The Moral Economy

by Ralph Barton Perry

Let me illustrate my meaning by referring to what Taine says of Greek sculpture:

Here we have the living body, complete and without a veil, admired and glorified, standing on its pedestal without scandal and exposed to all eyes. {186} What is its purpose, and what idea, through sympathy, is the statue to convey to spectators? An idea which, to us, is almost without meaning because it belongs to another age and another epoch of the human mind. The head is without significance; unlike ours it is not a world of graduated conceptions, excited passions, and a medley of sentiments; the face is not sunken, sharp, and disturbed; it has not many characteristics, scarcely any expression, and is generally in repose. . . . The contemporaries of Pericles and Plato did not require violent and surprising effects to stimulate weary attention or to irritate an uneasy sensibility. A blooming and healthy body, capable of all virile and gymnastic actions, a man or woman of fine growth and noble race, a serene form in full light, a simple and natural harmony of lines happily commingled, was the most animated spectacle they could dwell on. They desired to contemplate man proportioned to his organs and to his condition and endowed with every perfection within these limits; they demanded nothing more and nothing less; anything besides would have struck them as extravagance, deformity, or disease. Such is the circle within which the simplicity of their culture kept them.[6]

In other words, Greek art expressed the rare quality of Greek life; its naturalism, its compactness, its clearness. And it did so instinctively both to the artist and the spectator. We are not to think that because, in order to understand ancient art, it may be necessary for us first to obtain a conception of life and then to match it in art, this is essential to its appreciation. On the contrary, the object of art is not beautiful {187} until it flashes the idea upon us, communicating an ideal unity that is not intellectually articulate at all. This must always be the effect upon contemporaries, in whom the idea is so assimilated as to be unconscious. But the idea is there none the less; and the full beauty cannot exist for any one who is incapable of discerning the idea, and rejoicing in the apprehension of it.

The incomparable excellence of Greek sculpture is due to a type of genius in which clearness of mind and delicacy of touch are united. Among the Greeks the term infinite was a term of disparagement; they thought roundly and cleanly, thus preferring ideas to vague surmises. This was their first gift. And, adding to it a sensitiveness to form, they were enabled to express themselves, without redundancy and exaggeration, bringing whatever medium they employed into accord with the idea. It is this felicity and luminousness that gives to the art of the Greeks a peculiar appeal to the intelligence. For the mind delights in definiteness and light.

But the Greek conception of life belongs to an age preceding the advent of what has proved to be the European religion. And Christianity has so reconstructed the experience of the average man through its sensitiveness to pain, and its emphasis on what is called "the inner life," that I want further to illustrate the meaning of {188} discernment in art, by referring to the representation of the spirit of the Renaissance in the painting of Leonardo da Vinci. I quote the following from Pater's description of "La Gioconda":

The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed. All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the human form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reveries of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, which has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.[7]

The power of Renaissance painting is not wholly a matter of color, texture, modelling, and composition; for though it contains these and many {189} sensuous and perceptual values besides, it conveys through them with surpassing truth and delicacy ideas as evasive as they are subtle and profound. There is an ecstasy of mind in the discernment of these ideas, and a blend of emotion that follows in their train, both of which are conditioned by insight; that is, by a process that is neither sensuous, perceptual, nor emotional merely, but, in an additional sense, intellectual.

The interest in apprehension may thus be exhibited and satisfied in divers ways, differing according to the special processes of consciousness which they call into play. And while it may be crude or cultivated, it is safe to say that in all of its modes it is present to some degree in every individual human life. The simple-minded person who hisses the villain of the melodrama, and he who takes pleasure in the inevitableness of the Greek tragedy, are exhibiting the same interest in the emotions evoked by the spectacle of life. There is only a difference of training and sophistication between the man who enjoys a cheap chromo for the color or the "likeness," and one who appreciates Velasquez's treatment of light or the characterization of Franz Hals.

In the enjoyment of the highest forms of art these various modes of apprehension will be united, each so contributing to the enhancement of the {190} rest that it is impossible sharply to divide them. Nor do I venture any opinion as to which of these modes, if any, is fundamental in the different arts or in fine art as a whole. It is sufficient for our purposes to know that art does exercise and develop human nature in all of these ways.

We are now in a position to define a programme of criticism. Art thrives because it fulfils a complex and multiform interest. It is supported by an interest which it supplies with its proper objects. Hence it falls within the circle of life where questions of prudence, justice, and good-will are paramount. But, because moral considerations must thus in the nature of the case take precedence over purely aesthetic considerations, this proves nothing whatsoever concerning the way in which this precedence should be established. It was Plato's belief that society should employ a rigorous censorship, and banish the offending poet: