On passe plus facilement d’un extrême à un autre
que d’une nuance à une autre nuance.
Attirance de la Mort.
Another possible misapprehension which cannot be left unmentioned arises in connection with the doctrine ‘Art for Art’s sake’, a doctrine definitely and detrimentally dated; it concerns the place of what are called ulterior effects in the valuing of a work of art. It has been very fashionable to turn up the nose at any attempt to apply, as it is said, ‘external canons’ to art. But it may be recalled that of all the great critical doctrines, the ‘moral’, theory of art (it would be better to call it the ‘Ordinary values’ theory) has the most great minds behind it. Until Whistler came to start the critical movements of the last half-century, few poets, artists or critics had ever doubted that the value of art experiences was to be judged as other values are. Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Dante, Spenser, Milton, the Eighteenth Century, Coleridge, Shelley, Matthew Arnold and Pater, to name only the most prominent, all with varying degrees of refinement, held the same view.* The last is a somewhat unexpected adherent.
“Given the conditions I have tried to explain as constituting good art, then if it be devoted further to the increase of men’s happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or to the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new and old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may fortify us in our sojourn here . . . it will also be great art; if, over and above those qualities which I have summed up . . . it has something of the soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its architectural place, in the great structure of human life.”† No better brief emotive account of the conditions under which an experience has value could be desired.
Against all these weighty opinions, the view—supported largely by a distinction between Form and Content, Subject and Handling, which will be examined elsewhere,* and relying upon the doctrine of intrinsic, supersensible, ultimate Goods discussed above—that the values of art are unique, or capable of being considered in isolation from all others, has held sway for some thirty years in many most reputable quarters. The reasons for this attempted severance have already been touched upon; they are of all sorts. Partly it may be due to the influence of Whistler and Pater, and of those still more influential disciples who spread their doctrines. Partly it may be due to a massed reaction against Ruskin. Partly again we may suspect the influence, rather suddenly encountered, of Continental and German æsthetics upon the English mind. Almost from the beginning of scientific æsthetics, the insistence on the æsthetic experience as an experience, peculiar, complete, and capable of being studied in isolation, has received prominence. Often it is no more than an extension into this considering, whenever possible, one thing at a time. When critics in England, not very long ago, heard that there was something connected with art and poetry—namely, the æsthetic experience—which could be considered and examined in isolation by the methods of introspection, they not unnaturally leapt to the conclusion that its value also could be isolated and described without reference to other things. In some hands the further conclusions drawn were too queer to outlive their hour of fashion. They amounted often to the postulation of a ‘specific thrill’ yielded by works of art and nothing else, unlike and unconnected with all other experiences. “No queerer,” it was said, “than anything else in this incredibly queer universe.”† But the queerness of the universe is of a different and a more interesting sort. It may be a curiosity shop but it nowhere seems to be a chaos.
For our present purposes we need only consider the view as it is put forward by its ablest exponent, a critic who by his own explanations of this formula goes very far towards meeting the objection we urge.
“What then does the formula ‘Poetry for Poetry’s sake’ tell us about this experience? It says, as I understand it, these things. First, this experience is an end in itself, is worth having on ifs own account, has an intrinsic value. Next, its poetic value is this intrinsic worth alone. Poetry may have also have an ulterior value as a means to culture or religion; because it conveys instruction or softens the passions, or furthers a good cause; because it brings the poet fame, or money, or a quiet conscience. So much the better: let it be valued for these reasons too. But its ulterior worth neither is nor can directly determine its poetic worth as a satisfying imaginative experience; and this is to be judged entirely from within. . . . The consideration of ulterior ends whether by the poet in the act of composing or by the reader in the act of experiencing, tends to lower poetic value. It does so because it tends to change the nature of poetry by taking it out of its own atmosphere. For its nature is to be not a part, nor yet a copy of the real world (as we commonly understand that phrase) but to be a world by itself, independent, complete, autonomous†.”
