BEAUTY IN EVOLUTION
Theories of aesthetic, so far, have paid little attention to the
development of the sense of beauty, except perhaps in the individual.
This was natural enough so long as the idea of evolution was
unformulated, or, if touched upon speculatively, played little part in
men’s general attitude to life; and since the doctrine of evolution
came to its own, little original work, beyond that of Croce, has been
done in this region. Croce touches the evolutionary aspect but lightly,
though it is implicit in his identification of History with Philosophy:
“Since all the characteristics assigned to Philosophy are verbal
variants of its unique character, which is the pure concept, so all
the characteristics of History can be reduced to the definition
and identification of History with the individual judgment[26].”
“If History is impossible without the logical, that is, the
philosophical, element, philosophy is not possible without the
intuitive, or historical element[27].” “Philosophy, then, is
neither beyond, nor at the beginning, nor at the end of history,
nor is it achieved in a moment or in any single moment of history.
It is achieved _at every moment_ and is always completely united
to facts and conditioned by historical knowledge.--The _a priori_
synthesis, which is the reality of the individual judgment and of
the definition, is also the reality of philosophy and of history.
It is the formula of thought which by constituting itself qualifies
intuition and constitutes history. History does not precede
philosophy, nor philosophy history; both are born at one birth[28].”
This view, however interesting and suggestive it may be in the realm
of pure thought, for the simple reason that it does not boldly grapple
with the fact of _practical_ dualism, is difficult of application to
the process of the dawn of consciousness. Croce’s whole philosophy
is directed to the denial of dualism; it is a new form of idealistic
monism. We have been led in our earlier reasonings to deny an ultimate
dualism[29], but we have also been led to affirm dualism as existent
in Time, through the self-limitation and immanence of Eternal Spirit.
On this basis, at which we arrived through a detailed consideration of
the process of inorganic and organic evolution, we reared our whole
superstructure. On this same basis, then, we will attempt to reason
out a view of the evolution of beauty that shall be in harmony both
with the facts of evolution and with the theocentric system that issued
from our discussion as apparently the only possible explanation of the
universe, so far, at least, as its broad outline was concerned.
If beauty be the expression of an intuition, and if, further, the
intuition required involves a sense of relation, there can be no
true perception of beauty until self-consciousness arises. Broadly
speaking, this is to say there can be no sense of beauty except in man.
But here at once we are brought up against the fact of sexual
selection. Surely the posturings of spiders, the dance of the ruff,
the display of the peacock and the Bird of Paradise, the song of the
warbler (if indeed this be a courting and hymeneal song) do imply
some aesthetic preference in the mate? Still more does the elaborate
performance of the Bower-bird, with its love-chase through the gay
parterres of its carefully decked garden and in and out of the
double-doored bower, suggest some sense of beauty.
This fact, which at first sight seems fatal to our whole theory, really
supplies us with the clue we lacked.
Perhaps, even at this moment of courting, there is no true
self-consciousness. Our previous discussions have led us to question
whether this exists at all in animals, except possibly in a few
of those most developed through contact with man. But there is
unquestionably a sense of relation. The male and female are urged to
love-play by the sexual impulse, and this necessarily involves a sense
of inter-relatedness. It may not be--probably is not--sufficiently
conscious of the self and the other to be termed love. It is a mere
sense of the necessity of the other for fulfilling a need as urgent and
as little understood as hunger.
But in the sex-impulse we find a beginning of the fact of
inter-relation; and this is the foundation we require. The elaborate
instances we have mentioned go a step farther than the simple
sex-need. There is a definite attempt to make that need reciprocal by
stimulating the dormant sense of relation in the mate through the use
of objects to which a _meaning_ is given through emphasis or through
arrangement and juxtaposition. And this meaning is recognised, though
perhaps not as beauty exactly; that would imply the expression of
the meaning to the self, and it is doubtful if the self yet exists.
But it is very hard to draw any line. At all events we can say that
here there is relation--and _self-conscious_ relation is love; and
that here is expression of a meaning and a need--and a _recognised_
meaning, or intuition, when expressed to the self is beauty. We are
on the confines of aesthetic. Now at first sight this idea may raise
a feeling of antagonism, almost of disgust. We seem to have reduced
beauty to terms of the sexual impulse. Further consideration will serve
to dispel this sense of a derogation of beauty, and will even give
to the sex-impulse itself a nobler significance, making it appear as
the first stage in the emergence of Love and Beauty; rendering to it
the honour due from an understanding of the end which it subserves.
There can be little doubt that in man the perception of beauty in
the opposite sex--not _as_ beauty perhaps, but as simple attraction
to a beautiful person--does very generally precede that of more
impersonal forms of beauty. Amid savage races this is unquestionably
the case. The strange decoration of the body and other rites in the
initiation of the adolescent, are undoubtedly expressions connected
with sex-relations. To us they are ugly because they fail to express
our fuller understanding; to the savage they are beautiful. And I
believe that in the children of a highly developed artistic race it
is true also in some measure. The love-admiration of boys and girls
begins at a very tender age; and the psychoanalytic work of Freud and
Jung gives a significance, no doubt often exaggerated, to acts and
thoughts and dreams of children which, if not strictly sexual in the
common sense, are yet connected with the impulse--called by Jung the
_libido_--that underlies the evolution of the race. If we employ the
terminology of Bergson and Driesch, we may say that the _élan vital_,
or _entelechy_, is the _libido_ of Jung; that, as the animal progresses
along the path of evolution, it becomes the sexual impulse in the
wider sense given to the term by Freud; and that in one aspect it
finally becomes the sexual impulse in the sense in which the term is
commonly understood, while it achieves infinitely higher levels in the
direction of spiritual progress at the same time. But observe what this
implies. We have just noticed the obvious fact that the sex-impulse
involves a sense of relation. It is probable that the first dawnings
of relationship, albeit in a primitive, almost sensational form, arise
here. The using of inanimate objects as tools is probably evolved later
than conjugation, even in the protozoa. _Difflugia_ may make use of
grains of sand to form its test, but all protozoa conjugate. Anyhow,
this is a minor matter. The important point is that in the sex-impulse
arises first the sense of a relation between individuals, which is
destined, far later, to grow into the first stages of love; and in the
development of the child we find traces of this origin, distorted and
chronologically misplaced, exactly as one would expect from the Law of
Recapitulation.
Another point of interest arises here. Many psychoanalysts, and notably
Jung[30], have shown that mythology has an overwhelmingly sexual
content. Further, Rivers[31], and others, have extended the conception
of the primitive, or infantile, character of myth in relation to the
primitive or infantile character of dreams, showing that both belong
to a lower level of culture than does the waking self. As time goes
on more and more, not only of the minor activities of the individual,
but of the earlier activities of the race, are relegated to the
unconscious. Psychologists have long recognised this fact in dealing
with habit-formation, but these recent writers have given it a deeper
significance. The spirit uses the past as something on which to build
the future. In old days, and among primitive peoples still to-day, the
explanation of life was sought in a very childish manner. The impulse
of sex was not understood, its relation to procreation was largely
hidden, as witness the ceremonies of Intichiuma, and many others
that, by symbolic magic, should confer fertility. It was mysterious,
yet immensely powerful. It had some sort of relation to the birth of
children and animals. The creation of all things was mysterious, but
since the new was born these two mysteries must be connected. Hence
the sexual symbolism of myths that were predominantly aetiological in
character--that were predominantly attempts to answer the great Why? of
the universe.
