The Meaning of Good-A Dialogue Part 21

"Yes," said Dennis, "but with what a difference! That is the point I have been waiting to come to."

"What point?" I asked.

"Why," he said, "in the case of what you call Goods of sense, in their simplest and purest form, making abstraction from all aesthetic and other elements--as in the example you gave of a cold bath--the relation of the object to the sense is so simple and direct, that really, if we were to speak accurately, we should have, I think, to say, that so far as the perception of Good is concerned the object is merged in the subject, and what you get is simply a good sensation."

"Perhaps," I agreed, "that is how we ought to put it. But at the time I did not think it necessary to be so precise."

"But it has become necessary now, I think," he replied, "if we are to bring out a characteristic of works of Art which will throw light, I believe, on the general nature of Good."

"What characteristic is that?"

"Why," he replied, "when we come to works of Art, the important thing is the object, not the subject; if there is any merging of the one in the other, it is the subject that is merged in the object, not _vice versa_. We have to contemplate the object, anyhow, as having a character of its own; and it is to this character that I want to draw attention."

"In what respect?"

"In respect that every work of Art, and, for that matter, every work of nature--so far as it can be viewed aesthetically--comprises a number of elements necessarily connected in a whole; and this necessary connection is the point on which we ought to insist"

"But necessary how?" asked Wilson. "Do you mean logically necessary?"

"No," he replied, "aesthetically. I mean, that we have a direct perception that nothing in the work could be omitted or altered without destroying the whole. This, at any rate, is the ideal; and it holds, more or less, in proportion as the work is more or less perfect. Everyone, I suppose, who understands these things would agree to that."

No one seemed inclined to dispute the statement; certainly I was not, myself; so I answered, "No doubt what you say is true of works of Art; but will your contention be that it is also true of Good in general?"

"Yes," he said, "I think so, in so far at least as Good is to be conceived as comprising a number of elements. For no one, I suppose, would imagine that such elements might be thrown together haphazard and yet const.i.tute a good whole."

"I suppose not," I agreed, "and, if you are right, what we seem to have arrived at is this: among the works which man creates in his quest of the Good, there is one cla.s.s, that of works of Art, which, in the first place, may be said, in a sense, to be not precarious, seeing that by their form, through which they are Art, they are set above the flux of time, though by their matter, we admit, they are bound to it And, in the second place, the Good which they have, they have by virtue of their essence; Good is their substance, not an accident of their changing relations. And, lastly, being complex wholes, the parts of which they are composed are bound together in necessary connection.

These characteristics, at any rate, we have discovered in works of Art: and no doubt many more might be discoverable. But now, let us turn to the other side, and consider the defects in which this cla.s.s of Goods is involved."

"Ah!" cried Bartlett, "when you come to that, I have something to say."

"Well," I said, "what is it? We shall be glad of any help."

"It can be summed up," he replied, "in a single word. Whatever may be the merits of a work of Art--and they may be all that you say--it has this one grand defect--it isn't real!"

"Real!" cried Leslie. "What is real? The word's the plague of my life! People use it as if they meant something by it, something very tremendous and august, and when you press them they never know what it is. They talk of 'real life'--real life! what is it? As if one life wasn't as real as another!"

"Oh, as to real life," said Ellis, "I can tell you what that is. Real life is the shady side of life."

"Nonsense," said Parry, "real life is the life of men of the world."

"Or," retorted Ellis, "more generally, it is the life of the person speaking, as opposed to that of the person to whom he speaks."

"Well, but," I interposed, "it is not 'real life' that is our present concern, but Bartlett's meaning when he used the word 'real.' In what sense is Art not real?"

"Why," he replied, "by your own confession Art is something ideal. It is beautiful, it is good, it is lifted above chance and change; its connection with matter, that is to say with reality, is a kind of flaw, an indecency from which we discreetly turn our eyes. The real world is nothing of all this; on the contrary, it is ugly, brutal, material, coa.r.s.e, and bad as bad can be!"

"I don't see that it is at all!" cried Leslie, "and, even if it were, you have no right to a.s.sume that that is the reality of it. How do you know that its reality doesn't consist precisely in the Ideal, as all poets and philosophers have thought? And, in that case, Art would be more real than what you would call Reality, because it would represent the essence of the world, the thing it would like to be if it could, and is, so far as it can. That was Aristotle's view, anyhow."

"Then all I can say is," replied Bartlett, "that I don't agree with Aristotle! Anyhow, even if Art represents what the world would like to be, it certainly doesn't represent what it is."

"I don't know; surely it does, sometimes," said Parry, "for instance, there's the realistic novel!"

"Oh, that!" cried Ellis. "That's the most ideal of all--only it's apt to be such bad idealism!"

"Anyhow," said Bartlett, "in so far as it is real, it's not Art, in the sense, in which we have been using the word."

