The Literature of Ecstasy Part 10

They broadened its field. They gave the artist the right to write about a corpse or delirium tremens, to describe a murder or a crime without pointing out lessons. They permitted him to use his imagination to the full extent, and to invent any forms he chose.

But the theory overrode itself. It became an apology for abuses of art.

Writers began to create meaningless jargon, to waste words on trite ideas, to avoid all contact with life, to eliminate man as a subject of art. Art lacked soul, and if it showed a personality behind it, it was a petty, sterile and inane one. Art fought against intellect as well as against morals. Even those who advocated it were writing in direct violation of it. Flaubert's realistic novel _Madame Bovary_ and Swinburne's _Songs Before Sunrise_ were not art for art's sake. _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ was not art for art's sake; imprisonment had changed Wilde's views. Men like Gautier and Swinburne, who were the most ardent champions of the theory of art for art's sake, found themselves in a peculiarly inconsistent predicament by being the greatest admirers of Victor Hugo, much of whose work was written with humanitarian motives. Hearn in America started out as a believer in the theory and ended by attacking it.

Tolstoy wrote most bitterly against the idea, and we may say that from the time of the appearance of his _What is Art?_ in 1897, the theory fell into disrepute. Not that people accepted Tolstoy's views that art should teach the love of G.o.d and man, but his idea did much to humanize art. Before Tolstoy, Nietzsche had also taken a fling at the theory.

Critics to-day recognize that life forms the substance of art, that art gets all its material from life and that man is properly the subject of art, thinking man as well as emotional man. They further perceive that literature is so human in its origins that even unconscious human emotions are present where they were not suspected. The more we humanize literature the greater art does it become. It is true, however, that after the art work is completed, it has influence on life. Our lives may be devoted to art, we may have life for art's sake, but not art for art's sake.

Still, art for art's sake is a good theory to be invoked against the extreme didactic-minded one who thinks nothing should be written unless it ill.u.s.trates a lesson in our commonplace and bourgeois morality, a morality very often false and outworn. They would ask writers to show us men conforming to this morality, instead of revolting from it. They would make literature exalt self-sacrifice in all circ.u.mstances and would stamp out any tendencies to liberal speculation. They demand that poetry uphold society in all its inst.i.tutions, teach obedience, and prevail on us to bow down before the mandates of priests and capitalists. But literary men are often at variance with the moral views entertained by the clergy and the ruling cla.s.ses, and they have the right to ill.u.s.trate the views of morality that they consider much higher than the customs of society. An author should not be bound by the views of his age. He should in fact expose them and show their evil influence.

He does not, however, then write in conformity with the theory of art for art's sake, for he expresses another morality than that of society's, and thus has a higher moral purport in view. Ibsen's greatness lies in the fact that he did not subscribe to conventional morality: he attacked it and thus he really was an artist with a moral aim.

Brandes has shown in his essay on Bjornson how the attack upon art with a purpose is really often a disguised means of objecting to liberal thought in literature. Art for art's sake occasionally thus becomes an apology for conventional morals too. Most of the great works were written with a purpose. Dante and Milton have left records in their prose works of the purpose of their poems. But no one objected to the purpose of these poets, because they defend conventional morality. Yet as soon as literature tries to advance new ideas we hear the cry against its moralizing and didactic tendency. Art for art's sake is then the shout of even the conventional moralist. Those who declare themselves against the tendency of the intellectual element in literature are often those who fear new ideas; they would want only romance, homely morals, happy endings and impossible adventures, constant triumph of good, etc.

They do not understand what literature has to do with problems of marriage and divorce, the state and the individual. They want it to be separated from real life. Nevertheless, they cannot ignore the great books of our day which deal with these questions. They have been driven to the theory of "art for art's sake" by their hatred of liberal ideas.

"The formula, 'written with a purpose,'" says Brandes, "has been far too long employed as an effective scarecrow to drive authors away from the fruit that beckons to them from the modern tree of knowledge."

When Whitman, Ibsen, Tolstoy and Zola brought us messages in ecstatic prose, the enemies of intellect in art called them preachers of filthy ideas, misguided moralists, and would not consider them as artists and poets. The moralist and aesthete joined forces in attacking Balzac and Stendhal when these novelists gave us unpopular ideas emotionally expressed. The critic who hates advanced thought exclaims that he wants no ideas in art at all; he does not wish it to become the vehicle of views he personally dislikes. Hence at times even the Philistine critic who opposed the introduction of intellect in art found himself in harmony with members of the art for art's sake school.

