theoryofliteratu00inwell

Evaluation 255
"Difficult" beauty and artistic "greatness" are, it would ap-
pear, to be equated, as "perfect" art and "great" art should not
be. The element of size or length is important, not of course for
itself but as making possible an increase in the intricacy, tension,
and width of the work. A "major" work, or a "major" genre, is
one of dimension. If we cannot deal with this factor as simply as
Neo-Classical theorists did, we cannot dismiss it : we can but exact
that scope must be economical, that the long poem today must
"do" in return for its space more than it used.
To some aestheticians, "greatness" involves recourse to extra-
aesthetic criteria. 15 Thus L. A. Reid proposes to defend "the
view that greatness comes from the content side of art, and that,
roughly, art is 'great' in so far as it is expressive of the 'great'
values of life" ; and T. M. Greene proposes "truth" and "great-
ness" as extra-aesthetic but necessary standards of art. In practice,
however, Greene and especially Reid hardly get beyond Bosanquet's
criteria for difficult beauty. For example, "the great works
of the great poets, Sophocles, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, are
organized embodiments of a large variety of human experience."
The "notes" or criteria of greatness in any realm of theory or
practice appear to have in common "a grasp of the complex, with
a sense of proportion and relevance" ; but these common charac-
ters of greatness, when they appear in a work of art, have to
appear in "an embodied value-situation," as "an embodied value
to be savoured and enjoyed." Reid doesn't ask the question: Is
the great poem the work of a poet who is a great man (or mind
or personality), or is it great as a poem? Instead, he attempts to
reconcile the implied answers. Though he finds the great poem
great by its scope and judgment, he applies these criteria only
to the poem as poetically shaped, not to some hypothetical
Erlebnis. 16
Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost are good
test cases for formalist treatment. Croce, refusing to see the
Comedy as a poem, reduces it to a series of lyrical extracts interrupted
by pseudo-science. The "long poem" and the "philo-
sophical poem" both seem to him self-contradictory phrases.
The aestheticism of a generation ago, as instanced in a writer like
Logan Pearsall Smith, sees Paradise Lost as a compound of outmoded
theology and auditory delight—the celebrated "organ