Art principles in literature — A Closer Reading

e art with the shock of nerves or the tickling of concupiscence or with misguided realism, will not produce things of beauty. He gets a thrill, but it is not the permanent, undying thrill of art, not the thing of beauty, which is a joy forever.

2. REALISM AND REALITY

At an exhibition in New York City there was displayed a picture of an ocean wave upon the crest of which the artist had nailed a real bar of soap. The first idea of the spectator was to consider this peculiar product an advertisement, but it seems to have been intended as a serious, if perverted, attempt at art. If the artist was not slyly proposing the caricature of excessive realism, the cake of soap will serve well as a parable for those artists who do not distinguish between realism and reality.

The ultra-realist forgets that art is a creation, the making of another world. The artist cannot really create what he puts into his new world of sight or hearing or imagination, of color, of sound, of words. If he could actually make something new, not based on nature or on human nature, he would do so on the penalty of being unintelligible. Neither should he go to the other extreme and not leave the world of reality at all. He may not eat his cake and have it. If what he takes from actuality is not merged fully into his art form, he tries to give us fact and fiction, history and art, in the same product, and he nails a piece of soap on a painted wave.

Aristotle insists above all on probability in art, or motivation, as it is now commonly called. A probable or well-motived impossibility, he says, is more artistic and pleasing than an improbable, that is, an unmotived fact. For a like reason he demands that fiction be more philosophical than history. We accept a chronicle of facts without necessarily being aware of their causal connections. In the realms of art the connection must be established. This principle, so fruitful for art, is not to be understood as justifying or approving that school of subjective novelists which is parsimonious in happenings but diffuse in reasoning and gives us a maximum of discussion with a minimum of incident. Aristotle is thinking more of the people who witness the drama. The spectators want the motivation and plausibility of action rather than that of logic. The soliloquy has gone from the stage; the printed soliloquy should be curtailed in the novel. A true understanding of motivation will send all artists back to nature and to human nature for those incidents which are the springs of action and do not require lengthy logic to labor at their explanation. Homer is completely lacking in logical refining. Incident leads to feeling and talk, which gives rise to further incident. Action, feeling and character, Aristotle’s trinity of art subjects, are mingled and detailed, and the story moves on in a way plausible and pleasing to Homeric audiences. When Homer runs short of motivation, he does not resort to logic; he refers the causality to the gods, as modern writers refer all insoluble problems to evolution, which puts hardly more restrictions upon imagination than Homeric mythology.

The artist must transfer his product wholly to the world of art. Sculptured horses must not neigh, nor painted flowers give perfume, but neighing and scents may be suggested even in stone, and in lines by art happenings, which all may read running if the artist will use the language of human nature. He should paint his cake of soap in, not nail it on. If the exigencies of the story demand it, costumes of the night or costumes of bathing may be in place, but it is nailing on a cake of soap, it is outraging probabilities, to force a story into a setting or to adopt a style of dress or of undress simply for the sake of producing a shock. That is the shock of reality, not of art and beauty. Should the dramatist have an excellent quartet and stop the play in order to give a song, he is nailing on a piece of soap, which may be magnificent soap, but it is not art.

Why is the so-called realism depressing? Why is the Russian novelist left for the connoisseur but is caviar to the general? Is it the presence or absence of evil? Hardly that. Homer’s stories are full of evil and of death; Sophocles’ _King Œdipus_ and the _Prometheus_ of Eschylus are surcharged with evil, but they do not depress. Euripides, on the other hand, and Lucian have more alleged realism and are depressing, even when they cause a smile. The realist is cynical, and cynics do not soar off into the world of art, but keep tethering themselves to the real world. They do not lose themselves in their story because they are always thinking of keeping some one’s nose against their grindstone. Why should the optimistic moralizing of Polyanna be resented by critics any more than the cynic moralizing of Shaw or of _Main Street_? The cheerful idiot and the purblind dyspeptic are depressing in real life, especially when they are moralizing, but in and out of art we can laugh at the idiot, while we squirm at the assumed superiority of the cynic. The moralizing is a cake of soap.

