The Pathetic Fallacy

In the epilogue to Landscape into Art Sir Kenneth Clark suggests that the best hope for a continuation of landscape painting rests in “an extension of the pathetic fallacy, and the use of landscape as a focus for our emotions”.  His meaning is perfectly clear; but it is his gloss, not Ruskin’s phrase, that makes it so.  A reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement has seized the opportunity of explaining in general terms what the pathetic fallacy is, and has decided that “It is an agreement among men to see something in nature which is not, in fact, there but which may be truthfully imagined to be there”, and that “The history of art shows that the pathetic fallacy in one form or another is constant”.  Perhaps then the term is not only misleading but disingenuous; perhaps it conceals most than it illuminates; perhaps it was an unfortunate coinage which does not deserve to survive as a general critical term.

Ruskin’s chapter “Of the Pathetic Fallacy” in Modern Painters is the sort of stage performance that easily disarms criticism.  With an impetuous gesture he thrusts aside “two of the most objectionable words that were ever coined by the troublesomeness of metaphysicians, – namely ‘Objective’, and ‘Subjective’”, gives some not very convincing impersonations of imaginary metaphysicians, and shuffles off with a heavy-footed clown’s dance in the form of a pedantically jocular footnote.  He returns with smooth brow and shining face, armed with the bludgeon of common-sense and bearing the banner of ‘truth’, and addresses himself to a problem which, as he states it, is nothing if not concerned with the relation between subject and object.  He is now brutally matter-of-fact and will have no nonsense from anybody – not even the poets.  His final quod erat demonstrandum – that “therefore, the dominion of Truth is entire, over this, as over every natural and just state of the human mind” – is such a masterly equivocation that we are led back into the chapters to find out what he really did want to prove.

The dogmatic content of the chapter is small, but incisive enough to bring any straying artist or critic to his senses.  Great artists, Ruskin maintains, combine an exceptional capacity for acute feeling with the ability to ‘command’ it; second-rate art – or worse – arises from the inability to control emotion, and this failure is a sign of morbidity and weakness.  So far there is nothing to disagree with; but as soon as he applies his new title we are in a mare’s nest of difficulties.  Ruskin knew his Greek too well for the word ‘pathetic’ primarily to mean anything but ‘involved in strong feeling”, and this controls his first definition.  “All violent feelings…produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the ‘pathetic fallacy’.”  As an afterthought, in the chapter “Of Classical Landscape”, he includes the notion of vague poignancy – “pathos” in a most un-Greek sense – projected outwards upon nature.  But the cause of that refinement in the malady is not far to seek: “a large amount of the dreamy and sentimental sadness, tendency to reverie, and general patheticalness of modern life results merely from derangement of stomach.”  And the Greeks, he tells us, were more fortunate in this respect.

Having postulated that violent feelings cause “falseness in all our impressions of external things”, he is committed to some account of perception; and the weakness of his psychology immediately reveals itself in a cluster of equivocal words conveniently changing colour with their context – true, false, right, fact, and their cognates.  He distinguishes three ranks of men:

the man who perceives rightly, because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose, because he does not love it.  Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose: a star, or a sun, or a fairy’s shield, or a forsaken maiden.  And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing else than itself – little flower apprehended in the very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the associations and passions may be that crowd around it.  And…these three classes may be rated in comparative order, as the men who are not poets at all, and the poets of the second order, and the poets of the first.

His summary, to which he adds “prophetic inspiration”, begs even more questions.  “There are the men who feel nothing, and therefore see truly; the men who feel strongly, think weakly, and see untruly…; the men who feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly.”

Ruskin knew that states of feeling modify perception in important ways; but when he tries to support an acute and accurate intuition with arguments from a crude realism he is forced to abandon a discussion of painting and finds his examples in poetry.  Thus the flexible ambiguity and language keeps the perceptual test in the background and confuses it with an ontological test.  He does not hint how the first-rate artist’s perception is affected by his “acute feelings” (compare the “violent” feelings of the second-rate); he does not suggest what the relation is between the thing “there” and the thing as painted; hence his perceptual test fails to tell him anything about painting.  And although his verse illustrations show that he is a sensitive reader, they also show a total ignorance of the nature and purpose of metaphor.

