Chapter 6

Ugliness & Beauty in Oneness

The world doesn’t seem to be all of a piece, for while the handsome and sublime are in it—mountain peaks still go towards the skies, towards sunrises and sunsets—it is also quite observable that the misshapen, the broken, the ugly, the disgusting, the repulsive, the unendurable are there. The world seems to be an indefinite, endless compound of the ugly and pretty, the abominable and the beautiful. In philosophic terms, the world is not only Order but Disorder; not only Law but Unnerving Caprice; (or, getting back to the strictly philosophic,) not only A Priori but A Posteriori.

At this moment, the abidingly abstract is of the universe as a rusty forgotten pin is. It is arresting, this.

Art, being reality shown as it wholly is, has had to keep up. Consequently, while art has searched for the beautiful, it has included the ugly. The symmetrical alone has not been hunted for; hunted, too, has been the judiciously asymmetrical. And deep within man has been the feeling that the ugly and beautiful were closer than they seemed; that, perhaps, they were serving the same thing; that they—the ugly and beautiful—were of one reality stock.

Thought of how ugliness shows beauty is with us now, intensely, in many places. Beckett, Genêt, Soutine are three contemporary examples of the courting by art of the ugly. There are many others.

Summarily: the history of art and the history of art criticism contain a tendency to join the pleasant and unpleasant, the serene and painful, the soothing and unsettling: beauty and ugliness. The tendency to join beauty and ugliness is, according to the Theory of Opposites, based on the deep fact that they are one.

The Composed Assertion of Ugliness

Beauty is the composed assertion of ugliness, as the number 1 is the composed assertion of 2/17, 1/3, 1/51, 1/2, 1/34; for 1 is, in its serenity, 102/102. Ugliness has to do with the fragmentation, fractionality, brokenness, vicissitude, subtraction, division, addition, multiplication, alteration within beauty as a whole, or one. However this may be, it is clear that art has had in it a tendency to bring the ideal and the grotesque together, the “perfect” and the imperfect, the orderly and the disorderly.

Notable in the history of the making one of beauty and ugliness is the essay by Charles Lamb on Hogarth ^[1] —which appeared in The Reflector of 1811. Lamb doesn’t go as far—hardly—as what we can see today, but there are beginnings in his essay: beginnings presented consciously.

In the relation of beauty and ugliness, we should see the relation of the serious and the ludicrous. The serious, of course, is not exactly what beauty is, but there is something comely—not deformed—in the serious. Classic tragedy is serious, sad; but mighty orderly. As soon as, with Elizabethan tragedy, with Shakespeare conspicuously, the comic got into tragedy, there was a dent in what forbade seriousness and laughter to be together, in what rejected the keeping company of the orderly and disorderly. (Beauty is as much a dent in what is denied as it is a presentation of the permitted. As in mathematics, the negative is present in beauty.)

The gravedigger in Hamlet is an important figure in the making of the Tragic and Laughable one, in the making of Symmetry and Asymmetry, Beauty and Ugliness one.

Retrieving Lamb. In the essay “On the Genius and Character of Hogarth,” there is this sentence:

In the scene in Bedlam, which terminates the Rake’s Progress, we find the same assortment of the ludicrous with the terrible. ^[2]

At this point, it should be noted that one of the aspects of romanticism is the getting closer of the high and low, the mighty and “unimportant,” the grand and silly, the magnificent and grotesque. We find this in Wordsworth’s dealings with donkeys and idiot boys and porringers; in Scott’s getting in of queer, dazed, disorderly figures in his novels, like Dugald Dalgetty, Dandie Dinmont, Meg Merrilies, and many more; in some of Coleridge’s subjects and ways. And we find the romantic honoring of the low and unshapely in the criticism of Lamb, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Hunt.

Constantly in Lamb’s criticism is the restoration of the forgotten unhandsome. In the sentence I have just quoted, which finds an artistic kinship between the ludicrous and the terrible, a way of romantic criticism is to be seen.

Like Imagination Anywhere

Lamb writes with intensity of that work of Hogarth having the somewhat indecorous title of Gin Lane. Of this print, Lamb says, after comparing Hogarth with Poussin:

There is more of imagination in it—that power which draws all things to one,—which makes things animate and inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects and their accessories, take one colour, and serve to one effect. Every thing in the print, to use a vulgar expression, tells. [Pp. 95-96]

Gin Lane, or no, Lamb says imagination here is like imagination anywhere. Imagination couples the low and high. We don’t have to agree with Lamb as estimator to see that there was in his critical purpose, critical impulse, that which lessened the distinction between the comely and the improper.

According to Lamb, the comic can be used deeply or superficially; and when the comic is used deeply, why, the comic is in the field of the important, the beautiful. The comic, like other things, has its aesthetic gradations.

But merriment and infelicity, ponderous crime and feather-light vanity, like twiformed births, disagreeing complexions of one intertexture, perpetually unite to shew forth motley spectacles to the world. Then it is that the poet or painter shews his art, when in the selection of these comic adjuncts he chooses such circumstances as shall relieve, contrast with, or fall into, without forming a violent opposition to, his principal object. Who sees not that the Grave-digger in Hamlet, the Fool in Lear, have a kind of correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem to interrupt? [Pp. 99-100]

Two Ways with the Comic

The comic, Lamb sees as mattering, as a mental force in the world. There is a noble way of seeing the comic, a profound way of seeing the ludicrous. And there is a way not honoring sufficiently the idea of the comic. Lamb compares Hogarth’s prints to the “droll productions” of Bunbury:

But in all of them will be found something to distinguish them from the droll productions of Bunbury and others. They have this difference, that we do not merely laugh at, we are led into long trains of reflection by them. [P. 100]

And then Lamb, writing of Hogarth’s faces, is passionately philosophic:

They are permanent abiding ideas. Not the sports of nature, but her necessary eternal classes. [P. 101]

I have mentioned the tendency in romantic criticism to honor the low, disorderly, unseemly in art. It is interesting that in this essay, to sustain his approach to Hogarth, Lamb quotes a passage from Coleridge’s The Friend. In Coleridge’s dealing with Rabelais, Don Quixote, and Shakespeare, enough can be found to make it clear that the Coleridgean criticism wishes to honor the unshapely, unsymmetrical, unlooked for and low in the world and thought.

