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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The central argument of this essay, concerning what for want of a better name I shall, adapting the terminology of Hegel, call the “concrete universal,” proceeds from the observation that literary theorists have from early times to the present persisted in making statements which in their contexts seem to mean that a work of literary art is in some peculiar sense a very individual thing or a very universal thing or both. What that paradox can mean, or what important fact behind the paradox has been discerned by such various critics as Aristotle, Plotinus, Hegel, Whitehead and Ransom, it will be the purpose of the essay to inquire, and by the inquiry to discuss not only a significant feature of metaphysical poetics from Aristotle to the present day but the relation between metaphysical poetics and more practical and specific rhetorical analysis. In the brief historical survey which forms one part of this essay it will not be my purpose to suggest that any of these writers meant exactly what I shall mean in later parts where I describe the structure of poetry. Yet throughout the essay I shall proceed on the theory not only that men have at different times used the same terms and have meant differently, but that they have sometimes used different terms and have meant the same or somewhat the same. In other words, I assume that there is continuity in the problems of criticism, and that a person who studies poetry today has interest in what Plato said about poetry.
1 “Art as such takes for its object Mind—the conception of which is infinite concrete universality—in the shape of sensuous concreteness.” The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (London, 1886), p. 151. Cf. Chap, iii, pp. 72-78, 133-137. “Concrete universal” as I shall use it implies nothing about the “World Whole.”
2 J. S. Mill, A System of Logic (London, 1891), pp. 14-25. Book I, Chap. II, secs. 1-5.
3 The Meaning of Meaning (New York, 1936), pp. 10-11.
4 Charles W. Morris, “Esthetics and the Theory of Signs,” The Journal of Unified Science, viii (June 1, 1939), 131-150.
5 The terms “denotation” and “connotation” are commonly and loosely used by literary critics to distinguish the dictionary meaning of a term (denotation) from the vaguer aura of suggestion (connotation). But both these are parts of the connotation in the logical sense.
6 Cf. I. A. Richards, Interpretation in Teaching (New York, 1938), p. 354, on the question, “What is an apple?”
7 Cf. Mortimer J. Adler, Problems for Thomists, The Problem of Species (New York, 1940), pp. 24-25; Jacques Maritain, An Introduction to Logic (New York, 1937), pp. 12-13. But see a neo-scholastic statement of the opposite view, John J. Toohey, “What are the Predicables,” The New Scholasticism, x (July, 1936), 260-261; and cf. Joseph Fröbes, Tractatus Logicae Formalis (Rome, 1940), pp. 24-25.
8 “When we say what it is, we do not say ‘white’ or ‘hot’ or ‘three cubits long,’ but ‘a man’ or ‘a god’ ” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, vii (Z), 1 (1028).
9 See S. H. Butcher's attempt to distinguish between the universality of history and that of poetry (Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, London, 1907, p. 192.) See Richard McKeon, “Literary Criticism and the Concept of Imitation in Antiquity,” Modern Philology, xxxiv (August, 1936), 1-35.
10 “The arts are not to be slighted on the ground that they create by imitation of natural objects; for, to begin with, these natural objects are themselves imitations; then, we must recognize that they give no bare reproduction of the thing seen but go back to the ideas from which Nature itself derives” (Enneads, v, viii, 1, Plotinus—The Fifth Ennead, trans. Stephen MacKenna [London, 1926), p. 74).
11 See Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, trans. J. F. Scanlan (New York, 1937), pp. 24-25; Leonard Callahan, Theory of Aesthetic According to the Principles of St. Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D. C, 1927), p. 47.
12 See L. I. Bredvold, “The Tendency Toward Platonism in Neo-Classical Esthetics,” ELH, i (Sept. 1934), 91-119.
13 Kant's Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (London, 1931), pp. 88-89. In this passage (i, i, i, 17) Kant distinguishes between the idea of the imagination and a second or “rational Idea” and further distinguishes the Idea from the Ideal, “the representation of an individual being, regarded as adequate to an Idea.” Both Idea and Ideal are concerned with “purposiveness” and since “The only being which has the purpose of its existence in itself is man,” “man is, then, alone of all objects in the world, susceptible of an Ideal of beauty.”
14 The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (London, 1886), p. 67. Cf. Walter T. Stace, The Meaning of Beauty (London, 1929), p. 41. Mr. Stace's theory of beauty as fusion of empirical non-perceptual concept with a perceptual field (p. 43) is one which I believe I may refer to as substantially in accord with the ideas of this essay.
15 Idem, p. 16, Cf. pp. 72-78, 133-137.
16 The Friend, Sect. ii, Essay 4, quoted in Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), ii, 268.
17 “Esthetics and the Theory of Signs,” The Journal of Unified Science, vii (June 1, 1939), 136-137.
18 Foundations of the Theory of Signs, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, i, No. 2 (University of Chicago Press, 1938), p. 24. Cf. Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers, ii (Cambridge, 1932), 156-173.
19 Science and the Modern World (New York, 1925), p. 280.
20 Idem, p. 279.
21 The World's Body (New York, 1938), p. 348; The New Criticism (Norfolk, 1941), pp. 280-281, 314-316.
22 Allen Tate, Reason in Madness (New York, 1935), “Tension in Poetry,” p. 76.
23 This form of the doctrine seems to persist today chiefly among critics of the graphic arts. See for example the critics cited by Bernard Heyl, New Bearings in Esthetics and Art Criticism (Yale University Press, 1943), pp. 17, 41, 55.
24 At least the ideas are general as far as such a thing is possible. I have contended elsewhere (The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson [New Haven, 1941], p. 96) that Johnson was the only neo-classicist who managed even to approximate the kind of writing described in the theory, and the Ramblers suffer as art for that very reason. A neo-classicist like Pope, in The Rape of Lock, will be as particular as any romantic poet, only about different things, as Hazlitt so well describes his poetry, not about tempests but about tea-cups. All great poetry would seem to be alike in respect to the concrete and the universal; it is a balance.
25 Essay on Pope (London, 1806), i, 47.
26 Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Bloomsbury, 1932), pp. 970 977, 992.
27 It is true that Croce has protested: “Ce qu'on démontre comme inconciliable avec le principe de la pure intuition, ce n'est pas l'universalité, mais la valeur intellectualiste et transcendante donnée dans l'art à l'universalité, sous la forme de l'allégorie ou du symbole….” (“Le Caractère de Totalité de l'Expression Artistique,” in Bréviaire d'Esthetique, trad. Georges Bourgin [Paris, 1923], p. 170). But the main drift of his better-known Aesthetic is against the concept and the generality.
28 Preface to Shakespeare, Works (London, 1787), ix, 242. Cf. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, Book iii, Chap. 1. I do not argue that such passages represent all that the authors ever thought or wrote on the question involved, but that such passages are far more typical and far more explicit than the passages that may be adduced against them. (Cf. Arthur Friedman, review of my Prose Style of Samuel Johnson, PQ, xxi [April, 1942], 211-213; xxii [Jan. 1943], 73-76.) Such passages express the neo-classic theory of imitation as far as it can be defined or distinguished from other theories. Some such simplification as this is necessary if the history of theory is to be discussed at all.
29 Henri Bergson, Laughter, An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (New York, 1928), pp. 161-162. G. Wilson Knight, English Association Pamphlet No. 88; Shakespeare and Tolstoy (April, 1934), p. 19, offers a reconciliation in the following terms: “Hamlet … has no ‘character.’ He is more than ‘literary’: he is like a real person with a real person's potentiality for all things. … In him we recognize ourselves, not our acquaintances. Possessing all characters, he possesses none.”
30 Roger Fry in his Introduction to Reynolds' Third Discourse argues that the species presented in painting are not those of the natural, but those of the social world, as king, knight, beggar (Discourses, ed. Roger Fry, London 1905, p. 46). And a modern critic of sculpture, R. H. Wilenski, offers what is perhaps the last retreat of the doctrine of universals in visual art: not man, flower or animal but the forms of life analogous in (i.e. common to) man, flower and animal are abstracted and presented pure in sculptural art (R. H. Wilenski, The Meaning of Modern Sculpture [London, 1939], pp. 159-160).
31 “Just representations of general nature,” said Johnson, and it ought to be noted, though it perhaps rarely is, that two kinds of generality are involved, as indeed they are in the whole neo-classic theory of generality. There is the generality of logic or classification, of the more general as opposed to the more specific, “essential” generality, one might say. And there is the generality of literal truth to nature, “existential” generality. The assumption in neo-classic theory seems to be that these two must coincide. As a manner of fact they may and often do, but need not. Thus: “purple cow” is a more general (less specific) term and concept than “tan cow with a broken horn,” yet the latter is more general or true to nature. We have, in short, realism or fantasy, and in either there may be various degrees of the specific or general. We have A Journal of the Plague Year and The Rambler, Gulliver's Travels and Rasselas.
32 The New Criticism (Norfolk, 1941), p. 315. Mr. Maritain, coming from a different direction, arrives at somewhat the same poser. “If it pleases a futurist to paint a lady with only one eye, or a quarter of an eye, nobody denies him such a right: all one is entitled to require —and here is the whole problem—is that the quarter eye is all the lady needs in the given case” (Art and Scholasticism [New York, 1937], p. 28). Here indeed is the whole problem. Long ago Aristotle said, “Not to know that a hind has no horns is a less serious matter than to paint it inartistically” (Poetics, xxv, 5).
33 “Modern Painters, vol. iii, chap, i, ”Of the Received Opinions Touching the ‘Grand Style’.“
34 If we perceive and classify objects according to their heterogeneous unities, we perceive and classify them also according to their spacing against the background of potentiality (that is, the frequency of their occurrence in reality) and according to their importance in a given human context. Reflections of this fact may be seen in what seem to us the strangely concrete vocabularies of primitive peoples and in such word-group survivals in our own language as horse, mare, stallion, foal, colt. Cf. Otto Jespersen, Language (London, 1922), pp. 430-131. Cf. Locke, Human Understanding, ii, xxii, 5.
35 The structure and unity of a typewriter or of any other artifact is of course determined by the human end for which the artifact is constructed. Yet in this discussion I have avoided teleogical terms, in order to emphasize the character of the result, the structure of the object itself, from which the purpose is inferred. The attempt to assess works of art in terms of purpose or success of the artist in carrying out his purpose leads away from the objective study of structures toward various forms of relativism, subjectivism, inspirationalism, and expressionism. Cf. my article in collaboration with M. C. Beardsley, “Intention,” in Dictionary of World Literature, ed. Joseph T. Shipley, New York, 1943. Again, when in Part v of this essay, I speak more explicitly of structure in poetry, my argument does not imply the kind of autonomy for poetry that deprives it of all external relations. Poems depend on the meaning of words, and meaning in turn upon historical usage, but structures of meaning can be considered in themselves, and meaning, even though it depends upon language, can be assessed. Cf. my “Comment on ‘Two Essays in Practical Criticism’,” University Review, ix (Winter, 1942), 139-143.
36 Charles W. Morris, “Esthetics and the Theory of Signs,” The Journal of Unified Science, viii (June 1, 1927), p. 137; Melvin Rader, A Modern Book of Aesthetics (New York, 1935), pp. 233-234.
37 Dicoveries, ed. Maurice Castelain (Paris, 1906), p. 139. Jonson translates from Heinsius.
38 Aspects of the Novel (New York, 1927), pp. 103-104.
39 Mr. Eugene Waith has recently discussed the multiple character, all things by turns and nothing long, of Evanthe in Fletcher's Bride for a Month (“Characterization in John Fletcher's Tragicomedies,” RES, xix [April, 1943], 141-164).
40 The difficulty of defining the unity of Falstaff's character so as to distinguish it from the “humour” has been illustrated by Professor Stoll in stressing the number of coward-soldier traits in Falstaff and the lazzi, or stock tricks, of which he is guilty (“Falstaff,” Modern Philology, xii [October, 1914], 197-240; cf. Shakespeare Studies [New York, 1927], chap, viii, pp. 403-490) and by John Dryden as follows:
A character, or that which distinguishes one man from all others, cannot be supposed to consist of one particular virtue or vice, or passion only; but 'tis a composition of qualities which are not contrary to one another in the same person; thus, the same man may be liberal and valiant, but not liberal and covetous; so in a comical character, or humour (which is an inclination to this or that particular folly), Falstaff is a liar, and a coward, a glutton, and a buffoon, because all these qualities may agree in the same man; yet it is still to be observed, that one virtue, vice, and passion, ought to be shown in every man, as predominant over all the rest; as covetousness in Crassus, love of his country in Brutus; and the same in characters which are feigned (Preface to Troilus and Cressida, Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker, Oxford, 1926, i, 215; cf. Essay of Dramatic Poesy, i, 84).
