CHAPTER XXICONCLUSIONS
There are several aspects of the history of art which have had to be ignored in the preceding chapters. A student of ethnology, for instance, will blame us because in our hasty review of primitive art no mention has been made of the important influence which political institutions and religious systems have exercised on the development of art. Nor can there be any question of denying that these factors ought to be properly treated of in every research which aims at adescriptivecompleteness. From the historical point of view indeed nothing could be more interesting than to pursue throughout the general history of art that line of investigation which Mr. Posnett has applied to the study of literature. Not only in the lower stages of culture, but also among civilised nations, one might show how in all its forms and branches art has been influenced for good and bad by the progress of political development. Tribal drama, tribal sculpture, and tribal poetry might thus be instructively contrasted with the art of commonwealths and monarchic states. Still wider results might be attained by tracing those differences in types of art which arise from differences in the religious systems. But such researches, howeverimportant they might be, would not have much bearing upon the subject of the present work. Notwithstanding the differentiation of art-forms that has arisen from the varying political and religious conditions, we do not meet in these different forms with any principle of art that has not been treated of already in the preceding chapters. To explain, for instance, the art which serves as a means of political propitiation, we need only refer to our investigation of the æsthetic forms of sexual selection. It is true that songs, dances, and pantomimes will necessarily change in character when addressed to a chief or king instead of to a woman. But the purpose—to gain the favour of the spectator—is still the same in both cases. And from this identity of purpose there arises a general similarity between all manifestations of propitiatory art, which, from our point of view, is more important than the individual differences of these manifestations. As in tribes where social conditions have favoured the development of sexual selection erotic art acquires the distinction of attractiveness and sensuous beauty, so these qualities will also be prominent in the songs and dances by which people endeavour to conciliate the favour and benevolence of a mighty ruler. And as on the lower stages of culture men attribute to their gods their own likings and aversions, the same qualities will naturally be found to characterise those classes of art by which worshippers pay their homage to a divine spectator. And, finally, as a conspicuous outcome of the motive “to attract by pleasing” we meet with a similar group of dances, songs, and pantomimes addressed to the spirits of the deceased—those spectators whose favour or disfavour is of paramount importance to primitive man.
Side by side with this element of propitiation wefind in the artistic manifestations connected with funeral ceremonies examples of almost all those aspects of art to which attention has been called in the preceding chapters. The purpose of information is represented by pictorial, poetic, or dramatic representations in which the doings of the deceased are displayed before the survivors.[506]The dances and songs may in many cases be reasonably explained as aiming at a stimulation of the spirit, which certainly needs an increase of force in order to surmount all the hardships and the weary wanderings of its transitional life.[507]In other cases funeral art is evidently intended to produce upon invisible enemies the same kind of terrifying effects which have already been spoken of in connection with military paintings and pantomimes.[508]And, lastly, it is probably in the endeavour to exert a sympathetic influence upon the combats which the deceased must undergo before he can attain his peace and rest that the survivors hold magical sham-fights and tugs of war over his grave.[509]Thus in this one branch of art we can see how each of the sociological art-principles is of much wider applicability than has been possible to trace within the limits of this work. But, on the other hand, the crucial instance of funeral art shows us how even in such artistic manifestations as at the outset appear to be quite irreducible we may by a closer investigation reveal the influence of those general factors which have beenselected for treatment in the preceding chapters. And therefore, without entering upon a detailed examination of all the varying forms of art, we feel entitled to hold that the utilitarian motives of information, propitiation, stimulation, and magical efficiency afford a sufficiently complete list—from a theoretical point of view—of the most important non-æsthetic factors that have favoured the development of art.
The attentive reader will probably have remarked that those very aspects of art with which we have been engaged in the latter part of this work broadly correspond to some of the most important interpretations of the art-impulse offered by æsthetic theories. To give information—that is, to widen our knowledge of nature and life; to propitiate—that is, to flatter our senses by the display of beauty; to stimulate—that is, to heighten our vital energy, and thus make life easier to live and life’s work easier to perform; to work magic—that is, to produce an illusion of reality capable of leading to a confusion between the subjective and objective world;—these are all purposes which have been represented as essential to art. From our summary investigation of primitive art it has, we hope, appeared how fully we admit the close connection of these purposes with the historical development of art. And it might be shown, if our investigation were pursued into the later stages of development, that art on its highest plane still bears the same relation to concrete utilities as it does on the lowest. Art never ceases to inform, never ceases to please, never ceases to stimulate, never loses something of a magical efficacy. But while acknowledging the importance of all these purposes, we have, on the other hand, to maintain the view which wasset out in the psychological chapters of the opening—that it is only by assuming an independent art-impulse that we can explain the essential character of art. To make plain the distinction between these two points of view it is advisable to summarise in brief the arguments of either part of our investigation.
In the first chapters the writer attempted to show that the art-impulse in its broadest sense must be taken as an outcome of the natural tendency of every feeling-state to manifest itself externally, the effect of such a manifestation being to heighten the pleasure and to relieve the pain. We found in this fact the primary source of art as an individual impulse. But art is essentially social; and this also we explained on psychological grounds. The secondary effect of the exteriorisation of a feeling-state is to awaken similar feelings in other human beings who perceive the manifestation; and their sympathetic feeling acts upon the author of the original manifestation, heightening in him the feeling-state which gave rise to it.
