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comprehensive view of what he conceives to be worth while in human life. His style is a subject for dispute. But this is only to say that Carlyle is a conspicuous illustration of the fact that the style is the man. So long as you find a suggestion of worth and greatness in his presentation of life you will find him eloquent and impressive; and while he remains eloquent he remains significant. If this impression is dissipated his eloquence becomes tirade.

Likewise of Dickens. What makes "David Copperfield" to most persons the most impressive of his novels is the fact that there clearly you have Dickens himself. In his characters and in their difficulties the writer of fiction reveals his personal conception of the problem of life. If you are a lover of Dickens and rank him as in some manner a true artist it means that in the sober middle-class ideals that stand forth in his pages and in his sympathetic handling of lower-class life you find some of the value and essence of genuine humanity; and if you dismiss him as a sentimentalist, it means that you question the significance of middle and lower-class virtue. I suppose, again, that Arthur Pendennis is largely Thackeray himself-Thackeray taking himself humorously yet none the less offering an apologia. Pendennis, I fancy, is just the sort of decent, wholesome, yet withal clever and intelligent young Englishman most congenial to Thackeray's taste. He is not quite a man of genius, and he is no hero; but this only means that Thackeray has no very high appreciation of heroes-a moral estimate, be it noted, in which there will be others to agree with him.

Granting that seemingly great artists are sometimes seemingly the most immoral of men-seemingly, I mean, for the first look-it will be no less true that the final estimate of the art will coincide closely with the final estimate of the man. One cannot remain for long an admirer of Villon and also a Puritan moralist. Nor, again, will Tolstoi's four volumes of "War and Peace" remain an artistic monstrosity for one who has come to share Tolstoi's belief in a mystical humanity, the life of which is revealed

not in the passing acts of individuals but in the slower movements of nations and races; by one, in other words, whose moral ideal for the individual is self-effacement and absorption of self into humanity. For my own part, though I find Balzac's novels fascinating and compelling when once I am past the beginning, I cannot rate him as the great artist that his admirers usually find in him; and mainly because to my taste his slavish admiration of the manners of high life casts a blemish of vulgarity upon nearly every scene. And I have little appreciation of the much-praised "art" of de Maupassant because it seems to me that his "effects", so far from indicating either breadth or depth of experience of life, are just the customary shallow tricks of the journalist who creates dramatic situations (i.e., "news") by the simple distortion of fact. On the other hand, I am disposed to rate Tourgenieff as a very great artist because I seem to find in him (possibly indeed because I know him to have been a serious student of philosophy) a background of gravity and brooding contemplation, a sense of the tragic complexity of all human motive, which gives suggestiveness to the simplest of his sketches of Russian country life and to his revolutionists, such as Basarof and Roudine, a significance almost Shakespearian.

Any of these judgments of mine may be disputed. But it will be found, I think, that the ground of, the dispute will include the moral ground. It will be claimed that I have wrongly estimated not merely the artist but the man.

CHAPTER XI

THE BEAUTY OF KNOWLEDGE

§ 41. Aesthetic impressions and scientific facts. § 42. History as a branch of art.

Ο

NE of the more obvious objections to any conception

of the unity of the spirit is that which takes the

form of saying that there is no element either of the moral or of the aesthetic, no element of choice or of taste, in our knowledge of facts. Facts, it is said, are in no sense formed or created, they are simply given. The question is too large for comprehensive treatment, and the present brief chapter is merely to suggest what can be said for the thesis that knowledge of fact involves creative imagination. This suggestion I will convey through a more or less free rendering of Croce's theory of "impressions" and of his seemingly paradoxical theory that history is a branch of art.

§ 41

According to Croce art is expression; the expression of an impression, as he also says-that and nothing more. This means that in a certain perhaps proper sense of the word art is absolutely democratic. A peasant or a duke, a mill-worker or a poet, a hotel-waiter or a gentleman-andscholar-one subject has as much of the possibility of beauty in him as the other. There is no intrinsically ugly. And thus Croce takes issue with an authoritarian aesthetics which, like authoritarian ethics, believes that God in his wisdom has put a finer kind of human nature into some

frames than into others and has marked each with an

appropriate sign.1

But he also faces a scepticism more coldly factual. Art the communication of impressions! one may exclaim. What nonsense! When the cook tells me that she finds in the refrigerator only one pound of butter and four eggs she communicates an impression, but the communication is not art. It seems (so runs the objection) that Croce has missed the difference between two kinds of impressions. On the one hand we have the painter's impression of a landscape, or of a person, which he tries to express on canvas. Of this kind are the properly aesthetic impressions, and these we welcome as art. On the other hand are those ordinary impressions of matter of fact which the psychologist calls sensations, or sense-perceptions. The communication of these impressions is not art but plain information, or perhaps science.

Now to the reader of Croce it will be clear that he has not for a moment forgotten this difference. It is rather the chief purpose of his argument to show that this difference, the difference between the aesthetic and the matterof-fact impression, is not in the last analysis a real difference. At best it is a difference of degree and circumstance. And if we remember that in the Greek the term "aesthetic" covers both the artistic impression and the matter-of-fact perception we shall find ourselves asking whether after all every experience of matter of fact is not in its own measure an artistic experience. If so it will mean that all of our experience is in its own measure-so far indeed as it is any conscious experience-aesthetic experience; in other words, that all experience is, just as experience, a "sense of life".

This I believe to be profoundly true, but how to make it demonstratively true is another matter. For in most of

1 Here let me repeat a caveat. Croce also offends authoritarian ethics by teaching "art for art's sake”—along with, as it happens, “ duty for duty's sake". This blind service of two irresponsible masters implies that art is irrelevant to morality, and this it is my chief purpose to disprove.

our experience we seem to take the world just as it is given, most of all the world of common fact. Here we talk about "data" and "presentations". And here at least it seems that the mind is truly a tabula rasa, taking what comes just as it comes, without exercise of taste, with no regard for taste; nay, forewarned-by the scientist and the logician, by the psychiatrist, and most effectively by the brutal common sense of the plain man—against any exercise of taste. And thus the word "impression" comes to mean an inertly passive experience, to be described not as an activity of mind but as a "mental state".

Yet to any one initiated into the practice of self-consciousness, to one become curious about his "mental states", it will be clear, I think, that the passive character of the perceptive "states" is chiefly a convention. Even those who insist most upon the "given" character of sense-experience recognize the seeming activity of "apperception", or selective attention. But what this means we may best realize in the fatigue that follows a multitude of impressions --for example, after a day spent in a comfortable Pullman car. Then it seems that, so far from receiving passive impressions, it has required a day-long strain of attention to keep our world straight through a welter of shifting scenes. Here at least, it seems that the world is not given to us in a rational, intelligible, and harmonious picture. We have to form the picture. And to form an intelligible picture out of the daily run of modern experience is often a terrible effort. A pupil of mine just recovering from nervous prostration told me that in Chicago, where he lived, he could not venture down into the business district, since the sign-boards alone were too much for him. One need not succumb to nervous prostration to understand this.

Perception of fact is not, then, as it seems, a case of having an impression stamped upon us; it is always a process of forming and creating. We do not simply get an impression of the world before us, we form an impression. If the activity of forming is not always in evidence

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