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SECTION SEVEN Appreciation of Poetry and Art
SUBJECTIVE ELEMENT IN CRITICISM OF POETRY AND ART
All criticism of poetry is bound to have a strong subjective element in it and that is the source of the violent differences we find in the appreciation of any given author by equally "eminent" critics. All is relative here. Art and Beauty also, and our view of things and our appreciation of them depends on the consciousness which views and appreciates. Some critics recognise this and go in frankly for a purely subjective criticism — "this is why I like this and disapprove of that, I give my own values". Most labour to fit their personal likes and dislikes to some standard of criticism which they conceive to be objective; this need of objectivity, of the support of an impersonal truth independent of our personality or anybody else’s, is the main source of theories, canons, standards of art. But the theories, canons, standards themselves vary and are set up in one age only to be broken in another. Is there then no beauty of art independent of our varying mentalities? Is beauty a creation of our minds, a construction of our ideas and our senses, not at all existent in itself? In that case Beauty is non-existent in Nature, it is put upon Nature by our minds through mental imposition, adhyāropa. But this contradicts the fact that it is in response to an object and not independently of it that the idea of beautiful or not beautiful originally rises within us. Beauty does exist in what we see, but there are two aspects of it, essential beauty and the forms it takes. "Eternal beauty wandering on her way" does that wandering by a multitudinous variation of forms appealing to a multitudinous variation of consciousness. There comes in the difficulty. Each individual consciousness tries to seize the eternal beauty expressed in a form (here a particular poem or work of art), but is either assisted by the form or repelled by it, wholly attracted or wholly repelled, or partially attracted and partially repelled. There may be errors in the poet’s or artist’s transcription of beauty which mar the reception, but even these have different effects on different people. But the more radical divergences arise from the variation in the constitution of the mind and its difference of response. Moreover, there are minds, the majority indeed, who do not respond to "artistic" beauty at Page - 471 all — something inartistic appeals much more to what sense of beauty they have — or else they are not seeking beauty, but only vital pleasure. A critic cannot escape altogether from these limitations. He can try to make himself catholic and objective and find the merit or special character of all he reads or sees in poetry and art, even when they do not evoke his strongest sympathy or deepest response. I have little temperamental sympathy for much of the work of Pope and Dryden, but I can see their extraordinary perfection or force in their own field, the masterly conciseness, energy, point, metallic precision into which they cut their thought or their verse, and I can see too how that can with a little infusion of another quality be the basis of a really great poetic style, as Dryden himself has shown in his best work. But there my appreciation stops; I cannot rise to the heights of admiration of those who put them on a level with or on a higher level than Wordsworth, Keats or Shelley — I cannot escape from the feeling that their work, even though more consistently perfect within their limits and in their own manner (at least Pope’s), was less great in poetic quality. These divergences rise from a conception of beauty and a feeling for beauty which belongs to the temperament. So too Housman’s exaltation of Blake results directly from his feeling and peculiar conception of poetic beauty as an appeal to an inner sensation, an appeal marred and a beauty deflowered by bringing in a sharp coating or content of intellectual thought. But that I shall not discuss now. All this, however, does not mean that criticism is without any true use. The critic can help to open the mind to the kinds of beauty he himself sees and not only to discover but to appreciate at their full value certain elements that make them beautiful or give them what is most characteristic or unique in their peculiar beauty. Housman, for instance, may help many minds to see in Blake something which they did not see before. They may not agree with him in his comparison of Blake and Shakespeare, but they can follow him to a certain extent and seize better that element in poetic beauty which he overstresses but makes at the same time more vividly visible. 5.10.1934 Page – 472 CONTEMPORARY JUDGMENT OF POETRY
