Premeditation essential to art.
According to the popular and established distinction between art and
nature, the idea of Art (q.v.) only includes phenomena of which man is
deliberately the cause; while the idea of Nature includes all phenomena,
both in man and in the world outside him, which take place without
forethought or studied initiative of his own. Art, accordingly, means
every regulated operation or dexterity whereby we pursue ends which we
know beforehand; and it means nothing but such operations and
dexterities. What is true of art generally is of course also true of the
special group of the fine arts. One of the essential qualities of all
art is premeditation; and when Shelley talks of the skylark's profuse
strains of "unpremeditated art," he in effect lays emphasis on the fact
that it is only by a metaphor that he uses the word art in this case at
all; he calls attention to that which (if the songs of birds are as
instinctive as we suppose) precisely makes the difference between the
skylark's outpourings and his own. We are slow to allow the title of
fine art to natural eloquence, to charm or dignity of manner, to
delicacy and tact in social intercourse, and other such graces of life
and conduct, since, although in any given case they may have been
deliberately cultivated in early life, or even through ancestral
generations, they do not produce their full effect until they are so
ingrained as to have become unreflecting and spontaneous. When the
exigencies of a philosophic scheme lead some writers on aesthetics to
include such acts or traits of beautiful and expressive behaviour among
the deliberate artistic activities of mankind, we feel that an essential
distinction is being sacrificed to the exigencies of a system. That
distinction common parlance very justly observes, with its opposition of
"art" to "nature" and its phrase of "second nature" for those graces
which have become so habitual as to seem instinctive, whether originally
the result of discipline or not. When we see a person in all whose
ordinary movements there are freedom and beauty, we put down the charm
of these with good reason to inherited and inbred aptitudes of which the
person has never thought or long since ceased to think, and could not
still be thinking without spoiling the charm by self-consciousness; and
we call the result a gift of nature. But when we go on to notice that
the same person is beautifully and appropriately dressed, since we know
that it is impossible to dress without thinking of it, we put down the
charm of this to judicious forethought and calculation and call the
result a work of art.
The active and the passive pleasures of fine art.
The processes then of fine art, like those of all arts properly so
called, are premeditated, and the property of every fine art is to give
to the person exercising it a special kind of active pleasure, and a
special kind of passive or receptive pleasure to the person witnessing
the results of such exercise. This latter statement seems to imply that
there exist in human societies a separate class producing works of fine
art and another class enjoying them. Such an implication, in regard to
advanced societies, is near enough the truth to be theoretically
admitted (like the analogous assumption in political economy that there
exist separate classes of producers and consumers). In developed
communities the gifts and calling of the artist constitute in fact a
separate profession of the creators or purveyors of fine art, while the
rest of the community are its enjoyers or recipients. In the most
primitive societies, apparently, this cannot have been so, and we can go
back to an original or rudimentary stage of almost every fine art at
which the separation between a class of producers or performers and a
class of recipients hardly exists. Such an original or rudimentary stage
of the dramatic art is presented by children, who will occupy themselves
for ever with mimicry and make-believe for their own satisfaction, with
small regard or none to the presence or absence of witnesses. The
original or rudimentary type of the profession of imitative sculptors or
painters is the cave-dweller of prehistoric ages, who, when he rested
from his day's hunting, first took up the bone handle of his weapon, and
with a flint either carved it into the shape, or on its surface
scratched the outlines, of the animals of the chase. The original or
rudimentary type of the architect, considered not as a mere builder but
as an artist, is the savage who, when his tribe had taken to live in
tents or huts instead of caves, first arranged the skins and timbers of
his tent or hut in one way because it pleased his eye, rather than in
some other way which was as good for shelter. The original type of the
artificer or adorner of implements, considered in the same light, was
the other savage who first took it into his head to fashion his club or
spear in one way rather than another for the pleasure of the eye only
and not for any practical reason, and to ornament it with tufts or
markings. In none of these cases, it would seem, can the primitive
artist have had much reason for pleasing anybody but himself. Again, the
original or rudimentary type of lyric song and dancing arose when the
first reveller clapped hands and stamped or shouted in time, in honour
of his god, in commemoration of a victory, or in mere obedience to the
blind stirring of a rhythmic impulse within him. To some very remote and
solitary ancestral savage the presence or absence of witnesses at such a
display may in like manner have been indifferent; but very early in the
history of the race the primitive dancer and singer joined hands and
voices with others of his tribe, while others again sat apart and looked
on at the performance, and the rite thus became both choral and social.