Shakespeare is not depressing and Homer is not depressing. They do not blink the facts of life, and beyond the humor and humanity which saves them and their audience, they lose themselves in their story. The evil they depict is true evil, so recognized, in their art-world. It is, besides, evil called for by their story, not lugged in for a moral or to exemplify a theory of art. They know that drab is not the only color in life. They know that bright things are as real as black things, but they are not illustrating a theory but giving us a story. We pass with them into a fictitious world, and the things which depress the denizens of that world do not depress us if we are not brought back to reality by stumbling on a cake of real soap, not integrated with the story.

The sight of his dog Argos made the heart of Odysseus sink. Even for those who think ugliness the only reality, Argos was covered with realities and squatted on reality. He depressed his master but he does not depress us. He lies upon Main Street and has a Polyanna wag to his tail. His optimism and his pessimism are, however, not tacked on. “And lo, a hound raised up his head and pricked his ears, Argos, the hound of Odysseus.... Despised he lay (his master being afar) in the deep dung of mules and swine.... There lay the dog Argos, full of vermin. Yet even now when he was aware of Odysseus standing by, he wagged his tail and dropped both his ears, but nearer to his master he had not the strength to draw. But Odysseus looked aside and wiped a tear.” Argos is the ideal dog of a far away master; “who has lost his dominion,” as Eumæus, the shepherd of Odysseus, says. Argos registers the fate of his master. We feel, but we do not feel depressed. It is human; it is all inevitable; it is real as life but perfectly idealized by perfect transfer to the realm of art. Eumæus gives us the morality of it, the truth of it, but he is far from moralizing, either pessimistically or optimistically. Argos is the dog Schneider that Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle could not find to recognize him; he is the picture in brief of his master’s fate. Eumæus is as free from all obtrusive soap as Argos himself. The dog’s fate is ascribed to the careless women who “are no more inclined to honest service when their masters have lost dominion, for Zeus takes away the half of a man’s virtue when the day of slavery comes upon him.”

1. RELIGIOUS ORIGIN OF ART

The recent discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen has aroused the interest of the world. The perseverance of the explorer, the variety, artistic excellence and intrinsic value of the discovery gave the news a place in the press and signalized the latest triumph of the spade, which Schliemann converted into the best of historians. Dig in your back-yard, and you can read its past in the layers before your eyes. Make a cross-section of the country, and successive deposits will tell you its story. Lay bare the strata of the earth, and the buried fossils, the minerals, the gas, the oil, reveal the history of the world. Grave-digging is the most productive occupation to which science, art and even commerce can now be vocationally guided.

What was it that enriched the Egyptian tomb and other tombs of the past in which man was buried? It was religion, and specifically it was belief in the immortality of the soul. The latest opened tomb repeats the truth that was manifest in the pyramids of Egypt, which were temples as well as tombs. The beehive tombs of Mycenæ from which Schliemann actually shoveled gold ornaments of various kinds were also temples as well as tombs. The altar-stones in Catholic churches with their tiny _loculi_ for the relic of a saint keep still the memory of the days when persecuted Christians found the Catacombs of the dead places of worship as well as of escape from the persecutor.

The caves of Cro-Magnon and Aurignac and other ancient deposits in France and Spain have disclosed the earliest evidence of man’s art. The man was no mean artist, and the coloring and skillful drawing have astonished every one. Why dark caverns, inaccessible to light, should have been so decorated has puzzled observers. Reinach calls the pictures early “magic,” painting of animals to capture them. But there are paintings of men as well as of bisons and reindeer. Professor Osborne is quoted as saying that it seems to be art for art’s sake, namely, that the sheer pleasure of the drawing is its reason. An admission, it would seem, that the professor has no real explanation to offer. Sir Bertram Windle has recently asserted the religious origin of these pictures. They would seem to be the earliest appearance of stained-glass windows. The caves were temples, and the explanation is confirmed by a comparison with the beehive tombs of Mycenæ and with the Egyptian tombs. The altar, the sacrifice, the victims, the food, clothing and other accompaniments of life, are all evidences of religious feelings and a belief in a continued existence. The absence of the bodies in these caves may easily be accounted for. Fleeting time with prowling animals has destroyed them while it left the pictures on the wall. Art is even longer than Longfellow imagined.

