ART THE RELIEVER
In the endeavour to secure the transmission and perpetuation of a
feeling, the expressional activity gradually loses its purely impulsive
character. From an almost reflex outlet for abnormal nervous pressure,
it is more and more transformed into deliberate artistic production,
which is conscious of its aim as well as of the means for attaining
it. The elaboration of a work of art, in which the expression of
a feeling-state is to be concentrated, and concentrated in a way
which not only facilitates but even enforces in the spectator the
assimilation of this state, is a complicated operation which cannot of
course take place without the effectual co-operation of intellectual
and volitional activities. And their co-operation, on the other hand,
must evidently exercise some influence on the primordial feeling.
It is a familiar observation, duly emphasised in all psychological
handbooks, that strong feelings make clear thought impossible. Everyday
experience, as well as scientific experiment, gives unmistakable
evidence of the influence which abnormal excitement or depression
exercises, not only on our ideas and their associations, but even on
the perceptions. The converse has perhaps not been stated so often.
Still, it does not admit of doubt that intensified intellectual
activity may, in some cases, even more effectually than motor reaction,
overcome the tyranny of a hypernormal feeling. It is true that every
mental state becomes more distinct as a phenomenon of consciousness
when our thoughts are directed towards it. Feelings of low and moderate
intensity may even be enhanced in their purely emotional aspect if we
let our intellect play on them. But as soon as a greater intensity of
feeling is reached, this relation is reversed. Joy which is so great as
to be a burden, “Die Noth der Fülle,”[139] and numbing despair, must
inevitably decrease when there is an increase of distinctness in their
intellectual elements. The more we can compel ourselves to contemplate
with cool and clear attention the causes and manifestations of such
high-strung states, the more we are also able to master them. It is a
familiar experience to everyone that strong fear can be vanquished, if
only we can succeed in diverting all our attention to its objective
source, and “stare the danger in the face.” When the attention is
concentrated and intensified to the utmost degree, it may even, as in
the case of fascination, entirely prevent, to our own danger, the very
rise of this self-preserving emotion.
In artistic creation we are not concerned with an intentional or
unintentional effort to overcome feeling. On the contrary the aim is
here to keep the strongest possible hold of it in order to give it
the most effective embodiment. So irreconcilable, however, is the
conflict between emotional excitement and intellectual activity, that
the latter, even when it expressly serves the purposes of emotional
enhancement, must neutralise the excess of feeling. A state of strong
pleasure or pain can never be rendered intelligible to outsiders,
unless its expression is bridled and disciplined by thought. By being
thus embodied in a fixed form the feeling gains in conceivability as
well as in infectious power. But while the effect on spectators and
listeners is in this way increased, the artistic form influences the
feeling subject himself in a quite different way. Its very clearness
and distinctness necessarily brings something of that calm which all
excitement seeks as relief.
The immediate reaction which the work of art exercises on its own
creator is of course most easily seen and understood in the “higher”
art-forms with their pronounced intellectual elements. Literary
instances of the “poetic cure” for harassing or oppressing emotion are
too numerous to be mentioned. The only point we need dwell on is the
question how these instances are to be interpreted. When a poet seeks
to give shape and form to his own sufferings by means of fiction,
the relief he obtains is no doubt in part an effect of the diversion
of activity into the channels of expression. But to a still greater
degree it may be a result of the healthful influence exercised by the
contemplation of objective reality in the finished work of art. Such an
influence is unmistakable in the most illustrious instance of artistic
production as a life-preserving expedient: Goethe’s _Leiden des
jungen Werther_. In his memoirs the old poet frankly and unreservedly
describes how, when lacerated by the conflict between hypochondriac,
suicidal thoughts and an ineradicable love of life and cheerfulness,
he resorted to the old homely remedy of writing down his sufferings.
