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Art without Form?: A Question Prior to an Aesthetic of Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

E. F. Carritt
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Extract

Rogery Fry in Last Lectures threw out the suggestion that the inferiority of neolithic to palaeolithic painting might be due to the birth or growth of language and the consequent temptation to dull the vivid sensibility for individual life by the practically useful habit of abstract or generalized thinking. Whether or no the birth and growth of language involved a set-back for graphic and plastic art, it certainly first made poetry possible. And the question which puzzles me is this: Would any art analogous to poetry have been possible without speech? What if a tongue-tied race had invented a system of ideograms or purely conventional gestures?

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 16 , Issue 61 , January 1941 , pp. 19 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1941

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References

page 20 note 1 It is obvious that the same written signs may suggest different sounds and ideas to different nations (“pain”), or the same sound and different ideas to one nation (“ball”). The same written signs are very differently pronounced by a Cockney and a Tynesider: (Doctor: “Can you walk yet?” Patient: “Work! I can't even walk!”). I pronounce Greek rather differently from some of my friends, and so, I presume, did an Athenian from a Syracusan. Conversely, “cougher” and “coffer” represent to an Englishman the same sounds but different ideas. “BAG” and “bag” the same sound and the same idea.

page 23 note 1 Had a mediaeval knight contemplating an escutcheon any aesthetic experience, comparable perhaps to that of reading the Forsyte Saga?

page 23 note 2 Consider an analogy. A blind man or a man with his eyes shut certainly apprehends no beauty in a rainbow, and surely not the same that we do in a rose or a statuette. Is the beauty which it is claimed he can feel in a statuette like what we see there or more like what we might feel in a delightful fabric or a delightful breeze, or, again, more like what we might feel in reading

“Perfect little body without fault or stain on thee,

With promise of strength and manhood full and fair,”

or Vera incessu patuit dea?

page 24 note 1 American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to Deaf Mutes, Report of Fourth Summer Meeting,Chatauqua, N.Y.,1894. “H. Keller,” by McFarland, J.Google Scholar.

page 25 note 1 Theory of Beauty, VII, §§ 11, 12.

page 25 note 2 Aesthetik, III, pp. 227, 244–5, 270–7Google Scholar.