If you send your poems to five different poets, you are likely to get five absolutely disparate and discordant estimates of them. A poet likes only the poetry that appeals to his own temperament or taste, the rest he condemns or ignores. (My own case is different, because I am not primarily a poet and have made in criticism a practice of appreciating everything that can be appreciated, as a catholic critic would.) Contemporary poetry, besides, seldom gets its right judgment from contemporary critics. Nothing can be more futile than for a poet to write in expectation of contemporary fame or praise, however agreeable that may be, if it comes; but it is not of any definitive value, for very poor poets have enjoyed a great contemporary fame and very great poets have been neglected in their time, their merit known only to a few and gathering very slowly a greater volume of appreciation around it. A poet has to go on his way, trying to gather hints from what people say for or against when their criticisms are things he can profit by, but not otherwise moved (if he can manage it) — seeking mainly to sharpen his own sense of self-criticism by the help of others. Difference of estimate need not surprise him at all. 2.2.1932
POETIC AND ARTISTIC VALUE AND POPULAR APPEAL 1 I do not know why your correspondent puts so much value on general understanding and acceptance. Really it is only the few that can be trusted to discern the true value of things in poetry and art and if the "general" run accept, it is usually because acceptance is sooner or later imposed or induced in their minds by the authority of the few and afterwards by the verdict of Time. There are exceptions, of course, of a wide spontaneous acceptance because something that is really good happens to suit a taste or a demand in the general mind of the moment. Poetic and artistic value does not necessarily command mass understanding Page – 473 and acceptance. 2
What does he mean? that you can’t write mathematics in verse? I suppose not, it was not meant to be. You can’t start off Oh, two by three plus four plus seven! To add things is to be in heaven. But all the same, if one thinks it worth while to take the trouble, one can express the mathematician’s delight in discovery, or the grammarian’s in grammatising or the engineer’s in planning a bridge or a house. What about Browning’s Grammarian’s Funeral? The reason why these subjects do not easily get into poetry is because they do not lend themselves to poetic handling, their substance being intellectual and abstract and their language also, not as the substance and language of poetry must be, emotional and intuitive. It is not because they appeal only to a few people and not to the general run of humanity. A good dinner appeals not to a few people but to the general run of humanity, but it would all the same be a little difficult to write an epic or a lyric on the greatness of cooking and fine dishes or the joys of the palate and the belly. Spiritual subjects on the other hand can lend themselves to poetic handling because they can be expressed in the language of high emotion and radiant intuition. How many people will appreciate it is a question which is irrelevant to the merit of the poetry. More people have appreciated sincerely Macaulay’s Lays or Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads than ever really appreciated Timon of Athens or Paradise Regained — but that does not determine the relative value or appropriateness of these things as poetry. Artistic or poetic value cannot be reckoned by the plaudits or the reactions of the greatest number. 2.11.1936 3 It is quite true that all art and poetry is largely dependent on Page – 474 the vital for its activity and if there is no force of vitality in the poetry then it cannot be strong or great. But it does not follow that the vital element in poetry will appeal to everybody or a great number of people; it depends on the kind of vital movement that is there. The forceful but inferior sort of vital energy that you find in Kipling’s ballads appeals to a large mass of people; the vital element in Milton which is very powerful affects only a few in comparison, the rest take him on trust because he is a great classic but have not the true intense enjoyment of him as of Kipling. Yet Milton’s greatness will endure — that cannot be said certainly of Kipling’s ballads. The problem therefore remains where it was. Spiritual poetry also needs the vital force for expression; mere spiritual philosophy without the uplifting poetic force in its expression (which needs the vital energy for its action) cannot appeal to anybody. But all the same in spiritual poetry the vital element adopts a turn which may not go home to many, unless it takes a popular religious form which has a general appeal. There I do not follow quite X’s position — does he contend that one ought to suit one’s poetry to the mentality of others so that it may have a general appeal, not keeping to its natural purpose of expressing what is felt and seen by the poet according to the truth of the inspiration within him ? Surely that cannot be recommended; but if it is not done, the possibility of reaching (at first, of course) only a few remains uneliminated. It is not that a poet deliberately sets out to be appreciated by a few only; he sets out to be himself in his poetry and the rest follows. But consider a poet like Mallarmé writing his strange enigmatic profound