Heart of Man by George Edward Woodberry

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The images of Plato--those images in which alone he could adequately
body forth his intuitions of eternity--present the twofold attitude of
our nature, in mind and heart, toward the ideal with vivid distinctness;
and they illustrate the more intimate power of beauty, the more
fundamental reach of emotion, and the richness of their mutual life in
the soul. Under the aspect of truth he likens our knowledge of the ideal
to that which the prisoners of the cave had of the shadows on the wall;
under the aspect of beauty he figures our love for it as that of the
passionate lover. As truth, again,--taking up in his earliest days what
seems the primitive impulse and first thought of man everywhere and at
all times,--under the image of the golden chain let down from the
throne of the god, he sets forth the heavenly origin of the ideal and
its descent on earth by divine inspiration possessing the poet as its
passive instrument; and later, bringing in now the cooperation of man in
the act, he again presents the ideal as known by reminiscence of the
soul's eternal life before birth, which is only a more defined and
rationalized conception of inspiration working normally instead of by
the special act and favour of God. As beauty, again, he shows forth the
enthusiasm evoked by the ideal in the image of the charioteer of the
white and black horses mastering them to the goal of love. In these
various ways the first idealist thought out these distinctions of truth
and beauty as having a real community, though a divided life in the mind
and heart; and, as he developed,--and this is the significant
matter,--the poet in him controlling his speech told ever more
eloquently of the charm with which beauty draws the soul unto itself,
for to the poet beauty is nearer than truth. It is the persuasion with
which he sets forth this charm, rather than his speculation, which has
fastened upon him the love of later ages. He was the first to discern in
truth and beauty equal powers of one divine being, and thus to effect
the most important reconciliation ever made in human nature.

So, too, from the other great source of the race's wisdom, we are told
in the Scriptures that though we be fallen men, yet is it left to us to
lift our eyes to the beauty of holiness and be healed; for every ray of
that outward loveliness which strikes upon the eye penetrates to the
heart of man. Then are we moved, indeed, and incited to seek virtue with
true desire. Prophet and psalmist are here at one with the poet and the
philosopher in spiritual sensitiveness. At the height of Hebrew genius
in the personality of Christ, it is the sweet attractive grace, the
noble beauty of the present life incarnated in his acts and words, the
divine reality on earth and not, as Plato saw it, in a world removed,
that has drawn all eyes to the Judean hill. The years lived under the
Syrian blue were a rending of the veil of spiritual beauty which has
since shone in its purity on men's gaze. It is this loveliness which
needs only to be seen that wins mankind. The emotions are enlisted; and,
however we may slight them in practice, the habit of emotion more than
the habit of mind enters into and fixes inward character. More men are
saved by the heart than by the head; more youths are drawn to excellence
by noble feelings than are coldly reasoned into virtue on the ground of
gain. Some there are among men so colourless in blood that they embrace
the right on the mere calculation of advantage, but they seem to possess
only an earthly virtue; some, beholding the order of the world, desire
to put themselves in tune with nature and the soul's law, and these are
of a better sort; but most fortunate are they who, though well-nurtured,
find virtue not in profit, nor in the necessity of conforming to
implacable law, but in mere beauty, in the light of her face as it first
comes to them with ripening years in the sweet and noble nature of those
they grow to love and honour among the living and the dead. For this is
Achilles made brave, that he may stir us to bravery; and surely it were
little to see the story of Pelops' line if the emotions were not
awakened, not merely for a few moments of intense action of their own
play, but to form the soul. The emotional glow of the creative
imagination has been once mentioned in the point that it is often more
absorbed in the beauty and passion than in the intellectual
significance of its work; here, correspondingly, it is by the heart to
which it appeals rather than by the mind it illumines that it takes hold
of youth.