41 The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge, 1944), pp. 46-47, 54.
42 I do not mean that self-consciousness is the only principle of complexity in character, yet a degree of it I suspect will be found in all the richest characters.
43 Peacock's Four Ages of Poetry, Shelley's Defense of Poetry … ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith (Oxford, 1937), p. 26.
44 Preface to Poems (1815), in Wordsworth's Literary Criticism, ed. Nowell C. Smith (London, 1925), pp. 159-160.
45 Poetics, xxii, 16-17.
46 Cf. Poetics, xxi, 7 on the relation of metaphor to genus and species.
47 The Literary Mind (New York, 1935), p. 165.
48 Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy, ed. A. S. Cook (Boston, 1890), p. 35.
48a A reader whose judgment I esteem tells me that such a name appears in a serious discussion of poetics anomalously and in bad taste. I have allowed it to remain (in preference to some more dignified name of mediocrity) precisely because I wish to insist on the existence of badness in poetry and so to establish an antithetic point of reference for the discussion of goodness. Relativistic argument often creates an illusion in its own favor by moving steadily in a realm of great and nearly great art. See, for example, George Boas, A Primer for Critics (Baltimore, 1937), where a cartoon by Daumier appears toward the end as a startling approach to the vulgar. The purpose of my essay is not judicial but theoretical, that is, not to exhibit original discoveries in taste, but to show the relationship between examples acknowledged to lie in the realms of the good and the bad.
49 Aristotle, Metaphysics, xiii, 3.
50 S. T. Coleridge, “On the Principles of Genial Criticism,” in Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), ii, 232.
51 “On Poesy or Art,” ibid., ii, 255.
52 Aesthetic, trans. Douglas Ainslie (London, 1922), p. 13.
53 The Romantic Theory of Poetry (New York, 1926), pp. 120-121.
54 Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London, 1934), p. 172.
55 The relation of ideas to poetry is treated impressively by Walter T. Stace, The Meaning of Beauty (London, 1929), pp. 152-180 (Cf. ante, n. 14), and by P. H. Frye, “Dryden and the Critical Canons of the Eighteenth Century,” University Studies of the University of Nebraska, vii (January, 1907), 37-38.
56 “We shall … have instances of imagination which are valuable and instances which are not, and we must then go on to contrive a further theory, a theory of values which will explain (so far as we are able to do so at present) these differences of values. …” Coleridge does not so separate his psychology from his theory of value. His theory of Imagination is a combination of the two and there is much to be said in favour of this more difficult order of procedure. It does more justice to the unity of mental process, and, if such an exposition is understood, there is less risk of suggesting that the value aspects of our activities are independent of, or supernumerary to, their nature—less risk of our taking the same question twice as though it were two different questions, not one. (I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination [New York, 1935], pp. 96-97).
57 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London, 1937), p. 97. Cf. his discussion of understanding and belief in a note on Dante, Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (New York, 1932), p. 230.
58 The Intent of the Critic, ed. Donald Stauffer (Princeton, 1941), p. 76. For a survey of some other recent views of this sort, see Roy W. Battenhouse, “Theology and Literary Criticism,” The Journal of Bible and Religion, xiii (February, 1945), 16-22.
59 Essays Aesthetical and Philosophical (London, 1875), p. 251.
60 There is of course another view, that the play is moral sheerly through its tragic outcome. Thus Croce: “The tragedy of Anthony and Cleopatra is composed of the violent sense of pleasure, and its power to bind and to dominate, coupled with a shudder at its abject effects of dissolution and of death” (Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille [London, 1920], p. 242).
61 Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille (London, 1920), pp. 146-147.