CRITICISM is judgment, ideally as well as etymologically. Understanding of judgment is therefore the first condition for theory about the nature of criticism. Perceptions supply judgment with its material, whether the judgments pertain to physical nature, to politics or biography. The subject-matter of perception is the only thing that makes the difference in the judgments which ensue. Control of the subject-matter of perception for ensuring proper data for judgment is the key to the enormous distinction between the judgments the savage passes on natural events and that of a Newton or an Einstein. Since the matter of esthetic criticism is the perception of esthetic objects, natural and artistic criticism is always determined by the quality of first-hand perception; obtuseness in perception can never be made good by any amount of learning, however extensive, nor any command of abstract theory, however correct. Nor is it possible to exclude judgment from entering into esthetic perception, or at least from supervening upon a first total unanalyzed qualitative impression.
Theoretically, it should therefore be possible to proceed at once from direct esthetic experience to what is involved in judgment, the clues being given on one side from the formed matter of works of art as they exist in perception, and, on the other side, from what is involved in judgment by the nature of its own structure. But, in fact, it is first necessary to clear the ground. For unreconciled differences as to the nature of judgment are reflected in theories of criticism, while diverse tendencies among the arts have given rise to opposed theories that are developed and asserted for the sake of justifying one movement and condemning another. Indeed, there is ground for holding that the most vital questions in esthetic theory are generally to be found in controversies regarding special movements in some art, like "functionalism" in architecture, "pure" poetry or free verse in literature, "expressionism" in the drama, the "stream of consciousness" in the novel, "proletarian art" and the relation of the artist to economic conditions and revolutionary social activities. Such controversies may be attended with heat and prejudice. But they are more likely to be conducted with an eye directed upon concrete works of art than are lucubrations upon esthetic theory in the abstract. Yet they complicate the theory of criticism with ideas and aims derived from external partisan movements.
It cannot be safely assumed at the outset that judgment is an act of intelligence performed upon the matter of direct perception in the interest of a more adequate perception. For judgment has also a legalistic meaning and import, as in Shakespeare's phrase, "a critic, nay, a night watchman." Following the signification supplied by the practice of the law, a judge, a critic, is one who pronounces an authoritative sentence. We hear constantly of the verdict of critics, and of the verdict of history pronounced upon works of art. Criticism is thought of as if its business were not explication of the content of an object as to substance and form, but a process of acquittal or condemnation on the basis of merits and demerits.
The judge — in the judicial sense — occupies a seat of social authority. His sentence determines the fate of an individual, perhaps of a cause, and upon occasion it settles the legitimacy of future courses of action. Desire for authority (and desire to be looked up to) animates the human breast. Much of our existence is keyed to the note of praise and blame, exculpation and disapproval. Hence there has emerged in theory, reflecting a widespread tendency in practice, a disposition to erect criticism into something "judicial." One cannot read widely in the outgivings of this school of criticism without seeing that much of it is of the compensatory type — the fact which has given rise to the gibe that critics are those who have failed in creation. Much criticism of the legalistic sort proceeds from subconscious self-distrust and a consequent appeal to authority for protection. Perception is obstructed and cut short by memory of an influential rule, and by the substitution of precedent and prestige for direct experience. Desire for authoritative standing leads the critic to speak as if he were the attorney for established principles having unquestionable sovereignty.
Unfortunately such activities have infected the very conception of criticism. Judgment that is final, that settles a matter, is more congenial to unregenerate human nature than is the judgment that is a development in thought of a deeply realized perception. The original adequate experience is not easy to attain; its achievement is a test of native sensitiveness and of experience matured through wide contacts. A judgment as an act of controlled inquiry demands a rich background and a disciplined insight. It is much easier to "tell" people what they should believe than to discriminate and unify. And an audience that is itself habituated to being told, rather than schooled in thoughtful inquiry, likes to be told.
Judicial decision can be made only on the basis of general rules supposed to be applicable to all cases. The harm done by particular instances of judicial sentence, as particular, is much less serious than the net result in developing the notion and antecedent authoritative standards and precedents are at hand by which to judge. The so-called classicism of the eighteenth century alleged that the ancients provided models from which rules could be derived. The influence of this belief extended from literature to other branches of art. Reynolds recommended to students of art the observance of the art-forms of Umbrian and Roman painters, and, warning them against others, said of Tintoretto that his inventions are "wild, capricious, extravagant and fantastic."
A temperate view of the importance of the models furnished by the past is given by Matthew Arnold. He says that the best way to discover "what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us the most good, is to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry." He denies that he means that other poetry should be reduced to imitation, but says that such lines are an "infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality." Aside from the moralistic element involved in the words I have taken the liberty of italicizing, the idea of an "infallible" test is bound, if acted upon, to limit direct response in perception, to introduce self-consciousness and reliance upon extraneous factors, all harmful to vital appreciation. Moreover, there is involved the question as to whether the master-pieces of the past are accepted as such because of personal response or on the authority of tradition and convention. Matthew Arnold is really assuming an ultimate dependence upon someone's personal power of just perception.
Representatives of the school of judicial criticism do not seem to be sure whether the masters are great because they observe certain rules or whether the rules now to be observed are derived from the practice of great men. In general, it is safe to assume, I think, that reliance upon rules is a weakened, a mitigated, version of a prior, more direct, admiration, finally become servile, of the work of outstanding personalities. But whether they are set up on their own account or are derived from masterpieces, standards, prescriptions, and rules are general while objects of art are individual. The former have no locus in time, a fact naively stated in calling them eternal. They belong neither here nor there. In applying to everything, they apply to nothing in particular. In order to get concreteness, they have to be referred for exemplification to the work of the "masters." Thus in fact they encourage imitation. The masters themselves usually serve an apprenticeship, but as they mature they absorb what they have learned into their own individual experience, vision, and style. They are masters precisely because they do not follow either models or rulers but subdue both of these things to serve enlargement of personail experience. Tolstoi spoke as an artist when he said that "nothing so contributes to the perversion of art as these authorities set up by criticism." Once an artist is pronounced great "all his worlks are regarded as admirable and worthy of imitation. . . . Every f*lse work extolled is a door through which hypocrites of art creep in."
