A sensuous art

‘Ella on the stairs’ by Peter Brown. https://www.mallgalleries.org.uk

Inverted Commas 21: Words resonant

“‘Literature,’ he re-enunciated in his mind, ‘is the sensuous art of causing exquisite impressions by means of words.’ And yet there was something more […]” — Chapter IV

‘The Hill of Dreams’

In Arthur Machen’s 1907 novel The Hill of Dreams the young Lucian Taylor (alias Machen himself) is in Caermaen (a stand-in for Caerleon in Machen’s native Wales) imagining himself in a tavern enjoying the town’s ancient splendour as an outpost of the Roman Empire.

He sits, listening to the hubbub of conversation, doubtless enunciated in everything from educated to vernacular Latin, because as a bookish clergyman’s son Lucian has been thoroughly tutored in the classics.

And as he sits he muses: “The rich sound of the voices impressed him above all things, and he saw that words have a far higher reason than the utilitarian office of imparting a man’s thought.” What follows is a gradual laying out of his creed regarding beauty and its raison d’être.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ‘Fantasy of an Ancient Bath‘ (1755/1760)

As has already become evident Lucian is a budding aesthete, with intimations of synaesthesia. This is unsurprising because like his creator he grew up in an age of aestheticism, when certain leading artists proclaimed the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, “art for art’s sake” (in Latin ars gratia artis, in German Kunst für die Kunst). Théophile Gautier, John Ruskin, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde and many others, all were to assert that art needed to serve no moral, political, or didactic purpose but to exist of itself, independent of any social and utilitarian requirements. Lucian thinks along similar lines when he considers language:

The common notion that language and linked words are important only as a means of expression he found a little ridiculous; as if electricity were to be studied solely with the view of ‘wiring’ to people, and all its other properties left unexplored, neglected.

Let’s pass over whether his analogy is a close fit or not because, having downgraded its somewhat prosaic usefulness, he goes further:

Language, he understood, was chiefly important for the beauty of its sounds, by its possession of words resonant, glorious to the ear, by its capacity, when exquisitely arranged, of suggesting wonderful and indefinable impressions, perhaps more ravishing and farther removed from the domain of strict thought than the impressions excited by music itself.

Some of us might appreciate monologues and conversations, all speech really, as akin to abstract music if we were to drain meaning from the words themselves, but Lucian is aflame with the insights that occur to him. Surrounded in his imagination by a pleasing buzz of conversation in a babble of Latin dialects, as sunlight shafts through the tavern doors and the scent of exotic flowers perfumes the air, he believes he has alighted upon a deep mystery:

Here lay hidden the secret of the sensuous art of literature; it was the secret of suggestion, the art of causing delicious sensation by the use of words. In a way, therefore, literature was independent of thought; the mere English listener, if he had an ear attuned, could recognise the beauty of a splendid Latin phrase.

You have to admire Lucian’s tentative steps towards deeper thinking. Perhaps he was reacting against a strict kind of utilitarianism, even the kind of morality defined by John Stuart Mill, which declared that “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” Lucian seems to be enunciating the aesthetic position which thinks that essentially art is its own justification, and that the utilitarian approach – that art has the immediate and moral function to serve society – is to him somewhat anathema.

Philip Guston: ‘Dial’ (1956)

Myself, I think art is like two sides of the same coin: art can also serve two masters, though not necessarily at the same time. Language itself is a tool for conveying emotions, beliefs, observations, information, warnings, affection and so on; but so can body language, mime, sign language, dance, facial expressions, letters, printed matter, not forgetting much else under the umbrella of artistic expression. Language can also be beautiful in itself regardless of meaning, and in common with abstract art can evoke what Lucian terms “wonderful and indefinable impressions”.

A sensuous art causing exquisite impressions, regardless of the words’ meanings: yes, Lucian sees himself as an aesthete, yet what dangers such an exclusive path can lead him is explored more fully in Machen’s novel: months later, when Lucian returned to his London bedsit, he “spied a little bottle on the mantelpiece, a bottle of dark blue glass, and he trembled and shuddered before it, as if it were a fetish …” Clearly the “words resonant” weren’t quite enough.

---

More discussions of literary and other quotes can be found under the tag Inverted Commas

I reviewed The Hill of Dreams for Annabel’s Dewithon, Reading Wales Month 2023

https://bookjotter.com/2023/02/05/are-you-looking-forward-to-reading-wales-2023/