Y. Hirn

“ Yet the theories and the ideas which were first brought together as an organised body of thought in Baumgarten’s short manual had so deeply influenced the speculations of his age that, a generation later, the most important questions of life came to be treated as æsthetic problems. The philosophy of art, far from needing to justify its existence, dominated all philosophy—ethics, metaphysics, and even cosmogony. Imagination was treated as the ruling faculty in all creation, and beauty was referred to as the criterion, not only in art, but in morality. ”

“ Though emphasising as much as possible the unity of art, we are compelled to admit that the feelings which are conveyed in its higher and lower forms may be essentially different. While meeting in the “lower” art of our own and earlier times with an expression of the most general emotions and instincts which, by the very vehemence of their pathos, may awaken the aversion of the refined critic, we partake, in the higher art-forms, of feelings that can be derived only from a dispassionate contemplation of nature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But it is always an open question whether the attractiveness of such researches is not, strictly speaking, more æsthetic than scientific. Higher mathematics is perhaps, for those that live in the world of abstract quantities, only an abstract form of art, a soundless music or a wordless poetry. In other cases the eagerness with which pure science is pursued as an autotelic end may be explained as a result of acquired habits. Like the miser, the passionate researcher may often gradually lose sight of the ultimate aim of his activity and concentrate all his attention on the means. ”

“ When, one hundred and fifty years ago, Baumgarten wrote the treatise to which he gave the name Aesthetica, and which he described as a “theory of liberal arts and beautiful thinking,” it seemed to him needful to apologise for attracting attention to a field of inquiry so low and sensuous as that province of philosophy to which he then affixed a name. Many, he thought, might regard art and beauty, which appeal primarily to the senses, as subjects beneath the dignity of philosophers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No doubt there can be quoted a great number of artistic manifestations in which love is represented or described in all its phases. But we are not thereby justified in assuming that these dramas, pantomimes, and poems were called into existence by the preferences of the other sex. It would be absurd to adduce the pornographic art of modern times as proof of sexual selection. And it is equally absurd to cite in favour of Darwin’s thesis travellers’ tales of indecent dances or ceremonies in which no mention is made of the presence of the opposite sex. ”

“ We need only consult our memories—for example, of landscapes we have seen—to find that the emotional element of the recollection, our admiration, is always closely bound up with some single feature of the impression. We may indeed be able to revive the visual image itself by allowing the mind’s eye gradually to pass along all its details. But the subjective feelings in which we appropriated the impression and made it our own will not be resuscitated until we arrive at one particular detail—a single tree, or perhaps a figure—and concentrate our attention upon that. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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’s Leiden des jungen Werther. ”

“ 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 aim of play is attained when the surplus of vigour is discharged or the instinct has had its momentary exercise. But the function of art is not confined to the act of production; in every manifestation of art, properly so called, something is made and something survives. It is true that in certain manifestations—for instance in the dance or in acting—the effect is destroyed as soon as created; it survives only in the rhythm devised by the dancer, or in the spectator’s memory of the part played. ”

“ By denying such subjective independence in the creation and enjoyment of art, we should be no less guilty of one-sidedness than those authors who deny that genuine art has ever been influenced by “foreign purposes.” If it is presumptuous to adduce any particular works or manifestations in proof of free and independent production, it may be no less audacious to contend that even the most primitive form of art has flourished in tribes destitute of all æsthetic cravings. ”

“ Songs that are sung in order to facilitate the labour of workers and to increase the result of it, poems that aim at conjuring the favour of a hard-hearted or indifferent woman, charms for invoking or expelling spirits, and medical spells,—all these forms of poetic magic are too familiar to be more than mentioned.
From the point of view of the civilised observer the above-quoted examples of dramatic, pictorial, and poetic magic may seem to have an obvious and ready explanation. A work of art always gives to the spectator, and no doubt also to the creator, an illusion of reality. ”

“ Since it is so difficult for the individual himself to perceive a mental state as one of pure sensation with no element of thought, we need not wonder that his expression always transmits to the spectator something more than the mere excitement or depression of simple feeling. However strictly we try to isolate the pure rhythm of a lyrical performance, there will always slip into it an element of mimetic expression—we do not know of a better adjective—which suggests a mental state, distincter and better defined than that of pure feeling. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Well knowing this law of emotional mechanics, an intelligent woman who is anxious to please does not cover herself with jewels and ornaments. She prefers some single brilliant gem, which does not so much call for admiration itself, as draw attention to her charms and heighten the impression which they produce.
It may seem very far-fetched to explain the primitive means of attraction by reference to the art of pleasing among modern men. But however much the forms of courtship may have been changed by higher development, their psychological basis is still the same at all stages of culture. ”

“ On the contrary, it seems that a study of art-production affords the most convenient starting-point for any comprehensive treatment of art; all the more because every æsthetic pleasure, even when apparently most passive, always involves an element of unconscious artistic creation. [19] When absorbed in the beauty of nature we do in fact appear to ourselves to be entirely receptive; but in truth our enjoyment, if the enjoyment has any æsthetic value at all, is always more or less derived from the activity of our own mind. ”

