expression and imagination (in brief)

A major part of Hospers' argument against expressivism is that it attributes states of mind to artists when it has neither evidence nor reason to do so. In this connection he remarks that 'Shakespeare could hardly have gone through the experiences of Hamlet, Macbeth, Iago, Cleopatra, Lear, Goneril, Prospero and Coriolanus in one lifetime, but what difference does this make as long as he could present us with a series of vivid, powerful, convincing characterizations?' (Hospers 1969: 149). The point is that what matters is not Shakespeare's experience, but his imagination. It does not matter whether Shakespeare ever felt rage and frustration like Lear's; it only matters whether the character of Lear convincingly portrays it.

Behind this thought lies the most damaging objection to expressivism. It not only ignores the value of imagination; it actually eliminates it. Tolstoy's picture - to repeat - is one in which the artist undergoes an emotional experience of some kind and uses an artistic medium to communicate this emotion. He here captures an important aspect of nineteenth-century Romanticism, which emphasized within this picture the importance of sincerity. An artist's first duty is to be true to his or her own feelings. The mark of great art is the honesty and depth of feeling that it expresses. One con- sequence of this is that pretended feeling is to be deplored. From such a point of view it is shocking to discover that John Donne composed his immensely powerful poem of grief, The First Anniversary (1611), on 'the occasion of the untimely death of Mistress Elizabeth Drury' as a means of currying favour with her influential family. The sentiments he expresses in it he could not possibly have felt, since he never knew her.

Now the implications of this example point in two directions. For Romanticism, plainly, the historical fact must diminish the poem. Donne was insincere. On the other hand, it is equally reasonable to applaud Donne for being able to give such powerful expression to grief when he himself had not felt anything like it. Very few of us can give convincing expression to things we have never felt. The great thing about artists, it might be said, is that the fertility of their imaginations enables them to overcome this limitation.

Now as the example of Donne illustrates, it is a strange consequence of expressivism that it denies aesthetic value to imagination. If expressivism is true, then an artist is really a psychological reporter, simply recording and relaying fact about internal feeling. But if this truly were the case, the artist's activity would have nothing creative about it. It is in the absence of feeling that imagination is called for, and imagination is the mark of artistic creativity. The trouble is that expressivism cannot accommodate this kind of creativity.