Chapter XIII: Art and the æsthetic Experience (2)

ART AS VICARIOUS EXPERIENCE. The drama, art, and painting are, in general, ways by which we can vicariously experience the emotions of others. All of the expressive arts are made possible by the fundamental psychological fact that human beings give certain instinctive and habitual signs of emotion and instinctively respond to them. In consequence, through art experience may be immeasurably broadened, deepened, and mellowed. Through the medium of art, modes of life long past away can leave their imperishable and living mementos. Dante opens to the citizen of the twentieth century the mind and imagination of the Middle Ages. A Grecian urn can arouse, at least to a Keats, the whole stilled magic of the Greek spirit. And not only can we live through the life and emotion of times long dead, but the fiction and drama and poetry of our own day permit us to enter into realms of experience which in extent and variety would not be possible to one man. Indeed, the possibility of vicariously enlarging experience is one of the chief appeals of art. We cannot all be rovers, but we can have in reading Masefield a pungent sense of romantic open spaces, the salt winds, the perilous motion or the broad calm of the sea. We feel something of the same urgency as that of the author when we read:

"I must go down to the seas again, the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a gray mist on the sea's face and a gray dawn breaking."[2]

[Footnote 2: Masefield: _Sea-Fever_.]

Art opens up wide avenues of possibility; it releases us from the limitations to which a particular mode of life, an accidental niche in a business or profession has committed us. It enables us vividly to experience and sympathetically to appreciate the lives which are led by other men, and in which something in our own personalities could have found fulfillment.

While the objects of art thus broaden our experience by their precise and contagious communication of emotion, they may also express ideas. Thus a play may have a message, a poem a vision, a painting an allegory. Art is both at an advantage and at a disadvantage in the communication of ideas. Ideas, if they are to be accurately conveyed, should be devoid of emotional flourish, and presented with telegraphic directness and precision. They should have the clarity of formulas, rather than the distracting array and atmosphere of form. But ideas presented in the persuasive garb of beauty, gain in their hold over men what they lose in precision. Thus an eloquent orator, a touching letter, a vivid poem, may do more than volumes of the most definitive and convincing logic to insinuate an idea into men's minds. Compare in effectiveness the most thoroughgoing treatise on the status of the agricultural laborer with the stirring momentum of Edwin Markham's" The Man With the Hoe":

"Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not, and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

"Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power,
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the Dream he dreamed who shaped the suns,
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this--
More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed--
More filled with signs and portents for the soul--
More fraught with menace to the universe."

An idea clothed with such music and passion is an incomparably effective means of arousing a response. It is this which makes art so valuable an instrument of propaganda. People will respond actively to ideas set forth with fervor by a Tolstoy or an Ibsen who would be left cold by the flat and erudite accuracy of a volume on economics. And the confirmed Platonist is made so perhaps less by the convincingness of Plato's logic, than by the inevitable and irrefutable grace of his dramatic art.

There is, for certain persons educated in the arts, a satisfaction that is neither sensuous nor emotional, but intellectual. These come to discriminate form with the abstract though warm interest of the expert. The well-informed concert-goer begins to appreciate beauties hidden to the uninitiate. He notes with eager anticipation the technical genius of a composition as it unfolds, admiring the craft and skill as well as the vision of the artist. In extreme cases this may, of course, degenerate into mere pedantry. But at its best, it is the satisfaction of the man who, having a keen eye for beauty, is all the more solicitous for its accurate realization. The satisfactions of the connoisseur are merely a refinement of less sophisticated forms of appreciation. To appreciate the bare sounds of music, or the vividness of color in a painting is the prelude to more discriminating tastes. It is impossible for most men to have in all the arts expert judgment, but the ability to be able to discriminate with authority the technical achievements of a work of genius, while it does not supplant the emotional and sense satisfaction derived from the arts, nevertheless enhances them.

ART AND ÆSTHETIC EXPERIENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER. The creative activity which is, to a peculiar extent, the artist's, is sought and practiced to some degree by all men. Genius is rare, but talent of a minor sort is frequent. In the playing of a musical instrument, in the practice of a handicraft, in the cultivation of a garden, ordinary men in modern society find an outlet for invention, craftsmanship, and imagination. To give this joy of creation, in smaller or larger measure, to all men is to promote social happiness. In the discussion of instinct it was pointed out that men come nearest to attaining happiness when they are doing what is their bent by original nature, when they are acting out of sheer love of the activity rather than from compulsion. And since all men possess, although in moderate degree, the creative impulse, to give this impulse a chance is a distinct social good.

