Yet even the poem itself was a climax long led up to. The power of its feeling had been preparing in the conceptions, even in the reasonings, which through the centuries had been gaining ardour as they became part of the entire natures of men and women. Thus had mediæval thought become emotionalized and plastic and living in poetry and art. Otherwise, even Dante's genius could not have fused the contents of mediæval thought into a poem. How many passages in the Commedia illustrate this—like the lovely picture of Lia moving in the flowering meadow, with her fair hands making her a garland. The twenty-third canto of the Paradiso, telling of the triumph of Christ and the Virgin, yields a larger illustration; and within it, as a very concrete lyric instance, floats that flower of angelic love, the song of Gabriel circling the Lady of Heaven with its melody, and giving quintessential utterance to the love and adoration which the Middle Ages had intoned to the Virgin. Yes, if it be Dante's genius, it is also the gathering emotion of the centuries, which lifts the last cantos of the Paradiso from glory to glory, and makes this closing singing of the Commedia such supreme poetry. Nor is it the emotional element alone that reaches its final voice in Dante. Passage after passage of the Paradiso is the apotheosis of scholastic thought and ways of stating it, the very apotheosis, for example, of those harnessed phrases in which the line of great scholastics had endeavoured to put in words the universalities of substance and accident and the absolute qualities of God.[1]
[Footnote 1: Taylor: The Mediæval Mind, vol. II, pp. 588-89.]
In these supreme instances the ideas have been given a genuinely æsthetic expression. They are beautiful in form and music, as well as in content and vision. But not infrequently where propaganda appears, art flies out of the window. Many modern plays and novels might be cited, which in their serious devotion to the enunciation of some social ideal, lapse from song into statistics. The artist with his eye on the social consequences of his work may come altogether to cease to regard standards of beauty. It is only the rare genius who can make poetry out of politics. Even Shelley lapses into deadly and arid prosiness when his chief interest becomes the presentation of the political ideas of Godwin.
In contrast with the theory that art has a social responsibility, that so powerful an instrument must be used exclusively in the presentation of adequate social ideals, must be set the doctrine, widely current in the late nineteenth century, of "art for art's sake." To the exponents of this point of view, the artist has only one responsibility, the creation of beauty. It is his to realize in form every pulsation of interest and desire, to provide every possible exquisite sensation. The artist must not be a preacher; he must not tell men what is the good; he must show them the good, which is identical with the beautiful. And he must exhibit the beautiful in every unique and lovely posture which can be imagined, and which he can skillfully realize in color, in word, or in sound. Art is its own justification; "a thing of beauty is a joy forever."
Where art is governed by such intentions, form and material become more important than expression. Thus there develops in France in the late nineteenth century a school of Symbolists and Sensationalists in poetry, whose single aim is the production of precise and beautiful sensations through the specific use of evocative words. The form and the style become everything in literature, in painting, and the plastic arts. The emphasis is put upon exquisiteness in decoration, upon precision in technique, upon loveliness of material. The Pre-Raphaelite movement in poetry, with its emphasis on the use of picturesque and decorative epithets, the exclusive emphasis in some modern music on subtlety of technique in tone and color, are recent examples.
The position taken has clearly this much justification. A work does not become a work of art through the fact that it expresses noble sentiments. The most righteous sermon may not be beautiful. Whatever be the source of its inspiration, art must make its appeal through the palpable and undeniable beauty of the formal embodiment it has given to its vision. However much an object be prized as a moral instrument, unless it stirs the senses and the imagination, it hardly can be called a work of art. On the other hand, things intrinsically beautiful do seem to be their own justification. A poem of Keats, a Japanese print, a delicate vase, or an exquisite song demand no moral justification. They are their own sufficient excuse for being.
But the "art for art's sake" doctrine, carried to extremes, results in mere decadence or triviality. It produces at best exquisite decorative trifles rather than works of a large and serious beauty. Music seems to be the art where sheer beauty of form is its own justification, for music can hardly be used as a specific medium of communication. Those compositions that purport to be "program music," to convey definite impressions of particular scenes or ideas, are somewhat halting attempts to use music as one uses language. Yet even in music, though we may enjoy ingenious and fluent melodic trifles, we regard them less highly than the earnest and magnificent beauty of a Beethoven symphony.
But because art is only effective when it appeals to the senses and to the imagination does not mean that the senses and the imagination must be stirred by insignificance. The artist may use the rhythms of music, line and color, the suggestiveness of words, in the interests of ideal values. Gifted, as he is, with imaginative foresight to imagine a world better than the one in which he is living, he may, by picturing ideals in persuasive form, not only bring them before the mind of man, but insinuate them into his heart. The rational artist may note the possibilities afoot in his environment. He may treasure these hints of human happiness, and by giving them vivid reality in the forms of art indicate captivatingly to men where possible perfections lie. "For your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams." The artist may become the most influential of prophets, for his prophecies come to men not as arbitrary counsels, but as pictures of Perfection intrinsically lovely and intriguing. When Socrates is asked whether or not his perfect city exists, he replies that it exists only in Heaven, but that men in beholding it may, in the light of that divine pattern, learn to attain in their earthly cities a not dissimilar beauty.
CHAPTER XIV
SCIENCE AND SCIENTIFIC METHOD