THE NATURE OF ART
The only adequate clue to the historic mystery of that thing which
the human race has come to call "beauty," and that other thing--the
re-creation of this through individual human minds--which we
have come to call "art"--is found, if the complex vision is to be
trusted at all, in the contact of the emotion of love with the
"objective mystery," and its consequent dispersion, as the other
aspects of the soul are brought to bear upon it, into the three
primordial ideas of goodness, beauty, and truth.
The reason why this one particular aspect of the soul which we
call emotion is found to be the synthesis of what is discovered by
all the other aspects of the soul functioning together is that the
nature of emotion differs radically from reason, conscience, will,
imagination, taste, and the rest, in that it is not only a clarifying,
directing and discriminating activity but is also--as none of these
others are--an actual mood, or temper, or state of the soul,
possessing certain definite vibrations of energy and a certain sort
of psychic fluidity or outflowing which seems perpetually to
spring up from an unfathomable depth.
This synthetic role played by emotion in unifying the other
activities of the complex vision and preparing the psychic material
for the final activity of the apex-thought may perhaps be
understood better if we think of emotion as being an actual
outflowing of the soul itself, springing up from unfathomable
depths. Thinking of it in this way we may conceive the actual size
or volume of the "soul monad" to be increased by this centrifugal
expansion.
By such an increase of the soul's volume we do not mean an actual
increase; because the depths of all souls are equally unfathomable
when their recession inwards is considered. By such an increase
we refer to the forth-flowing of the soul as it manifests itself
through the physical body. Thus our theory brings us back, as all
theories must if they are consonant with experience, to the
traditional language of the human race. For in ordinary language
there is nothing strange about the expression "a great soul." Such
an expression simply refers to the volume of the soul's outflowing
through the body. And this outflowing is the fulness, more or less,
of the soul's well-spring of emotion.
A "great soul" is thus a soul whereof the outflowing emotion--on
both sides of its inherent duality--is larger in volume as it
manifests itself through the body than in normal cases; and a
"small soul" is a soul whose volume of outflowing emotion is less
than in normal cases.
It must be remembered, however, when we speak of the outflowing
emotion of the soul that we do not mean that there _pours through_
the soul from some exterior source a stream of emotion distinct
from the integral being of the soul itself. What we mean is that
the soul itself finds itself divided against itself in an eternal
contradiction which may be compared to the positive and negative
pole of electricity.
This outflowing of emotion is not, therefore, the outflowing of
something which emerges from the soul but is the outflowing, or
the expansion and dilation through the body, or the soul itself.
What we are now indicating, as to the less or greater degree of
volume in the soul's manifestation through the body, is borne
witness to in the curious fact that the bodies of persons under
strong emotion--whether it be the emotion of love or the emotion
of malice--do actually seem to dilate in bulk and stature.
All that we have been saying has a clear bearing upon the problem
of the relation between the emotional aspect of the soul and the
other aspects. The emotion of the soul is the outflowing of the soul
itself, on one side or other of its inherent duality; while the other
aspects of the soul--such as will, taste, imagination, reason, and so
forth--are the directing, selecting, clarifying, interpreting
activities of the soul as it flings itself upon the objective mystery.
Thus, while it is by means of that activity of the soul which we call
conscience that we distinguish between good and evil; and by
means of that activity called the aesthetic sense that we distinguish
between beauty and hideousness; and by means of that activity
called reason that we distinguish between reality and unreality; it
is all the while from its own emotional outflowing that the soul
directed and guided by these critical energies, creates the universe
which becomes its own, and then discovers that the universe
which it has created is also the universe of the immortals.
It is because this emotional duality of love and malice is the
inherent "psychic stuff" of all living souls whether mortal or
immortal that the soul of man comes at last to comprehend that
those primordial ideas of goodness, beauty and truth, out of which
the universe is half-created and half-discovered, draw, so to speak
the sanction of their objective reality from the eternal vision of the
immortals.
The distinction we have thus insisted upon between the nature of
emotion and the nature of the other aspects of the soul makes it
now clear how it is that we are compelled to regard these three
primordial ideas of beauty, truth and goodness as finding their
unity and their original identity in the emotion of love.
It has been necessary to consider these ultimate movements of the
soul in order that we may be in a position to understand the
general nature of this mysterious thing we call "art," and be able to
track its river-bed, so to speak, up to the original source. From a
consideration of the fact that the outflowing of the soul takes the
form of emotion, and that this emotion is at perpetual war within
itself and is for ever contradicting itself, we arrive at our first
axiomatic principle with regard to art, namely that art is, and must
always be, penetrated through and through by the spirit of
contradiction. Whatever else art may become, then, one thing we
can predicate for certain with regard to it, namely that it springs
from an eternal conflict between two irreconcilable opposites.
We are, further than this, able to define the nature of these
opposites as the everlasting conflict between creation and what
resists creation, or between love and malice. It is just here, in
regard to the character of these opposites, that the philosophy of
the complex vision differs from the Bergsonian philosophy of the
"élan vital."
According to Bergson's monistic system the only genuine reality is
the flux of spirit The spirit of some primordial self-expansion
projects what we call "matter" as its secondary manifestation and
then is condemned to an unending and exhausting struggle with
what it has projected.
Spirit, therefore, is pure energy and movement and matter is pure
heaviness and resistance. Out of the necessity of this conflict
emerge all those rigid logical concepts and mathematical
formulae, of which space and time, in the ordinary sense of those
words, are the ultimate generalization.
Our criticism of this theory is that both these things--this "spirit"
and this spirit-evoked "matter"--are themselves meaningless
concepts, concepts which, in spite of Bergson's contempt for
ordinary metaphysic, are in reality entirely metaphysical, being in
fact, like the old-fashioned entities whose place they occupy,
nothing but empty bodiless generalizations abstracted from the
concrete living reality of the soul. But quite apart from our
criticism of the Bergsonian "spirit" and "matter" on the ground of
their being unreal conceptions illegitimately abstracted from real
personality we are compelled to note a second vivid difference
between our point of view and his in regard to this matter of
opposites and their contradiction. Bergson's monism, as we have
seen, resolves itself into a duality which may be defined as
conscious activity confronted by unconscious inertness.
