aesthetic sense is addressed to the entire neglect of the others, the artistic content will become abnormal and develop into sentimentalism. The greatest spiritual worthiness, too, will

be found in that art which best satisfies the whole of the human heart, contradicting neither the demands of reason as judge of truth nor the dictates of the moral sense as judge of the good. From this follows the abnormal attitude of those who try to exclude from art the elements of truth and goodness as entirely irrelevant. We have already quoted Mr. Woodberry as saying that genius charges phenomena with its own personality. He continues: "....the contents of the work of art, its meaning, is constituted of the artists personality expressed therein. What a lean and diminished personality that would be from which intellectual and moral elements were excluded!"72

Brownson's principles of aesthetics did not arise from a mere desire to have a sound ethics guide art right towards the end of man. They form rather a system built a priori on his idea of the essence of the ideal beautiful. He considered this ideal to be given by God to the mind of man, and therefore appealed to the common and universal mind of man as a criterion. It is to this appeal to the common and universal mind that we also have had recourse in order to find out what is of true interest to mankind at large. The diversity of tastes is proverbial. There are so many elements operative towards human interest that the individual is rarely capable of absolute certainty. The errors of individual judgment are canceled by the judgment of the group. This would seem to make the judgment of art altogether empirical; but there is a permanent element in human nature which is more easily felt than defined. Just because it is indefinite, it leaves unlimited possibilities open to art, possibilities that will never be exhausted.

72 Op. cit., pp. 21-2.

!

CHAPTER VI

CRITIQUE OF THE LITERARY PRINCIPLES

1.-LITERATURE

The principles of art contained in the preceding pages naturally find application to literature as one of the forms of art. It will be our task now to give these principles their particular application in the field of literature in conjunction with the views that Brownson advanced in this regard.

Brownson's view of literature does not consider the first phase of art mentioned above, that of artistic activity, but treats literature merely as an influential power, from the standpoint. of 'art in its effect'. A recent development of this viewpoint says:

The act of reading has thus taken on a new dignity, as literature, in the evolution of critical theories, has become a process rather than a product, something that takes place rather than something which has been made. Literature in this sense is no finished material object-a pill to be swallowed by the reader, or a sugar-plum to be eaten by him. Rather is it a great continuous activity, which goes on through and by the reader, his participation constituting its final stage, as organically related to it as the writer's function itself."73

This view judges literature only by its value to the individual reader, and calls attention especially to the resulting fact that what is literature for one reader is not necessarily literature for another. Such a statement deserves most serious. consideration by all critics, for the view it expresess should be a main factor in all criticism. But in stressing the individual it leaves too much out of consideration that there is a common element in human nature, that there is after all a 'human nature,' not merely a group of individual and disparate natures. Again, this view does not distinguish between literature as an art and literature as any expression in writing; and

73 Gertrude Buck, The Social Criticism of Literature, pp. 19-20. Yale U. Press 1916.

it need not do so, for its test is applicable to all writing. However, we are here concerned with literature as a form of art and therefore need a criterion by which to distinguish writings that come under the caption of art from those that do not. Brownson, as we mentioned above, considers literature primarily as something 'specifically related to man as a moral, religious, and social being,' as an effect. This is really the second step, the first being to determine what is literary art, what writings have the stamp of artistic activity in them.

Falling back on our principles of art, we must consider literature in our sense as the expression of an intuition, of a mental vision; of an intuition, moreover, in some way above that of the ordinary man. It must reveal to the reader most emphatically a distinct viewpoint of something old or a view of something new, in an exterior form that adequately mirrors its content. Thus literature proper is separated from the philosophical treatise which expresses a chain of reasoning-the logical concept of Croce-and from the book of commonplaces.74 Of course it must be remembered with Croce that art may also contain reasoning, or the logical concept, that the two fields of the concept and of the intuition often meet, and that then the ultimate decision depends on whether the concept or the intuition prevails. Besides, a literary work cannot be apprehended at a glance as some other forms of art can; and the mental vision of the artist is only completely externalized and apprehended in time; i. e., when the end of the work has been reached. It is therefore doubly necessary that the writer keep before his mind, while externalizing part after part, his one purpose, his intuition, to which all parts are to be subservient. The demand for unity in art or literature, for coherence, etc., is nothing but the demand for the expression of a single vision

