PROGRESSIVENESS IN ART.
BY PRINCIPAL CAIRD.
ii.
WE have seen, then, that in whatever sense progressiveness can be predicated of art, inasmuch as excellence in this department depends more than in any other on an original creative activity which knowledge and culture cannot pro- duce, and the results of which are not, like those of scientific research, capable of being antiquated or absorbed by those of later times, the conditions which determine the advancement of science and philosophy do not apply to art.
But not only is art thus incapable of sliaring in the progress of science ; there are some considera- tions which might seem to favour the notion that the capacities which lead to progress in science are inimical to artistic excellence, so that as science advances art must necessarily decline. An age or period of the world's history which is marked by great scientific advances cannot, it may be held, from the very nature of the thing, be one of great artistic productiveness. As in the individual life, so in the intellectual life of the world, there is a period before reflection and rational observation liave been awakened, when the only explanations we can give of ourselves, and of the world around us, are those which imagination furnishes. If it be the function of art to idealise the world, the child is often an unconscious artist ; for, out of the com- luon matter-of-fact world of sense and siglit, it creates a new and brighter world, or sheds around the real world an atmosphere in which ordinary objects and appearances are transformed, refracted, recombined. To its eyes dead nature becomes animate with a life akin to our oivn, fanciful explanations are read into its phenomena, and a thousand dreams, stories, legends, are woven around its ever-changing forms and aspects. So, it may be said, there is in the general history of human intelligence a stage analogous to this, which, like this, passes silently away when awakening reason dissipates the illusions and visionary interpretations of things in which the imagination runs riot. When that change has come, when the world has out- grown its intellectual immaturity, we may still of set purpose play with the illusory creations of imagination ; but when scientific knowledge has obtained a firm hold of human intelligence, any other than rational explanations of nature and life can only be to ourselves a conscious imposture. The charm they once had for us is impossible when we must get ourselves into an attitude of make- believe in order to feel it. As the sport of idle hours they may be permitted to survive, but as a genuine form of human experience, the age of ]3oetry and art is gone, never to be recalled. Something like this is the view of the relations of art and science, and of the fatal influence of civilisa- tion and scientific progress as the production and enjoyment of works of art, which has been set forth with his usual rlietorical eff^ectiveness by Lord Macaulay in a well-known essay. ' We think,' says he, ' that as civilisation advances, poetry almost necessarily declines. Perhaps no person can be a ]5oet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain un- soundness of mind. By poetry we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of doing, by means of words, what the painter does by means of colours. Tims the greatest of poets has described it in lines which convey a just notion of his art : — ' " As imagination bodies forth The form of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothings A local habitation and a name." Truth,' he goes on, ' is indeed essential to poetry, but it is the truth of madness. The reasonings are just, but the premisses are false. . . . Hence of all people cliildren are the most imaginative. They abandon themselves without reserve to every illusion.
Every image which is strongly presented to their mental eye produces on them the effect of reality. In a rude state of society men are children with a greater variety of ideas. It is therefore in such a state of society that we may expect to find the poetical temperament in its highest perfection. In an enlightened age there will be much intelligence, much science, much philosophy; abundance of verses, and even good ones, but little poetry.'
The gist of this argument is that poetry and art produce their effects by an illusion, which advancing knowledge dissipates, and that they lose their hold over society when the scientific habit of mind, which rejects everything but exact knowledge and reality, has begun to predominate.
I cannot but think, however, that the argument partakes of that weakness which its author ascribes to art, viz. that its premiss is false. True art does not produce its effects by illusion, and therefore the progress of science does not tend to subvert its
