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

  C. NATURE THE CREATION OF THOUGHT

  3. In one sense of the the word, it would no doubt be true to say thatnature is simply and altogether that which we make it to be. Modernphilosophy has discarded the language which represented our knowledge ofthings as the result of impressions and the transmission of images.[2]If we still not only speak but think of ourselves as primarily passiveand in contact with an alien world, this arises simply from thedifficulty of conceiving a pure spontaneous activity. Driven from thecrude imagination which found the primary condition of knowledge in thereception of "ideas" from without, "common sense" took refuge in themore refined hypothesis of unknown objects, which cause our sensations,and through sensations our knowledge.[3] But this standing-ground hasbeen swept away by the consideration that such a cause may be foundwithin as well as without, in the laws of the subject's activity as wellas in objects confessedly beyond the reach of cognition. Our ultimateanalysis can find no element in knowledge which is not supplied byourselves in conformity to a ruling law, or which exists independentlyof the action of human thought.

  FOOTNOTES:

  [2] As, _e.g._, in the philosophy of Locke.

  [3] Probably referring to Herbert Spencer.

  D. THE "OUTWARD" ASPECT OF NATURE

  4. But though the world of nature is, in this sense, a world of man'sown creation, it is so in a different way from the world of art and ofphilosophy. Thought is indeed its parent, but thought in its primarystage fails to recognize it as its own, fails to transfer to it its ownattributes of universality, and identity in difference. It sees outwardobjects merely in their diversity and isolation. It seeks to penetratenature by endless dichotomy, glorying in that dissection of unity whichis the abdication of its own prerogative.[4] It treats outward thingsas ministering to animal wants, as the sources of personal andparticular pleasures and pains; and thus induces the sense of bondage,of collision with a world in which it has not yet learnt to find itself.It places the end of human life not in harmony with the law which is thehighest form of itself, but in happiness, _i.e._, in the extraction ofthe greatest possible amount of enjoyment from a world to which it seemsto be accidentally related. The view of things corresponding to thisstage of thought is what we commonly call their outward aspect. It isthe aspect of matter-of-fact, of logic, of "mere morality," as opposedto that of art, of philosophy, and religion.

  FOOTNOTE:

  [4] "Life," says Professor Dewey ('Studies in Logical Theory,' p. 81),"proposes to maintain at all hazards the unity of its own process." Andin a foot-note he adds: "Professor James's satisfaction in thecontemplation of bare pluralism, of disconnection, of radicalhaving-nothing-to-do-with-one-another, is a case in point. Thesatisfaction points to an aesthetic attitude in which the brutediversity becomes itself one interesting object; and thus unity assertsitself in its own denial. When discords are hard and stubborn, andintellectual and practical unification are far to seek, nothing iscommoner than the device of securing the needed unity by recourse to anemotion which feeds on the very brute variety. Religion and art andromantic affection are full of examples."

  E. CONQUEST OF NATURE BY ART

  5. The perfection of this of latter and higher view involves theabsolute fusion of thought and things. Its full attainment is a newcreation of the world. Yet it is but the discovery of a relationshipwhich was from the beginning, the adoption by thought of a child whichwas never other than its own. The habitual interpretation of naturalevents by the analogy of human design, to which every hour'sconversation testifies, is the evidence that to the ordinary man naturepresents itself not as something external, but, like a friend, as"another himself." The true conquest of nature is but the completion ofthe reconciliation thus anticipated in the everyday language andconsciousness of mankind. When the mind has come to see in the endlessflux of outward things, not a succession of isolated phenomena, but thereflex of its own development into an infinite variety of laws on abasis of identity--when the laws of nature are raised to the characterof laws which regulate admiration and love--when the experiences of lifeare held together in a medium of pure emotion, and the animal element sofused with the spiritual as to form one organization through which thesame impulse runs with unimpeded energy--then man has made nature hisown, by becoming a conscious partaker of the reason which animates himand it.[5] The attainment of this consummation is the end of life: butit is an end that can never be fully realised, while "dualism" remains anecessary condition of humanity. To most men it is as a land very faroff, of which occasional glimpses are caught from some "specular mount"of philosophic or poetic thought. It can only approach realisationthrough the operation of a power which can penetrate the whole man, andact on every moment of his life. But that power, which in the form ofreligion can make every meal a sacrament, and transform human passioninto the likeness of divine love, is represented at a lower stage, notonly by the unifying action of speculative philosophy, but by thecombining force of art.

  FOOTNOTE:

  [5] The same thought may be found, in concrete and poetic form, inWordsworth's lines:

  "And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains."

  F. THE ARTIST AS IDEALIZER

  6. The artist, even at his lowest level, is more than an imitator ofimitations.[6] Abridgment, selection, combination, are the necessaryinstruments of his craft; and by their aid he introduces harmony andorder into the confused multiplicity of sensuous images. He substitutesfor the primary outward aspect of things a new view, in which thoughtalready finds a resting place. Just as strong emotion tends to make allknown existence the setting of a single form; just as intense meditationsees in all experience the manifestation of a single idea; so theartist, even if he be merely telling a story, or painting a commonlandscape, puts some of his materials in a relief, and combines all in aharmony, which the untaught eye does not find in the world as it is. Hepresents to us the facts in the one case, the outward objects in theother, as already acted upon by thought and emotion. In this sense everyartist, 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 poemand the drama that we shall best appreciate its limitations in thenovel.