Nothing better ill.u.s.trates the harm which may result from the theory that shuns a purpose in art, than the neglect it brings about for books with an unpopular message. England, for example, has neglected the best work of one of the poets of the nineties, who intellectually ranks with her best poets. Who reads the later work of Robert Buchanan? Attention is riveted to his early lyrics, and good as these are, his more thoughtful poetry has been forgotten. A. Stoddart-Walker wrote after Buchanan's death _Robert Buchanan, the Poet of Modern Revolt_, and Harriet Jay wrote a biography. Attention was called in these volumes to the later works of Buchanan, where he stood for liberty of thought. Nor was he didactic in his pleas, in such poems as _The City of Dreams_, _The Wandering Jew_, _The Ballad of Mary the Mother_, _The Outcast_, _The Devil's Case_, and _The New Rome_. Lecky called _The City of Dreams_ the modern _Pilgrim's Progress_, and said that it would take a prominent position in the literature of the time. But no one knows these poems, and of Buchanan's work only a few ballads are known. Buchanan is not any more didactic than Browning, but since he represents bold speculation (and also made too many personal enemies) he was throttled by Philistinism.

The opponents of utilitarianism in art have been the calumniators of poets with ideas unacceptable to the majority. They have hindered the popularity of pessimistic poets like Leopardi and Thomson. They are shocked by the morbidities of Dostoievsky and Strindberg. But every author has the right to describe emotions without being compelled to draw a moral from them. In such case the writer becomes a great psychologist, and his work is by no means devoid of intellectual content. Thus the stories of Poe which have no moral outlook are really stories with a purpose for they are profound doc.u.ments in psychology. To them psychologists like Mosso have gone for studies of the emotion of fear. One finds ideas in them that throw light on the nature of our emotions. Hence Brownell in his well written essay on Poe which attacked him because of his indifference to moral problems (a view in which Howells and James concur) is wrong in denying to Poe a high place in art. Poe did what all artists do: he drew on his emotions and if he could portray fear and grief for death, it was because he had known them. Graham describes the timid nature of Poe, who was afraid to be himself alone. That feeling accounts for the _Fall of the House of Usher_. Poe's stories are rich in ideas, in valuable psychological data.

None of them, except _William Wilson_, has an ethical aim, but they all have an intellectual, utilitarian purport, in giving us profound knowledge of man's hidden emotions. They are the result of Poe's keen intellect as well as of his emotions. They have antic.i.p.ated many researches by psychologists; they have set circulating profound views of the psychic const.i.tution of man. They thus became art with a purpose, not however to spread ethical truisms, but broad liberating ideas.

Those art for art's sake critics who take their inspiration from Poe's essay on the _Poetic Principle_, sadly misunderstand their critic.

Except in two poems written as metrical and musical experiments, _The Bells_ and _Ulalume_, Poe's intellect adorned all the poetry he wrote in verse as well as prose. Read his prose poems, _Shadow_, _Silence_, _The Colloquy of Monos and Una_, _The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion_, _The Power of Words_, and _Eureka_. He was justified in his pleading that poetry should not become the mere vehicle of moral commonplaces, for these are not beautiful, and the vogue of the New England school was beginning to make the moral aims of poetry too paramount.

The poet should be free and if he wants to emotionalize a social message he should be allowed to do so, risking aesthetic value if he becomes didactic, or is false in his views. And he should also be allowed to describe beauty and emotions, without being compelled to draw a moral conclusion therefrom.

Croce, who defined poetry as intuition, has helped to keep on its last legs the idea of art for art's sake. He falsely teaches that poetry deals with pure emotions, and that emotions and ideas are two separate functions, one of the feeling man, the other of the thinking man.

Though Croce admits that the intellectual has its aesthetic side, that art deals with the philosophic and moral, yet this definition of literature in terms of intuition is not a true account of the nature of literature, for he regards the intuitive faculty as totally opposed to the logical faculty, a Kantian relic. Intuition, however, is the combined product of all the logical faculties exercised by man in the past, just as the action of an involuntary muscle is the continued action of a muscle once voluntary, but which by force of habit for ages became involuntary.

