Part 11
Assuredly we of to-day can see more in _Hamlet_ than its first audience could. But the curve of “posterity” is really a zig-zag. Each generation selects from a classic what suits it. Few of the original colours are “fast”; some fade, others grow more vivid and then fade in their turn. The Jacobean playgoer was impressed by Webster’s heaped corpses, and we titter. He probably revelled in the mad scene of the “lycanthropic” Ferdinand, where we are bored. (The taste for mad scenes was long lived; it lasted from the Elizabethans, on through Betterton’s time—see Valentine in _Love for Love_—and Garrick’s time, as we know from Boswell’s anecdote about _Irene_, down to the moment when Tilburina went mad in white satin.) On the other hand, a scene which has possibly gained in piquancy for us of to-day, the proud contemporaries of Mr. Shaw, is that wherein the Duchess woos the coy Antonio and weds him out of hand. When we chance upon a thing like this in a classic we are apt, fatuously enough, to exclaim. “How modern!”
No one is likely to make that exclamation over another classic of momentary revival, _Le Malade Imaginaire_. There is not a vestige of “modernity” in Molière’s play. It is absolutely primitive. Or rather it seems, in all essentials, to stand outside time, to exhibit nothing of any consequence that “dates.” It has suffered no such mishap as has befallen Webster’s tragedy—a change of mental attitude in the audience which has turned the author’s desired effect upside down. At no point at which Molière made a bid for our laughter are we provoked, contrariwise, to frown. You cannot, by the way, say this about all Molière. Much, _e.g._, of the fun in _George Dandin_ strikes a modern audience as merely cruel. Both in Alceste and Tartuffe there has been a certain alteration of “values” in the progress of the centuries. But _Le Malade Imaginaire_ is untouched. We can enjoy it, I imagine, with precisely the same delight as its first audience felt. Some items of it, to be sure, were actual facts for them which are only history for us; the subservience of children to parents, for instance, and (though Mr. Shaw will not agree) the pedantic humbug of the faculty. But the point is, that the things laughed at, though they may have ceased to exist in fact, are as ridiculous as ever. And note that our laughter is not a whit affected by childish absurdities in the plot. Argan’s little girl shams dead and he immediately assumes she is dead. Argan shams dead and neither his wife nor his elder daughter for a moment questions the reality of his death. His own serving-wench puts on a doctor’s gown and he is at once deceived by the disguise. These little things do not matter in the least. We are willing to go all lengths in make-believe so long as we get our laughter.
Here, then, is a classic which seems to be outside the general rule. It has not had to make, in M. Proust’s phrase, its own posterity. It has escaped those vicissitudes of appreciation which classics are apt to suffer from changes in the general condition of the public mind.... But stay! If it has always been greeted with the same abundance of laughter, has the quality of that laughter been invariable? Clearly not, for Molière is at pains to apologize in his play for seeming to laugh at the faculty, whereas, he says, he has only in view “le ridicule de la médecine.” Between half-resentful, half-fearful laughter at a Purgon or Diafoirus who may be at your bedside next week and light-hearted laughter at figures that have become merely fantastic pantaloons there is considerable difference. And so we re-establish our general rule.
PERVERTED REPUTATIONS
Sir Henry Irving used to tell how he and Toole had gone together to Stratford, and fallen into talk with one of its inhabitants about his great townsman. After many cross-questions and crooked answers, they arrived at the fact that the man knew that Shakespeare had “written for summat.” “For what?” they enquired. “Well,” replied the man, “I do think he wrote for the Bible.”
This story illustrates a general law which one might, perhaps, if one were inclined to pseudo-scientific categories, call the law of perverted reputations. I am thinking more particularly of literary reputations, which are those I happen chiefly to care about. And literary reputations probably get perverted more frequently than others, for the simple reason that literature always has been and (despite the cheap manuals, Board schools, and the modern improvements) still is an unfathomable mystery to the outer busy world. But, to get perverted, the reputations must be big enough to have reached the ears of that outer world. What happens, thereafter, seems to be something like this. The man in the back street understands vaguely that so-and-so is esteemed a great man. Temperamentally and culturally incapable of appreciating the works of literary art, for which so-and-so is esteemed great, the back-streeter is driven to account for his greatness to himself on grounds suitable to his own comprehension, which grounds in the nature of the case have nothing to do with the fine art of literature. The general tendency is to place these grounds in the region of the marvellous. For the capacity for wonder is as universal as the capacity for literature is strictly limited.