Our duality, on the contrary, which has behind it, not monism, but
pluralism, may be denned as conscious creation, or conscious love,
confronted by conscious resistance to creation, or conscious inert
malice. Thus while Bergson finds his ultimate axiomatic "data" in
philosophical abstractions, we find our ultimate axiomatic "data"
in the realities of human experiences. Bergson seeks to interpret
human life in terms of the universe. We seek to interpret the
universe in terms of human life. And we contend that we are
justified in doing this since what we call "the universe," as soon as
it is submitted to analysis, turns out to be nothing but an act of
faith according to which an immense plurality of separate personal
universes find a single universe of inspiration and hope in the
vision of the immortal gods.
The ultimate duality revealed by the complex vision is a
duality on both sides of which we have unfathomable abysses of
consciousness. On the one side this consciousness is eternally
creative. On the other side this consciousness is eternally
malicious, in its deliberate inert resistance to creation. It is
natural enough, therefore, that while Bergson's "creative evolution"
resolves itself into a series of forward-movements which are as
easy and organic as the growth of leaves on a tree, our advance
toward the real future which is also a return to the ideal past,
resolves itself in a series of supremely difficult rhythms, wherein
eternally conscious "good" overcomes eternally conscious "evil."
Our philosophy, therefore, may, in the strictest sense, be called
a "human" philosophy in contra-distinction to a "cosmic"
philosophy; or, if you please, it may be called a "dramatic"
philosophy in contra-distinction to a "lyric" philosophy. From all
this it will be clearly seen that it would be impossible for us to
hypostasize a super-moral or sub-moral universe in complete
disregard of the primordial conscience of the human soul. It will
be equally clearly seen that it would be impossible for us to project
a theoretical universe made up of "cosmic streams of tendency,"
whether "spiritual" or "material," in complete disregard of the
soul's primordial aesthetic sense.
The logical scrupulosity and rationalistic passion which drive a
cosmic philosopher forward, in his attempt to construct a universe
in disregard of the human conscience and the human aesthetic
sense, are themselves evidence that while he has suppressed in
himself the first two of the three primordial ideas of which we
speak, he has become an all-or-nothing slave of the last of these
three ideas--namely, the idea of truth. He has sacrificed his
conscience and his taste to this isolated and abstracted "truth," the
quest of pure reason alone, and, as a result of this fanaticism, the
real "true truth," that is to say the complete rhythmic vision of the
totality of man's nature, has been suppressed and destroyed.
It must be fully admitted at this point that the fanaticism of the
so-called "pure saint" and the so-called "pure artist" who suppress,
the one for the sake of "goodness" and the other for the sake of
"beauty," the third great primordial idea which we have called
"truth," is a fanaticism just as one sided and just as destructive of
the complete harmonious vision as those other kinds.
That this is the case can easily be proved by recalling how thin,
how strained, how morbid, how ungracious, how inhuman, those
so-called "saints" and "artists" become, when, in their neglect of
reason and truth, they persist in following their capricious,
subjective, fantastic, individual dreams, out of all concrete relation
to the actual world we live in.
We arrive, therefore, at a point from which we are able to detect
the true inner spirit of the nature of art; and what we discover may
thus be stated. Art is the expression, through the medium of an
individual temperament, of a beauty which is one of the primordial
aspects of this pluralistic world. The eternal duality of things
implies that this beauty is always manifested as something in
perpetual conflict with its opposite, namely with that antagonistic
aspect of the universe which we name the hideous or the ugly.
This duality exists as the eternal condition of each one of the three
primordial ideas out of which the universe is evoked. Each of
these three ideas is only known to us as the result of a relative
victory over its opposite. Beauty is known to us as a relative
victory over hideousness. Goodness is known to us as a relative
victory over evil. Truth is known to us as a relative victory over
the false and the unreal. The fact that each of these ideas can only
be known in a condition of conflict with its opposite and in a
condition of relative victory over its opposite is due to the fact that
all three of them are in their own nature only clarifying, selecting,
and value-giving activities; whereas the actual material upon
which they have to work, as well as the energy from which they
derive their motive-power, is nothing else but that mysterious
outflowing of the soul itself which we call emotion.
For since emotion is eternally divided against itself into love and
malice, the three primordial ideas which deal this emotion are also
eternally divided against themselves, into beauty and hideousness,
into goodness and evil, into reality and unreality. And since the
very existence of emotion depends upon the struggle between love
and malice, in the same way the very existence of our aesthetic
sense depends upon the struggle between beauty and hideousness;
and the very existence of reason depends upon the struggle
between reality and unreality. The only love we can possibly have
to deal with is a love which is for ever overcoming malice. The
only beauty we can possibly have to deal with is a beauty which is
for ever overcoming hideousness.
And the same assertion must be made both with regard to
goodness and with regard to truth. If any one of them absolutely
overcame the other, so as completely to destroy it, the ebb and
flow of life would at that moment cease.
A world where all minds could apprehend all truth without any
illusion or admixture of unreality, would not be a world at all, as
we know the world. It would be the colourless dream of an
immobile plurality of absolutes. As far as we are concerned it
would be synonymous with death. Thus the ultimate nature of the
world is found to be unfathomably dualistic. A sharp dividing line
of irreconcilable duality intersects every living soul; and the secret
of life turns out to be the relatively victorious struggle of
personality with the thing that in itself resists its fuller life.
This verdict of the complex vision is in unison with the natural
feeling of ordinary humanity and it is also in unison with the
supreme illuminated moments when we seem to apprehend the
vision of the gods. When once we have apprehended the inherent
nature of beauty, we are in a position to understand what the spirit
of art must be, whose business it is to re-create this beauty in terms
of personality. The idea of beauty itself is profoundly personal
even before art touches it, since it is one of the three primordial
ideas with which every conscious soul sets forth.
But it is not only personal. It is also objective and impersonal. For
it is not only the reaction of a particular soul to its own universe;
it is also felt, in the rare moments when the apex-thought of the
complex vision is creating its world rhythm, to be nothing less
than the vision of the immortals.
