Heart of Man by George Edward Woodberry

G >> George Edward Woodberry >> Heart of Man

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

The fact is that the limitation of sculpture and painting and their
kindred arts results from their use of the physical basis of life only
partially, and not as a whole as literature uses it. They set forth
their works in the single element of space; they exclude the changes
that take place in time. The types they show are arrested, each in its
moment; or if a story is told by a series of representations, it is a
succession of such moments of arrested life. The method is that of the
camera; what is given is a fixed state. But literature renders life in
movement; it revolves life through its moments as rapidly as on the
retina of sense; its method is that of the kinetoscope. It holds under
its command change, growth, the entire energy of life in action; it can
chase mood with mood, link act to act. It alone can speak the word,
which is the most powerful instrument of man. Hence the types it shows
by presenting moods, words, and acts with the least obstruction of
matter and the slightest obligation to the active senses, are the most
complete. They have broken the bonds of the flesh, of moment and place.
They exhibit themselves in actions; they speak, and in dialogue and
soliloquy set forth their states of mind lying before, or accompanying,
or following their actions, thus interpreting these more fully. Action
by itself reveals character; speech illumines it, and casts upon the
action also a forward and a backward light. The lapse of time, binding
all together, adds the continuous life of the soul. This large compass,
which is the greatest reached by any art, rests on the wider command and
more flexible control which literature exercises over that physical
basis which is the common foundation of all the arts. Hence it abounds
in complex types, just as other arts present simple types with more
frequency. All types, however, in so far as they appeal to the mind and
interpret the inward world, under which aspect alone they are now
considered, have their physical nature, materially or imaginatively,
even though it be solely visible beauty, in order to express
personality.

The type, in the usage of literature, must be further distinguished from
the bare idea of the species as it has thus far been defined. It is more
than this. It is not only an example; it is an example in a high state
of development, if not perfect. The best possible tree, for instance,
does not exist in nature, owing to a confused environment which does not
permit its formation. In literature a type is made a high type either by
intensity, if it be simple, or by richness of nature, if it be complex.
Miserliness, braggadocio, hypocrisy, in their extremes, are the
characters of comedy; a rich nature, such as Hamlet, showing variety of
faculty and depth of experience, is the hero of more profound drama.
This truth, the necessity of high development in the type, underlay the
old canon that the characters of tragedy should be of lofty rank, great
place, and consequence in the world's affairs, preferably even of
historic fame. The canon erred in mistaking one means of securing
credible intensity or richness for the many which are possible. The end
in view is to represent human qualities at their acme. In other times as
a matter of fact persons highly placed were most likely to exhibit such
development; birth, station, and their opportunities for unrestrained
and conspicuous action made them examples of the compass of human
energy, passion, and fate. New ages brought other conditions. Shakspere
recognized the truth of the matter, and laid the emphasis where it
belongs, upon the humanity of the king, not on the kingly office of the
man. Said Henry V: "I think the king is but a man as I am; the violet
smells to him as it doth to me; the element shows to him as it doth to
me; all his senses have but human conditions; his ceremonies laid by, in
his nakedness he appears but a man; and though his appetites are higher
mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with like wing."
Such, too, was Lear in the tempest. And from the other end of the scale
hear Shylock: "Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, appetites, passions? fed with the same food, hurt
with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same
means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian
is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh?
if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge?" Rank and race are accidents; the essential thing is that the
type be highly human, let the means of giving it this intensity and
richness be what they may.