Thus you have the notorious instance of Virgil figuring to the majority of men in the middle ages not as a poet but as a magician. Appreciation of his poetry was for the “happy few”; by the rest his reputation was too great to be ignored, so they gave it a twist to accommodate it to the nature of their own imaginations. In more recent times, indeed in our own day, there is the equally notorious instance of Shakespeare. The Stratford rustic knew nothing of Shakespeare’s plays, but did know (1) that there was a great man called Shakespeare, and (2) that there was a great book called the Bible. He concluded that Shakespeare must have written for the Bible. But I am thinking of a very different perversion of Shakespeare’s reputation. I am thinking of the strange people, exponents of the back-street mind, who, being incapable of appreciating Shakespeare’s poetry and dramatic genius—having in fact no taste for literature as such—have assigned his greatness to something compatible with their own prosaic pedestrian taste and turned him into a contriver of cryptograms. Again you see the old appetite for wonder reappearing. The imputed reputation, as in Virgil’s case, is for something _abscons_, as Rabelais would have said, something occult.
It is the old story. Superstition comes easier to the human mind than artistic appreciation. But superstition has played an odd freak in the case of Shakespeare. It is actually found side by side with artistic appreciation, of which it presents itself as the superlative, or ecstatic, degree. There is, for instance, an Oxford professor to whom the world is indebted for the most delicate, the most sympathetic, as well as the most scholarly appreciation of Shakespeare in existence. Yet this professor is so affronted by the flesh-and-blood domination of the actresses who play Shakespeare’s heroines, the dangerous competition of their personal charm with the glamour of the text, that he has committed himself to the startling proposition that poetic drama perished with Shakespeare’s boy actors! Jealousy for Shakespeare’s individual supremacy in artistic creation, which must “brook no rival near the throne,” has turned the professor into a misogynist. This I venture to call Shakespearian superstition. And there is another Oxford professor (oh, home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs!) who assures us that we can unravel all Shakespearian problems by a careful study of the text alone. Don’t trouble your minds about the actual facts in view of which the text had been written and in which it was to be spoken. Don’t ask where Shakespeare’s theatres were and what the audiences were like and what kind of shows they were used to and continued to expect. Don’t bother about the shape of the stage or its position in regard to the public. Stick to the text, and nothing but the text, and all shall be made plain unto you. It is this same professor who occasionally treats Shakespeare’s imaginary characters as though they were real persons, with independent biographies of their own. He obliges us with conjectural fragments of their biographies. “Doubtless in happier days he (Hamlet) was a close and constant observer of men and manners.” “All his life he had believed in her (Gertrude), we may be sure, as such a son would.” Shakespearian superstition again, you see, not merely alongside but actually growing out of artistic appreciation.
Literary critics, as a rule, have suffered less than so-called literary “creators” from perverted reputations. The reason is plain. The man in the back street has never heard of criticism. But what, it will be asked, about the strange case of Aristotle? Well, I submit that in his case the perversion arose from the second cause I have indicated—not from the ignorance of the multitude but from the superstitious veneration of the few. Who was it who began the game by calling Aristotle “the master of those who know”? A poet who was also a scholar. Who declared Aristotle’s authority in philosophy to equal St. Paul’s in theology? Roger Bacon (they say; I have not myself asked for this author at Mudie’s or _The Times_ Book Club). Who said there could be no possible contradiction between the Poetics and Holy Writ? Dacier, an eminent Hellenist. Who declared the rules of Aristotle to have the same certainty for him as the axioms of Euclid? Lessing, an esteemed “highbrow.” The gradual process, then, by which the real Aristotle, pure thinker, critic investigating and co-ordinating the facts of the actual drama of his time, was perverted into the spurious Aristotle, Mumbo Jumbo of criticism, mysteriarch, depositary of the Tables of the Law, was the same process that we have seen at work in the case of Shakespeare—enthusiastic appreciation toppling over into superstition.
But none of us can afford to put on airs about it. _Mutato nomine de te._ For, after all, what are these various cases but extreme instances of the “personal equation” that enters into every, even the sanest opinion? Can any one of us do anything else towards appreciating a work of art than remake it within himself? So, if we are to avoid these absurd extremes, let us look to ourselves, do our best to get ourselves into harmony with the artist, and “clear our minds of cant.”
THE SECRET OF GREEK ART
Mathematics may be great fun. Even simple arithmetic is not without its comic side, as when it enables you to find, with a little management, the Number of the Beast in the name of any one you dislike. Then there is “the low cunning of algebra.” It became low cunning indeed when Euler drove (so the anecdotist relates) Diderot out of Russia with a sham algebraical formula. “Monsieur,” said Euler gravely, “_(a + bⁿ)/n = x, donc Dieu existe; répondez_.” Diderot, no algebraist, could not answer, and left.
But geometry furnishes the best sport. Here is a learned American archæologist, Mr. Jay Hambidge, lecturing to that august body the Hellenic Society and revealing to them his discovery that the secret of classic Greek art (of the best period) is a matter of two magic rectangles. I understand that the learned gentleman himself did not make this extreme claim about the “secret” of “Art,” but it was at any rate so described in the report on which my remarks are based. Mr. Hambidge appears to have devoted years of labour and ingenuity to his researches. The result is in any case of curious interest. But how that result can be said to be “the secret of Greek art revealed” I wholly fail to see.