In the present connection, then, the chief interest of the work of
Freud and Jung on infantile phenomena associated with sex, in so far
as it is not exaggerated, lies in the fact that here too we have an
instance of the working of von Baer’s Law of Recapitulation. In the
animal the sense of relation begins with sex; in the child we have
strange, fragmentary primitive sex-phenomena (if these psychoanalysts
be right), dissociated from many of their natural concomitants;
phenomena suggesting some close analogy with the temporary appearance
in the embryo of structures that disappear again, having lost their
significance. Can it be that the purely animal basis on which man’s
great structure of relationship is raised, is merely a foundation,
becoming gradually hidden, covered up?
Love is, no doubt, in origin an impulse of sex. Yet the highest love
we know and experience in ourselves has nothing sexual in it. When a
man and a maid fall in love there is no thought of such things in the
mind of either. Primarily, true love is utterly pure from admixture
with animal instincts, though it may be, and is, founded on them in the
evolutionary sense, and though they still play a vastly important part,
made beautiful by the love they subserve. But the love that _begins_
as conscious sex-instinct is no love at all. There is love between
men and women, even young men and women, as well as between those of
the same sex, that is either utterly free from all sexual content,
or in which that content is so trivial in amount, and so completely
dismissed from attention, that it is practically non-existent. If
one is conscious of it at any moment, one is so by a definite effort
of the mind, and for the specific purpose of bringing before oneself
the wonderful emergence of the purest and highest activity of the
spirit from so lowly and physical an origin. Such love is far higher
than the love between husband and wife often is, where the sexual
side is primary as well as primitive, and friendship secondary. Only
when husband and wife are first friends, and then, after that, live
together with a full realisation of the sacramental meaning of sex as
the foundation on which the eternal temple of love has been and is
being built, can their union approach the highest level. Then it is
indeed the best of all in this life. It takes them closer to the heart
of things than mere friendship would, and enables them to make their
other friendships perfect through the understanding which it brings.
The physical subserves the spiritual, and even in the physical the two
are united. The physical and the spiritual are for them one--parts of a
whole. Their own friendship is perfect as far as anything human can be
perfect, and by it their friendships with others are made perfect.
We see, then, in the founding and development of the sexual impulse the
first movement of the _élan vital_ along its true path of evolution.
The _élan vital_ determines progress; it is the unrest, the divine
discontent of spirit creating itself in matter[32]. It progresses along
various roads, but the road that leads it to its own fulfilment lies
through sex. The _élan vital_ becomes _libido_ in an even narrower
sense than that, almost co-extensive with Bergson’s term, which Jung
gives to the word. For through sex the sense of individual, and
subsequently personal, inter-relationship comes into being[33]. With
the arousing of self-consciousness we find the dawn of love. This
is the beginning of understanding. In the intuition of love is born
the knowledge of Reality. Faint, partial, obscured by the sex-basis
on which it is built up, it is yet the key to the mystery of being.
Gradually, slowly, amid disappointing foulness and blind passion, it
still grows. In its insistence on relationship it is manifested as the
human aspect of religion. Side by side with it grows the knowledge
and love of God. This is the divine aspect of religion, and the two
together make the world and the activity of the spirit an intelligible
whole. The “What is Truth” of jesting Pilate finds here its answer. All
truth, all life, all process, in short Reality itself, is known in the
knowledge of the creative love which is the activity of spirit. We see
sex growing to greater and greater importance until we reach man. Then
self-consciousness intervenes; the ideas of relation and of fellowship
dawn; love finds a beginning, and then sex begins to lose its
privileged place. From pre-eminence it sinks to a secondary position.
Its spiritual part is nearly played, and something higher carries on
the work. Love is more than passion. Sex must continue to function,
for man has still a physical body; but its spiritual significance is
understood, and that is a thing far greater than itself. As love grows,
passion sinks and sinks from its first prominence, till love is all.
“They neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels.”
If this means anything at all, it means that in the end the physical
body will have played its noble part and pass away, with its passions
and its failures; while the life goes on, revealed in a body spiritual.
In the light of this understanding nothing is left unclean. Even in
the work of Freud, in so far as it is true, and not coloured by the
overstrained interpretations of a pathologist, there is nothing to
shock, though much to sadden us. Where in man there is over-emphasis
of sex there is a return to the lower, animal stage. Men are
regarding life in terms of what has been, and not of what shall be.
They are falling short of their own possibilities. In what degree
this phenomenon is pathological, due to some neurosis or psychosis,
we may not judge them; in what degree their over-concentration on
animal passion, to the exclusion of true spiritual activity, is
under the control of the will we are in presence of sin. For, from
the evolutionary point of view, sin is the refusal to live up to the
standard that is at present possible, the acquiescence in a standard
that belongs properly to a stage outgrown; lower; more animal, less
divine. It is content with an anachronism; the willing acceptance,
the welcome of failure to progress--and this means _refusal_ to
progress[34].
But to see in the sex-impulse the _explanation_ of love is to fall into
the same error as do the materialists, though the error has assumed a
new and more subtle guise. You can no more explain love by sex than you
can explain mind by matter. In both cases you are using terms to which
you can attach no meaning. Ultimately I cannot think of matter and yet
exclude mind; I cannot think of sex and yet exclude relation, and so,
ultimately, love. For scientific purposes no doubt I can do both, for
science is a process of abstraction in which we disregard everything
that is not relevant to an immediate and narrow purpose. But philosophy
may not abstract. She deals with the concrete and the real.
We have apparently lost sight of the question of beauty; but those who
have followed the thought of the first chapter will realise that we
have not in fact gone far afield. Upon the foundation of sex, as we
have seen, the sexless activity of love is being slowly reared; and
love is relation--relation is the reciprocal, creative activity which
is spirit, and spirit is Reality. God is Love; men perfected are,
or will be, love. The being of God and men alike is the activity of
personal relationship, made perfect in union while yet each retains
his self-identity[35]. The knowledge of this relation, the expression
of it, is Beauty; and in Beauty the whole theoretic activity is
comprehended in the ultimate resort, when intuition, the immediate
contact, and logic, the mediate contact, are made one through perfect
knowledge.
Since then, the first origin of the realisation of relationship is
born in the sex-impulse, here the beginnings of beauty must be sought.
But to search for them in any developed form--to search for what we
understand by beauty--in the animal consciousness is vain. There can
exist in it only some dim fore-shadowing, some preference. Not until
true self-consciousness arises can there be any real sense of beauty,
if beauty be the intuition of a relation expressed to the self and
to others. And arguing from the psychological effect of beauty upon
ourselves--the longing it produces, and the creative impulse--we have
been driven to define beauty as the expression of a relation. The
germ from which love and beauty will spring is already there in the
relation between animals, but who would guess that from the least of
seeds should be born so great and noble a tree?
Many have sought the origin of the sense of beauty in the attraction
of sex, and have then hanged Beauty under this bad name. To do this
is to proclaim oneself a materialist. Our idea is far different.
Reasoning from the standpoint to which we are driven by an examination
of evolution that does not neglect the phenomenon of personality;
finding the only explanation of evolution itself in free personal
relationship; we see in sex the primitive ground-work of that
relationship. Physically, the sex relation subserves many purposes;
it provides a chief mode of introducing variation, it blindly helps
on the evolutionary process through selective mating, it provides the
chemical stimulus to the development of a new organism from the gamete
or sex cell. But it does more. In the light of the end we see in sex
a far nobler function; of a significance not transient but abiding.
In the great adventure of Creative Love, to sex is given the task of
bringing about those relations which constitute the ground-work of the
personal union which is Love. Of the understanding and the expression
of this relation is born the sense of beauty, destined gradually to
transfigure the world for man, as he learns to see order and purpose
and significant relation in the whole, and to endure eternal and yet
always new.