What, then, is the nature of this emotional appeal which surpasses so
much in intimacy, pleasure, and power the appeal to the intellect? It is
the keystone of the inward nature, that which binds all together in the
arch of life. Emotion has some ground, some incitement which calls it
forth; and it responds with most energy to beauty. In the strictest
sense beauty is a unity of relations of coexistence in coloured space
and appeals to the eye; it is in space what plot is in time. Like plot,
it is deeply engaged in the outward world; it exists in the sensuous
order, and it shadows forth the spiritual order in man only in so far as
a fair soul makes the body beautiful, as Spenser thought,--the mood, the
act, and the habit of heroism, love, and the like nobilities of man,
giving grace to form, feature, and attitude. It is primarily an outward
thing, as emotion, which is a phase of personality, is an inward thing;
what the necessary sequence of events, the chain of causation, is to
plot,--its cardinal idea,--that the necessary harmony of parts, the
chime of line and colour, is to beauty; thus beauty is as inevitable as
fate, as structurally planted in the form and colour of the universe as
fate is in its temporal movement. And as plot has its characteristic
unity in the impersonal order of God's will, shown in time's event, so
beauty has its characteristic unity in the same order shown in the
visible creation of space. It is true that all phenomena are perceived
by the mind, and are conditioned, as is said, by human modes of
perception; but within the limits of the relativity of all our
knowledge, beauty is initially a sensuous, not a spiritual, thing, and
though the structure of the human eye arranges the harmonies of line and
colour, it is no more than as the form of human thought arranges cause
and effect and other primary relations in things; beauty does not in
becoming humanly known cease to be known as a thing external,
independent of our will, and imposed on us from without. It is this
outward reality, the harmony of sense, that sculpture and painting add
in their types to the interpretation they otherwise give of personality,
and often in them this physical element is predominant; and in the
purely decorative arts it may be exclusive. In landscape, which is in
the realm of beauty, personality altogether disappears, unless, indeed,
nature be interpreted in the mood of the Psalmist as declaring its
Creator; for the reflection which the presence of man may cast upon
nature as his shadow is not expressive of any true personality there
abiding, but enters into the scene as the face of Narcissus into the
brook. The pleasure which the mind takes in beauty is only a part of its
general delight in order of any sort; and visible artistic form as
abstracted from the world of space is merely a species of organic form
and is included in it.

The eye, however, governs so large a part of the sensuous field, the
idea of beauty as a unity of space-relations giving pleasure is so
simple, and the experience is so usual, that the word has been carried
over to the life of the more limited senses in which analogous phenomena
arise, differing only in the fact that they exist in another sense. Thus
in the dominion of the ear especially, we speak commonly of the beauty
of music; but the life of the minor senses, touch, taste, and smell, is
composed of too simple elements to allow of such combination as would
constitute specific form in ordinary apprehension, though in the blind
and deaf the possibility of high and intelligible complexity in these
senses is proved. Similarly, the term is carried over to the invisible
and inaudible world of the soul within itself, and we speak of the
beauty of Sidney's act, of Romeo's nature, and, in the abstract, of the
beauty of holiness, and, in a still more remote sphere, of the beauty of
a demonstration or a hypothesis; by this usage we do not so much
describe the thing as convey the charm of the thing. This charm is more
intimate and piercing to those of sensuous nature who rejoice in visible
loveliness or in heard melodies; but to the spiritually minded it may be
as close and penetrating in the presence of what is to them dearer than
life and light, and is beheld only by the inner eye. It is this charm,
whether flowing from the outward semblance or shining from the unseen
light, that wins the heart, stirs emotion, wakes the desire to be one
with this order manifest in truth and beauty, in the spirit and the body
of things, to go out toward it in love, to identify one's being with it
as the order of life, mortal and immortal; last the will quickens, and
its effort to make this order prevail in us and possess us is virtue.
The act through all its phases is, as has been said, one act of the
soul, which first perceives, then loves, and finally wills. Emotion is
the intermediary between the divine order and the human will; it
responds to the beauty of the one and directs the choice of the other,
and is felt in either function as love controlling life in the new
births of the spirit.

