TWO

Instruction and Delight
in Art

The preeminence usually ascribed to the reasonable faculties of understanding and judgment indicates allegiance to conscious thought and fear of what we call the unconscious; however, a certain amount of skepticism about mankind’s rational powers leads to conflicting views. The seventeenth-century controversy as to whether man should believe himself an image of God capable of approaching perfection or believe himself a limited animal leads directly to ideas about the function of art. If man were an image of God and were innately good, he still had to be instructed, taught to improve his understanding of eternal truths. Abstractions such as eternal truth are difficult to communicate through logical discourse, but the imagination as an elevated faculty envisions and communicates, for example, divine beauty through artistic forms such as ideal proportions. Art that achieves such a purpose is art of the highest kind, and it is connected to the highest parts of the soul. If man were merely a sensational animal, the purpose of art would be to gratify appetites for amusement, or to propagandize, or to propagate approved morals or virtues through conventional appeals to the passions or emotions. In art of this lower kind, the imagination is used to stimulate the lower passions, and the judgment is limited to distinguishing right and wrong in temporal terms or in terms of relativistic standards set by society.

Divergent views about judgment and imagination are behind the seventeenth-century preoccupation with “instruction” and “delight,” the purposes of art. Writers mention these concepts so often that we are led to think their thoughts on the subject superficial. Sometimes they are. But there are different kinds of instruction and delight, and the debate over them helped determine Baroque taste and artistic form. The Hobbesian sensationalists or Neo-Epicureans are at one extreme; the Christian Neoplatonists, at the other. Individual choices, which usually combine the two extremes, are determined by the ways each artist or theorist saw the human condition in terms of the mind or soul and can vary considerably. A single person could be drawn first to instruction and then to delight, with his views changing throughout his life.

Rubens’s painting Hercules between Vice and Virtue—representing one of the most popular and important motifs of the period, the motif of Hercules’ choice—helps define more clearly the dilemma of instruction versus delight. Which part of Hercules’ soul will rule, his appetites or his reason? Will he prefer the immediate, sensual pleasures of vice to the more arduously achieved, long-run, intellectual pleasures of virtue? The decision is ordinarily understood to be virtue over vice, but different painters present the subject in different ways. As Jean Hagstrum says in The Sister Arts (1958), Annibale Carracci makes Hercules incline toward virtue, while Rubens makes him incline toward vice.¹ If, like Hobbes, you believe only in the senses, that there is no higher soul, no abstract good or bad, only immediate pleasures, then the choice of vice becomes a choice for pleasure or sensation; thus this choice becomes the rational option. Since the high pleasures of virtue are illusory, immediate pleasure becomes the end of art.

Because of the increasing reliance on the senses to perceive truth, the increasing distrust of the imagination and of individual human endeavor, the boundaries of human perception shrank. The limits of belief moved toward a reality defined by facts and things, toward materialism, and away from belief in transcendent verities, away from the Neoplatonic ideas of vision, truth, and beauty. Instruction became more practical; delight became more sensual.

I

Although the fancy or imagination conceived great visions of goodness, great art, and great plans, it is always distrusted because it stimulates the basest appetites and passions and creates wild fantasies. Without judgment, the chaotic, imaginative powers are undirected. Over and over we learn that uncontrolled fancy is madness, that great powers of mind are close to insanity. Dryden, in well-known lines, says:

There are many horrible examples of characters whose irrational faculties gain ascendance over their reason, and the idea is not confined to the last part of the seventeenth century. The jealous Othello has an overactive imagination (1604). So have the pride-struck Satan in Paradise Lost (1667); the roistering Israelites in Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden Calf (ca. 1633); the drunken Alexander the Great in Dryden’s “Alexanders Feast” (1697); the ranting Emperor Maximin in Dryden’s Tyrannic Love (1669); the lust-torn Phèdre in Racine’s play of the same name (1677). And so have the unstable Duke of Buckingham, Charles II’s favorite, and the seventeenth-century religious fanatics whose brains were thought to be cracked by the heat of their overly exercised fancies.³ The degree to which an artist fears, uses, or trusts the irrational faculties (the imagination or fancy) determines the extent to which he emphasizes the role of judgment or understanding (rationality), the parts of the mind that impose form on art. Although a great wit has to have a powerful imagination (and Milton compliments Shakespeare by calling him “fancy’s child”), a person whose imagination or passions are stronger than his judgment is mad, or a madman, and the length of ascendancy of the imagination or passions determines whether a person has a temporary aberration or is permanently insane. Both artists and audiences were thought of in this way. The ideas of furor poeticus, or the poetic afflatus, of Plato’s view of the poet as madman (and subsequent variations thereof) were regarded with mixed emotions.⁴

Shakespeare’s Caliban and Ariel are instructive personifications of higher and lower parts of the second, the sensible soul. Caliban, with his libidinal urges, is the embodiment of the lower appetites.⁵ Ariel is the personification of “airy” fancy. Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine Neoplatonist, says (in translation) that sound and song “strike the aerial part of the hearer,” that delicate part of the imagination that receives music. Thomas Lodge makes the connection among Ariel, aerial music, and the higher parts of the soul even clearer:

