Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, originally published in Renascence 4.1 (1951)
Anyone familiar with the persistent use which Joyce makes of the labyrinth figure as the archetype of human cognition will have noticed the same figure as it appears in the dramatic action of a Thomistic “article.” There is first the descent into the particular matter of the “objections.” These are juxtaposed abruptly, constituting a discontinuous or cubist perspective. By abrupt juxtaposition of diverse views of the same problem, that which is in question is seen from several sides. A total intellectual history is provided in a single view. And in the very instant of being presented with a false lead or path the mind is alerted to seek another course through the maze. Baffled by variety of choice it is suddenly arrested by the “sed contra” [but contrary] and given its true bearings in the conclusion. Then follows the retracing of the labyrinth in the “respondeo dicendum” [reply]. Emerging into intellectual clarity at the end of this process it looks back on the blind alleys proffered by each of the original objections. Whereas the total shape of each article, with its trinal divisions into objections, respondeo, and answers to objections, is an “S” labyrinth, this figure is really traced and retraced by the mind many times in the course of a single article. Perhaps this fact helps to explain the power of Thomas to communicate a great deal even before he is much understood. It certainly suggests why he can provide rich esthetic satisfactions by the very dance of his mind - a dance in which we participate as we follow him.
His “articles” can be regarded as vivisections of the mind in act. The skill and with which he selects his objections constitute a cubist landscape, an ideal landscape of great intellectual extent seen from an airplane. The ideas or objects in this landscape are by their very contiguity set in a state of dramatic tension; and this dramatic tension is provided with the dramatic peripeteia in the respondeo, and with a resolution in the answers to the objections.
This, and much more was grasped by the young Joyce who seems to have been the first to make explicit the relation in Aquinas between the stages of apprehension and the creative process. In Aristotle the same view is also implicit, as Joyce was aware. In the Poetics (Chap. 4) Aristotle mentions imitation as connate to man, being the process by which men learn. But this fact is not linked with the power of abstraction in which in the De Anima he attributes to the nous poietikos or the agent intellect. That there is, however, a degree of poetic imitation in abstraction itself is plain from the fact that even in sensation “things exist in the soul without their proper matter, but with the singularity and individuation conditions which are the result of matter” (St. Thomas De Anima, article 13). That this is so is the effect of the nous poietikos which has the power of individuating anew in a bodily organ that which it has abstracted from existence. “For in things made by art the action of an instrument is terminated in the form intended by the artisan” (Ibid., article 12). Again, “for every object produced by art is the effect of the action of an artificer, the agent intellect being related to the phantasms illuminated by it as an artificer is to the things made by his art” (Ibid., article 5). And in the same place the creative efficacy of the nous poietikos as “illuminative” is referred to the text in the Psalms (4:7): “The light of thy countenance is signed upon us, O Lord.”
For Joyce and Eliot all art is a shadow of the Incarnation and every artist is dedicated to revealing, or epiphanizing, the signatures in things, so that what the nous poietikos is to perception and abstraction the artist is to existence at large:
“The artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and re-embody it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for its new office, he was the supreme artist.” (Stephen Hero, p. 78).
Ordinary experience is a riot of imprecision, of impressions enmeshed in pre-conceptions, clichés, profanities, and impercipience. But for the true artist every experience is capable of an epiphany:
“By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself . . . . Imagine my glimpses of that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanized. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty. (Stephen Hero, p. 221).
Joyce identified the three notes of beauty of St. Thomas with the three operations of the intellect.
[Aquinas’ three qualities of beauty are: 1. integrity (distinction), 2. proportion (ratio), 3. clarity (essence). Thus, Aquinas claimed that “beauty is a kind of knowledge”. In his The First Principles of Knowledge, Joseph Rickaby (1845-1932), an English Jesuit, wrote that Aquinas’ three operations of the intellect are: 1. apprehension, 2. judgment and 3. reasoning.]
“Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn’t make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas [clarity is definition of essence]. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment I call epiphany. First we recognize that the object is one integral thing, then we recognize it is an organized composite structure, a thing in fact; finally when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognize that is is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.” (Stephen Hero, p. 213).
