CHAPTER XV

CONCLUSION

[Sidenote: The failure of magic.]

The preceding analysis of religion, although it is illustrated mainly by

Christianity, may enable us in a general way to distinguish the rational

goal of all religious life. In no sphere is the contrast clearer between

wisdom and folly; in none, perhaps, has there been so much of both. It

was a prodigious delusion to imagine that work could be done by magic;

and the desperate appeal which human weakness has made to prayer, to

castigations, to miscellaneous fantastic acts, in the hope of thereby

bending nature to greater sympathy with human necessities, is a pathetic

spectacle; all the more pathetic in that here the very importunity of

evil, which distracted the mind and allowed it no choice or

deliberation, prevented very often those practical measures which, if

lighted upon, would have instantly relieved the situation. Religion when

it has tried to do man’s work for him has not only cheated hope, but

consumed energy and drawn away attention from the true means of success.

[Sidenote: and of mythology.]

[Sidenote: Their imaginative value.]

No less useless and retarding has been the effort to give religion the

function of science. Mythology, in excogitating hidden dramatic causes

for natural phenomena, or in attributing events to the human values

which they might prevent or secure, has profoundly perverted and

confused the intellect; it has delayed and embarrassed the discovery of

natural forces, at the same time fostering presumptions which, on being

exploded, tended to plunge men, by revulsion, into an artificial

despair. At the same time this experiment in mythology involved

wonderful creations which have a poetic value of their own, to offset

their uselessness in some measure and the obstruction they have

occasioned. In imagining human agents behind every appearance fancy has

given appearances some kinship to human life; it has made nature a mass

of hieroglyphics and enlarged to that extent the means of human

expression. While objects and events were capriciously moralised, the

mind’s own plasticity has been developed by its great exercise in

self-projection. To imagine himself a thunder-cloud or a river, the

dispenser of silent benefits and the contriver of deep-seated universal

harmonies, has actually stimulated man’s moral nature: he has grown

larger by thinking himself so large.

Through the dense cloud of false thought and bad habit in which religion

thus wrapped the world, some rays broke through from the beginning; for

mythology and magic expressed life and sought to express its conditions.

Human needs and human ideals went forth in these forms to solicit and to

conquer the world; and since these imaginative methods, for their very

ineptitude, rode somewhat lightly over particular issues and envisaged

rather distant goods, it was possible through them to give aspiration

and reflection greater scope than the meaner exigencies of life would

have permitted. Where custom ruled morals and a narrow empiricism

bounded the field of knowledge, it was partly a blessing that

imagination should be given an illegitimate sway. Without

misunderstanding, there might have been no understanding at all; without

confidence in supernatural support, the heart might never have uttered

its own oracles. So that in close association with superstition and

fable we find piety and spirituality entering the world.

[Sidenote: Piety and spirituality justified.]

Rational religion has these two phases: piety, or loyalty to necessary

conditions, and spirituality, or devotion to ideal ends. These simple

sanctities make the core of all the others. Piety drinks at the deep,

elemental sources of power and order: it studies nature, honours the

past, appropriates and continues its mission. Spirituality uses the

strength thus acquired, remodelling all it receives, and looking to the

future and the ideal. True religion is entirely human and political, as

was that of the ancient Hebrews, Romans, and Greeks. Supernatural

machinery is either symbolic of natural conditions and moral aims or

else is worthless.

[Sidenote: Mysticism a primordial state of feeling.]

There is one other phase or possible overtone of religion about which a

word might be added in conclusion. What is called mysticism is a certain

genial loosening of convention, whether rational or mythical; the mystic

smiles at science and plays with theology, undermining both by force of

his insight and inward assurance. He is all faith, all love, all vision,

but he is each of these things _in vacuo_, and in the absence of any

object.

Mysticism can exist, in varied degrees, at any stage of rational

development. Its presence is therefore no indication of the worth or

worthlessness of its possessor. This circumstance tends to obscure its

nature, which would otherwise be obvious enough. Seeing the greatest

saints and philosophers grow mystical in their highest flights, an

innocent observer might imagine that mysticism was an ultimate attitude,

which only his own incapacity kept him from understanding. But exactly

the opposite is the case. Mysticism is the most primitive of feelings

and only visits formed minds in moments of intellectual arrest and

dissolution. It can exist in a child, very likely in an animal; indeed,

to parody a phrase of Hegel’s, the only pure mystics are the brutes.

When articulation fails in the face of experience; when instinct guides

without kindling any prophetic idea to which action may be inwardly

referred; when life and hope and joy flow through the soul from an

unknown region to an unknown end, then consciousness is mystical. Such

an experience may suffuse the best equipped mind, if its primordial

energies, its will and emotions, much outrun its intelligence. Just as

at the beginning pure inexperience may flounder intellectually and yet

may have a sense of not going astray, a sense of being carried by earth

and sky, by contagion and pleasure, into its animal paradise; so at the

end, if the vegetative forces still predominate, all articulate

experience may be lifted up and carried down-stream bodily by the

elementary flood rising from beneath.

[Sidenote: It may recur at any stage of culture.]

Every religion, all science, all art, is accordingly subject to

incidental mysticism; but in no case can mysticism stand alone and be

the body or basis of anything. In the Life of Reason it is, if I may say

so, a normal disease, a recurrent manifestation of lost equilibrium and

interrupted growth; but in these pauses, when the depths rise to the

surface and obliterate what scratches culture may have made there, the

rhythm of life may be more powerfully felt, and the very disappearance

of intellect may be taken for a revelation. Both in a social and a

psychological sense revelations come from beneath, like earthquakes and

volcanic eruptions; and while they fill the spirit with contempt for

those fragile structures which they so easily overwhelm, they are

utterly incapable of raising anything on the ruins. If they leave

something standing it is only by involuntary accident, and if they

prepare the soil for anything, it is commonly only for wild-flowers and

weeds. Revelations are seldom beneficent, therefore, unless there is

more evil in the world to destroy than good to preserve; and mysticism,

under the same circumstances, may also liberate and relieve the spirit.

[Sidenote: Form gives substance its life and value.]

The feelings which in mysticism rise to the surface and speak in their

own name are simply the ancient, overgrown feelings of vitality,

dependence, inclusion; they are the background of consciousness coming

forward and blotting out the scene. What mysticism destroys is, in a

sense, its only legitimate expression. The Life of Reason, in so far as

it is life, contains the mystic’s primordial assurances, and his

rudimentary joys; but in so far as it is rational it has discovered what

those assurances rest on, in what direction they may be trusted to

support action and thought; and it has given those joys distinction and

connexion, turning a dumb momentary ecstasy into a many-coloured and

natural happiness.

*** End of Volume Three ***

REASON IN ART

Volume Four of “The Life of Reason”