If judicial critics do not learn modesty from the past they profess to esteem, it is not from lack of material. Their history is largely the record of egregious blunders. The commemorative exhibition of paintings by Renoir in Paris in the summer of 1933 was the occasion for exhuming some of the deliverances of official critics of fifty years before. The pronouncements vafy from assertions that the paintings cause a nausea like that of sea-sickness, are products of diseased minds — a favorite statement — that they mix at random the most violent colors, to an assertion that they "are denials of all that is permissible [characteristic vvord] in painting, of everything called light, transparence and shade, clarity and design." As late as 1897, a group of academicians (always the favorites of judicial criticism) protested against the acceptance by the Luxembourg Museum of a collection of paintings by Renoir, Cezanne, and Monet, and one of them stated that it was impossible that the Institute should be silent in the presence of such a scandal as reception of a collection of insanities since it is the guardian of tradition — another idea characteristic of judicial criticism.*
There is, however, a certain lightness of touch usually associated with French criticism. For real majesty of pronunciamento we may turn to the outgivings of an American critic on the occasion of the Armory exhibition in New York in 1913. Under the caption of the ineffectualness of Cezanne, it is said that the latter is "a second-rate impressionist who had now and then fair luck in painting a moderately good picture." The "crudities" of Van Gogh are disposed of as follows: "A moderately competent impressionist who was heavy-handed (!), and who had little idea of beauty and spoiled a lot of canvas with crude and unimportant pictures." Matisse is disposed of as one who has "relinquished all respect for technique, all feeling for his medium; content to daub his canvas with linear and tonal coarseness. Their negation of all that true art implies is significant of smug complacency. . . . They are not works of art but feeble impertinences." The reference to "true art" is characteristic of judicial criticism, never more injudicious than in this case with its reversal of what is significant in the artists mentioned: Van Gogh being explosive rather than heavy-handed; Matisse being a technician almost to a fault, and inherently decorative rather than coarse; while "second rate" applied to Cezanne speaks for itself. Yet this critic had by this time accepted the impressionist painting of Manet and Monet — it was 1913 instead of twenty years earlier; and his spiritual offspring will doubtless hold up Cezanne and Matisse as standards by which to condemn some future movement in the art of painting.
The "criticism" just quoted was preceded by other remarks that indicate the nature of the fallacy that is always involved in legalistic criticism: confusion of a particular technique with esthetic form. The critic in question quoted from a published comment of a visitor who was not a professional critic. The latter said, "I never heard a crowd of people talk so much about meaning and about life and so little about technique, values, tones, drawing, perspective, studies in blue and white, etc." Then the judicial critic adds: "We are grateful for this bit of concrete evidence of the fallacy which more than others threatens to mislead and completely obfuscate the too confiding observers. To go to this exhibition with a solicitude about 'meaning' and about 'life' at the expense of matters of technique is not simply to beg the question; it is to give it away with both hands. In art, elements of 'meaning' and 'life' do not exist until the artist has mastered those technical processes by which he may or may not have genius to call them [sic] into being."
The unfairness of the implication that the author of the comment intended to rule out matters of technique is so characteristic of alleged judicial criticism that it is significant only because it indicates how completely the critic can think of technique only as it is identified with some one model of procedure. And this fact is deeply significant. It indicates the source of the failure of even the best of judicial criticism: its inability to cope with the emergence of new modes of life — of experiences that demand new modes of expression. All of the post-impressionist painters (with the partial exception of Cezanne) had shown in their early works that they had command of the techniques of the masters that immediately preceded them. The influence of Courbet, Delacroix, even of Ingres, pervades them. But these techniques were suited to the rendering of old themes. As these painters matured, they had new visions; they saw the world in ways to which older painters were insensitive. Their new subject-matter demanded a new form. And because of the relativity of technique to form, they were compelled to experiment with the development of new technical procedures.* An environment that is changed physically and spiritually demands new forms of expression.
I repeat that here we have exposed the inherent defect of even the best of judicial criticism. The very meaning of an important new movement in any art is that it expresses something new in human experience, some new mode of interaction of the live creature with his surroundings, and hence the release of powers previously cramped or inert. The manifestations of the movement therefore cannot be judged but only misjudged when form is identified with a familiar technique. Unless the critic is sensitive first of all to "meaning and life" as the matter which requires its own form, he is helpless in the presence of the emergence of experience that has a distinctively new character. Every professional person is subject to the influence of custom and inertia, and has to protect himself from its influences by a deliberate openness to life itself. The judicial critic erects the very things that are the dangers of his calling into a principle and norm.
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The blundering ineptness of much that calls itself judicial criticism has called out a reaction to the opposite extreme. The protest takes the form of "impressionist" criticism. It is in effect, if not in words, a denial that criticism in the sense of judgment is possible, and an assertion that judgment should be replaced by statement of the responses of feeling and imagery the art object evokes. In theory, though not always in practice, such criticism reacts from the standardized "objectivity" of ready-made rules and precedents to the chaos of a subjectivity that lacks objective control, and would, if logically followed out, result in a medley of irrelevancies — and sometimes does. Jules Lemaftre has given an almost canonical statement of the impressionistic point of view. He said: "Criticism, whatever be its pretensions, can never go beyond defining the impression which, at a given moment, is made on us by a work of art wherein the artist has himself recorded the impression which he received from the world at a certain hour."
The statement includes an implication which, when it is made explicit, goes far beyond the intention of the impressionist theory. To define an impression signifies a good deal more than just to utter it. Impressions, total qualitative unanalyzed effects that things and events make upon us, are the antecedents and beginnings of all judgments.* The beginning of a new idea, terminating perhaps in an elaborate judgment following upon extensive inquiry, is an impression, even in the case of a scientific man or philosopher. But to define an impression is to analyze it, and analysis can proceed only by going beyond the impression, by referring it to the grounds on which it rests and the consequences which it entails. And this procedure is judgment. Even if the one who communicates his impression confines his exposition of it, his demarcation and delimitation, to grounds that lie in his own temperament and personal history, taking the reader frankly into his confidence, he still goes beyond the bare impression to something objective to it. Thus he gives the reader ground for an "impression" on his own part that is more objectively grounded than any impression can be that is founded on a mere "it seems to me." For the experienced reader is then given the means of discriminating among different impressions of different persons on the basis of the bias and experience of the person who has them.
The reference to objective grounds having begun with statement of personal history cannot stop there. The biography of the one who defines his impression is not located inside his own body and mind. It is what it is because of interactions with the world outside, a world which in some of its aspects and phases is common with that of others. If the critic is wise, he judges the impression that occurs at a certain hour of his own history by considering the objective causes that have entered into that history. Unless he does so, at least implicitly, the discriminating reader has to perform the task for him — unless he surrenders himself blindly to the "authority" of the impression itself. In the latter case, there is no difference among impressions; the insight of a cultivated mind and the gush of the immature enthusiast stand on the same level.
The sentence quoted from Lemaftre has another significant implication. It sets forth a proportion that is objective: as his subject-matter is to the artist, so is the work of art to the critic. If the artist is numb and if he does not impregnate some immediate impression with meanings derived from a prior rich funded experience, his product is meager and its form is mechanical. The case is not otherwise with a critic. There is an illicit suggestion contained in the reference to the impression of the artist as occurring at a "certain hour" and that of the critic as taking place "at a given moment." The suggestion is that because the impression exists at a particular moment, its import is limited to that brief space of time. The implication is the fundamental fallacy of impressionist criticism. Every experience, even that containing a conclusion due to long processes of inquiry and reflection, exists at a "given moment." To infer from this fact that its import and validity are affairs of that passing moment is to reduce all experience to a shifting kaleidoscope of meaningless incidents.
Moreover, the comparison of the attitude of a critic toward a work of art to that of the artist toward his subject-matter is so just as to be fatal to the impressionist theory. For the impression the artist has does not consist of impressions; it consists of objective material rendered by means of imaginative vision. The subject-matter is charged with meanings that issue from intercourse with a common world. The artist in the freest expression of his own responses is under weighty objective compulsions. The trouble with very much criticism, aside from the impressionist label, is that the critic does not take an attitude toward the work criticized that an artist takes toward the "impressions he has received from the world." The critic can go off into irrelevancies and arbitrary dicta much more readily than the artist, while failure to be controlled by subject-matter is much more evident to eye and ear than is a corresponding failure on the part of the critic. The tendency of the critic to dwell in a world apart is great enough in any case without being sanctioned by a special theory.
Were it not for the blunders made by the judicial critic, blunders that proceed from the theory he holds, the reaction of the impressionist theory would hardly have been called forth. Because the former set up false notions of objective values and objective standards, it was made easy for the impressionist critic to deny there are objective values at all. Because the former has virtually adopted a conception of standards that is of an external nature, derived from use of standards developed for practical ends, and legally defined, the latter has assumed there are no criteria of any sort. In its precise signification, a "standard" is unambiguous. It is a quantitative measure. The yard as a standard of length, the gallon as a standard of liquid capacity, are as precise as legal definitions can make them. The standard of liquid measure for Great Britain was defined, for example, by an act of Parliament in 1825. It is a container holding ten pounds avoirdupois of distilled water, weighed in air with the barometer at thirty inches and the Fahrenheit thermometer at sixty-two degrees.
There are three characteristics of a standard. It is a particular physical thing existing under specified physical conditions; it is not a value. The yard is a yardstick, and the meter is a bar deposited in Paris. In the second place, standards are measures of definite things, of lengths, weights, capacities. The things measured are not values, although it is of great social value to be able to measure them, since the properties of things in the way of size, volume, weight, are important for commercial exchange. Finally, as standards of measure, standards define things with respect to quantity. To be able to measure quantities is a great aid to further judgments, but it is not itself a mode of judgment. The standard, being an external and public thing, is applied physically. The yardstick is physically laid down upon the things measured to determine their length.
When, therefore, the word "standard" is used with respect to judgment of works of art, nothing but confusion results, unless the radical difference in the meaning now given standard from that of standards of measurement is noted. The critic is really judging, not measuring physical fact. He is concerned with something individual, not comparative — as is all measurement. His subject-matter is qualitative, not quantitative. There is no external and public thing, defined by law to be the same for all transactions, that can be physically applied. The child who can use a yardstick can measure as well as the most experienced and mature person, if he can handle the stick, since measuring is not judgment but is a physical operation performed for the sake of determining value in exchange or in behalf of some further physical operation — as a carpenter measures the boards with which he builds. The same cannot be said of judgment of the value of an idea or the value of a work of art.
Because of failure of critics to realize the difference between the meaning of standard as applied in measurement and as used in judgment or criticism, Mr. Grudin can say of a critic who is a believer in a fixed standard with respect to works of art: "His procedure has been that of an excursion for words and notions to support his claims, wherever he could find them; and he has had to trust to the meanings he could read into already available odds and ends belonging to various fields and gathered into a makeshift critical doctrine." And this, he adds with not too great severity, is the usual procedure followed by literary critics.