I began to be afraid that we should drift away into a discussion of realism in Art. So, to recall the conversation to the point at issue, I turned to Bartlett, and said:

"Your criticism seems to me to be fair enough as far as it goes. You say that the world of Art is a world by itself; that side by side of it, and unaffected by it, moves the world of what you call real life.

And that whatever be the relation between the two worlds, whether we are to say that the one imitates the other, or interprets it, or idealizes it, it does not, in any case, set it aside. Art is a refuge from life, not a subst.i.tute for it; a little blessed island in the howling sea of fact. Its Good is thus only a partial Good; whereas the true Good, I suppose, would be somehow universal."

"Still," said Leslie, "as far as it goes it is a Good without blemish."

"I am not so sure," I said, "even of that. I am inclined to think that Bartlett's criticism, if we squeeze it tight, will yield us more than we have yet got out of it--perhaps even more than he knows is in it"

"You don't mean to say," cried Bartlett, "that you are coming over to my side!"

"Yes," I said, "like a spy to the enemy's camp to see where your strength really lies."

"I have no objection," he replied, "if it ends in your discovering new defences for me."

"Well," I said, "we shall see. Anyhow, this is what I had in my mind.

We were saying just now that when people talk about 'real life,' the 'real world,' and so on, they are not always very clear as to what they mean. But one thing, I think, perhaps they have obscurely in their heads--that the Real is something from which you cannot escape; something which forces itself upon you without reference to choice or desire, having a nature of its own which may or may not conform, more or less to yours, but in any case is distinct and independent. That is why they would say, for example, that the illusions of a madman are not real, meaning that they do not represent real things, however vivid their appearance may be, because they are the productions merely of his own consciousness; whereas the very same appearances presented to a sane man would be called without hesitation real, because they would be conceived to proceed from objects having an independent nature of their own. Something of this kind, I suppose, is included in the notion 'real' as it is held by ordinary people."

"Perhaps" said Leslie, "but what then? And how does it bear upon Art?"

"I am not sure," I replied, "but it occurred to me that works of Art, though of course they are real objects, are such that a certain violence, as it were, has been done to their reality in our interest.

What I mean will be best understood, I think, if we put ourselves for the moment into the position of the artist. To him certain materials are presented which of course are real in our present acceptation of the term, being such as they are of their own nature, without any dependence upon him. Upon these materials he flings himself, and shapes them according to his desire, impressing, as it were, his own nature upon theirs, till they confront him as a kind of image of himself in an alien stuff. So far, then, he has a Good, and a Good presented to him as real; but for the Goodness of this reality he is himself responsible. In so far as it is, so to speak, merely real, it has still the nature which was first presented to him, before he began his work--a nature indifferent, if not opposed, to all his operations, as is shown by the fact that it changes and pa.s.ses away into something else, just as it would have done if he had never touched it. To this nature he has, as I said, done a certain violence in order to stamp upon it the appearance of Good; but the Good is still, in a sense, only an appearance; the reality of the thing remains independent and alien. So that what the man has found, in so far as he has found Good, is after all only a form of himself; and one can conceive him feeling a kind of despair, like that of Wotan in the Walkure, when in his quest for a free, substantial, self-subsistent Good he finds after all, for ever, nothing but images of himself:

"'Das Andre, das ich ersehne, Das Andre, erseh' ich nie.'

"I don't know whether what I am saying is intelligible, for I find it rather hard to put it into words."

"Yes," he said, "I think I understand. But what you are saying, so far as it is true, seems to be true only for the artist himself. To all others the work of Art must appear as something independent of themselves."

"True," I said, "and yet I think that they too feel, or might be made to fed if it were brought home to them, this same antagonism between the nature of the stuff and the form that has been given to it.

The form will seem from this point of view something fact.i.tious and artificial given to the stuff, not indeed by themselves, but by one like themselves, and in their interest. They will contrast, perhaps, as is often done, a picture of the landscape with the landscape Itself. The picture, they will say, however beautiful, is not a 'natural' Good, not a real Good, not a Good in its own right; it is a kind of makeshift produced by human effort, beautiful, if you will, admirable, if you will, to be sought, to be cherished, to be loved in default of a better, with the best faculties of brain and soul, but still not that ultimate thing we wanted, that Good in and of itself, as well as through and for us, Good by its own nature apart from our interposition, self-moved, self-determined, self-dependent, and in which alone our desires could finally rest.--Don't you think that some such feeling may, perhaps, be at the bottom of Bartlett's criticism of Art as unreal?"

Bartlett laughed. "If so," he said, "it is quite unknown to myself.

For to tell the truth, I have not understood a word that you have said."

"Well," I said, "in that case, at any rate you can't disagree with me.

But what do the others think?" And I turned to Dennis and Leslie, for Wilson and Parry did not seem to be attending. Leslie a.s.sented with enthusiasm. But Dennis shook his head.

"I don't know," he said, "what to think about all that. It seems to me rather irrelevant to the work of Art as such."

"Perhaps," I said, "but surely not to the work of Art as Good? Or do you not agree with me that the true Good must be such purely of its own nature?"