The art of today has gone beyond Lamb and Coleridge and Hazlitt in their approach to form and disorder. Romantic critical principles are, however, still alive, still essentially serviceable. The questions that Lamb and Coleridge raised as to why the out-of-bounds and disorderly are part of the power of Shakespeare and all art, are—in an earlier form—the question of today. Today the question has taken the form, How can the personally repulsive, the disgustingly fearful, become art, be at one with structure, design, accuracy, aesthetic consequence? Many painters, sculptors, writers of verse, dramatists are busy with this problem. We have domineering ladies with erysipelas, syphilitic Southern idiot boys, cripples of all kinds acting as tragic chorus, the affirmation of visceral complaints, philosophic lodgments in ash cans, freezing homicides, multitudinous, desperate and unappealing—often—sex, dermatological mishaps, death and death, vacuity, conqueringly oppressive trivia; all the panoply and shock and weariness of ugliness let loose. But art can be about always.

The ugly in art was in ancient times. Mediaeval people did not keep away from it. The Renaissance—Grünewald, Cranach, Bosch, with their distortions and agonies and leers, exemplify it—honored and worked with the ugly.

It was in 1827, in France, that the ugly in art—called at this time the grotesque—was thumpingly affirmed by Hugo as romantic critic. It was in Victor Hugo’s Preface to Cromwell. Hugo goes along with Lamb and Coleridge and Hazlitt, but he is widely excited. He uses history, swiftly, to express his critical passion. There is not much meditativeness in the early critical Hugo—as there is not in the later critical Hugo.

Hugo strangely says that it is Christianity which has led art to a proper notion of the ugly:

Christianity leads poetry to the truth. Like it, the modern muse will see things in a higher and broader light. It will realize that everything in creation is not humanely beautiful, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light. ^[3]

The “modern muse” of 1827 is certainly lively.

And Hugo says that he will try to prove—it is necessary—that the new art, the “modern genius,” results from the union of the ugly and beautiful.

Let us resume, therefore, and try to prove that it is of the fruitful union of the grotesque and the sublime types that modern genius is born—so complex, so diverse in its forms, so inexhaustible in its creations; and therein directly opposed to the uniform simplicity of the genius of the ancients; let us show that that is the point from which we must set out to establish the real and radical difference between the two forms of literature. [P. 369]

Art Always

Though Hugo says that he is writing of the “modern genius,” he is writing of art in itself. Art has always looked for the opponents of, the interferences with, the unsettlers of “beauty.” The energy of Balzac’s Birotteau is related to these words of Hugo; related, too, are the good and evil in Dostoevsky’s Sonia and Raskolnikov; the figures of Southern primitive evil in Caldwell and Faulkner. But, strictly speaking, every line of poetry trembling in symmetry and uncertainty; every painting staying within a canvas and trying to get out of it, with shapes in it affirming and fighting each other; every musical composition, plodding, leaping, halting, crisscrossing; every play using conflict to proceed with—is a study in the orderly and disorderly, a study in beauty and ugliness in their beginning in the nature of things, time and space, mind.

So it happens that the hero of Hugo’s 1827 Preface is the Grotesque:

In the idea of men of modern times, however, the grotesque plays an enormous part. It is found everywhere; on the one hand it creates the abnormal and the horrible, on the other the comic and the burlesque….If it passes from the world of imagination to the real world, it unfolds an inexhaustible supply of parodies of mankind. [Pp. 369-370]

Man has for a long time had a tendency to parody himself. He has desired to make himself ridiculous, to torture himself, to put himself out of commission, to nullify himself. Conscience, criticism, sense of ridicule, religion, humor have worked with art to have man show what he can do towards making himself less and existence less.

The Great Difference

Only, the important thing to see is that when man is made less with art, when the world is made less with art, it is good; both man and the world gain. When men and the world are made less, with wretched, pompous vanity as a personal cause, something else, not so good, goes on.

There are the subtleties, the critical details of the relation of the grotesque to the beautiful, of the ugly to the orderly. These are being worked at everywhere in the world today.

Meanwhile, this from Hugo:

On the other hand, the grotesque seems to be a halting-place, a mean term, a starting-point whence one rises toward the beautiful with a fresher and keener perception….And it would be true also to say that contact with the abnormal has imparted to the modern sublime a something purer, grander, more sublime, in short, than the beautiful of the ancients; and that is as it should be. [P. 370]

All the art of today is concerned with what “contact with the abnormal” exactly, fully means. Do the normal and abnormal in all their forms—one of them is the determinate and indeterminate—have a source in common instantaneity, or do they represent rival domains, like the half of a pair of scissors and one claw of a crab?

Art has said that the normal and abnormal come from one thing. And art is trying to show this discernibly in specific works.

What Is Deserved?

I have written about the meaning of Lamb’s essay on Hogarth and that of Hugo’s Preface to Cromwell—the meaning for any time—in a poem called “History of Art.” It seems right to use some relevant lines:

Art and science are both seeking. They are seeking the relation of the abnormal and normal in oneness, the relation of ugliness and beauty in oneness.