An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times
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Thomas Hill Green >> An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times
F. THE ARTIST AS IDEALIZER
6. The artist, even at his lowest level, is more than an imitator of
imitations.[6] Abridgment, selection, combination, are the necessary
instruments of his craft; and by their aid he introduces harmony and
order into the confused multiplicity of sensuous images. He substitutes
for the primary outward aspect of things a new view, in which thought
already finds a resting place. Just as strong emotion tends to make all
known existence the setting of a single form; just as intense meditation
sees in all experience the manifestation of a single idea; so the
artist, even if he be merely telling a story, or painting a common
landscape, puts some of his materials in a relief, and combines all in a
harmony, which the untaught eye does not find in the world as it is. He
presents to us the facts in the one case, the outward objects in the
other, as already acted upon by thought and emotion. In this sense every
artist, 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 poem
and the drama that we shall best appreciate its limitations in the
novel.
FOOTNOTE:
[6] Here are three beds: one existing in nature, which is
made by God, as I think that we may say--for no one else can be
the maker?--No.--There is another which is the work of the
carpenter?--Yes.--And the work of the painter is a third?--Yes?--Beds,
then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend
them: God, the maker of the bed, and the painter?--Yes, there are three
of them.--God, whether from choice or from necessity, made one bed in
nature and one only; two or more such ideal beds neither ever have been
nor ever will be made by God.... Shall we, then, speak of Him as the
natural author or maker of the bed?--Yes, he replied; inasmuch as by
the natural process of creation He is the author of this and of all
other things.--And what shall we say of the carpenter--is he not
also the maker of the bed?--Yes.--But would you call the painter a
creator 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 fairly
designate him as the imitator of that which the others make.--Good, I
said; then you call him who is third in the descent from nature an
imitator?--Certainly, he said.--And the tragic poet is an imitator, and
therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king
and 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.
Historically it seems to have originated in the records of ancestral
heroism, which passed from mouth to mouth in metre, as the natural form
of oral communication in an unlettered age. In the Iliad and Odyssey we
first find this outward form penetrated by a new spirit, which converts
the narrative into the poem. There is no need to do violence to
historical probability by supposing that Homer was a conscious artist,
or that he imagined himself to be doing anything else than representing
events as they happened. We have simply to notice that in him facts have
become poetry, and to ask ourselves what constitutes the change. How is
it that the epic poet, while "holding up the mirror to nature," yet
shows 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 the
essential laws of the human spirit, his scene is not the earth we live
in. He fills it with actors other than the men who "hoard and sleep and
feed" around us. He places the action either in heroic ages--in the
"past which was never present," when gods were more human and men more
divine--or in heavenly places, and among the powers of the air. The
action is simple in proportion to its remoteness from the reality of
life, and rapid in proportion to its simplicity. It arises from the
operation of the most elementary passions, the wrath of Achilles or the
pride of Satan, in collision with an overruling power. For the animal
wants and tricks of fortune, which entangle the web of man's affairs, it
has no place. The animal element, if not banished from view altogether,
becomes merely the organ of the ruling motions of the spirit; and
fortune is lost in destiny or providence. Thus the incidents of the
narrative cease to be mere incidents. They are held together by passion;
they are themselves, so to speak, manifestations of passion working with
more and more intensity to the final consummation. Not the laws which
regulate curiosity, but those which regulate hope and awe, are the laws
which they have to satisfy.
H. TRAGEDY AS PURIFIER OF THE PASSIONS
8. In tragedy, as the product of a more cultivated age, these
characteristics appear more strongly than in the primitive epic. The
Homeric poems are still legendary narratives, though narratives
unconsciously 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 spiritual
laws; to transport itself from a world, where chance and appetite seem
hourly to give the lie to its self-assertion, into one where it may work
unimpeded by anything but the antagonism inherent in itself and the
presence of an overruling law. This result is attained simply by the
action of the proper instruments of thought, abstraction and synthesis.
