The Resurrection, page 21
Art, like Nature (as human bias perceives it) contains affirmations which transcend practicality. If a mountain suggests to me, as it did to Wordsworth, dignity and highmindedness, my response to the mountain may or may not have consequences in my behavior. In either case, what I affirm (or what I imagine to be implied by the mountain) I in fact affirm for all mankind, for all time and space, as an absolute (human) good. Responding to aesthetic stimuli I say, in effect, “This belongs in my civilization,” or, in another case, “This belongs between my civilization and chaos.”
I am suggesting that affirmations can be of two kinds, in Kierkegaard’s sense ethical or moral. These kinds correspond precisely, though Burke did not notice it, to the two kinds of aesthetic experience elaborated by Edmund Burke, viz., the experience of the Beautiful and the experience of the Sublime. What Burke identifies with the Beautiful (the small, the curvilinear, the smooth, the pleasant) we may associate with ethical (i.e., social) affirmation; that is to say, with affirmations of what is to be sought, what will “do,” what must be tolerated (the harmlessly ugly or ludicrous), and what will not do in a given culture. All that belongs in Burke’s realm of the Sublime (the large, the angular, the terrifying, etc.) we may identify with moral affirmation; that is to say, with human defiance of chaos, or the human assertion of the godlike magnificence of human mind and heart. Thor’s annual circuit around Midgaard, hurling his hammer against trolls and monsters of the night—his back to the order his existence maintains, his face towards darkness—is Sublime, all the more sublime for the fact that every year Thor grows weaker, the circle of order smaller. In such terms, the voyage of the Pequod is Sublime; the teas of Jane Austen are Beautiful. That the two exist on a continuum is evidenced by the existence of Henry James or, better, Chaucer. Needless to say, designating a work Sublime is not the same as asserting its high artistic merit. Melville’s Pierre is sublime but unsuccessful: we understand what moral emotions we are expected to feel, but our thought is distracted by the writing.
Whereas Kant’s theory of delight without interest asserts that utility corrupts the response, a theory of delight beyond interest asserts man’s potential for selflessness. When Iphigenia—in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis—declares that she will die joyfully for Greece, we share her emotion and, though Greece fell long ago, experience interest: We hope that we too would die for country, or for mankind; but hope and, indeed, assert that there are always human beings capable of such goodness. What we mean when we say that Art imitates Nature, then—or at all events what we ought to mean—is this: Whereas in Nature human consciousness discovers and enlarges itself by learning to categorize and choose between brute sensations (or the emotional charge in brute sensations) and later to choose between passions, in Art a gifted consciousness simplifies, extends, or reorders categorization and choice for the rest of us, speeding up the painfully slow process of evolution toward what, hopefully, we are.
The aesthetic impulse may thus be understood to be moral, and Nature, or life, is indeed, as Pope said, the end or purpose of Art. By this we mean that the highest state a man can achieve is one of aesthetic wholeness. As Collingwood saw in Speculum Mentis (but forgot when he came to write his Principles), the end of aesthetic evolution, wholeness, is analogous to the end of religious evolution, saintliness, that state in which one is capable of embracing all experience as holy and some experience as more holy; and it is analogous too to the end of intellectual evolution, scientific knowledge. But aesthetic wholeness is nobler than saintliness just as saintliness is nobler than scientific knowledge. The concern of knowledge is with form and function abstracted from the sensual richness of substance; one grows saintly by rejecting both form and substance from their supposed essence, in other words, by evading the question. (Whether one chooses to speak of shoes as God or as a faint odor of turpentine, one is not in fact talking about shoes.) Aesthetic wholeness affirms with total selflessness the universal human interest in what is—as Wallace Stevens says, “the finale of seem.” The good life, then, towards which Art points the way.
