DEDUCTION OF ART-FORMS
In the science of art many hypotheses have been advanced as to the
order in which the different art-forms have made their appearance. We
do not intend to bring forward any new arguments on this much-debated
question. Even if our knowledge of prehistoric man were so complete
and trustworthy as to entitle us to draw any conclusions as to the
earliest stages in art-development, such an appeal to history would in
the present connection constitute a grave confusion of standpoints.
As long as we are occupied with that abstract datum, the purely
artistic activity, we cannot possibly find any support for our
reasoning in existing works of art, concerning which the question
may always be raised whether the motive was or was not a purely
autotelic art-impulse. We shall therefore in the following pages
entirely ignore the question of historical sequence and restrict our
attention to the various degrees of theoretical priority. Starting
from the interpretation of artistic activity which was postulated,
but not yet proved, in the preceding chapter, we shall consider those
art-forms as most primordial which stand in the closest connection
with the expression of feeling. By comparing those manifestations
of art-activity which are from our standpoint elementary, with the
non-æsthetic expression of emotional states, we shall try to isolate
the peculiarly artistic qualities in their simplest possible form. If
the result of such a treatment prove consistent with general æsthetic
ideals, as exhibited in the literature of art, this fact will naturally
go to the credit of our explanation.
The purest and most typical expression of simple feeling is that which
consists of mere random movements. Those activities, whether of the
whole body or of special parts,—the larynx, for instance,—which follow
immediately upon, or rather accompany, a state of pleasure or pain,
are in themselves entirely non-æsthetic. Thus it is impossible to see
anything artistic in the spectacle of a man leaping or shouting for
joy. Yet the lowest kind of lyrical music and lyrical “gymnastic” dance
may be almost as directly connected with the original state of feeling
as these purely expressional activities. The only difference is that in
music and dance the movements have been limited and restrained by the
adoption of a fixed sequence in time. This fixed sequence in time—the
rhythm—must therefore, from our point of view, be considered as the
simplest of all art-forms.
If we were to give a complete account of the psychology of rhythm, it
would be impossible not to resort to a sociological and historical
mode of treatment. By Dr. Wallaschek’s researches on primitive music
it has been conclusively shown how important a part rhythm, as a
means of facilitating co-operation, has played in the struggle for
existence.[124] And this utilitarian explanation has recently been
carried even farther by Professor Bücher, who points out the invaluable
saving of effort which the individual obtains by regulating his
movements in a fixed sequence of time.[125] We may think that Professor
Bücher has stretched his point too far in endeavouring to derive almost
all music and poetry from the economical exigencies of labour;[126]
but there can be no doubt that in whichever way the ultimate origin
of musical arts be explained, their development is largely due to the
practical advantages of rhythm. These considerations, however, which
will be developed in the following chapters, need not detain us here,
where we have to do with the presumably non-utilitarian and purely
æsthetic work of art. If the practical advantages of economy and
co-operation can be eliminated,—if we can imagine a dance and a song
which has not for its aim the facilitation or regulation of some form
of work or the stimulation of some effort, which, in short, has its
sole aim and purpose in itself,—then the art-element in this dance or
song must be explicable without reference to “foreign” purposes.
The only explanation we have been able to find is one which brings us
back to the standpoint of the last chapter. Looking upon art as an
essentially social activity, we naturally bestow our main attention
upon rhythm as a factor of unification. But as we are not allowed to
take into account its importance for _practical_ co-operation, we can
only interpret it as a means of bringing about _emotional_ community.
And it is evident that the fixed sequence in time, when used for the
purpose of communicating a state of feeling, must produce the same
effect as when it serves the purpose of diffusing and regulating the
impulses to work.
