The Poetics of Poesis by Bonaparte Felicia;

Author:Bonaparte, Felicia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

Chapter 8

Art as Poesis

Contrary to the sense of many that this is not an age of art, the nineteenth century was so profoundly conscious of and concerned with art that ancient Athens and the Renaissance are alone in comparing to it. Merz, who calls it a great “scientific century” as well as a great “critical century,” adds that it is at least as much an “aesthetical century” too, a word, he explains, he uses to mean that even more than the making of art, art was constantly thought about and philosophically written about (vol. 4, pt. 7, sec. 6). This was the universal view. In his essay “Chivalry,” Scott had already named science and art the “two new currents of enthusiasm” that dominated the modern world, and the century had just started when Jean Paul had already noticed in his Introduction to Aesthetics that “nothing abounds as much in our time as aestheticians.” “There are few families,” Coleridge writes in the Prospectus of the Course of Lectures published in his Literary Remains (1836, vol. 1), “in the higher and middle classes of English society, in which literary topics and the productions of the Fine Arts, in one or other of various forms, do not occasionally take their turn in contributing to the entertainment of the social board, and the amusement of the circle at the fire side.” “Everybody,” John Ruskin writes in The Unity of Art (1859, Lecture 2), “is talking about art, and writing about it, and more or less interested in it; everybody wants art.” “If familiarity,” comments Whistler in “The Ten O’Clock Lecture” (1885), “can breed contempt, certainly Art—or what is currently taken for it—has been brought to its lowest stage of intimacy. The people have been harassed with Art in every guise. . . . They have been told how they shall love Art, and live with it. Their homes have been invaded, their walls covered with paper, their very dress taken to task.” In George Du Maurier’s “Art in Excelsis” (1874), a cartoon he did for Punch, a husband and wife are seen to watch as their guests lie prone on a sofa staring immobile at the ceiling, the caption reading, “The Montgomery Spiffinses have just had their drawing-room ceiling elaborately decorated by artistic hands. They are much gratified by the sensation produced upon their friends.”

Nowhere is this passion for art more in evidence than in literature. The making of art and the artists who make it are more often than we notice a critical presence in the novel. Art in every conceivable form, and art in no particular form, simply the question of art itself as a philosophic topic, is often at the heart of the theme and not infrequently embedded in its plot and characters, and not just in the küntslerroman, of which category, however, there are massively more than we realize because they are often long and complex, covering many different categories, and come often thus to be classified under more familiar rubrics—historical fiction, industrial fiction, fiction about religion, and so on.

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