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pubOne.info present you this new edition. The question of a final criterion for the appreciation of art is one that perpetually recurs to those interested in any sort of aesthetic endeavor. Mr. John Addington Symonds, in a chapter of 'The Renaissance in Italy' treating of the Bolognese school of painting, which once had so great cry, and was vaunted the supreme exemplar of the grand style, but which he now believes fallen into lasting contempt for its emptiness and soullessness, seeks to determine whether there can be an enduring criterion or not; and his conclusion is applicable to literature as to the other arts. "Our hope, " he says, "with regard to the unity of taste in the future then is, that all sentimental or academical seekings after the ideal having been abandoned, momentary theories founded upon idiosyncratic or temporary partialities exploded, and nothing accepted but what is solid and positive, the scientific spirit shall make men progressively more and more conscious of these 'bleibende Verhaltnisse, ' more and more capable of living in the whole; also, that in proportion as we gain a firmer hold upon our own place in the world, we shall come to comprehend with more instinctive certitude what is simple, natural, and honest, welcoming with gladness all artistic products that exhibit these qualities

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	06 novembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819947998
Langue	English

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CRITICISM AND FICTION
By William Dean Howells
The question of a final criterion for theappreciation of art is one that perpetually recurs to thoseinterested in any sort of aesthetic endeavor. Mr. John AddingtonSymonds, in a chapter of 'The Renaissance in Italy' treating of theBolognese school of painting, which once had so great cry, and wasvaunted the supreme exemplar of the grand style, but which he nowbelieves fallen into lasting contempt for its emptiness andsoullessness, seeks to determine whether there can be an enduringcriterion or not; and his conclusion is applicable to literature asto the other arts. “Our hope, ” he says, “with regard to the unityof taste in the future then is, that all sentimental or academicalseekings after the ideal having been abandoned, momentary theoriesfounded upon idiosyncratic or temporary partialities exploded, andnothing accepted but what is solid and positive, the scientificspirit shall make men progressively more and more conscious ofthese 'bleibende Verhaltnisse, ' more and more capable of living inthe whole; also, that in proportion as we gain a firmer hold uponour own place in the world, we shall come to comprehend with moreinstinctive certitude what is simple, natural, and honest,welcoming with gladness all artistic products that exhibit thesequalities. The perception of the enlightened man will then be thetask of a healthy person who has made himself acquainted with thelaws of evolution in art and in society, and is able to test theexcellence of work in any stage from immaturity to decadence bydiscerning what there is of truth, sincerity, and natural vigor init. ”
I
That is to say, as I understand, that moods andtastes and fashions change; people fancy now this and now that; butwhat is unpretentious and what is true is always beautiful andgood, and nothing else is so. This is not saying that fantastic andmonstrous and artificial things do not please; everybody knows thatthey do please immensely for a time, and then, after the lapse of amuch longer time, they have the charm of the rococo. Nothing ismore curious than the charm that fashion has. Fashion in women'sdress, almost every fashion, is somehow delightful, else it wouldnever have been the fashion; but if any one will look through acollection of old fashion plates, he must own that most fashionshave been ugly. A few, which could be readily instanced, have beenvery pretty, and even beautiful, but it is doubtful if these havepleased the greatest number of people. The ugly delights as well asthe beautiful, and not merely because the ugly in fashion isassociated with the young loveliness of the women who wear the uglyfashions, and wins a grace from them, not because the vast majorityof mankind are tasteless, but for some cause that is not perhapsascertainable. It is quite as likely to return in the fashions ofour clothes and houses and furniture, and poetry and fiction andpainting, as the beautiful, and it may be from an instinctive or areasoned sense of this that some of the extreme naturalists haverefused to make the old discrimination against it, or to regard theugly as any less worthy of celebration in art than the beautiful;some of them, in fact, seem to regard it as rather more worthy, ifanything. Possibly there is no absolutely ugly, no absolutelybeautiful; or possibly the ugly contains always an element of thebeautiful better adapted to the general appreciation than the moreperfectly beautiful. This is a somewhat discouraging conjecture,but I offer it for no more than it is worth; and I do not pin myfaith to the saying of one whom I heard denying, the other day,that a thing of beauty was a joy forever. He contended that Keats'sline should have read, “Some things of beauty are sometimes joysforever, ” and that any assertion beyond this was toohazardous.
