Human Traits and their Social Significance Part 30

[Footnote 1: Many industrial processes exhibit elements of the fine arts. This is the case whenever there is opportunity for the worker to feel, and to have some ground for the feeling, that he is not merely turning out a product, but turning out a well-made or a beautiful one, to which his own skill is contributing.

The makers of fine books or bindings or furniture, of fine embroidery and the like, are examples. But such conditions occur chiefly in the so-called luxury trades. There is very little opportunity for the display of creative talent in quant.i.ty manufacture.

On the other hand, every fine art involves some elements of merely technical skill or craftsmans.h.i.+p, which is important in achieving an imaginative result, but is the skill of the mechanic rather than the vision of the artist.

In surveying the finished product of art as it appears in a painting by a Turner or a Cezanne, we may forget the "dust and ointment of the calling,"

but it is none the less there. The drudgery of art, the practicing of scales.

the mixing of colors, the rehearsing of plays, are, as it were, the necessary preliminary industry in art.]

aesthetic appreciation is indeed shared by all men, and is called out by other objects than paintings or poems. There is hardly anything men do which is not affected by what has been called "an irrelevant access of aesthetic feeling." We saw in another connection how our estimates of persons and situations are qualified by love and hate, sympathy and revulsion.

In the same way all our experiences have an aesthetic coloring.

It may be nothing more than the curious jubilance and vivacity, the thrill and tingle of the blood that comes upon a crisp autumn day. It may be, as Mill pointed out, the largeness of thought and vision promoted by habitually working in a s.p.a.cious and dignified room. aesthetic influences are always playing upon us; they determine not only our tastes in the decoration of our houses, our choices of places to walk and to eat, but even such seemingly remote and abstract matters as a scientific theory or a philosophy of life. Even the industrial ideal of efficiency has, "with its suggestion of Dutch neatness and cleanliness," order and symmetry, an aesthetic flavor. Similarly is there an appeal to our aesthetic sensibilities in the grouping of a wide variety of facts under sweeping inclusive and simple generalizations. There is, as has often been pointed out, scarcely anything to choose from as regards the relative plausibility of the Copernican over the Ptolemaic system. The former we choose largely because of its greater symmetry and simplicity in accounting for the facts. Even a world view may be chosen on account of its artistic appeal.

One feels moved imaginatively, even if one disagrees with the logic of those philosophies which see reality as one luminously transparent conscious whole, in which every experience is delicately reticulated with every other, where discord and division are obliterated, and the multiple variety of mundane facts are gathered up into the symmetrical unity of the eternal.

APPRECIATION _VERSUS_ ACTION. Every human experience has thus its particular and curious aesthetic flavor, as an inevitable though undetected obligato. aesthetic values enter into and qualify our estimates of persons and situations, and help to determine that general sympathy or revulsion, that love or hate for people, inst.i.tutions, or ideas, which make the pervasive atmosphere of all human action. But in the world of action, we cannot emphasize these irrelevant aesthetic feelings.

The appreciative and the practical moods are sharply contrasted.

In the latter we are interested in results, and insist on the exclusion of all considerations that do not bear on their accomplishment. The appreciative or aesthetic mood is detached; it is interested not to act, but to pause and consider; it does not want to use the present as a point of departure.

It wants to bask in the present perfection of color, word, or sound. The practical man is interested in a present situation for what can be done with it; he wants to know, in the vernacular, "What comes next?" "Where do we go from here?"

The appreciator wishes to remain in the lovely interlude of perfection which he experiences in music, poetry, or painting.

The aesthetic mood is obviously at a discount in the world of action. To bask in the charm of a present situation, to linger and loiter, as it were, in the sun of beauty, is to accomplish nothing, to interrupt action. It is precisely for this reason that persons with extremely high aesthetic sensibilities are at such a discount in practical life. They are too easily dissolved in appreciation. They are too much absorbed, for practical efficiency, in the tragic, the whimsical, the beautiful, or the comic aspects of men and affairs. The same sensitivity to the innuendoes and colors of life that enable some of such men to give an exquisite and various portraiture of experience, incapacitates them for action. The practical man must not observe anything irrelevant to his immediate business.