It is true that the type may seem defective in the point that it is at
best but a fragment of humanity, an abstraction or a combination of
abstracted qualities. There was never such an athlete as our Greek
sculptor's, never a pagan god nor Virgin Mother, nor a hero equal to
Homer's thought, so beautiful, brave, and courteous, so terrible to his
foe, so loving to his friend. And yet is it not thus that life is known
to us actually? does not this typical rendering of character fall in
with the natural habit of life? What man, what friend, is known to us
except by fragments of his spirit? Only one life, our own, is known to
us as a continuous existence. Just as when we see an orange, we supply
the further side and think of it as round, so with men we supply from
ourselves the unseen side that makes the man completely and continuously
human. Moreover, it is a matter of common experience that men, we
ourselves, may live only in one part, and the best, of our nature at one
moment, and yet for the moment be absorbed in that activity both in
consciousness and energy; for that moment we are only living so; now, if
a character were shown to us only in the moments in which he was living
so, at his best and in his characteristic state as the soldier, the
priest, the lover, then the ideal abstraction of literature would not
differ from the actuality of our experience. In this selfsame way we
habitually build for ourselves ideal characters out of dead and living
men, by dwelling on that part of their career which we most admire or
love as showing their characteristic selves. Napoleon is the conqueror,
St. Francis the priest, Washington the great citizen, only by this
method. They are not thereby de-humanized; neither do the ideal types of
imagination fail of humanization because they are thus fragmentarily,
but consistently, presented.

The type must make this human appeal under all circumstances. Its whole
meaning and virtue lie in what it contains of our common humanity, in
the clearness and brilliancy with which it interprets the man in us, in
the force with which it identifies us with human nature. If it is
separated from us by a too high royalty or a too base villany, it loses
intelligibility, it forfeits sympathy, it becomes more and more an
object of simple curiosity, and removes into the region of the unknown.
Even if the type passes into the supernatural, into fairyland or the
angelic or demoniac world, it must not leave humanity behind. These
spheres are in fact fragments of humanity itself, projections of its
sense of wonder, its goodness, and its evil, in extreme abstraction
though concretely felt. Fairy, angel, and devil cease to be conceivable
except as they are human in trait, however the conditions of their
nature may be fancied; for we have no other materials to build with save
those of our life on earth, though we may combine them in ways not
justified by reason. In so far as these worlds are in the limits of
rational imagination, they are derived from humanity, partial
interpretations of some of its moods, portions of itself; and the beings
who inhabit them are impaired for the purposes of art in the degree to
which their abstract nature is felt as stripping them of complete
humanity. For this reason in dealing with such simple types, being
natures all of one strain, it has been found best in practice to import
into them individually some quality widely common to men in addition to
that limited quality they possess by their conception. Some touch of
weakness in an angel, some touch of pity in a devil, some unmerited
misfortune in an Ariel, bring them home to our bosoms; just as the
frailty of the hero, however great he be, humanizes him at a stroke.
Thus these abstract fragments also are reunited with humanity, with the
whole of life in ourselves.

Types, then, whether simple or complex, whether apparently physical or
purely spiritual, whether given fragmentary or as wholes of personality,
express human character in its essential traits. They may be narrow or
broad generalizations; but if to know ourselves be our aim, those
types, which show man his common and enduring nature, are the most
valuable, and rank first in importance; in proportion as they are
specialized, they are less widely interpretative; in proportion as they
escape from time and place, race, culture, and religion, and present man
eternal and universal in his primary actions, moods, and passions, they
appeal to a greater number and with more permanence; they become
immortal in becoming universal. To preserve this universality is the
essence of the type, and the degree of universality it reaches is its
measure of value to men. It is immaterial whether it be simple as Ajax
or complex as Hamlet, whether it be the work of imagination solely as in
Hercules, or have a historical basis as in Agamemnon; its exemplary
rendering of man in general is its substance and constitutor its
ideality.

Action, the second great branch of life, is generalized by plot. It
lies, as has been said, in the region of experience. Character, though
it may be conceived as latent, can be presented only energetically as it
finds outward expression. It cannot be shown in a vacuum. It embodies or
reveals itself in an act; form and feature, as expressive of character,
are the record of past acts. This act is the link that binds type to
plot. By means of it character enters the external world, determining
the course of events and being passively affected by them. Plot takes
account of this interplay and sets forth its laws. It is, therefore,
more deeply engaged with the environment, as type is more concerned with
the man in himself. It is, initially, a thing of the outward as type is
a thing of the inward world. How, then, does literature, through plot,
reduce the environment in its human relations to organic form?

