THE CONCRETE ORIGINS OF ART
By explaining the art-impulse as a form of social expression we have
accounted for art-creation and art-enjoyment as activities which have
their end in themselves. The emotionalistic interpretation supplied
us with a principle, which we were able to apply to all stages, the
lower as well as the higher, of art-development. Without committing
ourselves to any definite statements as to the purely æsthetic and
autotelic character of the individual works of art, we felt ourselves
to be right in assuming that a desire of “expression for its own sake,”
or rather for the sake of its immediately enhancing or relieving
effects on feeling, may have operated as an art-factor on all stages
of culture, and thus have given an autotelic value even to the lowest
manifestations of art. The driving force in art-creation became
comprehensible by this assumption; and the most distinctive features of
the creation itself could be deduced from this psychological principle.
In attempting, however, to explain the refinement of artistic
attention, we could no longer proceed with purely psychical factors.
We were compelled to appeal to the influence exercised by the concrete
work of art. The psychological demonstration proving inadequate, it was
necessary to supplement it by an historical argument.
It may be thought, however, that in referring to the educative effects
of the work of art we need not desert the domain of a strictly
æsthetic and psychological inquiry. There is nothing improbable in the
supposition that the products of an activity of themselves influence
this activity, so as to bring about gradually a thorough change of its
character. From the expressional impulse, which in the lower stages
of culture gives rise to crude and simple manifestations, there might
thus be derived, by the retroactive effects of these manifestations
themselves, an increasingly refined form of expression. But such a
sequence of tendency, however clear and consistent it may appear at
the outset, cannot possibly be thought of as unsupported by outside
influences. The more we examine it, the more we shall find that the
series of causes is insufficient to explain the series of effects. This
view, to which we are necessarily led by investigating any period of
art-history, forces itself upon us with particular cogency when we turn
our attention to the earliest stages of art-development.
Before the first work of art had been created, the art-impulse as well
as the art-sense must necessarily have been in a very undeveloped
state. The æsthetic cravings cannot possibly have gained any
consciousness of their purposes ere they had realised themselves in
some objective works. Of these objective works, on the other hand, it
is only the simplest forms that can be derived solely from the pure
art-impulse. We may consider a lyrical dance, or even a lyrical song,
as direct outbursts of an emotional pressure, which, if unrelieved,
would prove dangerous to the system. But we can scarcely imagine that
any human being should be able to invent, say, a fully formed drama
simply in order to convey in the most efficacious manner the feeling
by which he is dominated. And it is yet more difficult to understand
how the craving after social expression could have created, merely for
its own satisfaction, such highly developed art-forms as painting and
sculpture. While we are able to derive the mental compulsion which
forces the artist to production, and the æsthetic qualities which give
their distinctive character to his productions from the psychological
notion of the art-impulse, we are compelled to look elsewhere for the
origin and development of the concrete technical medium of which he
avails himself in fulfilling his purpose.
As in this investigation we are no longer concerned with the abstract
and ideal work of art, it seems that we may now reasonably appeal
to those theories which we before found inadequate only because
they did not account for the purely æsthetic qualities of artistic
activity. The play-impulse, the impulse to attract by pleasing, the
imitative impulse, etc., although they give us no information as to
the essentially artistic criterion, may nevertheless have called into
existence works and manifestations which fulfil the requirements of
the several art-forms. Man may have composed dramas, may have painted
pictures, may have made poems, in play, or out of the desire to please,
or out of the inborn taste for mimicry. In particular the play-impulse
must, as we have already admitted in the first part of this work, be
dealt with as a factor of incalculable importance in the history of
art. In his conclusive researches on animal and human play Professor
Groos has succeeded in showing that the chief classes of art-forms
are already foreshadowed in the various forms of experimentation—that
most general and most important kind of play which can be observed
not only among children, but even among the higher animals.[173] In
the outcome of this simple and common activity we have, it may be
said, a sufficient bulk of raw material of which the art-impulse, when
once fully developed, can avail itself in order to fulfil its own
essentially artistic purposes. And it would therefore seem as if there
were no further problem to be solved with regard to the evolution of
art.
Adherents of this view may, moreover, point to the fact that, apart
from all the motive factors represented by the various non-æsthetic
impulses, the development of art has been favoured by influences of
a more passive or static character. It has evidently been of vital
importance to the evolution of architecture and decoration that things
of useful nature have provided these arts with a kind of concrete
frame within which to display their manifestations. The effects of
this material condition are so much the greater because with his
constitutional conservatism man—whether civilised or primitive—always
allows himself to be bound by old forms long after he has relinquished
the technical procedures which have originally called these forms into
existence. By the scientific “biological” researches on decorative art
it has been conclusively shown how great a portion of the ornamental
“store” consists of lines and combinations of lines which have quite
automatically been borrowed from an earlier technique. Decorative
motives, which to the uninitiated observer appear as products
of spontaneous artistic activity, thus reveal themselves to the
historical student as unintentional by-products of work. Where earlier
investigators assumed an æsthetic composition, modern researches
refer to the force of mental inertia and the cravings of expectant
attention.[174]
There is no intention here to undervalue the methods which are nowadays
employed in the study of decorative art, and which, indeed, the writer
himself has endeavoured to apply in some earlier studies on art-theory.
In the present research, however, it would be inappropriate to trace
in detail the evolution by which forms originating in mere utility—as
in basket-work—are gradually transformed into patterns or other
artistic decorations; for this process, however fertile in effects it
may be considered, cannot account for that phenomenon which, above
all, constitutes the main object of our investigation. Although the
psychical causes adduced above undeniably have called into existence
some of the most familiar ideas in decoration, they cannot possibly
explain the importance which decoration itself has attained in the
various human societies. And the same remark evidently applies to all
the other psychological sources from which art may be derived. The
play-impulse, for example, no doubt suggests a concrete source, but it
can in no way explain the important position which art occupies as a
leading factor in social life. In order to understand why even in the
lowest stages of development art has been acknowledged as a purpose
worthy of being seriously pursued, we must investigate this activity
in its connection with the most important biological and sociological
purposes of life.
We propose in the following chapters to examine the most powerful
non-æsthetic factors that have favoured the origin and development of
the several art-forms. And while we are keeping in view especially
such utilitarian requirements as those of intellectual information,
of stimulation for work or war, of sexual propitiation or of magic
efficiency, we shall be compelled to leave out of consideration all
distinctively æsthetic factors and conditions. Accordingly we shall
not be able to maintain in this historical and ethnological inquiry
the strictest æsthetic distinctions. But we hope that the unavoidable
vagueness in our terminology will not obscure those limitations and
demarcations which have—perhaps even too laboriously—been laid down
in the first part of this work. To preserve consistency between our
inquiries into the abstract and the concrete origins of art, it
need only be stated, once and for all, that the several works and
manifestations, as they are to be treated hereafter, are, strictly
speaking, only the raw material of art, if art is to be considered in
the purest sense as an autotelic activity.