Let us look first at his rectangles. His first is 2 × √5. It is said that these figures represent the ratio of a man’s height to the full span of his outstretched fingers. But what man? Of what race and age? Well, let us say an average Greek of the best period, and pass on. Mr. Hambidge has found this rectangle over and over again in the design of the Parthenon. “Closely akin” to it, says the report, is another fundamental rectangle, of which the two dimensions are in the ratio of Leonardo’s famous “golden section.” That ratio is obtained by dividing a straight line so that its greater is to its lesser part as the whole is to the greater. Let us give a mathematical meaning to the “closely akin.” Calling the lesser part 1 and the greater _x_, then—
_x_/1 = (_x_ + 1)/_x_ or _x_² - _x_ - 1 = 0
which gives you
_x_ = (√5 + 1)/2.
The square roots will not trouble you when you come to constructing your rectangles, for the diagonal of the first is √(5 + 4), or 3. If AB is your side 2, draw a perpendicular to it through B, and with A as centre describe the arc of a circle of radius 3; the point of intersection will give C, the other end of the diagonal. The second rectangle maintains AB, and simply prolongs BC by half of AB or 1. Just as the dimensions of the first rectangle are related to those of (selected) man, and to the plan of the Parthenon, so those of the second are related, it seems, to the arrangement of seeds in the sunflower and to the plan of some of the Pyramids. Sir Theodore Cook writes to _The Times_ to say that both the sunflower and the Pyramid discoveries are by no means new.
The fact is the theory of “beautiful” rectangles is not new. The classic exponent of it is Fechner, who essayed to base it on actual experiment. He placed a number of rectangular cards of various dimensions before his friends, and asked them to select the one they thought most beautiful. Apparently the “golden section” rectangle got most votes. But “most of the persons began by saying that it all depended on the application to be made of the figure, and on being told to disregard this, showed much hesitation in choosing.” (Bosanquet: “History of Æsthetic,” p. 382.) If they had been Greeks of the best period, they would have all gone with one accord for the “golden section” rectangle.
Nor have the geometers of beauty restricted their favours to the rectangle. Some have favoured the circle, some the square, others the ellipse. And what about Hogarth’s “line of beauty”? I last saw it affectionately alluded to in the advertisement of a corset manufacturer. So, evidently, Hogarth’s idea has not been wasted.
One sympathizes with Fechner’s friends who said it all depended upon the application to be made of the figure. The “art” in a picture is generally to be looked for inside the frame. The Parthenon may have been planned on the √5/2 rectangle, but you cannot evolve the Parthenon itself out of that vulgar fraction. Fechner proceeded on the assumption that art is a physical fact and that its “secret” could be wrung out of it, as in any other physical inquiry, by observation and experiment, by induction from a sufficient number of facts. But when he came to have a theory of it he found, like anybody else, that introspection was the only way.
And whatever rectangles Mr. Hambidge may discover in Greek works of art, he will not thereby have revealed the secret of Greek art. For rectangles are physical facts (when they are not mere abstractions), and art is not a physical fact, but a spiritual activity. It is in the mind of the artist, it is his vision, the expression of his intuition, and beauty is only another name for perfect expression. That, at any rate, is the famous “intuition-expression” theory of Benedetto Croce, which at present holds the field. It is a theory which, of course, presents many difficulties to the popular mind—what æsthetic theory does not?—but it covers the ground, as none other does, and comprehends all arts, painting, poetry, music, sculpture, and the rest, in one. Its main difficulty is its distinction between the æsthetic fact, the artist’s expression, and the physical fact, the externalization of the artist’s expression, the so-called “work” of art. Dr. Bosanquet has objected that this seems to leave out of account the influence on the artist’s expression of his material, his medium, but Croce, I think, has not overlooked that objection (“Estetica,” Ch. XIII., end), though many of us would be glad if he could devote some future paper in the _Critica_ to meeting it fairly and squarely. Anyhow, æsthetics is not a branch of physics, and the “secret” of art is not to be “revealed” by a whole Euclidful of rectangles.
But it is, of course, an interesting fact that certain Greeks, and before them certain Egyptians, took certain rectangles as the basis of their designs—rectangles which are also related to the average proportions of the human body and to certain botanical types. If Mr. Hambidge—or his predecessors, of whom Sir Theodore Cook speaks—have established this they have certainly put their fingers on an engaging convention. Who would have thought that the “golden section” that very ugly-looking (√5 + 1)/2 could have had so much in it? The builder of the Great Pyramid of Ghizeh knew all about it in 4700 B.C. and the Greeks of the age of Pericles, and then Leonardo da Vinci toyed with it—“_que de choses dans un menuet!_” It is really rather cavalier of Croce to dismiss this golden section along with Michael Angelo’s serpentine lines of beauty as the astrology of Æsthetic.