style which turned the whole structure of French upside down he cannot have expected or cared to be read and appreciated even by that part of the general public which is interested in and appreciative of poetry. Yet there is no one who had more influence on modern French-poets — he helped to create Verlaine, Valéry and a number of others who rank among the great ones in French literature and he himself too now ranks very high though he must still, I should think, be read only by a comparatively small though select audience; yet he has practically turned the current of French poetry. So there is something to be said for writing for oneself even if that implies writing only Page – 475 for the few and not for the many. As for the actor, that is quite a different art, meant for the public, depending on its breath of applause, ineffective if its public is not moved or captured. A poet publishes, but he can take his chance; if he does not succeed in commanding widespread attention, he can still continue to write; there is something in him which maintains its energy and will to create. If he seeks acknowledged greatness and success—though that is a secondary matter to the force that makes him write — he can still sustain himself on the hope of a future greatness with posterity; there are plenty of illustrious examples to console him. 5.11.1936 4 Well, but did they not say the same thing about Mallarmé? And what of Blake? Contemporary opinion is a poor judge of what shall live or not live. The fact remains that the impressionist movement in poetry initiated by Mallarmé has proved to be the most powerful stream in France. and its influence is not confined to that country. The whole thing is that it is a mistake to erect a mental theory and try to force into its narrow mould the infinite variety of the processes of Nature. Shakespeare may have so much vital force as to recommend himself to a large audience not so much for his poetry at first as for his dramatic vividness and power; it must be remembered that it was the German romantics two centuries later who brought about the apotheosis of Shakespeare — before that he had a much more limited circle of admirers. Other great poets have started with a more scanty recognition. Others have had a great popularity in their lifetime and sunk afterwards to a much lower level of fame. What is important is to preserve the right of the poet to write for himself, that is to say, for the Spirit that moves him, not to demand from him that he should write down to the level of the general or satisfy even the established taste and standard of the critics or connoisseurs of his time. For that would mean the end or decay of poetry — it would perish of its own debasement. A poet must be free to use his wings even if they carry him above the comprehension Page – 476 of the public of the day or of the general run of critics or lead him into lonely places. This is all that matters. Tolstoy’s logic is out of place. Nobody says that the value of the poet must be measured by the scantiness of his audience any more than it can be measured by the extent of his contemporary popularity. So there is no room for his reductio ad absurdum What is contended is that it cannot be measured by either standard. It must be measured by the power of his vision, of his speech, of his feeling, by his rendering of the world within or the world without or of any world to which he has access. It may be the outer world that he portrays like Homer and Chaucer or a vivid life-world like Shakespeare or an inmost world of experience like Blake or other mystic poets. The recognition of that power will come first from the few who recognise good poetry when they see it and from those who can enter into his world; afterwards it can spread to the larger number who can recognise good poetry when it is shown to them; finally, the still larger public may come in who learn to appreciate by a slow education, not by instinct and nature. There was a sound principle in the opinion always held in former times that it is time alone that can test the enduring power of a poet’s work, for contemporary opinion is not reliable. There remains the case of the poets great or small or null who immediately command a general hearing. They have an element in them which catches at once the mind of the time: they are saying things which have a general appeal in a way that everybody can understand, in a language and rhythm that all can appreciate. As you say, there must be a vital element in the poetry of such a writer which gets him his public. The question is, has he anything else and, again what is the value of this vital element? If he has nothing else or not much of any high value, his aureole will not endure. If he has something but not of the best and highest, he will sink in the eyes of posterity, but not set out of sight. If he has in him something of the very greatest and best, his fame will grow and grow as time goes on —some of the elements that caught him his contemporary public may fade and lose their value, but the rest will shine with an increasing