The course of events, taken as a whole, is in part a process of nature
independent of man, in part the product of his will. It is a continuous
stream of phenomena in great multiplicity, and proceeding in a temporal
sequence. Science deals with that portion of the whole which is
independent of man, and may be called natural events, and by discerning
causal relations in them arrives at the conception of law as a principle
of unchanging and necessary order in nature. Science seeks to reduce the
multiplicity and heterogeneity of facts as they occur to these simple
formulas of law. Science does not begin in reality until facts end;
facts, ten or ten thousand, are indifferent to her after the law which
contains them is found, and are a burden to her until it is found.
Literature, in its turn, deals with human events; and, in the same way
as science, by attending to causal relations, arrives at the conception
of spiritual law as a similarly permanent principle in the order of the
soul. This causal unity is the cardinal idea of plot which by
definition is a series of events causally related and conceived as a
unit, technically called the action. Plot is thus analogous to an
illustrative experiment in science; it is a concrete example of law,--it
is law operating.

The course of events again, so far as they stand in direct connection
with human life, may be thought of as the expression of the individual's
own will, or of that of his environment. The will of the environment may
be divided into three varieties, the will of nature, the will of other
men, and the will of God. In each case it is will embodied in events. If
these ideas be all merged in the conception of the world as a totality
whose course is the unfolding of one Divine will operant throughout it
and called Fate or Providence, then the individual will, through which,
as through nature also, the Divine will works, is only its servant.
Action so conceived, the march of events under some heavenly power
working through the mass of human will which it overrules in conjunction
with its own more comprehensive purposes, is epic action; in it
characters are subordinate to the main progress of the action, they are
only terms in the action; however free they may be apparently,
considered by themselves, that freedom is within such limits as to allow
entire certainty of result, its mutations are included in the
calculation of the Divine will. The action of the Aeneid is of this
nature: a grand series of destined events worked out through human
agency to fulfil the plan of the ruler of all things in heaven and
earth. On the other hand, if the course of events be more narrowly
attended to within the limits of the individual's own activity, as the
expression primarily and significantly of his personal will, then the
successive acts are subordinate to the character; they are terms of the
character which is thereby exhibited; they externalize the soul. Action,
so conceived, is dramatic action. If in the course of events there
arises a conflict between the will of the individual and that of his
environment, whether nature, man, or God, then the seed of tragedy,
specifically, is present; this conflict is the essential idea of
tragedy. In all these varieties of action, the scene is the external
world; plot lies in that world, and sets forth the order, the causal
principle, obtaining in it.

It is necessary, however, to refine upon this statement of the matter.
The course of external events, in so far as it affects one person,
whether as proceeding from or reacting upon him, reveals character, and
has meaning as an interpretation of inward life. It is a series outward
indeed, but parallel with the states of will, intellect, and emotion
which make up the consciousness of the character; and it is interesting
humanly only as a mirror of them. It is not the murderous blow, but the
depraved will; not the pale victim, but the shocked conscience; not the
muttered prayer, the frantic penance, the suicide, but remorse working
itself out, that hold our attention. Plot here manifests the law of
character outwardly; but the human reality lies within, and to be seen
requires the illumination which only our own hearts can give. All
fiction is such a shadowing forth of the soul. The constancy, the
intimacy, the profundity with which Shakspere felt this, from the
earliest syllables of his art, and the frequency with which he dwells
upon it, mark a characteristic of genius. Says Richard II:--

"'Tis very true, my grief lies all within;
And those external manners of lament
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells in silence in the tortured soul;
There lies the substance."

So Theseus, of the play of the rude artisans of Athens, excusing all
art: "The best in this kind are but shadows." So Hamlet; so Prospero.

