Page:Some New Philosophical Views.djvu/11

Rh criticism condemning the unreality of the theatre, protesting against a kind of preposterousness in some parts of our dress, and in the upholstering of certain apartments in our houses, and as being also shown in some of the manners allotted to the more leisurely hours of social intercourse, if it were borne in mind that, beneath the grotesqueness, these things have a real use in the sudden and complete disengagement of our ordinary efforts of attention, new adjustments being in these ways challenged in their place. It is easy to ridicule the circumstance of the chief room in every house being tricked out in a style which would seem to be only befitting if we were sophisticated fairies playing at an ornamental domesticity for a few hours now-and-again of an evening; also, there undeniably is palpable absurdity in opera being performed in a foreign language, and the full dress of both sexes, though in different kinds, has an admitted preposterousness. All that can be said on the other hand is, that universal experience shows this artificiality to be in a manner natural; since alongside the world of business and of practical life, a long-descended, shining, holiday tradition of an opposite, unserious sphere, wholly unlike common reality, has had to be kept up by sheer way of balance. Periodically, the artificiality grows ridiculously elaborate; amusement becomes more laborious than work,—the two almost exchange places. Then, Satire finds its true duty in exposing the failure, and effecting a sobering through the freshness of a return to plain reality; the laying aside the ponderous triviality being a temporary relief and recreation. But there is an abiding need for positive, unmitigated relaxation. The proper test is, whether the influence of the artificiality is to really lighten the spirits; if so, this second function of Art is discharged by it. Criticism must wait for depression setting in—the ceasing of a light, natural laughter is Satire's due signal."

I am tempted to find space for yet another passage, where the writer—still inquiring into the explanation of the feeling of Sublimity—argues that in Terror there is always a perception of more than Novelty. He observes:—

"A mountain with no scars upon its sides telling of the rage of storms; no dizzying sheer descents of plunging precipice; no gulfs; no inaccessible peaks; but a mountain showing all gradual, smooth, shining,—this would not be sublime in the second of the two senses above specified, no matter what its mere size. To give it sublimity of that kind you must mark it with violence. It needs here-and-there singeing and seaming with traces of the flaming thunderbolt; fringes of black struggling pines must show dwarfed and painful on the narrow edges of its unsheltering cliffs; you must hang somewhere amidst its higher snows the fatal avalanche, held only by creaking faulty chains of ice; the beaked-and-taloned eagle has to sweep and soar about its cliffs; it must have mysterious ravines, usually black with silence, in which you know lie bleaching the bones of victims of the precipices and the eagles—those dark abysses changing at times into the sudden crash and roar of unexplained tumult. The secret of the fearful addition to sublimity thus got is this,—that each circumstance in that list covers a nervous disintegration."

There is a good deal more in the chapter that must be left unnoticed here—the author's views of the function of Tragedy, and of a certain artifact which he looks for from the progress of physical science. Literature he styles the final department of Art, doing so on the ground that, by employing words as its medium, "it alone can use multiformity of associations, being able in a single phrase to mix the cues for starting several senses." But it may take some readers by surprise to find what is the writer's last word on this subject of Art: it is a long way from being wholly eulogistic. He says:—