Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads

by George Meredith

  The amount of regard that the artist owes to truth, so far as I am able to judge, is nearly as follows. In the purely effusive arts, such as music or the dance, truth and nature are totally irrelevant; the artist’s feeling and the gratification of the senses of mankind generally are the sole criterion of the effect. So in the fancies of decorative art, nature has very little place; suggestions are occasionally derived from natural objects, but no one is bound to adopt more of these than good taste may allow. Nobody talks of the design of a calico as being true to nature; it is enough if it please the eye. “Art is art because it is not nature.”12 The artist provides dainties not to be found in nature. There are, however, certain departments of art that differ considerably from music and fanciful decoration, in this respect, namely, that the basis of the composition is generally something actual, or something derived from the existing realities of nature or life. Such are painting, poetry, and romance.13 In these, nature gives the subject, and the artistic genius the adornment. Now, although in this case also the gratification of the senses and the aesthetic sensibilities is still the aim of the artist, he has to show a certain decent respect to our experience of reality in the management of his subject, that not being purely imaginary, like the figures of a calico, but chosen from the world of reality. Hence when a painter lays hold of the human figure in order to display his harmonies of colour and beauties of form and picturesqueness of grouping, he ought not to shock our feeling of truth and consistency by a wide departure from the usual proportions of humanity. We don’t look for anatomical exactness; we know that the studies of an artist do not imply the knowledge of a professor of anatomy; but we expect that the main features of reality shall be adhered to. In like manner, a poet is not great because he exhibits human nature with literal fidelity; to do that would make the reputation of a historian or a mental philosopher. The poet is great by his metres, his cadences, his images, his picturesque groupings, his graceful narrative, his exaltation of reality into the region of ideality; and if in doing all this he avoid serious mistakes or gross exaggerations, he passes without rebuke, and earns the unqualified honours of his genius.

  28. The attempt to reconcile the artistic with the true,—art with nature,—has given birth to a middle school, in whose productions a restraint is put upon the flights of pure imagination, and which claims the merit of informing the mind as to the realities of the world, while gratifying the various aesthetic emotions. Instead of the tales of Fairy-land, the Arabian nights, the Romances of chivalry, we have the modern novelist with his pictures of living men and manners. In painting we have natural scenery, buildings, men, and animals represented with scrupulous exactness. The sculptor and the painter exercise the vocation of producing portraits that shall hand down to future ages the precise lineaments of the men and women of their generation. Hence the study of nature has become an element in artistic education; and the artist often speaks as if the exhibition of truth were his prime endeavour and his highest honour. It is probably this attempt to subject imagination to the conditions of truth and reality that has caused the singular transference above mentioned, whereby the definition of science has been made the definition of art.

  Now I have every desire to do justice to the merits of the truth-seeking artist. Indeed the importance of the reconciliation that he aims at is undeniable. It is no slight matter to take out the sting from pleasure, and to avoid corrupting our notions of reality while gratifying our artistic sensibilities. A sober modern romancist does not outrage the probabilities of human life, nor excite delusive and extravagant hopes, in the manner of the middle-age romances. The improvement is a most beneficial one.

  Nevertheless, there is, and always will be, a distinction between the degree of truth attainable by an artist, and the degree of truth attained by a man of science or a man of business. The poet, let him desire it never so much, cannot study realities with an undivided attention. His readers in general do not desire truth simply for its own sake; nor will they accept it in the severe forms of an accurate terminology. The scientific man has not wantonly created the diagrams of Euclid, the symbols of Algebra, or the jargon of technical Anatomy; he was forced into these repulsive elements because in no other way could he seize the realities of nature with precision. It cannot be supposed that the utmost plenitude of poetic genius shall ever be able to represent the world faithfully by discarding all these devices in favour of flowery ornament and melodious metre. We ought not to look to an artist to guide us to truth; it is enough for him that he do not mis-guide us.

  Notes

  1. Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1855).

  2. Ibid., 61–62.

  3. According to Bain, “The function of a nerve is to transmit impressions, influences, or stimuli, from one part of the system to another. The nerves originate nothing; they are exclusively a medium of communication” (The Senses, 38; emphasis in original).

  4. sanctum sanctorum: Latin, literally, “holy of holies”; figuratively, used to mean a private retreat free from outside intrusion

  5. corpora . . . oblongata: parts of the brain

  6. Bain, The Senses, 534–35.

  7. Comparison, Bain maintains, is a process by which we extend the known into the unknown. See especially his chapter “Law of Similarity,” pp. 451–543.