Musicall concent (by reason of the aeriall nature thereof) being put in motion, moveth the body, and by purified aire, inciteth the aeriall part of the soule, and the motion of the body.... By the very motion of the subtill aire, it pierceth vehemently, and by contemplation sucketh sweetly.⁶

Shakespeare’s Ariel, the dispenser of music, is of the nature of air, a spirit of the middle air. His song, “Where the bee sucks, there suck I” (V, i) is of the nature of music in the sense that Lodge expresses: music “pierceth vehemently” and “sucketh sweetly.” The image of music is imaginative and Neoplatonic in its origins. The Renaissance parallel between music and lyric poetry, both of which were often thought by believers to be conducted through air by the spirits of the middle air, is total; recall not only that lyric poetry was sung but also that Renaissance poetry was largely oral.⁷ The ideas carry through the seventeenth century, at least as a convenient mythology. Henry Purcell has a charming song that gives the proper conception of the spirits of the middle air, “Ye gentle spirits of the air.”⁸ Purcell connects the spirits of the air to the imagination, but they are higher than the lower passions. As Purcell’s song progresses, the spirits are asked to sing, to lull love (passion) to sleep. The keys, which to Purcell have appropriate meanings, change according to the progress of the song, as passion is overcome. The song starts out in the passionate key of d with love present, modulates to a, to C, and finally to F at the end, when the music indicates that harmony of the soul, or hope of freedom from passion, has been achieved.

The arousal of the passions always has been thought to be fraught with danger, for even a true kind of enthusiasm is not totally controllable, and if the judgment is quiescent, it is difficult to distinguish between true and false enthusiasms. Ariel, for example, is an amoral spirit who does good things when controlled by Prospero’s judgment. The danger even in Ariel’s music in The Tempest is embodied in the strange shapes that appear in Act III, scene iii, which have to do with the potential, uncontrolled dangers of the imagination and passions when they are excited by music. John Marston, the Elizabethan playwright and satirist, takes a different but not opposing tack, associating music more with lust than with any other passion.⁹ Writers of the later seventeenth century usually talk about music and the passions together. René Descartes, in his Compendium musicae (Utrecht, 1650), says that each tone in the scale expresses and elicits a different emotion. Jeremy Collier (1697) goes further:

[Music] raises, and falls, and counterchanges the passions at an unaccountable rate. It charms and transports, ruffles and becalms, and governs with an almost arbitrary authority. [He goes on to say that no reason is absolute proof against it, witness Odysseus and the sirens.]¹⁰

Henry Purcell calls music “nature’s voice” and says that the passions (nature in this case), such as love, bind the fancy (Ariel-like fancy) and captivate the whole soul: “Love charms the sense and captivates the mind.” When we hear, we grieve or hate or rejoice (Orpheus Britannicus, I, p. 158).

The belief in the superiority of judgment or understanding affected the status of different kinds of art. The distrust of the passions goes along with a general distrust of music unless it is somehow subservient to words, which are supposedly more rational. Music overstimulates the passions; words supposedly are more intellectual and easier to control with judgment. This distrust is particularly true for practical, affective music. The Neoplatonic idea is that music (musica speculativa) instructs through its form, its mathematical proportions. And music has traditionally been associated with mathematics; both were included in the quadrivium, which consisted of arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music. Abstract, ideal mathematical proportions became embodied in sound by means of musical proportions. Such music by definition would be beautiful. But the older, Neoplatonic view of music, which carries through much of the seventeenth century, holds music less trustworthy than words. Marsilio Ficino, for example, thinks the word (or poetry) superior to music because it is an imitation of the mind of God (or what God thought); whereas music is an imitation of the harmony of the universe, which comes from God’s mind at one remove. Poetry is thus prior and superior because it is closer to absolute reality, the mind of God. In its highest manifestations, poetry comes from, and appeals to, the human analogue of God’s mind, the understanding, the reasonable part of the soul. Gretchen Finney elaborates on these ideas, which explain why in operas such as Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607) the music sets off the text (pp. 131, 133) and why Lully is so respectful of his librettos. The currency of such ideas in the seventeenth century is reinforced by their presence in the eighteenth. The practicing musicians and composers Thomas Clayton, Nicolino Haym, and Charles Dieupart, in a letter to The Spectator (No. 258, 26 December 1711), say that music is valuable only as it heightens the purpose of poetry, that music without words or a message of some kind is like nonsense verse:

It must always have some sentiment or passion to express, or else violins, voices, or any of the other organs of sound, afford an entertainment very little above the rattles of children.