CONCLUSION
Throughout this essay, in our quest for the meaning of Beauty we
have been driven to reject the ground of the Natural as the proper
standpoint for viewing the Beautiful. Rather, in Nature regarded from
the point of view of ultimate Reality, we have found a value only
through relation; and it is the intuition of this relation, expressed
to conscious mind, that constitutes Beauty. No relation is, however,
satisfying but one which is mutual. There is beauty in all expressed
relations, even those of mathematics and physics, but because these
relations are primarily expressed for the purpose of the science as
between thing and thing, and their relation to the perceiving mind is
relegated to the background, the sense of beauty is not roused in any
great degree. By scenery a far more vivid sense of beauty is kindled,
and hand in hand with this goes a keener sense of dissatisfaction and
creative longing. By pictures and the like we are brought into touch
with the mind of the artist; he has felt a relation and given to it
technical expression, and we follow anew his creative intuition. In
doing so we get in some degree into relation with his mind as well as
with the thing in which he saw beauty; and we derive additional joy
from this personal relation, mediate though it be. But still there is
dissatisfaction, as well as creative desire. This longing is identical
with the longing of one-sided love. We receive and cannot give. Only in
perfectly reciprocal love is the longing absent, while yet the creative
aspect is most vividly present.
The study of Philosophy irradiates the world for us, increasing our
sense of the beauty that is in it. We understand more; the world’s
relation to us is more real, deeper, wider. Religion has the same
effect, though in so far as it sometimes belittles the world it tends
also to deaden our understanding of the world’s beauty. But if our
philosophy coincides with our religion and our scientific theory is a
part of both, Beauty has a chance of winning her proper position. If
this philosophy and this religion find their ultimate Reality in the
personal relationship we call love; if in their ‘science’ the creative
process of that love’s activity in self-limitation stands revealed;
Beauty indeed comes to her own. In our intuition of the world’s beauty
we are in touch with the creative idea of the Master Mind. Only a
philosophy and a religion that are rooted and grounded in the God
who is Love, yet take the fullest account of the time-processes of
love which we call evolution, can reveal the fulness of Beauty. Then
Beauty is seen as Spirit’s grasp upon the relation between all the
parts of the whole--a relation that is not yet complete, and can only
be complete when the sole relation is that of love between personal
beings, of whom God is the first in timeless Being. Then, when matter
is seen as the expression of God’s self-limitation for the sake of His
people’s freedom, realisation dawns that matter is instinct with beauty
for the understanding mind. Aesthetic becomes the link that binds all
our theoretic knowledge together, making it one--serviceable as an
equal partner with the practical activity. In this partnership the
activity of the spirit is perfected[36]. The beauty of relationship is
always new, just as love is always new. Our creation is our expression
of our personal being in relationship, which is ultimately love. God’s
creation is the expression of His Personal Being in relationship.
Without relationship He would not be personal; but more is implied in
this statement than merely internal relations. Personality, the δύναμις
of κοινωνία, is centrifugally creative, as we have seen elsewhere,
and the thing created, because it is a relationship, is beautiful,
and is new. In the perennial newness of beauty we find the key to
God’s creative activity. He creates new persons, because His relation
to them is new and beautiful. Just because His experience is the
experience of Perfect Personality new things are perpetually added.
Without this activity His Being would not be perfect. Its perfection
is substantiated by its power of finding beauty new. Only the inactive
dullard fails to see beauty and is bored, and in his very dulness he
loses the prerogative of personality.
From the height of such a conception, standing upon ultimate Reality,
we have looked down upon the humble beginnings of the intuition of
relation, or of beauty. These we found pre-eminently in sex, and so
far we were in accord with the psychoanalytic schools of Vienna and
of Zurich. But we saw sex transformed and made beautiful, because our
eyes were fixed, not on low, immediate purposes, but on the wonderful
things that were to come. Mainly out of the relationship of sex spring
music, art, literature--all the beauty that is so far removed from
its physical origin--and it is in these things of eternal value that
we find the true purpose of sex, as opposed to its immediate physical
meaning. In music, art, literature we see the expression of growing
understanding. The Reality is brought nearer and nearer to man.
Could Philosophy but bring our thought in closer contact with
Aesthetic, as Croce has nobly endeavoured to bring it, understanding
would quicken marvellously. Could religion embrace the arts and use
them, the world would move Godward with fresh inspiration; the arts
themselves would be enriched, coming into their true heritage. Croce
has paved the way to understanding, but he missed the goal because he
did not perceive that the content of Reality is relationship. This
essay attempts to indicate how much is lost by his omission. God is
Love; Reality is Love. Love is relationship. Beauty is the expression
of our understanding of that relationship. The Good, the True, the
Beautiful are seen as different aspects of the same Reality; each
definable only in terms of another; each involving, and indeed being,
the same system of relations seen from a different angle. Goodness is
the relation of spirit to spirit, Truth the relation of part to part
and part to whole, Beauty the expression of the spirit’s knowledge
of the relations that make up Reality. Our understanding of these
relations--yes, and God’s understanding--is perpetually creative, and
its creation is a new thing for Perfect Being; for the Perfection
of Being is only substantiated by its power to create the new, the
beautiful, the related. Matter is beautiful because it is understood
as the expression of the infinite activity of the spirit of love. As
Personal Being is the one thing that lasts beyond Time, and carries in
itself the character of absoluteness, so it appears that Beauty, the
knowledge and expression of the relationship of Personal Being, is also
eternal. Beauty can never cease, for it is a necessary part of God’s
experience and ours.
APPENDIX
ART FORMS IN DEVELOPMENT
Although any detailed treatment of the concrete forms of art is
entirely foreign to the intention of this essay, it is desirable that
we should devote a little consideration to the way in which these
technical expressions arise and to the psychological effects they
produce. In doing this we shall refer to the work of various artists,
but only for purposes of illustration. The part of the art critic is as
unnecessary to our purpose as it is beyond our powers.
To omit all reference to concrete matters seemed undesirable, as
leaving the theory rather in the air. On the other hand any detailed
discussion of the theory as applied to the development of concrete
art-forms must necessarily introduce debatable propositions, and must
be tentative. It therefore seemed desirable to relegate the discussion
of concrete matters to an Appendix, and to state clearly that what was
there said was meant rather to suggest ideas than to lay down definite
principles. Applications that may be open to question do not invalidate
a theory, while they do make for clear understanding of it.
The question whether beauty itself is a universal or a particular
has already found implicit answer. Since beauty is the expression
of a relation that is understood as an essential determination of
Reality, the concept of beauty is a pure concept. It is expressive,
it is concrete, it is universal. It is clearly expressed to the self
as a cognitive product, expressible in words (definition) and symbols
(technique). It answers to Croce’s test that though “universal and
transcendent in relation to the single representation, it is yet
immanent in the single, and therefore in all representations,” and is
therefore concrete. It also transcends the single representations, “so
that no single representation, and no number of them can be equivalent
to the concept” and so is universal.
But the foundation of every universal concept exists in an intuition
of the particular. The intuition and its expression to the self come
first, then follows the extension of the theoretic activity in logic.
The concept of beauty must, then, have arisen, and at every fresh
realisation must still arise, like all concepts, from an intuition of
Reality as existent in a particular; and we must therefore seek its
origin in specific individual cases.
Now we have argued that beauty is most probably associated initially
with sex, since with sex the idea of personal relationship first
arises. Our main thesis would not however be invalidated if it could be
shown that a vague intuition of relation with inorganic or non-personal
objects arose first. The intuition of relation may well have several
separate starting points. Only, in this case, the reciprocal element
would be absent (though its lack might not be felt except as a vague
dissatisfaction) and could only arise when the sex-relation was the
subject of a similar intuition. But most likely the intuition of
relation did arise with sex, and, since our argument is concerned to
show that ultimately the intuition of beauty leads to the expression
of mutual relationship--love--and finds there the explanation both of
its peculiar quality, and of the creative longing it produces, we will
confine our argument mainly to this aspect.