The tragedian presents to us scenes of life, not its continuous flow of
incident. In "Macbeth," for instance, there is an hiatus of some years
between the earlier and later acts;[7] but we are not sensible of the
void; for the passions which lead to the catastrophe are but the
development of those which appear at the beginning, and to the law
against which they struggle "a thousand years are but as yesterday."
Time, however, is but one among many circumstances which the tragedian
ignores. The common facts of life as it is, and always must have been,
the influence of custom, the transition of passion into mechanical
habit, the impossibility of continuous effort, the necessary
arrangements of society, the wants of our animal nature and all that
results from them, these are excluded from view, and so much only of the
material of humanity is retained as can take its form from the action of
the spirit, and become a vehicle of pure passion. But the synthesis
keeps pace with the abstraction, for the tragedian creates not passions
but 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 proper
impulses and its proper laws. The false distinctions of dress, of
manner, of physiognomy, are obliterated, that the true individuality
which results from the internal modifications of passion may be seen in
clearer outline. These modifications are as infinite and as complex as
the spirit of man itself; and if the characters of the ancient
dramatists, in their broad simplicity, fail to exhibit the finer
lineaments of real life, yet in Shakespeare the variations of pure
passion are as numerous and as subtle as those of the fleshly or
customary mask by which man thinks that he knows his neighbour. The
essential difference lies in the fact that they are variations of the
spiritual, not the animal, man; that they arise from the qualifications
of the spirit by itself, not from its intermixture with matter. It is
this which gives tragedy its power over life. The problem of the
diabolic nature, of the possibility of a "fallen spirit," is not for
man to solve. He may be satisfied with the diagnosis of his own disease,
with the knowledge that it is his littleness, not his greatness, that
separates him from the divine; that not intellectual pride, not
spiritual self-assertion, but the meanness of his ordinary desires, the
degradation of his higher nature to the pursuit of animal ends, keep him
under the curse. From this curse tragedy, in its measure, helps to
relieve him. It "purifies his passions"[8] by extricating them from
their earthly immersion. For an hour, it may be, or a day, it raises him
into a world of absolute ideality, where he may forget his wants and his
vanity, and lose himself in a struggle in which the combatants are the
forces of the spirit, and of which the end is that annihilation in
collision with destiny which is but the blank side of reconciliation
with it. And though his sojourn in this region be short, yet, when he
falls again, the smell of the divine fire has passed upon him, and he
bears about him, for a time at least, among the rank vapours of the
earth, something of the freshness and fragrance of the higher air.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] The actual time represented in the play has been calculated to be
nine 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 _New
Shakespeare Society Publications_, 1877-79.
[8] The phrase is Aristotle's; cf. the 'Poetics,' Chap. vi, and, for
comment, Butcher's 'Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art,' Chapter
vi.
I. TRAGEDY THE ELEVATION OF LIFE
9. In this sense, then, tragedy satisfies its definition as "the flight
or elevation of life." The two indispensable supports which render this
elevation possible, are metrical expression and great situations. "In
the regeneration" the language of the market-place and the morning call
may answer to the realised harmony of life; there may, indeed, be "the
fifth act of a tragedy in every death-bed;" there may be no distinction
of great or little, high or low. But it is an affectation to confound
what shall be with what is. We cannot dissociate ordinary incidents from
the petty wants out of which they ordinarily spring, nor common language
from the common-place thoughts which it usually expresses. The action in
tragedy must be relative to the situation; and if the situation be one
which we are unable to separate from matter-of-fact associations,
neither can the action be so separated except by an effort which of
itself depresses the soaring spirit. Nor, again, if the action be
high-wrought, above the measure of man's ordinary activity, can it find
expression in the unrhythmical language[9] which corresponds to that
ordinary activity. New wine must not be put in old bottles; nor must the
motions of disenthralled passion be confined in vessels worn by the uses
of daily life.