It seemed to Chandler that no one might more easily have achieved it than he—that good life of which he wrote so feelingly—if only he had understood in time. He could now understand the state perfectly, could construct a clear and complete conception of its emotional quality. Indeed, he had achieved it; but the achievement was poisoned. His sense of being in two places was constant now, a thing that should have been all to the good. From the ceiling he watched himself laboring slowly, tortuously, struggling against idiotic bafflement, rereading a single sentence sometimes twenty times, straining to remember what he had meant when he began, and he felt, looking down at himself, compassion and faint amusement like that of a parent at sight of his child’s struggle with the colored balls on her crib. Like God he could affirm without personal involvement the beauty of the struggle, the beauty of a good mind, seen here in ruins, the beauty of the larger life process in which this man’s individual success or failure did not matter as much as the success of his kind, which must depend upon work like his, or like any man’s. From his place near the ceiling he watched the man’s wife bring food to him, kiss the top of his head, and tiptoe away to avoid interrupting his work. In that too, in the universality of human love, however twisted in its manifestations, he could feel the beauty.
But he was sick. His mouth was sour, as if from gulping tar from an unrested pipe, and his stomach floated with nausea. His head ached dully, and no matter what he put on, he could not get warm. It was as bad when he lay down as when he sat at his desk, and he could not see that the pills the doctor had sent made very much difference. All this did not rob him of his sense of the beautiful—the softness and warmth of his wife’s hand, the sheer music in his children’s voices—and neither did his sickness rob him of his sense of the value of beauty. His misery was a separate sensation, not infecting the others but intolerable in itself. With a single motion of his mind he wanted to listen to his children’s calls and wanted to sink into unconsciousness; in the same instant he might have moaned with pleasure at the soothing warmth of his wife’s hand pressed against his forehead and howled against the infuriatingly endless turmoil in his body.
And there was mental torment as well. He went through periods of terror, a groundless quaking of the heart that came over him without warning or apparent cause and made him want to howl. A clot of white cells somewhere, perhaps. He would believe the old woman to be somewhere in the room with him, or standing downstairs in the middle of the night, listening. Or he would see her, even hear her speak, murmuring words that didn’t quite make sense but hovered teasingly on the edge of sense. While the terror was on him he couldn’t think and when it was gone, he was afraid to think back to it. He began to long ardently for death.
More than “in the world but not of the world” (he wrote). More than Platonic. The wisdom of old people when, as sometimes happens, old people chance to become wise. To whom the death of a child is tragic but tolerable, as it is not to us. In whom no trace of self-pity remains. Who are not overly grieved by tragedy in life, and not because they have no commitment, no interest in the central figure of the tragedy, but because, having loved repeatedly, having survived by the skin of their teeth many times, just as those who love them will, despite their own wish, they can give of themselves unstintingly, fully prepared to pay back all they have spent. To see life’s beauty whole implies at once the ardent desire to look and the necessity of backing off.
“You betray me,” Horne had said.
He got up unsteadily from the typewriter and went over to the closed door. He leaned on the doorknob, listening. The television was on downstairs, and it reminded him that Anne and Susan had their innumerable dolls and stuffed animals assembled on the floor around the screen to watch. “It’s the funniest thing you ever saw,” Marie had said. “I’ll see if I can get them to leave it until you come down.”
“Do, yes!” he’d said, and he had laughed, imagining it.
Now he stood musing on whether or not he should go down. His legs were shaky when he stood too long. He shuffled over to the bed and sat down, still undecided, leaning his sharp elbows into his legs. He felt a faintness coming on and leaned back on the pillow. After a moment it passed.
7
VIOLA STALEY returned to her aunts profoundly changed, as it seemed to her. It seemed to her months ago that she’d heard those screams in the street and had rushed out into open air and sunlight, a world drastically and, she was soon to feel, beautifully changed. She had fallen in love. She’d been with the Chandlers for only four days, but every minute of that time, as it seemed to her, she’d been strangely alive, awake. There was very little required of her at her aunts’ house—no more than had been required of her when she’d lived with her mother in Effingham—and yet it had been at the Chandlers’, where it was important to be listening every minute for a child’s cry—listening even while she slept—and where responsibilities kept her running from dawn to dark, that she had felt, for the first time in her life, really free, really happy. Sometimes alone in the kitchen or up in young Mrs. Chandler’s closet, choosing the dress she would wear today (Marie Chandler had insisted that she make herself at home with her clothes), she would find to her surprise that she was singing. And sometimes, looking in the mirror, she would find that, strange to say (for Viola was in her own opinion hopelessly plain), she was beautiful.