Now if this be so, the sense of beauty is likely to be associated in
its earliest stages with sight, and only in a secondary degree with
sound, in the mating-call and in the beginnings of language. This is
borne out by the fact that music usually lags behind, and is more
primitive in expression than the visual arts--personal ornamentation
and even decoration of objects. True, the first formal _expression_
is likely to be in sound--in the beginnings of language. The dynamic
relation between persons maybe accompanied and expressed throughout by
speech. But at this primitive level it will be a very limited intuition
or understanding that is expressed, and moreover, an intuition that
is based on visual stimuli. We may therefore leave the question of
language for the present. Its importance in the earlier stages is
mainly practical. Through sight (when the stage of simple chemiotaxis
is passed) arises the perception of desirability in the opposite
sex[37], which is the animal starting-point from which love is evolved.
This desirability and this relation are expressed to the self, and
this expression is beauty in its humblest beginning. Then, later, the
creative aspect enters into consciousness. At first it was satisfied,
unconsciously, in mating; but soon this unconscious satisfaction is
felt to be inadequate. The representative process begins.
Now here we find a difficulty. According to our theory, the earliest
attempts at the pictorial art should be pictures of men and women,
but this is not, I believe, the case[38]. We must, however, remember
that the idea of symbolic magic arises very early. This is natural.
The representation of a thing is that thing in some degree. You have
power over your representations, therefore you have power over the
thing. The use of such power has an anti-social aspect, which forbids
its common or public use except in the form, of a magico-religious
ceremony. It is unlikely, therefore, that if such representations were
made, they should have come down to us. Moreover, it is unnecessary
that the magic object should bear any superficial resemblance to the
thing it symbolises; indeed it is undesirable that it should be
recognisable by others, since the practice for which it is destined
is nefarious and illicit. An esoteric significance is enough. There
is a very close connection between primitive art and religion. Thus
the Palaeolithic drawings of animals in the dark caves of Périgord and
Altamira, are undoubtedly connected with magico-religious ceremonies
to give power over the beasts. For this reason then--the acquiring
of a _prise_ over the object represented--we should hardly expect to
find many early drawings of men and women, other than divinities.
Even to-day many savages evince the greatest fear of having their
likeness drawn. Nevertheless, these Neolithic drawings do exist,
proving that there was no universal tabu on such representations.
Moreover such drawings as those of the Bushmen show that primitive
art at times uses drawings to record historical events, such as raids
by other tribes. The comparative scarcity of primitive drawings is,
however, easily explicable when we take the fact of magical beliefs
into account. And there are sufficiently numerous examples of drawings
of animals--bear, rhinoceros, lion, mammoth, bison, reindeer, to show
that prehistoric man did have an intuition of his relation to other
creatures. Furthermore, since the creative impulse does receive some,
if unconscious, satisfaction in sex-relationship, expressed in word and
action, there is the less need for technical expression in the early
stages. We find at all events enough prehistoric drawings to show the
recognition of relation, and the expressive activity, and these are the
desiderata for an aesthetic fact.
Leaving the most primitive level, we find the development of
decoration. Pottery is shaped with some regard to form and symmetry,
and simple ornament of a geometric character makes its appearance[39].
Much might be said on this subject, but we will confine ourselves to a
few fundamental considerations.
In the first place we notice that here man’s art is practically
unfettered by religious and magical inhibitions. Geometric forms do
not generally represent any person or power[40]. Artistic creation
therefore can move freely. Next, we observe that the art is reaching
a higher level, and that consciously. There is conscious elimination
and abstraction at work in the construction of patterns made of simple
lines and curves. We find also the rudiments of an endeavour to find a
harmony and rhythm that may give a sense of satisfied understanding.
Men are beginning to feel the need of unity and harmony and order,
and in so far as geometric ornament gives the feeling of these and
of purpose, it is beautiful, for it expresses their intuition of an
ordered reality.
It is unnecessary for us to discuss the intrinsic beauty of curves, or
the mental satisfaction afforded by the golden section. The Greeks,
and later writers such as Fechner, have expended much ingenuity in
doing this. But their conclusions amounted to little more than that
the aesthetic pleasure given by geometric form was due to the sense
of symmetry and order and unity that were brought about by elaborate
differentiation of detail subordinated to a single idea. As we have
just said, Geometric ornament expresses man’s intuition of an ordered
relation and interdependence in Reality.
We have introduced the ideas of elimination and abstraction. These
are present in all artistic representation, and probably in all
artistic perception. Because the power is rare in any high degree of
development, artistic genius is rare. Moreover it frequently happens
in ordinary people that the perception of beauty is first aroused
consciously by pictures rather than by natural scenes. A flower is
simple enough for a child to understand, and we find that in many
children, especially artistic ones, the perception of beauty is first
awakened by flowers. The elements of a sunset, or a moonlight scene
with clear tones and silhouetted outlines, are simple enough for the
untrained mind to appreciate. But it requires an artistic genius to see
the beauty of a complex landscape. In representing this technically
he simplifies, emphasises, eliminates and abstracts. The man who
looks at his picture follows the creative process of his mind, and,
the elimination being already done for him, is able to appreciate.
Moreover he receives training in the process, and is the more ready
to eliminate for himself; to appreciate natural beauty of a complex
order. Even if our artistic development is not high, we love pictures
because in looking at them and understanding them we perform a creative
act ourselves; but it is the artist who has made it possible for us to
perform the act by his simplification of the problem. Browning clearly
understood this, for he wrote:
We’re made so that we love
First, when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see[41].
Sometimes the artist achieves his emphasis by means not wholly
agreeable to the medium which he is using. Many artists of
great technical ability link human sympathies with an admirably
interpretative _mise-en-scène_ which carries out their vision.
Nevertheless the picture that tells a story calls in adventitious aid.
It is like the illustrated reading book of a child; by the child mind
it is created, and to the child mind it appeals. It cannot express a
clear intuition by a simple representation in a single medium, but
uses two, appealing not only in pictorial symbols, but in dramatic as
well, and the intuition itself is obscured by the process. Owing to
this confusion of media and of intuition the result is unsatisfactory
to minds more developed aesthetically, for reasons that we shall adduce
later, while yet the double appeal makes the meaning more evident to
the beginner. Again certain landscape artists of the second rank by
insistence on simple elements of natural beauty, by emphasis, and by
elimination of distracting ideas, open a new vision to minds hardly
prepared yet for such intuition in face of the natural object. Add to
this the half conscious yet acutely pleasurable process of following
out the technical means by which the artist has impressed his intuition
upon canvas, and we can understand the joy of looking at their pictures.
But where the artist’s vision goes deeper, where the reality is
more clearly seen, and where in order to express this intuition, to
represent it, and to bring out its less obvious harmony and order,
a more sweeping process of elimination and abstraction is needed,
the simple mind is unable to follow. Not everyone is at the stage to
appreciate the subtle symphonies of Whistler, the bare simplicity of
D. Y. Cameron, the rigorous certainty of Botticelli. The conventions
and purposeful line of an early Japanese print; the vibrant light
of the post-impressionist landscape artists; the wilful, obtrusive,
almost harsh insistence of the cubist that you _shall_ turn your mind
away from curves that hitherto you have deemed essential, in order to
grasp other truths, not only seem ugly--that is to say, meaningless--to
the mind whose artistic perception is little developed, but may even
distract it, in rebellious protest, from the truth the artist wishes
to proclaim, though others further advanced find in some of their work
a very high type of beauty. And, be it added, the artist himself fails
in his expression if he overdoes the emphasis in such a way that his
representation of the Reality becomes lopsided and inharmonious, as is
too often the case. Further where he is not a creative artist at all,
but a slavish imitator of a method not really his own, we are presented
with the meaningless monstrosities that here and there defile the
Salon des Indépendants--and other less catholic exhibitions! In some,
too, the animal basis is the only intuition expressed, and art gobbles
greedily at its mess of pottage.