FOOTNOTE:
[9] The language of prose is not necessarily unrhythmical, nor is it
always commonplace, as witness, for example, the more moving and
imaginative passages of the English Bible. On this point consult
Gummere's 'Beginnings of Poetry,' Chapter ii (Rhythm as the Essential
Fact of Poetry, especially pp. 56-60); Watts's article 'Poetry' in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica; and the _Publications of the Modern Language
Association_, xx. 4.
J. CONDITIONS FAVORABLE TO TRAGEDY
10. These considerations may explain to us why the production of a great
tragedy is almost an impossibility in our own time. The age most
favourable to it would seem to be one in which men stand on the edge of
an old and but half-known world--as Aeschylus and Sophocles stood on the
edge of the mythologic, Shakespeare on that of the feudal world--an age
of sufficient culture and reflection for men to be conscious of the
glory they have left behind, while yet civilisation has not reached the
stage of acquiescence in things as they are, and scepticism as to all
beyond them. Those great situations furnished by the mysterious past, in
which passion quits the earth, soon lose their charm, and with the reign
of wonder that of tragedy ceases. At Athens it gives place to the new
comedy, whose highest boast was to copy present life ([Greek: o Menandre
kai Bie, poteros ar' humon poteron apemimesato];):[10] in modern Europe
it has yielded to the novel.
FOOTNOTE:
[10] A saying of Aristophanes, the Grammarian, quoted by Syrianus on
Hermogenes, IV. 101. It may be translated: "O Menander and Life! Which
of 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 England
till the time of Fielding and Richardson, but it had long been in
process of formation. The seventeenth century at its close had lost the
tragic impulse of its youth. The ecstatic hope of a new world, combined
with the sad and wondering recollection of the old, which had raised the
human 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 the
wits complimented each other on their superiority to the weaknesses of
mankind, they made no scruple of indulging those weaknesses in their own
persons. 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 they
were weak and laughed over it, while others were weak and serious.
Philosophers congratulated themselves on their new enlightenment; but it
was 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 mean
performance with which they proclaimed themselves satisfied. The poetry
of the time was, at best, merely common-sense with ornamentation. It was
neither lyrical nor tragic, though it may have tried to be both. It
represented man neither as withdrawn into himself, nor as transported
into an ideal world of action, but as observing and reasoning on his
present affairs. The satire and moral essay were its characteristic
forms.
B. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SPECTATOR
12. The most pleasing expression of this self-satisfaction of the age is
found in the _Spectator_, the first and best representative of that
special style of literature--the only really popular literature of our
time--which consists in talking to the public about itself. Humanity is
taken as reflected in the ordinary life of men; and, as thus reflected,
it is copied with the most minute fidelity. No attempt is made either to
suppress the baser elements of man's nature, or to transfigure them by a
stronger light than that of the common understanding. No deeper laws are
recognised than those which vindicate themselves to the eye of daily
observation, no motives purer than the "mixed" ones which the practical
philosopher delights to analyse, no life higher than that which is
qualified by animal wants. The reader never finds himself carried into a
region where it requires an effort to travel, or which is above the
existing level of opinion and morality. It is from this levelness with
life that the _Spectator_ derives its interest--an interest so nearly
the same, barring the absence of plot, with that of the novel, as to
lead Macaulay to pronounce Addison "the forerunner of the great English
novelists."[11] The elements of the novel, indeed, already existed in
Addison's time, and only required combination. Fictitious biography,
which may be regarded as its raw material, had been written by Defoe
with a life-like reality which has never since been equalled; and the
popular drama furnished plots, in the shape of love stories drawn from
present life. Let the adventures of the fictitious biography, instead of
being merely external to the man, as in Defoe, be made subservient to
that display of character in which Addison had shown himself a master,
and let them become steps in the development of a love-plot, and the
novel--the novel of the last century, at any rate--is fully formed. As
was the self-contented, and therefore uncreative and prosaic, thought of
the age, which produced the novel, such the novel itself continued to
be. Man, comfortable and acquiescent, wished to amuse himself by a
reflex of the life which he no longer aspired to transcend. He wanted to
enjoy himself twice over--in act and in fancy; or, if the former were
denied him, at least to explore in fancy the world of pleasure and
excitement, of which circumstances abridged or disturbed his enjoyment
in fact. In "the smooth tale, generally of love,"[12] the novelist
supplied the want.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] "We have not the least doubt that, if Addison had written a novel,
on an extensive plan, it would have been superior to any that we
possess. As it is, he is entitled to be considered, not only as the
greatest of the English essayists, but as the forerunner of the great
English novelists."--Macaulay, 'Life and writings of Addison.'