Obviously the business of the artist in this context is that of an impersonal agent, humble before the laws of things, as well as before his own artistic activity as revealer. He must strip himself of all but his mere agency:
“I have only pushed to its logical conclusions the definition Aquinas has given of the beautiful.”
“Aquinas?”
“Pulchra sunt quae visa placent. He seems to regard the beautiful as that which satisfies the esthetic appetite and nothing more - that the mere apprehension of which pleases . . . .” (SH, 95)
The passage in St. Thomas formally distinguishing beauty and goodness has wide but precise bearings for everything Joyce did as an artist:
But they differ logically, for goodness properly relates to appetite (goodness being what all things desire), and therefore it has the aspect of an end (the appetite being a kind of movement towards a thing). On the other hand beauty relates to a cognitive power, for those things are said to be beautiful which pleases when seen. Hence beauty consists in due proportion, for the senses delight in things duly proportioned, as in what is like them - because the sense too is a sort of reason, as is every cognitive power. Now, since knowledge is by assimilation, and likeness relates to form, beauty properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause. (ST Q 5, a4, ad i)
That the senses themselves are properly analogous, as are the other cognitive powers, was a fact not lost on Joyce, who knew that the creative process itself was a retracing of the stages of apprehension. In this passage from St. Thomas can also be seen the reasons for Joyce’s preferring comic to tragic art. Any movement of appetite within the labyrinth of cognition is a “minotaur” which must be slain by the hero artist. Anything which interferes with cognition, whether concupiscence, pride, imprecision, or vagueness is a minotaur ready to devour beauty. So that Joyce not only was the first to reveal the link between the stages of apprehension and the creative process, he was the first to understand how the drama of cognition itself was the key archetype of all human ritual myth and legend [Joyce playfully termed this structure Monomyth, which Joseph Campbell would later pass onward to George Lucas, Disney, and fiction writers everywhere]. And this he was able to incorporate at every point of his work the body of the past in immediate relation to the slightest current of perception. He could well afford to look patronizingly on the psychological gropings of Freud and Jung and on the inferior poetic consciousness of a Yeats or Proust, saying in “The Holy Office”:
“So distantly I turn to view
The shamblings of that motley crew,
Those souls that hate the strength that mine has
Steeled in the school of old Aquinas.”
There was no shambling or guesswork in anything Joyce did as an artist. An absolute clairvoyance and precision attended his work from the first page of The Portrait to the end of Finnegans Wake. And the reason for this, as he insisted, was his grasp of the full implications of the Thomistic analysis of cognition:
“But, during the formulation of his artistic creed, had he not found item after item upheld for him in advance by the greatest and most orthodox doctor of the Church . . . while the entire theory in accordance with which his entire artistic life was shaped, arose most conveniently for his purpose out of the mass of Catholic theology?” (Stephen Hero, p. 205).
It is the Thomistic view that beauty relates to a cognitive rather than a volitional power that led Joyce to prefer comedy to tragedy. The long passage from his notebooks given by Herbert Gorman (James Joyce, pp. 96-97) will become a locus classicus:
“An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling of desire, but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the feeling of joy . . . the feeling which the possession of some good excites in us . . . . For desire urges us from rest that we may possess something but joy holds us in rest as long as we possess something . . . All art which excites in us the feeling of joy is so far comic and according to this feeling of joy is excited by whatever is substantial or accidental in human fortunes the art is to be judged more or less excellent . . . From this it may be seen that tragedy is the imperfect manner and comedy the perfect manner in art. All art, again, is static for the feelings of terror and pity on one hand and of joy on the other hand are feelings which arrest us. It will be seen afterwards how this rest is necessary for the apprehension of the beautiful . . . For beauty is a quality of something seen but terror and pity and joy are states of mind.”
It is hard to know or even discuss any phase of Joyce because he is so much of a piece. Anything of his includes all the rest. Thus, for example, his statement of the problem of genres seems simple and natural:
“There are three conditions of art: the lyrical, the epical, and the dramatic. That art is lyrical whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to himself; that art is epical whereby the artist sets forth the image in mediate relation to himself and to others; that art is dramatic whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to others.” (Gorman, pp. 97-98).
