Art, Play, and Civilisation
L’heure est & la construction, pas au badinage.
_Le Corbuster-Saugnier_.
The value of the experiences which we Seek from the arts does
not lie, so we have insisted, in the exquisiteness of the moment
of consciousness; a set of isolated ecstasies is not a sufficient
explanation. Its inadequacy is additional evidence that the theories
of value and of the mind upon which it rests are defective. We
must now consider what wider explanations are made possible by
the theory of value and the outline account of mental activity
and of communication above indicated. The ground, in part at
least, is cleared. What now can be said as to why the arts are
important and why good taste and sound criticism are not mere
luxuries, trivial excrescences grafted upon an independent civilisation?
A number of accounts of varying adequacy each in some degree
interesting but needing careful interpretation have been put
forward. The arts communicate experiences, it has been said,
and make states of mind accessible to the many which otherwise
would be only possible to few. To this it might be added that
the arts are also a means by which experiences arise in the mind
of the artist which would never otherwise come about. Both as
an occasion for a collectedness and concentration difficult to
attain in the ordinary course of life, and as the means by which
human effort may acquire a continuity analogous to but more subtle
than the continuity of science, the study and practice of the
arts can give immensely increased power to the artist, preserving
him from that diffusion of his energies which is perhaps his
greatest danger. All this is true, but it does not go to the
root of the matter.
Again the educational aspect of the arts is constantly being
stressed, sometimes in a manner which does them disservice. ‘Message’
hunting—the type of interest which discovers in _Macbeth_
the moral that ‘Honesty is the best policy’; in _Othello_
a recommendation to ‘Look before you leap’, in _Hamlet_
perhaps a proof that ‘Procrastination is the Thief of Time’,
or in _King Lear_ an indication that ‘Your sins will find
you out[76]’, in Shelley an exhortation to Idealism, in Browning
comfort for the discouraged and assurances as to a future life;
but in Donne or Keats no ‘message’—this mode of interpreting
the phrase ‘a criticism of life’, though to a minute degree on
the right lines, is probably more damaging than those entirely
erratic theories, of which ‘Art for Art’s sake’ is an example,
with which we have been more concerned.
None the less but in subtler ways the educational influence of
the arts is all-pervasive. We must not overlook bad art in estimating
it. “I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own
confraternity” wrote a novelist of the 19th century “if I were
to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and
middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the
novels that they read. Mothers would no doubt think of their
own sweet teaching; fathers of the examples which they set; and
schoolmasters of the excellence of their instructions. Happy
is the country which has such mothers, fathers and schoolmasters!
But the novelist creeps in closer than the father, closer than
the schoolmaster, closer almost than the mother. He is the chosen
guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses for herself. She
retires with him, suspecting no lesson . . . and there she is
taught how she shall learn to love; how she shall receive the
lover when he comes; how far she should advance to meet the joy;
why she should be reticent and not throw herself at once into
this new delight.”
The influence is also exerted in more indirect ways. There need
be, we must remember, no discernible connection or resemblance
whatever between the experience due to the work of art and the
later behaviour and experience which is modified through it.
Without such resemblance the influence may easily be overlooked
or denied, but not by anyone who has a sufficient conception
of the ways in which attitudes develop. No one who has repeatedly
lived through experiences at the level of discrimination and
co-ordination presupposed by the greater writers, can ever, when
fully ‘vigilant’, be contented with ordinary crudities though
a touch of liver may of course suspend these superior responses.
And conversely, keen and vigilant enjoyment of Miss Dell, Mr
Burroughs, Mrs Wilcox or Mr Hutchinson, when untouched by doubts
or the joys of ironic contemplation, is likely to have as a consequence
not only an acceptance of the mediocre in ordinary life, but
a blurring and confusion of impulses and a very widespread loss
of value.
These remarks apply even more evidently to the Cinema. People
do not much imitate what they see upon the screen or what they
read of in best-sellers. It would matter little if they did.
Such effects would show themselves clearly and the evil would
be of a manageable kind. They tend instead to develop stock attitudes
and stereotyped ideas, the attitudes and ideas of producers:
attitudes and ideas which can be ‘put across’ _quickly_
through a medium that lends itself to crude rather than to sensitive
handling. Even a good dramatist’s work will tend to be coarser
than that of a novelist of equal ability. He has to make his
effects more quickly and in a more obvious way. The Cinema suffers
still more than the stage from this disability. It has its compensating
advantages in the greater demands which it makes of the audience,
but hitherto very few producers have been able to turn them to
account. Thus the ideas and attitudes with which the ‘movie fan’
becomes familiar tend to be peculiarly clumsy and inapplicable
to life. Other causes, connected with the mentality of producers,
increase the effect.