  FOOTNOTE:

  [6] Here are three beds: one existing in nature, which ismade by God, as I think that we may say--for no one else can bethe maker?--No.--There is another which is the work of thecarpenter?--Yes.--And the work of the painter is a third?--Yes?--Beds,then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintendthem: God, the maker of the bed, and the painter?--Yes, there are threeof them.--God, whether from choice or from necessity, made one bed innature and one only; two or more such ideal beds neither ever have beennor ever will be made by God.... Shall we, then, speak of Him as thenatural author or maker of the bed?--Yes, he replied; inasmuch as bythe natural process of creation He is the author of this and of allother things.--And what shall we say of the carpenter--is he notalso the maker of the bed?--Yes.--But would you call the painter acreator 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 fairlydesignate him as the imitator of that which the others make.--Good, Isaid; then you call him who is third in the descent from nature animitator?--Certainly, he said.--And the tragic poet is an imitator, andtherefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the kingand 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.Hist
orically it seems to have originated in the records of ancestralheroism, which passed from mouth to mouth in metre, as the natural formof oral communication in an unlettered age. In the Iliad and Odyssey wefirst find this outward form penetrated by a new spirit, which convertsthe narrative into the poem. There is no need to do violence tohistorical probability by supposing that Homer was a conscious artist,or that he imagined himself to be doing anything else than representingevents as they happened. We have simply to notice that in him facts havebecome poetry, and to ask ourselves what constitutes the change. How isit that the epic poet, while "holding up the mirror to nature," yetshows 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 theessential laws of the human spirit, his scene is not the earth we livein. He fills it with actors other than the men who "hoard and sleep andfeed" around us. He places the action either in heroic ages--in the"past which was never present," when gods were more human and men moredivine--or in heavenly places, and among the powers of the air. Theaction is simple in proportion to its remoteness from the reality oflife, and rapid in proportion to its simplicity. It arises from theoperation of the most elementary passions, the wrath of Achilles or thepride of Satan, in collision with an overruling power. For the animalwants and tricks of fortune, which entangle the web of man's affairs, ithas no place. The animal element, if not banished from view altogether,becomes merely the organ of the ruling motions of the spirit; andfortune is lost in destiny or providence. Thus the incidents of thenarrative cease to be mere incidents. They are held together by passion;they are themselves, so to speak, manifestations of passion working withmore and more intensity to the final consummation. Not the laws whichregulate curiosity, but those which regulate hope and awe, are the lawswhich they have to satisfy.

  H. TRAGEDY AS PURIFIER OF THE PASSIONS

  8. In tragedy, as the product of a more cultivated age, thesecharacteristics appear more strongly than in the primitive epic. TheHomeric poems are still legendary narratives, though narrativesunconsciously 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 spirituallaws; to transport itself from a world, where chance and appetite seemhourly to give the lie to its self-assertion, into one where it may workunimpeded by anything but the antagonism inherent in itself and thepresence of an overruling law. This result is attained simply by theaction of the proper instruments of thought, abstraction and synthesis.The tragedian presents to us scenes of life, not its continuous flow ofincident. In "Macbeth," for instance, there is an hiatus of some yearsbetween the earlier and later acts;[7] but we are not sensible of thevoid; for the passions which lead to the catastrophe are but thedevelopment of those which appear at the beginning, and to the lawagainst which they struggle "a thousand years are but as yesterday."Time, however, is but one among many circumstances which the tragedianignores. The common facts of life as it is, and always must have been,the influence of custom, the transition of passion into mechanicalhabit, the impossibility of continuous effort, the necessaryarrangements of society, the wants of our animal nature and all thatresults from them, these are excluded from view, and so much only of thematerial of humanity is retained as can take its form from the action ofthe spirit, and become a vehicle of pure passion. But the synthesiskeeps pace with the abstraction, for the tragedian creates not passionsbut 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 properimpulses and its proper laws. The false distinctions of dress, ofmanner, of physiognomy, are obliterated, that the true individualitywhich results from the internal modifications of passion may be seen inclearer outline. These modifications are as infinite and as complex asthe spirit of man itself; and if the characters of the ancientdramatists, in their broad simplicity, fail to exhibit the finerlineaments of real life, yet in Shakespeare the variations of purepassion are as numerous and as subtle as those of the fleshly orcustomary mask by which man thinks that he knows his neighbour. Theessential difference lies in the fact that they are variations of thespiritual, not the animal, man; that they arise from the qualificationsof the spirit by itself, not from its intermixture with matter. It isthis which gives tragedy its power over life. The problem of thediabolic nature, of the possibility of a "fallen spirit," is not forman to solve. He may be satisfied with the diagnosis of his own disease,with the knowledge that it is his littleness, not his greatness, thatseparates him from the divine; that not intellectual pride, notspiritual self-assertion, but the meanness of his ordinary desires, thedegradation of his higher nature to the pursuit of animal ends, keep himunder the curse. From this curse tragedy, in its measure, helps torelieve him. It "purifies his passions"[8] by extricating them fromtheir earthly immersion. For an hour, it may be, or a day, it raises himinto a world of absolute ideality, where he may forget his wants and hisvanity, and lose himself in a struggle in which the combatants are theforces of the spirit, and of which the end is that annihilation incollision with destiny which is but the blank side of reconciliationwith it. And though his sojourn in this region be short, yet, when hefalls again, the smell of the divine fire has passed upon him, and hebears about him, for a time at least, among the rank vapours of theearth, something of the freshness and fragrance of the higher air.