This fact can also be observed in all cases of social expression. The
most general and simple states of emotional excitement, such as a
festive mood or a warlike intoxication, may indeed be diffused with
sufficient efficacy by simple contagious imitation. But even with
regard to such eminently infectious feelings, if a great mass of
men is to be collectively and simultaneously stimulated by a common
execution of the appropriate expressive movements, these movements must
be regulated by the adoption of a rhythm. On the other hand, as soon
as the expression is fixed in rhythmical form its contagious power is
incalculably increased. By its incessant and regular recurrence, the
rhythm takes a ruthless hold of the attention, and thereby compels
even the most recalcitrant to yield to the power of the transmitted
feeling.[127]
As evidence of the irresistibility with which a rhythmical expression
may rouse an audience to an almost unvoluntary imitation, one may refer
to the familiar effects of the southern dances. The tarantella, as is
well known, often entices the unwilling as well as the willing to join
in its wild movements. And the same is said of several other Spanish
and Italian dances. We need only refer to the apologue of the Fandango,
so often used as a motive of ballets, in which the dance, brought into
court for causing disturbance, compels judge and jury to yield to
its temptations and dissolve the sitting for a fierce gambade.[128]
Such stories give an exaggerated yet typical example of the great
influence which the sight of dancing exercises on the lively Latin
nations. An impassive Northerner can indeed always master the impulse
to join actively in a wild dance. But even he cannot avoid sharing the
excitement by internal imitation.
It is, however, impossible to decide with any exactitude whether the
effects which a dance-performance exercises on the spectators are
mainly due to the movements themselves or to the rhythm by which they
are regulated. In order, therefore, to estimate at its proper value the
importance of time, it is necessary to examine it as it appears when
isolated from bodily movement. The lowest types of music, in which the
element of melody is of no importance, show us rhythm in its simplest
and purest form. Such instruments as drums, tom-toms, and castanets
may serve as a most effective means of emotional excitation. The same
exaltation or depression, which in a dance is conveyed by a series
of varied expressive movements, may be transmitted with almost equal
effectiveness by a simple sequence of sounds. Any group of acoustic
impressions following each other in a fixed rhythm may, independently
of their character, arouse in the listener the same modifications of
functions and activities, and hence also the same emotional state,
as was originally expressed by this particular time-sequence. Thus
pure feeling, as it appears when abstraction has been made of all
intellectual elements, can be as it were exteriorised in rhythmical
form. And, which is of still greater importance, a pure feeling can in
this exteriorisation be fixed down for future repetition. Even in its
simplest manifestations art is thus capable of raising an emotional
state beyond the limitations of space and time.
It is most natural, when speaking of the connection between feeling
and rhythm, to refer to dance and the simplest vocal and instrumental
music. But it goes without saying that the effects are the same in
kind, although less in degree, when the time-sequence is impressed upon
our mind in some more indirect way. Thus, by appropriating the element
of rhythm, which enters into all poetry, we may in reciting or reading
a verse partake of an emotional state in the same way as we do when
joining, actively or “internally,” the movements of a dance. Similarly,
the formative and decorative arts may, by compelling our eye to follow
a regular arrangement of lines and figures, transmit to us an emotional
excitement by the mediation of rhythm. Ornament, that purely popular
art, may therefore be compared as to its psychological effects with
simple popular dances and melodies.[129]
In these three logically most primordial arts, viz. gymnastic dance,
geometric ornament, and unmelodic, simply rhythmical music or singing,
the unmotived “objectless” feeling is expressed in a medium which
directly conveys to us its accompanying modifications of activity.
Notwithstanding the meagreness of their intellectual content, these
purely lyrical forms, if we may so call them, are therefore emotionally
suggestive to a high degree. General and indistinct moods, such as a
feeling of ease, of liberation from restraint, of assurance and power,
etc., may by them be transmitted with unsurpassable fidelity. But
their expressive power is also confined to such purely hedonic states.
Whenever, therefore, the feeling forms a part of a differentiated
and fully formed emotion, the impulse to social expression must avail
itself of some more adequate means of transmission.