But the complex generic idea operative here is a shadow at once of the three operations of the intellect and of the procession of the Persons in the Trinity. There is also a note of Joyce’s dated at Paris (March 27, 1903) which concerns Aristotle and imitation:
“e teknhe mimeitai ten physin - this phrase is falsely rendered as “Art is an imitation of Nature.” Aristotle does not here define art; he says only, “Art imitates Nature” and means that the artistic process is like the natural process . . . .” (Ibid., p. 98).
It is in Stephen Hero that there are the texts which explain what Joyce understood by “natural process”:
“For Stephen art was neither a copy nor an imitation of nature: the artistic process was a natural process . . . a veritably sublime process of one’s own nature which had a right to examination and open discussion.” (Stephen Hero, p. 171)
That this process is that of ordinary apprehension is made plain on page 212:
“What we symbolize in black the Chinaman may symbolize in yellow; each has his own tradition. Greek beauty laughs at Coptic beauty and the American Indian derides them both. It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty that has ever been adored on earth by an examination of the mechanism of esthetic apprehension whether it be dressed in red, white, yellow, or black. [These are the four colors classically associated with each of the four homors: blood, phlegm, yellow & black bile.] We have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar. The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinized in action.”
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this last phase for an understanding of Joyce’s art, because he never ceased to evolve technique for scrutinizing sensations and impressions “at the very instant of their apparition.” And this meant for Joyce neither impressionism or expressionism but the revelation of the profoundly analogical drama of existence as it is mirrored in the cognitive powers in act:
“They sat sometimes in the pit of a music-hall and one unfolded to the other the tapestry of his poetical aims while the band bawled to the comedian and the comedian bawled to the band. Cranly grew used to having sensations and impressions recorded and analyzed before him at the very instant of their apparition.” (Ibid., p. 125).
Dubliners, for example, is a tapestry of such arrested apparitions variously woven into the natural process of childhood, youth, maturity and age. The Portrait is likewise static as the title insists, an inclusive moment focusing the stage of artistic apprehension in a vivisection of the young artist. It is noteworthy that Joyce excludes from the esthetic discussion in The Portrait just those features of the Thomistic analysis of cognition which were most important to him as a mature artist - namely the fact of that creative process as the natural process of apprehension arrested and retraced. The Stephen of The Portrait (probably named after the Dedalian Stéphane Mallarmé) understands Aquinas via Mallarmé, whereas Joyce the artist, while led to Aquinas by Mallarmé and the symbolists, finally was able to complete the work of the symbolists because he discovered how to perfect their insights by means of Aquinas. Yet it needs also to be said that the feebleness of grasp among Joyce critics is not so much their ignorance of St. Thomas as their half-awareness of what Joyce found in Flaubert, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. Because Joyce and Eliot have surpassed these writers, only, however, with their assistance, it is enforced on the English critic to perfect their knowledge of them if only that the French in turn may come to enjoy the achievement of Joyce and Eliot.
There is a passage in Stephen Hero which will serve to suggest the kind of debt Joyce owed to Flaubert and his successors:
“The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection is the most modern process one can conceive. The ancient method investigated law with the lantern of justice, morality with the lantern of revelation, art with the lantern of tradition. But all these lanterns have magical properties; they transform and disfigure. The modern method examines its territory by the light of day . . . It examines the entire community in action and reconstructs the spectacle of redemption. If you were an esthetic philosopher you would take not of all my vagaries because here you have the spectacle of the esthetic instinct in action. The philosophic college should spare a detective for me.” (p. 186)
The use of the words “vagaries” and “detective” is here precise and significant. For on the one hand the figure of the labyrinth is used everywhere by Joyce as the archetype of cognition and esthetic apprehension, and on the other the modern detective since Poe employs the technique of retracing in order to reconstruct an action exactly as it occurred. Edgar Poe is rightly regarded in France as the father of symbolism because he was the first to formulate the poetic process as one of discovering by retracing. The precise poetic formula for any emotion, he pointed out, was to be found by working backwards from effect to the arrangement of words which would produce that effect. It is also his esthete Dupin who first displays the same method in the service of crime detection. The modern psychologist, historiographer, and archaeologist use this method in common with the physicist, the chemist, and the “private eye.” Professor Gilson’s Unity of Philosophical Experience has the distinction of being the first work of philosophy in which this method of reconstruction is fully employed.