brightness. But even the vital and popular elements in the work Page – 477 may have different values — Shakespeare’s vitality has the same appeal now as then; Tennyson’s has got very much depreciated; Longfellow’s is now recognised for the easily current copper coin that it always was. You must remember that when I speak of the vital force in a poet as something necessary, I am not speaking of something that need be low or fitted only to catch the general mind, not fit to appeal to a higher judgment, but something that can be very valuable from the highest point of view. When Milton writes Fall’n Cherub, to be -weak is miserable, or describes the grandeur of the fallen archangel, there is a vital force there that is of the highest quality, — so is that of Shakespeare; so is that of many pieces of Blake. This vital energy makes the soul stir within you. Nothing can be more high and sublime than the vital energy in Arjuna’s description of the Virat Purusha in the Grta. 6.11.1936 5
I remain convinced that fame is a fluke. Even a settled literary fame seems to be a very fluctuating affair. Who gave a thought to Blake or Donne in former times — when I was in England, for instance? But now they bid fair to be reckoned among the great poets. I see that Byron is in the depths, the quotations for Pope and Dryden are rising, it was very different in those days. 5.2.1932 6
What is not understood or appreciated by one select circle may be understood or appreciated by another select circle or in the future like Blake’s poetry. Nobody appreciated Blake in his own time. Now he ranks as a great poet, more poetic than Shakespeare, says Housman. Tagore wrote he could not appreciate X’s poetry because it is too "Yogic" for him. Is Tagore unselect, one of the public at large? Page – 478 I don’t agree at all with not publishing because you won’t be understood. At that rate many great poets would have remained unpublished. What about the unintelligible Mallarmé who had such a great influence on later French poetry? 24.7.1936 ABIDING INTUITION OF POETIC AND ARTISTIC GREATNESS
Yes, of course there is an intuition of greatness by which the great poet or artist is distinguished from those who are less great and these again from the not-great-at-all. But you are asking too much when you expect this intuition to work with a mechanical instantaneousness and universality so that all shall have the same opinion and give the same values. The greatness of Shakespeare, of Dante» of others of the same rank is unquestioned and unquestionable and the recognition of it has always been there in their own time and afterwards. Virgil and Horace stood out in their own day in the first rank among the poets and that verdict has never been reversed since. The area of a poet’s fame may vary; it may have been seen first by a few, then by many, then by all. At first there may be adverse critics and assailants, but these negative voices die away. Questionings may rise from time to time — e.g. as to whether Lucretius was not a greater poet than Virgil — but these are usually from individuals and the general verdict abides always. Even lesser poets retain their rank in spite of fluctuations of their fame. You speak of the discrediting of some and the rehabilitation of the discredited. That happened to Pope and Dryden. Keats and his contemporaries broke their canons and trampled over their corpses to reach romantic freedom; now there is a rehabilitation. But all this is something of an illusion — for mark that even at the worst Pope and Dryden retained a place among the great names of English literature. No controversy, no depreciation could take that away from them. This proves my contention that there is an abiding intuition of poetic and artistic greatness. The attempts at comparison of poets likej31ake and Shakespeare or Dante, and Shakespeare by critics like Housman and Page – 479 Eliot? It seems to,-me that these are irrelevant and otiose. Both Dante and Shakespeare stand at the summit of poetic fame, but each with so different a way of genius that comparison is unprofitable. Shakespeare has powers that Dante cannot rival; Dante has heights which Shakespeare could not reach; but in essence they stand as mighty equals. As for Blake and Shakespeare, that opinion is more a personal fantasy than anything else. Purity and greatness are not the same thing; Blake’s may be pure poetry in Housman’s sense and Shakespeare’s not except in a few passages; but nobody can contend that Blake’s genius had the width and volume and richness of Shakespeare’s. It can be said that Blake as a mystic poet achieved things beyond Shakespeare’s measure — for Shakespeare had not the mystic’s vision; but as a poet of the play of life Shakespeare is everywhere and Blake nowhere. These are tricks of language and idiosyncrasies of preference. One has to put each thing in its place without confusing issues and then one can see that Housman’s praise of Blake may be justified but any exaltation of him by comparison with Shakespeare is not in accordance with the abiding intuition of these things which