Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/38

 32 Philosophies of Style As a starting point I shall take the opposition, long ago pointed out, 19 between the imitative theory of poetry advanced by Aristotle and the theory of creation assigned to Bacon. According to Aris- totle, poetry is imitation imitation of something outside the mind of the author and it must meet the test of truth, not necessarily literal fidelity to the facts of the external world, but fidelity to the "universal" which constitutes a higher kind of reality. Bacon, on the other hand, regarded poetry as creation or fantasy, a use of the imagination in the construction, out of images furnished by the real world, of that which satisfies one's desires as the real world cannot do. The distinction of definition thus stated would not be accepted by the advocates of classical and romantic theories today. Aristo- tle does not sufficiently provide for the element added by the author to satisfy the modern classicist, and Bacon divorces the world of imagination from the world of reality somewhat too crude- ly for the modern romanticist, who would deny that the world of art exists primarily to satisfy the desires thwarted in the world of reality. And yet we are getting at an important implication which I wish to bring out. According to the theory of representation, literature is set over against life, and yet is most intimately related to it. Literature points out the real significance of life, it suggests psychology, tends to emphasize art as representing purely the aesthetic life, and the aesthetic life, in turn, as distinct from the rest of life. Consequently, there has been a movement toward the identification of matter and form. Beginning with the subjective and individual, aesthetics carries through its explanation in subjective terms. See Bosanquet, History of Aesthetic, pp. 441 ff.; Croce's Aesthetic (Douglas Ainslee's translation), pp. 26 f. The study of the origins of art on the other hand, seems to favor the distinction between matter and form. It finds that art is a social fact, that artistic activity, as Him and Grosse and others have shown, has sprung, almost universally, from practical activity, ,and that the art of civilized people has utilitarian ends. It does not see art as primarily a phenomenon in the life of an individual, the end of which is self- realization; rather, it sees art as a social phenomenon which has a social end. The picture, the poem, the temple of early peoples, and even of uncivilized tribes of our own time, were fundamentally useful, and even among the most highly civilized peoples they are not divorced from usefulness. Only music furnishes a possible exception. See Hirn, Origins of Art, p. 306; Grosse, The Beginnings of Art, p. 406. 19 David Masson, Essays Biographical and Critical (Cambridge, 1856), p. 41 1. See also Bacon's The Advancement of Learning, Book II, iv. 2, and various passages in Aristotle's Poetics.