There seem four points well worth close consideration here. The first is that the things mentioned as possible ulterior values in Dr Bradley’s list—culture, religion, instruction, softening of the passions, furtherance of good causes, the poet’s fame, or money, or quiet conscience—these things are plainly upon quite different levels. He says of all of them that they cannot possibly determine the poetic worth of an æsthetic experience; that whether or no any poetic experience is poetically valuable cannot depend upon any of these ulterior values. But it is certain that some of these stand in a quite different relation to the poetic experience than do others. Culture, religion, instruction in some special senses, softening of the passions, and the furtherance of good causes may be directly concerned in our judgments of the poetic values of experiences. Otherwise, as we shall see, the word ‘poetic’ becomes a useless sound. On the other hand, the poet’s fame, his reward, or his conscience, seem plainly to be irrelevant. That is the first point.
The second point is that what Dr Bradley says as to the imaginative experience—that it is to be judged entirely from within—is misleading. In most cases we do not judge it from within. Our judgment as to its value is no part of it. In rare instances such a judgment may be part of it, but this is exceptional. As a rule we have to come out of it in order to judge it, and we judge it by memory or by other residual effects which we learn to be good indices to its value. If by judging it in the experience we mean merely while these residual effects are fresh, we may agree. In so judging it, however, it’s “place in the great structure of human life” cannot possibly be ignored. The value which it has is dependent upon this, and we cannot judge that value without taking this place, and with it innumerable ulterior worths, into account. It is not that we shall evaluate it wrongly if we neglect them, but that evaluation is just this taking account of everything, and of the way things hang together.
The third point arises with regard to Dr Bradley’s third position, that the consideration of ulterior ends, whether by the poet in the act of composing, or by the reader in the act of experiencing, tends to lower poetic value. Here all depends upon which are the ulterior ends in question, and what the kind of poetry. It will not be denied that for some kinds of poetry the intrusion of certain ulterior ends may, and often does, lower their value; but there seem plainly to be other kinds of poetry in which its value as poetry definitely and directly depends upon the ulterior ends involved. Consider the Psalms, Isaiah, the New Testament, Dante, the Pilgrim’s Progress, Rabelais, any really universal satire, Swift, Voltaire, Byron.
In all these cases the consideration of ulterior ends has been certainly essential to the act of composing. That needs no arguing; but, equally, this consideration of the ulterior ends involved is inevitable to the reader.
Dr Bradley puts this third position forward in a tentative form; he says that the ulterior tends to lower poetic value, an important reservation, but it would be better to distinguish two kinds of poetry, one to which his doctrine applies and one to which it does not. As illustrations of the cases in which his doctrine does apply, The Ancient Mariner and Hartleap Well may be mentioned. Here in both cases the experiences are of a kind into which no ulterior ends enter in any important degree. Thus when Coleridge and Wordsworth introduce moral considerations, the effect is undeniably one of intrusion. As Mrs Meynell comically remarks, “The Ancient Mariner offends upon a deliberate plan. It denies the natural function of observation when it invents sanctions for the protection of a wild bird’s life, and for the punishment of its slaughter. Coleridge intends to enforce a lesson by telling us that 200 mariners died of thirst because they had—with the superstition pardonable in their state of education—supposed an albatross to be the bringer of foggy weather, and had approved its slaughter, as almost all men implicitly approve the daily slaughter of innocent beast and bird.” But this charge against Coleridge is only reasonable if we make of this ulterior end, this ‘lesson’ against cruelty to animals, a vital part of the poem. Mrs Meynell, we may think, takes Coleridge’s moral too seriously. It may be this possibility which Coleridge had in mind when he said, long afterwards, that The Ancient Mariner did not contain enough of the moral. As the poem stands, it is of a kind into which ulterior ends do not enter. If we are to take this alien element, this lesson, into account in our judgment, we shall have deliberately to misread the poem, with Mrs Meynell. The same considerations apply to Hartleap Well; and so far as Dr Bradley is merely enforcing this point, we may agree; but he fails to notice—it is only fair to say that few critics seem ever to notice it—that poetry is of more than one kind, and that the different kinds are to be judged by different principles. There is a kind of poetry into the judgment of which ulterior ends directly and essentially enter; a kind part of whose value is directly derivable from the value of the ends with which it is associated. There are other kinds, into which ulterior ends do not enter in any degree, and there are yet other kinds whose value may be lowered by the intrusion of ends relatively trivial in value. Dr Bradley is misled by the usual delusion that there is in this respect only one kind of poetry, into saying far more than the facts of poetic experience will justify.
