BOOKS OF THE DAY
Aesthetics of ' Leviathan '
The Aesthetic Theory of Thomas Hobbes. By Clarence De Witt Thorpe. (Oxford University Press. 225. 6d.) WE do not usually associate the name of the author of Leviathan with beauty or the theory of art. This volume, a publication of the University of Michigan, not merely corrects that impression, but goes far to prove that the Sage of Malinesbury was the father of English aesthetics, or, at any sate, of that approach to the subject which culminated in the magnificent if incomplete philosophy of Coleridge. That approach is, of course, the psychological one, and the aesthetics of Hobbes is merely part of that general realistic analysis of the mind and activities of man which gives him such an important place in the develop- ment of modem thought. There is already a good deal of aesthetics in Leviathan, especially in the opening chapters on Sense, Imagination, the Consequence or Train of Imaginations and on Speech. Hobbes was perhaps the first philosopher to realise the full significance of speech in human evolution, and as a result he became very conscious in his use of language. Not only was he, as Aubrey said, "rare at definitions," but he had also an equally rare feeling for what he called the "natural contexture of the words ":
For the order of words when placed as they ought to be, carries
a light before it, whereby a man may foresee the length of his period, as a torch in the night shows a man the stops and unevenness in the way. But when plac'd unnaturally, the Reader will often find unexpected checks and be forced to go back and hunt for the sense, and suffer such unease, as in a coach a man unexpectedly finds in passing over, a furrow.
This quotation comes from his essay on "The Virtues of an Heroic Poem" (1675), which, with "The Answer to Davenant " (1650), constitutes his only direct literary criticism. But he began his literary activities with a translation of Thucydides which is more remarkable for its elegance than its accuracy, and In his old age he not only translated the Iliad and the Odyssey, but wrote an autobiography in Latin verse. Dryden compared him to Lucretius, and the comparison is a happy one. At any rate, we can consider Hobbes as a literary artist of the first rank, and it is because his aesthetics was based on his experience and practice of an art that it possesses the realism or truth which has made it the foundation of the psychological method in aesthetics.
After an introduction, Mr. Thorpe gives us some account of Hobbes's predecessors in the psychological approach, beginning with Plato and Aristotle and passing by way of the Stoics to Longinus, Plotinus, St. 'Thomas Aquinas, Italian and Spanish thinkers of the Renaissance period such as Telesio and Huarte, Campanella and Gracian, and finally to English Renaissance critics and philosophers like Puttenham and Bacon. Having then given an account of Hobbes's theory of imagination and of his doctrine of effects, he goes on to trace the development of the psychological approach in Dryden and John Dennis, ending with a chapter on evidences of Hobbes's influence on Cowley and others, and throwing a glance forward to Hartley, Coleridge and Wordsworth. It will be seen that the book thus constitutes a fairly complete history of the origins and development of English aesthetics up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and as such it fills a gap in our critical literature. It is true that it ignores an alternative approach to the subject, which might be called academic or idealistic, but that is precisely its virtue; it traces a living stream through the veritable wilderness of irrele- vant rubbish that has been written on the subject. Future students will be very grateful to Mr. Thorpe.
It may be asked in what consists this psychological approach to aesthetics. It is, of course, merely part of Hobbes's general attempt to relate all human phenomena to natural law. All mental phenomena must be traced to their physiological basis in perception. "There is no other act of man's mind. . . naturally planted in him . . . but to be born a man, and live with the use of his five Senses." When, on this principle, Hobbes has defined sensation, he is ready to deal with those terms like "wit," " fancy " and "imagination" which are still the stock elements of literary criticism. Hobbes's theory that motion is the cause of knowledge is worthy of Pavlov, and one feels that if only he had
had some adequate facts about the physiology of the brain to help him, he would have arrived at an anticipation of the theory of conditioned reflexes just as his theory of association seems to anticipate Freud. 'these are perhaps exaggerated comparisons, but they do indicate the basic tendencies of Hobbes's psychology. The interesting fact is that, on the basis of his mechanistic psychology, Hobbes could nevertheless arrive at satisfactory definitions of concepts like imagination and genius, of whose reality he, as an artist, was fully convinced. "Time and Educa- tion begets experience; Experience begets memory; Memory be- gets judgement and fancy; Judgement begets the strength and structure ; and Fancy begets the ornaments of a poem . . "
It is tempting to go on with this quotation from "The Answer to Davenant," one of the noblest passages in English prose, but it is long and elaborate. We must be content with Mr. Thorpe's zusrunary
The old negative connotations of Plato's phantasy have dis- appeared. The fancy here, as an architect able to create, is responsible for all those achievements of civilisation which have depended upon the inventive, constructive powers of the mind. She it is who, seeing what is required and what is to be had, is able to choose from the storehouse of experience and construct new forms better fitted to meet men's greatest needs.
In short, no one has ever made such a firm scientific defence of the poetic faculty as this sceptical debunker of human follies and
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