Читать книгу Art principles in literature - Francis P. Donnelly - Страница 9
Оглавление2. 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.”
