Читать книгу The Literary Discipline - John Erskine - Страница 9

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In this discussion of sex our attention has shifted from the problem of language to the question of the general and the particular in art—that is, from the principle of decorum involving the medium of literature to the principle of decorum involving its subject-matter. This second principle, rightly understood, marks the chief difference between contemporary art and what some of us still believe was the great art of the world hitherto—the best of the Greek, the best of the medieval. When you look at life naturally, in the directions dictated by your spontaneous impulses, it is your own life that seems important, your private fortunes, your personal ambitions. Everything that belongs to you seems peculiar, because it is not natural at first to compare the lives of others with our own. A poet who presents experience from this angle of individuality will always make a strong initial appeal and perhaps a lasting one, since he falls in with our instincts, and this accord will seem to us evidence of something profound. Such a poet, to some extent, was Euripides, who imagined his characters sympathetically from their private points of view, and portrayed for us the egotism of human nature in its most tragic form. It is not fair to say that in his world men and women need only to explain themselves in order to be right; but, at least, after they have explained themselves it is hard to tell who are right and who are wrong. Such another poet is Browning, who represents human nature one individual at a time, always from the individual’s point of view. By such a simple and primitive method he obtains effects of obvious richness—he shows how varied life is, since there are so many individuals in it, and how novel it perpetually must be, since each of us is discovering the world for the first time, and how much right there is in every man’s cause, once he has the chance to speak for himself. If we had all the works of Euripides, we should probably find in them as rich and varied a world as Browning’s, expressed with clearer and more direct poetic genius. Our contemporary taste is rather solidly for this kind of literature—Browning flourishes more and more, and Euripides has been revived; and if you really approve of the individualistic approach to art, it is hard to see how you can call anything indecent. Anything that is natural to any kind of character must get a hearing.

But men can also be imaginative enough to look at life as a whole—first, perhaps, to look out at all other men, and then to stand off and look at all men, oneself included. When you begin to take an interest in other men, you notice of course that their lives are not like yours, not so important nor interesting nor promising, but in their drabness they are all curiously alike; they all, with slight variation, are born, are brought up, fall in love according to their lights, marry, earn their living, have children, grow old, and die. When this uniformity begins to interest you, you are making your first intelligent acquaintance with life; and when you have looked at mankind and included yourself in the picture, when you have admitted however reluctantly that the single addition does not change the total effect, that life is still simple and uniform and that you are less peculiar than you thought—then you have seen yourself at last as one of the human race.

To see this calls for imagination and for the Greek virtue which we translate as magnanimity—great-mindedness. The virtue is not to be acquired all at once. We have made a great advance when we can think of life in terms not of ourselves but of moral and material aspects and powers—in terms of youth and age, for example, of strength or beauty or pride. This is the allegorical stage of our pilgrimage in wisdom, no mean stage to reach, though it happens to be out of fashion just now. We are acquainted with it in the old morality plays, especially in the almost popular Everyman, and perhaps in Æschylus, especially in Prometheus Bound.

But our advance is greatest when we can recognize these aspects and powers in the individuals around us—when our observation includes at one and the same time the general truths of life and the particular instances. The poet preëminently master of this sane wisdom was Sophocles, who, in Arnold’s familiar phrase, saw life steadily and saw it whole. The point of view which he represented is the most magnanimous, the least egotistical, that art has yet taken, and one would have to think meanly of the race to believe that we shall not return to it, as to the noblest part of the Greek legacy. But Sophocles was only the illustration of a decorum generally practised. In the brief and magnificent period which left us our greatest perfection in the arts, the Athenians thought of the individual as important if he illustrated for the moment the general truths or fortunes of life, but his strictly private fate was insignificant.

This attitude has been explained by saying that the Greeks, having no gift for introspection, took always an objective view of life, but such a formula hardly accounts for all the illustrations of magnanimity. When Athens was in her glory, for example, it was only the public buildings that were glorious; no individual, not even Pericles himself, thought of putting Phidias to decorate his private home. Again, in the Antigone Sophocles is introspective enough—as introspective as Euripides or Ibsen himself—but the introspection is concerned with the general theme of piety, of one’s duty to blood relations, not at all with the love story of Antigone. She was betrothed to the son of the king who condemned her to death, and the fact proves tragic for the son and for the king, but the love of the two young people is their private business, and the poet therefore does not let his heroine discuss the problem of piety from that point of view.

It was the genius of Shakespeare and of Molière, even in comedy, to preserve the same decorum. They show us those aspects of man’s fortune which are of interest to all men; of course we are free to fill in the gaps according to our taste in gossip, but the dramatist awakens our feelings and calls our attention only to general experiences and common wisdom. In Shakespeare, Measure for Measure is a good example, a noble tragedy and a decent play. It is less glorious than the Antigone, obviously, since it shows human nature resisting temptation rather than establishing an ideal, but the grimness of its subject and the fact that it portrays an indecent character do not make it indecent, as some critics think. Its power is its probing into general truths of life, chiefly into the capriciousness of temptation where sex is concerned, and into the various forms of the fear of death.

Claudio, condemned to die and convinced that there is no hope, persuades himself that he does not care to live; but immediately he has a chance to live at the cost of his sister’s honor, and he finds himself slipping into casuistry to make his escape possible even on such terms. Here is introspection of the Sophoclean sort, touching the psychology not of a particular man but of all of us. Walter Pater remarked the paradox that Angelo is tempted to his fall by sight of the pure-minded Isabella, the incarnation of virtue. He might have named other paradoxes of Isabella’s influence. She fascinates all the men she meets, good or bad. At the end of the play the Duke announces that he intends to marry her himself, and since he gives her little opportunity to dispute this plan, we may speculate how far his motives differ essentially from Angelo’s. But Lucio, the wretch so steeped by habit in indecency that he can hardly frame a clean sentence, is immediately and permanently sensitive to Isabella’s beauty of soul as well as of body. Why? Shakespeare merely exhibits the paradox, in his characteristic way, without hint of explanation. But we may read a lesson in decorum, if we wish, in the decency of art, from the first speech of Lucio to Isabella in the nunnery, when the dirty-minded wretch, having none but coarse formulas in his vocabulary, tries to address her with the reverence he feels.