Читать книгу Art principles in literature - Francis P. Donnelly - Страница 7
Оглавление2. VAGARIES OF INDIVIDUALISM
Modern art has not followed Horace very far. It has broken with conventionality as Horace did with the clichés of Alexandria, but it has not yet entered upon the path of right philosophy. The Spoon River Anthology, a typical specimen from the individualistic school of what might be called localists or village gossips, is in the epode-stage of Horace, the stage of personalities, lubricity and garlic gruesomeness. Hopes might be entertained that Spoon River and Main Street and other individualistic photographs would progressively improve with Horace except for one sad deficiency: Horace had humor and laughed at others, and even at himself; modern individualists are so heavily armored with the seriousness of their own views, that they don’t even smile. To imagine the New Art laughing is impossible; if the New Art had humor and laughed, it would cease to be New Art and would join the larger brotherhood of art uncapitalized. Had the new artists a sense of humor, it would probably be their death sentence. In the course of time they might catch sight of their own art products, whether of painting or of poetry.
Is it not an indication of individualism that so many recent novels are biographies, that the stage is not holding up the mirror to life but applying the scalpel to an ulcer? The biography or personal views of Scott and Shakespeare cannot be discovered in their works. The modern pamphleteer distributes his paradoxes among various mouthpieces whose only difference is in name, and this is called a play, when it is in reality propaganda. There are probably now no less than 100,000 college graduates turning college escapades and flirtations into chapters, which their authors consider typical of life because the incidents were individually experienced. And, as the long stories of the day are biographies or problems and as the drama is a diagnosis of diseases, in the same way many of the short stories are pathological, but all are tending to be individualistic. The artist makes his own subjective experience the full measure of his artistic expression and seems to imagine that his own peculiarities are good art because he sincerely expresses what he feels. Individual nature is not human nature.
Aristotle has described poetry as the universal in the concrete. The “new poets” give the individual in the concrete. Homer, Shakespeare, the true poets, plumb to the depths of the human heart; they voice ripened experience and enshrine mellow wisdom, and so appeal to all men of all times. Much of the new poetry ostentatiously disdains tradition and rejects the wisdom of the ages in discarding its dress. You may see the rouge on the cheek and the freckle on the nose, but as far as life and experience and heart are concerned, most of the new poetry is pitiably young and callous. Meticulous recording of disconnected and unrelated novelties is no adequate substitute for the warmth and depth of life crystallized by the ardent gaze of the true poet out of his experience. New poetry is contemporaneous with the invention and use of the Kodak and has all the responsibility and profundity of that instrument.
Individualism has come to such a pass in modern art that everything in it is resolving itself into pure emotionalism, and that an emotionalism which does not belong to art at all. Degenerates are the products of civilization; they are decayed exotics. “The higher the organism, the more noisome the decay,” a science professor used to say when paying his respects to diseased metaphysics. As only a believer can blaspheme luridly, so when an artist goes wrong, he goes wrong hideously. A pistol in the hands of a marksman gone mad is more destructive than in the hands of a savage. Colors, sounds, shapes, fair words and gorgeous imaginings are instruments of degradation and death if they are a finer veneer over what is false. Individual vagaries and whims, no matter how unusual, will not have the permanence of art because they are based on no principles, but devised simply to startle. Degrade the appeal of beauty to a spinal thrill and your artist will pander to concupiscence.
It is noteworthy that Homer’s worst lapse in story-telling takes place among the luxurious Phæacians, ancient prototypes of degeneracy. Homer may have felt justified artistically because he was depicting the non-Grecian world through whose monsters and marvels Odysseus was passing and making the first collection of sailors’ yarns. But Homer shocked even the pagan world and set an unhappy precedent. Lucian and Ovid, Petronius and Apuleius and the Byzantine eroticists made what was incidental in Homer their chief concern and practice. They perverted fiction into calculated suggestiveness.
That depraved and sensual theory of story-telling was, however, more Aristophanic than Homeric, despite the single unfortunate precedent in the Odyssey. The tradition of Greek and Latin comedy was carried on by the medieval troubadours and by the story-tellers who catered to the decadent nobility of Italy and France. They retorted on their clerical censors and stimulated jaded appetites, substituting in shameless intrigues priests and nuns for the pagan gods. It was and is the glory of Scott that he broke away from these evil traditions which made the novel a hateful thing to our forefathers. Scott deserted the continental school of novelists and their English imitators, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, the last of all Byron. Scott gave up the satirical purposes which handed on in fiction the vulgar devices of low comedy. He went to history, to chivalry, to healthy men and women and created romances, not pathological studies. English, Irish and American fiction for a whole century yielded to the healthy and bracing impulse of Scott, but the younger novelists in vogue today in England, Ireland and America have gone back to the continental type, individual, pathological biographical problems, forsaking Scott’s revival through balladry of the best Homeric manner, where men “drank delight of battle with their peers far on the ringing plains of Troy.”
The individualist must emancipate himself by the contemplation of nature. Pathological specimens, freakish oddities, all the surface impressions of the local colorists are not nature any more than a face contorted with a toothache is a man’s likeness. Such exceptional exhibitions cannot form the enduring basis of art. Personal experience must be widened by length of time, by merging into the stream of wisdom, flowing freighted from the past, or must, in exceptional cases, be won quickly by that intense and probing comprehension of genius, which seems almost Divine intuition. Excessive individualism, like the latest fashion, will be quaint and incongruous on the morrow. Homer lives eternal because through strange names and strange language and strange costumes we see our own sun and fields and ocean and sky and put our fingers on a pulse which registers the beat of a heart throbbing as ours.
