A Study of Poetry | Page 7

is a protest
against the modern opinion that Art should have nothing to say
intellectually."
On the other hand, many distinguished artists and critics have given
assent to what has been called the "Persian carpet" theory of painting.
According to them a picture should be judged precisely as one judges a
Persian rug--by the perfection of its formal beauty, its harmonies of line,
color and texture, its "unity in variety." It is evident that the men who
hold this opinion are emphasizing form in the work of art, and that
Millet and Watts emphasized significance. One school is thinking
primarily of expression, and the other of that which is expressed. The
important point for the student of poetry to grasp is that this divergence

of opinion turns upon the question of relative emphasis. Even pure
form, or "a-priori form" as it has sometimes been called,--such as a
rectangle, a square, a cube,--carries a certain element of association
which gives it a degree of significance. There is no absolutely bare or
blank pattern. "Four-square" means something to the mind, because it
is intimately connected with our experience.
[Footnote: See
Bosanquet, Three Lectures on Aesthetic, pp. 19, 29, 39, and Santayana,
The Sense of Beauty, p. 83.]
It cannot be a mere question of balance,
parallelism and abstract "unity in variety." The acanthus design in
architectural ornament, the Saracenic decoration on a sword-blade, aim
indeed primarily at formal beauty and little more. The Chinese
laundryman hands you a red slip of paper covered with strokes of black
ink in strange characters. It is undecipherable to you, yet it possesses in
its sheer charm of color and line, something of beauty, and the freedom
and vigor of the strokes are expressive of vitality. It is impossible that
Maud's face should really have been
"Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,
Dead perfection, no
more."
Nevertheless, though absolutely pure decorative beauty does not exist,
the artist may push the decorative principle very far, so far, indeed, that
his product lacks interest and proves tedious or nonsensical. There is
"nonsense-verse," as we shall see later, which fulfills every condition
for pure formal beauty in poetry. Yet it is not poetry, but only
nonsense-verse.
Now shift the interest from the form to the meaning contained in the
work of art, that is, to its significance. An expressive face is one that
reveals character. Its lines are suggestive of something. They are
associated, like the lines of purely decorative beauty, with more or less
obscure tracts of our experience, but they arouse a keen mental interest.
They stimulate, they are packed closely with meaning, with fact, with
representative quality. The same thing is true of certain landscapes.
Witness Thomas Hardy's famous description of Egdon Heath in _The
Return of the Native_. It is true of music. Certain modern music almost
breaks down, as music, under the weight of meaning, of fact, of thought,

which the composer has striven to make it carry.
There is no question that the principle of significance may be pushed
too far, just as the principle of decorative or purely formal beauty may
be emphasized too exclusively. But is there any real antagonism
between the elements of form and significance, beauty and
expressiveness? This question has been debated ever since the time of
Winckelmann and Lessing. The controversy over the work of such
artists as Wagner, Browning, Whitman, Rodin has turned largely upon
it.
Browning himself strove to cut the difficult aesthetic knot with a rough
stroke of common sense:
"Is it so pretty
You can't discover if it means hope, fear,
Sorrow or
joy? Won't beauty go with these?"
[Footnote: "Fra Lippo Lippi."]
He tried again in the well-known passage from The Ring and the Book:
"So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,
Beyond mere
imagery on the wall,--
So note by note bring music from your mind

Deeper than ever e'en Beethoven dived,--
So write a book shall mean
beyond the facts,
Suffice the eye and save the soul beside."
How Whistler, the author of Ten O'Clock and the creator of exquisitely
lovely things, must have loathed that final line! But Bosanquet's
carefully framed definition of the beautiful, in his _History of
Aesthetic_, endeavors, like Browning, to adjust the different claims of
form and significance: "The beautiful is that which has characteristic or
individual expressiveness for sense-perception or imagination, subject
to the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same
medium." That is to say, in less philosophical language, that as long as
you observe the laws of formal beauty which belong to the medium in
which you are working, you may be as expressive or significant as you
like. But the artist must be obedient to the terms of his chosen medium
of expression; if he is composing music or poetry he must not break the
general laws of music or