Intuition is not merely the knowledge of our hearts but of our brain as well. The great novels and plays of the world's literature are the artistic results of the intellect collaborating with the emotions. Croce presents an ingenious explanation to enable him to call works of art which are full of intellectuality, works of intuition. He says that the effect of the work as a whole is that of an intuition. He holds that when intellectual concepts are mingled with intuition they are not then intellectual concepts but part of the intuition. If this be so, the rule works the other way around. If intuition is mingled with intellectual concepts appearing in a philosophical or scientific work, why not then say that the intuitive quality disappears and becomes part of the intellectual concept and that the scientific or philosophic work becomes a work of intuition or a work of art as a whole? There is intellectual working in Hamlet and intuitive expression in a dialogue of Plato. The former is not wholly intuitive nor the latter wholly intellectual.

This is Croce's great fault--that he tries to rid poetry of what he calls any suggestion of intellectualism.[146:A] He identifies the first rudimentary form of knowledge with intuition, he distinguishes the so-called first degree of the activity of the mind, the unreflecting, unreasoning emotion, from intellectual and perceptual knowledge, which involves concepts, so that his view of poetry is that of the art for art's sake school,--that poetry deals not with ideas but with intuitive feeling.

Now, feeling and thought are not separable. Feeling involves knowledge and instant reflection. The bereaved poet knows and reflects on many things at the very instant he is suffering the shock of his loss. His intellectual and perceptual faculties cannot be set apart from the psychical activity of his emotions. The authors of the greatest English elegies philosophized while bemoaning their loss. The moral, intellectual and logical faculties are at work along with the intuitive faculty, or immediate knowledge of feeling, in all great poets.

It is in his views on intuition that Croce reduces art to presentation of childish impressions or views, divested of judgment and reflection.

He discourages reasoning and thinking on the part of the artist. He seeks only the first instant of the poet's emotions, though he admits that in real life sensations are followed by reflections and mental solutions. He thinks the purest artists are those who persist longest in that first moment of intuition, and are innocent and childish in their outlook.

Art is not, as Croce thinks, devoid of the character of conceptual knowledge. No, discrimination and judgment, distinction between reality and unreality, is an important part of the poet's work, and to say that it matters little what the poet thinks or says or concludes, that correct ideas, judgments, statements, are not to be sought from him, is to reduce him to the level of a babbling child. The ideality of poetry does not, as Croce thinks, disappear as soon as reflection and judgment enter, for these may be bathed in ecstasy. Croce's definition of imaginative literature excludes ideas, except as casually introduced, or as the utterances in accordance with the truth of the character portrayed. He levels literature to a primitive degree.

Croce seems to think that art is expression of only intuition, but is not expression of intellectual concepts which he claims belong to philosophy. He who did so much to clear away the artificial divisions reigning in the various arts, commits a greater error. He a.s.signs one kind of expression--intuition--to one branch of human endeavor--art; and another kind of expression--true concepts--to another branch of human endeavor,--logic. Yet he admits that intuition and concepts are two moments in a single process. As a matter of fact, expressed concepts are also literature when emotionalized, and logic is poetry when combined with ecstasy.

Man cannot separate the two faculties, and we seldom have what Croce calls pure intuition, that is, knowledge free of concepts. Hence poetry scarcely deals with intuition in Croce's understanding of the term.

Croce takes care to distinguish intuition from mere physical sensation, and from a.s.sociation. For him intuition is not unconscious memory but the first degree of the mind's activity which is expression. One fails to see why even sensation may not be intuition and hence art; some of the world's best literature describes hunger. And to deny that intuition includes unconscious memory is to deprive it of its essential quality.

Croce lost sight of the importance of that phase of art which deals with the thinking man who feels, and he tried to bridge over the gap by a.s.serting that what determined the difference of the intellectual and intuitive fact lay in the result, in the effects aimed at by their authors. Yet Virgil thought he was a poet in his _Georgics_ but he gave us a book in farming instead. Plato sought to be a philosopher in his _Banquet_ but he wrote a poem also.

Croce's conclusions lead to strange anomalies. His view that philosophical pa.s.sages, that is, intellectual concepts occurring in a novel or play, become part of the intuition of the author, would mean that the most unecstatic concept transposed from, say Hegel, to a Shakespearean play, becomes intuition. The converse would also follow that a pa.s.sage of Shakespeare incorporated in Hegel is no longer poetry.

One of the results of Croce's aesthetic views on intuition is to drive out of literary criticism the exercise of the intellect. He would have us judge a book by its own standards and merely seek to find if the author succeeded in doing what he intended. This view has been wrongly attributed also to Goethe and Carlyle. It is, however, Maupa.s.sant's view about the novel as he expounded it in his preface to _Pierre and Jean_.