The employment of the creative imagination demands both leisure and training. Leisure is needed because, in the routine activities of industry, men's actions are determined not by their imagination, but by the immediacies of practical demands. There may be, as Helen Marot suggests, a possibility of a wide utilization of the creative impulse in industry. But a large part of industrial life must of necessity remain routine. In consequence, during their leisure hours alone, can men find free scope for some form of æsthetic interest and activity. The second requisite is training. Even the poor player of an instrument can derive some pleasure from his performance. And, under the accidents of economic and social circumstance, many a flower may really be born to blush unseen through the fact that its talents receive no opportunity. The occasional "discovery" by a wealthy man of a genius in the slums, indicates how a more liberal and general provision of training in the arts might redound to the general good. And a more widespread endowment of training in the fine arts, if it did not produce many geniuses, might at least produce a number of competent painters and musicians, who, in the practice of their skill, during their leisure, would derive considerable and altogether wholesome pleasure.

While high æsthetic capacity may be lacking in most people, æsthetic appreciation is widely diffused, and the education of taste and the growth in appreciation of the arts have been marked. The museums of art in our large cities report a constantly increasing attendance, both of visitors to the galleries and attendants at lectures. And the crowds which regularly attend musical programs of a sustainedly high character in many cities, winter and summer, are evidence of how widespread and eager is appreciation of the fine arts. In the Scandinavian countries and in Germany one of the most remarkable social phenomena has been the growth of a widely supported people's theater movement, in which there has been consistent support of the highest type of operas and plays.

ART AS AN INDUSTRY. The fact that objects of art are themselves immediate satisfactions and supply human wants, makes their provision for large numbers an important social enterprise. Certain forms of art, therefore, become highly industrialized. The provision of the objects of art becomes a profitable business, as it is also made possible only by a large economic outlay. Tolstoy in his _What is Art?_ brings out strikingly the economic basis of artistic enterprises in contemporary society:

For the support of art in Russia [1898], the government grants millions of roubles in subsidies to academies, conservatories, and theatres. In France, twenty million francs are assigned for art, and similar grants are made in Germany and England.

In every large town enormous buildings are erected for museums, academies, conservatories, dramatic schools, and for performances and concerts. Hundreds of thousands of workmen--carpenters, masons, painters, joiners, paperhangers, tailors, hairdressers, jewelers, molders, type-setters--spend their whole lives in hard labor to satisfy the demands of art, so that hardly any other department of human activity, except the military, consumes so much energy as this.

Not only is enormous labor spent on this activity, but in it, as in war, the very lives of men are sacrificed. Hundreds of thousands of people devote their lives from childhood to learning to twirl their legs rapidly (dancers), or to touch notes and strings very rapidly (musicians) or to turn every phrase inside out and find a rhyme for every word.[1]

[Footnote 1: Tolstoy: _What is Art?_ pp. 1-2 (written in 1898).]

Tolstoy's point in thus emphasizing the immense energies devoted to artistic enterprises is to lead us to consider what is the end of all this labor. He points out scathingly the ugliness, frivolity, and crudity of much that passes for drama in the theater, for music in the concert hall, and for literature between covers. He pleads for a simple art that shall express with sincerity the genuine emotions of the great mass of men.

Whatever be our estimate of Tolstoy's sweeping condemnation of so much of what has come to be regarded as classic beauty, the point he makes about the commercialization of art is incontrovertible. If art is an industry, the good is determined, as it were, by popular vote. The many must be pleased rather than the discriminating. While, as has been noted, æsthetic appreciation is fairly general, appreciation of the subtler forms of art requires training. The glaring, the conspicuous, the broad effect, is more likely to win rapid popular approval than the subtle, the quiet, and the fragile. That taste is readily educable is true. But when immediate profits are the end, one cannot pause to educate the public. And publishing and the theater are two conspicuous instances of the conflicts that not infrequently arise between standards of economic return and standards of æsthetic merit. Even where there is no deliberate selection of the worse rather than the better, commercial standards operate to put the novel in art at a discount. As already pointed out, we tend to appreciate forms and ideas to which we are accustomed. In consequence, where commercial demands make immediate widespread appreciation necessary, the untried, the odd, the radical innovation in music, literature, or drama, is a questionable venture. There are notable instances of works which, though eventually recognized as great, had to go begging at first for a publisher or a producer. This was the case with some of Meredith's earlier novels; later Meredith, as a publisher's reader, turned down some of Shaw. The same inhospitality met some of the plays of Ibsen and some of the symphonies of Tschaikowsky.