But a great deal of poetic experiment and development preceded the discovery of the technique of reconstruction as discovery. And most of all is owing to the practitioners of the picturesque school of landscape that began with James Thomson in 1724. By the time of Scott, Byron, and Chateaubriand the possibilities of discontinuous landscape as a means of including and controlling a vast range of otherwise chaotic material was available to the novelist as a means of examining “the entire community in action.” First Stendhal and then Flaubert and Dickens went ahead on these lines. But Flaubert was the first to see in his Sentimental Education that it means the abandonment of the continuity of unilateral narrative in favor of the more profound effects to be achieved by analogical juxtaposition of characters, scenes, and situations without copula. So that the Cartesian cries against cubist discontinuity have always been raised by those ignorant of analogy and equivocity.
But Joyce, while alert to all that Flaubert had achieved for him was not content with controlling just the larger areas of his discontinuous landscapes. He wanted and got a simultaneous control of the widest perspectives and the most intimate and evanescent moments of apprehension. And this he was able to achieve by analysis of the labyrinth of cognition which Aristotle and Aquinas had revealed to him. It is thus, for example, that he is able to include in the first two pages of The Portrait the entire experience of the race, the ground plan of all his unwritten work, and the most individual features of Stephen’s expanding awareness. The opening words place the hero in the traditional labyrinth and confront him with a minotaur adapted to his infant years:
“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo . . .”
Stephen Hero is so named because the artist in that work confronts and slays scores of minotaurs. The book swarms with labyrinths of many kinds of levels:
“At the door he had to resign her to others and see her depart with insignificant courtesies and as he came home alone he led his mood through mazes of doubts and misgivings.” (p. 159).
Following this passage there is another labyrinth which is both exterior and interior. It presents one of the Daedalus family migrations inside Dublin:
“On the night before the day fixed for his legal eviction he moved his camp by night. The little furniture which remained to them was carried on a float and Stephen and his brother and his mother and his father carried the ancestral portraits themselves as the draymen had drunk a good deal more than was good for them. It was a clear night of the late summer freshened with cold as they walked in a body beside the sea-wall . . . . The tide was lapping softly by the wall, being at the full, and through the clear air Stephen heard his father’s voice like a muffled flute singing a love-song. He made his mother stop to listen and they both leaned on the heavy picture-frames and listened: ‘Shall carry my heart to thee . . . .’ “
Traditionally there are two kinds of labyrinth, stone and sea. Joyce uses both constantly. Here both are fused in the “sea-wall” - the family treading the maze between two powers (earth and sea) and carrying the household goods is arrested by the song. The moment of arrest is an epiphany, a moment not in time’s covenant, and it is by the bringing of complex perceptions to a focus in such moments that the minotaurs of the labyrinth are always overcome.
But the technical means of capturing these moments is by landscape, as Wordsworth and others were aware. The Pre-Raphaelites and then Swinburne, Pater, and the early Yeats had sought for the means to prolong these moments. But the symbolists discovered that the moment was not an end but a beginning. It was a point from which to begin a retracing of the labyrinth of apprehension in order to find the inevitable artform for that moment.
”In the center of her attitude towards him he thought he discerned a point of defiant ill will and he thought he understood the cause of it. He had swept the moment into his memory, the figure, and the landscape into his treasure-room, and conjuring with all three had brought forth some pages of sorry verse.” (Stephen Hero, p. 67).
