R. Cairns Craig the Continuity of the Associationist Aesthetic
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R. Cairns Craig The Continuity of the Associationist Aesthetic: from Archibald Alison toT .S. Eliot (and beyond) The great figures in our histories of literature exert a kind of gravita tional pull on all that was going on around them: what preceded the arrival of the major writer or thinker can only be a prelude to his ap pearance; what follows him without showing the imprint of his work is anachronistic-it has missed the tide of history. The way we pattern the past very often reflects a desire that the development of 'thought' in general should match what we now recognize as the most signifi cant individual contributions. Nowhere is this more so than in the case of Coleridge. We look back to him as the source of so much of our own aesthetic theory that we depreciate all who came after him and failed to acknowledge the enormity of the change in sensibility that his theories represented. Our standard account of nineteenth century literary theory is founded on the centrality of Coleridge's thought; indeed, it is such a fixed assumption that Isabel Armstrong, in her study of Victorian criticism, can express an almost pained sur prise at the lack of awareness of Coleridge even in the 1840s and 'SOs.I And it is one of the ironies of modern criticism that I.A. Richards, whose general philosophy is entirely at odds with Coleridge's, should have done more than anyone to enhance his reputation.2 It is ironic because the writers with whom Richards has much in common, the eighteenth century associationists and their nineteenth century followers, are the ones who are almost entirely ignored because of our attention to Coleridge. It is generally assumed that associationist theory is of use only in the understanding of eighteenth century pre-romantic notions of art and that it was demolished when Coleridge showed that it might be relevant as a description of the realm of 'fancy', but not as the foun dation of 'imagination'. Associationist theories are presented, even by such studies as M.H. Abrams' The Mirror and the Lamp, as the 'mechanistic' background against which we can measure the advance AESTHETICS FROM ALISON TO T.S. ELIOT 21 represented by an 'organic' theory of art. Such an opposition does less than justice to the attempts-particularly in the Scottish Enlightenment-to develop a coherent associationist aesthetic that would go beyond the terms set by David Hartley from whose philosophy Coleridge was to be such a notable apostate. And it com mits a great injustice in that it casts into a kind of historical limbo the work of Archibald Alison, whose Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste of 1790 was the culmination of the theories of art that tried to build on David Hume's sceptical empiricism and his placing at the centre of the mind's workings of the process of association.J Several writers have tried to rectify our neglect of Alison but with little success. Walter J. Hipple has suggested that the Essays were to 'revolutionize aesthetic speculation in Britain' and that they 'ex hibited an originality, complexity and logical coherence unmatched in British aesthetics' 4, and Samuel Monk argued that the Essays represented 'the rise of a totally new attitude towards art.'S Despite the acknowledged influence of Alison on certain other major writers-Wordsworth and Hazlitt for instance6-he has remained a marginal figure in littrary history because his theories are regarded as the last flowering of an eighteenth century conception of art that was to be rapidly supplanted by Romanticism and which was to have no significant influence on later developments in literature. I want to suggest in this essay some of the ways in which the theory of which Alison is the best exponent continues through the nineteenth century to stimulate both critical theory and creative practice, and how it has remained, in many ways, more central to modern attitudes than our usual obeisance to the idea of 'organic unity' and the 'creative im agination' would suggest. Archibald Alison's Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste were published in Edinburgh in 1790. Edinburgh was Alison's birth place and he was to lead a distinguished career there as a preacher from 1797, but the book received little attention on its first publica tion and did not require a second edition until 1811 . After that, however, aided by a laudatory discussion in the Edinburgh Review by Francis Jeffrey7, it gained a large public and was reprinted in 1812, 1815, 1817, 1825 , 1853 , 1871 and 1879. Jeffrey's review was to be equally influential since it was incorporated into the Encyclopaedia Britannica, from 1824 till 1875, as its article on 'Beauty'. Alison's theory was a constant presence in aesthetic thinking, therefore, throughout the nineteenth century and though Hume was still to be rediscovered as a philosopher, his psychology, based on the associa- 22 DALHOUSIE REVIEW tion of ideas, was to remain a central