CHAPTER XXXIArt, Play, and CivilisationL’heure est & la construction, pas au badinage.Le Corbuster-Saugnier.Thevalue of the experiences which we Seek from the arts does not lie, so we have insisted, in the exquisiteness of the moment of consciousness; a set of isolated ecstasies is not a sufficient explanation. Its inadequacy is additional evidence that the theories of value and of the mind upon which it rests are defective. We must now consider what wider explanations are made possible by the theory of value and the outline account of mental activity and of communication above indicated. The ground, in part at least, is cleared. What now can be said as to why the arts are important and why good taste and sound criticism are not mere luxuries, trivial excrescences grafted upon an independent civilisation?A number of accounts of varying adequacy each in some degree interesting but needing careful interpretation have been put forward. The arts communicate experiences, it has been said, and make states of mind accessible to the many which otherwise would be only possible to few. To this it might be added that the arts are also a means by which experiences arise in the mind of the artist which would never otherwise come about. Both as an occasion for a collectedness and concentration difficult to attain in the ordinary course of life, and as the means by which human effort may acquire a continuity analogous to but more subtle than the continuity of science, the study and practice of the arts can give immensely increased power to the artist, preserving him from that diffusion of his energies which is perhaps his greatest danger. All this is true, but it does not go to the root of the matter.Again the educational aspect of the arts is constantly being stressed, sometimes in a manner which does them disservice. ‘Message’ hunting—the type of interest which discovers inMacbeththe moral that ‘Honesty is the best policy’; inOthelloa recommendation to ‘Look before you leap’, inHamletperhaps a proof that ‘Procrastination is the Thief of Time’, or inKing Learan indication that ‘Your sins will find you out*’, in Shelley an exhortation to Idealism, in Browning comfort for the discouraged and assurances as to a future life; but in Donne or Keats no ‘message’—this mode of interpreting the phrase ‘a criticism of life’, though to a minute degree on the right lines, is probably more damaging than those entirely erratic theories, of which ‘Art for Art’s sake’ is an example, with which we have been more concerned.None the less but in subtler ways the educational influence of the arts is all-pervasive. We must not overlook bad art in estimating it. “I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own confraternity” wrote a novelist of the 19th century “if I were to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels that they read. Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching; fathers of the examples which they set; and schoolmasters of the excellence of their instructions. Happy is the country which has such mothers, fathers and schoolmasters! But the novelist creeps in closer than the father, closer than the schoolmaster, closer almost than the mother. He is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses for herself. She retires with him, suspecting no lesson . . . and there she is taught how she shall learn to love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes; how far she should advance to meet the joy; why she should be reticent and not throw herself at once into this new delight.”The influence is also exerted in more indirect ways. There need be, we must remember, no discernible connection or resemblance whatever between the experience due to the work of art and the later behaviour and experience which is modified through it. Without such resemblance the influence may easily be overlooked or denied, but not by anyone who has a sufficient conception of the ways in which attitudes develop. No one who has repeatedly lived through experiences at the level of discrimination and co-ordination presupposed by the greater writers, can ever, when fully ‘vigilant’, be contented with ordinary crudities though a touch of liver may of course suspend these superior responses. And conversely, keen and vigilant enjoyment of Miss Dell, Mr Burroughs, Mrs Wilcox or Mr Hutchinson, when untouched by doubts or the joys of ironic contemplation, is likely to have as a consequence not only an acceptance of the mediocre in ordinary life, but a blurring and confusion of impulses and a very widespread loss of value.These remarks apply even more evidently to the Cinema. People do not much imitate what they see upon the screen or what they read of in best-sellers. It would matter little if they did. Such effects would show themselves clearly and the evil would be of a manageable kind. They tend instead to develop stock attitudes and stereotyped ideas, the attitudes and ideas of producers: attitudes and ideas which can be ‘put across’quicklythrough a medium that lends itself to crude rather than to sensitive handling. Even a good dramatist’s work will tend to be coarser than that of a novelist of equal ability. He has to make his effects more quickly and in a more obvious way. The Cinema suffers still more than the stage from this disability. It has its compensating advantages in the greater demands which it makes of the audience, but hitherto very few producers have been able to turn them to account. Thus the ideas and attitudes with which the ‘movie fan’ becomes familiar tend to be peculiarly clumsy and inapplicable to life. Other causes, connected with the mentality of producers, increase the effect.The danger lies not in the fact that school-girls are sometimes incited to poke revolvers at taximen, but in much subtler and more insinuating influences. Most films indeed are much more suited to children than to adults, and