CHAPTER VIIIART THE RELIEVER
In the endeavour to secure the transmission and perpetuation of a feeling, the expressional activity gradually loses its purely impulsive character. From an almost reflex outlet for abnormal nervous pressure, it is more and more transformed into deliberate artistic production, which is conscious of its aim as well as of the means for attaining it. The elaboration of a work of art, in which the expression of a feeling-state is to be concentrated, and concentrated in a way which not only facilitates but even enforces in the spectator the assimilation of this state, is a complicated operation which cannot of course take place without the effectual co-operation of intellectual and volitional activities. And their co-operation, on the other hand, must evidently exercise some influence on the primordial feeling.
It is a familiar observation, duly emphasised in all psychological handbooks, that strong feelings make clear thought impossible. Everyday experience, as well as scientific experiment, gives unmistakable evidence of the influence which abnormal excitement or depression exercises, not only on our ideas and their associations, but even on the perceptions. The converse has perhaps not been stated so often. Still, it does not admit ofdoubt that intensified intellectual activity may, in some cases, even more effectually than motor reaction, overcome the tyranny of a hypernormal feeling. It is true that every mental state becomes more distinct as a phenomenon of consciousness when our thoughts are directed towards it. Feelings of low and moderate intensity may even be enhanced in their purely emotional aspect if we let our intellect play on them. But as soon as a greater intensity of feeling is reached, this relation is reversed. Joy which is so great as to be a burden, “Die Noth der Fülle,”[139]and numbing despair, must inevitably decrease when there is an increase of distinctness in their intellectual elements. The more we can compel ourselves to contemplate with cool and clear attention the causes and manifestations of such high-strung states, the more we are also able to master them. It is a familiar experience to everyone that strong fear can be vanquished, if only we can succeed in diverting all our attention to its objective source, and “stare the danger in the face.” When the attention is concentrated and intensified to the utmost degree, it may even, as in the case of fascination, entirely prevent, to our own danger, the very rise of this self-preserving emotion.
In artistic creation we are not concerned with an intentional or unintentional effort to overcome feeling. On the contrary the aim is here to keep the strongest possible hold of it in order to give it the most effective embodiment. So irreconcilable, however, is the conflict between emotional excitement and intellectual activity, that the latter, even when it expressly serves the purposes of emotional enhancement, must neutralise the excess of feeling. A state of strong pleasure or pain can never be rendered intelligible to outsiders, unless itsexpression is bridled and disciplined by thought. By being thus embodied in a fixed form the feeling gains in conceivability as well as in infectious power. But while the effect on spectators and listeners is in this way increased, the artistic form influences the feeling subject himself in a quite different way. Its very clearness and distinctness necessarily brings something of that calm which all excitement seeks as relief.
The immediate reaction which the work of art exercises on its own creator is of course most easily seen and understood in the “higher” art-forms with their pronounced intellectual elements. Literary instances of the “poetic cure” for harassing or oppressing emotion are too numerous to be mentioned. The only point we need dwell on is the question how these instances are to be interpreted. When a poet seeks to give shape and form to his own sufferings by means of fiction, the relief he obtains is no doubt in part an effect of the diversion of activity into the channels of expression. But to a still greater degree it may be a result of the healthful influence exercised by the contemplation of objective reality in the finished work of art. Such an influence is unmistakable in the most illustrious instance of artistic production as a life-preserving expedient: Goethe’sLeiden des jungen Werther. In his memoirs the old poet frankly and unreservedly describes how, when lacerated by the conflict between hypochondriac, suicidal thoughts and an ineradicable love of life and cheerfulness, he resorted to the old homely remedy of writing down his sufferings. He lays especial stress on his desire to give definite form and body to his vague feelings of distress. And as we read that afterwards, when the work lay finished before him, “bound in boards, as a picture in its frame, so as toprove the more convincingly its individual and concrete existence,” he could feel “free and joyful, and entitled to a new life,” we cannot but explain this renewed courage to live as a result of the sensation of security and support which the beholding of external form affords.[140]
Thus, to begin with, by its character as a palpable, objective reality, the work of art may diminish the subjective disturbance in which it originates. This influence is supplemented by the retroaction of the æsthetic qualities, in the narrowest sense of the term, such as beauty, symmetry, and the like, by which an artist always seeks, intentionally or unintentionally, to arrest the attention of his public. The more therefore the work grows in definiteness in the thought and under the hand of the artist, the more it will repress and subdue the chaotic tumult of emotional excitement. The Dionysiac rapture, as the ancients would have said, gives place to Apolline serenity. In language pruned of mythological symbolism, this only means that art is better able than any of the immediate expressional activities to give complete and effective relief from emotional pressure. And it further implies that however earnestly an artist may strive to communicate to his public the exact feeling he has himself experienced, the emotional content expressed in his work will always be of another and more harmonious character than the mental state by which his production was originally called into existence. To the extent that artistic form appears in a given work or manifestation there will also be present, independently of the subject,—cheerful or sad, passionate or calm,—a sense of mental liberation,which atones for the excesses of emotional excitement.