He lays especial stress on his desire to give definite form and body
to his vague feelings of distress. And as we read that afterwards,
when the work lay finished before him, “bound in boards, as a picture
in its frame, so as to prove the more convincingly its individual and
concrete existence,” he could feel “free and joyful, and entitled to
a new life,” we cannot but explain this renewed courage to live as a
result of the sensation of security and support which the beholding of
external form affords.[140]
Thus, to begin with, by its character as a palpable, objective reality,
the work of art may diminish the subjective disturbance in which it
originates. This influence is supplemented by the retroaction of the
æsthetic qualities, in the narrowest sense of the term, such as beauty,
symmetry, and the like, by which an artist always seeks, intentionally
or unintentionally, to arrest the attention of his public. The more
therefore the work grows in definiteness in the thought and under the
hand of the artist, the more it will repress and subdue the chaotic
tumult of emotional excitement. The Dionysiac rapture, as the ancients
would have said, gives place to Apolline serenity. In language pruned
of mythological symbolism, this only means that art is better able
than any of the immediate expressional activities to give complete and
effective relief from emotional pressure. And it further implies that
however earnestly an artist may strive to communicate to his public
the exact feeling he has himself experienced, the emotional content
expressed in his work will always be of another and more harmonious
character than the mental state by which his production was originally
called into existence. To the extent that artistic form appears in a
given work or manifestation there will also be present, independently
of the subject,—cheerful or sad, passionate or calm,—a sense of mental
liberation, which atones for the excesses of emotional excitement.
In a final and exhaustive treatment of æsthetic problems this influence
of artistic form would need to be traced through all the departments of
art-activity. And it would be one of the most interesting parts of such
a research to estimate the relative power with which art in its various
branches is able to assuage at the same time as it excites. We need not
here undertake such a thorough comparative examination of the different
arts. What has been said about literary creation may be applied in
substance to formative production as well. And it even remains true
with regard to those most lyrical and immediately expressive arts which
seem to be altogether destitute of objective form and intellectual
content. Although it has often been said that the lowest kinds of
music are purely emotional manifestations, we may still discern an
element of form in the rhythm which regulates even the simplest songs
and dances.[141] And the creation of this form undoubtedly requires a
certain amount of conscious intention and intellectual activity. It
is therefore natural that the intensest and most abnormally enhanced
feeling should exclude the possibility of rhythmical movement.
Exalted joy and violent despair are in their external manifestations
not only inharmonious and ungraceful, but also unrhythmic.[142] But
by subjecting the expression to the yoke of a fixed time order we
may succeed in harmonising it. And while the regular recurrence of
intervals facilitates our movements—which thereby gain in ease and
gracefulness—the vehemence of our feeling will be abated. Thus it is
possible that although rhythm powerfully reinforces musical or dramatic
excitement, it may at the same time exercise a restraining influence
on hypernormal feeling. And its effects in music and dance show us, in
the simplest and most comprehensive of all examples, the importance
of artistic form. The musical katharsis or relief to sensation always
involves stimulation, but it may nevertheless affect us as a sedative.
The more the form-element and attention to form gain in prominence,
the more effectual also is the relieving influence of art. Where the
stimulative element is predominant in a work of art, there the relief
is less complete.
This contrast, which can be observed at all stages of artistic
development, is eminently conspicuous in ancient art, where high and
low forms are often to be found in close juxtaposition. The superiority
of Greek music over Phrygian music was a favourite topic of the old
writers on art, and the legend of the contest between Apollo and
Marsyas served as a mythological variation on the same theme. Lyre and
flute stood as symbols for two different classes of art, of which one
was violent, orgiastic, and barbarous, while the other was calm in its
Olympian serenity.[143]
But the contrast expressed in these parables by the ancient authors
and some of their modern followers is not so sharp in reality. Even
the lively notes of a flute may, to use the old metaphor, by their
bound time exercise a kind of restraining influence on the passions.
