PART I – LAW
CHAPTER I – POETIC TRUTH
All art, said Aristotle, is imitation. That he did not mean by this the mere copying or mirroring of facts is sufficiently clear from his remarks about the ideal and philosophic character of poetry: “Tragedy represents men as better than they are,” [1] “It should preserve the type and yet ennoble it.” [2] In the light of such passages, the word “imitation” takes on another significance from that we might at first be inclined to give it, but it is still misleading, and it seems better to substitute the broader term, “poetic truth.” What does this mean, and what does it imply?
[1 Poetics, II.]
[2 Ib., XV.]
All art, and hence all great drama, is in its nature both universal and personal, both general and selective. The painter cannot, for example, paint every leaf of a tree, and if he did so his painting would certainly be more unsatisfactory to us than if he had worked with less minuteness. His art lies in determining which of the impressions into which the infinitely complex total which we call “tree” may be resolved – which of these is to be preserved as essential, which may be rejected. No two artists would ever make quite the same choice, yet each might be, artistically, true to the subject. Each would, if he were a great artist, give us something better than the landscape itself, he would interpret it to us – make it mean more than it had before. Millet once said, in effect, “A flock of sheep must be regarded by the painter, not as a collection of animals, but as one single huge animal, moving on many feet, and it must be so painted.” And it is because Millet himself painted sheep in this way that his work is really art. To take another illustration, there is a certain living artist who has wonderful power in drawing the urchins of London’s streets, conveying, with a few seemingly careless strokes, the very life and movement of the boys. It is said that he first makes a rather detailed drawing of his subject, then goes over his work, eliminating line after line, until he has reduced it, as it were, to its lowest terms, and there remains no line not absolutely necessary. The finished product, with its appearance of carelessness, is really the result of the most careful selection. It is conceivable that such a process should all have been mental, and nothing have appeared on paper but the final result; conceivable, too, that it might be partly or wholly unconscious on the part of the artist; but the process, or something like it, is characteristic of all art, and in proportion as the artist is great will his selective power be true and unerring, never rejecting the significant and retaining the unessential. To this end, however, he needs large and deep knowledge of his subject. Wordsworth said that a simple recital of the facts of a given phenomenon might be at once formally accurate and essentially untrue because it had been made either mechanically or ignorantly, noting the unessential and the significant without discriminating between them. Such discrimination comes with knowledge, which enables us to check our observation of particular instances by a knowledge of the universal, gained through observation of other particular instances.
It will now be evident what was meant by saying that art is in its nature both universal and personal or selective. It becomes the one by means of the other, for the selection will reject the accidental and temporary and retain the essential and permanent. In this selective process the personality of the artist is tested; upon his personality depends the value of his work to others. If it is deep enough and big enough to be in unison with the individuality (if the expression is legitimate) of humanity, he will see in his subject, be it landscape or human soul, the things that all humanity must see when it looks deeply enough, though it may need his quickened vision to point them out. Thus the artist must be at once different from his fellow-man, and like him. “Once in a while an individual Ideal, when expressed, enlightens the world of art, and then we have the artistic genius; he is the prophet who shows to others an ideal field which they at once recognize as effective for themselves, although but for him it would have been unknown to them. To express his own ideal must be the artist’s work.” [1] Of the ideal in this sense Amiel’s remark is true: “The ideal, after all, is truer than the real; for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things: it is their type, their sum, their raison d’être, their formula in the book pf the Creator, and therefore at once the most exact and the most condensed expression of them.” [2]
[1 H.R. Marshall, Aesthetic Principles, p. 97.]
[2 Amiel, Journal, p. 105.]
The danger in this selective art-process is evident, especially if we note some phases of it in painting. The extremists of the so-called “impressionist” school are simply carrying this process to its farthest issue. They reproduce of a landscape only a single aspect. All its possibilities of suggestion, its complexity and shading, are swept away to make room for the artist’s single impression. The result is rather remarkable. If one happens to approach such a picture from the right direction, with exactly the right light, and in a peculiarly receptive mood, one may receive from it an impression startlingly vivid. If, on the other hand, these conditions are not fulfilled, the picture may be absolutely meaningless to us. The reason is plain enough. The artist has so narrowed his presentation of impressions that it appeals to but few besides himself – it has become personal past the point of contact with others.
The same thing occurs in literature, though it is not so easily demonstrable. Schopenhauer is a case of the too narrowly selective, the viciously personal. He attempts satire, let us say; what results? Often enough, it is not satire, but invective, more or less hysterical. He is giving us things as they appear to him, but they appear to him as they do not appear to a sane man, and his work becomes interesting, not as art, but as pathology. If one would see the difference between satire and anger, that is, between legitimate and illegitimate personality, compare him with Juvenal or Swift at their best, or compare the fourth part of Gulliver’s Travels with the first three parts.