it is the adults who really suffer from them. No one can intensely and whole-heartedly enjoy and enter into experiences whose fabric is as crude as that of the average super-film without a disorganisation which has its effects in everyday life. The extent to which second-hand experience of a crass and inchoate type is replacing ordinary life offers a threat which has not yet been realised. If a false theory of the severance and disconnection between ‘æsthetic’ and ordinary experience has prevented the value of the arts from being understood, it has also preserved their dangers from recognition.Those who have attempted to find a place in the whole structure of life for the arts have often made use of the conception of Play; and Groos and Herbert Spencer are famous exponents of the theory. As with so many other Æsthetic Doctrines the opinion that Art is a form of Play may indicate either a very shallow or a very penetrating view. All depends upon the conception of Play which is entertained. Originally the view arose in connection with survival values. Art, it was thought, had little practical value of the obvious kinds, so some indirect means must be found by which it could be thought to be of service. Perhaps, like play, it was a means of harmlessly expending superfluous energy. A more useful contribution was made when the problem of the value of play itself was seriously attacked. The immense practical utility of most forms of play then became evident. Characteristically play is the preparatory organisation and development of impulses. It may easily become too narrowly specialised, and the impulses active may be such as never to receive ‘serious’ exercise. None the less with our present understanding of the amazingly recondite interactions between what appear to be totally different activities of the nervous system, the importance of play is not likely to need much insistence.There are many human activities which, fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, are no longer required of or possible to civilised man. Yet their total discontinuance may lead to grave disturbances. For some of these play serves as an opportunity. The view that art provides in some cases an analogous outlet through vicarious experience has naturally been put forward, notably by Mr Havelock Ellis. “We have lost the orgy, but in its place we have art†.” If we do not extend the ‘sublimation’ theory too far or try to bring under this Safety-valve heading work with which it has no concern, it may be granted that in some cases the explanation is in place. But the temptation to extend it, and so to misconceive the whole matter, is great.The objection to the Play Theory, unless very carefully stated, lies in its suggestion that the experiences of Art are in some way incomplete, that they are substitutes, meagre copies of the real thing, well enough for those who cannot obtain better. “The moralising force of Art lies, not in its capacity to present a timid imitation of our experiences, but in its power to go beyond our experience, satisfying and harmonising the unfulfilled activities of our nature.”†The Copy View, with the antithesis between Life and Literature which so often accompanies it, is a devastating misconception. Coupled with the suggestion involved by the word ‘Play,’ that such things are for the young rather than for the mature, and that Art is something one grows out of, it has a large share of the responsibility for the present state of the Arts and of Criticism. Its only rival in obscuring the issues is its close cousin the Amusement or Relaxation Theory.The experiences which the arts offer are not obtainable, or but rarely, elsewhere. Would that they were! They are not incomplete; they might better be described as ordinary experiences completed. They are not such that the most adequately equipped person can dispense with them and suffer no loss, and this loss is not momentary, but recurrent and permanent; the best equipped are precisely the people who most value these experiences. Nor is Art, as by way of corollary is sometimes maintained, a thing which had its’ function in the youth of the world, but with the development of Science becomes obsolete. It may very possibly decline and even disappear, but if it does a biological calamity of the first order will have occurred. Nor again is it something which may be postponed while premillennial man grapples with more immediate problems. The raising of the standard of response is as immediate a problem as any, and the arts are the chief instrument by which it may be raisedor lowered.Hitherto we have been concerned chiefly with more or less specific effects of the experiences of the arts, with the effects, upon single definite groups or systems of impulses, of their exercise in these experiences. The Play Theory tends to limit us to these consequences. Important though they are, we must not overlook the more general effects which any well-organised experience produces. They may in certain cases be extraordinarily widespread. Such an apparently irrelevant test as the ability to stand upon one foot without unsteadiness has recently been employed, by Mr Burt, as an index to mental and especially to emotional organisation. All our activities react upon one another to a prodigious extent in ways which we can only as yet conjecture.Finer adjustment, clearer and more delicate accommodation or reconciliation of impulses in any one field tends to promote it in others. A step in mathematical accomplishment, other things being equal, facilitates the acquisition of a new turn in ski-ing. Other things are rarely equal it should perhaps be remarked. If this is true even of such special narrowly restricted impulses as are involved in a scientific technique, it is far more evident when the major, the most widespread systems, those active in our responses to human beings and to the exigences