remains undisturbed by any individual verdict. The errors of great poets in judging their contemporaries are personal freaks — they are failures in intuition due to the mind’s temporary movements getting in the way of the intuition. The errors of Goethe and Bankim were only an over-estimation of a genius or a talent that was new and therefore attractive at the time. Richardson’s Pamela was after all the beginning of modern fiction. As I have said, the general intuition does not work at once and with a mechanical accuracy. Over-estimation of a contemporary is frequent, under-estimation also. But, taken on the whole, the real poet commands at first or fairly soon the verdict of the few whose eyes are open — and often the attacks of those whose eyes are shut — and the few grow in numbers till the general intuition affirms their verdict. There may be exceptions, for there is hardly a rule without exceptions, but this is, I think, generally true. As for the verdict of Englishmen upon a French poet or vice versa, that is due to a difficulty in entering into the finer spirit Page – 480 and subtleties of a foreign language. It is difficult for a French-man to get a proper appreciation of-Keats or Shelley or for an Englishman to judge Racine, for this reason. But a Frenchman like Maurois who knows English as an Englishman knows it, can get the full estimation of a poet like Shelley well enough. These variations must be allowed for; the human mind is not a perfect instrument, its best intuitions are veiled by irrelevant mental formations; but in these matters the truth asserts itself and stands fairly firm and clear in essence through all changes of mental weather. 6.10.1934 COMPARISON OF THE ARTS 1
I do not know what to say on the subject you propose to me — the superiority of music to poetry—for my appreciation of music is bodiless and inexpressible, while about poetry I can write at ease with an expert knowledge. But is it necessary to fix a scale of greatness between two fine arts when each has its own greatness and can touch in its own way the extremes of aesthetic Ananda? Music, no doubt, goes nearest to the infinite and to the essence of things because it relies wholly on the ethereal vehicle, śabda, (architecture by the by can do something of the same kind at the other extreme even in its imprisonment in mass); but painting and sculpture have their revenge by liberating visible form into ecstasy, while poetry though it cannot do with sound what music does, yet can make a many-stringed harmony, a sound revelation winging the creation by the word and setting afloat vivid suggestions of form and colour, — that gives it in a very subtle kind the power of all the arts. Who shall decide between such claims or be a judge between these godheads?
2 I fear I must disappoint you. I am not going to pass the Gods Page – 481 through a competitive examination and assign a highest place to one and lower places to others. What an idea! Each has his or her own province on the summits and what is the necessity of putting them in rivalry with the others? It is a sort of Judgment of Paris you want to impose on me? Well, but what became of Paris and Troy? You want me to give the crown or apple to Music and enrage the Goddesses of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Embroidery, all the Nine Muses? Your test of precedence — universal appeal — is all wrong. I don’t know that it is true, in the first place. Some kind of sound called music appeals to everybody, but has really great music a universal appeal? And, speaking of arts, more people go to the theatre or read fiction than go to the opera or a concert. What ‘ becomes then of the superior universality of music, even in the cheapest sense of universality? Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads exercise a more universal appeal than was ever reached by Milton or Keats — we will say nothing of writers like Blake or Francis Thompson; a band on the pier at a seaside resort will please more people than a great piece of music with the orchestration conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. In a world of gods it might be true that the highest makes the most universal appeal, but here in a world of beasts and men…it is usually the inferior things that have the more general if not quite universal appeal. On the other hand the opposite system you suggest (the tables turned upside down — the least universal and most difficult appeal makes the greatest art) would also have its dangers. At that rate we should have to concede that the cubist and abstract painters had reached the highest art possible, only rivalled by the up-to-date modernist poets of whom it has been said that their works are not at all either read or understood by the public, are read and understood only by the poet himself and are read without being understood by his personal friends and admirers. When you speak of direct appeal, you are perhaps touching something true. Technique does not come in—for although to have a complete and expert judgment or appreciation you must know the technique not only