The Complex Vision

by John Cowper Powys

Conscience is compelled to be satisfied with something less than its own rigid demands. Reason is compelled to accept something less than its own rigid demands. Both of these things tend to become, under the pressure of the play of circumstance, pragmatical, time-serving, and opportunist. But the aesthetic sense, although in itself it has always room for infinite growth, is in its inherent nature unable to compromise; unable to bend this way and that; unable to dally with half-measures.

Any action, in a world of this kind, necessarily implies compromise; and since goodness is so largely a matter of action, goodness is necessarily penetrated by a spirit of compromise. Indeed it may be said that a certain measure of common-sense is of the very essence of goodness. But what has common-sense to do with art? Common-sense has never been able, and never will be able, to understand even the rudiments of art. For art is the half-discovery of something that must always seem an impossibility to common-sense; and it is the half-creation of something that must always render common-sense irrelevant and unimportant. Truth, again, in a world of so infinite a complication, must frequently have to remain an open question, a suspended judgment, an antinomy of opposites. The agnostic attitude—as, for instance, in the matter of the immortality of the soul—may in certain cases come to be the ultimate gesture of what we call the truth.

But with the aesthetic sense there can never be any suspension of judgment, never any open question, never any antinomy of opposites, never the least shadow of the pragmatic, or "working" test. It is therefore natural enough that when persons possessed of any degree of cultivated taste hear other persons speak of "goodness" or "truth" they grow distrustful and suspicious, they feel uneasy and very much on guard. For they know well that the conscience of the ordinary person is but a blunt and clumsy instrument, quite as likely to distort and pervert the essential spirit of "goodness" as to reveal it, and they know well that the "truth" of the ordinary person's reason is a sorry compound of logical rigidity and practical opportunism; with but small space left in it for the vision of imagination.

It is because of their primary importance in the sphere of practical action that the conscience and the reason have been developed out of all proportion to the aesthetic sense. And it is because the deplorable environment of our present commercial system has emphasized action and conduct, out of all proportion to contemplation and insight, that it is so difficult to restore the balance. The tyranny of machinery has done untold evil in increasing this lack of proportion; because machinery, by placing an unmalleable and inflexible material—a material that refuses to be humanized—between man's fingers and the actual element he works in, has interrupted that instinctive aesthetic movement of the human hands, which, even in the midst of the most utter clumsiness and grossness, can never fail to introduce some touch of beauty into what it creates.

We have thus arrived at a definite point of view from which we are able to observe the actual play of man's aesthetic sense as, in its mysterious fusion with the energy of reason and conscience, it interprets the pervading beauty of the system of things, according to the temperament of the individual. It remains to note how in the supreme works of art this human temperamental vision is caught up and transcended in the high objectivity of a greater and more universal vision; a vision which is still personal, because everything true and beautiful in the universe is personal, but which, by the rhythm of the apex-thought, has attained a sort of impersonal personality or, in other words, has been brought into harmony with the vision of the immortals.

The material upon which the artist works is that original "objective mystery," confronting every individual soul, out of which every individual soul creates its universe. The medium by means of which the artist works is that outflowing of the very substance of the soul itself which we name by the name of emotion. This actual passing of the substantial substance of the soul into whatever form or shape of objective mystery the soul's vision has half-discovered and half-created is the true secret of what happens both in the case of the original creation of the artist and in case of the reciprocal re-creation of the person enjoying the work of art.

For Benedetto Croce, the Italian philosopher, is surely right when he asserts that no one can enter into the true spirit of a work of art without exercising upon it something of the same creative impulse as that by the power of which it originally came into existence. In the contemplation of a statue or a picture or a piece of bric-a-brac, in the enjoyment of a poem or an exquisite passage of prose, just as much as in the hearing of music, the soul of the recipient is projected beyond its normal limitation in the same way as the soul of the creator was projected beyond its normal limitation.

The soul which thus gives itself up to Beauty is actually extended in a living ecstasy of vibration until it flows into, and through, and around, the thing it loves. But even this is an inadequate expression of what happens; for this outflowing of the soul is the very force and energy which actually is engaged in re-creating this thing out of what at present I confine myself to calling the "objective mystery."

The emotion of the soul plays therefore a double part. It half-discovers and half-creates the pervading beauty of things; and it also loses itself in receptive ecstasy, in embracing what it has half-created and half-found.

We have now reached a point from which we are able to advance yet another step.