of existence, are engaged.There is abundant evidence that removal of confusion in one sphere of activity tends to be favourable to its removal elsewhere. The ease with which a trained mind approaches a new subject is the plainest example, but equally a person whose ordinary emotional experience is clear, controlled and coherent, is the least likely to be thrown into confusion by an unheard-of predicament. Complications sometimes obscure this effect: a mathematician approaching psychology may attempt to apply methods which are inappropriate, and the sanest people may prove stupid in their dealings with individuals of other races. The specialist, either intellectual or moral, who is helpless outside his own narrow field is a familiar figure in inferior comedy. But what would have to be shown before the principle is invalidated is that, granted equal specialisation, the successful specialist is not better fitted for life in general than his unsuccessfulconfrère. Few people, however, will dispute the assertion that transference of ability frequently occurs although the mode by which it comes about may be obscure.When very widespread and very fundamental impulses are implicated, where attitudes constantly taken up in ordinary life are aroused, this transference effect may be very marked. Everybody knows the feeling of freedom, of relief, of increased competence and sanity, that follows any reading in which more than usual order and coherence has been given to our responses. We seem to feel that our command of life, our insight into it and our discrimination of its possibilities, is enhanced, even for situations having little or nothing to do with the subject of the reading. It may be a chapter ofGösta Berlingor ofThe ABC of Atoms, the close of theVanity of Human Wishes, or the opening ofHarry Richmond; whatever the differences the refreshment is the same. And conversely everybody knows the diminution of energy, the bafflement, the sense of helplessness, which an ill-written, crude, or muddled book, or a badly acted play, will produce, unless the critical task of diagnosis is able to restore equanimity and composure.Neither the subject nor the closeness of correspondence between the experience and the reader’s own situation has any bearing upon these effects. But indeed, to anyone who realises what kind of a thing an experience is, and through what means it comes about, the old antithesis between subject and treatment ceases to be of interest (cf. Chapter XVI). They are not separable or distinct things and the division is of no service. In this case the effects we are considering depend only upon the kind and degree of organisation which is given to the experiences. If it is at the level of our own best attempts or above it (but not so far above as to be out of reach) we are refreshed. But if our own organisation is broken down, forced to a cruder, a more wasteful level, we are depressed and temporarily incapacitated, not only locally but generally. It is when what we are offered, and inveigled into accepting, is only slightly inferior to our own developed capacity, so that it is no easy matter to see what is wrong, that the effect is greatest. Stuff of an evident and extreme badness is exhilarating rather than depressing when taken from a discriminating standpoint; and there need be nothing snobbish or self-congratulatory in such reading. What is really discomposing and damaging to the critical reader is the mediocre, the work which falls just below his own standards of response. Hence the rage which some feel at the productions of Sir James Barrie, Mr Locke, or Sir Hall Caine, a rage which work comparatively devoid of merits fails to excite.These effects are not merely momentary or evanescent; if we would understand the place of the arts in civilisation we must consider them more closely. An improvement of response is the only benefit which anyone can receive, and the degradation, the lowering of a response, is the only calamity. When we take into account not merely the impulses actually concerned in the experience but all the allied groups which thrive or suffer with it, and all the far-reaching effects of success or failure upon activities which may seem to be independent, the fact that some people feel so keenly about the arts is no longer surprising.Underestimation of the importance of the arts is nearly always due to ignorance of the workings of the mind. Experiences such as these, into which we willingly and whole-heartedly enter, or into which we may be enticed and inveigled, present peculiar opportunities for betrayal. They are the most formative of experiences, because in them the development and systematisation of our impulses goes to the furthest lengths. In ordinary life a thousand considerations prohibit for most of us any complete working out of our response; the range and complexity of the impulse-systems involved is less; the need for action, the comparative uncertainty and vagueness of the situation, the intrusion of accidental irrelevancies, inconvenient temporal spacing—the action being too slow or too fast—all these obscure the issue and prevent the full development of the experience. We have to jump to some rough and ready solution. But in the ‘imaginative experience’ these obstacles are removed. Thus what happens here, what precise stresses, preponderances, conflicts, resolutions and interinanimations, what remote relationships between different systems of impulses arise, what before unapprehended and inexecutable connections are established, is a matter which, we see clearly, may modify all the rest of life. As a chemist’s balance to a grocer’s scales, so is the mind in the imaginative moment to the mind engaged in ordinary intercourse or practical affairs. The comparison will bear pressing. The results, for good or evil, of the untrammelled response are not lost to us in our usual trafficking.
