needless to remark that between composition thus understood, and that which is often so-named, symmetry and the arrangement of the parts in accordance with artificial rules, there is an abyss. True composition is the most powerful method of expression.' Freedom of expression is the characteristic of the Fine Arts-the artes liberales, artes ingenuae, of antiquity-and by this test Architecture is lowest in the scale, because the architect is most fettered by considerations of utility.' But this freedom of expression is controlled by the limits which are in each case fixed by the nature of the means employed. Lessing gave an example of the manner in which Homer expressed the idea of beauty by the true poetic method; and Cousin, who deals less fully with the methods of the 'arts of sight,' uses Hadyn's Tempest' to show how a master-musician can be no less restrained. 1 This agrees with Hegel's classification of the arts. 1. Architecture. (Sensuous material in excess, but symbolic) 2. Sculpture (An advance towards the ideal as representing the living body.) (Eliminates the 3rd dimension of space, and rids itself of the coarse material substrate of sculpture.) (The most subjective of the arts-all elements of space are suppressed; its 'content' is the inner emotional nature.) (Has privilege of universal expression; it contains all other arts in itself, namely, the plastic art in the epic, music in the ode, and the unity of both in the drama.) 'Give the wisest symphonist a tempest to render. Nothing is easier than to imitate the whistling of the winds and the noise of the thunder. But by what combination of ordered sounds could he present to our sight the lightning flashes which suddenly rend the veil of night, and that which is the most terrific aspect of the tempest, the alternate movement of the waves, now rising mountain high, now sinking and seeming to fall headlong into bottomless abysses? If the hearer has not been told beforehand what the subject is, he will never divine it, and I defy him to distinguish a tempest from a battle. In spite of scientific skill and genius, sounds cannot represent forms. Music, rightly advised, will refuse to enter upon a hopeless contest; it will not undertake to express the rise and fall of the waves and other like phenomena; it will do better: with sounds it will produce in our soul the feelings which successively arise in us during the various scenes of the tempest. It is thus that Hadyn will become the rival, even the conqueror of the painter, because it has been given to music to move and sway the soul even more profoundly than painting.'1 1 At the other end of the scale is poetry, which is least dependent upon the senses, and, therefore, most expressive. By means of language it can appeal directly to the soul through the imagination. 'Speech is the instrument of poetry; poetry moulds it to its uses and idealizes it that so it may express ideal beauty. It gives it the charm and majesty of metre, it turns it into something that is neither voice nor music, but which partakes of the nature of both, something at once material and spiritual, something finished, clear, and precise, like the sharpest contours and forms, something living and animated 1 P. 195-6. like colour, something pathetic and infinite like sound. A word in itself, above all a word chosen and transfigured by poetry, is the most energetic and the most universal of symbols. Equipped with this talisman of its own creation poetry reflects all the images of the world of the senses, like sculpture and painting; reflects feeling like painting and music, rendering it in all its variations-variations which music cannot reach, and that come in a rapid succession which painting cannot follow, while it remains as sharply turned and as full of repose as sculpture; nor is that all, it expresses what is inaccessible to all other arts, I mean thought, thought which has no colour, thought which allows no sound to escape, which is revealed in no play of feature, thought in its loftiest flight, in its most refined abstraction.'1 In this recognition of words as the supreme instrument for arousing the imagination, and of 'thought' as the supreme element in poetry, we have returned through the various analyses of formal criticism to the standpoint which Addison adopted. And it is from this standpoint of thought, not formof poetry as the highest expression of the imaginative reason that criticism to-day looks out upon all creative literature. 1 P. 202-3. CHAPTER VIII MATTHEW ARNOLD INSISTS UPON THE INTERPRETA TIVE POWER OF LITERATURE: THE HIGH SERI- OF SUPREME MERIT IN POETRY MATTHEW ARNOLD is not merely a critic of letters: he is a critic of life also. He identifies the literature of a period with the life of that period, and equally his criticism of literature proceeds upon the same lines as his criticism of life. And there is this that is remarkable in his position. He is a critic in an epoch of criticism, a reformer in an age of reforma critic of the critics and a reformer of the reformers. The very titles of his works have a challenging ring: God and the Bible, Literature and Dogma, Culture and Anarchy. The man who assumes this attitude is obliged to emphasize and exaggerate the points on which he conceives that he differs from his contemporaries. And for this purpose Matthew Arnold brings all life to the test of the ideal. Nothing will satisfy him short of perfection. Even where he admits that the ideal cannot be attained, he insists upon the necessity of keeping it in view, for future improvement depends upon the recognition of present imperfection. Perfection,' he says,' ‘can never be reached without seeing things as they really are.' Neither politicians, nor theologians, nor even the poets could do this, he thought; and, therefore, he suggested a remedy, a means of 'seeing things as they really are.' The whole scope of his essay ✓ Culture and Anarchy is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best that has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.'' What Matthew Arnold here calls 'culture' is something which is more properly indicated by the term 'criticism.' He speaks of this remedy as a 'pursuit' and a 'getting to know,' implying a certain progress and activity which is alien to the idea of culture. For culture is rather the mental condition which results from the possession of knowledge, whereas what Arnold recommends is plainly the acquisition of this mental condition by distinguishing truth from falsehood—that is, by criticism. In other words, he here states as a process what is in reality the result of that process. And subsequently we find that he himself identifies 'culture' with 'criti 1 Culture and Anarchy. Pref. p. xxxiv. 2 Ib. p. viii. |