The emotion, to return to the world of art, which is felt in the
presence of imaginary things is actual in us; but the attempt is made to
fix upon it a special character differentiating it from the emotion felt
in the presence of reality. One principle of difference is sought in the
point that in literature, or in sculpture and painting, emotion entails
no action; it has no outlet, and is without practical consequences; the
will is paralyzed by the fatuity of trying to influence an unreal series
of events, and in the case of the object of beauty in statue or painting
by the impossibility of possession. The world of art is thus thought of
as one of pure contemplation, a place of escape from the difficulties,
the pangs, and the incompleteness that beset all action. It is true that
the imagined world creates special conditions for emotion, and that the
will does not act in respect to that world; but does this imply any
radical difference in the emotion, or does it draw after it the
consequence that the will does not act at all? Checked emotion, emotion
dying in its own world, is common in life; and so, too, is contemplation
as a mode of approach to beauty, as in landscape, or even in human
figures where there is no thought of any other possession than the
presence of beauty before the eye and soul; escape, too, into a sphere
of impersonality, in the love of nature or the spectacle of life, is a
common refuge. Art does not give us new faculties, generate unknown
habits, or in any way change our nature; it presents to us a new world
only, toward which our mental behaviour is the same as in the rest of
life. Why, then, should emotion, the most powerful element in life, be
regarded as a fruitless thing in that ideal art which has thus far
appeared as a life in purer energy and higher intensity of being than
life itself?

The distinction between emotion depicted and that felt in response must
be kept in mind to avoid confusion, for both sorts are present at the
same time. In literature emotion may be set forth as a phase of the
character or as a term in the plot; it may be a single moment of high
feeling as in a lyric or a prolonged experience as in a drama; it may be
shown in the pure type of some one passion as in Romeo, or in the
various moods of a rich nature as in Hamlet; but, whether it be
predominant or subordinate in any work, it is there treated in the same
way and for the same purpose as other materials of life. What happens
when literature gives us, for instance, examples of moral experience? It
informs the mind of the normal course of certain lines of action, of the
inevitable issues of life; it breeds habits of right thinking in respect
to these; it is educative, and though we do not act at once upon this
knowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to act. So, when
literature presents examples of emotional experience, it informs us of
the nature of emotion, its causes, occasions, and results, its value in
character, its influence on action, the modes of its expression; it
breeds habits of right thinking in respect to these, and is educative;
and, just as in the preceding case, though we do not act at once upon
this knowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to act.
Concurrently with emotions thus objectively presented there arises in us
a similar series of emotions in the beholding; by sympathy we ourselves
feel what is before us, the emotions there are also in us in proportion
as we identify ourselves with the character; or, in proportion as our
own individuality asserts itself by revolt, a contrary series arises of
hatred, indignation, or contempt, of pity for the character or of terror
in the feeling that what has happened to one may happen to us in our
humanity. We are taught in a more intimate and vital way than through
ideas alone; the lesson has entered into our bosoms; we have lived the
life. Literature is thus far more powerfully educative emotionally than
intellectually; and if the poet has worked with wisdom, he has bred in
us habits of right feeling in respect to life, he has familiarized our
hearts with love and anger, with compassion and fear, with courage, with
resolve, has exercised us in them upon their proper occasions and in
their noble expression, has opened to us the world of emotion as it
ought to be in showing us that world as it is in men with all its
possibilities of baseness, ugliness, and destruction. This is the
service which literature performs in this field. Imagination shows us a
scheme of emotion attending the scheme of events and presents it in its
general connection with life, in simple, powerful, and complete
expression, on the lines of inevitable law in its sphere. We go out from
the sway of this imagined world, more sensitive to life, more accessible
to emotion, more likely and more capable, when the occasion arises, to
feel rightly, and to carry that feeling out into an act. In all
literature the knowledge gained objectively, whether of action or
emotion, is a preparation for life; but this intimate experience of
emotion in connection with an imagined world is a more vital
preparation, and enters more directly, easily, and effectually into
men's bosoms.

