THE GAY SCIENCE. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. I. the title. HAVE called the present work the CHAPTER Gay Science, because that is the shortest description I can find of its Meaning of aim and contents. But I have ventured to wrest the term a little from its old Provençal meaning. The Gay Science was the name given by the troubadours to their art of poetry. We could scarcely now, however, call poetry, The term or the art of poetry, a science. It is true that Science. the distinction between science and art has always been very hazy. In our day it has been as hotly disputed as among the schoolmen whether logic be a science or an art, or both. Even so late a writer as Hobbes classes poetry among the sciences, for it is in his view the CHAPTER science of magnifying and vilifying. I hope I. before I have finished this work to trace See Chapter more accurately than has yet been done the IX. dividing line between science and art; but, in The Gay Science, because the science of This the 3000 years. the meantime, there is no doubt that poetry Why the Gay Science, however? The light- pleasure. joyfulness of their art. In the dawn of modern literature, they declared, with a straightforwardness which has never been surpassed either by poets or by critics, that the immediate aim of art is the cultivation of pleasure. But it so happens that no critical doctrine is in our day more unfashionable than this-that the object of art is pleasure. Any of us who cleave to doctrine of the old creed, which has the prescription of about thirty centuries in its favour, are supposed to be shallow and commonplace. Nearly all thinkers now, who pretend to any height or depth of thought, abjure the notion of pleasure as the object of pursuit in the noble moods of art. But what if these high-fliers are wrong and the thirty centuries are right? What, if not one of those who reject the axiom of the thirty centuries can agree with another as to I. the terms of a better doctrine? What if theirs CHAPTER be the true commonplace which cannot see the grandeur of a doctrine, because it comes to us clothed in unclean and threadbare garments? There is no more commonplace thinker than he who fails to see the virtue of the commonplace. It suggests a great about plea sure. Pleasure, no doubt, is an ugly word, and, as re- Doubts presenting the end of art, a feeble one; but there is no better to be found. deal for which as yet we have no adequate language. One day it may be that we shall find a different word to express more fully our meaning; but that day will never come until we have first learned thoroughly to understand what is involved in pleasure; and to see what a hundred generations of mankind have groped after when they set before them pleasure as the goal of art. It can be shown that this doctrine of pleasure has a greatness of meaning which the high-fliers little suspect that it is anything but shallow; and that if it be commonplace, it is so only in the sense in which sun, air, earth, water, and all the elements of life are commonplace. We to feel this the moment we attempt to pleasure. Take any allowable definition. Kant says that it is a feeling of the furtherance of life, as pain is a sense of its hindrance. Such a definition at once leads us into a larger circle of ideas than is usually supposed to be covered by the name of pleasure. Perhaps it is not begin Palliated by define nition of it. Kant's defi I. CHAPTER quite satisfactory, but we need not now be too particular about its terms. What Kant says is near enough to the truth to show that on the first blush of it we need not be repelled by the assertion of pleasure being the end of art. Neither need any one be repelled if this doctrine of pleasure strike the key-note, and suggest the title of the present work, in which an attempt will be made to show that a science of criticism is possible, and that it must of necessity be the science of the laws of pleasure, the joy science, the Gay Science. |