Joseph Addison himself says that words make music reasonable and instructive.¹¹ The idea that words are superior to sound shows how an idea hangs on after its time. By Addison’s era, musical theory is largely affective in nature, that is, music instructs through appeals to the emotions, not so much through mathematically conceived form. The idea that music instructs through mathematical proportions while it delights through harmony had for some time been dying out, but conventions connected with it were through association themselves influencing the passions.¹²

Music is not the only art that raised suspicious passions. Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) points out that although fancy or imagination helps poets and painters envision transcendent ideas, their work must be governed also by reason.¹³ To Burton, human beings who lack reason are merely animals ruled by concupiscence (pp. 140-41). Imagination, the common cause of passions (p. 224), causes madness (p. 847) and is unfortunately strengthened by the continued exercise of the emotions (p. 469). Art that appeals to, or raises, the imagination is therefore dangerous, for whoever wants to cure madness “must first rectify [the] passions and perturbations of the mind” (p. 467). He describes love, for example, as “a lesion of the fancy” (p. 659). Burton says repression of the emotions is temperance, the “bridle of gold, and he that can use it aright is liker a God than a man: for as it will transform a beast to a man again, so it will make a man a God” (p. 401). In normal or superior people, the imagination, therefore, has to be inferior to the more rational powers in both quality and strength. In The Tempest, both the high and the low kinds of passion and imagination are controlled by Prospero, whose power signifies the judgment or understanding of the whole, reasonable soul. The psychological allegory is clear: if Prospero loses his control (his judgment), he literally will lose his power over the ethereal Ariel and be overcome by the sensual Caliban (his baser passions). In the seventeenth century, some theorists and artists may have believed that the rational and irrational faculties should be in balance; but the rational ones always have to be firm to counteract the potentially formless vacuities of the irrational.

The recognition of imagination as a powerful force or faculty caused it to play an important role in all theories of artistic creation, purpose, and reception. Imagination is important to instructive Neoplatonic visions of divine beauty, as well as to art that merely stimulates passions. When Thomas Hobbes says art is the product of a “decaying sense” (imagination), he is not saying that imagination is unimportant to art but that art is less important than either science or history because the imagination is less instructive and less important than the judgment. To Hobbes, the imagination creates, communicates, and receives delight. Dryden, in his Preface to The Rival Ladies, says this about fancy:

This worthless present was designed you long before it was a play; when it was only a confused mass of thoughts, tumbling over one another in the dark; when the fancy was yet in its first work, moving the sleeping images of things toward the light, there to be distinguished, and then either chosen or rejected by the judgment.¹⁴

The fancy, here, is roughly equivalent to our conception of the unconscious. Dryden’s version of fancy is like Hobbes’s version because it is not a creating faculty: fancy relies wholly on the memory. The vagaries of the imagination also are thought to work sometimes in terms of chance, and they also produce divine inspiration, which carries a creator to his greatest, unexplainable heights, to the sublime—to Bouhours’s je ne sais quoi, to Horace’s curiosa felicitas, to Tasso’s non so che, or to Pope’s “grace beyond the reach of art.” This sublime creativity achieves effects far beyond mere beauty, a quality usually reached by a great, sober talent possessing much judgment.¹⁵ Although there were Neoplatonists who thought imagination at least as important as judgment in envisioning beauty, the seventeenth century tended to elevate reason over the imagination. Given the structure of the soul, with the reasonable soul in the highest place, the kind of art that pleased the reason most was thought to be the best art. As John Davies says, “Poetry . . . [requires] not only great happiness of thought, but also a noble restraint of the judgment, over and above some fury or enthusiasm, which may strike life into all the rest.”¹⁶

II

Despite the general distrust of the imagination and the passions, and the kind of art that appealed to them, all Baroque artists and theorists include delight (and persuasion) as an important function of art. The range of opinions about instruction and delight runs from Thomas Hobbes’s extreme view of delight as the only end to various kinds and extremes of the opposite view. John Dryden, by far the most influential seventeenth-century English critic, vacillates in his opinion about the relationship of instruction to delight, and his reasoning and debate about these two ends of art are indicative of variable attitudes toward art’s moral utility. He first says (possibly under the influence of Hobbes) that delight is primary but later, toward the end of his career, he comes finally to the conclusion that though delight comes first, instruction is the great end, thus affirming the primary role of the reasonable soul in the production and appreciation of art.¹⁷ Dryden’s final view of delight as the first but subsidiary end of art is the normally accepted view throughout the seventeenth century.

Thomas Hobbes thinks that delight is the main end of art (see Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Joel Spingarn [Bloomington: 1963]):

For all men love to behold, though not to practise Vertue. So that at last the work of an Heroique Poet [the highest kind of poet] is no more but to furnish an ingenuous Reader (when his leisure abounds) with the diversion of an honest and delightful Story, whether true or feigned. [In Spingarn, II, p. 68]

Hobbes, of course, does not believe in a rational or reasonable soul, and if his views are to be accepted, God and man’s elevation toward God are a snare and a delusion. Art cannot instruct in the sense that speculative music is instructive (that it is an imitation of God’s order in the universe). Hobbes believes wholly in local stimuli, that external motions touch the senses, stimulating motions within the recipient. Stimuli are also induced locally by art, and thus art to him is totally the product of rhetorical, artistic devices (figures, tropes, colors, sounds) used to arouse specific pleasures and motions in us. Art need have no social utility whatsoever; its raison d’être is delight. If people are controlled by local stimuli, they enjoy art only when it pleasurably arouses their appetites or appeals to their tastes, and judgments about art become relativistic, a reflection of individual taste rather than absolute verities or standards. There is no good or bad art in the abstract, there is only art that we either like or dislike. To Hobbes, history or science deals directly with truth or facts. Art does not; it deals with remembered facts dressed up by the fancy. Since a work of art can instruct us only inaccurately about truth (which to Hobbes is phenomenological fact), all higher literary themes are illusory. There is a paradox, however. Hobbes thinks imagination an inferior faculty; yet his belief that man acts only for pleasure and from appetite testifies in itself to the power of the imagination. For it is imagination which enflames the passions. Art is thus an important tool in shaping behavior and belief.

