Schopenhauer tells us that all major artists ask and in their fashion answer a single commanding question: "What is life?" The critic works to show how the author frames that query and how he answers it. Critics are necessary for this work because the answers that most artists give to major questions are indirect. Artists move forward through intuition and inference: They feel their way to their sense of things. The critic, at his best, makes explicit what is implicit in the work.

This kind of criticism is itself something of an art, not a science. You cannot tell that you have compounded a valid reading of Dickens any more than that you have compounded a valid novel or a valid play. When others find your Dickensian endorsement of Dickens to be of use to them, humanly, intellectually, spiritually, then your endorsement is a success. The desire to turn the art of reading into a science is part of what draws the profession to the application of sterile concepts.

Mark Edmundson, "Against Readings"

I have an essay featured on Humane Pursuits today: "3 Ways Reading T. S. Eliot Can Help You Make Great Art."

The tragic Romeo and Juliet moves us, as reading the Psalms of David might move us, by taking us out of ourselves and our present concerns. We do not feel the emotions immediately as our own, but we do learn what it is like to experience those emotions: the longing and frustration of the lovers; the exuberance, faith, or despondency of the psalmist. And we expand our own ability to feel, and to judge the rightness or wrongness of our feelings. Beautiful art allows us, as Scruton says, “to understand dramatic events not theoretically, but by living through them in imagination and sympathy, as the fate of Demeter is lived through by the one who sings the Homeric hymn to her, or as the crucifixion of Christ is lived through by the choir and congregation during the St. Matthew Passion.”

Through this imaginative distance, art teaches us how to order our emotions, as Augustine might say. Art enables us to feel more truly and more deeply.

Liz Horst, "Art Appreciation is for the Everyday" 

What writers from our century will endure? Surely the poets T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden will make the list, both informed by Christian sensibility. Solzhenitsyn no doubt will, albeit more for the raw force of his words than for their craft. Perhaps J. R. R. Tolkien will also be read a century from now, his invention of another world still shedding light on this one.

One of those artists, T. S. Eliot, makes an interesting study. Faced with the political crises of communism and nazism, for twenty years he wrote little poetry, concerning himself instead with more “urgent” matters such as politics, economics, and pragmatic schemes to improve society. In such works as Idea of a Christian Society, After Strange Gods, and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, he turned away from firmly embedded nails and toward goads. Yet who reads those works today? Eliot’s poetry easily outlasted his well-intentioned ideas. Can we learn a lesson from Eliot? Perhaps the best way to achieve the values we approve is not to talk about them all the time, or to try and legislate them, but rather to create literature and art in which they are placed as firmly embedded nails.

Philip Yancey, "The Writer as Artist"

Roger Scruton explains why the modern poet/critic must be essentially conservative:

For let us ask ourselves just what is required of “one who knows” [the poet/critic]. Should he, in the modern world, devote himself like Sartre or Foucault to undermining the “structures” of bourgeois society, to scoffing at manners and morals, and ruining the institutions upon which he depends for his exalted status? Should he play the part of a modern Socrates, questioning everything and affirming nothing? Should he go along with the mindless culture of play, the post-modernist fantasy world in which all is permitted since neither permission nor interdiction have any sense?

To answer yes to any of those questions is in effect to live by negation, to grant nothing to human life beyond the mockery of it. It is to inaugurate and endorse the new world of “transgression,” a world which will not reproduce itself, since it will undermine the very motive which causes a society to reproduce. The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order and set an example of orderly living. The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order, and allow the future to emerge. But it will not emerge, as we know. These philosophies of the “new world” are lies and delusions, products of a sentimentality which has veiled the facts of human nature.

"T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor"

[T. S. Eliot] believed that his contemporaries’ use of worn-out poetic diction and lilting rhythms betrayed a serious moral weakness: a failure to observe life as it really is, a failure to feel what must be felt towards the experience that is inescapably ours. And this failure is not confined, he believed, to literature, but runs through the whole of modern life. The search for a new literary idiom is therefore part of a larger search—for the reality of modern experience. Only then can we confront our situation and ask ourselves what should be done about it.

Roger Scruton, "T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor"

Lewis points out in Chapter 3 of An Experiment in Criticism that to truly understand a work of art, music, or literature, we must surrender to the work on its own terms. This doesn't mean that we must agree with it, but that we must slow down and let the work be what it is before we evaluate it or impose our own meaning on it.

We must begin by laying as completely as we can all our own preconceptions, interests, and associations. We must make room for Botticelli's Mars and Venus, or Cimabue's Crucifixion, by emptying out our own. After the negative effort, the positive. We must use our eyes. We must look, and go on looking till we have certainly seen exactly what is there. We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)

Aquinas says that art does not require rectitude of the appetite, that it is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made. He says that a work of art is a good in itself, and this is a truth that the modern world has largely forgotten. We are not content to stay within our limitations and make something that is simply a good in and by itself. Now we want to make something that will have utilitarian value. Yet what is good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God. The artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists. He must first of all be aware of his limitations as an artist--for art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

Flannery O'Connor, "Catholic Novelists"

When you take time to read a book or listen to music or look at a picture, the first thing you are doing is turning your attention inwards. The outside world, with all of its demands, has to wait. As you withdraw your energy from the world, the artwork begins to reach you with energies of its own. The creativity and concentration put into the making of the artwork begin to cross-current into you. This is not simply about being recharged, as in a good night's sleep or a holiday, it is about being charged at a completely different voltage.

