THE ART AND ETHIC OF GEORGE MACDONALD.

Evening Star, Issue 18809, 6 December 1924, Page 2

THE ART AND ETHIC OF GEORGE MACDONALD.

Ajit is one of those words whose moaning everybody knows and nobody can tell. It is as elusive os an atmosphere. We speak of the art of reading. Wo oppose art -to science and to Nature. Wo talk of the fine arts and mechanical. We have oven got so'far as talk of the “noble art” of sclf-dofcncc. The late Sir Waller Resant wrote an essay claiming for the novelists’ work a co-ordinate place with the arts of painting, music, poetry. We cannot here enter into any detailed discussion of this difficult question. Emerson has two or throe essays on the subject. For our purpose. wo follow him. Everything is at first a thought. But the thought is ever tending to express itself "in action. The action may take two forma—use and beauty. So emerges the distinction between the fine arts and the useful. In Nature we find both. So we arrive at the conception of Nature as thought, as the expression of a Universal Mind. A generation ago .that would hardly have been admitted. But now wo have the International Congress of Philosophy, which met recently at Naples, affirming it. We are told that it has been proved experimentally that “even in the piano of the physical life there are two kinds of realities operating in the closest possible connection with each other. One of these is nonsensuous and non-mechanical in its nature, and it directs and controls the other.” When wo pass up to the higher forms of life to man this becomes more and more evident. It finds thought, intelligence in. the world, otherwise science would be impossible. There is, then, but one Universal Mind. All the arts, useful and beautiful, are an attempt to read and reveal the working of this Universal Mini The aim of the true artist is to hide himself and become the medium of it. The moment ho obtrudes himself he limits or contracts the value of ms work, just as the moment he who works in the useful arts contradicts Nature she simply walks over him, wipes him out, drowns him in her seas, crushes him in her wheels, or buries him beneath his towers. This brings us within sight of the aid of George Macdonald. * * * * It was said last week on this page that Macdonald was a born preacher, but ho forgot sometimes

That stars beyond a certain height Give mortals neither heat nor light. As he once said himself, “ thoughts began to bum in me, and words to come unbidden, till I had almost to restrain myself from rising in the pew ” and making bis way to the pulpit. He preached in poetry and prose. The former he loved best. In one of his earliest books he says: “My conviction is that the poetry is far the deepest in us, and that the prose is only broken down poetry.” His first literary venture was in poetry, but ho never quite mastered the musical form. The thought is there all right, but the expression which makes it poetry is largely Jacking. What, then, was the substance or gospel of Ids preaching ? He was a mystic, and what is a mystic ? The roan in the street, and some others as well, imagine it has to do with mistiness and moonshine. As Macdonald says in ‘ A Seaboard Parish ’: “It is a kind of spiritual ash pit, into which they consign dust and stones, never asking if they may not be gold dust and rubies all in a heap.” As a distinguished member of the mystic cult puts it: “ To the mystic all the universe is an omen and a sign. Everything that exists is an outward expression of an inward thought of God. Ho is the great symbolic teacher. He teaches by signs, which ho writes on the veil which hangs between us and His face, but which is thin and penetrable. ... It is this that is meant by those who insist, like the author of ‘ John Inglesant,’ that Nature is sacramental, an exterior judex e(f an inner grace and virtue.” Or as a poet puts it: The Lord is in His holy Place, In all things near and far, Shckinah of the snowflake He, And glory of the star; And secret of the April-hand That stirs the field to flowers, Whose little tabernacles rise To hold Him through the hours. 9 * * * So wo arrive at George Macdonald s art. He is an idealist. Since his death nineteen years ago idealism in art has been in the shadow. Realism has spread itself over all the field. What is the difference between them? The Realist preaches and practises a return to Nature. Ho asks for truth, by which he means things just as they arc—just as they present themselves to the senses. Ho declines limitation. To him nothing is common or unclean; nothing that is not a lit subject for art. Art knows no morals. It is morally indifferent. Its function is to photograph what is in the heavens above or the hells beneath. You have its theory popularly when people say of a work of fiction; “ Oh, it is absurd. It is impossible; that never happened. No such people as are depicted there ever existed. It is not true to Nature.” The principle which gives body to criticism of this sort is tho principle of Realism, the principle whicn demands that the novelist should reproduce for us Nature and life as it actually is, as we see it around us every day. 11 The novelist, says Zola, one of the first and great masters of this school, “is not a moralist, but an anatomist, who contents himself with telling what ho finds in tho human corpse. The formula of the naturalistic method in literature is tho same as that of the sciences, particularly physiology. It is a searching inquest into tho vital and oiganic facts of individual and social life in all their manifestations.” Much may be urged in favor of this theory of art. It has certainly given us impressive and powerful works. But it has also laid itself open, not seldom, to Lowell s sharp criticism that'“on the title pages of many of its

