The Functions of Art

...Perhaps their bias is toward the idea of audience as participant in a common experience, such as is natural to those who share a common language, though they may use it to sustain totally different modes of awareness...

...We are indeed so sickened with this worn-out species of composition, that we have lost all relish for it...

...Thus Oliver Goldsmith thought of the novel as superseding the classroom: Were our schoolmasters, if any of them have sense enough to draw up such a work, thus employed, it would be much more serviceable to their pupils than all the grammars and dictionaries they may publish these ten years...

...So far as I know, Lowenthal breaks completely new ground here, in seeing the contribution of Goldsmith as revealing the function of the ideal critic as one of mediation between the audience and the writer...

...It is a great advantage to be able to follow this dispute through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and on into our own time, by means of the learning and experience of Professor Lowenthal...

...Pascal "finds this kind of escape something to be fought against...

...So far as English literature is concerned, the great monument to this crisis is Pope's Dunciad, in which Pope asserts the responsibil ity of the author to be a guide and corrective to perception rather than to provide an anodyne for anxieties...

...Most dangerous diversion of all, in Pascal's view, is the theater...

...For the packaging and retailing of technologically codified experience has become the actuality which at an earlier stage it had merely served to conceal...

...One theme that pervades the book is stated at the outset, in a chapter on "Diversion and Salvation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries...

...By changing place, occupation, company, I escape...

...The present one breaks a good deal of new ground, especially in the eighteenth century...

...It was two or more centuries after the invention of the printed book before there was sufficient organization of the market to create a crisis in the minds of authors...

...There was nothing snobbish about Pope's animus against the little hacks...

...All the problems of our own time first confronted the writer in the eighteenth century, and many twentieth century answers were given then to problems that we think of as new...

...This frankly therapeutic idea of art has always been held by a large group of intellectuals, for whom it is perfectly obvious that bad novels and plays and movies are just as necessary as beer or whiskey, and do not involve any self-deceit whatever...

...The idea of the arts as solace for inner pain and malaise suggested to Montaigne the need for variety and diversity of fictions...

...We tend to assume that serious perception gets outered in one art form or another, but such fragmentation of the components of consciousness would not for a moment have seemed to Pope or Swift to qualify as intelligent perception...

...It is no accident therefore that intelligence has for some time concentrated upon the unintelligent and the unconscious as objects of attention...

...Whereas the seventeenth century had sought identity upwards and the eighteenth century downwards, a common basis for taste eluded all the searchers...

...There was a common feeling that the novel had had its day: The manufacture of novels has has been so long established, that in general they have arrived at mediocrity...

...This issue has been increasingly obscured since Pope's time by the sheer quantity of printed language, until, today, those able to exercise direct perception must turn it upon the vast trade in indirect perception...

...But by the nineteenth century there was no such dialogue of answerable or critical perception at any level of public or private life...

...It ab sorbs all our senses and therefore has great capacity for deceiving man into believing he has all those noble qualities he sees portrayed on the stage...

...It loses my trace and leaves me safe...

...It was Goldsmith who initiated what Lowenthal regards as "perhaps the most far-reaching change which took place in the concept of the critic...

...Such is not however the Pascal position...

...according to the arrangement and collection of them [they] become narrations, speeches, sentiments, descriptions, etc., and when a very great quantity of them .. . are wedged together after a particular form and manner, they are denominated a NOVEL...

...Montaigne even uses the word escape: A painful fancy takes possession of me...

...Today these themes tend to get stated in terms of producer or consumer orientation in literature and entertainment...

...he must also interpret the public back to the writer...

...It was this orientation to audience experience which opened up an entirely new dimension in the debate over art and popular culture...

...Lowenthal comments: "Critics, writers, and philosophers — Johnson, Burke, Hume, Reynolds, Kames, and the Wartons all adopted Goldsmith's premise, as they began to analyze the experience of the reader...

...This is a chapter in which he has collaborated with Marjorie Fisk...

...In this view the author must inevitably take the side of the language itself, as the accumulated store of perception to which the writer owes the deepest responsibility...

...if I cannot combat it, I run away from it...

...I find it shorter to change than to subdue it...

...Perhaps the two positions could be reconciled by saying that for Montaigne the hope is to escape from immediate miseries, while for Pascal the hope is for ultimate escape, by using the more austere forms of art as a means of spiritual grace...

...ready at hand for such machines...

...That is why Pope made such an issue of dullness, for he saw the hack writers as people not only without perception, but as creators of a collective opacity in language, which is the very instrument of perception...

...But to be squirted to death, as poor Wycherly said to me on his death-bed, by apothecaries' apprentices, by the understrappers of undersecretaries, to secretaries who were no secretaries—this would provoke as dull a dog as Phillips himself...

...He shows that Goethe tended to straddle somewhat between these two attitudes, prefacing his Faust with "Prelude on the Stage" in which he considers the extent to which an artist should condescend to the taste of the populace, by means of a dialogue between the stage manager and the poet...

...But is not this an acknowledgment that the task of perception in the later eighteenth century and ever since shifted from producer to consumer orientation...

...Thus Pascal takes his stand with that very large party for whom popular culture is a threat to morality, contemplation, and an integrated personality...

...it would vex one more to be knocked on the head with a pisspot than by a thunderbolt...

...One magazine writer recommended that machines be adapted to make the novel-writing process easier, and one essayist analyzed the stereotypes al...

...In the eighteenth century the actuality had still been the live dialogue of people in responsible places...

...Lowenthal explains it this way: He believes (unlike his successors in later centuries) that these fictional emotions move the writer, the actor (and the barrister) just as they do the audience, because the writers and actors share with their audiences the need to escape from their own woes...

...The concluding chapters of Lowen thal's book are concerned with "The Triumph of Mass Idols," and the relations of "Literature and Society...

...He really regarded the language as a prime agent of perception, fit to be used only by those trained in direct perception, and not by those who were middlemen and retailers of the perceptions of others...

...Nobody anywhere is in possession of any relevant data or awareness of the kind that Pope took for granted as an adequate level of perception and judgment...

...It would be hard to decide how much semantics and how much temperament goes to the making of such a polarity, but the distinction has proved sufficient to provide a deep division of attitudes ever since their time...

...not only was he to reveal the beauties of literary works to the general public by means of which, in Goldsmith's terms 'even the philosopher may acquire popular applause...

...Lowenthal suggests that the stark polarity of these approaches was consequent upon the traumatic effects of the medieval breakup...

...To have provided a history of such a shift in the strategy of intelligence is the task which Lowenthal has assigned to himself in the present book...

...This is more familiar ground for most readers, but the research and insight of Professor Lowenthal makes it a rewarding ground to retraverse...

...Lowenthal quotes Pope in a letter to Swift: My spleen is at the little rogues of it...

...And today it is unimaginable that anything is being said anywhere in the world that represents a direct perceptual confrontation of actuality...

...It may be that so stating the issues today is what gives new relevance to the ancient quarrel between the party of Montaigne and the party of Pascal, as Lowenthal puts it: Our review begins with two literary figures who, although separated by nearly sixty years in time are, in some respects, poles apart in viewpoint: Montaigne, the founder of modern skepticism, and Pascal, the forerunner of modern religious existentialism...

...That is the importance of his main section on "the English Eighteenth Century as a Case Study...

...Naturally, the question of the box-office did not arise until there had been an organization of the bookmarket and the public sufficient to give meaning to such an issue...