Early Christianity, with its delighted recognition of the soul’s reality, its awful consciousness of inner depths unplumbed, had produced, as we saw, many words describing human emotions by their effects, and especially by their effects on the soul’s relation to the Divine. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the increase of self-consciousness among the leisured classes, a more sympathetic, “introspective”[67] attitude to the emotions grew up, and this we traced to its development in the romantic sensibility of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. How did it fare, then, with this tender nursling in the years that followed? Was it crushed and dissected into a neatly labelled little corpse, or was it suffered to grow up unchecked, uneducated, into the middle-aged and well-fed sentimentalism of our Victorian ancestors? Fortunately it avoided both these fates. Carefully tended by small groups of earnest men, now in this academy and now in that, it had escaped the dissection of Nature because it had learned not to draw its nourishment from Nature and the God of Nature, but from man himself. And on this diet it had thriven and waxed until it was a veritable young giant, able to stand up and confront Nature as her equal. But we must retrace our steps a little.
Attentive readers of Jane Austen’s novels will have noticed the slightly unfamiliar way in which she employs the two words romantic and picturesque. A closer examination reveals the fact that in her time they still bore traces of their origin. These adjectives are taken from the arts, romantic meaning in the first instance ‘like the old Romances’, and picturesque ‘like a picture’ or ‘reminding one of a picture.’ They are thus members of a quite considerable group of words and phrases, attitude, comic, dramatic, lyrical, melodramatic, point of view, and the like, in which terms taken in the first place from the arts are subsequently applied to life. Nowadays we sometimes go farther and use the name of a particular artist, speaking, for instance, of a Turneresque sunset, a Praxitelean shape; or we even call to our aid a writer’s fictitious creatures, as in “Falstaffian morality”, “the Pickwickian sense”,... Such a figure of speech looks at first sight like any other kind of imagery, and we perhaps imagine it in use since the beginnings of art. In point of fact, however, it is probable that it was not known before the time of the Renaissance, when men’s notions of art changed so suddenly, when, indeed, their very consciousness of it as a separate, unrelated activity, something which can be distinguished in thought from a “craft”, a “trade”, or a religious ceremony, seems to have first sprung into being. Moreover, the ancient word art used to include in its purview not only these meanings, but also most of those which we now group under the heading science. In the Middle Ages the Seven Liberal Arts[68]—Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy—were contrasted with the “servile” or “mechanical” arts—that is, handicrafts involving manual labour. And thus, though art in this wide sense is old, artist first occurs in Sir Philip Sidney’s Apologie for Poetry. Artisan appeared at about the same time, and was not then, as now, confined to mechanical and manual labourers.
O, what a world of profit and delight
wrote the poet, Marlowe,
Is promis’d to the studious artisan.
In the light of two or three familiar words let us try and trace the development, from Sidney’s time onwards, of some of our modern notions of “art”, and in particular of poetry. Criticism—the branch of literature or journalism with which our daily and weekly reviews make us so familiar—does not date very far back into the past. Its parents were the medieval arts of grammar and philology, which, among the commentators on classical texts, had already sometimes blossomed into the rudiments of aesthetic. The actual words critic and critical, however, have been traced no farther back than Shakespeare; critic in its aesthetic sense is first found in Bacon; and criticism and criticize are neither of them earlier than the seventeenth century. Based for the most part on Aristotle’s Poetics, serious criticism began to take shape in England at the Renaissance. From Elizabethan critical essays, such as Sidney’s Apologie for Poetry, we can get an idea of the light in which poetry and the other arts had begun to be viewed at that time. To Sidney, for example, the distinguishing mark of poetry was, not metre, but a certain “feigning.” The first philosophers and historians, he affirmed, were also poets, not indeed because of what we should magnificently call their “creative imagination”, but simply because they “invented” certain fictitious persons and events. We should not now regard this as a virtue in an historian. Sidney, however, points out the derivation of poetry from the Greek ‘poiein’, ‘to make’,[69] and shows how this distinguishes it from all the other arts and sciences, which in the last analysis merely “follow Nature”, while only the poet,
disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the Zodiac of his own wit.
And Sidney adds that this fact is not to be made light of merely because the works of Nature are “essential” while the poet’s are only “in imitation or fiction”. The poet has contemplated the “Ideas” behind Nature, and it is those which he “delivers forth, as he hath imagined them”. With ten or twenty new novels appearing on the bookstalls every week it is not so easy for us to realize the dignity and glory which were once felt to distinguish this great human achievement of fiction—that is, of ‘making’ or ‘making up’ (from the Latin ‘fingere’, to ‘form’ or ‘make’) purely imaginary forms, instead of merely copying Nature.
Now the presence of a made-up element, especially when it comprised supernatural beings such as giants and fairies, was held to be one of the distinguishing marks of a romance. The old medieval romances, as their name suggests, had been nursed to life in that curious period of contact between Roman and Celtic myth which also gave us such words as fairy and sorcery.[70] They were so called because they were written or recited in the romance vernacular[71] instead of in literary Latin, and they seem to have developed out of an increasing tendency among the medieval bards to embroider, on their own responsibility, the traditional accounts of historical and mythical events. This tendency, wherever it had hitherto been detected among the western Aryans, had been strenuously opposed in the interests of learning and morality. It was one of the reasons why Plato decided to expel poets from his Republic, and it is remarkable that the earlier uses of a word like fable in twelfth- and thirteenth-century French and fourteenth-century English should have been all condemnatory. Now by the time the Renaissance dawned on England this word had come to be applied, in one instance at least, not merely to the embroidery, but to the garment itself, so that, for example, the whole prodigious fabric of classical mythology might be implicit in the disparaging phrase “fables of poets”. And after the Revival of Learning, when the most able men began to have a very different feeling towards the myths of Greece and Rome, such a phrase became the very opposite of disparaging. Fiction and romance were gradually recognized as a legitimate and noble expression of the human spirit.
Gradually: to Sidney, poetry was still, after Aristotle’s definition, “an art of imitation”; only poets must “to imitate, borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be, but range ... into the divine consideration of what may be and should be”. And during the seventeenth century all art continued to be regarded as imitation, of which, however, there were two kinds—the imitation of other arts and the imitation of Nature herself. The second kind, by analogy from picture-dealing, was called original, and the faculty which achieved it was named invention (Latin, ‘invenire’, ‘to find’), a word implying that something had been found in Nature which had not yet been imitated by man. Early in the eighteenth century the substantive originality was formed from original, and an increasing importance began to be attached to the element of novelty in experiences of all kinds, Addison placing it on a level with greatness and beauty as a source of pleasure to the imagination.