facts over even a small part of the field, since it must take what is a concomitant merely of a phase in the process of satisfaction as the mainspring of the whole. Pleasure, however, has its place in the whole account of values, and an important place, as we shall see later. But it must not be allowed to encroach on ground to which it has no right.
CHAPTER X
Poetry for Poetry’s Sake
On passe plus facilement d’un extrême à un autre
que d’une nuance à une autre nuance.
Attirance de la Mort.
Another possible misapprehension which cannot be left unmentioned arises in connection with the doctrine ‘Art for Art’s sake’, a doctrine definitely and detrimentally dated; it concerns the place of what are called ulterior effects in the valuing of a work of art. It has been very fashionable to turn up the nose at any attempt to apply, as it is said, ‘external canons’ to art. But it may be recalled that of all the great critical doctrines, the ‘moral’, theory of art (it would be better to call it the ‘Ordinary values’ theory) has the most great minds behind it. Until Whistler came to start the critical movements of the last half-century, few poets, artists or critics had ever doubted that the value of art experiences was to be judged as other values are. Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Dante, Spenser, Milton, the Eighteenth Century, Coleridge, Shelley, Matthew Arnold and Pater, to name only the most prominent, all with varying degrees of refinement, held the same view.[*] The last is a somewhat unexpected adherent.
“Given the conditions I have tried to explain as constituting good art, then if it be devoted further to the increase of men’s happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or to the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new and old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may fortify us in our sojourn here . . . it will also be great art; if, over and above those qualities which I have summed up . . . it has something of the soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its architectural place, in the great structure of human life.”[†] No better brief emotive account of the conditions under which an experience has value could be desired.
Against all these weighty opinions, the view—supported largely by a distinction between Form and Content, Subject and Handling, which will be examined elsewhere,[*] and relying upon the doctrine of intrinsic, supersensible, ultimate Goods discussed above—that the values of art are unique, or capable of being considered in isolation from all others, has held sway for some thirty years in many most reputable quarters. The reasons for this attempted severance have already been touched upon; they are of all sorts. Partly it may be due to the influence of Whistler and Pater, and of those still more influential disciples who spread their doctrines. Partly it may be due to a massed reaction against Ruskin. Partly again we may suspect the influence, rather suddenly encountered, of Continental and German æsthetics upon the English mind. Almost from the beginning of scientific æsthetics, the insistence on the æsthetic experience as an experience, peculiar, complete, and capable of being studied in isolation, has received prominence. Often it is no more than an extension into this considering, whenever possible, one thing at a time. When critics in England, not very long ago, heard that there was something connected with art and poetry—namely, the æsthetic experience—which could be considered and examined in isolation by the methods of introspection, they not unnaturally leapt to the conclusion that its value also could be isolated and described without reference to other things. In some hands the further conclusions drawn were too queer to outlive their hour of fashion. They amounted often to the postulation of a ‘specific thrill’ yielded by works of art and nothing else, unlike and unconnected with all other experiences. “No queerer,” it was said, “than anything else in this incredibly queer universe.”[†] But the queerness of the universe is of a different and a more interesting sort. It may be a curiosity shop but it nowhere seems to be a chaos.
For our present purposes we need only consider the view as it is put forward by its ablest exponent, a critic who by his own explanations of this formula goes very far towards meeting the objection we urge.