Ruskin here offers two or three valid apercus; but they have no systematic structure.  As soon as he attempts to correlate them into a critical principle his philosophical incapacity leads him to place the centre of reference outside the range of artistic experience.  He rightly distinguishes a large family of artistic failures; but he gives it a vague and pretentious name, and erects around it a screen of pseudo-arguments which only go to fortify misinterpretation.  The word ‘pathetic’ is slippery enough; the word ‘fallacy’ is far more objectionable.  For almost a century it has silently linked Ruskin’s authority to the illusion that works of art can be judged by some standard of external coherence, and to the further illusion that that position is supported by impregnable rational argument.  His problem is mal posé, and thus becomes a different question which, if solved, would tell us nothing about art.  Ruskin announces his affiliation with Plato and the angels, and argues like a philistine.

There is a wide gap between a good critic’s ability to criticise works of art and his ability to formulate a critical system which other people, differently equipped, can apply.  When Sir Kenneth Clark departs in his book from practical criticism to investigate speculative questions he modestly describes himself as “splashing about with our more exuberant philosophers in the shallow end of journalism”.  The discrepancy between Ruskin’s intuitions and his formulation of them would not matter much if only the resonant phrase he coined had not had such a powerful narcotic effect upon critical theorists.  The phrase has stuck, and with it all the wrong-headedness of his argument has been perpetuated; while the positive features of his analysis, to which the argument was not necessary, have had to be rediscovered and asserted for new – by Eliot, for instance.

The term ‘pathetic fallacy’ – in Ruskin’s sense, a false interpretation or representation [of what?], arising from violent feelings – assumes an unequivocal distinction between man and nature, subject and object; it assumes that there is some external and demonstrable datum by which distortion, misdirection, or false attribution can be assessed; it further assumes that a single subject-objection distinction applies to all kinds of human endeavour, including art.  If these assumptions were valid, philosophy would be a less thorny wilderness than it is, and than Ruskin found it.  If he had noticed that the ‘fact’ and the datum of ‘true’ perception which he invoked are of a lower order of apprehension than the artist’s, he would hardly have postulated so glibly his “little flower apprehended in the very plain and leafy fact of it”.  Philosophical theories of perceiving and knowing will one day profit greatly by a careful study of artistic experience.  At present we do not know, except in terms of human perception and response, what in nature is ‘there’; and no theory of art is improved by supposing that we do, or by neglecting the complexity and variety of human response to what may be called external stimuli.  In any case, it is questionable whether those considerations take us farther than to the fringes of art.

If we transfer the question of perception to Sir Kenneth Clark’s book we find that his subdivisions into Landscape of Fact, of Sentiment, of Fantasy, the Ideal Landscape, and so on, are unified by his insistence upon the quality of the painter’s perception, of the ‘concern’ the painter brings to his work, the degree and quality of excitement accompanying his visual experience.  “Facts”, he declares, “become art through love, which unifies them and lifts them to a higher plane of reality.  Dürer’s topographical work, “by its intense concentration, has an almost hypnotic effect”.  Bellini had “the landscape painter’s greatest gift: an emotional response to light” and his greatest work is “the result of impassioned observation”.  Breughel was “so continuously excited by what he saw, and possessed such prodigious powers of observation and memory, that his place is with the masters of fact”.  Of Vermeer’s View of Delft, the nearest approach which painting has ever made to a coloured photograph, he says that “the mood of heightened receptivity necessary to achieve it cannot be isolated from the tension of spirit which goes to the creation of any great work of art”.  And so on, until Cézanne’s “miraculous style created with the patience and self-sacrifice of a Milton or a Flaubert” is shown to arise from “the reaction of his whole being, of that tempérament, which he used to pronounce with such ferocious rolling of the ‘r’.”

Art does not arise from an analytical separation between subject and object; which is another way of saying that it is contemplative, not pragmatic.  It is concerned with the fields of emotional force which bind together all antitheses into a single perspective; and those fields of force ‘matter’ because they arise when we apprehend nakedly the tragic paradox of the human situation.  The perceptual experience of artists shows definitely that vividness of perception, heightened feeling, and a conviction that the experience matters are distinguishable facets of a total experience, and that these facets are simultaneously but not causally related.  The conviction is not propositional, and neither it nor the quality of perception can be completely analysed in terms of ‘average’ perception or of any intellectually conceived formula.  ‘Truth to Nature’, for example, is every bit as much a blunderbuss formula as the pathetic fallacy.  An individual may know what he means by it, and even do good work in the light of his own concept.  And that means at best that it is a principle of method, a way of keeping the eye on the ball: it can’t tell us what is going to be done with the ball, or how well it will be done.