[12] "A small tale, generally of love."--Johnson's Dictionary.
C. THE MODERN NOVEL A REFLECTION OF ORDINARY LIFE
13. This Johnsonian definition may be objected to as merely accidental,
and as inconsistent with the romantic character which the novel assumed
in the hands of Sir Walter Scott. It expresses, however, adequately
enough the view which the popular novelists prior to Scott took of their
own productions. Cervantes, though in his own great work attaining that
rhapsody of grotesqueness which lies on the edge of poetry, had yet
established the idea of the novel as the antithesis of romance. These
novelists, accordingly, if they are not always telling the reader (like
Fielding), seem yet to be always thinking to themselves, how perfectly
natural their stories are. It is on this naturalness they pride
themselves; and naturalness, in their sense, meant conformity to nature
as it is commonly seen. This is the characteristic feature of the class.
Whether, like Richardson, they analyse character from within, or, like
Miss Austen, develop it in the outward particularities of an unruffled
life--whether they describe, like Fielding, the buoyancy of a generous
animalism, or, like Miss Edgeworth and Miss Burney, the precise
decencies of conventional morality--they deal simply with
eighteenth-century life as seen by eighteenth-century eyesight. All
romantic virtue, all idealised passion, they rigorously eschew. Prudence
they make the guide, happiness the end, of life. And they do well. They
undertake to copy present life, and they do so. They have to reflect
man's habitual consciousness; it is not for them to anticipate a
consciousness which has not yet been attained, or to represent man's
lower nature as absorbed in a spiritual movement which, because we
cannot arrest it, we habitually ignore. It is just their deficiency in
this respect which gives them their peculiar fascination. Man is not
really mere man, though he may think himself so. He is always something
potentially, which he is not actually; always inadequate to himself; and
as such, disturbed and miserable. The novel, on the contrary, represents
him as being what he vainly tries to be--adequate to himself. It offers
to his imagination the full enjoyment of earthly life, unchallenged by
obstinate surmises, untroubled by yearnings after the divine. Ordinary
men are satisfied with this enjoyment; the highest are allured by its
temptation. The "reading public" is charmed with the contemplation of
its own likeness, "twice as natural" as life. Its own wisdom, its own
wishes, its own vanity, are set before it in little with a completeness
and finish which the deeper laws of the universe, vindicating themselves
by apparent disorder and misfortune, happily prevent from being attained
in real life.[13] It is thus pleasantly flattered into contentment with
itself--a contentment not disturbed by the occasional censure of
practices which good taste condemns as ungraceful, or prudence as
prejudicial to happiness. But the man of keener insight, who, instead of
wrestling with the riddle of life, seeks for a time to forget it, and
to place in its stead the rounded representation of activity which the
novelist supplies, cannot but find the vanity of hiding his face from
the presence which he dreads. Out of heart with the world about
him--conscious of its actual meanness, and without vigor to re-cast it
in the mould of his own thought--he fancies that after a sojourn in the
world of fiction he may come back braced for his struggle with life. In
his study, with a novel, he hopes to overlook the walls of his
prison-house, to see the beginning and the end of human strife. But he
soon finds himself in the embrace of the very power which he sought to
escape. Here is the world itself brought back to him. Here is a perfect
copy of that which in actual experience he sees but partially. The
mirror is but too truly held up to nature. The getting and spending, the
marrying and giving in marriage, the dominion of fortune which makes
life a riddle, the prudential motives and worship of happiness which
hide its divinity, these meet him here as they meet him in life,
untransmuted, unidealised. Yet the charm of art overcomes him. The
perfectness of the representation, the skill with which the incidents
are combined to result in a crowning happiness behind which no sorrow
seems to lie, make him find a pleasure in the copy which he cannot find
in actual life, when in personal and painful collision with it. But
meanwhile he gains no real strength, he readies no new height of
contemplation. He comes back to the world, as a man with a diseased
digestion, after living for a time on spiced meats, comes back to
ordinary food. He has not braced the assimilative power of his thought
by a flight into the ideal world, or learnt even for a time to turn
"matter to spirit by sublimation strange." He has remained on the earth,
and though his fancy has for the hour given the earth a charm, he is no
better able than he was before to raise his eyes from its dead level, or
remove the limits of its horizon.