The danger lies not in the fact that school-girls are sometimes
incited to poke revolvers at taximen, but in much subtler and
more insinuating influences. Most films indeed are much more
suited to children than to adults, and it is the adults who really
suffer from them. No one can intensely and whole-heartedly enjoy
and enter into experiences whose fabric is as crude as that of
the average super-film without a disorganisation which has its
effects in everyday life. The extent to which second-hand experience
of a crass and inchoate type is replacing ordinary life offers
a threat which has not yet been realised. If a false theory of
the severance and disconnection between ‘æsthetic’ and ordinary
experience has prevented the value of the arts from being understood,
it has also preserved their dangers from recognition.
Those who have attempted to find a place in the whole structure
of life for the arts have often made use of the conception of
Play; and Groos and Herbert Spencer are famous exponents of the
theory. As with so many other Æsthetic Doctrines the opinion
that Art is a form of Play may indicate either a very shallow
or a very penetrating view. All depends upon the conception of
Play which is entertained. Originally the view arose in connection
with survival values. Art, it was thought, had little practical
value of the obvious kinds, so some indirect means must be found
by which it could be thought to be of service. Perhaps, like
play, it was a means of harmlessly expending superfluous energy.
A more useful contribution was made when the problem of the value
of play itself was seriously attacked. The immense practical
utility of most forms of play then became evident. Characteristically
play is the preparatory organisation and development of impulses.
It may easily become too narrowly specialised, and the impulses
active may be such as never to receive ‘serious’ exercise. None
the less with our present understanding of the amazingly recondite
interactions between what appear to be totally different activities
of the nervous system, the importance of play is not likely to
need much insistence.
There are many human activities which, fortunately or unfortunately
as the case may be, are no longer required of or possible to
civilised man. Yet their total discontinuance may lead to grave
disturbances. For some of these play serves as an opportunity.
The view that art provides in some cases an analogous outlet
through vicarious experience has naturally been put forward,
notably by Mr Havelock Ellis. “We have lost the orgy, but in
its place we have art[77].” If we do not extend the ‘sublimation’
theory too far or try to bring under this Safety-valve heading
work with which it has no concern, it may be granted that in
some cases the explanation is in place. But the temptation to
extend it, and so to misconceive the whole matter, is great.
The objection to the Play Theory, unless very carefully stated,
lies in its suggestion that the experiences of Art are in some
way incomplete, that they are substitutes, meagre copies of the
real thing, well enough for those who cannot obtain better. “The
moralising force of Art lies, not in its capacity to present
a timid imitation of our experiences, but in its power to go
beyond our experience, satisfying and harmonising the unfulfilled
activities of our nature.”[78] The Copy View, with the antithesis
between Life and Literature which so often accompanies it, is
a devastating misconception. Coupled with the suggestion involved
by the word ‘Play,’ that such things are for the young rather
than for the mature, and that Art is something one grows out
of, it has a large share of the responsibility for the present
state of the Arts and of Criticism. Its only rival in obscuring
the issues is its close cousin the Amusement or Relaxation Theory.
The experiences which the arts offer are not obtainable, or but
rarely, elsewhere. Would that they were! They are not incomplete;
they might better be described as ordinary experiences completed.
They are not such that the most adequately equipped person can
dispense with them and suffer no loss, and this loss is not momentary,
but recurrent and permanent; the best equipped are precisely
the people who most value these experiences. Nor is Art, as by
way of corollary is sometimes maintained, a thing which had its’
function in the youth of the world, but with the development
of Science becomes obsolete. It may very possibly decline and
even disappear, but if it does a biological calamity of the first
order will have occurred. Nor again is it something which may
be postponed while premillennial man grapples with more immediate
problems. The raising of the standard of response is as immediate
a problem as any, and the arts are the chief instrument by which
it may be raised _or lowered_.
Hitherto we have been concerned chiefly with more or less specific
effects of the experiences of the arts, with the effects, upon
single definite groups or systems of impulses, of their exercise
in these experiences. The Play Theory tends to limit us to these
consequences. Important though they are, we must not overlook
the more general effects which any well-organised experience
produces. They may in certain cases be extraordinarily widespread.
Such an apparently irrelevant test as the ability to stand upon
one foot without unsteadiness has recently been employed, by
Mr Burt, as an index to mental and especially to emotional organisation.
All our activities react upon one another to a prodigious extent
in ways which we can only as yet conjecture.
Finer adjustment, clearer and more delicate accommodation or
reconciliation of impulses in any one field tends to promote
it in others. A step in mathematical accomplishment, other things
being equal, facilitates the acquisition of a new turn in ski-ing.
Other things are rarely equal it should perhaps be remarked.
If this is true even of such special narrowly restricted impulses
as are involved in a scientific technique, it is far more evident
when the major, the most widespread systems, those active in
our responses to human beings and to the exigences of existence,
are engaged.
There is abundant evidence that removal of confusion in one sphere
of activity tends to be favourable to its removal elsewhere.