L’heure est & la construction, pas au badinage.Le Corbuster-Saugnier.
L’heure est & la construction, pas au badinage.
Le Corbuster-Saugnier.
Thevalue of the experiences which we Seek from the arts does not lie, so we have insisted, in the exquisiteness of the moment of consciousness; a set of isolated ecstasies is not a sufficient explanation. Its inadequacy is additional evidence that the theories of value and of the mind upon which it rests are defective. We must now consider what wider explanations are made possible by the theory of value and the outline account of mental activity and of communication above indicated. The ground, in part at least, is cleared. What now can be said as to why the arts are important and why good taste and sound criticism are not mere luxuries, trivial excrescences grafted upon an independent civilisation?
A number of accounts of varying adequacy each in some degree interesting but needing careful interpretation have been put forward. The arts communicate experiences, it has been said, and make states of mind accessible to the many which otherwise would be only possible to few. To this it might be added that the arts are also a means by which experiences arise in the mind of the artist which would never otherwise come about. Both as an occasion for a collectedness and concentration difficult to attain in the ordinary course of life, and as the means by which human effort may acquire a continuity analogous to but more subtle than the continuity of science, the study and practice of the arts can give immensely increased power to the artist, preserving him from that diffusion of his energies which is perhaps his greatest danger. All this is true, but it does not go to the root of the matter.
Again the educational aspect of the arts is constantly being stressed, sometimes in a manner which does them disservice. ‘Message’ hunting—the type of interest which discovers inMacbeththe moral that ‘Honesty is the best policy’; inOthelloa recommendation to ‘Look before you leap’, inHamletperhaps a proof that ‘Procrastination is the Thief of Time’, or inKing Learan indication that ‘Your sins will find you out*’, in Shelley an exhortation to Idealism, in Browning comfort for the discouraged and assurances as to a future life; but in Donne or Keats no ‘message’—this mode of interpreting the phrase ‘a criticism of life’, though to a minute degree on the right lines, is probably more damaging than those entirely erratic theories, of which ‘Art for Art’s sake’ is an example, with which we have been more concerned.
None the less but in subtler ways the educational influence of the arts is all-pervasive. We must not overlook bad art in estimating it. “I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own confraternity” wrote a novelist of the 19th century “if I were to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels that they read. Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching; fathers of the examples which they set; and schoolmasters of the excellence of their instructions. Happy is the country which has such mothers, fathers and schoolmasters! But the novelist creeps in closer than the father, closer than the schoolmaster, closer almost than the mother. He is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses for herself. She retires with him, suspecting no lesson . . . and there she is taught how she shall learn to love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes; how far she should advance to meet the joy; why she should be reticent and not throw herself at once into this new delight.”
The influence is also exerted in more indirect ways. There need be, we must remember, no discernible connection or resemblance whatever between the experience due to the work of art and the later behaviour and experience which is modified through it. Without such resemblance the influence may easily be overlooked or denied, but not by anyone who has a sufficient conception of the ways in which attitudes develop. No one who has repeatedly lived through experiences at the level of discrimination and co-ordination presupposed by the greater writers, can ever, when fully ‘vigilant’, be contented with ordinary crudities though a touch of liver may of course suspend these superior responses. And conversely, keen and vigilant enjoyment of Miss Dell, Mr Burroughs, Mrs Wilcox or Mr Hutchinson, when untouched by doubts or the joys of ironic contemplation, is likely to have as a consequence not only an acceptance of the mediocre in ordinary life, but a blurring and confusion of impulses and a very widespread loss of value.
These remarks apply even more evidently to the Cinema. People do not much imitate what they see upon the screen or what they read of in best-sellers. It would matter little if they did. Such effects would show themselves clearly and the evil would be of a manageable kind. They tend instead to develop stock attitudes and stereotyped ideas, the attitudes and ideas of producers: attitudes and ideas which can be ‘put across’quicklythrough a medium that lends itself to crude rather than to sensitive handling. Even a good dramatist’s work will tend to be coarser than that of a novelist of equal ability. He has to make his effects more quickly and in a more obvious way. The Cinema suffers still more than the stage from this disability. It has its compensating advantages in the greater demands which it makes of the audience, but hitherto very few producers have been able to turn them to account. Thus the ideas and attitudes with which the ‘movie fan’ becomes familiar tend to be peculiarly clumsy and inapplicable to life. Other causes, connected with the mentality of producers, increase the effect.
