Lascelles Abercrombie

“ If we suppose that art can be understood, we suppose that it has a function, and that this is necessary. But this can only mean, that art necessarily publishes itself: for how else could it function?
All this could, however, be put more simply, if more brusquely, thus: if the function of art be wholly private to the artist, why should he be at such pains to perfect an intelligible outward expression? And if it be said that he is under no obligation to do this, the answer is that unless he produce something in which others can share, he has not produced what is called art. ”

“ This is the artist's sincerity; to attend faithfully and laboriously to the utterance which will say exactly what is in him, neither more nor less; to attend to this without allowing the reward of it—beauty—to divide his mind, and perhaps prejudice him in his selection of means. A work of art, in fact, is not created in order to be beautiful; beauty is the sign that it has succeeded in being a work of art. ”

“ Art requires the public just as certainly as the public requires art. Take away his audience and you take away the artist's function. This is nothing exceptional. I suppose an engineer builds bridges for his own satisfaction; but would he build them if there were no one to go over them? And indeed we must either assume that art is fundamentally a publication of experience; or else we must assume that art has no function or has it only as an epiphenomenon. But a function that is an epiphenomenon is an absurity; and to conceive an activity as functionless is to be intellectually incoherent. ”

“ But I am rather thinking of what the ordinary man means when he calls a locomotive a beautiful design: and, at any rate, he means the mere look of the thing, as when he calls a face or a hill beautiful; surgery does not seem to provide a parallel here. Does he find some common quality in a locomotive, a face, and a hill? He may: but if we are to make his sense of beauty depend, in these three things, on perception of a common quality, we must, in all three, ignore certain other qualities which clearly enter into that sense. ”

“ But art can perfectly achieve what these can but imperfectly endeavour, because art goes for its inspiration to the source of these and expresses it undisturbed by them; art passes serenely by the struggles of philosophy, ethics and civilisation, and arrives at the safety they vainly reach for, because art directly expresses the original of our sense of the significance of things—that which indeed is by its very nature significance—æsthetic experience. ”

“ If æsthetic experience is the condition of art's activity, the essence of its activity is communication.
No Communication, No Art A man is looking at a landskip and finding it beautiful. But he is not thereby creating a work of art; it would take an æsthetic philosopher to say that, and he could only say it in the poor sophism that the man is creating a private little work of art of his own and enjoying it all by himself. There is no such thing as a private work of art: all art is public property—that is the meaning of the word "art." ”

“ I am far from suggesting that adaptation to an end is always beautiful: and very far from suggesting that beauty is always an adaptation to an end. But when it is paramount in appearance—when, in fact, this supremacy of end as such over means forms the staple of an æsthetic experience which calls for finality of æsthetic judgment. It will soon appear that the beauty peculiar to art is due to the fact that æsthetic experience is there presented for judgment in an exactly similar form. ”

“ When we say that art consists of the expression of experience, we mean the expression of whole experience: both of the substance which the world contributes by being experienced and simultaneously of the value which the mind contributes by experiencing. There must always be two parties to an experience; and we may broadly mark them out as that which makes the occasion and that which exploits the occasion. But, of course, the occasion and its exploitation become one in the experience: they both exist as the experience. ”

“ But—here brevity requires the airs of dogmatism—beauty is not a quality of things. The sense of beauty is the sense of ourselves passing the final æsthetic judgment on certain crucial forms of pure experience. By virtue of it we completely experience the complete judgment of experience. This may not greatly diminish the puzzle of beauty: but it at least shows us where to look for its elucidation—in ourselves. It absolves us from the difficulty of taking beauty as a thing perceived: the difficulty, namely, of showing what is the factor common to the infinite variety of "beautiful perceptions." ”

“ How it is the Type of a Work of Art Now if this be absolute beauty, it is the type of every work of art, in a much more recognisable manner than the idea of beauty as universal quality can be. For in the first place, a work of art cannot be other than, as far as its scope extends, a world of coherent parts harmonised into self-contained unity. ”

“ But a significant world is a world in which nothing happens out of relation with the whole of things, in which everything must perfectly cohere with the rest and nothing can occur irrelevantly: a world in which each is for all and all is for each. That is the world we desire; and that is the world we never quite get—except in art. Whatever we experience in art, we experience in a perfectly coherent and orderly manner, in a necessary and intricate interrelationship with the rest of our experience there: in, that is to say, a significant manner. ”

“ A good story well told has no need to be anything more than just that; in fact, it is a work of art. I should have expressed myself—to what purpose?—in order to achieve an expression that could satisfactorily exist simply as a piece of expression: it had no other purpose—but there may be more in that purpose than at first appears. Expression for its own sake, then,—expression that carries its own justification—that does not need to go beyond itself in order to make good: that seems to be the condition under which a work of art can occur. ”

“ We may notice it clearly, perhaps, only when it has a striking occasion: my small boy and the foundered horse; nursemaids at a funeral, inspecting with all the airs of connoisseurs the grief of this mourner and of that; the thrilling summons we all feel, going soberly on our business, when the running crowds tell us there has been an accident. On such occasions we notice with a certain shock human nature's capacity for taking things at their face-value, for liking them as things good in themselves: is that one a good specimen of a mourner? ”