Yet as a whole we have moved a long way from the animal expression of
a need of its complementary animal. The whole world is related to us,
and in that relation we find beauty. And beautiful as it is we find it
very lovable, even though we cannot but feel that our love can never be
satisfied since we can give nothing back.
Yet something we can give, though not to it--something that makes
things clearer. In our minds we can give to this world a meaning, as
itself subordinate, yet the necessary means of our self-realisation,
and we can share this meaning with others. We find a meaning in life,
and that meaning is fellowship. We find a meaning in nature, and that
meaning dwells in the Creative Being of the God who is Love. Beauty,
more clearly day by day, becomes for us the expression of Reality, and
that Reality is the reciprocal relationship of persons. Religion gives
one pathway of approach, Beauty another, but both join to form the
highway of our God. There is more than room for beauty in religion;
there is more than room for aesthetic in theology; there is an absolute
need, if they are not to be in a measure inexpressive, lopsided, and
therefore ugly. Our concept of Reality must be symmetrical, or fail of
adequacy.
What is true of pictorial art is equally true of other forms.
Style--the higher art of language--demands education before it can be
appreciated. In literature again, the general public prefers Longfellow
to Keats, _The Passing of Arthur_ to _A Death in the Desert_, Ella
Wheeler Willcox to the _Divina Commedia_. Henry James demands a more
intimate appreciation of the spirit of man than does Dickens. In all
these there is beauty--the expression of an intuition--but those who
see furthest and most clearly have the smallest public. Most men cannot
even follow where they lead, and few indeed are the pioneers.
Before we leave the question of literature and language, we may just
glance at its development. This is comparatively an easy matter
to understand. The warning, the expression of satisfaction, the
mating-call are common among animals. The powers of communication and
of speech develop with the development of self-consciousness. They are
expressions of the relation between the self and its ‘others,’ and
especially of the relation between the self and other selves. They
carry the germs of understanding, and as they lead from the particular
to the more general they bear in them the quality of the beautiful.
The relations between the self and the other selves, and between the
self and the environment, become more and more universalised. In speech
they are communicated, but speech is transient. A more permanent
record is required, and here again resort is had to symbolism, less
generally intelligible, more esoteric, than the pictorial symbol,
since there is no one universal language; the symbolism of written
speech. Speech, however, is episodic and dramatic. It moves along with
the march of events. So too with literature, for the most part. The
Pictorial and Plastic arts represent beauty as static; yet they are
not lifeless. Activity, movement, is implicit in them, while yet the
beauty they express is restful, and has in it something of the quality
of absoluteness and transcendence. Language, literature, drama are
dynamic. In them beauty moves; immanent and unquiet at first sight; yet
here too there is something that expresses the eternal meaning. Purpose
moves to its fulfilment, and, while it moves, the end is in view.
Nevertheless in pictorial art the static side is the most prominent, in
linguistic the dynamic side. We may observe, however, that in order to
counteract the transitoriness of purely episodic speech, recourse is
had to visual symbolism as well. The graphic art aims at perpetuating
the episode, and by doing so renders possible the development to which
we shall immediately draw attention.
Now the untrained mind appreciates the dynamic aspect of literature,
whether it be the originative mind or the mind of the reader. This
explains the output and the popularity of the thrilling tale of
adventure. At its lowest we find the Penny Dreadful. Through Stanley
Weyman and Dumas we move towards Conrad and Meredith and Hardy, where
the dynamic element is thrillingly present (as present it must be
indeed even in the most quiet essays) but where it is subordinated to
a clear vision of the permanent and eternal which we have mis-termed
static. In poetry this truth is obvious. Even in drama, though our
attention is distracted by the action, it is the chief quality if the
drama is really great. In Sophocles, in Euripides, in Shakespeare;
perhaps almost too consciously in Galsworthy, and Paul Claudel and
Synge, for conscious art loses the sincerity of a first vision; it is
not the episodic sequence that interests us, except from the point
of view of technique. Our attention is focussed upon the motive,
the fundamental intuition to which the dramatist is trying to give
technical expression. Moreover in all the infinite variety of literary
art the motive is the same. One definite intuition is expressed--that
of relationship; relation between person and person, relation between
person and machine, relation between person and some ever-ruling
Order, be it Fate, Chance, or God also personal. It is the reality
of personal inter-relationship that underlies all literature, be it
love-poem, novel, or some drama of Fate in which personal relationship
is overshadowed by the impersonal, or at least the unsympathetic;
or else it is the one-sided relation of a person to a thing, as in
descriptive science, which has only the beauty of order. But can we
say that the intuition which the pictorial artist represents is the
same as this? Hardly, unless the picture tells a story; and in so far
as it does this we feel that the realm of pictorial art is invaded by
an alien influence. It may at first sight seem surprising that art
should not gain by the introduction of various intuitions of relation;
that it does not, as a rule, is certain. All the arts overlap; we shall
see the most marked example of this when we come to consider music and
deal further with this point; but intrinsically each is peculiar in its
scope and method.
Now it is worth while to observe that the longing aroused by the beauty
of literature is rather different from that induced by pictures. It is
less vague. Because literature deals with the relation between persons
our attention is directed towards the persons we know--our longings
and aspirations reach out consciously towards them and towards God.
We think of particular people and our relation to them. Our creative
longing is directed towards them, in active relation, or towards
creative literary work of which, more or less consciously to ourselves
they are the background. Moreover we always identify ourselves, in a
greater or less degree, with one or more of the protagonists of the
story; in them we suffer, we love, we adventure at second-hand. This
phenomenon of identification, closely allied as it is to day-dreaming,
has of late come much under the attention of psychoanalysts under the
title of phantasy; a term covering all attempts to achieve through
the imagination the satisfaction denied to us in actual life. For our
present purpose this is only noteworthy as confirming the truth of our
observation that in literary creation, whether at first or second hand,
it is human relation--the relation of ourselves and others--that lies
behind our intuition and its expression.
In some pictorial art this relation between persons, this personal
touch, does not obtain. In landscape the artist’s intuition obviously
deals with the relation of things to men--a relation much more
onesided. Correspondent to this, we find our intuition and our longing
far more vague, far more dissatisfied. There needs a higher knowledge
of Reality to understand how man has relation to things. The intuition
of this relation is generally expressed with far less understanding.
Human relations may intrude, and we get the story-picture and the
problem-picture. Moral relations may intrude, and we get the symbolic
picture, such as those of Watts and Blake. Drama, myth and legend may
intrude and we get the Ladies of Shallot, the Ledas, and the Calumnies
of Apelles.
But pictorial art reaches its highest plane in the religious picture
and the portrait. Have we not, here, the intrusion of the story in the
first case; and in the second have we not the purely human relations
between artist and sitter?
I think it is just to say that the religious picture is not episodic.
It represents what, for want of a better word, we have termed a static
intuition. In the greatest Madonnas, even those of the beginning of the
decadence, such as Raphael’s, all the birth-pangs, all the pain, and
all the achievement of life at its highest go to make up the intuition
of the artist. I venture to think that in one picture at least, the
Madonna of the Magnificat, the artist even hints subtly that he is
expressing in an image the whole meaning of the world, by distorting
his figures and modifying his lights as they would be distorted and
modified when reflected in a convex mirror. διὰ κάτοπτρον is for all
art, but the fact is not evident to him who only glances. The artist’s
intuition must be understood, by a mind that follows it creatively;
even if its creation be at times over-ingenious.