It was not that those four days had been pure joy, a comfortable feeling of being loved and needed, or the pleasure of being in command, or, least of all, a sense of being caught up in real life instead of some sickly make-believe, though at first she had thought that all that accounted for her feeling. (There, where Marie Chandler had novels and even books of poetry and where Mr. Chandler had a whole library of philosophy books, it had hardly crossed Viola’s mind that she might stop whatever she was doing, if she liked, and read. Yet at her aunts’ she had read incessantly.) She was loved and needed at Chandlers’, that was true, but the three girls had loved her no more and needed her no more, really—though in a different, somewhat more pleasant way—than the three old women she lived with; and if she was in command at the Chandlers’, it was a delicate, difficult command, one that had to be constantly modified to take account of old Mrs. Chandler’s wishes—for it was she, at least technically, who ran the house—and modified to take account, too, of the wishes of the children, for she had no more power over them than they freely gave her. It had at first seemed to her an entirely new situation. At her aunts’, her position was clearer—or so she would have said. Aunt Betsy was the master, and Viola’s only task was somehow to guess Aunt Betsy’s will and execute it as well as she might. The only danger was that she might guess wrong or do clumsily what was required of her, that is, do it in some way that Aunt Betsy herself would not have done it; for when she made a mistake, all three of them became the masters, by a sudden change in the rules, and Viola became the stepchild alone in the cinders. Yet Viola’s first sense of the thing had passed; the two situations were the same, really—except for the mysterious fact that she’d fallen in love, quite literally, with the Chandler family. The two situations were even the same in specific ways. Aunt Betsy and Karen, respectively, were the rulers of the two establishments, at least in the sense that they were the ones who laid out plans when plans were needed or functioned as final judges. Aunt Maud and Susan were the especially demonstrative ones, the representatives of love to whom one turned for reassurance or a moment’s rest from the complication of things. And Aunt Emma and Anne were, in their exactly opposite ways, the mysterious ones, the centers of turbulence, the holy ghosts of excitement or uneasiness or trouble. And not only that: Except for that one enormous difference, the fact of her transmuted heart, the two situations were the same with respect to Viola’s place in them. It was something that had dawned on her on the second afternoon at the Chandlers’, while she was watching the children play.
It was the queerest game she’d seen in all her life, she was sure. Anne and Susan would stand by the fence, and Karen would roll an imaginary pair of dice, and then she would give one of them permission to take a certain number of steps, first Anne, then Susan, in turn. The child who first reached the other end of the yard was the winner, and the determining factor, evidently, was Karen’s whim. It seemed to be clearly understood that only Karen knew the rules and that Karen’s permissions or penalties for cheating—the penalties were often severe—were, at least theoretically, beyond dispute. Anne would cry sometimes when she lost, but it never seemed to occur to her to blame Karen rather than bad luck. Karen, on the other hand, would sympathize with what one would have sworn was perfect sincerity, and she would hope that Anne might be luckier next time. And indeed, Anne would win the next time, or at least would come within a hair’s breadth, which proved, supposedly, that the game was on the level.
And of course it was on the level, Viola had realized all at once.
It was not that Karen alone knew the rules or that Karen’s whim controlled the game. No one knew the rules, and each had as much control as any other. What determined the number of steps that Susan or Anne might take was Karen’s calculation of how much Susan or Anne would put up with: How far, with the magical help of the imaginary dice, could one push Anne or Susan without triggering sufficient outrage to make them quit? On the other hand, if Karen called out “Four steps,” Susan might quickly ask, “Six, did you say?” forcing Karen to another quick calculation: If she said, “No, four,” would Susan decide to call her a liar, insisting that she had said six (believing it, of course, at least while she was saying it, exactly as she believed by choice in the imaginary dice)? Sometimes, in righteous indignation, Karen would say, “No, I said four, and you heard me perfectly well.” At other times she’d say, “Well, all right six,” and at others, firmly, “Six.” Now and then Susan and Anne would cheat, darting forward a few steps when Karen supposedly wasn’t looking. If she caught them it meant still another calculation: She could send them back to the starting line, she could ignore it completely, or she could accuse them of cheating, but tentatively, so that they might go back or remain, depending on their mood.