A primitive type of the instrumental musician is the shepherd who first
notched a reed and drew sounds from it while his sheep were cropping.
The father of all artists in dress and personal adornment was the first
wild man who tattooed himself or bedecked himself with shells and
plumes. In both of these latter instances, it may be taken as certain,
the primitive artist had the motive of pleasing not himself only, but
his mate, or the female whom he desired to be his mate, and in the last
instance of all the further motive of impressing his fellow-tribesmen
and striking awe or envy into his enemies. The tendency of recent
speculation and research concerning the origins of art has been to
ascribe the primitive artistic activities of man less and less to
individual and solitary impulse, and more and more to social impulse and
the desire of sharing and communicating pleasure. (The writer who has
gone furthest in developing this view, and on grounds of the most
careful study of evidence, has been Dr Yrjo Hirn of Helsingfors.)
Whatever relative parts the individual and the social impulses may have
in fact played at the outset, it is clear that what any one can enjoy or
admire by himself, whether in the way of mimicry, of rhythmical
movements or utterances, of imitative or ornamental carving and drawing,
of the disposition and adornment of dwelling-places and utensils--the
same things, it is clear, others are able also to enjoy or admire with
him. And so, with the growth of societies, it came about that one class
of persons separated themselves and became the ministers or producers of
this kind of pleasures, while the rest became the persons ministered to,
the participators in or recipients of the pleasures. Artists are those
members of a society who are so constituted as to feel more acutely than
the rest certain classes of pleasures which all can feel in their
degree. By this fact of their constitution they are impelled to devote
their active powers to the production of such pleasures, to the making
or doing of some of those things which they enjoy so keenly when they
are made and done by others. At the same time the artist does not, by
assuming these ministering or creative functions, surrender his enjoying
or receptive functions. He continues to participate in the pleasures of
which he is himself the cause, and remains a conscious member of his own
public. The architect, sculptor, painter, are able respectively to
stand off from and appreciate the results of their own labours; the
singer enjoys the sound of his own voice, and the musician of his own
instrument; the poet, according to his temperament, furnishes the most
enthusiastic or the most fastidious reader for his own stanzas. Neither,
on the other hand, does the person who is a habitual recipient from
others of the pleasures of fine art forfeit the privilege of producing
them according to his capabilities, and of becoming, if he has the
power, an _amateur_ or occasional artist.
Pleasures of fine art disinterested.
Most of the common properties which have been recognized by consent as
peculiar to the group of fine arts will be found on examination to be
implied in, or deducible from, the one fundamental character generally
claimed for them, namely, that they exist independently of direct
practical necessity or utility. Let us take, first, a point relating to
the frame of mind of the recipient, as distinguished from the producer,
of the pleasures of fine art. It is an observation as old as Aristotle
that such pleasures differ from most other pleasures of experience in
that they are disinterested, in the sense that they are not such as
nourish a man's body nor add to his riches; they are not such as can
gratify him, when he receives them, by the sense of advantage or
superiority over his fellow-creatures; they are not such as one human
being can in any sense receive exclusively from the object which bestows
them. Thus it is evidently characteristic of a beautiful building that
its beauty cannot be monopolized, but can be seen and admired by the
inhabitants of a whole city and by all visitors for all generations. The
same thing is true of a picture or a statue, except in so far as an
individual possessor may choose to keep such a possession to himself, in
which case his pride in exclusive ownership is a sentiment wholly
independent of his pleasure in artistic contemplation. Similarly, music
is composed to be sung or played for the enjoyment of many at a time, and
for such enjoyment a hundred years hence as much as to-day. Poetry is
written to be read by all readers for ever who care for the ideas and
feelings of the poet, and can apprehend the meaning and melody of his
language. Hence, though we can speak of a class of the producers of fine
art, we cannot speak of a class of its consumers, only of its recipients
or enjoyers. If we consider other pleasures which might seem to be
analogous to those of fine art, but to which common consent yet declines
to allow that character, we shall see that one reason is that such
pleasures are not in their nature thus disinterested. Thus the sense of
smell and taste have pleasures of their own like the senses of sight and
hearing, and pleasures neither less poignant nor very much less capable
of fine graduation and discrimination than those. Why, then, is the title
of fine art not claimed for any skill in arranging and combining them?