The religious picture, no doubt, could not have been painted but
for the historic episode which it represents. But there is a strong
presumption that it does not owe its intuition to one episode, nor even
to the whole history of a life; though a Crucifixion, an Entombment,
and indeed a Madonna, would only be intelligible in their fulness to
one who knew the life of Christ. It is the relation of a whole Life,
Divine yet Human, to the life of each one of us that lies at the bottom
of the artist’s vision. Only a great Christian can paint a great
Madonna, however sin-stained he may be. Magdalene, who loved much,
could see deeper than jesting Pilate, deeper than the self-righteous
Pharisee.
There is here no intrusion of an alien element; a vision of Reality
is represented in one medium. The episode no doubt is there, but it
is incidental, and does not constitute the vision. Episode is always
there, even in a landscape; the question is whether the appeal--the
original intuition--is episodic or universal. But no doubt the human
relation is emphasised; and in this respect we have moved far away from
landscape. The relation of man to inanimate nature is however included
and interpreted in the artist’s vision. I think that the half-conscious
perception of this lies behind the frequent introduction of landscape
in such pictures. It may be said that these simply help to complete
the composition, but to say this is to beg the question. Why do they
complete the composition? Why do they satisfy us? Is it not that they
form an intrinsic part of the artist’s intuition; that in the harmony
of figures and landscape he symbolises, and we after him, the universal
harmony which he has seen?
In a portrait, too, we read not only the relation between sitter and
artist, which must be a relation of deep sympathy and understanding if
the portrait is to be anything but an imitation, but also the relation
of the sitter to all the events of his life. Think of Raeburn’s
portrait of James Wardrop. The strength, the kindliness, the rugged
purpose, the humour with which the old man faced his life all through
are there. It is the face of a man who has fought and won, and in
fighting and winning has learned much wisdom. Think of Giorgione’s
Portrait of a Gentleman, with its wealth of refinement; with its
conviction that “manners makyth man,” sustained with gentleness already
many times when courtesy and calm were not easy. Yet here too there is
no representation of episode. The painter’s art is faithful to itself
and allows no alien intrusion. The harmony, the unity of a man’s life,
compounded though that life be of sequent episodes, makes the artist’s
intuition. History has become philosophy. An absolute thing, an aspect
of Reality, is presented, and we feel somehow that it is not set
against the world but includes the world.
The same kind of thing may be said of lapidary art, and we will not
dwell on it in detail. The sculptor sees beauty in the human or
animal form and in three dimensional representation generalises from
it, whether his work represent an individual or an ideal; for the
individual is used to express an ideal, the ideal is localised in an
individual. The problem of the architect is somewhat different, being
on the theoretic side the attempt to portray in three dimensions that
which the designer of geometric patterns expresses in two--rhythm and
order; multiplicity that establishes a unity; unity that interprets
a multiplicity. But here, more than in other arts, the practical has
to be kept in mind, and a harmony preserved between the economic and
the theoretic activities. Generally one or other predominates, no one
clear idea is expressed, and in consequence, much modern architecture,
especially domestic and civic architecture, is unpleasing. To build
a house is harder than to paint a picture, because men have to live
in a house; and in a contention between two ideas the artistic side
is overbalanced by the practical. Moreover the idea of relationship
is comparatively subordinate here just because two ideas are set over
against one another. The relationship of a thing to a man is in view.
The aim is primarily economic, and beauty takes a second place because
the intuition of harmony is vague and its expression imperfect.
If, however, a house is built, as some Tudor and Georgian houses were,
with an eye to simple proportion which must not be violated, but
otherwise with the realisation that it had to be lived in, and that it
must be designed solely with this end in view, the result is eminently
pleasing. There is no falsity, no attempt to mingle irreconcileables,
no striving after a beauty that cannot be achieved because it is
without meaning in such a connection.
We may now turn to music, in some ways the most difficult of all.
Beginning with the evolutionary aspect, as with linguistic art we find
its origin in the relation of beasts to each other and to the world.
The mating-call, the crooning of passion and of satisfied well-being,
the warning of danger, the hunting call, the sound of the wind, the
sea, the river, the “going in the tops of the trees,” provide the
ground-work of both, expressing the relation of beast to beast, and
beast to thing. But, as we have seen, such calls, such sounds, and the
language to which they give rise, are episodic. The sense of unity and
endurance is lost. Just as, over against the visual symbols of episode
which constitute the beginnings of literature we find the visual
symbols of unity and static endurance which characterise pictorial art,
so too we find the auditory symbols of episode that make speech, and
the auditory symbols of unity that make music. We saw that, to preserve
the episode of speech, visual symbolism is eventually called in. Even
to-day the untrained reader has to form the sound with his lips as he
reads; for the more expert the visual symbol definitely represents
the sound: the written symbols have their own timbre. So too with
music. To preserve the unity from being lost, it comes at last to be
symbolised visually, and there are many who can hear the music as they
read the score. Both the letter on the page and the notes on the stave
are symbols of the second degree--symbols of symbols--for what they
symbolise is in itself the symbol of the artist’s intuition of a unity
in multiplicity. This in parenthesis.
We have said that in purely episodic sound such as the danger-call
and the mating-call the sense of unity is absent. Doubtless no call
is really and wholly episodic, in man at any rate, but it cannot be
questioned that the episode is predominant. The sense of relation is
transient; the economic need is all important.
But the theoretic activity cannot be left out of account for long.
The man of to-day, when he feels his whole being in harmony, his
body tingling from the cold bath, sings lustily. When we are well and
cheerful we sing. So too when a bird is well and cheerful, with all his
bodily needs satisfied or soon to be satisfied--so readily satisfied
as to be themselves a pleasure of anticipation--he sings. No doubt the
cave-mother sang to her baby in quiet murmurs; no doubt the cave-father
hummed as he lolled in the cave-mouth after dinner, idly binding an
arrow-head upon the shaft. Somehow, in a rhythmic sequence of sound
the satisfaction of a body in harmonious rhythm with itself and its
surroundings is expressed. Then, we may imagine, the singer becomes
aware of his song, and begins to think about it. The beauty of the song
as a whole, the beauty of a sequence in sound that makes a unity, is
consciously perceived, and a new art dawns. It is an art very similar
to that of the designer of geometric patterns. Unity is established
through infinite multiplicity of details, in forming no one of which
is the unity forgotten. The music mirrors an intuition of harmony in a
Reality that owes its unity to its multiplicity and its multiplicity to
its unity; a Reality that is based on relationship of parts.
In music, then, we find rhythm, order, sequence. It is both episodic
and static, though episode and unity are in symbolic form. In the
individual sequences, the internal multiplicity, the episode is given;
in the whole, the unity of Reality, the static, or better, the absolute
element.
Because in good music these two aspects must of necessity be perfectly
balanced, music can rouse the keenest, highest sense of beauty in a
greater degree than any other of the arts.
But often music falls short of this. Mendelssohn for instance, too
often sacrifices everything to prettiness. The individual sequences are
trivial and empty. Multiplicity of episode is lost sight of in a rather
petty unity; the two are not balanced. The fourth sound is simply a
fourth note, not a star. Not only is the intuition limited, but the
balance is not preserved between the notes and the whole in its
expression. Bach owes his pre-eminence to the perfect balance between
attention to detailed sequence and expression of a great intuition.
Future musicians may see further than he did, but unless they can
achieve his perfect balance they will fail to express what they see,
and in so far as they fail they will be rewarded with ugliness.
The music-hall tune has but a very paltry vision to express; generally
the relationship it portrays is one of vulgar intrigue or animal
desire, at best one of elementary aspiration; and its notes have
a purely subordinate and utilitarian _rôle_. If it is pretty or
ingenious it has got far beyond the average. Generally, moreover,
it is constrained by considerations alien to music. The words are
written, and the tune has to illustrate them. In this it differs
from folk-tunes, where words and music grow together, each shaping,
moulding, modifying the other, till the song is one thing.
This brings us back to a question which we have several times touched
upon, and as often shelved--the question of the overlapping of
different arts. Opera, oratorio, and ballet give us excellent examples,
and from them we will draw the material of our brief discussion.
In Opera we have drama, episode expressed in language, set in a more or
less accordant scene with histrionic accompaniment, and woven in with
a musical interpretation. In Oratorio we have the same thing without
the scenery and the histrionics. In Ballet--and of this art the Russian
Ballet is especially in my mind--we have the drama, the scene, the
histrionic accompaniment in choregraphic form, and the music.
Let us take Opera first. There are two appeals to the ear and two
to the eye. The music and the words; the acting and the scenery.
The scenery, if subdued and perfectly in accord with the action,
does not much distract the attention, for it is purely a pictorial
setting. Nevertheless a sense is growing that in drama it ought to
be so much subordinated that it does not distract the attention at
all, being confined to a few patterns that help in our understanding
of the motive, or to simple draperies. As far as I am aware this has
not yet been attempted in opera[42], but opera is such a jumble of
incongruities that it can never be an artistic whole, much as we may
rejoice in individual parts of it. The words, however, do constrain
the music in a manner thoroughly unjustifiable: “In composing an opera
the stage should be the musician’s first thought, he must not abuse
the confidence of the theatre-goer who comes to _see_ as well as to
_hear_.... The stage often paralyses a composer’s inspiration, that
is why symphonic and chamber music are so far superior to opera. A
symphony or a sonata imposes no limitations, but in opera, the first
necessity is to speak the musical language of the great public[43].”
Moreover the action and the music are so incompatible that we are
forced to leave our sense of humour outside the theatre door. When
the hero explains for ten minutes that the heroine is in acute danger
and that therefore he must hurry away; when Tristan and Isolde sing
their passion with complete detachment for more than half an hour; we
cannot feel that the action helps the music or the music the action. In
Oratorio, since action is absent, we feel this particular incongruity
less, for we manage mentally to eliminate time; but few will be found
to defend the oratorio as a form of aesthetic expression. It is the
anthem prolonged into a “useless Alexandrine,” “which like a wounded
snake drags its slow length along.” The fatal fact about opera and
oratorio is that the music is constrained to do something that is alien
to itself. It is interpretive of episode, and the episode forces it
into shape. It is not free. This is the root trouble always when two
arts overlap. Art must be completely free to express its intuition
technically, subject only to the inevitable restrictions of the
technique proper to it. From _these_ restrictions it even gains, since
the lines of simplification are to some extent determined, and this
very determination helps the artist towards clear expression of a clear
intuition. It would, of course, be absurd to say that music does not
express definite intuitions that are expressible through other media as
well. “I do not in the least agree with you that music cannot interpret
the universal nature of love,” writes Tchaikovsky to Nadejda von Meck.
“On the contrary, I think only music is capable of doing so. You say
words are necessary. O no! This is just where words are not needed, and
where they have no power; a more eloquent language comes in, which is
music. Look at the poetical forms to which poets have recourse in order
to sing of love; they simply usurp the spheres which belong inseparably
to music. Words clothed in poetical forms cease to be mere words; they
become partly music[44].” But if there is a restriction alien to the
art and imposed from without, which prevents full expression in that
medium, the result is bound to be more or less a failure. The dramatic
episode and the verbal form in opera constitute such a restriction,
introducing a vein of unreality that is fatal to aesthetic expression.
In oratorio, where the words demand a representation they do not get,
and where yet the music is bound by the words, we feel the same thing.
Even to take a poem and set it to music is almost bound to lead to
aesthetic disappointment. The intuition of the artist is not single
nor free. The writer of the melody may recreate the intuition of the
poet, he may try to express the same intuition in his setting, but the
setting is none the less constrained by the words. The musician is not
at liberty to form one clear intuition and give it free play[45]. The
form of the expression is already fixed in part, and the knowledge
of this fixation forms a second intuition which generally obscures
and confuses the main one. Moreover both expressions appeal to the
same sense, that of hearing, and this, apparently, produces greater
confusion, more lack of clarity, in the auditor. The same fact accounts
for the unsatisfactoriness of music which moves out of its proper
sphere and endeavours to tell a definite story or paint a definite
scene. The 1812 Overture, fine though it is, can never be said to be
pre-eminent as music; nor can Haydn’s Creation, nor any of the music
that, intentionally or unintentionally, is not single-hearted, but
calls up visual images as well as depending on them. This statement
does not constitute an indictment of programme-music. The _Adagio_
of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony cannot be thus lightly dismissed[46].
In Tchaikovsky’s introspective letters we find most interesting
accounts of the inspiration from which he worked, and an eloquent
defence of programme-music in general, and his own Fourth Symphony in
particular[47]. To N. F. von Meck he writes[48]: “Laroche is entirely
opposed to a programme. He thinks the composer should leave the hearer
to interpret the meaning of the work as he pleases; that the programme
limits his freedom; that music is incapable of expressing the concrete
phenomena of the physical and mental world.... If you care to hear my
opinion on the subject, I will give it in a few words.... I think the
inspiration of a symphonic work can be of two kinds: subjective or
objective. In the first instance it expresses the personal emotion of
joy or sorrow, as when a lyric poet lets his soul flow out in verse.
Here a programme is not only unnecessary, but impossible. It is very
different when the composer’s inspiration is stirred by the perusal of
some poem, or by the sight of a fine landscape, and he endeavours to
express his impressions in musical forms. In this case a programme is
indispensable.... To my mind, both kinds of music have their _raison
d’être_, and I cannot understand those who will only admit one of these
styles. Of course every subject is not equally suitable for a symphony,
any more than for an opera; but, all the same, programme-music can and
must exist. Who would insist, in literature, upon ignoring the epic and
admitting only the lyric element?”
Tchaikovsky seems to me to ignore the deepest side of music, however;
that intuition of an ordered, universal harmony which gives to Bach his
pre-eminence. Programme-music, then, is not necessarily limited to any
great extent by that which it represents, provided the representation
is sufficiently generalised to allow the music free scope. But it is
always in danger of losing touch with the universal in over-emphasis of
the particular, becoming constrained by its subject. Moreover it loses
something of the freedom, and independence of phenomenal existence,
which is the peculiar privilege of music and its unique prerogative
among the arts, taking on something that belongs to painting or
language. In so far as the wrong technical medium is used, just so far
aesthetic expression fails.
These strictures do not apparently apply, at any rate in the same
degree, where two media appealing to two different senses are used
simultaneously. We are accustomed to correlate sight and hearing
and to form through them a single intuition. This may explain the
extraordinary satisfyingness of the Russian Ballet, in spite of its
frequent artificiality and the perverted themes and imagery that pass
unnoticed by the more healthy-minded public of England. The episodic
side, made rhythmical and ordered in its choregraphic presentation,
parallels, but does not constrain in any great degree, the musical
side. In Les Sylphides especially the same intuition is expressed in
two media. The choregraphic artist has studied and followed out the
intuition of Chopin, and has expressed it in a different medium. But
music and dancing have much ground in common, and consequently both
are capable of serving as the technical medium for one or the same
intuition. Therefore Les Sylphides[49] is more of an artistic whole
than almost any other compound aesthetic expression. Art must be free,
and if it use two media, both must express the same intuition--this is
the root of the matter. You may appeal simultaneously to two senses,
but you must do so in the medium proper to each sense and the intuition
must be capable of expression in those media. To appeal to one sense
through the medium proper to another is to court disaster. We see that
this must be so if, as is the case, the aesthetic intuition has to
be founded on the particular before it can move out to discover the
universal; and the particular cannot be faithfully represented if the
representation is not as clear-cut as the intuition and the reality
intuited. Art must be free, for it is the intuition of a relation free
on one side at least, and not finally satisfied till it finds rest
in mutuality, love, free on both sides. It is the expression of our
growing understanding of the meaning of Reality.