In point of fact there will nearly always, even in the most impulsive
outburst of pleasure or pain, enter an element of simple dramatic
representation, by which some of the mental qualities distinctive of
the various emotions are communicated. With regard to dancing, for
instance, we can only speak in the abstract of any simply “gymnastic”
forms.[130] Even if the movements originally aim at nothing but
enhancement or relief for an indistinct emotional state, they will
unavoidably take the character of such movements as have been
connected with some emotion, and thereby, in spectators as well as
in performers, awaken some faint revival of this complex state of
feeling. This process can be very clearly observed in the case of
the pseudo-pantomimes which are so general among lower tribes. When
a savage is in a high-strung state of feeling, he generally resorts
to the same movements which have served him to express the greatest
and most frequent excitements of his life. Among warlike tribes the
dances of joy, as well as their developments, salutation dances,
and complimentary dances,[131] generally have a distinct military
character.[132] No doubt it may be contended that the particular
character of these pantomimes was originally a result of political
considerations. In a military state of society it is perhaps simply
a measure of safety to receive strangers with threats. But however
important this utilitarian aspect may be, it seems more probable that
a great part of these apparently unmotived pantomimes, which are
executed when we should expect only a simple outburst of joy, are best
interpreted as real instances of borrowed expression, necessitated by
the limitations of our means of expression and furthered by associative
processes.
In the life of self-contained educated men we do not generally
meet with this phenomenon in so distinct a form. But even here the
fragmentary pantomimes into which a man often falls when mastered by
a quite indistinct feeling—we need only refer to the erotic character
of embraces and other gestures of joy—show us that expression always
adds an element of definiteness to the psychical state expressed.
When treating of the reactions consequent upon bodily pain, we
have already had to take into account the species of imaginative
materialisation, as though pain were a concrete thing, a shirt of
Nessus, by which a sufferer is generally induced to explain his
automatic movements. Here we need only point out that a similar, so to
speak, mythogenic influence, a natural tendency to personification,
results not only from reactions to pain, but also from all expressive
activities. An indistinct mood of pleasure thus generally passes
over into a joy—that is, a feeling which is referred to some cause,
imaginary or real—when the functional enhancement has reached our
voluntary muscles. An oppression, which in its origin may be purely
physiological, is transformed, when the bodily modifications become
more differentiated,[133] into fear of something unknown—for instance,
some impending danger.
Since it is so difficult for the individual himself to perceive a
mental state as one of pure sensation with no element of thought, we
need not wonder that his expression always transmits to the spectator
something more than the mere excitement or depression of simple
feeling. However strictly we try to isolate the pure rhythm of a
lyrical performance, there will always slip into it an element of
mimetic expression—we do not know of a better adjective—which suggests
a mental state, distincter and better defined than that of pure
feeling. In reality, therefore, the dramatic forms of dancing are no
less primordial than those purely rhythmical manifestations which the
necessities of treatment have compelled us to consider as a separate
group.[134] It is also evident that the dramatic or mimetic element
will increase in importance as the endeavour to represent mental states
and transmit them to outsiders becomes more conscious and deliberate.
