Personality in Literature | Page 3

in music are
in such-and-such a key. But he will allow no objective grounds of
excellence to art in the more important sense. If you say that this poem
is beautiful or sublime, you are asserting what is only true for you, a
mere personal preference which others need not be expected to share.
Not only do men of "trained sensibility" differ from the uncultured, but
they differ equally from one another. He cites the evidence of Greek
music to show how widely the cultured of one nation and epoch may
differ from the cultured of other nations and epochs. Having laid it
down as an axiom that our æsthetic judgments are "for the most part
immediate, and, so to speak, intuitive," and observing that the
fastidious differ among themselves, and that their delight in fine objects
is no more intense than the delight of the vulgar in coarser themes, he
proceeds to the conclusion that there can be no valid right or wrong in
taste, no absolute standard of beauty. He even maintains that art is not
based upon any special faculty for perceiving the true. "I can find no
justification in experience for associating great art with penetrating
insight."
Before going further it is necessary to hint at a curious confusion in
which he here involves himself--a surely rather crude confusion
between æsthetic, and moral, right and wrong. Being concerned to
disprove the existence of the former, he for a moment identifies it with
the latter. It is either, as I have taken it, a crude confusion of thought, or
an equivocating device more often used in political controversy than in
the domain of art criticism--that of identifying the opinion attacked
with another of an ignominious character. The view which he is
rejecting is thus set forth. "An artist is deemed to be more than the
maker of beautiful things. He is a seer, a moralist, a prophet." Surely he
must realise that there are many who would most fervently hold that an
artist must be a seer or even a prophet, who would ridicule the idea that
he must be that very different sort of thing, a moralist. And in the same
way, when he has declared categorically: "I can find no justification in
experience for associating great art with penetrating insight," he almost
ludicrously adds, "or good art with good morals."

It is this confusion of the aim of the artist with the aims of other
expounders--the moralist, the philosopher, the theologian--that vitiates
his argument against the insight of the great artists. Why does he deny
them this "penetrating insight?" Because they have cherished opposite
convictions about fundamental matters. "Optimism and pessimism;
materialism and spiritualism; theism, pantheism, atheism, morality and
immorality; religion and irreligion; lofty resignation and passionate
revolt--each and all have inspired or helped to inspire the creators of
artistic beauty." The non sequitur of this argument lies in the fact that
he only shows that artists have differed in respect of what is not
essential to art. If he had shown that some artists have created the
beautiful, and others have created the ugly, he would have produced
evidence fatal to his opponents. As it is he has denied perception of the
beautiful to artists because they differ in respect of that which has no
necessary connection with beauty.
But to leave this technical, though not wholly unreal, disputation. There
is this merit in Mr. Balfour's essay: that it states in its most extreme
form a view for which there is something to be said and which has been
gaining in favour in modern times. It is a reaction against the view
which became established in the course of the last century. It was the
habit of the eighteenth century to judge poetry by its form alone; the
nineteenth judged it by the spirit which inspired it, by that which, as De
Quincey puts it, was "incarnated" in a work of art. William Blake
literally believed that there was a real world of the imagination which
was opened up to the artist in his visions, and that was why he said:
"Learn to see through, not with, the eye." Coleridge, too, asserted the
primacy of Reason and imagination; and for Wordsworth poetry was
"Reason in her most exalted form," just as for Keats "Beauty is truth,
truth Beauty." Even so logical and prosaic a thinker as John Stuart Mill
recognised that supremacy of the artist to which he himself could not
attain; the artist, as he said in a letter to Carlyle, perceives truth
immediately, by intuition, and it was his own humble function to
translate the truths discerned by the artist into logic. "Is not the
distinction between mysticism, the mysticism which is of truth, and
mere dreamery, or the institution of imaginations for