No doubt music, like all other arts, has been transformed from its
original character. It is no longer imitative, though it may have been
first roused by imitative attempts; it is no longer dependent on the
harmony of bodily well-being, though it may first have expressed such
harmony. In it spirit calls to spirit, no longer body to body. But this
need not surprise us. The foundations contribute nothing to the beauty
of a building, though upon them the building is reared. All that is
greatest in man had a very humble beginning. Even his limbs and lungs
had a plebeian ancestry.
We have said nothing of the aesthetic problem of simple tone and
colour. Though Plato, and even Hegel, discussed these, it is generally
accepted to-day that they do not in fact exist in isolation from other
suggestions. They always derive a value from their suggested relations
and cannot be conceived apart from these. Such aesthetic value as
clear tones and colours have is due to the fact that the elements they
suggest and imply are few, like a sunset sky, and therefore they do not
demand any great degree of elimination in the mind of the observer.
Neither have we dealt with the problem of the relative importance of
colour and form, except implicitly. The essential factor here is, of
course, that colour does not exist _per se_. You cannot isolate a thing
from its colour, in aesthetic intuition. To begin with, colour is the
basis of visual perception, for the light by means of which the eye
perceives an object must be of some definite series of wave-lengths of
certain amplitudes balanced against one another in some definite manner
through the selective absorption of that object, and wave-length is the
physical basis of colour. Then, secondly, colour belongs to, and is
an integral part of form. Form is not mere shape; it is determined by
tone (or wave-amplitude) and colour (or wave-frequency) as well as by
outline; and these are essential factors in the unity and order of the
whole, and so are essential factors of the intuition.
What we have said, then, of symmetry and geometric form, and of
clearness of expression, together with what we have said of the
elimination that is involved in aesthetic intuition, really covers the
problem.
Together, yet each in its own way, colour and form arouse in us the
sense of unity and appeal to us as being in harmony with the intuition
derived from other particulars; that in the world, under all its
apparent multiplicity, there subsists a unity which relates all things
together.
CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY J. B. PEACE, M.A., AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Bosanquet, _Hist. Aesth._ p. 18.
[2] _Ibid._ p. 148.
[3] G. Vico, _Scienza nuova seconda, Elementi liii_, quoted in Croce’s
_Aesthetic_.
[4] Bosanquet, _Hist. Aesth._ p. 267, _seq._
[5] Croce, _Aesthetic_, trs. Ainslie, p. 303.
[6] Wildon Carr, _The Philosophy of Croce_, p. 97.
[7] The clearest summary of Croce’s position is to be found in the
brief third section of the first part of his _Philosophy of the
Practical_. Prof. Wildon Carr also has given a very clear account
of Croce’s philosophy as a whole in his book on _The Philosophy of
Benedetto Croce_.
[8] _Philosophy of the Practical_, p. 591.
[9] _Philosophy of the Practical_, pp. 258-261.
[10] This is not to condemn programme music altogether, for much of the
best programme music does not attempt to paint a scene in such a way as
to call up visual images. _Vide infra._
[11] Cf. the work of the psychoanalytic school, especially Jung’s
_Psychology of the Unconscious_ and Rivers’ _Dreams and Primitive
Culture_.
[12] Lyly’s _Campaspe_.
[13] G. Macdonald, _Phantastes_.
[14] _Evolution and Spiritual Life_ and _Evolution and the Doctrine of
the Trinity_.
[15] _Evolution and Spiritual Life._
[16] _Opp. citt. passim._
[17] _Evolution and the Doctrine of the Trinity._
[18] I make no apology for not entering here on any discussion of how
God can be Love. I have endeavoured to offer suggestions on this matter
in my earlier books, and especially in _Evolution and the Doctrine of
the Trinity_.
[19] _Evolution and the Doctrine of the Trinity_, ch. III.
[20] _Evolution and the Doctrine of the Trinity_, ch. III.
[21] _Ibid._ See also Strong, _The Origin of Consciousness_.
[22] Bosanquet, _History of Aesthetic_, p. 37.
[23] McDowall, _opp. citt._
[24] _Evolution and Spiritual Life._
[25] _Evolution and Spiritual Life_, ch. VI, and _Evolution and the
Doctrine of the Trinity_, ch. VI.
[26] Croce, _Logic_, p. 279.
[27] _Ibid._ p. 310.
[28] Croce, _Logic_, pp. 324-325.
[29] McDowall, _opp. citt._
[30] _The Psychology of the Unconscious._
[31] _Dreams and Primitive Culture._
[32] For the exact sense in which these words are used, and for their
implications in regard to God’s creative activity, see _Evolution and
the Need of Atonement_.
[33] A word may be said concerning the personal relationship of fear
and hate. Here in self-defence the ‘other’ is not regarded as in
personal relation to the person threatened, at all events in early
stages of development; he is as external as a flood or a precipice.
Nevertheless in fear and hate, when they have reached a high stage of
development, there is a feeling of personal relation. But only in one
sense can this relation be termed personal; the ‘other’ is recognised
as a person, but in concentrating our attention on the things in him we
fear and hate we concentrate it on his ‘otherness’--on his lack of any
but an external relation to us. There is nothing reciprocal; we refuse
to give or receive. It is this externality of relation that makes hate
and fear so poignant and so bitter.
[34] Cf. _Evolution and the Need of Atonement_, ch. IV. _et passim_.
[35] McDowall, _opp. citt. passim_.
[36] For detailed consideration of the nature of evolutionary process
in material conditions reference may be made to my earlier works, to
which the present essay constitutes a postscript.
[37] Even though there may be a mating-call.
[38] I believe that I am right in saying that it is not until the
Neolithic period that human (female) images are found, and some of
these are probably divinities, though Dr A. C. Haddon informs me that
there are Neolithic paintings of human beings on rocks in Spain which
presumably do not represent divinities.
[39] Really, geometric art seems to have arisen nearly contemporaneously
with representative art, for patterns of considerable complexity and
symmetry are found in the later palaeolithic period.
[40] Though the representation of an eye is frequently included in
the pattern as a counter-charm, and indeed many of the patterns _may_
originally have had a magical significance, though most seem to be
merely inspired by woven basket-work and the like.
[41] _Fra Lippo Lippi._
[42] I understand that Purcell’s _Fairy Queen_ has just been played at
Cambridge with draped scenes only.
[43] Tchaikovsky, letter to N. F. von Meck, Nov. 27th, 1879.
[44] Tchaikovsky, letter to N. F. von Meck, Feb. 9th, 1878.
[45] Tchaikovsky’s letters to N. F. von Meck give an interesting
insight into the process by which the intuition comes to the composer,
and his method of working it out. See especially the letters of Feb.
17th, March 5th, and June 24th, 1878.
[46] If one can say that it has a programme and not simply an
inspiration.
[47] Letter to Taneiev, March 27th, 1878.
[48] Dec. 5th, 1878.
[49] Petrouchka is said to be equally homogeneous, but I have not seen
it, and Carnaval approaches this level.
End of Project Gutenberg's Beauty and the Beast, by Stewart A. McDowall