ART AND MORALS. Attention has already been called to the fact that objects of art are powerful vehicles for social propaganda. Indeed some works become famous less for their intrinsic beauty than for their moral force.[1] The effectiveness of art forms as instruments of propaganda lies in the fact, previously noted, that the ideas presented, with all the accouterments of color, form, and movement, are incomparably effective in stimulating passion; ideas thus aroused in the beholder have the vivid momentum of emotion to sustain them. There is only rhetorical exaggeration in the saying, "Let me sing a country's songs, and I care not who makes its laws." Plato was one of the first to recognize how influential art could be in influencing men's actions and attitudes. So keenly did he realize its possible influence, that in constructing his ideal state he provided for the rigid regulation of all artistic production by the governing power, and the exile of all poets. He felt deeply how insinuatingly persuasive poets could become with their dangerous "beautiful lies." Artists have, indeed, not infrequently been revolutionaries, at least in the sense that the world which they so ecstatically pictured makes even the best of actual worlds look pale and paltry in comparison. The imaginative genius has naturally enough been discontented with an existing order that could not possibly measure up to his ardent specifications. Shelley is possibly the supreme example of the type; against his incorrigible construction of perfect worlds in imagination he set the real world in which men live, and found it hateful.

[Footnote 1: The classic instance of a work that certainly was notable in its early history for its propaganda value is _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. An extreme instance of a book famous almost exclusively for its vivid propaganda is Upton Sinclair's _The Jungle_.]

In consequence of this discontent which the imaginative artist so often expresses with the real world, and the power of his enthusiastic visions to win the loyalties and affections of men, many moralists and statesmen have, like Plato, regarded the creative artist with suspicion. They have half believed the lyric boast of the Celtic poet who wrote:

"One man with a dream at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown,
And three with a new song's measure,
Can trample an empire down.

"We, in the ages lying,
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
We o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth,
For each age is a dream that, is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth."[1]

[Footnote 1: O'Shaughnessy: _Ode to the Music-Makers_.]

Many, therefore, who have reflected upon art--Plato first and chiefly--have insisted that art must be used to express only those ideas and emotions which when acted upon would have beneficent social consequences. Only those stories are to be told, those pictures to be painted, those songs to be sung, which contribute to the welfare of the state. Many artists have similarly felt a Puritanical responsibility; they have told only those tales which could be pointed with a moral. The supreme example of this dedication of art to a moral purpose is found in the Middle Ages, when all beauty of architecture, painting, and much of literature and drama, was pervaded, as it was inspired, with the Christian message. Later Milton writes at the beginning of _Paradise Lost_:

"... What in me is dark,
Illumine, what is low--raise and support,
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to man."[2]

[Footnote 2: Milton: _Paradise Lost_, book I, lines 22-26.]

In a sense, the supreme achievements of creative genius have been notable instances of the expression of great moral or religious or social ideals. Lucretius's _On the Nature of Things_ is the noblest and most passionate extant rendering of the materialistic conception of life. Goethe's _Faust_ expresses in epic magnificence a whole romantic philosophy of endless exploration and infinite desire. Dante's _Divine Comedy_ sums up in a single magnificent epic the spirit and meaning of the mediæval point of view. As Henry Osborn Taylor writes of it:

Yet even the poem itself was a climax long led up to. The power of its feeling had been preparing in the conceptions, even in the reasonings, which through the centuries had been gaining ardour as they became part of the entire natures of men and women. Thus had mediæval thought become emotionalized and plastic and living in poetry and art. Otherwise, even Dante's genius could not have fused the contents of mediæval thought into a poem. How many passages in the _Commedia_ illustrate this--like the lovely picture of Lia moving in the flowering meadow, with her fair hands making her a garland. The twenty-third canto of the _Paradiso_, telling of the triumph of Christ and the Virgin, yields a larger illustration; and within it, as a very concrete lyric instance, floats that flower of angelic love, the song of Gabriel circling the Lady of Heaven with its melody, and giving quintessential utterance to the love and adoration which the Middle Ages had intoned to the Virgin. Yes, if it be Dante's genius, it is also the gathering emotion of the centuries, which lifts the last cantos of the _Paradiso_ from glory to glory, and makes this closing singing of the _Commedia_ such supreme poetry. Nor is it the emotional element alone that reaches its final voice in Dante. Passage after passage of the _Paradiso_ is the apotheosis of scholastic thought and ways of stating it, the very apotheosis, for example, of those harnessed phrases in which the line of great scholastics had endeavoured to put in words the universalities of substance and accident and the absolute qualities of God.[1]

[Footnote 1: Taylor: _The Mediæval Mind_, vol. II, pp. 588-89.]

