Pope’s Essay on Criticism
(1711)
Some beauties yet no precepts can
declare,
For there’s happiness as well as
care.
Music resembles poetry, in each
Are nameless graces which no methods
teach,
And which a master hand alone can
reach.
If, where the rules not far enough
extend
(Since rules were made but to promote
their end)
Some lucky license answers to the
full
The intent proposed, that
license is the rule.
Thus Pegasus, a nearer way to take,
May boldly deviate from the common
track.
From vulgar bounds with brave
disorder part
And snatch a grace beyond the reach
of art,
Which without passing through
judgment
gains
The heart, and all its end at once
attains.
But though the ancients thus their
rules invade
(As kings dispense with laws themselves
have made)
Moderns, beware! or if you must
offend
Against the precept, ne'r transgress
its end;
Let it be seldom, and compelled by
need
And at least their precedent plead.
The critic else proceeds without
remorse
Seizes your fame, and puts his law in
force.
Some to conceit alone their taste
confine,
And glittering thoughts struck out
with at every line;
Pleased with a work where nothing's
just or fit
One glaring chaos and wild heap of
wit.
Poets, like painters, thus unskilled
to trace
The naked nature and the living
grace,
With gold and jewels cover every
part,
And hide in ornament their want of
art.
Tis not enough your counsel
still be true;
Blunt truths more mischief than nice
falsehoods do.
Men must be taught as if you taught
them not
And things unknown proposed as things
forgot.
Without good breeding truth is
disapproved
That only makes superior Sense
belov'd.
Tis best sometimes your censure to
restrain,
and charitably let the dull be
vain;
Your silence there is better than
your spite,
For who can rail so long as
they can write?
By any account Samuel
Johnson (1709-1784) was a moralist. That is, he conceived the purpose
of literature to be the instruction in morals, even if that entailed a
didacticism which Pope would disapprove. Johnson’s Sermons accomplish that
purpose effectively by which I mean he does not reduce the Gospel to any series
of commonplaces or catch phrases but preserves the obscurity that one encounters
in attempts to apply its measure to everyday judgements, though not with such grand
‘metaphysical’ obscurity that one finds in the Sermons of John Donne. It was
only with great difficulty in the performance tact that Johnson could
preach the Gospel to the men of his age without giving great offense. The men
and women of his age appreciated his efforts even above the efforts those who
were specifically assigned to the task of preaching in Church and on solemn
public occasions.
Well , anyone familiar with Johnson
would likely recognize the influence his style and manner has had on my own.
I’ve read a lot of Johnson. This is a good example of his best work:
Supposedly, Johnson was the first to
recognize that theater-goers were not necessarily expecting an accurate
representation of life as it is lived in a unity of time and space but took
their pleasure in the performance they witnessed as fiction. If they did not
regard the show as a fiction, a pretense, they would not be likely to enjoy it.
Who wants to witness real murder, heartbreak or tragedy? That the first act of
a play takes place in Athens and moments later the second in Rome is no
imposition of the imagination of audiences, as some critics of Johnson’s time
liked to claim.
Johnson’s criticism of Shakespeare
runs along these lines:
‘His first defect is that to which
may be imputed most of the evil in books and men. He sacrifice virtue to
convenience, and this so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he
seems to write without any moral purpose. From his writings indeed a system of
social duty may be selected, for he that thinks reasonably must think morally;
but his precepts and axioms drop casually from him; he makes no just
distribution of good and evil, nor is always careful to show in the virtuous a
disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indifferently through
right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further care, and leaves
their operations to chance. This fault the barbarity of his age cannot
extenuate; or it is always the writer’s duty to make the world better, and
justice is a virtue independent on time or place.”
Besides the fact that unpacking the
dense condensations in this paragraph would expose several weak
arguments, he’s pretty much dead wrong. Amoralism ( be sure that there is a
distinction between that and immorality) is one of the true pleasures and
foundation of whatever ‘instruction’ is to be gleaned from literature, when
fiction better encompasses the real than science, philosophy, religion or
history. As Hans-Georg Moeller put it:
“...for an empirical point of view,
in everyday life and even in most of our important decisions, ethics or morals
do not provide useful guide. It is doubtful, for example, that becoming
righteously angry with an obnoxious colleague, boss or family member is more
beneficial than avoiding a moral a mindset altogether . Actually, when moral
discourse prevails, disaster often appears. The demand for “moral smartness” (
as in the “smart diplomacy” advocated by the present U.S. Administration, or
the debate over immigration) is a symptom of social crisis and a society
verging on hopeless disorder and accumulating misery.”
It is the amoralism of Shakespeare
which provides a space for the catharsis and sublimity in his plays which
Johnson attributes, some what contradictorily, to the bards experience in
the rough and tumble of the London theatrical scene, his connections to the
common audiences and popular books of his day rather than an extension of
formal education in the ‘classics’; his origins in the artisan class.
Strict probity is not how most people get on in life. Even for those who
can afford it, it is more often than not a self-delusion. It’s hard to imagine
Johnson didn’t understand that. Owing to the apparent contradiction perhaps we
must conclude that at least in some respects Johnson was quite mad, which
is not far from the depiction in Reynold’s portrait.
David Hume (1711-1776), a
paragon of philosophical excellence in many quarters, always seemed to me to
take the stance of lecturing to fools. Perhaps because what once was uniquely enlightening
is now taken as pre-suppositionally commonplace. Between various opinions that
abound in the world definite judgments as to their truth or falsity can
be made. The moon is not made of green cheese. We’ve gone to the moon and
discovered tha it is made of rock. In the matter of sentiment and taste, the
proofing of the puddling is not so simple. Never-the-less, Hume did believe
some aesthetic judgments were better than others based on the experience of the
judges. What attention, deliberations, comparisons, allowance for different
points of view in both time and space, what ends are being pursued in judging
make a difference, establishes validity and sets up a hierarchy. It’s the same
story the editor of The Critical Tradition mentioned in his Introduction:
the vicious conundrum that ‘to know something you must know everything’, as it
may apply to beauty or any of the literary graces.
This is a highly debatable
proposition which has a tendency to ‘go around in circles,” somewhat
solipsistically. In her article “Contingencies of Value” in Critical Inquiry
no 10, (1983) Barbara Herrnstein Smith made the argument that
“There is a tendencious conviction
among those who argue these questions that unless one judgment can be shown to
be more ‘valid’ than another, then all judgments must be ‘equal’ or ‘equally
valid.” Indeed, it is the odor or apparent absurdity of such egalitarianism
that commonly gives force to the charge that “relativism” produces social chaos
or is a logically untenable position. While the radical contingency of all
value certainly does imply that no value judgment can be more valid than
another in the sense of being a more accurate statement about the
value of an object ( for the latter concept then becomes vacuous), it does not
follow that all value judgments are equal or equally valid. On the contrary,
what does follow is that the concept of “validity” is inappropriate with
regards to evaluations and that there are is no non-trivial parameter with
respect to which they could be “equal”.
The goodness or badness of an
evaluation, a judgment of taste based on sentiment with respect to the
beauty and graces of any literary or other artistic production, is not a matter
of abstract truth value but how well it performs various desired/ desirable
functions for the various people who may at any time perform them.
Whatever else David Hume might have
said about Art- I have not read all that he did- it is consistent with what he
said about Religion, that they do not have abstract truth value.
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