When I read Seamus Heaney or Ted Hughes, I'm not just reading a poet's take on the world, I am entering into a different world - a world built from the beginning on other principles. William Carlos Williams said: "It's hard to get the news from poems, but men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."

Jeannette Winterson, "The Secret Life of Us"

Ken Myers, All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes:

If our cultural lives are sick, it is likely to be an impediment to our spiritual lives. Much popular culture promotes a spirit of restlessness. That is likely to be an obstacle to prayer, to concerned reflection, and to attentiveness to the needs of others. Popular culture also has an extremely limited range of sensibilities. I have never heard a work of popular music that has the depth of poignancy of the opening bars of Brahms's 'German Requiem,' for example, with its text, 'Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.' I learn something about mourning when I hear Brahms; I know of no similar lessons in popular music.

Russell Kirk, qtd. in "Want Truth? Work for Beauty" by Gerald Russello: 

The man of letters teaches the norms of our existence, often rowing with muffled oars. Like William Faulkner, the writer may write much more about what is evil than about what is good; and yet, exhibiting the deprav­ity of human nature, he establishes in his reader’s mind the awareness that there endure standards from which we may fall away; and that fallen nature is an ugly sight. Or the writer may deal chiefly, as did J. P. Marquand, with the triviality and emptiness of a smug society which has forgotten norms. The better the artist, one almost may say, the more subtle the preacher. Imaginative persuasion, not blunt exhortation, commonly is the strategy of the literary champion of norms.

From time to time my students have used the phrase "hidden meanings" in reference to symbolism and metaphor in works of literature. But when a writer uses a powerful symbol or a metaphor, it's not that meaning is hidden--it's that there is so much meaning that the reader cannot comprehend it all. When the Bible uses symbolism and metaphor in the Psalms, Isaiah, and Revelation, is it to hide meaning? No. The point is that the meaning is so rich and full and mesmerizing that we can't get our minds around it.

The other day I came across this quotation from Augustine Di Noia. I'm emphatically not a Roman Catholic, but I thought his words shed light on the richness of theological mysteries and in a limited way to the symbolism and metaphor used in literature and other art forms.

The crucial difference between the Catholic and common uses of the word “mystery” lies here. When the term is applied to divine realities, the mystery involved is by definition without end. This is not to say . . . that the things of God are permanently or radically incomprehensible and ineffable, but that they are endlessly comprehensible and expressible. Not darkness, but too much light is what we encounter here. That irritating conversation stopper, “it’s a mystery,” doesn’t mean that we have nothing further to say but that we can’t say enough about the matter in hand. The mysteries of faith are so far-reaching in their meaning and so breathtaking in their beauty that they possess a limitless—that is to say, literally an unending and inexhaustible—power to attract and transform the minds and hearts, the individual and communal lives, in which they are pondered, digested, and, ultimately, loved and adored.

From Rod Dreher's The Little Way of Ruthie Leming:

On the way to Paris from London, the coach stopped in a town around sixty miles southwest of the French capital. Our group was going to see a famous Gothic church, they told us. Fine by me. By then I had shed the small-town faith in which I had been raised. Being a seventeen-year-old man of the world, I was fairly confident that God did not exist, but I was pleased, of course, to look at beautiful churches. 

This is the untutored boy from the sticks who ambled unaware into Chartres Cathedral, one of the great architectural treasures of Western civilization. The complexity, the beauty, the sheer genius of the thing staggered me. I moved past the huge statues of biblical patriarchs, carved into the jamb of the west portal door, and into the narthex, staring gape-mouthed at the soaring arches in the church vault. Who had built this? How had they done it? And in the thirteenth century! It looked like those thin ribs held aloft tons of limestone, and, miraculously, those vast stained-glass windows, great sheets of reds, greens, blues, and golds, glowing in the sunlight like rubies, emeralds, and sapphires in the firmament, forming portraits of Jesus, His mother, the prophets, and the saints. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for the glory of this building, and the overwhelming scale and intensity of its beauty. 

I walked out of that cathedral a different man, though I wouldn't understand what Chartres had done for me until years later . . . The bus drove on to Paris, but I recall not one thing about the first time I saw the Eiffel Tower, ate a real French baguette, or much else about my maiden voyage to this city that figured so prominently in my boyhood imagination. I only remember Chartres. It was, to me, a message from another time and place, and a mystery. I did not know what it said, not yet, but I wanted to find out. What kind of religious vision can inspire men to build a temple like that to their God? What is God saying about Himself through the stone and the glass of that cathedral? What is he saying to me?