element in aesthetic debate. Hume had used his concept to justify his own neo-classic taste in literature, but in Alison's work Hume's theory becomes the justifica tion for a dynamic, subjectivist approach to literature. Alison's main intent in writing the Essays was to heal the breach between conceptions of the 'beautiful' and of the 'sublime' which left eighteenth century aesthetics in such a fractured condition. In order to produce a unitary account of aesthetic experience he denies that there is a single emotion corresponding to either of these responses and he denies, equally, that there is anything in nature which has the property of being beautiful or sublime. The experience is neither directly subjective nor objective, but arises from the trains of associated images and ideas-operating by the usual connections of contiguity, resemblance and causality-which the object sets moving in the observer's mind. It is the experience of our own associative pro cesses, held together by a single emotional tone, which, for Alison, actually constitutes aesthetic experience. Thus, as Jeffrey summar ised it, the emotions which we experience from the contemplation of sublimity or of beauty, are not produced by any intrinsic quality in the objects we contemplate, but by the recollection or conception of other objects which are associated in our imaginations with those before us and con sequently suggested by their appearance, and which are interesting or affecting, on the common and familiar principle of being the natural objects of love, or of pity, or of fear or veneration, or some other com mon and lively sensation of the mind. 8 By such a theory Alison felt he could overcome the outstanding prob lems of eighteenth century aesthetics-the division between the beautiful and the sublime-and at the same time account for the ma jor problem that Hume had bequeathed his Scottish foll owers, how one established a standard of taste. Alison's position I summarise in the following four propositions for the sake of brevity: 1) what we experience from art or natural beauty is emotion; Alison's intention was to account for people's experience and not to alter it and he therefore accepts the prevailing emotivist explanation of art and the division into the beautiful and the sublime, but his purpose was to show that there was no essential dichotomy between them. 2) our emotions in such contexts are not simple, having a single mode or component; rather they are a combination AESTHETICS FROM ALISON TO T.S. ELIOT 23 of sentiments experienced already in non-aesthetic con texts. What distinguishes them in aesthetic experience is that they are suspended in a contemplative regard Alison's term is 'reverie', later used by Wordsworth and Yeats-and so demand neither decision nor action.9 3) this contemplative state of mind is characterised by the complete freedom of the imagination in the production of associated trains of images and ideas: it acts according to the laws of association but it is in no way determined by the pattern of relations imposed by memory.IO 4) we can distinguish the quality of aesthetic experience by the quantity of associations generated; there are difficult cases here, but in general Alison holds that the best work will produce the greatest number of associations in those minds most capable of producing the appropriate kinds of associations.!! Thus all aesthetic experience has the same basic structure, associa tion, and the power to generate associations, either in the work or in the reader, will be the distinguishing feature of their value. Alison's own taste remained largely neo-classical, but he saw this as a function of cultural training and therefore prepared the way for a shift from 'educated' to 'natural' tastes in the arts by revealing that there was no essential difference between them. If a wild landscape could generate as many associations as references to the classical deities then it was equally fitted for use by the poet. What distinguishes Alison's work from Coleridge's is that he is not interested in the creation of poems, but in their reception. For Alison the artist's work does indeed seem somewhat mechanical in com parison with Coleridge's presentation, but for Alison the real creative effort is that of the reader, because the aesthetic object is only the stimulus to the real aesthetic experience. which is not of the object in itself but of the accumulated contents of one's own mind as it reveals itself in the process of association. It is the reader in whom the real operations of the imagination are to be found: 'the first lines we meet with take possession of our imagination, and awaken in it such in numerable trains of imagery, as almost to leave behind the fancy of the poet.' 12 Alison concentrates, therefore, on those whom he sees as being in the best position to develop such imaginative ability, 'the va cant and unemployed' IJ, the leisured class who can exercise associa tions uncorrupted by pressures of business or profession or limited 24 DALHOUSIE REVIEW educational background.