Yet it does not follow because of absence of a uniform and publicly determined external object, that objective criticism of art is impossible. What follows is that criticism is judgment; that like every judgment it involves a venture, a hypothetical element; that it is directed to qualities which are nevertheless qualities of an object; and that it is concerned with an individual object, not with making comparisons by means of an external preestablished rule between different things. The critic, because of the element of venture, reveals himself in his criticisms. He wanders into another field and confuses values when he departs from the object he is judging. Nowhere are comparisons so odious as in fine art.
Appreciation is said to occur with respect to values, and criticism is currently supposed to be a process of valuation. There is, of course, truth in the conception. But it is fraught, in current interpretation, with a host of equivocations. After all, one is concerned with the values of a poem, a stage-play, a painting. One is aware of them as qualities-in-qualitative-relations. One does not at the time categorize them as values. One may pronounce a play fine or "rotten." If one term such direct characterization valuing, then criticism is not valuing. It is a very different sort of thing than a direct ejaculation. Criticism is a search for the properties of the object that may justify the direct reaction. And yet, if the search is sincere and informed, it is not, when it is undertaken, concerned with values but with the objective properties of the object under consideration — if a painting, with its colors, lights, placings, volumes, in their relations to one another. It is a survey. The critic may or may not at the end pronounce definitely upon the total "value" of the object. If he does, his pronouncement will be more intelligent than it would otherwise have been, because his perceptive appreciation is now more instructed. But when he does sum up his judgment of the object, he will, if he is wary, do so in a way that is a summary of the outcome of his objective examination. He will realize that his assertion of "good" or "bad" in this and that degree is something the goodness or badness of which is itself to be tested by other persons in their direct perceptual commerce with the object. His criticism issues as a social document and can be checked by others to whom the same objective material is available. Hence the critic, if he is wise, even in making pronouncements of good and bad, of great and small in value, will lay more emphasis upon the objective traits that sustain his judgment than upon values in the sense of excellent and poor. Then his surveys may be of assistance in the direct experience of others, as a survey of a country is of help to the one who travels through it, while dicta about worth operate to limit personal experience.
If there are no standards for works of art and hence none for criticism (in the sense in which there are standards of measurement), there are nevertheless criteria in judgment, so that criticism does not fall in the field of mere impressionism. The discussion of form in relation to matter, of the meaning of medium in art, of the nature of the expressive object, has been an attempt on the part of the writer to discover some of these criteria. But such criteria are not rules or prescriptions. They are the result of an endeavor to find out what a work of art is as an experience: the kind of experience which constitutes it. As far as the conclusions are valid, they are of use as instrumentalities of personal experience, not as dictations of what the attitude of anyone should be. Stating what a work of art is as an experience, may render particular experiences of particular works of art more pertinent to the object experienced, more aware of its own content and intent. This is all any criterion can do; and if and as far as the conclusions are invalid, better criteria are to be set forth by an improved examination of the nature of works of art in general as a mode of human experience.
Criticism is judgment. The material out of which judgment grows is the work, the object, but it is this object as it enters into the experience of the critic by interaction with his own sensitivity and his knowledge and funded store from past experiences. As to their content, therefore, judgments will vary with the concrete material that evokes them and that must sustain them if criticism is pertinent and valid. Nevertheless, judgments have a common form because they all have certain functions to perform. These functions are discrimination and unification. Judgment has to evoke a clearer consciousness of constituent parts and to discover how consistently these parts are related to form a whole. Theory gives the names of analysis and synthesis to the execution of these functions.
They cannot be separated from each other, because analysis is disclosure of part as parts of a whole; of details and particulars as belonging to a total situation, a universe of discourse. This operation is the opposite of picking to pieces or dissection, even when something of the latter sort is required in order to make judgment possible. No rules can be laid for the performance of so delicate an act as determination of the significant parts of a whole, and of their respective places and weights in the whole. This is the reason, perhaps, why scholarly dissertations upon literature are so often merely scholastic enumerations of minutiaea, and so-called criticisms of paintings are of the order of analyses of handwriting by experts.
Analytic judgment is a test of the mind of the critic, since mind, as organization into perceptions of meanings derived from past intercourse with objects, is the organ of discrimination. Hence the safeguard of the critic is a consuming informed interest. I say "consuming" because without natural sensitivity connected with an intense liking for certain subject-matters, a critic, having even a wide range of learning, will be so cold that there is no chance of his penetrating the heart of a work of art. He will remain on the outside. Yet, unless affection is informed with the insight that is the product of a rich and full experience, judgment will be one-sided or not rise above the level of gushy sentimentalism. Learning must be the fuel of warmth of interest. For the critic in the field of art, this informed interest signifies acquaintance with the tradition of his particular art; an acquaintance that is more than knowledge about them since it is derived from personal intimacy with the objects that have formed the tradition. In this sense acquaintance with masterpieces, and with less than master-pieces, is a "touchstone," of sensitiveness, though not a dictator of appraisals. For masterpieces themselves can be critically appreciated only as they are placed in the tradition to which they belong.
There is no art in which there is only a single tradition. The critic who is not intimately aware of a variety of traditions is of necessity limited and his criticisms will be one-sided to the point of distortion. The criticisms of post-impressionistic painting that were cited came from persons who thought they were expert because of exclusive initiation into a single tradition. In the plastic arts, there is the tradition of Negro, of Persian, of Egyptian, of Chinese and Japanese art, as well as the Florentine and Venetian traditions — to mention a few outstanding ones. It is because of lack of sense for the variety of traditions that unstable swings of fashion mark the attitude of different periods toward works of art — the overestimation of Raphael and the Roman school, for example, at the expense of Tintoretto and El Greco once current. Much of the unending and sterile controversy of critics adhering exclusively to "classicism" and "romanticism" has a like source. In the field of art, there are many mansions; artists have built them.
