69 We pay far too much heed to recognizability: the artist’s ability to make all his work typical of his style. It pleases the would-be connoisseur in us. Now it is true that every style and technique has to be explored; and a rapid migration through style after style, as every art student knows, is not the best method of producing satisfying work. But there is a balance to be struck.
POETRY AND HUMANITY
70 I do not believe, as it is fashionable in this democratic age to believe, that the great arts are equal; though, like human beings, they have every claim to equal rights in society. Literature, in particular poetry, is the most essential and the most valuable. In what follows, by ‘poetry’ I mean whatever is memorably expressed in words: principally but not necessarily what is ordinarily meant by poetry.
71 The ‘languages’ of the other arts are all languages of the mind minus words. Music is the language of aural sensation; painting, of visual; sculpture, of plastic-visual. They are all language substitutes of one kind or another, though in certain fields and situations these language substitutes are far more effective in communicating than verbal language proper. Visual art can convey appearance better than words, but as soon as it tries to convey what lies behind visual appearance, words are increasingly likely to be of more use and value. Similarly music can convey sound, and very often generalized emotion, better than words; but with the same disadvantage when we try to go beyond the surface of the sound or the emotions it evokes.
72 The language of music can convey natural sound and can create sound which is pleasurable purely as sound; but we think chiefly of it as an evoker of emotion. It reproduces natural sounds far better than words, which have only the clumsy technique of onomatopoeia; it creates pure sound as words can only if they are largely deprived of meaning, and then only within the narrow range of the human voice. But it evokes emotion in a characteristically imprecise way, unless descriptive words (as in a programme title or a libretto) or historical convention link the emotion verbally to some precise situation.*
73 Visual art has to deal with the mask; the artist may know what lies behind the appearance of what he paints or draws or sculpts, and we say of some visual artefacts, such as good portraits, that they ‘tell’ us about the subject. They may do this because, as Lavater believed of all human physiognomy, the appearance happens to reveal what lies behind; but they are more likely to do so because the artist translates his verbal knowledge of what lies behind the appearance into distortions or special emphases of the mask of appearance that reveal the ‘secret’ behind – a process that ends in caricature.
74 This distortion process has an advantage; it allows some, perhaps most, of the ‘secret’ behind, of the real character behind the appearance, to be grasped at a glance. If I am adequately to explain in words the sadness of this Rembrandt self-portrait, I must study his entire work and his biography. The iconographic entry into the reality of his life takes, for any except the professional critic, only a few minutes; the verbal-biographic will take at least several hours, and perhaps much longer.
75 There is the same comparative immediacy of effect, of communication, in music; in, say, the welling sadness of the adagio from Mozart’s G minor quintet. But the disadvantage of this immediacy is that, without verbal knowledge of the circumstances of Rembrandt’s or Mozart’s life, I have only a very imprecise knowledge of the true nature of their sadness. I know its intensity, but not its cause. I am once again faced with a mask, which may be very beautiful and moving, but behind which I can really penetrate only with words. In short, both the visual and the aural arts sacrifice accuracy of information to speed and convenience of communication.
76 This both justifies and evaluates them. Being human is wanting to do and to know and to feel and to understand many things in a short span; and any way of making that knowing, feeling and understanding more available to the many is justifiable. But the quality of knowing and understanding, and ultimately of feeling, must be inferior in the visual and aural arts to that in poetry. All the achievements of visual art beyond direct representation of appearance are in a sense the triumphs of a deaf-mute over his deaf-muteness, just as in music the triumphs are those of a blind mute over his mute blindness.
77 The stock reply in this often-used analogy is that literature is both blind and deaf: not being mute is its specific grace. But the incontrovertible fact is that there is no artefact in the other arts that could not be more or less precisely defined by words, while there are countless artefacts and situations in literature that cannot even in the vaguest way be defined by the ‘languages’ of the other arts. We have neither the time nor the vocabulary nor the desire to describe the great majority of aural and visual artefacts in words, but they are all ultimately describable; and the converse is not so.
78 The word is inherent in every artistic situation, if for no other reason than that we can analyse our feelings about the other arts only in words. This is because the word is man’s most precise and inclusive tool; and poetry is the using of this most precise and inclusive tool memorably.
79 Some scientists say that man’s most precise tool is the mathematical symbol; semantically some equations and theorems appear to have a very austere and genuine poetry. But their precision is a precision in a special domain abstracted, for perfectly good practical reasons, from the complexity of reality. Poetry does not make this abstraction of a special domain in order to be more precise. Science is, legitimately, precision at all cost; and poetry, legitimately, inclusion at all cost.
80 Science is always in parenthesis; poetry is not.
81 Some technological philosophers and scientists dismiss memorable poetic statements as no more than brilliant generalizations or statements of emotional attitude, whose only significant value is as historical data or bits of biographical description of the poet. To these bigots, all statements not statistically or logically verifiable are supposedly tinsel, pretty carnival gew-gaws remote from the sobriety of the allegedly most real reality: their notion of science.
82 If he had been such a scientist, Shakespeare would have begun Hamlet’s famous soliloquy with some properly applicable statement, such as ‘The situation in which I find myself is one where I must carefully examine the arguments for and against suicide, never forgetting that the statements I shall make are merely emotional verbal statements about myself and my own present situation and must not be taken to constitute any statement about any other person or situation or to constitute anything more than biographical data’.
83 Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda. When once our short life has burnt away, death is an unending sleep. This is a totally unverifiable statement, but it is a proof that other standards exist besides verifiability. Why else has it been countlessly remembered for two thousand years?
84 The ‘brilliant generalizations’ of great poetry are not pseudo-equations or pseudo-definitions, because the things and emotions they summarize and define exist, yet cannot be summarized or defined in any other way. The situation about which most poetic statements are made is so complex that only such a statement can make it. Just as the equation may be proved useless because of errors about the data its symbols are based on, so may the poetic statement be ‘disproved’ because it is not sufficiently memorable – not semantically perceptive enough or, non-semantically, not well enough expressed. The better poet disproves the worse.