CHAPTER XXXIII

Truth and Revelation Theories

Oh never rudely will I blame his faith In the might of stars and angels! ’Tis not merely The human being’s pride that peoples space With life and mystical predominance; Since likewise for the stricken heart of Love This visible nature, and this common world Is all too narrow . . . . Coleridge, _Piccolomini_.

Knowledge, it is recognised, is good, and since the experiences which we have been discussing may readily be supposed to give knowledge, there is a strong tradition in criticism which seeks to derive their value from the worth of knowledge. But not all knowledge is equally valuable: the kind of information which we can acquire indefinitely by steady perusal of Whitaker or of an Encyclopædia is of negligible value. Therefore a special kind of knowledge has been alleged.

The problem which ensues is for many people the most interesting part of critical theory. That so many capital-letter words—such as Real, Ideal, Essential, Necessary, Ultimate, Absolute, Fundamental, Profound, and many others—tend to appear in Truth doctrines is evidence of the interest. This heavy artillery is more than anything else a mode of emphasis, analogous to italics, underlining and solemn tones of utterance. It serves to impress upon the reader that he would do well to become serious and attentive, and like all such devices it tends to lose its effect unless cunningly employed.

We may most conveniently begin by considering a range of representative doctrines chosen from the writings of famous critics with a view to illustrating chiefly their differences. Some, it is true, will hardly repay investigation. It is far too easy to write, with Carlyle “All real art is the disimprisonment of the soul of fact[85]” or “The infinite is made to blend itself with the finite; to stand visible, and, as it were, attainable there. Of this sort are all true works of art; in this (if we know a work of art from the daub of artifice) we discern eternity looking through time, the God-like rendered visible[86]”.

All the difficulty begins when this has been written, and what has been said is of no assistance towards its elucidation. Nor is Pater, for all his praise of clarity and accuracy, of much better quality. “Truth! there can be no merit, no craft at all, without that. And, further, all beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within”[87]. It would perhaps be difficult, outside Croce,[88] to find a more unmistakable confusion between value and communicative efficacy. But the _Essay_ is a veritable museum of critical blunders.

The extracts which follow are arranged approximately in order of obscurity. They rise from the most matter of fact to the most mystical uses of truth-notions in criticism. All might be taken as glosses upon the phrase ‘Truth to Nature’; they serve to show what different things may be meant by what is apparently simple language.

We may begin with Aristotle. He makes three remarks which bear upon the matter. The first is in connection with the antithesis between Tragedy and History.

“Poetry is a more philosophical and a more serious thing than History: for Poetry is chiefly conversant about general (universal) truth, History about particular. In what manner, for example, any person of a certain character would speak or act, probably or necessarily—this is universal; and this is the object of Poetry. But what Alcibiades did, or what happened to him—this is particular truth.” (_Poetics_, IX).

His second remark is made in connection with the requisites of Tragic Character:—

“The third requisite (in addition to goodness in a special sense, appropriateness, and consistency) of Character is that it have _verisimilitude_[89]”. (_Poetics_, XV).

Aristotle’s third observation is in the same chapter:—

“The poet when he imitates passionate or indolent men and such, should preserve the type and yet ennoble it[90]”.

Wordsworth’s interpretation carries us a definite stage nearer to the mystical:—

“Aristotle, I have been told, has said that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing. It is so. Its object is truth—not individual and local, but general and operative. Not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion: truth which is its own testimony; which gives competence and confidence to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal[91]”.

Wordsworth remains still on the hither side of the gap, as does Goethe in suggesting that “The beautiful is the manifestation of secret laws of nature which, but for this disclosure, had been for ever concealed from us[92]”. But Coleridge, from whom Wordsworth probably heard about Aristotle, takes the step into mysticism unhesitatingly:—

“If the artist copies the mere nature, the _natura naturata_, what idle rivalry!—if he proceeds only from a given form which is supposed to answer to the notion of beauty—what an emptiness, what an unreality, there always is in his productions. Believe me, you must master the essence, the _natura naturans_, which presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of man[93]”.

But Coleridge held many mystical views, not always easy to reconcile with one another. In the same Essay he continues:—

“In the objects of nature are presented as in a mirror all the possible elements, steps and processes of intellect antecedent to consciousness, and therefore to the full development of the intelligential act; and man’s mind is the very focus of all the rays of intellect which are scattered throughout the images of nature. Now so to place these images, totalised and fitted to the limits of the human mind, as to elicit from and to superinduce upon the forms themselves the moral reflections to which they approximate, to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought and thought nature—this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts.”