He must not be dissolved, at every random provocation, into ecstacy, laughter, or sorrow. There is too much to be done in business, government, mechanics, and the laboratory, to allow one's attention to wander dreamingly over the tragic, the beautiful, the pathetic, the comic, and the grotesque qualities of the day's work. To take an extreme case, it would, as Jane Harrison observes, be a monstrosity, when our friend was drowning, to note with lingering appreciation the fluent white curve of his arm in the glimmering waters of the late afternoon. The man to whom every event is flooded with imaginative possibilities and emotional suggestions is a useless or a dangerous character in situations where it is essential to discriminate the immediate and important bearings of facts. We cannot select an expert accountant on the basis of a pleasant smile, nor a chauffeur for his sense of humor.

But while, in the larger part of the lives of most men, observation of facts is controlled with reference to their practical bearings, observation may sometimes take place for its own sake. The glory of a sunset is not commonly prized for any good that may come of it; n.o.body but a general on a campaign or a fire warden looks out from a mountain peak upon the valley below for reasons other than the pleasure of the beholding. In the case of persons, also, we are not always interested in them for their uses; we are sometimes delighted with them in themselves. We pause to watch merry or quaint children, experts at tennis, beautiful faces, for their own sakes.

While even in nature and in social experience, we thus sometimes note specifically aesthetic values, the objects of fine art have no other justification than the immediate satisfactions they produce in their beholder. Those intrinsic pleasures which go by the general name of beauty are various and complicated. Our joy may be in the sheer delight of the senses, as in the hearing of a singularly lucid and sustained note of a clarinet, a flute, a voice, or a violin. It may be in the appreciation of form, as in the case of the symmetry of a temple, an arch, or an altar. It may be in the simultaneous stirring of the senses, the imagination, and the intellect, by the presentation of an idea suffused with music and emotion, as in the case of an ode by Wordsworth or a sonnet by Milton.

In all these instances we are not interested in anything beyond the experience itself. The objects of the fine arts are not drafts on the future, antic.i.p.ations of future satisfactions eventually to be cashed in. They are immediate and intrinsic goods, absolute fulfillments. They are not signals to action; they are releases from it. A painting, a poem, a symphony, do not precipitate movement or change. They invite a restful absorption. It was this that made Schopenhauer regard art as a rest from reality. During these interludes, at least, we live amid perfections, and are content there to move and have our being.

SENSE SATISFACTION. Appreciation of the arts begins in the senses. Sight and sound, these are unquestionably the chief avenues by which the imagination is stirred.[1]

[Footnote 1: The so-called lower senses are not regarded as yielding aesthetic values. Smell, taste, and touch are not generally, certainly in Occidental art, made much of.]

In the words of Santayana:

For if nothing not once in sense is to be found in the intellect, much less is such a thing to be found in the imagination. If the cedars of Lebanon did not spread a grateful shade, or the winds rustle through the maze of their branches, if Lebanon had never been beautiful to sense, it would not now be a fit or poetic subject of allusion.... Nor would Samarcand be anything but for the mystery of the desert, and the picturesqueness of caravans, nor would an argosy be poetic if the sea had no voices and no foam, the winds and oars no resistance, and the rudder and taut sheets no pull. From these real sensations imagination draws its life, and suggestion its power.[2]

[Footnote 2: Santayana: _Sense of Beauty_, p. 68.]

Satisfaction in sounds arises from the regular intervals of the vibrations of the air by which it is produced. The rapidity of these regular beats determines the pitch. But sounds also differ in _timbre_ or quality, depending on the number of overtones which occur in different modes of production. This explains why a note on the scale played on the piano, differs from the same note played on the 'cello or the organ. From these fundamental sensuous elements of sound, elaborate symphonic compositions may be built up, but they remain primary nevertheless. Unless the sensuous elements of sound were themselves pleasing it is difficult to imagine that a musical composition could be. Music would then be like an orchestra whose members played in unison, but whose violins were raucous and whose trumpets hoa.r.s.e.

Color again ill.u.s.trates the aesthetic satisfactions that are found in certain kinds of sense stimulation, apart from the form they are given or the emotions or ideas they express.

The elements of color, _as_ color, may be reduced to three simple elements: First may be noted _hue_, as yellow or blue; second, _value_ (or _notan_) dark or light red; and third _intensity_ (or brightness to grayness), as vivid blue or dull blue. Specific vivid aesthetic combinations and variations are made possible by variations or combinations of these three elements of color. If a color scheme is displeasing, the fault may be in the wrong selection of hues, in weak values, in ill-matched intensities or all three.