  8. From Book I of the Iliad, line 54. Apollo is a Greek god associated with the sun.

  9. Bain, The Senses, 605–9.

  10. Erecting a purely functional building is one of Bain’s examples of a “construction of the reason.”

  11. granary: grain warehouse

  12. From Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96).

  13. In this context, “romance” should be understood as novel writing.

  A. B. Johnson, from The Physiology of the Senses (1856)1

  Alexander Bryan Johnson (1786–1867) was an American banker, amateur scientist, and philosopher of language whose Physiology of the Senses was praised by the English press for its lively synthesis of contemporary thought about how sensory perception relates to understanding and language use. Words do not name the knowledge we gain through our senses, Johnson insists. Rather, words name our intellectual or emotional understanding of sensory perceptions. As Johnson puts it, “the sensible signification of language is strictly limited by the sensible knowledge of the hearer.”2 Key to Johnson’s account of how language can promote or impede the communication of sensory experience from one person to another is a distinction among “sensible” knowledge (learned through sensory experience), “intellectual” knowledge (understood verbally or intellectually), and “emotional” knowledge (gained through analogy). Readers will find that Johnson’s theory resonates with discussions in the “Nineteenth-Century Poetics” section (particularly the essays by Hallam and Massey). The numbers preceding each section are from Johnson’s original; we retain them here for readers’ convenience.

  From Part II, “Theorem II”3

  Any feel [information received from the sense of touch, or as Johnson calls it, the sense of feeling] which feeling has not informed me of, is unknown to me. . . .

  1. When I see surgical operations, my intellect learns thereby the visible effect on the sufferer, and the audible effect, so far as he expresses any sound; but I can learn no feel that I have not felt. The principle is general, hence language is unintelligible to me in its sensible4 signification when it refers to feels that I have not experienced; though to the extent that I have felt analogous feels, my meaning of the words will approximate to their true meaning. The sensible experience of two men is rarely identical; but the differences are usually not sufficient to produce much ambiguity in their ordinary intercommunications. Our nomenclature of pains might alone enable us to infer that each man’s personal acquaintance with pains was limited to his own experience, for we talk of headache, toothache, stomachache; designating locations rather than feelings; and of throb, ache, shoot, acute; designating classes o
f pains, not particularities; or of gnawing pains, piercing, lancinated,5 stitching, burning, scalding pains; designating only effects of general processes to which the pains we would designate are deemed analogous. When, however, we speak of weight, we designate it to a grain; or of distance, we designate it to the thousandth part of an inch; practices which evince that weight and distance, with their divisions, we can manifest to each other specifically. When, therefore, a person says words cannot convey his feelings, the obstacle is in our organic inability to communicate to a man feelings he has not felt.

  2. . . . After feeling has informed me of roughness, it is known to me in the skin of a rhinoceros that I have never felt, as well as in the tongue of a cat which I have felt, while sensibly we can know such feels only as we have experienced,—the identity of every roughness being only a conception of the intellect. The inhabitants of the tropics and the inhabitants of the polar regions, speak not merely alike of cold weather generally; but of very cold, exceedingly cold, intensely cold. The poorest tenant of a log hut will discriminate some items of his food, as good, very good, excellent, delicious, rich, luscious, sumptuous; hence a sermon that should be preached in the most fashionable church of London against excessive dress, extravagant furniture, dissipation in visiting and dancing, indulgence in delicacies of eating and drinking; may be preached with equal verbal pertinancy6 and intellectual cogency in every age and in every place. I have heard such sermons in neighbourhoods where the itinerant missionary, addressing his congregation seated on wooden benches in a district school-room, lighted with a few tallow candles in tin candle-sticks, has made many a poor female auditor feel self-condemned at the pound of loaf sugar she recently purchased, or the new ribbon worn by her ambitious daughter.

  3. In the foregoing instances, we fail to discriminate the sensible meaning of words from their intellectual meaning; so the following examples will show that we fail to discriminate intellectual intimations from sensible revelations. When I am at sea and behold a distant beacon, the sight intimates to my intellect that a tangible body is the source of what I see. The sight may indicate no such fact to an inexperienced child; but when we look at the moon, few persons discriminate its indicated tangibility from tactile perception. The intellectually conceived tangible magnitude of the stars and tangible speed of light, signify sensibly certain sensible revelations that are not tangibilities; but we rarely discriminate the intellectually conceived tangibility from a revelation of feeling. Children led by this intellectual prepossession, will, with entire unconsciousness of any delusion, deem a rainbow tangible, and chase after it if you suggest the action. Younger children evince the prepossession in their attempts to grasp a shadow on a wall, or the figures of a painting. If you fill a bladder with air, and place it in the hands of a child, he will deem the feel conclusive that the contents possess visibility; and when the wind blows against us so that we can scarcely resist its pressure, the invisibility of our seeming ghostly assailant would overwhelm us with superstitious terror, were we not familiar with this exception to the accustomed association of visibility with tangibility. So you may occasionally feel something crawling over your neck, and scarcely credit a companion who informs you that nothing is visible, his negation seeming like a contradiction of your feelings, rather than the announcement of a misconception of your intellect. . . .

  From Part II, “Theorem VI”7

  All knowledge which none of my senses nor my intellect can inform me of, is emotional. . . .