Even when Coleridge is most ‘the God-intoxicated man’ his remarks to a careful reader suggest that if they could be decoded, as it were, they would provide at the least a basis for interesting speculation. Many adumbrations of this mystical view might be quoted. “There is a communication between mystery and mystery, between the unknown soul and the unknown reality; at one particular point in the texture of life the hidden truth seems to break through the veil”, writes Mr Middleton Murry in an Essay[94] which as an emotive utterance disguised to resemble an argument is of interest. How this feeling of insight arises we have seen in the foregoing chapter; the sense of immediate revelation of which he treats as “the primary stuff out of which literature is created” is certainly characteristic of the greater kinds of art. And there must be few who have not by one arrangement or another contrived from these visionary moments a philosophy which, for a time, has seemed to them unshakable because for a time emotionally satisfying. But emotional satisfaction gained at the cost of intellectual bondage is unstable. When it does not induce a partial stupor it breaks down. The freely inquiring mind has a fatal way of overthrowing all immediate and mystical intuitions which, instead of being duly subordinate, insist on giving it orders.

For the inquiring mind is simply the human being’s way of finding a place and function for all its experiences and activities, a place and function compatible with the rest of its experience. When the mystical insight is understood, and its claims fitly directed, although it may seem to those who still misunderstand it to have lost all the attributes for which they have sought to retain it, and to be no longer either mystical or an insight, it does not lose but gains in value. But this further adjustment is often very difficult to make.

These Revelation Doctrines, when we know what they are really about, come nearer, we shall see, to supplying an explanation of the value of the arts than any of the other traditional accounts. But the process of translation is no easy matter. They are not what they seem, these utterances apparently about Truth. In interpreting them we shall find ourselves forced to consider language from an angle and with a closeness which are not usual, and to do so, certain very powerful resistances and deeply ingrained habits of the mind have first to be broken down.

[85] _Shooting Niagara_.

[86] _Sartor Resartus_.

[87] _Essay on Style_.

[88] A discussion of Croce’s doctrines might seem advisable at some point. But all that is strictly necessary has already been said in _The Foundations of Æsthetics_. It may be repeated here in the vigorous terms of Giovanni Papini (_Four and Twenty Minds_): “If you disregard critical trivialities and didactic accessories, the entire æsthetic system of Croce amounts merely to a hunt for pseudonyms of the word ‘art’, and may indeed be stated briefly and accurately in this formula: art = intuition = expression = feeling = imagination = fancy = lyricism = beauty. And you must be careful not to take these words with the shadings and distinctions which they have in ordinary or scientific language. Not a bit of it. Every word is merely a different series of syllables signifying absolutely and completely the same thing.” When you are not careful the amalgam of confusions and contradictions which ensues is very remarkable. It is interesting to notice that Croce’s appeal has been exclusively to those unfamiliar with the subject, to the man of letters and the dilettante. He has been ignored by serious students of the mind. How many of those for example who have been impressed by his dicta as to expression and language have been aware of how the problem has been discussed before, or have ever heard of the ‘imageless thought’ controversy? Upon the ways in which Croce’s strategy has inveigled the guileless into supposing him to be saying something, Papini is excellent. ‘The Barabbas of art, the Thug of philosophy, the Apache of culture’—Papini so describes himself—has here rendered a notable service to those who have been depressed by the vogue of ‘Expressionism’.

[89] _ὅμοιον_. This word is variously translated ‘resemblance’ (Twining), and ‘truth to life’? (Butcher). Its usual meaning in the _Poetics_ is ‘the quality of _being like ourselves_’, ‘_average_ humanity’.

[90] Cf. Eastlake, _Literature of the Fine Arts_.

“The elephant with his objectionable legs and inexpressive hide may still be supposed to be a very normal specimen and may accordingly be a fit object for artistic imitation.”

[91] Preface to _Lyrical Ballads_.

[92] Compare Thomas Rymer, _A Short View of Tragedy_.

“A little preparation and forecast might do well now and then. For his Desdemona’s Marriage, he might have helped out the probability by figuring how that some way or other a Blackamoor woman had been her nurse and suckled her; or that once upon a time some _Virtuoso_ had transfused into her veins the Blood of a Black Sheep.” We may take it such are not the secret laws of nature to which Goethe was alluding.

[93] _On Poesy or Art_.

[94] ‘Literature and Religion’ in _The Necessity of Art_, published by The Student Christian Movement, p. 155.