We can see a Hobbesian influence in many Restoration comedies in which the characters act solely according to their appetites. The various villains and heroes—Horner in William Wycherley’s Country Wife (1675), Vernish in Wycherley’s Plain Dealer (1676), and Dorimant in Sir George Etherege’s Sir Fopling Flutter (1676)—are not particularly distinguishable from one another in terms of morality or elevation of character, although they are distinguishable in ability and success associated with materially realized cleverness and power. There is little or no regard for abstract moral virtue or for the moral improvement of the audience because there is no such thing as innate virtue (or very little of it). The boundaries of reality are the exigencies and desires of the passions and appetites.

Restoration comedy, as it presents supposed facts about the world, is what we would call realistic entertainment. It fits into a Hobbesian scheme of art by presenting amusing facts and situations as remembered, distorted and exaggerated, so that the imagination that envisaged the situation and that gave impetus to the writing and production of the play is at one remove from the society it mirrors, fitting Hobbes’s definition of imagination (since it is derived from memory) as “decaying sense” and reinforcing his view that art exists primarily to give pleasure. But Restoration comedy also instructs. With little emphasis on plot, it teaches its audiences the ways and manners of an elegantly savage world. It tries to show that people act only in their own interests for power, appetite, and pleasure. It represents a world without transcendent values, a world so lacking in idealism that it could not be acceptable for long to any but a small proportion of the population. Restoration audiences in general tended to prefer art that is morally instructive and improving. We would expect, therefore, a reaction to characters and beliefs of such an unsentimental nature, and this is what happened. Shadwell’s popular play Don John, or The Libertine (1676) forcefully shows the punishment merited and received by a wicked person who does not recognize the reasonable soul, whose every action is to satisfy his carnal appetites, and whose rational faculties are used to figure out the means of satisfying those appetites. The heroes and heroines of sentimental comedy in the early eighteenth century are much more moral (although less entertaining) than those of Restoration comedy.¹⁸ Restoration comedy, for all its licentiousness, was not a widely popular entertainment. London in the Restoration most of the time barely supported two playhouses in which such plays were performed; much of the time, only one. Although it was important and influential, Hobbes’s view of the purpose of art as entertainment is not ordinary.

Although Hobbes’s views toward art and life are extreme for his time, all the arts at all levels of morality at least partially aim at delighting the senses, from Milton’s Paradise Lost (1672) to Rochester’s Valentinian (1685), and interest in the ways in which the passions could be raised grew as the affections were regarded with more respect. The evidence for this changing interest is everywhere, in all Baroque art, both in England and on the Continent. There is a great deal of difference between Michelangelo’s grand perceptions of the human body as a manifestation of God’s beauty and Bronzino’s sensual Allegory of Passion or Bernini’s fanciful Apollo and Daphne, between the largely speculative music of Josquin Des Prez and the emotionally charged works of Monteverdi. It is this change, the increasing emphasis on human passions, that commentators often note as one of the differences between Renaissance and Baroque art.

Changes in attitude toward the passions over a shorter period of time are more difficult to pin down because of the mixture of beliefs artists—sometimes even the same artist—held. Bernini is an example. Robert Petersson calls the Cornaro chapel “one of Bernini’s most theatrical works; and one of his most elaborately illusionistic.”¹⁹ He also points out that in Baroque art all the arts are fused to achieve “a single dramatic impact” (p. 47) and that Bernini is a literary artist (p. 50). What he says is true, and the effects he talks about are achieved by rational, artistic techniques that without distortion we call rhetorical. Bernini also has a Neoplatonic side to his art. Petersson says that Bernini’s “realism” is “the Christian cosmos of all that can be known, sensed, and intuited” (p. 48), that he imitated the idea in the mind, that models only got in the way (p. 48),²⁰ and that he thought he breathed life into a statue the way God breathed life into substance (p. 50)—the Neoplatonic belief that the artist is an analogue of God the creator. Petersson ends by saying that Baroque art (Bernini’s statue of St. Teresa he calls “perhaps” the “supreme example” of all Baroque sculpture [p. 51]) has “planned spontaneity” (p. 120).

The mixture of Platonic and rationally rhetorical strains of thought that Petersson indicates are in Bernini is also evident in meditative poetry and painting. Anthony Blunt points out the connection of meditative exercises to painting,²¹ and as pointed out in Chapter III meditative poetry is rhetorical. Yet Louis Martz correctly says that in meditative poetry the Neoplatonic fusion of beauty and intellect from God is inspiration.²² There is a mixture of views, but in its increasing emphasis on the passions and the rhetorical devices that present or direct the passions seventeenth-century art became more affective and less Neoplatonically oriented in both conception and effect. It tried increasingly to arouse emotion and passion in its recipients rather than to induce harmony in their bodies and souls. Interest in the passions gradually superseded the transcendent idea that harmonious grace, beauty, and virtue comprise an ideal state of the human soul. Instruction became an overt product of affective devices rather than an elevating effect of artistic form. Delight became more sensual, linked to passion rather than to divine truth. The different meanings attached either to instruction or to delight can cause difficulty for us in understanding what a seventeenth-century writer means.