Why are there no recognized arts of savours and scents corresponding in
rank to the arts of forms, colours and sounds--or at least none among
Western nations, for in Japan, it seems, there is a recognized and finely
regulated social art of the combination and succession of perfumes? An
answer commonly given is that sight and hearing are intellectual and
therefore higher senses, that through them we have our avenues to all
knowledge and all ideas of things outside us; while taste and smell are
unintellectual and therefore lower senses, through which few such
impressions find their way to us as help to build up our knowledge and
our ideas. Perhaps a more satisfactory reason why there are no fine arts
of taste and smell--or let us in deference to Japanese modes leave out
smell, and say of taste only--is this, that savours yield only private
pleasures, which it is not possible to build up into separate and durable
schemes such that every one may have the benefit of them, and such as
cannot be monopolized or used up. If against this it is contended that
what the programme of a performance is in the musical art, the same is a
_menu_ in the culinary, and that practically it is no less possible to
serve up a thousand times and to a thousand different companies the same
dinner than the same symphony, we must fall back upon that still more
fundamental form of the distinction between the aesthetic and
non-aesthetic bodily senses, upon which the physiological psychologists
of the English school lay stress. We must say that the pleasures of
taste cannot be pleasures of fine art, because their enjoyment is too
closely associated with the most indispensable and the most strictly
personal of utilities, eating and drinking. To pass from these lower
pleasures to the highest; consider the nature of the delight derived from
the contemplation, by the person who is their object, of the signs and
manifestations of love. That at least is a beautiful experience; why is
the pleasure which it affords not an artistic pleasure either? Why, in
order to receive an artistic pleasure from human signs and manifestations
of this kind, are we compelled to go to the theatre and see them
exhibited in favour of a third person who is not really their object any
more than ourselves? This is so, for one reason, evidently, because of
the difference between art and nature. Not to art, but to nature and
life, belongs love where it is really felt, with its attendant train of
vivid hopes, fears, passions and contingencies. To art belongs love
displayed where it is not really felt; and in this sphere, along with
reality and spontaneousness of the display, and along with its momentous
bearings, there disappear all those elements of pleasure in its
contemplation which are not disinterested--the elements of personal
exultation and self-congratulation, the pride of exclusive possession or
acceptance, all these emotions, in short, which are summed up in the
lover's triumphant monosyllable, "Mine." Thus, from the lowest point of
the scale to the highest, we may observe that the element of personal
advantage or monopoly in human gratifications seems to exclude, them from
the kingdom of fine art. The pleasures of fine art, so far as concerns
their passive or receptive part, seem to define themselves as pleasures
of gratified contemplation, but of such contemplation only when it is
disinterested--which is simply another way of saying, when it is
unconcerned with ideas of utility.
An objection and its answer.
Modern speculation has tended in some degree to modify and obscure this
old and established view of the pleasures of fine art by urging that the
hearer or spectator is not after all so free from self-interest as he
seems; that in the act of artistic contemplation he experiences an
enhancement or expansion of his being which is in truth a gain of the
egoistic kind; that in witnessing a play, for instance, a large part of
his enjoyment consists in sympathetically identifying himself with the
successful lover or the virtuous hero. All this may be true, but does
not really affect the argument, since at the same time he is well aware
that every other spectator or auditor present may be similarly engaged
with himself. At most the objection only requires us to define a little
more closely, and to say that the satisfactions of the ego excluded from
among the pleasures of fine art are not these ideal, sympathetic,
indirect satisfactions, which every one can share together, but only
those which arise from direct, private and incommunicable advantage to
the individual.
Fine arts cannot be practised by rule and precept.