Now, all works of art have a common element notwithstanding their diversity. They express, each in their own medium, a mood or moods of the artist; they arise, that is, out of the impulse to expression, which is as primitive as feeling itself. Every man seeks automatically to heighten his feelings of pleasure and to relieve his feelings of pain. The artist is the man who finds that he can gain such enhancement or relief, not only by the direct action of giving expression to his feeling, but also by arousing a kindred feeling in others. Hence originates in him that desire to transmit his moods to an external audience which must be regarded as the simplest and most primordial inducement to artistic production. And also as a further means ofrealising the same purpose there arises the endeavour to give the artistic product—that is to say, the externalised expression of his mood—a form which may facilitate the revival of the original state in an ever wider circle of sympathisers. Thus from the reflex outlet for a strong emotional pressure we are led to a deliberate creation, in which the intellectual and volitional elements preponderate increasingly over the automatic, emotional impulse. But from this gain in consciousness there does not result any change in the essential character of the artistic activity. However great the difference between the highest forms of art, such as, for instance, a drama or a sculpture, and the primitive dance-pantomime, the underlying impulse is still the same in both cases. Perpetuation—that is, expression which is addressed to a fictitious audience—can only be explained by reference to the enhancing and relieving effects which man has experienced as results of emotional transmission. And all the intentional activities, the artistic composition, the artistic technique, and so on, by which perpetuation is secured can thus be regarded as subservient to the emotionalistic purpose. Moreover, these same activities, however unemotional they may be in themselves, will enable the artist to extort an increased emotional value from his “motives”; for instance, the greater a man’s skill in suggesting the peculiar thrill of colour, the greater will be his pleasure in colour itself. Technical excellency, which to the outsider is a cold and neutral thing, may thus to the artist and to the intelligent critic be full of expressional significance. From whichever point of view we may look at art, we shall have to interpret its central and essential characteristics in terms of feeling. In this way we can account for it as a self-sufficing, or as wehave said, autotelic activity. And in this way only can we explain the strength of that compelling force which urges an artist to an exertion from which he derives no external utility.
But it cannot be contended that primitive human nature furnishes not only the impulse to expression but also the medium. The artist in man had the feeling; he had to discover a way to exteriorise it. Nearest perhaps to primitive art lie the immediate manifestations by regulated gesture and regulated sounds of the voice, which are also in their highest development the most potent means for transmitting an emotion. Yet the different utilities of life offered also other means—as it were, words of a language—in which the feeling could express itself and transmit itself from mind to mind. The man who used drawing as a means of communicating thoughts could express in a drawing the terror which a beast inspired or the delight he had derived from watching its movements. And just as the purpose of imparting information—whether by word or image—afforded a natural medium through which the art-impulse could work to its own ends, so also the purpose of propitiation afforded in dance or decoration something which might be diverted from its original object and be used with the single intention of expressing, for instance, the dancer’s mood. Similarly each of the other purposes that have been discussed or alluded to afforded, as it were, a concrete material for art—a shape in which the primitive impulse to gesture could embody and develop itself. And beyond the fact that art has been obliged to avail itself of media which have originally been called into existence by utilitarian, non-æsthetic needs, there lies another fact. To these external “origins” we can also trace some of the mostimportant qualities which we appreciate in a work of art. In this way it is open to us to explain how several of the virtues of art, as we know it, may be derived from the primitive needs which it subserved; how, for instance, the lucidity of art may find its explanation in art’s use for conveying information; how the sensuous and attractive qualities of all art may be traced to the need for propitiating favour; how the power that resides in art to brace and stimulate the mind may be transmitted from the days when the artist was appointed to nerve his fellows for work or war. And, lastly, it might be argued that a most characteristic quality of art, the imagination, which is in a sense faith in the reality of the unreal (whether native to the human mind or not), may have been immensely heightened by the use of art for purposes of magic, which fuses the visible and the invisible.
There is thus suggested a further point. We were able to derive those qualities of artistic composition, which in all æsthetic systems have been insisted on as the most primordial, from the distinctive qualities of the self-sufficing art-impulse, by showing how the unity, the concentration, and the subordination of parts to a whole correspond to the unity of a feeling-state which it is the object of the art-impulse to convey and to perpetuate in its entirety. On the other hand, we are forced to acknowledge that by the side of these primordial qualities there exist certain secondary qualities which have been of great importance in facilitating and securing the transmission and perpetuation of the original feeling-state; and we have shown how these qualities arise out of the vassalage by which art in its historical development has been bound to the necessities and utilities of practical life. For those who crave a theoretical basisfor the estimation of art there is offered a field of research in the comparison and relative valuation of these two orders of qualities. By studying the alternate influences which the primary and the derived factors have exercised on the character of works of art, it may even be possible to lay down a kind of scale by which to rank general qualities as well as individual manifestations. But all this train of thought, though cognate to our inquiry, is not a part of it. This book has aimed simply to give an answer to the question, How did art originate? To those minds which see no value in an æsthetic inquiry that neither purposes to offer guidance for the artist in producing works of art, nor for the student in appreciating them, the whole discussion may probably appear futile. The author on his part has thought that such investigation into an important and typical human energy must be of interest at least, if not of value. But upon the practical question it is his personal opinion that the loss would be greater than the gain if theories and judgments based upon philosophical considerations were allowed to influence either the production or the enjoyment of art.