Art, therefore, which is the representation in terms of some
particular personal temperament, of that sense of beauty which is
the inheritance of all souls born into the world, must be profoundly
penetrated by the victorious struggle of the emotion of love with
the emotion of malice. For although the human sense of the beauty
of the world, which may be called the objective sense of the
beauty of the world, since the vision of the immortals lies behind
it, is the thing which art expresses, it must be remembered that this
sense is not an actual substance or concrete entity, but is only a
principle of selection or a process of mental reaction, in regard to
life.
The thing which may be called an actual substance is that outflowing
of the soul itself in centrifugal waves of positive and
negative vibration which we have chosen to name by the name
"emotion." This may indeed be called an actual concrete extension
of the psychic-stuff of the substantial soul. None of the three
primordial ideas resemble it in this. They are all attitudes of the
soul; not conscious enlargements or lessenings of the very stuff; of
the soul.
The idea of beauty is a particular reaction to the universe. The idea
of truth is a particular reaction to the universe. The idea of
goodness is a particular act of the will with regard to our relation
to the universe. But the emotion of love, in its struggle with the
emotion of malice, is much more than this. It is the actual outflowing
of the soul itself; and it offers, as such, the very stuff and
material out of which truth and beauty and goodness are
distinguished and discerned.
Some clear hints and intimations as to the nature of art may be
arrived at from these considerations. We at any rate reach a
general criterion, applicable to all instances, as to the presence or
absence in any particular case of the authentic and objective "note"
of true art. This "note" is the presence in a work of art of the
decisive relative victory of love over malice. When, on the
contrary, in any work of art, the original struggle of love with
malice issues in a relative overcoming of love by malice, then such
a work of art belongs, ipso facto, to an inferior order of excellence.
This criterion is one of easy intuitive application, although any
exact analysis of it, in a particular case, may be difficult and
obscure. Roughly and generally expressed it amounts to this. In
the great works of art of the world, wherein the subjective vision
of the artist expresses itself in mysterious reciprocity with the
objective vision of the immortals, there is always found a certain
large "humanity." This humanity, wherein an infinite pity never
for a moment degenerates into weak sentiment, reduces the
co-existence of cruelty and malice to the lowest possible minimum,
consonant with the ebb and flow of life.
Some residuum of such malice and cruelty there must be, even in
the supremest work of art, else the eternal contradictions upon
which life depends would be destroyed. But the emotion of love,
in such works, will always be found to have its fingers, as it were,
firmly upon the throat of its antagonist, so that the resultant
rhythm shall be felt to be the ultimate rhythm of life itself, wherein
the eternal struggle of love with malice issues in the relative
overcoming of the latter by the former.
It would be invidious perhaps to name, in this place, any particular
works of art in which the predominant element is malice rather
than love. But such works of art exist in considerable number, and
the lacerated and distorted beauty of them remains as a perpetual
witness to what they have missed. In speaking of these inferior
works of art the aesthetic psychologist must be on his guard
against the confusion of such moods as the creative instinct of
destruction or the creative instinct of simple sensuality with the
inert malice we are considering.
The instinct of destruction is essentially connected with the
instinct of creation and indeed must be regarded as an indirect
expression of that instinct; for, as one can clearly understand,
almost every creative undertaking implies some kind of destructive
or at least some kind of suppressive or renunciant act which
renders such an undertaking possible.
In the same way it is not difficult to see that the simple impulse of
natural sensuality, or direct animal lust, is profoundly connected
with the creative instinct, and is indeed the expression of the
creative instinct on the plane of purely material energy. But it must
be understood, however, that neither the will to destruction nor the
will to sensuality are by any means always as innocent as the
forms of them I have indicated above.
It often happens indeed that this destructive instinct is profoundly
penetrated by malice and derives the thrill of its activity from
malice; and this may easily be observed in certain famous but not
supreme works of art. It must also be understood that the impulse
to sensuality or lust is not always the direct simple animal instinct
to which I have referred. What has come to be called "Sadism" is
an instance of this aberration of an innocent impulse.
The instinct of "sadism," or the deriving of voluptuous pleasure
from sensual cruelty, has its origin in the legitimate association of
the impulse to destroy with the impulse to create, as these things
are inseparably linked together in the normal "possession" of a
woman by a man. In such "possession" the active masculine
principle has to exercise a certain minimum of destruction with a
view to a certain maximum of creation; and the normal resistance
of the female is the mental corollary of this.
The normal resistance of the artist's medium to the activity of his
energy is a sort of aesthetic parallel to this situation; and it is
easy to see how, in the creation of a work of art, this aesthetic
overcoming of resistance may get itself mentally associated with
the parallel sensation experienced on the sensual plane. The point
we have to make is this: that while in normal cases the impulse to
sensuality is perfectly direct, innocent, animal, and earth-born; in
other cases it becomes vitiated by the presence in it of a larger
amount of destructive energy than can be accounted for by the
original necessity.
Thus in a great many quite famous works of art there will be found
an element of sadism. But it will always remain that in the
supreme works of art this sadistic element has been overcome and
transformed by the pressure upon it of the emotion of love. There
exists, however, other instances, when the work of art in question
is obviously inferior, in which we are confronted by something
much more evil than the mere presence of the sadistic impulse.
What I refer to is a very subtle and complicated mood wherein the
simple sadistic impulse to derive sensual pleasure from the
contemplation of cruelty has been seized upon and taken
possession of by the emotion of malice.
The complicated mood resulting from this association of sadistic
cruelty with inert malice is perhaps the most powerful engine of
evil that exists in the world; although a pure unmitigated condition
of unsensualized, unimpassioned, motiveless malice is, in its
inmost self, more essentially and profoundly evil. For while the
energy of sadism renders the actual destructive power of malice
much more formidable, we must remember that what really
constitutes the essence of evil is never the energy of destruction
but always the malicious inertness of resistance to creation. We
have thus arrived at some measure of insight as to the nature of art
and we find that whatever else it may be it must be penetrated
through and through by the overcoming of malice by love. It must,
in other words, have the actual outflowing of the soul as the
instrument of its expression and as the psycho-material medium
with which it inscribes its vision upon the objective mystery that
confronts it.