In a final and exhaustive treatment of æsthetic problems this influence of artistic form would need to be traced through all the departments of art-activity. And it would be one of the most interesting parts of such a research to estimate the relative power with which art in its various branches is able to assuage at the same time as it excites. We need not here undertake such a thorough comparative examination of the different arts. What has been said about literary creation may be applied in substance to formative production as well. And it even remains true with regard to those most lyrical and immediately expressive arts which seem to be altogether destitute of objective form and intellectual content. Although it has often been said that the lowest kinds of music are purely emotional manifestations, we may still discern an element of form in the rhythm which regulates even the simplest songs and dances.[141]And the creation of this form undoubtedly requires a certain amount of conscious intention and intellectual activity. It is therefore natural that the intensest and most abnormally enhanced feeling should exclude the possibility of rhythmical movement. Exalted joy and violent despair are in their external manifestations not only inharmonious and ungraceful, but also unrhythmic.[142]But by subjecting the expression to the yoke of a fixed time order we may succeed in harmonising it. And while the regular recurrence of intervals facilitates our movements—which thereby gain in ease and gracefulness—the vehemence of our feelingwill be abated. Thus it is possible that although rhythm powerfully reinforces musical or dramatic excitement, it may at the same time exercise a restraining influence on hypernormal feeling. And its effects in music and dance show us, in the simplest and most comprehensive of all examples, the importance of artistic form. The musical katharsis or relief to sensation always involves stimulation, but it may nevertheless affect us as a sedative. The more the form-element and attention to form gain in prominence, the more effectual also is the relieving influence of art. Where the stimulative element is predominant in a work of art, there the relief is less complete.
This contrast, which can be observed at all stages of artistic development, is eminently conspicuous in ancient art, where high and low forms are often to be found in close juxtaposition. The superiority of Greek music over Phrygian music was a favourite topic of the old writers on art, and the legend of the contest between Apollo and Marsyas served as a mythological variation on the same theme. Lyre and flute stood as symbols for two different classes of art, of which one was violent, orgiastic, and barbarous, while the other was calm in its Olympian serenity.[143]
But the contrast expressed in these parables by the ancient authors and some of their modern followers is not so sharp in reality. Even the lively notes of a flute may, to use the old metaphor, by their bound time exercise a kind of restraining influence on the passions. And on the other hand the sedative power of soft music is by no means so great as has often been contended. While acting hygienically as a cure for excess of passionor sorrow it cannot produce any moral result properly so called. As M. Combarieu has pointed out in his acute criticism of Cardinal Perraud’sEurythmie et Harmonie, it is an incontestable fact, which has only too often been overlooked by Platonising philosophers, that even the most immoral feelings may be expressed in perfect melody.[144]The musical, and still more the merely rhythmical, form cannot change the quality of these feelings; it can only deprive them of their dangerous intensity. The mental state thereby gains in pure and unmingled pleasure; it becomes ennobled as enjoyment, but it is by no means moralised, at least not according to modern views. It is only from the standpoint of a purely hedonic system of ethics that music, or any other art, can be said to exercise an immediate moral influence.
When trying to summarise our researches on the differences between artistic and non-artistic expression of emotional states in a comprehensive conclusion, we are again led to that eminently illustrative instance—the Bacchantic condition of the ancient Maenads. We have seen that in their description of Dionysiac mania the classical authors enumerate almost all the various orgiastic manifestations which can be found in all periods in different parts of the world. And if ancient literature affords us an epitome of the various expedients to which the expressional impulse resorts in its endeavour to enhance and relieve an emotional state, the force of this craving for expression, on the other hand, nowhere appears with such convincing clearness as in the Dionysiac monuments of classical art.
The frieze around the Bacchic candelabra in theLouvre proves better than any psychological analysis to how great a degree the Dionysiac state is alloyed with pain and the longing for relief. If these Maenads be compared with the figures on the great vases in the British Museum and with the various Agave reliefs, it will still more conclusively appear that it is real distress which compels the dancers to seek in ever-increasing excitement deliverance from the burden of their feelings. No movement could be more eloquently expressive of the corresponding psychical state than the peculiar toss on the head and the backward curve of the upper trunk which can always be recognised in the most violent of the dancers. An approach to this attitude (“opisthotonos”) sometimes appears, as Spencer remarks in his essay on the Physiology of Laughter, in movements of great joy, which has not been able to find expression by the usual channels of discharge.[145]But there is no doubt that, however pleasurable the quality of the original state may have been, its tone must have been radically transformed before it could produce these strained postures. A feeling which distorts the body by its efforts to find relief, which is not satisfied with the wild cries, the dances, and all the madness of the Bacchic intoxication, must in its abnormal exaggeration be perceived as a pain. The pathological character of this feeling appears further from the fact that the very same movement may be observed in Pierre Breughel’s paintings of hysteric patients and in M. Charcot’s photographs from La Salpétrière.[146]And this same backward toss of the head may be seen in sculptures of witches, the mediæval Bacchantes, where it sometimes gives an impression of proud and insolent defiance, sometimes one of profound melancholy.[147]But in the reliefs representing Bacchic orgies, side by side with the dancers whose distorted attitude and violent movements betray the pain underlying the appearance of revel and riot, there may always be seen the figures of women moving with easy and graceful step. The freedom of their motion shows that they at least have found deliverance from the oppression of overstrung feeling. The nervous tension which in their companions manifests itself in unrhythmic, inharmonious leapings and withings, has in their case found relief and given place to a feeling of rest and calm. This expression of peace in their faces, attitudes, and draperies affords an instructive comment on the Greek notion of Dionysos, the god of music, who, with all his wildness is none the less able to still the tempests of overpowering feelings.
This god of music, as conceived by those who gave him a place among the Olympians, was not a symbol of dissolute pleasure. On the contrary, the myths tell us how those who oppose his ritual themselves fall victims to a mania even more violent than the Bacchic frenzy itself. His devotees, on the other hand, receive from the stirring notes of his flute and cymbals a determinate form and mould for their otherwise vehement and irregular expression-movements. Their joy loses its defiant and barbaric character, their black despair is dissolved into gentle sadness. Rightly, therefore, was Dionysos saluted as a deliverer when, with his merry crew, he marched from village to village. Like him art moves among men, ennobling their joy and blunting the edge of their sufferings.