We have dealt at sufficient length with the transmission of emotion
by mimetic expression. A striking instance of this process has
already been found outside the domain of art in the contagiousness of
collective states of mind. When art adopts emotional transmission as
an end in itself, this contagiousness is naturally increased. On the
side of the executant we have to suppose a conscious endeavour to make
the mimic expression as easily appropriated as possible; on the side
of the spectator an increased readiness to partake of the expressed
feeling. A theatrical audience, indeed, unlike a riotous mob, does not
generally go so far as to imitate its leader, the actor, by actual
movement. Conscious of the fictitious character of the performance, the
spectators are able to resist the sub-conscious volitional impulses
which they receive. But while thus controlling their outward activity,
those who attentively follow the acting may nevertheless appropriate in
an almost direct manner the feelings represented. Although they remain
passive spectators and preserve an appearance of immobility, they are
apt to follow, in a kind of abridgment, the attitudes and facial play
of the performers. At the most critical stages of a popular melodrama
the audience always falls into an unconscious pantomime, which, as
Engel remarked, to the psychological observer is of far greater
interest than that enacted on the stage.[135] In the higher forms of
dramatic art this direct transmission of feeling no doubt loses a great
deal of its importance. But we believe that every attentive playgoer
has occasional opportunities of observing, in himself if not in his
neighbours, faint traces of an unconscious and involuntary imitation
which follows all the movements of the performers. Such imitation will,
of course, become more and more pronounced the more the dialogue gives
place to pantomimic action, and the more vividly and convincingly this
action is represented. As an example of the power with which a good
mimic may compel even the most critical spectator to participate in
emotional moods, we cannot quote anything better than the description
of Garrick in Lichtenberg’s _Briefe aus England_. “His facial
expression is so powerful as to invite imitation. When he is grave his
audience is grave. When he frowns the house frowns, and it smiles when
he smiles. In his hidden pleasure, and in his intimate manner, when, in
an aside, he gives the audience his confidence, there is something so
winning that one’s whole soul goes out to this fascinating man.”[136]
It may be thought that the above described processes occur only in
those arts which can be called dramatic in the proper sense of the
word. If this were the case, the principle of emotional transmission
by direct imitation would of course be of very restricted æsthetic
importance. We think, however, that a histrionic element can be
noticed, with greater or less distinctness, no doubt, in all the
various forms of artistic production. It certainly enters into
literature, where popular authors, especially of the sentimental class,
always possessed the secret of suggesting feelings by representing
their manifestations in “contagious” description. And it plays an
important part in all the arts of design, formative as well as
decorative.
We may often catch ourselves faintly imitating movements or attitudes
represented in sculpture. And this influence of suggestion is felt
not only, as Professor Lange thinks, in the case of melodramatic
sculpture—expressive of the most violent passions—it contributes also,
in no slight degree, to our enjoyment of the forms which represent the
gentler moods.[137] However calm and impassive the facial expression
of a statue may be, the attitude of the body will always communicate
to us a feeling of some kind, of strength and assurance, or perhaps of
settled melancholy.
In the art of painting this mimetic principle tends to be lost among
the descriptive elements. The direct transmission of feeling is
replaced by an indirect and associative one. Still, there are few
works, if any, in which the histrionic factor is entirely lacking.
It may be detected with especial clearness in sentimental or comic
figure-painting, which often literally infects us with the emotions it
represents. When looking at a Japanese caricature, for instance, of the
gods of happiness, we often laugh with the laughter of the picture long
before we have realised the cause of it, or formulated any judgment as
to the artistic merits of the representation.
It is true that pictorial art has many branches in which the human
figure does not appear at all. But this absence does not by any means
entail a complete loss of mimetic suggestiveness. As our perceptions,
whether of animate or inanimate objects, are always accompanied by a
complete or abortive imitation, any kind of form or movement may call
forth in us activities distinctive of some emotional mood. Just as a
rhythmic series of simple acoustic or visual impressions may occasion
in us the functional modifications accompanying simple feeling, and
thereby arouse in us the mental state of which this rhythm is an
exteriorisation, so the mimic movements which are the physiological
counterparts of distinct emotion may be, so to speak, translated into
lines and forms, by which the emotion is reproduced in other minds.
Thus even an object of handicraft—a vase, for instance—may, by the
suggestiveness of its shape, affect our emotional life in an almost
immediate way. And geometric ornament has an equal, if not even
greater, power of conjuring up in us emotional states, which we read
into the angles and volutes. Finally, the concrete objects of nature
are full of “expressive qualities” which make them available as a means
of conveying our feelings. The whole world of visual reality can thus
be used in a kind of indirect mimetism,—a dramatic expression, so to
speak, in which natural and abstract forms replace the human body.