“ But this would be to overlook the fact that the pure artist, as well as the purely artistic activity, must be considered as an abstraction. The bent of Goethe’s genius, for example, was perhaps by nature quite as much towards science, particularly philosophy, as towards art. Thus, although an artist may himself lay the chief stress on the intellectual or ethical elements in his work, his opinion should not induce us to give up the purely æsthetic criteria which we need for the theoretical definition of art-production as an activity to itself. ”

“ The artist has in a sense a double capacity; and artistic creation in solitude may be always explained by the fact that the creator exists also as his own spectator.
The production of even the most individualistic and most isolated artists can therefore be explained only by sociological considerations. And the same is the case with those artists who work only for posterity. It would be wrong to say that art in any one of its higher manifestations aims at transmitting a feeling. ”

“ Nor did the art of the period exhibit the bewildering multiplicity of a fertile age,—least of all in Germany, the home and centre of æsthetic inquiry. The formative arts were less important than ever before; music, which was so soon to eclipse all other arts, had not yet awakened the interest of philosophers. The crafts were at a low ebb; landscape-gardening is indeed the only kind of applied art that we hear about at this time. Beauty, art, the ideal—these and all other general notions must have been suggested with unsurpassable simplicity by this uniform and monotonous artistic output. ”

“ A historic study of art shows us that the artistic activity proper can never be explained by examining concrete works as we meet them in reality. Whenever we have to deal with art as autotelic, the need of theoretical abstraction forces itself upon us with irresistible cogency. It is of no avail to argue from the data of art-history, because we can never fully know the mental origin of the works. ”

“ At a time when intimate confessions seem to be the most sought-for things in literature, we have reason to value every appeal to the dignity of the artist. But it is only a confusion of ideas which can lead any one to think that this dignity would be in any way infringed by the adoption of an emotionalistic art-theory. We have been especially anxious not to be misunderstood on this point, and this is the only reason why in the preceding chapters we have taken so much pains to disentangle the psychology of feeling, especially the relation between simple feeling and emotions. ”

“ It seems impossible, moreover, to treat of such art-forms as the nature-myths, the tales, and the animal stories without bringing in those factors which should especially be kept outside the present research—the art-impulse, the play-impulse, or the delight in pure invention for invention’s sake; whereas we are justified in treating even the highest purely commemorative art as the development of an activity which was connected with the utilitarian end of information. ”

“ And even where there is no previous sympathetic relation, a state of joy or sadness may often, if it is only distinctly expressed, pass over, so to say, from the individual who has been under the influence of its objective cause, to another who, as it were, borrows the feeling, but remains unconscious of its cause. We experience this phenomenon almost daily in the influence exerted upon us by social intercourse, and even by those aspects of nature—for instance, blue open sky or overhanging mountains—which naturally call up in us the physical manifestation of emotional states. ”

“ It is true that in fully formed anger, joy, contempt, and so on, the tendency to expression for expression’s sake—as when a child laughs or dances for mere joy—is seldom found pure and unmixed. But even in such complex states we may in the abstract distinguish the impulse directly and inherently connected with the physiological change—the impulse which tends automatically to bring out the tone of pleasure with more prominence or to relieve the tone of pain—from all the conscious and volitional activities by which the external cause of the feeling is either approached or avoided. ”

“ The corybantic mania afforded to the Greek mind a typical simile by which to illustrate that state of formless excitement which precedes the artistic creation. In the mythical descriptions of the melancholia of the Thyiads, and in the sculptural representations of their dances and extravagances, it was easy to recognise—more by instinct, perhaps, than by reflection—the same dissatisfaction and the same longing for fuller and deeper expression which compels the artist to seek in æsthetic production compensation for the deficiencies of life. ”

“ And it is no doubt for this reason that music and dance have attained so surprising a development in the lower stages of culture. In trying, therefore, to explain the historical development of art, we are compelled to take into account that foreign purpose which is repudiated in art-theory.
If every work of art were really an end in itself—a Selbstzweck—standing quite isolated from all the practical utilities of life, it would be nothing less than a miracle that art should be met with in tribes which have not yet learnt to satisfy, nor even to feel, the most elementary necessities of life. ”

“ Pure music, pure poetry, pure painting, thus develop into isolated, independent arts, of which each one establishes its own laws and conditions for itself. The critic who, in spite of this evolution, tries to apply a narrow æsthetic standard of beauty to all the various arts may indeed—according to his influence—delay the public appreciation of modern works, and thus indirectly impede artistic development. But no amount of theorising will enable him to arrest the growth of artistic forms whose very existence contradicts the generalisations of the old systems. ”

“ And even if the feeling which originally called forth a dance, a song, or a drama is one of pain, its expression will unavoidably acquire under the influence of artistic form an element of ease. The freedom, and, still more, the unconsciousness, that characterise the “inspired” creation may thus clothe with a peculiar grace even the representation of such mental states as in real life manifest themselves in the most inharmonious forms. [153] In the same way dignity, the quality complementary to grace, may be deduced directly from the emotional conditions of artistic activity. ”

“ As we cannot explain the creation of concrete works of art without reference to a craving for social expression, so we cannot distinguish the artistic from the non-artistic intuition without assuming a tendency—unconscious and unintentional it may be, but none the less powerful—to socialise the emotional content, which is connected with a given intuition. The potential poet or painter, whose embryo work is bound to remain for ever a fact only of his own experience, is seldom apt to realise the purpose of his endeavour ”