Since the relation of labyrinth and landscape calls for separate treatment it will serve for now to have pointed out that the conjunction of landscape and labyrinth provided Joyce with that vivisection of the stages of esthetic apprehension of which he was the only begetter. As much, therefore, as the ancient Daedalus who made the labyrinth in Crete, Joyce had the right to name his hero “Stephen Dedalus” (the French form of the word). But is not only the labyrinth of cognition in which Joyce made himself at home, tracing and retracing with delicate precision. The labyrinthine structure of the eye it is that gives such salience in his work to the figure of the Cyclops. Most of all he was at home in the labyrinth of the inner ear where he met Persse O’Reilly, who is per se, son of the Real and father of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly in The Cocktail Party. On the labyrinth of the ear, organ of the Incarnation, Joyce built those metaphysical analogies which enabled him to restore the seven liberal arts to its plenary functions. He is never less than the artist of the Word. Ulysses is reared on the labyrinth-landscape of the human body as the body politic; and Finnegans Wake whispers throughout with the voice of the river of human blood and immemorial racial consciousness. Joyce was at home in all labyrinths because of his original conquest of the stages of apprehension, of the mind in act.
[James Joyce was born in 1882, in a world newly shaped by artificial electricity. At the publishing of this essay in 1951, McLuhan noted in a letter to mathematician Norbert Wiener, who coined the term “cybernetics”: “In short, appearances and pedagogical limitations aside, there never is nor can be a dichotomy between the top-level perceptions and procedures in the arts and sciences of an age."]
Having suggested that Joyce took up the analysis of this matter at the very promising stage at which Mallarmé had left it at his death in 1898, I should like to point to what is, so far as I know, the first stage of philosophic awareness concerning the retracing of apprehension as the poetic process. It occurs in Thomas Brown’s posthumously published lectures on The Philosophy of the Human Mind. Brown was a professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh until his death in 1820. And it is in lecture XXXVII where he is considering the “secondary laws of suggestion” as they affect genius that he states the difference between the imagination of genius and the fancy of ordinary minds. The mind of genius, he suggests, works in some sort of reverse direction to ordinary minds.
“In a poetic mind of a higher order, the conception of this very subject cannot exist for a moment, without awakening, by the different tendency of the suggestion principle, groups of images which had never before existed in similar combination. . . . new forms of external passion, would crowd upon his mind, by their analogy to ideas and feelings previously existing; and this single change of the direction of the suggesting principle would be sufficient to produce all those wonders, which the poet of the imagination ascribes to the influence of inspiring genii . . . The inventions of poetic genius then, are the suggestions of analogy: the prevailing suggestions of common minds, are those of mere contiguity.
In these lectures Brown is a severe critic of Locke and Hartley and the associationists, and seems to use “analogy” in a traditional sense. To what extent he was aware of the speculations of Coleridge, I cannot say. But Coleridge seems not to have had any inkling of the retracing process of the poetic process. It is noteworthy that the celebrated definition of the primary imagination merely states the notion of Aristotle and Aquinas concerning the nous poietikos or the agent intellect:
“The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”
That this has not been noticed as the nous poietikos is only less curious than the fact that Coleridge never seems to have commented on it again. His definition of the poetic or secondary imagination has aroused great interest and enthusiasm but is far from the precision of his definition of the primary imagination:
”The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing” only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, “diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and unify.”
Nothing could well be vaguer than this. It does not look very impressive beside Brown’s statement. And Brown’s view is in the line that leads through Burke to Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Joyce.
-HMM, Renascence LXIV, No. 1 (Republished: Fall 2011): p. 89-99.
[The remaining paragraphs of this essay have been added by the author to the original essay and appear in Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques for the first time. Ed. note (1962)]
The student of the Joyce-Aquinas axis will find a great deal of aid in Reality and Judgment according to St. Thomas by Peter Hoenen, S. J. (Henry Regnery and Co.; Chicago, 1952). In Chapter Ten he discusses the concept of St. Thomas of “facientes cognuscunt.” (”By constructing they come to know.”):
St. Thomas uses the expression, “By constructing they come to know.” (facientes cognuscunt) at the end of the passage where he discovers and explains the origin of the intellectual intuition of a geometric truth in a structure of a geometric figure which had been actuated by the seeker . . . But St. Thomas has a detailed theory which has this truth as its foundation. He deduces this theory form the activity of the artisan and he applies it frequently. It is his theory of the “knowledge which is the cause of things . . .” (scientia quae est causa rerum) as opposed to the “knowledge received from things” (scientia accepta a rebus) . . . . St. Thomas uses this theory, for example, to determine and classify the objects of God’s knowledge.