The ease with which a trained mind approaches a new subject is
the plainest example, but equally a person whose ordinary emotional
experience is clear, controlled and coherent, is the least likely
to be thrown into confusion by an unheard-of predicament. Complications
sometimes obscure this effect: a mathematician approaching psychology
may attempt to apply methods which are inappropriate, and the
sanest people may prove stupid in their dealings with individuals
of other races. The specialist, either intellectual or moral,
who is helpless outside his own narrow field is a familiar figure
in inferior comedy. But what would have to be shown before the
principle is invalidated is that, granted equal specialisation,
the successful specialist is not better fitted for life in general
than his unsuccessful _confrère_. Few people, however, will
dispute the assertion that transference of ability frequently
occurs although the mode by which it comes about may be obscure.
When very widespread and very fundamental impulses are implicated,
where attitudes constantly taken up in ordinary life are aroused,
this transference effect may be very marked. Everybody knows
the feeling of freedom, of relief, of increased competence and
sanity, that follows any reading in which more than usual order
and coherence has been given to our responses. We seem to feel
that our command of life, our insight into it and our discrimination
of its possibilities, is enhanced, even for situations having
little or nothing to do with the subject of the reading. It may
be a chapter of _Gösta Berling_ or of _The ABC of Atoms_,
the close of the _Vanity of Human Wishes_, or the opening
of _Harry Richmond_; whatever the differences the refreshment
is the same. And conversely everybody knows the diminution of
energy, the bafflement, the sense of helplessness, which an ill-written,
crude, or muddled book, or a badly acted play, will produce,
unless the critical task of diagnosis is able to restore equanimity
and composure.
Neither the subject nor the closeness of correspondence between
the experience and the reader’s own situation has any bearing
upon these effects. But indeed, to anyone who realises what kind
of a thing an experience is, and through what means it comes
about, the old antithesis between subject and treatment ceases
to be of interest (cf. Chapter XVI). They are not separable or
distinct things and the division is of no service. In this case
the effects we are considering depend only upon the kind and
degree of organisation which is given to the experiences. If
it is at the level of our own best attempts or above it (but
not so far above as to be out of reach) we are refreshed. But
if our own organisation is broken down, forced to a cruder, a
more wasteful level, we are depressed and temporarily incapacitated,
not only locally but generally. It is when what we are offered,
and inveigled into accepting, is only slightly inferior to our
own developed capacity, so that it is no easy matter to see what
is wrong, that the effect is greatest. Stuff of an evident and
extreme badness is exhilarating rather than depressing when taken
from a discriminating standpoint; and there need be nothing snobbish
or self-congratulatory in such reading. What is really discomposing
and damaging to the critical reader is the mediocre, the work
which falls just below his own standards of response. Hence the
rage which some feel at the productions of Sir James Barrie,
Mr Locke, or Sir Hall Caine, a rage which work comparatively
devoid of merits fails to excite.
These effects are not merely momentary or evanescent; if we would
understand the place of the arts in civilisation we must consider
them more closely. An improvement of response is the only benefit
which anyone can receive, and the degradation, the lowering of
a response, is the only calamity. When we take into account not
merely the impulses actually concerned in the experience but
all the allied groups which thrive or suffer with it, and all
the far-reaching effects of success or failure upon activities
which may seem to be independent, the fact that some people feel
so keenly about the arts is no longer surprising.
Underestimation of the importance of the arts is nearly always
due to ignorance of the workings of the mind. Experiences such
as these, into which we willingly and whole-heartedly enter,
or into which we may be enticed and inveigled, present peculiar
opportunities for betrayal. They are the most formative of experiences,
because in them the development and systematisation of our impulses
goes to the furthest lengths. In ordinary life a thousand considerations
prohibit for most of us any complete working out of our response;
the range and complexity of the impulse-systems involved is less;
the need for action, the comparative uncertainty and vagueness
of the situation, the intrusion of accidental irrelevancies,
inconvenient temporal spacing—the action being too slow or too
fast—all these obscure the issue and prevent the full development
of the experience. We have to jump to some rough and ready solution.
But in the ‘imaginative experience’ these obstacles are removed.
Thus what happens here, what precise stresses, preponderances,
conflicts, resolutions and interinanimations, what remote relationships
between different systems of impulses arise, what before unapprehended
and inexecutable connections are established, is a matter which,
we see clearly, may modify all the rest of life. As a chemist’s
balance to a grocer’s scales, so is the mind in the imaginative
moment to the mind engaged in ordinary intercourse or practical
affairs. The comparison will bear pressing. The results, for
good or evil, of the untrammelled response are not lost to us
in our usual trafficking.
[76] Even Coleridge was not exempt from this failing. Cf. his
comments on Gloster.
[77] Essay on Casanova, in _Affirmations_, p. 115.
[78] _Affirmations_, p. 115.