The Refuge of the Impersonal

I DO not know whether the vogue of self-expression in the arts has come to an end, but certainly it is high time that the obsequies of that degenerate era should be celebrated. The number of people, even taking all history into account, with selves deserving of deliberate expression is infinitesimal. And even those who would have been most justified in devoting a lifetime to self-expression have more often devoted themselves to self-renunciation, intoxicated by some cause in comparison to which they felt their private consciousness to be of small concern in the face of the universe.

The world has agreed to look on great poets as interesting men. But the greatest poets have far transcended themselves in their works, or we should respect their memories a good deal less. It is at least a question whether Shakespeare the man was as perfect and sublime a work as King Lear, and I should guess that the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is a more flawless creation than its creator. One of the great services of the arts is to offer men a means of transcending themselves by studious application to forms and modes of expression perfected through the ages, which have acquired a certain impersonality and warrant of excellence by their long tradition of noble use and ambitious exercise.

Self-expression is a therapeutic measure applicable to men and women who have to be confined periodically in a sanatorium to prevent the continued practice of their follies from arriving at its natural conclusion. And even in a sanatorium, although I speak with deference as one totally uninstructed in medical matters, I wonder whether it would not be a better prescription for the patients not to express themselves, but something quite other than themselves, something intrinsically good or useful?

To make a chair or table out of new, clean wood, for example, is an admirable therapeutic measure for anyone, with or without seriously disordered nerves, no matter how crude may be the result. But I should not care to employ a carpenter who thought of tables as a means of self-expression, and I think I should hesitate to trust in use a table I had made myself under such a conviction. The use of the table, in another sense, its virtue whether regarded medically or merely as a normal and pleasant exercise of creative energy, lies precisely in the fact that it is something quite opposite to myself, or any other self, something quite impersonal and material. It is crude matter, raw stuff, which may be cut and fastened according to well-defined and non-personal principles of carpentry into a practical, possibly an admirable, object. It is good in itself if it is good at all, and not because of any connection with me.

There is a world of difference between saying, ‘I have expressed myself,’ and ‘I have made a good table.’ True, the wood has passed through my hands. I have observed the grain, and turned it to best account. I have countersunk the screws, handled the saw, planed the edges. These operations have given me particular and probably vain satisfaction, and through them I have exerted my energy and intelligence for the profound and gratifying purpose of creation. But the man who dubs the result an example of self-expression will be somewhat less than flattering either to me or to my table, and he will have deeply and irritatingly missed the point. It was not myself that I was making, but something fine and admirable, in the shaping of which my often contemptible self seemed to appropriate some of the qualities of the object it wrought. Substitute ‘poem’ for ‘table,’ and, with a few alterations in the metaphors, the application of this to the arts will be strict and true.

Granted that the desire to write a poem, or to fashion a strain of music into a symphony, is in part a desire to express one’s self — that is, to put outside one’s self a something that first was within, and to give it an external embodiment, a permanent and tangible existence in the world. At least equally important is the motive of expressing, or fashioning, a something felt to be intrinsically excellent, a something which, even in that germinal period when it lay within the mind and was felt in the most private and personal recesses of consciousness, possessed an aspect of the awesome, and seemed to come as a divine stranger. This is the profound motive of art, and its point of radical divorce from any kind of therapeutics or of self-expression popularly conceived. Imagine, if you can, Beethoven plunged in the fathomless concentration which biographers report of him when he was writing his great Mass; then imagine what was the precise and exquisite point of his joy in that sublime exertion. Was it the thought that he was expressing himself? If you can believe that, you have no dimension in your mind congruous with Beethoven’s even for the most infinitesimal distance; and you have never heard what Beethoven heard, through deafness and all demands of self — his Mass!

I have sometimes thought that the greatest poets, in those moments when they write their best, most nearly approach each other and are least distinguishable. What they then write, speaking in terms of our own tongue, is not the ‘style’ of this man or that, but English.

I would not soil these pure ambrosial weeds With the rank vapour of this sin-worn mould.

These lines might have been Shakespeare’s, but were Milton’s.

The grandeur and the loftiness of the poetical movement are Milton’s, but the lines are Wordsworth’s. Poets intent on self-expression would have taken more pains, I think, to distinguish themselves from each other.

It is curious that so much theological blood has been spilt in maintaining that God is a person. Do the makers of creeds realize what they espouse in this assertion? To be personal is to be moody, irregular, impulsive, finite; confiding one instant, offended and vindictive the next; all affection one day, all jealousy and suspicion on the morrow. It is to exhibit every fault that touches home to our fallible human frame. But the everlasting is without variableness or shadow of turning. And it is this we see when we lift up our eyes to the hills.

Can any human eye regard mountains without being moved? Alas, yes. Did not Doctor Johnson define a mountain as a ‘considerable protuberance’? But when I see a rugged line of hills trace itself, blue and serene, upon the distance, I feel that I begin to draw solace and tranquillity from afar. And a part of my veneration for mountains arises from the blessed impersonality of them — the calm, the self-possession, that our frail humanity so frequently lacks. Looking upon a mountain, I feel my uncertain self absorbed and sustained in a transcendent reality, a sure and immense control, as in a great work of art by a master who gave expression not merely to what was within his own mind individually, but to broad tracts of life and knowdedge of which he had made himself the rightful lord by dedicated labor and self-denying thought. I doubt if Deity, as creator of all things, gave much heed to self-expression. The infinite mind was infinite because it could interest itself in the conception of myriad entities foreign to its own essence. It was the idea of a mountain that must have led the Lord to create mountains; the idea of himself would not have sufficed. When we consider animate creation, the case is even more glaring. The intelligence that could, in a fit of self-expression, ordain apes and alligators is not one that theologians would take much comfort in contemplating.

But we had best not scrutinize too closely the motives for creations of that sort — or of men and women either.