Two particular phases of this educative power should be specifically
mentioned. The objective presentation of emotion in literature, as has
been often observed, corrects the perspective of our own lives, as does
also the action which it envelops; and by showing to us emotion in
intense energy, which by this intensity corresponds to high type and
important plot, and in a compass far greater than is normal in ordinary
life, the portrayal leads us better to bear and more justly to estimate
the petty trials, the vexations, the insignificant experiences of our
career; we see our lives in a truer relation to life in general, and
avoid an overcharged feeling in regard to our private fortune. And,
secondly, the subjective emotion in ourselves is educative in the point
that by this outlet we go out of ourselves in sympathy, lose our egoism,
and become one with man in general. This is an escape; but not such as
has been previously spoken of, for it is not a retreat. There is no
escape for us, except into the lives of others. In nature it is still
our own face we see; and before the ideal creations of art we are still
aware, for all our contemplation, of the ineffable yearning of the
thwarted soul, of the tender melancholy, the sadness in all beauty,
which is the measure of our separation therefrom, and is fundamental in
the poetic temperament. This is that pain, which Plato speaks of--the
pain of the growing of the wings of the spirit as they unfold. But in
passing into the lives of other men, in sharing their joys, in taking on
ourselves the burden of humanity, we escape from our self-prison, we
leave individuality behind, we unite with man in common; so we die to
ourselves in order to live in lives not ours. In literature, sympathy
and that imagination by which we enter into and comprehend other lives
are most trained and developed, made habitual, instinctive, and quick.
It begins to appear, I trust, that ideal art is not only one with our
nature intellectually, but in all ways; it is the path of the spirit in
all things. Moreover, emotion is in itself simple; it does not need
generalization, it is the same in all. It is rather a means of
universalizing the refinements of the intellect, the substantive
idealities of imagination, by enveloping them in an elementary,
primitive feeling which they call forth. Poetry, therefore, especially
deals, as Wordsworth pointed out, in the primary affections, the
elementary passions of mankind; and, whatever be its intellectual
contents of nature or human events, calls these emotions forth as the
master-spirit of all our seeing. Emotion is more fundamental in us than
knowledge; it is more powerful in its working; it underlies more
deliberate and conscious life in the mind, and in most of us it rules,
as it influences in all. It is natural, therefore, to find that its
operation in art is of graver importance than that of the intellectual
faculty so far as the broad power of art over men is concerned.

Another special point arises from the fact that some emotions are
painful, and the question is raised how in literature painful emotions
become a pleasure. Aristotle's doctrine in respect to certain of these
emotions, tragic pity and terror, is well known, though variously
interpreted. He regards such emotions as a discharge of energy, an
exhaustion and a relief, in consequence of which their disturbing
presence is less likely to recur in actual life; it is as if emotional
energy accumulated, as vital force is stored up and requires to be
loosed in bodily exercise; but this, except in the point that pity and
terror, if they do accumulate in their particular forms latently, are
specifically such as it is wise to be rid of, does not differentiate
emotion from the rest of our powers in all of which there is a similar
pleasure in exercising, an exhaustion and a relief, with less liability
of immediate recurrence; this belongs to all expenditure of life. It is
not credible to me that painful emotion, under the illusions of art, can
become pleasurable in the common sense; what pleasure there is arises
only in the climax and issue of the action, as in case of the drama when
the restoration of the order that is joyful, beautiful, right, and wise
occurs; in other words, in the presence of the final poetic justice or
reconciliation of the disturbed elements of life. But here we come upon
darker and mysterious aspects of our general subject, now to be slightly
touched. Tragedy dealing with the discords of life must present painful
spectacles; and is saved to art only by its just ending. Comedy, which
similarly deals with discords, is endurable only while these remain
painless. Both imply a defect in order, and neither would have any place
in a perfect world, which would be without pity, fear, or humour, all of
which proceed from incongruities in the scheme. Tragedy and comedy
belong alike to low civilizations, to wicked, brutal, or ridiculous
types of character and disorderly events, to the confusion, ignorance,
and ignominies of mankind; the refinement of both is a mark of progress
in both art and civilization, and foretells their own extinction, unless
indeed the principle of evil be more deeply implanted in the universe
than we fondly hope; pathos and humour, which are the milder and the
kindlier forms of tragedy and comedy, must also cease, for both are
equally near to tears. But before leaving this subject it is interesting
to observe how in the Aristotelian scheme of tragedy, where it was
little thought of, the appeal is made to man's whole nature as here
outlined--the plot replying to reason, the scene to the sense of beauty,
the katharsis to the emotions, and poetic justice to the will, which
thus finds its model and exemplar in the supremacy of the moral law in
all tragic art.