The fourth point is of more general importance perhaps than these three. It is in fact the real point of disagreement between the view we are upholding and the doctrine which Dr Bradley, together with the vast majority of modern critics, wishes to maintain. It is stated in the concluding sentence of the paragraph which I have quoted. He says of poetry that “its nature is to be, not a part nor yet a copy of the real world, as we commonly understand that phrase, but to be a world by itself, independent, complete, autonomous. To possess it fully, you must enter that world, conform to its laws, and ignore, for the time being, the beliefs, aims, and particular conditions which belong to you in the other world of reality.” This doctrine insists: upon a severance between poetry and what, in opposition, may be called life; a complete severance, allowing however, as Dr Bradley goes on to insist—an ‘underground’ connection. But this ‘underground’ connection is all-important. Whatever there is in the poetic experience has come through it. The world of poetry has in no sense any different reality from the rest of the world and it has no special laws and no other-worldly peculiarities. It is made up of experiences of exactly the same kinds as those that come to us in other ways. Every poem however is a strictly limited piece of experience, a piece which breaks up more or less easily if alien elements intrude. It is more highly and more delicately organised than ordinary experiences of the street or of the hillside; it is fragile. Further it is communicable. It may be experienced by many different minds with only slight variations. That this should be possible is one of the conditions of its organisation. It differs from many other experiences, whose value is very similar, in this very communicability. For these reasons when we experience it, or attempt to, we must preserve it from contamination, from the irruptions of personal particularities. We must keep the poem undisturbed by these or we fail to read it and have some other experience instead. For these reasons we establish a severance, we draw a boundary between the poem and what is not the poem in our experience. But this is no severance between unlike things but between different systems of the same activities. The gulf between them is no greater than that between the impulses which direct the pen and those which conduct the pipe of a man who is smoking and writing at once, and the ‘disassociation’ or severance of the poetic experience is merely a freeing of it from extraneous ingredients and influences. The myth of a ‘transmutation’ or ‘poetisation’ of experience and that other myth of the ‘contemplative’ or ‘æsthetic’ attitude, are in part due to talking about Poetry and the ‘poetic’ instead of thinking about the concrete experiences which are poems.
The separation of poetic experience from its place in life and its ulterior worths, involves a definite lop-sidedness, narrowness, and incompleteness in those who preach it sincerely. No one, of course, would bring such charges against the author of Shakespearean Tragedy; his is that welcome and not unfamiliar case of the critic whose practice is a refutation of his principles. When genuinely held the view leads to an attempted splitting up of the experiencing reader into a number of distinct faculties or departments which have no real existence. It is impossible to divide a reader into so many men—an æsthetic man, a moral man, a practical man, a political man, an intellectual man, and so on. It cannot be done. In any genuine experience all these elements inevitably enter. But if it could be done, as many critics pretend, the result would be fatal to the wholeness and sanction of the critical judgment. We cannot e.g. read Shelley adequately while believing that all his views are moonshine—read Prometheus Unbound while holding that ‘the perfectibility of man is an undesirable ideal’ and that ‘hangmen are excellent things.’ To say that there is a purely æsthetic or poetic approach to, let us say, the Sermon on the Mount, by which no consideration of the intention or ulterior end of the poem enters, would appear to be merely mental timidity, the shrinking remark of a person who finds essential literature too much for him. Into an adequate reading of the greater kinds of poetry everything not private and peculiar to the individual reader must come in. The reader must be required to wear no blinkers, to overlook nothing which is relevant, to shut off no part of himself from participation. If he attempts to assume the peculiar attitude of disregarding all but some hypothetically-named æsthetic elements, he joins Henry James’ Osmond in his tower, he joins Blake’s Kings and Priests in their High Castles and Spires.