GEORGE SANTAYANA

hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê

CONTENTS

REASON IN ART

CHAPTER I

THE BASIS OF ART IN INSTINCT AND EXPERIENCE

Man affects his environment, sometimes to good purpose.—Art is plastic

instinct conscious of its aims.—It is automatic.—So are the ideas it

expresses.—We are said to control whatever obeys us.—Utility is a

result.—The useful naturally stable.—Intelligence is docility.—Art is

reason propagating itself.—Beauty an incident in rational art,

inseparable from the others. Pages 3-17

CHAPTER II

RATIONALITY OF INDUSTRIAL ART

Utility is ultimately ideal.—Work wasted and chances missed.—Ideals

must be interpreted, not prescribed.—The aim of industry is to live

well.—Some arts, but no men, are slaves by nature.—Servile arts may

grow spontaneous or their products may be renounced.—Art starts from

two potentialities: its material and its problem.—Each must be definite

and congruous with the other.—A sophism exposed.—Industry prepares

matter for the liberal arts.—Each partakes of the other. Pages 18-33

CHAPTER III

EMERGENCE OF FINE ART

Art is spontaneous action made stable by success.—It combines utility

and automatism.—Automatism fundamental and irresponsible.—It is tamed

by contact with the world.—The dance.—Functions of gesture.—Automatic

music. Pages 34-43

CHAPTER IV

MUSIC

Music is a world apart.—It justifies itself.—It is vital and

transient.—Its physical affinities.—Physiology of music.—Limits of

musical sensibility.—The value of music is relative to them.—Wonders

of musical structure.—Its inherent emotions.—In growing specific they

remain unearthly.—They merge with common emotions, and express such as

find no object in nature.—Music lends elementary feelings an

intellectual communicable form.—All essences are in themselves good,

even the passions.—Each impulse calls for a possible congenial

world.—Literature incapable of expressing pure feelings.—Music may do

so.—Instability the soul of matter.—Peace the triumph of

spirit.—Refinement is true strength. Pages 44-67

CHAPTER V

SPEECH AND SIGNIFICATION

Sounds well fitted to be symbols.—Language has a structure independent

of things.—Words, remaining identical, serve to identify things that

change.—Language the dialectical garment of facts.—Words are wise

men’s counters.—Nominalism right in psychology and realism in

logic.—Literature moves between the extremes of music and

denotation.—Sound and object, in their sensuous presence, may have

affinity.—Syntax positively representative.—Yet it vitiates what it

represents.—Difficulty in subduing a living medium.—Language

foreshortens experience.—It is a perpetual mythology.—It may be apt or

inapt, with equal richness.—Absolute language a possible but foolish

art Pages 68-86

CHAPTER VI

POETRY AND PROSE

Force of primary expressions.—Its exclusiveness and

narrowness.—Rudimentary poetry an incantation or charm.—Inspiration

irresponsible.—Plato’s discriminating view.—Explosive and pregnant

expression.—Natural history of inspiration.—Expressions to be

understood must be recreated, and so changed.—Expressions may be recast

perversely, humourously, or sublimely.—The nature of prose.—It is more

advanced and responsible than poetry.—Maturity brings love of

practical truth.—Pure prose would tend to efface itself.—Form alone,

or substance alone, may be poetical.—Poetry has its place in the

medium.—It is the best medium possible.—Might it not convey what it is

best to know?—A rational poetry would exclude much now thought

poetical.—All apperception modifies its object.—Reason has its own

bias and method.—Rational poetry would envelop exact knowledge in

ultimate emotions.—An illustration.—Volume can be found in scope

better than in suggestion Pages 87-115

CHAPTER VII

PLASTIC CONSTRUCTION

Automatic expression often leaves traces in the outer world.—Such

effects fruitful.—Magic authority of man’s first creations.—Art brings

relief from idolatry.—Inertia in technique.—Inertia in

appreciation.—Adventitious effects appreciated first.—Approach to

beauty through useful structure.—Failure of adapted styles.—Not all

structure beautiful, nor all beauty structural.—Structures designed for

display.—Appeal made by decoration.—Its natural rights.—Its alliance

with structure in Greek architecture.—Relations of the two in Gothic

art.—The result here romantic.—The mediæval artist.—Representation

introduced.—Transition to illustration. Pages 116-143

CHAPTER VIII

PLASTIC REPRESENTATION

Psychology of imitation.—Sustained sensation involves

reproduction.—Imitative art repeats with intent to repeat, and in a new

material.—Imitation leads to adaptation and to knowledge.—How the

artist is inspired and irresponsible.—Need of knowing and loving the

subject rendered.—Public interests determine the subject of art, and

the subject the medium.—Reproduction by acting ephemeral.—demands of

sculpture.—It is essentially obsolete.—When men see groups and

backgrounds they are natural painters.—Evolution of painting.—Sensuous

and dramatic adequacy approached.—Essence of landscape-painting.—Its

threatened dissolution.—Reversion to pure decorative design.—Sensuous

values are primordial and so indispensable Pages 144-165

CHAPTER IX

JUSTIFICATION OF ART

Art is subject to moral censorship.—Its initial or specific excellence

is not enough.—All satisfactions, however hurtful, have an initial

worth.—But, on the whole, artistic activity is innocent.—It is

liberal, and typical of perfect activity.—The ideal, when incarnate,

becomes subject to civil society.—Plato’s strictures: he exaggerates

the effect of myths.—His deeper moral objections.—Their

lightness.—Importance of æsthetic alternatives.—The importance of

æsthetic goods varies with temperaments.—The æsthetic temperament

requires tutelage.—Aesthetic values everywhere interfused.—They are

primordial.—To superpose them adventitiously is to destroy them.—They

flow naturally from perfect function.—Even inhibited functions, when

they fall into a new rhythm, yield new beauties.—He who loves beauty

must chasten it Pages 166-190

CHAPTER X

THE CRITERION OF TASTE

Dogmatism is inevitable but may be enlightened.—Taste gains in

authority as it is more and more widely based.—Different æsthetic

endowments may be compared in quantity or force.—Authority of vital

over verbal judgments.—Tastes differ also in purity or

consistency.—They differ, finally, in pertinence, and in width of

appeal.—Art may grow classic by idealising the familiar, or by

reporting the ultimate.—Good taste demands that art should be rational,

_i.e._, harmonious with all other interests.—A mere “work of art” a

baseless artifice.—Human uses give to works of art their highest

expression and charm.—The sad values of appearance.—They need to be

made prophetic of practical goods, which in turn would be suffused with

beauty Pages 191-215

CHAPTER XI

ART AND HAPPINESS

Aesthetic harmonies are parodies of real ones, which in turn would be

suffused with beauty, yet prototypes of true perfections.—Pros and cons

of detached indulgences.—The happy imagination is one initially in line

with things, and brought always closer to them by experience.—Reason is

the principle of both art and happiness.—Only a rational society can

have sure and perfect arts.—Why art is now empty and

unstable.—Anomalous character of the irrational artist.—True art

measures and completes happiness. Pages 216-230

REASON IN ART

CHAPTER I

THE BASIS OF ART IN INSTINCT AND EXPERIENCE

[Sidenote: Man affects his environment, sometimes to good purpose.]

Man exists amid a universal ferment of being, and not only needs

plasticity in his habits and pursuits but finds plasticity also in the

surrounding world. Life is an equilibrium which is maintained now by

accepting modification and now by imposing it. Since the organ for all

activity is a body in mechanical relation to other material objects,

objects which the creature’s instincts often compel him to appropriate

or transform, changes in his habits and pursuits leave their mark on

whatever he touches. His habitat must needs bear many a trace of his

presence, from which intelligent observers might infer something about

his life and action. These vestiges of action are for the most part

imprinted unconsciously and aimlessly on the world. They are in

themselves generally useless, like footprints; and yet almost any sign

of man’s passage might, under certain conditions, interest a man. A

footprint could fill Robinson Crusoe with emotion, the devastation

wrought by an army’s march might prove many things to a historian, and

even the disorder in which a room is casually left may express very

vividly the owner’s ways and character.

Sometimes, however, man’s traces are traces of useful action which has

so changed natural objects as to make them congenial to his mind.

Instead of a footprint we might find an arrow; instead of a disordered

room, a well-planted orchard—things which would not only have betrayed

the agent’s habits, but would have served and expressed his intent. Such

propitious forms given by man to matter are no less instrumental in the

Life of Reason than are propitious forms assumed by man’s own habit or

fancy. Any operation which thus humanises and rationalises objects is

called art.

[Sidenote: Art is plastic instinct conscious of its aim.]

All art has an instinctive source and a material embodiment. If the

birds in building nests felt the utility of what they do, they would be

practising an art; and for the instinct to be called rational it would

even suffice that their traditional purpose and method should become

conscious occasionally. Thus weaving is an art, although the weaver may

not be at every moment conscious of its purpose, but may be carried

along, like any other workman, by the routine of his art; and language

is a rational product, not because it always has a use or meaning, but

because it is sometimes felt to have one. Arts are no less automatic

than instincts, and usually, as Aristotle observed, less thoroughly

purposive; for instincts, being transmitted by inheritance and imbedded

in congenital structure, have to be economically and deeply organised.

If they go far wrong they constitute a burden impossible to throw off

and impossible to bear. The man harassed by inordinate instincts

perishes through want, vice, disease, or madness. Arts, on the contrary,

being transmitted only by imitation and teaching, hover more lightly

over life. If ill-adjusted they make less havoc and cause less drain.

The more superficial they are and the more detached from practical

habits, the more extravagant and meaningless they can dare to become; so

that the higher products of life are the most often gratuitous. No

instinct or institution was ever so absurd as is a large part of human

poetry and philosophy, while the margin of ineptitude is much broader in

religious myth than in religious ethics.

[Sidenote: It is automatic.]

Arts are instincts bred and reared in the open, creative habits acquired

in the light of reason. Consciousness accompanies their formation; a

certain uneasiness or desire and a more or less definite conception of

what is wanted often precedes their full organisation. That the need

should be felt before the means for satisfying it have been found has

led the unreflecting to imagine that in art the need produces the

discovery and the idea the work. Causes at best are lightly assigned by

mortals, and this particular superstition is no worse than any other.

The data—the plan and its execution—as conjoined empirically in the

few interesting cases which show successful achievement, are made into a

law, in oblivion of the fact that in more numerous cases such

conjunction fails wholly or in part, and that even in the successful

cases other natural conditions are present, and must be present, to

secure the result. In a matter where custom is so ingrained and

supported by a constant apperceptive illusion, there is little hope of

making thought suddenly exact, or exact language not paradoxical. We

must observe, however, that only by virtue of a false perspective do

ideas seems to govern action, or is a felt necessity the mother of

invention. In truth invention is the child of abundance, and the genius

or vital premonition and groping which achieve art, simultaneously

achieve the ideas which that art embodies; or, rather, ideas are

themselves products of an inner movement which has an automatic

extension outwards; and this extension manifests the ideas. Mere craving

has no lights of its own to prophesy by, no prescience of what the world

may contain that would satisfy, no power of imagining what would allay

its unrest. Images and satisfactions have to come of themselves; then

the blind craving, as it turns into an incipient pleasure, first

recognises its object. The pure will’s impotence is absolute, and it

would writhe for ever and consume itself in darkness if perception gave

it no light and experience no premonition.

[Sidenote: So are the ideas it expresses.]

Now, a man cannot draw bodily from external perception the ideas he is

supposed to create or invent; and as his will or uneasiness, before he

creates the satisfying ideas, is by hypothesis without them, it follows

that creation or invention is automatic. The ideas come of themselves,

being new and unthought-of figments, similar, no doubt, to old

perceptions and compacted of familiar materials, but reproduced in a

novel fashion and dropping in their sudden form from the blue. However

instantly they may be welcomed, they were not already known and never

could have been summoned. In the stock example, for instance, of groping

for a forgotten name, we know the context in which that name should lie;

we feel the environment of our local void; but what finally pops into

that place, reinstated there by the surrounding tensions, is itself

unforeseen, for it was just this that was forgotten. Could we have

invoked the name we should not have needed to do so, having it already

at our disposal. It is in fact a palpable impossibility that any idea

should call itself into being, or that any act or any preference should

be its own ground. The responsibility assumed for these things is not a

determination to conceive them before they are conceived (which is a

contradiction in terms) but an embrace and appropriation of them once

they have appeared. It is thus that ebullitions in parts of our nature

become touchstones for the whole; and the incidents within us seem

hardly our own work till they are accepted and incorporated into the

main current of our being. All invention is tentative, all art

experimental, and to be sought, like salvation, with fear and trembling.

There is a painful pregnancy in genius, a long incubation and waiting

for the spirit, a thousand rejections and futile birth-pangs, before the

wonderful child appears, a gift of the gods, utterly undeserved and

inexplicably perfect. Even this unaccountable success comes only in rare

and fortunate instances. What is ordinarily produced is so base a

hybrid, so lame and ridiculous a changeling, that we reconcile ourselves

with difficulty to our offspring and blush to be represented by our

fated works.

[Sidenote: We are said to control whatever obeys us.]

The propensity to attribute happy events to our own agency, little as we

understand what we mean by it, and to attribute only untoward results to

external forces, has its ground in the primitive nexus of experience.

What we call ourselves is a certain cycle of vegetative processes,

bringing a round of familiar impulses and ideas; this stream has a

general direction, a conscious vital inertia, in harmony with which it

moves. Many of the developments within it are dialectical; that is, they

go forward by inner necessity, like an egg hatching within its shell,

warmed but undisturbed by an environment of which they are wholly

oblivious; and this sort of growth, when there is adequate consciousness

of it, is felt to be both absolutely obvious and absolutely free. The

emotion that accompanies it is pleasurable, but is too active and proud

to call itself a pleasure; it has rather the quality of assurance and

right. This part of life, however, is only its courageous core; about it

play all sorts of incidental processes, allying themselves to it in more

or less congruous movement. Whatever peripheral events fall in with the

central impulse are accordingly lost in its energy and felt to be not so

much peripheral and accidental as inwardly grounded, being, like the

stages of a prosperous dialectic, spontaneously demanded and instantly

justified when they come.

The sphere of the self’s power is accordingly, for primitive

consciousness, simply the sphere of what happens well; it is the entire

unoffending and obedient part of the world. A man who has good luck at

dice prides himself upon it, and believes that to have it is his destiny

and desert. If his luck were absolutely constant, he would say he had

the _power_ to throw high; and as the event would, by hypothesis,

sustain his boast, there would be no practical error in that assumption.

A will that never found anything to thwart it would think itself

omnipotent; and as the psychological essence of omniscience is not to

suspect there is anything which you do not know, so the psychological

essence of omnipotence is not to suspect that anything can happen which

you do not desire. Such claims would undoubtedly be made if experience

lent them the least colour; but would even the most comfortable and

innocent assurances of this sort cease to be precarious? Might not any

moment of eternity bring the unimagined contradiction, and shake the

dreaming god?

[Sidenote: Utility is a result.]

