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G.W.F. Hegel. In the 20th century, his Continental Idealism lost to Anglo-American Pragmatism.
HEGEL:
A work of art is a product of human activity, and this activity being the conscious production of an external object can also be known and expounded, and learnt and pursued by others. For what one man makes, another, it may seem, could make and imitate too, if only he were first acquainted with the manner of proceeding; so that, granted universal acquaintance with the rules of artistic production, it would only be a matter of everyone’s pleasure to carry out the procedure in the same manner and produce works of art. It is in this way that rule-providing theories, with their prescriptions calculated for practical application, have arisen.
But what can be carried out on such directions can only be something formally regular and mechanical. Being abstract in content, such rules reveal themselves, in their presence of adequacy to fill the consciousness of the artist, as wholly inadequate, since artistic production is not a formal activity in accordance with given specifications. On the contrary, as spiritual activity it is bound to work from its own resources and bring before the mind’s eye a quite other and richer content and more comprehensive individual creations than formulae can provide.
Thus, as it turns out, the tendency just indicated has been altogether abandoned, and instead of it the opposite one has been adopted to the same extent. For the work of art was no longer regarded as a product of general human activity, but as a work of an entirely specially gifted spirit which now, however, is supposed to give free play simply and only to its own particular gift, as if to a specific natural force; it is to cut itself altogether loose from attention to universally valid laws and from a conscious reflection interfering with its own instinctive-like productive activity. From this point of view the work of art has been claimed as a product of talent and genius.
A third view concerning the idea of the work of art as a product of human activity refers to the placing of art in relation to the external phenomena of nature. Here the ordinary way of looking at things took easily to the notion that the human art-product ranked below the product of nature; for the work of art has no feeling in itself and is not through and through enlivened, but, regarded as an external object, is dead; we are accustomed to value the living higher than the dead.
However: Human interest, the spiritual value possessed by an event, an individual character, an action in its complexity and outcome, is grasped in the work of art and blazoned more purely and more transparently than is possible on the ground of other non-artistic things. Therefore the work of art stands higher than any natural product which has not made this journey through the spirit. For everything spiritual is better than any product of nature. Besides, no natural being is able, as art is, to present the divine Ideal.
WORDSWORTH:
It is supposed, that by the act of writing in verse an Author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association; that he not only thus apprizes the Reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded. This exponent or symbol held forth by metrical language must in different areas of literature have excited very different expectations: for example, in the age of Catullus, Terrence and Lucretius, and that of Statius or Claudian; and in our own country, in the age of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher, and that of Donne and Cowley, or Dryden, or Pope. I will not take upon me to determine the exact import of the promise which by the act of writing in verse an Author, in the present day, makes to his Reader; but I am certain, it will appear to many persons that I have not fulfilled the terms of an engagement thus voluntarily contracted. I hope the Reader will not censure me, if I attempt to state what I have proposed to myself to perform.
To choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended; and are more durable; and lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.
Nature is beautiful and the products of Man are not—the exception being art, which finds its beauty in nature. This sums up the Ancient Greek view of art and that whole range of Criticism with Beauty as its measure.
If it is ugly, it does not get a hearing in art. And this Greek ideal has not gone away. Moderns pride themselves on having richer, broader, and more varied views and appreciations when it comes to art, and Hegel and Wordsworth are typical examples of Art Criticism that makes human interest and variety, not beauty, the apparent concern.
No more cookie-cutter beautiful art! We are modern!
Not really.
Hegel insists art has an ideal/spiritual dimension which springs from “human interest,” and thus “dead” art is superior to “living” nature. But Hegel speaks abstractly and can be dismissed for that reason.
Wordsworth is cleverer and the more profound philosopher of art. W. understands the paradox: if one attempts to praise man-made products (the plain “speech of men,” for instance) as something superior to nature, one turns those very products into “art,” which is the one Greek exception in the simple aesthetic above. The modern attempt to escape the Greek Aesthetic proves impossible, for the simple reason that you become what you attempt to praise. Permit the ugly and you are only, in so many ways, including the ugly as art, not as the ugly.
The truly ugly always remains out of sight. Wordsworth’s “speech of men,” we are so often reminded, is rhyming poetry.
Despite Wordsworth’s ‘modern’ rhetoric, Wordsworth is finally Greek, not modern.
But… not quite.
And this is where Wordsworth’s cleverness enters and why he changed art, poetry, and the world forever. W. understood the challenge of getting out from under the Greek Aesthetic, and the key was Nature—not in the Greek sense, as in a beautiful human body, but in the modern sense: Wordsworth was poetry’s first environmentalist. Nature becomes not the ideal, but everything.
Wordsworth said: OK, I’m not going to be a Greek; I’m not going to give a damn about Beauty; I’m going to write poetry that is the ‘speech of men.’ And here Wordsworth is betrayed by the paradox: the surface of his poetry is ideally beautiful; it does not really admit any ugliness (plain speech) and so, sorry, Wordsworth, you are Beauty-endowed.
But Wordsworth goes further. After (and this is why we included that prior passage) laying the groundwork with his observation of previous poetry in history: “certain classes of ideas and expressions” are chosen and “others carefully excluded,” and after his famous pronouncement that he will replicate “language really used by men,” the dense passage runs on (like a mighty river) to add that he will select “low and rustic life,” in which are profoundly and passionately expressed “the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”
Wordsworth, in modern guise, says he will expand his “language” to include that “really used by men” (which was not true) but then announces “rustic life” will be the theme. By “selecting” this theme, Wordsworth “carefully excludes” the ugly products of urban Man: Roman poets and their tawdry women, for instance; Roman poets Wordsworth explicitly cited in his previous ‘graph. Wordsworth understands that all poets, no matter how ‘modern,’ must always exclude what they find to be ugly.
Wordsworth is the first Modern Poet to consciously make concessions to the inescapable Greek Aesthetic: Wordsworth’s plain “rural life” is far less “modern” than the Roman poets and their urban floozies with foul language and sexuality and eye makeup—who are older than Wordsworth by two thousand years.
Wordsworth’s sleight-of-hand shows us “language” but gives us “rustic life.”
And “rustic life” is key for what it leaves out.
Sex is conspicuously absent from Wordsworth. No beautiful Greek bodies in Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s nature is—nature, the modern nature of environmentalism. Modern critics may charge Wordsworth with being the environmentalist of “Romantic, Lake District, white males” (is the only ‘true’ environmentalist a black gay woman from New York City?) but the British Empire was in Wordsworth’s day global-conscious and the planet potentially to be managed by the British—interestingly enough, today the most urgent and prominent environmentalist is Prince Charles. Qualifying Wordsworth’s environmentalism is a quibble we’ll leave aside for the time being.
All poets—no matter how modern—exclude the ugly. Do contemporary poets, for instance, put ‘hate speech’ in their poetry? No, of course not, and why? Because it’s ugly. The “language” of poetry, the selections of “ideas and expressions” made by poetry, is still limited.
Wordsworth broke through, and broke through, big time (Emerson and other early American liberals crossed the ocean to beat a path to his door) into a modern sensibility, by attaching himself to—what has become today’s secular religion: the Planet.
WINNER: WORDSWORTH
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