II
I should, indeed, prefer another line of Keats's, ifI were to profess any formulated creed, and should feel much saferwith his “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, ” than even with myfriend's reformation of the more quoted verse. It brings us back tothe solid ground taken by Mr. Symonds, which is not essentiallydifferent from that taken in the great Mr. Burke's Essay on theSublime and the Beautiful— a singularly modern book, consideringhow long ago it was wrote (as the great Mr. Steele would havewritten the participle a little longer ago), and full of a certainwell-mannered and agreeable instruction. In some things it is ofthat droll little eighteenth-century world, when philosophy had gotthe neat little universe into the hollow of its hand, and knew justwhat it was, and what it was for; but it is quite withoutarrogance. “As for those called critics, ” the author says, “theyhave generally sought the rule of the arts in the wrong place; theyhave sought among poems, pictures, engravings, statues, andbuildings; but art can never give the rules that make an art. Thisis, I believe, the reason why artists in general, and poetsprincipally, have been confined in so narrow a circle; they havebeen rather imitators of one another than of nature. Critics followthem, and therefore can do little as guides. I can judge but poorlyof anything while I measure it by no other standard than itself.The true standard of the arts is in every man's power; and an easyobservation of the most common, sometimes of the meanest things, innature will give the truest lights, where the greatest sagacity andindustry that slights such observation must leave us in the dark,or, what is worse, amuse and mislead us by false lights. ”
If this should happen to be true and it certainlycommends itself to acceptance— it might portend an immediate dangerto the vested interests of criticism, only that it was written ahundred years ago; and we shall probably have the “sagacity andindustry that slights the observation” of nature long enough yet toallow most critics the time to learn some more useful trade thancriticism as they pursue it. Nevertheless, I am in hopes that thecommunistic era in taste foreshadowed by Burke is approaching, andthat it will occur within the lives of men now overawed by thefoolish old superstition that literature and art are anything butthe expression of life, and are to be judged by any other test thanthat of their fidelity to it. The time is coming, I hope, when eachnew author, each new artist, will be considered, not in hisproportion to any other author or artist, but in his relation tothe human nature, known to us all, which it is his privilege, hishigh duty, to interpret. “The true standard of the artist is inevery man's power” already, as Burke says; Michelangelo's “light ofthe piazza, ” the glance of the common eye, is and always was thebest light on a statue; Goethe's “boys and blackbirds” have in allages been the real connoisseurs of berries; but hitherto the massof common men have been afraid to apply their own simplicity,naturalness, and honesty to the appreciation of the beautiful. Theyhave always cast about for the instruction of some one whoprofessed to know better, and who browbeat wholesome common-senseinto the self-distrust that ends in sophistication. They havefallen generally to the worst of this bad species, and have been“amused and misled” (how pretty that quaint old use of amuse is! )“by the false lights” of critical vanity and self-righteousness.They have been taught to compare what they see and what they read,not with the things that they have observed and known, but with thethings that some other artist or writer has done. Especially ifthey have themselves the artistic impulse in any direction they aretaught to form themselves, not upon life, but upon the masters whobecame masters only by forming themselves upon life. The seeds ofdeath are planted in them, and they can produce only thestill-born, the academic. They are not told to take their work intothe public square and see if it seems true to the chance passer,but to test it by the work of the very men who refused and decriedany other test of their own work. The young writer who attempts toreport the phrase and carriage of every-day life, who tries to telljust how he has heard men talk and seen them look, is made to feelguilty of something low and unworthy by people who would like tohave him show how Shakespeare's men talked and looked, or Scott's,or Thackeray's, or Balzac's, or Hawthorne's, or Dickens's; he isinstructed to idealize his personages, that is, to take thelife-likeness out of them, and put the book-likeness into them. Heis approached in the spirit of the pedantry into which learning,much or little, always decays when it withdraws itself and standsapart from experience in an attitude of imagined superiority, andwhich would say with the same confidence to the scientist: “I seethat you are looking at a grasshopper there which you have found inthe grass, and I suppose you intend to describe it. Now don't wasteyour time and sin against culture in that way. I've got agrasshopper here, which has been evolved at considerable pains andexpense out of the grasshopper in general; in fact, it's a type.It's made up of wire and card-board, very prettily painted in aconventional tint, and it's perfectly indestructible. It isn't verymuch like a real grasshopper, but it's a great deal nicer, and it'sserved to represent the notion of a grasshopper ever since manemerged from barbarism. You may say that it's artificial. Well, itis artificial; but then it's ideal too; and what you want to do isto cultivate the ideal. You'll find the books full of my kind ofgrasshopper, and scarcely a trace of yours in any of them. Thething that you are proposing to do is commonplace; but if you saythat it isn't commonplace, for the very reason that it hasn't beendone before, you'll have to admit that it's photographic. ”
As I said, I hope the time is coming when not onlythe artist, but the common, average man, who always “has thestandard of the arts in his power, ” will have also the courage toapply it, and will reject t