We have at least arrived at this point in our search for a definite
criterion: that when in any work of art a vein of excessive cruelty
or, worse still, a vein of sneering and vindictive malice, dominates
the emotional atmosphere, such a work of art, however admirable
it may be in other respects, falls below the level of the most
excellent. The relation between the idea of beauty as expressed by
the aesthetic sense and those other ideas, namely of truth and
goodness, which complete the circle of human vision, is a relation
which may be suggested thus.
Since all three of these primordial ideas are unified by the emotion
of love it is clear that the emotion of love is the element in which
each of them severally moves. And since it is impossible that love
should be antagonistic to itself we must conclude that the love
which is the element or substratum of beauty is the same love that
is the element or substratum of goodness and truth. And since all
these three elements are in reality one element, which is indeed
nothing less than the dominant outflowing of the soul itself, it
follows that those portions of the soul's outflowing which have
been directed by reason and by conscience, which we call the idea
of truth and the idea of goodness, must have an ultimate identity
with that portion of the soul's outflowing which has been directed
by the aesthetic sense and which we call the idea of beauty.
This identity between truth and goodness on the one hand and
beauty on the other cannot be regarded as an absolute identity. The
idea of truth continues to represent one facet of the universe, the
idea of goodness another, and the idea of beauty another or a third.
What we mean by the use of the term "identity" is simply this: that
the universe revealed by each one of these three ideas is the same
universe as is revealed by the others, and the emotional
out-flowing of the individual soul, which reveals each of these
separate facets or aspects of the universe, is the same in each of
the three ideas which govern its direction.
It is, however, only at their supreme point, when they are fused
together by the apex-thought of the complex vision, that the
activity of these separate ideas is found to be in complete
harmony. Short of this extreme limit they tend to deviate from
each other and to utter contradictory oracles. We may therefore lay
it down as an unalterable law of their activity that when any one of
these ideas contradicts another it does so because of a weakness
and imperfection in its own intensity or in the intensity of the idea
it contradicts.
Thus if an idea of goodness is found irreconcilable with an idea of
beauty, something is wrong with one or the other of these ideas, or
perhaps with both of them. And we are not only able to say that
something is wrong with such ideas when they contradict one
another, we are able to predicate with certainty as to what
precisely is wrong. For the "something wrong" which leads to this
contradiction, the "something wrong" which stands in the way of
the rhythmic activity of the soul's apex-thought, will invariably be
found to be a weakening of the outflowing of the emotion of love
in one or other or perhaps all three of the implicated ideas.
For the outflowing of the soul's emotion is not only the life of the
root of this "tree of knowledge"; it is also the life of the sap of the
uttermost branches; it is the force that makes the fragrance of each
topmost leaf mingle with that of all the rest, in that unified breath
of the whole tree which loses itself in the air.
Thus we arrive at our final conclusion as to the nature of art. And
when we apply our criterion to any of the supreme works of art of
the world we find it does not fail us. The figure of Christ, for
instance, remains the supreme incarnation of the idea of goodness
in the world; and few will deny that the figure of Christ represents
not only the idea of goodness but the ideas of truth and beauty
also. If one contemplates many another famous "good man" of
history, such as easily may be called to mind, one is at once
conscious that the "goodness" of these admirable persons is a thing
not altogether pleasing to the aesthetic taste, and a thing which in
some curious way seems to obscure our vision of the real truth of
life.
A great work of art, such as Leonardo's "Virgin of the Rocks," or
Dostoievsky's "Idiot," is intuitively recognized as being not only
entirely satisfying to the aesthetic sense but also entirely satisfying
to our craving for truth and our longing for the inmost secret of
goodness. Every great work of art is the concentrated essence of a
man's ultimate reaction to the universe. It has an undertone of
immense tragedy; but in the depths of this tragedy there is no
despair, because an infinite pity accompanies the infinite sorrow,
and in such pity love finds itself stronger than fate. No work of art,
however appealing or magical, can carry the full weight of what it
means to be an inheritor of human tradition, of what it means to be
a living soul, until it has arrived at that rhythm of the apex-thought
which is a fusion of what we call the "good" with what we call the
"beautiful" and the "true."
It is only when our notion of what _is_ good and what is true falls
short of the austere demands of the aesthetic sense that a certain
uneasiness and suspicion enters into a discussion of this kind. And
such an uneasiness is justified by reason of the fact that the
popular notion both of goodness and truth does so often fall
lamentably short of such demands. The moral conscience of
average humanity is a thing of such dull sensibility, of such
narrow and limited vision, that it is inevitable that its "goodness"
should clash with so exacting a censor as the aesthetic sense.
The rational conscience of average humanity is a thing of such
dense and rigid and unimaginative vision that it is inevitable that
its "truth" should clash with the secrets revealed by the aesthetic
sense. The cause, why the aesthetic sense seems to come on the
scene with an apparatus of valuation so much more advanced and
refined than that possessed by the conscience or by the reason, is
that both conscience and reason are continually being applied to
action, to conduct, to the manipulation of practical affairs, and are
bound in this commerce with superficial circumstance to grow a
little blunt and gross and to lose something of their fine edge.
Conscience and reason, in the hurly-burly and pell-mell of life, are
driven to compromise, to half-measures, to the second-best.
Conscience is compelled to be satisfied with something less than
its own rigid demands. Reason is compelled to accept something
less than its own rigid demands. Both of these things tend
to become, under the pressure of the play of circumstance,
pragmatical, time-serving, and opportunist. But the aesthetic
sense, although in itself it has always room for infinite growth, is
in its inherent nature unable to compromise; unable to bend this
way and that; unable to dally with half-measures.
Any action, in a world of this kind, necessarily implies
compromise; and since goodness is so largely a matter of action,
goodness is necessarily penetrated by a spirit of compromise.
Indeed it may be said that a certain measure of common-sense is
of the very essence of goodness. But what has common-sense to
do with art? Common-sense has never been able, and never will be
able, to understand even the rudiments of art. For art is the
half-discovery of something that must always seem an impossibility to
common-sense; and it is the half-creation of something that must
always render common-sense irrelevant and unimportant. Truth,
again, in a world of so infinite a complication, must frequently
have to remain an open question, a suspended judgment, an
antinomy of opposites. The agnostic attitude--as, for instance, in
the matter of the immortality of the soul--may in certain cases
come to be the ultimate gesture of what we call the truth.
