“The Mind’s Internal Heaven” in Poetry

"THE MIND'S INTERNAL HEAVEN" IN POETRY WILLIAM O. RAYMOND Whate'er the senses take or may refuse The mind's internal heaven shall shed her dews Of inspiration on the humblest lay. THESE lines of a well-known sonnet of Wordsworth, close to the heart of his own poetic credo, raise the question of the relationship between the sensuous and the imaginative elements involved in the complex structure of art. De gustibus non est disputandum is a maxim to be borne in mind by any writer who makes even a tentative sally into the debatable realm of aesthetic theory. If he escape the censure of the artist in his attempt to define the elusive quality of beauty, the metaphysician and the psychologist may soon challenge and engage him. Part of the difficulty of any theory of beauty arises from the fact that it tries to analyse an experience which is largely intuitive and synthetic. Consequently, the theorist, more particularly the psychol... gist, too often treads near the perilous brink described by Wordsworth: Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes .the beauteous fonns of things:We murder to dissect. On the other hand the artist, richly gifted with the intuitive and imaginative power to create or reveal beauty, may be largely unable to analyse or define the process. It is a paradox of aesthetic history that some of the most searching ideas of the nature and function of the beautiful have been set forth by men prosaically minded. No' eulogist, in the wildest flight of fancy, could invest Immanuel Kant with poetic temperament. Yet the Critique of Judgement will always remain a landmark in the development of aesthetic theory. Contrari. wise, a poet with such native sensihility to beauty as Bums has contributed little to a rational understanding of its peculiar essence. Once, and once only, in the history of Europe, has there been a man royally endowed with both poetic and philosophic gifts of the highest order. But Plato, as fearing the envy of the gods, shrank from the twofold sovereignty, and cast the golden ring of his artistic imagination into the sea of metaphysics. Yet, because he was eminently a poet at heart, the gleam of that ring in the Symposium and Phaedrus has been 215 U NIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUART:r.RLY, vol. XX, no, 3. April, 1951 216 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY more potent in man's creative dream of beauty than a dozen systems of Kunstwissenschaft. Of the two natural roads which from a reflective standpoint lead to a definition of beauty, psychology rather than metaphysics has been a favourite highway in our time. This is in keeping with the swing of emphasis in contemporary thought from an objective to a subjective conception of beauty. Since the development of the theory of Einfuhlung in the Aesthetik of Theodor Lipps, Germany has teemed with books devoted to the psychology of art. In England, Henry Marshall in his work entitled The Beautiful states his conviction that the psychological method of approach rather than the metapbysical "has thus far yielded, and is likely in the future to yield, the more fruitful results." There is much stress on the analysis of mental reactions in Ivor Richards' Practical Criticism and Principles of Literary Criticism. He explains the technical terminology of the latter work as due to "the desire to link even the commonplaces of criticism to a systematic exposition of psychology." Even where, as in the Estetica of Croce and in Santayana's The Sense of Beauty, a metaphysics is presupposed, the tendency to interpret man's experience of the beautiful in term~ of modem psychology is unmistakable. Yet the very popularity of psychology as applied to aesthetics involves the danger of its becoming an Idol of the Tribe. All roads lead to Rome, and though metaphysics and psychology have claimed in tum to be the king's highway leading to the understanding of the concept of beauty, there are other important avenues of insight. At times, moreover, there may be a positive advantage in forsaking the beaten path. In his preface to Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Pater remarks that the value of aesthetic philosophy "has most often...