Through knowledge of a variety of conditions, the critic becomes aware of the vast variety of materials that are usable (since they have been used) in art. He is saved from the snap judgment that this or that work is esthetically wrong because it has matter to which he is not accustomed, and when he comes across a work whose matter has no discoverable precedent he will be wary of uttering an offhand condemnation. Since form is always integral with matter, he will also, if his own experience is genuinely esthetic, appreciate the multitude of special forms that exist and be safeguarded against identifying form with some technique that he has come to prefer. In short, not only will his general background be broadened, but he will become familiar, to the point of saturation, with a more fundamental matter, the conditions under which the subject-matter of varied modes of experience move to fulfillment. And this movement constitutes the objective and publicly accessible content of all works of art.
This knowledge of many traditions is no foe to discrimination. While I have spoken for the most part of the condemnations passed by judicial criticisms, it would be easily possible to quote as great egregious blunders in misplaced laudations. Absence of sympathetic acquaintance with a number of traditions leads the critic to a ready appreciation of academic works of art provided they are done with excellent technical facility. Seventeenth century Italian painting was met with an acclaim that it was far from deserving simply because it pushed to an extreme, with technical skill, factors that earlier Italian art had held within bounds. Knowledge of a wide range of traditions is a condition of exact and severe discrimination. For only by means of such a knowledge can the critic detect the intent of an artist and the adequacy of his execution of intent. The history of criticism is filled with charges of carelessness and willfulness that would never have been brought if an adequate knowledge of traditions had been present, just as it is filled with praise for works that have no merit beyond a skillful use of materials.
In most cases, the discrimination of a critic has to be assisted by a knowledge of the development of an artist, as that is manifested in the succession of his works. Only rarely can an artist be criticized by a single specimen of his activity. The inability is not merely because Homer sometimes nods, but because understanding of the logic of the development of an artist is necessary to discrimination of his intent in any single work. Possession of this understanding broadens and refines the background without which judgment is blind and arbitrary. The words of Cezanne about the relation of exemplars of tradition to the artist are applicable to the critic. "Study of the Venetians, especially of Tintoretto, sets one upon a constant search for means of expression which will surely lead one to experience from nature one's own means of expression. . . . The Louvre is a good book to consult, but it is only an intermediary. The diversity of the scene of nature is the real prodigious study to be undertaken. . . . The Louvre is a book where we learn to read. But we should not be content to keep the formulsea of our illustrious predecessors. Let us leave them so as to study beautiful nature and search to express it according to our personal temperament. Time and reflection gradually modify vision, and at last comprehension comes." Change the terms that need to be changed, and the procedure of the critic stands forth.
Critic and artist alike have their predilections. There are aspects of nature and life that are hard and others that are soft; that are austere even bleak, and that have attractive charm; that are exciting and that are pacifying, and so on almost without end. Most "schools" of art exhibit a tendency in one direction or another. Then some original mode of vision seizes upon the tendency and carries it to its limit. There is, for example, the contrast between the "abstract" and the "concrete" — that is, the more familiar. Some artists work for extreme simplification, feeling that internal complexity leads to a superfluity that distracts attention; others take as their problem the multiplication of internal specifications to the utmost point consistent with organization. * There is again the difference between the frank and open approach and the indirect and allusive approach to vague matter that goes by the name of symbolism. There are artists who tend toward what Thomas Mann calls the dark and death and others who rejoice in light and air.
It goes without saying that every direction has difficulties and dangers that increase as it approaches its limit. The symbolic may lose itself in unintelligibility and the direct method in the banal. The "concrete" method ends in mere illustration and the "abstract" in scientific exercise, and so on. But yet each is justified when form and matter achieve equilibrium. The danger is that the critic, guided by personal predilection or more often by partisan conventionalism, will take some one procedure as his criterion of judgment and condemn all deviations from it as departures from art itself. He then misses the point of all art, the unity of form and matter, and misses it because he lacks adequate sympathy, in his natural and acquired one-sidedness, with the immense variety of interactions between the live creature and his world.
There is a unifying as well as a discriminating phase of judgment — technically known as synthesis in distinction from analysis. This unifying phase, even more than the analytic, is a function of the creative response of the individual who judges. It is insight. There are no rules that can be laid down for its performance. It is at this point that criticism becomes itself an art — or else a mechanism worked by precept according to a ready-made blue print. Analysis, discrimination, must result in unification. For to be a manifestation of judgment it must distinguish particulars and parts with respect to their weight and function in formation of an integral experience. Without a unifying point of view, based on the objective form of a work of art, criticism ends in enumeration of details. The critic operates after the manner of Robinson Crusoe when he sat down and made a credit and debit list of his blessings and troubles. The critic points out so many blemishes and so many merits, and strikes a balance. Since the object is an integral whole, if it is a work of art at all, such a method is as boring as it is irrelevant.
That the critic must discover some unifying strand or pattern running through all details does not signify that he must himself produce an integral whole. Sometimes critics of the better type substitute a work of art of their own for that they are professedly dealing with. The result may be art but it is not criticism. The unity the critic traces must be in the work of art as its characteristic. This statement does not signify that there is just one unifying idea or form in a work of art. There are many, in proportion to the richness of the object in question. What is meant is that the critic shall seize upon some strain or strand that is actually there, and bring it forth with such clearness that the reader has a new clue and guide in his own experience.
A painting may be brought to unity through relations of light, of planes, of color structurally employed, and a poem through predominant lyric or dramatic quality. And one and the same work of art presents different designs and different facets to different observers — as a sculptor may see different figures implicit in a block of stone. One mode of unification on the part of the critic is as legitimate as another — provided two conditions are fulfilled. One of them is that the theme and design which interest selects be really present in the work, and the other is the concrete exhibition of this supreme condition: the leading thesis must be shown to be consistently maintained throughout the parts of the work.