“ Hence all he can do, if his mind is set on beauty, is to adapt the beauty that has already been created and try to fit it into his own purpose. And hence, the amateur artist. The genuine artist does not bother about beauty; he does not need to. He has something to express; to get it expressed is the sole business of his art; and all he is anxious about is to achieve expression complete and just and unequivocal. He knows that if he can do so his work cannot fail to be beautiful; for such expression, experienced and judged as such, becomes beauty by being so judged. ”

“ Anchors, lines of prow and stern, rigging, masts, funnels and the rest—they are all beautiful simply because, in the æsthetic experience of them, nothing can be clearer than their complete manifestation of functional design: in each of them, a single end harmonises and controls the means. So all the means of art are manifestly designed to achieve an end; and beauty is the sign of success. An interesting enquiry suggests itself here. Can a simple experience be judged beautiful? If so, would its expression be art? We must first be sure what simple experience is. ”

“ I have not used the term æsthetic yet: though this is often taken as equivalent to the theory of art. But we cannot move with any security in this region unless we keep these two terms separate, and make them refer to different, though related, studies. You can study æsthetic without bringing in art; but you cannot study art without bringing in æsthetic. There is a certain kind of experience, or way of experiencing things, out of which the activity called art arises. We see a sunset, and we enjoy it. We just happen on it: it fades, and the experience finishes. ”

“ Significance What is the central, the inveterate desire of the mind, which all man's practical and spiritual activities imply? It is the desire for significant experience, the desire to be living in and a conscious part of a significant world. Not that we desire to know what the world means; in one sense we know that already, and in another sense we can never know it: the world can only mean itself, a proposition in which the most of us take but faint interest. ”

“ But he will have done much more than that; he will have added to the natural beauty—he will have wholly enveloped it in—a beauty that cannot occur in nature, a beauty that belongs peculiarly to art: the beauty that resides in the mere fact of expression. You would see that at once if the work of art we are supposing were music or a poem; but it would be no less certain if the natural beauty—the beauty of the experience which was equally composed of what his eyes saw and what his spirit valued—if this had been expressed by the skill of painting. ”

“ It may be asked here: why, if unity through form is peculiarly significant in art, is not unity through shape equally significant in visible objects? But it is a question not of unity of objects, but of unity of experience. Even in the arts which, like painting, effect their form through shape, the unity given by their form is not merely a unity of the thing seen, but a unity of the experience in which the thing seen is only a part. The shape of a thing seen must certainly be a visual experience ”

“ The question must leave us gaping, if the Idea is a universal quality. But take it as judgment. Why, then, absolute beauty is nothing but the whole universe and sum of things experiencing itself and judging its self-experience to be beautiful. ”

“ And this is a world of coherent parts manifesting throughout an ultimate unity. It is nothing but a model, in the experience of an individual subject, of the absolute beauty in the experience of the universal subject. ”

“ Whenever we enter into art, we recollect the ideal towards which we must forever strive; we perfectly know what it is at which our lives are aimed; and we forget that our hopes must be, except in artistic consciousness of them, eternally frustrated. ”

“ The affair would be a simple one, if art were the communication of this or that part of experience, as everyday language is, or as a photograph is. But art is the communication of whole experience; and for any artist, therefore, the problem is the same: namely, to construct in his medium occasions of such expressive experience as will somehow associate itself in the recipient's mind with matter equivalent to the artist's incommunicable inspiration of impulsive experience. It is obvious, therefore, that what the artist makes is by no means the same thing as what he intends. ”

“ Most writers on these topics assume that in art an experience is first judged to be beautiful and then expressed. The most cursory survey of any art will show the falsity of this. There is no necessity that the experience which is expressed must have been beautiful; there is solely the necessity that whatever art expresses must become beautiful in the expression. Instances jump to one's mind of nobly beautiful works of art expressing something which we can still feel in the art—through the beauty of it—as not beautiful. ”

“ The Judgment of Beauty But there are two observations on the general conditions and nature of beauty which are pertinent to our enquiry. In the first place, it must not be assumed that æsthetic experience merely has to be enjoyed in order to be beautiful. I can quite easily like a state of things wholly for its own immediate quality without finding beauty in it; and it seems clear to me that it is even possible to like ugliness without in the least pretending that it is beauty. ”

“ We cannot, at any rate, exclude from the theory of art the fact that the appeal of art is variable, since it can only appeal by providing the occasion of an experience which we ourselves must exploit. It must often have been noticed, by anyone who looks nicely into his own mind, how largely the pleasure of a familiar work of art is provided by its familiarity. ”

“ So that in art the impression of every fractional or momentary detail is an impression of the significance of things, and the impression of the whole work is an impression of a significant world. Chance or irrelevance can have no place in art; and chance is the enemy of significance, since it is an intrusion of irrelevance, a lapse from coherence. It is the incoherent, the irrelevant, which we are continually trying to eliminate from our practical or intellectual or other experience ”

“ But what has been argued of the symbolic efficacy of Representative art is obvious when we turn to poetry, music and architecture. In fact, all the arts have the same problem of expression to solve. All must find a technique of symbolism, whether arbitrary or empirical, which the recipient can take in with pleasure, and which can be relied on to translate itself in his mind into an ultimate æsthetic experience equivalent to that which inspired the artist. ”