But with the aesthetic sense there can never be any suspension of
judgment, never any open question, never any antinomy of
opposites, never the least shadow of the pragmatic, or "working"
test. It is therefore natural enough that when persons possessed of
any degree of cultivated taste hear other persons speak of
"goodness" or "truth" they grow distrustful and suspicious, they
feel uneasy and very much on guard. For they know well that the
conscience of the ordinary person is but a blunt and clumsy
instrument, quite as likely to distort and pervert the essential spirit
of "goodness" as to reveal it, and they know well that the "truth"
of the ordinary person's reason is a sorry compound of logical
rigidity and practical opportunism; with but small space left in it
for the vision of imagination.
It is because of their primary importance in the sphere of practical
action that the conscience and the reason have been developed out
of all proportion to the aesthetic sense. And it is because the
deplorable environment of our present commercial system has
emphasized action and conduct, out of all proportion to
contemplation and insight, that it is so difficult to restore the
balance. The tyranny of machinery has done untold evil in
increasing this lack of proportion; because machinery, by placing
an unmalleable and inflexible material--a material that refuses to
be humanized--between man's fingers and the actual element he
works in, has interrupted that instinctive aesthetic movement of
the human hands, which, even in the midst of the most utter
clumsiness and grossness, can never fail to introduce some touch
of beauty into what it creates.
We have thus arrived at a definite point of view from which we
are able to observe the actual play of man's aesthetic sense as, in
its mysterious fusion with the energy of reason and conscience, it
interprets the pervading beauty of the system of things, according
to the temperament of the individual. It remains to note how in the
supreme works of art this human temperamental vision is caught
up and transcended in the high objectivity of a greater and more
universal vision; a vision which is still personal, because
everything true and beautiful in the universe is personal, but
which, by the rhythm of the apex-thought, has attained a sort of
impersonal personality or, in other words, has been brought into
harmony with the vision of the immortals.
The material upon which the artist works is that original "objective
mystery," confronting every individual soul, out of which every
individual soul creates its universe. The medium by means of
which the artist works is that outflowing of the very substance of
the soul itself which we name by the name of emotion. This actual
passing of the substantial substance of the soul into whatever form
or shape of objective mystery the soul's vision has half-discovered
and half-created is the true secret of what happens both in the case
of the original creation of the artist and in case of the reciprocal
re-creation of the person enjoying the work of art.
For Benedetto Croce, the Italian philosopher, is surely right when
he asserts that no one can enter into the true spirit of a work of art
without exercising upon it something of the same creative impulse
as that by the power of which it originally came into existence. In
the contemplation of a statue or a picture or a piece of bric-a-brac,
in the enjoyment of a poem or an exquisite passage of prose, just
as much as in the hearing of music, the soul of the recipient is
projected beyond its normal limitation in the same way as the soul
of the creator was projected beyond its normal limitation.
The soul which thus gives itself up to Beauty is actually extended
in a living ecstasy of vibration until it flows into, and through, and
around, the thing it loves. But even this is an inadequate
expression of what happens; for this outflowing of the soul is the
very force and energy which actually is engaged in re-creating this
thing out of what at present I confine myself to calling the
"objective mystery."
The emotion of the soul plays therefore a double part. It
half-discovers and half-creates the pervading beauty of things; and it
also loses itself in receptive ecstasy, in embracing what it has
half-created and half-found.
We have now reached a point from which we are able to advance
yet another step.
Since what we call beauty is the evocation of these two confronted
existences, the existing thing which we call the soul and the
existing thing which we call the objective mystery, it follows that
there resides, as a potentiality, in the nature of the objective
mystery, the capacity for being converted into Beauty at the touch
of the soul. There is thus a three-fold complication of reality in
this thing we call the beauty of the universe.
There is the individual, human, subjective reality of it, dependent
upon the temperament of the observer. There is the universal
potential reality of it, existing in the objective mystery. And finally
there is the ideal reality of it, objective and absolute as far as we
are concerned, in the vision that I have called "the vision of the
immortals." If it be asked why, in all these ultimate problems, it is
necessary to introduce the vision of the immortals, my answer is
that the highest human experience demands and requires it.
At those rare moments when the "apex-thought" reaches its
rhythmic consummation the soul is conscious that its subjective
vision of Truth and Beauty merges itself and loses itself in an
objective vision which carries the "imprimatur" of eternity. This is
a definite universal experience which few introspective minds will
dare to deny.
But since, as we have already proved, the ultimate reality of things
is personality, or, to be more exact, is personality, confronting the
objective mystery, it is clear that if the subjective vision of the
soul is to correspond with an objective reality outside the soul, that
objective reality outside the soul must itself be the vision of
personality. It may be asked, at this point, why it is that the
potentiality or the capacity for being turned into beauty at the
touch of the soul, which resides in the objective mystery is not
enough to explain this recognition by the soul of an eternal
objective validity in its ultimate ideas.
It is not enough to explain it, because this potentiality remains
entirely unrecognized until it is touched by personality, and it is
therefore quite as much a potentiality of inferior beauty,
inadequate truth, and second-rate goodness, as it is a potentiality
of the rarest of these things.
The objective mystery by itself cannot explain the soul's
experience of an eternal validity in its deepest ideas because the
objective mystery in its role of pure potentiality is capable of
being moulded into the form of _any_ ideas, whether deep or
shallow. Thus our proof of the real existence of "the vision of the
immortals" depends upon two facts.
It depends upon the fact that the soul experiences an intuitive
assurance of objective reality in its ideas. And it depends upon the
fact that there is no other reality in the world, with any definite
form or outline, except the reality of personality. For an idea to be
eternal, therefore, it must be the idea of a personality, or of many
personalities, which themselves are eternal; and since we have no
evidence that the human soul is eternal and does not perish with
the body we are compelled to assume that somewhere in the
universe there must exist beings whose personality is able to resist
death and whose vision is an immortal vision.
It might be objected at this point, by such as follow the philosophy
of Epicurus, that, even though such beings exist, we have no right
to assume that they have any regard for us. My answer to this is
that in such moments as I have attempted to describe, when the
rhythmic activity of the soul is at its highest, we become directly
and intuitively conscious of an immense unutterable harmony
pervading all forms of life, whether mortal or immortal; a
harmony which could not be felt if there were not some mysterious
link binding all living souls together.