We cannot accept this view. We must ask why does the author intend what he does, and is he justified in his intentions? We must go back of his intentions and show him that his intellect and outlook are due to certain causes and we must state whether or not we agree with him, and why. An author may record his ecstasy in expounding absurd ideas. I want to know why he believes in these ideas and I want to see if he can make me believe them. If he does not, I cannot satisfy myself with studying his intentions, even when they are in the form of verse or in a novel. I also am concerned with the question whether he is right in accepting these ideas, though I admit his sincerity.

Again I take up a Puritanical poem. I cannot judge the author by merely studying the writer's intentions and contenting myself with the knowledge that he has faithfully and beautifully recorded them. No, I want to know why he is a Puritan; I seek to show the folly of his expression; I must register my protest that I have not been moved by him, that I consider him intellectually and morally deficient.

The great fault of Croce's views, however, is that in looking upon art as expression he takes no interest in the question whether it meets with sympathy. It is true he recognizes that the poet often expresses our own intuitions for us, when he expresses his own. But he is not concerned with the question whether the poet has a right to feel that way and whether he has a sympathetic audience no matter how small. Yet the artist who expresses his intuitions is always bound to have some audience. It is because "every atom that belongs to me as good belongs to you." He is bound to have sympathizers. If Croce had said that the artist should not be concerned because the majority does not agree with him, we could follow him, but only because we think the artist is right and the majority is wrong. But to cast aside the question of sympathy altogether, to refuse to take into consideration the emotions of any readers, is to demoralize art and cast intelligence out of it.

It cannot be repeated then too often that poetry is not a matter of emotions only, but of intellectual perception and moral outlook as well.

The poet who has described a painful episode in his life does not always just merely record the pain, he goes further than his intuition. He thinks and judges and condemns and plans. He is also a philosopher and a moralist, excited to such states by his intuition. It wasn't intuition that created the plays of Shakespeare and Ibsen, it was a moral and intellectual vision working with the poet's intuition. Logic, science, metaphysics, ethics, are part of the poetic material. All ideas are philosophic or scientific, and emotionally and beautifully expressed may become poetry or literature.

However, Croce did good service in calling for the independence of art, since reformers and moralists often seek to force upon art a practical end outside and beside it. He also admits that the practical and aesthetic are often found united, and that it would be erroneous to maintain that the artist's independence of vision should be extended to the communication. "If art be understood as the externalization of art, then utility and morality have a perfect right to deal with it; that is to say, the right one possesses to deal with one's own household." Since the artist selects from his intuitions when he writes, his selection is governed by the economic conditions of life and of its moral direction.

Hence Croce finds the artist's use of the concepts of morality to some extent justified.

But where the ideas dealt with by an author are such as all accept, the beauty of the work depends on the manner in which it is written. Here he does not write for the purpose of the underlying idea, which he uses merely as a pretext for artistic work. He seeks to portray an emotion and to make the reader feel it. Drawing a picture may be the object of the author. He may merely try to reproduce with vividness what we all see; or narrate what we all know. The importance of his work lies then in its technique. There is no question that technique is always to be considered in determining one's greatness as a writer.

What distinguishes the layman from the artist is that the former has no power of craftsmanship; he does not understand the secrets of any of the forms of literature; he does not know how to set down his thoughts or sentiments in a pleasing or beautiful manner. There are many laymen who have better views on morality and who possess a greater intellect than many successful authors, but they are not artists. If by knowing how to tell a story or sing a poem they could move the world,--if they had craftsmanship,--then we would call them artists.

It does not follow, however, that because an author has certain technical genius, but is dest.i.tute of any intellect, and dallies with trite ideas, that he is a great artist. To rank among the great artists perfection of form should be welded with great and important ideas of life.

FOOTNOTES:

[146:A] Wordsworth was on better ground when he said, "Our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts." _Preface to Lyrical Ballads_ (1800).

CHAPTER IX

HIGH FORM OF POETRY ECSTATIC PRESENTATION OF ADVANCED SOCIAL IDEALS

We are always fascinated by the poet who comes to the aid of the people, and is even rejected by them for his advanced ideas. We like to think of the poet as one who belongs to the minority, as a non-conformist, as a champion of liberty, as a sponsor for advanced views. We want him not to be uttering and singing the commonplaces of to-day but the truths of the morrow. In the long run it is the Sh.e.l.leys and Whitmans and Ibsens that count. Even though the poets be mad like Don Quixote or Brand, and do evil with good intentions, we admire them.