A POINT OF CROCE’S
Adverting to Mr. Jay Hambidge’s rectangles of beauty I had occasion to cite Croce and his distinction between the æsthetic fact of expression and the practical fact of externalization, to which distinction, I said, Dr. Bosanquet had objected that it ignored the influence upon the artist of his medium. Dr. Bosanquet has courteously sent me a copy of a communication, “Croce’s Æsthetic,” which he has made to the British Academy, and which deals not only with this point, but with his general objections to the Crocean philosophy of art. It is not all objection, far from it; much of it is highly laudatory, and all of it is manifestly written in a spirit of candour and simple desire to arrive at the truth. But I have neither the space nor the competence to review the whole pamphlet, and I will confine myself to the particular point with which I began. While suggesting, however, some criticisms of Dr. Bosanquet’s contentions, I admit the suspicion that I may resemble one of those disputants who, as Renan once said, at the bottom of their minds are a little of the opinion of the other side. That, indeed, was why I said that many of us would be glad to hear further on the point from Croce himself. But with Dr. Bosanquet’s pamphlet before me I cannot afford to “wait and see.” I must say, with all diffidence, what I can.
Dr. Bosanquet describes the Crocean view quite fairly. “The ‘work of art,’ then, picture, statue, musical performance, printed or spoken poem, is called so only by a metaphor. It belongs to the practical (economic) and not to the æsthetic phase of the spirit, and consists merely of expedients adopted by the artist as a practical man, to ensure preservation and a permanent possibility of reproduction for his imaginative intuition. The art and beauty lie primarily in his imagination, and secondarily in the imagination of those to whom his own may communicate its experience. The picture and the music are by themselves neither art nor beauty nor intuition-expression.”
But when Dr. Bosanquet goes on to make his inferences, I suggest that he infers too much. “Thus,” he says, “all embodiment in special kinds of physical objects by help of special media and special processes is wholly foreign to the nature of art and beauty.... There is nothing to be learned from the practical means by help of which intuitions of beauty receive permanence and communicability.” “Wholly foreign” and “nothing to be learned” are, I think, too strong. Though the practical means are distinct from art, they are part of the artist’s experience. The artist is not working _in vacuo_. He is a certain man, with a certain nature and experience, at a certain moment of time. His joy, say, in handling and modelling clay (I take this example from an old lecture of Dr. Bosanquet’s) will be one of the factors in his experience. In that sense it will not be “wholly foreign” to his art, and he will have “learned” something from it. It is not itself the art-impulse, the expressive activity, but it is, what Croce calls it, a _point d’appui_ for a new one.
For let us hear what Croce himself says on this point (“Estetica,” Ch. XIII.). “To the explanation of physical beauty as a mere aid for the reproduction of internal beauty, or expression, it might be objected, that the artist creates his expressions in the act of painting or carving, writing or composing; and that therefore physical beauty, instead of following, sometimes precedes æsthetic beauty. This would be a very superficial way of understanding the procedure of the artist, who, in reality, makes no stroke of the brush without having first seen it in his imagination; and, if he has not yet seen it, will make it, not to externalize his expression (which at that moment does not exist), but as it were on trial and to have a mere _point d’appui_ for further meditation and internal concentration. The physical _point d’appui_ is not physical beauty, instrument of reproduction, but a means that might be called _pedagogic_, like retiring to solitude or the many other expedients, often queer enough, adopted by artists and men of science and varying according to their various idiosyncrasies.” Can we not put it more generally and say that the artist’s historic situation is changing at every moment and his experience with his medium is part of that situation (just as is the date of his birth, his country, or the state of his digestion), or in other words, one of the influences that make him what he is and not some one else? But to admit that, it seems to me, is not at all to deny the independence of his spiritual activity in expression any more than the freedom of the will is denied by the admission that will must always be exercised in a definite historical situation.
What Dr. Bosanquet cannot abide is Croce’s great principle that in æsthetic philosophy there are no arts but only art. He says this “offers to destroy our medium of intercourse through the body and through natural objects.” Why “destroy”? Surely it is not a case of destruction but of removal; removal from the philosophy of art to that of practice. Croce is not quite so foolish as to offer to destroy things indestructible; he is only trying to put them in their place.
“The truth is, surely, that different inclinations of the spirit have affinities with different qualities and actions of body—meaning by body that which a sane philosophy accepts as concretely and completely actual in the world of sense-perception. The imagination of the particular artist is
like the dyer’s hand, Subdued to what it works in,