Читать книгу Art principles in literature - Francis P. Donnelly - Страница 8
Оглавление1. THE UNIVERSAL ELEMENT
A serious defect in most modern art movements is that they start from art; they are modifications of previous art movements. True art movements start from human nature. When perfection in any art is standardized, when tradition and conventionality prevail, and the artist has originality enough to chafe at the restraints of classicism but not originality enough to reveal finer ideals through classic expression, his temptation is to rebel at conventionalities and to deem himself original because he is unconventional. He wishes to be different from other artists and seeks for the difference by discarding the traditional medium rather than by improving his own personal message. He prefers to be different and even original by cutting his ginger-bread into the shape of automobiles and air-planes instead of going back to mother’s classic make and blending his ingredients into a new creation, a creation which will make fresh appeal even in former animal shapes or in the traditional ginger-bread cart-wheels.
Art is a social institution. If not by the people, art is of the people, and certainly for the people. When Greek literary art grew conventional in its different forms, the artists went back to the people for another medium to be transfigured by art. Ruskin has called architecture a “glorified roof.” The sonata is a glorified folk melody; epic is glorified folk lore; and Greek drama is a glorified folk song, as Elizabethan drama is a glorified folk chronicle. Both dramas have their roots in the religious services of the people. Homer told us about the public he had, but the nineteenth century would not trust his word until Schliemann dug up the great halls where Demodokos and his fellows told the people their own folk stories in a glorified, artistic form. Greek lyric and Greek pastoral were as public as Greek oratory, Greek choruses, temples and statuary. It was left for Roman conquerors to begin the segregation of art into the cold storage of the modern millionaire and of the modern museum.
The permanence of Greek art is based upon that public appeal. Art is long because it embodies nature, and most of all human nature. Homer has appealed to man, woman and child for thousands of years. His human nature is our human nature despite external differences of every kind. Homer himself was aware of the appeal of nature in art. On the shield of Achilles, he marveled at the field which grew black behind the plowing, a marvel of Homer’s close study of nature as well as an expression of his ideal for art. Nature is a language all can understand and human nature is a language all must and do understand. When lament was made over the body of Patroklos, the elegy of Briseis stirred all, “and thereon the women wailed, in semblance for Patroklos, but each for her own woe.” Similar is the appeal of art where in semblance of something else, each sees what belongs to self. Aristotle in seeking to explain the characteristic pleasure of art ascribes it to mimesis or re-presentation in another medium. Such staging, he says, not only robs the terrifying of its terrors but enables all to understand and reason to the nature of each art product. Such understanding and reasoning mean surely something more than the mere recognition of photographic accuracy and likeness. If we may press the meaning of the Greek word used for reason, the process of art enjoyment is similar to the syllogistic process which involves an appeal to a general statement. The process is one which recognizes the general in a particular case, as the grief of Briseis found an echoing grief in every heart.
Whether Aristotle and this interpretation of him is correct or not, it is evident that art must generalize. Art must select, both by choice of the artist and by the limitations of his medium. Art does not photograph, because it has no sensitive plate for its medium. The photographer’s art largely precedes the camera and consists in selecting that pose and that expression, out of many, which is yours. The camera is nature, controlled by mechanism, and is not art. If the photographer or painter or sculptor photographed you in some passing spasm, we should not learn and reason that it was you. The spasm was realism and fact, but it was peculiar and individual; it was not you whom we have known and generalized from experience. In such a case, Aristotle says shrewdly, we might get artistic pleasure from the workmanship or colors, that is, from the medium and the mechanics of art, but we should have no artistic pleasure from the soul and substance of the art product because the product found no prototype in our experience, because we could not define it or generalize it. Art selects. It cannot give everything, and if it would be true, it must give what all may understand; it must give what is generally true, and what is generally true of all men is human nature.
Selective idealism has usually the advantage of being intelligible, but it labors under the disadvantage of becoming merely intelligible. It gives the truth, but through familiarity the beauty or artistic appeal of the truth has been dulled and tarnished, or, like the dandelion, until a Lowell gives it a new luster, its very commonness leaves us unmoved. We enjoy human nature in Homer because he was the creator of sleeping winds and of rosy-fingered dawns and of the mother’s smile alight through tears. A modern who would transfer these same touches to his own composition would leave us cold. He too must create; he must be personal, but he must not be individual. Personality is the knowing and loving principle, and looks to the many with its thoughts and wishes. Individuality is the principle of separation and isolation and is looking inward, not outward. When the artist, therefore, creates and gives his own winds or dawn or mother love, he should speak to us in his own concrete embodiments of nature, and of human nature, using a language man understands. If selective idealism tends to become merely intelligible and unappealing, individualism tends to become unintelligible and to mystify.
The poet, the novelist, the painter have more depth than silver nitrate on a photographic plate. Artists do not simply mirror nature; they do not catch at the odd or freakish. That is photography, not creation. Horace did not give us a moving picture of a falling tree, but he saw the humor and human interest of that “sorry log.” Burns did not give us an anatomical study of the typhus-carrier on a lady’s bonnet in a kirk, making it crawl upon ourselves and sending us after the kerosene can and bath tub, but Burns soared away, from that sight with Horatian humor and Horatian human nature, into the immortal lines, “O wad some power the giftie gie us.” The artist who confounds the generalized mental attractiveness found in true 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.