The danger lies not in the fact that school-girls are sometimes incited to poke revolvers at taximen, but in much subtler and more insinuating influences. Most films indeed are much more suited to children than to adults, and it is the adults who really suffer from them. No one can intensely and whole-heartedly enjoy and enter into experiences whose fabric is as crude as that of the average super-film without a disorganisation which has its effects in everyday life. The extent to which second-hand experience of a crass and inchoate type is replacing ordinary life offers a threat which has not yet been realised. If a false theory of the severance and disconnection between ‘æsthetic’ and ordinary experience has prevented the value of the arts from being understood, it has also preserved their dangers from recognition.
Those who have attempted to find a place in the whole structure of life for the arts have often made use of the conception of Play; and Groos and Herbert Spencer are famous exponents of the theory. As with so many other Æsthetic Doctrines the opinion that Art is a form of Play may indicate either a very shallow or a very penetrating view. All depends upon the conception of Play which is entertained. Originally the view arose in connection with survival values. Art, it was thought, had little practical value of the obvious kinds, so some indirect means must be found by which it could be thought to be of service. Perhaps, like play, it was a means of harmlessly expending superfluous energy. A more useful contribution was made when the problem of the value of play itself was seriously attacked. The immense practical utility of most forms of play then became evident. Characteristically play is the preparatory organisation and development of impulses. It may easily become too narrowly specialised, and the impulses active may be such as never to receive ‘serious’ exercise. None the less with our present understanding of the amazingly recondite interactions between what appear to be totally different activities of the nervous system, the importance of play is not likely to need much insistence.
There are many human activities which, fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, are no longer required of or possible to civilised man. Yet their total discontinuance may lead to grave disturbances. For some of these play serves as an opportunity. The view that art provides in some cases an analogous outlet through vicarious experience has naturally been put forward, notably by Mr Havelock Ellis. “We have lost the orgy, but in its place we have art†.” If we do not extend the ‘sublimation’ theory too far or try to bring under this Safety-valve heading work with which it has no concern, it may be granted that in some cases the explanation is in place. But the temptation to extend it, and so to misconceive the whole matter, is great.
The objection to the Play Theory, unless very carefully stated, lies in its suggestion that the experiences of Art are in some way incomplete, that they are substitutes, meagre copies of the real thing, well enough for those who cannot obtain better. “The moralising force of Art lies, not in its capacity to present a timid imitation of our experiences, but in its power to go beyond our experience, satisfying and harmonising the unfulfilled activities of our nature.”†The Copy View, with the antithesis between Life and Literature which so often accompanies it, is a devastating misconception. Coupled with the suggestion involved by the word ‘Play,’ that such things are for the young rather than for the mature, and that Art is something one grows out of, it has a large share of the responsibility for the present state of the Arts and of Criticism. Its only rival in obscuring the issues is its close cousin the Amusement or Relaxation Theory.
The experiences which the arts offer are not obtainable, or but rarely, elsewhere. Would that they were! They are not incomplete; they might better be described as ordinary experiences completed. They are not such that the most adequately equipped person can dispense with them and suffer no loss, and this loss is not momentary, but recurrent and permanent; the best equipped are precisely the people who most value these experiences. Nor is Art, as by way of corollary is sometimes maintained, a thing which had its’ function in the youth of the world, but with the development of Science becomes obsolete. It may very possibly decline and even disappear, but if it does a biological calamity of the first order will have occurred. Nor again is it something which may be postponed while premillennial man grapples with more immediate problems. The raising of the standard of response is as immediate a problem as any, and the arts are the chief instrument by which it may be raisedor lowered.
Hitherto we have been concerned chiefly with more or less specific effects of the experiences of the arts, with the effects, upon single definite groups or systems of impulses, of their exercise in these experiences. The Play Theory tends to limit us to these consequences. Important though they are, we must not overlook the more general effects which any well-organised experience produces. They may in certain cases be extraordinarily widespread. Such an apparently irrelevant test as the ability to stand upon one foot without unsteadiness has recently been employed, by Mr Burt, as an index to mental and especially to emotional organisation. All our activities react upon one another to a prodigious extent in ways which we can only as yet conjecture.
Finer adjustment, clearer and more delicate accommodation or reconciliation of impulses in any one field tends to promote it in others. A step in mathematical accomplishment, other things being equal, facilitates the acquisition of a new turn in ski-ing. Other things are rarely equal it should perhaps be remarked. If this is true even of such special narrowly restricted impulses as are involved in a scientific technique, it is far more evident when the major, the most widespread systems, those active in our responses to human beings and to the exigences of existence, are engaged.
