Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

66

6

Philosophy of Art" may be, for aught I care, its moral or its social Philosophy. Even on these points I have not only left much to other parts of this volume, but have passed over many an aphorism, such as, that "power is never wasted" (Modern Painters, pt. i. sec. i. chap. iii.); that there is no generic difference between the sublime and the beautiful (Ibid. pt. i. sec. ii. chap. iii.); that “the words objective and subjective' are two of the most objectionable words ever coined" (Ibid. pt. iv. chap. xii. § 1.); with other things of like novelty. If I have said a word to confirm the Reader's convictions that Art is not Nature that a Landscape is not a Lecture nor the Painter a Prophet that imitation is not synonymous with Pharisaism, nor inadvertence with lying, nor accuracy with greatness, nor knowledge with wisdom, nor letter with spirit, nor material with moral painting; - if I have shown that Claude was not silly because Turner was scientific,that we are not quite justified in cashiering three centuries of Art and Artists,

"To be forgotten as fools, or remembered as worse ;”—

if I have hinted, rather than uttered, that, in criticism as in morals, there is such a thing as being "righteous overmuch," and that it has its pains and penalties; -if I have awakened one salutary feeling that, as Lord Bacon says, "discretion in speech is more than eloquence;" and that glittering sentences, and paradoxical subtleties, and the "lamp-black and lightning" of declamatory passion are a poor substitute for purity of taste, solidity of judg

THE AUTHOR'S SCOPE AND OBJECT.

79

ment, and the equanimities, amenities, and catholicities of, shall I say?" artistic life," -I trust I may have offered, even thus far, some modest contribution—a clergyman's mite-to what may be termed, in no very exaggerated sense, "the Philosophy of Art."

We proceed now to matters of graver import.

CHAP. X.

THE POETRY OF ART.

"WHAT IS POETRY? "*

WE are as familiar with the expression "Poetry of Art" as with that which declares painting "imitative." Strange to say, "Pre-Raffaellitism" has thrown even more confusion about the one than about the other. Here is a true nineteenth century statement that may put the most poetical amongst us on the inquiry what it is we really mean when we speak of poetry:

6

"And in Art, as in Literature, that sentence of Carlyle is inevitably and inexorably true, that Poetry will more and more come to be understood as nothing more than higher knowledge; and the only genuine Romance for grown persons, Reality." (Edin. Lectures, p. 237.)

Now I do not like hard words, even in regard to one who flings them about (I mean Carlyle) by cartloads. Yet it is impossible not to say that the above aphorism, though assuming a prophetic form, is

*The contents of this and the following chapter were written some months ago. In the third volume of "Modern Painters," since published, I find this very question, " What is Poetry?" with the remark that the author does "not recollect hearing the question often asked, and never recollects its being "attempted to be answered."

WHAT IS POETRY? — CARLYLE'S DEFINITION. 81

either very shallow or very false. We might as well say that diamond is but a sufficient quantity of charcoal, or flame a due proportion of Greenland oil. But let us try it by a congenial test.

If poetry be truth, and it is the degree of truth that makes it poetry, then, either the "Eneid," "Paradise Lost," and the "Orlando Furioso," are not poetry, or they are true true, not in a loose sense (truth at bottom with a superstructure of fiction), but true in the degree in which they are poetry; poetry no further than they are true; the truth being in fact the poetry.

But then, on the other hand, since no one has ever ventured to affirm that the "Tempest," "Taming the Shrew," and "Midsummer Night's Dream" are more true, expressions, that is, of "higher knowledge," say than "Cicero de Officiis," or Locke's "Essay on the Human Understanding," we must, on the prophetic assertion, give up at least so much of their claim to a poetic character as we are not prepared to award, in all due proportion, to the two last-named works.

And again, if poetry be higher knowledge, then the more knowledge the more poetry. Definitions, therefore, and axioms, and postulates, are, at least, so many germs of poetry; and Euclid's "Elements" and Bacon's "Novum Organum" its more magnificent efflorescence: What is the precise amount of poetic beauty in that well-known theorem?

"If several ratios be the same with several ratios, each to each, the ratio which is compounded of ratios which are the same with the first ratios, each to each, is

G

the same with the ratio compounded of ratios which are the same with the other ratios, each to each."

But, it may be answered, this is scientific, not poetical truth.

If we admit the answer, then Mr. Carlyle's account of poetry is not what we took it for. Suppose a distinction of subject, and you have another definition of poetry.

But then how are we to state the definition? What subjects belong, what do not belong, to poetry? Not mathematics: What then of metaphysics, morals, natural science? What of all that world of Turnerisms, "truth of space, truth of earth, truth of clouds," and so on? When and where are we within the frontier? Is human nature, with all its feelings, motives, interests, actions, within the field of poetry? But this is the field of history. Is history poetry? or where does one begin and the other end? Not surely in truth and fiction, or, "poetry" being the "truth," history must be the fiction. If, on the other hand, it is in the "higher" truth, what are the relative poetic ranks of Sophocles and Thucydides, of Virgil and Tacitus?

But how, again, shall we pronounce upon such cases as the following?

[ocr errors]

"Man," says Zophar, "is born like the wild ass's colt." They go astray," says David, "as soon as they are born." "Foolishness," says Solomon, "is bound up in the heart of a child." This is "truth;" can we take what follows as the "higher" degree of it?

« AnteriorContinuar »