Action is vital in us, and has a double order of phenomena; so far as
these are physical, their law is one of the physical world, and
interests us no more than other physical laws; so far as they belong in
the inward world of self-consciousness, their law is spiritual, and has
human interest as being operant in a soul like our own. The external
fact is seized by the eye as a part of nature; the internal fact is of
the unseen world, and is beheld only in the light which is within our
own bosoms--it is spiritually discerned. On the stage plainly this is
the case. So far as the actions are for the eye of sense alone they are
merely spectacular; so far as they express desires and energies, they
are dramatic, and these we do not see but feel according as our
experience permits us so to comprehend them. We contemplate a world of
emotion there in connection with the active energy of the will, a world
of character in operation in man; we feed it from our life, interpret it
therefrom, build it up in ourselves, suffering the illusion till
absorbed in what is arising in our consciousness under the actor's
genius we become ourselves the character. The greatest actor is he who
makes the spectator play the part. So far is the drama from the scene
that it goes on in our own bosoms; there is the stage without any
illusion whatsoever; the play in vital for the moment in ourselves.

And what is true of the stage is true of life. It is only through our
own hearts that we look into the hearts of others. We interpret the
external signs of sense in terms of personality and experience known
only within us; the life of will, head, and heart that we ascribe to
our nearest and dearest friends is something imagined, something never
seen any more than our own personality. Thus our knowledge of them is
not only fragmentary, as has been said; it is imaginative even within
its limits. It is, in reality as well as in art, a shadow-world we live
in, believing that within its sensuous films a spirit like unto
ourselves abides,--the human soul, though never seen face to face. To
enter this substantial world behind the phenomena of human life as
sensibly shown in imagination, to know the invisible things of
personality and experience, and to set them forth as a spiritual order,
is the main end of ideal art. Though in plot the outward order is
brought into the fullest prominence, and may seem to occupy the field,
yet it is significantly only the shadow of that order within.

In thus presenting plot as the means by which the history of a single
soul is externalized, one important element has been excluded from
consideration. The causal chain of events, which constitutes plot, has a
double unity, answering to the double order of phenomena in action as a
state of mind and a state of external fact. Under one aspect, so much
of the action as is included in any single life and is there a linked
sequence of mental states, has its unity in the personality of that
individual. Under the other aspect, the entire action which sets forth
the relations of all the characters involved, of their several courses
of experience as elements in the working out of the joint result, has
its unity in the constitution of the universe,--the impersonal order,
that structure of being itself, which is independent of man's will,
which is imposed upon him as a condition of existence, and which he must
accept without appeal. This necessity, to give it the best name, to
which man is exposed without and subjected within, is in its broadest
conception the power that increases life, and all things are under its
sway. Its sphere is above man's will; he knows it as immutable law in
himself as it is in nature; it is the highest object of his thoughts.
Its workings are submitted to his observation and experiment as a part
of the world of knowledge; he sees its operation in individuals, social
groups, and nations, and sets it forth in the action of the lyric, the
drama, and the epic as the law of life. In its sphere is the higher
unity of plot by virtue of which it integrates many lives in one main
action. Such, then, is the nature of plot as intermediary between man
and his environment, but deeply engaged in the latter, and not to be
freed from it even by a purely spiritualistic philosophy; for though we
say that, as under one aspect plot shadows forth the unseen world of the
soul's life, so under the other it shadows forth the invisible will of
God, we do not escape from the outward world. Sense is still the medium
by which only man knows his brother man and God also as through a glass
darkly,--

"The painted veil which those who live call life."

It separates all spirits, the beautiful but dense element in which the
pure soul is submerged.