Goethe, for example, gave a notable manifestation of "synthetic" criticism in his account of the character of Hamlet. His conception of the essential character of Hamlet has enabled many a reader to see things in the play that otherwise would have escaped attention. It has served as a thread, or better as a centralizing force. Yet his conception is not the only way in which the elements of the play may be brought to a focus. Those who saw Edwin Booth's portrayal of the character may well have carried away the idea that the key to Hamlet as a human being is found in the lines spoken to Guildenstern after the latter had failed to play on a reed. "Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. 'S blood, do you think I am easier to be played upon than a pipe?"
It is customary to treat judgment and fallacies in intimate connection with each other. The two great fallacies of esthetic criticism are reduction, and confusion of categories. The reductive fallacy results from oversimplification. It exists when some constituent of the work of art is isolated and then the whole is reduced to terms of this single isolated element. Generalized examples of this fallacy have been considered in previous chapters: for example, in the isolation of a sense-quality, like color or tone, from relations; isolation of the purely formal element; or again when a work of art is reduced to the exclusive representative values. The same principle applies when technique is taken apart from its connection with form. A more specific example is found in criticism made from a historical, political or economic point of view. There can be no doubt that the cultural milieu is inside as well as outside works of art. It enters as a genuine constituent, and acknowledgment of it is one element in a just discrimination. The sumptuousness of Venetian aristocracy and commercial wealth is a genuine constituent of the painting of Titian. But the fallacy of reducing his pictures to economic documents, as I once heard done by a "proletarian" guide in the Hermitage in Leningrad, is too evident to need mention were it not that it is a gross case of what often happens in modes so subtle as not to be readily perceptible. On the other hand, the religious simplicity and austerity of French twelfth century statues and paintings, which come into them from their cultural milieu, is held up, apart from the strictly plastic qualities of the objects in question, as their essential esthetic quality.
A more extreme form of the reductive fallacy exists when works of art are "explained" or "interpreted" on the basis of factors that are incidentally inside them. Much of so-called psychoanalytic "criticism" is of this nature. Factors that may — or may not — have played a part in the causative generation of a work of art are treated as if they "explained" the esthetic content of the work of art itself. Yet the latter is just what it is whether a father or mother fixation, or a special regard for the susceptibilities of a wife, entered into its production. If the factors spoken of are real and not speculative, they are relevant to biography, but they are wholly impertinent as to the character of the work itself. If the latter has defects, they are blemishes to be detected in the construction of the object itself. If an OEdipus complex is part of the work of art, it can be discovered on its own account. But psychoanalytic criticism is not the only kind that falls into this fallacy. It flourishes wherever some alleged occasion in the life of the artist, some biographical incident, is taken as if it were a kind of substitute for appreciation of the poem that resulted.*
The other chief mode in which this type of the reductive fallacy prevails is in so-called sociological criticism. Hawthorne's , Seven Gables, Thoreau's Walden, Emerson's Essays, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn have an undoubted relation to the respective milieus in which they were produced. Historical and cultural information may throw light on the causes of their production. But when all is said and done, each one is just what it is artistically, and its esthetic merits and demerits are within the work. Knowledge of social conditions of production is, when it is really knowledge, of genuine value. But it is no substitute for understanding of the object in its own qualities and relations. Migraine, eyestrain, indigestion may have played a part in the production of some works of literature; they may even account, from a causal point of view, for some of the qualities of the literature produced. But knowledge of them is an addition to medical lore of cause and effect, not to judgment of what was produced, even though the knowledge induce towards the author a moral charity we might not otherwise share.
We are thus brought to the other great fallacy of esthetic judgment which indeed is mixed with the reductive fallacy: the confusion of categories. The historian, the physiologist, the biographer, the psychologist, all have their own problems and their own leading conceptions that control the inquiries they undertake. Works of art provide them with relevant data in the pursuit of their special investigations. The historian of Greek life cannot construct his report of Greek life except by taking into account the monuments of Greek art; they are at least as relevant and as precious for his purpose as the political institutions of Athens and Sparta. The philosophic interpretations of the arts provided by Plato and Aristotle are indispensable documents for the historian of the intellectual life of Athens. But historic judgment is not esthetic judgment. There are categories — that is, controlling conceptions of inquiry — appropriate to history, and only confusion results when they are used to control inquiry into art which also has its own ideas.
What is true of historical approach is true of the other modes of treatment. There are mathematical aspects of sculpture and painting as well as of architecture. Jay Hambidge has produced a treatise on the mathematics of Greek vases. An ingenious work has been produced on the mathematically formal elements of poetry. The biographer of Goethe or Melville would be derelict if he did not use their literary products when he is constructing a picture of their lives. The personal processes involved in construction of works of art are as precious data for the study of certain mental processes as records of procedures used by scientific inquirers are significant in the study of intellectual operations.
The phrase "confusion of categories" has an intellectualistic sound. Its practical counterpart is confusion of values.* Critics as well as theorists are given to the attempt to translate the distinctively esthetic over into terms of some other kind of experience. The commonest form of this fallacy is to assume that the artist begins with material that has already a recognized status, moral, philosophic, historical or whatever, and then renders it more palatable by emotional seasoning and imaginative dressing. The work of art is treated as if it were a reediting of values already current in other fields of experience.
There can be no doubt, for example, that religious values have exercised an almost incomparable influence upon art. For a long period in European history, Hebrew and Christian legends formed the staple material of all the arts. But this fact of itself tells us nothing about distinctively esthetic values. Byzantine, Russian, Gothic and early Italian paintings are all equally "religious." But esthetically each has its own qualities. Doubtless the different forms are connected with difference of religious thought and practice. But esthetically the influence of the mosaic form is a more pertinent consideration. The question involved is the difference between material and matter so often referred to in previous discussions. The medium and effect are the important matters. For this reason, later works of art that have no religious content have a profoundly religious effect. I imagine the majestic art of "Paradise Lost" will be more, not less, admitted, and the poem be more widely read, when rejection of its themes of Protestant theology has passed into indifference and forgetfulness. And this opinion does not imply that form is independent of matter. It implies that artistic substance is not identical with theme — any more than the form of the "Ancient Mariner" is identical with the story that is its theme. The mis-en-scene of Milton's portrayal of the dramatic action of great forces need not be esthetically troublesome, any more than is that of the Iliad, to the modern reader. There is a profound distinction between the vehicle of a work of art, the intellectual carrier through which an artist receives his subject-matter and transmits it to his immediate audience, and both the form and matter of this work.