It is in finding the mean between this personal narrowness that is too selective, and the photographic impersonality that is not selective at all, that the individuality of the artist, his training and his ideals, are tested. It is this that determines how much his work shall possess of what we may call poetic, or artistic, truth. The difference between such truth and the truth of philosophy is not so much in the final result as in the means employed to reach it. The philosopher seeks to discover the essential and universal, and to state it in terms of the universal. The artist seeks to state it in terms of the particular. If he wishes to present the contrast between the misguided human heart, preoccupied with its gloomy or ghastly criminal purposes, and the sane and kindly standards of the world of freer men, the philosopher will state this in terms of universal application; the poet may symbolize it by the rough and sudden knocking at a castle gate, and the drowsy murmurs of a sleepy porter.
Such a selective process is forced upon the dramatist, also, by the practical conditions of his problem. A play must, when acted, not exceed three hours, but this is an extreme estimate, and includes the time for scene-shifting and other waits; the business of the play itself ought not to use more than two-thirds of this time. He has, then, two hours in which to present his action, with its causes and results. Obviously, there are in real life few cases where such an action occupies so short a time; it is more apt to stretch over months or years, and its links are “the little, nameless, unremembered acts” of our daily life. The artist cannot possibly reproduce all these, and he must, therefore, be in a sense “untrue” to his model. [1] Yet, if he could reproduce them, he would not. For life, nature, in itself, as distinguished from nature as seen by us, is unemphatic. Its so-called contrasts, its humor, its varying emphasis, its “meaning,” have their existence, not in the things themselves, but in the mind of the observer. It is, therefore, the artist’s part to supply these, to mould his material, impressing upon it the stamp of his mind, and thus giving it emphasis, proportion, perspective, – which brings us back again to the selective process. Out of the infinite series of occurrences he chooses such links as seem to him most important, or such as may be made to symbolize more than themselves. These critical moments he emphasizes, the rest he lets go, trusting that from what we see we will infer what we do not see. [2]
[1 Cf. infra, pp. 14-16.]
[2 Cf. the discussion of “the unities” in the following chapter, especially pp. 14-19.]
Take Macbeth. The dramatist must present to us the moral ruin, – the spiritual disintegration of a man, with its inner causes. What does he do? He selects his moments, presents these, and lets them stand for all that goes between. We first hear of our hero as a high-minded and courageous soldier. Then we see him, fresh from victory, receive the first suggestion of greater honors to be won; we see how the idea takes hold of him, and we suspect that one so easily touched must have been less sound at heart than we and others had supposed. What goes on in his mind immediately after this we are not told, but after the scenes with Lady Macbeth, we can look back and imagine. That is, we find ourselves responding to the poet’s demand, we are become co-workers with him. After the murder, again, we get no insight into Macbeth’s inner life until after he has been made king. Then comes the banquet-scene, which, brief as it is, throws a blaze of light backward over the interval. We recognize with perfect certitude the disintegration that has been going on in a spirit that we now see to have been never really strong, either for good or evil. And now our mind can go forward without teaching, we shall expect from the harassed king no firmness of touch, we know his spirit is fevered, that he is the slave of his past. For Lady Macbeth we are given no clews through the course of the play until, at the end, we are allowed, for one brief glimpse, to see her off her guard, when her will of steel is relaxed in delirious sleep. But those few lurid moments reveal to us a whole life-history, and it is enough.
If one would realize the tremendous compression of the play, and get the full significance of its method, let him note how another artist has treated a similar theme. Dostoiefsky, in Crime and Punishment, gives us the history of a few days in a young man’s life, during which he commits a crime, and afterwards, hovering on the verge of madness, undergoes spiritual tortures of the most exquisite kind. His mental processes are given almost from minute to minute, not an hour is unaccounted for. The effect of the whole is, it is true, tremendous; but it is not the kind of effect that art ought to produce, it is not the purified “pity and fear” which makes a subject beautiful in art which is merely terrible in nature. The writer certainly possessed such knowledge of the human soul as is given to few; had he possessed also the power to wield this knowledge, his book would have been one of the grandest art-productions to which a man ever gave being. But one feels that he is not master of his inspiration, he is mastered by it, and the book has upon it the taint of madness from which the author, if we may trust report, was not wholly free. And thus it happens, that while Shakespeare had probably a less profound understanding than Dostoiefsky of the inner life of a sin-darkened soul, we feel that his drama is a great artistic creation, whereas of Dostoiefsky’s story we feel that it might have been this, but is not.
The discussion has led us to the verge of that never-dying controversy concerning the merits of the realistic and the idealistic in art. To enter upon it would carry us beyond the limits of our subject. Be it suggested, however, that the antithesis between the two terms is not absolute and fixed, for all true art is, as we have seen, ideal, and all true art is based in reality. The difference between the two schools is quantitative, it is a difference in the proportionate emphasis they lay upon these two aspects of art, and their divergence should never be so great as to lead them, the one beyond the limits of art into the photographic, the other beyond the limits of art into the over narrowly personal.