If the earliest art so far found is religious in origin, these so called Cro-Magnon or Aurignacian artists exemplify again what is a commonplace in the history of art. It would be easy to add to the following statements found under “Art” in Hasting’s _Dictionary of Religion_: “The religious aspect of art in Egypt includes almost all that is known of it.” “There is hardly any doubt that the high level of Assyrian and Babylonian art is due to the deep religious feeling of the two nations.” “The history of art in Greece is throughout its course intimately connected with religion.” The fact is beyond all denying. Religion and art are united, in music and song, from the dances of savages to the Hebrew psalms and the stateliest liturgies; in painting, from the early caveman to the modern man; in sculpture, from the crudest icons dug up at Troy to the idol statues of Greece and Rome, in the lions and bulls of buried Mycenæ and Crete, of Assyria and Egypt, in the tiny seal rings, in the ornaments and statuary of our modern churches; in oratory, from the prayers of the priest in the _Iliad_, to the fulminations of the prophet and the eloquence of the pulpit; even in civic oratory we find Demosthenes and Cicero in their sublimest heights touching upon religious motives; in the poetry of incantation, of oracle, of revelation, in liturgy and drama; in the little tale of the fable and in the mighty story of the epic, for the full sweep of which Homer and Virgil, Dante and Milton must stage their events upon the background of a Divine Providence; in architecture, from the tombs and temples of the eastern world, to the temples of the Aztecs and to the Gothic cathedral.

Aquinas gave in his _Summa_ a synthesis of all science; Dante gave in his _Divina Comedia_ a synthesis of man’s life and destiny; the Gothic cathedral of the same age gave a synthesis of all the arts in one structure, exemplifying in fullness and excellence the mutual interaction of art and religion in the middle ages, where manifestly religion held sway as never before or since. The Morgan “Collection” in the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts in New York exhibits the dusty wreckage of that wonderful union of religion and art. No poet’s imagination is needed to rebuild those fragments into that marvelous structure, under whose myriad statuary of serious saints and grotesque gargoyles, you pass through carved portals into the spacious aisles over which arches leap aspiringly. The painter fascinates you with the story of many colors in the windows. The weaver hangs other pictures on the rich tapestry curtaining the walls. The wood-carver is everywhere evoking beauty with cunning fingers. Music and song in the dramatic and antiphonal liturgy, the sublime eloquence of the pulpit in turn charm and rest the ears.

The minutest detail is as artistic as the rich magnificence. The missal on the altar will be a “Book of Kells,” a reflection on illuminated parchment of the religious and monastic life which produced it, by its patience, learning, devotion, silent application, and scrupulous exactness; “examined with a microscope for hours,” says an authority, “without detecting a false line or irregular interlacement.” Near the missal of the Gothic cathedral would be found a jeweled chalice, like that of Ardagh, with three hundred and fifty-four distinct pieces, classic and rich in all kinds of ornament. Baldwin Brown was surely right in declaring: “It is probable that nothing more artistically beautiful has ever been seen than the Gothic cathedral,” and the Gothic cathedral is the crowning glory of a deeply religious age.