The direct influence of scientific upon artistic values is much less than that of religion. It would be a brave critic who would assert that the artistic qualities of either Dante's or Milton's works are affected by acceptance of a cosmogony that no longer has scientific standing. As to the future, I think Wordsworth spoke truly when he said: "... if the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present... he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings." But poetry will not on that account be a popularization of science, nor will its characteristic values be those of science.
There are critics who confuse esthetic values with philosophic values, especially with those laid down by philosophic moralists. T. S. Eliot, for example, says that "the truest philosophy is the best material for the greatest poet," and implies that what the poet does is to make philosophic content more viable by addition of sensuous and emotional qualities. Just what the "truest philosophy" is, is a matter of some dispute. But critics of this school do not lack definite, not to say dogmatic, convictions on this point. Without any particular special competency in philosophic thought, they are ready to pronounce ex cathedra judgments, because they are committed to some conception of the relation of man to the universe that flourished in some past epoch. They regard its restoration as essential to the redemption of society from its present evil state. Fundamentally, their criticisms are moral recipes. Since great poets have had different philosophies, acceptance of their point of view entails that if we approve the philosophy of Dante we must condemn the poetry of Milton, and if we accept that of Lucretius we must find the poetry of both the others woefully defective. And where, upon the basis of any of these philosophies, does Goethe come in? And yet these are our great "philosophic" poets.
Ultimately all confusion of values proceeds from the same source: — neglect of the intrinsic significance of the medium. The use of a particular medium, a special language having its own characteristics, is the source of every art, philosophic, scientific, technological and esthetic. The arts of science, of politics, of history, and of painting and poetry all have finally the same material; that which is constituted by the interaction of the live creature with his surroundings. They differ in the media by which they convey and express this material, not in the material itself. Each one transforms some phase of the raw material of experience into new objects according to the purpose, each purpose demands a particular medium for its execution. Science uses the medium that is adapted to the purpose of control and prediction, of increase of power; it is an art.* Under particular conditions, its matter may also be esthetic. The purpose of esthetic art being the enhancement of direct experience itself, it uses the medium fit for the accomplishment of that end. The necessary equipment of the critic is, first, to have the experience and then to elicit its constituent in terms of the medium used. Failure in either of these respects results inevitably in confusion of values. To treat poetry as having a philosophy, even a "true" philosophy, for its especial material is like supposing that literature has grammar for its material.
An artist may, of course, have a philosophy and that philosophy may influence his artistic work. Because of the medium of words, which are already the product of social art and are already pregnant with moral meanings, the artist in literature is more often influenced by a philosophy than are artists who work with a plastic medium. Mr. Santayana is a poet who is also a philosopher and a critic. Moreover, he has stated the criterion which he employs in criticism, and the criterion is just the thing most critics do not state and apparently are not even aware of. Of Shakespeare he says, "... the cosmos eludes him; he does not seem to feel the need of framing that idea. He depicts human life in all its richness and variety, but leaves that life without a setting and consequently without a meaning." Since the various scenes and characters presented by Shakespeare have each its own setting, the passage evidently implies lack of a particular setting, namely of a total cosmic setting. That this absence is what is implied is not left a matter of conjecture; it is definitely stated. "There is no fixed conception of any forces, natural or moral, dominating and transcending our mortal energies." The complaint is of lack of "totality"; fullness is not wholeness. "What is required for theoretic wholeness is not this or that system but some system."
In contrast with Shakespeare, Homer and Dante had a faith that "had enveloped the world of experience in a world of imagination in which the ideals of the reason, of the fancy and the heart had a natural expression." (None of the italics are in the original text.) His philosophic point of view, perhaps, is best summed up in a sentence occurring in a criticism of Browning: "The value of experience is not in experience but in the ideals which it reveals." And of Browning it is said that his "method is to penetrate by sympathy rather than to portray by intelligence" — a sentence one might suppose to be an admirable description of a dramatic poet rather than the adverse criticism it is intended to be.
There are philosophies and philosophies as well as criticisms and criticisms. There are points of view from which Shakespeare had a philosophy, and had a philosophy that is more pertinent to the work of an artist than one which conceives the ideal of philosophy to be the enclosure of experience within and domination of its varied fullness by a transcendent ideal that only reason beyond experience can conceive. There is a philosophy which holds that nature and life offer in their plenitude many meanings and are capable through imagination of many renderings. In spite of the scope and dignity of the great historic philosophic systems, an artist may be instinctively repelled by the constraint imposed by acceptance of any system. If the important thing is "not this or that system but some system," why not accept, with Shakespeare, the free and varied system of nature itself as that works and moves in experience in many and diverse organizations of value? As compared with the movement and change of nature, the form that "reason" is said to prescribe may be that of a particular tradition which is a premature and one-sided synthesis in terms of a single and narrow aspect of experience. Art that is faithful to the many potentialities of organization, centering about a variety of interests and purposes, that nature offers — as was that of Shakespeare — may have not only a fullness but a wholeness and sanity absent from a philosophy of enclosure, transcendence, and fixity. The question for the critic is the adequacy of form to matter, and not that of the presence or absence of any particular form. The value of experience is not only in the ideals it reveals, but in its power to disclose many ideals, a power more germinal and more significant than any revealed ideal, since it includes them in its stride, shatters and remakes them. One may even reverse the statement and say the value of ideals lies in the experiences to which they lead.