books you might inscribe the ancient signboard words ‘entertainment here for man and—beast.’” It confounds fact with truth. A thing may bo fact, but it may not be a truth. A lie, e.g., is a fact, but it is not truth. Moreover, the business of tho novelist is not tho same as that of the physiologist. To say that it is, as Zola docs, is to ignore the distinction between science and imaginative art, with injury to both. The imaginative artist is pretty sure to blunder in his facts and misconceive their relative proportions. “ Tho imaginative writer is after effects. Tho scientific man is after truth. Science is decent, modest; it does not try to startle, but .instruct. The scenes and objects which outrage every sense of delicacy in the storyteller’s highly-colored paragraphs can bo read without giving offence in the chaste, language of tho physiologist or the physician. There are subjects which, in the interests of science and humanity, science must investigate, as the! sanitary inspector investigates sewers and rotten 1'ood.” But they are not subjects to he brown broadcast in tho community in the pastes of fiction BhimmerinjE In tie

glamor of a vivid and unrestrained imagination. They thus reach minds that did not desire them, and start prurient thoughts that can be indulged in secret without tlie shame or danger of deeds. But they also lead on to the latter, lor is the inevitable tendency of thoughts to complete themselves in action.. A cynical critic once said tiiat it seemed to be tho mission of America to vulgarise mankind. That might he more truly said of a great deal of the Realistic literature of the day. It is many years ago since Oliver Wondcil Holmes wrote that the great additions of Realism to art consist “largely in swampy, malarious, ili-smelHng patches of soil, which had previously been loft to reptiles and vermin. . . . There is no subject,

or hardly any, winch may not be treated of at Hie propel - time, in tlie proper place, by the fitting person, for the right kind of listener and reader. But whe.u tlie poe,t or the storyteller invades lire province of the man of science lie is on dangerous ground ” —dangerous alike to him ami to those who give heed to him.

Shakespeare says it is the function of tlie drama “to hold the mirror up to Nature.” AJI that wo can ask from a mirror is that it reflect truly. But the function of tho novelist is something more than that. It is, we take it, to idealise Nature and life. The difference between Iho two is tho difference between the photographer and the painter. The former catches you as you are at any given moment. His skill consists in being able to reproduce you as you appear at that instant of time. Yet it is obvious that literal accuracy here is really inaccuracy. For no one can deliver himself—his whole real self—at any given moment. That which we call self, personality, is an exceedingly complex thing. It is the function of the aa'tist in oils to select, distil, create, and synthetiso it out of many sittings and many impressions, and his excellence consists in tho skill with which ho can do this. Tennyson states it thus: As when a poet poring on a face. Divinely, through all hindrance, finds the

man Behind it; and so paints him that his face, The shape and color of a mind and life, Lives for his children over at his best

and fullest. That, wo take it, is, broadly speaking, the essential difference between Realism and Idealism relative to fiction, and the comparative transitorinoss of tho work of tho one and tho permanence of tho other is an indication of the merits of each.

Perhaps within its compass no better exposition and defence of Idealism in ait has been given than George Macdonald supplies in ‘ Sir Gibbie.’ His son, in his recently-published biography of his father, says ‘ Sir Gibbie ’ is in some ways the most picturesque of his Scottish stories. We are inclined to think it is the best of all his books. Near- the beginning he anticipates the objection that tho ordinary reader is likely to make to ‘Sir Gibbie.’ Ho will be inclined to say that no such child ever existed, and that therefore tho portraiture is false, contrary to reality. Macdonald admits that his character is rare—perhaps non-existent, in fact—but ho claims that just because of this humanity has all the more need to bo made acquainted with it. The best things are the commonest, but tho highest types and best combinations of them are the rarest. Love, for instance, is the commonest fact of life; it is the raw material of every novelist. But if it bo reproduced in its ordinary and everyday imperfect form you may have a novel corresponding with facts as they actually are, but you will not have one in consonance with truth —i.e., with facts in their permanent and eternal reality. For imperfect love, just because it is imperfect, and in as far as it is so, is transitory and ephemeral. On tho other hand, love idealised, shown in its uncommon and perfect manifestation, is yet the true reality or tho real truth. “That which ought to bo presented to the beholding of tho eye is the common good uncommonly developed, not because of its rarity, but because it is timer to humanity. . It is the noble, not the failure from the noble, that is the true human; and if I must show the failure, let it bo with an eye to the final possible—yea, imperative—success. But in our day a man will refuse to accept . . . not only as impossible, but as inconsistent with human nature, tho representation of a person Lying to bo merely as noble as is absolutely essential to his being—except, indeed, ho bo at the same time represented as utterly failing in tho attempt, and compelled to fall back upon the-imperfections of humanity and acknowledge them as its laws, Its improbability, judged by the experience of most men, I admit; its unreality in fact I deny; and its absolute unity with the idea of humanity I boliovo and assert.”