FORM AND CONTENT
Wallace Phelps
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NE OF THE MANY PROBLEMS
which centuries of criticism have failed
to solve is the relation of form to content. The principal reason, I suspect,
is that the question has not been accurately stated. A blurred question
evokes irrelevant answers. A long line of idealist estheticians took the
problem as a pinpoint for speculation, somehow never conceiving it as a
real basis for specific criticism. More recently the British school of
critics has evaded the fundamental issues in probing the place of a writer's
beliefs in our estimate of his achievement. The closest approach to a
solution has appeared in incidental statements by Marxian critics whose
concern for usable elements in our literary heritage has brought them to
the heart of the question.
For a long time the relation of form to content was considered to be
a special case of the general relation of matter to spirit, substance to
essence, the temporal to the eternal, etc. These are immediately recognized
as variations on a prominent
motif
of idealist philosophy. From this
approach form was always emphasized as the essential, enduring, spiritual
element of art. Plato and Plotinus in seeking a definition of
beauty,
squeezed out the substance and meaning of specific art works, and found
beauty in the essence, the divine idea. (Aristotle, as a naturalist, examined
the material of art, but was left with an inconclusive emphasis on the
universal and on the formal aspects of poetry and drama). Kant and his
followers argued that beauty in art arises from its design which is given
to pure intUitiOn. Hegel inverted the formula by conceiving of matter as
the form in which the Universal Idea is shaped, and he envisaged a prim–
itive dialectical relation between the two, but his hypostasizing of substance
puts the weight on form which is energized by spirit. And Croce, after
acknowledging the existence of content says "the esthetic fact, therefore,
is form, and nothing but form." I have referred to but a few outstanding
figures, but the history of esthetics is for the most part an elaboration of
this theme. This is not very surprising when we consider that the funda–
mental premise of idealist philosophy is a detachment from the material
conditions of life, and a severance of the necessary social derivations of
ideas and forms.
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