Utility, like significance, is an eventual harmony in the arts and by no

means their ground. All useful things have been discovered as the

Lilliputians discovered roast pig; and the casual feat has furthermore

to be supported by a situation favourable to maintaining the art. The

most useful act will never be repeated unless its secret remains

embodied in structure. Practice and endeavour will not help an artist to

remain long at his best; and many a performance is applauded which

cannot be imitated. To create the requisite structure two preformed

structures are needed: one in the agent, to give him skill and

perseverance, and another in the material, to give it the right

plasticity. Human progress would long ago have reached its goal if every

man who recognised a good could at once appropriate it, and possess

wisdom for ever by virtue of one moment’s insight. Insight,

unfortunately, is in itself perfectly useless and inconsequential; it

can neither have produced its own occasion nor now insure its own

recurrence. Nevertheless, being proof positive that whatever basis it

needs is actual, insight is also an indication that the extant

structure, if circumstances maintain it, may continue to operate with

the same moral results, maintaining the vision which it has once

supported.

[Sidenote: The useful naturally stable.]

When men find that by chance they have started a useful change in the

world, they congratulate themselves upon it and call their persistence

in that practice a free activity. And the activity is indeed rational,

since it subserves an end. The happy organisation which enables us to

continue in that rational course is the very organisation which enabled

us to initiate it. If this new process was formed under external

influences, the same influences, when they operate again, will

reconstitute the process each time more easily; while if it was formed

quite spontaneously, its own inertia will maintain it quietly in the

brain and bring it to the surface whenever circumstances permit. This is

what is called learning by experience. Such lessons are far from

indelible and are not always at command. Yet what has once been done may

be repeated; repetition reinforces itself and becomes habit; and a clear

memory of the benefit once attained by fortunate action, representing as

it does the trace left by that action in the system, and its harmony

with the man’s usual impulses (for the action is felt to be

_beneficial_), constitutes a strong presumption that the act will be

repeated automatically on occasion; _i.e._, that it has really been

learned. Consciousness, which willingly attends to results only, will

judge either the memory or the benefit, or both confusedly, to be the

ground of this readiness to act; and only if some hitch occurs in the

machinery, so that rational behaviour fails to takes place, will a

surprised appeal be made to material accidents, or to a guilty

forgetfulness or indocility in the soul.

[Sidenote: Intelligence is docility.]

The idiot cannot learn from experience at all, because a new process, in

his liquid brain, does not modify structure; while the fool uses what he

has learned only inaptly and in frivolous fragments, because his

stretches of linked experience are short and their connections insecure.

But when the cerebral plasm is fresh and well disposed and when the

paths are clear, attention is consecutive and learning easy; a multitude

of details can be gathered into a single cycle of memory or of potential

regard. Under such circumstances action is the unimpeded expression of

healthy instinct in an environment squarely faced. Conduct from the

first then issues in progress, and, by reinforcing its own organisation

at each rehearsal, makes progress continual. For there will subsist not

only a readiness to act and a great precision in action, but if any

significant circumstance has varied in the conditions or in the

interests at stake, this change will make itself felt; it will check the

process and prevent precipitate action. Deliberation or well-founded

scruple has the same source as facility—a plastic and quick

organisation. To be sensitive to difficulties and dangers goes with

being sensitive to opportunities.

[Sidenote: Art is reason propagating itself.]

Of all reason’s embodiments art is therefore the most splendid and

complete. Merely to attain categories by which inner experience may be

articulated, or to feign analogies by which a universe may be conceived,

would be but a visionary triumph if it remained ineffectual and went

with no actual remodelling of the outer world, to render man’s dwelling

more appropriate and his mind better fed and more largely transmissible.

Mind grows self-perpetuating only by its expression in matter. What

makes progress possible is that rational action may leave traces in

nature, such that nature in consequence furnishes a better basis for the

Life of Reason; in other words progress is art bettering the conditions

of existence. Until art arises, all achievement is internal to the

brain, dies with the individual, and even in him spends itself without

recovery, like music heard in a dream. Art, in establishing instruments

for human life beyond the human body, and moulding outer things into

sympathy with inner values, establishes a ground whence values may

continually spring up; the thatch that protects from to-day’s rain will

last and keep out to-morrow’s rain also; the sign that once expresses an

idea will serve to recall it in future.

Not only does the work of art thus perpetuate its own function and

produce a better experience, but the process of art also perpetuates

itself, because it is teachable. Every animal learns something by

living; but if his offspring inherit only what he possessed at birth,

they have to learn life’s lessons over again from the beginning, with at

best some vague help given by their parents’ example. But when the

fruits of experience exist in the common environment, when new

instruments, unknown to nature, are offered to each individual for his

better equipment, although he must still learn for himself how to live,

he may learn in a humaner school, where artificial occasions are

constantly open to him for expanding his powers. It is no longer merely

hidden inner processes that he must reproduce to attain his

predecessors’ wisdom; he may acquire much of it more expeditiously by

imitating their outward habit—an imitation which, furthermore, they

have some means of exacting from him. Wherever there is art there is a

possibility of training. A father who calls his idle sons from the

jungle to help him hold the plough, not only inures them to labour but

compels them to observe the earth upturned and refreshed, and to watch

the germination there; their wandering thought, their incipient

rebellions, will be met by the hope of harvest; and it will not be

impossible for them, when their father is dead, to follow the plough of

their own initiative and for their own children’s sake. So great is the

sustained advance in rationality made possible by art which, being

embodied in matter, is teachable and transmissible by training; for in

art the values secured are recognised the more easily for having been

first enjoyed when other people furnished the means to them; while the

maintenance of these values is facilitated by an external tradition

imposing itself contagiously or by force on each new generation.

[Sidenote: Beauty an incident in rational art.]

Art is action which transcending the body makes the world a more

congenial stimulus to the soul. All art is therefore useful and

practical, and the notable æsthetic value which some works of art

possess, for reasons flowing for the most part out of their moral

significance, is itself one of the satisfactions which art offers to

human nature as a whole. Between sensation and abstract discourse lies a

region of deployed sensibility or synthetic representation, a region

where more is seen at arm’s length than in any one moment could be felt

at close quarters, and yet where the remote parts of experience, which

discourse reaches only through symbols, are recovered and recomposed in

something like their native colours and experienced relations. This

region, called imagination, has pleasures more airy and luminous than

those of sense, more massive and rapturous than those of intelligence.

The values inherent in imagination, in instant intuition, in sense

endowed with form, are called æsthetic values; they are found mainly in

nature and living beings, but often also in man’s artificial works, in

images evoked by language, and in the realm of sound.

[Sidenote: Inseparable from the others.]

Productions in which an æsthetic value is or is supposed to be

prominent take the name of fine art; but the work of fine art so defined

is almost always an abstraction from the actual object, which has many

non-æsthetic functions and values. To separate the æsthetic element,

abstract and dependent as it often is, is an artifice which is more

misleading than helpful; for neither in the history of art nor in a

rational estimate of its value can the æsthetic function of things be

divorced from the practical and moral. What had to be done was, by

imaginative races, done imaginatively; what had to be spoken or made,

was spoken or made fitly, lovingly, beautifully. Or, to take the matter

up on its psychological side, the ceaseless experimentation and ferment

of ideas, in breeding what it had a propensity to breed, came sometimes

on figments that gave it delightful pause; these beauties were the first

knowledges and these arrests the first hints of real and useful things.

The rose’s grace could more easily be plucked from its petals than the

beauty of art from its subject, occasion, and use. An æsthetic

fragrance, indeed, all things may have, if in soliciting man’s senses or

reason they can awaken his imagination as well; but this middle zone is

so mixed and nebulous, and its limits are so vague, that it cannot well

be treated in theory otherwise than as it exists in fact—as a phase of

man’s sympathy with the world he moves in. If art is that element in the

Life of Reason which consists in modifying its environment the better

to attain its end, art may be expected to subserve all parts of the

human ideal, to increase man’s comfort, knowledge, and delight. And as

nature, in her measure, is wont to satisfy these interests together, so

art, in seeking to increase that satisfaction, will work simultaneously

in every ideal direction. Nor will any of these directions be on the

whole good, or tempt a well-trained will, if it leads to estrangement

from all other interests. The æsthetic good will be accordingly hatched

in the same nest with the others, and incapable of flying far in a

different air.

CHAPTER II

RATIONALITY OF INDUSTRIAL ART

[Sidenote: Utility is ultimately ideal.]

If there were anything wholly instrumental or merely useful its

rationality, such as it was, would be perfectly obvious. Such a thing

would be exhaustively defined by its result and conditioned exclusively

by its expediency. Yet the value of most human arts, mechanical as they

may appear, has a somewhat doubtful and mixed character. Naval

architecture, for instance, serves a clear immediate purpose. Yet to

cross the sea is not an ultimate good, and the ambition or curiosity

that first led man, being a land-animal, to that now vulgar adventure,

has sometimes found moralists to condemn it. A vessel’s true excellence

is more deeply conditioned than the ship-wright may imagine when he

prides himself on having made something that will float and go. The best

battle-ship, or racing yacht, or freight steamer, might turn out to be a

worse thing for its specific excellence, if the action it facilitated

proved on the whole maleficent, and if war or racing or trade could be

rightly condemned by a philosopher. The rationality of ship-building has

several sets of conditions: the patron’s demands must be first

fulfilled; then the patron’s specifications have to be judged by the

purpose he in turn has in mind; this purpose itself has to be justified

by his ideal in life, and finally his ideal by its adequacy to his total

or ultimate nature. Error on any of these planes makes the ultimate

product irrational; and if a finer instinct, even in the midst of

absorbing subsidiary action, warns a man that he is working against his

highest good, his art will lose its savour and its most skilful products

will grow hateful, even to his immediate apprehension, infected as they

will be by the canker of folly.

[Sidenote: Work wasted and chances missed.]

Art thus has its casuistry no less than morals, and philosophers in the

future, if man should at last have ceased to battle with ghosts, might

be called upon to review material civilisation from its beginnings,

testing each complication by its known ultimate fruits and reaching in

this way a purified and organic ideal of human industry, an ideal which

education and political action might help to embody. If nakedness or a

single garment were shown to be wholesomer and more agreeable than

complicated clothes, weavers and tailors might be notably diminished in

number. If, in another quarter, popular fancy should sicken at last of

its traditional round of games and fictions, it might discover infinite

entertainment in the play of reality and truth, and infinite novelties

to be created by fruitful labour; so that many a pleasure might be found

which is now clogged by mere apathy and unintelligence. Human genius,

like a foolish Endymion, lies fast asleep amid its opportunities,

wasting itself in dreams and disinheriting itself by negligence.

[Sidenote: Ideals must be interpreted, not prescribed.]

Descriptive economy, however, will have to make great progress before

the concrete ethics of art can be properly composed. History, conceived

hitherto as a barbarous romance, does not furnish sufficient data by

which the happiness of life under various conditions may be soberly

estimated. Politics has receded into the region of blind impulse and

factional interests, and would need to be reconstituted before it could

approach again that scientific problem which Socrates and his great

disciples would have wished it to solve. Meantime it may not be

premature to say something about another factor in practical philosophy,

namely, the ultimate interests by which industrial arts and their

products have to be estimated. Even before we know the exact effects of

an institution we can fix to some extent the purposes which, in order to

be beneficent, it will have to subserve, although in truth such

antecedent fixing of aims cannot go far, seeing that every operation

reacts on the organ that executes it, thereby modifying the ideal

involved. Doubtless the most industrial people would still wish to be

happy and might accordingly lay down certain principles which its

industry should never transgress, as for instance that production should

at any price leave room for liberty, leisure, beauty, and a spirit of

general co-operation and goodwill. But a people once having become

industrial will hardly be happy if sent back to Arcadia; it will have

formed busy habits which it cannot relax without tedium; it will have

developed a restlessness and avidity which will crave matter, like any

other kind of hunger. Every experiment in living qualifies the initial

possibilities of life, and the moralist would reckon without his host if

he did not allow for the change which forced exercise makes in instinct,

adjusting it more or less to extant conditions originally, perhaps,

unwelcome. It is too late for the highest good to prescribe flying for

quadrupeds or peace for the sea waves.

What antecedent interest does mechanical art subserve? What is the

initial and commanding ideal of life by which all industrial

developments are to be proved rational or condemned as vain? If we look

to the most sordid and instrumental of industries we see that their

purpose is to produce a foreordained result with the minimum of effort.

They serve, in a word, to cheapen commodities. But the value of such an

achievement is clearly not final; it hangs on two underlying ideals, one

demanding abundance in the things produced and the other diminution in

the toil required to produce them. At least the latter interest may in

turn be analysed further, for to diminish toil is itself no absolute

good; it is a good only when such diminution in one sphere liberates

energies which may be employed in other fields, so that the total human

accomplishment may be greater. Doubtless useful labour has its natural

limits, for if overdone any activity may impair the power of enjoying

both its fruits and its operation. Yet in so far as labour can become

spontaneous and in itself delightful it is a positive benefit; and to

its intrinsic value must be added all those possessions or useful

dispositions which it may secure. Thus one ideal—to diminish

labour—falls back into the other—to diffuse occasions for enjoyment.

The aim is not to curtail occupation but rather to render occupation

liberal by supplying it with more appropriate objects.

[Sidenote: The aim of industry is to live well.]

It is then liberal life, fostered by industry and commerce or involved

in them, that alone can justify these instrumental pursuits. Those

philosophers whose ethics is nothing but sentimental physics like to

point out that happiness arises out of work and that compulsory

activities, dutifully performed, underlie freedom. Of course matter or

force underlies everything; but rationality does not accrue to spirit

because mechanism supports it; it accrues to mechanism in so far as

spirit is thereby called into existence; so that while values derive

existence only from their causes, causes derive value only from their

results. Functions cannot be exercised until their organs exist and are

in operation, so that what is primary in the order of genesis is always

last and most dependent in the order of worth. The primary substance of

things is their mere material; their first cause is their lowest

instrument. Matter has only the values of the forms which it assumes,

and while each stratification may create some intrinsic ideal and

achieve some good, these goods are dull and fleeting in proportion to

their rudimentary character and their nearness to protoplasmic thrills.

Where reason exists life cannot, indeed, be altogether slavish; for any

operation, however menial and fragmentary, when it is accompanied by

ideal representation of the ends pursued and by felt success in

attaining them, becomes a sample and anagram of all freedom.

Nevertheless to arrest attention on a means is really illiberal, though

not so much by what such an interest contains as by what it ignores.

Happiness in a treadmill is far from inconceivable; but for that

happiness to be rational the wheel should be nothing less than the whole

sky from which influences can descend upon us. There would be meanness

of soul in being content with a smaller sphere, so that not everything

that was relevant to our welfare should be envisaged in our thoughts and

purposes. To be absorbed by the incidental is the animal’s portion; to

be confined to the instrumental is the slave’s. For though within such

activity there may be a rational movement, the activity ends in a fog

and in mere physical drifting. Happiness has to be begged of fortune or

found in mystical indifference: it is not yet subtended by rational art.

[Sidenote: Some arts, but no men, are slaves by nature.]

The Aristotelian theory of slavery, in making servile action wholly

subservient, sins indeed against persons, but not against arts. It sins

against persons because there is inconsiderate haste in asserting that

whole classes of men are capable of no activities, except the physical,

which justify themselves inherently. The lower animals also have

physical interests and natural emotions. A man, if he deserves the name,

must be credited with some rational capacity: prospect and retrospect,

hope and the ideal portraiture of things, must to some extent employ

him. Freedom to cultivate these interests is then his inherent right. As

the lion vindicates his prerogative to ferocity and dignity, so every

rational creature vindicates his prerogative to spiritual freedom. But a

too summary classification of individuals covers, in Aristotle, a just

discrimination among the arts. In so far as a man’s occupation is merely

instrumental and justified only externally, he is obviously a slave and

his art at best an evil necessity. For the operation is by hypothesis

not its own end; and if the product, needful for some ulterior purpose,

had been found ready made in nature, the other and self-justifying

activities could have gone on unimpeded, without the arrest or

dislocation which is involved in first establishing the needful

conditions for right action. If air had to be manufactured, as dwellings

must be, or breathing to be learned like speech, mankind would start

with an even greater handicap and would never have come within sight of

such goals as it can now pursue. Thus all instrumental and remedial

arts, however indispensable, are pure burdens; and progress consists in

abridging them as much as is possible without contracting the basis for

moral life.

[Sidenote: Servile arts may grow spontaneous or their products may be

renounced.]

This needful abridgment can take place in two directions. The art may

become instinctive, unconscious of the utility that backs it and

conscious only of the solicitation that leads it on. In that measure

human nature is adapted to its conditions; lessons long dictated by

experience are actually learned and become hereditary habits. So

inclination to hunt and fondness for nursing children have passed into

instincts in the human race; and what if it were a forced art would be

servile, by becoming spontaneous has risen to be an ingredient in ideal

life; for sport and maternity are human ideals. In an opposite direction

servile arts may be abridged by a lapse of the demand which required

them. The servile art of vine-dressers, for instance, would meet such a

fate if the course of history, instead of tending to make the vintage an

ideal episode and to create worshippers of Bacchus and Priapus, tended

rather to bring about a distaste for wine and made the whole industry

superfluous. This solution is certainly less happy than the other,

insomuch as it suppresses a function instead of taking it up into

organic life; yet life to be organic has to be exclusive and finite; it

has to work out specific tendencies in a specific environment; and

therefore to surrender a particular impeded impulse may involve a clear

gain, if only a compensating unimpeded good thereby comes to light

elsewhere. If wine disappeared, with all its humane and symbolic

consecrations, that loss might bring an ultimate gain, could some less

treacherous friend of frankness and merriment be thereby brought into

the world.

In practice servile art is usually mitigated by combining these two

methods; the demand subserved, being but ill supported, learns to

restrain itself and be less importunate; while at the same time habit

renders the labour which was once unwilling largely automatic, and even

overlays it with ideal associations. Human nature is happily elastic;

there is hardly a need that may not be muffled or suspended, and hardly

an employment that may not be relieved by the automatic interest with

which it comes to be pursued. To this automatic interest other

palliatives are often added, sometimes religion, sometimes mere dulness

and resignation; but in these cases the evil imposed is merely

counterbalanced or forgotten, it is not remedied. Reflective and

spiritual races minimise labour by renunciation, for they find it easier

to give up its fruits than to justify its exactions. Among energetic and

self-willed men, on the contrary, the demand for material progress

remains predominant, and philosophy dwells by preference on the

possibility that a violent and continual subjection in the present might

issue in a glorious future dominion. This possible result was hardly

realised by the Jews, nor long maintained by the Greeks and Romans, and

it remains to be seen whether modern industrialism can achieve it. In

fact, we may suspect that success only comes when a nation’s external

task happens to coincide with its natural genius, so that a minimum of

its labour is servile and a maximum of its play is beneficial. It is in

such cases that we find colossal achievements and apparently

inexhaustible energies. Prosperity is indeed the basis of every ideal

attainment, so that prematurely to recoil from hardship, or to be

habitually conscious of hardship at all, amounts to renouncing

beforehand all earthly goods and all chance of spiritual greatness. Yet

a chance is no certainty. When glory requires Titanic labours it often

finds itself in the end buried under a pyramid rather than raised upon a

pedestal. Energies which are not from the beginning self-justifying and

flooded with light seldom lead to ideal greatness.

[Sidenote: Art starts from two potentialities: its material and its

problem.]

The action to which industry should minister is accordingly liberal or

spontaneous action; and this one condition of rationality in from two

the arts. But a second condition is implicit in the first: freedom means

freedom in some operation, ideality means the ideality of something

embodied and material. Activity, achievement, a passage from prospect

to realisation, is evidently essential to life. If all ends were already

reached, and no art were requisite, life could not exist at all, much

less a Life of Reason. No politics, no morals, no thought would be

possible, for all these move towards some ideal and envisage a goal to

which they presently pass. The transition is the activity, without which

achievement would lose its zest and indeed its meaning; for a situation

could never be achieved which had been given from all eternity. The

ideal is a concomitant emanation from the natural and has no other

possible status. Those human possessions which are perennial and of

inalienable value are in a manner potential possessions only. Knowledge,

art, love are always largely in abeyance, while power is absolutely

synonymous with potentiality. Fruition requires a continual recovery, a

repeated re-establishment of the state we enjoy. So breath and

nutrition, feeling and thought, come in pulsations; they have only a

periodic and rhythmic sort of actuality. The operation may be sustained

indefinitely, but only if it admits a certain internal oscillation.

A creature like man, whose mode of being is a life or experience and not

a congealed ideality, such as eternal truth might show, must accordingly

find something to do; he must operate in an environment in which

everything is not already what he is presently to make it. In the actual

world this first condition of life is only too amply fulfilled; the real

difficulty in man’s estate, the true danger to his vitality, lies not

in want of work but in so colossal a disproportion between demand and

opportunity that the ideal is stunned out of existence and perishes for

want of hope. The Life of Reason is continually beaten back upon its

animal sources, and nations are submerged in deluge after deluge of

barbarism. Impressed as we may well be by this ancient experience, we

should not overlook the complementary truth which under more favourable

circumstances would be as plain as the other: namely, that our deepest

interest is after all to live, and we could not live if all acquisition,

assimilation, government, and creation had been made impossible for us

by their foregone realisation, so that every operation was forestalled

by the given fact. The distinction between the ideal and the real is one

which the human ideal itself insists should be preserved. It is an

essential expression of life, and its disappearance would be tantamount

to death, making an end to voluntary transition and ideal

representation. All objects envisaged either in vulgar action or in the

airiest cognition must be at first ideal and distinct from the given

facts, otherwise action would have lost its function at the same moment

that thought lost its significance. All life would have collapsed into a

purposeless datum.

The ideal requires, then, that opportunities should be offered for

realising it through action, and that transition should be possible to

it from a given state of things. One form of such transition is art,

where the ideal is a possible and more excellent form to be given to

some external substance or medium. Art needs to find a material

relatively formless which its business is to shape; and this initial

formlessness in matter is essential to art’s existence. Were there no

stone not yet sculptured and built into walls, no sentiment not yet

perfectly uttered in poetry, no distance or oblivion yet to be abolished

by motion or inferential thought, activity of all sorts would have lost

its occasion. Matter, or actuality in what is only potentially ideal, is

therefore a necessary condition for realising an ideal at all.

[Sidenote: Each must be definite and congruous with the other.]

This potentiality, however, in so far as the ideal requires it, is a

quite definite disposition. Absolute chaos would defeat life as surely

as would absolute ideality. Activity, in presupposing material

conditions, presupposes them to be favourable, so that a movement

towards the ideal may actually take place. Matter, which from the point

of view of a given ideal is merely its potentiality, is in itself the

potentiality of every other ideal as well; it is accordingly responsible

to no ideal in particular and proves in some measure refractory to all.

It makes itself felt, either as an opportune material or as an

accidental hindrance, only when it already possesses definite form and

affinities; given in a certain quantity, quality, and order, matter

feeds the specific life which, if given otherwise, it would impede or

smother altogether.

[Sidenote: A sophism exposed]

Art, in calling for materials, calls for materials plastic to its

influence and definitely predisposed to its ends. Unsuitableness in the

data far from grounding action renders it abortive, and no expedient

could be more sophistical than that into which theodicy, in its

desperate straits, has sometimes been driven, of trying to justify as

conditions for ideal achievement the very conditions which make ideal

achievement impossible. The given state from which transition is to take

place to the ideal must support that transition; so that the desirable

want of ideality which plastic matter should possess is merely relative

and strictly determined. Art and reason find in nature the background

they require; but nature, to be wholly justified by its ideal functions,

would have to subserve them perfectly. It would have to offer to reason

and art a sufficient and favourable basis; it would have to feed sense

with the right stimuli at the right intervals, so that art and reason

might continually flourish and be always moving to some new success. A

poet needs emotions and perceptions to translate into language, since

these are his subject-matter and his inspiration; but starvation,

physical or moral, will not help him to sing. One thing is to meet with

the conditions inherently necessary for a given action; another thing is

to meet with obstacles fatal to the same. A propitious formlessness in

matter is no sort of evil; and evil is so far from being a propitious

formlessness in matter that it is rather an impeding form which matter

has already assumed.

[Sidenote: Industry prepares matter for the liberal arts.]

Out of this appears, with sufficient clearness, the rational function

which the arts possess. They give, as nature does, a form to matter, but

they give it a more propitious form. Such success in art is possible

only when the materials and organs at hand are in a large measure

already well disposed; for it can as little exist with a dull organ as

with no organ at all, while there are winds in which every sail must be

furled. Art depends upon profiting by a bonanza and learning to sail in

a good breeze, strong enough for speed and conscious power but placable

enough for dominion and liberty of soul. Then perfection in action can

be attained and a self-justifying energy can emerge out of apathy on the

one hand and out of servile and wasteful work on the other. Art has

accordingly two stages: one mechanical or industrial, in which untoward

matter is better prepared, or impeding media are overcome; the other

liberal, in which perfectly fit matter is appropriated to ideal uses and

endowed with a direct spiritual function. A premonition or rehearsal of

these two stages may be seen in nature, where nutrition and reproduction

fit the body for its ideal functions, whereupon sensation and

cerebration make it a direct organ of mind. Industry merely gives nature

that form which, if more thoroughly humane, she might have originally

possessed for our benefit; liberal arts bring to spiritual fruition the

matter which either nature or industry has prepared and rendered

propitious. This spiritual fruition consists in the activity of turning

an apt material into an expressive and delightful form, thus filling the

world with objects which by symbolising ideal energies tend to revive

them under a favouring influence and therefore to strengthen and refine

them.

[Sidenote: Each partakes of the other]

It remains merely to note that all industry contains an element of fine

art and all fine art an element of industry; since every proximate end,

in being attained, satisfies the mind and manifests the intent that

pursued it; while every operation upon a material, even one so volatile

as sound, finds that material somewhat refractory. Before the product

can attain its ideal function many obstacles to its transparency and

fitness have to be removed. A certain amount of technical and

instrumental labour is thus involved in every work of genius, and a

certain genius in every technical success.

CHAPTER III

EMERGENCE OF FINE ART

[Sidenote: Art is spontaneous action made stable by success.]

Action which is purely spontaneous is merely tentative. Any experience

of success or utility which might have preceded, if it availed to make

action sure, would avail to make it also intentional and conscious of

its ulterior results. Now the actual issue which an action is destined

to have, since it is something future and problematical, can exert no

influence on its own antecedents; but if any picture of what the issue

is likely to be accompanies the heat and momentum of action, that

picture being, of all antecedents in the operation, the one most easily

remembered and described, may be picked out as essential, and dignified

with the name of motive or cause. This will not happen to every

prophetic idea; we may live in fear and trembling as easily as with an

arrogant consciousness of power. The difference flows from the greater

or lesser affinity that happens to exist between expectation and

instinct. Action remains always, in its initial phase, spontaneous and

automatic; it retains an inwardly grounded and perfectly blind tendency

of its own; but this tendency may agree or clash with the motor

impulses subtending whatever ideas may at the same time people the

fancy. If the blind and the ideal impulses agree, spontaneous action is

voluntary and its result intentional; if they clash, the ideas remain

speculative and idle, random, ineffectual wishes; while the result, not

being referable to any idea, is put down to fate. The sense of power,

accordingly, shows either that events have largely satisfied desire, so

that natural tendency goes hand in hand with the suggestions of

experience, or else that experience has not been allowed to count at all

and that the future is being painted _a priori_. In the latter case the

sense of power is illusory. Action will then never really issue in the

way intended, and even thought will only seem to make progress by

constantly forgetting its original direction.

Though life, however, is initially experimental and always remains

experimental at bottom, yet experiment fortifies certain tendencies and

cancels others, so that a gradual sediment of habit and wisdom is formed

in the stream of time. Action then ceases to be merely tentative and

spontaneous, and becomes art. Foresight begins to accompany practice

and, as we say, to guide it. Purpose thus supervenes on useful impulse,

and conscious expression on self-sustaining automatism. Art lies between

two extremes. On the one side is purely spontaneous fancy, which would

never foresee its own works and scarcely recognise or value them after

they had been created, since at the next moment the imaginative current

would as likely as not have faced about and might be making in the

opposite direction; and on the other side is pure utility, which would

deprive the work of all inherent ideality, and render it inexpressive of

anything in man save his necessities. War, for instance, is an art when,

having set itself an ideal end, it devises means of attaining it; but

this ideal end has for its chief basis some failure in politics and

morals. War marks a weakness and disease in human society, and its best

triumphs are glorious evils—cruel and treacherous remedies, big with

new germs of disease. War is accordingly a servile art and not

essentially liberal; whatever inherent values its exercise may have

would better be realised in another medium. Yet out of the pomp and

circumstance of war fine arts may arise—music, armoury, heraldry, and

eloquence. So utility leads to art when its vehicle acquires intrinsic

value and becomes expressive. On the other hand, spontaneous action

leads to art when it acquires a rational function. Thus utterance, which

is primarily automatic, becomes the art of speech when it serves to mark

crises in experience, making them more memorable and influential through

their artificial expression; but expression is never art while it

remains expressive to no purpose.

[Sidenote: It combines utility and automatism.]

A good way of understanding the fine arts would be to study how they

grow, now out of utility, now out of automatism. We should thus see

more clearly how they approach their goal, which can be nothing but the

complete superposition of these two characters. If all practice were art

and all art perfect, no action would remain compulsory and not justified

inherently, while no creative impulse would any longer be wasteful or,

like the impulse to thrum, symptomatic merely and irrelevant to

progress. It is by contributing to the Life of Reason and merging into

its substance that art, like religion or science, first becomes worthy

of praise. Each element comes from a different quarter, bringing its

specific excellence and needing its peculiar purification and

enlightenment, by co-ordination with all the others; and this process of

enlightenment and purification is what we call development in each

department. The meanest arts are those which lie near the limit either

of utility or of automatic self-expression. They become nobler and more

rational as their utility is rendered spontaneous or their spontaneity

beneficent.

[Sidenote: Automatism fundamental and irresponsible.]

The spontaneous arts are older than the useful, since man must live and

act before he can devise instruments for living and acting better. Both

the power to construct machines and the end which, to be useful, they

would have to serve, need to be given in initial impulse. There is

accordingly a vast amount of irresponsible play and loose experiment in

art, as in consciousness, before these gropings acquire a settled habit

and function, and rationality begins. The farther back we go into

barbarism the more we find life and mind busied with luxuries; and

though these indulgences may repel a cultivated taste and seem in the

end cruel and monotonous, their status is really nearer to that of

religion and spontaneous art than to that of useful art or of science.

Ceremony, for instance, is compulsory in society and sometimes truly

oppressive, yet its root lies in self-expression and in a certain

ascendency of play which drags all life along into conventional channels

originally dug out in irresponsible bursts of action. This occurs

inevitably and according to physical analogies. Bodily organs grow

automatically and become necessary moulds of life. We must either find a

use for them or bear as best we may the idle burden they impose. Of such

burdens the barbarian carries the greatest possible sum; and while he

paints the heavens with his grotesque mythologies, he encumbers earth

with inventions and prescriptions almost as gratuitous. The fiendish

dances and shouts, the cruel initiations, mutilations, and sacrifices in

which savages indulge, are not planned by them deliberately nor

justified in reflection. Men find themselves falling into these

practices, driven by a tradition hardly distinguishable from instinct.

In its periodic fury the spirit hurries them into wars and orgies, quite

as it kindles sudden flaming visions in their brains, habitually so

torpid. The spontaneous is the worst of tyrants, for it exercises a

needless and fruitless tyranny in the guise of duty and inspiration.

Without mitigating in the least the subjection to external forces under

which man necessarily labours, it adds a new artificial subjection to

his own false steps and childish errors.

[Sidenote: It is tamed by contact with the world.]

This mental vegetation, this fitful nervous groping, is nevertheless a

sign of life, out of which art emerges by discipline and by a gradual

application to real issues. An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream

of the actual world; he is a highly suggestible mind hypnotised by

reality. Even barbaric genius may find points of application in the

world. These points will be more numerous the more open the eyes have

been, the more docile and intelligent the mind is that gathers and

renders back its impressions in a synthetic and ideal form. Intuition

will then represent, at least symbolically, an actual situation. Grimace

and gesture and ceremony will be modified by a sense of their effect;

they will become artful and will transform their automatic

expressiveness into ideal expression. They will become significant of

what it is intended to communicate and important to know; they will have

ceased to be irresponsible exercises and vents for passing feeling, by

which feeling is dissipated, as in tears, without being embodied and

intellectualised, as in a work of art.

[Sidenote: The dance.]

[Sidenote: Functions of gesture.]

The dance is an early practice that passes after this fashion into an

art. A prancing stallion may transfigure his movements more beautifully

than man is capable of doing; for the springs and limits of effect are

throughout mechanical, and man, in more than one respect, would have to

become a centaur before he could rival the horse’s prowess. Human

instinct is very imperfect in this direction, and grows less happy the

more artificial society becomes; most dances, even the savage ones, are

somewhat ridiculous. A rudimentary instinct none the less remains, which

not only involves a faculty of heightened and rhythmic motion, but also

assures a direct appreciation of such motion when seen in others. The

conscious agility, _fougue_, and precision which fill the performer

become contagious and delight the spectator as well. There are indeed

dances so ugly that, like those of contemporary society, they cannot be

enjoyed unless they are shared; they yield pleasures of exercise only,

or at best of movement in unison. But when man was nearer to the animal

and his body and soul were in happier conjunction, when society, too,

was more compulsive over the individual, he could lend himself more

willingly and gracefully to being a figure in the general pageant of the

world. The dance could then detach itself from its early association

with war and courtship and ally itself rather to religion and art. From

being a spontaneous vent for excitement, or a blind means of producing

it, the dance became a form of discipline and conscious social

control—a cathartic for the soul; and this by a quite intelligible

transition. Gesture, of which the dance is merely a pervasive use, is an

incipient action. It is conduct in the groping stage, before it has lit

on its purpose, as can be seen unmistakably in all the gesticulation of

love and defiance. In this way the dance is attached to life initially

by its physiological origin. Being an incipient act, it naturally leads

to its own completion and may arouse in others the beginnings of an

appropriate response. Gesture is only less catching and less eloquent

than action itself. But gesture, while it has this power of suggesting

action and stimulating the response which would be appropriate if the

action took place, may be arrested in the process of execution, since it

is incipient only; it will then have revealed an intention and betrayed

a state of mind. Thus it will have found a function which action itself

can seldom fulfil. When an act is done, indications of what it was to be

are superfluous; but indications of possible acts are in the highest

degree useful and interesting. In this way gesture assumes the rôle of

language and becomes a means of rational expression. It remains

suggestive and imitable enough to convey an idea, but not enough to

precipitate a full reaction; it feeds that sphere of merely potential

action which we call thought; it becomes a vehicle for intuition.

Under these circumstances, to tread the measures of a sacred dance, to

march with an army, to bear one’s share in any universal act, fills the

heart with a voluminous silent emotion. The massive suggestion, the

pressure of the ambient will, is out of all proportion to the present

call for action. Infinite resources and definite premonitions are thus

stored up in the soul; and merely to have moved solemnly together is the

best possible preparation for living afterwards, even if apart, in the

consciousness of a general monition and authority.

[Sidenote: Automatic music.]

Parallel to this is the genesis and destiny of music, an art originally

closely intertwined with the dance. The same explosive forces that

agitate the limbs loosen the voice; hand, foot, and throat mark their

wild rhythm together. Birds probably enjoy the pulsation of their

singing rather than its sound. Even human music is performed long before

it is listened to, and is at first no more an art than sighing. The

original emotions connected with it are felt by participation in the

performance—a participation which can become ideal only because, at

bottom, it is always actual. The need of exercise and self-expression,

the force of contagion and unison, bears the soul along before an

artistic appreciation of music arises; and we may still observe among

civilised races how music asserts itself without any æsthetic intent, as

when the pious sing hymns in common, or the sentimental, at sea, cannot

refrain from whining their whole homely repertory in the moonlight. Here

as elsewhere, instinct and habit are phases of the same inner

disposition. What has once occurred automatically on a given occasion

will be repeated in much the same form when a similar occasion recurs.

Thus impulse, reinforced by its own remembered expression, passes into

convention. Savages have a music singularly monotonous, automatic, and

impersonal; they cannot resist the indulgence, though they probably have

little pleasure in it. The same thing happens with customary sounds as

with other prescribed ceremonies; to omit them would be shocking and

well-nigh impossible, yet to repeat them serves no end further than to

avoid a sense of strangeness or inhibition. These automatisms, however,

in working themselves out, are not without certain retroactive effects:

they leave the system exhausted or relieved, and they have meantime

played more or less agreeably on the senses. The music we make

automatically we cannot help hearing incidentally; the sensation may

even modify the expression, since sensation too has its physical side.

The expression is reined in and kept from becoming vagrant, in

proportion as its form and occasion are remembered. The automatic

performer, being henceforth controlled more or less by reflection and

criticism, becomes something of an artist: he trains himself to be

consecutive, impressive, agreeable; he begins to compare his

improvisation with its subject and function, and thus he develops what

is called style and taste.

CHAPTER IV

MUSIC

[Sidenote: Music is a world apart.]

Sound readily acquires ideal values. It has power in itself to engross

attention and at the same time may be easily diversified, so as to

become a symbol for other things. Its direct empire is to be compared

with that of stimulants and opiates, yet it presents to the mind, as

these do not, a perception that corresponds, part by part, with the

external stimulus. To hear is almost to understand. The process we

undergo in mathematical or dialectical thinking is called understanding,

because a natural sequence is there adequately translated into ideal

terms. Logical connections seem to be internally justified, while only

the fact that we perceive them here and now, with more or less facility,

is attributed to brute causes. Sound approaches this sort of ideality;

it presents to sense something like the efficacious structure of the

object. It is almost mathematical; but like mathematics it is adequate

only by being abstract; and while it discloses point by point one strain

in existence, it leaves many other strains, which in fact are interwoven

with it, wholly out of account. Music is accordingly, like mathematics,

very nearly a world by itself; it contains a whole gamut of experience,

from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies. Yet this

second existence, this life in music, is no mere ghost of the other; it

has its own excitements, its quivering alternatives, its surprising

turns; the abstract energy of it takes on so much body, that in

progression or declension it seems quite as impassioned as any animal

triumph or any moral drama.

[Sidenote: It justifies itself.]

That a pattering of sounds on the ear should have such moment is a fact

calculated to give pause to those philosophers who attempt to explain

consciousness by its utility, or who wish to make physical and moral

processes march side by side from all eternity. Music is essentially

useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends

utility to its conditions. That the way in which idle sounds run

together should matter so much is a mystery of the same order as the

spirit’s concern to keep a particular body alive, or to propagate its

life. Such an interest is, from an absolute point of view, wholly

gratuitous; and so long as the natural basis and expressive function of

spirit are not perceived, this mystery is baffling. In truth the order

of values inverts that of causes; and experience, in which all values

lie, is an ideal resultant, itself ineffectual, of the potencies it can

conceive. Delight in music is liberal; it makes useful the organs and

processes that subserve it. These agencies, when they support a

conscious interest in their operation, give that operation its first

glimmering justification, and admit it to the rational sphere. Just so

when organic bodies generate a will bent on their preservation, they add

a value and a moral function to their equilibrium. In vain should we ask

for what purpose existences arise, or become important; that purpose, to

be such, must already have been important to some existence; and the

only question that can be asked or answered is what recognised

importance, what ideal values, actual existences involve.

[Sidenote: It is vital and transient.]

We happen to breathe, and on that account are interested in breathing;

and it is no greater marvel that, happening to be subject to intricate

musical sensations, we should be in earnest about these too. The human

ear discriminates sounds with ease; what it hears is so diversified that

its elements can be massed without being confused, or can form a

sequence having a character of its own, to be appreciated and

remembered. The eye too has a field in which clear distinctions and

relations appear, and for that reason is an organ favourable to

intelligence; but what gives music its superior emotional power is its

rhythmic advance. Time is a medium which appeals more than space to

emotion. Since life is itself a flux, and thought an operation, there is

naturally something immediate and breathless about whatever flows and

expands. The visible world offers itself to our regard with a certain

lazy indifference. “Peruse me,” it seems to say, “if you will. I am

here; and even if you pass me by now and later find it to your advantage

to resurvey me, I may still be here.” The world of sound speaks a more

urgent language. It insinuates itself into our very substance, and it is

not so much the music that moves us as we that move with it. Its rhythms

seize upon our bodily life, to accelerate or to deepen it; and we must

either become inattentive altogether or remain enslaved.

[Sidenote: Its physical affinities.]

This imperious function in music has lent it functions which are far

from æsthetic. Song can be used to keep in unison many men’s efforts, as

when sailors sing as they heave; it can make persuasive and obvious

sentiments which, if not set to music, might seem absurd, as often in

love songs and in psalmody. It may indeed serve to prepare the mind for

any impression whatever, and render the same more intense when it comes.

Music was long used before it was loved or people took pains to refine

it. It would have seemed as strange in primitive times to turn utterance

into a fine art as now to make æsthetic paces out of mourning or

child-birth. Primitive music is indeed a wail and a parturition; magical

and suggestive as it may be, for long ages it never bethinks itself to

be beautiful. It is content to furnish a contagious melancholy

employment to souls without a language and with little interest in the

real world. Barbaric musicians, singing and playing together more or

less at random, are too much carried away by their performance to

conceive its effect; they cry far too loud and too unceasingly to

listen. A contagious tradition carries them along and controls them, in

a way, as they improvise; the assembly is hardly an audience; all are

performers, and the crowd is only a stimulus that keeps every one

dancing and howling in emulation. This unconsidered flow of early art

remains present, more or less, to the end. Instead of vague custom we

have schools, and instead of swaying multitudes academic example; but

many a discord and mannerism survive simply because the musician is so

suggestible, or so lost in the tumult of production, as never to

reconsider what he does, or to perceive its wastefulness.

Nevertheless an inherent value exists in all emitted sounds, although

barbaric practice and theory are slow to recognise it. Each tone has its

quality, like jewels of different water; every cadence has its vital

expression, no less inherent in it than that which comes in a posture or

in a thought. Everything audible thrills merely by sounding, and though

this perceptual thrill be at first overpowered by the effort and

excitement of action, yet it eventually fights its way to the top.

Participation in music may become perfunctory or dull for the great

majority, as when hymns are sung in church; a mere suggestion of action

will doubtless continue to colour the impression received, for a

tendency to act is involved in perception; but this suggestion will be

only an over-tone or echo behind an auditory feeling. Some performers

will be singled out from the crowd; those whom the public likes to hear

will be asked to continue alone; and soon a certain suasion will be

exerted over them by the approval or censure of others, so that

consciously or unconsciously they will train themselves to please.

[Sidenote: Physiology of music.]

The musical quality of sounds has a simple physical measure for its

basis; and the rate of vibration is complicated by its sweep or

loudness, and by concomitant sounds. What a rich note is to a pure and

thin one, that a chord is to a note; nor is melody wholly different in

principle, for it is a chord rendered piece-meal. Time intervenes, and

the harmony is deployed; so that in melody rhythm is added, with its

immense appeal, to the cumulative effect already secured by rendering

many notes together. The heightened effect which a note gets by figuring

in a phrase, or a phrase in a longer passage, comes of course from the

tensions established and surviving in the sensorium—a case, differently

shaded, of chords and overtones. The difference is only that the more

emphatic parts of the melody survive clearly to the end, while the

detail, which if perceived might now clash, is largely lost, and out of

the preceding parts perhaps nothing but a certain swing and potency is

present at the close. The mind has been raked and set vibrating in an

unusual fashion, so that the _finale_ comes like a fulfilment after much

premonition and desire, whereas the same event, unprepared for, might

hardly have been observed. The whole technique of music is but an

immense elaboration of this principle. It deploys a sensuous harmony by

a sort of dialectic, suspending and resolving it, so that the parts

become distinct and their relation vital.

[Sidenote: Limits of musical sensibility.]

Such elaboration often exceeds the synthetic power of all but the best

trained minds. Both in scope and in articulation musical faculty varies

prodigiously. There is no fixed limit to the power of sustaining a given

conscious process while new features appear in the same field; nor is

there any fixed limit to the power of recovering, under changed

circumstances, a process that was formerly suspended. A whole symphony

might be felt at once, if the musician’s power of sustained or

cumulative hearing could stretch so far. As we all survey two notes and

their interval in one sensation (actual experience being always

transitive and pregnant, and its terms ideal), so a trained mind might

survey a whole composition. This is not to say that time would be

transcended in such an experience; the apperception would still have

duration and the object would still have successive features, for

evidently music not arranged in time would not be music, while all

sensations with a recognisable character occupy more than an instant in

passing. But the passing sensation, throughout its lapse, presents some

experience; and this experience, taken at any point, may present a

temporal sequence with any number of members, according to the synthetic

and analytic power exerted by the given mind. What is tedious and

formless to the inattentive may seem a perfect whole to one who, as they

say, takes it all in; and similarly what is a frightful deafening

discord to a sense incapable of discrimination, for one who can hear the

parts may break into a celestial chorus. A musical education is

necessary for musical judgment. What most people relish is hardly music;

it is rather a drowsy revery relieved by nervous thrills.

[Sidenote: The value of music is relative to them.]

The degree to which music should be elaborated depends on the capacity

possessed by those it addresses. There are limits to every man’s

synthetic powers, and to stretch those powers to their limit is

exhausting. Excitement then becomes a debauch; it leaves the soul less

capable of habitual harmony. Especially is such extreme tension

disastrous when, as in music, nothing remains to be the fruit of that

mighty victory; the most pregnant revelation sinks to an illusion and is

discredited when it cannot maintain its inspiration in the world’s

presence. Everything has its own value and sets up its price; but others

must judge if that price is fair, and sociability is the condition of

all rational excellence. There is therefore a limit to right complexity

in music, a limit set not by the nature of music itself, but by its

place in human economy. This limit, though clear in principle, is

altogether variable in practice; duly cultivated people will naturally

place it higher than the unmusical would. In other words, popular music

needs to be simple, although elaborate music may be beautiful to the

few. When elaborate music is the fashion among people to whom all music

is a voluptuous mystery, we may be sure that what they love is

voluptuousness or fashion, and not music itself.

[Sidenote: Wonders of musical structure.]

Beneath its hypnotic power music, for the musician, has an intellectual

essence. Out of simple chords and melodies, which at first catch only

the ear, he weaves elaborate compositions that by their form appeal also

to the mind. This side of music resembles a richer versification; it may

be compared also to mathematics or to arabesques. A moving arabesque

that has a vital dimension, an audible mathematics, adding sense to

form, and a versification that, since it has no subject-matter, cannot

do violence to it by its complex artifices—these are types of pure

living, altogether joyful and delightful things. They combine life with

order, precision with spontaneity; the flux in them has become

rhythmical and its freedom has passed into a rational choice, since it

has come in sight of the eternal form it would embody. The musician,

like an architect or goldsmith working in sound, but freer than they

from material trammels, can expand for ever his yielding labyrinth;

every step opens up new vistas, every decision—how unlike those made in

real life!—multiplies opportunities, and widens the horizon before him,

without preventing him from going back at will to begin afresh at any

point, to trace the other possible paths leading thence through various

magic landscapes. Pure music is pure art. Its extreme abstraction is

balanced by its entire spontaneity, and, while it has no external

significance, it bears no internal curse. It is something to which a few

spirits may well surrender themselves, sure that in a liberal

commonwealth they will be thanked for their ideal labour, the fruits of

which many may enjoy. Such excursions into ultra-mundane regions, where

order is free, refine the mind and make it familiar with perfection. By

analogy an ideal form comes to be conceived and desiderated in other

regions, where it is not produced so readily, and the music heard, as

the Pythagoreans hoped, makes the soul also musical.

[Sidenote: Its inherent emotions.]

It must be confessed, however, that a world of sounds and rhythms, all

about nothing, is a by-world and a mere distraction for a political

animal. Its substance is air, though the spell of it may have moral

affinities. Nevertheless this ethereal art may be enticed to earth and

married with what is mortal. Music interests humanity most when it is

wedded to human events. The alliance comes about through the emotions

which music and life arouse in common. For sound, in sweeping through

the body and making felt there its kinetic and potential stress,

provokes no less interest than does any other physical event or

premonition. Music can produce emotion as directly as can fighting or

love. If in the latter instances the body’s whole life may be in

jeopardy, this fact is no explanation of our concern; for many a danger

is not felt and there is no magic in the body’s future condition, that

it should now affect the soul. What touches the soul is the body’s

condition at the moment; and this is altered no less truly by a musical

impression than by some protective or reproductive act. If emotions

accompany the latter, they might as well accompany the former; and in

fact they do. Nor is music the only idle cerebral commotion that enlists

attention and presents issues no less momentous for being quite

imaginary; dreams do the same, and seldom can the real crises of life so

absorb the soul, or prompt it to such extreme efforts, as can delirium

in sickness, or delusion in what passes for health.

[Sidenote: In growing specific they remain unearthly.]

There is perhaps no emotion incident to human life that music cannot

render in its abstract medium by suggesting the pang of it; though of

course music cannot describe the complex situation which lends earthly

passions their specific colour. It is by fusion with many suggested

emotions that sentiment grows definite; this fusion can hardly come

about without ideas intervening, and certainly it could never be

sustained or expressed without them. Occasions define feelings; we can

convey a delicate emotion only by delicately describing the situation

which brings it on. Music, with its irrelevant medium, can never do this

for common life, and the passions, as music renders them, are always

general. But music has its own substitute for conceptual distinctness.

It makes feeling specific, nay, more delicate and precise than

association with things could make it, by uniting it with musical form.

We may say that besides suggesting abstractly all ordinary passions,

music creates a new realm of form far more subtly impassioned than is

vulgar experience. Human life is confined to a dramatic repertory which

has already become somewhat classical and worn, but music has no end of

new situations, shaded in infinite ways; it moves in all sorts of bodies

to all sorts of adventures. In life the ordinary routine of destiny

beats so emphatic a measure that it does not allow free play to feeling;

we cannot linger on anything long enough to exhaust its meaning, nor can

we wander far from the beaten path to catch new impressions. But in

music there are no mortal obligations, no imperious needs calling us

back to reality. Here nothing beautiful is extravagant, nothing

delightful unworthy. Musical refinement finds no limit but its own

instinct, so that a thousand shades of what, in our blundering words, we

must call sadness or mirth, find in music their distinct expression.

Each phrase, each composition, articulates perfectly what no human

situation could embody. These fine emotions are really new; they are

altogether musical and unexampled in practical life; they are native to

the passing cadence, absolute postures into which it throws the soul.

[Sidenote: They merge with common emotions, and express such as find no

object in nature.]

There is enough likeness, however, between musical and mundane feeling

for the first to be used in entertaining the second. Hence the singular

privilege of this art: to give form to what is naturally inarticulate

and express those depths of human nature which can speak no language

current in the world. Emotion is primarily about nothing, and much of it

remains about nothing to the end. What rescues a part of our passions

from this pathological plight, and gives them some other function than

merely to be, is the ideal relevance, the practical and mutually

representative character, which they sometimes acquire. All experience

is pathological if we consider its ground; but a part of it is also

rational if we consider its import. The words I am now writing have a

meaning not because at this moment they are fused together in my animal

soul as a dream might fuse them, however incongruous the situation they

depict might be in waking life; they are significant only if this

moment’s product can meet and conspire with some other thought speaking

of what elsewhere exists, and uttering an intuition that from time to

time may be actually recovered. The art of distributing interest among

the occasions and vistas of life so as to lend them a constant worth,

and at the same time to give feeling an ideal object, is at bottom the

sole business of education; but the undertaking is long, and much

feeling remains unemployed and unaccounted for. This objectless emotion

chokes the heart with its dull importunity; now it impedes right action,

now it feeds and fattens illusion. Much of it radiates from primary

functions which, though their operation is half known, have only base or

pitiful associations in human life; so that they trouble us with deep

and subtle cravings, the unclaimed _Hinterland_ of life. When music,

either by verbal indications or by sensuous affinities, or by both at

once, succeeds in tapping this fund of suppressed feeling, it

accordingly supplies a great need. It makes the dumb speak, and plucks

from the animal heart potentialities of expression which might render

it, perhaps, even more than human.

[Sidenote: Music lends elementary feelings an intellectual communicable

form.]

By its emotional range music is appropriate to all intense occasions: we

dance, pray, and mourn to music, and the more inadequate words or

external acts are to the situation, the more grateful music is. As the

only bond between music and life is emotion, music is out of place only

where emotion itself is absent. If it breaks in upon us in the midst of

study or business it becomes an interruption or alternative to our

activity, rather than an expression of it; we must either remain

inattentive or pass altogether into the realm of sound (which may be

unemotional enough) and become musicians for the nonce. Music brings its

sympathetic ministry only to emotional moments; there it merges with

common existence, and is a welcome substitute for descriptive ideas,

since it co-operates with us and helps to deliver us from dumb

subjection to influences which we should not know how to meet otherwise.

There is often in what moves us a certain ruthless persistence, together

with a certain poverty of form; the power felt is out of proportion to

the interest awakened, and attention is kept, as in pain, at once

strained and idle. At such a moment music is a blessed resource. Without

attempting to remove a mood that is perhaps inevitable, it gives it a

congruous filling. Thus the mood is justified by an illustration or

expression which seems to offer some objective and ideal ground for its

existence; and the mood is at the same time relieved by absorption in

that impersonal object. So entertained, the feeling settles. The passion

to which at first we succumbed is now tamed and appropriated. We have

digested the foreign substance in giving it a rational form: its

energies are merged in that strength by which we freely operate.

In this way the most abstract of arts serves the dumbest emotions.

Matter which cannot enter the moulds of ordinary perception, capacities

which a ruling instinct usually keeps under, flow suddenly into this

new channel. Music is like those branches which some trees put forth

close to the ground, far below the point where the other boughs

separate; almost a tree by itself, it has nothing but the root in common

with its parent. Somewhat in this fashion music diverts into an abstract

sphere a part of those forces which abound beneath the point at which

human understanding grows articulate. It nourishes on saps which other

branches of ideation are too narrow or rigid to take up. Those

elementary substances the musician can spiritualise by his special

methods, taking away their reproach and redeeming them from blind

intensity.

[Sidenote: All essences are in themselves good, even the passions.]

There is consequently in music a sort of Christian piety, in that it

comes not to call the just but sinners to repentance, and understands

the spiritual possibilities in outcasts from the respectable world. If

we look at things absolutely enough, and from their own point of view,

there can be no doubt that each has its own ideal and does not question

its own justification. Lust and frenzy, revery or despair, fatal as they

may be to a creature that has general ulterior interests, are not

perverse in themselves: each searches for its own affinities, and has a

kind of inertia which tends to maintain it in being, and to attach or

draw in whatever is propitious to it. Feelings are as blameless as so

many forms of vegetation; they can be poisonous only to a different

life. They are all primordial motions, eddies which the universal flux

makes for no reason, since its habit of falling into such attitudes is

the ground-work and exemplar for nature and logic alike. That such

strains should exist is an ultimate datum; justification cannot be

required of them, but must be offered to each of them in turn by all

that enters its particular orbit. There is no will but might find a

world to disport itself in and to call good, and thereupon boast to have

created that in which it found itself expressed. But such satisfaction

has been denied to the majority; the equilibrium of things has at least

postponed their day. Yet they are not altogether extinguished, since the

equilibrium of things is mechanical and results from no preconcerted

harmony such as would have abolished everything contrary to its own

perfection. Many ill-suppressed possibilities endure in matter, and peep

into being through the crevices, as it were, of the dominant world.

Weeds they are called by the tyrant, but in themselves they are aware of

being potential gods. Why should not every impulse expand in a congenial

paradise? Why should each, made evil now only by an adventitious

appellation or a contrary fate, not vindicate its own ideal? If there is

a piety towards things deformed, because it is not they that are

perverse, but the world that by its laws and arbitrary standards decides

to treat them as if they were, how much more should there be a piety

towards things altogether lovely, when it is only space and matter that

are wanting for their perfect realisation?

[Sidenote: Each impulse calls for a possible congenial world.]

Philosophers talk of self-contradiction, but there is evidently no such

thing, if we take for the self what is really vital, each propulsive,

definite strain of being, each nucleus for estimation and for pleasure

and pain. Bach impulse may be contradicted, but not by itself; it may

find itself opposed, in a theatre which it has entered it knows not how,

by violent personages that it has never wished to encounter. The

environment it calls for is congenial with it: and by that environment

it could never be thwarted or condemned. The lumbering course of events

may indeed involve it in rum, and a mind with permanent interests to

defend may at once rule out everything inconsistent with possible

harmonies; but such rational judgments come from outside and represent a

compromise struck with material forces. Moral judgments and conflicts

are possible only in the mind that represents many interests

synthetically: in nature, where primary impulses collide, all conflict

is physical and all will innocent. Imagine some ingredient of humanity

loosed from its oppressive environment in human economy: it would at

once vegetate and flower into some ideal form, such as we see

exuberantly displayed in nature. If we can only suspend for a moment the

congested traffic in the brain, these initial movements will begin to

traverse it playfully and show their paces, and we shall live in one of

those plausible worlds which the actual world has made impossible.

[Sidenote: Literature incapable of expressing pure feelings.]

Man possesses, for example, a native capacity for joy. There are

moments, in friendship or in solitude, when joy is realised; but the

occasions are often trivial and could never justify in reflection the

feelings that then happen to bubble up. Nor can pure joy be long

sustained: cross-currents of lassitude or anxiety, distracting

incidents, irrelevant associations, trouble its course and make it

languish, turning it before long into dulness or melancholy. Language

cannot express a joy that shall be full and pure; for to keep the purity

nothing would have to be named which carried the least suggestion of

sadness with it, and, in the world that human language refers to, such a

condition would exclude every situation possible. “O joy, O joy,” would

be the whole ditty: hence some dialecticians, whose experience is

largely verbal, think whatever is pure necessarily thin.

[Sidenote: Music may do so.]

That feeling should be so quickly polluted is, however, a superficial

and earthly accident. Spirit is clogged by what it flows through, but at

its springs it is both limpid and abundant. There is matter enough in

joy for many a universe, though the actual world has not a single form

quite fit to embody it, and its too rapid syllables are excluded from

the current hexameter. Music, on the contrary, has a more flexible

measure; its prosody admits every word. Its rhythms can explicate every

emotion, through all degrees of complexity and volume, without once

disavowing it. Thus unused matter, which is not less fertile than that

which nature has absorbed, comes to fill out an infinity of ideal forms.

The joy condemned by practical exigencies to scintillate for a moment

uncommunicated, and then, as it were, to be buried alive, may now find

an abstract art to embody it and bring it before the public, formed into

a rich and constant object called a musical composition. So art succeeds

in vindicating the forgotten regions of spirit: a new spontaneous

creation shows how little authority or finality the given creation has.

[Sidenote: Instability the soul of matter.]

What is true of joy is no less true of sorrow, which, though it arises

from failure in some natural ideal, carries with it a sentimental ideal

of its own. Even confusion can find in music an expression and a

catharsis. That death or change should grieve does not follow from the

material nature of these phenomena. To change or to disappear might be

as normal a tendency as to move; and it actually happens, when nothing

ideal has been attained, that _not to be thus_ is the whole law of

being. There is then a nameless satisfaction in passing on; which is the

virtual ideal of pain and mere willing. Death and change acquire a

tragic character when they invade a mind which is not ready for them in

all its parts, so that those elements in it which are still vigorous,

and would maintain somewhat longer their ideal identity, suffer violence

at the hands of the others, already mastered by decay and willing to be

self-destructive. Thus a man whose physiological complexion involves

more poignant emotion than his ideas can absorb—one who is

sentimental—will yearn for new objects that may explain, embody, and

focus his dumb feelings; and these objects, if art can produce them,

will relieve and glorify those feelings in the act of expressing them.

Catharsis is nothing more.

[Sidenote: Peace the triumph of spirit.]

There would be no pleasure in expressing pain, if pain were not

dominated through its expression. To know how just a cause we have for

grieving is already a consolation, for it is already a shift from

feeling to understanding. By such consideration of a passion, the

intellectual powers turn it into subject-matter to operate upon. All

utterance is a feat, all apprehension a discovery; and this intellectual

victory, sounding in the midst of emotional struggles, hushes some part

of their brute importunity. It is at once sublime and beneficent, like a

god stilling a tempest. Melancholy can in this way be the food of art;

and it is no paradox that such a material may be beautiful when a fit

form is imposed upon it, since a fit form turns anything into an

agreeable object; its beauty runs as deep as its fitness, and stops

where its adaptation to human nature begins to fail. Whatever can

interest may prompt to expression, as it may have satisfied curiosity;

and the mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a

truth, however unwelcome to the flesh, or discover an actual force,

however unfavourable to given interests. As meditation on death and on

life make equally for wisdom, so the expression of sorrow and joy make

equally for beauty. Meditation and expression are themselves congenial

activities with an intrinsic value which is not lessened if what they

deal with could have been abolished to advantage. If once it exists, we

may understand and interpret it; and this reaction will serve a double

purpose. At first, in its very act, it will suffuse and mollify the

unwelcome experience by another, digesting it, which is welcome; and

later, by the broader adjustment which it will bring into the mind, it

will help us to elude or confront the evils thus laid clearly before us.

Catharsis has no such effect as a sophistical optimism wishes to

attribute to it; it does not show us that evil is good, or that calamity

and crime are things to be grateful for: so forced an apology for evil

has nothing to do with tragedy or wisdom; it belongs to apologetics and

an artificial theodicy. Catharsis is rather the consciousness of how

evil evils are, and how besetting; and how possible goods lie between

and involve serious renunciations. To understand, to accept, and to use

the situation in which a mortal may find himself is the function of art

and reason. Such mastery is desirable in itself and for its fruits; it

does not make itself responsible for the chaos of goods and evils that

it supervenes upon. Whatever writhes in matter, art strives to give form

to; and however unfavourable the field may be for its activity, it does

what it can there, since no other field exists in which it may labour.

[Sidenote: Refinement is true strength.]

Sad music pleases the melancholy because it is sad and other men because

it is music. When a composer attempts to reproduce complex conflicts in

his score he will please complex or disordered spirits for expressing

their troubles, but other men only for the order and harmony he may have

brought out of that chaos. The chaos in itself will offend, and it is no

part of rational art to produce it. As well might a physician poison in

order to give an antidote, or maim in order to amputate. The subject

matter of art is life, life as it actually is; but the function of art

is to make life better. The depth to which an artist may find current

experience to be sunk in discord and confusion is not his special

concern; his concern is, in some measure, to lift experience out. The

more barbarous his age, the more drastic and violent must be his

operation. He will have to shout in a storm. His strength must needs, in

such a case, be very largely physical and his methods sensational. In a

gentler age he may grow nobler, and blood and thunder will no longer

seem impressive. Only the weak are obliged to be violent; the strong,

having all means at command, need not resort to the worst. Refined art

is not wanting in power if the public is refined also. And as

refinement comes only by experience, by comparison, by subordinating

means to ends and rejecting what hinders, it follows that a refined mind

will really possess the greater volume, as well as the subtler

discrimination. Its ecstasy without grimace, and its submission without

tears, will hold heaven and earth better together—and hold them better

apart—than could a mad imagination.

CHAPTER V

SPEECH AND SIGNIFICATION

[Sidenote: Sounds well fitted to be symbols.]

Music rationalises sound, but a more momentous rationalising of sound is

seen in language. Language is one of the most useful of things, yet the

greater part of it still remains (what it must all have been in the

beginning) useless and without ulterior significance. The musical side

of language is its primary and elementary side. Man is endowed with

vocal organs so plastic as to emit a great variety of delicately varied

sounds; and by good fortune his ear has a parallel sensibility, so that

much vocal expression can be registered and confronted by auditory

feeling. It has been said that man’s pre-eminence in nature is due to

his possessing hands; his modest participation in the ideal world may

similarly be due to his possessing tongue and ear. For when he finds

shouting and vague moaning after a while fatiguing, he can draw a new

pleasure from uttering all sorts of labial, dental, and gutteral sounds.

Their rhythms and oppositions can entertain him, and he can begin to use

his lingual gamut to designate the whole range of his perceptions and

passions.