14. Thus, then, the old quarrel of the philosopher with the imitative
arts seems to be revived in respect of the novel. But though
novel-writers might be banished from a new republic,[14] it would not be
as artists, but for the inferiority of their art. An artist indeed the
novelist is; he combines events and persons with reference to ends; he
concentrates into a dialogue of a few sentences an amount of feeling and
character which it would take real men some hours to express; he imparts
a rapidity to the stream of incident quite unlike the sluggishness of
our daily experience. In this sense he does not copy what we see, but
shows us what we can not see for ourselves. Our complaint against him is
that the aspect of things which he shows us is merely the outward and
natural, as opposed to the inner or ideal. His answer would probably be
either that the ideal, in any sense in which it can be opposed to the
natural, must be false and delusive; or that it is merely an accident of
novel-writing, as hitherto practised, and not anything essential to this
species of composition, which has prevented it from exhibiting the
highest aspect of things; or, finally, that admitting the view which the
novel presents to be necessarily lower than the poetic, it yet is a more
useful view for man to contemplate.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] This rather obscure phrase may be interpreted as follows: The
average man would like to live such a rounded and symmetrical life as is
portrayed in the novel. He would like to see his wisdom justifying
itself, his vanity triumphant, his selfishness achieving its end; and he
thinks that his cravings are being satisfied. But the deeper laws of the
universe will not be balked, they are lying in wait. And presently when
he thinks, good easy man, his little bourgeois world is rounding into
the perfect sphere, they spring up in his path, shatter his sugar-candy
paradise, and ruthlessly vindicate themselves (that is, prove that they
cannot be disregarded, that they must be reckoned with) by bringing into
his life disorder and misfortune.
[14] As poets were from the republic of Plato. "When any one of these
pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that they can imitate anything,
comes to us, and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, we
will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being;
but we must also inform him that in our state such as he are not
permitted to exist; the law will not allow them. And so when we have
anointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool upon his head, we
shall send him away to another city. For we mean to employ for our
souls' health the rougher and severer poet or story-teller, who will
imitate the style of the virtuous only, and will follow those models
which we prescribed at first when we began the education of our
soldiers."--Plato, 'Republic,' III. 398.
D. NATURALISM vs. IDEALISM
15. Much fruitless controversy between naturalism and idealism in art
might have been saved by a consideration of the true character of the
antithesis. It becomes unmeaning as soon as nature is expanded to the
fulness of the idea. And so expanded it may be, for, according to the
old formula, it is always in flux. It is never in being, always in
becoming. As has been already pointed out, it is what we see; and we see
according to higher and lower laws of vision. We may look at man and the
world either from without or from within. We may observe man's actions
like other phenomena, and from observation learn to ascribe them to
certain general but distinct motives and faculties, which we do not
refer to any higher unity; or, on the other hand, by the light of our
own consciousness we may recognise that in man of which no observation
of his actions could tell us--something which is in him, but yet is not
his own; which combines with all his faculties, but is none of them;
which gives them a unity, to which their diversity is merely relative.
So again with regard to the phenomena of the world; we may look on these
either simply as phenomena, or as manifestations of destiny or divine
will. The former view of man and the world we may conveniently call
_natural_, because the only view that mere observation can give us; the
latter _ideal_, because making observation posterior to something given
in thought.