Q.2 Make a precis of the given passage and suggest a suitable heading.
From Plato to Tolstoi art has been accused of exciting our emotions and thus of disturbing the order and harmony of our moral life. “Poetical imagination, according to Plato, waters our experience of lust and anger, of desire and pain, and makes them grow when they ought to starve with drought. “Tolstoi sees in art a source of infection. “Not only in infection,” he says, “a sign of art, but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art.” But the flaw in this theory is obvious. Tolstoi suppresses a fundamental moment of art, the moment of form. The aesthetic experience – the experience of contemplation – is a different state of mind from the coolness of our theoretical and the sobriety of our moral judgment. It is filled with the liveliest energies of passion, but passion itself is here transformed both in its nature and in its meaning. Wordsworth defines poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility”. But the tranquility we feel in great poetry is not that of recollection. The emotions aroused by the poet do not belong to a remote past. They are “here”-alive and immediate. We are aware of their full strength, but this strength tends in a new direction. It is rather seen than immediately felt. Our passions are no longer dark and impenetrable powers; they become, as it were, transparent. Shakespeare never gives us an aesthetic theory. He does not speculate about the nature of art. Yet in the only passage in which he speaks of the character and function of dramatic art the whole stress is laid upon this point. “The purpose of playing,” as Halmet explains, “both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as, twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” But the image of a passion is not the passion itself. The poet who represents a passion does not infect us with this passion. At a Shakespeare play we are not infected with the ambition of Macbeth, with the cruelty of Richard III, or with the jealousy of Othello. We are not at the mercy of these emotions; we look through them; we seem to penetrate into their very nature and essence. In this respect Shakespeare’s theory of dramatic art, if he had such a theory, is in complete agreement with the conception of the fine arts of the great painters and sculptors.
Solved Precis of CSS 2009
Topic: Art transforms nature’s trait
Art has been criticized for exciting emotions and disturbing the moral life of a person. Plato defines art and poetry as a source of lust and anger which opens the pores of pain and desires whereas Tolstoi defines art as not only the source of poison but also he has taken this poison as the sole measure of excellence in art. On the other hand, the aesthetic experience poses completely different view. It considers art as powerful tool of energy which transforms both the nature and its meaning. While considering the view of Shakespeare, one came to know that his theory of dramatic art corresponds to conception of fine arts and that his view that poetry recollects the emotion with tranquility is not true in real because these emotions in great poetry are alive and immediate and they cannot be infectious by the negative traits.