The course of our argument has led us to emphasise the lyrical and
dramatic elements in artistic activity. But we do not by any means
wish to underrate the fact that it is only a very small minority of
works the nature of which can be exhaustively described by these two
qualities. With increased importance of the intellectual elements
accompanying the emotional states, direct emotional suggestion must
unavoidably appear an inadequate means of communication. A joy or a
sorrow, together with a notion of some objective cause of it, rapture
or admiration, anger, hate, or despair,—all these and similar states
can be completely conveyed to an outsider only in so far as they have
been accounted for to his intellect. As the theoretically latest
manifestation of the craving for social expression there will thus
appear an impulse to represent or describe objective events or things,
by which a feeling similar to that of the producing artist may be
called forth in his audience. And thus in almost all art-forms, in
ornament and music as well as in painting and novels, there will be
found an imitation of nature which serves what in the widest use of the
term we may call an epic purpose.
The intellectual justification of a feeling by representation of a
cause and the orderly form of its direct or secondary expression are,
however, in themselves insufficient to secure a response; the attention
and goodwill of the audience must first be conciliated. A sympathetic
rapport always presupposes a state of compliance in at least one of
the parties involved. When seeking by means of a work of art to obtain
a response to an overmastering feeling the artist is thus constrained
to exercise persuasion upon his real or fictitious public. As M.
Sully-Prudhomme has finely remarked, it is only by first caressing our
senses that art rouses our feelings and awakens our thoughts.[138]
Besides that element of beauty which can be immediately derived from
the expressed content, and that element of gracefulness which follows
as result of the psychical freedom attained by expression, there are
in nearly all works of art qualities whose aim is exclusively to
please. If we may risk a somewhat audacious parallel, we may say that
the work of art, in the same way as a living organism, an animal or
a plant, entices the attention and charms the senses with the beauty
of its “means of attraction,” not for the sake of these attractions
themselves, but for the secret they at the same time conceal and
disclose. All these allurements might easily cause a superficial
observer to lose sight of the simple fact which lies at the bottom of
the artistic work, viz. the feeling-state which demands expression and
response. We thus see why the impulse to attract by pleasing has been
considered as synonymous with the art-impulse.
As has already been remarked, such an interpretation cannot account
for the coercive force of the artistic impulse. And equally with the
theories based upon the epic or descriptive elements in art, it is
incompatible with the principle of the unity of art. If the logical
evolution of the art-forms is conceived in the way we have described,
all the various manifestations of artistic activity can be derived
from one common principle. And by the aid of this one principle we are
able to explain the force of that impulse which, with similar coercive
force, urges to creation within the various art-forms.
However much the artistic impulse may become differentiated with the
progress of culture, its innermost nature will always remain the same.
However complex its manifestations, their aim is always to secure a
faithful response to an overmastering feeling. The more accomplished
the work of art, the more its creator will become independent of the
chance audience, which by its sympathetic expression produces an
enhancing retroaction on his feeling. He learns to give his mental
states an embodiment which facilitates their reproduction in wider
surroundings. Thus the expressional impulse directs him to place
himself in sympathetic rapport with a fictitious public. He creates,
that is to say, expresses himself, for an ideal spectator,—for
posterity or for himself. With a proud indifference to his most
immediate social environment, he may thus consider his own production
as perfectly exempt of any social motivation. The aphorism of Mill,
“All poetry is a soliloquy,” would no doubt be accepted by many of
the most eminent poets. But the psychological observer cannot help
remarking that in such soliloquies the ego serves as a substitute for
an external public. The artist has in a sense a double capacity; and
artistic creation in solitude may be always explained by the fact that
the creator exists also as his own spectator.
The production of even the most individualistic and most isolated
artists can therefore be explained only by sociological considerations.
And the same is the case with those artists who work only for
posterity. It would be wrong to say that art in any one of its higher
manifestations aims at transmitting a feeling. Its purpose is far
rather an immortalisation. But this very desire to perpetuate a mental
state, this desire which constrains the artist to strive indefatigably
for the attainment of a form, capable of imparting to all men of
every country and every age the same enhancement and the same rapture
which he has himself experienced—this highest manifestation of the
expressional impulse—can be fully explained only by reference to
the enhancing and relieving power of social expression. In whatever
light the art-impulse may appear to the reflecting consciousness of
the producing artist, this is the only consistent interpretation at
which we can arrive by an examination of the artistic activity on
psychological grounds.