  1. . . . I have experimented with comparatively few stones, yet I pick one up anywhere with entire certainty that it will fall to the earth when I relax my hold of it. Why am I certain? You may say my intellect knows that like causes produce like effects; but this dogma cannot be authoritative till I have found that the new stone is like the former ones. Here, then, is seemingly a mystery,—experience can give us only specific knowledge, yet it gives us general knowledge; but the mystery disappears when we know that knowledge is sensible, intellectual, and emotional, and that the knowledge in question is only emotional. We know sensibly the fall of a stone that is transpiring before our eyes; we know intellectually the fall that has so transpired; but we know only emotionally the fall that is future. As the fly wheel of a machine supplies a momentum during any momentary cessation of the moving power, so our emotions supply a compensating knowledge during the cessation of our sensible experience. We may never have fallen into a pit, or off a high tower, yet we have experienced analogous dangers, and a proximity to either a pit or tower excites organically emotions which obviate the danger. A man in any such position, who should seem regardless of the danger, would be stigmatized as feeling foolhardy—the phrase denoting the absence of a proper emotion. Phraseology testifies in the same way that our knowledge is emotional in relation to the future fall of a stone—we feel confident, we feel sure, we feel certain of the fall. A present fall we see—thus denoting our knowledge thereof to be sensible;—while a past fall we recollect—thus denoting our knowledge thereof to be intellectual. The famous puzzle of man’s inability to prove the existence of an external universe, or even his own existence, is founded on the same disregard of the triplicity of knowledge. The proof applicable to the existence is emotional (our consciousness), hence the ability to prove is not contradicted, as the puzzle implies it is, by the absence of sensible and intellectual proof.

  Shakespeare makes Anthony say to Cleopatra—

  Though you may know what moderation ought to be,

  You know not what it is.8

  The knowledge thereof which she possessed was intellectual, but the knowledge she lacked was emotional; the two being generically different, and only verbally identical. Some years ago, a sect existed who believed that the world was forthwith to be destroyed. Their belief was emotional, but the public not knowing that such belief may coexist with an intellectual disbelief, supposed the believers to be either insane or hypocritical. . . .

  2. Having thus endeavoured to contemplate man as tripersonal, sensible, intellectual, and emotional, we may render the division more intelligible by saying that the intellectual person remembers, thinks, reasons, reflects, speculates, guesses, calculates; the emotional person believes, doubts, disbelieves, hopes, fears, loves, contemns, envies, hates; the sensible person sees, hears, tastes, feels, and smells. The emotional person is more (feelingly) the man himself than either of the other two, our emotions being to the tripersonality what sound is to a piano; while the senses and the intellect assimilate to the keys and strings. When my intellect is uncertain as to the organism9 to which any word refers on any given use thereof, the forms of phraseology will usually resolve the uncertainty; as, for instance, is doubt intellectual, emotional, or sensible? It is emotional, for phraseologically, we say, I feel in doubt, I feel dubious, &c. In speaking of sensible things, phraseology almost uniformly designates the sense which is the source of our information; as I smell fire, I felt an earthquake, I saw a volcano, I heard thunder, I taste pepper. The intellect employs verbs designative of intellections; as I think, I guess, I remember, I reason. The emotions possess verbs designative of our susceptions; as I fear, hope, love, envy, hate, &c. But we ought to note here that the intellect conceives an analogy between its own actions and the actions of the sense of seeing, hence we say indiscriminately, I see an argument is cogent, and I see a stick is straight; though one is an intellection and the other a sight. So the intellect conceives an analogy between the sense of feeling and our emotions, hence we say indiscriminately, I feel fear, I feel pain—the first being emotional and the latter physical; but the intellect of the most uneducated man discriminates accurately in all practical uses, when any word applies to vision, and when to intellection; when to physical feeling, and when to emotional. . . .

  As phraseology in the foregoing examples manifests the organism to which verbs refer, so an equal tendency exists in phraseology to manifest the organism of the nominative.10 My emotions were unpleasant; my anger was excited; my intellect is stored
with examples; my taste rejected it; my sight was satisfied; my hearing is perfect: the hearing cannot refuse to hear, or the sight to see. Instead of thus making the organism act as nominative to verbs, we more usually employ the personal pronoun; I felt unpleasant, I heard, I tasted, &c., and nothing so speculatively mystifies our knowledge as the implied oneness of such an actor, the oneness being only a contrivance of the intellect. The same may be said of the objective “me.” The “me” which is afflicted by envy or jealousy is my emotional organism, the “me” which can be taught that three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles is my intellect; while the “me” which can be tortured by fire is my sense of feeling. The several “mes” are as heterogeneous in their underlying unverbal meanings as the several organisms to which they relate. . . .

  3. As phraseology can tell us the organism to which any word refers for its signification, so conversely our organisms can interpret phrases better than any other interpreter. For instance, the phrase “I thank you”; what is its meaning? Etymologists say it means, “I will think of you.” We may then ask what the latter phrase means, and we can arrive at no end of such inquisition; but, by looking inwardly, we shall find an emotion which every man experiences on becoming the recipient of kind offices from other men; and that constitutes the ultimate meaning of the phrase. Adieu! God bless you! Peace go with you! refer to another emotion which is organically excited in friends when they are about to separate, hence in all languages some phrase must be employed to express the emotion, as also the former; and the phrases will be dictated by the different habits or local knowledge of the different races who use the respective phrases. Etymology may reveal to us how “I thank you,” came to be applied by Englishmen to a given emotion, but when we would know the meaning of the new use we must not look to the etymology, but to the organic manifestation to which the new use refers.