There is abundant evidence that removal of confusion in one sphere of activity tends to be favourable to its removal elsewhere. The ease with which a trained mind approaches a new subject is the plainest example, but equally a person whose ordinary emotional experience is clear, controlled and coherent, is the least likely to be thrown into confusion by an unheard-of predicament. Complications sometimes obscure this effect: a mathematician approaching psychology may attempt to apply methods which are inappropriate, and the sanest people may prove stupid in their dealings with individuals of other races. The specialist, either intellectual or moral, who is helpless outside his own narrow field is a familiar figure in inferior comedy. But what would have to be shown before the principle is invalidated is that, granted equal specialisation, the successful specialist is not better fitted for life in general than his unsuccessfulconfrère. Few people, however, will dispute the assertion that transference of ability frequently occurs although the mode by which it comes about may be obscure.
When very widespread and very fundamental impulses are implicated, where attitudes constantly taken up in ordinary life are aroused, this transference effect may be very marked. Everybody knows the feeling of freedom, of relief, of increased competence and sanity, that follows any reading in which more than usual order and coherence has been given to our responses. We seem to feel that our command of life, our insight into it and our discrimination of its possibilities, is enhanced, even for situations having little or nothing to do with the subject of the reading. It may be a chapter ofGösta Berlingor ofThe ABC of Atoms, the close of theVanity of Human Wishes, or the opening ofHarry Richmond; whatever the differences the refreshment is the same. And conversely everybody knows the diminution of energy, the bafflement, the sense of helplessness, which an ill-written, crude, or muddled book, or a badly acted play, will produce, unless the critical task of diagnosis is able to restore equanimity and composure.
Neither the subject nor the closeness of correspondence between the experience and the reader’s own situation has any bearing upon these effects. But indeed, to anyone who realises what kind of a thing an experience is, and through what means it comes about, the old antithesis between subject and treatment ceases to be of interest (cf. Chapter XVI). They are not separable or distinct things and the division is of no service. In this case the effects we are considering depend only upon the kind and degree of organisation which is given to the experiences. If it is at the level of our own best attempts or above it (but not so far above as to be out of reach) we are refreshed. But if our own organisation is broken down, forced to a cruder, a more wasteful level, we are depressed and temporarily incapacitated, not only locally but generally. It is when what we are offered, and inveigled into accepting, is only slightly inferior to our own developed capacity, so that it is no easy matter to see what is wrong, that the effect is greatest. Stuff of an evident and extreme badness is exhilarating rather than depressing when taken from a discriminating standpoint; and there need be nothing snobbish or self-congratulatory in such reading. What is really discomposing and damaging to the critical reader is the mediocre, the work which falls just below his own standards of response. Hence the rage which some feel at the productions of Sir James Barrie, Mr Locke, or Sir Hall Caine, a rage which work comparatively devoid of merits fails to excite.
These effects are not merely momentary or evanescent; if we would understand the place of the arts in civilisation we must consider them more closely. An improvement of response is the only benefit which anyone can receive, and the degradation, the lowering of a response, is the only calamity. When we take into account not merely the impulses actually concerned in the experience but all the allied groups which thrive or suffer with it, and all the far-reaching effects of success or failure upon activities which may seem to be independent, the fact that some people feel so keenly about the arts is no longer surprising.
Underestimation of the importance of the arts is nearly always due to ignorance of the workings of the mind. Experiences such as these, into which we willingly and whole-heartedly enter, or into which we may be enticed and inveigled, present peculiar opportunities for betrayal. They are the most formative of experiences, because in them the development and systematisation of our impulses goes to the furthest lengths. In ordinary life a thousand considerations prohibit for most of us any complete working out of our response; the range and complexity of the impulse-systems involved is less; the need for action, the comparative uncertainty and vagueness of the situation, the intrusion of accidental irrelevancies, inconvenient temporal spacing—the action being too slow or too fast—all these obscure the issue and prevent the full development of the experience. We have to jump to some rough and ready solution. But in the ‘imaginative experience’ these obstacles are removed. Thus what happens here, what precise stresses, preponderances, conflicts, resolutions and interinanimations, what remote relationships between different systems of impulses arise, what before unapprehended and inexecutable connections are established, is a matter which, we see clearly, may modify all the rest of life. As a chemist’s balance to a grocer’s scales, so is the mind in the imaginative moment to the mind engaged in ordinary intercourse or practical affairs. The comparison will bear pressing. The results, for good or evil, of the untrammelled response are not lost to us in our usual trafficking.