This, then, being the nature of the ideal world in its whole range
commensurate with our being, and these the methods of its intellectual
and emotional appeal, it remains to examine the world of art in itself,
and especially its genesis out of life. The method by which it is built
up has long been recognized to be that of imitation of the actual, as
has been assumed hitherto in the statement that all art is concrete. But
the concrete which art creates is not a copy of the concrete of life;
it is more than this. The mind takes the particulars of the world of
sense into itself, generalizes them, and frames therefrom a new
particular, which does not exist in nature; it is, in fact, nature made
perfect in an imagined instance, and so presented to the mind's eye, or
to the eye of sense. The pleasure which imitation gives has been often
and diversely analyzed; it may be that of recognition, or that of new
knowledge satisfying our curiosity as if the original were present, or
that of delight in the skill of the artist, or that of interest in
seeing how his view differs from our own, or that of the illusion
created for us; but all these modes of pleasure exist when the imitation
is an exact copy of the original, and they do not characterize the
artistic imitation in any way to differentiate its peculiar pleasure. It
is that element which artistic imitation adds to actuality, the
difference between its created concrete and the original out of which
that was developed, which gives the special delight of art to the mind.
It is the perfection of the type, the intensity of the emotion, the
inevitability of the plot,--it is the pure and intelligible form
disclosed in the phases and movement of life, disengaged and set apart
for the contemplation of the mind,--it is the purging of the sensual
eye, enabling it to see through the mind as the mind first saw through
it, which renders the world of art the new vision it is, the revelation
accomplished by the mind for the senses. If the world of art were only a
reduplication of life, it would give only the pleasures that have been
mentioned; but its true pleasure is that which it yields from its
supersensual element, the reason which has entered into it with ordering
power. In the world thus created there will remain the imperfections
which are due to the limitation of the artist, in knowledge, skill, and
choice.