In 1893 the German sculptor Adolf Hildebrand published The Problem of Form. Like “Le Demon de l’Analogie,” by Mallarme, this book revealed the proportion that is between knowing and making. But Hildebrand’s small book had a great and immediate effect on the artists of his time. In 1907 it was translated into English by Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden.
One reason why Hildebrand had such an immediate effect on the artists of his time is that he was able to explain why synesthesia is not only normal human experience, but he showed why the isolation of the retinal or the haptic or any other impression was, artistically, a disaster. Humanly speaking, the separation of the senses is the formula for insanity. King Lear is a study, as is Othello, of the effects of isolation of the senses. Hildebrand saw with absolute clarity that photography and photo-engraving were effecting an isolation of retinal impression from the other senses. After his book appeared, the critics like Bernard Berenson and later Roger Fry and Clive Bell began to stress the urgency of haptic, tactile quality in retinal impression. Professor Sheila Watson, in an unpublished doctoral dissertation on Wyndham Lewis has gone into the matter. The role of Hildebrand in shaping the vortex idea of Lewis, Pound, and T. S. Eliot is as decisive as his effect on Heinrich Wolfflin and the Bauhaus.
A few brief samples of his discussion will indicate his importance for the Joyce student.
Since Art does not depend on a mere knowing, but on a doing which puts this knowledge into practice, a treatise on artistic problems can be fruitful only when it follows the artistic process in its practical, as well as in its theoretical aspects. We must strive to understand clearly the connection between the artist’s inner mental process and the realization of his ideas in his work. Unless we can show this mental process, demonstrate it, so to speak, ad oculos, then all insight into Art remains obscure and it is left to each individual to interpret the process this way or that according to the refinement of his senses. Finding that most theories of Art exhibit a useless quantity of reasoning and a dearth of practical experience, I have attempted to avoid this in my work by giving prominence, not to theoretical considerations, but to the actual process of creating a work of art. Accordingly, my book culminates fittingly in the chapter on stone carving; for work of this nature is, as a matter of fact, only the realization of all those artistic ideas which we shall treat in the chapters leading up to the last. The idea which informs the artist’s creation is one thing, the process of the creation is another. The true connection between these two could scarce be understood except when placed at the end of the treatise. An insight into this connection seems all the more imperative since the technical progress and factory work of our day have led us to lose our appreciation of the manner in which a thing is made, and have caused us to value a product more for itself than as a result of some mental activity.
Hildebrand everywhere testifies to the crux of formal causality as necessary in artistic understanding, but he never separates formal from material, efficient or final causes:
Nature, as she moves, produces alterations in her appearance, upon the most comprehensible of which we seize as characteristics and indices of her processes. The perception of these indices suggests to us the idea of the whole process, and in imagination we perform the process and thus comprehend this inner action as the cause of the external appearance.
The mimetic play of laughter and of weeping in others is comprehended by the child only through imitating it and then comparing it with his own muscular acts which accompany his pleasures and pains. Indeed, it is in this way that we all come to understand the mimetic activity of others and to translate their movements as we perceive them into the comprehensible expression of certain mental processes. We even go so far as to interpret a novel bodily expression by imitating it and thus comparing it with certain more or less similar expressions with which we are familiar, and which signify to us certain definite feelings. In this way a fund of indices to processes is accumulated, the value of each index being proportional to its clearness.
If we expand this conception to cover all bodily form, we find it applicable everywhere in Nature. Our ideas of function are everywhere vitalizing agents, and thus, for both spectator and artist determine the form of the representation. What we call, off-hand, the life of Nature is, in reality, the animation of Nature through our ideas. The expression of function is to be taken here in the widest sense; not merely for a direct momentary process or act but also for the state of repose. Such states of repose may require of the spectator more in the way of subjective interpretation than do states of motion.