We become aware at such moments that not only are all living
souls thus bound together but that all are bound together by the
fact that the ideal vision of them all is one and the same. This is
not only my answer to such as maintain that though there may be
Beings in the system of things superior to man, such Beings have
no necessary connection with man; it is also my answer to the
question as to how, considering the capricious subjectivity of our
human vision, we can be assured that the ideal vision of the
immortals does not vary in the same way among themselves. We
are assured against both these possibilities; against the possibility
of the immortals being indifferent to humanity, and against the
possibility of the immortals being divided among themselves, by
the fact that, according to the very basic revelation of the complex
vision, wherever there is a living soul, that living soul is dependent
for its continued existence upon the overcoming of malice by love.
This duality is so much the essence of what we call personality
that we cannot conceive of personality without it. If, therefore, the
immortals are possessed of personality they must be subject to this
duality; and the fact that they are subject to it puts them
necessarily in at least a potential "rapport" with all other living
souls, since the essence of every living soul is to be found in the
same unfathomable struggle.
But granting that there _are_ superior Beings, worthy to be called
Gods, who in their essential nature resemble humanity, how can
we be assured that there is any contact between them and
humanity? We are assured of this in the intuitive revelation of a
most definite human experience, an experience which few
philosophers have been sceptical enough to deny, although their
explanations of it may have been different from mine.
William James, for instance, whose psychological investigations
into the phenomena of religious feeling are so thorough and
original, describes the sense we have of the presence of these
unseen Powers in a very interesting and curious way. He points
out that the feeling we experience at such moments is that there
exists below the level of our ordinary consciousness a deep and
limitless reservoir or cistern containing "more" of the same stream
of spiritual emotion which we are conscious of as being our very
inmost self or soul of our soul.
On the waves of this subconscious ocean of deeper life we are, so
to speak, able to "ride"; if once, in a sudden revolution of absolute
humility, we can give ourselves up to it.
It is needless to indicate how the Ideas of Plato, the "sub specie
aeternitatis" of Spinoza, the "Liberation" from "the Will" of
Schopenhauer, the "Beatific Vision" of the Catholic saints are all
analogues and parallels, expressed under different symbols, of the
same universal feeling. The difference between these philosophic
statements of the situation and mine, is that, whereas these are
content, with the doubtful exception of Plato, to eliminate from
this subconscious "more" of what is "best" in our own soul, every
trace and element of personality, I am unable to escape from the
conviction that compared with personality no power in the
universe, whether it be called "Idea" or "Substance" or a "Will to
annihilate Will" or "Life Force" or "Stream of consciousness" or
any other name, is worthy to be regarded as the cause and origin of
that intimation of "something more" by which our soul comes into
contact with the secret of the system of things.
To assume that the vision of unutterable truth which is reached in
the supreme works of art is anything less than the vision of
super-human Personality is to assume that something other than
Peripety is the secret of life. And how can man, who feels so
profoundly conscious that his own personal "I am I" is the inmost
essence of his being, when it comes to the question of the cause of
his sensation of "riding on the waves" of this something "more," be
content to find the cause in mere abstractions from personality,
such as "streams of consciousness" or "life-force" or "Absolute
Substance"?
What we _know for certain_, in this strange imbroglio, is that
what we call Beauty is a complex of two mysteries, the mystery of
our own "I am I" and the mystery of the "objective something"
which this "I am I" confronts. And if, as is the case, our most
intense and passionate experience, when the rhythm of our nature
is at the fullest, is the intuition of some world-deep authority or
sanction giving an eternal validity to our ideas, this authority or
sanction cannot be interpreted in mere metaphors or similes
abstracted from personality, or in any material substance without a
mind, or in any "stream of thought" without a thinker: but can only
be interpreted in terms of what alone we have an inside
consciousness of, namely in terms of personality itself.
To some temperaments it might seem as though this reduction of
the immense unfathomable universe to a congeries of living
souls were a strangling limitation. There are certain human
temperaments, and my own is one of them, whose aesthetic sense
demands the existence of vast interminable spaces of air, of water,
of earth, of fire, or even of blank emptiness. To such a
temperament it might seem as though to be jostled throughout
eternity by other living souls were to be shut up in an unescapable
prison. And when to this unending population of fellow-denizens
of space we add this doctrine that our deepest ideas of Beauty
remain subjective and ephemeral until they have received the
"imprimatur" of some mysterious superhuman Being or Beings,
such rebellious temperaments as I am speaking of might
conceivably cry aloud for the Psalmist's "wings of a dove."
But the aspect of things which I have just suggested is after all
only a superficial aspect of the situation. Those hollow spaces
of unplumbed darkness, those gulfs filled with primordial
nothingness, those caverns of midnight where the hoary chemistry
of matter swirls and ferments in eternal formlessness; these indeed
_are_ taken away from us. But as I have indicated again and again,
no movement of human logic, no energy of human reason, can
destroy the unfathomableness of Nature. The immense spectacle
of the material universe, with its perpetually receding background
of objective mystery, is a thing that cannot be destroyed. Those
among us who reluct at every human explanation of this panorama
of shadows, are only too easily able to "flee away and be at rest" in
the bottomless gulf they crave.
The fact that man's apex-thought reveals the presence of an
unending procession of living souls, each of whose creative energy
moulds this mystery to its own vision, does not remove the
unfathomableness of the world-stuff whereof they mould it. As we
have already seen, this aboriginal world-stuff, so impenetrable to
all analysis, assumes as far as we are concerned a three-fold form.
It assumes the form of the material element in that fusion of matter
and consciousness which makes up the substance of the soul. It
assumes the form of the universal medium which binds all souls
together. And it assumes the form of the objective mystery which
confronts the vision of all souls. Over these three forms of the
"world-stuff" hangs irrevocably the great "world-curve" or
"world-circle" of omnipresent Space, which gives the final and
ultimate unity to all possible universes.