in music and painting where it is more difficult, but in poetry and architecture also, it is something Page – 482 else and not that kind of judgment of which you are speaking. It is perhaps true that music goes direct to the intuition and feeling with the least necessity for the using of the thinking mind with its strongly limiting conceptions as a self-imposed middleman, while painting and sculpture do need it and poetry still more. At that rate music would come first, architecture next, then sculpture and painting, poetry last. I am aware that Housman posits nonsense as the essence of pure poetry and considers its appeal to be quite direct — not to the soul but to somewhere about the stomach. But then there is hardly any pure poetry in this world and the little there is is still mélangé with at least a homeopathic dose of intellectual meaning. But again if I admit this thesis of excellence by directness, I shall be getting myself into dangerous waters. For modern painting has become either cubist or abstract and it claims to have got rid of mental representation and established in art the very method of music; it paints not the object, but the truth behind the object — by the use of pure line and colour and geometrical form which is the basis of all forms or else by figures which are not representations but significances. For instance a modern painter wishing to make a portrait of you will paint at the top a clock surrounded by three triangles, below them a chaos of rhomboids and at the bottom two table castors to represent your feet and he will put in underneath this powerful design, "Portrait of N". Perhaps your soul will leap up in answer to its direct appeal and recognise at once the truth behind the object, behind your vanished physical self,—you will greet your psychic being or your Atman or at least your inner physical or vital being. Perhaps also you won’t. Poetry also seems to be striving towards the same end by the same means — the getting away from mind into the depths of life or, as the profane might put it, arriving at truth and beauty through ugliness and unintelligibility. From that you will perhaps deduce that the attempt of painting and poetry to do what music alone can do easily and directly without these acrobatics is futile because it is contrary to their nature — which proves your thesis that music is the highest art because most direct in its appeal to the soul and the feeling. Maybe — or maybe not; as the Jams put it, syād vā syād vā. Page – 483 I have written so much, you will see, in order to say nothing — or at least to avoid your attempt at putting me in an embarrassing dilemma. 3
… Or shall we put it in this way "Each of the great arts has its own appeal and its own way of appeal and each in its own way is supreme above all others"? That ought to do. 6.1.1936 DANCE
Dance alone with rhythm and significance can express something of the occult or of the Divine as much as writing or poetry or art — why should it not and why should there be anything in it condemnable? 17.7.1933 POETRY AND NOVEL
No need to put poetry against novel and make a case between them. Both can be given admission to the spiritual Parnassus — but not all poetry and all novels. All depends on the consciousness from which the thing is done. If it is done from the psychic or the spiritual consciousness and bears the stamp of its source, that is sufficient. Of course there are certain things that cannot be done from there, but neither poetry nor fiction is in that case. They can be lifted to a higher level and made the expression of the psychic or spiritual mind and vision. When that is said, all is said. I hope my brevity has been of the right kind — and not left the question mystically obscure. 9.6.1936 MUSICAL EXCELLENCE AND GENERAL CULTURE
I have not seen the remarks in question. I don’t suppose all- Page – 484 round general culture has much to do with excelling in music. Music is a gift independent of any such thing and it can hardly be said that, given a musical gift in two people, the one with an all-round culture would go farther than the other in musical excellence. That would not be true in any of the arts. But something else was meant, perhaps, — that there is a certain turn or element in the excellence which an all-round culture makes possible? It is only in that sense that it could be true. Shakespeare’s poetry, for instance, is that of a man with a vivid and many-sided response to life; it gives the impression of a multifarious knowledge of things but it was a knowledge picked up from life as he went: Milton’s gets a certain colour from his studies and learning; in neither case is the genius or the excellence of the poetry due to culture, but there is a certain turn or colouring in Milton which would have not been there otherwise and which is not there in Shakespeare. It does not give any superiority in poetic excellence to one over the other. 12.11.1936 COMMENT ON CROCE’S THEORY OF AESTHETICS1
I have not read Croce but it seems to me that Durant must have taken something of their depth out of them in his presentation.
¹This comment is apropos of the following passages from a statement of Benedetto Croce’s philosophy of aesthetics presented by Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy (Earnest Benn, London, 1948), pp. 406-407: " ‘Knowledge has two forms: it is either intuitive knowledge or logical knowledge; knowledge obtained through the imagination or knowledge obtained through the intellect; knowledge of the individual or knowledge of the universal; of individual things or of the relations between them; it is the production either of images or of concepts.’ (B Croce, Æsthetic, 1902, D- P-1.) The origin of art, therefore, lies in the power of forming images. ‘Art is ruled uniquely by the imagination. Images are its only wealth. It does not classify objects, it does not pronounce them real or imaginary, does not qualify them, does not define them; it feels and presents them —nothing more.’ (In Carr, The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce, 1917, p. 35.) Because imagination precedes thought, and is necessary to it, the artistic, or image-forming, activity of the mind is prior to the logical, concept-forming, activity. Man is an artist as soon as he imagines, and long before he reasons. "The great artists understood the matter so. ‘One paints not with the hands but with the brain,’ said Michelangelo; and Leonardo wrote: ‘The minds of men of lofty genius are most active in invention when they are doing the least external work.’ Everybody knows the story told of Da Vinci, that when he was painting the ‘Last Supper’, he sorely displeased the Abbot who had ordered the work, by sitting motionless for days before an untouched canvas; and revenged himself for the importunate Ahbot’s persistent query — When would- he begin to work? — by using the gentleman as an unconscious model for the figure of Judas. "The essence of the assthetic activity lies in this motionless effort of the artist to conceive the perfect image that shall express the subject he has in mind; it lies in a form of intuition that involves no mystic insight, but perfect sight, complete perception, and adequate imagination. The miracle of art lies not in the externalization but in the conception of the idea; externalization is a matter of mechanical technique and manual skill. ‘When we have mastered the internal word, when we have vividly and clearly conceived a figure or a statue, when we have found a musical theme, expression is born and is complete, nothing more is needed. If, then, we open our mouth, and speak or sing,…what we do is to say aloud what we have already said within, to sing aloud what we have already sung within. If our hands strike the keyboard of the pianoforte, if we take up pencil or chisel, such actions are willed’ (they belong to the practical, not to the aesthetic, activity), ‘arid what we are then doing is executing in great movements what we have already executed briefly and rapidly within.’ (B.Croce, Æsthetic, 1902, p. 50.)" Page – 485 At any rate, I cannot accept the proposition that there are only two forms of knowledge, imaginative and intellectual, — still less if these two are made to coincide with the division between knowledge of the individual and that of the universal and again with image-production and concepts. Art can be conceptual as well as imaginative — it may embody ideas and not merely produce images. I do not see the relevancy of the Da Vinci story — one can sit motionless to summon up concepts as well as images or a concept and image together. Moreover, what is this intuition which is perfect sight and adequate imagination, that is production of an image, — is it empty of all "idea", of all conception ? Evidently not, — for immediately it is said that the miracle of art lies in the conception of an idea. What then becomes of the division between the production of images and the production of concepts; and how can it be said that Art is ruled only by the image-producing power and images are its only wealth? All this seems to be very contradictory and confusing. You cannot cut up the human mind in that way — the attempt is that of the analysing intellect which is always putting things as trenchantly divided and opposite. If it had been said that in Art the synthetic action of the idea is more prominent than the analytic idea which we find most prominent in logic and science and philosophical reasoning, then one could understand the , statement. The integrating or direct integral conception and the image-making faculty are the two leading powers of Art with Page – 486 intuition as the driving force behind it — that too would be a statement that is intelligible. Still more strange is the statement that the externalisation is outside the miracle of art and is not needed; beauty, he says, is adequate expression, but how can there be expression, an expressive image without externalisation? The inner image may be the thing to be expressed, it may itself be expressive of some truth but unless it is externalised how can the spectator contemplating beauty contemplate it at all or get into unity of vision with the artist who creates it? The difference between Shakespeare and ourselves lies only in the power of inwardly forming an image, not in the power of externalising it? But there are many people who have the power of a rich inner imaging of things, but are quite unable to put them down on paper or utter them in speech or transfer them to canvas or into clay or bronze or stone. They are then as great creative artists as Shakespeare or Michael Angelo? I should have thought that Shakespeare’s power of the word and Michael Angelo’s of translating his image into visible form is at least an indispensable part of the art of expression, creation or image-making. I cannot conceive of a Shakespeare or Michael Angelo without that power — the one would be a mute inglorious Shakespeare and the other a rather helpless and ineffective Angelo. 19.12.1936 P.S. This is of course a comment on the statement as presented — I would have to read Croce myself in order to form a conception of what is behind his philosophy of Aesthetics. Page – 487 |