Most criticism has to be directed against the uncritical because they concentrate upon the inessential.  No matter how closely we hold Ruskin’s term to his own definition, it will always misrepresent the relation between the artist and his work, and between a work of art and ‘nature’.  Further, it confuses two aspects of the creative act which require more and more clearly to be distinguished: (a) the degree and king of emotion and how it is ‘commanded’; and (b) the relation between the artist’s method and his intention.  One of these, and possibly both, Ruskin proposed to clarify.

(a) The artist’s task is to focus and clarify his emotions in all their complexity and vividness, and so to embody them.  When emotion runs wild, attaching itself to inappropriate objects and disrupting the form in which it seeks a body, the work of art exhibits what may conveniently be called sentimentalism.  And the key to sentimentalism, as Ruskin hinted and Eliot has asserted, is not strength but imprecision of emotion.  Sentimentalism may be a deplorable mistake, or a lamentable misfortune, but it is not a fallacy: for it arises from a breakdown in responsive organization, and marks the artist’s failure to integrate himself and his world.  The study of integration would perhaps be illuminated by an analytical differentiation, in moral terms, between feeling and emotion.

(b) Ruskin’s essay gives a strong suspicion that he is trying to set up one term of a secondary antithesis as a primary critical principle – that he wants to say that ‘classical’ art, or ‘objective’ art, is a good thing and everything else is a bad thing.  We may be too generous if we find in his propagandist indignation a sign that he was seeking a test of artistic integrity, that he was trying to assert that a good critic’s judgement of what is a good picture cuts across all secondary antitheses.  In any case, his injudicious choice of terms led him to conduct his argument in a shadowland of irrelevance.  The secondary antitheses (subjective-objective, romantic-classical, expressionism and naturalism, symbolism and its opposite) apply to method, point of view, personality, and can be separated from primary values with that same sort of precision as appears when technical achievement is detached from integrity of purpose.  What in the end matters is whether a work of art is whole; it makes no difference how it got that way.  The greatest art is not achieved by taking up an attitude midway between any of these methodological extremes, but by pursuing any of them unrelentingly.  Unfortunately the word ‘objectivity’ is now firmly attached to that condition of occluded response which accompanies a limited interpretation of ‘fact’ and ‘knowledge’.  That this neutral and bloodless state of mind should be accorded a sort of mystical veneration is part of our mental and social climate, and has led (among other oppressive and wrong-headed notions) to the preposterous view that criticism can, or even should, be ‘scientific’ on the model of physics or biology or Marxist history.  And it is to this view that Ruskin’s dictum has lent weight, not so much by what he wrote as by what his interpreters, isolating his term from its confused context, have said they thought he meant.

If we are to judge works of art in terms of wholeness, of integrity, we must be extremely sensitive to shades of intention.  All a work of art can say is ‘here it is’, and neither the artist nor anybody else can define any of the three words in the exclamation.  Any departure from that contemplative disinterestedness – any desire to excite emotion, terror, admiration, curiosity, bewilderment; any need to discourse, to paint about rather than to embody – is a breach of artistic integrity, no matter how subtle.  Very little is known about integral judgements, except that they are essential in creating a work of art.  One thing is certain: a method for applying such judgements cannot be formulated.  The best we can hope for is a discipline of preparation which will induce a state of dynamic receptivity in the presence of works of art.

The critical faculty, being recreative, is as easily disorganised by subtle changes of intention as is the creative faculty.  Cant phrases and hermetic formulae have sometimes justified their survival by bringing light and liveliness into an inquiry.  But the term ‘pathetic fallacy’ ought not to survive.  Even when accurately applied it is misleading; it prejudices issues which cannot be definitively settled and thus introduces irrelevant criteria; it misrepresents the nature and purpose of art by proposing to explain contemplative activity in terms of pragmatic activity.  It is sad to think how many introductory lectures on nineteenth century literature would have to be torn up if Ruskin’s phrase were outlawed by general consent.  But they could be replaced by some lectures extricating what the term conceals and confuses: and the chances are that those lectures might bring us into much closer touchy with poems and paintings.