Next, let us consider another generally accepted observation concerning
the nature of the fine arts, and one, this time, relating to the
disposition and state of mind of the practising artist himself. While
for success in other arts it is only necessary to learn their rules and
to apply them until practice gives facility, in the fine arts, it is
commonly and justly said, rules and their application will carry but a
little way towards success. All that can depend on rules, on knowledge,
and on the application of knowledge by practice, the artist must indeed
acquire, and the acquisition is often very complicated and laborious.
But outside of and beyond such acquisitions he must trust to what is
called genius or imagination, that is, to the spontaneous working
together of an incalculably complex group of faculties, reminiscences,
preferences, emotions, instincts in his constitution. This
characteristic of the activities of the artist is a direct consequence
or corollary of the fundamental fact that the art he practices is
independent of utility. A utilitarian end is necessarily a determinate
and prescribed end, and to every end which is determinate and prescribed
there must be one road which is the best. Skill in any useful art means
knowing practically, by rules and the application of rules, the best
road to the particular ends of that art. Thus the farmer, the engineer,
the carpenter, the builder so far as he is not concerned with the look
of his buildings, the weaver so far as he is not concerned with the
designing of the patterns which he weaves, possesses each his peculiar
skill, but a skill to which fixed problems are set, and which, if it
indulges in new inventions and combinations at all, can indulge them
only for the sake of an improved solution of those particular problems.
The solution once found, the invention once made, its rules can be
written down, or at any rate its practice can be imparted to others who
will apply it in their turn. Whereas no man can write down, in a way
that others can act upon, how Beethoven conquered unknown kingdoms in
the world of harmony, or how Rembrandt turned the aspects of gloom,
squalor and affliction into pictures as worthy of contemplation as those
into which the Italians before him had turned the aspects of spiritual
exaltation and shadowless day. The reason why the operations of the
artist thus differ from the operations of the ordinary craftsman or
artificer is that his ends, being ends other than useful, are not
determinate nor fixed as theirs are. He has large liberty to choose his
own problems, and may solve each of them in a thousand different ways
according to the prompting of his own ordering or creating instincts.
The musical composer has the largest liberty of all. Having learned what
is learnable in his art, having mastered the complicated and laborious
rules of musical form, having next determined the particular class of
the work which he is about to compose, he has then before him the whole
inexhaustible world of appropriate successions and combinations of
emotional sound. He is merely directed and not fettered, in the case of
song, cantata, oratorio or opera, by the sense of the words which he has
to set. The value of the result depends absolutely on his possessing or
failing to possess powers which can neither be trained in nor
communicated to any man. And this double freedom, alike from practical
service and from the representation of definite objects, is what makes
music in a certain sense the typical fine art, or art of arts.
Architecture shares one-half of this freedom. It has not to copy or
represent natural objects; for this service it calls in sculpture to its
aid; but architecture is without the other half of freedom altogether.
The architect has a sphere of liberty in the disposition of his masses,
lines, colours, alternations of light and shadow, of plain and
ornamented surface, and the rest; but upon this sphere he can only enter
on condition that he at the same time fulfils the strict practical task
of supplying the required accommodation, and obeys the strict mechanical
necessities imposed by the laws of weight, thrust, support, resistance
and other properties of solid matter. The sculptor again, the painter,
the poet, has each in like manner his sphere of necessary facts, rules
and conditions corresponding to the nature of his task. The sculptor
must be intimately versed both in the surface aspects and the inner
mechanism of the human frame alike in rest and motion, and in the rules
and conditions for its representation in solid form; the painter in a
much more extended range of natural facts and appearances, and the rules
and conditions for representing them on a plane surface; the poet's art
of words has its own not inconsiderable basis of positive and
disciplined acquisition. So far as rules, precepts, formulas and other
communicable laws or secrets can carry the artist, so far also the
spectator can account for, analyse, and, so to speak, tabulate the
effects of his art. But the essential character of the artist's
operation, its very bloom and virtue, lies in those parts of it which
fall outside this range of regulation on the one hand and analysis on
the other. His merit varies according to the felicity with which he is
able, in that region, to exercise his free choice and frame his
individual ideal, and according to the tenacity with which he strives to
grasp and realize his choice, or to attain perfection according to that
ideal.