Viola had bent forward over the rickety window table cluttered with plants, and she had watched for a long time. It made her skin crawl. The incredible seriousness of the thing! The silence like death when Karen studied the imaginary dice! It all had some powerful but indefinite meaning for her, but she could not find words for what it was that she felt. It was somehow more than itself—so it seemed to Viola—like familiar rooms seen in an unfamiliar cast of sunlight, or like old pictures in Aunt Betsy’s album. The game seemed to tell her something, but something she couldn’t make out. She heard Mrs. Chandler come into the room behind her, and she said, “Come here, look at this”—pointing. Mrs. Chandler had come over to stand beside her, but of course she saw nothing—only the blurry forms of the children, apparently—for she said: “Poor dears.” That was all. (Anne abruptly ended the game. She found something in the grass, and she sat down to examine it.) Viola had nodded absently, then had turned away and had gone on with her furniture polishing: the piano, the flower tables, the bookshelves, the wood on the arms of the couch. She thought (as if momentarily confusing the family and the furniture) How beautiful they are. I couldn’t love them more if the children were my own. She thought of James Chandler standing over Aunt Maud with his hand on her stomach. He had a startled look, as though he were wondering how he’d gotten into this. Viola laughed, all at once, remembering that look. Strange, she thought then. She’d lost completely her sense that he was dying. She knew, now as surely as before, that he was; but she had lost belief in what she knew. (The smell of his pipe would catch her unaware in a musty corner or on the attic stairs, or one of the girls would mention him very casually, and the tone of the man would change the surrounding world for an instant.) His family no longer believed in his dying either. The older Mrs. Chandler told long, pointless stories, as she might have at any other time, about old Mr. Donaldson, next door, who had arthritic knees but who nevertheless worked from morning to night every day in his garden. These were some of his tomatoes. He’d brought so many Mrs. Chandler had had to can them. Or she would tell of some woman who had bought a navy-blue coat, and come to find out, it wasn’t navy blue at all, but black.
When Viola was dusting the dining-room table the thought had come, as if out of the sky, That was my life they were playing. Maybe everybody’s life, she’d thought a moment later, without the faintest idea what it was, exactly, that she meant. The half-formed idea had shocked her, and she’d vowed never to think about it again.
But as luck would have it, she hadn’t been given a chance to forget. Marie had come home that night, briefly, to look in on the children, and old Mrs. Chandler had fixed tea for her and they’d sat at the table, talking. Marie Chandler told of some unpleasant old man she’d met, and old Mrs. Chandler, who knew him, had defended him. Marie said wearily, in no mood to argue—or rather, perhaps, in the perfect mood to argue and therefore careful to keep out of a fight—waving her hand hopelessly, as if to shoo away a huge bird that she knew would probably refuse to leave: “It wasn’t really him that annoyed me. Life in general. ’All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’” The line, which she delivered with scorn, as though the line itself disgusted her, was startling to Viola, close as it was in some obscure way to what she herself had been thinking this afternoon. She said, “Who said that, Mrs. Chandler?” “Bartlett,” young Mrs. Chandler said. Viola had laughed, though she didn’t think it was funny, and she’d said, “What does it mean?” Marie had turned to look at her briefly, unspeakably tired but hiding at least most of her irritation, and she’d said, “Nothing. It’s merely a transition.” Viola had laughed again politely, perhaps rather bitterly this time, and had withdrawn. The line continued to nag her. And then when she was putting the children to bed, something else had happened, and it seemed to throw all the rest into a new light, though again the exact connection would not come to her but stood in the dark of her mind like the undiscovered exit from a sealed room.