Dutch tiles, j.a.panese prints and blue towels, Abruzzi towels, American blue quilts, etc., are examples of harmony built up with several values of one hue.

With two hues innumerable variations are possible. j.a.panese prints of the "red and green" period are compositions in light yellow-red, middle green, black, and white....

Color varies not only in hue and value [_notan_] but in intensity--ranging from bright to gray. Every painter knows that a brilliant bit of color, set in grayer tones of the same or neighboring hues, will illuminate the whole group--a distinguished and elusive harmony.

The fire opal has a single point of intense scarlet, melting into pearl; the clear evening sky is like this when from the sunken sun the red-orange light grades away through yellow and green to steel gray.[1]

[Footnote 1: Dow: _Composition_, p. 109.]

These variations in hue, value, and intensity of color afford specific aesthetic satisfactions. The blueness of the sky is its specific beauty; the greenness of foliage in springtime is its characteristic and quite essential charm. Apart from anything else, sensations themselves afford satisfaction or the reverse. A loud color, a strident or a shrill sound may cause a genuine revulsion of feeling. A soft hue or a pellucid note may be an intrinsic pleasure, though a formless one, and one expressive of no meaning at all.

FORM. While the imagination is stirred most directly by the immediate material beauty, by the satisfaction of the senses, beauty of form is an important element in the enhancement of appreciation. In the plastic arts and in music, it is, next to the immediate appeal of the sensuous elements involved, the chief ingredient in the effects produced. And even in those arts which are notable for their expressive values, poetry, fiction, drama and painting, the appeal of form, as in the plot of a drama, or the structure of an ode or it sonnet is still very high. Certain dispositions of line and color in painting; of harmony and counterpoint in music; rhythm, refrain, and recurrence in poetry; symmetry and balance in sculpture; all have their specific appeal, apart from the materials used or the emotions or ideas expressed. Certain harmonic relations are interesting in music apart from the particular range of notes employed, or the particular melody upon which variations are made. The pattern of a tapestry may be interesting, apart from the color combinations involved.

The structure of a ballade or a sonnet may be beautiful, apart from the melody of the words or the persuasiveness of the emotion or idea. Out of the factors which enter into the appreciation of form certain elements stand out.

There is, in the first place, _symmetry_, the charm of which lies partly in recognition and rhythm. "When the eye runs over a facade, and finds the objects that attract it at equal intervals, an expectation, like the antic.i.p.ation of an inevitable note or requisite word, arises in the mind, and its non-satisfaction involves a shock."[1]

[Footnote 1: Santayana: _The Sense of Beauty_, p. 92.]

Similarly, form given to material brings a variety of details under a comprehensive unity, enabling us to have at once the stimulation of diversity and the clarification of a guiding principle. We cherish sensations in themselves, when they consist of elements like limpidness of color and lucidity of sound. But too much miscellany of sensation is disquieting; it has an effect a.n.a.logous to noise. A baby or a barbarian may delight in loud heterogeneity and vivid confusion, but extravagance of sensation does not const.i.tute an aesthetic experience.

The discovery of the one in the many, the immediate apprehension of the fluent tracing of a pattern, a form, or a structure, is intrinsically delightful. The pattern of a tapestry design is as striking and suggestive as the colors themselves.

When musical taste has pa.s.sed from a sentimental intoxication with the sensuous beauty of the sounds themselves, the beauty we admire is primarily beauty of form or structure.

The musical connoisseur likes to trace the recurrence of a theme in a symphony, its deviations and disappearances, its distribution in the various choirs of wood-wind, bra.s.s, and strings, its interweaving with other themes, its resilient, surprising, and apposite emergences, its pervasive penetration of the total scheme.

The aesthetic experience, indeed, as specifically aesthetic, rather than merely sensuous or intellectual, is, it might be said, almost wholly a matter of form. It is the artist's function, as it is occasionally his achievement, to give satisfying, determinate forms to the indeterminate and miscellaneous materials at his command. Formlessness is for the creator of beauty the unpardonable sin. To give clarity and coherence to the vague ambiguous scintillations of sound, to chisel a specific perfection out of the indefinite inviting possibilities of marble, to form precise and consecutive suggestions out of the random and uncertain music of words, is to achieve, in so far, success in art. Nor does form mean formality. Experience is so various and fertile, and so far outruns the types under which human invention and imagination can apprehend it, that inexhaustible novelty is possible. Novelty, on the other hand, does not mean formlessness. The artist must, if he is to be successful, always remain something of an artisan.