To be sure I did not become more religiously observant on that trip, or back home for my senior year of high school. What happened was that Chartres put me onto something. I was still a teenage boy full of himself and longing to drink beer and chase girls, but in Chartres I had encountered something that for all its stony mass and solidity, seemed to me a thin veil over a higher reality. It sounds strange but I felt . . . judged by Chartres. I had seen it; I couldn't unsee it. Chartres haunted me, principally because having been there, I could no longer say with any conviction that Christianity was nothing more than middle-class social conformity or a con game for nitwit followers of TV evangelists.

J. M. W. Turner's Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying--Typhoon Coming On) is based on an actual incident of a ship captain trying to lighten his ship in a typhoon by throwing slaves into the ocean. From the Norton Anthology of English Literature: 

The subject of Turner's painting--slaves thrown overboard, still in chains, as a storm approaches--is the occasion for apocalyptic use of light and color. For several years, John Ruskin owned this painting, a gift from his father; but he later sold it, finding the subject "too painful to live with." 

This painting probably contributed to the passing of a British law against the slave trade in 1843.

From Creation Regained, Albert Wolters, pp. 22-24:

Our understanding of creation is usually restricted to the physical realm . . . [and we assume creation does not involve] the disciplines of sociology, aesthetics, political science, and economics. . . . We will not make such a distinction if we understand creation in terms of a law-subject correlation. God's ordinances also extend to the structures of society, to the world of art, to business and commerce. Human civilization is normed throughout. Everywhere we discover limits and proprieties, standards and criteria: in every field of human affairs there are right and wrong ways of doing things. There is nothing in human life that does not belong to the created order. 

[God's creational design applies to government.] The same holds true for such structures as the family and the church and for such modern institutions as businesses and schools. They too are grounded in the realities of God's world order and are therefore not arbitrary in their configuration. All schools and businesses have certain constant features that distinguish them from other institutions. The constancy of these distinguishing features must be referred to the nature of reality as given by God. Educators, for example, develop an intuitive sense for the distinctive structure of a school; if school board members try to run it like a business, they recognize that violence is being done to the nature of an educational institution. They are attuned to its normative structure, to the law that holds for it. Similarly, business executives know that a cannot be treated like a family. Relations in a firm have to be "businesslike" to be normative. . . . 

What is true for societal life is also true of culture. The worlds of art and pedagogy are bound to given standards. . . . Both artists and aestheticians are called, each in their own ways, to discern the criteria that define good art--criteria that are not arbitrary but rooted in a given order of things that must be honored. Things are no different in the field of pedagogy and child rearing. There are stages of emotional and intellectual maturity in the child's development that must be respected by the educator. The teacher cannot afford to ignore a child's natural curiosity or spontaneous playfulness. A pedagogy that ignores these given realities is antinormative; it flies in the face of the law of creation. 

And so we could go on. Human emotionality and sexuality, for example, are not normless. Our reasoning is subject to the laws of thought, our speech to semantic principles. Everything is subject to the given laws of God: everything is creational.... [All aspects of human life] are appointed and ordained by God as provinces of the earthly realm he created."

A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in Which a Lamp Is Put in Place of the Sun, 1766, Joseph Wright.

Camille Pisarro's St. Stephen's Church, Lower Norwood.

From Jeanne Murray Walker's essay "On Poets and Poetry":

I would add another category of bad poems: those that are not marked by a struggle with the medium of language. They are English gussied up to look like poetry. Some such poems are written in order to argue some dogma: Marxism, Christianity, the superiority of a breath freshener. There is poetry and then there is dogma. Both have their place. But they have very different personalities. If I start a poem with dogma rather than a metaphor, say, or a dramatic voice, it usually goes bad, even if I try to fix it using a lot of metaphor. I don't mean that any poem with an idea in it is bad. Not at all. I mean that a poem seems to include its own fossil record of how it was conceived. I find that I can't cheat on this score. If I start with an idea, if I don't have to struggle to get there, the poem is likely to sound idea-driven and polemical. . . .  

Then what is the relationship between poetry and truth? I think the point of all the arts, including poetry, is to tell the truth about what it is to be human. . . .  

. . . It's wrong to read a poem as if it were a list of propositions. And it's wrong to ask poetry to supply us with such a list, since poetry, like other arts, represents rather than argues. Beyond this, I am very skeptical toward anyone who tells me that he knows some piece of art or another doesn't conform to the truth and therefore should be banished. Human experience is very broad, and truth is wider than the universe. . . .  

. . . The ultimate purpose of our creation is to know and love God, but there are a practically infinite number of interesting things going on in the universe, and it seems to me that they are all fair game for writers. I believe that the art for art's sake movement, for example, which led to confessional poetry, is heartbreakingly and awfully mistaken. Art is wonderful, but it cannot save us and it cannot be the whole point. And yet I do not believe that the point of art is to spread the gospel either. Take a look at the variety of what God has created: giraffes, hedgehogs, the dawn, the mind-boggling world of a cell, the Milky Way. He is not didactic. He has a sense of humor. And He must be fascinated by His whole creation.

John Singer Sargent's Repose:

“The purpose of theology - the purpose of any thinking about God - is to make the silences clearer and starker to us, to make the unmeaning - by which I mean those aspects of the divine that will not be reduced to human meanings - more irreducible and more terrible, and thus ultimately more wonderful. This is why art is so often better at theology than theology is.”

Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss