THE PURPOSE OF ART
We have analyzed the mental functions which are most powerful in the
audience of the photoplay. We studied the mere act of perceiving the
pictures on the screen, of perceiving their apparently plastic
character, their depth, and their apparent movements. We turned then to
those psychical acts by which we respond to the perceived impressions.
In the foreground stood the act of attention, but then we followed the
play of associations, of memory, of imagination, of suggestion, and,
most important of all, we traced the distribution of interest. Finally
we spoke of the feelings and emotions with which we accompany the play.
Certainly all this does not exhaust the mental reactions which arise in
our mind when we witness a drama of the film. We have not spoken, for
instance, of the action which the plot of the story or its social
background may start in our soul. The suffering of the poor, the
injustice by which the weak may be forced into the path of crime, and a
hundred other social motives may be impressed on us by the photoplay;
thoughts about human society, about laws and reforms, about human
differences and human fates, may fill our mind. Yet this is not one of
the characteristic functions of the moving pictures. It is a side effect
which may set in just as it may result from reading the newspapers or
from hearing of practical affairs in life. But in all our discussions we
have also left out another mental process, namely, esthetic emotion. We
did speak about the emotions which the plot of the play stirs up. We
discussed the feelings in which we sympathize with the characters of the
scene, in which we share their suffering and their joy; and we also
spoke about that other group of emotions by which we take a mental
attitude toward the behaviour of the persons in the play. But there is
surely a third group of feelings and emotions which we have not yet
considered, namely, those of our joy in the play, our esthetic
satisfaction or dissatisfaction. We have omitted them intentionally,
because the study of this group of feelings involves a discussion of the
esthetic process as such, and we have left all the esthetic problems for
this second part of our investigation.
If we disregard this pleasure or displeasure in the beauty of the
photoplay and reflect only on the processes of perception, attention,
interest, memory, imagination, suggestion, and emotion which we have
analyzed, we see that we everywhere come to the same result. One general
principle seemed to control the whole mental mechanism of the spectator,
or rather the relation between the mental mechanism and the pictures on
the screen. We recognized that in every case the objective world of
outer events had been shaped and molded until it became adjusted to the
subjective movements of the mind. The mind develops memory ideas and
imaginative ideas; in the moving pictures they become reality. The mind
concentrates itself on a special detail in its act of attention; and in
the close-up of the moving pictures this inner state is objectified. The
mind is filled with emotions; and by means of the camera the whole
scenery echoes them. Even in the most objective factor of the mind, the
perception, we find this peculiar oscillation. We perceive the movement;
and yet we perceive it as something which has not its independent
character as an outer world process, because our mind has built it up
from single pictures rapidly following one another. We perceive things
in their plastic depth; and yet again the depth is not that of the outer
world. We are aware of its unreality and of the pictorial flatness of
the impressions.
In every one of these features the contrast to the mental impressions
from the real stage is obvious. There in the theater we know at every
moment that we see real plastic men before us, that they are really in
motion when they walk and talk and that, on the other hand, it is our
own doing and not a part of the play when our attention turns to this or
that detail, when our memory brings back events of the past, when our
imagination surrounds them with fancies and emotions. And here, it
seems, we have a definite starting point for an esthetic comparison. If
we raise the unavoidable question--how does the photoplay compare with
the drama?--we seem to have sufficient material on hand to form an
esthetic judgment. The verdict, it appears, can hardly be doubtful. Must
we not say art is imitation of nature? The drama can show us on the
stage a true imitation of real life. The scenes proceed just as they
would happen anywhere in the outer world. Men of flesh and blood with
really plastic bodies stand before us. They move like any moving body in
our surroundings. Moreover those happenings on the stage, just like the
events in life, are independent of our subjective attention and memory
and imagination. They go their objective course. Thus the theater comes
so near to its purpose of imitating the world of men that the comparison
with the photoplay suggests almost a disastrous failure of the art of
the film. The color of the world has disappeared, the persons are dumb,
no sound reaches our ear. The depth of the scene appears unreal, the
motion has lost its natural character. Worst of all, the objective
course of events is falsified; our own attention and memory and
imagination have shifted and remodeled the events until they look as
nature could never show them. What we really see can hardly be called
any longer an imitation of the world, such as the theater gives us.
When the graphophone repeats a Beethoven symphony, the voluminousness of
the orchestra is reduced to a thin feeble surface sound, and no one
would accept this product of the disk and the diaphragm as a full
substitute for the performance of the real orchestra. But, after all,
every instrument is actually represented, and we can still discriminate
the violins and the celli and the flutes in exactly the same order and
tonal and rhythmic relation in which they appear in the original. The
graphophone music appears, therefore, much better fitted for replacing
the orchestra than the moving pictures are to be a substitute for the
theater. There all the essential elements seem conserved; here just the
essentials seem to be lost and the aim of the drama to imitate life with
the greatest possible reality seems hopelessly beyond the flat,
colorless pictures of the photoplay. Still more might we say that the
plaster of Paris cast is a fair substitute for the marble statue. It
shares with the beautiful marble work the same form and imitates the
body of the living man just as well as the marble statue. Moreover,
this product of the mechanical process has the same white color which
the original work of the sculptor possesses. Hence we must acknowledge
it as a fair approach to the plastic work of art. In the same way the
chromo print gives the essentials of the oil painting. Everywhere the
technical process has secured a reproduction of the work of art which
sounds or looks almost like the work of the great artist, and only the
technique of the moving pictures, which so clearly tries to reproduce
the theater performance, stands so utterly far behind the art of the
actor. Is not an esthetic judgment of rejection demanded by good taste
and sober criticism? We may tolerate the photoplay because, by the
inexpensive technical method which allows an unlimited multiplication of
the performances, it brings at least a shadow of the theater to the
masses who cannot afford to see real actors. But the cultivated mind
might better enjoy plaster of Paris casts and chromo prints and
graphophone music than the moving pictures with their complete failure
to give us the essentials of the real stage.
We have heard this message, or if it was not expressed in clear words it
surely lingered for a long while in the minds of all those who had a
serious relation to art. It probably still prevails today among many,
even if they appreciate the more ambitious efforts of the
photoplaywrights in the most recent years. The philanthropic pleasure in
the furnishing of cheap entertainment and the recognition that a certain
advance has recently been made seem to alleviate the esthetic situation,
but the core of public opinion remains the same; the moving pictures are
no real art.
And yet all this arguing and all this hasty settling of a most complex
problem is fundamentally wrong. It is based on entirely mistaken ideas
concerning the aims and purposes of art. If those errors were given up
and if the right understanding of the moving pictures were to take hold
of the community, nobody would doubt that the chromo print and the
graphophone and the plaster cast are indeed nothing but inexpensive
substitutes for art with many essential artistic elements left out, and
therefore ultimately unsatisfactory to a truly artistic taste. But
everybody would recognize at the same time that the relation of the
photoplay to the theater is a completely different one and that the
difference counts entirely in favor of the moving pictures. _They are
not and ought never to be imitations of the theater. They can never give
the esthetic values of the theater; but no more can the theater give the
esthetic values of the photoplay._ With the rise of the moving pictures
has come an entirely new independent art which must develop its own life
conditions. The moving pictures would indeed be a complete failure if
that popular theory of art which we suggested were right. But that
theory is wrong from beginning to end, and it must not obstruct the way
to a better insight which recognizes that the stage and the screen are
as fundamentally different as sculpture and painting, or as lyrics and
music. _The drama and the photoplay are two coördinated arts, each
perfectly valuable in itself._ The one cannot replace the other; and the
shortcomings of the one as against the other reflect only the fact that
the one has a history of fifteen years while the other has one of five
thousand. This is the thesis which we want to prove, and the first step
to it must be to ask: what is the aim of art if not the imitation of
reality?
But can the claim that art imitates nature or rather that imitation is
the essence of art be upheld if we seriously look over the field of
artistic creations? Would it not involve the expectation that the
artistic value would be the greater, the more the ideal of imitation is
approached? A perfect imitation which looks exactly like the original
would give us the highest art. Yet every page in the history of art
tells us the opposite. We admire the marble statue and we despise as
inartistic the colored wax figures. There is no difficulty in producing
colored wax figures which look so completely like real persons that the
visitor at an exhibit may easily be deceived and may ask information
from the wax man leaning over the railing. On the other hand what a
tremendous distance between reality and the marble statue with its
uniform white surface! It could never deceive us and as an imitation it
would certainly be a failure. Is it different with a painting? Here the
color may be quite similar to the original, but unlike the marble it has
lost its depth and shows us nature on a flat surface. Again we could
never be deceived, and it is not the painter's ambition to make us
believe for a moment that reality is before us. Moreover neither the
sculptor nor the painter gives us less valuable work when they offer us
a bust or a painted head only instead of the whole figure; and yet we
have never seen in reality a human body ending at the chest. We admire a
fine etching hardly less than a painting. Here we have neither the
plastic effect of the sculpture nor the color of the painting. The
essential features of the real model are left out. As an imitation it
would fail disastrously. What is imitated in a lyric poem? Through more
than two thousand years we have appreciated the works of the great
dramatists who had their personages speak in the rhythms of metrical
language. Every iambic verse is a deviation from reality. If they had
tried to imitate nature Antigone and Hamlet would have spoken the prose
of daily life. Does a beautiful arch or dome or tower of a building
imitate any part of reality? Is its architectural value dependent upon
the similarity to nature? Or does the melody or harmony in music offer
an imitation of the surrounding world?
Wherever we examine without prejudice the mental effects of true works
of art in literature or music, in painting or sculpture, in decorative
arts or architecture, we find that the central esthetic value is
directly opposed to the spirit of imitation. A work of art may and must
start from something which awakens in us the interests of reality and
which contains traits of reality, and to that extent it cannot avoid
some imitation. But _it becomes art just in so far as it overcomes
reality, stops imitating and leaves the imitated reality behind it_. It
is artistic just in so far as it does not imitate reality but changes
the world, selects from it special features for new purposes, remodels
the world and is through this truly creative. To imitate the world is a
mechanical process; to transform the world so that it becomes a thing of
beauty is the purpose of art. The highest art may be furthest removed
from reality.
We have not even the right to say that this process of selection from
reality means that we keep the beautiful elements of it and simply omit
and eliminate the ugly ones. This again is not in the least
characteristic of art, however often the popular mind may couple this
superficial idea with that other one, that art consists of imitation. It
is not true that the esthetic value depends upon the beauty of the
selected material. The men and women whom Rembrandt painted were not
beautiful persons. The ugliest woman may be the subject of a most
beautiful painting. The so-called beautiful landscape may, of course, be
material for a beautiful landscape painting, but the chances are great
that such a pretty vista will attract the dilettante and not the real
artist who knows that the true value of his painting is independent of
the prettiness of the model. He knows that a muddy country road or a
dirty city street or a trivial little pond may be the material for
immortal pictures. He who writes literature does not select scenes of
life which are beautiful in themselves, scenes which we would have liked
to live through, full of radiant happiness and joy; he does not
eliminate from his picture of life that which is disturbing to the peace
of the soul, repellant and ugly and immoral. On the contrary, all the
great works of literature have shown us dark shades of life beside the
light ones. They have spoken of unhappiness and pain as often as of joy.
We have suffered with our poets, and in so far as the musical composer
expresses the emotions of life the great symphonies have been full of
pathos and tragedy. True art has always been selection, but never
selection of the beautiful elements in outer reality.
But if the esthetic value is independent of the imitative approach to
reality and independent of the elimination of unpleasant elements or of
the collection and addition of pleasant traits, what does the artist
really select and combine in his creation? How does he shape the world?
How does nature look when it has been remolded by the artistic
temperament and imagination? What is left of the real landscape when the
engraver's needle has sketched it? What is left of the tragic events in
real life when the lyric poet has reshaped them in a few rhymed stanzas?
Perhaps we may bring the characteristic features of the process most
easily to recognition if we contrast them with another kind of reshaping
process. The same landscape which the artist sketches, the same historic
event which the lyric poet interprets in his verses, may be grasped by
the human mind in a wholly different way. We need only think of the
scientific work of the scholar. He too may have the greatest interest in
the landscape which the engraver has rendered: the tree on the edge of
the rock, torn by the storm, and at the foot of the cliff the sea with
its whitecapped waves. He too is absorbed by the tragic death of a
Lincoln. But what is the scholar's attitude? Is it his aim to reproduce
the landscape or the historic event? Certainly not. The meaning of
science and scholarship and of knowledge in general would be completely
misunderstood if their aim were thought to be simply the repeating of
the special facts in reality. The scientist tries to explain the facts,
and even his description is meant to serve his explanation. He turns to
that tree on the cliff with the interest of studying its anatomical
structure. He examines with a microscope the cells of those tissues in
the branches and leaves in order that he may explain the growth of the
tree and its development from the germ. The storm which whips its
branches is to him a physical process for which he seeks the causes, far
removed. The sea is to him a substance which he resolves in his
laboratory into its chemical elements and which he explains by tracing
the geological changes on the surface of the earth.
In short, the scientist is not interested in that particular object
only, but in its connections with the total universe. He explains the
event by a reference to general laws which are effective everywhere.
Every single growth and movement is linked by him with the endless chain
of causes and effects. He surely reshapes the experience in connecting
every single impression with the totality of events, in finding the
general in the particular, in transforming the given facts into the
scientific scheme of an atomistic universe. It is not different from the
historical event. To the scholarly historian the death of Lincoln is
meaningless if it is not seen in its relation to and connection with the
whole history of the Civil War and if this again is not understood as
the result of the total development of the United States. And who can
understand the growth of the United States, unless the whole of modern
history is seen as a background and unless the ideas of state philosophy
which have built up the American democracy are grasped in their
connection with the whole story of European political thought in
preceding centuries? The scholar may turn to natural or to social
events, to waves or trees or men: every process and action in the world
gains interest for him only by being connected with other things and
events. Every point which he marks is the nodal point for numberless
relations. To grasp a fact in the sense of scholarly knowledge means to
see it in all its connections, and the work of the scholar is not simply
to hold the fact as he becomes aware of it but to trace the connections
and to supplement them by his thought until a completed system of
interrelated facts in science or in history is established.