There is one problem that artist, philosopher, and critic alike must face: the relation between permanence and change. The bias of philosophy in its more orthodox phase throughout the ages has been toward the unchanging, and that bias has affected the more serious critics — perhaps it is this bias which generates the judicial critic. It is overlooked that in art — and in nature as far as we can judge it through the medium of art — permanence is a function, a consequence, of changes in the relations they sustain to one another, not an antecedent principle. There is to be found in Browning's essay on Shelley what seems to me to come as near as criticism can come, to a just statement of the relations between the unified and "total"; between the varied and moving, the "individual," and the "universal," so that I shall quote it at length. "If the subjective might seem to be the ultimate requirement of every age, the objective in its strictest sense must still retain its original value. For it is with this world, as starting point and basis alike, that we shall always have to concern ourselves; the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned. The spiritual comprehension may be infinitely subtilized but its raw material must remain.
"There is a time when the general eye has, so to speak, absorbed its full of the phenomena around it, whether spiritual or material, and desires rather to learn the exacter significance of what it possesses than to receive any augmentation of what it possesses. Then is the opportunity for the poet of loftier vision to lift his fellows, with their half-apprehensions, up to his own sphere, by intensifying the import of details and rounding out the universal meaning. The influence of such an achievement will not soon die out. A tribe of successors (Homerides) working more or less in the same spirit dwell on his discoveries and reenforce his doctrine till, at unawares, the world is found to be subsisting wholly on the shadow of a reality, on sentiments diluted from passions, on the tradition of a fact, the convention of a moral, the straw of last year's harvest. Then is the imperative call for the appearance of another sort of poet, who shall at once replace this intellectual rumination of food swallowed long ago by a supply of fresh and living swathe; getting at new substance by breaking up the assumed wholes into parts of independent and unclassed value, careless of the unknown laws for recombining them (it will be the business of yet another poet to suggest these hereafter), prodigal of objects for men's outer and not inner sight, shaping for their uses a new and different creation from the last, which it displaces by the right of life over death — to endure till, in the inevitable process, its very sufficiency to itself shall require, at length, an exposition of its affinity to something higher — when the positive yet conflicting facts shall again precipitate themselves under a harmonizing law... .
"All the bad poetry in the world (accounted poetry, that is by its affinities) will be found to result from some one of the infinite degrees of discrepancies between the attributes of the poet's soul, occasioning a want of correspondency between his work and the varieties of nature — issuing in poetry, false under whatever form, which shows a thing not as it is to mankind generally, nor as it is to the particular describer, but as it is supposed to be for some unreal neutral mood, midway between both and of value to neither, and living its brief minute simply through the indolence of whoever accepts it in his inability to denounce a cheat."
Nature and life manifest not flux but continuity, and continuity involves forces and structures that endure through change; at least when they change, they do so more slowly than do surface incidents, and thus are, relatively, constant. But change is inevitable even though it be not for the better. It must be reckoned with. Moreover, changes are not all gradual; they culminate in sudden mutations, in transformations that at the time seem revolutionary, although in a later perspective they take their place in a logical development. All of these things hold of art. The critic, who is not as sensitive to signs of change as to the recurrent and enduring, uses the criterion of tradition without understanding its nature and appeals to the past for patterns and models without being aware that every past was once the imminent future of its past and is now the past, not absolutely, but of the change which constitutes the present.
Every critic, like every artist, has a bias, a predilection, that is bound up with the very existence of individuality. It is his task to convert it into an organ of sensitive perception and of intelligent insight, and to do so without surrendering the instinctive preference from which are derived direction and sincerity. But when his especial and selective mode of response is allowed to harden in a fixed mold, he becomes incapacitated for judging even the things to which his bias draws him. For they must be seen in the perspective of a world so multiform and so full that it contains an infinite variety of other qualities that attract and of other ways of response. Even the bewildering aspects of the world in which we live are material for art when they find the form through which they are actually expressed. A philosophy of experience that is keenly sensitive to the unnumbered interactions that are the material of experience is the philosophy from which a critic may most safely and surely draw his inspiration. How otherwise can a critic be animated by that sensitiveness to the varied movements toward completion in different total experiences that will enable him to direct the perceptions of others to a fuller and more ordered appreciation of the objective content of works of art?
For critical judgment not only grows out of the critic's experience of objective matter, and not only depends upon that for validity, but has for its office the deepening of just such experience in others. Scientific judgments not only end in increased control but for those who understand they add enlarged meanings to the things perceived and dealt with in daily contact with the world. The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art; it is an auxiliary in the process, a difficult process, of learning to see and hear. The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task. The moral office of criticism is performed indirectly. The individual who has an enlarged and quickened experience is one who should make for himself his own appraisal. The way to help him is through the expansion of his own experience by the work of art to which criticism is subsidiary. The moral function of art itself is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive. The critic's office is to further this work, performed by the object of art. Obtrusion of his own approvals and condemnations, appraisals and ratings, is sign of failure to apprehend and perform the function of becoming a factor in the development of sincere personal experience. We lay hold of the full import of a work of art only as we go through in our own vital processes the processes the artist went through in producing the work. It is the critic's privilege to share in the promotion of this active process. His condemnation is that he so often arrests it.
*The greater part of the collection is now in the Louvre — a sufficient comment on the competency of official criticism.
*See ante, p. 142.
*See ante, p. 191.
*While the two examples of animal art are given primarily to indicate the nature of "essence" in art, they also exemplify these two methods.
*Martin Schuetze, in his Academic Illusions, gives pertinent detailed examples of this kind of fallacy and shows them to be the stock-in-trade of entire schools of esthetic interpretation.
*There is a significant chapter with this title in Buermeyer's The Aesthetic Experience.
*This point I have emphasized in the Quest for Certainty, Chapter IV.