An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times

by Thomas Hill Green

F. THE ARTIST AS IDEALIZER

6. The artist, even at his lowest level, is more than an imitator of imitations.[6] Abridgment, selection, combination, are the necessary instruments of his craft; and by their aid he introduces harmony and order into the confused multiplicity of sensuous images. He substitutes for the primary outward aspect of things a new view, in which thought already finds a resting place. Just as strong emotion tends to make all known existence the setting of a single form; just as intense meditation sees in all experience the manifestation of a single idea; so the artist, even if he be merely telling a story, or painting a common landscape, puts some of his materials in a relief, and combines all in a harmony, which the untaught eye does not find in the world as it is. He presents to us the facts in the one case, the outward objects in the other, as already acted upon by thought and emotion. In this sense every artist, instead of copying nature, idealises it. In degree and mode, however, the idealisation varies infinitely in the various kinds of art. It is by considering the height to which it is carried in the epic poem and the drama that we shall best appreciate its limitations in the novel.

FOOTNOTE:

[6] Here are three beds: one existing in nature, which is made by God, as I think that we may say—for no one else can be the maker?—No.—There is another which is the work of the carpenter?—Yes.—And the work of the painter is a third?—Yes?—Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend them: God, the maker of the bed, and the painter?—Yes, there are three of them.—God, whether from choice or from necessity, made one bed in nature and one only; two or more such ideal beds neither ever have been nor ever will be made by God.... Shall we, then, speak of Him as the natural author or maker of the bed?—Yes, he replied; inasmuch as by the natural process of creation He is the author of this and of all other things.—And what shall we say of the carpenter—is he not also the maker of the bed?—Yes.—But would you call the painter a creator and maker?—Certainly not.—Yet if he is not the maker, what is he in relation to the bed?—I think, he said, that we may fairly designate him as the imitator of that which the others make.—Good, I said; then you call him who is third in the descent from nature an imitator?—Certainly, he said.—And the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth.—That appears to be so.—Plato, 'Republic,' X. 597.

G. THE EPIC

7. In outward form the epic poem is simply a narrative in verse. Historically it seems to have originated in the records of ancestral heroism, which passed from mouth to mouth in metre, as the natural form of oral communication in an unlettered age. In the Iliad and Odyssey we first find this outward form penetrated by a new spirit, which converts the narrative into the poem. There is no need to do violence to historical probability by supposing that Homer was a conscious artist, or that he imagined himself to be doing anything else than representing events as they happened. We have simply to notice that in him facts have become poetry, and to ask ourselves what constitutes the change. How is it that the epic poet, while "holding up the mirror to nature," yet shows us in the glass a glory which belongs not to nature as we see it, in its material limitations? The answer is, that though he follows the essential laws of the human spirit, his scene is not the earth we live in. He fills it with actors other than the men who "hoard and sleep and feed" around us. He places the action either in heroic ages—in the "past which was never present," when gods were more human and men more divine—or in heavenly places, and among the powers of the air. The action is simple in proportion to its remoteness from the reality of life, and rapid in proportion to its simplicity. It arises from the operation of the most elementary passions, the wrath of Achilles or the pride of Satan, in collision with an overruling power. For the animal wants and tricks of fortune, which entangle the web of man's affairs, it has no place. The animal element, if not banished from view altogether, becomes merely the organ of the ruling motions of the spirit; and fortune is lost in destiny or providence. Thus the incidents of the narrative cease to be mere incidents. They are held together by passion; they are themselves, so to speak, manifestations of passion working with more and more intensity to the final consummation. Not the laws which regulate curiosity, but those which regulate hope and awe, are the laws which they have to satisfy.

H. TRAGEDY AS PURIFIER OF THE PASSIONS

8. In tragedy, as the product of a more cultivated age, these characteristics appear more strongly than in the primitive epic. The Homeric poems are still legendary narratives, though narratives unconsciously transmuted by the highest art. Tragedy, on the contrary, has no extraneous elements. It implies a conscious effort of the spirit, made for its own sake, to re-create human life according to spiritual laws; to transport itself from a world, where chance and appetite seem hourly to give the lie to its self-assertion, into one where it may work unimpeded by anything but the antagonism inherent in itself and the presence of an overruling law. This result is attained simply by the action of the proper instruments of thought, abstraction and synthesis. The tragedian presents to us scenes of life, not its continuous flow of incident. In "Macbeth," for instance, there is an hiatus of some years between the earlier and later acts;[7] but we are not sensible of the void; for the passions which lead to the catastrophe are but the development of those which appear at the beginning, and to the law against which they struggle "a thousand years are but as yesterday." Time, however, is but one among many circumstances which the tragedian ignores. The common facts of life as it is, and always must have been, the influence of custom, the transition of passion into mechanical habit, the impossibility of continuous effort, the necessary arrangements of society, the wants of our animal nature and all that results from them, these are excluded from view, and so much only of the material of humanity is retained as can take its form from the action of the spirit, and become a vehicle of pure passion. But the synthesis keeps pace with the abstraction, for the tragedian creates not passions but men. The outer garment, the flesh itself, is stript off from man, that the spirit may be left to re-clothe itself, according to its proper impulses and its proper laws. The false distinctions of dress, of manner, of physiognomy, are obliterated, that the true individuality which results from the internal modifications of passion may be seen in clearer outline. These modifications are as infinite and as complex as the spirit of man itself; and if the characters of the ancient dramatists, in their broad simplicity, fail to exhibit the finer lineaments of real life, yet in Shakespeare the variations of pure passion are as numerous and as subtle as those of the fleshly or customary mask by which man thinks that he knows his neighbour. The essential difference lies in the fact that they are variations of the spiritual, not the animal, man; that they arise from the qualifications of the spirit by itself, not from its intermixture with matter. It is this which gives tragedy its power over life. The problem of the diabolic nature, of the possibility of a "fallen spirit," is not for man to solve. He may be satisfied with the diagnosis of his own disease, with the knowledge that it is his littleness, not his greatness, that separates him from the divine; that not intellectual pride, not spiritual self-assertion, but the meanness of his ordinary desires, the degradation of his higher nature to the pursuit of animal ends, keep him under the curse. From this curse tragedy, in its measure, helps to relieve him. It "purifies his passions"[8] by extricating them from their earthly immersion. For an hour, it may be, or a day, it raises him into a world of absolute ideality, where he may forget his wants and his vanity, and lose himself in a struggle in which the combatants are the forces of the spirit, and of which the end is that annihilation in collision with destiny which is but the blank side of reconciliation with it. And though his sojourn in this region be short, yet, when he falls again, the smell of the divine fire has passed upon him, and he bears about him, for a time at least, among the rank vapours of the earth, something of the freshness and fragrance of the higher air.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] The actual time represented in the play has been calculated to be nine days, with intervals of a week or two between Acts II and III, scenes ii and iii of Act IV, and scenes i and ii of Act V. See New Shakespeare Society Publications, 1877-79.