Now we are better prepared to recognize the characteristic function of
the artist. He is doing exactly the opposite of what the scholar is
aiming at. Both are changing and remolding the given thing or event in
the interest of their ideal aims. But the ideal aim of beauty and art is
in complete contrast to the ideal aim of scholarly knowledge. The
scholar, we see, establishes connections by which the special thing
loses all character of separateness. He binds it to all the remainder of
the physical and social universe. The artist, on the contrary, cuts off
every possible connection. He puts his landscape into a frame so that
every possible link with the surrounding world is severed. He places
his statue on a pedestal so that it cannot possibly step into the room
around it. He makes his persons speak in verse so that they cannot
possibly be connected with the intercourse of the day. He tells his
story so that nothing can happen after the last chapter. _The work of
art shows us the things and events perfectly complete in themselves,
freed from all connections which lead beyond their own limits, that is,
in perfect isolation._
Both the truth which the scholar discovers and the beauty which the
artist creates are valuable; but it is now clear that the value in both
cases lies not in the mere repetition of the offerings of reality. There
is no reason whatever for appreciating a mere imitation or repetition of
that which exists in the world. Neither the scholar nor the artist could
do better than nature or history. The value in both cases lies just in
the deviation from reality in the service of human desires and ideals.
The desire and ideal of the scholar is to give us an interconnected
world in which we understand everything by its being linked with
everything else; and the desire and ideal of the artist in every
possible art is to give us things which are freed from the connection
of the world and which stand before us complete in themselves. The
things of the outer world have thousandfold ties with nature and
history. An object becomes beautiful when it is delivered from these
ties, and in order to secure this result we must take it away from the
background of reality and reproduce it in such a form that it is
unmistakably different from the real things which are enchained by the
causes and effects of nature.
Why does this satisfy us? Why is it valuable to have a part of nature or
life liberated from all connection with the world? Why does it make us
happy to see anything in its perfect isolation, an isolation which real
life seldom offers and which only art can give in complete perfection?
The motives which lead us to value the product of the scholar are easily
recognized. He aims toward connection. He reshapes the world until it
appears connected, because that helps us to foresee the effects of every
event and teaches us to master nature so that we can use it for our
practical achievements. But why do we appreciate no less the opposite
work which the artist is doing? Might we not answer that this enjoyment
of the artistic work results from the fact that only in contact with an
isolated experience can we feel perfectly happy? Whatever we meet in
life or nature awakes in us desires, impulses to action, suggestions and
questions which must be answered. Life is a continuous striving. Nothing
is an end in itself and therefore nothing is a source of complete rest.
Everything is a stimulus to new wishes, a source of new uneasiness which
longs for new satisfaction in the next and again the next thing. Life
pushes us forward. Yet sometimes a touch of nature comes to us; we are
stirred by a thrill of life which awakens plenty of impulses but which
offers satisfaction to all these impulses in itself. It does not lead
beyond itself but contains in its own midst everything which answers the
questions, which brings the desires to rest.
Wherever we meet such an offering of nature, we call it beautiful. We
speak of the beautiful landscape, of the beautiful face. And wherever we
meet it in life, we speak of love, of friendship, of peace, of harmony.
The word harmony may even cover both nature and life. Wherever it
happens that every line and every curve and every color and every
movement in the landscape is so harmonious with all the others that
every suggestion which one stirs up is satisfied by another, there it is
perfect and we are completely happy in it. In the life relations of love
and friendship and peace, there is again this complete harmony of
thought and feeling and will, in which every desire is satisfied. If our
own mind is in such flawless harmony, we feel the true happiness which
crowns our life. Such harmony, in which every part is the complete
fulfillment of that which the other parts demand, when nothing is
suggested which is not fulfilled in the midst of the same experience,
where nothing points beyond and everything is complete in the offering
itself, must be a source of inexhaustible happiness. To remold nature
and life so that it offers such complete harmony in itself that it does
not point beyond its own limits but is an ultimate unity through the
harmony of its parts: this is the aim of the isolation which the artist
alone achieves. That restful happiness which the beautiful landscape or
the harmonious life relation can furnish us in blessed instants of our
struggling life is secured as a joy forever when the painter or the
sculptor, the dramatist or the poet, the composer or the
photoplaywright, recomposes nature and life and shows us a unity which
does not lead beyond itself but is in itself perfectly harmonious.