In an earlier post (All That Is Implied), I had occasion to mention the British philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood. Best known, perhaps, for his work in aesthetics, Collingwood made no bones in his essay “Form and Content in Art” about the difference between the romantic and the classical artist:
Romantics are obviously warm-blooded and excitable people, and they often accuse classical art of being cold and passionless. That is a mistake, but a natural mistake. The classical artist is cold-blooded about his subject, but he is not cold-blooded about his work. The romantic portrait-painter falls in love with his sitter, and hopes that this will make the portrait a good one; the classical portrait-painter does not fall in love with his sitter because he is already in love with his art.
How might this distinction apply to the study of language? Collingwood believed that these two perspectives must complement each other in the successful work of art, whether statue, painting, or paragraph. He says elsewhere in the same essay that “a classical art that was not romantic would be an art with perfect form and no content, perfect mastery of its materials and no subject matter, a perfectly expressive language with nothing to express.” His argument is the traditional one that there is an essential difference to be made between form and content, that is, between what we see and what meaning that form conveys to us. The work of art embraces them.
So important is that distinction, though, that If we forget it, we risk being confused and carried off by the emotions that attend on what presents itself to our senses. The great philosopher and Indologist Ananda Coomaraswamy. magisterial in his perspicacity, made the same point in his essay “That Beauty is a State.” Note his reference here to the artist’s subject, not object, that is, content, not form:
In all ages of creation the artist has been in love with his particular subject—when it is not so, we see that his work is not ‘felt’—he has never set out to achieve the Beautiful, in the strict aesthetic sense, and to have this aim is to invite disaster, as one who should seek to fly without wings.
And a page earlier in the same essay, he says this, where his words loveliness and beauty (this time not capitalized) refer respectively to form (or what he calls expression) and content (theme):
The vision of beauty is spontaneous…. And we know that this state of grace is not achieved in the pursuit of pleasure; the hedonists have their reward, but they are in bondage to loveliness, while the artist is free in beauty.
What is lovely to you may not be so to me, but that is of no ultimate matter if our eyes are set on the meaning, the content, of whatever form we individually encounter. And that realization has implications for language and learning. The traditional curriculum named liberal is so called because its study is intended to free one from the merely personal (the expressive), to direct one’s attention instead to the ideas (the theme) which anything particularly attractive to us may embody.
That is why it is futile to argue whether theoretical learning—in language, the rules of grammar and sentence construction and usage—is more or less important than the practical. Theory and practice, like form and content, are correlative, two sides of the same one coin. We can no more do without one than the other. This is the point the poet and writer Mark Van Doren makes in his Liberal Education about the curriculum traditionally called liberal:
Liberal education is nothing if not practical. It studies an art, or a system of arts, designed both by nature and by man to secure that human beings shall be precisely and permanently human.
And he sees this value of the human as the message the ancient Oracle of Delphi was enigmatically pronouncing to one seeking wisdom:
If the student wonders whether his own being [that is, the personal] is end enough, that is because he does not yet know the difference between himself as individual and as person. ’Know thyself’ was an oracle addressed to the individual, charging him to become a person; to know, as a matter of fact, almost everything other than himself, to know the world for what it is, for what it ‘honestly and deeply means,’ and above all to substitute for the inquiry ‘What do I think?’ the inquiry ‘What can be thought?’ The emphasis is not upon his reason but upon reason; not upon himself but upon his kind.
And that kind is the human. All three of these writers are expressing the same belief in the mysterious but fruitful ambiguity of the humanities and the arts, which again all of them see as more than what one makes or learns how to do for one’s own sake and gain. The personal is not enough, and by instead looking to articulate the universals common to each individual, we can speak to the human person who each individual—only an individual by circumstance and happenstance—really is. That is the path on which classical understanding and its romantic freedom may likeliest lie.
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Great!