III

The disapproval of art as entertainment as expressed by Plato in The Republic, Book X, was known to every educated person and was extremely influential in the Baroque era. To Plato, if an art does not have a moral purpose and benefit, it should be cast out of the Commonwealth, and he criticizes most severely literary works of art. Much was written to justify the arts in the light of Plato’s indictment. Art created for diversion is, therefore, the least defensible kind of art since it concerns the passions rather than the understanding. Art should have a serious purpose. It should be useful if it is to be regarded as respectable. Anthony Blunt recounts the evolution of painting into an honored occupation:²³ an artist had to become an educated person, associating his painting with rhetoric, mathematics, and moral instruction. Paintings could then be conceived and received by the highest part of the reasonable soul, the understanding. The Plotinian or Neoplatonic idea that absolute beauty could be envisioned only by the imagination and induced into the soul by artistic form gave way to pragmatic or moral usefulness as the important function of art. In Shakespeare, for example, there often is no poetic justice because his vision goes beyond the bounds of mere existence. Justice need not occur on earth. In the French code of dramatic rules, which so strongly influenced the Baroque era, poetic justice is important. It presupposes a moral order on earth, a rational order that can be anticipated in nature. The movement toward emphasis on poetic justice confines the moral imagination and bases art on a rational judgment that is more limited than a Neoplatonic fusion of judgment and imagination. According to French rules criticism, a transgression or an admirable action has to be duly weighed, then punished or rewarded in worldly terms. Art that follows such a rule is not as profoundly real as the excessive suffering of a King Lear. Rational instruction is clearly the product of the judgment, and an overactive imagination detracts from overt utility, breaking down the controlled perception and understanding of a defined, limited order. There is much difference between a transcendent vision of reality conceived in the soul by means of a single powerful human imagination and the externally imposed dogma of critical rules within which the artist must confine himself. The primary difference between the two views is evident in the imaginative scope of the works made.

In the seventeenth century, satirical painting and literary satire, pastoral music, painting, and poetry express moral purposes and are justified by the instruction they give. This didactic function is even more true of the higher genres, history painting, epic, and tragedy.²⁴ Le Bossu, for example, says that the first step in writing an epic is to formulate a moral : “La première chose part ou l’on dois commencer pour faire une Fable, est de choisir l’instruction et le point de morale qui lui doit servir de fond, selon que le dessein et la fin qui l’on se propose.”²⁵ Dryden records Le Bossu’s influence, saying that Homer’s moral in The Iliad is “of preventing discord amongst confederate princes, which was his principal intention. For the moral (as Bossu observes) is the first business of the poet, as being the groundwork of his instruction.”²⁶ Evelyn’s translation of Fréart de Chambray (1665) states, “Paynting, founded upon the real principles of geometrie, makes at once a double demonstration of what she represents [truth of harmony and proportion, and the moral also]; but it will indeed require different eyes to contemplate and enjoy her beauty entirely: For the eye of the understanding, is the first and principal judge of what she undertakes.”²⁷ Rubens says his figures are allegorical, that he paints to express intellectual meaning (letter no. 93), and (in letter no. 242) describes the allegory in his painting The Horrors of War.²⁸ Thomas Mace, in the old style, says that music “powerfully” captivates all our “unruly faculties and affections (for the time), and disposing us to solidity, gravity, and a good temper; making us capable [to receive and understand] of heavenly and divine influences.”²⁹ Marin Mersenne, whose thought is more modern, devotes all of the First General Preface to the Reader in his monumental L’Harmonie universelle (1636) to justifying music’s utility.³⁰

Since it was thought that art that appeals to baser parts of the human soul (the appetite, the lower passions, and the imagination, which stimulates them) is not instructive and therefore indefensible, throughout the seventeenth century there is allegory in painting (and paintings of noble heroes); Platonic, mystical explanations of music; and moral themes and poetic justice in poetry of every kind. If one art, say, music, were thought to be more morally elevated than another, theorists of other arts, such as of poetry and painting, borrowed conceptions about that art to explain and elevate their own. The harmony of music is therefore identified with the harmony of poetic metrics. Mersenne, for example, in Part II of L’Harmonie universelle, tries to work out an explanation of the musical modes in terms of meter, and he discusses rhythms of verse in Pindar, Horace, and Anacreon.³¹ George Puttenham devotes Book II of his Arte of English Poesie (1589) to harmonic proportion in rhyme, meter, and stanza forms. And the noble heroes, religious figures, and mythological characters that grace paintings are found also in poetry.