74 Newman writes: "Literature expresses, not objective truth, as it is called, but subjective; not things, but thoughts. Now this doctrine will become clearer by considering another use of words which does relate to objective truth, or to things; which relates to matters, not personal, not subjective to the individual, but which, even were there no individual man in the whole world to know them or to talk about them, would exist still. Such objects become the matter of Science, and words indeed are used to express them, but such words are rather symbols than language, and however many we use, and however we may perpetuate them by writing, we never could make any kind of literature out of them, or call them by that name,” Idea of a University, p. 274.

New York 1905.

3

or intuition in any work of art. "In literary as in all other art, structure is all-important," says Pater, "felt, or painfully missed, everywhere that architectural conception of work, which foresees the end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but with undiminished vigour unfold and justify the first"—and this he calls "the necessity of mind in style.75 We should rather call it the necessity of mind in art, flowing from the fact that art is the externalization of an intuition, a mental vision. And we would judge the artistic quality of any literary work just by this intuition rather than by any effect the work has on man or men. The greater the intuitional power of a writer displayed in it, or the more the intuition expressed in it ranks above that of the ordinary man, the higher is the position which it takes as an expression of artistic activity, as a work of genius.

Intimately connected with the question of the artistic intuition is that of form, the external expression of the intuition. Brownson, as we saw before, considered the form negligible and the content all-important. But the content and the form in art are really inseparable: the first determines the second, the second reveals the first. The symbols, here words, that make up the form all have a conventional meaning, and every word expresses and idea. If nevertheless the words convey nothing but incongruities to the mind, it is not so much because of a defective form, as of the lack of an intuition or mental vision on the part of the writer. Here again, as before, it is necessary to remember that sufficient mastery of the tools of externalization is presupposed, that sufficient mastery of language is not so much the essence of literature as an indispensable condition. Brownson says that form should be made as beautiful as possible because what is worth doing at all is worth doing well. But beauty of form has no value apart from the content to be expressed, nor has any other so-called quality of style. The form, or style, should reflect as faithfully as possible the intuition or mental vision the author has. Brownson seems to consider the style as something superimposed upon the content, independent of it; and the reason for this is that he

75 Op. cit., p. 18.

considered literature only in its effect and not in the first place as the expression of an artistic intuition. The dependence of form on content on the other hand, which Croce so emphasized, was applied by him also to language. Croce points out that poor writing is really a poor thinking out, and that clear speech means simply clear apprehension. The immediate dependence of style on thought was brought out long ago by Newman:

Thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one: style is a thinking out into language. This is what I have been laying down, and this is literature; not things, not the verbal symbols of things; not on the other hand mere words; but thoughts expressed in language, ........the mere dealer in words cares little or nothing for the subject which he is embellishing, but can paint and gild anything whatever to order; whereas the artist, whom I am acknowledging, has his great or rich visions before him, and his only aim is to bring out what he thinks or what he feels in a way adequate to the thing spoken of, and appropriate to the speaker.76

What, indeed, is a flowery style but the externalization of imaginative thought, what is a grotesque style but the externalization of grotesque conceptions? "We still hear talk of the 'grand style'," writes Mr. Spingarn, "and essays on style continue to be written, like the old 'arts of poetry' of two centuries ago. But the theory of styles has no longer a real place in modern thought; we have learned that it is no less impossible to study style as separate from the work of art than to study the comic as separate from the work of the comic artist."77

The proper view of style is then to consider it a mirror of thought. But does not this contradict our claim above; namely, that the essence of art, the artistic activity, is not reasoning but intuition? We think not. In identifying the intuition with expression in art, we referred with Croce to internal expression. This does not mean that any work of art exists in the mind in all its details as later externalized, but that the content of the work exists there in its essential features art emphasizes the essential, as Mr. Brownell says

76 Op. cit., pp. 276, 285.

77 Op. cit., p. 31.