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Art and Katharsis
ART, we all know, is concerned with the Beautiful; it is no less intimately connected with the True; the Good too is in like manner part and parcel of the æesthetic movement. For, Art not only delights or illumines, it uplifts also to the same degree. Only it must be noted that the uplifting aimed at or effected is not a mere moral or ethical edification – even as the Truth which Art experiences or expresses is not primarily the truth of external facts and figures in the scientific manner, nor the Beauty it envisages or creates the merely pleasant and the pretty.
There is a didactic Art that looks openly and crudely to moral hygiene. And because of this, there arose, as a protest and in opposition, a free-lance art that sought to pursue art for art's sake and truth for truth's sake – even if that truth and that art were unpleasant and repellent to the morality-ridden sophisticated consciousness. Or perhaps it may have been the other way round: because of the degeneracy of Art from its high and serious and epic nobility and sublimity to lesser levels of æsthetic hedonism and dilettantism that the didactic took its rise and sought to yoke art to duty, to moral welfare and social service. Not that there is an inherent impossibility of moralising art becoming good art in its own way; but great art is essentially a-moral – not in the sense of being infra-moral, but in the sense of being supra-moral.
Art does not tend towards the Good in the manner of the moralist. It does not teach or preach that virtue is to be pursued and vice to be shunned, that a good deed is rewarded and a wrong one punished. Poetic justice, of the direct and crude style, is a moral code or dogma, and, if imposed upon the æesthetic movement, serves only to fetter and curb and Page – 181 twist it. Art opens the vision to a higher good than what the conventions of moral idealism can frame. Great art does not follow the lines laid down by the ethical mentality, not only because this mentality cannot embody the true truth, but also because it does not give us the Good which art should aim at, that is to say, the purest and the highest good.
Aristotle speaks of the purifying function of the tragic art. How is the purification effected? By the evocation of the feelings of pity and terror. For such feelings widen the sympathies, pull us out of our small egoistic personal ephemeral pleasures and put us in contact with what is to be shared and enjoyed in wide commonalty. Tragedy, in this way, initiates the spectator into the enjoyment that is born not of desire and gain but of detachment and freedom. The uplifting power of Art is inherent in its nature, for Art itself is the outcome of an uplifted nature. Art is the expression of a heightened consciousness. The ordinary consciousness in which man lives and moves is narrow, limited, obscure, faltering, unhappy – it is the abode of all that is evil and ugly; it is inartistic. The poetic zeal, enthusiasm or frenzy, when it seizes the consciousness, at once lifts it high into a state that is characterised by wideness and depth and a new and fresh exhilarating intensity of perception and experience. We seem to arrive at the very fountain-head, where things take birth and are full of an unspoilt life and power and beauty and light and harmony. A line burdened with the whole tragedy of earthly existence such as Shakespeare's:
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain... or the Virgilian syllables ringing, as it were, with the crash of destiny and the doom of the world:
feror ingenti eireumdata noete Invalidasque tibi tendens, heu! non, tua palmas. . . even if they make us sad do not depress the soul; it is a divine sadness fraught with a profound calm and a strange poignant sweetness of secret delight. The rhythm and the sound and the suggestions so insinuate themselves into our nerve and blood Page – 182 that these seem to be sublimated – as if by a process of oxygenation – to a finer substance, a purer and more limpid and vibrant valency. A consciousness opens in our very flesh and marrow that enables us to pierce the veil of things and pass beyond and understand – see and experience – the why and the how and the whither of it all. It is a consciousness cosmic in its purview and disposition, which even like the Creator could contemplate all and declare it all as good. Indeed, this is the Good which Art at its highest seeks to envisage and embody – the summum bonum that accompanies a summit consciousness. It is idle to say that all or most poets have this revelatory vision of the Seer – Rishi – but a poet is a poet in so far as he is capable of this vision; otherwise he remains more or less either a moralist or a mere æsthete.
Whatever is ugly and gross, all the ills and evils of life – that is to say, what appears as such to our external mind and senses – when they have passed through the crucible of the poet's consciousness undergoes a sea-change and puts on an otherworldly beauty and value. We know of the alchemy of poetic transformation that was so characteristic of Wordsworth's manner and to which the poet was never tired of referring, how the physical and brute nature – even a most insignificant and meaningless and unshapely object in it attains a spiritual sense and beauty when the poet takes it up and treasures it in his tranquil and luminous and in-gathered consciousness, his "inward eye". A crude feeling, a raw passion, a tumult of the senses, in the same way, sifted through the poetic perception, becomes something that opens magic casements, glimpses the silence of the farthest Hebrides, wafts us into the bliss of the invisible and the beyond.
The voice of Art is sweetly persuasive – kantasmmita, as the Sanskrit rhetoricians say-it is the voice of the beloved, not that of the school-master. The education of Poetry is like the education of Nature: the poet said of the child that “grew in sun and shower†– And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face. Even so the beauty of poetic creation, when we contemplate it Page – 183 and live in it, automatically and inevitably steals into our consciousness, works a subtle change in our nature and by elevating and refining it makes us, for the moment at least, less crude and obscure and earthy things that we usually are. Page – 184
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