The temperamental revolt, however, which I am endeavouring to
describe, against our doctrine of personality, does not stop with a
demand for de-humanized air and space. It has a passionate
"penchant" for the projection of such vague imaginative images as
"spirit" and "life." Forgetful that no man has ever seen or touched
this "spirit," apart from a personal soul, or this "life," apart from
some living thing, the temperament I am thinking of loves to make
imaginative excursions into what it supposes to be vast receding
abysses of pure "spirit" and of impersonal inhuman "life."
It gains thus a sense of liberation from the boundaries of its own
personality and a sense of liberation from the boundaries of all
personality. The doctrine, therefore, that the visible universe
is a mysterious complex of many concentrated mortal visions,
stamped, so to speak, with the "imprimatur" of an ideal immortal
vision, is a doctrine that seems to impede and oppose such a
temperament in this abysmal plunge into the ocean of existence.
But my answer to the protest of this temperament--and it is an
answer that has a certain measure of authority, since this
temperament is no other than my own--is that this feeling of
"imprisonment" is due to a superficial understanding of the
doctrine against which it protests. It is superficial because it does
not recognize that around, above, beneath, within, every form of
personality that the "curve of space" covers, there is present the
aboriginal "world-stuff," unfathomable and inexplicable, out of
which all souls draw the material element of their being, in which
all souls come into contact with one another, and from which all
souls half-create and half-discover their personal universe.
It was necessary to introduce this question of temperamental
reaction just here, because in any conclusion as to the nature of
Beauty it is above all things important to give complete
satisfaction to every great recurrent exigency of human desire.
And this desire for liberation from the bonds of personality is one
of the profoundest instincts of personality.
We have now arrived at a point of vantage from which it is
possible to survey the outlines of our final problem; the problem,
namely as to what it really is which renders one object in nature
more beautiful than another object, and one work of art more
beautiful than another work of art. We know that in the intuitive
judgment which affixes these relative valuations there must be the
three elements of mortal subjective vision, of immortal objective
vision, and of the original "world-stuff" out of which all visions
are made.
But upon what criteria, by what rules and standards, do we
become aware that one tree is more beautiful than another tree,
one landscape than another landscape, one poem or person or
picture than another of the same kind? The question has already
been lifted out of the sphere of pure subjective taste by what has
been said with regard to the eternal Ideal vision. But are there any
permanent laws of Beauty by which we may analyse the verdict of
this objective vision? Or are we made aware of it, in each
individual case, by a pure intuitive apprehension?
I think there _are_ such laws. But I think the "science," so to say,
of the aesthetic judgment remains at present in so rudimentary a
stage that we are not in a position to do more than indicate their
general outline. The following principles seem, as far as I am able
to lay hold upon this evasive problem, of more comprehensive
application than any others.
A thing to be beautiful must form an organic totality, even though
in some other sense it is only a portion of a larger totality.
It must carry with it the impression, illusive or otherwise, that it
is the outward form or shape of a living personal soul.
It must satisfy, at least by symbolic association, the physical
desires of the body.
It must obey certain hidden laws of rhythm, proportion, balance,
and harmony, both with regard to colour and form, and with
regard to magical suggestiveness.
It must answer, in some degree, the craving of the human mind for
some symbolic expression of the fatality of human experience.
It must have a double effect upon us. It must arouse the excitement
of a passion of attention, and it must quiet us with a sense of
eternal rest.
It must thrill us with a happiness which goes beyond the pleasure
of a passing physical sensation.
It must convey the impression of something unique and yet
representative; and it must carry the mind through and beyond
itself, to the very brink and margin of the ultimate objective
mystery.
It must suggest inevitableness, spontaneity, a certain monumental
ease, and a general feeling of expansion and liberation.
It must, if it belong to nature, convey that magical and world-deep
sadness which springs from an inarticulate appeal; or, if it belong
to art, that wistful loneliness which springs from the creation of
immortality by the hands of mortality.
The above principles are not offered as in any way exhaustive.
They are outlined as a temporary starting point and suggestion for
the more penetrating analysis which the future will surely provide.
And I have temporally excluded from them, as can be seen, all
references to those auxiliary elements drawn from reason and
conscience which, according to the philosophy of the complex
vision, must be included in the body of art, if art is to be the final
expression of human experience.
But after gathering together all we have accumulated among these
various paths leading to the edge of the mystery of art, what we
are compelled to recognize, when we confront the palpable thing
itself, is that, in each unique embodiment of it, it arrests and
entrances us, as with a sudden transformation of our entire
universe.
Out of the abysses of personality--human or super-human--every
new original work of art draws us, by an irresistible magnetism,
into itself, until we are compelled to become _what it is_, until we
are actually transformed into its inmost identity.
What hitherto has seemed to us mere refuse and litter and
dreariness and debris--all the shards and ashes and flints and
excrement of the margins of our universe--take upon themselves,
as they are thus caught up and transfigured, a new and ineffable
meaning.
The terrible, the ghastly, the atrocious, the abominable, the
apparently meaningless and dead, suddenly gather themselves
together and take on strange and monumental significance.
What has hitherto seemed to us floating jetsom and blind
wreckage, what has hitherto seemed to us mere brutal lumps of
primeval clay tossed to and fro by the giant hands of chaos, what
has hitherto seemed to us slabs of inhuman chemistry, suddenly
assumes under the pressure of this great power out of the abyss a
strange and lovely and terrible expressiveness.
Deep calls to Deep; and the mysterious oceans of Personality
move and stir in a terrific reciprocity.
The unfathomable gulfs of the eternal duality within us are roused
to undreamed-of response in answer to this abysmal stirring of the
powers that create the world.
What is good in us is enlarged and heightened; what is evil in us is
enlarged and deepened; while, under the increasing pressure of
this new wave of the perilous stuff "of emotion," slowly, little by
little, as we give ourselves up to the ecstasy of contemplation, the
intensified "good" overcomes the intensified "evil."
It is then that what has begun in agitation and disturbance sinks by
degrees into an infinite peace; as, without any apparent change or
confusion, the waves roll in, one after another, upon our human
shore, and we are lifted up and carried out on that vast tide into the
great spaces, beneath the morning and the evening, where the
eternal vision awaits us with its undescribable calm.
Let art be as bizarre, as weird, as strange, as rare, as fantastic, as
you please, if it be true art it must spring from the aboriginal
duality in the human soul and thus must remain indestructibly
personal. But since the two elements of personality wrestle
together in every artist's soul, the more personal a work of art
becomes the more comprehensive is its impersonality.