2. THE KINSHIP OF ART AND RELIGION

The history of art from its lowest manifestations to its highest gives evidence of its union and intimacy with religion. The fact is admitted, and might easily be confirmed by the very way in which religious movements violently reacted against art. Hebraism knew the power of art over its followers, and Hebraic antagonism to sculpture and painting served to give religious impulse freer outlet in Hebrew poetry and oratory and other literature. The Bible is the supreme illustration of the influence of religion upon literary art. Islamism opposed art, but gradually succumbed to its influence at least in architecture. That Islam has not yielded more to art is an evidence of arrested civilization, as well as of baser and more sensual religious feelings. Puritanism, the intensest form of Protestantism, opposed art in all its manifestations, but Puritanism either diverted art energy to poetry and literature or provoked excesses by its attempt to check the natural impulses of art, and Puritanism finally yielded to art. It is clear then that religious opposition to art serves but to show more strikingly the union of religion and art. The religion that opposes art must direct the art impulse into other channels or the religion degenerates. By their nature religion and art are congenial.

What now is the explanation of this close and continuous union of art and religion, found everywhere and in all ages? Taine and his school, led astray by some details in the artist’s subject matter, have tried to explain art by environment; but environment is an explanation absurd in itself, and cannon be adequate for an ubiquitous fact which transcends all environment. The theorists who ascribe the origin of art to play and the deploying of superfluous energies liken, with Herbert Spencer, the art impulse to the acts of a kitten playing with a ball. Play may be partly an excess of energy, but not all energy is artistic, and animal play is the stirring of appetite, bearing but a slight, superficial resemblance to man’s early strivings for artistic expression. How many games are imitative and made more attractive by art! From the very first, mind enters into early and even child art, and at the last the devotion of the artists to their ideals in the higher manifestations of art, a devotion quite unlike play, shows that the art impulse is essentially different from the instinctive impulse of the kitten, which pounces on a rat as it pounced on a ball of wool.[1]

Another school, striving to explain the connection between art and religion, takes a directly opposite view to the play theory. Fear and magic are, according to these authors, the controlling factors. The difficulty in this theory is the utterly selfish element in the fear and magic impulse, whereas the art impulse is disinterested and unselfish. Besides, religious belief precedes the fear and magic propitiation of offended powers. The voodoo and the hoodoo mark degradations of religious impulses. Impulses in harmony with man’s nature may go down as well as up, and even should we suppose that the unselfish impulse of art, which finally becomes the evidence and glory of man’s highest civilization, could be traced back to the sordid details of selfish superstition, why should such an ugly duckling evolve into a fair swan? Devolution and degradation are easier than evolution. Why did the art impulse take the narrow, upward path and shun the broad way down to perdition?

The perfection of the oak must have been in the potency of the acorn. The oak could not come from a peanut, nor can all the powers of sun, rain and soil or any other factor of the environment evolve the fruit of the peanut vine into the majesty of the oak. We can explain by an extrinsic cause the stunting of an oak or the rotting of an oak, but we cannot account for the existence of the oak—except by an acorn. We may find perhaps a thwarted or corrupted art tendency in superstitious fear and its products, but that element of fear could not write a poem or compose a sonata or rear a Gothic cathedral. The perfection reached by the art product must have been in the potency of the first artistic impulse in germ.

Religion and art were then united potentially in the original art impulse just as the strength and lofty beauty of the oak were latent in the acorn. The art impulse is natural to man; it is intellectual. It requires brains to be artistic, as it requires brains to laugh, and no animal has done either or will ever do either. The bird in building its nest displays an intelligence not its own; its nest building is inherited just as its song is. Jean Fabre’s observations have shown conclusively the wonders of instinct, coupled with the stupidity of the creature possessing the instinct. But the earliest scrawl or daub of the child displays the mind working on matter and the deliberate shaping of means to an end. All intellectual testers from Simon-Binet to the latest have found the making or interpreting of pictures a measure of intellectual power. They are right. Art is rationalized pigments or sounds or words with their images or some other rationalized material. Dr. James Harvey Robinson in _Mind in the Making_ says that we are wrong in rationalizing the past to make up our minds, and how does he show it? By rationalizing another past for us. The truth is we must rationalize the past, and Dr. Robinson should induce us, not to stop rationalizing, but to rationalize correctly and should give us something better than universal skepticism with which to rationalize. The art tendency is one with the religious tendency in being rational and intellectual.