Always with Hildebrand, then, is the prime stress on the interplay of knowing and making. The intelligible is Being, says Aquinas; and it is the splitting up of knowing and making which impoverishes art, experience, and Being alike says Hildebrand in a passage relevant to “dissociation of sensibility”:
In view of the foregoing, a comparison of the Art of earlier times with that of to-day must reveal the undoubted fact that the logic of visual representation was far more highly developed then than it is now; and upon this fact is founded the superiority of earlier Art over ours. In times when Art is enjoying freedom of growth, the natural drift of ideas will follow the regular course of mental organization. Of this dependency on the laws of mental organization the artist is conscious only in so far as he may desire to be logical, and to give true expression to his natural impulses. No influence sways him in his work save that of the natural laws of Art embodied in the artistic Problem of Form. There is as yet no discord between his mental representation and his actual observation. The natural unity of idea and perception still reigns.
Other periods may be termed inartistic for the reason that this naiveté no longer exists, and that in its stead false interests and abnormal points of view confuse the natural artistic tendency and deflect it from its course. If we but consider that the artistic idea is in essence nothing more than a further evolution in the natural process of learning to see - a process which each one of us begins to perform in childhood; and if we remember than in childhood visual imagery is most vivid; then we may gain some idea of the sudden end to all this play of fancy which must follow the child’s entrance into school. For school turns the much prized hours of youth and activities and disciplines inimical to Art. Deflected thus from his natural course, the child develops his artificial rather than his natural resources, and it is only when he reaches full maturity that the artist learns to think again in terms of the natural forces and ideas which in his childhood were his happiest possession. How many of us have preserved our inborn desire for expression? In most cases only physical ability has survived, and we are ignorant even as to the means and ends of using it. Into what devious by-ways does will lead when only instinct should direct?
As Aquinas indicates everywhere, there is a proportion between the modes of Being and the modes of our human knowing. Hildebrand points the corollary for Art: “If one would speak, then, of a mission of Art, it can be no other than this: In spite of all temporal eccentricities, to re-establish and make felt the sound and natural relations between our thought and sense activities.” This is surely close to Baudelaire’s notion that the role of Art is to diminish the traces of original sin.
Among the numerous ideas of Hildebrand which figure prominently in the esthetics of the next generation we find the idea of “significant form” so much used by Fry and Bell, but without Hildebrand’s lucid meaning:
. . . Art consists in giving shape to these ideas of spatial values, thus taking what may have been in Nature insignificant and fortuitous, and rendering it expressive and inevitable. However, in order to be effective in a work of art, these elements must be so combined that each may have its full significance. Since in Nature it is entirely a matter of chance whether or not this condition is met in the appearance, an artistic representation cannot be a mere mechanical counterfeit of Nature, but must comply with those conditions which render visual values effective. Thus an artist’s single representation is, in fact, an expression for the whole world of form as he has worked it out in his mind into effective spatial values.
He then rejects the “innocent eye” notion of art as postulating a separation rather than an interplay of the senses: “The height of positivism would be attained if we could perceive things with the inexperience of a new-born child. This theory would lead us to regard the sculptor’s art as appealing exclusively to the tactual-kinesthetic sense of the esthetic percipient; the painter’s art, on the other hand, as appealing entirely to the visual sense quite apart from all experience of form . . . In true Art the actual form has its reality only as an effect. By conceiving Nature as a relation of kinesthetic ideas to visual impressions, all combined and inter-related in a totality Art frees her of change and chance.”
Both for the student of Joyce and of Eliot, Hildebrand’s luminous presentation of the idea of Art as impersonal will be extremely relevant:
The historic point of view from which Art is generally considered, has not produced this consciousness of the universal laws of Art. Instead, it has tended to emphasize the differences manifest in artistic production. Consequently Art is treated either as an emanation of personal qualities in various individuals, or as a product of temporal conditions and national traits. This gives rise directly to a false conception of Art as primarily a manifestation of personality, of Art as a product of what in truth is the absolutely non-artistic side of man. The result is simple: no universal measure of artistic value is left. The greatest emphasis is laid on accessory relations, while the real artistic content obeying its internal laws unaffected by the alterations of time, is ignored. It is as though a gardener were to let his plants grow under glass vases of different shapes and then ask our attention wholly to the strange forms thus produced, expecting us to forget entirely that the really important thing is the plant itself and its inner mode of life, concerning which these artificial effects of shape and size can give us no true information whatsoever.
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