However beautiful his vision, he must have sufficient command of the technical resources to his craft to give a specific and determinate embodiment to his ideal.

Every one has haunting premonitions of beauty; it is the business of the artist to give realization in form to the hints of the beautiful which are present in matter as we meet it in experience, and to the imaginative longings which they provoke.

In which forms different individuals will find satisfaction depends on all the circ.u.mstances which go to make one individual different from another. There cannot be in the case of art, any more than in any other experience, absolute standards.

We can be pleased only with those arrangements of sound or color to which our sensibilities have early been educated.

Even the most catholic of tastes becomes restricted in the course of education. To Western ears, there is at first no music at all in Chinese music, and Beethoven would appear to the Chinese as barbarous as their compositions appear to us.

But while in a wide sense, conformity to the average determines or limits our possible appreciation of the beautiful, within these limits certain elements are intrinsically more pleasing than others. Those elements of experience, in the first place, more readily acquire aesthetic values, which in themselves strikingly impress the senses. Thus tallness in a man, because it is in the first place striking, becomes readily incorporated into our standard of the beautiful. And all elements in themselves beautiful, the human eye, the curve of the arm, the wave of the hair, come to be emphasized. These outstanding elements may themselves become conventionalized and standardized, so that objects of art which conform to them are insured thereby of a certain degree of recognition as beautiful. Too close a conformity produces monotonous formalities, cloying cla.s.sicisms. Too wide a divergence results in shock and unpleasantness. The history of all the arts, however, is full of instances of how the taste of a people can be educated to new forms. Ruskin had to educate the English people to an appreciation of Turner. The poets of the Romantic period were condemned by the critics brought up on the rigid cla.s.sic models. The so-called Romantic movements in the arts are, at their best, departures from old forms, not into formlessness, but into new, various, and more fruitful forms. Romanticism at its worst dissolves into mere formlessness and inarticulate ecstacies. Infinite variety of forms the world of experience may be made to wear, but sensations, emotions, and ideas must be given some form, if they are to pa.s.s from a fruitless yearning after beauty into its positive incarnation in objects of art.

All forms have their characteristic emotional effects, as have all materials, even apart from the emotions or ideas they express.

The glitter of gold and the sparkle of diamonds, the strength of marble, the st.u.r.diness of oak--we hardly can think of these materials without thinking of the a.s.sociations which go with them. Similarly the symmetry of the colonnades of a temple, the multiplicity and variety of Gothic architecture, even so simple a form as a circle, provoke a great or slight characteristic emotional reaction. Likewise, a staccato or a fluent rhythm in music, a march, or a dance movement, have, even apart from their unconscious or intentional expressiveness, specific emotional values. In literature, also, where the value of the words themselves might be expected to give place entirely to the emotions or ideas of which they are the expressive instruments, poems may themselves, by their form and music, be provocative of specific emotional effects.

"...And over them the sea wind sang, Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down By zigzag paths and juts of pointed rock, Came on the s.h.i.+ning levels of the lake.

Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves, And barren chasms, and all to left and right, The bare black cliff clanged round him, as he based His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang, Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels-- And on a sudden, lo! the level lake, And the long glories of the winter moon."[1]

[Footnote 1: From Tennyson's _Morte d'Arthur_.]

Here the effect lies partly in the form, but more especially in the _timbre_ and reverberation of the words themselves. In other cases, it is the form that is the chief ingredient in the effect produced. In Alfred Noyes's "The Barrel Organ,"

apart from the meaning, it is the rhythmic form that is of chief aesthetic value:

"Come down to Kew in lilac time, in lilac time, in lilac time, Come down to Kew in lilac time, it is n't far from London, And you shall wander hand-in-hand with love in summer's wonderland.

Come down to Kew in lilac time; it is n't far from London.

"The cherry trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume.

The cherry trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near to London!) And there they say, when dawn is high, and all the world's a blaze of sky, The cuckoo, though he's very shy, will sing a song for London."

Apart from all considerations of meaning, set the easy fluent grace of this lyric over against the march and majesty of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword; His truth is marching on.