It will be said at once that all these concrete representations
necessarily fail to realize the artist's thought, and are inadequate,
inferior in exactness, to scientific and philosophic knowledge; in a
measure this is true, and would be important if the method of art were
demonstrative, instead of being, as has been said, experimental and
inductive. So, too, all thinkers, using the actual world in their
processes, are at a disadvantage. The figures of the geometer, the
quantities of the chemist, the measurements of the astronomer, are
inexact approximations to their equivalent in the mind. Art, as an
embodiment in mortal images, is subject to the conditions of mortality.
Hence arises its human history, the narrative of its rise, climax, and
decline in successive ages. The course of art is known; it has been run
many times; it is a simple matter. At first art is archaic, the sensible
form being rudely controlled by the artist's hand; it becomes, in the
second stage, classical, the form being adequate to the thought, a
transparent expression; last, it is decadent, the form being more than
the thought, dwarfing it by usurping attention on its own account. The
peculiar temptation of technique is always to elaboration of detail;
technique is at first a hope, it becomes a power, it ends in being a
caprice; and always as it goes on it loses sight of the general in its
rendering, and dwells with a near eye on the specific. Nor is this
attention to detail confined to the manner; the hand of the artist draws
the mind after it, and it is no longer the great types of manhood, the
important fates of life, the primary emotions in their normal course,
that are in the foreground of thought, but the individual is more and
more, the sensational in plot, the sentimental in feeling. This
tendency to detail, which is the hallmark of realism, constitutes
decline. It arises partly from the exhaustion of general ideas, from the
search for novelty of subject and sensation, from the special phenomena
of a decaying society; but, however manifold may be the causes, the fact
of decline consists in the lessened scope of the matter and the
increased importance of the form, both resulting in luxuriant detail.
Ideas as they lose generality gain in intensity, but in the history of
art this has not proved a compensation. In Greece the three stages are
clearly marked both in matter and manner, in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides; in England less clearly in Marlowe, Shakspere, and Webster.
How monstrous in the latter did tragedy necessarily become! yet more
repulsive in his tenderer companion-spirit, Ford. In Greek sculpture,
passing into convulsed and muscular forms or forms of relaxed
voluptuousness, in Italian painting, in the romantic poetry of this
century with us, the same stages are manifest. Age parallels age.
Tennyson in artistic technique is Virgilian, we are aware of the style;
but both Virgil and Tennyson remain classic in matter, in universality,
and the elemental in man. Browning in substance is Euripidean, being
individualistic, psychologic, problematic, with special pleading;
classicism had departed from him, and left not even the style behind.
The great opposition lies in the subject of interest. Is it to know
ourselves in others? Then art which is widely interpretative of the
common nature of man results. Is it to know others as different from
ourselves? Then art which is specially interpretative of abnormal
individuals in extraordinary environments results. This is the
opposition between realism and idealism, while both remain in the limits
of art, as these terms are commonly used. It belongs to realism to tend
to the concrete of narrow application, but with fulness of special trait
or detail. It belongs to idealism to tend to the concrete of broad
application, but without peculiarity. The trivial on the one hand, the
criminal on the other, in the individual, are the extremes of realistic
art, while idealism rises to an almost superhuman emphasis on that
wisdom and virtue, and the beauty clothing them, which are the goal of a
nation's effort. Race-ideas, or generalizations of a compact and
homogeneous people summing up their serious interpretations of life,
their moral choices, their aspiration and hope in the lines of effort
that seem to them highest, are the necessary matter of idealism; when
these are expressed they are the Greek spirit, the Roman genius, great
types of humanity on the impersonal, the national scale. As these
historic generalizations dissolve in national decay, art breaks up in
individual portrayal of less embracing types; the glorification of the
Greek man in Achilles yields place to the corruptions of the homunculus;
and in general the literature of nationality gives way to the unmeaning
and transitory literature of a society interested in its vices,
superstitions, and sensations. In each age some genius stands at the
centre of its expression, a shining nucleus amid its planetary stars;
such was Dante, such Virgil, such Shakspere. Few indeed are the races
that present the spectacle of a double-sun in their history, as the
Hebrews in Psalm and Gospel, the Greeks in Homer and in Plato. And yet,
all this enormous range of life and death, this flowering in centuries
of the human spirit in its successive creations, reposes finally on the
more or less general nature of the concretes used in its art, on their
broad or narrow truth, on their human or individualistic significance.
The difference between idealism and realism is not more than a question
which to choose. At the further end and last remove, when all art has
been resolved into a sensation, an effect, lies impressionism, which, by
its nature, is a single phase at a single moment as seen by a single
being; but even then, if the mind be normal, if the phase be veritable,
if the moment be that of universal beauty which Faust bade be eternal,
the artistic work remains ideal; but on the other hand, it is usually
the eccentric mind, the abnormal phase, the beauty of morbid sensation
that are rendered; and impressionism becomes, as a term, the
vanishing-point of realism into the moment of sense.

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