It is necessary only to summarize the characteristics of plot which are
merely parallel to those of type already illustrated. Plot may be simple
or complex; it may be more or less involved in physical conditions in
proportion as it lays stress on its machinery or its psychology; it must
be important, as the type must be high, but important by virtue of its
essential human meaning and not of its accidents; it is a fragment of
destiny only, but in this falls in with the way life in others is known
to us; if it passes into the superhuman world, it must retain human
significance and be brought back to man's life by devices similar to
those used in the type for the same purpose; it rises in value in
proportion to the universality it contains, and gains depth and
permanence as it is interpretative of common human fate at all times and
among all men; it may be purely imaginary or founded on actual
incidents; and its exemplary interpretation of man's life is its
substance, and constitutes its ideality.

In the discussion of type and plot, the concrete nature of the world of
art, which was originally stated to be the characteristic work of the
creative reason, or imagination acting in conformity with truth, has
been assumed; but no reason has been given for it, because it seemed
best to develop first with some fulness the nature of that inward order
which is thus projected in the forms of art. It belongs to the frailty
of man that he seizes with difficulty and holds with feebleness the pure
ideas of the intellect, the more in proportion as they are removed from
sense; and he seeks to support himself against this weakness by framing
sensible representations of the abstract in which the mind can rest.
Thus in all lands and among savage tribes, as well as in the most
civilized nations, symbols have been used immemorially. The flag of a
nation has all its meaning because it is taken as a physical token of
national honour, almost of national life itself. The Moslem crescent,
the Christian cross, have only a similar significance, a bringing near
to the eye of what exists in reality only for the mind and heart. A
symbol, however, is an arbitrary fiction, and stands to the idea as a
metaphor does to the thing itself. In literature the parable of the
mustard seed to which the kingdom of heaven was likened, exemplifies
symbolical or metaphorical method; but the tale of the court of Arthur's
knights, ideal method; between them, and sharing something of both, lies
allegorical method. Idolatry is the religion of symbolism, for the image
is not the god; Christianity is the religion of idealism, for Christ is
God incarnate. Idealism presents the reality itself, the universal truth
made manifest in the concrete type, and there present and embodied in
its characteristics as they are, not merely arbitrarily by a fiction of
thought, symbolically or allegorically.

The way in which type concretes truth is sufficiently plain; but it may
be useful, with respect to plot, to draw out more in detail the analogy
which has been said to exist between it and an illustrative scientific
experiment. If scientific law is declared experimentally, the course of
nature is modified by intent; certain conditions are secured, certain
others eliminated; a selected train of phenomena is then set in motion
to the end that the law may be illustrated, and nothing else. In a
perfect experiment the law is in full operation. In plot there is a like
selection of persons, situations, and incidents so arranged as to
disclose the working of that order which obtains in man's life. The law
may be simple and shown by means of few persons and incidents in a brief
way, as in ancient drama, or complex and exhibited with many characters
in an abundance of action over a wide scene as in Shakspere; in either
case equally there is a selection from the whole mass of man's life of
what shall illustrate the causal union in its order and show it in
action. The process in the epic or prose narrative is the same. The
common method of all is to present the universal law in a particular
instance made for the purpose.

In thus clothing itself in concrete form, truth suffers no
transformation; it remains what it was, general truth, the very essence
of type and plot being, as has been said, to preserve this universality
in the particular instance. There is a sense in which this general truth
is more real, as Plato thought, than particulars; a sense in which the
phenomenal world is less real than the system of nature, for phenomena
come and go, but the law remains; a sense in which the order in man's
breast is more real than he is, in whom it is manifest, for the form of
ideas, the mould of law, are permanent, but their expression in us
transitory. It is this higher realism, as it was anciently called, that
the mind strives for in idealism,--this organic form of life, the object
of all rational knowledge. Types, under their concrete disguise, are
thus only a part of the general notions of the mind found in every
branch of knowledge and necessary to thought; plots, similarly, are only
a part of the general laws of the ordered world; literature in using
them, and specializing them in concrete form by which alone they differ
in appearance from like notions and laws elsewhere, merely avails itself
of that condensing faculty of the mind which most economizes mental
effort and loads conceptions with knowledge. In the type it is not
personal, but human character that interests the mind; in plot, it is
not personal, but human fate.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15