And on the other hand the sedative power of soft music is by no means
so great as has often been contended. While acting hygienically as
a cure for excess of passion or sorrow it cannot produce any moral
result properly so called. As M. Combarieu has pointed out in his
acute criticism of Cardinal Perraud’s _Eurythmie et Harmonie_, it is
an incontestable fact, which has only too often been overlooked by
Platonising philosophers, that even the most immoral feelings may be
expressed in perfect melody.[144] The musical, and still more the
merely rhythmical, form cannot change the quality of these feelings; it
can only deprive them of their dangerous intensity. The mental state
thereby gains in pure and unmingled pleasure; it becomes ennobled as
enjoyment, but it is by no means moralised, at least not according to
modern views. It is only from the standpoint of a purely hedonic system
of ethics that music, or any other art, can be said to exercise an
immediate moral influence.
* * * * *
When trying to summarise our researches on the differences between
artistic and non-artistic expression of emotional states in a
comprehensive conclusion, we are again led to that eminently
illustrative instance—the Bacchantic condition of the ancient Maenads.
We have seen that in their description of Dionysiac mania the classical
authors enumerate almost all the various orgiastic manifestations which
can be found in all periods in different parts of the world. And if
ancient literature affords us an epitome of the various expedients to
which the expressional impulse resorts in its endeavour to enhance and
relieve an emotional state, the force of this craving for expression,
on the other hand, nowhere appears with such convincing clearness as in
the Dionysiac monuments of classical art.
The frieze around the Bacchic candelabra in the Louvre proves
better than any psychological analysis to how great a degree the
Dionysiac state is alloyed with pain and the longing for relief. If
these Maenads be compared with the figures on the great vases in the
British Museum and with the various Agave reliefs, it will still more
conclusively appear that it is real distress which compels the dancers
to seek in ever-increasing excitement deliverance from the burden
of their feelings. No movement could be more eloquently expressive
of the corresponding psychical state than the peculiar toss on the
head and the backward curve of the upper trunk which can always be
recognised in the most violent of the dancers. An approach to this
attitude (“opisthotonos”) sometimes appears, as Spencer remarks in
his essay on the Physiology of Laughter, in movements of great joy,
which has not been able to find expression by the usual channels of
discharge.[145] But there is no doubt that, however pleasurable the
quality of the original state may have been, its tone must have been
radically transformed before it could produce these strained postures.
A feeling which distorts the body by its efforts to find relief, which
is not satisfied with the wild cries, the dances, and all the madness
of the Bacchic intoxication, must in its abnormal exaggeration be
perceived as a pain. The pathological character of this feeling appears
further from the fact that the very same movement may be observed in
Pierre Breughel’s paintings of hysteric patients and in M. Charcot’s
photographs from La Salpétrière.[146] And this same backward toss of
the head may be seen in sculptures of witches, the mediæval Bacchantes,
where it sometimes gives an impression of proud and insolent defiance,
sometimes one of profound melancholy.[147] But in the reliefs
representing Bacchic orgies, side by side with the dancers whose
distorted attitude and violent movements betray the pain underlying the
appearance of revel and riot, there may always be seen the figures of
women moving with easy and graceful step. The freedom of their motion
shows that they at least have found deliverance from the oppression
of overstrung feeling. The nervous tension which in their companions
manifests itself in unrhythmic, inharmonious leapings and withings, has
in their case found relief and given place to a feeling of rest and
calm. This expression of peace in their faces, attitudes, and draperies
affords an instructive comment on the Greek notion of Dionysos, the god
of music, who, with all his wildness is none the less able to still the
tempests of overpowering feelings.
This god of music, as conceived by those who gave him a place among the
Olympians, was not a symbol of dissolute pleasure. On the contrary,
the myths tell us how those who oppose his ritual themselves fall
victims to a mania even more violent than the Bacchic frenzy itself.
His devotees, on the other hand, receive from the stirring notes of
his flute and cymbals a determinate form and mould for their otherwise
vehement and irregular expression-movements. Their joy loses its
defiant and barbaric character, their black despair is dissolved into
gentle sadness. Rightly, therefore, was Dionysos saluted as a deliverer
when, with his merry crew, he marched from village to village. Like him
art moves among men, ennobling their joy and blunting the edge of their
sufferings.