Some English critics in the Baroque age, influenced by extreme rationalism, followed French lines of thought about regularity and useful instruction. Thomas Rymer is a conspicuous example. In the Preface of the Translator (1694), in his translation of Rapin’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie, Rymer says, “Fancy with them [the Arabs] is predominant, is wild, vast and unbridled, o’re which their judgment has little command or authority: hence their conceptions are monstrous, and have nothing of exactness, nothing of resemblance or proportion” (p. A4).³² Rymer says of Edmund Spenser, “He wanted a true idea [like Le Bossu’s moral]. . . . All is fanciful and chimerical, without any uniformity, without any foundation in truth” (Preface, p. 9). He likes Spenser’s wit. The Italians, he thinks, “debauch[ed]” Spenser’s judgment. He translates Rapin, “The principle end of poesie is to profit,” among other ways “by refreshing the mind, to render it more capable of the ordinary functions, and by asswaging the troubles of the soul with its harmony” (p. 12). That harmony is not the Neoplatonic microcosmic imitation of the macrocosm but a balanced view of the world, the way the world should be (not the way the universe is). Rymer dislikes the imaginative developments of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser. He wants them instead to exhibit the order that should exist in the world.

Another work that shows the increasing tendency in England to enshrine rational instruction is Joseph Addison’s Cato (written ca. 1703), a rather unexciting, but moral and instructive, tragedy admired by cognoscenti in France and England for its appeal to the rational mind. Voltaire, who expresses belief in the pleasurable regularity produced by the unities, says,

The tragedy of Cato, which does such a great honor to M. Addison, your successor in the ministry [Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke]; this tragedy, I say, the only one your nation has produced which is well written from beginning to end—you yourself have said it—owes its great reputation to no other element than its beautiful lines, its vigorous and true thoughts, expressed in harmonious verse.³³

Addison’s Cato is not widely admired for its imaginative vision.

Unlike Hobbes, both Rymer and Voltaire maintain that art should instruct its viewers in morality, through regularity, decorum, and poetic justice. As such their view agrees with the rational view of art expressed by Plato but takes a potentially transcendent idea like poetic justice and limits it to earthly confines. That kind of idealization of life, combined with the accepted usefulness of Aristotelian rules to make drama verisimilar or illusionistic, leads to a common source both for French rules criticism and for Hobbesian views of art. That source is the desire for a collective rationality, for the use of external, commonly accepted rules. It is combined with a distrust of the rationality of a single person, presupposing a distrust of individual genius. (Hobbes, of course, says human beings are more equal in intelligence than they are even in physical strength.) The purpose of rules and regularity—Rymer’s and Voltaire’s concerns—is to make drama as rational as possible so that a rational person can recognize its truth and admire in it those ideas commonly accepted or propagated by society. For the rules supersede individual genius. The judgment works on a low level. Cato is a play many thought they should respect and admire. It instructs through overt morality expressed rhetorically, appealing through the passions to the judgment, but not to the total understanding in the manner of King Lear or Antony and Cleopatra.

The whole idea of moral instruction helped justify rules-oriented criticism about dramatic poesy and painting, wherein the manners, the three unities, les bienséances, decorum, poetic justice, and the other rules all are supposed to give the illusion of reality to a morally elevated, larger-than-life presentation of virtue. Art of this moral kind was widespread in the Baroque era, although the fashion and purpose of the morality varied according to perceptions of reality peculiar to individual painters, and changing attitudes over a period of time, and differing national attitudes. The change in French painting over time is evident, and was extremely influential, in England. Simon Vouet, for example, the first painter for Louis XIII, painted large numbers of abstract allegories about truth, justice, and other such abstractions. Nicholas Poussin painted fewer; Charles Le Brun, fewer still. The bulk of Le Brun’s paintings, as first painter to Louis XIV, glorify Louis himself, both for state propaganda purposes and for Louis’s own ego. Thus we see Louis XIV in a painting of the crucifixion and in other paintings in which he resembles Alexander the Great or some other hero, not to induce harmony into our souls, or even into society, but to glorify Louis XIV. The propagandizing is not carried out through a vision of beauty or even through an appeal to the highest soul, but through appeals to the emotions. We are to be overcome emotionally by Louis XIV’s gloire. We are to feel his presence. The instruction in regard to Louis XIV is political and personal yet still rational in intent. We are made to understand and to admire, through emotional persuasion, worldly power and greatness rather than the goodness and vastness of God’s cosmos seen through the artistic product as artifact, as microcosm, although conventional allusions to the cosmos are used to achieve emotional effects.

Louis XIV’s use of art for political purposes, as well as his own pleasure, is an example of art with all its elevated, Neoplatonic connotations employed rhetorically for political ends;³⁴ this practice indicated the tendency to follow the kind of materialism espoused by Hobbes. Le Brun’s use of an accepted mode of allegorical or rhetorical expression, based on his expectations of how spectators will react to artistic conventions, indicates a fundamental distrust of mankind’s rational capacities, a distrust inherent in the external probabilities (truths) imposed by instructively oriented rules criticism. The distrust of individual imagination and judgment coincided in France with the idea that a secular centralized power can provide the corrective, an idea similar to Hobbes’s. The history of French art follows such a view. Robert Isherwood can say that Charles Le Brun more than anyone else turned visual allegory and mythology into “a principal weapon of Louis’s artistic arsenal” and that Le Brun’s paintings are perfect complements to the physical settings of Lully’s operas (p. 168). Incidentally, painting and opera in their planned effects, in the passions and beliefs they try to raise and instill in their spectators, are the same. As Isherwood says, “Paintings and opera were almost interchangeable media” (p. 169). When one of Lully’s operatic heroes prepares to go to war, his operatic scenes are comparable to the sequence of actions in Le Brun’s allegorical Esquisses pour la voute de la galérie des glaces à Versailles (1681-84).