  FOOTNOTES:

  [7] The actual time represented in the play has been calculated to benine 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 _NewShakespeare Society Publications_, 1877-79.

  [8] The phrase is Aristotle's; cf. the 'Poetics,' Chap. vi, and, forcomment, Butcher's 'Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art,' Chaptervi.

  I. TRAGEDY THE ELEVATION OF LIFE

  9. In this sense, then, tragedy satisfies its definition as "the flightor elevation of life." The two indispensable supports which render thiselevation possible, are metrical expression and great situations. "Inthe regeneration" the language of the market-place and the morning callmay answer to the realised harmony of life; there may, indeed, be "thefifth act of a tragedy in every death-bed;" there may be no distinctionof great or little, high or low. But it is an affectation to confoundwhat shall be with what is. We cannot dissociate ordinary incidents fromthe petty wants out of which they ordinarily spring, nor common languagefrom the common-place thoughts which it usually expresses. The action intragedy must be relative to the situation; and if the situation be onewhich we are unable to separate from matter-of-fact associations,neither can the action be so separated except by an effort which ofitself depresses the soaring spirit. Nor, again, if the action behigh-wrought, above the measure of man's ordinary activity, can it findexpression in the unrhythmical language[9] which corresponds to thatordinary activity. New wine must not be put in old bottles; nor must themotions of disenthralled passion be confined in vessels worn by the usesof daily life.

  FOOTNOTE:

  [9] The language of prose is not necessarily unrhythmical, nor is italways commonplace, as witness, for example, the more moving andimaginative passages of the English Bible. On this point consultGummere's 'Beginnings of Poetry,' Chapter ii (Rhythm as the EssentialFact of Poetry, especially pp. 56-60); Watts's article 'Poetry' in theEncyclopaedia Britannica; and the _Publications of the Modern LanguageAssociation_, xx. 4.

  J. CONDITIONS FAVORABLE TO TRAGEDY

  10. These considerations may explain to us why the production of a greattragedy is almost an impossibility in our own time. The age mostfavourable to it would seem to be one in which men stand on the edge ofan old and but half-known world--as Aeschylus and Sophocles stood on theedge of the mythologic, Shakespeare on that of the feudal world--an ageof sufficient culture and reflection for men to be conscious of theglory they have left behind, while yet civilisation has not reached thestage of acquiescence in things as they are, and scepticism as to allbeyond them. Those great
situations furnished by the mysterious past, inwhich passion quits the earth, soon lose their charm, and with the reignof wonder that of tragedy ceases. At Athens it gives place to the newcomedy, whose highest boast was to copy present life ([Greek: o Menandrekai Bie, poteros ar' humon poteron apemimesato];):[10] in modern Europeit has yielded to the novel.

  FOOTNOTE:

  [10] A saying of Aristophanes, the Grammarian, quoted by Syrianus onHermogenes, IV. 101. It may be translated: "O Menander and Life! Whichof you copies the other?"

  II. THE NOVEL AN INFERIOR FORM OF ART

  A. BEGINNINGS OF THE NOVEL

  11. The novel in its proper shape did not come to the birth in Englandtill the time of Fielding and Richardson, but it had long been inprocess of formation. The seventeenth century at its close had lost thetragic impulse of its youth. The ecstatic hope of a new world, combinedwith the sad and wondering recollection of the old, which had raised thehuman spirit to the height of the Shakesperian tragedy, had died out,and the age had become eminently satisfied with itself. Wits,philosophers, and poets, alike were full of the present time. While thewits complimented each other on their superiority to the weaknesses ofmankind, they made no scruple of indulging those weaknesses in their ownpersons. It was part of their business to do so, for it was part of"life." The only difference between them and other men was that theywere weak and laughed over it, while others were weak and serious.Philosophers congratulated themselves on their new enlightenment; but itwas an enlightenment which gave them insight into things as they are,not as they are to be. "The proper study of mankind," they held was"man;" man, however, not in his boundless promise, but in the meanperformance with which they proclaimed themselves satisfied. The poetryof the time was, at best, merely common-sense with ornamentation. It wasneither lyrical nor tragic, though it may have tried to be both. Itrepresented man neither as withdrawn into himself, nor as transportedinto an ideal world of action, but as observing and reasoning on hispresent affairs. The satire and moral essay were its characteristicforms.