What sad figures the versifiers of unimportant conceits make when confronted with the great poets who use their intellect. These petty minstrels are the same types whom Milton attacked; they are the gossips of literature who like housewives think every trivial fancy must be voiced. And when we are bored by their nuances, their play with words, their records of unprofitable incidents, they tell us we cannot appreciate poetry, that we have not "taste." Man will always listen even though disapprovingly and hostilely, if the poet reveals a soul. But the minor versifier has no soul, or if he has he keeps it out of his verses.

He is ready to talk to you about his spectacles, his bath, or his dinner, but he cannot refer to his inner thoughts and feelings. Even if he does experience an emotion he often conveys it through the images of books.

Poetry which champions human liberty and shows characters battling for truth amidst persecution is always great poetry. We like to think of the poet as Baudelaire characterized him, one whose own mother does not understand him, one in whose food the public puts ashes, one with whom his own wife is not in sympathy. We like to think of him as an Ishmaelite, as one who is against his age, since the majority is often incapable of welcoming a new and great idea even emotionally treated. If he is merely a patriotic or a religious or conventionally moral poet, he will appeal to most people, but these represent the audience that is not of an elevated intellectual order. He is not universal, for people of other countries and religions, and the people of the future who will break away from the old morality will not find that he reaches their sentiments.

We want the progressive poet, and not the eternal harper on the commonplace.

Nor are these views inconsistent with the a.s.sertion that poetry should not be the handmaid of religion and morality. If it must be a handmaid, then let it be the handmaid of a universal religion, which finds its roots in thought and sane feeling; of a morality of love and justice that is still too ideal to be grasped by the age. No worthy poet to-day would write a poem merely to teach us simple precepts of morality. In a rude age, an emotional treatment of the most commonplace ethical maxims was great poetry because these were in advance of the age. To us such a production is stale. Hence the "great" poem of one age may become nauseating to a later epoch.

Poetry is a progressive art. The emotion playing about the old ballads and legends is not as compelling as that found in the great modern novels and plays. Our great later poets and thinkers are more advanced and do not worship superst.i.tion and defend false beliefs, or celebrate revenge and war, as the old primeval poets do. When we think of the ideal poet, it is not the champion of the middle cla.s.s like Longfellow and Tennyson, or one full of the early martial spirit and drawing fighting heroes like the author of _Beowulf_, or the _Nibelungen Lied_.

Nor do we think of the poet who incorporates the religious errors and legends of his time and imitates ancient epics, nor of one who portrays a preceding and bygone age. We, or at least a few of us, like to think of him as a man drawing people in the grip of pa.s.sions and battling for advanced ideas. We like to think of men like Shakespeare and Ibsen, Isaiah and Job, Balzac and Cervantes, Moliere and Goethe, Byron and Sh.e.l.ley, Burns and Heine, Whitman and Swinburne, Carducci and Nietzsche, Carlyle and Ruskin, Dostoievsky and d.i.c.kens, Hugo and Rolland. We like to think chiefly of men who were largely personal in their appeal, and depicted their own sufferings, and described grief brought about by the social construction of society which they criticized. Such poets are no dalliers with anaemic feelings. They felt what they sang and were not afraid to give sway to their emotions and ideas. They are not didacticists nor moralists, but emotional thinkers. They do not think that they ought to deny the claims of the intellect and the moral vision. I do not say that other kinds of emotional writers are not great poets. I merely cite what I think is a high order of poetry. I do not deny that poets may avoid any moral mission and just sing private emotions, whether in prose or verse. The Troubadours, and the Roman Elegists, De Musset and Verlaine, Hafiz and Keats, are among the very greatest poets, even though they are not prophets.

Much of our so-called democratic poetry is not democratic at all. Poetry does not become democratic because some poets dwell on the privileges the working people of to-day have in contrast with those working people had generations ago, or because writers have discovered that even common people experience most of the emotions of the upper cla.s.s. Literature cannot be democratic, while poets write for the few who use them as tools for their own interests, to defend a system which is courteously called compet.i.tion instead of exploitation. Much of our democratic literature is either capitalistic or bourgeois literature that gives a slight condescending nod to the proletariat. Many wealthy and cultured authors have taken up the cause of the laborer just as they would that of caged animals. They have suggested improvements in the treatment of captives, but not complete freedom. Fortunately we have had works like Galsworthy's _Strife_, Hauptmann's _Weavers_, Verhaeren's _Dawn_, Sinclair's _Jungle_, Zola's _Germinal_, Gissing's _Nether World_.