In these supreme instances the ideas have been given a genuinely æsthetic expression. They are beautiful in form and music, as well as in content and vision. But not infrequently where propaganda appears, art flies out of the window. Many modern plays and novels might be cited, which in their serious devotion to the enunciation of some social ideal, lapse from song into statistics. The artist with his eye on the social consequences of his work may come altogether to cease to regard standards of beauty. It is only the rare genius who can make poetry out of politics. Even Shelley lapses into deadly and arid prosiness when his chief interest becomes the presentation of the political ideas of Godwin.

In contrast with the theory that art has a social responsibility, that so powerful an instrument must be used exclusively in the presentation of adequate social ideals, must be set the doctrine, widely current in the late nineteenth century, of "art for art's sake." To the exponents of this point of view, the artist has only one responsibility, the creation of beauty. It is his to realize in form every pulsation of interest and desire, to provide every possible exquisite sensation. The artist must not be a preacher; he must not tell men what is the good; he must show them the good, which is identical with the beautiful. And he must exhibit the beautiful in every unique and lovely posture which can be imagined, and which he can skillfully realize in color, in word, or in sound. Art is its own justification; "a thing of beauty is a joy forever."

Where art is governed by such intentions, form and material become more important than expression. Thus there develops in France in the late nineteenth century a school of Symbolists and Sensationalists in poetry, whose single aim is the production of precise and beautiful sensations through the specific use of evocative words. The form and the style become everything in literature, in painting, and the plastic arts. The emphasis is put upon exquisiteness in decoration, upon precision in technique, upon loveliness of material. The Pre-Raphaelite movement in poetry, with its emphasis on the use of picturesque and decorative epithets, the exclusive emphasis in some modern music on subtlety of technique in tone and color, are recent examples.

The position taken has clearly this much justification. A work does not become a work of art through the fact that it expresses noble sentiments. The most righteous sermon may not be beautiful. Whatever be the source of its inspiration, art must make its appeal through the palpable and undeniable beauty of the formal embodiment it has given to its vision. However much an object be prized as a moral instrument, unless it stirs the senses and the imagination, it hardly can be called a work of art. On the other hand, things intrinsically beautiful do seem to be their own justification. A poem of Keats, a Japanese print, a delicate vase, or an exquisite song demand no moral justification. They are their own sufficient excuse for being.

But the "art for art's sake" doctrine, carried to extremes, results in mere decadence or triviality. It produces at best exquisite decorative trifles rather than works of a large and serious beauty. Music seems to be the art where sheer beauty of form is its own justification, for music can hardly be used as a specific medium of communication. Those compositions that purport to be "program music," to convey definite impressions of particular scenes or ideas, are somewhat halting attempts to use music as one uses language. Yet even in music, though we may enjoy ingenious and fluent melodic trifles, we regard them less highly than the earnest and magnificent beauty of a Beethoven symphony.

But because art is only effective when it appeals to the senses and to the imagination does not mean that the senses and the imagination must be stirred by insignificance. The artist may use the rhythms of music, line and color, the suggestiveness of words, in the interests of ideal values. Gifted, as he is, with imaginative foresight to imagine a world better than the one in which he is living, he may, by picturing ideals in persuasive form, not only bring them before the mind of man, but insinuate them into his heart. The rational artist may note the possibilities afoot in his environment. He may treasure these hints of human happiness, and by giving them vivid reality in the forms of art indicate captivatingly to men where possible perfections lie. "For your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams." The artist may become the most influential of prophets, for his prophecies come to men not as arbitrary counsels, but as pictures of Perfection intrinsically lovely and intriguing. When Socrates is asked whether or not his perfect city exists, he replies that it exists only in Heaven, but that men in beholding it may, in the light of that divine pattern, learn to attain in their earthly cities a not dissimilar beauty.