POETS AND POETRY.
AN ESSAY TOWARDS A THEORY OF ART.* 11'nosE who are interested in art because they desire to create or experience it, to give or to receive, are the readers who will be most interested in Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie's able essay. This might seem a commonplace, for who caring nothing for art would take the trouble to follow an elaborate argument about it ? But a somewhat new species of interest in art has begun to show its head very clearly, an interest which is more or less scientific. Anthropologists and psychologists and those ,interested in comparative religion have long studied primitive art as a significant manifestation of the spirit of the savage, and we are just beginning to realize that a civilized man's interest in art is equally symptomatic. As giving a clue through a more intricate labyrinth it is perhaps better worth attention. But Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie does not begin quite at the beginning of his subject.
It is not that he altogether takes art for granted as a human activity, but that when he gets beyond the nature of the artistic stimulus (the work of art) and considers the nature of the recipient (the reader or the hearer) be becomes somewhat more superficial. For example, he takes as one of the elements out of which he builds his argument an " event "—in the sense in which the word is used in metaphysics—which he calls the aesthetic perception. He gives a very special meaning to this phrase—a meaning which he makes clear by an anecdote. A horse was sunk in a quicksand, and its rescuers had the task of extricating the struggling and terrified creature before the swiftly oncoming tide had put it beyond help. The whole of the inhabitants of the little seaside place turned out to take part in what seemed a work of mercy. The antics of delight indulged in by a small boy (the author's son), however, gave the show away, and made the adult onlookers—or at least the sensitive Mr. Abercrombie—realize that the strongest element in the whole affair was not compassion as they had supposed, but a sense of exciting, and hence delightful, adventure. This An Essay Towards a Theory of Art. By Laseelles Abercrombie. London: Xartia &poker. 15e.1 sense of joy, which the little boy naively expressed, is what Mr. Abercrombie means by the aesthetic perception. It is the instant unreflecting judgment that a thing is good in itself, the feeling which we express when we say " How dramatic " as well as when we say " How beautiful ! "
The author of An Essay Towards a Theory of Art, however, analyses this aesthetic sense no further, but, as I indicated, takes it as primary, an assumption which may make the whole of his subsequent argument seem a little insecure to the psychologist, for this immediate sense is obviously the iceberg's point, the visible symptom only of an extensive subconscious system.
However, his neglect of this part of his foundation is a nice, clean defect in the book, for it is an omission that further study by the reader may supply probably without invalidating much of the argument which is based on a gratuitous assumption. One other subject which he leaves out is any theory of error, in this case, bad art. This is in some ways a more serious omission.
Into his argument as to the nature of beauty, space makes it impossible for us to enter here. We can only say that it is one which is compatible with the theory of art as primarily a means of communication. The author likens the work of art as con- ceived by the artist to one half of the arch, which is completed by the recipient—(the reader or the hearer)—the fusion of the two being the achievement of the artist's goal. Here, again, we feel a slight lack of foundation, as the author does not ask himself why the artist should desire to communicate 'with his fellows, though the answer is, probably, a very simple ore easily within the powers of construction of so able a thinker as Mr. Abercrombie here proves himself. It is, I think, to be found in the region of the concept of the categorical nature of knowledge.
On the way towards his final conclusions as to the nature of the artistic process he lets fall some quite admirable judgments on matters of artistic detail; for instance, in dealing with the place of thought in a work of art, he instances the difference between Lticretius's De Benzin Naturd, Darwin's Origin of Species, and Strauss's Zarathustra. Darwin's Origin of Species is not a work of art ; the other two are works of art.
" What we value in so-called philosophical poetry—and music, too (as in Strauss's Zarathustra)—is not a version of this or that philosophy, but an expression of what it feels like to be a philosopher of this or that kind.. . . Darwin in the Origin of Species gives us simply what we may variously call the object, substance or occasion of an experience : an argument, or process of intellection. And the book for just that reason is not art. It would have been art if the technique which expressed the substance had simultaneously been a technique which expressed the pains and fervours, the sense of laborious diligence and of flashing insight, the troublesomeness and the exultation, which accompanied this great argument. For then he would have been expressing experience as such and as a whole—Darwin's matter and Darwin's sense of it. Just this—thought enveloped in the whole experience of thinking—is what Lucretius did express, thereby supremely achieving art. De Return Naturd is not an expression simply of a train of thought, but equally of Lucretius's flaming exultation in the belief that his thought explained the world. And we read the poem not to learn what Lucretius thought, but because he can communicate to us the sublime experience of being made by intellect equal to our destiny."
That is a clear, and as it were a portable expression of an extremely valuable artistic fact, and one which, though it may not be a completely new concept, is at least not consciously realized by very many artists--except perhaps those whose medium is the stage, where, consciously or unconsciously, the particular prevalence of transference is exploited to this particular end.
Finally, Mr. Abercrombie, like many other thinkers, finds in the life of art the desire for a significant world.
" What is the central, the inveterate desire of the mind, which all man's practical and spiritual activities imply ? It is the desire for significant experience, the desire to be living in, and a conscious part of, a significant world. Not that we desire to know what the world means ; in one sense we know that already, and in another sense we can never know it ; the world can only mean itself, a proposition in which the most of us take but faint interest. But a significant world is a world in which nothing happens out of relation with the whole of things, in which everything must perfectly cohere with the rest and nothing can occur irrelevantly. . . . Art then is not properly the creation of beauty ; beauty is rather the sign that it has accom- plished its function. . . . What life is elsewhere trying for, in art we have. In art . . . we know what it is to experience our world as the manifest ideal. It is, indeed, only in con- sciousness ; but we cannot have it both ways. Whenever we enter into art, we recollect the ideal towards which we must forever strive ; we perfectly know what it is at. which our lives
are aimed ; and we forget that our hopes must be, except in artistic consciousness of them, eternally frustrated."
Probably when the flush of creating so admirably limpid and intellectual a piece of work as An Essay Towards a Theory of Art is over, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie will realize that this is only a partial analysis of the function of the arts. There is one more major omission. Yet the evidence of his poems, and even the internal evidence of this volume, makes it clear that Mr. Aber- crombie is perfectly sensitized to the unconsidered element. He has omitted all discussion of the inexpressible reaching forward which the artist and the receiver both experience, the half understood scraps of thought or of emotion that seem to come from an unfamiliar region. He is, of course, quite right in thinking that the orderliness of the artistic world is one of its great attractions, but he must no more forget in his theory than he does in his practice that the dweller in the artistic world is not only a trimmer of garden borders but also a seeker after intellectual and emotional meteorites.
A. WIT.T.TAMS-ELLIS.
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