For art, by means of the personal and the particular, attains the
impersonal and the universal. By means of sinking down into the
transitory and the ephemeral, by means of moulding chance and
accident to its will, it is enabled to touch the eternal and the
eternally fatal.
From agitation to peace; from sound to silence; from creation to
contemplation; from birth and death to that which is immortal;
from movement to that which is at rest--such is the wayfaring of
this primordial power.
It is from the vantage-ground of this perception that we are able
to discern how the mysterious beauty revealed in apparently
"inhuman" arrangements of line and colour and light and shade is
really a thing springing from the depths of some personal and
individual vision.
The controversy as to the superior claims of an art that is just "art,"
with an appeal entirely limited to texture and colour and line and
pure sound, and an art that is imagistic, symbolic, representative,
religious, philosophical, or prophetic, is rendered irrelevant and
meaningless when we perceive that all art, whether it be a thing of
pure line and colour or a thing of passionate human content, must
inevitably spring from the depths of some particular personal
vision and must inevitably attain, by stressing this personal
element to the limit, that universal impersonality which is implied
in the fact that every living soul is composed of the same
elements.
It may require no little subtlety of vision to detect in the pure
beauty of line, colour, and texture that compose, say, some lovely
piece of bric-a-brac, the hidden presence of that primordial duality
out of which all forms of beauty emerge, but the metaphysical
significance latent in the phrase "the sense of difficulty overcome"
points us towards just this very interpretation. The circumstantial
and the sexual "motifs" in art, so appealing to the mob, may or
may not play an aesthetic part in the resultant rhythm. If they do,
they do so because such "interest" and such "eroticism" were an
integral portion of the original vision that gave unity to the work
in question. If they do not, but are merely dragged in by the
un-aesthetic observer, it is easy enough for the genuine virtuoso to
disregard such temptation and to put "story," "message,"
"sentiment," and "sex-appeal" rigidly aside, as he seeks to respond
to the primordial vision of an "unstoried" non-sexual beauty
springing from those deeper levels of the soul where "story,"
"sentiment," and sex have no longer any place.
More dangerous, however, to art, than any popular craving for
"human interest" or for the comfort of amorous voluptuousness, is
the unpardonable stupidity of puritanical censorship. Such
censorship, in its crass impertinence, assumes that its miserable
and hypocritical negations represent that deep, fierce, terrible
"imperative" uttered by the soul's primordial conscience.
They represent nothing of the sort.
The drastic revelations of "conscience" are, as I have pointed out
again and again, fused and blended in their supreme moments with
the equally drastic revelations of reason and the aesthetic sense.
They are inevitably blended with these, because, as we have
proved, they are all three nothing less than divergent aspects of the
one irresistible projection of the soul itself which I have named
"creative love."
Thus it comes about that in the great, terrible moments of tragic art
there may be an apparent catastrophic despair, which in our
normal moods seems hopeless, final, absolute.
It is only when the complex rhythm of the apex-thought is brought
to bear upon these _moments of midnight_ that a strange and
unutterable healing emerges from them, a shy, half-hinted whisper
or something deeper than hope, a magical effluence, a "still, small
voice" from beneath the disastrous eclipse, which not only "purges
our passions by pity and terror" but evokes an assured horizon,
beyond truth, beyond beauty, beyond goodness, where the mystery
of love, in its withdrawn and secret essence, transforms all things
into its own likeness.
The nature of art is thus found to be intimately associated with the
universal essence of every personal life. Art is not, therefore, a
thing for the "coteries" and the "cliques"; nor is it a thing for the
exclusive leisure of any privileged class. It is a thing springing
from the eternal "stuff of the soul," of every conceivable soul,
whether human, sub-human, or super-human.
Art is nearer than "philosophy" or "morality" to the creative
energy; because, while it is impossible to think of art as
"philosophy" or "morality," it is inevitable that we should think of
both of these as being themselves forms and manifestations of art.
All that the will does, in gathering together its impressions of life
and its reactions to life, must, even in regard to the most vague,
shadowy, faint and obscure filcherings of contemplation, be
regarded as a kind of intimate "work of art," with the soul as the
"artist" and the flow of life as the artist's material.
Every personal soul, however "inartistic," is an artist in this sense;
and every personal life thus considered is an effective or
ineffective "work of art."
The primal importance of what in the narrow and restricted sense
we have come to call "art" can only be fully realized when we
think of such "art" as concentrating upon a definite material
medium the creative energy which is for ever changing the world
in the process of changing our attitude to the world.
The deadly enemy of art--the power that has succeeded, in these
commercial days, in reducing art to a pastime for the leisured and
wealthy--is the original inert malice of the abyss.
This inert malice assumes, directly it comes in contact with
practical affairs, the form of the possessive instinct. And the
attitude towards art of the "collector" or the leisured "epicurean,"
for whom it is merely a pleasant sensation among other sensations,
is an attitude which undermines the basis of its life. The very
essence of art is that it should be a thing common to all, within the
reach of all, expressive of the inherent and universal nature of all.
And that this is the nature of art is proved by the fact that art is
the personal expression of the personal centrifugal tendency in all
living souls; an expression which, when it goes far enough,
becomes _impersonal_, because, by expressing what is common to
all, it reaches the point where the particular becomes the
universal.
It thus becomes manifest that the true nature of art will only be
incidentally and occasionally manifested, and manifested among
us with great difficulty and against obstinate resistance, until the
hour comes when, to an extent as yet hardly imaginable, the
centripetal tendency of the possessive instinct in the race shall
have relinquished something of its malicious resistance to the
out-flowing force which I have named "love." And this yielding of the
centripetal power to that which we call centrifugal can only take
place in a condition of human society where the idea of
communism has been accepted as the ideal and, in some effective
measure, realized in fact.
For every work of art which exists is the rhythmic articulation, in
terms of any medium, of some personal vision of life. And the
more entirely "original" such a vision is, the more closely--such is
the ultimate _paradox_ of things--will it be found to approximate
to a re-creation, in this particular medium, of that "eternal vision"
wherein all souls have their share.