The moral, or instructive, content of music is a somewhat special case because music, by its nature, cannot be as overtly instructive as the other arts. Being a part of mathematics, music is more abstract than they, and its suitability for allegorical instruction lies first in its connection to poetry and song. In song music is subservient to what the words say and tries to imitate their sense either literally or abstractly. If literally, then music is “practical.” Thomas Morley, in A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), says, “Practical [music] is that which teacheth all that may be known in songs, eyther for the understanding of other men’s or making of one’s own.”³⁵ The instruction contained in practical music is rhetorical in that it teaches through persuasion, through appeals to the emotions. For example, Jacques Gohory says that “Orland di Lassis [Orlando di Lasso], the most skillful musician of this time,” expresses all the passions. Gohory says Orlando is the first to set the syllables of words on the notes and is like Virgil and Cicero (and Apelles) in his persuasiveness.³⁶ Rhetorical, persuasive, practical music consciously contrived to affect the listener is the kind of music that became most important.

Another kind of music instructs abstractly through form. It is music based on the significance of harmony and intervals, for example; it has a kind of mystical instruction or meaning that transcends passions and earthly existence. This is “speculative” music. After stating that we thank God that “he gave us a reasonable soul” so that we can search for “more than earthly things” (Introduction), Thomas Morley says that speculative music “is that kind of music which by mathematical helps, seeketh out the causes, properties, and natures of sounds by themselves, and compared with others proceeding no further, but content with only contemplation of the art. . . .”³⁷ The instruction offered by speculative music is more abstract, inducing harmony in the soul of listeners through the harmony of the music itself. Sir Thomas Browne says, “For there is musicke wherever there is harmony, order, or proportion; and thus far we may maintain the musick of the spheres; for those well ordered motions and regular paces, though they give no sound to the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony.” As late as 1698 as great a thinker as Christian Huygens says that the harmony of music is the same as geometry in giving pleasure to the understanding.³⁸ Music thus was thought to lend itself to the expression of Neoplatonic ideas of beauty and harmony throughout the Baroque age. And artistic theories of the period that rely on relationships depicted in musical terms (proportion, harmony) are still largely Neoplatonic in nature whether they apply to poetry, painting, architecture, or sculpture and whether the idea of musical harmony itself is a rhetorical device.

Proportion in painting serves the same purpose as harmony in music. The influential Lomazzo says (1584) that the proportions have the same purpose in all the arts, as they deal with men.³⁹ In painting, “when we behold a well-proportioned thing we call it beautiful. . . . [Beauty is] communicated to the eye, and so conveyed to the understanding. . . . Effects of piety, reverence, and religion are stirred up in men’s minds, by means of their suitable comliness of apt proportion” (p. 25). After telling us that beauty comes from proportion, he says, “As in all natural things [in art, too], neither goodness can stand without beauty, nor beauty without goodness” (p. 81). As we have already seen, goodness is an idea understood only by the highest faculties of the soul. Beauty, therefore, appeals to those same faculties. And Marin Mersenne says that music assists in the contemplation of the divine mysteries, in the practice of virtue, and in achieving harmony in our lives (I, p. 1).⁴⁰ Thomas Tallis’s “Mass for Four Voices” (ca. 1570), for example, is supposed to do just that. A common, half skeptical Restoration attitude toward Neoplatonic ideas concerning harmony, intellect, and the soul as found in art is nicely summed up by the Restoration writer Ferrand Spence in his Preface to Saint-Évremond’s Miscellanea (1686). He says,

The Thomists will have the fruition of the divinity to consist solely in an act of the understanding, which they call vision: But the Scotists in an act of the will, which is love: And the Thomists seem to have the better of the argument, because seeing the operation in which our perfectest happiness is founded, must be the perfectest operation, and seeing that of the intellectual [the understanding] is more perfect than the sensitive part [the second soul], it is apparent, that the operation of this fruition must lye in the intellectual part only. But though I question not but that both in th’upshot may be brought to an accomodation, according to the maximes of the new philosophy which holds all sensations not to be realities either in the senses or the objects of them, but to subsist solely in the perception. I say, I do not care, whether the pleasure springs from either part, provided I have the pleasure [both Spence and Saint-Évremond are Neo-Epicureans]: Tho, perhaps, all that results from harmony, arises from the concern, [art] bears to our souls, which some have opined to be harmony.⁴¹

Spence gives us the point of view of a Neo-Epicurean lover of the arts, even speculating in the last sentence that the highest pleasures might come from the relationship between art and the harmonic quality of the cosmos, the perception of which art communicates to our understanding.

