Art Principles in Literature

INTRODUCTION

In the Art of Interesting (Kenedy, 1920) the writer began a discussion of the principles of art and of their application to writing and speaking. In this work the discussion is carried further and is not restricted to the one feature of arousing and fixing attention, especially in oratory, which was the chief topic of the Art of Interesting. The following chapters represent the reactions of the writer to literature both as composed today and as taught in our schools. Any active mind, bewildered by the ceaseless experimenting in literature and education, and not satisfied with a passive acceptance of even excellent critics, is necessarily forced back upon first principles. Such a mind will not yield to the despair of skepticism, that there are no first principles, nor to the despair of agnosticism, that there may be such principles but we cannot know them, nor yet to the despair of pragmatism, that we must wait and see whether the human race ages from now will give us assurance that there really are principles of art because the last man has seen that these principles have been found to work up to the moment prior to which he joined Tutankhamen.


Art, just as morals and pure science, differs entirely from the natural sciences, which are generalizations based upon acquired information and must change as long as the information upon which they are based can be modified and enlarged. But where, as in art or pure science, principles are based on final truths, the principles have also a finality and can only be rejected if their basis can be changed or modified. Aristotle’s principles have something of that finality. Aristotle had for his study a body of literature that has for centuries met with the approval of the best taste in every age and of every critic. Aristotle’s biology or physics are not final, but his ethics, his logic, his esthetics are in measurable distance of finality except where some additions have been made to the materials upon which he based his analysis. In religion, because of revelation, in music because of discoveries in instrumentation, and perhaps in other arts, time has added to the original store, but in literature there are few additions to the fields which lay before Aristotle, and subsequent ages have not developed any keener analytical powers than those of Aristotle.

It is Aristotle’s principles that in the main have dominated the writer’s reactions to modern art and literature. When Greek literature held an honored place in our schools, there was less need of insisting on obvious truths of art. The intense modernism


 now predominating everywhere has driven classical literature and classical methods from school and life. History is modernized too or fails to supply the vital contact with the ever-living past which earlier schools experienced in the poets, historians, orators and philosophers of Greece and Rome. So-called cultural subjects in modern education are chiefly informational. Culture is a word which calls for definition, but on its intellectual side at least, culture for the largest number of persons in the world can be gauged most satisfactorily by their appreciation of literature and by their capacity to produce literature. The study of literature as an art is the chief topic of this book, and Aristotle’s great principles need all the more stressing now that his philosophy of art and the supreme literature on which he based his conclusions are passing away from present-day consciousness.

The chapters that follow are popular rather than scientific in presentation. Readers who seek a fuller and wider view may be interested in such a work as Benedetto Croce’s Æsthetic, from the Italian by Douglas Ainslie. Its historical summary, especially for modern times, is valuable and good. For the Greeks and earlier periods, Butcher’s Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts is easily best. Professor Rhys Roberts’ editions of the works of Dionysius, Longinus and Demetrius are excellent for


 the traditions of classical rhetoric, a tradition weak in America.

In theory Croce is an extreme intellectualist in the principles of art. He locates all of esthetics in pure intuition, which is “lyrical,” that is, emotional, because it represents “the states of the soul,” “passionality, feeling, personality.” For Croce “natural beauty is simply a stimulus to esthetic reproduction, which presupposes previous production.” He is therefore an idealist in his conception of beauty. Even monuments of art seem to be only “stimulants to esthetic reproduction” and are not beautiful in themselves. In another place, however, Croce seems to be a realist. “Art is governed entirely by imagination; its only riches are images. Art does not classify objects nor pronounce them real or imaginary nor qualify them nor define them. Art feels and represents them. In as far as it apprehends ‘the real’ immediately before it is modified and made clear by the concept, it must be called pure intuition.”

Quite to the other extreme in theory goes The Psychology of Beauty by Ethel D. Puffer. This author has much about sensations and their physiology and but little about ideas. For Croce the last stage is in the idea; for Puffer it would seem to be in the work of art. “The low-lying wide expanse of some of the old Dutch landscapists give us repose, not


 because they remind us of the peaceful happiness of the land but because we cannot melt ourselves into all those horizontal lines without the restful feeling which accompanies such relaxation.” This passage might almost class the writer with the Einfühlung school,—the school which gives Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy” a number of advocates. Pathetic fallacy was a complete misnomer when applied by Ruskin to the well-known tropes of metaphor and personification. Kingsley was not insane enough to imagine that a wave was actually cruel and actually crawled. He likened the wave that drowned to a wild animal. But the school of Lipps in Germany desires you to moan with the wind and smile with the rose and lie flat with painted horizontal lines.

Perhaps Puffer’s formula of stimulation with repose and Croce’s formula of intuition with lyricism can be reconciled with Aquinas’ definition of the beautiful, quæ visa placent. A study of Maurice De Wulf’s excellent little volume L’Œuvre d’Art et la Beauté gives us briefly and clearly the neo-scholastic solution of the esthetic problem. The book is a good example of the reasonable discussion which has won for scholastic philosophy the universal designation as the philosophy of common sense. Longhaye’s Théorie des Belles Lettres, which is scholastic philosophy applied to literature, is another clear and sane presentation of the principles of the art.


The reader who desires to supplement the popular exposition of this book with a systematic treatise on the esthetic and its application to literature is recommended to De Wulf and to Longhaye. English is rich in criticism but is deficient in works treating of the philosophy of beauty in literature.