It may be puzzling that the kind of instruction offered, when proportionate and decorous, also gives elevated pleasures to the reasonable soul. Harmony, for example, gives delight to the soul. So does beauty (which is harmonious). Truth is delightful. Neoplatonic ideas operate in the realm of delight, but delight of a high kind. The higher pleasures may be expressed in terms other than Neoplatonic, and Aristotle, in the Nichomachean Ethics, helps define them:

It is accordingly clear that we cannot call pleasures those which are admittedly base; they are pleasures only to corrupt people. But of the pleasures which are regarded as decent, what sort of which particular pleasure are we to claim as being truly proper to man? Surely, this is shown by the activities in which he engages, since it is these that the pleasures accompany. Those pleasures, therefore, which complete the activities of a perfect or complete and supremely happy man, regardless of whether those activities are one or several, can be called in the true sense the pleasures proper to man.⁴²

Aristotle, in this rather circular statement, is talking about the highest pleasures in an existent, terrestial sense, not the real, absolute pleasure of the understanding that emanates from Platonic thought. Yet because of the confusing mixture of Aristotelian, Platonic, and Neoplatonic thought that existed in the Baroque age, Aristotle’s statement can be applied in different ways. A good person can be made happy on earth through the highest earthly pleasures—as long as these pleasures are morally good—as well as through his nearness to the harmony and perfection of the universe that embody absolute happiness and pleasure. Both views say that good art, as an instructive product of the artist’s judgment or understanding, is morally justifiable and socially useful, giving pleasure to the understanding and answering literally Plato’s objections to art in Book X of his Republic.

One could examine at great length in Baroque treatises on all the arts the role of the understanding, which receives and gives instruction, the faculty that elevates art. Lawrence Lipking sums up the discussion on this subject:

The development of English writing about the arts [actually, in European treatises in general] was determined largely by theories designed to counter these indictments: poetry is immoral; the skills involved in painting are manual; music is an idle (or sacrilegious) amusement. As a result, critics throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are likely to argue that poetry is supremely and primarily moral, that painting is the result of intellectual contemplation, and that music is important (or holy) work. Whatever the rights and wrongs of these arguments, critical debate was founded on them. Only when painting had acquired a place of its own, its own appropriate respectability, could the successors of Junius relax their pretensions and begin to speak as equals to equals, as men to men.⁴³

Given the whole effect of art, that which appeals to the reasonable soul (instruction or delight) is superior to that which merely gives delight to the sensible soul, that is, merely arouses passions and appetites.

What a creator intends, his content, or what he says (or does not say) affects the status of his art: whether his art is used to improve individual morality, whether his art is useful to his society or to mankind in general, and whether the amusement his art provides is its first or second purpose. Different ways of defining the soul and of viewing its relationship to art produce different kinds of art. Poetic justice in French drama is a device that tells us something about the view of the world expressed. Shakespeare’s King Lear offers no French conception of poetic justice, yet we feel Shakespeare’s conception of the cosmos is much more magnificent and comprehensive, and so did seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Englishmen. The same differences in conception occur between Poussin and Michelangelo, between Virgil and Homer. A work of art like Racine’s Phèdre makes us marvel at its decorous regularity and preciseness, and we can see how each part plays on our conception of worldly wisdom. Given the circumstances, the kind of people in Phèdre can exist, and Racine’s purposes are clear. But a work like Michelangelo’s Moses transcends our limited world; the personification of power, energy, and wisdom that Michelangelo, with his extraordinary imagination, could only envision and, with his extraordinary artistic skill, can communicate to us only partially is a visual equivalent to the kind of thinking at work in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. Our understanding of Racine’s purposes comes from the parts, from the rhetorical parts as they combine to form a whole. Our feeling for King Lear or Moses comes from the tremendous effect of the whole work on our whole being; yet these artistic wholes also are made of rhetorically conceived parts. The difference comes from the dominance of the imaginative vision or idea that makes Moses and King Lear both greater than the sums of their parts. John Evelyn defends Michelangelo’s Moses against the adverse criticism of Roland Fréart de Chambray (“To the Reader,” An Idea of the Perfection of Painting [London, 1668]). Evelyn admits that Michelangelo is deficient in decorum, which is essentially a consideration of parts, but justifies his opinion of Michelangelo by using the term magnificence, which has to do with the effect of a work in its totality. Fréart attacks the indecorous parts of The Last Judgment, for instance, and after a list of examples, he says (in Evelyn’s translation):

And after all this, what are we to expect of tollerable in this famous piece? There being so many strange and extravagant things, totally repugnant to the verity of the Gospels. [P. 74]

The results of such reliance on judgmental matters, such as decorum of parts, are based on a distrust of the force of imagination, the products of which are those “many strange and extravagant things.” The more imagination is distrusted, the more distrust there is of individual human beings and the less regard we have for the kind of art produced by a Shakespeare or a Michelangelo. Individual and national tastes are formed by such ideas. Michelangelo and Shakespeare were important to the English of the Baroque age as neither was to the French of the same period.

Rhetorically, art can be pitched toward any part or faculty of the soul, and once we see how the parts of the soul were regarded, the kinds of behavior and capacities attributed to each part, and how a painter, poet, or a musician of the period understands, expresses, and portrays man’s mind and how it functions, we can also see and understand how each artist, using devices of his art, tries to influence or instruct the understandings, opinions, and emotions of his audiences or spectators through delight: through form, content, and characterization. We can thereby understand a great deal more about art and its aims and realize why, sociologically and analytically, certain purposes of art and critical attitudes toward art came to be and why the arts were considered an important endeavor. In the seventeenth century the movement away from art as theoretically elevated to art used in specifically purposeful ways, whether to combat ennui, to teach moral lessons, or to reinforce political, religious, and social beliefs, is crucial.